Monika Krause

• London School of Economics and Political Science

Current research on culture rarely differentiates explicitly between period-specific and other kinds of cultural patterns. This paper develops the concept of “zeitgeist” as a tool for sociological analysis. I propose we understand zeitgeist as a hypothesis for a pattern in meaningful practices that is specific to a particular historical time-period...

Field theorists have long insisted that research needs to pay attention to the particular properties of each field studied. But while much field-theoretical research is comparative, either explicitly or implicitly, scholars have only begun to develop the language for describing the dimensions along which fields can be similar to and different from...

This chapter expands the focus of the Caring in Crisis study beyond humanitarian communication, by situating it within the broader context of the humanitarian field and the different actors involved. Krause argues that the analysis of humanitarian communication has focused heavily on fundraising. She calls for the need to re-contextualize this anal...

It has long been suggested that charismatic species attract a disproportionate amount of attention and resources in international conservation. This paper follows up on this observation and investigates how cultural schemas and organisational routines shape resource allocation in conservation more broadly. Based on 44 in-depth interviews with progr...

This book compares things, objects, concepts, and ideas. It is also about the practical acts of doing comparison. Comparison is not something that exists in the world, but a particular kind of activity. Agents of various kinds compare by placing things next to one another, by using software programs and other tools, and by simply looking in certain...

Christian Smith’s paper “The Incoherence of ‘Culture’ in American Sociology” is a valuable provocation that can prompt us to reflect on the role of concepts and on the role of agreement on the definition of concepts in scientific research. In this comment paper, I raise questions about Smith’s empirical expectation that sociologists should agree on...

This paper discusses the role of privileged research objects (‘model systems’) in producing patterns in transnational knowledge production. In its approach it follows Bourdieu's call to focus on contexts of production and forces internal to disciplines as well as his insistence on practice. Learning from work in science and technology studies it al...

NGOs set out to save lives, relieve suffering, and service basic human needs. They are committed to serving people across national borders and without regard to race, ethnicity, gender, or religion, and they offer crucial help during earthquakes, tsunamis, wars, and pandemics. But with so many ailing areas in need of assistance, how do these organi...

The debate about knowledge-production in sociology has pitted “internalist” accounts, which pay close attention to the places, practices, and tools of knowledge, against “externalist” accounts of institutions and fields. Using psychoanalysis as a case, this paper develops an approach that integrates these traditions by comparing the differentiation...

The aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis still reverberate throughout the globe. Markets are down, unemployment is up, and nations from Greece to Ireland find their very infrastructure on the brink of collapse. There is also a crisis in the management of global affairs, with the institutions of global governance challenged as never before, acco...

An der Schnittstelle von Internationalen Beziehungen und Soziologie hat sich in den vergangenen Jahren ein zentrales interdisziplinäres Forschungsfeld herausgebildet. Die gemeinsam von Autorenpärchen aus den Bereichen Soziologie und IB verfassten Beiträge in diesem Sonderband zeigen auf, dass Dynamiken politischer Macht und Herrschaft in einer sich...

Perhaps more than ever before, we live in a situation in which, as Hannah Arendt put it in her 1943 article, ‘We Refugees’, ‘passports or birth certificates, and sometimes even income tax receipts, are no longer formal papers but matters of social distinction’. In what constituted a drastic shift in policy, many Western governments curtailed legal...

During the last two decades, many U.S. universities have restructured themselves to operate more like corporations. Nowhere has this process been more dramatic than at New York University, often touted as an exemplar of the "corporate university." Over the same period, an academic labor movement has arisen in response to this restructuring. Using t...

Practicing Culture seeks to revitalize the field of cultural sociology with an emphasis not on abstract theoretical debates but on showing how to put theoretical sources to work in empirical research. Culture is not just products and representations but practices. It is made and remade in countless small ways and occasional bursts of innovation. It...

An Interview with Oskar Negt