Harrison White as (Not Quite) Poststructuralist

Abstract

This paper explores the overlaps and divergences between network sociologist Harrison White's second edition of Identity and Control: How Social Formations Emerge (2008) and poststructuralist theories from the past three decades. Although poststructuralist thought is barely discussed in White's work, comparing the approaches reveals significant convergence. I detail two major overlaps: White's ideas of control compared to Foucault's concept of discipline, and White's conception of identity compared to that of feminist poststructuralists. Differences are apparent also, especially as regards treatment of categorical identities such as gender and race. Then, I turn to two ways poststructuralism and White can be put into productive conversation: how focusing on gender as discursive rather than attributional can help network analysts develop theories that better explain the gendered dimensions of social life, and how using blockmodeling methods can aid feminist poststructuralism in understanding what gender looks like without men's and women's bodies present.

Embedded in Whiteness: How the New Economic Sociology Came to Ignore Race & Racism

“…Emirbayer and Goodwin (1994: 1414-1415) dubbed this tendency "the anticategorical imperative", which asserts that "one can never simply appeal to such attributes as class membership or class consciousness, political party affiliation, age, gender, social status, religious beliefs, ethnicity, sexual orientation, psychological predispositions, and so on, in order to explain why people behave the way they do." While the anticategorical imperative and associated network theorizing is, in some sense, deeply compatible with structural and even poststructural theories of race and gender (Seeley 2014), this imperative clashed sharply with the dominant understanding of race and racism as individual-level phenomena in the 1980s.…”

A kritikai elméletek hálózati modellje

“…Elsősorban Luhmann kommunikációelméletét igyekeztek ebbe az irányba továbbfejleszteni (Fuchs 2001, Fuhse 2015a. A kritikai elméletek közül Bourdieu mezőelmélete váltott ki számottevő érdeklődést (Bottero-Crossley 2011, De Nooy 2003, Erickson 1996, Garcelon 2010, Kirschbaum 2012, Seeley 2014, de találunk példát Habermas elméletének ilyen irányú továbbgondolására is (Mische 2003(Mische , 2008. Mások továbbá amellett érvelnek, hogy a kritikai elméletek egész hagyományát újra kell fogalmazni ebből a perspektívából (Harrison 2001).…”