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J. Berger, M. Zelditch and D.G. Wagner carried out a long-term reception of the ideas of postpositivism in sociology. In the 1970s, these researchers began to apply the concepts of scientific paradigm and research program to studies of the structure and dynamics of theoretical knowledge. They identified conceptual convergences and possibilities of combining various alternative post-positivist approaches in sociological studies. From the mid-1980s, they analyzed the metatheoretical implications of postpositivist ideas in sociology, defined the metatheoretical functionality of paradigms and research programs. In the early 1990s, the basic principles of postpositivism in sociology were systematized (the presence of non-empirical elements in empirical sociological knowledge, all facts are theory-laden, all theories are metatheory-laden). In the 2010s, the functional analogy of paradigms and research programs in sociology was discovered. Theoretical research programs at their local subject level function as universally accepted scientific paradigms and contribute to the theoretical growth of sociology.

AbstractMulti‐sited ethnography (MSE) is an underutilized research method that presents particular challenges and unique possibilities for generative research that can build upon existing theories of race and ethnicity. This review discusses the theoretical and methodological components of MSE and provides examples of both transnational and translocal ethnographic studies. These examples illustrate how MSE as a method can enrich analyses of race and ethnicity by enabling ethnographers to identify site‐specific phenomena as well as social processes that transcend a single locale. MSE, when intentionally paired with methodological framings in line with research priorities, can enable scholars to produce rigorous sociological analysis and theory building. Multi‐sited ethnographies of race can provide a set of analyses that complement a range of other sociological research tools, including single‐sited ethnography and quantitative studies, to deepen our understandings about the production and maintenance of racial and ethnic categories in the United States and transnationally.

Through developing of the concept of hitmazrehut, the article highlights avenues for decolonializing and de-orientalizing sociopolitical theory and practice in Israel/Palestine. Hitmazrehut (literally 'becoming of the East') is understood as the transformation of relations between space, identity, and narrative through an intersectionality framework of social movement activism and intellectual counter-discourse. Exposing the intersections among sites of marginality as well as cultivating localized interpretations of identity (delinked from the orientalist positing of Israel in the 'West') would contribute to the possibility of the formation of transformative coalition building across national boundaries. Hitmazrehut is both an outcome and a necessary process for enabling geopolitical reframing. The article begins with the ahistorical and orientalist biases of sociological inquiry into the region. It continues with an analysis of efforts to localize and re-orient Jewish identity as well as the Mizrahi discursive critique of epistemological violence guiding sociological scholarship, double consciousness and patterns of ethnic passing.

Michel Foucault was a gifted but elusive thinker with a wide and continuing impact across many academic fields. This article positions his work as a historical sociology of knowledge and evaluates its contribution. After reviewing Foucault's central preoccupations as they emerge in his major works, the argument briefly considers their influence on accounting scholarship as an informative exemplar of a wider Foucault effect. Four key areas for the sociological reception of Foucault are then considered: the nature of discourse and archaeology, his historical method, the problem of agency and action, and his conception of power. Articulating Foucault's relationship to sociology is inherently problematic, not least because he takes the emergence of the sciences of man as something to be explained rather than augmented. Yet his work remains a rich resource for inquiries of the sociological type, is broadly aligned with a practice turn in social theory, and intersects with several themes in both mainstream and critical sociology.

The role of European welfare states in intergenerational monetary transfers: A micro-level perspective .This article integrates sociological and economical theory to provide a comprehensive explanation for why parents send money to particular children, and tests more explicit hypotheses
on how differences in welfare state provisions can explain divergent patterns between countries. The spending on various welfare domains as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product is used to determine whether intergenerational solidarity is shaped by welfare state provisions. We use data from
the Survey of Health and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to analyse the influence of welfare state provisions on the likelihood of intergenerational transfers in ten European countries. The results indicate that parental resources and reciprocity expectations as well as children's needs
are important determinants of monetary transfers. Although differences between countries are found, they do not seem to justify the distinct division between "the three worlds of welfare" often used in sociological work.

The relation between individual trait differences, social mobility and social structure is central to social biology. Because genetic variance underlies phenotypic variance in some of these traits, for example IQ, several mechanisms determine the population variance. Polygenic inheritance is the basic mechanism. Social mobility and assortative partner choice distribute the trait variance within generations. This feedback circle is constrained by sociological conditions at several levels of analysis. Fundamental to this theory of social assortment is the relation between social–biological traits and social class on the one hand, and these traits and social mobility on the other hand. The focus here is on the relation between social class, social mobility and cognitive ability. The National Child Development Study is drawn upon, including the last follow-up (1999–2000). By approaching this relationship through various methods, both social–biological and sociological aspects of this research question can be assessed.

In an effort to promote more theoretically incisive research regarding the specifically sociological aspects of addiction, this article critically discusses three prominent theoretical paradigms for the study of addiction - neurology, learning theory and symbolic interaction. Neurological theories and learning theories are found to inadequately provide for the role of culturally transmitted meanings in the addiction process. While symbolic interactionist theories have been centrally concerned with meaning, they have failed to theorize how issues of meaning might figure in the addict's inevitable subjective estrangement from his or her drug-related activities. This stems from their failure to appreciate the reality of non-symbolic meaning, or meaningful experience that manifests pre-reflectively, at the level of our immediate bodily encounter with reality. The article concludes by suggesting that sociological students of addiction adopt a more thoroughly praxiological orientation to meaningful experience, so as to overcome the analytic limitations inherent in the antinomy between biological reductionism and disembodied cognitivism.

In recent sociological studies of markets, especially financial markets, researchers have argued that economics is performative (MacKenzie, Callon et al.). By this they refer to the observation that theories such as the Black-Scholes formula do not simply describe reality, but contributed to the regulatory creation of financial markets in which the agents started to adopt behavioral patterns that correspond to the theory, also relying on artefacts that have been created by the originators of the theory. This notion of performativity fits also other recent uses of language theory in economics, such as the theory of organizational forms in organizational ecology (Carroll and Hannan) or John Searle's theory of institutions. The paper builds on this, especially Searle's approach, and explores the underlying cognitive operations. It is argued that performativity builds on the human capacity to generate new meanings from existing concepts. This is elaborated in the theory of conceptual blending that has been developed by Fauconnier and Turner. For example, blends are a typical phenomenon in the emergence of new business models, such as in the dotcom bubble. The theory of conceptual blending can be based on neuroscientific insights into the operations of the human brain, corresponding to Searle's proposal to ground institutions in neurophysiological dispositions. -- Searle's theory of institutions ; financial markets ; emergence of novelty ; conceptual blending ; neural theory of metaphor

A philosophical exploration is presented that considers entities such as atoms, electrons, protons, reasoned (in existing physics theories) by induction, to be other than universal building blocks, but artifacts of a sociological struggle that in elemental description is identical with that of all processes of matter and energy. In a universal context both men and materials, when stressed, struggle to accomplish/maintain the free state. The space occupied by cognition, inferred to be the result of the inequality of spaces, is an integral component of both processes and process interpretation; arbitration space, ubiquitous throughout nature, occurred to a vast number of vastnesses, a manifestation of the existence of time dependent mass/number/amount, is argued to be located to the same judging criteria with which principles are determined for sociological purposes: the processes of mind are determined (excuse the pun) to occur as a free state that is reflectively equal to what is construed by the intellect as universe. Scientifically determined states are not free states.

The The formation of laws and regulations in Indonesia must be understood comprehensively as a legal process as well as a political process. The legal process must be based on Law no. 12 of 2011 while the political process is obliged to look at the aspect of community deliberation to minimize the potential for conflict in the community. This study aims to analyze the CK Law and to suggest the urgency of socio-legal research in the formation of laws and regulations in Indonesia. This research is a socio-legal legal research that tries to look at the law internally and externally with the help of non-legal science, namely social science. This study uses primary legal materials in the form of UUCK and secondary legal materials in the form of journals, books, and related websites. Primary legal materials were analyzed using theories and concepts in secondary legal materials. This research uses a conceptual approach and a statutory approach The results of the study confirm that Ralf Dahrendorf's Conflict Theory in the Establishment of the CK Law emphasizes that the drafting and ratification of the CK Act is not optimal in involving quasi-groups or groups with high and low bargaining positions. In addition, the urgency of socio-legal analysis in the formation of laws and regulations in Indonesia is needed because when based on a socio-legal analysis a law does not have sociological validity, the law has the potential to cause conflict in society and even has the potential to be canceled by the Court. Constitution through formal review.

The impacts of digital technology on news media industry manifest itself in different parts of the world. Many big media organizations, in developed Western countries, are now using AI technology and automation in their newsrooms. This is somehow not the case in developing countries that confront multi-facet challenges to embrace AI-related technological advancements in their news ecologies. This study specifically focuses on the case of Pakistan's mainstream news media. Despite economic and technological constraints, the country's news media is considered as vibrant and vocal within South Asia with massive expansion in the past fifteen years. Nevertheless, it is still in nascent stage in terms of technological advancements in news media industry. Therefore, using diffusion of innovation theory, this study aims to address issues in the adoption of AI technology and automation by Pakistan's mainstream news media. To achieve this aim, this study employs the qualitative method of in-depth interviews. Findings suggests that the adoption of AI technology and automation is not without potential challenges at various stages of the diffusion of technological innovation. The Pakistani journalists from the Urdu language's newspapers, regardless of their age and gender, are substantially resistant to accept technological innovations as compared to their colleagues from television news channels and English-language's newspapers. This study highlights that the Pakistani journalists' lack of awareness and their limited interest into AI-driven transformations underpin their resistance and fear to adopt technological innovations in routine practice. Interviewed journalists, regardless of their gender and age, express their concern that the use of automated journalistic tools can result in job redundancy in local news media ecology. This study highlights other obstacles too for the adoption of AI-driven journalistic practice in Pakistan's mainstream news media including: economic and technological constraints, a lack of journalists' training and an absence of government's strategies and policies to deploy AI technology in news media industry like other sectors in Pakistan, and the country's existing digital divide.

Despite the key commonalities between the affective and the practical turns, affect is still an underexplored aspect in practice theory. Proposing an analytical distinction between the sociological and the ontological levels of analysis, this article looks into schemes of appraisal as they appear in Bourdieusian practice theory, and highlights how beneath the unity of social conditioning, habitus creates fragmentation between embodied and cognitive meaning. Additionally, it provides a limited and often foggy account of emotions and affectivity. To overcome these challenges, it is argued that practice theory needs to rely on a conceptualisation of subjectivity, which allows for a more holistic and affective meaning making. Doing so draws on Wetherell's affective practice and Ahmed's Hume-inspired concept of impression, but also on a variant of practice which works with empirical rather than epistemic individuals. A theory of practice infused with affect overcomes not only the mind-body dualism, but also contributes to reducing the tension between structural and agentic poles.

AbstractMost studies see demand for populist forces driven by broad sociological factors that make certain issues salient among specific constituencies. However, this argument is not normally tested at the individual level. We propose a theory of populist voting which argues that populist attitudes are themselves important predictors of voting, interacting with ideological positions. We test this theory through a comparison of recent voting in Chile and Greece, two countries where the contexts for activating populist attitudes are very different. We find that despite similar levels of populist attitudes across both countries, these attitudes explain much more of the vote in Greece than they do in Chile, and that in both countries they interact with ideological positions in predictable ways.