No abstract

Jens Beckert's superb book builds on his earlier work analyzing the nature of capitalism, and the limitations of the economic approach, specifically rational choice theory, as an explanation for economic behavior, and the prominent role of uncertainty in economic life (Beckert 1996). Sociology has for the most part ignored the future as a source of explanations for economic behavior, drawing instead on the past and presentthe structure of social networks, the configuration of organizational fields, and institutions, norms, morality, etc. Economic theory, alternatively, has embraced the future, but in ways, that are also problematic.

This study examines how proximate small cities in the United States that have similar socioeconomic backgrounds, disproportionately high rates of opioid overdose, but different racial demographics, narrate local experiences of the opioid epidemic. Using critical discourse analysis, we analyzed 251 local news articles from Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts. This comparative study highlights the racialization of space and the racializing power of space in two small city newspapers: the Eagle Tribune and the Lowell Sun. We demonstrate how (White) criminality is made sympathetic through White death, and how space is employed as a multi-valiant mechanism of colorblind racialization. We theorize the construction of a distorted and racialized "supply chain," featuring narratives of "stock dealers" from "source cities" moving drugs into predominately White "receiver cities" populated by vulnerable "new users," employing and producing space as a racialized frame. Ultimately, we map how familiar racialization and novel decriminalization is produced in/by local news media.

Sociologists are engaging in a long-overdue reckoning about the place of the traditional canon in social theory courses and pedagogy. Instructors are revising their syllabi to include a more diverse set of authors while “provincializing” classics that have long been taught as universal. We confront the question of how to teach contested canonical works after an instructor has committed to this work. We argue that progressive reforms to theory syllabi can raise new problems associated with teaching “canonical” works and propose one way to address them with a flexible recipe designed to resolve tensions between pedagogical imperatives. An extended example from our experience teaching Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is employed to illustrate our proposal. Our aim is to contribute to an ongoing disciplinary dialogue that will maintain theory’s central place in sociology’s identity while constantly asking what, and whom, it is for.