Books by Daniel Silver
Let’s set the scene: there’s a regular on his barstool, beer in hand. He’s watching a young coupl... more Let’s set the scene: there’s a regular on his barstool, beer in hand. He’s watching a young couple execute a complicated series of moves on the dance floor, while at the table in the corner the DJ adjusts his headphones and slips a new beat into the mix. These are all experiences created by a given scene—one where we feel connected to other people, in places like a bar or a community center, a neighborhood parish or even a train station. Scenes enable experiences, but they also cultivate skills, create ambiances, and nourish communities.
In Scenescapes, Daniel Aaron Silver and Terry Nichols Clark examine the patterns and consequences of the amenities that define our streets and strips. They articulate the core dimensions of the theatricality, authenticity, and legitimacy of local scenes—cafes, churches, restaurants, parks, galleries, bowling alleys, and more. Scenescapes not only reimagines cities in cultural terms, it details how scenes shape economic development, residential patterns, and political attitudes and actions. In vivid detail and with wide-angle analyses—encompassing an analysis of 40,000 ZIP codes—Silver and Clark give readers tools for thinking about place; tools that can teach us where to live, work, or relax, and how to organize our communities.
The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy brings together a range of international
experts to cr... more The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy brings together a range of international
experts to critically analyze the ways that governmental actors and non-governmental
entities attempt to influence the production and implementation of urban policies
directed at the arts, culture, and creative activity. Presenting a global set of
case studies that span five continents and 22 cities, the essays in this book
advance our understanding of how the dynamic interplay between economic and
political context, institutional arrangements, and social networks affect urban
cultural policy-making and the ways that these policies impact urban development and
influence urban governance. The volume comparatively studies urban cultural
policy-making in a diverse set of contexts, analyzes the positive and negative
outcomes of policy for different constituencies, and identifies the most effective
policy directions, emerging political challenges, and most promising opportunities
for building effective cultural policy coalitions.
Articles by Daniel Silver
Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2024
Temporal clustering extends the conventional task of data clustering by grouping time series data... more Temporal clustering extends the conventional task of data clustering by grouping time series data according to shared temporal trends across sociospatial units, with diverse applications in the social sciences, especially urban science. The two dominant methods are as follows: Time Series Clustering (TSC), with dynamic cluster centres but static labels for each entity, and Sequence Label Analysis (SLA), with static cluster centres but dynamic labels. To implement the universe of models spanning the design space between TSC and SLA, we present tscluster, an open-source Python framework. tscluster offers: (1) several innovative techniques, such as Bounded Dynamic Clustering (BDC), that are not available in existing libraries, allowing users to set an upper bound on the number of label changes and identify the most dynamically evolving time series; (2) a user-friendly interface for applying and comparing these methods; (3) globally optimal solutions for the clustering objective by employing a mixed-integer linear programming formulation, enhancing the reproducibility and robustness of the results in contrast to existing methods based on initializationsensitive local optimization; and (4) a suite of visualization tools for interpretability and comparison of clustering results. We present our framework using a case study of neighbourhood change in Toronto, comparing two methods available in tscluster. Supplemental materials provide an additional case study of local business development in Chicago and a detailed mathematical exposition of our framework. tscluster can be installed via PyPI (pypi.org/project/tscluster), and the source code is accessible on Github (github.com/tscluster-project/tscluster). Documentation is available online at the tscluster website (tscluster.readthedocs.io).
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery , 2024
Modern data-oriented applications often require integrating data from multiple heterogeneous sour... more Modern data-oriented applications often require integrating data from multiple heterogeneous sources. When these datasets share attributes, but are otherwise unlinked, there is no way to join them and reason at the individual level explicitly. However, as we show in this work, this does not prevent probabilistic reasoning over these heterogeneous datasets even when the data and shared attributes exhibit significant mismatches that are common in real-world data. Different datasets have different sample biases, disagree on category definitions and spatial representations, collect data at different temporal intervals, and mix aggregate-level with individual data. In this work, we demonstrate how a set of Bayesian network motifs allows all of these mismatches to be resolved in a composable framework that permits joint probabilistic reasoning over all datasets without manipulating, modifying, or imputing the original data, thus avoiding potentially harmful assumptions. We provide an open source Python tool that encapsulates our methodology and demonstrate this tool on a number of real-world use cases.
American Sociologist, 2024
When sociologists examine the content of sociological knowledge, they typically engage in textual... more When sociologists examine the content of sociological knowledge, they typically engage in textual analysis. Conversely, this paper examines the relationship between theory figures and causal claims. Analyzing a random sample of articles from prominent sociology journals, we find several notable trends in how sociologists both describe and visualize causal relationships, as well as how these modes of representation interrelate. First, we find that the modal use of arrows in sociology are as expressions of causal relationship. Second, arrow-based figures are connected to both strong and weak causal claims, but that strong causal claims are disproportionately found in U.S. journals compared to European journals. Third, both causal figures and causal claims are usually central to the overarching goals of articles. Lastly, the strength of causal figures typically fits with the strength of the textual causal claims, suggesting that visualization promotes clearer thinking and writing about causal relationships. Overall, our findings suggest that arrow-based figures are a crucial cognitive and communicative resource in the expression of causal claims.
PLOS ONE, 2024
Early optimism saw possibilities for social media to renew democratic discourse, marked by hopes ... more Early optimism saw possibilities for social media to renew democratic discourse, marked by hopes for individuals from diverse backgrounds to find opportunities to learn from and interact with others different from themselves. This optimism quickly waned as social media seemed to breed ideological homophily marked by "filter bubbles" or "echo chambers." A typical response to the sense of fragmentation has been to encourage exposure to more cross-partisan sources of information. But do outlets that reach across partisan lines in fact generate more civil discourse? And does the civility of discourse hosted by such outlets vary depending on the political context in which they operate? To answer these questions, we identified bubble reachers, users who distribute content that reaches other users with diverse political opinions in recent presidential elections in Brazil, where populism has deep roots in the political culture, and Canada, where the political culture is comparatively moderate. Given that background, this research studies unexplored properties of content shared by bubble reachers, specifically the quality of conversations and comments it generates. We examine how ideologically neutral bubble reachers differ from ideologically partisan accounts in the level of uncivil discourse they provoke, and explore how this varies in the context of the two countries considered. Our results suggest that while ideologically neutral bubble reachers support less uncivil discourse in Canada, the opposite relationship holds in Brazil. Even non-political content by ideologically neutral bubble reachers elicits a considerable amount of uncivil discourse in Brazil. This indicates that bubble reaching and incivility are moderated by the national political context. Our results complicate the simple hypothesis of a universal impact of neutral bubble reachers across contexts.
Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science
Urban research has long recognized that neighbourhoods are dynamic and relational. However, lack ... more Urban research has long recognized that neighbourhoods are dynamic and relational. However, lack of data, methodologies, and computer processing power have hampered a formal quantitative examination of neighbourhood relational dynamics. To make progress on this issue, this study proposes a graph neural network (GNN) approach that permits combining and evaluating multiple sources of information about internal characteristics of neighbourhoods, their past characteristics, and flows of groups among them, potentially providing greater expressive power in predictive models. By exploring a public large-scale dataset from Yelp, we show the potential of our approach for considering structural connectedness in predicting neighbourhood attributes, specifically to predict local culture. Results are promising from a substantive and methodologically point of view. Substantively, we find that either local area information (e.g. area demographics) or group profiles (tastes of Yelp reviewers) give the best results in predicting local culture, and they are nearly equivalent in all studied cases. Methodologically, exploring group profiles could be a helpful alternative where finding local information for specific areas is challenging, since they can be extracted automatically from many forms of online data. Thus, our approach could empower researchers and policy-makers to use a range of data sources when other local area information is lacking.
Urban Studies
This article examines the dynamics of inter-referencing between cities and develops the concept o... more This article examines the dynamics of inter-referencing between cities and develops the concept of the 'Urban Referencing Network' as a representation of the references made by cities to one another in policy documents. The study employs public art policies, specifically the Percent for Art policy, to investigate the structure of inter-referencing within the urban referencing network. Using a corpus of policy documents from 26 Anglophone cities with over one million residents, we analyse 150 documents containing 2178 inter-references. Combining network measurements and regressions, we explore the emergence of central nodes and the mechanisms influencing their formation. The broader field of arts and cultural policies, with its extensive inter-urban connections and professional networks, provides fertile ground for studying urban referencing networks. By integrating literature on policy mobility and urban networks, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the circulation of urban ideas and the interplay between cities in policy-making processes. The results demonstrate that only a few cities, including New York, Chicago, London, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Montreal, emerge as central nodes, attracting the other cities' attention. Attributes of the referenced cities, like economic importance, iconicity and early adoption, determine to a great extent who are the most central nodes.
American Journal of Sociology, 2022
Research on the relationship between categorical unconventionality and popularity has produced mi... more Research on the relationship between categorical unconventionality and popularity has produced mixed results. While many accounts suggest that unconventionality is penalized, much sociological theorizing indicates that success comes from a delicate balancing act between conventional and unconventional offerings. Using data on the genre selfclassifications of over 2 million musicians and bands across the United States, the authors find broad support for this balancing act. Yet the shape it takes is also conditioned on local contexts, across both high-order complexes of musical genres and geographic space. The authors highlight the local metropolitan area characteristics that shift the relationship between unconventionality and popularity. They also create a typology of cities based on how their unconventional offerings are rewarded and punished. An online visualization tool enables further investigation of these relationships. The authors close by proposing an agenda for how to study local heterogeneity in the relationship between unconventionality and popularity.
EPJ Data Science , 2022
Politics in different countries show diverse degrees of polarization, which tends to be stronger ... more Politics in different countries show diverse degrees of polarization, which tends to be stronger on social media, given how easy it became to connect and engage with like-minded individuals on the web. A way of reducing polarization would be by distributing cross-partisan news among individuals with distinct political orientations, i.e., "reaching the bubbles". This study investigates whether this holds in the context of nationwide elections in Brazil and Canada. We collected politics-related tweets shared during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election and the 2019 Canadian federal election. Next, we proposed an updated centrality metric that enables identifying highly central bubble reachers, nodes that can distribute content among users with diverging political opinions-a fundamental metric for the proposed study. After that, we analyzed how users engage with news content shared by bubble reachers, its source, and its topics, considering its political orientation. Among other results, we found that, even though news media disseminate content that interests different sides of the political spectrum, users tend to engage considerably more with content that aligns with their political orientation, regardless of the topic.
This paper elaborates a multi-model approach to studying how local scenes change. We refer to thi... more This paper elaborates a multi-model approach to studying how local scenes change. We refer to this as the "4 D's" of scene change: development, differentiation, defense, and diffusion. Each posits somewhat distinct change processes, and has its own tradition of theory and empirical research, which we briefly review. After summarizing some major trends in scenes and amenities in the US context, for each change model, we present some initial findings, discussing data and methods throughout. Our overall goal is to point toward new research arcs on change models of scenes, and to give some clear examples and directions for how to think about and collect data to understand what makes some scenes change, others not, why, and in what directions.
Cities, 2023
In this study, we articulate a functional model of neighbourhood change and continuity, adapted f... more In this study, we articulate a functional model of neighbourhood change and continuity, adapted from a classical model proposed by Stinchcombe in 1968. We argue this model provides a relatively simple way to capture key aspects of the complex causal structure of neighbourhood change that are implicit in much neighbourhood change research but rarely formulated explicitly. To evaluate the model, we formulate six testable propositions, which we empirically test with large-scale data from Yelp.com. We illustrate our approach with the case of Toronto, but find broad support for all propositions in an analysis of six cities. A conclusion reflects on the value of incorporating functionalist models into neighbourhood research and policy.
Simmel Studies
How should we read and understand Georg Simmel’s famous essay, “How Is Society Possible?” How and... more How should we read and understand Georg Simmel’s famous essay, “How Is Society Possible?” How and how well does Simmel answer his main question? What bearing, if any, does the essay have on the study of forms of interaction, in his own work or in modern scholarship? The exchange below addresses such questions in the form of an article, extended commentary, and response. With the support of the editors of Simmel Studies, we present the trio of items as a single unit to illustrate to fellow Simmel scholars the possibilities of divergent readings and critiques. The exchange began when Lechner sent a draft of his paper “How Is Society Possible?” to Silver, who responded with detailed comments. It occurred to us that rather than simply submitting a paper revised in light of those comments, or letting further revision occur behind the scenes through peer review, it might be worthwhile to make our contrasting views public as a stimulus to further reflection on a classic essay. Since we have both been inspired by the work and thought of the great Simmel scholar Donald Levine, we also offer this joint effort as an instance of the dialogical approach to theory he advocated.
Cities, 2023
In an era of international flows of policy ideas, when many cities apply the 'same' policy ideas,... more In an era of international flows of policy ideas, when many cities apply the 'same' policy ideas, their local translations can be substantially different. Yet, urban studies have not provided sufficient tools to compare such translations among a wide number of cities. We develop a methodological program that operationalizes into a quantitative analysis the rich Policy Assemblage framework often used to compare selected cases. We distinguish between assemblage as a process and assemblage as an outcome, and argue that both are important for urban policy mobility studies. While assemblage as a process is often seen as the thicker description, assemblage outcomes provide central snapshots that reveal the broader process and make its concrete configurations evident. Using the case of public art policies and the mechanism of the Percent of Public Art, we compare the assemblage outcome of the idea in 26 cities with more than one million residents in the Anglosphere. We ask, how do cities assemble policy discourses, and what is the logic that differentiates cities from one another? We find cities use multiple discourses which refer to the socioeconomic , cultural identity and the spatial dimensions of public art in cities. Nevertheless, when cities assemble these discourses, the socioeconomic dimension tends to define a central cleavage between cities. To examine how such a cleavage is constructed, we examine the assembly process of Toronto more closely.
Philosophy Today, 2023
The concepts of contradiction and dialogue are crucial to Hermann Goldschmidt's Contradiction Set... more The concepts of contradiction and dialogue are crucial to Hermann Goldschmidt's Contradiction Set Free. In this paper, I place Goldschmidt into dialogue with two social thinkers for whom similar ideas were equally crucial: Georg Simmel and Donald Levine. In the case of Simmel, I highlight his theory of con ict speci cally, but more generally his commitment to duality and ambiguity. In the case of Levine, I feature his attempt to articulate what he calls a "dialogic" narrative of the sociological tradition. I seek to evaluate Goldschmidt's own thinking by his own criteria, by asking whether the sociological and the philosophical approaches to these questions are parallel, in opposition, or an instance of a contradiction in Goldschmidt's sense.
European Journal of Sociology
This paper adds to a vital international tradition of discussing the history of sociological theo... more This paper adds to a vital international tradition of discussing the history of sociological theory by empirically investigating its structure, dynamics, and relationships. Our primary contribution to this tradition is to bring to the conversation a greater level of comparative and historical scope, a more systematic quantitative methodology, and a degree of reflexivity and synthesis. To do so, we examine some 670 editions of sociological-theory books geared toward students, published in English, German, and French between 1950 and 2020. Our empirical analysis highlights patterns, trends, and relationships among the theorists featured in these books, the narratives and approaches that define their visions of sociological theory, and the characteristics of the authors who wrote them. Our findings reveal some key intellectual as well as sociological factors associated with the changing composition of the canon.
Journal of Urban Affairs
In this article, we study neighborhood preferences among residents of highly diverse, lower incom... more In this article, we study neighborhood preferences among residents of highly diverse, lower income suburban neighborhoods in Toronto, Ontario. By extending the typical application of conjoint designs to the urban domain, we show techniques for measuring place alienation—a sense of disconnec-tion from place—and its impact on neighborhood satisfaction. We find that residents in lower SES neighborhoods share many of the same priorities as residents in higher SES neighborhoods when it comes to safety, transit, school quality, neighborliness, public spaces, and building types. However, differences appear across a range of preferences including bike usage, local commercial spaces, and cultural and recreation facilities. When considering place alienation and neighborhood satisfaction, we find a consistent, robust inverted relationship—as place alienation decreases, neighborhood satisfac-tion increases. Moreover, this relationship is not mitigated by socioeconomic factors, neighborhood conditions, or even attitudinal and experiential fac-tors. We end with suggestions for future research
Urban Studies
This paper is part IV of “towards a model of urban evolution”. It demonstrates how the Toronto Ur... more This paper is part IV of “towards a model of urban evolution”. It demonstrates how the Toronto Urban Evolution Model (TUEM) can be used to encode city data, illuminate key features, demonstrate how formetic distance can be used to discover how spatial areas change over time, and identify similar spatial areas within and between cities. The data used in this study are reviews from Yelp. Each review can be interpreted as a formeme where the category of the business is a form, the reviewer is a group and the review is an activity. Yelp data from neighbourhoods in both Toronto and Montreal are encoded. A method for aggregating reviewers into groups with multiple members is introduced. Longitudinal analysis is performed for all Toronto neighbourhoods. Transversal analysis is performed between neighbourhoods within Toronto and between Toronto and Montreal. Similar neighbourhoods are identified validating formetic distance.
Urban Studies
This paper develops a formal model of urban evolution in terms of (1) sources of variations; (2) ... more This paper develops a formal model of urban evolution in terms of (1) sources of variations; (2) principles of selection; and (3) mechanisms of retention. More specifically, regarding (1) it defines local and environmental sources of variation and identifies some of their generative processes, such as recom-bination, migration, mutation, extinction, and transcription errors. Regarding (2), it outlines a series of selection processes as part of an evolutionary ecology of urban forms, including density dependence, scope dependence, distance dependence, content dependence, and frequency dependence. Regarding (3), it characterizes retention as a combination of absorption and restriction of novel variants, defines mechanisms by which these can occur, including longevity, fidelity, and fecundity, and specifies how these processes issue in trajectories define by properties such as stability, pace, convergence, and divergence. A conclusion reviews the effort and looks forward to computer simulation and data-driven applications , as well as focused theoretical extensions of parts of the model. This paper builds on Parts I and II and is part of the Urban Genome Project, about which more information can be found here.
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Books by Daniel Silver
In Scenescapes, Daniel Aaron Silver and Terry Nichols Clark examine the patterns and consequences of the amenities that define our streets and strips. They articulate the core dimensions of the theatricality, authenticity, and legitimacy of local scenes—cafes, churches, restaurants, parks, galleries, bowling alleys, and more. Scenescapes not only reimagines cities in cultural terms, it details how scenes shape economic development, residential patterns, and political attitudes and actions. In vivid detail and with wide-angle analyses—encompassing an analysis of 40,000 ZIP codes—Silver and Clark give readers tools for thinking about place; tools that can teach us where to live, work, or relax, and how to organize our communities.
experts to critically analyze the ways that governmental actors and non-governmental
entities attempt to influence the production and implementation of urban policies
directed at the arts, culture, and creative activity. Presenting a global set of
case studies that span five continents and 22 cities, the essays in this book
advance our understanding of how the dynamic interplay between economic and
political context, institutional arrangements, and social networks affect urban
cultural policy-making and the ways that these policies impact urban development and
influence urban governance. The volume comparatively studies urban cultural
policy-making in a diverse set of contexts, analyzes the positive and negative
outcomes of policy for different constituencies, and identifies the most effective
policy directions, emerging political challenges, and most promising opportunities
for building effective cultural policy coalitions.
Articles by Daniel Silver
In Scenescapes, Daniel Aaron Silver and Terry Nichols Clark examine the patterns and consequences of the amenities that define our streets and strips. They articulate the core dimensions of the theatricality, authenticity, and legitimacy of local scenes—cafes, churches, restaurants, parks, galleries, bowling alleys, and more. Scenescapes not only reimagines cities in cultural terms, it details how scenes shape economic development, residential patterns, and political attitudes and actions. In vivid detail and with wide-angle analyses—encompassing an analysis of 40,000 ZIP codes—Silver and Clark give readers tools for thinking about place; tools that can teach us where to live, work, or relax, and how to organize our communities.
experts to critically analyze the ways that governmental actors and non-governmental
entities attempt to influence the production and implementation of urban policies
directed at the arts, culture, and creative activity. Presenting a global set of
case studies that span five continents and 22 cities, the essays in this book
advance our understanding of how the dynamic interplay between economic and
political context, institutional arrangements, and social networks affect urban
cultural policy-making and the ways that these policies impact urban development and
influence urban governance. The volume comparatively studies urban cultural
policy-making in a diverse set of contexts, analyzes the positive and negative
outcomes of policy for different constituencies, and identifies the most effective
policy directions, emerging political challenges, and most promising opportunities
for building effective cultural policy coalitions.
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context. Synthesizing the array of factors that influence the processes and politics behind urban cultural policy, we suggest, helps to see how urban cultural policy and analysis is moving beyond the now familiar creative city script. We conclude this introduction by presenting the organization of the book.
This chapter uses two case studies to explore how local politics have been affected by these changes. One highlights the politics at stake in cultural work and consumption. In the case of the West Queen West Triangle, a vibrant independent art scene, supported by city officials, politicians, and influential media figures and professionals, sought to resist and alter proposed condominium developments that threatened to turn one of the city’s core post-industrial employment districts into a “bedroom community for the suburbs.” The other highlights the politics of residence and community. In the case of the Wychwood Barns, neighbors clashed over whether to rehabilitate abandoned and dilapidated streetcar repair barns into artist live-work space, an environmental educational center, and a farmers market or to demolish it for a traditional grass and trees park.
unity. John Dewey, Georg Simmel, Kenneth Burke, Charles Baudelaire, among others, will serve as reference points for this exercise. Second comes an illustration of how scenes can be empirically studied as both outgrowths and drivers of key aspects of urban life. To do so I will draw from original Canadian national databases of local amenities. Built from census of business and online business directories, these databases cover all Canadian postal areas and include millions of listings of hundreds of amenity categories (such as family restaurants, churches, art galleries, and the like). Similar databases have been built in the US, France, Spain, and Korea. The conclusion argues for the fruitfulness of synthesizing scenes-oriented research with the neighborhood effects tradition of urban analysis, exemplified most powerfully in recent years by Robert Sampson’s Great American City.
We propose several hypotheses and analyses about scenes as one factor that contributes to ‘creative cities’. We situate these propositions within a broader universe of ideas about the significance of creativity. First, we offer a brief overview of the processes involved in what we call the institutionalization and internalization of creativity. This is a process whereby creativity moves from the margins to the centre of basic conceptions of human action, bringing with it special attention to the specific mechanisms through which creative activity is more likely to occur in one place and moment rather than another. Second, we briefly review some classic and contemporary hypotheses about what these multiple mechanisms might be, such as education, technology, density and the like. Third, we propose adding scenes as a distinctly important factor of creativity.
We offer a brief introduction to our scenes perspective on urban development, before proposing and testing several hypotheses about how scenes drive urban development.
Nevertheless, we think that the classical social theorists share much in common that sets them apart from most philosophers of action and allows for a systematic comparison of the action- theoretical alternatives they offer. First, they do not confine the matter of action to the more or less metaphysical distinction between what is action and what is not; nor do they reduce action to an “exercise of reason” in the Kantian mode. Instead, they treat action and its sociality as practical problems that emerge in the course of life, such as when actors find it difficult to understand one another or experience resistances and constraints. In other words: rather than deal with the question, “what ontological criteria must a behavior meet to count as ‘an action’?” they instead elaborate on the fact that acting and/or activity in daily life takes place under “imperfect” conditions of time pressure, sympathy, dependency, power, role-taking, drives, interests, solidarity. “Action” and “actor” are results, often contested, of dealing with these imperfect conditions. The “idealized rational actor” forecloses analysis of these conditions from the start; furthermore, breaking down these complex social entanglements to a handy difference between “reason” or “instinct” – as we come across in e.g. Korsgaard – is also not an option the sociological “classics” took into consideration.
What is more, the classical sociologists articulated “thick” historic examples to show that “action” and “agency” are interweaved with social institutions, habits, values and forms. The analyses of this interpenetration of action and sociality they undertook go much deeper than simply taking note that some, mostly self-evident, process of socialization shapes the conditions of agency and identity. For our protagonists, the social dimension of action stands for more than the social dependency of children or a “deficient” mode of individual autonomy. Their theories are meant to enable systematic analyses and observations of the world of sociable action, in all of its types, objects, and forms.
Our discussion of some of these theoretical efforts is organized as follows. We begin with the two uncontested classics of sociology, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, and highlight crucial divergences between their methodological statements and their material investigations. In the case of Weber, his theoretical statements about the methodological priority of instrumentally rational individual actions are belied by his research into the origins of the capitalist work ethic, which stresses instead customs and common values. In the case of Durkheim, his theoretical statements about the “thing-like” and coercive character of society are belied by his research into religious rites, which stresses instead how ritual action generates a meaningful and attractive social world. The remainder of our essay turns to Talcott Parsons and Georg Simmel as representatives of two classical approaches to theorizing the implicit connections between action and sociality never fully addressed by Weber and Durkheim. Simmel’s formal sociology focuses on forms rather than objects of social action and situates the social form of experience as one among many. Parsons’ general theory of action treats systems of social roles as one sub-system of action alongside personality systems and cultural systems, all of which emerge from the problems and contingencies inherent to acting in situations.
conversations it promises. To whet our collective appetite, we include in this edition of Theory abstracts of papers to be presented in Cambridge, June 27-29. Thank you to co-chairs Patrick Baert and Agnes Ku for their excellent work in organizing and managing the event, and for the tremendous support provided by Kate Williams. We are also excited about the two pieces we feature in this edition. Continuing our ongoing series on how sociological theory is taught in various parts of the world, Lars Döpking examines the situation in Germany. Additionally, Natàlia Cantó-Milà discusses the ongoing “mainstreaming of relational sociology,” by way of introducing the new focus of the journal Digithum: a relational perspective on culture society. Many members may be interested in participating in the journal’s various endeavors, and so we encourage you to visit its website: http://journals.uoc.edu/index.php/digithum/.
This issue of Theory is dedicated to Don’s memory. We include articles that testify to his intellectual and personal impact on the field, in its content and form. The notion of dialogue is the keynote. Indeed, through his final days, Don was working on a book, Dialogical Social Theory (which Transaction Press will publish), that would forward the concept of dialogue as the emergent guiding idea of his own oeuvre and as a potential lynchpin to a powerful reinterpretation of the theoretical tradition writ large.
We are pleased to publish a brief selection from the introduction to Dialogical Social Theory here, and thank Howard Ungerman and Transaction Press for permission to do so. Jon Baskin introduces this selection by way of an account of what it was like to work with Don towards its completion. A University of Chicago graduate student and one of Don’s long-time friends, Baskin’s piece offers a moving portrait of how thought, teaching, and friendship fused in Don’s life.
Other articles in this edition speak to issues that Don held dear. He was intensively concerned with questions about how to teach social theory, and believed that doing so well required careful reflection on the aims of education together with the broader situations in which teachers and students find themselves. Wolfgang Knöbl’s essay on his own practice as a theoretical educator ably demonstrates the importance of undertaking such reflection. Questions about the nature of social relations, processes, and structures also animated Don’s work, especially given his life-long engagement with the thought of Simmel and Parsons. Such issues are central in the “invitation to an ongoing experiment” we publish here, which records an ongoing conversation about relational sociology among several participants, with François Dépelteau and Jan Fuhse at the center. That this conversation appears as an unfolding dialogue, in all of its fits and starts, gives and takes, nearing and distancing, would be highly congenial to Don, we believe. In a similar experimental and dialogical vein, we include a link to “Theorizing from the South,” by Gabriel Restrepo. Finally, Don was a master at “inverting the lens” from the objects of social thought to its thinkers, their texts, and their relationships. The essay here by Cinthya Guzman and Dan Silver draws explicit inspiration from Don’s Visions of the Sociological Tradition in reporting ongoing work analyzing sociological theory syllabi in Canada and beyond.
The sociological art is not easy; most attempts fail. I suggest John Dewey's Art as Experience and Susanne Langer's Feeling and Form provide a valuable fund of ideas for elaborating the nature of sociology as an aesthetic practice. To clarify the sociological implications of their ideas, I contrast them to another account of sociological artistry, Robert Nisbet's, which is rooted in humanism rather than pragmatism. The early Chicago School provides an illuminating example of this pragmatist approach to sociology as a form of art, in particular in the intensive use of visual, abstract, non-verbal symbols, most notably maps. These images, I argue, express - as neither everyday experience nor discursive symbols can -- the experience of society as a form of life, moving, growing, uncertain, tensive, emotionally fraught, adaptive, competitive, contingent, but also -- because it is all of these -- potentially meaningful.
Pedimos a varias figuras internacionales que respondieran tres preguntas acerca de sus primeras lecturas de la obra simmeliana y las circunstancias personales que rodearon tal encuentro. Hoy publicamos lo que contestaron los profesores Valentina Salvi y Esteban Vernik, ambos de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, y Daniel Silver, profesor estadounidense de la Universidad de Toronto.