Collection
The Postulate of Adequacy: Causality, Meaning, Performativity
The Special Issue draws attention to the themes and contributions in which sociology understands and engages with the adequacy of its theories, methods, data collections, and interpretations. That the postulate of adequacy is nowadays performed by any quantitative and qualitative researchers in some way or another only serves to underline the need for a renewed attention to the topic. Why does adequacy between first-degree and second-degree constructs matter? What ultimate features of consciousness and the life-world make adequacy of experience possible? How are they affected by historical transformations of social life and should or should not be redrafted? While adequacy is achieved through a form of interaction and mutual understanding between the first order constructs of actors in everyday life and researchers’ second order constructs, generalization often glosses over individual biographies and those of outsiders and outcasts of class, racial, ethnic, cultural or national communities. What justification do researchers have for assuming that they have reached necessary and sufficient condition of adequacy? What efforts at mutual understanding and enlightenment can be done?
The Special Issue expects to advance the discussion on the workings of adequacy in sociological theories, methods, and empirical research. It aims at concerted efforts by bringing together sociologists and philosophers, phenomenologists and critical theorists, quantitative and qualitative researchers, and public sociologists.
Editors
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Simon Lafontaine
Simon Lafontaine (slafontaine@gmail.com) is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut für Soziologie, Technische Universität Berlin, and at the Social Science Archive, Universität Konstanz. He completed his PhD at the University of Brussels in 2019 with a thesis applying social phenomenology to mobility research. His research interests also include sociological theory, sociology of culture, queer and affect studies, and media and communication theories. He is currently working on a project where his main focus is the relationship between loneliness, individuality and collective structures.
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H.T. Wilson
H.T. Wilson is Professor Emeritus and former Director of the Social and Political Thought Program at York University. Over an academic career spanning 60 years, he has published or edited 20 books and written hundreds of articles, book chapters and monographs in the areas of social and political theory, public policy, administrative law, bureaucratic structure and process, theory of innovation, higher education policy, citizenship and representation and social theories of time, space and place. htwilson@osgoode.yorku.ca
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Thomas Kemple
Thomas Kemple (thomas.kemple@ubc.ca) teaches social and political theory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His articles have appeared in Theory, Culture & Society and the Journal of Classical Sociology; he is the author of Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber’s Calling (Palgrave 2014), Simmel (Polity 2018), Marx’s Wager: Das Kapital and the Spirit of Capitalism (Palgrave 2022); and he is the co-editor with Mark Featherstone of Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader (Routledge 2020) .
