Dual-process theories of morality are approaches to moral cognition that stress the varying significance of emotion and deliberation in shaping judgments of action. Sociological research that builds on these ideas considers how cross-cultural variation alters judgments, with important consequences for what is and is not considered moral behavior. Yet lacking from these approaches is the notion that, depending on the situation and relationship, the same behavior by the same person can be considered more or less moral. The author reviews recent trends in sociological theorizing about morality and calls attention to the neglect of situational variations and social perceptions as mediating influences on judgment. She then analyzes the moral machine experiment to demonstrate how situations and relationships inform moral cognition. Finally, the author suggests that we can extend contemporary trends in the sociology of morality by connecting culture in thinking about action to culture in thinking about people.
Preprint, final version in Sociological Theory available at: http://stx.sagepub.com/content/33/2/148.fullThis article is about behavioral variation in genocide. Research frequently suggests that violent behaviors can be explained by or treated as synonymous with ethnic categories. This literature also tends to pre-group actors as perpetrators, victims, or bystanders for research purposes. However, evidence that individuals cross boundaries from killing to desistance and saving throughout genocide indicates that the relationship between behaviors and categories is often in flux. I thus introduce the concept of behavioral boundary crossing to examine when and how Hutu in 1994 Rwanda aligned with the killing behaviors expected of them and when and how they did not. I analyze interviews with 31 Hutu, revealing that transactional, relational, social-psychological, and cognitive mechanisms informed individuals’ behaviors during the genocide. The result is a dynamic theory of action that explains participation without homogenizing individual experience due to presumptions about behavioral and categorical alignment.
This article is about behavioral variation in genocide. Research frequently suggests that violent behaviors can be explained by or treated as synonymous with ethnic categories. This literature also tends to pre-group actors as perpetrators, victims, or bystanders for research purposes. However, evidence that individuals cross boundaries from killing to desistance and saving throughout genocide indicates that the relationship between behaviors and categories is often in flux. I thus introduce the concept of behavioral boundary crossing to examine when and how Hutu in 1994 Rwanda aligned with the killing behaviors expected of them and when and how they did not. I analyze interviews with 31 Hutu, revealing that transactional, relational, social-psychological, and cognitive mechanisms informed individuals’ behaviors during the genocide. The result is a dynamic theory of action that explains participation without homogenizing individual experience due to presumptions about behavioral and categorical alignment.
In contrast to the portrayal of archives as neutral sites that contain evidence of times past, this paper examines the construction of three archives during and after the Holocaust to highlight the challenges involved in gathering, preserving, and sharing documents produced by victimized populations. Specifically, I analyze the construction of, and conflicts among, the archives of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, and the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. Each archive purports to contain the history of Jews in France during the Holocaust and strived in its aftermath not only to gather the remnants of European Jewish history but to reconstitute it, leading to contestations over what it meant to be Jewish in turn. Through analysis of the conflicts among these three archives, I show how debates over the possession of documents after genocide became symbolic debates about Jewish history and identity that would shape each of these archives for generations to come. I generalize from the example to discuss the practical implications of working with conflicting archives and examine the broader lessons for social scientists who wish to give "voice to the voiceless" by working with documents produced by victimized populations.
Research on authoritarian legitimation suggests that rulers seek support through ideological, personalistic, performance-based, and procedural strategies. Typically, however, this work only considers the dynamics of legitimation between rulers and civilians. In contrast, this paper suggests that meso-level actors play a critical role in shaping legitimation from both above and below. Through an historical analysis of the French episcopate’s support for the Vichy regime from 1940 to 1942, I identify four practices that bolstered Vichy’s attempts to accrue legitimacy and simultaneously identify the consequences of these practices for the Church’s relationship with Jews. Public endorsements by the religious authorities for Marshal Pétain, their cooperation with the Vichy administration, the expression of shared values, and common rhetoric all contributed to the regime’s legitimation process while leading to a concomitant decline in the hierarchy’s ties to the rabbinate. These results suggest that attention to meso-level actors brings into relief important dynamics about how legitimation processes unfold in authoritarian settings while simultaneously contributing to research on the Holocaust in France.
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