The Explanation of Social Action

Martin, John Levi

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199773312.001.0001

Cited by 268 publications

(170 citation statements)

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“…Cassirer criticizes substantialism from multiple angles, including the classic Kantian critique that the theory cannot account for its own principles of differentiation. But also because, in a fashion that prefigures both Gaston Bachelard and Thomas Kuhn, Cassirer suggests that the logic of substantialism defines and limits one's scientific thinking and thus prevents one from being capable of understanding the relational foundations of reality (Cassirer, 1910;Martin, 2011;Mohr, 2010). 5 Bourdieu writes: "It is for the purpose of breaking with this substantialist mode of thinking, and not for the thrill of sticking a new label on old theoretical wineskins, that I speak of this "field of power" rather than of the dominant class, the latter being a realist concept designating an actual population of holders of this tangible reality that we call power.…”

Section: What Is An Institutional Logic?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The institutional logics of love: measuring intimate life

et al. 2014

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Does love follow an institutional logic? 1 Institutional logics have been applied to the study of organizational behaviors where changes are effected in public through the actions of officeholders and there is abundant textual activity both in justification and codification, all of which leave their traces in public statement, law, regulation, budgets and official statement. Romantic love, in contrast, is an individual phenomenon effected in private through interpersonal relations that not only leave little textual trace, but whose enactment depends on registers of corporeality, affect and co-presence that do not even accede to language, let alone text. Is it even possible to investigate the intimate behaviors of college students to see if they are ordered by the institutional logic of romantic love?2 We think so. In this paper we build on a theorization of institutional logics and a long tradition of measuring cultural logics from a relational perspective that provide figurations more appropriate to that theory. We use the formal method of correspondence analysis (MCA) to examine a set of data recently collected from a sample of American university students in order to see how institutional logics operate in the lived experience of individuals who negotiate their intimate "love lives" within a complex social space in which different institutional logics are operative. What is An Institutional Logic?Institutional logics obtain where subjects, practices and objects cohere as cultural grammars.3 An institutional logic is an order of production composed of distinctive subjects and In contrast, the eminent historian of the conventions of American courtship prefaces her book this way: "the word love scarcely appears in the following pages. This is not because I have a cynical view of the subject but because love was not so much the province of convention. Convention looked to a multiplicity of desires, not to love itself. It structured and controlled the manifestation of sexual desire and the desires for security, for status, for a clear role in societyeven the desire for love. Love and desire are intertwined, but I will leave love to lovers in private and examine the public conventions of desire" (Bailey, 2013:12). 3 Institutional logics refer to materialized languages, not just linguistic speech, but to constellations of unit acts, concepts, objects and relations. Note that this paper builds on but also goes beyond earlier theoretical and empirical work that we have published on the formal analysis of institutional logics as duality structures (e

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Section: What Is An Institutional Logic?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The institutional logics of love: measuring intimate life

et al. 2014

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“…As opposed to the claims made by Vaisey (2009Vaisey ( ), p. 1687, that semistructured and in-depth interviews only give sociologists access to the interviewees' "discursive consciousness, " therefore leaving the true drivers of action inaccessible to the sociologist, seeing identity as actively constructed by the individual and as constructing the lines of action one takes by giving them their particular meanings means that these interviews do not miss out on any inner drivers, but enable the sociologist to probe into the mechanisms responsible for individuals' identity claims, and thus the specific lines of action they happen to construct as part of their larger strategies or action plans (Martin, 2011;Pugh, 2013). That is, interviews allow the sociologist to see how individuals frame situations, imbuing these situations with the sort of ideal typical meaning Weber (1968), p. 26, claimed that they do, and to use this information as a springboard for probing into the institutional dilemmas to which such strategies are posed.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Conscious Values to Tacit Beliefs: Assessing Parsons’ Influence on Contemporary Sociology

Williams

2017

Front. Sociol.

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Much sociological research is now focused on demonstrating how culture both motivates individuals to act and provides them with justifications for their actions (Vaisey, 2009). However, I argue that this sociological work relies on a model of action that sees culture itself as driving action beyond individuals' reflexive use of culture. I argue that it does so by conceptualizing the internalization of culture as pre-subjective and impersonal, essentially committing what is often deemed the Parsonian problem of diminishing the contingent nature of social action through the use of abstractions. Just as Parsons was charged with placing undue emphasis on various social systems rather than on persons, dominant strands of sociological inquiry overemphasize the salience of shared norms and schemas at the cost of individual perception. The major difference, however, is that while Parsons justified his focus on the system level by framing individuals as highly conscious and deliberate in their actions, contemporary sociologists tend to frame individuals' actions as largely unconscious and reliant on situational logics. In doing so, the consciously and normatively overdetermined actor in Parsonian sociology is now unconsciously and situationally overdetermined in contemporary sociology, a perspective ironically anticipated and deliberately positioned against by Parsons himself. Thus, I assert that efforts to de-Parsonize the discipline have given rise to theoretical problems that need resolution. I demonstrate how utilizing some of Parsons' key insights on the importance of simultaneously considering multiple levels of analysis when studying action could be a fruitful way to proceed.

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“…Indeed, modern semiotics has developed since its inception in the context of such a tension, which In doing so, they have also created a hierarchy within each binary (in this case, a hierarchy centered on the relevance of the signified, of language, of competence), because it seemingly enabled them to place culture (in the form of cultural or meaning structures) at the same explanatory level of social structures, making abstraction and generalization possible and thereby having -seemingly but mistakenly -more leverage in the production of what John Levi Martin has has identified as theory "in the third person" (Martin 2011). Semiotics, in turn, also went a long way toward the definition of a third-person, systematic palace, to the point that it -particularly in the tradition of structuralist semiotics -eschewed pragmatics and brought any consideration of the first person (a prominent sociosemiotic theme in the Peircean tradition, where it is supplemented by the dimension of dialogue) under the more reassuring safety net of textuality, where action could be understood as embedded in a textualized system of action or could be analyzed, as Paul Ricoeur famously claimed, as a "text", insofar as it was "meaningful" (Ricoeur 1971).…”

Section: Such a Proliferation Of Tasks Is In Line With What Umbertomentioning

confidence: 99%