If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. ABSTRACTPurpose À The paper argues for a comprehensive method of sociological deconstruction and reconstruction that includes: (i) de-subjectifying interpretation, (ii) re-subjectifying explanation, (iii) de-objectifying understanding, and (iv) re-objectifying conceptualization.
One of the central issues faced by all social research is identifying a limited number of concrete social objects to represent abstract social structures and processes. Yet the rationale for selecting such objects is one of the least studied areas in sociology. A typical assessment of the situation sounds like this: "Existing outcome data-available from public administrative records and household surveys-are limited in terms of what is measured, how well it is measured, the extent to which various measures can be aggregated at the individual and household level, and the possibilities for disaggregating these analyses to policy-relevant geographic areas. [...] Disagreements begin with the question of what to measure" (Meyers and Garfinkel 1999:150). Rather than following the tradition of treating ad hoc survey variables as social indicators, why not take a bird's eye view of social structures and processes with a hope of finding pivotal objects of social measurement there? Our strategy is to look for such valued objects in distinct phases of recurrent macrosocial functioning, or reproduction, where they are embedded and involved in the mechanisms of social exchange and social distribution. This study in the sociology of knowledge explores dimensions of cognitive and objectified social space and time underlying the differentiation of central social values and the measurement of their structures.It is widely believed that what we buy are goods and services for individual consumption. This is an illusion introduced by classical economics and repeatedly pointed out by critical social scientists, notably by Marx, Veblen, and Baudrillard. In reality, all tangible things that we acquire are important to us not in and of themselves but because of the social meanings that are attached to them or, more exactly, to which they are attached by Western promotional culture and the advertising industry in particular. For Marx, the immediate use-values of commodities were just fronts for certain amounts of (abstract) productive labor power that made highly mediated commodity exchange and, in this sense, the entire system of capitalist (productive) social relations, possible. Once you could see the unfair exchange between working and capitalist classes in these terms, Marx argued, the roots of the enormous disparity in their social conditions would become apparent. Veblen (1959) talked about the leisure class that indulged in conspicuous consumption where consumer goods were acquired not to satisfy material needs but rather to show off their privileged social position. Baudrillard continued this line of thought in our time. Consumer goods, he wrote, "speak to us not so much of the user and technical practices, as of social pretension and resignation, of social mobility and inertia, of acculturation and enculturation, of stratification and of social classification." They are "nothing but the different types of relations and significations [...]" (1981:38, 63).It is the social meanings attached to goods and services that are subject...
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