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This article develops a theory of “societalization,” demonstrating its plausibility through empirical analyses of church pedophilia, media phone-hacking, and the financial crisis. Although these strains were endemic for decades, they had failed to generate broad crises. Reactions were confined inside institutional boundaries and handled by intra-institutional elites according to the cultural logics of their particular spheres. The theory proposes that boundaries between spheres can be breached only if there is code switching. When strains become subject to the cultural logics of the civil sphere, widespread anguish emerges about social justice and concern for the future of democratic society. Once admired institutional elites come to be depicted as perpetrators, and the civil sphere becomes intrusive legally and organizationally, leading to repairs that aim for civil purification. Institutional elites soon engage in backlash efforts to resist reform, and a war of the spheres ensues. After developing this macro-institutional model, I conceptualize civil sphere agents, the journalists and legal investigators upon whose successful performances the actual unfolding of societalization depends. I also explore “limit conditions,” the structures that block societalization. I conclude by examining societalization, not in society but in social theory, contrasting the model with social constructionism, on the one hand, and broad traditions of macro-sociological theory, on the other.

The treatment of social meaning in sociolinguistic variation has come in three waves of analytic practice. The first wave of variation studies established broad correlations between linguistic variables and the macrosociological categories of socioeconomic class, gender, ethnicity, and age. The second wave employed ethnographic methods to explore the local categories and configurations that inhabit, or constitute, these broader categories. In both waves, variation was seen as marking social categories. This article sets out a theoretical foundation for the third wave, arguing that ( a ) variation constitutes a robust social semiotic system, potentially expressing the full range of social concerns in a given community; ( b ) the meanings of variables are underspecified, gaining more specific meanings in the context of styles, and ( c ) variation does not simply reflect, but also constructs, social meaning and hence is a force in social change.

In 2006, Graddol predicted that numbers of 'English as a foreign language' learners would begin to decline through the second decade of this century, as global English achieves basic skill status for children entering education in more societies across the world. As he further noted, having skills in additional languages may thus offer a competitive edge in a global job market where English skills have become commonplace, and where monolingual and even bilingual English speakers may lose out to multilingual competitors. As yet, however, the extent to which the spread of global English may motivate individuals to diversify their language skills beyond English seems limited. Rather, both empirical evidence and commonly held perceptions would seem to endorse the view that global English tends to impact negatively on motivation to learn other languages, despite the growing linguistic and cultural diversity of today's societies. This article critically analyses this impact on motivation from two perspectives. First, from a macro-sociological perspective, it explores the tensions among language globalization, multiculturalism, and multilingualism in today's changing social world and examines the mixed messages communicated for language education in general and for language learners in particular. In so doing, it considers the socially distributed nature of motivation at the level of societal multilingualism and educational policy and practice, and the impact of the social on the individual. Second, from a theoretical perspective, the article considers whether the impact of global English on motivation to learn other languages might be more positively construed by shifting away from SLA frames of reference (concerned with progression toward proficiency in a particular language) in favour of a 'linguistic multi-competence' framework, defined by Cook (2016) as the overall system of a mind or community that uses more than one language. As the article concludes, an important pedagogical implication would be a focus on multilingual (rather than L2) speakers as the normative model of communication and instruction, and the associated promotion of ideal multilingual selves.

This article discusses relations among the multiple levels of analysis present in macro-sociological explanation—i.e., relations of individual, structural, and institutional processes. It also criticizes the doctrinal insistence upon single-level individualistic explanation found in some prominent contemporary sociological theory. For illustrative material the article returns to intellectual uses of Weber's \"Protestant Ethic thesis,\" showing how an artificial version has been employed as a kind of proof text for the alleged scientific necessity of individualist explanation. Our alternative exposition renders the discussion of Protestantism and capitalism in an explicitly multilevel way, distinguishing possible individual-level, social-organizational, and institutional linkages. The causal processes involved are distinct ones, with the more structural and institutional forms neither captured nor attainable by individual-level thinking. We argue more generally that \"methodological individualisms\" confuse issues of explanation with issues about microfoundations. This persistent intellectual conflation may be rooted in the broader folk models of liberal individualism.

Under the influence of groundbreaking work by John Meyer and Brian Rowen, as well as Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, over the last 30 years research in the new sociological institutionalism has focused on processes of isomorphism. I argue that this is a one-sided focus that leaves out many insights from other institutional and macrosociological approaches and does not do justice to actual social change because it overlooks the role played by divergent institutional development. While the suggestion of divergent trends is not new, there have been few attempts to integrate divergence into the theoretical premises of the new sociological institutionalism. Based on the typology proposed by DiMaggio and Powell, I show that the mechanisms identified by them as sources of isomorphic change can support processes of divergent change as well. The theoretical challenge is to identify conditions under which these mechanisms push institutional change toward homogenization or divergence.

Attempts to reconcile space and time from a social-science perspective have recently become more common. This article goes about this task by developing a workable concept of social space-time, focusing on the connections between historicity—the relationship of the past, present, and future as it is constructed in the social sphere—and social constitutions of space such as the home or the nation-state. In the context of an exploratory study within the area of biographic constructions, this article draws upon twenty-four biographical-narrative interviews to reconstruct constitutions of time and space. It will be shown that certain relationships between past, present, and future concur with certain spatial constitutions. Space-time is therefore a concept that enriches empirical and theoretical work in the social sciences. Macrosociological analyses of modernity, of a transition to flexible accumulation, or processes of exclusion can be elucidated by differentiation between the proposed concentric-linear, networked-episodic, and insular-cyclical space-time types.

The events of 9/11 appeared to make good on Ulrich Beck's claim that we are now living in a (global) risk society. Examining what it means to ‘govern through risk’, this article departs from Beck's thesis of risk society and its appropriation in security studies. Arguing that the risk society thesis problematically views risk within a macro-sociological narrative of modernity, this article shows, based on a Foucauldian account of governmentality, that governing terrorism through risk involves a permanent adjustment of traditional forms of risk management in light of the double infinity of catastrophic consequences and the incalculability of the risk of terrorism. Deploying the Foucauldian notion of ‘dispositif’, this article explores precautionary risk and risk analysis as conceptual tools that can shed light on the heterogeneous practices that are defined as the ‘war on terror’.

Recent studies have demonstrated incontrovertibly that person perception influences language perception. Much of this research is predicated on the notion that social categories are stable constructs that are perceived similarly by members of various speech communities. Power differentials necessarily impact the legibility of the social performances circumscribed by macrosociological categories and thus bely any claim to objectivity in these categorization systems. Developing a more just applied psycholinguistics requires researchers to explicitly consider the role of power in language, how power shapes fields’ notions of what research questions are important and meaningful, and therefore how research data are collected, analyzed, and disseminated. We argue that psycholinguists should widely adopt approaches to studying linguistic processing in ways which acknowledge the role of social ideologies in shaping their outcome, and which reckon with how asymmetrical power relations shape the perception, acquisition, and judgment of both social and linguistic variation. We conclude with a series of guidelines intended to promote characterizations of social and linguistic diversity which accurately reflect the importance of power differentials and which engage ethically with sociopolitical goals of justice and equity.

This article analyzes the China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) education policy using a critical policy discourse approach. At the textual level, this paper focuses on policy framing by identifying how diagnostic (problem definition), prognostic (solutions), and motivational (rationales) framings are described in two foundational BRI education policy documents. Next, six additional policy documents are selected to construct a discursive totality to understand how framings are linked to and embedded within the broader discursive practice of policy documents. The interpretations of these framings are viewed through the lens of policy driver, lever, and value. Finally, a macro-sociological analysis aimed at explanatory and normative critique shows that BRI education is embedded in the discourses of national rejuvenation and China’s aspirations to become a global leader of an alternative global governance and order. The paper ends with a discussion postulating that the BRI education policy’s success depends on various shifting domestic and geopolitical factors, from the growth of the Chinese economy and ideological struggles among the world’s major powers to grassroots reception or resistance to Chinese influence in BRI countries.

Sociology can no longer avoid engagement with biological ideas, but it can incorporate them where they are useful. Most biologically inspired explanations of sociological processes from outside the discipline are simple and, moreover, too reliant on biological rather than sociological models of social processes. Yet, it is possible to engage these efforts by developing sociological concepts and theories that meet those using evolutionary theory from biology. This paper argues that the heavy reliance on Darwinian natural selection limits sociological explanations, although this approach can help sociologists understand the evolved behavioral propensities of humans as evolved apes. These behavioral propensities cannot, however, explain the evolution and dynamics of the layers of sociocultural phenomena studied by sociologists, and efforts to do so with Darwinian notions of natural selection on individual organisms will always be inadequate. As an alternative, we propose that there are other types of natural selection inherent in the organization of what Herbert Spencer termed superorganisms. We label these Durkheimian, Spencerian, and Marxian selection, and they explain what Darwinian selection cannot: the dynamics and evolution of sociocultural phenomena.