Beck’s theory of risk society offers a powerful account of manufactured uncertainty, transboundary hazards, and the limits of national and class-based insulation under reflexive modernization. Yet its universalizing language remains insufficient for explaining how risks are differentially produced, displaced, governed, and lived across colonial and postcolonial geographies. This article critically reconstructs Beck from the standpoint of the Global South, understood not as a fixed geography but as a historically produced positionality within unequal global power relations. I argue that the key issue is not whether risks become transboundary but how unequal capacities for protection, buffering, accountability, and repair stabilize asymmetrical exposure under global interdependence. To address this, I propose the concept of unequal risk regimes , through which accumulation logics, spatial displacement, slow violence, and institutional–epistemic mechanisms combine to routinize and obscure harm. Beck’s theory should not be abandoned; rather, it should be transformed through a justice- and mechanism-oriented sociology of global risk.
Conventional third places have declined among marginalized communities, yet what takes their place in fostering solidarity has been undertheorized. This article introduces the concept of “emotional third places” to explain how marginalized groups temporarily transform ordinary environments through collective emotional practices. Unlike frameworks emphasizing formal organization or planned resistance, emotional third places emerge through spontaneous gatherings and recurring rituals in spaces never intended for community-building. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, I identify four key mechanisms: formation through collective recognition, boundary maintenance through performative solidarity, dissolution through external pressure, and spatial transformation through collective behavior. By theorizing how collective emotions can reorganize spatial power relations through affective rather than political processes, this framework illuminates community formation across varying physical spaces. As traditional communal spaces become inaccessible to marginalized populations, understanding how these groups foster temporary but significant connections through shared emotional experiences is vital for comprehending social life.
In the context of ongoing debates in the social sciences on the relationship between race, gender, and the reproduction of capitalist society, many scholars have turned to the concept of “articulation.” However, it remains unclear how, exactly, capital and ascriptive difference are articulated and why particular articulations of race, gender, and capital remain so enduring. This article undertakes a critical reading of Stuart Hall’s landmark writing on articulation to engage these themes. I begin by contextualizing Hall’s “articulationist” approach, situating it in relation to Louis Althusser’s writing on articulation and in relation to the “modes of production debate.” Against the backdrop of Hall’s account, I then argue that the built environment is a mechanism through which the articulation of capital and difference occurs and a critical “line of tendential force” that holds articulations together over time and space.
Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus explains class reproduction but undertheorizes social mobility. I address this by developing the conditions model of the habitus, which preserves the concept’s core features while challenging Bourdieu’s assumption that people in the same class share the same conditions and habitus. Using interviews from the National Study of Youth and Religion, I demonstrate that youth in the same class develop different habitus in different conditions. At the bottom of the class structure, youth raised in constraining conditions typically form a habitus oriented toward class reproduction, whereas those in less constraining conditions often form a habitus oriented toward upward mobility. At the top, youth raised in conditions free from constraint tend to develop a habitus geared toward class reproduction, and those in more constrained conditions develop a habitus oriented toward downward mobility. Thus, separating class from conditions illuminates how the habitus contributes to both reproduction and mobility.
In his sociology of the state, Bourdieu introduces the concept of "de-particularization" to spotlight processes through which those who dominate the state establish their particular lifestyle as a universal cultural norm. While Bourdieu did not elaborate on such processes, the article develops a specific mechanism of de-particularization in articulating his framework with postcolonial perspectives on analogies between race and class. Focusing on the German Empire and drawing on published and unpublished sources, it shows how the Verein f & uuml;r Sozialpolitik, a prominent social policy actor in the emerging welfare state, implicitly analogized the worker question and questions of racial degeneration in a study on European tropical settlement. As the principles of vision and division distinguishing workers from the educated bourgeoisie were transposed onto the difference of colonizers and natives, the ethos regarded as particularly bourgeois in previous investigations of the worker question came to be construed as universally German.
Bourdieu’s triad of doxa, orthodoxy, and heresy explains consensus and contestation yet leaves undertheorized the middle ground where practice unfolds. I theorize mediodoxy as a third logic of practice and knowledge that neither ratifies doxa nor negates it. Drawing on 23 interviews with Jews and Muslims, I reconstruct sequences in which actors invoke racialized tropes (“Timbuktu,” “pure-blooded”), normalize discriminatory jokes, or acquiesce in exclusion. These cases show symbolic violence operates not only by external imposition but also through the practical compromises of those navigating stigma. Extending Bourdieu’s claim that domination works with the complicity of the dominated, I specify mechanisms of complicity and argue that mediodoxy can crystallize as a mediodoxic habitus—durable, patterned, and formed through recurrent experience of antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism. Mediodoxy refines field theory and advances the sociology of racism and antisemitism by showing inequality is stabilized, legitimated, and rendered ordinary between orthodoxy and heresy.
The symbolic interactionist (SI) tradition has been criticized for having an overly optimistic view of human development within democratic society. As we see an increasing trend toward authoritarian and fascist movements globally, it becomes especially important to foster a more critical theoretical framework for SI. Introducing Erich Fromm to SI allows for the exploration of new research questions that dig deeper into structural conditions and how they interact with unconscious emotional drives. We compare the social psychology of Fromm to the intellectual precursor of symbolic interactionism, G. H. Mead, and consider how to creatively combine their approaches. This “Frommeadian” synthesis is not without challenges, so we consider this combination in a way that is logically consistent while still being true to the source material. We present this integrated model with the hope it might inspire new research questions as we strive to understand the processes of ideological recruitment across social contexts.
The sociology of performance and action has primarily focused on how actors are able to create new renderings of the social world. However, this perspective has yet to explore the process through which new formations of power become encoded and forms enduring structures. In this article, I analyze the rise and spread of the evangelical activist organization Concerned Women for America to show how performances of the self serve as the basis for more stable structures of social relations. I argue that these initial performances provide frameworks of action and interpretation that serve as an ethical repertoire that people may draw on as techniques of agentive subject formation. The everyday performative work of subjects thus serves as the actualization of new expressions of power invoked by dramatic performances. I develop the theoretical language of subject refashioning to highlight how frameworks for subjectivity serve as the deeper process affected by performances.
This article proposes the Latin American Baroque as an interpretative matrix for analyzing digital modernity. Drawing on Echeverr & iacute;a's modernidad barroca and Latin American theories of dependency and historical-structural heterogeneity, we argue that capitalism in the periphery functions as a heterogeneous assemblage of overlapping temporalities, logics, labor regimes, and infrastructures. Using this baroque lens, we examine the subsumption of baroque economies by platform capitalism, focusing on the sphere of informality and the real capture of popular vira & ccedil;& atilde;o. Finally, we show how the baroque ethos operates as a subjective grammar of digital labor in which self-entrepreneurship, compliant misbehavior, algorithmic management, popular economies, and "making do" practices are entangled within platforms' operations. The Baroque thus becomes an operative matrix for analyzing platform labor and theorizing digital capitalism from the Global South.
Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927) was an early twentieth-century writer who engaged Marxist theoreticians and conventional American sociological theory in his writings, but he remains unknown to social theorists and histories of American social science. This article shows that Harrison was a social theorist offering valuable insights into the relationship between racial inequality and capitalism. Across his writings, Harrison developed a nascent theory of racial capitalism that anticipated contemporary debates while offering distinct contributions. He conceptualized capitalist production as racially bifurcated and asserted the relative autonomy of race; he offered a structuration theory of racism and capitalist reproduction, showing how racial capitalism is a system co-constituted by racism and economic imperatives; he theorized the role of imperialism and its different forms, explaining how racism globalizes; and he explained agency and resistance as necessary outcomes of the logic of global racial capitalism.
In the following essay, I make the case that sociology is long overdue for an affective "turn," or a full-scale embrace of emotional dynamics. For most of its history, sociology has had a tenuous relationship with emotions and affect. Sometimes ignored, more often examined as a dependent variable caused by structure, culture, and cognition, a diverse array of research on motivation and action demonstrates affect is a causal force of thinking and doing. I begin by drawing from this research and some corners of sociology already embracing affectivism to make the case for an affective sociology. Once outlined, I point to some possible directions for a systematic, vibrant research agenda.
Theorizing the importance of the state in regulating sexuality and how sexuality shapes the state has been key to understanding state control and definition. Monogamy has been treated as an implicit aspect of sexual regulation, but its significance in defining the state has yet to be theorized. The lack of explicit attention to monogamy dovetails with a lack of attention to colonial and racial histories in state boundary-work. This article theorizes the monogamous state to uncover a grid of intelligibility that connects colonial understandings of perverse sexuality to polygamy, in contradistinction to moral and productive monogamy. Drawing on the case of France, I examine how the state defined itself against a racialized, polygynous Other as part of its civilizing mission to make monogamy central to citizenship and public order. I identify three historical periods that demonstrate the building, consolidation, and reinforcement of the monogamous state.
This article proposes a cognitive structural account of the emergence of social worlds that organize the expectations of producers and audiences. The proposed model considers the emergence process in three stages: (1) the arrival of distinctive clusters of objects and their producer, (2) conceptualization of the labeled clusters in high-energy social structures that we call a "scene," and (3) whether a scene's coordinating concept becomes generally taken for granted. We first develop an ontology for analyzing these processes. We then analyze the role of social structure in these stages and define the emergence process in terms of hazards, that is, the event rates of each stage. The proposed account can explain the emergence of worlds in a variety of social contexts, including organizational forms in markets, genres in creative industries, disciplines in science, and forms of social protest.
As both ethnoracial and sex/gender categories come to be increasingly understood as fluid, contextual, and constructed, transgender identities have gained cultural legitimacy, yet transracial claims remain widely contested. This contrast has prompted the question, "If transgender, why not transracial?" I contend that this comparison overlooks fundamental differences between ethnoracial and sex/gender systems-particularly in their modalities of division and structures of exclusion-that render the analogy problematic. Drawing out these distinctions, I argue that transgender identification emerges as a plausible outcome of a sex/gender system-constituted through culturally elaborated nomenclatures, institutions, and practices-that has historically given rise to variable categories of "deviance" from cis-heteronormative standards. By contrast, transracialism remains unintelligible and will likely remain so within ethnoracial systems that sustain hierarchical boundaries between legitimized racialized groups, boundaries that are reinforced through collective loyalties. Recognizing this distinction, this study calls for greater precision in theorizing how culturally elaborated categories acquire specific structural forms.
This article revisits and revises the secularization paradigm in light of late-stage secularization. Whereas secularization theory, influenced by Peter Berger, holds that structural differentiation, rationalization, pluralism, and individualization erode religious authority, we argue that these same processes facilitated the emergence of a secular sacred canopy. Drawing from recent developments in cultural sociology, we demonstrate how scientific empiricism, naturalism, and a romantic liberal imaginary collectively function as a secular equivalent to a religious cosmology. By theorizing secularization in cultural sociological terms, we are able to explain the rise and resilience of cradle nonreligion, the shift from "religion" to "spirituality," the ascendance of right-wing "religious" populisms, and the paradoxical nature of the heretical imperative in highly secular societies (and contexts). We conclude by outlining the methodological, theoretical, and explanatory implications of our paradigm revision.
Recently, sociology saw a surge of interest in practical theorizing. Many contributions to this discourse adopt an empiricist approach to theory building characterized by data centrism, a separation between discovery and justification, and an unclear or restricted role of existing theory. The article develops "hermeneutic theorizing" as a distinct approach that reconceptualizes engagement with prior theory as a central driver of novel theorizing. This hermeneutic mode has implicitly shaped the self-understanding of many classical sociological theorists and finds its roots in Hegel's concept of determinate negation and the broader hermeneutic tradition. By explicating this way of thinking with and against tradition and showing its relevance for contemporary sociological theory building, the article aims to broaden the conception of theorizing and find a systematic place for the critical engagement with established theory in theory development.
Sociologists of race tend to prioritize either how race structures people's lives or the change and variation of racial categories across time and space. This bifurcation constrains sociological race theorizing. Structural materialist sociologists tend to minimize the significance of variations in racial systems across the world, and symbolic boundary race sociologists turn away from theorizing the substance or basis of racial categories. These tendencies either overdetermine racial categories or naturalize racial difference. As a solution, in this article, I synthesize theses of the colonial constitution of racial categories with dualistic theories of race as structure. I specify race as a historically contingent subset of broader structures of descent-based difference whose categories were generated through early-modern Western European colonial expansion. Systems of racial classification vary regionally based on the history of the region and its population's trade and labor relationships to specific Western European empires from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century.
This article presents a pragmatist framework for the sociology of emotions by introducing the concepts of aesthetic and anaesthetic emotions. Aesthetic emotions arise from disruptions of habits, generating emotional qualities that unify experience and reshape sensibility, and thus influence future emotional experiences. Anaesthetic emotions remain routinized, failing to expand sensibility or guide future experiences. I argue that aesthetic emotions are key to understanding the affective grounds of civic and political engagement. By focusing on aesthetics as an affective process, I highlight how sensibility contributes to recognizing public issues and the potential for collective action. I also explore how anaesthetic dynamics-often rooted in uncultivated experiences, structural apathy, or institutionalized habits-limit the transformative potential of emotions. By tracing how sensibility is cultivated or neglected, this framework shows its powerful (an)aesthetic effects on everyday life and the public sphere.
Freedom has long been central to philosophical inquiry and political discourse, yet sociological analyses remain limited. This article introduces a novel sociological framework structured around two dimensions-superordinate unity (dominant configurations of social, ecological, economic, and political interdependencies) and freedom claims (explicit normative demands for autonomy). I propose a typology of four ideal-typical freedom regimes: ancient, medieval, modern, and planetary. Critically assessing historical forms of freedom within city-states, feudal systems, and nation-states, particularly within the Global North's historical trajectory, I identify limitations in modern conceptions amid global ecological and socioeconomic crises. I introduce "planetary freedom" as an empirically observable emergent ideal-type, characterized by reflexive awareness of global interdependencies, collective stewardship, and institutionalized cooperation, thus reconceptualizing autonomy as shaped by contemporary global challenges.
The phenomena going under the label of "work-life balance" (WLB) are crucial for understanding not only major pressures weighing on people's well-being and choices but also the very organization and negotiation of everyday life. Despite being heavily researched, however, WLB is surprisingly undertheorized within sociology. This article attempts to redress the situation by proposing a robust and multilayered sociological model capable of explaining its genesis, experience, and variations. I first deconstruct the commonsense notion of WLB, recasting it as a family-employment-leisure nexus, and specify its elements. Next, I flag the limits of current conceptualizations of WLB and turn to Bourdieu's field theory for solutions. I go beyond Bourdieu, however, by modeling more precisely how multiple fields interact to shape the demands, dispositions, and desires of everyday experience. I develop a series of concepts and distinctions to that end and finish with a sketch of research possibilities.
