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Studies on societal path dependencies tend to focus on mechanisms that anchor and stabilize national trajectories while paying less attention to transnational interactions and multilevel governance. This paper explores processes of path transformation in societies that are presumed to have the characteristics of open systems. Two pairs of case studies are presented and compared. The first illustrates institutional change through collision, when a national path meets with another. The second describes the emergence of transnational institutional paths and the impact of that process on national institutions and their (potential) transformation. The results indicate that path transformation often stems from a gradual succession and combination of incremental steps and junctures – change is gradual but consequential. They also point to increasing co-evolutionary interaction between national path transformation and transnational path creation. This implies a need for analytical tools that are adapted to the analysis of multi-level, nested processes of institutionalization and de-institutionalization. The paper suggests that the concept of path generation allows for a better specification of the conditions for change in existing societal paths and for the emergence of new paths in the case of open systems than the concept of path dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that a satisfying structural account must be distinguished from an account that simply focuses on structures, paradoxically, a sound structural account must pay close attention to actors. Consideration of specific accounts of the Nicaraguan revolution supports this claim. The paper also suggests the plausibility of the observe argument that agenital accounts of revolution must attend closely to structures. Structural account is defined as one developing the thesis that specific structures have a significant impact on the likelihood of a successful social revolution. This structural thesis is stated in formal terms, particular accounts will differ regarding the specific structures stressed and in the degree of impact upon outcomes attributed to structures. An agenital account, on the other hand, seeks to show that revolutionaries are casually important for the occurrence of revolutions. The two approaches need not be mutually exclusive. In the broad form presented in the paper, the structural and agenital theses may seem toothless. But as soon as a theorist specify the sorts of structures that affect the probability of revolution, the degree to which that probability is structurally influenced or the possible impact of agency upon the probability, it debates on the pre-conditions of revolution.

This paper asks what a sociology of modernity could sensibly look life if it existed. Briefly, the paper follows Agnes Heller both in acknowledging the deep-seated crisis of representation and in insisting on the possibility to strive for an understanding of entire social formations over long periods of time. It starts by highlighting two features of this end of an era literature. First, in describing contemporary society the ephemeral, the fugitive, the fleeting, the contingent nature of the postmodern condition is emphasized. The present is distinguished from the past by being more in motion, less fixed, what was bound is set free, what was orderly and perspicuous becomes chaotic and undecipherable, what was taken for granted and for undoubtedly real has to be questioned and, often enough, assumes an air of pervasive unreality. The second part of this article is devoted to an assessment of the theoretical significance of postmodernity. As in the case of the historical claim, the author argues that there is a considerable significance, though often less in the exact terms of such works but rather in terms of a sensitizing with regard to issues that are neglected or repressed in a social science that often was all too modern.

Erving Goffman had a fullness of perspective on the social world, an inveterate taste for the texture of social reality. These qualities drew him into the orbit of the linguistic turn, and the companionship of linguists; yet he remained always his own man, as much a critics as anything else. From first to last his own vision of an intact sphere of reality governed his participation. It can be seen in his first paper to signal his involvement in a loose confederation at Berkeley in the early 1960s, one that became the basis of a continuing network of sociolinguistic activity. The paper, The Neglected Situation, was his contribution to a symposium at the 1963 meetings of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, California, and was published the next year in a special number of the American Anthropologist. In this paper, as in his conversation at the time, Erving welcomed the emerging attention to the social dimension of language, but issued a warning. Research that correlated this or that aspect of speech with this or that aspect of participant and setting would entail an infinite ingress. One would always be entering upon the social reality of speech without ever encompassing it. States of talk have their own constraints and configurations that are not reducible to partial correlation.

The paper places the model of the media field in the context of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's theory of fields, capital and habitus. It illustrates the media field approach by analyzing several field case studies. Through systematic comparison with other approaches to media research, it highlights the unique contributions offered by the field theory while pointing out some still unresolved difficulties. Bourdieu and associates developed a new paradigm for the sociology of journalism centered around the concept of the media field. Their basic thesis is that as journalism has become less autonomous from the economic field, its influence and pervasiveness have also increased. The news media serving as an agent of dominant power are undermining the autonomy of other spheres of cultural production and thus the optimal social conditions for the production of scientific knowledge and artistic innovation. In service of this intellectual project, Bourdieu and associates contribute to the Anglo-American tradition of news media research in various ways.

This article argues that the most significant central problems of sociology are inevitable, that they constitute necessary features of the discipline's epistemological and historical conditions of possibility. At the basis of the argument will be a reading of Michel Foucault's work on the location of the human sciences within a specific epistemological configuration and on the historical preconditions of their emergence. In particular, the article attempts to show that at the basis of the human sciences is a conception of man as both subject and object and that this dualism is a precondition of the field of inquiry. As such therefore, no resolution or synthesis of the dualism or duality may be located within the field of inquiry of the human sciences. To consider the conception of man as both subject and object, and the analogue of action and structure and their respectively derivative sociologies as a problem awaiting synthesis or resolution, is to pose for solution that which must remain insoluble within the terms of reference of the human sciences. The paper begins with a few comments on conventional conceptions of sociology's history and status as a science and then proceed to a discussion of a radically different conception derived from the work of Foucault.

This article presents information about several authors who have contributed papers to the present issue of the periodical "Theory & Society." Some of them are Mansoor Moaddel and Jon Shefner. Moaddel is Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University. He is currently working on a comparative project on determinants of ideological production in the Islamic world. With financial supports from the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation and Bank of Sweden Foundation, he is carrying out surveys of attitudes and value orientations of the national representative samples of the Islamic publics in Egypt, Iran and Jordan. Shefner is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee. In addition to researching urban politics in Latin America, he has recently completed a study of a university community partnership in New Orleans. He continues to study both, politics of the poor and their interactions with nongovernmental organizations and is currently working on a book discussing the impact of politics from below on Mexico's democratization process.