Ronald N Jacobs
Biographic Data
| ID | 3685904 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ronald N Jacobs |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ronald N |
| FAMILY NAME | Jacobs |
| SIGNATURE | JACOBS R N |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 122 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 4 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 20 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Force of Embodiment: Violence and Altruism in Cultures of Practice
This article examines two stories that foreground significant practices of embodiment: violence and altruism. The stories tackle the notions of violent and altruistic bodies, and both seem to have clear ethical implications. They are interpreted through two theoretical interests that are central to studies of the body: habitus and networks. The first story is from Norbert Elias, who has published two major works: The Civilizing Process (1984) and…
From Moral Sentiments to Civic Engagement: Sociological Analysis as Responsible Spectatorship
This article proposes an entirely different understanding of the goals of cultural sociology, arguing that the subject position of the “spectator” should replace that of the “social scientist.” It contends that cultural sociology should aspire for fidelity—to moods and experiences, to locations and dramas, and to the truth of experience—and that this fidelity can be achieved through witnessing. In order to build the case for a new kind of cultura…
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…
Rationalization Processes inside Cultural Sociology
This article examines the use of analytic continua with spatial scaling and with potentially similar reifying effects to rationalize social meaning rather than just sound or sight in cultural sociology. It considers the use of the figure of spatial scaling as a point of entry to elucidate the basic logic by which many sociologists interpret the relation between what is culturally meaningful and what lies “outside” culture (or our concept of cultu…
Globalization and Religion
This article examines the relationship between religious cultures and the forces of globalization. It first considers the distinction between teleological-homogenizing approaches to religious developments in modernity, which assume that secularization is inevitable, and those that emphasize cross-national variability and historical contingency. In particular, it discusses the cultural sociology approach, the value of which can be recognized when …
Cultural Pragmatics and the Structure and Flow of Democratic Politics
This article focuses on the performative dimensions, causes, and consequences of the struggle for political power in a fragmented and differentiated society committed to democracy and regulated by open and unabashed struggles for influence and public legitimation. It begins with a review of the literature in the fields of political sociology and political science that addresses how presidents conceive of and exercise their authority and legitimac…
Introduction: Cultural Sociology Today
This article introduces the reader to the current status of cultural sociology as a specific mode of inquiry. It first discusses the pre-history of cultural sociology, tracing its origins in the demise of Parsonian functionalism from the mid-1960s onward, the cultural turn in sociology through the 1980s, and the emergence of an increasingly confident cultural sociology as an alternative paradigm to the once dominant sociology of culture. The arti…
Media, Intellectuals, the Public Sphere, and the Story of Barack Obama in 2008
This article examines the epoch-making sense of Barack Obama’s historic election as U.S. president in 2008 and the heightened solidarity it produced, as well as the role of the mass media in creating such meanings. It first describes a sociological model of the public sphere by combining insights from field analysis and the Strong Program in cultural sociology, focusing on the theories advanced by Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jeffrey C. …
Culture and the Economy
This article examines the intellectual mission of a cultural sociology of the economy, its theoretical horizon, and its pragmatic relevance in times of economic crisis. It first considers classical sources of a cultural sociology of the economy before discussing the use of cultural analysis in contemporary economic sociology. It then outlines the central features of a cultural sociology of the economy and emphasizes the moral obligation of schola…
The Constitution of Religious Political Violence: Institution, Culture, and Power
This article examines politicized religion on institutional grounds, arguing that religious violence is both a corollary of attempted institutional transformation and, more specifically, of the institutional logic of religion itself. The institutionalism that this article proposes is a cultural sociological project; it seeks to encompass, not displace, prior institutional constitutions. The article contends that institutions are constituted by or…
Remembrance of Things Past: Cultural Trauma, the “Nanking Massacre,” and Chinese Identity
This article examines the theory of cultural trauma from a cultural sociological perspective by using the case of the Nanking Massacre and its implications for Chinese identity. It begins with an overview of the Nanking Massacre and its initial constructions, focusing on the shift from Western concern to Western silence about the mass murder from a cultural standpoint. It then considers why the Nanking Massacre disappeared from the consciousness …
Mediatized Disasters in the Global Age: On the Ritualization of Catastrophe
This article examines how disasters become extensively and intensively enacted and performed within the news media. It first considers contemporary forms of media ritualization evident across a range of “exceptional” media phenomena, including moral panics and mediated scandals. It then explores how some of these different forms of media ritualization enter into and shape the public elaboration of major disasters, including the South Asian tsunam…
Events as Templates of Possibility: An Analytic Typology of Political Facts
This article extends the concept of events to bring cultural analysis to bear on political explanation and privileges “thick description” and narrative as methodological tools. Drawing on the views of Emile Durkheim, it argues that events constitute “social facts”—phenomena with sufficient identity and coherence that the social collectivity recognizes them as discrete and important. The article first considers the tension between the political an…
Ethnicity, Race, Nationhood, Foreignness, and Many Other Things: Prolegomena to a Cultural Sociology of Difference-Based Interactions
This article demonstrates how cultural sociology may contribute to, and further enrich, contemporary efforts to understand difference-based interactions in a non-reductionist way. More specifically, it explains how a systematic understanding of symbolic structures may be particularly useful in fostering the recent emphasis on boundary-making, rather than collective groups, as the focus of analysis. The article begins with a discussion of two majo…
Narrative and Social Movements
This article focuses on the use of narrative to understand the dynamics of social movements. More specifically, it examines how the strategic use of storytelling can shed light on the distinctly cultural obstacles that activists face in effecting change. After discussing the main approach to culture in movements, that of collective action framing, the article considers how a study of storytelling can help to account for the cultural and instituti…
Cultural Sociology as Research Program: Post-Positivism, Meaning, and Causality
This article examines cultural sociology as a research program from an epistemological standpoint within the larger context of “post-positivist” social science. It first outlines an understanding of what sociological knowledge is and does before discussing the problematic status of cultural interpretations, with particular emphasis on the distinction between minimal and maximal interpretations. A minimal interpretation is a report upon some socia…
Narrating Global Warming
This article examines global warming using the narrative genre model of risk evaluation. The narrative genre model of risk evaluation offers a systematic and comparative way of looking at the form and structure of storytelling and its consequences for human action. It is based on a number of claims, for example: uncertain events and real world facts are “clues”; we can see things as low mimetic, romantic, tragic, or apocalyptic; binary opposition…
Inbetweenness and Ambivalence
This article focuses on the extraordinary space in between the opposites based on a paradigm in cultural sociology that conceives of ambivalence and inbetweenness as a fundamental and indissoluble given of classification and interpretation. More specifically, it considers something that transcends the sucessful ordering and splitting of the world into neat binaries, arguing that this inbetweenness is essential for the construction of culture. Rea…
Cultural Sociology and Civil Society in a World of Flows: Recapturing Ambiguity, Hybridity, and the Political
This article "provincializes" cultural sociology and more specifically, the cultural sociology of politics and civil society. It first traces the origins of what is distinctive about the cultural sociology of civil society before discussing its three unspoken assumptions: the assumption of minimal stateness in the lives and worlds of social movements and civil society, the relation between civil and civilized, and the notion that the social locat…
Four Ways to Measure Culture: Social Science, Hermeneutics, and the Cultural Turn
This article considers four of the ways in which measurement practices have been applied to create formal models of culture in the social sciences. It first examines the nature of formal measurement models in the social sciences and compares this mode of scholarship to more hermeneutic styles of research, paying attention to debates over method in the social sciences before and after the cultural turn. It then discusses four different types of fo…
The Space of OpinionMedia Intellectuals and the Public Sphere: Media Intellectuals and the Public Sphere
Opinion is increasingly central in American news media, but there has been little systematic attention paid to the institutional spaces of media opinion, or to the role of media commentary in contemporary civil society. The Space of Opinion fills this gap, offering an insightful and authoritative account of the newspaper op-ed pages, the Sunday morning political talk shows on television, and the evening cable news television lineup. In this major…
Culture, the Public Sphere, and Media Sociology: A Search for a Classical Founder in the Work of Robert Park
Media Publicity and the Voluntary Sector: The Case of Nonprofit Organizations in New York City
Media publicity is an important resource for contemporary voluntary associations, but very little is actually known about the resources and organizational characteristics that are most important for getting media attention. To address this question, we collected and analyzed data on the organizational attributes and news publicity of 739 nonprofit organizations in New York City. We find that an organization’s income, paid staff, membership size, …
The Problem with Tragic Narratives: Lessons from the Los Angeles Uprising
The Space of OpinionMedia Intellectuals and the Public Sphere: Media Intellectuals and the Public Sphere
Opinion is increasingly central in American news media, but there has been little systematic attention paid to the institutional spaces of media opinion, or to the role of media commentary in contemporary civil society. The Space of Opinion fills this gap, offering an insightful and authoritative account of the newspaper op-ed pages, the Sunday morning political talk shows on television, and the evening cable news television lineup. In this major…
The Problem with Tragic Narratives: Lessons from the Los Angeles Uprising
Culture, the Public Sphere, and Media Sociology: A Search for a Classical Founder in the Work of Robert Park
Media Publicity and the Voluntary Sector: The Case of Nonprofit Organizations in New York City
Media publicity is an important resource for contemporary voluntary associations, but very little is actually known about the resources and organizational characteristics that are most important for getting media attention. To address this question, we collected and analyzed data on the organizational attributes and news publicity of 739 nonprofit organizations in New York City. We find that an organization’s income, paid staff, membership size, …
Four Ways to Measure Culture: Social Science, Hermeneutics, and the Cultural Turn
This article considers four of the ways in which measurement practices have been applied to create formal models of culture in the social sciences. It first examines the nature of formal measurement models in the social sciences and compares this mode of scholarship to more hermeneutic styles of research, paying attention to debates over method in the social sciences before and after the cultural turn. It then discusses four different types of fo…
Inbetweenness and Ambivalence
This article focuses on the extraordinary space in between the opposites based on a paradigm in cultural sociology that conceives of ambivalence and inbetweenness as a fundamental and indissoluble given of classification and interpretation. More specifically, it considers something that transcends the sucessful ordering and splitting of the world into neat binaries, arguing that this inbetweenness is essential for the construction of culture. Rea…
Cultural Sociology and Civil Society in a World of Flows: Recapturing Ambiguity, Hybridity, and the Political
This article "provincializes" cultural sociology and more specifically, the cultural sociology of politics and civil society. It first traces the origins of what is distinctive about the cultural sociology of civil society before discussing its three unspoken assumptions: the assumption of minimal stateness in the lives and worlds of social movements and civil society, the relation between civil and civilized, and the notion that the social locat…
The Problem with Tragic Narratives: Lessons from the Los Angeles Uprising
Media Publicity and the Voluntary Sector: The Case of Nonprofit Organizations in New York City
Media publicity is an important resource for contemporary voluntary associations, but very little is actually known about the resources and organizational characteristics that are most important for getting media attention. To address this question, we collected and analyzed data on the organizational attributes and news publicity of 739 nonprofit organizations in New York City. We find that an organization’s income, paid staff, membership size, …
Culture, the Public Sphere, and Media Sociology: A Search for a Classical Founder in the Work of Robert Park
The Space of OpinionMedia Intellectuals and the Public Sphere: Media Intellectuals and the Public Sphere
Opinion is increasingly central in American news media, but there has been little systematic attention paid to the institutional spaces of media opinion, or to the role of media commentary in contemporary civil society. The Space of Opinion fills this gap, offering an insightful and authoritative account of the newspaper op-ed pages, the Sunday morning political talk shows on television, and the evening cable news television lineup. In this major…
The Force of Embodiment: Violence and Altruism in Cultures of Practice
This article examines two stories that foreground significant practices of embodiment: violence and altruism. The stories tackle the notions of violent and altruistic bodies, and both seem to have clear ethical implications. They are interpreted through two theoretical interests that are central to studies of the body: habitus and networks. The first story is from Norbert Elias, who has published two major works: The Civilizing Process (1984) and…
From Moral Sentiments to Civic Engagement: Sociological Analysis as Responsible Spectatorship
This article proposes an entirely different understanding of the goals of cultural sociology, arguing that the subject position of the “spectator” should replace that of the “social scientist.” It contends that cultural sociology should aspire for fidelity—to moods and experiences, to locations and dramas, and to the truth of experience—and that this fidelity can be achieved through witnessing. In order to build the case for a new kind of cultura…
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…
Rationalization Processes inside Cultural Sociology
This article examines the use of analytic continua with spatial scaling and with potentially similar reifying effects to rationalize social meaning rather than just sound or sight in cultural sociology. It considers the use of the figure of spatial scaling as a point of entry to elucidate the basic logic by which many sociologists interpret the relation between what is culturally meaningful and what lies “outside” culture (or our concept of cultu…
Globalization and Religion
This article examines the relationship between religious cultures and the forces of globalization. It first considers the distinction between teleological-homogenizing approaches to religious developments in modernity, which assume that secularization is inevitable, and those that emphasize cross-national variability and historical contingency. In particular, it discusses the cultural sociology approach, the value of which can be recognized when …
Cultural Pragmatics and the Structure and Flow of Democratic Politics
This article focuses on the performative dimensions, causes, and consequences of the struggle for political power in a fragmented and differentiated society committed to democracy and regulated by open and unabashed struggles for influence and public legitimation. It begins with a review of the literature in the fields of political sociology and political science that addresses how presidents conceive of and exercise their authority and legitimac…
Introduction: Cultural Sociology Today
This article introduces the reader to the current status of cultural sociology as a specific mode of inquiry. It first discusses the pre-history of cultural sociology, tracing its origins in the demise of Parsonian functionalism from the mid-1960s onward, the cultural turn in sociology through the 1980s, and the emergence of an increasingly confident cultural sociology as an alternative paradigm to the once dominant sociology of culture. The arti…
Media, Intellectuals, the Public Sphere, and the Story of Barack Obama in 2008
This article examines the epoch-making sense of Barack Obama’s historic election as U.S. president in 2008 and the heightened solidarity it produced, as well as the role of the mass media in creating such meanings. It first describes a sociological model of the public sphere by combining insights from field analysis and the Strong Program in cultural sociology, focusing on the theories advanced by Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jeffrey C. …
Culture and the Economy
This article examines the intellectual mission of a cultural sociology of the economy, its theoretical horizon, and its pragmatic relevance in times of economic crisis. It first considers classical sources of a cultural sociology of the economy before discussing the use of cultural analysis in contemporary economic sociology. It then outlines the central features of a cultural sociology of the economy and emphasizes the moral obligation of schola…
The Constitution of Religious Political Violence: Institution, Culture, and Power
This article examines politicized religion on institutional grounds, arguing that religious violence is both a corollary of attempted institutional transformation and, more specifically, of the institutional logic of religion itself. The institutionalism that this article proposes is a cultural sociological project; it seeks to encompass, not displace, prior institutional constitutions. The article contends that institutions are constituted by or…
Remembrance of Things Past: Cultural Trauma, the “Nanking Massacre,” and Chinese Identity
This article examines the theory of cultural trauma from a cultural sociological perspective by using the case of the Nanking Massacre and its implications for Chinese identity. It begins with an overview of the Nanking Massacre and its initial constructions, focusing on the shift from Western concern to Western silence about the mass murder from a cultural standpoint. It then considers why the Nanking Massacre disappeared from the consciousness …
Mediatized Disasters in the Global Age: On the Ritualization of Catastrophe
This article examines how disasters become extensively and intensively enacted and performed within the news media. It first considers contemporary forms of media ritualization evident across a range of “exceptional” media phenomena, including moral panics and mediated scandals. It then explores how some of these different forms of media ritualization enter into and shape the public elaboration of major disasters, including the South Asian tsunam…
Events as Templates of Possibility: An Analytic Typology of Political Facts
This article extends the concept of events to bring cultural analysis to bear on political explanation and privileges “thick description” and narrative as methodological tools. Drawing on the views of Emile Durkheim, it argues that events constitute “social facts”—phenomena with sufficient identity and coherence that the social collectivity recognizes them as discrete and important. The article first considers the tension between the political an…
Ethnicity, Race, Nationhood, Foreignness, and Many Other Things: Prolegomena to a Cultural Sociology of Difference-Based Interactions
This article demonstrates how cultural sociology may contribute to, and further enrich, contemporary efforts to understand difference-based interactions in a non-reductionist way. More specifically, it explains how a systematic understanding of symbolic structures may be particularly useful in fostering the recent emphasis on boundary-making, rather than collective groups, as the focus of analysis. The article begins with a discussion of two majo…
Narrative and Social Movements
This article focuses on the use of narrative to understand the dynamics of social movements. More specifically, it examines how the strategic use of storytelling can shed light on the distinctly cultural obstacles that activists face in effecting change. After discussing the main approach to culture in movements, that of collective action framing, the article considers how a study of storytelling can help to account for the cultural and instituti…
Cultural Sociology as Research Program: Post-Positivism, Meaning, and Causality
This article examines cultural sociology as a research program from an epistemological standpoint within the larger context of “post-positivist” social science. It first outlines an understanding of what sociological knowledge is and does before discussing the problematic status of cultural interpretations, with particular emphasis on the distinction between minimal and maximal interpretations. A minimal interpretation is a report upon some socia…
Narrating Global Warming
This article examines global warming using the narrative genre model of risk evaluation. The narrative genre model of risk evaluation offers a systematic and comparative way of looking at the form and structure of storytelling and its consequences for human action. It is based on a number of claims, for example: uncertain events and real world facts are “clues”; we can see things as low mimetic, romantic, tragic, or apocalyptic; binary opposition…
Inbetweenness and Ambivalence
This article focuses on the extraordinary space in between the opposites based on a paradigm in cultural sociology that conceives of ambivalence and inbetweenness as a fundamental and indissoluble given of classification and interpretation. More specifically, it considers something that transcends the sucessful ordering and splitting of the world into neat binaries, arguing that this inbetweenness is essential for the construction of culture. Rea…
Cultural Sociology and Civil Society in a World of Flows: Recapturing Ambiguity, Hybridity, and the Political
This article "provincializes" cultural sociology and more specifically, the cultural sociology of politics and civil society. It first traces the origins of what is distinctive about the cultural sociology of civil society before discussing its three unspoken assumptions: the assumption of minimal stateness in the lives and worlds of social movements and civil society, the relation between civil and civilized, and the notion that the social locat…
Four Ways to Measure Culture: Social Science, Hermeneutics, and the Cultural Turn
This article considers four of the ways in which measurement practices have been applied to create formal models of culture in the social sciences. It first examines the nature of formal measurement models in the social sciences and compares this mode of scholarship to more hermeneutic styles of research, paying attention to debates over method in the social sciences before and after the cultural turn. It then discusses four different types of fo…
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (19 works) · Social science (19 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Psychology (6 works)