Formal and substantive multidimensionality in Jeffrey Alexander's work

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4481744
AutoresJayme Gomes Neto (0000-0003-1561-9001, Freie Universität Berlin, autor de correspondencia)
Año2025
Volumen188
Número1
Páginas15-38
Fecha de publicación2025-06-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThesis Eleven (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0725-5136 • E-ISSN: 1461-7455
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/07255136251344960
OpenAlexW4410922657
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas23

In the present article, I propose the notion of "multidimensionality" in theory construction as the underlying motive of Jeffrey Alexander's intellectual development and use this to reconstruct his work in four connected steps. In the first part, I analyze his explorations of the theoretical logic in social sciences and the way the notion of multidimensionality emerges, at the end of this process, as a solution, an evaluative standard, and a driving force in theory construction. In the second part, I analyze how this understanding orients Alexander's reconstruction of sociology's history from classics to post-Parsonian sociology and how it leads him to elaborate a kind of new convergence thesis. In the remainder of the article, I try to show how, in the hands of Alexander, these formal considerations on multidimensionality are turned into substantive multidimensional theories. In the third part, I analyze how this transition is done, in the case of neofunctionalism, as an attempt to make Parsonianism more multidimensional through a synthesis between some of its more flexible branches and recent developments in symbolic interactionism. In the fourth part, I explore how this passage toward substantive multidimensionality is carried out in cultural sociology through a fourfold move where culture is inquired in terms of its symbolic patterns (codes and binary oppositions), ordering structures (discourses/narratives), symbolic practices (performances), and surrounding materiality (iconicity

Epistemology · Sociology · Work (physics · Philosophy · Philosophy and History of Science · Philosophy and Theoretical Science