Brekhus W., Ignatow G. (Eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology

Oxford University Press, 2019. — 704 p. — ISBN 0190273380.In recent years there has been a growing interest in cognition within sociology and other social sciences. Within sociology this interest cuts across various topical subfields, including culture, social psychology, religion, race, and identity. Scholars within the new subfield of cognitive
sociology, also referred to as the sociology of culture and cognition, are contributing to a rapidly developing body of work on how mental and social phenomena are interrelated and often interdependent.In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, Wayne H. Brekhus and Gabe Igantow have gathered some of the most influential scholars working in cognitive sociology to present an accessible introduction to key research areas in a diverse field. While classical sociological and newer interdisciplinary
approaches have been covered separately by scholars in the past, this volume alternatively presents a broad range of cognitive sociological perspectives. The contributors discuss a range of approaches for theorizing and analyzing the "social mind," including macro-cultural approaches, interactionist
approaches, and research that draws on Pierre Bourdieu's major concepts. Each chapter further investigates a variety of cognitive processes within these three approaches, such as attention and inattention, perception, automatic and deliberate cognition, cognition and social action, stereotypes,
categorization, classification, judgment, symbolic boundaries, meaning-making, metaphor, embodied cognition, morality and religion, identity construction, time sequencing, and memory.A comprehensive look at cognitive sociology's main contributions and the central debates within the field, the Handbook will serve as a primary resource for social researchers, faculty, and students interested in how cognitive sociology can contribute to research within their substantive areas of focus.The volume is organized into seven parts. The first three parts are organized around general theoretical, interdisciplinary, and methodological contributions. Part I addresses theoretical foundations that forge cognitive sociology and its relationships to cultural sociology and to cognitive science. Part II emphasizes perspectives from other fields that inform an interdisciplinary cognitive social science. Part III highlights methodological developments in cognitive sociological analysis. The next four parts focus on employing cognitive sociology to examine the sociocultural organization of specific cognitive processes. Part IV analyzes the sociology of perception and attention. Part V explores the sociocultural framing of meaning through oppositions, language, analogies, and metaphor. Part VI looks at the social construction of categories, boundaries, and identities. Part VII examines collective experiences of time and memory.