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The article analyzes the Amherst papers in relation to development of Parsons' theory. A careful analysis of the Amherst papers reveals that the basic ideas and philosophical principles that Parsons followed throughout his life were already in place, some more fully developed than others, yet forming an integrally coherent pattern to a surprising degree. The clear existence in Parsons's Amherst papers of a metatheoretical framework predating his later professional writing calls into question some still existing myths about radical breaks in the development of Parsons's theory. In one version of this mythology, Parsons began his theory as a voluntarist, then became a structural-functionalist, later moved on to become a systems-theorist and ended up as a social evolutionist. Despite such claims, Parsons always was a voluntarist, even during his so-called structural-functionalist middle period. The Amherst papers reveal an amazingly complex and logically coherent theoretical system-in the mind of a twenty-year-young man-and testify to an extraordinary scope of philosophical depth, and intellectual maturity.

This article comments on a paper by David Jenness, which focused on the efforts of the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) in organizing the social sciences in their own interest. The future of federal support for sociology will depend on the continued mobilization efforts of COSSA and upon public recognition of sociological contributions to the realization of two prime sets of values. Much has been written since 1981, when Reaganism became the guiding hand and official ideology at the federal level, of the need for new academic-industry partnerships. Most often, research training and subject-matter expertise were the initial factors to employment. Marketable skills opened opportunities that would have been shut to someone simply proclaiming sociology as his or her trade or profession. The virtues of a range of sociological skills are recognized much more readily: for information and intelligence, for systems analysis and design, for social trend analysis and forecasting, and in general for systematic scouting of the environment within which organized efforts in the public and private sectors operate, flourish, or decline. Herbert Costner once referred to this aspect of applied work as reconnaissance sociology.

The article focuses on the relevance of communication studies for human sciences. Communication studies is often proposed as a synthetic approach to the human sciences outright, an interdisciplinary inquiry capable of linking the researches of specialized human sciences to the philosophical foundations of the project of human scientific inquiry itself. The author says that from the standpoint of the relation between philosophy and the human sciences, the constitution of perception, institutions and thought by media of communication is the thesis proper to communication studies, the thesis from which its larger significance derives. According to the author, by describing the precise point at which a theory of communication diverges from a theory of scientific meaning, it is possible to note a significant convergence between phenomenology and a Marxist critique of a semiotic theory of language.

The article discusses economic and social theory of Talcott Parsons. Parsons's persistent attention to economic theory has been relatively neglected by critics of Parsons who, in attacking the alleged functionalism of Parsonian sociology, concentrated on the issues of value consensus and normative integration, believing that Parsons had relatively little interest in the economic base of society. This neglect of Parsons's economic sociology was probably intensified by the Marxist undercurrent of much so-called conflict theory. In recent years there has fortunately been considerable interest shown in Parsons's analysis of economic theory and more specifically in his economic sociology. At Amherst, Parsons came under the influence of the philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn, who prompted his students to consider broad questions relating to alternatives to industrial capitalist society and who created an educational environment within which students were involved in a general analysis of the social sciences. It was this engagement with institutional economics that marked Parsons's departure from biology into the social sciences as an academic career. Parsons was introduced to a broad spectrum of social theory relating to cultural and biological dimensions of human existence as explanations of social differentiation.

Predicting and modeling human behavior and finding trends within human decision-making processes is a major problem of social science. Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) is the fundamental strategic question in many game theory problems and real-world competitions. Finding the right approach to beat a particular human opponent is challenging. Here we use an AI (artificial intelligence) algorithm based on Markov Models of one fixed memory length (abbreviated as "single AI") to compete against humans in an iterated RPS game. We model and predict human competition behavior by combining many Markov Models with different fixed memory lengths (abbreviated as "multi-AI"), and develop an architecture of multi-AI with changeable parameters to adapt to different competition strategies. We introduce a parameter called "focus length" (a positive number such as 5 or 10) to control the speed and sensitivity for our multi-AI to adapt to the opponent's strategy change. The focus length is the number of previous rounds that the multi-AI should look at when determining which Single-AI has the best performance and should choose to play for the next game. We experimented with 52 different people, each playing 300 rounds continuously against one specific multi-AI model, and demonstrated that our strategy could win against more than 95% of human opponents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper gives a philosophical outline of the importance of plausible ontologies in the social sciences and argues how mechanisms and processes should be placed as the foundation in the social world. The argumentation is mainly based on a critical appraisal of the use of mechanisms and processes in the works of Norbert Elias, Charles Tilly, and Jon Elster. I start by elaborating on how inquiries of scientific interest evolve to shed light on cases, facts and the things that constitute such facts, whilst the actual explanation demands the description of mechanisms and processes. Basically, focusing on (co)variation and difference making is not sufficient to sustain claims of ontological plausibility and reasonableness. It is thus pointed out how the practices and proceedings of the social sciences can be ontologically enhanced by embracing the complementary roles of mechanisms plus processes together with difference making, as is performed in a special science such as biology, as well as is informally but promisingly pursued in the works of the discussed social scientists. While discussing their work, it is also argued that we should differentiate between processes and mechanisms in order to formalize this approach, which highlights the role of technologies and institutions as prime building blocks for social explanation. I conclude by presenting a claim that in taking seriously that the purported relations between beings and entities need to make discursive sense and historical sense, the social sciences will increase our cognitive success about the things of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on a computer game that shows humans prefer equality. James Fowler, associate political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, and his team designed a game to fine out the people's motive for punishment. They wanted to know whether people wanted to punish free loaders or that moderate-to-low earners resented the rich.

The scale development process is critical to building knowledge in human and social sciences. The present paper aimed (a) to provide a systematic review of the published literature regarding current practices of the scale development process, (b) to assess the main limitations reported by the authors in these processes, and (c) to provide a set of recommendations for best practices in future scale development research. Papers were selected in September 2015, with the search terms 'scale development' and 'limitations' from three databases: Scopus, PsycINFO, and Web of Science, with no time restriction. We evaluated 105 studies published between 1976 and 2015. The analysis considered the three basic steps in scale development: item generation, theoretical analysis, and psychometric analysis. The study identified ten main types of limitation in these practices reported in the literature: sample characteristic limitations, methodological limitations, psychometric limitations, qualitative research limitations, missing data, social desirability bias, item limitations, brevity of the scale, difficulty controlling all variables, and lack of manual instructions. Considering these results, various studies analyzed in this review clearly identified methodological weaknesses in the scale development process (e.g., smaller sample sizes in psychometric analysis), but only a few researchers recognized and recorded these limitations. We hope that a systematic knowledge of the difficulties usually reported in scale development will help future researchers to recognize their own limitations and especially to make the most appropriate choices among different conceptions and methodological strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Journal of Behavioral Medicine emerged 40 years ago as a part of a concerted effort to promote a greater understanding of health and illness through the integrated lenses of behavioral and biomedical sciences. The aim of this special series is to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Behavioral Medicine through state-of-the-science reviews synthesizing the origins, evolution, current status, and future directions of key aspects of the field. In this introduction, we outline the impetus for this special series and highlight the key themes across the included papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores whether the concept of social capital as popularized by Robert Putnam is a good social science concept. Taking Gerring's work on concept evaluation as the starting point, the paper first presents a set of criteria for conceptual 'goodness' and discusses how social capital performs on these criteria. It is argued that social capital eventually may be a good concept if it can be shown empirically to be a unidimensional concept. An empirical section therefore explores the validity of the unidimensionality assumption and rejects it in four separate tests at both the individual and aggregate level. We conclude that even if social capital has been a remarkably productive idea, it is not a good concept as most popular conceptualizations define social capital as several distinct phenomena or as phenomena that already have been conceptualized under other labels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how and why academics in different parts of the academy collaborate. In this paper we argue that: (1) There is a useful analytical distinction to be made between collaboration (fluid and expressive) and Collaboration (concrete and instrumental); (2) These two are not mutually exclusive and their use varies between disciplines; and (3) This distinction is an informative one for policy making that aims to encourage collaboration. Two interview based studies were used to explore the differences in collaborative practices across disciplines. The first was small and confined to a single university (n = 36) and the second was a larger study conducted in three countries (n = 274). Cross tabulations and analysis of open ended questions demonstrated many differences across the humanities, sciences and social sciences in collaboration. The C/collaboration distinction proves useful in understanding different disciplinary approaches to research, and in pointing to implications for research policy and funding. Attempts to increase collaborative research through Collaboration only, may well have deleterious effects on both collaboration and Collaboration. Research policy and funding should bear these differences in mind when seeking to stimulate collaborative research, so as to gain better outcomes across a range of disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regression models with a large number of predictors arise in diverse fields of social sciences and natural sciences. For proper interpretation, we often would like to identify a smaller subset of the variables that shows the strongest information. In such a large size of candidate predictors setting, one would encounter a computationally cumbersome search in practice by optimizing some criteria for selecting variables, such as AIC, $$C_{P}$$ and BIC, through all possible subsets. In this paper, we present two efficient optimization algorithms vis Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach for searching the global optimal subset. Simulated examples as well as one real data set exhibit that our proposed MCMC algorithms did find better solutions than other popular search methods in terms of minimizing a given criterion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses ethnomethodology's program in relation to the phenomenological life-world analysis of Alfred Schutz. A recent publication of Garfinkel's early writings sheds new light on how he made use of phenomenological reflections in order to create a new sociological approach. Garfinkel used Schutz's life-world analysis as a source of inspiration, called for 'misreading' in the sense of an alternate reading and developed a new, empirical approach to the analysis of social order which he called 'ethnomethodology'. Ethnomethodologists usually acknowledge the historical importance of Schutz but emphasize that Garfinkel succeeded to overcome the limitations of phenomenological analyses and moved beyond. This view has spread above all in the Anglosaxon countries. In German sociology, Schutz's life-world analysis still has a much stronger standing than ethnomethodology and is interpreted as a systematic whole. Following Luckmann, it is discussed as a protosociological foundation of the methodology of social sciences or, following Srubar, as a philosophical anthropology with two poles: a subjective and a social, pragmatic pole. Both versions claim to analyze the meaningful constitution of the social world, to serve as a foundation of sociological methodology and to provide guidelines for an 'adequate' sociology. While Garfinkel used phenomenological concepts for sociological analysis, Luckmann clearly distinguishes the two: you either do phenomenology (protosociology) or you do sociology (a theoretically guided, empirical sociology of knowledge). This paper describes the present-day debate in German sociology and compares ethnomethodology's program with these interpretations of Schutz's life-world analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes to discuss the issue of civicness in the governance of social services by analyzing policy changes relative to the regulation and governance of social services in Europe. The empirical analysis is structured around the concept of “governance regime.” The paper shows that modernization processes within the field of social services in Europe develop along two radically different regulative conceptions reflected into two different governance regimes: market-based or competitive governance vs civic-based or partnership governance. The governance of social services in Europe appears to take place within a mix between two ideal-typical governance regimes: the market-based and partnership-based governance regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the escape/intervention concept as it is used in the agent growing environment framework. The Escape and Intervention is used in many multi-disciplinary areas, including agent research, artificial intelligence, groupware and workflow, process support, software engineering, and social sciences. Based on an ontological perspective, this paper explains how an interaction-oriented agent architecture and language (used for modelling, simulation, and development) makes use of an interaction pattern that is inspired from social contexts seen as multi-agent systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews applications in computer science that decision theorists have addressed for years, discusses the requirements posed by these applications that place great strain on decision theory/social science methods, and explores applications in the social and decision sciences of newer decision-theoretic methods developed with computer science applications in mind. The paper deals with the relation between computer science and decision-theoretic methods of consensus, with the relation between computer science and game theory and decisions, and with “algorithmic decision theory.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the relationship between internationalisation, mobility, quality and equality in the context of recent developments in research policy in the European Research Area (ERA). Although these developments are specifically concerned with the growth of research capacity at European level, the issues raised have much broader relevance to those concerned with research policy and highly skilled mobility. The paper draws on a wealth of recent research examining the relationship between mobility and career progression with particular reference to a recently completed empirical study of doctoral mobility in the social sciences (Ackers et al. Doctoral Mobility in the Social Sciences. Report to the NORFACE ERA-Network, 2007). The paper is structured as follows. The first section introduces recent policy developments including the European Charter for Researchers and Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers and the European Commission’s Green Paper on the ERA. The discussion focuses on concerns around the definition of ‘mobility’ and the tendency (in both policy circles and academic research) to conflate different forms of mobility and to equate these with notions of excellence or quality. Scientific mobility is shaped as much by ‘push’ factors (limited opportunity) as it is by the ‘draw’ of excellence. Scientists are exercising a degree of ‘choice’ within a specific and individualised framework of constraints. The following sections consider some of the ‘professional’ and ‘personal’ factors shaping scientific mobility and the influence that these have on the relationship between mobility, internationalisation and excellence. The paper concludes that mobility is not an outcome in its own right and must not be treated as such (as an implicit indicator of internationalisation). To do so contributes to differential opportunity in scientific labour markets reducing both efficiency and equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the widest elaborations of generativity today is the theoretical model proposed by McAdams and de St. Aubin. This model has not yet been tested completely, that is only some of its components and their relations have been tested. The main reasons for such an empirical status of the model are inadequately clear operationalizations of the components of the model. After our previous research, which include adaptation of scales for measuring of some key components of model, generative care and generative action (Lacković-Grgin et al., Suvremena Psihologija, 5, 9, 2002; Lacković-Grgin, Zbirka psihologijskih skala i upitnika, Zadar: University of Zadar, 2004; Tucak et al., Generativna briga i generativno djelovanje u odraslih osoba u Hrvatskoj i Sloveniji, XVII Dani Ramira i Zorana Bujasa, Summaries, 98, 2005), as well as operationalization of so called belief in species component (which is a component of Philosophy about human nature) (Ćubela Adorić et al., Philosophies of Human Nature in Adolescents and Adults, 7th Alps-Adria Conference in Psychology, Abstracts, 167, 2005), in this paper we have tried to evaluate life goals questionnaire. This questionnaire tried to measure the other component of the model—inner desire. In that way we could realize the main goal of this paper, research of how important are the evaluations in the prediction of generative action in Croatian and Slovenian adults. Generative action is under the strong influence of cultural demands and inner desires. There are more sociological and economical indications about the differences in expected social development in countries like Croatia and Slovenia. Because of the fact that in the last decade Slovenia has been developed more than Croatia, we could expect that this could also be manifested in assessment of importance of some areas of life, which are relevant for generative action (e.g., work, marriage, free time), for life goals of agency and communion, as well as for generative care as a possible predictor of generative action. The greater differences were obtained in some predictors of generative action (e.g. importance of job, importance of free time, goals of agency and communion), as well as in their predictive importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been renewed interest over the past 5 years among sociologists in empirically examining the status of sociology in high school. The few studies that have recently been conducted, however, have focused almost exclusively on high school sociology teachers. The nature and structure of the courses themselves have been largely ignored. Given the American Sociological Association’s recent attempts to develop and implement an Advanced Placement course, it seems especially important to examine the characteristics of existing sociology courses. This paper uses the results of a national mail survey to describe and discuss three aspects of the nature and structure of a random sample of sociology courses that were offered during the 2005–06 school year: instructional materials and pedagogical resources, teaching techniques, and course content. I demonstrate that these aspects of the courses look remarkably similar across the country: Teachers rely overwhelmingly on standard introductory textbooks to structure their courses. They are also apt to utilize supplemental materials from textbook publishers and from newspapers and newsmagazines, and to use a combination of lecture and discussion in their sociology classes. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper revisits and reconsiders the prevailing assumption or conventional wisdom about the association or affinity between Puritanism and liberty in historically Puritan societies, especially America and to a lesser extent Great Britain. It argues and elaborates on that the “Puritanism and liberty” equation or link is a naïve assumption, speculative explanation or cherished liberal-democratic mythology analogous and related to, as well as even more enduring and prevalent than, what contemporary sociologists call the “beloved myth” of an elective affinity or connection between Calvinism and modern capitalism. The paper aims to fill in a void in the current sociological literature in which attempts to question and reveal the Puritanism and liberty equivalence as a myth are relatively infrequent. Overall, the paper aims to contribute to the existing literature on the relationships between Puritanism, Calvinism and other ascetic Protestantism on the one hand and modern democratic society on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Uchendu’s ethnographic study entitled ‹the Igbo of Southeast Nigeria’ with a view to interrogating its relevance in explaining the Igbo of the contemporary time. Chapter by chapter examination of the book shows that although written more than four decades ago, it is still relevant in its account of the continuity and change in Igboland. For instance, although marriage in the traditional way is still the most cherished and popular, church and court marriages are acceptable. Those who can afford it can go through the three rituals. The paper notes that although phenomenal changes in population growth, infrastructure and human resources development, modern economic activities, etc., have taken place, the very essence of Igbo world view, belief system, Igbo hospitality, marriage, kinship and non-kinship networks, Igbo traditional ways in government and affinity to fatherland as captured in the book, to a large extent, still holds true of the Igbo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How has sociology evolved over the last 40 years? In this paper, we examine networks built on thousands of sociology-relevant papers to map sociology's position in the wider social sciences and identify changes in the most prominent research fronts in the discipline. We find first that sociology seems to have traded centrality in the field of social sciences for internal cohesion: sociology is central, but not nearly as well bounded as neighboring disciplines such as economics or law. Internally, sociology appears to have moved away from research topics associated with fundamental social processes and toward social-problems research. We end by discussing strategies for extending this work to wider science production networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conversation analysis (CA) is now what Kuhn once called a normal science. It has a discernible body of concepts, methods, and recognizable objects of analysis. More importantly, its considerable archive of accumulated findings has a very high degree of redundancy–in the positive sense that researchers have continually replicated the findings of their colleagues. It ought, then, in every respect, to be the envy of the social sciences generally and not easily dismissed as an abstruse and recondite branch of language studies or “discourse analysis” concerned with merely trivial fragments of recorded talk as such. To help CA be respecified in this way, the present paper unearths a relatively unknown part of its history in the partial book manuscript of Harvey Sacks’s Aspects of the Sequential Organization of Conversation, circulated in mimeo to colleagues in 1970. There we find innumerable appeals to the now well-recognized fact that the practical actions of everyday talk have significant, culture-wide, formal structures that are the proper objects of the discipline. Or, in Sacks’s own terms, seemingly insignificant mundane events are generated by a powerful (if not always intuitively accessible) social “machinery.” The purpose of this paper is, then, to extract a sample of these aspects of Sacks’s Aspects in order to illustrate, sketch, or give a preliminary sense of just that point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I show how the consideration of the role of the intellectual in democratic society informs an understanding of the critical project of the sociology of culture. This leads to a review of general sociological approaches to the problem of culture as they contribute to a critical project, suggesting the need for a distinctive conceptualization of the object of inquiry, “culture as the arts and sciences, broadly understood.” This approach requires making crucial distinctions, as well as studying key correlations. The distinctions are between: (1) Culture and Ideology, (2) High Culture and Autonomous Culture, and (3) Power and Knowledge. The correlations are between: (1) The Arts and Sciences, and Everyday Life, and (2) The Arts and Sciences, and Politics. At a time when the alternative to globalization is far from certain (this is what I get from the implicit debate between Calhoun and Beck), when the grounds for critique seem to be based on little more than nostalgic utopianism (this is how I understand Touraine’s prognosis of the end of society) or nostalgic pessimism (see Bauman) or hopeful pragmatism (Beck), I believe it is necessary to get closer to the pits of critical reflection and creative action in the cultural sphere. Casanova points to this in his consideration of religion in public life, even globalized religion (Casanova). Sassen () suggests that we must understand globalization and its alternatives in their concrete local manifestations. Here, I would like to investigate secular alternatives, attempting to localize the critique of the global, showing how the traditions and projects of culture as the arts and sciences inform a collective intelligence with democratic deliberative dimensions (Pierre Levy). This is a call to keep alive critique in the postmodern circumstance, as part of an incomplete project of critical reflection and democratic action, a call for a sociology of culture as a key instrument for a renewed sociological imagination. The paper is centered on dialogue, (the relative autonomy of) culture, and critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates inequality in criminal victimization in the United States over the past quarter century. By analyzing data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, it shows that the crime drop since the early 1970s has benefited upper-income households much more than the poor, so that criminal victimization has become more concentrated among the poor (particularly in the area of nonstranger violence). The paper then decomposes this trend statistically in order to investigate factors that may explain it. That analysis finds that demographic changes in each quintile explain a significant share of the growing concentration of criminal victimization among the poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Human Development Index (HDI) implicitly defines "human development" and ranks countries accordingly. To elucidate the HDI's meaning of "human development," the paper examines the sensitivity of the HDI to changes in its components, namely social indicators of education, longevity and standard of living. The HDI is next compared with two alternatives, the Life Quality Index (LQI) and a Time Allocation lndex (TAI) developed in this paper from the HDI's components. Also considered is the likely uncertainly in the HDI and what it means for HDI rankings. It is concluded that the HDI's weighting of the gross domestic product is in good agreement with peoples' preferences as revealed in the LQI and the TAI; further, that the HDI places many times greater weight on education than is indicated by peoples' allocation of time in developed countries. Literacy is accorded very high weight in the HDI, but its measure is unreliable. The HDI ranking of highly developed nations is so close and so uncertain that it is meaningless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of the social sciences into long-term ecological research is an urgent priority. To address this need, a group of social, earth, and life scientists associated with the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network have articulated a conceptual framework for understanding the human dimensions of ecological change for the LTER Network. This framework explicitly advocates that what is often divided into “natural” and human systems be considered a single, complex social-ecological system (SES). In this paper, we propose a list of core social science research areas, concepts, and questions; identify the need for multiscale investigatory frameworks crucial for implementing integrated research; and suggest practical approaches for integration. In sum, this paper is a general outline for empirical and cross-site research projects where investigators agree that bringing together social, biological, and earth scientists can lead to synthetic approaches and a unified understanding of the mechanisms regulating SES. Although the motivation for this goal is specific to the LTER Network and similar projects, we believe that the issues and ideas presented here are widely applicable to other interdisciplinary SES studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some important work (Bulmer, Harvey) in the history of sociology questions whether the Chicago School should be identified with qualitative as opposed to more quantitative, statistical, and correlational methods. This paper will examine whether this characterization is a "myth" or whether there was some real basis for this association of Chicago sociology with qualitative research and a broader epistemological stance critical of radical neo-positivism. It does so by utilizing Floyd Nelson House's (1893-1975) The Development of Sociology (1936) as a primary source for answering these questions. House received his Ph.D. from Chicago in 1924, taught there in 1925-1926, and continued to identify himself as a Chicagoan after his appointment to the University of Virginia. Although his book provides a long historical survey, House paid ample attention to the development of American sociology. He frequently drew attention to the differences between Chicago sociology and that produced by the First Columbia School of Sociology founded by the radical neo-positivist Franklin H. Giddings. These differences focused on methods and epistemological stances. House identified himself as part of a Chicago "Group of Five" (including Park, Blumer, Eubank, and Bogardus) which questioned "concrete sociological research" in the absence of careful conceptualization. The contrast between Columbia and Chicago sociology in both descriptive and evaluative terms is, in fact, a leitmotif of what appears to be on the surface an impartial textbook. This paper concludes that the depiction of the Chicago School as welcoming to qualitative methods and much less inclined to radical neo-positivism than the First Columbia School is not a latter-day construction of neo or "wannabe" Chicagoans but has its roots in contemporary developments of the Chicago School in its heyday of the 1920s and 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents instructions for all the authors of the journal "Human Studies." The periodical is a quarterly journal dedicated primarily to advancing the dialogue between philosophy and the human sciences. In particular, such issues as the logic of inquiry, methodology, epistemology and foundational issues in the human sciences exemplified by original empirical, theoretical and philosophical investigations are addressed. The journal prefers the submission of papers in LaTeX, however, papers submitted in AMSTex, LAMSTeX and for conventional typesetting is also accepted. Manuscripts should be typewritten on A4 or US Letter bond paper, one side only, leaving enough margin on all sides to permit remarks by the reviewers. Subheadings should be in, lower case and capital letters and they must be identified by the use of numbers separated by decimals to indicate sections and subsections. References to books, journal papers, articles in collections and conference or workshop proceedings, and technical reports should be collected in a list at the end of the paper and listed in alphabetical order.

This paper directs itself to the impact of American social science on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal on the role of education and social science in "modern" industrial democracy. After a brief sketch of the Myrdals' role in the development of Swedish welfare reforms and of their intellectual contacts in the United States during the 1930's, the paper outlines four theoretical "dilemmas" of "modernity" to the solution of which education and social research was seen to contribute: the relationships between facts and values, the individual and the collective, child rearing and social change, and theory and practice. The paper concludes by tracing the articulation of these themes in the Social Democratic Party school reform proposals of 1948. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper falls under the rubric of the sociology of knowledge, which bridges the gap between phenomenological philosophy and the human sciences (Berger et al., 1969). It presents an empirical investigation of the communicative construction of psychotherapeutic reality. I examine therapeutic talk and psychotherapists' reconstructions of the transition from state socialism in Germany in 1989. In both instances I show how psychotherapists' commonly shared interpretative conventions and rules of reasoning produce typical accounts. The first part of the paper shows how certain interpretative conventions and rules of reasoning organize therapeutic talk and interaction in general. The second part focuses on how the interpretative conventions typical of therapy also inform psychotherapists' interpretations of the transition from state socialism. [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.

This paper presents a case study of a psychiatric intervention as an example of an institutional ethnography of psychiatric work. Institutional ethnography, a mode of inquiry outlined by Dorothy Smith (1987), is conceived here as an approach to the analysis of work in institutions as the contingent, local and context-bound insertion of a particular "case" - a patron, a pupil, a client, a patient - into both institutional and other social (e. g. gender, class) relations. The case presented in this paper, shows how a psychiatric factual account is the outcome of a process of the recognition, and/or the production, of "mentionables," followed by the documentary interpretation of mentionables as symptoms. Subsequently it is demonstrated that, and how, the recognition of mentionables depends on non-professional interpretations which by their nature express other social (such as gender, class, etc.) relations. This description of psychiatric diagnostic work is produced by means of a method of discourse analysis that consists of the juxtaposition of the various institutional texts (the two reports) with the transcript of the interview. An analysis of only the interview data would undoubtedly have resulted in some insights about psychiatric interviewing but would have shown neither how the interview functioned as a stage in the institutional process of (re)writing reports nor how ideological evaluations entered the diagnostic process. On the other hand, an analysis of only the two reports would have resulted in some insights about psychiatric reporting but would not have shown how these reports were produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As researchers, we cannot be outside society and thus activities such as "science," or "objectivity" are striated with procedures for minimizing or celebrating the presence of the researcher in the research product. Our recognition of the situated character of scientific knowledge is the context in which questions about the researchers‘ relation to the group s/he studies have arisen. The paper begins with a review of the Insider/Outsider debate which circles around the researcher‘s relation to those she studies. Where the researcher enters the research site as an Insider - someone whose biography (gender, race, class, sexual orientation and so on) gives her a lived familiarity with the group being researched - that tacit knowledge informs her research producing a different knowledge than that available to the Outsider - a researcher who does not have an intimate knowledge of the group being researched prior to their entry into the group. This paper describes the research issues that arise and the various strategies researchers have used to manage them. The argument then shifts to query the social boundaries implicit in the construction of research Insiders and Outsiders. Reflecting on research that explored mothering for schooling, the article shows that researchers are rarely Insiders or Outsiders. Rather, research is constructed in a relationship with many Others. The interaction of individual biography and social location shape the research relation in complex ways which undercut the common-sense translation of historical familiarity into epistemological privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay describes institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, and introduces a collection of papers which make distinctive contributions to the development of this novel form of investigation. Institutional ethnography is presented as a research strategy which emerges from Smith‘s wide-ranging explorations of the problematic of the everyday world. Smith‘s conception of the everyday world as problematic involves a critical departure from the concepts and procedures of more conventional sociologies. She argues for an alternative sociology which begins with the standpoint of the actor in everyday life, rather than from within a professional sociological discourse aligned with the society‘s ruling institutions. The familiar sociologies of everyday life do not suffice for this purpose, since they deal with local settings and social worlds, but stop short of examining how these are knitted into broader forms of social organization. In contrast, institutional ethnography examines how the scenes of everyday life are shaped by forms of social organization which cannot be fully grasped from within those scenes. The principal tasks of institutional ethnography include describing the coordination of activities in the everyday world, discovering how ideological accounts define those activities in relation to institutional imperatives, and examining the broader social relations in which local sites of activity are embedded. The four papers which follow demonstrate that specific contributions to institutional ethnography can be made in relation to a wide array of topics, methods, and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an analysis of double hermeneutics in the human sciences, a distinction between a ’’weak‘‘ and a ’’strong‘‘ rhetorical analysis of human-scientific research is introduced, taking account of the self-reflective character of hermeneutic interpretation. The paper argues that there are three hermeneutic topics in the research process for human-scientific experience, which are associated with applying specific rhetorical tools. The three topics are described under the following rubrics: (a) bridging the gap between ’’experience-near‘‘ and ’’experience-distant‘‘ concepts; (b) achieving integrity of the cultural objects dispersed in different interpretive strategies; and (c) taking into consideration that an important task of hermeneutic interpretation in human-scientific research is to give an account of the object‘s immanent narrative coherence. The paper is written in the conviction that a kind of re-methodologization of philosophical hermeneutics which does not rehabilitate epistemological foundationalism can provide a new philosophical identity to the human sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to show the complementarity between phenomenology and physical education as human sciences, and discusses how a consideration of this relation might inform the questions we ask and the methods we use in our research and teaching. We enter the common ground shared by phenomenology and physical education by way of three sensitizing concepts: lived experience, intersubjectivity, and 'insiders' stories. Using exam- pies from physical education and phenomenology, the paper shows the connections between these two increasingly compatible partners, emphasizes the primary connection - the body - and shows the practical and heuristic applications of phenomenology in the lifeworld of physical education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the author in this paper is to examine patterns of collaboration more systematically by analyzing 45 multi-party arguments out of a total of 75 that were gleaned from videotapes of unsupervised reading groups in a first-grade classroom. Fifty-four children from eight groups in three classrooms of one elementary school participated in the study. The subjects were Caucasian, native speakers of English and from middle class American families. This paper has aimed to remedy a neglect of multi-party disputes by addressing how those involved in a two-party argument may collaborate with others who are co-present. Collaboration is a complex phenomenon. In the first place, one have seen that disputes, although initially produced by two parties, do not consist simply of two sides. Rather, given one party's displayed position, stance, or claim, another party can produce opposition by simply aligning against that position or by aligning with a counterposition. This means that parties can dispute a particular position for different reasons and by different means. It is therefore possible for several parties to serially oppose another's claim without achieving collaboration. A second complexity, then, is just that collaboration is a negotiated phenomenon.

After a review of comparable degree productivity among several social and behavioral sciences, this paper concludes that sociology was uniquely affected by forces that lowered both the production of B.A.'s, M.A.'s, and Ph.D.'s and the quality of its graduate students. From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, sociology suffered drastic declines in student numbers and quality. The increased careerism among students apparently accounts for a substantial portion of this decline, but through a very concrete mechanism: the expansion of business programs. The paper suggests that perhaps an absence of a serious commitment to teaching scientific sociology accounts for the loss of quality, since applied sciences have fared much better than has sociology. The recent ASA Task Force recommendations for curriculum redesign are reviewed, and a call is issued for revitalizing the scientific component of undergraduate sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an applied sociology of social problems that encompasses concern with the definition of problems and the conditions defined as problematic. The literature on applied sociology focuses on social problems, but exhibits no concern with the social definition of problems, an issue that should be of primary concern according to the constructionist perspective on social problems. I propose an applied research orientation that is capable of assessing the definition of a problem as well as describing the condition defined as problematic. I illustrate the proposed orientation by discussing an applied study of the people who inhabit the streets in Santa Cruz, California. The study succeeded in redefining those people as streetpeople instead of as transients, but not as part of the new poor. The paper considers the implications of assessing the definition of a problem for policy development, the factors that constrain the redefinition of a problem, and other issues of general relevance. The paper concludes by underscoring the importance of definitional processes and politics, and indicating the prospects of an applied sociology of social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many sociologists believe that behavioral sociology is alien to traditional sociological thought, and some have questioned its legitimacy as a sociological perspective. This paper takes the position that behavioral sociology is very much in accord with basic tenets of sociology. The belief that it is not results from misunderstanding and confusion about the foundations and practice of behavioral sociology. Three key concerns about behavioral sociology are addressed: (1) the subject matter of behavioral sociology and its distinction from behavioral psychology; (2) the unexplained "givens" of behavioral sociology (the origins of existing reward systems), and (3) the concern that behaviorists view human behavior as mechanistic and unfeeling. The paper concludes that many differences between behavioral sociology and other sociological perspectives have been exaggerated, that behavioral sociology does exhibit most traditional characteristics of the discipline, and that the concern with the legitimacy of behavioral theory in sociology has obscured the one significant difference that does exist disagreement over the goals and conduct of a science of human behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U S environmental law requires that environmental impact statements make "integrated use" of the social sciences in identifying the impacts of certain new developments, and requires that decisionmakers give "appropriate consideration" to the impacts which are identified. Despite this fact, sociological expertise is severely underrepresented in the impact statement process--not only in the final decisions, but in the impact statements themselves. This paper draws attention to the existing situation, and offers several suggestions for improving the sociological content of impact statements in the future. The paper's final section examines potential implications of increased sociological involvement in impact assessments, it concludes that there is a good deal that could be promising about improved (and genuinely "social") impact assessments. Not only could they exert an increased influence on policy outcomes, but they hold the potential to contribute to baste sociology as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a review and discussion of the two most common ways sociologists distinguish sociology from common sense in their constant dental of the perennial charge that "sociology is just common sense" Sociologists routinely exaggerate the differences between sociology and common sense by insisting that common sense is (1) false and (2) contradictory. These responses are unsatisfactory, incomplete, and often untrue. Each of these points is discussed and supported by illustrative examples from a wide range of sociological literature. The paper proposes that sociologists' handling of the sociology/common sense issue is a self-serving ideology designed to mystify their audiences in an effort to monopolize their role as experts on social life and to protect their professional autonomy. The paper ends by referring the reader to published materials' which deal more adequately with the similarities and dissimilarities of sociology and common sense and by supporting the thesis that sociology must combine the two types of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues, by way of empirical example, that the long-accepted contention that participant-observation research can best be accomplished by strangers who become like natives is by no means the only or even best approach. Rather, natives can be trained to distance themselves from their own group, making use of inherently objective sociological and anthropological perspectives. Such natives-as-strangers are more likely to be cognizant of nuances in the cultural life being studied. Using the example of the author's research among Jews, the paper also outlines some of the risks of this native-as-stranger approach, foremost among them being the tendencies to take too much for granted and to become alienated from one's native group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I have attempted to present, without too much violation of their original intent by my own interjections, a balance of viewpoints between those who maintain that creative sociology is conservative and those who claim that it is revolutionary (a) in the Kuhnian sense of paradigm change and (b) in the political sense.
Is it possible, on the basis of the fairly representative sample of views presented here to answer the question posed in the title of this paper: "Creative Sociology": Conservative or Revolutionary? Do the spokesmen for each side provide adequate evidence upon which one may decide? With regard to the issue of paradigm change, the answer is "no." If, as appears to be the case, a group of theorists claim to have developed a revolutionary paradigm, which will replace existing paradigms, then the burden of responsibility for support of their claim must rest on them. So far, they have not provided support which makes it possible to accept or deny their claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a uniform test of linearity against threshold effects in the quantile regression framework. The test is based on the supremum of the Wald process over the space of quantile and threshold parameters. We establish the limiting null distribution of the test statistic for stationary weakly dependent processes, and propose a simulation method to approximate the critical values. The proposed simulation method makes the test easy to implement. Monte Carlo experiments show that the proposed test has good size and reasonable power against non-linear threshold models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because wellbeing is a multi-varied and dynamic phenomenon, social scientists need to better understand how different aspects of people's wellbeing are tied together and how these ties differ between individuals at one point in time and within individuals over time. The paper outlines a general model that considers the multidimensional structure of wellbeing. We utilize the potential of latent variable modelling on a unique Swedish database: the Panel Survey of Ageing and the Elderly (PSAE). An inclusive and flexible model that considers the interactions between semi-autonomous domains (material resources, health, psychosocial factors, lifestyle, etc.) is developed. Our empirical study is based on cross-sectional PSAE data and focuses on people 55 years or older (N = 5,374). The analysis takes advantage of recent developments in statistical theory in the field of latent variable modelling to bring about a more dynamic and theory confirming analysis of a multifaceted phenomenon such as wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]