Paul Lichterman
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 223546 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Paul Lichterman |
| NOMBRES | Paul |
| APELLIDO | Lichterman |
| FIRMA | LICHTERMAN P |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Southern California |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 38 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 806 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 37 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1992 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2022 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Ethnographic Approaches to the Study of Political Participation
Ethnographic research gives access to distinct insights on political participation. Sensitized by classic and contemporary theoretical work, ethnographers follow political participation outside as well as inside the realm of institutionalized citizenship, focusing on activities that politicize or depoliticize in a wide range of institutional and everyday sites. This chapter argues that ethnographic research is especially good at illuminating thre…
Appendix II
How Civic Action Works
The ways that social advocates organize to fight unaffordable housing and homelessness in Los Angeles, illuminated by a new conceptual framework for studying collective actionHow Civic Action Works renews the tradition of inquiry into collective, social problem solving. Paul Lichterman follows grassroots activists, nonprofit organization staff, and community service volunteers in three coalitions and twelve organizations in Los Angeles as they ca…
"Qualitative Research" Is a Moving Target
How Civic Action Works
This book renews the tradition of inquiry into collective, social problem-solving. The book follows grassroots activists, nonprofit organization staff, and community service volunteers in three coalitions and twelve organizations in Los Angeles as they campaign for affordable housing, develop new housing, or address homelessness. The book shows that to understand how social advocates build their campaigns, craft claims, and choose goals, we need …
From Culture to Claimsmaking
Conceptual approaches to claimsmaking often feature the overarching symbolic templates of political culture or else the strategic actor of the social movement framing approach. Both approaches have value, but neither shows adequately how cultural context influences claimsmaking in everyday situations. To better understand cultural context and situated claimsmaking together, we retheorize the concept of discursive field, showing how such a field i…
Grouping Together in Lived Ancient Religion
3
Reinventing the Concept of Civic Culture
This article proposes a new and better concept of civic culture and shows how it can benefit sociology. It argues that a better concept of civic culture gives us a stronger, comparative, and contextual perspective on voluntary associations—the conventional American empirical referent for “civic”—while also improving our sociologies of religion and social movements. The article first considers the classic perspective on civic culture and its curre…
Interpretive reflexivity in ethnography
Many would argue that ethnographic knowledge claims are partial. Many say this predicament demands the researcher's self-reflexivity about ethnographic claims. Commonly, ethnographers perform reflexivity by discussing how their research may reflect interests or biases that accompany their positions in hierarchies of domination. Positional reflexivity uneasily straddles a realism that claims to know which position(s) affected the research, and a n…
Religion Beyond Religion
How a housing advocacy coalition adds health
Making things political
The Handbook of Cultural Sociology provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary scholarship in sociology and related disciplines focused on the complex relations of culture to social structures and everyday life. With sixty-five essays written by scholars from around the world, the book draws diverse approaches to cultural sociology into a dialogue that charts new pathways for research on culture in a global era. Contributing scholars addres…
Theory and Contrastive Explanation in Ethnography
We propose three interlinked ways that theory helps researchers build causal claims from ethnographic research. First, theory guides the casing and re-casing of a topic of study. Second, theoretical work helps craft a clear causal question via the construction of a contrast space of the topic of investigation. Third, the researcher uses theory to identify social mechanisms that condense causal accounts. We show how each step can accommodate the e…
Collaboration and Culture
This paper presents a theory of the role of culture in collaborative policy networks. It builds on the literature that analyzes the factors related to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of collaborative arrangements by demonstrating the importance of hitherto undertheorized cultural factors. Cultural theory indicates that actors with different cultural viewpoints have distinct and predictable biases in terms of their expectations of coll…
Plutocracy in America
Civic Action
Commonly, researchers have looked for civic life in a distinct sector in which they assume that voluntary associations will cultivate special skills and virtues. Gathering together many challenges to this approach, and using ethnographic cases of housing advocacy and youth civic engagement projects, the authors reconceptualize “the civic” as civic action and show how patterned scene styles shape it. Doing so reveals patterns of action in complex …
Dramatic performances in the play of politics
This review article explores J effrey A lexander's cultural theory of political transformations. In his two recent works Performative Revolution in E gypt (2011) and The Performance of Politics: O bama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (2009), A lexander analyses the fall of P resident H osni M ubarak and the rise of P resident B arack O bama, respectively. A lexander challenges the idea that revolutions depend primarily on the mate…
Ethnographies de la participation
Dans le contexte d’un renouveau de l’ethnographie du politique, le passage en revue d’enquêtes ethnographiques sur des terrains ayant trait à la participation permet de baliser un domaine de recherches en développement. L’enjeu de ce numéro n’est pas seulement méthodologique. Les ethnographies de la participation interrogent les frontières mêmes de leur objet. Elles invitent à explorer, au-delà des dispositifs identifiés comme participatifs, les …
Religion in Public Action
Contemporary social research often has located religion's public influence by focusing on individual or collective religious actors. In this unitary actor model, religion is a stable, uniform feature of an individual or collectivity. However, recent research shows that people's religious expression outside religious congregations varies by context. Building on this new work, along with insights from Erving Goffman and cultural sociology, an alter…
Thick Description as a Cosmopolitan Practice
Clifford Geertz's classic essay on thick description1 is deceptively simple. It is Geertz the raconteur, telling us that when he is in the field with his subjects, he really is just trying to figure out "what the devil they are up to." Relaxed, amused with himself and his subjects alike, he pokes light fun at his own delivery as he tries to explain how he figures those people out. Along the way, he spars with unnamed but easily divined anthropolo…
Social Capacity and the Styles of Group Life
This article introduces a concept of social capacity and offers a method of studying it. Social capacity is people's ability to work together to organize public relationships, rather than give responsibility for those relationships wholly to state actors or the flux of market exchange. The article proposes that to study social capacity, we examine the everyday group styles of civic life. Those culturally patterned styles enable and constrain a gr…
The Civic Life of American Religion
Religious groups constitute a large part of America's voluntary sector, yet relatively few works have investigated them broadly. This collection of essays investigates the public roles of religious congregations and associations. With contributions by premier social scientists, the work gets to the bottom of how effective—or ineffective—religious groups are in offering social services, fostering community life, and creating discussion of social i…
Religion and the Construction of Civic Identity
Studies of religion's public roles typically concern the ways in which religious frameworks justify opinions and actions. This article draws from participant-observation research to show how people also use religion to define the boundaries of group identities and relationships. Importantly, people do this in situation-specific ways that we cannot predict from people's religious reasons for public actions. Evidence comes from two religiously-base…
Self, Social Structure, and Beliefs
Circulation de la religion sur la place publique locale aux États-Unis
Les chercheurs et les critiques sociaux présument souvent que la religion influe sur la vie publique en nous fournissant des motifs que nous utilisons pour justifier nos opinions sur les enjeux sociaux. Cet article examine étroitement, d'un point de vue ethnographique, la façon dont le langage religieux circule dans deux associations volontaires locales, des sites de ce que j'appellerai la place publique locale. Dans ces deux associations de déno…
Culture in Interaction
How does culture work in everyday settings? Current social research often theorizes culture as “collective representations”—vocabularies, symbols, or codes—that structure people’s abilities to think and act. Missing is an account of how groups use collective representations in everyday interaction. The authors use two ethnographic cases to develop a concept of “group style,” showing how implicit, culturally patterned styles of membership filter c…
Piecing Together Multicultural Community
Journal Article Piecing Together Multicultural Community: Cultural Differences in Community Building Among Grass-Roots Environmentalists Get access Paul Lichterman Paul Lichterman University of Wisconsin Correspondence: Lichterman, Department of Sociology, The University of Wisconsin, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 42, Issue 4, 1 No…
Religion and the Construction of Civic Identity
Studies of religion's public roles typically concern the ways in which religious frameworks justify opinions and actions. This article draws from participant-observation research to show how people also use religion to define the boundaries of group identities and relationships. Importantly, people do this in situation-specific ways that we cannot predict from people's religious reasons for public actions. Evidence comes from two religiously-base…
Interpretive reflexivity in ethnography
Many would argue that ethnographic knowledge claims are partial. Many say this predicament demands the researcher's self-reflexivity about ethnographic claims. Commonly, ethnographers perform reflexivity by discussing how their research may reflect interests or biases that accompany their positions in hierarchies of domination. Positional reflexivity uneasily straddles a realism that claims to know which position(s) affected the research, and a n…
Civic Action
Commonly, researchers have looked for civic life in a distinct sector in which they assume that voluntary associations will cultivate special skills and virtues. Gathering together many challenges to this approach, and using ethnographic cases of housing advocacy and youth civic engagement projects, the authors reconceptualize “the civic” as civic action and show how patterned scene styles shape it. Doing so reveals patterns of action in complex …
Religion in Public Action
Contemporary social research often has located religion's public influence by focusing on individual or collective religious actors. In this unitary actor model, religion is a stable, uniform feature of an individual or collectivity. However, recent research shows that people's religious expression outside religious congregations varies by context. Building on this new work, along with insights from Erving Goffman and cultural sociology, an alter…
What Do Movements Mean? The Value of Participant-Observation
Talking identity in the public sphere
Theory and Contrastive Explanation in Ethnography
We propose three interlinked ways that theory helps researchers build causal claims from ethnographic research. First, theory guides the casing and re-casing of a topic of study. Second, theoretical work helps craft a clear causal question via the construction of a contrast space of the topic of investigation. Third, the researcher uses theory to identify social mechanisms that condense causal accounts. We show how each step can accommodate the e…
Collaboration and Culture
This paper presents a theory of the role of culture in collaborative policy networks. It builds on the literature that analyzes the factors related to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of collaborative arrangements by demonstrating the importance of hitherto undertheorized cultural factors. Cultural theory indicates that actors with different cultural viewpoints have distinct and predictable biases in terms of their expectations of coll…
Beyond the Seesaw Model
La theorie sociologique «communautaire» a affirme l'incompatibilite entre une culture de l'epanouissement personnel et celle qui met en avant la recherche du bien public. L'A. montre que cette perspective releve d'un modele d'opposition et que celui-ci ne montre pas de facon definitive l'impossibilite de lier les deux types d'aspirations. L'A. examine les theories democratiques radicales. Il examine la perspective personnaliste. Il pose la necess…
Ethnographies de la participation
Dans le contexte d’un renouveau de l’ethnographie du politique, le passage en revue d’enquêtes ethnographiques sur des terrains ayant trait à la participation permet de baliser un domaine de recherches en développement. L’enjeu de ce numéro n’est pas seulement méthodologique. Les ethnographies de la participation interrogent les frontières mêmes de leur objet. Elles invitent à explorer, au-delà des dispositifs identifiés comme participatifs, les …
Self-help reading as a thin culture
Social capital or group style? Rescuing Tocqueville's insights on civic engagement
Social Capacity and the Styles of Group Life
This article introduces a concept of social capacity and offers a method of studying it. Social capacity is people's ability to work together to organize public relationships, rather than give responsibility for those relationships wholly to state actors or the flux of market exchange. The article proposes that to study social capacity, we examine the everyday group styles of civic life. Those culturally patterned styles enable and constrain a gr…
From Culture to Claimsmaking
Conceptual approaches to claimsmaking often feature the overarching symbolic templates of political culture or else the strategic actor of the social movement framing approach. Both approaches have value, but neither shows adequately how cultural context influences claimsmaking in everyday situations. To better understand cultural context and situated claimsmaking together, we retheorize the concept of discursive field, showing how such a field i…
"Qualitative Research" Is a Moving Target
Self, Social Structure, and Beliefs
Circulation de la religion sur la place publique locale aux États-Unis
Les chercheurs et les critiques sociaux présument souvent que la religion influe sur la vie publique en nous fournissant des motifs que nous utilisons pour justifier nos opinions sur les enjeux sociaux. Cet article examine étroitement, d'un point de vue ethnographique, la façon dont le langage religieux circule dans deux associations volontaires locales, des sites de ce que j'appellerai la place publique locale. Dans ces deux associations de déno…
Self-help reading as a thin culture
Law's Promise, Law's Expression
Beyond the Seesaw Model
La theorie sociologique «communautaire» a affirme l'incompatibilite entre une culture de l'epanouissement personnel et celle qui met en avant la recherche du bien public. L'A. montre que cette perspective releve d'un modele d'opposition et que celui-ci ne montre pas de facon definitive l'impossibilite de lier les deux types d'aspirations. L'A. examine les theories democratiques radicales. Il examine la perspective personnaliste. Il pose la necess…
Piecing Together Multicultural Community
Journal Article Piecing Together Multicultural Community: Cultural Differences in Community Building Among Grass-Roots Environmentalists Get access Paul Lichterman Paul Lichterman University of Wisconsin Correspondence: Lichterman, Department of Sociology, The University of Wisconsin, 1180 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 42, Issue 4, 1 No…
The Search for Political Community
This book challenges the myth that Americans' emphasis on personal fulfilment necessarily weakens commitment to the common good. Drawing on extensive participant-observation with a variety of environmentalist groups, Paul Lichterman argues that individualism sometimes enhances public, political commitment and that a shared respect for individual inspiration enables activists with diverse political backgrounds to work together. This personalised c…
The Search for Political Community
What Do Movements Mean? The Value of Participant-Observation
‘We Begin with Our Favorite Theory …’
Michael Burawoy's extended case method is a wonderful model for participant observation and for social research in general. It is not just a a cookbook for doing social research; it is also a social theory in its own right. As a theory in its own right, it deserves the kind of treatment that Burawoy suggests researchers should offer other theories: it deserves reconstruction in light of anomalous cases. How does one reconstruct a theory? begin wi…
Talking identity in the public sphere
Culture in Interaction
How does culture work in everyday settings? Current social research often theorizes culture as “collective representations”—vocabularies, symbols, or codes—that structure people’s abilities to think and act. Missing is an account of how groups use collective representations in everyday interaction. The authors use two ethnographic cases to develop a concept of “group style,” showing how implicit, culturally patterned styles of membership filter c…
Elusive Togetherness
Many scholars and citizens alike have counted on civic groups to create broad ties that bind society. Some hope that faith-based civic groups will spread their reach as government retreats. Yet few studies ask how, if at all, civic groups reach out to their wider community. Can religious groups--long central in civic America--create broad, empowering social ties in an unequal, diverse society? Over three years, Paul Lichterman studied nine libera…
Self, Social Structure, and Beliefs
Circulation de la religion sur la place publique locale aux États-Unis
Les chercheurs et les critiques sociaux présument souvent que la religion influe sur la vie publique en nous fournissant des motifs que nous utilisons pour justifier nos opinions sur les enjeux sociaux. Cet article examine étroitement, d'un point de vue ethnographique, la façon dont le langage religieux circule dans deux associations volontaires locales, des sites de ce que j'appellerai la place publique locale. Dans ces deux associations de déno…
The Limits (and Virtues) of Superiority
Social capital or group style? Rescuing Tocqueville's insights on civic engagement
The Civic Life of American Religion
Religious groups constitute a large part of America's voluntary sector, yet relatively few works have investigated them broadly. This collection of essays investigates the public roles of religious congregations and associations. With contributions by premier social scientists, the work gets to the bottom of how effective—or ineffective—religious groups are in offering social services, fostering community life, and creating discussion of social i…
Religion and the Construction of Civic Identity
Studies of religion's public roles typically concern the ways in which religious frameworks justify opinions and actions. This article draws from participant-observation research to show how people also use religion to define the boundaries of group identities and relationships. Importantly, people do this in situation-specific ways that we cannot predict from people's religious reasons for public actions. Evidence comes from two religiously-base…
Social Capacity and the Styles of Group Life
This article introduces a concept of social capacity and offers a method of studying it. Social capacity is people's ability to work together to organize public relationships, rather than give responsibility for those relationships wholly to state actors or the flux of market exchange. The article proposes that to study social capacity, we examine the everyday group styles of civic life. Those culturally patterned styles enable and constrain a gr…
Thick Description as a Cosmopolitan Practice
Clifford Geertz's classic essay on thick description1 is deceptively simple. It is Geertz the raconteur, telling us that when he is in the field with his subjects, he really is just trying to figure out "what the devil they are up to." Relaxed, amused with himself and his subjects alike, he pokes light fun at his own delivery as he tries to explain how he figures those people out. Along the way, he spars with unnamed but easily divined anthropolo…
Ethnographies de la participation
Dans le contexte d’un renouveau de l’ethnographie du politique, le passage en revue d’enquêtes ethnographiques sur des terrains ayant trait à la participation permet de baliser un domaine de recherches en développement. L’enjeu de ce numéro n’est pas seulement méthodologique. Les ethnographies de la participation interrogent les frontières mêmes de leur objet. Elles invitent à explorer, au-delà des dispositifs identifiés comme participatifs, les …
Religion in Public Action
Contemporary social research often has located religion's public influence by focusing on individual or collective religious actors. In this unitary actor model, religion is a stable, uniform feature of an individual or collectivity. However, recent research shows that people's religious expression outside religious congregations varies by context. Building on this new work, along with insights from Erving Goffman and cultural sociology, an alter…
Dramatic performances in the play of politics
This review article explores J effrey A lexander's cultural theory of political transformations. In his two recent works Performative Revolution in E gypt (2011) and The Performance of Politics: O bama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (2009), A lexander analyses the fall of P resident H osni M ubarak and the rise of P resident B arack O bama, respectively. A lexander challenges the idea that revolutions depend primarily on the mate…
Collaboration and Culture
This paper presents a theory of the role of culture in collaborative policy networks. It builds on the literature that analyzes the factors related to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of collaborative arrangements by demonstrating the importance of hitherto undertheorized cultural factors. Cultural theory indicates that actors with different cultural viewpoints have distinct and predictable biases in terms of their expectations of coll…
Plutocracy in America
Civic Action
Commonly, researchers have looked for civic life in a distinct sector in which they assume that voluntary associations will cultivate special skills and virtues. Gathering together many challenges to this approach, and using ethnographic cases of housing advocacy and youth civic engagement projects, the authors reconceptualize “the civic” as civic action and show how patterned scene styles shape it. Doing so reveals patterns of action in complex …
Sociology (34 obras) · Political science (24 obras) · Psychology (17 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Epistemology (13 obras) · Politics (13 obras) · Anthropology (12 obras) · Social science (11 obras) · Ethnography (10 obras) · Philosophy (9 obras)