The subject of the research in the article is the crisis of art, which is considered both exogenous (its occurrence is associated with various external factors) and endogenous, identified as a state of self-sufficiency in the existence of art. The emphasis is placed on the analysis of the experience of the sociology of art in understanding the crisis and crisis as a factor in the development of time and man. An assessment of the theorizing about the crisis of art (...) at the interdisciplinary level is given, and the main emphasis is placed on the potential of sociological knowledge in stating the state of art under study. In addition, the main directions of conceptualization of the crisis of art in science are revealed. The main conclusions of the study are the following key provisions: 1) conceptualization of the crisis of art within the framework of the relevant branch of sociology is carried out both in terms of understanding art as a form of public consciousness, and from the point of view of the correlation of form and content, as well as ideological and artistic potential; 2) conceptualization of the crisis of art is an independent perspective of scientific research that sets the task of objectifying the crisis of art, understanding the basic laws of its occurrence 3) the sociology of art identifies the crisis of art as a state in which the role of art in the socialization and inculturation of the individual decreases. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1975, is an examination of the theoretical foundation of the sociology of art and literature and an in-depth study in the sociology of knowledge. In discussing and clarifying some of the important philosophical issues in this field, the constant underlying reference is to the creative and artistic-expressive areas of knowledge ¿ so that the better understanding of the social nature and genesis of all knowledge may point the way towards a similar comprehension of (...) art and society. (shrink)

Aesthetic theories of art refuse to go away. In spite of decades of criticism and derision, a minority of thinkers stubbornly persist in maintaining that we need a general theory of art that makes essential appeal to beauty, elegance, daintiness, and other aesthetic properties.1 However, those who approach the theory of art from a sociological point of view tend to be skeptical about any account of art that appeals to aesthetic properties in a fundamental way. This skepticism takes two overlapping (...) forms, only one of which I will pursue here. The form of skepticism I am interested in is concerned to deny that we need to appeal to aesthetic considerations in explaining the production of art. Let us call this production skepticism. This form of skepticism does not coincide with skepticism about the appeal to aesthetic considerations in explaining our experiences and judgments about art. Let us call that consumption skepticism. Examples of consumption skeptics are Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton, who think that aesthetic value judgments about art really reflect social status rather than being a response to qualities of the works.2 In my view, the reasons, such as they are, that Bourdieu and Eagleton put forward in favor of.. (shrink)

Explores sociocultural influences on the construction of traditional aesthetic theories and judgments.

In Sociology of Culture and of Cultural Practices, Laurent Fleury presents a synthesis of research and debate from France and the United States. He traces the development of the sociology of culture from its origins and examines the major trends that have emerged in this branch of sociology. Fleury also raises issues of cultural hierarchy, distinction, and legitimate culture and mass culture and focuses on new areas of research, including the role of institutions, the reception of works (...) of art, aesthetic experience, and emancipation through art. (shrink)

In Sociology of Culture and of Cultural Practices, Laurent Fleury presents a synthesis of research and debate from France and the United States. He traces the development of the sociology of culture from its origins and examines the major trends that have emerged in this branch of sociology. Fleury also raises issues of cultural hierarchy, distinction, and legitimate culture and mass culture and focuses on new areas of research, including the role of institutions, the reception of works (...) of art, aesthetic experience, and emancipation through art. (shrink)

Bell argues that the dialogue that emanate from the aesthetic realm cannot be understood through a solely art-historical approach; instead, they must be understood as part of a collective endeavour. In this sense, the 'art' of post-dictatorship is not something that belongs to art or the artists themselves, but is about how the subjectivities and imaginations of new generations engage with questions of response, ethics and justice; and, in so doing, re-align themselves in relation to the past and to the (...) future. This book provides a valuable resource for those interested in the law, politics, art and sociology of contemporary Argentina. It will be of immense use to those studying in these areas and to those concerned more widely with transitional justice and memory politics. (shrink)

This article draws on contributions from the Sociology of Science and Technology and Science and Technology Studies, the Sociology of Risk and Uncertainty, and the Sociology of Work, focusing on the transformations of employment regarding expanded automation, robotization and informatization. The new work patterns emerging due to the introduction of software and hardware technologies, which are based on artificial intelligence, algorithms, big data gathering and robotic systems are examined closely. This article attempts to “open the black boxes” (...) of the “black carpet” (robotic sorting system) and examine the reorganization of Greek postal services through the introduction of software and hardware technologies, highlighting a) the high risk of flexible, pluralistic, decentralized (under)employment and aspects of the sub-politics of automation, b) the new forms of work organization and c) aspects of labor precariousness as a result of de-specialization or “flexible expertise” interconnected with new forms of inequalities based on AI, algorithms, big data and robots as reflected in the lived experiences of workers. The above are investigated through primary empirical social research in postal service companies in Greece. (shrink)

Zangwill's recent article offers a provocative and compelling account of the alleged deficiencies of the sociology of art. However, his main targets—christened, respectively, `production and skepticism' and `consumption skepticism'—are, in fact, only decontextualised and one-sided caricatures of the leading theories in this area. Zangwill has misrepresented some of the discipline's leading theorists including Bourdieu, Eagleton, Pollock and Wolff. His own `aesthetic' explanation of artistic acts appears, at first glance, attractive, not least for its repudiation of radical sociological reductionism. But (...) it turns out to be altogether too simplistic an alternative. Zangwill is a sociological `primitive' who understands adequately neither how society exists in the mind itself, nor, paradoxically, in artists' embodied sense of the right feel for the game. A less `enchanted' approach toartists' practices is required. This needs to stress both artists' role in the public sphere and also their specific interests in the artistic field. Key Words: sociology • art • aesthetics • canon • pleasure. (shrink)

The sociology of art has experienced a significant revival during the last three decades. However, in the first instance, this renewed interest was dominated by the ‘production of culture’ perspective and was heavily focused on contextual factors such as the social organization of artistic markets and careers, and displays of ‘cultural capital’ through consumption of the arts. In this article, I outline a new mode of approaching art sociologically that begins with Alfred Gell’s (1998) Art and Agency, but (...) comes to full fruition in what I am calling the ‘new sociology of art’. A major theoretical statement that captures many of the aspirations of the new approach is Jeffrey Alexander’s essay: ‘Iconic Consciousness: The Material Feeling of Meaning’. It is suggested that the new sociology of art has much in common with material culture studies, and that a more robust concept of the artwork’s agency is needed now that art has well and truly taken on a social and cultural life well beyond those institutions traditionally understood as the ‘art world’. (shrink)

Utopian dreams of a fundamentally different world would seem to have little place in the de-radicalized political arena of the post-communist age. This article challenges this idea by ethnographically examining three cases of electoral politics in the contemporary United States, which can be seen as a “least likely” context for electoral utopianism. Evidence from these cases – the 2008 Obama campaign, 2016 Sanders campaign, and local organizing work of the Green Party – is used to make three claims: utopianism is (...) present in the US electoral arena; utopianism and electoral instrumentalism are not incompatible and may “need” each other; and the relationship between utopianism and instrumentalism varies, resulting in multiple types of utopian politics. The article’s key contribution is to theorize and illustrate three such types. (shrink)

While numerous studies have shown diverse effects of rankings, rather little is known about their production. This article contributes to a broader understanding of rankings in society, and does so by focusing on underlying worldviews. I argue that the existence of a ranking and its concrete methodology can be explained by the producer’s paradigmatic assumptions about a world-to-be-ranked. Referring to the sociology of knowledge and studies on commensuration, comparisons, quantification and valuation, I provide a general heuristic to analyze this (...) relation between underlying worldviews and observational regimes through which order is constructed systematically. Presenting empirical results on a ranking for the most famous artists in the world, I show how the review device’s initial problem and its construction of order derive from consistent assumptions about contemporary art, its symbolic structures and its social embeddedness. These findings have implications for both research on rankings and sociology of the arts. (shrink)

This text aims to provide a contribution to the analysis of beliefs and, through the elaboration of the notion of good reasons, to make a significant contribution to the theory of rationality. It examines the main theories that have been used in the social sciences and psychology for the explanation of beliefs. The author develops a particular model which enables him to show that people often have good reasons to believe in false ideas. The central idea of this model is (...) that people often draw controversial conclusions from valid arguments because they introduce implicit statements which they do not perceive, since they treat them - with good reasons - as self-evident. Hence they can hold doubtful, or even false, conclusions and regard them as solidly grounded. Boudon shows that this model can be used to reinterpret many findings from the sociology of religion and the sociology of knowledge, as well as from cognitive psychology. (shrink)

Much of Arnold Hauser’s work on the social history of art and the philosophy of art history is informed by a concern for the cognitive dimension of art. The present paper offers a reconstruction of this aspect of Hauser’s project and identifies areas of overlap with the sociology of knowledge—where the latter is to be understood as both a separate discipline and a going intellectual concern. Following a discussion of Hauser’s personal and intellectual background, as well as of the (...) shifting political and academic setting of his work, the paper addresses one of Hauser’s central questions, viz. how best to square a thoroughgoing commitment to the social nature of art with the reality of successive artistic styles, given that the latter seem to be characterizable on purely formal grounds. This is followed by a discussion of Hauser’s conflicted views on the relation between art, science, and technology. This injects a tension into Hauser’s work, due to his initial reluctance to explain just how the aesthetic and the cognitive realms relate. The final part of the paper, through a closer examination of the analogies and disanalogies that Hauser sees between art history and the history of science, attempts to give a positive answer—“on Hauser’s behalf”, as it were—to the question of whether art may be credited with a specific cognitive dimension of its own, and if so, what its contribution to our cognitive enterprise may consist in. (shrink)

Faced with the difficulty of reconciling the objectivity demanded of it as a science with the demands placed on it by its task of understanding the social being of man, sociology exists uneasily between the natural sciences and the humanities. Alfred Schutz tried to achieve such reconciliation by giving Weber's interpretive sociology a foundation in Husserl's phenomenology. The present attempt to take a few steps towards a more adequate sociology of art builds on this rather shaky foundation. (...) The sociology of art is to be approached as a branch of the sociology of knowledge; only the phenomenological perspective, it is claimed, provides a philosophically sound basis for the latter. Unfortunately this brief reworked dissertation is too uncritically eclectic to demonstrate the promise of the approach it advocates. (shrink)

The article begins with a sociologically triumphalist critique of philosophical aesthetics, grounded in the work of Ernest Gellner and Emile Durkheim. It proceeds to note the practical failure of this kind of sociology to become institutionalized within the wider discipline. It explores a number of possible explanations for this failure, but finally suggests that a normalized sociology of art requires a normalized conception of art itself, such as that tentatively advanced by Pierre Bourdieu and Franco Moretti. The article (...) also has an autobiographical subtext. (shrink)

This book reformulates the sociological subdiscipline known as the sociology of knowledge. Knowledge is presented as more than ideology, including as well false consciousness, propaganda, science and art.

The main discourse on Islamic art in the western academia primarily views Islamic art through the lens of art history and sociology of art. Islamic art is considered as sacred in Islamic civilisation and culture, and derives its sanctity from the Quran as the fountain from which it has emanated, which Muslims consider to be the Word of God, much like Christ is the Word of God in Christianity. The Quran has played a formative role in shaping the trinity (...) of sacred Islamic art which is Quranic recitation, calligraphy and architecture. However, another approach which not only is viable but can be considered of great importance to the study of Islamic art, is the employment and utilisation of principles of Islamic philosophy and Sufism which were the pillars of the intellectual milieu in which a given work of art is produced. The application of such principles allows a more comprehensive and detailed interpretation of a work of art. In this paper, the primary Islamic philosophy and sufi doctrines that will be discussed are the concepts of imagination, colour, and calligraphy and examples of their application in the khānqāh and shrine ensemble of Shaykh Ṣafi al-Din Ardabīlī in Ardabil, Iran. (shrink)

An original sociology of art and artistic practice, based on the theories of Emile Durkheim and contemporary models of complex social systems. The book offers a critique of current history, philosophy and sociology of art and stands in a constructive and informative relation to much contemporary art historical theory.

PRELIMINARIES Hysterical trading in art AT THE PRESENT TIME, when a great amount of music is being both composed and heard, a great deal is also being ...

Even before Erving Goffman, in his studies of interaction, develops and makes the most of the metaphor of a daily life entirely composed of representation, or even stage acting, sociology had already stolen from theatre a number of terms and modes particular to it: the concept of “role”, to take the most classic example, but also the term “actor”, which sociology in fact translates as social actor.

The subject of the study is the consideration of modern trends in the study of fine art, in particular Russian portrait and narrative painting of the beginning of the XXI century. The object is scientific works related to various fields of the humanities, namely: art history, aesthetics, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, psychology, etc. Using their material, it is possible to show not only the difference in approaches to understanding the essence and role of the image of a modern person in (...) the art process, but also to demonstrate the specifics of the artistic interpretation of this figurative system in the context of art criticism, cultural and philosophical issues. Such a study allows us to systematize existing ideas about the peculiarities of the development of anthropological subjects in the mainstream of contemporary fine art in modern Russia, to identify the main directions. The main methodological basis of the study was a systematic approach that allowed us to consider contemporary Russian art as a single system. This helped to compare the approaches of modern researchers analyzing the place and role of the human image in it. Through the postmodern paradigm of perception and interpretation of anthropological topics, to identify the essential features of the ideas of Russian scientists. Methods of art historical analysis were also used. The starting point of the research is that at the moment in Russian science there is a body of art history and cultural studies devoted to the development of contemporary art in the country. However, there are no works summarizing the existing experience of scientists and defining the main directions of scientific thought. In light of this, the scientific novelty of the article lies in expanding the understanding of the methodological apparatus necessary for the analysis of the anthropological trend in the visual arts of our time, which is a promising path for future research in this area. The most demanded conceptual philosophical and historical-cultural foundations for the analysis and solution of practical problems in the field of contemporary art in relation to the representation of the human image are identified. Empirical research material has been collected and analyzed. (shrink)

Commissions of experts regularly meet to reply to questions such as: What will be the population of the country, or even of our planet, in ten, fifteen or twenty-five years? In what proportion will production have increased, what modifications will its composition and utilizations have undergone? The attraction of efforts to forecast the future continues. That is a fact. How does it proceed? That is a problem, one on which de Jouvenel focuses on in this book. The Art of Conjecture (...) clearly explains what the "study of the future" can mean. De Jouvenel emphasizes the logical and political problems of forecasting and discusses methods in economics, sociology, and political science by which the future can be studied. More importantly, he discusses the fallacies to which the "study of the future" is peculiarly likely to give rise. The author argues that it is natural and necessary for the population to have visions of the future. Without this, he states, we would only be able to set one opinion of the future against another. If the origins and meanings of these predictions remained obscure, only the event could decide among the opinions. If any man can be said to have created the serious "study of the future" in our time, it is Bertrand de Jouvenel. Futuribles, a periodical he created, continues to represent a major turning point in contemporary social science. Jouvenel aimed to show how "the art of conjecture" could inform prudential judgment and allow citizens and statesmen to detect troubles before they arise. (shrink)

My aim in this comment is to provide reasons that highlight the importance of the Spanish translation of Brian Bix’s book: “Jurisprudence, Theory and Context”. My comment stems from the sociology of knowledge and takes as a point of departure an empirical study about the state of the art of legal philosophy in Mexican Law Schools. My conclusion is that Brian Bix’s work shows how Mexican legal philosophy might be incorporated into current jurisprudential debate.Resumen: El objetivo de este comentario (...) es proporcionar algunas razones a favor de la importancia de la publicación de la traducción al español del libro de Brian Bix “Jurisprudence, Theory and Context” para la actualización de la filosofía del derecho en México. Mi comentario es realizado desde la perspectiva de la sociología del conocimiento y tiene como punto de partida un estudio empírico sobre el estado del arte de la filosofía del derecho en las facultades de derecho del país. Mi conclusión es que el trabajo de Brian Bix responde la pregunta fundamental: ¿cómo incorporar a la filosofía del derecho mexicana al contexto global?, que estudiantes, profesores y jóvenes investigadores se plantean actualmente. (shrink)

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of the social practice of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu¿s sociology of taste. For the first time, this book unites sociologists and other social scientists with artists and curators, art theorists and art educators, and art, design and cultural historians who engage with the practice of taste as it relates to encounters with art, cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life, in national and transnational contexts. The volume is divided into (...) four sections. The first section on ¿Taste and art¿, shows how art practice was drawn into the sphere of ¿good taste¿, contrasting this with a post-conceptualist critique that offers a challenge to the social functions of good taste through an encounter with art. The next section on ¿Taste making and the museum¿ examines the challenges and changing social, political and organisational dynamics propelling museums beyond the terms of a supposedly universal institution and language of taste. The third section of the book, ¿Taste after Bourdieu in Japan¿ offers a case study of the challenges to the cross-cultural transmission and local reproduction of ¿good taste¿, exemplified by the complex cultural context of Japan. The final section on ¿Taste, the home and everyday life¿ juxtaposes the analysis of the reproduction of inequality and alienation through taste, with arguments on how the legacy of ideas of ¿good taste¿ have extended the possibilities of experience and sharpened our consciousness of identity. As the first book to bring together arts practitioners and theorists with sociologists and other social scientists to examine the legacy and continuing validity of Pierre Bourdieu¿s sociology of taste, this publication engages with the opportunities and problems involved in understanding the social value and the cultural dispositions of taste ¿after Bourdieu¿. It does so at a moment when the practice of taste is being radically changed by the global expansion of cultural choices, and the emergence of deploying impersonal algorithms as solutions to cultural and creative decision-making. (shrink)

This groundbreaking work challenges modernist military science and explores how a more open design epistemology is becoming an attractive alternative to a military staff culture rooted in a monistic scientific paradigm. The author offers fresh sociological avenues to become more institutionally reflexive -- to offer a variety of design frames of reference, beyond those typified by modern military doctrine. Modernist military knowledge has been institutionalized to the point that blinds militaries to alternative designs organizationally and in their interventions. This book (...) seeks to reconstruct strategy and operations in "designing ways" and develops theories of action through multifaceted contextualizations and recontextualizations of situations, showing that military design does not have to rely on set rational-analytic decision-making schemes, but on seeking alternative meanings in- and on-action. (shrink)

As Michel Foucault and others have shown, from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, Western political discourse has perpetuated an art of governing aimed at societies and populations. This article argues that this modern art of governing is now coming undone, in the name of governance. The discourse on governance is taking us from an art of governing premised on producing policy for a society or a population to an art of governing premised on solving problems with no necessary reference (...) to any kind of society or population. Tracing the evolution of that discourse, the article argues that existing social and political theory has failed to make sense of this shift. It concludes that in order to access and assess the new art of governing on its own terms we need a sociological imagination that stretches beyond societies and a political imaginary without the presupposition of collectivities. (shrink)

In trying to say what modernism is , we must remind ourselves that it cannot and must not—to be properly described and understood—be confined only to the arts of music, literature, painting, sculpture, theater, architecture, those arts with which we normally associate the term “culture.” Modernism can be said to embrace, in the broadest terms, not only the arts of Western culture but also science, technology, the family, marriage, sexuality, economics, the politics of democracy, the politics of (...) authoritarianism, the politics of totalitarianism, and such academic disciplines as philosophy and the social sciences of sociology and anthropology . Its influence and effects have been all-pervasive. No corner of twentieth-century life has escaped its profound alteration of both the individual and society. It has radicalized all levels of human existence.What, then, is modernism?Some have described it as a state of “chronic revolution,” that is, revolution against the past, against tradition, against history itself. Others have pointed to its voracious appetite for innovation, for the search for the “new,” for the hunger to be “original”—to be the first and last with something unique and difference, whatever that something might be or in whatever area of human endeavor it might arise.Still others have characterized modernism as the application to all realms of human life of forms of structural rationalization, that is, finding rationally structured ways of being and doing regardless of consequences and, more especially, rationalizing away the mysteries and questions which have to do with meaning, that is, morality and ethics—those areas that lie outside the purely rational. And still others have viewed modernism as a condition of freedom within which the individual can be himself, unfettered and uninhibited, released from the drag of superego and conscience, a separate entity of being, unanswerable to others whether in the form of individuals or society as a whole.Last but not least, there are those who continue to see modernism as a self-perpetuating form of avant-gardism, always at the point of the interface between the present and the future, always ready to move on to the next stage because living itself is a process of constant change, constant motion, perpetual transformation. George Rochberg is the composer of a large body of musical works and the author of a recently published collection of essays, The Aesthetics of Survival, A Composer’s View of Twentieth-Century Music. He is currently writing his fifth symphony, on a commission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In 1983 he retired from the University of Pennsylvania as Emeritus Annenberg Professor of the Humanities. (shrink)

The sociology of literature, in the first of many paradoxes, elicits negations before assertions. It is not an established field or academic discipline. The concept as such lacks both intellectual and institutional clarity. Yet none of these limitations affects the vitality and rigor of the larger enterprise. We use the sociology of literature here to refer to the cluster of intellectual ventures that originate in one overriding conviction: the conviction that literature and society necessarily explain each other. Scholars (...) and critics of all kinds congregate under this outsize umbrella only to differ greatly in their sense of what they do and what sociology of literature does. They subscribe to a wide range of theories and methods. Many would not accept the sociology of literature as an appropriate label for their own work; other would refuse it to their colleagues. Nevertheless, every advocate agrees that a sociological practice is essential to literature. For the sociology of literature does not constitute just one more approach to literature. Because it insists upon a sociology of literary knowledge and literary practice within the study of literature, the sociology of literature raises questions basic to all intellectual inquiry.The sociology of literature begins in diversity. The way that is combines the ancient traditions of art with the modern practices of social science makes the very term something of an oxymoron. There is not one sociology of literature, there are many sociological practices of literature, each of which operates within a particular intellectual tradition and specific institutional context. These practices cross basic divisions within the contemporary intellectual field, especially within the university. Inherently interdisciplinary, the sociology of literature is subject to constant reformulation as scholars re-evaluate their disciplines. In consequence, disciplinary boundaries seem less rigid, less logical, and, hence, less authoritative than ever before. Even so—and this is another paradox of the sociology of literature—any sociological conception of literature is best situated in terms of an original discipline and its institutional setting. However frequently individual scholars cross over disciplinary lines, the fundamental divisions retain their force. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson is professor of French at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she is author of Literary France: The Making of a Culture. Philippe Desan, whose Naissance de la method: Machiavelle, la Ramée, Bodin, Montaigne, Descartes was published in 1987, is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Wendy Griswold, associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, recently published Renaissance Revivals: City Comedy and Revenge Tragedy in the London Theatre, 1576-1980. (shrink)

The subject of the study is the epistemological specificity of art through the «prism» of the Paleolithic and modern eras. The focus of the research is aimed at analyzing the phenomenon of «eidetism», which is a link between modern and primitive art. The purpose of the article is to comprehend the epistemological specifics of art, which began with the «psychophysiology» of the primitive world and developed into forms of «practical philosophizing» of the modern era. The research methodology includes a review (...) of literary sources, a dialectical approach to historical and art historical reconstruction, analysis of paleopsychological data, comparative analysis, elements of systems psychology and sociology. An element of novelty is the author's position that already in the lower, early layers of its evolution, the status of art «as one of the most ancient forms of human activity» is enriched by the status of «a form of practical philosophizing». The generalization is made that the art of the XX-XXI centuries, on the one hand, abandoned both mimesis and humanism, on the other – it continued the path of «practical philosophizing» begun in ancient times, based on the perceptual-empirical method of cognition of reality. The evolution of art from its primitive origins through archaic, classical to its modern state is, at the same time, the transformation of human consciousness, and the comprehension through artistic and creative activity of one's being and place in the universe, etc. - the development of its «depth» (the content of art). This is the development of art «in breadth» (the development of artistic form): the proliferation of its types and genres, the growth of stylistic and technological polyphony, etc. As a result, «art has come a long way from its purely psychophysiological hypostasis to «practical philosophizing». Artistic and creative activity itself as a whole continues to be the most important component of the global «mechanism» of mastering reality. (shrink)

Like some other human sciences, sociology has had a recurrent concern to clarify the ambivalent relationship between its professional accounts of social reality on the one hand and lay understandings of social reality on the other. Sociological ethnographers have claimed to accomplish this clarification by including in their accounts both direct representation and responsive interpretation of the vernacular voice of those human subjects whose actions and understandings comprise the focus of their inquiries. I briefly examine some of the practical (...) and textual strategies by which studies have accomplished this. I go on to note that the authenticity of ethnographic work has itself become a matter of dispute on the grounds of the ineradicable asymmetry between the professional voice of the researcher and the vernacular voice of research subjects. Drawing on work in literary theory, anthropology and feminist scholarship, a favoured solution to this problem has argued for the necessity of acknowledging the essentially dialogical character of the relationship between researchers and subjects and also of finding ways to make ethnographic texts reflect this character. This article draws attention to an alternative set of professional practices that prefer ‘co-construction’ to ‘dialogue’ as a term of art. Its use encourages and facilitates the close and detailed examination of the multiple ways in which subjects already speak of and for themselves and others within the local sites of their real-world activities. Studies of these matters accord the vernacular voice of human subjects renewed significance for sociological investigation as part of a radical ‘respecification’ of prior understandings of the proper relationship between vernacular and professional accounts of social reality. The article assesses the upshot of these claims for the current practice and future prospects of sociology as one of the human sciences. (shrink)