Understanding Society

Is there a place within the social sciences for the representation of concrete, individual-level experience?  Is there a valid kind of know...

Images: cover illustration from Anthony Appiah, In My Father's House ; Chinese neolithic pot c. 1500 BC People often return from their t...

It may seem like a strange question: What is Alsace? It is a region of France. It is a culturally and linguistically distinct population o...

What is involved in providing a sociology of technical practices? (An earlier posting is also devoted to this question.) Here I am think...

The topic of methodological individualism (MI) came up in a recent posting , and I underlined the connection between MI and some version of ...

Does Wittgenstein's philosophy in the Philosophical Investigations have anything distinctive to add to better ways of understanding soc...

By a practice I mean such things as agricultural techniques, craft technologies, and customs of ordinary life -- how to greet a neighbor, ho...

In teaching an undergraduate seminar on the philosophy of history, I tried to come up with some readings that would stimulate some genuinely...

It is interesting to consider what kinds of social knowledge people need in their everyday lives. This is clearly a question of scale. At th...

Is there such a thing as a "micro"-culture -- a culture that is somewhat distinctive of a particular community in a specific time ...

Rational choice theory usually advances a highly abstract theory of decision-making -- utility-maximizing choice among discrete options -- a...

I am struck by the difference between the football game that I watch, as a not-very-involved fan, and the one that the experienced coach or ...

Are there such things as "social structures"? In what do they consist? What sorts of social powers do they exercise? This...