Dealing with dysnomia: Strategies for the cultivation of used concepts in social research

Abstract

This article follows recent calls to turn social theory away from its fixations on intellectual history and toward the mechanics and craft of creating social theories in the research process. The subject of this article is a dilemma common to theorizing in social science: dysnomia, or the phenomenon in which some object is poorly named. Specifically, this article focuses on how social scientists distinguish original concepts from their equivalents in everyday speech. Three tactics for dealing with dysnomia are named—academic arcana, classification and sociologism—and considered in order to ascertain the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Publication Title

British Journal of Sociology

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