What the Situation Explains

Some two decades ago, a number of German sociologists called for a fundamental reorientation of research into violence, arguing that the failure to make violence as such — in the sense of a situated event, a physical activity — the subject of social-scientific research represented a serious deficit that bordered on the grotesque. Such research, these critics claimed, had been hitherto limited mainly to the socio-structural, cultural-historical and biographically conditioned causes of violence, factors that were remote from the situations in which violence was physically manifested.1 Mainstream sociology, which is able to identify quantitative distributions and statistical connections — for example, between poverty, disintegrated milieux, ethnicised attitudes and violence — has almost nothing to say about the actual exercise of violence and, in addition, has a tendency to over-predict its occurrence. Such a sociology can perhaps explain rates and probabilities of violence but not a violent act, a violent event. Explaining the latter, as Trutz von Trotha has argued, requires a "genuine sociology of violence", one that begins with a "thick description" and a "microscopic analysis" of the violent action.2

Criminology · Epistemology · German · Mainstream · Nothing · Political science · Situated · Sociology · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Sociology and Norbert Elias

• Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society

  Open Access•R N Jacobs•Race, Media, and the Crisis of…•2000

  Add to list

• The Moral Issue in Collective Behavior and Collective Action

  Ralph Turner, R Anthony Turner•Mobilization An International…•1996

  Add to list

• Race Riots Past and Present

  Open Access•Ralph H Turner•Symbolic Interaction•1994

  Add to list