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University of California, Davis and Santa Cruz
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- Professor
Publications
Publications (85)
A visual tour of the Williston Basin region offers one window on the land of North Dakota and the western US that will be affected by Trump administration policies.
This is a daily journal with photographs that I kept while canvassing for Democrats in Buncombe County, North Carolina during the month of September 2024, when hurricane Hélène devastated the area.
Review essay on Bryan Turner, A Theory of Catastrophe. Boston: De Gruyter, 2023. 153pp. $101.99 cloth. ISBN: 9783110772234.
https://doi.org/10.1177/00943061241269347
In this chapter, an exploratory survey focuses on ‘popular theologies’ in relation to institutional religious formations in the US in order to bring to light affinities and disjunctures between alternative ways that global salvation can be (or fail to be) envisioned and engaged in relation to climate futures. Given climate change, the future of sal...
This co-edited collection of essays examines the increasing centrality of futures and futures-thinking in all disciplines. It provides theoretical perspectives on constructions of futurity, across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, opening up multidisciplinary conversations between them. Bringing together emerging perspectives on the future...
Max Weber's famous lecture, "Politics as a vocation," was originally presented in Munich, Germany, in 1919. This performance of the lecture, by John R. Hall, took place 100 years later. The original lecture is sharply abridged [originally it must have run to two hours] and in the 2019 performance, Professor Weber follows his lecture with Q&A concer...
In December 2016, Zygmunt Bauman's self-described “recent heart failure” did not deter him from providing the author with “three pieces I have scribbled” to use in revising Bauman's chapter for the second edition of the Handbook of Cultural Sociology. The author draws from this experience working with Bauman at the end of his life to reflect on the...
In December 2016, Zygmunt Bauman’s self-described “recent heart failure” did not deter him from providing the author with “three pieces I have scribbled” to use in revising Bauman’s chapter for the second edition of the Handbook of Cultural Sociology. The author draws from this experience working with Bauman at the end of his life to reflect on the...
En diciembre de 2016, lo que el propio Zygmunt Bauman describió como una “insuficiencia cardíaca reciente” no impidió que me entregara “tres bosquejos de artículos” para el capítulo sobre Bauman que estaba preparando para la segunda edición del Handbook of Cultural Sociology. A partir de esta experiencia con Bauman, quien se encontraba al final de...
[Full-text copy available by emailing jrhall@ucdavis.edu] Despite compelling scientific research that affirms the reality of climate change, including global warming, social and political engagement with the issue remains highly contested. To identify the cultural and social structurations of alternative approaches to climate change, this study dra...
The phenomenology of religion has uneven relationships to philosophical phenomenology and social-scientific research. Descriptive, analytic, and social phenomenological approaches can be distinguished as ideal types. Descriptive phenomenology elides the philosophical distinction between existence and appearances, thereby bypassing issues of ontolog...
To explore whether supposedly non-modern patrimonial arrangements ever advance the "modern" economy, this essay examines emergent state institutional practices in North America in relation to the domain of public lands from colonial times to the late nineteenth-century U.S. I deconstruct the Weberian model of patrimonialism into four elements - log...
The history of qualitative methodological practices concerns development of research practices, objects of inquiry, and analytic strategies in relation to archival, observational, and interview data. There are three unevenly autonomous and connected streams: (1) historical inquiry and historical social science (especially historical sociology), (2)...
Scholars invoke the terms “millenarian,” “millennialist,” and “apocalyptic” to refer to movements and sects that embrace ideologies positing the (typically traumatic) end of one era, promising relief from the sufferings of this world and its present age, and purporting to give rise to salvation in a new “golden age,” “heaven on earth,” or realized...
Violence has always played a part in the religious imagination, from symbols and myths to legendary battles, from colossal wars to the theater of terrorism. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence offers intersections between religion and violence throughout history and around the world. Its forty chapters include overviews of major religious...
In
Ruling Oneself Out
Ivan Ermakoff (2008) addresses the puzzle of what amounts to collective political suicide: why would any constitutional body pass legislation that in effect cedes all its power to another entity—an autocrat? Constitutional rule rules itself out, closing off any pathway back to constitutional rule. Ermakoff explores this unusua...
Methodologies of historical sociology face research problems centered on the instability of historical referents, their historical non-independence, and the privileging of objective time of the clock and calendar. The present essay, by reflecting on an analysis of the apocalyptic in the long run (Hall 2009), proposes the potential to solve these pr...
Research relevant to teaching about NRMs and violence suggests that internal and external factors, and their interaction contribute to the occasional involvement of religious movements in violent episodes. Charismatic leadership, "totalistic" organization, and apocalyptic beliefs are among internal factors that have been implicated in violence, whi...
This conversation, transcribed from a conference in April 2002, is intended to illuminate current debates about the use and abuse of the embeddedness concept in economic sociology.
In sociohistorical inquiry, no epistemology prevails as a widely accepted account of knowledge. Positivism yet retains its defenders. As alternatives, both structuralist and hermeneutic challenges to science are undermined as foundations of knowledge by their own accounts, yielding the postmodern loss of certitude. Conventionalism, rationalism, and...
This Handbook showcases research and thinking in the sociology of religion. The contributors, all active writers and researchers in the area, provide original chapters focusing on select aspects of their own engagement with the field. Aimed at students and scholars who want to know more about the sociology of religion, this handbook also provides a...
Modernity's Wager: Authority, the Self, and Transcendence. By Adam B. Seligman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 141p. $27.95. - Volume 95 Issue 4 - John R. Hall
To trace the importance of Richard Peterson for theories of culture in effect this article maps developments over the past thirty years. Initially, Peterson introduced the production-of-culture approach as a grounded theoretical perspective, rather than a formal theory. Theoretically, this perspective was undergirded by assumptions about culture as...
One way to recast the problem of cultural explanation in historical inquiry is to distinguish two conceptualizations involving culture: (1) cultural meanings as contents of signification (however theorized) that inform meaningful courses of action in historically unfolding circumstances; and (2) cultural structures as institutionalized patterns of...
Cultures of Inquiry provides an overview of research methodologies in social science, historical and cultural studies. Facing Kant's proposition that pure reason cannot contain social inquiry, John R. Hall uses a method of hermeneutic deconstruction to produce a 'critique of impure reason', thereby charting a 'third path' to knowledge. Inquiries co...
Conventionally, proposals to improve working relations between sociology and history have been interdisciplinary. The present essay advances an alternative approach-consolidation of sociohistorical inquiry as a transdisciplinary enterprise. All socio-historical inquiry depends on four elemental forms of discourse: discourse on values, narrative dis...
1. Reason and Culture: The Legacy of Descartes 2. The Roots of Compulsion: The Legacy of Durkheim 3. The Confrontations of Reason: The Heirs of Descartes 4. The Mundane Enemies of Reason: From Hegel to Freud 5. Ailments of Reason: The Descent from Popper 6. Counter Currents: Some Consequences of Wittgenstein 7. Rationality as a way of life: Reason...
In sociohistorical inquiry, no epistemology prevails as a widely accepted account of knowledge. Positivism yet retains its defenders. As alternatives, both structuralist and hermeneutic challenges to science are undermined as foundations of knowledge by their own accounts, yielding the postmodern loss of certitude. Conventionalism, rationalism, and...
Previous research on resource mobilization in religious social movements represents one side of a sociological equation that
can be balanced by investigating resource allocation, toward both collective goals and individual needs of participants. Peoples
Temple offers an instructive example of the resource-related organizational tensions in a poor p...
Kanter's (1968, 1972) theory of commitment posits that the mutual identification of individuals and a group emerges from resolving three problems of commitment: continuance of members' participation, their social cohesion, and social control over their relevant conduct. For 30 19th-century communal groups, Kanter found that groups employing commitm...
Parsons's epistemology of "analytical realism" could be developed only by first displacing Weber's alternative epistemology within the social action perspective. Reconsideration of Parsons's epistemological moves shows that he came to conclusions unsupportable within the social action perspective. Reassertion of the postulate of Verstehen retrieves...
Within the last two decades, theories about world systems have played a decisive role in shifting the boundaries of discourse on long-term social change. The triumph of world-system analysis was nearly a "bloodless coup": few scholars were terribly anxious to defend the theoretical bastion of modernization theory that it supplanted; at best they re...
Max Weber took his position in the Methodenstreit of his day largely in a polemic against what he regarded as invalid methodologies of psychological reductionism, social organizism, evolutionism, and both idealist and materialist teleologies. Because he was far more interested in empirical studies, Weber never developed his own position in any comp...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington. Bibliography: l. [315]-323.
Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the same hour, at the same minute, we wake up, millions of us at once. At the very same hour, millions like one, we begin our work, and millions like one, we finish it. United into a single body with a million hands, at the very same second, designated by the Tables, we carry the spoons to our mouths; a...
