Dave Elder-Vass is a senior lecturer in sociology at Loughborough University, where he teaches a variety of core sociology modules. He also offers an MA module on Digital Economies and an innovative undergraduate option that consists entirely of debates between students on popular recent books. He is available to supervise PhD students, particularly those with an interest in social theory, critical realism, digital social developments or economic sociology.
Previously, he spent three years as a British Academy post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, after completing his PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. Before returning to the academic world he was a senior IT executive in a major UK retail business.
Dave's research programme is oriented to bringing ontological clarity to the social sciences. Taking a critical realist perspective, he examines the kinds of entity that operate in the social world and how it might be possible for them to have emergent causal powers. The Causal Power of Social Structures addresses both the general theory of emergence and its application to the sociological concepts of social structure and human agency. In a series of related publications and conference papers, Dave has discussed the implications of emergence for critical realism, for the theory of structure and agency, and for the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences.
His new book The Reality of Social Construction examines the ontology of language, discourse, culture and knowledge. This provides a basis for explaining how they can contribute to constructing our social reality and hence for a synthesis of realism and constructionism. The book goes on to use this ontological analysis to evaluate the potential of some specific constructionist arguments, including claims for the social construction of institutions, categories, subjects and reality itself. In the process it engages critically with the work of a wide range of thinkers whose work is significant for social theory, including Margaret Archer, John Searle, Ferdinand de Saussure, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Judith Butler.
Currently, he is working on issues in the social ontology of economic phenomena, including money and markets, and on gifting as an alternative to market exchange.
Address: Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU, United Kingdom
E-mail: d.elder-vass (at) lboro.ac.uk