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Through organizational case studies conducted at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in China and Central European University in Hungary, this paper examines academic culture and citizenship in societies transitioning from communist to market-driven social and economic structures. The article presents a new model of citizenship, representing types of citizenship along the dimensions of locally informed to globally informed and individualist to collectivist. Implications emphasize the hybridization of academic culture and a reinterpretation of cosmopolitan professional identity in faculty life, expanding the concept from Gouldner's focus on disciplinary loyalty to commitments in a global sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the close resemblances evident in their major works, their critical stance and their politics, C. Wright Mills and Alvin Gouldner have received strikingly different responses from their sociological peers, and they now occupy very different places in the collective memory of the discipline. This intriguing discrepancy provides the basis here for a comparative case study that examines both ongoing commemorative practices and historical evidence. This paper shows how the sociological community has frequently and approvingly commemorated Mills through introductory textbooks, as well as reading lists for doctoral comprehensive examinations, awards in Mills' honor and biographies of Mills, while doing much less to preserve and promote the memory of Gouldner and his contributions to the field. In an effort to attain a better understanding of such differences, I compare the prescriptions that each advocated for the discipline, especially as these are expressed in Mills' Sociological Imagination and Gouldner's Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. The analysis emphasizes how Mills explicitly sought to move beyond sociology, in a narrow academic sense, and called for well-honed empirical endeavors with relevance for a variety of publics, whereas Gouldner proceeded largely as an academic theorist who demanded sociological-theoretical reform. Unlike Mills, he did not breach the gap between academia and the general public. These findings illustrate an apparent paradox, namely, that American sociology in the twenty-first century may reserve its most esteemed positions for internal critics who advocate movement beyond its contemporary confines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section introduces a series of articles on financing sociological research. The late Alvin Gouldner presented us with a fundamental paradox that those who supply the greatest resources for the institutional development of sociology are precisely those who most distort its quest for knowledge. The problem of financing sociological research is not the burden of individual researchers, it is the challenge to a discipline and a profession that must take account of a shifting cultural-political climate and be accountable to a restive public. The paper by Martin Bulmer examines the unique role of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, under the directorship of Breadsley Ruml, in distributing relatively large amounts of money for social research during the 1920s. Highlighting the entry of more direct federal government support for basic social science research, Roberta Balstand Miller's paper, The Social Sciences and the Politics of Science: the 1940s, examines the debate about the inclusion of the social sciences in the legislation that established the National Science Foundation.

This article is an attempt to evaluate the contribution of the late Erving Goffman to the field of Sociology. In doing so I have attempted to document some of the main commentaries upon Coffman's work — especially those of A. Dawe and A.W. Gouldner — and to evaluate their validity. This paper is presented within the framework of a general overview of Goffman's work and an elaboration of some of the salient themes within it. The intention of the author is to free Goffman from some of the crude overgeneralizations that his colleagues have used in evaluating his writings. In particular, I have attempted to show, in general terms, how Goffman's work is sensitive to ‘structural’ as well as ‘situational’ concerns and also to class, hierarchy and power. It is argued that Goffman's importance has been underestimated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the work of Alvin Ward Gouldner as a social theorist. The theory behind the journal Theory and Society is of what Gouldner saw as the social requisites of rational dialogues on human affairs. And this theory of what rationality requires of its human milieu derives, in turn, from what was perhaps the main empirical find in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. Now if, as Gouldner argues, personal experience is the arbiter of social theory, then the unacknowledged dogmas which pervade the experience will hugely influence the formulation and especially the acceptance or rejection of ostensibly scientific hypothesis. It was his conclusion, in other words, that total systems of sociological theory like Marxism and Parsonian structural-functionalism are so vulnerable to criticism that their passionate embrace by intelligent people is explicable not so much on logical as on sociological and historical grounds. All in all, the key question of sociology, as Gouldner saw it, was the age-old problem of theory and practice; and the first step toward solving it was creating new theoretical collectives. His work on how and why social theories are produced and accepted proceeded on two fronts: logical analysis of the problems posed by the theories themselves and sociological analysis of the specific theories and theorists in situ.

The article examines sociologist Alvin Gouldner's analysis from the standpoint of these contemporary analyses of factory life--acknowledging, of course that Marxism was much less developed at the time Gouldner was writing. In exposing different types of bureaucratic rules and elaborating them into patterns, Gouldner mounts his attack on the view of bureaucracy as a juggernaut of history, relentlessly eating away at the few remaining freedoms. Gouldner's own analysis suggests that the adoption of a representative pattern would imply a much greater harmony of interests than actually exists. He does not examine the nature of underlying conflict that leads to the withdrawal of consent and little motivation to work, which in turn necessitate rules. To put it another way, the mock bureaucracy and the punishment-centered bureaucracy are not functional equivalents, in that their conditions of existence reflect both a different balance of class forces and a different set of technological and efficiency imperatives. As Gouldner argues in his paper on Organizational Analysis, ego's continued conformity to the role expectations of alter produces system disequilibrium, because the value of conformity diminishes as alter takes it for granted. But the costs of forcing Marxian ideas into the framework of a general theory of group tensions are high indeed: for what is lost, as before, is Marx's specific theory of capitalism.

This paper examines the gradual emergence of the theory of the New Class out of sociologist Alvin Gouldner's prior work. The most striking feature of Gouldner's work, taken as a whole is its iconoclasm. Thus, he rejected professionalism in sociology, as well as the party line in Marxism and objectivism in them both. His dichotomous definition of intellectuals in The Future of Intellectuals, as both a speech community and as a cultural bourgeoise is an attempt to express this double identity at a general theoretical level. Gouldner's assessment of the repression of Marxism is implied in his early work on bureaucracy. On the whole, even given his iconoclasm, Gouldner remains loyal to the ideal of a scientific and effective sociology. By the late sixties, however, Gouldner had begun to distinguish two theoretical traditions in Marxism. One source of the reflexive impulse is doubtless the perception of a scientifically inexplicable gap between available data and accepted theory. He first begins to examine the connection between social theory and the profession of sociology in a critical way in his well-known Anti-Minotaur essay. His specific contribution to the New Class theory is his attempt to fuse this rich tradition with the sociology of professions, the sociology of science, the thesis of the managerial revolution, human capital theory and a theory of linguistic segregation.

This paper critically examines Alvin Ward Gouldner's contribution to the theory of the New Class, focusing on two major propositions from The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. The place intellectuals occupy in the social structure was for Gouldner a life-long concern. These two intellectual concerns are: first, in the sociology of sociology, the question of whether objectivity is possible while reality is mediated by speech and is interpreted by a theorist who is not value free but partisan; and second, in the sociology of Marxism, the question of the effects of revolution on the role of revolutionary intellectuals. In The Metaphoricality of Marxism and the Context Freeing Grammar of Socialism, Gouldner writes about the unspeakability of the intelligentsia and their role in Marxism. In the development of the Marxist theory of classes, the critique of the Hegelian theory of the state and of the universal class played a decisive role. Thus Gouldner calls Marxism the false consciousness of the New Class. Gouldner's theory of the New Class criticizes Marx from a Hegelian perspective, but Gouldner also fashioned a critical theory from the Marxian critique of Hegel. Gouldner is among the few theorists for whom the New Class includes both technical and humanistic intellectuals.

This paper introduces a series of articles which deals with the life and work of social theorist Alvin Ward Gouldner.