Violence and Social Order

• In Event: 3151 - Theory Section Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 3. Building theory: Innovations and Applications – A

Abstract

Although violence is a key feature of U.S. society, touching and shaping the lives of all U.S. citizens, sociologists have been curiously uninterested in understanding the role it plays, as a general phenomenon, in shaping social life. I address this gap in the literature by arguing that violence plays a key role, along with factors such as consent, discourse, and embodiment, in producing social order throughout society (overall social order). Violence helps produce overall social order, I argue, both because it is coercive and because it helps build consent to the social order, which it does by (a) promoting the psychological, cultural, and material interests of subordinate groups and (b) aligning individual identity, subjectivity, and bodily practices with dominant institutional practices, external power relations, and objective social relations. Violence thus has both coercive and productive properties and powers.

Author

• Liam Downey, University of Colorado