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Sociology
Kinds of Sociology Terms modified by Sociology Selected AbstractsWICKED WATER PROBLEMS: SOCIOLOGY AND LOCAL WATER ORGANIZATIONS IN ADDRESSING WATER RESOURCES POLICY,JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN WATER RESOURCES ASSOCIATION, Issue 3 2000David M. Freeman ABSTRACT: Water policy problems are wicked, not in an ethically deplorable sense, but in the sense that they present us with especially difficult challenges of becoming more effective in our interdisciplinary collaboration, of integrating two very different types of knowledge, of working across several socio-political units of analysis simultaneously, and of better organizing water as a common property resource. Sociology, as a discipline, does not have a particularly rich history of successful interdisciplinary collaboration on water resources research and teaching, but it potentially has a most useful contribution to make by focusing on the analysis of local common property resource organizations that operate in the interface between individual resource users and State-Federal entities. These organizations (e.g., water user associations, mutual companies, irrigation districts, acequias, conservancy districts) have been the orphans of water policy discourse but their operations are critical to undertaking more effective 21st century social analysis, research work, and action programs. Sociologists who work to better comprehend the operations of, and constraints upon, these organizations build a sociology that can better collaborate with other water-related disciplines in addressing the challenges posed by the wickedness of our water problems. [source] KARL MANNHEIM AND ALOIS RIEGL: FROM ART HISTORY TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF CULTUREART HISTORY, Issue 4 2009JEREMY TANNER Karl Mannheim and Erwin Panofsky took Alois Riegl's concept of Kunstwollen as their point of departure in the development of the sciences of cultural interpretation. This article seeks to elucidate the very different readings of Riegl made by Mannheim and Panofsky, and to show how the sociological appropriation and transformation of the concept of Kunstwollen was central to the development of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, and in particular to the analysis of ,styles of thought' in his classic study Conservative Thought (1927). The limited reception of Mannheim's synthesis of sociology and art history is interpreted in the intellectual context of Britain immediately after the 1939,45 war. [source] Theology is not Mere Sociology: A Theological Reflection on the Reception of the Christian Religion in Mainland ChinaDIALOG, Issue 3 2004By Pilgrim W.K. Abstract:, Post-Maoist China retains its loyalty to Marxist principles; yet voices are being heard that interpret religion much more positively. Both government spokespersons and Religious Studies scholars measure the value of religion according to its social function. Such a criterion of evaluation fails to take account of what is essential to Christian theology, namely, appeal to divine transcendence. Yet, Christian theology in the tradition of the Lutheran Reformation begins with transcendence and turns toward human responsibility for the world through loving the neighbor. This may mark a common cause between Chinese sociology of religion and Christian commitments to social well-being. [source] A Realist Framework for the Sociology of Education: thinking with BourdieuEDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2002Roy Nash First page of article [source] Sociology of Gender/Gender Perspectives in Sociology: An Introduction to the Special IssueINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JAPANESE SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2005Yoriko Meguro [source] Media and Cultural Studies in Japanese Sociology: An IntroductionINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JAPANESE SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2002Saeko Ishita [source] The International Relations of the "Transition": Ernest Gellner's Social Philosophy and Political Sociology,INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 4 2007Roland Dannreuther Ernest Gellner's political sociology has been relatively neglected not only in international relations (IR) but also in sociology and social anthropology. This article provides an overview of Gellner's ambitious vision of our modern condition. Central to this vision is the salience of the "transition" from agrarian to industrial society, which Gellner believed had transformed and revolutionized not only our philosophical outlook but also our sociological and historical condition. This article argues that Gellner's work provides an intellectually rich, demanding, and fruitful model which has much relevance to IR. We illustrate this by showing how Gellner's sociological insights into the study of nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism continue to have a direct application to contemporary concerns within IR, as well as providing an illustration of how IR can benefit from a multidisciplinary engagement with the disciplines that Gellner most creatively borrowed from: sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. [source] On violence as the negativity of the Durkheimian: between anomie, sacrifice and effervescenceINTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, Issue 2006S. Romi Mukherjee In this introductory article I contextualise, historically and theoretically, the rapport between Durkheimianism and violence. Telescoping Durkheimian theories of anomie, sacrifice and effervescence, I demonstrate how both Durkheim and Mauss, arguably the most prominent members of the French School of Sociology, found themselves constantly reflecting on violence in all its forms while never outlining an explicit theory of violence. Violence was thus the dark spot of their enterprises, at once omnipresent but disavowed. I weave together the various fragments of their oeuvres that illuminate the ground of the Durkheimian theory of violence and also examine the precise reasons for its lack of clear theorisation. I conclude with some remarks on Durkheim and fascism. Therefore, this article serves to supplement and set the stage for the articles that appear in this volume, pieces that in their own ways grapple with similar problematics while also moving beyond them and charting new directions in Durkheimian studies. [source] The Nexus of Market Society, Liberal Preferences, and Democratic Peace: Interdisciplinary Theory and EvidenceINTERNATIONAL STUDIES QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2003Michael Mousseau Drawing on literature from Anthropology, Economics, Political Science and Sociology, an interdisciplinary theory is presented that links the rise of contractual forms of exchange within a society with the proliferation of liberal values, democratic legitimacy, and peace among democratic nations. The theory accommodates old facts and yields a large number of new and testable ones, including the fact that the peace among democracies is limited to market-oriented states, and that market democracies,but not the other democracies,perceive common interests. Previous research confirms the first hypothesis; examination herein of UN roll call votes confirms the latter: the market democracies agree on global issues. The theory and evidence demonstrate that (a) the peace among democratic states may be a function of common interests derived from common economic structure; (b) all of the empirical research into the democratic peace is underspecified, as no study has considered an interaction of democracy with economic structure; (c) interests can be treated endogenously in social research; and (d) several of the premier puzzles in global politics are causally related,including the peace among democracies and the association of democratic stability and liberal political culture with market-oriented economic development. [source] The Promise of Historical Sociology in International Relations,INTERNATIONAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 3 2006GEORGE LAWSON This essay draws on historical sociology, in particular on historical institutionalism, to critique the micro-, macro-, and meso-level explanations of contemporary international relations theory. Focusing on institutional development, change, and disintegration, it proposes a conjectural, mid-range approach to capturing the processes of large-scale change that are occurring in the international realm. This essay seeks to broaden the field's scope by outlining the possibilities that historical sociology offers to international relations theory and practice. [source] Psychoanalytic Sociology and the Interpretation of EmotionJOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 2 2003Simon Clarke Simon Clarke, Psychoanalytic Sociology and the Interpretation of Emotion, pp. 145,163. In this paper I explore the sociological study of emotion, contrasting constructionist and psychoanalytic accounts of envy as an emotion. I seek not to contra each vis-à-vis the other but to establish some kind of synthesis in a psychoanalytic sociology of emotion. I argue that although the constructionist approach to emotion gives us valuable insights into the social and moral dimensions of human encounters, it is unable to address the level of emotional intensity found for example in murderous rage against ethnic groups, or the emotional and often self destructive elements of terrorism. Psychoanalytic ideas do engage with these dynamics, and as such, a theory that synthesises both the social construction of reality and the psychodynamics of social life is necessary if we are to engage with these destructive emotions. [source] Some Problems and Possibilities in the Study of Dynamical Social ProcessesJOURNAL FOR THE THEORY OF SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR, Issue 1 2000John E. Puddifoot The recent challenge of Dynamical Systems Theory (also known as ComplexityTheory or Chaos Theory) to the social sciences, is based largely on the beliefthat processes in the social arena can be considered as analogous to those of the natural world, and that in consequence general theoretical advances in explaining the latter might with advantage be applied to the former. This paper aims to show that claims for Dynamical Systems Theory with respect to the understanding or measurement of social processes would be premature; the reasons for this lying not only in the unfamiliarity and operational difficulties of Dynamical Systems Theory in itself, but also in the problematic nature and history of our usage of the term ,social process'. Reviewing some examples of such usage from Sociology and Social Psychology, it is concluded that Dynamical Systems Theory might serve as a catalyst for a re-examination of existing orthodoxies and major concepts, but that progress would be retarded by the uncritical application of it's terminology, concepts, and techniques of mathematical modelling, without this prior and demanding first step. [source] Spectres of Transnationalism: Changing Terrains of Sociology of LawJOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 4 2009Roger Cotterrell The growth of ,legal transnationalism', that is, the reach of law across nation-state borders and the impact of external political and legal pressures on nation-state law , undermines the main foundations of sociology of law. Modern sociology of law has assumed an ,instrumentalist' view of law as an agency of the modern directive state, but now it has to adjust to the state's increasingly complex regulatory conditions. The kind of convergence theory that underpins analysis of much legal transnationalism is inadequate for socio-legal theory, and old ideas of ,law' and ,society' as the foci of sociology of law are no longer appropriate. Socio-legal theory should treat law as a continuum of unstable, competing authority claims. Instead of taking ,society' as its reference point, it should conceptualize the contrasting types of regulatory needs of the networks of community (often not confined by nation-state boundaries) that legal transnationalism addresses. [source] Reflections on the Methodological Issues of the Sociology of LawJOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 2 2000Reza Banakar The general focus of this paper is on the methodological limitations of the sociology of law in capturing the law's ,truth' as its practitioners experience it. The paper starts with arguing that the law does not have a monolithic ,truth'. Some aspects of its ,truth' are produced through its own recursively sealed operations, while its other aspects are generated with reference to empirically grounded knowledge, which potentially links the discourses of law and sociology. Notwithstanding this discursive kinship, the sociological studies of the law's internal processes cause difficulties even to those scholars who are versed in substantive law. To expound this problem, the sociology of law is compared with medical sociology and attention is drawn to the way sociology copes with the ,truth' of medicine. The final part of the paper initiates a quest for possible solutions to the methodological problems of the sociology of law by placing them in the context of the ongoing conflicts and competitions of the field of science. [source] WICKED WATER PROBLEMS: SOCIOLOGY AND LOCAL WATER ORGANIZATIONS IN ADDRESSING WATER RESOURCES POLICY,JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN WATER RESOURCES ASSOCIATION, Issue 3 2000David M. Freeman ABSTRACT: Water policy problems are wicked, not in an ethically deplorable sense, but in the sense that they present us with especially difficult challenges of becoming more effective in our interdisciplinary collaboration, of integrating two very different types of knowledge, of working across several socio-political units of analysis simultaneously, and of better organizing water as a common property resource. Sociology, as a discipline, does not have a particularly rich history of successful interdisciplinary collaboration on water resources research and teaching, but it potentially has a most useful contribution to make by focusing on the analysis of local common property resource organizations that operate in the interface between individual resource users and State-Federal entities. These organizations (e.g., water user associations, mutual companies, irrigation districts, acequias, conservancy districts) have been the orphans of water policy discourse but their operations are critical to undertaking more effective 21st century social analysis, research work, and action programs. Sociologists who work to better comprehend the operations of, and constraints upon, these organizations build a sociology that can better collaborate with other water-related disciplines in addressing the challenges posed by the wickedness of our water problems. [source] Merton as Harvard sociologist: Engagement, thematic continuities, and institutional linkagesJOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Issue 1 2010Lawrence T. Nichols In this paper I explore the significance of the initial decade of Robert K. Merton's graduate and professional career, from 1931, when he entered the new doctoral program in sociology at Harvard, until 1939, when he joined the Department of Sociology at Tulane University as an associate professor and acting chairperson. Drawing on archival sources, as well as the professional literature, I examine how Merton engaged the exceptionally rich, interdisciplinary context of Harvard in the 1930s, including both interpersonal networks and diverse intellectual perspectives. In particular, I identify connections between Merton's early writing, "oral publications" and teaching, and three locally developed and dominant paradigms of sociology. Following an assessment of the influence of Merton's works published from 1934 to 1939, I trace continuities between Merton's achievements at Harvard and his subsequent teaching and research at Tulane and Columbia. I conclude that a fuller appreciation of Merton's "less noticed" decade in Cambridge is indispensable for understanding his overall career, and that it clarifies linkages across sociological work at three universities in the mid-twentieth century. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] Comparative Sociology of Law: Legal Fields, Legal Scholarships, and Social Sciences in Europe and the United StatesLAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 2 2006Mauricio García-Villegas This article attempts to gain a better understanding of the sociology(ies) of law in a comparative perspective through a structural and comparative explanation of the American and the French legal fields. It is argued that comparative sociology of law will not be able to explain the difference among countries, scholars, movements, and schools of thought in short, it will not be able to compare,as long as it avoids the analysis of some social and cultural presuppositions related to the context in which these differences take place. It focuses mainly on two of these presuppositions. First, legal fields, with their history, their internal structure, and their power relations, and second the type of relation between the legal field and the state. The empirical examination provided in this article explicitly seeks to offer insights for the reconstruction of Bourdieu's structural theory of the legal field. [source] Public Beliefs about GM Foods: More on the Makings of a Considered SociologyMEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2001Anne Murcott First page of article [source] Franz Oppenheimer's (1864,1943) Social Economic Approach to HealthAMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2010Ursula Backhaus The idea of scholarly synthesis was central to the founders of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. Franz Oppenheimer (1864,1943) in fact impersonated the idea of scholarly synthesis. Being the son of a Reformist rabbi,these religious roots provided the impulse for his work,he started out as a physician in the industrial suburbs of Berlin; his diagnosis was that he faced social and not medical disease, which consequently brought him to the study of economics. But unlike many mainstream economists today, he insisted on the necessary cooperation between economists and sociologists, ideally in one person. His chair in Frankfurt, showing his own handwriting, was denominated for economic theory and sociology. In this article, I show his contributions with respect to economic aspects of health. These are not well known. Part of the reason is that the field of health economics as it is taught now is very narrow. Therefore, Oppenheimer's health economic contributions tend to be overlooked. [source] Larry Moss and the Struggle Against Racism by the Whately Professors of Political EconomyAMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2010Sandra J. Peart In this note, we highlight an important consideration of Larry Moss's life's work, the continual struggle within economics against racism. Larry initiated and supported the symposium on eugenics published by the American Journal of Economics and Sociology in July 2005. He edited the volume Social Inequality, Analytical Egalitarianism and the March Toward Eugenic Explanations in the Social Sciences in August 2008. These constitute obvious signs of Larry's concern. He conjectured that the Trinity College Dublin political economists who held the Whately professorship should be thought of as a school. Such a school was in fact identified in 1850 by an outsider who pointed to their shared opposition to racial explanations within an institutional setting. That shared opposition allowed them to speak against the narrow interests of the rulers of the country. Of course, other political economists of the time, Mill in particular, were also emphatic in their anti-racism. Thus, not only do we need to take up Larry's challenge to describe the Trinity College school but we must also seek its connections with the Scottish-English group of anti-racists. [source] Adolph Lowe's Plea for Cooperation and Constructive Synthesis in the Social SciencesAMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 4 2002Mathew Forstater Adolph Lowe and his mentor Franz Oppenheimer were founding members of the Editorial Board of the The American Journal of Economics and Sociology in 1941. Both this journal's name and its mission were inspired by Lowe's greatly underappreciated 1935 book, Economics and Sociology. There, Lowe issued his "plea for cooperation" and "constructive synthesis" in the social sciences. Lowe was committed to interdisciplinary teaching and research for the entirety of his long and interesting career. When celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Journal, it is worthwhile to recall Lowe's enduring contributions. His expression "constructive synthesis" still remains part of the mission of the AJES as inscribed on the back cover of the journal itself. [source] Fiscal Sociology: What For?AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2002Jurgen Backhaus In discussing the question, Fiscal sociology: What for? we shall first give a short sketch of the history of thought of the field. We will next identify main issues. In discussing the concept of the tax state, we emphasize issues in constitutional public finance. One of the fields in which fiscal sociology has been most important is taxation, and notably income taxation. In citing applications and issues, we identify an entire alphabet of fiscal sociological issues. We conclude by discussing the future of the field in both instruction and research. [source] On the Origins of The American Journal of Economics and Sociology: Its Purposes and ObjectivesAMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2001Will Lissner This essay, written with the help of his devoted wife, Mrs. Dorothy Burnham Lissner, was prepared at the request of the current editor of the AJES. This essay was written during the fall of 1999. On September 10, Mrs. Lissner informed me that, "The early history of the Journal is all done. . . . I hope it is satisfactory . . . Will and I worked very hard on it. Long hours. . . . so I decided to interview him and take down what he said or have him answer on tape. Then I put everything together on the computer, almost like an article. He [Will Lissner] has checked it and thinks it's perfect, that we can do no better" (correspendence of D. B. Lissner with L. Moss, 9/10/99). This is the last known writing of Will Lissner and summarizes his aims, goals, and ambitions for this Journal nearly six decades after its founding. Had Will had more time, this essay would have been the first of a series of reflections on this history of this Journal. [source] An Interview with Diego GambettaOXONOMICS, Issue 2 2009Article first published online: 18 DEC 200 Diego Gambetta is Professor of Sociology and official fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Born in Turin, Italy, he received his PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge, U.K. in 1983. Since 1992 he has been in Oxford in various positions. He has been visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Science Po and the College de France in Paris. His main scholarly interests are trust, signalling theory and its applications, organised crime, and violent extremists. In 2000 he was made a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of numerous books including The Sicilian Mafia (Gambetta, 1993), Making Sense of Suicide Missions (Gambetta, 2005) and, most recently, The Codes of the Underworld (Gambetta, 2009). [source] Futurology as Further Ideology: Reflections on Pryor's Millennium Survey of EconomistsAMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2000Patrick McGuire This comment is in response to Frederic L. Pryor (2000). "The Millennium Survey: How Economists View the U.S. Economy in the 21st Century."The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. 59 (January), pp. 3-33. [source] Understanding the changing role of public sector performance measurement in less developed countriesPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION & DEVELOPMENT, Issue 3 2010Sandra Tillema Abstract This article develops a framework for understanding changes in the demand for and supply of performance information in public sector organizations in less developed countries (LDCs). New Institutional Sociology (NIS) is used to argue that pressures from specific stakeholders stimulate organizations to produce particular performance information. The article distinguishes three groups of stakeholders (i.e. funding bodies, statutory boards and purchasers), and elaborates on the performance dimensions these stakeholders are interested in. The group of funding bodies, with their interest in financial performance information, used to be the most important group of stakeholders. However, statutory boards and purchasers are gaining importance as a result of recent public sector reforms, which include decentralization, marketization and the implementation of anti-corruption programs. As a consequence of pressures coming from these stakeholders, new performance dimensions, such as the quality and quantity of services and the political governance structure, will be added to organizations' performance measurement (PM) systems. Whether these and other,often more traditional financial,performance dimensions will be balanced and integrated throughout organizations depends on the power positions of the various stakeholders. The arguments presented in this article intend to stimulate public sector organizations in LDCs to design and redesign PM systems as a response to changing stakeholder interests. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Wisdom in Public Administration: Looking for a Sociology of Wise PracticePUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW, Issue 4 2008David Rooney This article explores a sociological account of practical wisdom in public administrations. Very little research on contemporary applications of wisdom exists, and what research there is has a cognitive bias, largely ignoring sociology. For public organizations to create the conditions for wise practice within themselves and within individual administrators, an understanding of the social relational structures and processes that build and sustain practical wisdom is crucial. Furthermore, given that there is an aesthetic dimension to practical wisdom, an aesthetics-based approach to sociology of organizational wisdom provides a useful starting point in this sociological project. Aesthetics raises important issues of communicative action and discourse that address social relations and their structures and processes. Finally, a research agenda that explores these structural and processual issues in public administration is canvassed. [source] Varieties of second modernity: the cosmopolitan turn in social and political theory and researchTHE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2010Ulrich Beck Abstract The theme of this special issue is the necessity of a cosmopolitan turn in social and political theory. The question at the heart of this introductory chapter takes the challenge of ,methodological cosmopolitanism', already addressed in a Special Issue on Cosmopolitan Sociology in this journal (Beck and Sznaider 2006), an important step further: How can social and political theory be opened up, theoretically as well as methodologically and normatively, to a historically new, entangled Modernity which threatens its own foundations? How can it account for the fundamental fragility, the mutability of societal dynamics (of unintended side-effects, domination and power), shaped by the globalization of capital and risks at the beginning of the twenty-first century? What theoretical and methodological problems arise and how can they be addressed in empirical research? In the following, we will develop this ,cosmopolitan turn' in four steps: firstly, we present the major conceptual tools for a theory of cosmopolitan modernities; secondly, we de-construct Western modernity by using examples taken from research on individualization and risk; thirdly, we address the key problem of methodological cosmopolitanism, namely the problem of defining the appropriate unit of analysis; and finally, we discuss normative questions, perspectives, and dilemmas of a theory of cosmopolitan modernities, in particular problems of political agency and prospects of political realization. [source] The British Journal of Sociology at sixtyTHE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2010Frances Heidensohn First page of article [source] The British Journal of Sociology in the 1960s: a discipline in fermentTHE BRITISH JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2010Richard Wright No abstract is available for this article. [source] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||