Sociological Theory 33(1)

Sociological Theory, March 2015: Volume 33, Issue 1

Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence
Rogers Brubaker

This paper seeks to develop a nuanced and qualified account of the distinctive ways in which religion can inform political conflict and violence. It seeks to transcend the opposition between particularizing stances, which see religiously informed political conflicts as sui generis and uniquely intractable, and generalizing stances, which assimilate religiously informed political conflicts to other forms of political conflict. The paper specifies the distinctively religious stakes of certain political conflicts, informed by distinctively religious understandings of right order, as well as the distinctiveness of religion as a rich matrix of interlocking modalities and mechanisms that—in certain contexts—can contribute to political conflict and violence even when the stakes are not distinctively religious. At the same time, the paper shows that many putatively religious conflicts are fundamentally similar to other conflicts over political power, economic resources, symbolic recognition, or cultural reproduction.

Repulsed by the “Other”: Integrating Theory with Method in the Study of Intergroup Association
Zbigniew Karpiński and John Skvoretz

We offer an integration of theory and method in the study of intergroup social associations. Specifically, we show that models for intergroup association tables developed using generic log-linear methods for categorical data analysis embody a general theoretical point of view on the driving force behind intergroup association, namely, as the outcome of a probabilistic process of repulsion from dissimilar others. We develop this argument and illustrate it with intermarriage data. We conclude by identifying the advantages that accrue to both theory and method when the theoretical assumptions underlying the application of a generic statistical methodology are clearly understood.

Beyond World Images: Belief as Embodied Action in the World
Michael Strand and Omar Lizardo

In this article, we outline the analytic limitations of action theories and interpretive schemes that conceive of beliefs as explicit mental representations linked to a desire-opportunity folk psychology. Drawing on pragmatism and practice theory, we recast the notion of belief as a species of habit, with pre-reflexive anticipation the primary mechanism accounting for both the formation of beliefs and their causal influence on action. We demonstrate the utility of this approach in three ways: first, by linking it with recent research on the cognitive and motor development of infants; second, by drawing out a typology of belief states that accounts for a range of different experiential traits; and third, by applying the new model to reinterpret two belief-based phenomena of broad sociological interest: “irrational” decision making and religious conversion.

Revising as Reframing: Original Submissions versus Published Papers in Administrative Science Quarterly, 2005 to 2009
David Strang and Kyle Siler

Peer review guides the intensive reworking of research reports, a key mechanism in the construction of social scientific knowledge and one that gives substantial creative agency to journal editors and reviewers. We conceptualize this process in terms of two types of challenges: evidentiary challenges that question a study’s methodology and interpretive challenges that question a study’s theoretical framing. A survey of authors recently published in Administrative Science Quarterly finds that their peer review experience was dominated by interpretive challenges: extensive criticisms, suggestions, and subsequent revision concerning conceptual and theoretical issues but limited attention to methodological and empirical aspects of the work. Salient differences between original submissions and published papers include intensive reworking of theory and discussion sections as well as growth and turnover in citations and hypotheses. We consider implications of the dominance of interpretive challenges in successful revision and possible sources of variation across scholarly fields.