Monika Krause

Reporting and the transformations of the journalistic field: US news media, 1890-2000:

How have journalistic ideals of public service arisen? To what extent do journalists live up to these ideals? Can we make any claims as to the social conditions that this performance depends on? Using Bourdieu’s theory of fields of cultural production, this article addresses these questions with evidence from the history of journalism in the United States. What is most distinctive about modern journalism is a specific practice: active news-gathering or reporting. This practice became common in the 1860s and 1870s with the emergence of journalism as a field with its own stakes, relatively independent from political advantage or literary merit. The power of field-specific capital to organize practices in the media has varied since then. The field consolidated in the era from 1890 to 1914, with the newspaper industry expanding. In the interwar years, the boundary between PR and journalism became blurry and the institutional basis for active news-gathering declined. Under favorable economic and political conditions reporting practices, including local and investigative reporting, flourished between 1945 and1970 across media forms. In the past 40 years the importance of active news-gathering has declined.

The Ruralization of the World

We live, we are told, in a world that is urbanizing and that is urbanizing at a rapid pace. But the diagnosis of urbalization has lost all meaning. To fully make sense of current sociospatial transformations, we need to also analyze them from the perspective of that which is supposedly acted upon or being transformed. A focus on ruralization brings into view not only urban agriculture and urban wildlife but also boring towns and farmers in suburbs. This approach allows us to study new developments that only become visible once we abandon the narrow focus on urbanization, such as the emergence of new forms of improvisation in the face of failing infrastructures.

The Production of Counter-Publics and the Counter-Publics of Production

The last decades have seen an international revival of interest in public realm theory and it has become the foremost means to understand the changing social conditions for democratic practices. The debate about “public sociology” in the US initiated by Michael Burawoy’s address to the American Sociological Association has underscored the stakes of understanding how publics work: It reminds us that an analysis of the public sphere is not only a task for specialists within the academy, it is a condition of all intellectual practice that aims to be reflexive about the conditions of its own possibility and its effectiveness in the world.

Recombining micro/macro: The grammar of theoretical innovation

This article analyses the patterns underlying debates in sociological theory, using the debate surrounding the distinction between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ as its case. Although – and indeed because – few authors have attempted explicit definition of the distinction, a number of different distinctions have been subsumed under these labels and research has been shaped by packages of assumptions that have gone largely unexamined in their contradictory nature. The article disaggregates the different distinctions that have been associated with the terms ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ and situates theoretical strategies of the past decades in the grammar of oppositions that makes them possible and innovative. Gap-bridging has been the attempt to bring together aspects of the distinction that have been construed as direct opposites; recombination has been the attempt to release certain aspects of the distinction from their association with one side of the divide. Disaggregating the distinction can help us isolate specific theoretical problems for further work, including work that asks how aspects emphasized by different theoretical approaches vary empirically.

'Western Hegemony' in the Social Sciences: Fields and Model Systems

This paper discusses the role of privileged research objects (‘model systems’) in producing patterns in transnational knowledge production. In its approach it follows Bourdieus call to focus on contexts of production and forces internal to disciplines as well as his insistence on practice. Learning from work in science and technology studies it also considers material objects of knowledge and spaces of knowledge-production. It discusses the case of sociology and argues that conventions surrounding privileged research objects matter relatively independently of authors’ national origin or field-position. Examining model systems, I argue, can contribute to our understanding of how some well-established inequalities are produced and reproduced. This focus adds specific stakes to the debates about global knowledge production: we can discuss the problem of neglected cases in ways that are not always included in current reflections that draw on general political – rather than specifically knowledge-political – categories.

The meanings of theorizing

Richard Swedberg has done the social sciences a significant service by encouraging scholars to focus less on ‘theory’ as a thing and more on ‘theorizing’ as a practice. His point that ‘theorizing comes before theory’ can be read both as an empirical and as a normative argument: Swedberg makes the claim that theorizing comes before theory in the actual process involved in the production of social scientific works and he suggests that theorizing should come before theory, or that attention to theorizing should come before attention to theory. Swedberg’s project is not least also a pedagogical project: He wants to change the way we teach theory and it is to his credit that he has sustained this project over a number of years (Swedberg 2012, 2014a) and has enrolled a significant number of colleagues (e.g. Swedberg 2014b). Of course the call for a shift from theory to theorizing raises the question as to what exactly we mean by ‘theorizing’. It has been observed that ‘theory’ is a mutlivalent term, which means different things to different people (Abend 2008). Theory is also a judgmental term, which is used both to value and to devalue certain kinds of work. The shift in focus from ‘theory’ to ‘theorizing’ has advantages for this discussion but it does not by itself settle the issues raised by different meanings of these terms. In what follows, I will briefly discuss different ways in which theorizing can be understood. This allows me to make the judgments and choices invoked in Swedberg’s account explicit in a different way. Briefly, I will distinguish between theorizing as the interpretation of major figures, as the application of existing concepts, as the practice of linking observations to existential issues, as the development of new concepts and as the joining of concepts to form testable hypothesis. I will use this to discuss how different aspects of theorizing might relate to each other and to examine some of the obstacles to implementing Swedberg’s agenda. A focus on practice should lead us to challenge the focus on big names and the focus on testing hypothesis about links between old concepts, and value

Reflexive habits: dating and rationalized conduct in New York and Berlin

This paper builds on the work of Norbert Elias to examine how conduct varies across cultural contexts. We compare courtship practices in New York and Berlin and ask how people act during the course of ‘getting together’ with a sexual or romantic partner. Drawing on interviews in both contexts, we find that conduct associated with the practice of ‘dating’ among New York respondents is more rationalized as indicated by a greater awareness of timing, a greater degree of intentionality and planning and a greater tendency to psychologize self and others. Berlin respondents report observations of themselves and others in less detail and tend to describe themselves as passive objects of the impersonal forces of love. Whereas conduct associated with dating is more reflexive in some ways, these forms of reflexive conduct are not themselves fully conscious or the object of reflection but have in turn become taken for granted and habitual. These findings challenge us to conceptualize habitus in a manner that does not reproduce the opposition between habit and reflexivity but allows us to use the concept as a tool to capture variations in how self-monitoring and habit are combined in modes of conduct.

How fields vary

Field theorists have long insisted that research needs to pay attention to the particular properties of each field studied. But while much field-theoretical research is comparative, either explicitly or implicitly, scholars have only begun to develop the language for describing the dimensions along which fields can be similar to and different from each other. In this context, this paper articulates an agenda for the analysis of variable properties of fields. It discusses variation in the degree but also in the kind of field autonomy. It discusses different dimensions of variation in field structure: fields can be more or less contested, and more or less hierarchical. The structure of symbolic oppositions in a field may take different forms. Lastly, it analyses the dimensions of variation highlighted by research on fields on the sub- and transnational scale. Post-national analysis allows us to ask how fields relate to fields of the same kind on different scales, and how fields relate to fields on the same scale in other national contexts. It allows us to ask about the role resources from other scales play in structuring symbolic oppositions within fields. A more fine-tuned vocabulary for field variation can help us better describe particular fields and it is a precondition for generating hypotheses about the conditions under which we can expect to observe fields with specified characteristics.

Attempting to Bring Valuation and Politics Together : The Politics of Valuation Studies at a Series of Sessions in Copenhagen

Attempting to Bring Valuation and Politics Together : The Politics of Valuation Studies at a Series of Sessions in Copenhagen

Clarification? Yes! Standarization? No. Or: What Kind of Cooperation for the Sociology of Culture?

Christian Smith’s paper “The Incoherence of ‘Culture’ in American Sociology” is a valuable provocation that can prompt us to reflect on the role of concepts and on the role of agreement on the definition of concepts in scientific research. In this comment paper, I raise questions about Smith’s empirical expectation that sociologists should agree on a concept of culture based on debates in the sociology of science. I also suggest that in terms of the future agenda for the sociology of culture, we should distinguish between dialogue and clarification on the one hand, which I agree is needed, and standardization on the other hand, which seems incompatible with open-minded empirical research. Rather than work on agreement on what culture is, we might work on clarifying relevant distinctions among dimensions of culture.