In _Abductive Analysis_, Iddo Tavory and Stefan Timmermans provide a new navigational map for constructing empirically based generalizations in qualitative research. They outline an accessible way to think about observations, methods, and theories that nurtures theory-formation without locking it into predefined conceptual boxes. The authors view research as continually moving back and forth between a set of observations and theoretical generalizations. To craft theory is to then pitch one’s observations in relation to other potential cases, both within and without one’s (...) field. The book provides novel ways to approach the challenges that plague qualitative researchers across the social sciences—how to think about the relation between methods and theories, how to conceptualize causality, how to construct axes of variation, and how to leverage the researcher’s community of inquiry. _Abductive Analysis_ is a landmark work that shows how a pragmatist approach provides a more productive and fruitful way to conduct qualitative research. (shrink)

Micro-sociological theory has traditionally stressed interactional pressures towards alignment: actors’ attempts to co-construct a shared definition of the situation. We argue that this model provides an insufficient account of the coordination of action and of the emergence of intersubjectivity among actors. To complement the focus on alignment, we develop a theory of disruption—a perceived misalignment of the dramaturgical structure of interaction in coordinating expected lines of action. We develop a theory of the interaction order that takes the interplay between interactional (...) alignment and disruption as a foundational challenge both for sociology and for actors in their everyday lives. We focus on the practical ways in which actors negotiate both interactional breaches and wider relational ruptures, and how they differentiate between disruptions-of relations and disruptions-for them. By doing so, we connect the interaction order to a wider relational order, providing a bridge between micro-level interactionism and the sociology of culture. (shrink)

Based on interviews with climate-change activists and NGO workers in Finland and Malawi, this article reconsiders the ways in which the coordination of identity projects and action is approached in social movement scholarship. Rather than beginning with personal and collective identities, we take our cue from recent work by Laurent Thévenot and trace actors’ forms of engagement—the various ways actors produce commonality. As we show, doing so in vastly different social contexts allows us to see permutations in such forms afforded (...) by participation in a transnational social movement and to identify patterns of collective action that we would otherwise be apt to miss. Finnish activists narrated their activities by way of engaging in the forms of the common good driving the climate movement, but coordinated various situations also through engagement in familiarity, comfort, and ease. Malawian activists and NGO employees also spoke of the common good the movements worked to achieve, but principally created common ground by engaging in shared individual choices and projects, which were jointly consecrated by fellow NGO participants. Ultimately, we argue that tracing forms of engagement enables more in-depth understanding of what is at stake when people act together in social movement organizations: moving away from collective and personal identity to patterns of engagement allows a vantage point into the processes through which commonality is created and generates new hypotheses regarding the coordination of action in social movement organizations. (shrink)

The article presents a social phenomenology of naturalism. Starting from Stefan Bargheer’s Moral entanglements (2018), it argues that to understand the transformations of naturalist practices, we have to focus both on the shifting typifications of activity and their organizational moorings, but also on the experiential affordances of practice. Drawing on the work of Schutz and Merleau-Ponty, I focus on the transformation of animals from background into figure, the peculiar province of meaning that naturalist practice entails, as well as the experience (...) of “play” that Bargheer highlights. Doing so, I argue that the affordances of experience are a constitutive aspect of any historical account of practice: that a phenomenological approach is crucial not only for the micro-sociology of interaction and experience, but for understanding larger historical processes and transformations. (shrink)

Based on the work of Alfred Schutz, this article develops a theory of intersubjectivity—one of the basic building blocks of social experience—and shows how such a theory can be empirically leveraged in sociological work. Complementing the interactionist and ethnomethodological emphasis on the situated production of intersubjectivity, this paper revisits the basic theoretical assumptions undergirding this theory. Schutz tied intersubjectivity to the way people experience the world of everyday life: a world that he held as distinct from other provinces of meaning, (...) such as religious experience, humor, or scientific reasoning. However, as this article shows, such neat distinctions are problematic for both empirical and theoretical reasons: The cognitive styles that define different provinces of meaning often bleed into one another; people often inhabit multiple provinces of meaning simultaneously. Intersubjectivity may thus be simultaneously anchored in multiple worlds, opening a host of empirical research questions: not only about how intersubjectivity is done in interaction, but about how different kinds of intersubjective experiences are constructed, how multi-layered they are, as well as opening up questions about possible asymmetries in the experiences of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this article delineates a process through which members of an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles unintentionally delegate boundary work and membership-identification to anonymous others in everyday life. Living in the midst of a non-Jewish world, orthodox men are often approached by others, both Jews and non-Jews, who categorize them as “religious Jews” based on external marks such as the yarmulke and attire. These interactions, varying from mundane interactions to anti-Semitic incidents, are then tacitly (...) anticipated by members even when they are not attending to their “Jewishness”—when being a “Jew” is interactionally invisible. Through this case, I argue that, in addition to conceptualizing boundaries and identifications as either emerging in performance or institutionally given and stable, the study of boundaries should also chart the sites in which members anticipate categorization and the way these anticipations play out in everyday life. (shrink)