This article examines the idea of a “sociology of biography.” As such, it focuses on the social construction of both biographical continuity and biographical discontinuity. It explores in particular ...the contribution of Harold Garfinkel to the study of biographical continuity and Peter Berger to the study of biographical discontinuity.
This paper revisits Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis fifty years after its publication. The paper first situates this book within the context of its intellectual precursors, namely Georg Simmel's 1917 ...essay “Sociability,” Alfred Schutz's 1945 article “On Multiple Realities,” and Gregory Bateson's 1955 paper “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” It then examines the book's three main themes, namely framing , keying , and disattention .
This interview offers a historical reconstruction of Eviatar Zerubavel's work, from his pioneering studies of time to his not-yet-published analysis of "concept-driven sociology", running the gamut ...of Zerubavel's career and embracing a period of more than forty years of sociological research. The interview encompasses several major topics: the beginnings of Zerubavel's own intellectual path and his move from Israel to the United States; the nuts and bolts of sociology of time and cognitive sociology; the underlying theoretical framework of a transcontextual and comparative mode of social inquiry; an in-depth analysis of the last books which Zerubavel has devoted to the study of phenomena such as backgroundness and taken-for-grantedness; the range of his academic and intellectual relationships (especially the one with his mentor Goffman, but also his rapport with Peter Berger, Lewis Coser, Renée Fox, and Murray Davis, among others); the polymorphic connection between sociological theory and politics; the development of the so-called "Rutgers School of Sociology"; the issue of "public sociology"; the future of sociology and academic research.
Excerpted from my book Generally Speaking, this paper introduces “concept‐driven sociology,” a special way of theorizing designed to reveal social patterns. As such, it examines the methodological ...process by which we can “distill” generic patterns from the culturally, historically, and situationally specific contexts in which we encounter them. It thus champions a “generic sociology” that is pronouncedly transcontextual (transcultural, transhistorical, transsituational, and translevel) in its scope. In order to uncover generic, transcontextual social patterns, we need to collect our data in a wide range of social contexts. Such contextual diversity is manifested multi‐culturally, multihistorically, multisituationally, as well as at multiple levels of social aggregation. True to its message, the book illustrates generic social patterns by drawing on numerous examples from diverse cultural contexts and historical periods and a wide range of diverse social domains, as well as by disregarding scale. Emphasizing cross‐contextual commonality, concept‐driven sociology tries to reveal formal “parallels” across seemingly disparate contexts. The paper features the four main types of cross‐contextual analogies concept‐driven sociologists tend to use—cross‐cultural, cross‐historical, cross‐domain, as well as cross‐level—disregarding conventionally noted substantive differences in order to note conventionally disregarded formal equivalences.
Drawing on Berger and Luckmann’s discussion of reification, this paper examines the five aspects of essentialism that make the social construction of a seemingly objective reality possible. The five ...aspects are religion (as typically manifested in the idea of ‘God’), science (as typically manifested in the idea of ‘Nature’), reason (as typically manifested in the notion of ‘Logic’), universalism (as typically manifested in the notion of ‘Everybody’), and eternalism (as typically manifested in the notion of ‘Always’). They constitute the foundations of the process of making the merely intersubjective and conventional seem objective and inevitable.
Eviatar Zerubavel casts a critical eye on how we trace our past--individually and collectively--arguing that rather than simply find out who our ancestors are from genetics or history, we actually ...create the stories that make them our ancestors.
This paper examines social pattern analysis, the yet-unarticulated research strategy that guides formal sociologists in their efforts to distill generic social patterns from their specific cultural, ...situational, and historical contexts. Following in the implicit methodological footsteps of Georg Simmel, social pattern analysts view specific sociohistorical configurations as mere instantiations of such patterns, thereby deliberately disregarding various idiosyncrasies of the particular communities, events, and social situations they examine. Analytically focused, they thus draw their evidence from multiple social contexts, thereby making their essentially decontextualized findings more generalizable. Furthermore, in sharp contrast to historians and ethnographers, they try to highlight universality rather than singularity, thereby focusing their attention on the common formal features of any given pattern across those contexts while deliberately ignoring differences among its various specific manifestations. The outcome of such transcultural, transsituational, and transhistorical (that is, transcontextual) mode of inquiry is an empirically grounded "social geometry."
This paper examines the mental process of grouping "similar" things together in distinct clusters and separating "different" clusters from one another. The role language plays in providing us with ...seemingly homogeneous mental niches for lumping things together yet at the same time allowing us to carve seemingly discrete categories out of experiential continua directs the sociological study of classification to intersubjective, conventional mindscapes that are neither personal nor "logical." The paper identifies a nonmetric, topological mode of thinking that involves playing down intracluster while exaggerating intercluster mental distances and ends with some methodological observations of the need to approach classification from a comparative perspective as well as highlighting the role of spatial zoning, rites of separation, and Freudian slips in the study of the social construction of difference and similarity.
This paper examines social pattern analysis, the yet‐unarticulated research strategy that guides formal sociologists in their efforts to distill generic social patterns from their specific cultural, ...situational, and historical contexts. Following in the implicit methodological footsteps of Georg Simmel, social pattern analysts view specific sociohistorical configurations as mere instantiations of such patterns, thereby deliberately disregarding various idiosyncrasies of the particular communities, events, and social situations they examine. Analytically focused, they thus draw their evidence from multiple social contexts, thereby making their essentially decontextualized findings more generalizable. Furthermore, in sharp contrast to historians and ethnographers, they try to highlight universality rather than singularity, thereby focusing their attention on the common formal features of any given pattern across those contexts while deliberately ignoring differences among its various specific manifestations. The outcome of such transcultural, transsituational, and transhistorical (that is, transcontextual) mode of inquiry is an empirically grounded “social geometry.”
