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.

Sociology Compass 19, no. 12 (2025), e70133.

A preprint is available at this link.

This article reviews the transformation of humanitarian aid in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on global health and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). COVID-19 and ongoing emergencies—including the Gaza and Ukraine crises and changes in international funding—have reshaped the humanitarian sector’s coordination, funding, staff security, and crisis response. Drawing on sociological research on these topics, the review analyzes pandemic-driven reforms such as localization, digital and remote aid delivery, and new volunteer models. The article illustrates how these changes in humanitarian aid highlight persistent challenges and present new opportunities for global health and NGO coordination, as well as for promoting human rights and accountability. The article outlines key directions for future sociological research, emphasizing the importance of understanding humanitarian restructuring, local and global adaptation, and the evolving role of NGOs in humanitarian response during ongoing crises.

Sociological Theory 34, no. 3 (2016): 196-219

Read the article at this link.

Abstract: Field theory has largely treated the cultural dimensions of social fields as an emergent property of their objective structures. This article reconsiders the role of culture in fields by examining the development of the logics that govern new social fields. As a study case, it focuses on the genesis of the logics underpinning the field of transnational humanitarianism, focusing on the International Committee of the Red Cross (established 1863). The article shows that the Calvinist doctrine to which the early Red Cross activists subscribed motivated and shaped the genesis of the humanitarian field, especially through its convictions about the nature of war, state and society relations, and charity. Activists drew on this doctrine to justify and advocate the establishment of a permanent, independent, and neutral humanitarian field. Based on this evidence, the article argues that preexistent belief systems have a key role in establishing the logics of new social fields.

The Sociological Review 64S, no. 2 (2016): 79–97

Winner of the Global and Transnational Sociology Best Graduate Student Paper Award from the American Sociological Association

Read the article at this link.

Despite the growing interest in transnational fields and their influence on national-level dynamics, existing literature has not yet addressed the processes involved in creating such fields in the first place. This article provides insight into the complexities involved in national-transnational interactions amidst national and transnational field formation. It examines the nascent transnational humanitarian field of the late nineteenth-century through the work of the emerging Red Cross Movement in the 1860s-1890s, drawing primarily on the archive of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The findings show that National Red Cross (NRC) societies employed a discourse drawn from a transnational cultural arena in order to gain central positioning in their national fields and to convince other parties of their necessity. Conversely, NRCs used nationalism as a form of symbolic capital in establishing themselves in their national fields, seemingly at odds with their cosmopolitan aspirations. Thus, by contrast to the ideal-typical representation of global humanitarianism as non-national, these findings suggest that nationalism and impartial humanitarianism are historically intertwined. More broadly, the article argues that national-level field dynamics as well as nationalism play important roles in the creation of transnational fields, even when field actors present themselves as acting for universal causes.

Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 51, no. 5 (2021), 1010-1030.

Read the article at this link.

Abstract: Recent literature has highlighted the central role donor identity, one's perception of oneself as a giving person, plays in fundraising. In this, nonprofit organizations develop strategies to encourage a generous self-perception among potential donors and volunteers in order to elicit donations. However, existing literature has not yet examined the cultural repertoires organizations develop to portray convincing representations of donor identity to their donor- and volunteer-base. This article argues that nonprofit organizations draw on broad, culturally-defined notions of the moral good in order to create idealized depictions of a donor identity. To demonstrate, the article looks at the early decades of the Red Cross movement. It shows that the movement developed four different logics in order to depict romanticized notions of donors and volunteers, each of which based on a different idea of the social good. The article argues that such meaning making is a key aspect of nonprofit organizations’ work. 

*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 Criticism18, no. 1 (2012): 13-19.

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

Sociology Compass 14, no. 2 (2020)

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

Abstract: Although the study of institutions is one of the longest standing sociological topics, numerous recent studies have revisited questions about the genesis of new institutions and institutional domains. In this review, I argue for increased attention to the role cultural beliefs play in the emergence of new institutions. I highlight three substantive research areas where sociologists have demonstrated a relatively independent causal effect of beliefs on the genesis of new institutions: (a) studies of states and state institutions; (b) studies of emergent markets; and (c) studies of the charitable aid sector. I conclude by highlighting promising avenues for future research on beliefs and institutional emergence.

Supported by the Heidelberg | Harvard Explorer Seed Fund, this project examines how organizations in Germany and the United States create and sustain spaces where people from different religious and political backgrounds meet, talk, and work together. We study how facilitators and participants understand the goals and limits of “bridge‑building” and peacemaking, and how their efforts are defended or criticized in light of debates about structural injustice, antisemitism, Islamophobia, and “normalization” of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Through interviews, observation, and analysis of organizational and public materials, the project asks when such encounters are seen as meaningful forms of recognition and repair, and when they are perceived as ethically or politically problematic.

*Rural Sociology, Volume 85, Issue 1 pp. 111-136

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

Abstract: Although there is burgeoning research on environmental activism, few studies have examined the interrelationship between nationalism and nature protection in detail. This paper examines how groups manage the tension between national commitment and caring for the environment. It focuses on two opposing Israeli activist groups: a settler movement that aims to establish new communities in the fast-dwindling Israeli open expanses, and a “green” movement intent on preserving open spaces. Our observations, interviews, and textual analysis show that both groups believe themselves to be committed to the protection of nature, and that both groups see environmental responsibility as an integral aspect of their Zionist identity. However, the Israeli green movement sees abstaining from interventions in nature and adhering to sustainable development as Zionist because it preserves Israel for future generations. Conversely, the settler movement sees active intervention in nature—by building new communities, planting trees, and hiking—as the proper way to protect Israeli natural expanses and to maintain the livelihood of Israeli society. Our case demonstrates that, although environmental movements often aspire to universalism, local movements also interlace environmentalism and nationalism in ways that generate multiple (and even contradictory) interpretations of the appropriate way to care for nature.

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

*The Sociological Quarterly, Volume 61 (1), Pages 22-41, 2020 

The article is available on the journal's website. An open access pre-print is available at this link.

Abstract: Recent political events, such as Brexit and Trump’s election, have inspired talk of collective trauma in academic publications and news outlets. Yet, scholars have been unclear about the processes that transform mundane political events into collective traumatic experiences. In this article, we ask how political factions come to interpret election outcomes as a trauma. We draw on cultural trauma theory to examine the ways state-founding political elites interpret their election losses. We show that such elites commemorate the loss by employing narratives that depict them as victims of unjust political processes, and simultaneously provide them with a sense of moral superiority. This enduring self-conception hinders subsequent efforts to draw new supporters or to change political strategies. We demonstrate this process using two empirical cases: the Israeli socialist Zionists and Turkish secular republicans, both of whom dominated their respective nations for decades until they were ousted through democratic elections. We suggest that cultural trauma theory can illuminate the reasons for some of the political deadlocks that shape newly-founded democracies’ policies. 

Policy paper

One policy analysis based on this project is available on ResetDOC: “Why faltering democracies need strong opposition parties: Lessons from Turkey.”

*Sociological Inquiry 84, no.2 (2014): 294–315.

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

Negotiations about reparations tend to take the language of interests and to deal primarily with monetary compensation for disadvantaged groups. In such proceedings, aggrieved claimants are likely to make a variety of claims about the use of money to represent their experience, ranging from demands for increased compensation to rejections of the entire process altogether. The article draws attention to the communicative functions of money in the reparation process. It claims that actors may grudgingly agree to attach a monetary value to what they hold sacred, but simultaneously strive to preserve their sense of self-worth and to elicit identification by raising moral critiques about the use of fiscal logic. To exemplify, the article focuses on the 2005 removal of Jewish-Israeli settlers from Israeli-occupied territories. It shows that settlers indeed demanded to be compensated fiscally for their lost property. At the same time, it shows that they raised objections to the use of fiscal logic in representing their experience and offered alternate logics of evaluation. The settlers resisted shame and devaluation through such competing logics, demanding that the state reaffirm a positive and embracing relationship with them despite its decision to evict them.

Policy brief

One policy brief related to this article is available on the Scholars Strategy Network website: "Israeli Settlers Evicted from Occupied Areas Want Community Affirmation along with Compensation", SSN Key Findings, November 2013.

In: Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering. Edited by Ron Eyerman, Jeffrey C. Alexander and Elizabeth Breese, 107-132. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers 2011.

Read the full paper at this link.

The legendary status of the Holocaust as a sacred evil has inspired international human rights law, new restrictions on national sovereignty, and newly powerful moral strictures against ethnic and racial cleansing. Yet, even as this markedly universalizing construction became ever more deeply institutionalized in Western Europe and North America, the Holocaust came to be configured in a radically particularistic manner in Israel and the Middle East. This chapter traces the drastically different trajectories the Holocaust memory took for the Israeli right-wing, the Israeli left-wing, and their Arab neighbors. For Arab nations neighboring the new Jewish nation, for occupied Palestinians inside Israel or in exile, and for radical Islamicists the world wide, the Holocaust’s reality was fiercely challenged and the extraordinary nature of Jewish trauma ridiculed and denied. Meanwhile, inside the boundaries of the Jewish state, religiously conservative and politically right-wing Zionists came to understand the Holocaust as a tragedy that was unique to the Jewish people, not as a tragedy of our times. The Israeli version of the Holocaust trauma drama reinforced ethnic and religious boundaries rather than pointing to the necessity for transcending them. Where Israeli left-wing parties have historically attempted to draw on the Holocaust metaphor in extending sympathy toward the Palestinian plight, such attempts were often ill-received by mainstream Israeli society. These divergent paths the Holocaust trauma followed underscore the autonomy of the traumatic event from its referent and demonstrate the culturally variable routes its remembrance may take.

Reprints and translations

A translation to Greek appeared in Science and Society 28, no. 1 (2011-12): 21- 50.

This chapter was reprinted as “Holocaust and Trauma: Moral Restriction in Israel” in Trauma: A Social Theory by Jeffrey C. Alexander, 97-117. London: Polity, 2012.