Why do some figures and ideas in sociology become celebrated as essential, while others are overlooked or debated? A Canon of the People examines how the sociological canon is constructed, challenged, and re-imagined over time. Focusing on debates about inclusion and exclusion, the project explores how scholars justify the value of particular thinkers and traditions, and how these arguments reflect broader disagreements about morality and purpose within the discipline. By tracing the changing boundaries of what counts as "core" sociology, the book highlights the ways academic fields grapple with pluralism, recognition, and the shifting landscape of intellectual life.

How do sociologists study fundamental questions about right and wrong, justice, and the good society? The Sociology of Morality (in progress) provides an overview of how the field investigates moral life using a range of theories and methods. Rather than focusing on a single approach, the book highlights the diversity of topics and perspectives that make up this area of research, from questions of moral agency and cultural variation to the ways in which moral boundaries are drawn in social life. By examining both classic and contemporary debates, this project underscores how sociological inquiry helps to illuminate the moral foundations of social action and collective life.

How do sociologists navigate disagreement and evaluate what counts as “good science” within their own field? Moral Minefields analyzes key debates and controversies in sociology, showing how judgments about research are often rooted in competing moral frameworks and understandings of the common good. This book explores both overt and subtle forms of moral communication among scholars and examines how moments of conflict become opportunities for reflection, critique, and change. By focusing on these contested spaces, Moral Minefields sheds light on the ways that moral considerations shape not just the practice of research, but the development of sociology as a discipline. Click here for more information.

What unites sociological studies of morality across different topics and traditions? The Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, Vol. 2 brings together a wide range of scholars to explore how morality is understood, studied, and debated in contemporary sociology. This volume highlights both the diversity of approaches in the field and the shared questions that drive research on moral beliefs, practices, and conflicts. By examining work from across subfields and methodological perspectives, the handbook offers a comprehensive view of how sociologists analyze moral life, the evolution of the field itself, and the ongoing challenges and directions for future study. Click here for more information.

Forthcoming in the British Journal of Sociology.

Available on the publisher’s website. A preprint is available at this link.

Sociologists of knowledge production have long explored how scholars tackle empirical, methodological, and theoretical challenges. This article highlights a parallel process: the accumulation of moral justifications for pursuing knowledge in specific fields, which we term normative cumulation. As researchers face normative objections and dilemmas, they develop new moral justifications for their work. Researchers’ interpretive work leads some justifications to institutionalize and accumulate over time. These justifications may continue to coexist within the same scholarly community. We examine 20th-century American family demography as a case study, tracing historically how scholars justified their nascent scholarship through moral arguments linked to perceived social goods that demography produces. Over the history of family demography’s development, diverse moral frameworks emerged, coexisting to justify family demographers’ work. The article analyzes how shifting moral justifications in twentieth-century American family demography diversified the field's approach, influencing its research agendas and potential societal roles.

Theory & Society 48, no. 2 (2019): 325-350

Honorable Mention, 2020 American Sociological Association Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Outstanding Published Article Award

An open access version of the article is available on the publisher's website. A downloadable preprint is available at this link. Recent years have seen numerous sociological disagreements devolve into moral debates, with scholars openly accusing their peers of being both empirically wrong and morally misguided. While social scientists routinely reflect on the ethical implications of certain research assumptions and data collection methods, the sociology of knowledge production has said little about how moral debates over scholarship shape subsequent research trajectories. Drawing on the New French Pragmatic Sociology, this article examines how sociologists respond to moral criticisms of their work, and outlines three typical responses: (1) accepting the moral criticism and changing direction completely; (2) accepting the criticism but changing discursive register to allow additional work in the area without being subject to critique; and (3) circumventing the criticism by using the debate to devise new research directions that would not trigger such criticism. To demonstrate, the article looks at how sociologists of religion responded, in their published scholarship, to criticisms of secularization theory as depreciating religious people and spiritual experience. Across the responses, we show that sociologists have included moral considerations in their empirical investigations and have switched between diverse moral frameworks to address -- and also avoid -- criticism. We conclude by demonstrating that this model can be extended to other domains of sociological inquiry, including the study of gender-based wage inequality and methodological nationalism. The article highlights the importance of mapping the moral frameworks sociologists use for the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of morality. 

Please contact me if you would like a copy of this paper.

Theory & Society 47, no. 2 (2018): 175-206

Winner of the 2018 American Sociological Association Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Outstanding Published Article Award

An open access version of the article is available on the publisher's website. A downloadable pre-print is available at this link.

Although a great deal of literature has looked at how individuals respond to stigma, far less has been written about how professional groups address challenges to their self-perception as abiding by clear moral standards. In this paper, we ask how professional group members maintain a positive self-perception in face of moral stigma. Drawing on pragmatic and cultural sociology, we claim that professional communities hold narratives that link various aspects of the work their members perform with specific understanding of the common good. These narratives allow professionals to maintain a shared view of their work as benefitting society and to perceive themselves as moral individuals. As a case study, we focus on the advertising industry, which has long been stigmatized as complicit in exploitative capitalist mechanisms and cultural degradation. We draw on 9 total months of fieldwork and 74 interviews across three U.S. advertising agencies. We find that advertising practitioners use narratives to present their work as contributing to the common good, depicting themselves as moral individuals who care about others in the process. We analyze three prevalent narratives: the account-driven narrative, which links moral virtue to caring for clients; the creative-driven narrative, which ties caring to the production of meaningful advertisements; and the strategic-driven narrative, which sees caring in finding meaningful relationships for consumers and brands. 

Blog post

"How Do Admen Sleep at Night? Responding to Moral Stigma in a Creative Industry."Work in Progress: Sociology on the Economy, Work and Inequality, July 2018 (with Andy Cohen).

*Sociological Forum* 27, no. 4 (2012): 847-871

An open access version of the article is available on the publisher's website. A downloadable pre-print is available at  this link.

Urban sociology has tended to study interactions between passersby and “street persons” with an emphasis on the ways street persons become bothersome, harassing, or dangerous. This article moves away from the focus on the ways interactions in public go awry and focuses on how individuals account for the mundane, everyday exchanges they have with strangers who seek their help. Based on interview data and qualitative analysis of data from an Internet survey, this article suggests that the presence of beggars does not inherently symbolize urban decay to passersby and does not necessarily elicit anxiety, but instead provides a valuable texture of urban life. Further, the article argues that individuals, when justifying their responses to requests for help from needy persons (beggars) in urban spaces, use a variety of cultural strategies to maintain their perception of themselves as moral persons, both when they choose to help and when they refuse. Drawing from these findings, the article suggests that urban sociology and the sociology of risk would benefit from sensitizing their studies of public interactions to the diverse meanings individuals assign to them, rather than presupposing annoyance, anxiety, or fear as their predominant characteristic.

Policy memo

"How Passers-By and Policymakers View Beggars in American Communities", SSN Key Findings, April 2014.

*New Literary History* 41, no. 2 (2010): 351-369

Read the article at this link or on the publisher's website.

The disciplines of sociology and literary studies have seen a renewed interest in morality and in ethics in recent decades, but there has been little dialogue between the two. Recognizing that literary works, both classical and popular, can serve as moral critiques and that readers, of all types and classes, can and often do serve as moral critics, this paper seeks to apply some insights of pragmatic sociology to the field of literature by exploring the ways in which moral claims are expressed, evaluated, and negotiated by texts and through texts by readers. Drawing on the new French pragmatic sociology, represented by sociologists such as Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, this paper claims that fiction has a twofold role in civil society. Firstly, novels serve as critiques in their ability to formalize and dramatize generalizable logics of evaluation and to elicit debates by pointing to the inadequacies of, and clashes between, such evaluative logics in the lives of their characters. Secondly, the reading public is often moved to form its own critiques of a novel, in praise or in denunciation of its content, its form, or its perceived intent, and in doing so exercises its moral capacity in the public sphere.

Translations

An abridged translation to Russian appeared in Social Sciences and Humanities: Domestic and International Literature, series 7: Literary Criticism 18, no. 1 (2012): 13-19.

A translation to Polish appeared in Second Texts, no. 6 (2012): 167-187.

Theory & Society 51, no. 6 (2022): 893-906

The article is available on the publisher's website. A downloadable preprint is available at this link. Moral Entanglements: Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany, by Stefan Bargheer, claims that work and play orientations have respectively organized German and British wild bird conservation efforts. The book argues that work and play are nonmoral categories, and—more broadly—that moral justifications for action should be understood as mere post-hoc surface phenomena that contribute little to social action. The new French pragmatic sociology provides conceptual tools to examine how categories like work and play intertwine with logics of moral evaluation that define what activities rightly qualify as each category, what public goods might each yield, and what value ought to be attached to them. With this approach in mind, this review examines Moral Entanglements’ claims, and identifies ways in which moral logics did indeed play a role in establishing different bird conservation styles in each country. The review highlights the broader importance for comparative-historical sociologists to take moral repertoires into account as they reconstruct historical institutional emergence.

*Teaching Sociology Volume 53, Issue 3

The article is available on the publisher’s website. A free access pre-print is available here.

This article introduces a pedagogical exercise aimed at enhancing students’ engagement with sociological theory courses. Despite their importance, students often feel disconnected from these courses in their daily lives. This exercise, adaptable for various class sizes and formats, encourages students to explore the moral and ethical dimensions of sociological theory. It involves group work where students analyze statements reflecting diverse moral orientations toward sociology and identify and discuss theorists’ moral underpinnings in their writing about what sociology is and how it should be conducted. Groups then present their findings in class and engage in a class-wide discussion about the necessity of these normative preconceptions in ongoing research and debate. The exercise aims to shift students’ attention from detached theories to passionate statements about the social good and to foster engagement and critical thinking while acknowledging the moral foundations of sociological thought.