"[10] Notable students of Jeffrey Alexander include Ronald Jacobs,[11] Philip Smith,[12] Isaac Reed,[13] Matthew Norton,[14] and Elizabeth Breese.
[15] In sociology, neofunctionalism represents a revival of the thought of Talcott Parsons by Jeffrey C. Alexander, who sees neofunctionalism as having five central tendencies: While Parsons consistently viewed actors as analytical concepts, Alexander defines action as the movement of concrete, living, breathing persons as they make their way through time and space.
In addition he argues that every action contains a dimension of free will, by which he is expanding functionalism to include some of the concerns of symbolic interactionism.
[22] Here, too, the incident had to be culturally narrated and constructed as involving the core values of American society,[23] turning what was first thought to be a mundane faux-pas into a full-fledged scandal.
[24] A key claim of both studies is that even events that are currently thought of as deeply traumatic for civil society are not inherently devastating but are rather constructed as such through cultural processes.
[26] Actors, claims Alexander, care deeply about having others believe the meanings they attempt to convey, and to this end they seek to create a performance as authentic-looking as possible.
Alexander claims that in tribal societies the various elements of cultural performance were tightly fused, and were employed in collective rituals in which the entire tribe partook and its members experienced first-hand.
In modern societies, these various elements became de-fused (as per Weber's sphere differentiation) and for this reason actors who wish to appear authentic must draw upon various repertoires.
[28] In contradistinction with various sociologies of culture that have tended to see the visual or the material as a form of falsity or degradation, Alexander draws on the Durkheimian notion of the symbolic collective representation to argue that the ways in which culture operates—both in instilling and in recreating values—is intrinsically tied to symbolic material forms.
[30] Following the Egyptian Revolution, Alexander conducted a study of the revolutionary months from a cultural sociological point of view, applying some of his previous theories in order to understand the ways in which the various protests voiced by demonstrators, journalists, bloggers, and public actors ultimately persuaded the Egyptian army to turn against the regime.
The key to understanding the revolution, claims Alexander, is in the binary structure these various actors applied to the Moubarak regime, persuasively depicting it as corrupt and outdated and thereby convincing the wider public that it was a menace to Egyptian society.