M Strand
Biographic Data
| ID | 18754 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Strand |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Strand |
| SIGNATURE | STRAND M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Brandeis University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6820-5358 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 362 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Florian Znaniecki; or, Radical Culturalism
Performativity
This article proposes a post-Austinian approach to performativity by drawing from Peircean semeiotics. The argument proceeds on three fronts. First, we establish how the performativity approach of John L. Austin has served as a model case for performativity research, but the problems of this are currently being seen in the fragmentation and nominalism of the field. Second, we argue that the problem with Austin's 'doing things with words' approach…
Chance, Orientation, and Interpretation
The image of Max Weber as an 'interpretivist' cultural theorist of webs of significance that people use to cope with a meaningless world reigns largely unquestioned today. This article presents a different image of Weber's sociology, where meaning does not transport actors over an abyss of meaninglessness but rather helps them navigate a world of Chance. Retrieving this concept from Weber's late writings, we argue that the fundamental basis of th…
For a probabilistic sociology
Mark Worrell, The Sociogony
The political unconscious of practice theory
This article attempts a self-clarification of practice theory by providing a genetic history of 'practice' as a figure in social thought. This locates two different versions of practice theory in Marx's 'practical question' and Hobbes' 'Kingdom of Darkness', respectively, and shows how both historically comprise a practical critique of testing reason. This article examines how the practical critique performs a dialectic of politicization and depo…
Sociology and philosophy in the United States since the sixties
Practice theory and conservative thought
The concept of practice is thematically central to modern conservative thought, as evident in Edmund Burke’s writings on the aesthetic and his diatribe against the French Revolution. It is also the main organizing thread in the framework in the human sciences known as practice theory, which extends back at least to Karl Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. This article historicizes ‘practice’ in conservative thought and practice theory, accounts for the…
Public Health as a Matter of Concern
Public health is currently evolving, expanding, and reinforcing itself as a governance project in which health authorities' concerns meet and blend with epidemiology and civil engineering. Rarely, however, are those concerns found worthy of examination, at least not to account for the multiplying involvements of public health, its ability to find political life in things, and its many translations. The shape of public health is dictated as much b…
Taken for Granted
"Unpacking" Cross-Disciplinary Research Collaboration in the Social Sciences and Humanities
In this article, we, a team of scholars from Project Unpack, detail our process of successful cross-disciplinary collaboration. We include a discussion of the aims of our collaborative project, our process of collaboration and the roles of each individual organizer, the resources we used to support the collaboration, data sharing practices, and how our research approaches and methodologies have been influenced by engaging in collaborative researc…
Bauman and Contemporary Sociology
Toward the end of his extensive and detailed critical analysis of the work of the late Zygmunt Bauman, Ali Rattansi provides a general point of focus that could serve as a general orientation for the entire book: “trends are more complex, ambivalent and contradictory, as well as subject to more oppositional currents, than Bauman acknowledges” (252). The figure of Zygmunt Bauman does not really loom over sociology or even haunt it. When he passed …
Luc Boltanski and the paranoid style
Historicizing social inequality
The Hysteresis Effect
Widespread reliance on representationalist understandings commit social scientists to either partially or totally decouple belief from reality, limiting the domain of phenomena that can be treated by belief as an analytic concept. Developing the contrastive notion of practical belief, we introduce the hysteresis effect as a situational phenomenon involving the systematic production of agent‐environment mismatches and argue for its placement as a …
Sociological Amnesia
Causality in Contemporary American Sociology
Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006–2008 in the A merican J ournal of S ociology and A merican S ociological R eview, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that (1) “variablistic” or “covering law” models are not the dominant way of making caus…
Beyond World Images
In this article, we outline the analytic limitations of action theories and interpretive schemes that conceive of beliefs as explicit mental representations linked to a desire-opportunity folk psychology. Drawing on pragmatism and practice theory, we recast the notion of belief as a species of habit, with pre-reflexive anticipation the primary mechanism accounting for both the formation of beliefs and their causal influence on action. We demonstr…
The genesis and structure of moral universalism
Authenticity as a form of worth
Scholarly engagement with authenticity has been revitalized by recent efforts to theorize the value-ladenness of authenticity claims. Yet, these approaches are restricted by the lack of available conceptual tools necessary to explain variations in the meaning of authenticity between different cultural forms and social groups. In this paper, I draw from Boltanski and Thevenot’s pragmatic hermeneutics to develop an approach to authenticity in popul…
Interest-Oriented Action
Sociology frequently presumes interest-oriented action but deconstructs interests. Here, we argue for more inquiry into the social conditions under which interest-oriented action is generated. We analyze how interest-oriented action is understood in classical sociology, rational choice theory, social exchange theory, and cultural sociology. These perspectives vary in the extent to which interests are an explanatory principle, how interests are co…
Where do classifications come from? The DSM-III, the transformation of American psychiatry, and the problem of origins in the sociology of knowledge
Skills, toolkits, contexts and institutions
Postmodernism and Globalization
Interest in postmodernity that has stagnated over the past decade has come to be replaced by a concern with globalization. While the two terms are often considered to be divergent there is a continuity as theoretical discourse transfers from one to the other. In what follows, we first distill the heuristic models employed by various knowledge-geographical traditions of social thought in conceptualizing postmodernism. We then transpose these model…
Skills, toolkits, contexts and institutions
The Hysteresis Effect
Widespread reliance on representationalist understandings commit social scientists to either partially or totally decouple belief from reality, limiting the domain of phenomena that can be treated by belief as an analytic concept. Developing the contrastive notion of practical belief, we introduce the hysteresis effect as a situational phenomenon involving the systematic production of agent‐environment mismatches and argue for its placement as a …
Beyond World Images
In this article, we outline the analytic limitations of action theories and interpretive schemes that conceive of beliefs as explicit mental representations linked to a desire-opportunity folk psychology. Drawing on pragmatism and practice theory, we recast the notion of belief as a species of habit, with pre-reflexive anticipation the primary mechanism accounting for both the formation of beliefs and their causal influence on action. We demonstr…
Taken for Granted
Interest-Oriented Action
Sociology frequently presumes interest-oriented action but deconstructs interests. Here, we argue for more inquiry into the social conditions under which interest-oriented action is generated. We analyze how interest-oriented action is understood in classical sociology, rational choice theory, social exchange theory, and cultural sociology. These perspectives vary in the extent to which interests are an explanatory principle, how interests are co…
Where do classifications come from? The DSM-III, the transformation of American psychiatry, and the problem of origins in the sociology of knowledge
Sociological Amnesia
The genesis and structure of moral universalism
Causality in Contemporary American Sociology
Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006–2008 in the A merican J ournal of S ociology and A merican S ociological R eview, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that (1) “variablistic” or “covering law” models are not the dominant way of making caus…
Chance, Orientation, and Interpretation
The image of Max Weber as an 'interpretivist' cultural theorist of webs of significance that people use to cope with a meaningless world reigns largely unquestioned today. This article presents a different image of Weber's sociology, where meaning does not transport actors over an abyss of meaninglessness but rather helps them navigate a world of Chance. Retrieving this concept from Weber's late writings, we argue that the fundamental basis of th…
For a probabilistic sociology
Sociology and philosophy in the United States since the sixties
Practice theory and conservative thought
The concept of practice is thematically central to modern conservative thought, as evident in Edmund Burke’s writings on the aesthetic and his diatribe against the French Revolution. It is also the main organizing thread in the framework in the human sciences known as practice theory, which extends back at least to Karl Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. This article historicizes ‘practice’ in conservative thought and practice theory, accounts for the…
"Unpacking" Cross-Disciplinary Research Collaboration in the Social Sciences and Humanities
In this article, we, a team of scholars from Project Unpack, detail our process of successful cross-disciplinary collaboration. We include a discussion of the aims of our collaborative project, our process of collaboration and the roles of each individual organizer, the resources we used to support the collaboration, data sharing practices, and how our research approaches and methodologies have been influenced by engaging in collaborative researc…
Luc Boltanski and the paranoid style
Postmodernism and Globalization
Interest in postmodernity that has stagnated over the past decade has come to be replaced by a concern with globalization. While the two terms are often considered to be divergent there is a continuity as theoretical discourse transfers from one to the other. In what follows, we first distill the heuristic models employed by various knowledge-geographical traditions of social thought in conceptualizing postmodernism. We then transpose these model…
Skills, toolkits, contexts and institutions
Where do classifications come from? The DSM-III, the transformation of American psychiatry, and the problem of origins in the sociology of knowledge
Interest-Oriented Action
Sociology frequently presumes interest-oriented action but deconstructs interests. Here, we argue for more inquiry into the social conditions under which interest-oriented action is generated. We analyze how interest-oriented action is understood in classical sociology, rational choice theory, social exchange theory, and cultural sociology. These perspectives vary in the extent to which interests are an explanatory principle, how interests are co…
Authenticity as a form of worth
Scholarly engagement with authenticity has been revitalized by recent efforts to theorize the value-ladenness of authenticity claims. Yet, these approaches are restricted by the lack of available conceptual tools necessary to explain variations in the meaning of authenticity between different cultural forms and social groups. In this paper, I draw from Boltanski and Thevenot’s pragmatic hermeneutics to develop an approach to authenticity in popul…
Causality in Contemporary American Sociology
Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006–2008 in the A merican J ournal of S ociology and A merican S ociological R eview, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that (1) “variablistic” or “covering law” models are not the dominant way of making caus…
Beyond World Images
In this article, we outline the analytic limitations of action theories and interpretive schemes that conceive of beliefs as explicit mental representations linked to a desire-opportunity folk psychology. Drawing on pragmatism and practice theory, we recast the notion of belief as a species of habit, with pre-reflexive anticipation the primary mechanism accounting for both the formation of beliefs and their causal influence on action. We demonstr…
The genesis and structure of moral universalism
Luc Boltanski and the paranoid style
Historicizing social inequality
The Hysteresis Effect
Widespread reliance on representationalist understandings commit social scientists to either partially or totally decouple belief from reality, limiting the domain of phenomena that can be treated by belief as an analytic concept. Developing the contrastive notion of practical belief, we introduce the hysteresis effect as a situational phenomenon involving the systematic production of agent‐environment mismatches and argue for its placement as a …
Sociological Amnesia
Bauman and Contemporary Sociology
Toward the end of his extensive and detailed critical analysis of the work of the late Zygmunt Bauman, Ali Rattansi provides a general point of focus that could serve as a general orientation for the entire book: “trends are more complex, ambivalent and contradictory, as well as subject to more oppositional currents, than Bauman acknowledges” (252). The figure of Zygmunt Bauman does not really loom over sociology or even haunt it. When he passed …
Practice theory and conservative thought
The concept of practice is thematically central to modern conservative thought, as evident in Edmund Burke’s writings on the aesthetic and his diatribe against the French Revolution. It is also the main organizing thread in the framework in the human sciences known as practice theory, which extends back at least to Karl Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. This article historicizes ‘practice’ in conservative thought and practice theory, accounts for the…
Public Health as a Matter of Concern
Public health is currently evolving, expanding, and reinforcing itself as a governance project in which health authorities' concerns meet and blend with epidemiology and civil engineering. Rarely, however, are those concerns found worthy of examination, at least not to account for the multiplying involvements of public health, its ability to find political life in things, and its many translations. The shape of public health is dictated as much b…
Taken for Granted
"Unpacking" Cross-Disciplinary Research Collaboration in the Social Sciences and Humanities
In this article, we, a team of scholars from Project Unpack, detail our process of successful cross-disciplinary collaboration. We include a discussion of the aims of our collaborative project, our process of collaboration and the roles of each individual organizer, the resources we used to support the collaboration, data sharing practices, and how our research approaches and methodologies have been influenced by engaging in collaborative researc…
Mark Worrell, The Sociogony
The political unconscious of practice theory
This article attempts a self-clarification of practice theory by providing a genetic history of 'practice' as a figure in social thought. This locates two different versions of practice theory in Marx's 'practical question' and Hobbes' 'Kingdom of Darkness', respectively, and shows how both historically comprise a practical critique of testing reason. This article examines how the practical critique performs a dialectic of politicization and depo…
Sociology and philosophy in the United States since the sixties
Chance, Orientation, and Interpretation
The image of Max Weber as an 'interpretivist' cultural theorist of webs of significance that people use to cope with a meaningless world reigns largely unquestioned today. This article presents a different image of Weber's sociology, where meaning does not transport actors over an abyss of meaninglessness but rather helps them navigate a world of Chance. Retrieving this concept from Weber's late writings, we argue that the fundamental basis of th…
For a probabilistic sociology
Performativity
This article proposes a post-Austinian approach to performativity by drawing from Peircean semeiotics. The argument proceeds on three fronts. First, we establish how the performativity approach of John L. Austin has served as a model case for performativity research, but the problems of this are currently being seen in the fragmentation and nominalism of the field. Second, we argue that the problem with Austin's 'doing things with words' approach…
Florian Znaniecki; or, Radical Culturalism
Sociology (22 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Political science (9 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (9 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Politics (7 works) · Social science (7 works)