The ‘Souverainement Orphelin’ of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Early Writings

One of Morocco’s most important sociologists, and certainly one of the first following Independence, Abdelkébir Khatibi occupied an unusual place in the new, developing discipline of post-colonial sociology. Both a poet and a novelist, Khatibi was also interested in history, philosophy and cultural theory; and this wide-ranging set of interests served him well when, barely thirty, he became editor of the Bulletin économique et social du Maroc. Here began a literary as well as sociological adventure which, little known in his œuvre, took Khatibi from Marx and Gurvitch to Lukacs and Lucien Goldmann. As well as leading research into sociological topics in Morocco and North Africa such as women’s sexuality, young people’s opinions or radical theories of social explanation, Khatibi began a study of the Moroccan class system in a synthetic analysis stretching back to earliest makhzen periods, using Ibn Khaldun, Marx and Durkheim to account for the açabiyya tradition of male lineage in tribal rulers. It is in this context that Khatibi wrote his Tattooed Memory in 1971, his sociology of the post-colonial self.

The truth in social construction

Central strands of biological psychiatry, such as the Research Domain Criteria championed by Thomas Insel, aim to identify mental illnesses with genetic and/or neural dysfunctions. Such approaches are justified by the mismatch between psychopathologies picked out by descriptive criteria (such as those used by the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and neural correlates: patients presenting with the same symptoms may share little at the neural level, while those who share dysfunction at the neural level may exhibit quite different symptoms. Biological psychiatry is typically understood as opposed to social constructionist approaches to mental illness. This chapter argues that because symptomatology and disorders of neural circuits fail to match, biological psychiatry needs to embrace social construction, broadly understood. The differences at the level of symptomatology will often be explicable by differences in patients’ individual histories and social and cultural settings. The notion that social construction and biological psychiatry are mutually exclusive arises from an inchoate and incoherent feeling on both sides that only the second offers a physicalist explanation of mind and behaviour; in fact, a social explanation can ultimately be cashed out in physicalist terms. Nevertheless, systematicity of the kind sciences seek will need to be sought at the level of representations, as well as at the level of the brain, since cultural and social factors are unlikely to be able to be cashed out in terms of physical natural kinds.

Respect for Subjects in the Ethics of Causal and Interpretive Social Explanation

Rival causal and interpretive approaches to explaining social phenomena have important ethical differences. While human actions can be explained as a result of causal mechanisms, as a meaningful choice based on reasons, or as some combination of the two, it is morally important that social scientists respect others by recognizing them as persons. Interpretive explanations directly respect their subjects in this way, while purely causal explanations do not. Yet although causal explanations are not themselves expressions of respect, they can be used in respectful ways if they are incorporated into subjects’ self-directed projects. This can occur when subjects correctly understand and freely adopt researchers’ goals through a process of informed consent. It can also occur when researchers correctly understand and adopt their subject’s goals, using their research to empower those they study.

Disappearing ‘formal organization’: How organization studies dissolved its ‘core object’, and what follows from this

This article addresses itself to accounting for how and why the situation has arisen whereby much, though by no means all, of what self-identifies as organizational analysis – whether in sociology or organization studies – isn’t actually organizational, and to exploring what follows from this. The article argues that the specificity of ‘organizational analysis’ – which requires its proponents to think (and, indeed, act) ‘organizationally’ – has been returned to the amorphous world of ‘social explanation’. The article therefore attempts to highlight the manner in which the tropes of social explanation deployed within contemporary sociology and organization studies reduce ‘formal organization’ to the status of a social container. In making this case, the article commends an alternative stance towards organization that precisely eschews ‘talking about organizations’ epiphenomenally. It does so by seeking to highlight key aspects of the practical disposition towards organization adopted by classic organization theories and other related approaches throughout the history of organization analysis. In approaching organizational matters in this way, it also attempts to upend the reflex accusation of naivety, rationalism and contemporary irrelevance directed towards the ‘historical artefacts’ of organizational theorizing from the present, and indeed to suggest how classical preoccupations can be applied to pressing matters of contemporary organizational concern without any need to ‘update’ them.

Process-ing with mechanism: The renaissance of critical realism in human geography?

This paper fleshes out the advantages of critical realism in social explanation. It does so first through criticizing the obsession with process-ing in the field of geography, which uses time to explain space, for obscuring inherited social relations and key mechanism in social research. Second, the paper argues that under such a circumstance, Yeung’s ((2019) Rethinking mechanism and process in the geographical analysis of uneven development. Dialogue in Human Geography 9(3): 226–255) accusation that the conflation of process and mechanism leads to chaotic concepts makes great sense. While he distinguishes the process as a contingent change from the mechanism as a necessary relation, he combines them to explain specific and concrete outcomes. Finally, the paper argues that this insight suggests the need to return to Doreen Massey’s distinction and interaction between time- and space-dimension explanations by comparing Harvey’s views on the Marxist political economy with Ong’s assemblage thinking used when scrutinizing ‘neoliberalization’ in China. As such, the purpose of this paper is to underscore the merit of causal analysis as advocated by critical realism.

Social Explanation: Structures, Stories, and Ontology. A Reply to Díaz León, Saul, and Sterken

In response to commentaries by Esa Díaz León, Jennifer Saul, and Ra- chel Sterken, I develop more fully my views on the role of structure in social and metaphysical explanation. Although I believe that social agency, quite generally, occurs within practices and structures, the relevance of structure depends on the sort of questions we are asking and what interventions we are considering. The emphasis on questions is also relevant in considering metaphysical and meta-metaphysical is- sues about realism with respect to gender and race. I aim to demon- strate that tools we develop in the context of critical social theory can change the questions we ask, what forms of explanation are called for, and how we do philosophy.