Randall Collins

Randall Collins (born July 29, 1941) is an American sociologist who has been influential in both his teaching and writing... He is a leading contemporary social theorist whose areas of expertise include the macro-historical sociology of political and economic change; micro-sociology, including face-to-face interaction; and the sociology of intellectuals and social conflict. Collins's publications include The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), which analyzes the network of philosophers and mathematicians for over two thousand years in both Asian and Western societies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randall_Collins

• Collins on credential inflation
  • As Collins points out, even the existence of a small number of elite jobs acts in ways to shape the entire system of social mobility competition.
• Collins is a social scientist who views theory as essential to understanding the world. He says "The essence of science is precisely theory...a generalized and coherent body of ideas, which explain the range of variations in the empirical world in terms of general principles". This is Collins' way of examining the social world, emphasizing the role and interaction of larger social structures.
• He has devoted much of his career and research to study society, how is it created and destroyed through emotional behaviors of human beings. Collins believes that the simplest explanation for radical behavior and actions is emotion. Emotional energy, Collins says, is the "amount of emotional power that flows through one's actions" and does not refer to one specific emotion.
• he never talks about specific emotions like love, joy, hate, and so forth. The same is true with his interest in culture. In Collins hands, culture becomes symbolic goods that are used in exchange or sacred symbols that unite a group. Collins also emphasizes the significance of people coming together and the influence this has on behavior.
• Collins argues sex, smoking, and social stratification and much else in our social lives are driven by a common force: interaction rituals. His Interaction Ritual Chains is a major work of sociological theory that attempts to develop a "radical microsociology."
• successful rituals create symbols of group membership and pump up individuals with emotional energy, while failed rituals drain emotional energy.
• Each person flows from situation to situation, drawn to those interactions where their cultural capital gives them the best emotional energy payoff. This theory of interaction ritual chains is where the individual is the carrier of the micro-macro link.
• There are two components to this linkage: emotional energy and cultural capital. Emotional energy is the emotional charge that people can take away with them from an interaction. Cultural capital is the shorthand way of talking about the different resources we have to culturally engage with other people
• three types of cultural capital known as Generalized Cultural Capital, Particularized Cultural Capital, and Reputational Capital.
• The theory of interaction ritual chains is inspired by Emile Durkheim's theory of ritual, laid forward in his book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, by the conflict theory of Max Weber, microsociology of Erving Goffman. It has itself inspired various domains across the social sciences, including Management Studies, Creative Tourism, International Relations, and Jeffrey C. Alexander's Cultural Pragmatics.
• Numerous empirical studies have likewise employed Interaction Ritual Theory, for instance to explore how specific institutions maintain themselves
• Collins has also argued that violent confrontation goes against human physiological hardwiring. It is the exception, not the rule—regardless of the underlying conditions or motivations. This is in opposition to explanations by social scientists that violence is easy under certain conditions, like poverty, racial or ideological hatreds, or family pathologies.
• Collins's work has been critically assessed in the special issue of Thesis 11 - 'The Sociology of Randall Collins' edited by Steven Loyal and Sinisa Malesevic and in a book 'Ritual, Emotion, Violence: Studies on the Micro-Sociology of Randall Collins (2019) edited by Elliott B. Weininger, Annette Lareau, Omar Lizardo (26).