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 2022-05-01 to 2026-05-01.)

Article	Citations
“Black people don’t love nature”: white environmentalist imaginations of cause, calling, and capacity	34
A Marxist-Humanist perspective on Stuart Hall’s communication theory	23
Simulating theory and society: How multi-agent artificial intelligence modeling contributes to renewal and critique in social theory	23
Interview with Steve Brint for Theory and Society	20
Correction: From heterodoxy to pluralism: the need for a conservative paradigm in social science	19
Encounters, separations, and incursions: Theorizing the Black Panther Party’s challenge to the War on Poverty	14
Theorizing democratic conflicts beyond agonism	13
First impressions and the built environment: exploring zero acquaintance judgments in socio-spatial contexts	12
Retrospect & prospect: a post-progressive developmental evolutionary psychopathology	11
Corruption: A situational action view	9
The gates to the profession are open: the alternative institutionalization of data science	9
Virtue, moral teleology, and practice: bringing Alasdair MacIntyre into the sociology of morality	9
The stratification of emotions as a driving force in human societies	8
The structure of political conflict. The oligarchs and the bourgeoisie in the Chilean Congress, 1834–1894	8
The multivocality of the nation: political imagination and transformation in the emergence of African Nationalism	7
Correction to: Reimagining modern politics in the European mountains: confronting the traditional commons with the neo‑rural conception of the common good	6
What is assimilation, how do we measure it, and how do we know if a group has assimilated?	6
Collective learned helplessness: a conceptional framework	6
Tangled motivations: pathways to costly careers	6
Correction: Rethinking medicalization: unequal relations, hegemonic medicalization, and the medicalizing dividend	5
The misruling elites: the state, local elites, and the social geography of the Chinese Revolution	5
Response to Commentaries	5
The theory and function of Marxian water rent in the United States	5
Nuclear denial in Japan: the network power of an energy industrial complex	5
Do social media platforms increase well-being? Three unresolved puzzles	5

Patterns of tolerance: how interaction culture and community relations explain political tolerance (and intolerance) in the American libertarian movement	5
Discourse regimes and liberal vehemence	5
Frames and arguments on the admission of refugees: an empirically grounded typology	5
Theorizing sex work: a sectoral approach	5
Agency as conversion process	5
War by numbers: The sociology of counting in armed conflict	4
Algorithmic Management and the Social Order of Digital Markets	4
From modern urban resident to sociable urban citizen: The making of spatial-political subjectivity through public housing in Singapore, 1972—2021	4
The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960–2024	4
Dating in captivity: creativity, digital affordance, and the organization of interaction in online dating during quarantine	4
A strategy for developing explanatory theories in sociology	4
What makes randomized controlled trials so successful—for now? Or, on the consonances, compromises, and contradictions of a global interstitial field	4
Bridging the gap: human societies as adaptive knowledge ecologies	4
Diversity, conflict, and normative neutrality: the university as a critical institution	4
Identities, meaning, the social structure, and the life course: Developing identity theory in sociology	4
Computational structuralism: Toward a formal theory of meaning in the age of digital intelligence	3
Distinguishing but not defining: How ambivalence affects contemporary identity disclosures	3
The methodological stagnation of sociology is related to its left-wing skew	3
Narratives we live by: sequentiality and timeliness in temporal structuring of action	3
The tempest within: the origins and outcomes of intense national emotions in times of national division	3
From civil society to populism. Mapping a typology of political activism in Europe	3
Beyond conflict: recovering the sociology of social progress	3
What counts as investment? Productive and unproductive expenditures	3
Institutional fiefdoms: the implementation of governance and new norms within an emerging strategic action field	3
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose: how to reverse the closing of the sociological imagination	3
The art of the impossible: Utopia and instrumentalism in contemporary electoral politics	3
The Morality of Birding: Aesthetic Engagement, Emotion, and Cognition	3
The means and ends of nature	3
What makes a good social science theory, and why the evolutionary model of the actor is one	3
Institutionalized Futurity Loss: How societies destroy future viability despite Adequacy and Capability	3
Arbitrage in Sociological Theorizing: the case of W. E. B. Du Bois	3
A theory of core identities	3
Moral entanglements with a changing climate	3
Correction to: Language, ethnicity, and the nation-state: on Max Weber’s conception of “imagined linguistic community”	3
Does identity change matter? Everyday agency, moral authority and generational cascades in the transformation of groupness after conflict	2
Deweyan moral sociology: descriptive cultural history or critical Social Ethics?	2
Risky businesses: economic crisis in Argentina and the generative power of generations	2
Credit rating agencies and the state: an inter-field regulated relationship	2
Certainty, unity, tolerance	2
Transcending the Capitalism and Slavery Debate: Slavery and World Geographies of Accumulation	2
Experimentally falsifying ghost criminology: exercising rigor, exorcising residue	2
Value change and the pragmatist theory of morality: A response	2
Meritorious disparities: AP exams and the academic pipeline to medicine	2
Democratization, development, and inequality: the limits of redistributive models of democracy	2
Critical reflections on Pollitt and Bouckaert’s construct of the neo-Weberian state (NWS) in their standard work on public management reform	2
The culture of official statistics. Symbolic domination and “bourgeois” assimilation in quantitative measurements of immigrant integration in Germany	2
The genesis of Brexit in the UK: outline of a multi-field model	2
The paradox of women’s marital freedom: nonlinear individualization in post-reform China	2
Interview with Alan Fiske for Theory and Society	2
Class-based differences in moral judgment: A bayesian approach	2

Performative Certainty	2
Resignation without relief: democratic governance and the relinquishing of parental rights	2
Normative scientific conflict is unavoidable and should be welcomed	2
Certainty and explanation	1
Theories of parenting and child development in different cultural contexts	1
The inner stage: resituating Hochschild’s surface/deep binary from action to interaction	1
Multi-organizational couplings of societal domains: a typology of meta-organizations in a functionally differentiated society	1
Decoupling social movements from modernity: a critical reappraisal of Charles Tilly’s theory on the origins of social movements	1
The post-progressive condition: Meta-critical theory and the rebalancing of knowledge	1
Exponential expansions in social evolution: the case of per capita income averages in the U.S.	1
Defiant conformists: gender and resistance against genocide	1
Interview with Rosemary Hopcroft for Theory and Society	1
Understanding sustainable cooperation	1
A theory of concealment	1
The revival of the social sciences – inoculation against parasitic ideas and suicidal empathy, and the quest for consilience via the evolutionary lens	1
A case for de-diagnosis of harms in the social and behavioral sciences	1
The illusion of rigor: Why analytical sophistication cannot substitute for inferential coherence	1
Nationalizing accounts: everyday nationalism, Japanese scientists, and global policy	1
Institutional fragility at the boundary: reframing systemic decline as a crisis of recalibration	1
Clientelism in a broader frame	1
If universal basic income is the answer, what is the question?	1
Class signature in schools: Field, habitus, and cultural capital intertwined to understand the reproduction of inequality at the organizational level	1
Entanglements of experience: sketch for a sociological phenomenology of nature	1
A Criminology of Machines	1
High-leverage sociological concepts and the progress of theory, part one	1
Symbols and reasons in democratization: cultural sociology meets deliberative democracy	1
Correction: Interview with Steve Brint for Theory and Society	1
Democracy and the problem of certainty	1
How can freedom of expression on campus be defended?	1
The power of fragmented elites: the role of inadvertent robust action	1
The domestic violence victim as COVID crisis figure	1
Cognitive tools for the transition to anonymous societies	1
Planning as social practice: the formation and blockage of competitive futures in tournament chess, homebuying, and political organizing	1
Response to “Democracy and the problem of certainty”	1
Asymmetric information and open discourse: US and South Korea	1