Culture and social order: Three critical remarks on Jeffrey Alexander's cultural sociology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jeffrey Alexander's revaluation of the role of culture in the study of society is grounded on the Durkheimian theory that a society can only be built on the shared acceptance of a symbolic system that guarantees social order. To explain how this shared acceptance is produced, Alexander proposes the concept of the civil sphere, defined as an “analytically independent” and “empirically differentiated” sphere of society devoted to the production and elaboration of shared symbolic patterns. In this text I put forward three main critiques of this theory: first, Alexander does not succeed in analytically separating the civil sphere from other spheres of society; second, he postulates and does not demonstrate the unitary nature of the civil sphere; third, he does not clearly explain how consensus is formed in the context of the civil sphere and, more importantly, how an established consensus may be observed as such.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".