Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion (2012) -- article presents an introduction to the cognitive science of religion. It shows that CSR began with original theoretical approaches within the human sciences and has subsequently developed into a more empirical, interdisciplinary feld of study. The feld is growing rapidly with the appearance of several centers and projects. The most important theories, fndings, and criticisms are presented. Also the various centers of study and recent projects are described. -- Keywords -- cognition, agency, sociality, ritual -- Downloaded to Tab S2

Michele Starnini, Mattia Frasca & Andrea Baronchelli -- Scientific Reports 6, Article number: 31834 (2016), doi:10.1038/srep31834
Multi-agent models often describe populations segregated either in the physical space, i.e. subdivided in metapopulations, or in the ecology of opinions, i.e. partitioned in echo chambers. Here we show how both kinds of segregation can emerge from the interplay between homophily and social influence in a simple model of mobile agents endowed with a continuous opinion variable. In the model, physical proximity determines a progressive convergence of opinions but differing opinions result in agents moving away from each others. This feedback between mobility and social dynamics determines the onset of a stable dynamical metapopulation scenario where physically separated groups of like-minded individuals interact with each other through the exchange of agents. The further introduction of confirmation bias in social interactions, defined as the tendency of an individual to favor opinions that match his own, leads to the emergence of echo chambers where different opinions coexist also within the same group. We believe that the model may be of interest to researchers investigating the origin of segregation in the offline and online world. -- Downloaded to Tab S2

Plan de l'article
Une clarification sémantique préalable
I - La querelle de la sécularisation et l’interprétation de la modernité
II - Malaise dans la civilisation post-moderne
III - La modernité sortie de la modernité ?
Duvoux Nicolas, « Les grammaires de la modernité. Notices bibliographiques autour de trois débats essentiels», Le Philosophoire 2/2005 (n° 25) , p. 135-152
URL : www.cairn.info/revue-le-philosophoire-2005-2-page-135.htm.
DOI : 10.3917/phoir.025.0135.
Downloaded via iPhone to DBOX

University of Stuttgart - Institute of Economics and Law -- The characteristic capability of science – to turn whatever it might touch into knowledge – seems to have eluded economics. Currently, economists do not understand how the economy works. To get out of the cul-de-sac requires a paradigm shift. It consists in replacing behavioral axioms by structural axioms. The subject matter of theoretical economics is not human behavior but systemic behavior. From the structural analysis follows a new Law of Supply and Demand and a new Profit Law for the economy as a whole. The conventional supply-demand-equilibrium approach is refuted. This implies that the reliance on the spontaneous order metaphor is unfounded. -' Number of Pages in PDF File: 29 -- downloaded pdf to Note

In "Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture" (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), William Leach tackles a two-fold problem confronting historians of the period we have identified (infelicitously, in Rebecca Edwards’s estimation) as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.[1] First, historians face the problem of how to adequately convey the sheer scale and scope of the thoroughgoing transformations in practically every facet of American society during this period. Second, historians face the problem of how to explain these changes. This latter task is always tricky for historians (or at least it should be), and it poses particular challenges for the historiography of this period. -- very nice ruminating on historiographical problems, presentism, shifts in historiographical approaches (e.g. after the linguistic turn) especially questions of agency and/or structure, in this case Leach using the biographical materials newly available in archives to show the development of "consumer cuoture" from the perspective of one of the main pkayers, Sam Wanamaker -- downloaded as pdf to Note

Responding to claims that sociology isn't a "science" or that it goes off the rails when its pretensions to scientific status dominate, he discusses 4 ideal-types of sociology -- Cognitive, Expressive, Descriptive (cameral) and Critical. The first, which he claims fits a range of the most important theories in philosophy of science, is represented by Tocqueville, Weber and Durkheim. The produced explanations of puzzling phenomena that linked micro and macro - why particular actions or choices were rational for classes of actors in the sense that the meaning was consistent with their beliefs and experiences given their position in social structures and the tools they had available to understand and control their situation consistent with their values. This type of causal explanation can be used, elaborated and built on for cumulative knowledge. The more popular bestseller works tend to be expressive and/or critical - speaking to people's current experiences, felt anxieties, or ideological orientation so they are useful, but not necessarily true - he gives Foucault on prisons as an example. The descriptive, which is directed towards policy ("cameral" in Schumpeter) grows increasingly dominant as we become increasingly data sensitive and driven. Topics tend to come in waves based on issues that have become prominent and a focus of political debates, social movements, etc. Thus only the cognitive is a truly scientific contribution to cumulative knowledge. Interesting remarks on the type of methodological individualism that's central to the cognitive but both different and sometimes inappropriate in the other ideal-types.

King's College London - Department of Political Economy -- Peter Berger has attempted to develop an account of the relationship between social structure and human agency that navigates a middle way between voluntarism and determinism. Berger’s approach has been criticised by social theorists for reproducing, rather than transcending, the very errors of voluntarism and determinism that he strives to avoid. However, the critics have focused on Berger’s explicit, meta-theoretical pronouncements about the nature or ontology of the social world, whilst ignoring the more sophisticated account of the structure agency relationship that is implicit in, and presupposed by, his substantive sociological research. The notions of ‘emergence’ and ‘emergent properties’ are used to develop an account of the structure-agency relationship that is consistent with Berger’s concrete sociological work, whilst avoiding the shortcomings of his explicit reflections about the nature of the social world. -- Number of Pages in PDF File: 21 -- Keywords: Berger, social ontology, structure-agency relationship -- downloaded pdf to Note

Social theory is experiencing something of a revival within economics. Critical analyses of the particular nature of the subject matter of social studies and of the types of method, categories and modes of explanation that can legitimately be endorsed for the scientific study of social objects, are re-emerging. Economists are again addressing such issues as the relationship between agency and structure, between the economy and the rest of society, and between inquirer and the object of inquiry. There is renewed interest in elaborating basic categories such as causation, competition, culture, discrimination,evolution, money, need, order, organisation, power, probability, process, rationality, technology, time, truth, uncertainty and value, etc. The objective for this series is to facilitate this revival further. In contemporary economics the label `theory' has been appropriated by a group that confines itself to largely a-social, a-historical, mathematical `modelling'. Economics as Social Theory thus reclaims the `theory' label, offering a platform for alternative, rigorous, but broader and more critical conceptions of theorising.

Chapter draft for edited book - post-humanism or post-anthropology? Extensive footnotes to these post Foucault, Latour, etc trends -- downloaded pdf to Note

Jan-Hendrik Passoth, University of Bielefeld - Nicholas J. Rowland, Pennsylvania State University -- doi: 10.1177/0268580909351325 International Sociology November 2010 vol. 25 no. 6 818-841 -- This conceptual article draws on literature in the sociology of science on modelling. The authors suggest that if state theory can be conceptualized as an ‘engine’ rather than merely a ‘camera’, in that policy is mobilized to make the world fit the theory, then this has implications for conceptualizing states. To examine this possibility the authors look through the lens of actor-network theory (ANT) and in doing so articulate a relationship between two models of the state in the literature. They find that an ‘actor model’ of the state is accepted by many scholars, few of whom develop ‘network models’ of the state. In response, this study introduces an actor-network model and proposes that its contribution to state theory is in rethinking the character of modern states to be the outcome of actually performed assemblages of all those practices of building it, protecting it, governing it and theorizing about it. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Downloaded pdf to Note

C Experience has recently reemerged as an important analytical category for historians of the Old Regime and the French Revolution. Reacting against the perceived excesses of discourse analysis, which made political language independent of any social determinants, certain post-revisionists are now seeking to contextualize political language by relating it to the experience of those who use it. Political agency, in these analyses, is understood to be the effect of particular formative experiences. This article suggests that the search for an experiential antidote to discourse is misconceived because it perpetuates an untenable dichotomy between thought and reality. Access to the phenomenon of historical agency should be pursued not through experience or discourse but through the category of consciousness, since the make-up of the subject's consciousness determines how he/she engages the world and decides to attempt changing it. After a brief discussion of an important study that exemplifies both the allure and the functionality of the notion of experience, Timothy Tackett's Becoming a Revolutionary, the article focuses on the evolving political consciousness of a man who became a revolutionary agitator in 1789, J.-M.-A. Servan. Analysis of his writings between 1770 and 1789 shows that the way in which his perspective was constructed, rather than the lessons of experience per se, determined the shape of his revolutionary intentions in 1789. -- issue devoted to Agency after postmodernism -- big bibliography -- downloaded pdf to Note

U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 279 -- Any reader of Foucault's corpus recognizes fairly quickly that it is animated by an ethical impulse, namely, to liberate individuals from a kind of oppression from which they suffer. This oppression, however, does not involve the familiar tyranny of the Leviathan or the totalitarian state; it exploits instead values that the victim of oppression herself accepts, and which then leads the oppressed agent to be complicit in her subjugation. It also depends, crucially, on a skeptical thesis about the epistemology of the social sciences. It is this conjunction of claims - that individuals oppress themselves in virtue of certain moral and epistemic norms they accept - that marks Foucault's uniquely disturbing contribution to the literature whose diagnostic aim is, with Max Weber, to understand the oppressive character of modernity, and whose moral aim is, with the Frankfurt School, human liberation and human flourishing. I offer here both a reconstruction of Foucault's project - focusing on the role that ethical and epistemic norms play in how agents subjugate themselves - and some modestly critical reflections on his project, especially the weaknesses in his critique of the epistemic standing of the human sciences. -- Number of Pages in PDF File: 18 -- Keywords: Foucault, Nietzsche, human sciences, epistemology -- downloaded pdf to Note

Jens Beckert's 2009 article on the constitution and dynamics of markets is a bold attempt to define a novel research agenda. Deeming uncertainty and coordination essential for the constitution of social action in markets, Beckert proposes a framework centered on the resolution of three coordination problems: valuation, cooperation, and competition. The empirical study of these three coordination problems has the potential to contribute considerably to the sociological analysis of markets. However, the assertion that such a theoretical vantage point can explain the constitution and dynamics of markets is not compelling because it (1) conflates social interaction with social structures, (2) fails to address power relations, institutions, and macro-level structures, and (3) neglects the historically contingent and socially contested nature of markets themselves. The present article shows that these three pitfalls are the result of starting from the problem of order and building upon uncertainty as the basis of action in markets, lending the suggested framework a methodologically individualist bent. Therefore, Beckert's suggested framework is in danger of mystifying the very power relations, institutions, and macro-level structures that are at the heart of the constitution and dynamics of markets. -- paywall -- see bibliography on jstor information page

Mead no doubt had a manifest influence on Blumer's thinking, and Blumer's acknowledgment of his indebtedness to Mead is a central feature of Blumer's writing. While I do not presume to question the importance Blumer assigns to the role played by Mead in the development of Blumerian symbolic interactionism, I argue that the perspective also owes much to the insights of Georg Simmel. In particular, a Simmelian flavor is evident in how Blumer addresses the core sociological issues of the nature of social reality, the nature of the relationship between the individual and society, and the nature of social action. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Parallels and distinctions between Fin-de-Siècle pessimism, especially social theorists, re liberalism and Enlightenment as sustainable modernity and Postmodernism -- both concern re the subject and the possibilities of social knowledge -- helpful bibliography -- downloaded pdf to Note

"From Structure to Agency to Process: The Evolution of Charles Tilly's Theories of Social Action as Reflected in His Analyses of Contentious Politics" in special issue - Remembering Charles Tilly -- Charles Tilly's social theories shifted over the course of his career from an early focus on quantitative and macro-sociological approaches to a later focus on relations and agency. His studies of state-making also shifted, from a focus on conflict and capitalism to explorations of democracy. This paper details these shifts and places them in the context of broader trends in comparative-historical and political sociology. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Original Citation:
Mark Bevir and David Richards, “Decentring Policy Networks: A Theoretical Agenda”, Public Administration 87 (2009), 3-14.

Keywords:
Networks, Policy Networks, Ethnography, Decentring

Over 100 references -- frequently cited

Good bibliography for recent work in history and sociology on networks, events selection for explanation, creation of bounded "cases" within which network analysis applied to events, not just social relations, can produce explanation -- opens with focus on meaning rather than causation, though speculate that historical processes less subject to contingency than most historians believe -- see jstor information page for multiple cites to the article

Very useful intellectual history and status of sociology theory streams, research programs,cross boundary links, borrowings etc-- downloaded pdf to Note The Sad Demise, Mysterious Disappearance, and Glorious Triumph of Symbolic Interactionism Gary Alan Fine Annual Review of Sociology Vol. 19, (1993) (pp. 61-87) Page Count: 27 Symbolic interactionism has changed over the past two decades, both in the issues that practitioners examine and in its position within the discipline. Once considered adherents of a marginal oppositional perspective, confronting the dominant positivist, quantitative approach of mainstream sociology, symbolic interactionists find now that many of their core concepts have been accepted. Simultaneously their core as an intellectual community has been weakened by the diversity of interests of those who self-identify with the perspective. I examine here four processes that led to these changes: fragmentation, expansion, incorporation, and adoption. I then describe the role of symbolic interactionism in three major debates confronting the discipline: the micro/macro debate, the structure/agency debate, and the social realist/interpretivist debate. I discuss six empirical arenas in which interactionists have made major research contributions: social coordination theory, the sociology of emotions, social constructionism, self and identity theory, macro-interactionism, and policy-relevant research. I conclude by speculating about the future role of interactionism.