Theodore D. Kemper, Status, Power and Ritual Interaction: A Relational Reading of Durkheim, Goffman and Collins.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
T he question of what influences our behaviours the most, individual factors, the social and structural conditions of the environment, or the interaction of both, is still a current sociological debate.Kemper proposes a theoretical model from a radical standpoint: our behaviours, choices, and motives are status-power relational products and the self is irrelevant for sociological analyses.This book has the potential to ignite passionate and constructive theoretical debates in the fields of social psychology and social inequality.Kemper considers that ritual as conceptualized by Durkheim, Goffman, and Collins, is incomplete since status-power dynamics are neglected.Using an axiomatic theoretical model, he suggests that all our actions, including the altruistic and compassionate ones, aim to enhance status and/or power.Our status and/or power motivated behavioural patterns are mediated through reference groups that determine our values, beliefs, and decisions.A reference group is defined as any individual or group with whom we have a real or imagined relationship (p.34.).By abiding to the values, norms and expectations of a reference group, we aim 1) to claim, confer, or consume status and/or, 2) to acquire and manage power for others or ourselves while avoiding sanctions or negative consequences from this reference group.The reference group seeks to civilize what Kemper calls the organism: the locus of our drives, passions, and desires (p.49), but this organism is not the self as defined by previous social scientists.Indeed, Kemper suggests that the theoretical concept of self is superfluous to understand human behaviours sociologically.Our motives, beliefs, and thoughts result from our relationships, not the self.We do not mobilize in conflicts because of our ideas and we do not bind together because of our beliefs.Rather, we strive to remain loyal to the reference groups to which we identify.When we behave, the reference group to which we identify influences our behaviour, not the self with its thoughts, beliefs, emotions, or cognitive processes.To illustrate the accuracy of his model, Kemper revisits Durkheim, Goffman, and Collins' definitions of
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".