An important philosopher and anthropologist of science, Bruno Latour has recently outlined an ambitious programme for a new sociological empiricism, in continuation of his actor-network-theory (ANT). Interrogating issues of description, explanation and theoretical interpretation in this 'sociology of associations', we argue that certain internal tensions are manifest. While Latour's philosophy of social science demands an absolute abandonment of theory in all its forms, proposing instead to simply 'go on describing', he is in practice employing versions of common sense explanation and pragmatic-constructivist theory to make ends meet. The core of this tension, we claim, can be located in Latour's meta-theoretical commitments, in effect obscuring important ways in which human subjects employ things, effects and symbols beyond their simple, 'empirical' existence. To illustrate these claims, we deploy the example of how morality works in social life, and coin the term quasiactant, in allusion to the Latourian actant, to better understand such processes. Our overall criticism of ANT is immanent, aiming at the re-introduction of what we dub 'virtual theory' into Latourian empiricism, thus further strengthening what remains one of the most promising contemporary attempts to reinvigorate the sociological enterprise.

This article argues that there is a double problem in international research in cultural capital and educational attainment: an empirical problem, since few new insights have been gained within recent years; and a theoretical problem, since cultural capital is seen as a simple hypothesis about certain isolated individual resources, disregarding the structural vision and important related concepts such as field in Bourdieu's sociology. We (re-)emphasize the role of field theory in cultural capital research in education, taking into consideration current concerns in international quantitative research.

This article analyzes recent developments in Danish alcohol policy, culture, and industry. It reveals cross-sector dynamics and complexities that are often downplayed in existing literature. It traces how a stable “structural configuration” emerged in the 1960s-1980s between the three domains, based on liberalization. A particular adolescent alcohol culture of intoxication, however, emerged in the 1990s, raising public awareness and calls for policy intervention. Contrary to what may have been expected, this did not represent a break with the liberal alcohol configuration in policy, culture, and industry, but an increased segregation of adolescent consumption from adult consumption, exposing the former to severe legal and moral regulation. This analysis of historic-structural dynamics helps explain why adolescent drinking is dependent on more than isolated causal links such as between policy events and consumption.

Ongoing European financial market integration relies on the creation of harmonized and centralized market infrastructures: the little-known institutions and systems that settle financial transactions across borders. Since the constitutional conception of market integration within the EU entails creating 'a level playing field' for competition, a fundamental problem emerges of how to provide that centralization and harmonization without violating the core principles of an open market economy either through private monopolization or public privatization. The paper presents a sociotechnological study of a recent major infrastructure initiative by the European Central Bank, called Target2 Securities (T2S). Embedding the analysis of the struggles and debates around the birth and development of T2S in an analysis of the structural problem of competition and centralization in European financial market integration, the paper suggests an alternative perspective to that of performativity dominating the research field.

Financial market integration processes in the European Union (EU) are characterised by an epistemic problem of economic theory. This problem encompasses what 'the market' is, how it is to be 'integrated', and the nature and role of 'money' as infrastructure of the fully integrated market. The EU's legal framework has imported this epistemic problem along with the competitive conception of the market as described in economic theory-as a 'level playing field' for private exchange, under free, fair and ideally unrestrained competition. It manifests itself in European financial market integration processes, as exemplified in the article, via two otherwise disconnected areas of European Central Bank (ECB) activity: (a) the provision of central bank credit for the purpose of financial transaction settlement in the Eurozone; and (b) the conduct of ordinary monetary policy in the Eurozone. While the problem can be stabilized through legal, technical and other means, it remains latent, and may manifest itself again in unexpected ways, as happened in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Thus, contrary to ideologies that are widely understood as more or less coherent systems of doctrines, epistemic problems are characterised by specific tensions, contradictions and conceptual uncertainties.