OOIR: Observatory of International Research

Papers

(The median citation count of Theory and Society is 1. The table below lists those papers that are above that threshold based on CrossRef citation counts [max. 250 papers]. The publications cover those that have been published in the past four years, i.e., from 2022-08-01 to 2026-08-01.)

Article	Citations
A Marxist-Humanist perspective on Stuart Hall’s communication theory	37
Interview with Steve Brint for Theory and Society	31
Correction: From heterodoxy to pluralism: the need for a conservative paradigm in social science	25
Encounters, separations, and incursions: Theorizing the Black Panther Party’s challenge to the War on Poverty	23
Institutional time inequality: speed capital and the social distribution of waiting	19
Simulating theory and society: How multi-agent artificial intelligence modeling contributes to renewal and critique in social theory	17
Theorizing democratic conflicts beyond agonism	16
“Black people don’t love nature”: white environmentalist imaginations of cause, calling, and capacity	14
Retrospect & prospect: a post-progressive developmental evolutionary psychopathology	10
Virtue, moral teleology, and practice: bringing Alasdair MacIntyre into the sociology of morality	9
First impressions and the built environment: exploring zero acquaintance judgments in socio-spatial contexts	9
Corruption: A situational action view	9
Extending the reach of relational models theory: measurement, model mixing, null relations, and mere dominance	9
The gates to the profession are open: the alternative institutionalization of data science	9
The multivocality of the nation: political imagination and transformation in the emergence of African Nationalism	8
Collective learned helplessness: a conceptional framework	8
The stratification of emotions as a driving force in human societies	8
Correction to: Reimagining modern politics in the European mountains: confronting the traditional commons with the neo‑rural conception of the common good	8
Frames and arguments on the admission of refugees: an empirically grounded typology	7
Correction: Rethinking medicalization: unequal relations, hegemonic medicalization, and the medicalizing dividend	7
Tangled motivations: pathways to costly careers	7
Discourse regimes and liberal vehemence	7
What is assimilation, how do we measure it, and how do we know if a group has assimilated?	7
Theorizing sex work: a sectoral approach	6
Do social media platforms increase well-being? Three unresolved puzzles	6

Positioning value: mapping the logics of persuasion in Science, with evidence from AI research	6
Nuclear denial in Japan: the network power of an energy industrial complex	6
The theory and function of Marxian water rent in the United States	6
Agency as conversion process	6
The misruling elites: the state, local elites, and the social geography of the Chinese Revolution	6
Patterns of tolerance: how interaction culture and community relations explain political tolerance (and intolerance) in the American libertarian movement	5
Response to Commentaries	5
A strategy for developing explanatory theories in sociology	5
Dating in captivity: creativity, digital affordance, and the organization of interaction in online dating during quarantine	5
Identities, meaning, the social structure, and the life course: Developing identity theory in sociology	5
War by numbers: The sociology of counting in armed conflict	5
Bridging the gap: human societies as adaptive knowledge ecologies	5
Diversity, conflict, and normative neutrality: the university as a critical institution	5
The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960–2024	4
Arbitrage in Sociological Theorizing: the case of W. E. B. Du Bois	4
Institutional fiefdoms: the implementation of governance and new norms within an emerging strategic action field	4
What counts as investment? Productive and unproductive expenditures	4
What makes randomized controlled trials so successful—for now? Or, on the consonances, compromises, and contradictions of a global interstitial field	4
A theory of core identities	4
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose: how to reverse the closing of the sociological imagination	4
The methodological stagnation of sociology is related to its left-wing skew	4
Algorithmic Management and the Social Order of Digital Markets	4
Institutionalized Futurity Loss: How societies destroy future viability despite Adequacy and Capability	4
Distinguishing but not defining: How ambivalence affects contemporary identity disclosures	4
The art of the impossible: Utopia and instrumentalism in contemporary electoral politics	4
The Morality of Birding: Aesthetic Engagement, Emotion, and Cognition	3
Meritorious disparities: AP exams and the academic pipeline to medicine	3
Evolutionary biology of human societies	3
Normative scientific conflict is unavoidable and should be welcomed	3
Moral entanglements with a changing climate	3
Computational structuralism: Toward a formal theory of meaning in the age of digital intelligence	3
The tempest within: the origins and outcomes of intense national emotions in times of national division	3
Deweyan moral sociology: descriptive cultural history or critical Social Ethics?	3
Appropriate research conduct in an age of political polarization: an intervention	3
The paradox of women’s marital freedom: nonlinear individualization in post-reform China	3
Does identity change matter? Everyday agency, moral authority and generational cascades in the transformation of groupness after conflict	3
Experimentally falsifying ghost criminology: exercising rigor, exorcising residue	3
Beyond conflict: recovering the sociology of social progress	3
Narratives we live by: sequentiality and timeliness in temporal structuring of action	3
Misperceiving inequality: the social science of trends, causes, and consequences of economic inequality	3
Value change and the pragmatist theory of morality: A response	3
What is society?	3
Interview with Alan Fiske for Theory and Society	3
What makes a good social science theory, and why the evolutionary model of the actor is one	3
From civil society to populism. Mapping a typology of political activism in Europe	3
Correction to: Language, ethnicity, and the nation-state: on Max Weber’s conception of “imagined linguistic community”	3
Performative Certainty	2
Transcending the Capitalism and Slavery Debate: Slavery and World Geographies of Accumulation	2
Correction: When does a provocation demand a violent response? A randomized scenario study of the code of the street	2
Resignation without relief: democratic governance and the relinquishing of parental rights	2

Correction: Interview with Steve Brint for Theory and Society	2
Theories of parenting and child development in different cultural contexts	2
A theory of concealment	2
High-leverage sociological concepts and the progress of theory, part one	2
The culture of official statistics. Symbolic domination and “bourgeois” assimilation in quantitative measurements of immigrant integration in Germany	2
Democratization, development, and inequality: the limits of redistributive models of democracy	2
The revival of the social sciences – inoculation against parasitic ideas and suicidal empathy, and the quest for consilience via the evolutionary lens	2
Class-based differences in moral judgment: A bayesian approach	2
If universal basic income is the answer, what is the question?	2
Entanglements of experience: sketch for a sociological phenomenology of nature	2
Symbols and reasons in democratization: cultural sociology meets deliberative democracy	2
Asymmetric information and open discourse: US and South Korea	2
Certainty, unity, tolerance	2
The activation problem in political coalition formation: why humans respond asymmetrically to ethnic markers and economic position	2
Naturalize the social sciences	2
Critical reflections on Pollitt and Bouckaert’s construct of the neo-Weberian state (NWS) in their standard work on public management reform	2
Credit rating agencies and the state: an inter-field regulated relationship	2
Certainty and explanation	2
Understanding sustainable cooperation	2
Defiant conformists: gender and resistance against genocide	2
A case for de-diagnosis of harms in the social and behavioral sciences	2
Response to “Democracy and the problem of certainty”	1
Social media, meet old politics: preservation and innovation in Colombian presidential elections, 2010–2018	1
Institutional fragility at the boundary: reframing systemic decline as a crisis of recalibration	1
Interview with Rosemary Hopcroft for Theory and Society	1
Relational complexity and conflict in psychotherapy	1
The inner stage: resituating Hochschild’s surface/deep binary from action to interaction	1
Beyond contention: The politics of alignment as a social movement regime	1
Parallel trajectories and theorizations of religion and family in modernity: Toward an institutional logics perspective	1
Probabilistic justice against status defense: inequality, uncertainty, and the future of the welfare state	1
Theorising, conceptualising and operationalising social cohesion: some innovations	1
Correction to: “Insurgent subjectivity: Hope and its interactant emotions in the Nicaraguan revolution”	1
How professors teach contentious political issues	1
The domestic violence victim as COVID crisis figure	1
Exponential expansions in social evolution: the case of per capita income averages in the U.S.	1
Democracy and the problem of certainty	1
Planning as social practice: the formation and blockage of competitive futures in tournament chess, homebuying, and political organizing	1
Cognitive tools for the transition to anonymous societies	1
How can freedom of expression on campus be defended?	1
Elements of a theory of certainty in society	1
In defense of value-free analysis against a woke-like order of knowledge	1
Why did Trump call prayers politically correct? The coevolution of the PC notion, the authenticity ethic, and the role of the sacred in public life	1
Multi-organizational couplings of societal domains: a typology of meta-organizations in a functionally differentiated society	1
The power of fragmented elites: the role of inadvertent robust action	1
Clientelism in a broader frame	1
The post-progressive condition: Meta-critical theory and the rebalancing of knowledge	1
Class signature in schools: Field, habitus, and cultural capital intertwined to understand the reproduction of inequality at the organizational level	1
More solutions, more problems	1
Decoupling social movements from modernity: a critical reappraisal of Charles Tilly’s theory on the origins of social movements	1
The illusion of rigor: Why analytical sophistication cannot substitute for inferential coherence	1
Nationalizing accounts: everyday nationalism, Japanese scientists, and global policy	1
Ideological homogeneity and its epistemic discontents: a case study of research on transgender issues	1
Interview with Gene Robinson for Theory and Society	1
The micro-foundations of elite politics: conversation networks and elite conflict during China’s reform era	1
A Criminology of Machines	1