This article develops a sociological account of emotions as lines: dynamic processes that unfold over time, undergo interruptions, intensifications, and transformations, and become entangled with other emotional and social trajectories. Drawing on classical pragmatism and Ingold’s linealogy, it challenges static and substantialist accounts that treat emotions as discrete states or entities. Instead, emotions are understood as trajectories shaped through ongoing adjustments within conduct. The article advances three interconnected concepts—emotions as lines, correspondences, and meshworks—to show how affective life develops through relational entanglements, mutual responsiveness, and temporal continuity. By integrating insights from sociology, affect studies, developmental psychology, and process philosophy, it argues that emotions are best understood through their trajectories and practical effects rather than through their presumed foundations, offering a relational and process-oriented framework for the study of emotional experience.
What is the purpose of social science research? We argue that different data analytical approaches lead to fundamentally different endpoints. We examine the convergence and similarities between abductive analysis and Florian Znaniecki’s sociological method of analytical induction. Both approaches originated in a similar intellectual and historical climate and share similar methodological precepts such as recognizing the transformative analytical potential of negative cases and an iterative refinement of analytical categories throughout the research process. However, the aims of the analysis are different: analytical induction aims for causal explanations and typification of social systems while abductive analysis aims for theory discovery.
Several decades after the storm that shook Talcott Parsons’s General Theory of Action had subsided, the time is ripe to assess what has remained standing. In his recent book, Reading Talcott Parsons: A Re-Assessment of His Legacy, Helmut Staubmann undertakes this task with seriousness. Each chapter initially concentrates on a particular aspect of the General Theory of Action - including its different stages, its theory of interchange media, its perspective on social change and evolution, its conceptualization of personality and culture - which is then examined in virtue of its relevance for contemporary sociology. The study pursues pedagogical, systematic, and analytical goals while developing a multidimensional analysis that explores ontological, epistemological, methodological, and sociological questions, alongside an examination of the distinctive features of modern societies. For these reasons, it constitutes an essential reading for those interested in Parsons’s thought and may also prove highly stimulating for anyone interested in sociological and social theory more broadly.
The history of sociology is highly selective, privileging a relatively small set of canonical figures while marginalizing many actors who contributed to the discipline’s development. Although recent scholarship has increasingly recovered such “neglected figures,” the conditions under which they become historically significant – and subsequently forgotten – remain insufficiently understood. In this article, I introduce a temporal perspective on neglect. Drawing on the concept of liminality, I show how moments of crisis and reorganization in the discipline create opportunities for actors operating between institutional, intellectual, and national domains. In such contexts, otherwise marginal figures – here described as liminal intermediaries – can exert significant influence. Yet these same conditions also render them vulnerable to later neglect once disciplinary structures stabilize and retrospective narratives consolidate. In this light, I understand neglect not merely as omission, but as a post-liminal effect of disciplinary closure and historiographical reconstruction. This argument is developed through the case of Max Ralis and his role in the development of empirical social research and the reconfiguration of sociology in post-1945 Germany.
In this article I provide an overview of Talcott Parsons’s most psychoanalytically orientated book, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process. Additionally, I consider his related writings on life course maturation. My main goal is to introduce a largely neglected aspect of Parsons’s psychoanalytic sociology to a new generation of scholars in social psychology. As such, the article consists of three main parts. In the first I render a renewed reading of FSIP that gives a nuanced assessment of the middle-class post-war American family. I then examine the work of four scholars who were Parsons’s protégés around the time that FSIP was published. I show how Parsons’s ideas were taken in several directions by these family sociologists of the ‘second generation’, the cohort of 1950s students who began their careers under Parsons’s tutelage. I then offer a first intimation as to why Parsons’s social psychological theory of family system did not survive in its totality – as a viable theoretical system – beyond the second generation. Lastly, I propose that Parsons’s theory of family could have relevance for family studies today.
The academic job market is changing rapidly due to financial and political strains. This is particularly true for sociology. Yet, we do not know much about sociology graduate students’ preferences for and expectations about their future career paths. Using survey data from a representative sample of graduate students in the U.S., we assess sociology students’ career preferences and expectations and how they compare to graduate students in other disciplines. We find that sociology graduate students have particularly high preferences for and expectations of a tenure-track career that likely do not align with the job market. We offer recommendations for ways that sociology graduate programs can better prepare students both psychologically and materially for a wider range of career paths.
This essay responds to six symposium contributions on Erving Goffman and the Cold War and reflects on what the project set out to do and what it has become. Though conceived as a study of texts rather than a biography, the book has been broadly received as one because situating a thinker in time and place inevitably brushes against the biographical form. The symposiasts illuminate the book's central concerns from a wide range of national and disciplinary perspectives, and their contributions advance the project in several directions: clarifying the concept of "natural metaphor," refining the network vocabulary through the French notion of r & eacute;seau, and recovering the "pantographic" logic by which the book moves between individual and epoch. Against critiques that the book over-unifies Goffman's work, I argue that its Cold War frame is heuristic rather than totalizing. It is an invitation to see overlooked dimensions of a thinker who, as Whitman put it, contains multitudes. Ultimately, situating Goffman "of and in the American Cold War" enriches our understanding by showing how the dominant moods of an era-suspicion, fragility, aggression-shape not only institutions but the very forms of theorizing that emerge within them.
Humanity’s entanglement with other living entities is undergoing profound ecological, ethical, and emotional transformations. While sociology has increasingly engaged with non-human animals, plants, and ecosystems, the role of emotions in these interspecies and inter-entity relations remains under-theorized. This article argues that the sociology of emotions provides crucial tools for understanding how humans categorize, value, and act upon living entities, particularly in contexts of uncertainty and moral ambiguity. Drawing on more-than-human perspectives, human–non-human animal studies, and social-ecological approaches, we focus on living entities – such as micro-organisms (bacteria, viruses) or organoids, —as a theoretical test case to examine how emotional engagements mediate “boundary-work”, shaping ethical concern, legal status, and practical engagement. We show that emotional engagements are relational, socially patterned, and contextually regulated, structuring interactions across a gradient from clearly sentient to ambiguous entities. By extending the sociology of emotions beyond human-centered analysis, this article contributes to a broader understanding of the affective, ethical, and practical dimensions of human interactions with the living world and highlights new avenues for sociological inquiry into the boundaries and hierarchies of life.
Georg Simmel, despite being a founding father of sociology, is often excluded from the list of the discipline’s principal founders. This neglect of Simmel’s work was perpetuated in ethnomethodology even though, like ethnomethodology, Simmel’s work concerns the minute organization of everyday interaction. It can, therefore, be of considerable importance for ethnomethodological inquiries. A group of ethnomethodologists devoted two years to reviewing Simmel’s corpus to identify and reveal resources that are useful for contemporary sociologists at large. What we discovered exceeded our expectations, and this article discusses some of these conceptual tools and theoretical resources, including praxis as the object of sociological investigations, objectivation practices, membership as degrees of commonness-and-strangeness, and the individual-“unity” relationship. We also review connections between Simmel, Husserl, Garfinkel and other scholars. Both Simmel and Garfinkel were relentless in their refusal to replace the dynamic character of social life with static theoretical constructs. We argue that thinking through their theories together fruitfully impedes sociologists in pursuing dualistic reasoning and re-orients them towards phenomena and issues of great sociological import that have remained largely overlooked, or have receded from view, in current sociology. We conclude that Simmel’s notion of “purely sociological” forms is perfectly consonant with the motivating interest of ethnomethodological researchers, who might employ his conceptual insights to address the lived objectivity of social phenomena empirically. At the same time, this also shows how ethnomethodology is concerned with foundational sociological issues. And, finally, it illuminates Simmel’s textured heritage beyond set, traditional readings of sociological thought and its history.
The sciences, in general, and the social sciences are directly connected with the processes of social structuring in which the communities of scientists who develop them are inscribed. These first years of the 21st century have taught us that social change has become dizzying. The modifications in the so-called Society 4.0, the industrial growth (and construction) in Asia over the last 30 years, and the current consequences of the Climate crisis are among the many contemporary phenomena that make us think about changes in times. This presentation illustrates how the sociology of emotions agenda should reflect the changes brought about by the current process of trans-globalization. Its objective is to expose the basic contents of that agenda. The exposition strategy will be as follows: (a) current global problems are synthesized in the context of transglobalization, (b) two politics of sensibilities that can be reconstructed on a global scale are described, and (c) the contents of a critical sociology of emotions are exposed as primary components of a future agenda of the sociology of emotions.
Sociology is dependent, for its disciplinary survival, on the health of its undergraduate major, and this is objectively in steep decline. Using publicly available data, I find that since 2005 sociology undergraduate completions have declined as a share of all completions by 40
There has long been a crisis of trust in sociology, one that is inextricably linked to the discipline’s contradictory self-understandings. This paper aims to construct a metasociological model of the legitimacy of sociology in order to clarify these debates. The core of this model lies in recognizing sociology as a social structure embedded within a larger society, and understanding that claims regarding the legitimacy of sociology primarily occur at the structural relations both internal and external to sociology. Through an analysis of Chinese, Iranian and American sociology, we summarize seven types of legitimacy of sociology.
This text attempts to show how French sociologists, primarily those closely or remotely associated with the Durkheimians of the French School of Sociology, upon becoming acquainted with Znaniecki’s work mainly during the interwar period, missed the mark with an author they misunderstood. At that time, they were preoccupied with “psychologizing” (that is, with taking on objects of study such as “mentality,” the emergence and expression of feelings and emotions, etc.) a sociological discipline perceived in France as being in crisis. Seeking sources of inspiration, they showed an interest in American sociology, with which they associated Znaniecki. Consequently, the criticisms they leveled at his work were similar to the major epistemological and theoretical objection they addressed to American studies in general: the mistaken ignorance of the fact that every group or society must be understood as a self-contained “totality.”
The present article introduces the Analytical Three-Dimensional Model FEI (Felt, Expressed, and Identified Emotions) as a conceptual and methodological instrument for the study of emotions from a sociological perspective. In contrast to approaches that have considered emotions as universal reactions or physiological responses, the model is based on a social and contextual conception, inspired by recent contributions from social neuroscience and a rich sociological tradition that has interpreted emotions as symbolic practices, normatively regulated. The FEI model posits the distinction between felt, expressed, and identified emotions, with the objective of facilitating more precise access to affective processes within social contexts. Each dimension is associated with varying degrees of reflexivity, intentionality, and modes of empirical access. These dimensions are accompanied by critical reflection on interpretative risks and appropriate methodological protocols for their analysis. This organization facilitates observation by recognizing the hermeneutical burden and analytical responsibility of the researcher. In essence, it is a three-dimensional framework designed to provide sociology with a robust tool for the study of emotions as experiences shaped by context, regulated by social norms, and expressed, felt and identified in concrete situations of interaction.
The Chicago School of sociology is often described as narrowly focused on casework, departmental life, and the city of Chicago. These internalist accounts obscure the Chicago School's exchanges with places like Kansas, Ohio, Mexico, Canada, the Philippines, and Poland. They also overlook the ways Chicago School research has been appropriated and extended by sociologists working in countries from China to France. Rather than dismiss these international ties as outliers, this special issue conceptualizes them as currents flowing around a coherent whole, demonstrating the value of examining the Chicago School as a case of global sociology. This paper thematizes the currents identified in this special issue's works in a four-fold relation flowing into, out from, through, and against their case - the Chicago School. Interpreting global scholarship in this way suggests that externalist accounts of intellectual life can be thought of in terms of the relations between cases and currents. It also shows that the global Chicago School has been there all along.
In Erving Goffman and the Cold War, Gary Jaworski (2023) draws upon Harold Garfinkel’s (1956) notion of “natural metaphor” to interpret Goffman’s sociology as responsive to the distinctive ethos of Cold War USA. The note examines the origins of cold war concerns in Goffman’s writings and how natural metaphors were deployed by Jaworski in his book. It raises some questions about the interpretation and how it connects with recent thinking about the role played by metaphor in Goffman’s sociology.
This paper traces the rise and fall of “social construction” in sociology. I begin with a brief sketch of its roots in Kantian philosophy, as interpreted by Durkheim and Saussure, and its codification by Berger and Luckmann. I then use a dataset of roughly 350 million words published in 115,000 articles across nineteen journals over 130 years to demonstrate the rise of social construction in the late-1960s, its peak around 2000, and the recent decline of the last fifteen years. I conclude with a discussion of possible explanations for this decline and suggest fruitful theoretical alternatives.
The so-called “social question” has accompanied the development of capitalism since its origins, acting as both an “effect” and a “cause” of its processes of gestation and development. This social question entails changes and transformations across all areas of individuals’ daily lives, institutions, and, consequently, social life. These transformations include state interventions, known as social policies, along with the theoretical and political debates that surround them. Social policies can be defined as state interventions that affect the production and reproduction of daily life across various sectors and social groups. The main objective of this article is to present a research agenda for studies on the connections between social policies and emotions. The proposal is framed within a theoretical and empirical research program that encompasses the sociology of social policies, the sociology of emotions, and, in particular, the analysis of the politics of sensibilities as a specific approach to exploring the connection between politics and emotions. To achieve this objective, the following argumentative strategy was developed: first, the relationship between the social question and social policies is analyzed; second, the connections between social policies and bodies/emotions are synthesized; and finally, the search for and challenges to an agenda of research are presented. The paper concludes by emphasizing the urgency of establishing an agenda that considers the impact and regulation of emotions arising from state interventions on poverty, with comparative analysis across countries.
Jaworski’s Erving Goffman and the Cold War addresses the question of how Goffman became “Goffman,” that is, the author of his own sociological perspective. Jaworski claims that Goffman as an author was shaped by his own experience of the Cold War. This approach raises important interpretive questions: Does Jaworski “absolutize” (in the Mannheimian sense of the term) by expanding the scope of the influence of the young Goffman’s experiences on his entire work? Does Jaworski’s analysis evade Michel Foucault’s concept of the “rarefaction of discourse”, which encourages us to exercise great caution when trying to explain the nature of a work through the features of its author’s biographical experience? Does Jaworski’s argument, based on the assumption of the continuity of Goffman’s identity, contradict what Goffman, as a pre-postmodern author, might have said about himself?
