Social play is complicated to study because of its emergent, diverse, and inter-subjective nature. Since social psychology and sociology have studied human interactions in great detail and depth in real life, we propose that they can deepen our understandings of social game experience. Specifically, the interaction ritual theory (IR theory) from Micro-sociology that focuses on moment-to-moment ...

In order to explain the success of populist politicians use of social media, we need to subtract the social from relationality and separate social relationships from network theory applications. A pure theory of relationality is suggested by Werner Heisenberg’s breakthrough in quantum mechanics. It is argued that sociology, to its detriment, has failed to incorporate a theory of communication, ...

In this study, we test Durkheim’s (1897) conceptualization of suicide as a pattern of suicidal behavior caused by sociological conditions and its effects on attitudes towards state sanctioned death through examining support for assisted suicide and the death penalty. Using secondary-data and quantitative analytical methods, we empirically examine personal attitudes towards assisted suicide for ...

We develop an analytical core for sociology. We follow standard dynamical systems theory by first specifying the conditions for social equilibrium, and then studying the dynamical principles that govern disequilibrium behavior. Our general social equilibrium model is an expansion of the general equilibrium model of economic theory, and our dynamical principles treat the society as a complex ada...

This article puts forth an axiomatic description of the complexity of an object of sociological investigation. The proposed axioms allow us to determine complexity within the framework of mathematical sociology such as the variational principle, which is formed relative to the state of the object of sociological investigation. On the basis of this principle we can conclude the equation of state...

1. The innovative potential of cell phone technology in an evolutionary perspective .. 2 2. The Expansion of cell phone usage as a multidimensional challenge for sociological theory and research ................................................................................ 4 3. Implications for human individuals.......................................................................... 7 4. Im...

Introduction This paper's purpose is to describe and criticize the strategies of theory construction presented by the Columbia Department of Sociology's faculty during the 1950s. The Columbia Department was a major center for sociological theory during the 1950s and some of its graduates became important theorists during the last half of the century.

This article presents the first steps towards a sociological understanding of emergent social media. This article uses Twitter, the most popular social media website, as its focus. Recently, the social media site has been prominently associated with social movements in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria. Rather than rush to breathlessly describe its novel role in shaping contemporary social mov...

This essay provides an outline and a history of the theory of performance. This new macro-sociological theory reconfigures the concept of ritual into a more complex model of social action as lying in the continuum between the analytic poles of successful and failed performances. I argue that the more complex and segmented social and cultural structures become, the more the elements of performan...

Socioculturalists are divided on two of the foundational theoretical claims of the paradigm: a process ontology of the social world; and the inseparability of the individual and the group. A process ontology holds that only processes are real; entities, structures or patterns are ephemeral and do not really exist. Inseparability is the claim that the individual and the social cannot be methodol...