Interrogating the Social: A Critical Sociology for the 21st Century

296 Pages·2017·2.761 MB·English

by  Fuyuki Kurasawa

INTERROGATING
THE SOCIAL
A Critical Sociology for the 21st Century
EDITED BY FUYUKI KURASAWA
Interrogating the Social
Fuyuki Kurasawa
Editor
Interrogating
the Social
A Critical Sociology for
the 21st Century
Editor
Fuyuki Kurasawa
Department of Sociology
York University
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
ISBN 978-3-319-59947-2 ISBN 978-3-319-59948-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59948-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017946313
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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Contents
An Invitation to Critical Sociology 1
Fuyuki Kurasawa
Part I Rethinking Society 35
Political Friendship and the Social Bond 37
Peter Mallory
Interaction, Indifference, Injustice: Elements of a 
Normative Theory of Urban Solidarity 61
Mervyn Horgan
Towards a Sociological Account of Political Agon:
(Re)considering the Social Dimensions of Agonal
Democracy 95
Philip Alexander Steiner
v
vi Contents
Part II Configuring Power 125
The Business Cycle and Capitalist Social Regulation:
The Origins of Economic Government 127
Matthew F. Hayes
Civil Society Reconfigured: Manag(erializ)ing
AIDS in Uganda 157
Marcia Oliver and Stephen Tasson
A Critical Sociology of International Expertise: The Case
of International Democracy Assistance 191
Michael Christensen
Part III Practicing Culture 217
The Fun and Games of Creative Citizenship: Urban
Cultural Policy and Participatory Public Art 219
Saara Liinamaa
Body Worlds and the Social Life of the Plastinated Body:
Considerations on the Biotechnology of Plastination 247
Elisabeth Rondinelli
Faith in Progress: Evolutionism and the New Atheism 269
Stephen LeDrew
Index 293
An Invitation to Critical Sociology
Fuyuki Kurasawa
What Is Critical Sociology Today?
Interrogating the Social collects the work of a group of scholars, the
Canadian Network for Critical Sociology, who, over the course of the last
five years, have collaborated to put forth a collective vision of what criti-
cal sociology is in the twenty-first century. This vision has taken shape via
a research agenda organized around three themes: recasting the character
of social relations and interactions in contemporary society, uncovering
institutional and discursive configurations of socio-economic and political
power at different scales, and understanding emerging cultural practices
and their social implications.1 Accordingly, the book’s chapters put into
practice a mode of sociological reasoning that moves beyond the divide
between empirical and theoretical orientations, as well as between ‘scien-
tific’ analysis and normative critique, by studying types of social relations,
organizations and discourses, and cultural practices. Yet to refer to critical
F. Kurasawa (*)
Department of Sociology, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
© The Author(s) 2017 1
F. Kurasawa (ed.), Interrogating the Social,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59948-9_1
2 F. Kurasawa
sociology is not an uncomplicated matter today, for it evokes a confus-
ingly vast array of intellectual traditions stemming back several decades
(Gouldner 1980; Mills 1956; Williams 2006; Hall et al. 1991; Horkheimer
1982; Habermas 1987). Rather than reviewing these traditions in great
detail, however, it is preferable to identify two recent interventions that
help to situate and clarify the iteration of critical sociology proposed here.
The first of these interventions is Burawoy’s much-discussed appeal in
favour of public sociology, notably his proposal for a ‘critical public soci-
ology’ as a form of reflexive scholarly knowledge simultaneously addressed
to academic and extra-academic audiences (Burawoy 2005a, b, c).
Burawoy offers an insightful alternative to an excessively professionalized
vision of sociology, which, because of its disciplinary self- referentiality,
privileges careerism and credentialization above all else. While academic
debates and professional concerns justifiably guide sociological research,
a critical sociology equally values an emancipatory critique of the estab-
lished social order designed to cultivate collective resistance to relations
of power and apparatuses of reproduction of social injustices, as informed
by debates and struggles within local, national, and global civil societies.2
If critical sociology is to be publicly minded in a substantive way, it
should strive to accomplish two tasks. Firstly, it can act as a form of pub-
lic intellectual work that employs conventional media outlets and social
media platforms to intervene in current social and political debate, bring-
ing research and specialized knowledge to bear on significant problems
and questions.3 Secondly, critical sociology can defend the robustness and
vitality of public spheres by opposing the logics of fiscal austerity, priva-
tization, and deregulation, which undermine principles of equity and
universal access through which public services have been advanced and
the notion of the public good has been sustained in the face of commodi-
fication and possessive individualism. By examining certain topics and
making findings widely available, critical sociology can support informal
groups, social movements, and organizations devoted to projects pro-
moting the aforementioned notions of participatory self-management,
egalitarian universalism, and autonomy.
The second intervention through which to define our version of criti-
cal sociology consists of an ongoing debate within French sociological
circles between the proponents of a structurally oriented Bourdieusian
An Invitation to Critical Sociology 3
sociology and various post-Bourdieusian strands of an actor-focused
interpretive sociological pragmatism (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006;
Thévenot 2006; Boltanski 1990; Bénatouïl 1999; Latour 2005; Callon
and Latour 1981).4 On the one hand, the Bourdieusian school has pro-
duced a potent analytical framework, enabling researchers to bring to
light the functioning of systems of social reproduction of material and
symbolic domination, which are anchored in a vastly asymmetrical dis-
tribution of resources across domains of the social world (via the notions
of capital and field). Furthermore, by linking structural constraints to
situational forms of practice, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus provides a
compelling explanation of actors’ dispositional tendencies and prefer-
ences according to their relational and hierarchically differentiated posi-
tions within fields (Bourdieu 1977, 1984, 1990, 1997).
Nonetheless, the structuralism of Bourdieu’s model can be excessively
deterministic in its analysis of social action and culture, to the extent that
his writings view the mapping out of entrenched structures and distri-
butions of capital as pre-determining the outcomes of situational prac-
tices and the meanings of cultural works. Consequently, habitus can be
reduced to the status of a transmission belt of structural realities, which
direct subjects’ actions in a manner that accords them limited agency and
reflexivity. Indeed, for Bourdieu, actors regularly misrecognize the play
of mechanisms of symbolic violence and social domination (Bourdieu
and Wacquant 1992, 167–168; Boltanski 2011). Relatedly, structuralist
determinism undergirds the Bourdieusian tendency towards reification
and ‘black boxing’ of structures, for the latter are frequently presumed
to exist and to reproduce themselves over time rather than demonstrat-
ing their circumstantial and provisional formation in particular contexts
through the work of temporarily stabilizing assemblages of social relations
and the creation of normative compromises resulting from processes of
critique and justification among social actors (Callon and Latour 1981;
Boltanski and Thévenot 2006). In turn, Bourdieusian sociology has a
tendency to equate society and culture in toto to systems of domina-
tion and reproduction of hierarchies without fully considering the mul-
tiplicity of ways in which social actors deploy their critical capacities to
intervene in or resist the circulatory and distributional processes through
which power is exercised (Boltanski 2011).
4 F. Kurasawa
On the other hand, in an attempt to establish a rupture with and dis-
tinguish themselves from Bourdieu’s oeuvre, pragmatist strands of soci-
ology favour a social hermeneutics that ‘follow[s] the actors themselves’
(Latour 2006, 22, 283) by analysing how these actors make sense of
the social world, operate in specific institutional settings, and negoti-
ate with others in morally pluralistic societies. Pragmatism treats subjects
as reflexive agents, equipped with the necessary competences to give an
account of themselves as well as to justify their actions and worldviews
when encountering critiques (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006; Barthe and
Lemieux 2002). Hence, sociological pragmatism approaches the social
as a complex and contingent assemblage of relations and human and
non-human connectors, forming networks that constantly must be put
together from the ground up. The central sociological problem becomes
that of social coordination, that is to say, the need to explain how con-
nectors are momentarily organized into modes of action, networks, and
institutions that, when aggregated, give shape to what is termed ‘social
order’ (Thévenot 2006; Latour 2006).
Yet from our vantage point, pragmatist sociology’s response to Bourdieu
overcorrects his tendency towards structuralist determinism by implicitly
falling into the converse trap of agentic determinism, leading to a vol-
untarism that underplays the constraining and dispositionally forming
effects of distributional inequalities and institutionalized modes of domi-
nation upon social actors. Thus, actor-network theory tends to downplay
the impact of network-exogenous social structures on the formation and
extension of relations among actants within networks, whereas Boltanski
and Thévenot’s earlier formulations of their theory overstate actors’
capacities for reflexive and morally based public justification in the face
of critique (Boltanski 2011; Honneth 2010). To put it differently, they
underestimate the extent to which structural factors create a hierarchi-
cal distribution of competences among a population regarding public
accounting for a situationally specific course of action through appeal to
meta-situational moral orders of worth. What is required, then, is greater
recognition of the fact that, because of the uneven distribution of cul-
tural and symbolic capital across a social space, actors are not equally
equipped to participate in tests of public justification around key societal
issues; they possess differing modes of communication accorded more or