Papers by Claudio Benzecry
ASA Culture Newsletter, 2024
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University of Chicago Press, 2022
The Perfect Fit shows us how globalization works through the many people and places involved in m... more The Perfect Fit shows us how globalization works through the many people and places involved in making women’s shoes.
We know a lot about how clothing and shoes are made cheaply, but very little about the process when they are made beautifully. In The Perfect Fit, Claudio E. Benzecry looks at the craft that goes into designing shoes for women in the US market, revealing that this creative process takes place on a global scale. Based on unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, The Perfect Fit offers an ethnographic window into the day-to-day life of designers, fit models, and technicians as they put together samples and prototypes, showing how expert work is a complement to and a necessary condition for factory exploitation.
Benzecry looks at the decisions and constraints behind how shoes are designed and developed, from initial inspiration to the mundane work of making sure a size seven stays constant. In doing so, he also fosters an original understanding of how globalization works from the ground up. Drawing on five years of research in New York, China, and Brazil, The Perfect Fit reveals how creative decisions are made, the kinds of expertise involved, and the almost impossible task of keeping the global supply chain humming
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In Angélica Olave(ed). The Cultural Sociology of Reading. London: Palgrave-McMillan. Pp. 249-274., 2022
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Qualitative Sociology, 2023
Our Co-Chief Editorial Editor, Claudio E. Benzecry, interviewed the legendary sociology Howard S.... more Our Co-Chief Editorial Editor, Claudio E. Benzecry, interviewed the legendary sociology Howard S. Becker on April 26, 2022, for a virtual event jointly organized by IDAES and Siglo XXi Editores (Argentina) and the Sociedad Mexicana de Sociologia. What follows below is the transcript of that conversation.
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International Sociology, 2023
In its seven theses, this article discusses: (a) how different qualitative sociology is from othe... more In its seven theses, this article discusses: (a) how different qualitative sociology is from other approaches; (b) the role of ‘casing’ in generating both units of analysis and settings; (c) the theoretical and empirical work of adjudicating what some emergent phenomena is a case of; (d) the ‘modelization’ through writing of our case as a research object; (e) the rhetorical construction of causality and the central role of ‘puzzles’ on it; (f) the reflexive epistemological vigilance about the role of the participant observer in producing the knowledge they generate; and (g) the reconceptualization of qualitative sociology as a type of epistemological package, and of theorization, in consequence, as a kind of practical activity.
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Perspectives 43 (1), 2021
Letter from the Chair for the Theory Section Newsletter
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Public Books, 2021
Review Essay of Fernando Domínguez Rubio "Still Life. Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the ... more Review Essay of Fernando Domínguez Rubio "Still Life. Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum"
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Prefacio a Ezequiel Saferstein, 2021. Cómo se Fabrica un Best Seller Político. Siglo XXI Editores
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qualitative sociology, 2020
Introduction to Special Issue of Archival Work as Qualitative Sociology
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Newsletter of the Global and Transnational Sociology section of ASA, 2020
Coda for my book The Global Shoe. The Work of Creativity Across Borders.
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Review Essay sobre The Corn Wolf de Michael Taussig y de In Harm’s Way de Javier Auyero y Fernand... more Review Essay sobre The Corn Wolf de Michael Taussig y de In Harm’s Way de Javier Auyero y Fernanda Berti.
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Chapter for The Handbook of Cultural Sociology
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Uncorrected proofs of a chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Tom Medvetz... more Uncorrected proofs of a chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, edited by Tom Medvetz and Jeff Sallaz
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Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy , 2018
Paper for Interrogating Ethnography: Why Evidence Matters. Conference after Steven Lubet's Interr... more Paper for Interrogating Ethnography: Why Evidence Matters. Conference after Steven Lubet's Interrogating Ethnography book.
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DISTINKTION: JOURNAL OF SOCIAL THEORY, 2018
Review Article on Robin Wagner Pacifici's What is an Event? (U of Chicago, 2017)
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Sociological Theory, 2017
This article aims to redirect the study of patronage politics towards its quotidian character and... more This article aims to redirect the study of patronage politics towards its quotidian character and to acknowledge the key role played by brokers’ strong ties with their closest followers, so as to better understand and explain the practical features of clientelist domination. This article argues that clientelist politics occur during routine daily life and that most loyal clients’ behavior should be understood and explained neither as the product of rational action nor as the outcome of normative behavior but as generated by a clientelist habitus, a set of cognitive and affective political dispositions manufactured in the repeated interactions that take place within brokers’ inner circles of followers. The article also has as a secondary objective: to contribute to dispositional sociology through the conceptualization of the clientelist habitus. It does so by showing the active work agents engage in as they prevent disjunctures provoked by what Bourdieu calls the “hysteresis effect.”
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Theory & Society, 2017
Despite recent interest in political ethnography, most of the reflection has been on the ethnogra... more Despite recent interest in political ethnography, most of the reflection has been on the ethnographic aspect of the enterprise with much less emphasis on the question implicit in the first word of the couplet: What is actually political about political ethnography and how much should ethnographers pre-define it? The question is complicated because a central component of the definition of what is political is the struggle to actually define its jurisdiction and how it gets distinguished from what is not. In this paper we aim to show how ethnography can actually lead us out of this conundrum in which the political is paradoxically both predefined and, at the same time, the open question that leads the process of inquiry. We do so by advancing a formal and relational approach that provides us with procedural tools to define the nature and specificity of the political bond not ex ante, but rather during the process of research itself. In the first part of the paper we historicize the development of political ethnography as a distinct avenue for inquiry and show what have been the challenges to its normalization. This is followed by the main section of the paper, which focuses on the three ways in which what is political has been conceptualized in contemporary socio-ethnographical literature. In the concluding part of the paper, we advance a lowest common denominator definition proposal, with examples from other scholars as well as from our own research to illustrate how this approach would work.
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Papers by Claudio Benzecry
We know a lot about how clothing and shoes are made cheaply, but very little about the process when they are made beautifully. In The Perfect Fit, Claudio E. Benzecry looks at the craft that goes into designing shoes for women in the US market, revealing that this creative process takes place on a global scale. Based on unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, The Perfect Fit offers an ethnographic window into the day-to-day life of designers, fit models, and technicians as they put together samples and prototypes, showing how expert work is a complement to and a necessary condition for factory exploitation.
Benzecry looks at the decisions and constraints behind how shoes are designed and developed, from initial inspiration to the mundane work of making sure a size seven stays constant. In doing so, he also fosters an original understanding of how globalization works from the ground up. Drawing on five years of research in New York, China, and Brazil, The Perfect Fit reveals how creative decisions are made, the kinds of expertise involved, and the almost impossible task of keeping the global supply chain humming
We know a lot about how clothing and shoes are made cheaply, but very little about the process when they are made beautifully. In The Perfect Fit, Claudio E. Benzecry looks at the craft that goes into designing shoes for women in the US market, revealing that this creative process takes place on a global scale. Based on unprecedented behind-the-scenes access, The Perfect Fit offers an ethnographic window into the day-to-day life of designers, fit models, and technicians as they put together samples and prototypes, showing how expert work is a complement to and a necessary condition for factory exploitation.
Benzecry looks at the decisions and constraints behind how shoes are designed and developed, from initial inspiration to the mundane work of making sure a size seven stays constant. In doing so, he also fosters an original understanding of how globalization works from the ground up. Drawing on five years of research in New York, China, and Brazil, The Perfect Fit reveals how creative decisions are made, the kinds of expertise involved, and the almost impossible task of keeping the global supply chain humming
Link to whole book:
https://www.amazon.com/Social-Theory-Now-Claudio-Benzecry/dp/022647528X/ref=sr_1_1?
Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2020.
Routledge, 1978. Reprint, Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2014.
Published by Contemporary Sociology 44 (5), 2015
The next to last paragraph should read (there was a copy editing issue):
"Cultural sociologists have smartly moved away from this cultural studies tradition in which the process of signification is erroneously equated with and reduced to content analysis."
Between Cultural Domination and Autonomy,
by Vincent Dubois, Jean-Matthieu Meon,
and Emmanuel Pierru
Javier Auyero and De´bora Swistun. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Inventing the New: Innovation in Creative Enterprises
April 8 and 9, 2016
Claudio E. Benzecry & Pablo J. Boczkowski (Communication Studies, Northwestern University)
Tentative Program
Krause and Isaac Ariail Reed’s Social Theory Now: social theoretical dialogue and development in
America from a British perspective, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory