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.
