Experiencing Sociology

Fraser, Mariam

doi:10.1177/1368431008099644

Cited by 25 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…7 Producing texts that can be read and listened to simultaneously also allows the potential for linear arguments to be combined with non-linear interconnections and routes. I want to return to a passage from the Law and Urry text quoted earlier and a specifi c passage that others have also found suggestive (see Fraser, 2009). They write:…”

Section: Conclusion: Making Some Realities More Realmentioning

confidence: 99%

Live Sociology: Social Research and its Futures

Back¹

2012

The Sociological Review

102

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The article draws on recent debates about empirical sociology's methodological crisis that results from the emergence of sophisticated information‐based capitalism and digital culture. Researchers face the challenge of ‘newly coordinated social reality’ in which social relations and interconnections exist across time and space. However, this challenge co‐exists with an unprecedented opportunity to use digital multimedia to reimagine social research. In the face of these developments it is argued that the sociological craft needs to be invigorated by a renewed focus on its political purpose. Digital culture offers researchers the opportunity to develop new methodological devices. This vision is contrasted with a critique of dead sociology that is characterized as objectifying, comfortable, disengaged and parochial. The article argues for a live sociology, able to attend to the fleeting, distributed, multiple and sensory aspects of sociality through research techniques that are mobile, sensuous and operate from multiple vantage points. If researchers enact reality rather than simply reflect it, there is an opportunity to create sociological forms of representation that are more knowing and innovative than their antecedents.

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Section: Conclusion: Making Some Realities More Realmentioning

confidence: 99%

Live Sociology: Social Research and its Futures

Back¹

2012

The Sociological Review

102

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“…Mills argues that on one hand, grand theory fetishizes its concepts, and as a consequence works at such a high level of abstraction that it 'outruns any specifi c and empirical problem ' (1959: 58), while on the other, abstracted empiricism loses its grip on the problems of the empirical world by confusing 'whatever is to be studied with the set of methods suggested for its study ' (1959: 61). The argument of the present paper is that while Parsons and Lazarsfeld barely feature in contemporary sociology, this double impasse of theory and method remains with us today, and for this reason, among others (see Back, 2007;Fraser, 2009;Kemple and Mawani, 2009), there is a strong case for returning to Mills' work. The aim of this paper is to re-read Mills' Sociological Imagination to consider current crises of theory and method, and to pose again the question of the 'promise' or value of the discipline.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 74%

Measure, Value and the Current Crises of Sociology

Gane¹

2011

The Sociological Review

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This paper returns to C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination to make an argument about the crisis of sociological method and theory today. Mills' famous text opens with a stinging critique of abstracted empiricism and grand theory on the grounds that they fetishize either methods or concepts. It is argued that Mills' critique can be applied to current sociological practices and thinking. The first part of this paper centres on questions of method, and reads between Mills' critique of abstracted empiricism and a recent debate over what Mike Savage and Roger Burrows call the ‘coming crisis of empirical sociology’. In the light of this, it is argued that two crises currently haunt empirical sociology: a crisis of imagination and measurement. The second part of the paper then moves to the analysis of what Mills calls ‘grand theory’. Here, two parallel crises are identified: a generational crisis within social theory that is tied in turn to what might be called a crisis of the concept. The conclusion of the paper returns to Mills in order to rethink his vision of the promise or value of sociology. It is argued that innovative conceptual work must lie at the heart of future sociological thinking if it is to move beyond the parallel traps of what Mills calls abstracted empiricism and grand theory.

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“…Indeed, this is what I have suggested is at stake in the feminist theories that I have discussed above. However, taking up the notions of the reciprocal or entangled relations between the socio-cultural and economic that I have also discussed, an ethical position might also be to consider ethics as an empirical problem (see also Fraser 2009, Coleman 2008. In this sense, the vantage points from which to examine the ethics of body-image initiatives -and hence ethical responses or cutsmay differ depending on whether they come from the position of girls and young women (and importantly, which girls and young women -in developed or developing countries, for example?…”

Section: Conclusion: Entanglement Cutting and Ethicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pricing bodies: a feminist new materialist approach to the relations between the economic and socio-cultural

Coleman

2018

Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory

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Arguments that the economic and socio-cultural should be understood as relational and intertwined, and that price involves a reciprocal relationship between the economic and socio-cultural, are increasingly prevalent in the social sciences. I develop these notions of relationality and reciprocation through a feminist new materialist perspective, which emphasises the entanglement of and intra-action between what might usually be seen as independent and autonomous entities. To do this, I focus on a range of recent body-image initiatives, led by government, corporate and non-profit organisations, which aim to improve girls' and young women's levels of confidence and self-esteem. I explore how feminist theory tends to see such initiatives in terms of the expansion of the economic sphere into the sociocultural, which involves a tainting or contamination of embodiment and feeling. Rather than dispute these arguments, I take seriously theories and practices from cultural economy that see the economic and socio-cultural as co-constitutive. I augment these ideas with a feminist new materialist approach and argue that the economic and socio-cultural are in intra-active relations: they do not precede or exist apart from each other. In doing so, I consider how body-image initiatives can be understood as phenomena produced through these entangled intra-active relations, 2 and offer an understanding of pricing as a simultaneously socio-cultural and economic process, where value and values become. I also raise questions regarding how, ethically and politically, boundary making and unmaking can be conceived, and how despite being in entangled relations, asymmetries between economic and sociocultural relations may be approached.

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Experiencing Sociology

Cited by 25 publications

References 7 publications

Live Sociology: Social Research and its Futures

Live Sociology: Social Research and its Futures

Measure, Value and the Current Crises of Sociology

Pricing bodies: a feminist new materialist approach to the relations between the economic and socio-cultural

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