Summary: <strong>Performance and Cultural Pragmatics in Social Action</strong> <em>Jeffrey Alexander (Yale)</em> Jeffrey Alexander presents an overview of his current work on the role of performance and cultural pragmatics in social action. He leads a discussion about the fruitful interaction of contemporary cultural sociology and performance studies—and the place of dramaturgy, narrative, audience and performance in social inquiry. Jeffrey Alexander is the author of <em>The Civil Sphere</em> (2006), <em>Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity</em> (2004 co-author), <em>The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology</em> (2003), <em>Neofunctionalism and After</em> (1998), <em>Fin-de-Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction and the Problem of Reason</em> (1995), <em>Structure and Meaning: Relinking Classical Sociology</em> (1989), <em>Action and Its Environments: Towards a New Synthesis</em> (1988), <em>Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War Two</em>, Columbia University Press (1987), <em>Theoretical Logic in Sociology</em> (1982-83). Today, Alexander is leading a team of researchers at Yale University dedicated to developing a ‘strong program in cultural sociology’. A preliminary version of Alexander’s work on social performance can be found in the volume he recently edited with Bernhard Giesen and Jason Mast, <em>Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual</em> (Cambridge, 2006).
