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REIFICATION

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2012

Reification is the mental conversion of a person or abstract concept into a thing. Reification is treating that which is abstract as something tangible; the error which consists in treating as a "thing" something which is not one.

To treat as though real that which is just an abstraction or a conceptualization.

Sociologists since Durkheim have been accused of reifying society which critics say is just an abstract concept and does not exist.

To act as though society exists and thus can act or make decisions or coerce people is to reify society.

In Marxism, reification is the consideration of an abstraction or an object as if it had living existence and abilities; at the same time it implies the thingification of social relations. 

In computer science, reification is the act of making a data model for a previously abstract concept.

The Reification-Realism-Positivism Controversy in Macromarketing: A Philosopher's View, Michael Levin, Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 11, No. 1, 57-65 (1991)
This article attempts to sort out the strands in the realism debate. Positivism is shown not to be realistic, and realism, properly understood, is defended. Overall, the standard empirical method is defended against the newer "hermeneutical' paradigm.

Reification and Realism in Marketing: In Defense of Reason - Shelby D. Hunt, Texas Tech University - Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 9, No. 2, 4-10 (1989) © 1989 SAGE Publications
Recent Journal of Macromarketing articles by Monieson (1988) and Dholakia (1988) attack "positivism" and "positivistic social science" which, they contend, dominate contemporary marketing and social science. Although their articles constructively extend marketing's "Xcrisis literature" on several dimensions, numerous aspects of their articles are problematical and a historical. This article reviews and evaluates three major themes that emerge in the articles by Monieson and Dholakia: (1) the law-like generalizations issue, (2) the rigor/relevance issue, and (3) the reification/realism issue. - jmk.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/2/4

Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness - Peter Berger, Stanley Pullberg
History and Theory, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1965)

Maybe We Shouldn’t Study "Gangs" - Does Reification Obscure Youth Violence? 
Mercer L. Sullivan, Rutgers University - Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Vol. 21, No. 2, 170-190 (2005) © 2005 SAGE Publications
The extensive study of youth gangs over the years has tended to become a field of studies unto itself. Yet, scholars have failed to arrive at a commonly accepted definition of what youth gangs are. Further, collective illegal behavior by youths is not always identified with gangs. One result of this definitional ambiguity is the discrepancy between the reported proliferation of youth gangs in the 1990s and the sharp decline in reported youth violence during the latter part of the same decade. This article proposes a heuristic typology of forms of association and applies that typology to comparative ethnographic data from different areas of New York City. The results suggest that ongoing patterns of collective violent behavior rooted in local social ecology can be relabeled as gang behavior under certain conditions of youth culture and popular moral panic. A broader focus on youth violence and youthful collective behavior is urged. - ccj.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/21/2/170

Axel Honneth, Verdinglichung: Eine Annerkennungstheoretische Studie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005). (In German, Reification is called Verdinglichung).
Extract from Social Pathologies as Second-Order Disorders
Christopher F. Zurn, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky - uky.edu/AS/SocTheo/Zurn-Social%20Pathologies.pdf
"Honneth argues that the concept of reification can be productively re-animated today under changed theoretical and historical conditions by understanding acts of reification as actions in which an objectivating stance to the others, the world, or the self is adopted, while simultaneously forgetting the constitutive connections that such an objectivating stance has to our practical, interested, and normatively laden interactions with others. What is distinctive of reification, as opposed to a benign objectivating stance that serves to promote cognitive values in a normatively permissible manner—say a naturalizing stance that promotes rational problem-solving within a morally delimited sphere of permissible objectivation of others—is that reification involves an active forgetting of the priority of intersubjective recognition to cognition, where that forgetting is socially pervasive and systematically or institutionally reproduced, and serves to deform the networks of intersubjective recognition that are essential conditions for the maintenance of an ethical form of social life. Thus, the reification of others involves a disregard of the structures of normatively-imbued and meaningful recognition of others, where that disregard is located in distorted forms of sociality that serve to dehumanize participants and thereby perpetuate pathological social structures. A further analysis claims that reification of others can be caused in two analytically distinct ways: either internally, where individuals more or less consciously adopt a praxis that requires the objectivating stance to overwhelm any limits set by the normative structures of recognition—say engaging in sports where the intensity of competition leads participants to dehumanize their opponents—or externally, through the socially prevalent use of thought schemas and interactive patterns that require participants to approach others as mere objects to be manipulated for self interested motives—say the structural imperatives of market-mediated interactions where 
objectivation of others is assumed to be a necessity for bare material survival itself. In either case, reification involves a widely shared disregard of the primordial recognitional structure of intersubjective interactions in favor of objectivation, where that forgetting is socially caused and leads to social pathologies: specifically, pathologies that distort fully humanized interactions, thereby impeding the necessary social conditions for an ethical form of the good life. Social interactions are the centerpiece of this analysis, yet it is not restricted only to intersubjective phenomena, for Honneth also develops a categorial framework for understanding what it would mean to have a reifying relationships both to the objective, non-social, world, and to the inner world of subjective self-relations. Reification of the physical world means a forgetfulness of the significance that objects and relations in the physical world might have for others. The idea here follows Dewey’s epistemological lead: in order to cognitively grasp objects in the world, one needs to be able to set them in a context of purposes and uses, and this context is in turn constituted by other human projects and human interactions with others. (A similar account could equally proceed from Heidegger’s analysis of the conceptual primordiality of the stance of care for our being-in-the-world). Reification of objects then involves a systematic forgetting of the way in which they are constituted as meaningful and useful to us only in a specific context of social purposes and interactions. Reification of objects is then a sort derivative phenomenon from the reification of others. Reification of one’s own self involves a distorted relation to one’s own inner states, where one forgets that one’s relation to self is first and foremost a practical relation, a kind of qualitative recognition of one’s self first made possible through the variety of intersubjective relations of recognition one experiences. The analysis identifies two varieties of such self-reification evident in contemporary culture. On the one hand, there is a form of self-objectivation that Honneth labels detectivism, where individuals take their own inner states as brute empirical givens, not subject to transformation through acts of self-reflection, but rather only given states of affairs to be accurately detected and catalogued. Exemplary here is the kind of reification that occurs when individuals are required to take a disinterested stance towards their ‘personality type’ and adjust their detached observations of their inner states to standardized grids for self-profiling: think for instance of the reification involved in establishing one’s identity profile in on-line dating forums. At the opposite extreme, there is a kind of reification of self that Honneth identifies as constructivism, where individuals take up an instrumentalizing stance to their inner states, believing in essence that those inner states are at the disposition of acts of will, and thereby represent wholly plastic material to be remolded in the light of socially defined norms and goals: think for instance of the repeated need to transform one’s personality under the pressures for job-specific character traits in contemporary ‘flexible’ economies and the demise of life-long careers."

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