M Krause
Biographic Data
| ID | 2079 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Krause |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Krause |
| SIGNATURE | KRAUSE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8699-5496 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 322 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
What was ‘Grand Theory’? Sociological Inquiry between Scientism and the Philosophy of History
This article asks how the label ‘grand theory’ has been used in the history of sociology and uses its findings to offer an argument about the nature of sociological inquiry. It discusses two episodes, which involve a demarcation against ‘grand theory’ on strikingly similar terms: The term was initially used to reject Parsons’ structural functionalism after World War 2 and was also applied to Marxism in this period. These arguments were anticipate…
Expertise as contingency-reduction: Evidence from interviews concerning Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine on German TV news
This article analyses interviews with experts on German television news concerning the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine in the context of debates about the public contribution of the social sciences and humanities. Considering the first 13 months of the war, we find that the questions put to experts are mostly not about Eastern Europe or Ukraine. Rather they concern the present and the future with reference to implications for a 'we' conceived as…
Rethinking the Modern and Modernity with Jacob Taubes
Jacob Taubes’s book Occidental Eschatology (1947) offers a unique framework for examining cultural patterns across the line often construed as separating ‘the religious’ from the ‘non-religious’. This article highlights the implications of the application of this framework for our understanding of modernity: With Taubes, the ‘modern’ conception of history, totality and sovereignty can be traced to the emphatic distinction between ‘world’ and ‘God…
Human Rights as a Lay Category of Thought: Content and Structure in the United States
What are human rights? Although legal scholars point to a growing list of international entitlements, social scientists have highlighted underlying ideological assumptions and the selective interpretation of human rights in practice. Lay conceptualizations of human rights, however, merit further examination. This study brings together human rights research and cognitive sociology, deploying a novel, online task-based study to explore the content …
Uma Introdução Ao Princípio De Landauer – Review
O Princípio de Landauer estabelece uma conexão fundamental entre informação e termodinâmica, postulando que o apagamento irreversível de um bit de informação em um sistema acarreta a dissipação de uma quantidade mínima de energia na forma de calor. Esta relação é quantificada pela fórmula QL = (kT)Ln2, onde a quantidade de calor QL representa o limite de Landauer, k é a constante de Boltzmann, T é a temperatura termodinâmica do sistema e Ln o log…
Special issue: The Elements of Theorizing
"Social science is explanation or it is nothing." Introduction to a debate
This essay introduces contributions to a special section, which documents and extends a debate on the proposition "Social Science is Explanation or it is Nothing" held at the London School of Economics on October 13th, 2022. It discusses the history of the "Group for Theoretical Debates in Anthropology" led by Tim Ingold, Peter Wade and Soumhya Venkatesan, which has handed down a list of credible candidates for issues that had a chance of engagin…
Scientificity before Scientism: The Invention of Cultural Research in German Studies of Antiquity 1800-1850
This paper examines how scholars of Greek and Roman antiquity in the German-speaking territories in the first half of the nineteenth century define scientificity (Wissenschaftlichkeit). I will argue that antiquity studies in this period of its foundation as a discipline is an instructive case to examine with regard to questions as to how scientific knowledge is established as different from other forms of knowledge, how scientific fields establis…
Theorizing from neglected cases
Some cases in the social sciences have been attributed a greater capacity to generate transferrable insights than others.This is evident in the phenomenon now widely diagnosed as Eurocentrism but is not limited to it.When some cases are privileged by convention, others come into view as occasions primarily for 'application' of insights derived from other cases or of insights canonized in conversations organized around the label of 'theory'.This p…
Standpoint theory and middle-range theorizing in International Sociology
This paper responds to Julian Go's Lecture "Thinking against Empire. Anti-colonial Thought and Social Theory." It proceeds in two parts: I first follow Go's invitation to read and reread Mabel Dove Danquah and Frantz Fanon and explore what their work contributes to our understanding of state-forms. I then examine the terms of Go's invitation more closely. I contrast Go's juxtaposition of imperial sociology on the one hand and anti-colonial sociol…
Non-liberal Internationalism: The Field of International Mission Agencies
This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of the variegated ties established across national borders by non-state actors by offering an account of the field of international mission agencies. Noting agencies’ specific goal to promote the gospel, we ask how mission agencies shape where missionaries go, whom they are trying to reach and what activities they engage in. Based on in-depth interviews with managers, we discuss the historical f…
How Does Popular Sovereignty Vary
Materialising reform: How Conservation Encounters Collection Practises in Zoos
This paper examines how zoos decide which animals to keep, drawing on guidance produced by zoo membership organisations and in-depth interviews with zoo curators. Zoos make curatorial decisions within constraints posed by each zoo’s legacy of buildings and animals. Different versions of ‘conservation value’ inform decision-making alongside other criteria such as education value, visitor value and whether or not animals are available. We find that…
Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites
On Sociological Reflexivity
This article offers a critique of the self-observation of the social sciences practiced in the philosophy of the social sciences and the critique of epistemological orientations. This kind of reflection involves the curious construction of wholes under labels, which are the result of a process of 'distillation' or 'abstraction' of a 'position' somewhat removed from actual research practices and from the concrete claims and findings that researche…
Prioritization in human rights NGOs: The role of intra-organizational units of planning
Drawing on forty in-depth interviews with program managers in nineteen Western international human rights organizations, this article examines how human rights organizations make decisions about how to allocate resources and how to manage their commitments to specific causes, specific people, and specific areas. It argues that organizational routines shape the allocation of resources relatively independently of other factors and it pays particula…
What is Zeitgeist? Examining period-specific cultural patterns
Current research on culture rarely differentiates explicitly between period-specific and other kinds of cultural patterns. This paper develops the concept of "zeitgeist" as a tool for sociological analysis. I propose we understand zeitgeist as a hypothesis for a pattern in meaningful practices that is specific to a particular historical time-period, links different realms of social life and social groups, and extends across geographical contexts.…
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 propertie…
Attempting to Bring Valuation and Politics Together: The Politics of Valuation Studies at a Series of Sessions in Copenhagen
International audience
Charismatic Species and Beyond: How Cultural Schemas and Organisational Routines shape Conservation”
It has long been suggested that charismatic species attract a disproportionate amount of attention and resources in international conservation. This paper follows up on this observation and investigates how cultural schemas and organisational routines shape resource allocation in conservation more broadly. Based on 44 in-depth interviews with programme managers in international conservation NGOs and in zoos with conservation programmes, we argue,…
Social Theory Now
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 Bourdieu's 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…
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 …
Aid in Danger: The Perils and Promise of Humanitarianism
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 Bourdieu's 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…
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 propertie…
Fielding Transnationalism: An Introduction
The new interest in transnational phenomena since the 1990s has produced a wide range of studies across the social sciences.In the discipline of history, Akira Iriye (1989: 2) has called for historians to 'search for historical themes and conceptions that are meaningful across national boundaries', a call echoed by the new global and transnational history
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 urbanization 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 suburb…
Undocumented Migrants: An Arendtian Perspective
The number of people without rights of residence or work in the territory of Western Europe's nation states is growing. In official representations of political life this group is commonly 'symbolically eliminated' or taken up by an increasingly hostile discourse on 'illegal immigrants' and 'international terrorism'. This article explores what a rereading of the work of Hannah Arendt can contribute to the analytical task of giving an alternative …
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-gather…
How facts travel: The model systems of sociology
What is Zeitgeist? Examining period-specific cultural patterns
Current research on culture rarely differentiates explicitly between period-specific and other kinds of cultural patterns. This paper develops the concept of "zeitgeist" as a tool for sociological analysis. I propose we understand zeitgeist as a hypothesis for a pattern in meaningful practices that is specific to a particular historical time-period, links different realms of social life and social groups, and extends across geographical contexts.…
On Sociological Reflexivity
This article offers a critique of the self-observation of the social sciences practiced in the philosophy of the social sciences and the critique of epistemological orientations. This kind of reflection involves the curious construction of wholes under labels, which are the result of a process of 'distillation' or 'abstraction' of a 'position' somewhat removed from actual research practices and from the concrete claims and findings that researche…
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 Bourdieu's 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…
The Production of Counter-Publics and the Counter-Publics of Production: An Interview with Oskar Negt
An Interview with Oskar Negt
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 Bourdieu's 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…
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…
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 n…
Theorizing from neglected cases
Some cases in the social sciences have been attributed a greater capacity to generate transferrable insights than others.This is evident in the phenomenon now widely diagnosed as Eurocentrism but is not limited to it.When some cases are privileged by convention, others come into view as occasions primarily for 'application' of insights derived from other cases or of insights canonized in conversations organized around the label of 'theory'.This p…
The Couch as a Laboratory: The Spaces of Psychoanalytic Knowledge-Production Between Research, Diagnosis and Treatment
The debate about knowledge-production in sociology has pitted "internalist" accounts, which pay close attention to the places, practices, and tools of knowledge, against "externalist" accounts of institutions and fields. Using psychoanalysis as a case, this paper develops an approach that integrates these traditions by comparing the differentiation of places, tools and practices of knowledge production. The paper shows that, in a context in which…
Special issue: The Elements of Theorizing
Social Theory Now
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 …
Prioritization in human rights NGOs: The role of intra-organizational units of planning
Drawing on forty in-depth interviews with program managers in nineteen Western international human rights organizations, this article examines how human rights organizations make decisions about how to allocate resources and how to manage their commitments to specific causes, specific people, and specific areas. It argues that organizational routines shape the allocation of resources relatively independently of other factors and it pays particula…
Die Aufgangszeiten der Gestirne
The Politics of Critical Theory: Language/Discourse/Society
The Production of Counter-Publics and the Counter-Publics of Production: An Interview with Oskar Negt
An Interview with Oskar Negt
Undocumented Migrants: An Arendtian Perspective
The number of people without rights of residence or work in the territory of Western Europe's nation states is growing. In official representations of political life this group is commonly 'symbolically eliminated' or taken up by an increasingly hostile discourse on 'illegal immigrants' and 'international terrorism'. This article explores what a rereading of the work of Hannah Arendt can contribute to the analytical task of giving an alternative …
TheLogicoftheBanks - Dirk Baecker, Womit handeln Banken? Eine Untersuchung zur Risikoverarbeitung in der Wirtschaft, mit einem Vorwort von Niklas Luhmann (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, [1991] 2008)
TheLogicoftheBanks - Dirk Baecker, Womit handeln Banken? Eine Untersuchung zur Risikoverarbeitung in der Wirtschaft, mit einem Vorwort von Niklas Luhmann (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, [1991] 2008). - Volume 50 Issue 3
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-gather…
How facts travel: The model systems of sociology
The Couch as a Laboratory: The Spaces of Psychoanalytic Knowledge-Production Between Research, Diagnosis and Treatment
The debate about knowledge-production in sociology has pitted "internalist" accounts, which pay close attention to the places, practices, and tools of knowledge, against "externalist" accounts of institutions and fields. Using psychoanalysis as a case, this paper develops an approach that integrates these traditions by comparing the differentiation of places, tools and practices of knowledge production. The paper shows that, in a context in which…
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…
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 urbanization 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 suburb…
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 n…
The Good Project: Humanitarian Relief NGOs and the Fragmentation of Reason
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 Bourdieu's 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…
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 …
Aid in Danger: The Perils and Promise of Humanitarianism
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 Bourdieu's 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…
Fielding Transnationalism: An Introduction
The new interest in transnational phenomena since the 1990s has produced a wide range of studies across the social sciences.In the discipline of history, Akira Iriye (1989: 2) has called for historians to 'search for historical themes and conceptions that are meaningful across national boundaries', a call echoed by the new global and transnational history
Attempting to Bring Valuation and Politics Together: The Politics of Valuation Studies at a Series of Sessions in Copenhagen
International audience
Charismatic Species and Beyond: How Cultural Schemas and Organisational Routines shape Conservation”
It has long been suggested that charismatic species attract a disproportionate amount of attention and resources in international conservation. This paper follows up on this observation and investigates how cultural schemas and organisational routines shape resource allocation in conservation more broadly. Based on 44 in-depth interviews with programme managers in international conservation NGOs and in zoos with conservation programmes, we argue,…
Social Theory Now
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 propertie…
Prioritization in human rights NGOs: The role of intra-organizational units of planning
Drawing on forty in-depth interviews with program managers in nineteen Western international human rights organizations, this article examines how human rights organizations make decisions about how to allocate resources and how to manage their commitments to specific causes, specific people, and specific areas. It argues that organizational routines shape the allocation of resources relatively independently of other factors and it pays particula…
What is Zeitgeist? Examining period-specific cultural patterns
Current research on culture rarely differentiates explicitly between period-specific and other kinds of cultural patterns. This paper develops the concept of "zeitgeist" as a tool for sociological analysis. I propose we understand zeitgeist as a hypothesis for a pattern in meaningful practices that is specific to a particular historical time-period, links different realms of social life and social groups, and extends across geographical contexts.…
Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites
On Sociological Reflexivity
This article offers a critique of the self-observation of the social sciences practiced in the philosophy of the social sciences and the critique of epistemological orientations. This kind of reflection involves the curious construction of wholes under labels, which are the result of a process of 'distillation' or 'abstraction' of a 'position' somewhat removed from actual research practices and from the concrete claims and findings that researche…
Sociology (25 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Political science (16 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (14 works) · Social science (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Law (10 works)