Sociological Theory 28(3)

More than a Game: Sociological Theory from the Theories of Games
Benjamin DiCicco-Bloom and David R. Gibson

Sociologists are fond of game metaphors. However, such metaphors rarely go beyond casual references to generic games. Yet games are little social systems, and each game offers a distinctive perspective on the relationship between rules and constraints, on the one side, and emergent order, on the other. In this article, we examine three games—chess, go, and (Texas hold ‘em) poker—for sociological insights into contested social arenas such as markets, warfare, politics, and the professions. We describe each game's rules and emergent properties, and then offer a brief theorization of the social world through the “lens” of that game. Then we show how a study of the three games advances the sociology of strategy by enriching ideas about skill, position, and strategic dilemma.

Routine, Reflexivity, and Realism
Margaret S. Archer

Many scholars continue to accord routine action a central role in social theory and defend the continuing relevance of Bourdieu's habitus. Simultaneously, most recognize the importance of reflexivity. In this article, I consider three versions of the effort to render these concepts compatible, which I term “empirical combination,”“hybridization,” and “ontological and theoretical reconciliation.” None of the efforts is ultimately successful in analytical terms. Moreover, I argue on empirical grounds that the relevance of habitus began to decrease toward the end of the 20th century, given major changes in the structures of the advanced capitalist democracies. In these circumstances, habitual forms prove incapable of providing guidelines for people's lives and, thus, make reflexivity imperative. I conclude by arguing that even the reproduction of natal background is a reflexive activity today and that the mode most favorable to producing it—what I call “communicative reflexivity”—is becoming harder to sustain.

Explaining Religious Market Failure: A Gendered Critique of the Religious Economies Model
Evelyn Bush

According to the religious economies model, religious supply in open religious economies should adapt to the demands of diverse market niches. This proposition is inconsistent with the finding that, although women constitute the majority of religious consumers, the majority of the religions produced in the American religious marketplace favor men's interests relative to women's. Three modifications to the religious economies model are suggested to account for this contradiction. The first modification is a respecification of “religious capital” that takes into account unequal distributions of power among producers of religious value and their differential effects on the beneficiaries and targets of religious norms. The second modification theorizes religion's linkages to other social institutions as sources of cost and benefit that are taken into account by religious entrepreneurs. The third modification accounts for status-based discrimination and unequal distributions of capital as sources of constraint that influence the production of religious supply. Several directions for future research are proposed.

The Missing Key: Institutions, Networks, and the Project of Neoclassical Sociology
Marc Garcelon

The diversity of contemporary “capitalisms” underscores the need to supplant the amorphous concept of structure with more precise concepts, particularly institutions and networks. All institutions entail both embodied and relational aspects. Institutions are relational insofar as they map obligatory patterns of “getting by and getting along”—institutional orders—that steer stable social fields over time. Institutions are simultaneously embodied as institutional paradigms, part of a larger bodily agency Pierre Bourdieu called habitus. Institutions are in turn tightly coupled to networks between various people based on, but not reducible to, strategic interests. Yet social interaction sometimes exceeds institutional boundaries, giving rise to disjunctive fields and underscoring the prominence of institutional failures in the unfolding of antagonistic relations such as warfare. Such disjunctive fields can be tracked in relation to some transnational networks at the global level without assuming developmental convergence. This last point underscores the meaning of neoclassical sociology, which eschews assumptions of developmental convergence at the global level.

Sociological Theory, September 2010: Volume 28, Issue 3