Chris Shilling
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 224775 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Chris Shilling |
| PRENOMES | Chris |
| SOBRENOME | Shilling |
| ASSINATURA | SHILLING C |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Kent |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2930-9223 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 77 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 873 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 77 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1986 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2022 |
| ÍNDICE H | 17 |
Social character, interdependence, and the dualities of other-directedness
David Riesman's exploration of the other-directed characterological form, suited to corporate capitalism and the rise of the service sector, became one of the most influential sociological analyses of the twentieth century. Yet sociologists interested in the contemporary fate of those dispositional qualities suited to mutual adjustment confront a paradox: why, in an age of increasing interdependencies apparently conducive to the sustenance of oth…
Body pedagogics, transactionalism and vélo identities
Sociological research into the body pedagogics of occupational, educational, religious and sporting groups focuses on cases in which the social and material environment reproduces these 'ways of life', yet devotes little attention to how cultures persist within circumstances hostile to their maintenance. Developing a transactionalist approach to body pedagogics, I address this lacuna by investigating the case of cycling within societies dominated…
Body pedagogics, culture and the transactional case of Vélo worlds
During the past two decades, there has been a significant growth of sociological studies into the 'body pedagogics' of cultural transmission, reproduction and change. Rejecting the tendency to over-valorise cognitive information, these investigations have explored the importance of corporeal capacities, habits and techniques in the processes associated with belonging to specific 'ways of life'. Focused on practical issues associated with 'knowing…
Body Pedagogics, Transactional Identities and Human-Animal Relations
The sociology of the body developed as a reaction against Cartesian conceptions of homo clausus that haunted disciplinary thought in the late 20th century but exhibited anthropocentric tendencies in neglecting non-human animals. Building upon recent attempts to address this situation, I develop a transactional approach towards body pedagogics that explores how the shifting borders governing human-animal relations influence people's embodied ident…
Edgework, Uncertainty, and Social Character
This article proposes a novel conceptual understanding of 'edgework' - a term denoting the voluntary embrace of risk - by drawing on the long-standing sociological tradition of character studies. In doing so, it addresses the paradox that while first-generation research into high-risk leisure suggested that these activities provided identity-affirming escapes from bureaucratised capitalism, second-generation writings argued that edgework exists i…
The Fate of Social Character in an Age of Uncertainty
This article develops the long-standing sociological tradition of 'character studies', arguing that the accelerated change and associated uncertainties central to late modern life have been accompanied by what we refer to as a new opportunity-directed form of individuality. Engaging with Sayer's agenda-setting return to the subject, we acknowledge the ideological uses to which the promotion of this characterological form may be put, but argue tha…
Embodying culture
Contemporary research into the field of body pedagogics has produced a growing number of studies concerned with the embodied character of cultural transmission, experience, reproduction and change. This article advances this sociological development by reinterpreting recent writings on situated epistemic relations (SER) and practical epistemological analysis (PEA) as complementary, methodological, techniques that can enhance these investigations.…
Embodiment
Human embodiment has become one of the fastest growing areas of sociological investigation since the mid‐1980s, involving an explosion of theoretical and substantive studies on the significance for social and cultural life of “the body” and its variable capacities, connections, needs, and frailties. Focused on such areas as consumption, work, sex and gender, sport, history, medical developments, aging, and disability, these writings reach beyond …
Uncovering Social Life
In an era when rapid social change, the disappearance of traditional communities, the rise of political populism and the threat posed by radical religious movements makes it appear that ‘all that is solid melts into air’, the classical sociological problem of how peaceable societies can be created and maintained assumes renewed urgency. Uncovering Social Life: Critical Perspectives from Sociology explores how contemporary institutional changes er…
Arbitrage, uncertainty and the new ethos of capitalism
This paper examines the arbitrageur as a figure who both embodies the new ethos of uncertainty central to 'financialized' capitalism, and exemplifies the issues of ethics and innovation raised by those who now personify what Weber called the 'devotion to the calling of making money'. We begin by providing a brief background to financial 'abstraction' in the economy, and the issues of dissimulation with which this has been associated, before sugge…
Body Pedagogics
This article contributes to the growing sociological concern with body pedagogics; an embodied approach to the transmission and acquisition of occupational, sporting, religious and other culturally structured practices. Focused upon the relationship between those social, technological and material means through which institutionalized cultures are transmitted, the experiences of those involved in this learning, and the embodied outcomes of this p…
Series Editor's Acknowledgements
For a Sociology of Deceit
Deceit occupies a significant role in historical conceptualizations of social order, but dominant approaches to the subject are limited by the normative assumptions and conceptions of agency and structure on which they rest. This article suggests that renewed sociological engagement with deceit is overdue and can illuminate the 'situational logics of opportunity' within modernity (Archer, 2010). Focusing on the contemporary era, and building upon…
The challenge of embodying archaeology
Sociology of the Sacred
Drawing on classical and contemporary social theory, Sociology of the Sacred presents a bold and original account of how interactions between religious and secular forms of the sacred underpin major conflicts in the world today, and illuminate broader patterns of social and cultural change inherent to global modernity. It demonstrates: * How the bodily capacities help religions adapt to social change but also facilitate their internal transformat…
From iron maiden to superwoman
This paper develops a theoretically grounded account of one extraordinary individual’s journey from female bodybuilder to Strongwoman. It is set against the challenges socially marginalised sportswomen confront in seeking to forge a coherent identity amidst the competing demands of the social, practical and embodied environments that invariably impinge upon such quests. Highlighting the complexities and ambiguities of the regimes to which Sarah a…
Re-conceptualising the religious habitus
The utility of the notion of the religious habitus rests on its capacity to illuminate how embodied dispositions emergent from routinised practices come to be socially and culturally significant. This has been called into question, however, by global changes that undermine the societal stability and personal habits on which it is often understood to rely, stimulating instead reflexive engagements with change. After assessing conventional concepti…
Re-Conceptualizing Sport as a Sacred Phenomenon
Sociological studies of sport have established their subject matter as significant to a wide range of sociocultural concerns. Despite a broad consensus about its global importance, however, the reasons for the particular, even ‘extraordinary’, societal importance of sport today remain deeply contested. Most studies account for it by highlighting its entanglement within a range of secular phenomena including state building, rationalization, biopol…
Afterword
The rise of body studies has, since its development in the early 1980s, been characterized by a resilience and creativity that shows no signs of abating. There are various reasons for this success, but two are especially worthy of note. Socially informed studies of the materialities, capacities and connectedness of body subjects have maintained their capacity to advance disciplinary, cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary work on the subject i…
Series Editor's Introduction
Making things sacred
The sociological importance attributed to 'the sacred' has varied historically as theorists have sought to explain the relationship between religion and early capitalism, the rise of twentieth-century secularization processes, the profusion of nationalism in post-Soviet societies, and the recent global upsurge in religious movements. Paradoxically, however, sociology's concern with the social significance of the sacred has not been accompanied by…
The Body and Social Theory
Retheorising Emile Durkheim on Society and Religion
In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the po…
Afterword
Body Work in Health and Social Care: Critical Themes, New Agendas is a welcome addition to the social scientific literature in the field of 'body studies', demonstrating as it does the importance of the body to one of the longest standing areas of sociological interest, work. By focusing on the inter-corporeal tensions, challenges, co-operations, pleasures, ambivalences and emotional exchanges associated with bodies-working-on-bodies, the papers …
The Religious Habitus
This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Charisma, Rationalization, and Technological Culture Emotions, Symbols, and Rituals Religion as Habitus Conclusion Bibliography
Modernity, Self-Identity and the Sequestration of Death
Throughout its establishment and development sociology has been concerned almost exclusively with problems of life, rather than with the subject of death. However, if we take seriously Peter Berger's (1967) point that death is an essential feature of the human condition that requires people to develop means of coping with it, then to neglect death is to ignore one of the few universal parameters in which social and individual life are constructed…
Durkheim, Morality and Modernity
The issue of morality has lost its position of importance within the discipline, yet a growing number of sociologists interested in the ambivalent character of (post) modernity have returned to this subject in recent years. This article examines the revival of interest in morality and suggests it would benefit by engaging creatively with Durkheim's writings on homo duplex, collective effervescence, and the social construction of moral orders. Aft…
Sociology and the Body
Reflecting developments in consumer culture, the politics of social movements, public health policy, and medical technologies, the body has since the early 1980s become one of the most popular and contested areas of academic study. The following discussion introduces this monograph by positioning the body as a subject within contemporary sociology, accounting for the discipline's historical ambivalence towards embodiment in terms of sociology's f…
Educating the Body
This paper seeks to challenge the marginal status of the body in sociology by examining the place of 'the physical' in the production of social inequalities. After reviewing briefly Bourdieu's concept of embodied capital, I seek to extend his analysis by examining some recent work which looks at gender and the body-society relationship. It will be argued that a social analysis of the body is central to understanding the production of gender inequ…
Culture, the 'sick role' and the consumption of health
This paper revisits Parsons's conception of the 'sick role' and examines the relevance of his writings on the cultural understanding of sickness to the consumption of health in the contemporary era. In terms of current developments, I focus on the development of pro-active approaches towards the healthy body, and the growth of 'information rich' consumers of health care. These have become prominent themes in sociology, and while Parsons's writing…
The Undersocialised Conception of the Embodied Agent in Modern Sociology
Sociological reconceptualisations of the structure/agency divide have motivated important theoretical advances in the discipline, and the development of 'structuration theories' and 'analytical dualism' has promoted fresh thought about dominant views of the human agent. These approaches have sought to release sociology from any residual reliance on the oversocialised conception of the individual that formed part of the legacy of Parsonian sociolo…
The Two Traditions in the Sociology of Emotions
The sociology of emotions is an established specialism within the discipline and its products have become increasingly visible parts of the sociological landscape since the late 1970s. This specialism has also demonstrated, at least to its own satisfaction, the importance of emotions for social action and order, and for those related moral issues concerned with self-determined and other-oriented action. Paradoxically, however, the relationship be…
Body Pedagogics
This article contributes to the growing sociological concern with body pedagogics; an embodied approach to the transmission and acquisition of occupational, sporting, religious and other culturally structured practices. Focused upon the relationship between those social, technological and material means through which institutionalized cultures are transmitted, the experiences of those involved in this learning, and the embodied outcomes of this p…
Embodiment, Experience and Theory
This paper examines whether the theoretical analyses and ambitions of sociologists of the body are increasingly making obstructive and irrelevant the subject boundaries and methodological conventions associated with their parent discipline. Concerns about the utility of the discipline have been expressed by a number of body studies emanating from within and outside of sociology. These imply that it is necessary to reject the dominant problematic …
Exploring the society–body–school nexus
In this article I identify how developments in consumer culture, waged-work and health policy have informed our current interest in the body, before suggesting that Durkheim's and Mauss's methodological approach towards the external and internal dimensions of ‘social facts’ provides us with a valuable basis on which we can analyse the impact of these factors on those subject to them. Building on their interest in the corporeal internalization of …
Physical capital and situated action
Pierre Bourdieu's writings provide us with a powerful vision of corporeal sociology (an approach towards human relationships and identities that has at its centre the socially shaped embodied subject), and an understanding of the body as a form of physical capital. Despite his protestations to the contrary, however, a reproductionist bias pervades Bourdieu's conception of social action, making it difficult for him to account theoretically for tho…
Cultures of Embodied Experience
Two trends have dominated recent sociological analyses of embodiment. There has, on the one hand, been a proliferation of analyses identifying bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist and interact in the world. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a large growth in studies suggesting that technological advances have both increased our exposure to instrumental rationality and radically weakened the boundaries between h…
Reconceptualising Structure and Agency in the Sociology of Education
Since the 1970s there has been considerable debate among sociologists of education about the macro‐micro gap in educational analyses. However, educational research remains divided largely into the study of large‐scale phenomena such as social systems and national policies on the one hand, and case‐studies of individual schools and social interaction on the other. This split has had a number of unfortunate consequences for the development of the f…
Retheorising Emile Durkheim on Society and Religion
In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the po…
Towards an embodied understanding of the structure / agency relationship
Embodiment, Structuration Theory and Modernity
Body pedagogics and the religious habitus
Sociological theory has been central to the modern study of religion. In the face of the global resurgence of religious phenomena, however, and the challenge this has presented for the assumptions that characterised much twentieth century sociology, there is a need for new theoretical models to make sense of religion today. This paper contributes to this task by building upon Durkheim's suggestion that religious social facts become fully efficaci…
Embodying culture
Contemporary research into the field of body pedagogics has produced a growing number of studies concerned with the embodied character of cultural transmission, experience, reproduction and change. This article advances this sociological development by reinterpreting recent writings on situated epistemic relations (SER) and practical epistemological analysis (PEA) as complementary, methodological, techniques that can enhance these investigations.…
Social Space, Gender Inequalities and Educational Differentiation
The spatial dimensions of social interaction and reproduction have received increasing attention from sociologists in recent years. However, these issues remain largely implicit in most studies of classrooms, schools and the education system. In this paper, I argue that the study of social space should be integral to analyses of the relationship between educational differentiation and social reproduction. After examining the position of space in …
Towards an embodied understanding of the structure/agency relationship
Theoretical conceptualizations of the structure/agency relationship have been central to the development of the discipline, yet tend to exhibit two major limitations. First, they share a relatively disembodied view of the agent which overemphasizes cognition and marginalizes the significance of the emotional dimensions of interaction for human action and social structure. Second, most have difficulty maintaining the causal significance of both th…
Re-conceptualising the religious habitus
The utility of the notion of the religious habitus rests on its capacity to illuminate how embodied dispositions emergent from routinised practices come to be socially and culturally significant. This has been called into question, however, by global changes that undermine the societal stability and personal habits on which it is often understood to rely, stimulating instead reflexive engagements with change. After assessing conventional concepti…
Emotions, Embodiment and the Sensation of Society
The study of emotions has attracted an increased amount of attention from mainstream sociologists in recent years, both because of its potential to provide an added dimension to the analysis of such subjects as social conflict, gender inequalities and the organisation of the workplace, and as a result of its relevance to theoretical and methodological debates which have long characterised the discipline. This paper suggests that some of the core …
Afterword
Body Work in Health and Social Care: Critical Themes, New Agendas is a welcome addition to the social scientific literature in the field of 'body studies', demonstrating as it does the importance of the body to one of the longest standing areas of sociological interest, work. By focusing on the inter-corporeal tensions, challenges, co-operations, pleasures, ambivalences and emotional exchanges associated with bodies-working-on-bodies, the papers …
The Demise of Sociology of Education in Britain
(1993). The Demise of Sociology of Education in Britain? British Journal of Sociology of Education: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 105-112
Body pedagogics, culture and the transactional case of Vélo worlds
During the past two decades, there has been a significant growth of sociological studies into the 'body pedagogics' of cultural transmission, reproduction and change. Rejecting the tendency to over-valorise cognitive information, these investigations have explored the importance of corporeal capacities, habits and techniques in the processes associated with belonging to specific 'ways of life'. Focused on practical issues associated with 'knowing…
Implementing the Contract
Participating schools have a contractual responsibility to recruit a ‘balanced intake’ of students to TVEI courses. However, in many schools it is form teachers who have the eventual job of promoting TVEI to both sexes ‘across the ability range’. What this recruitment structure does not allow for is that form teachers may be affected by a number of ‘sources of influence’, the effects of which do not coincide with this objective. The aim of this p…
Work‐experience and schools
The growth of work‐experience as part of the school curriculum in such schemes as TVEI, has led to a growing body of literature concerned with the educational, social and political consequences of this trend. However, one aspect of analysis has been neglected by those working in this area. There has been a marked lack of investigation into factors which affect the supply of work placements to schools. Behind this lies an assumption that the parti…
Work‐experience as a Contradictory Practice
Radical educationalists have analysed work‐experience as an activity which provides poor quality and unreflected experiences for school students and serves to 'mystify capitalist relations of production'. Using data gathered from a case‐study which examines the experiences of a group of students who had recently returned from a week in a place of work, this paper suggests that such a view may be misleading. Furthermore, the experiences of student…
School to Work Programmes and the Production of Alienation
Since the late 1970s it has become generally accepted among British politicians that the transition of young people from school to work is a problematic process. The major response to this at the level of the school has been a proliferation of national and local vocationally oriented courses designed to ease this situation through creating a ‘permanent bridge’ to the labour market. This paper is an examination of a course which constitutes a cent…
The Mini‐Enterprise in Schools Project
The Mini‐Enterprise in Schools Project (MESP) represents one aspect of the growing ‘education for enterprise’ movement in Britain. It is distinctive in catering for school students from the age of nine years, and in making young people part‐time capitalists or labourers during school time. This paper examines some of the general issues relevant to the form of enterprise education promoted by the Mini‐Enterprise Project. MESP is analysed as an imp…
Work experience codes of practice
In England and Wales during the 1980s there has been a large growth in the use of work experience as part of the education of school students. This has prompted an increasing number of organizations to produce guidelines aimed at facilitating the operation and educational aims of this activity. By examining critically the British Institute of Management/British Educational Management and Administration Society's code of practice, this paper aims …
The organization of supply workers in state schools and the National Health Service
Supply teachers are playing a growing role in many schools in England and Wales as a result of staff shortages and the demands of in‐service training. However, little research has been conducted into this section of the teaching force. This paper uses data gained from a comparative case‐study of cover arrangements in a local education authority and a district health authority to identify several major factors which affect the organization of supp…
Social Use of the School Library
The existing literature on school libraries has been dominated by a view of them as ‘learning laboratories’ which should allow students opportunities for reading and conducting research into small scale projects. From this perspective, resource issues and helping students become knowledgeable users of library facilities are the major problems facing school librarians. This study breaks from the traditional research by focusing on the social use o…
Permanent Supports or Temporary Props? Supply Workers in State Schools and the National Health Service
Supply teachers are playing a growing role in many schools across England and Wales as a result of staff shortages and the demands of implementing the 1988 Education Reform Act. However, little research has been conducted into this female dominated section of the teaching force despite governmental concern about the motivation and recruitment of supply teachers, and recent deteriorations in their pay and conditions of service. This paper uses dat…
Social Space, Gender Inequalities and Educational Differentiation
The spatial dimensions of social interaction and reproduction have received increasing attention from sociologists in recent years. However, these issues remain largely implicit in most studies of classrooms, schools and the education system. In this paper, I argue that the study of social space should be integral to analyses of the relationship between educational differentiation and social reproduction. After examining the position of space in …
Labouring at School
The Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) is a four year programme of study for 14-18 year olds which aims to provide vocational and general education broadly related to employment trends. It was announced by the Prime Minister in 1982 and in 1986 the government signalled its intention to extend TVEI to all local education authorities (LEAs) in England and Wales. Although it is not yet clear how much of TVEI will be retained within…
Educating the Body
This paper seeks to challenge the marginal status of the body in sociology by examining the place of 'the physical' in the production of social inequalities. After reviewing briefly Bourdieu's concept of embodied capital, I seek to extend his analysis by examining some recent work which looks at gender and the body-society relationship. It will be argued that a social analysis of the body is central to understanding the production of gender inequ…
Reconceptualising Structure and Agency in the Sociology of Education
Since the 1970s there has been considerable debate among sociologists of education about the macro‐micro gap in educational analyses. However, educational research remains divided largely into the study of large‐scale phenomena such as social systems and national policies on the one hand, and case‐studies of individual schools and social interaction on the other. This split has had a number of unfortunate consequences for the development of the f…
Schooling and the Production of Physical Capital
The work of Pierre Bourdieu has been central to theoretical developments in educational research since the 1970s. However, sociologists of education have drawn only selectively on his approach in accounting for the role of schools in society. In particular, there has been a neglect of Bourdieu's writings on embodied capital, despite the importance Bourdieu assigns to the corporeal in reproducing and legitimising social inequalities. In this paper…
The Demise of Sociology of Education in Britain
(1993). The Demise of Sociology of Education in Britain? British Journal of Sociology of Education: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 105-112
The body and social theory
The Body and Social Theory provides a clear, critical analysis of the new sociological literature on the body and an introduction to the most important traditions of thought that have informed social theories of human embodiment. In recent years, contemporary societies have been characterized by a heightened attention to the body, expressed in the changing relation of individual identity to health, sexuality and bodily image. Developments in aren…
Modernity, Self-Identity and the Sequestration of Death
Throughout its establishment and development sociology has been concerned almost exclusively with problems of life, rather than with the subject of death. However, if we take seriously Peter Berger's (1967) point that death is an essential feature of the human condition that requires people to develop means of coping with it, then to neglect death is to ignore one of the few universal parameters in which social and individual life are constructed…
The Body and Social Theory
Reflexive modernity and the religious body
There are a growing number of attempts to reconsider the nature and role of contemporary religion with reference to the issues of ‘postmodernity’ and ‘postmodernism’. Against these, it is suggested here that efforts to reconstruct the study of religion within the framework of an assumption that we are entering a postmodern social order would be fundamentally misconceived. While the emergence of features within the present social order are acknowl…
The Body and Social Theory
The Body and Social Theory
Embodiment, Structuration Theory and Modernity
Re-forming the Body
"Through an analysis of successive re-formations of the body, this book constructs a wide-ranging account of how the creation and evolution of different patterns of human community are intimately related to the somatic experience of the sacred." "Grounded in classical and contemporary theory, Re-Forming the Body makes a seminal contribution to understanding the relationship between the sacred and profane: the world of religious and moral sentimen…
Emotions, Embodiment and the Sensation of Society
The study of emotions has attracted an increased amount of attention from mainstream sociologists in recent years, both because of its potential to provide an added dimension to the analysis of such subjects as social conflict, gender inequalities and the organisation of the workplace, and as a result of its relevance to theoretical and methodological debates which have long characterised the discipline. This paper suggests that some of the core …
The Undersocialised Conception of the Embodied Agent in Modern Sociology
Sociological reconceptualisations of the structure/agency divide have motivated important theoretical advances in the discipline, and the development of 'structuration theories' and 'analytical dualism' has promoted fresh thought about dominant views of the human agent. These approaches have sought to release sociology from any residual reliance on the oversocialised conception of the individual that formed part of the legacy of Parsonian sociolo…
Sociology (66 obras) · Epistemology (48 obras) · Social science (37 obras) · Philosophy (28 obras) · Political science (28 obras) · Psychology (23 obras) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (20 obras) · Law (19 obras) · Aesthetics (17 obras) · Embodied cognition (15 obras)