The term “agency” is quite slippery and is used differently depending on the epistemological roots and goals of scholars who employ it. Distressingly, the sociological literature on the concept rarely addresses relevant social psychological research. We take a social behaviorist approach to agency by suggesting that individual temporal orientations are underutilized in conceptualizing this core sociological concept. Different temporal foci—the actor's engaged response to situational circumstances—implicate different forms of agency. This article offers a theoretical model involving four analytical types of (...) agency (“existential,”“identity,”“pragmatic,” and “life course”) that are often conflated across treatments of the topic. Each mode of agency overlaps with established social psychological literatures, most notably about the self, enabling scholars to anchor overly abstract treatments of agency within established research literatures. (shrink)

Copresence, the idea that the presence of other actors shapes individual behavior, links macro- and micro-theorizing about social interaction. Traditionally, scholars have focused on the physical proximity of other people, assuming copresence to be a given, objective condition. However, recent empirical evidence on technologically mediated (e.g., e-mail), imaginary (e.g., prayer), and parasocial (e.g., watching a television show) interactions challenges classic copresence assumptions. In this article we reconceptualize copresence to provide theoretical building blocks (definitions, assumptions, and propositions) for a revitalized research (...) program that allows for the explicit assessment of copresence as an endogenous, subjective variable dynamically related to social context. We treat copresence as the degree to which an actor perceives mutual entrainment (i.e., synchronization of attention, emotion, and behavior) with another actor. We demonstrate the ramifications of this reconceptualization for classic theorizing on micro-macro linkages and contemporary research questions, including methodological artifacts in laboratory research and disparities in patient-provider rapport. (shrink)

Introduction -- A primer on inequality -- The social scientific study of morality -- The difficulty of studying morality across cultures -- Morality as a measure of society -- The theory of inequality and moral emotions -- Affect control theory: how do cultures draw moral lines? -- Methodology and a description of the data -- Empirical analysis -- Conclusion.

Buchanan and Powell’s ambitious work offers a wide-ranging philosophical treatment about one of social science’s active inquries: human morality and how it evolved. This review humbly offers a brief engagement with the social science of morality, both to support the book’s conclusions and occasionally to build productive interdisciplinary bridges toward an even more fuller treatment of the topic.