Suchergebnisse

Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- The problem of order -- The problem of change -- Bodies and health -- Sex, gender and sexuality -- Employment -- Finance -- New social media and the internet -- Technology -- Religion -- Governance -- Conclusion -- References -- Index

Drawing on classical and contemporary social theory, Sociology of the Sacred presents a bold and original account of how interactions between religious and secular forms of the sacred underpin major conflicts in the world today, and illuminate broader patterns of social and cultural change inherent to global modernity.--Provided by publisher

This article proposes a novel conceptual understanding of 'edgework' – a term denoting the voluntary embrace of risk – by drawing on the long-standing sociological tradition of character studies. In doing so, it addresses the paradox that while first-generation research into high-risk leisure suggested that these activities provided identity-affirming escapes from bureaucratised capitalism, second-generation writings argued that edgework exists in harmony with the norms of 'risk societies', raising questions about its continuing appeal. Developing a new analytical perspective with which to assess these views, we argue that the former studies should be understood in the context of challenges to 'other-directed' characterological forms prominent within the post-War era, while the latter signal the embodiment of edgework within emergent 'opportunity-directed' modalities of social character. This interpretation explains the enduring attractions of edgework alongside its changed social role, and also signals its utility as a prism through which to observe broader characterological changes.

This article develops the long-standing sociological tradition of 'character studies', arguing that the accelerated change and associated uncertainties central to late modern life have been accompanied by what we refer to as a new opportunity-directed form of individuality. Engaging with Sayer's agenda-setting return to the subject, we acknowledge the ideological uses to which the promotion of this characterological form may be put, but argue that its core qualities can help suitably situated persons negotiate radical uncertainty via a reflexive, future-oriented commitment to agency. Despite the advantages of this orientation in the contemporary era, however, we conclude by suggesting that opportunity-directedness is associated with certain 'pathologies', involving psychological costs and social inequalities, that raise questions about its desirability and sustainability.

Deceit occupies a significant role in historical conceptualizations of social order, but dominant approaches to the subject are limited by the normative assumptions and conceptions of agency and structure on which they rest. This article suggests that renewed sociological engagement with deceit is overdue and can illuminate the 'situational logics of opportunity' within modernity (Archer, 2010). Focusing on the contemporary era, and building upon Simmel's argument that individuals lead a 'doubled existence', within and outside social forms, we view deceit as neither a personal trait nor an effect of social structures. Instead, it emerges through, and assumes contrasting meanings as a consequence of, people's interested and strategic engagements with the social world. Developing this theoretical analysis substantively, we then focus on several examples of how deceit is used to subvert or reaffirm boundaries between 'insider' and 'outsider' groups, including those emergent from sociology's own 'doubled existence' relative to modern life.

Contemporary sociology mirrors Western society in its general aversion and sensitivity to pain, and in its view of pain as an unproductive threat to cultures and identities. This highlights the deconstructive capacities of pain, and marginalizes collectively authorized practices that embrace it as constitutive of cultural meanings and social relationships. After exploring the particularity of this Western orientation to pain — by situating it against processes of instrumentalization and medicalization, and within a broader context of other social developments conducive to a heightening of affect control — this article builds on Mauss's analysis of 'body techniques' in suggesting that the cultural, physiological and psychological dimensions of pain can be combined in various ways. In examining this point further, we then compare contrasting religious engagements with pain as a way of detailing how it can be positively productive of cultural meanings and identities, and conclude by using these comparisons to illuminate the relationship between the current Western approach to pain and the Christian traditions that shaped the West historically.

Sociology has traditionally been concerned with problems of social order and meaning, and with how modern societies confronted these challenges when religion was in apparent decline, yet classical sociologists struggled to reconcile within their analyses the (dis)ordering and meaningful potentialities of eroticism. This ar ticle examines how eroticism has been viewed as a source of life-affirming meanings and as personally and socially destructive. Utilizing the contrasting theories of Weber and Bataille, we explore sociology's ambivalence towards eroticism, and criticize contemporary sociological approaches to the subject, before turning to the writings of Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva for alternative models of the religiously informed eroticization of daily life. The perspectives these French theorists bring to the subject, and the issues that remain unresolved in their work, identify new lines of inquiry and re-emphasize the importance of building a sociology of eroticism that can address adequately its relationship to questions of order and meaning.

Throughout its establishment and development sociology has been concerned almost exclusively with problems of life, rather than with the subject of death. However, if we take seriously Peter Berger's (1967) point that death is an essential feature of the human condition that requires people to develop means of coping with it, then to neglect death is to ignore one of the few universal parameters in which social and individual life are constructed. In this paper we examine the relationship between self-identity, the sequestration of death, and the period Anthony Giddens terms `late' or `high modernity', and argue that the organisation and experience of death have become increasingly privatised. This has acquired particular significance as a result of three central characteristics of high modernity: the growing role played by the reflexive re-ordering of biographical narratives in the construction of self-identity (Giddens 1991); the increased identification of the self with the body; and the shrinkage of the scope of the sacred. This is not to argue that people lack survival strategies when dealing with death, but that these strategies become increasingly precarious and problematic in the conditions of high modernity.