Abstract: As awareness of its complexity has grown, scholars have increasingly begun to describe the American state as "hidden." In this paper, we argue that the state is rarely actually "hidden," and that conceiving of state visibility in terms of this metaphor obscures important cultural and political dynamics. We argue that the complex form of the state alone cannot account for the apparent hiddenness or visibility of the American state; instead, awareness of the state derives from political struggles to categorize a complex, multistable system of governmental practices. We identify two processes, attribution and desensitization, through which these struggles are waged, and demonstrate the utility of our approach through a case study of the "Healthy San Francisco" initiative from 2006-2013. Our analysis suggests that scholars should pay greater attention to these classification struggles, and how they help produce the visibility or hiddenness of the American state.
2017 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship (Article or Book Chapter) Award, Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association
Abstract: A growing literature posits the importance of boundaries in structuring social systems. Yet sociologists have not adequately theorized one of the most fraught and consequential sites of boundary-making in contemporary life: the delineation of the official edges of the government--and, consequently, of state from society. This article addresses that gap by theorizing the mechanisms of state boundary formation. In so doing, we extend culturalist theories of the state by providing a more specific model of how the state-society boundary is produced. Further, we contribute to institutionalist accounts of politics by highlighting boundary-work during policy creation as a crucial site of political struggle, one with causal implications insofar as it illuminates a process that determines fine-grained distinctions in policy forms.