Television Series as Critical Theories: From Current Identitarianism to Levinas. American Crime, The Sinner, Sharp Objects, Unorthodox

Critical theory with emancipatory aims today to find a source of regeneration in ordinary cultures, and in particular, in TV series. Certain series can play a role in reinventing critical theories, drawing on the tradition of the Frankfurt School but shifting some of that School’s formulations through contact with current forms of interpretive sociology and pragmatic sociology. This requires a cross-border dialogue between the “language game” of TV series and the “knowledge game” of political theory, to use concepts inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein. In this article, I will focus on four series: seasons 1 of American Crime (2015) and The Sinner (2017); Sharp Objects (2018); and Unorthodox (2020). The resources provided by these cultural works can help us formulate a critical decoding of important aspects of the current ideological context, in particular, the intersecting identitarian and ultra-conservative tendencies we find in France, Europe, the United States, and Brazil. These critical resources bear affinities to a political philosophy of the opening of being inspired by the ethical reflections of Emmanuel Levinas.

The Laws of Finance For a Sociology of Finance and Law Entanglement

In this special issue, we unpack law and finance entities and consider their co-construction, entanglement and interchanging relationship. Adopting a processual sociology lens, we aim to connect micro-technical devices and controversies to the macroscopic big picture of financialized capitalism. We combine analytical tools from pragmatic sociology, emphasizing how social reality and institutions are (re-)enacted through trials, with a dynamic and historicized sociology of the state and the juridical field. Four avenues illustrate our research program on the sociology of financial law. First, we focus on how this juridical space is co-produced by public and private forces, organizations and initiatives. Second, we look at how financial law displaces and endogenizes core regalian purposes traditionally associated with the state. Third, we show the forms of asymmetries that pervade law enforcement in financial cases. Fourth, we address how power intervenes in normal and exceptional times, such as financial crises. The legal and financial co-production of political regimes shapes economies and legitimate forms of social distribution.

Committed capitalism

This article presents contributions from pragmatic sociology to the debate on the commitment of economic actors to socio-environmental causes. Given the controversy about the achievements of their engagement, we propose the notion of committed capitalism and seek to understand it through the moral ground of its critiques, defenses and the construction of its normativity. We aim to emphasize two dimensions observed in contemporary capitalism: the declared commitment to a cause and the efforts of actors to stabilize a compromise among distinct orders of worth (market, industrial, and civic) and create devices that actualize it in the world. Drawing on a textual corpus of Brazilian newspapers, we examine the interplay of critiques of corporate social responsibility, corporate sustainability, and social finance, as well as their responses. As a result, we present a framework of internal and external critiques of the compromise that allow us to understand the contours of the moral dimension that underpins some crucial aspects of contemporary capitalism.

Who is a good journalist? Evaluations of journalistic worth in the era of social media

In this article, I enquire into the ways that journalists understand their identities and values now that social media dominate the routines of networked newsrooms. My approach is grounded on a Discourse Theory framework within which journalism emerges as a symbolic practice constituted through the discourse of its practitioners. Drawing additionally on pragmatic sociology, I understand journalists as reflexive practitioners who discursively attribute value to various orders of worth in order to evaluate their own identities. Taking the British news organisation The Guardian as my case study, my analysis of 10 newsroom interviews demonstrates how journalists develop a series of evaluations in order to identify themselves. My findings confirm a shift in the ways that journalists evaluate themselves, which is today associated with a new valorisation of networking. This shift towards networking, however, does not destroy long-standing journalistic values. It is ultimately their institutional identities that journalists re-invent through social media, and it is according to their institutional expertise that they evaluate themselves as professionals. In conclusion, I argue that, whilst journalists reaffirm their disdain for the financial rewards of the market, by embracing social media networking they expose themselves to the influence of capitalist markets.

Emotions and Valuations: Notre-Dame de Paris on Fire as a Case Study for Axiological Sociology

The emotional reactions aroused by the fire that partly destroyed Notre-Dame de Paris in April 2019 can be analyzed as “valuations” in the light of the pragmatic sociology of values, since they provide empirically grounded material allowing for the description and modeling of the actual implementations and effects of valuations. After a quick summary of the recent history of the pragmatic turn in sociology as related to the sociology of valuation, and a short reflection on the relationship between emotions and values, the fire of Notre-Dame de Paris is used as a case study in the light of “axiological sociology”, a model built on value judgments observed in various contexts, including the display of emotions. This article intends to demonstrate both empirically and theoretically how important it is for the social sciences to consider values as an autonomous issue, deserving to be treated as “axiological facts”, as any other kind of social fact.

‘Uncertainty is the only certainty’: how pragmatic sociology provides a useful theoretical framework for researching the third sector during COVID-19

This research note argues that pragmatic sociology is a useful theoretical framework when researching the third sector during the uncertain times of COVID-19 and beyond. It begins by introducing pragmatic sociology, which describes how actors express their values through the ‘orders of worth’ framework, and then how they justify their practices during moments of conflict, through the process of ‘tests’. This ultimately employs complex and fragile moments in history to uncover meaning making and, by extension, individual and organisational practice. This article then demonstrates useful research questions that pragmatic sociology can offer for the third sector during this uncertain time and how this theory’s utility can be applied even after the pandemic, due to its embracement of organisational dynamism, nuance and a fresh approach to power relationships.

Why are the institutional injustice and the lack of fairness omnipresent in Serbia? A pragmatic assessment of plural orders of worth

Recent results from Round 9 of the European Social Survey (ESS) indicate that Serbia differs from other European countries in terms of justice and fairness. Whereas the Serbian people?s dissatisfaction relating to unjust income distribution, unfair employment chances and political institutions may not be surprising, these findings still raise a dozen questions. Situated within contemporary discussions on normativity in sociology and survey methodology, this paper aims to reassess the moral grammar of these judgments. By endorsing tenets of pragmatic sociology and its principal aim to recognize the plural modes of valuation and criticism and reflective capacities of social actors to judge and evaluate, this paper develops around few major points. First, we underline how most major approaches to axiology remain stuck in a co-determinist framework, thereby renewing a number of dualisms. Instead, we opt for a relational approach and further present how the theoretical model of Boltanski and Thev?not enables the locating of different assessments of worth. After setting our methodological framework against the ?externalist? epistemology, we explore our key assumption that the above-mentioned high rates come as a problem of a feasible ?truce? between the domestic regime and the civic polity, ruled by proclaimed legality, representativeness and impersonal character. We trace the problem of incorporating multiple arrangements as a problem of generality, by relating these to two layers of information acquired through the ESS. One involves the analysis of the domestic polity covering the household situation in terms of organization and unveiling the specific worth given to care and protection. Another layer is derived from regression analysis which affirms that the absence of fairness in civic polity correlates with a higher degree of worth given to the domestic one, but also that the latter situation depicts a deeper ontological puzzle about making a mild transition to the assumed ?horizontality? of civic matters.