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This paper examines how the Durkheimian approach to the 'ideal' delineates a possible way of straddling the dilemma between the normative orientation of 'powerful knowledge' accounts and the critical orientation of 'knowledge of the powerful' accounts. It argues that the normative aims are embedded in the fabrics of the sociological description with which the Durkheimian notion of 'elementary form' is concerned. To see where this enterprise can lead, this paper turns to the sociology of education of Bourdieu and Bernstein. Both draw on Durkheim's writings on primitive classifications in education and society, working towards uncovering the regularities of the world of knowledge classifications. Keeping in line with Bourdieu and Bernstein, this paper argues that one has to make the same refusal to the advocates of an abstract ideal of educational knowledge that is dissociated from its social conditions of historical realization in pedagogic contexts, and to the advocates of a cynical relativism of ideal that rejects any necessities socially established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After documenting Tarde's neglect and placing him in the 19th-century sociological context, this paper argues that his concept of "imitation" was important because social learning (writ small) or culture (writ large), a non-genetic form of heredity, means that a distinct cultural evolutionary process including variation and selection resulting in descent with modification is inevitable. Beginning in the last half of the 20th century there was a flowering of theorizing and research about cultural evolution across the humanities and social sciences and eventually about culture in general in sociology. Unfortunately, what should have been recognized as Tarde's role as a forefather of these has only occasionally been recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re‐examines a key feature of Emile Durkheim's sociology of knowledge from a critical realist perspective. It is argued that Durkheim's attempt to establish a social basis for the categories in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life should be understood along ontological rather than epistemological lines. This brings to light new problems with the argument which, however, can be brought fruitfully into contact with the more recent social psychological literature on collective intentionality. This yields insights into future lines of inquiry into social cognition and theories of human conceptualizing capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of conferences in the late nineteenth century significantly changed the ways in which the international scientific community functioned and experienced itself. In the early modern Republic of Letters, savants mainly related through print and correspondence, and apart from at local and later national levels, scholars rarely met. International conferences, by contrast, brought scientists together regularly, in the flesh and in great numbers. Their previously imagined community now became tangible. This paper examines how conferencing reshaped the collective of international scientists by zooming in on the massive meetings of the International Congress of Applied Chemistry, 1893–1914. Drawing on Emile Durkheim's studies of religious gatherings it analyses the ritualization of routine conference practices, such as plenary ceremonies, toasts, ladies' programmes and committee meetings. It looks at how roles were distributed as participants performed as hosts and guests, and in masculine and feminine and national and international identities. Importantly, it shows both how the sacralization of chemistry as a higher aim served to instil senses of dedication in order to organize labour and mitigate conflict, and how the self-perception of the international chemical community was based on contemporary understandings of parliament, democracy and representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution is based on Robert Bellah's introduction to Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society (1973) and second on other references to the French sociologist in Bellah's work as well as in Bortolini's insightful remarks on the "homology" between Durkheim and Bellah. The publication of the book took place in a time of Durkheimian effervescence: Steven Lukes' Emile Durkheim.His Life and Work was published on the same year and a new Durkheimology appeared in the English-speaking world: attention shifted from methodology, as expressed in Suicide or in the Rules of Sociological Method, to morality with a focus on the moral basis on a non-pathological society. Bellah's statement is quite strong: Durkheim can "be seen as a theologian of French civil religion". The paper will examine's this point of view with respect to the state of French society at the turn of the century and Durkheim's social project. One side question concerns the choice of texts: the editor did not give enough weight to texts that might have strengthen Bellah's point of view, particularly l'Education morale. Bortolini mentions Bob's long and silent work on Durkheim and his critique of mainstream analysis of The Elementary forms of Religious Life, reducing religion to a mere projection of society (:142). The biographer insists on the ambivalent, if not contradictory, vision of Durkheim in Bellah's work, in which he finds a key to the interpretation of the oeuvre. The article focuses on how to account for its complexity, which is never as clear as in the interpretation of Durkheim's sociology in a post-rationalist direction. Bortolini's concept of role model/hero incarnated by the founding fathers (here Weber and Durkheim) is analyzed in connection with Parsons' reconstitution of a pantheon. The question of civil religion is reexamined in the light of the transatlantic transfers carrying different meanings of civil religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) decided to constitute sociology, a novel field, as 'scientific' early in his career. He adopted evolutionized biology as then practiced as his principal model of science, but at first wavered between alternative repertoires of concepts, models, metaphors and analogies, in particular Spencerian Lamarckism and French neo-Lamarckism. I show how Durkheim came to fashion a particular deployment of the French neo-Lamarckian repertoire. The paper describes and analyzes this repertoire and explicates how it might have been available to a non-biologist. I analyze Durkheim's very early writings between 1882 and 1892 in this context to substantiate my argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National styles of 'doing sociology' exist, all celebrating respective 'founding fathers'. Timid, British pragmatism has tended to misrecognise Durkheim ever since our barely transcended early 20th century origins. In relatively low-status teacher education, even when sociology of education was popularly taught from the late sixties through the seventies, Durkheim was presented as a conservative anti-hero. The only important exception to this condition was the teaching and research of Basil Bernstein, unfortunately buried by the excesses both of 'New Directions' and the neo-Marxisms which recoiled from it in the seventies. His always numerous and active group of research students became the main carriers of his voice. There are now some signs that failure strewn, maligned and substantially dispersed sociology of education is evincing fresh interest in his and Durkheim's work. Bernstein's interest, since the middle 1950s, has been the study of symbolic systems which function as pedagogic relays. He alone in modern sociology has attempted to move from the seconds that make up the classroom moment, through institutional to societal power structures, in a way that not only insists on conceptual consistency but thinks it not worth having unless it produces both models and empirical markers. This paper first appeared as: Brian Davies (1994) Durkheim and the Sociology of Education in Britain, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 15:1, 3-25, DOI: (see ). I am very grateful to Taylor & Francis for their permission to reproduce this paper in this journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this article is to provide some guidance and inspiration for the teaching of the classics in sociology by taking a close look at the way in which Robert K. Merton taught this topic at Columbia University. The course was entitled "History of Sociological Theory (Sociology 150)" and was given between 1958 and 1968. With the help of archival material, the article reconstructs what Merton said during his lectures, which texts he assigned, what kind of tests he gave, and what type of paper the students should write. Merton did not want the students to only study the texts of the classics but also try to figure out how these went about their research and were able to formulate their theories. This meant that he emphasized how the classics approached such activities as problem-finding, problem-solving and looking for strategic research sites. In the concluding section, the broad approach to theory in Merton's teaching is contrasted to the more narrow one he presented in Social Theory and Social Structure. Positive and negative aspects of Merton's approach to the classics are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zygmunt Bauman's sociology of morality signals an important new direction from the orthodoxy of Emile Durkheim's 'society' realised ethics. The first part of this paper defends Bauman's postmodern position as valuable in theorising the moral present, offering a sociological conception of the sources, strategies and experience of contemporary morality. The paper then shifts to a critique of Bauman's social theory of 'being for the other', arguing that it misses the particular and embodied aspects of moral sociality and effaces the self in endless responsibility to the Other. It is suggested that a sociology of morality is needed which goes beyond Bauman's moral saint and provides conceptual space to theorise the self and cultures of authenticity and self-fulfilment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is organized in three stages. In the first part, I outline the evolution of the notion of altruism with its critical dimension of political economy by following the intellectual sequence from Auguste Comte to Pierre Bourdieu, through Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. In the second, I consider the forms of transaction to which these sociologists report altruism and its derivatives. In the last section, I examine recent developments on altruism as a result of developments on performativity on the one hand and market design on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that Durkheim's positions on happiness and socialism are relevant in today's neoliberal and post-affluent societies. Durkheim dissociates happiness from economic progress and makes it contingent upon the relationships between the individual and society. An important component of Durkheimian happiness is the dynamic equilibrium between desires and means. Therefore, his friendly criticism of the socialist project is that it promises to fulfil the desires that were released by a disembedded market economy. Durkheim's point helps us to understand why the social democratic promise was broken and how the neoliberal imperatives of competition and unlimited wants sow unhappiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper rereads René Girard's intellectual biography as a process first of apparent dissociation, and then of not so very much apparent, though quite solid, recovery of historical thinking. A trained historian-archivist, the young Girard began to massively rearrange his intellectual outlook by adopting methods and perspectives drawn from both very modern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, and classical thinkers such as Émile Durkheim. In developing his signature theory of the scapegoat mechanism, however, Girard's intellectual biography eventually came full circle. Reluctantly, and sometimes probably even unconsciously, he began to work intellectually like a good historian. Historical methodology and mimetic theory have, therefore, very much in common. This usually overlooked close relationship would seem to offer a promising new perspective when it comes to further developing mimetic theory methodologically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life provides a theory of the eminently social processes by which people, places, times and things come to be seen as sacred or profane. He demonstrates how the sacred is a locus of collectivization essential to the formation of the solidaristic bonds that characterize a moral community. Recent work in cultural sociology suggests that the mobilization of the binary discourse of civil society -- the sacred/profane -- is key to democratic deliberation in the public sphere (Alexander 2006). Drawing on participant observation, local media resources, and printed and online materials, this paper examines the deployment of this binary discourse in a conflict around the rezoning of agricultural land in rural Nova Scotia (2009-2011). Substantively, this case demonstrates how the symbolic coding of rural/agricultural space as sacred played a significant role in the rejection of the proposed rezoning. At a theoretical level, this paper reaffirms that the Durkheimian vision of the symbolic power of the sacred remains a core cultural resource in social organization and political mobilization, and a vital conceptual resource in sociological analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines and rejects arguments made by contemporary sociologists in France about the appropriateness of Durkheim's sociology in general, and his sociology of religion in particular. A century after the publication of The Elementary Forms, social scientists, especially in Europe, contend that "individualized" spiritualities are the definitive feature of contemporary forms of modern, globalised religion and infer from this empirical evidence that Durkheim's "sociologism" is outdated. However, contemporary evidence indicates that collective religious expressions are colonizing the public spaces from whence they ostensibly had been withdrawn. Individualization, per se, is not only a contested concept but also a normative discursive technique of rationalization by which the great religions and new religious movements adjust to the "individualistic" values of modernity in global settings. This paper addresses the question of whether Durkheim really was wrong about the collective, yet complex nature and future of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to make a Foucaultean approach to the meta-governmentality. Hence, we will do a close reading of Foucault's works in order to find epistemological tools. Then, we will focus our work in the durkhemian reflections made about the objectivity of sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By leveraging the case of Hindu sati, this paper elucidates the ways in which structure and culture condition suicidal behavior by way of social psychological and emotional dynamics. Conventionally, sati falls under Durkheim's discussion of altruistic suicides, or the self-sacrifice of underindividuated or excessively integrated peoples like widows in traditional societies. In light of the fact that Durkheim's interpretation was based on uneven data, nineteenth century Eurocentric beliefs, and a theoretical framework that can no longer resist modification and elaboration, by reconsidering sati it is possible to sketch a new model that strengthens Durkheim's theory by making it more robust and generalizable. The following model is built on five principles. First, integration and regulation are not distinct causal forces, but overlapping contextual conditions. Second, to better explain the variation in suicidality across time and space, we must also pay attention to culture as it provides the underlying meanings of suicide that can increase the odds a person or class of persons become suicidal or are protected against suicidality. Third, structure still matters, but in many cases, the role power and power-differentials play must be considered. Fourth, understanding why and how people choose suicide depends on incorporating identity and status processes. Fifth, because the expression of social emotions like shame are patterned by structural and cultural conditions, to understand how suicidality is socioculturally patterned we must further explore the link between identity/status, social emotions, and structure and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Value neutrality and science are often equated. This paper argues that the work of doing science and engaging in scientific practices with meaningful objects depend on social facts which have moral prerequisites and are not value neutral. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes a dual relationship between Adorno and Durkheim: on the one hand, Adorno adopts Durkheim’s perspective on society, describing it as an obscure, opaque thing that individuals cannot understand by themselves; on the other, he tries to get out of the opacity that he recognizes as a structural moment of the society he lives in. This last point engages us in a discussion of the relationship between political sociology and philosophy of emancipation, which allows to study in a new perspective the only text Adorno published in his lifetime on Durkheim: his preface to Philosophy and Sociology, the critical violence of which is well known and often interpreted as a complete rejection of Durkheim’s sociology. The thesis of this article is that the conflict between Adorno and Durkheim is a political one and that the division between the two authors lies in their evaluation of the capacity of the modern capitalist society to produce out of itself common ideals that assure the justice of the actual social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses John Furlong’s analysis of student disaffection written over 20 years ago as a basis for building new analyses in changing contexts for schooling. Specifically, Furlong’s observation of the dominance of psychological based explanations for student disruption and disengagement in education policy making holds—albeit an evolving psychological narrative. Divided into two parts this paper presents Furlong’s argument and takes up the challenge of reconstructing sociological analyses of student disengagement and disruption and interrogates the increasing rates of diagnosis of individual student defects and educational exclusions. Hyper-awareness of an increasing catalogue of behavioural and attention disorders has diminished the analysis of the pathology of schooling in the production of student disengagement. This is further accentuated in an era of high stakes accountability and school comparisons where student disaffection and disengagement are serious threats to risk averse schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Several authors have suggested that the contract between the university and society formulated in the nineteenth century is breaking down, and a new relation between knowledge and society is being installed. This paper investigates what is at stake in this shift by re-visiting the roots of disciplinary knowledge, examining Durkheim's social theory of knowledge to display the evolution of basic and professional disciplines in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two contemporary challenges to disciplinary knowledge are then examined and evaluated. The paper concludes that it is time to transcend the standoff between disciplinary knowledge and practice-based accounts of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I consider the relation between Dorothy E. Smith's critical sociology and Durkheim's understanding of society through Randle J. Hart and Andrew McKinnon's text entitled as Sociological Epistemology: Durkheim's Paradox and Dorothy E. Smith's Actuality in which these authors favour the reflections of this theoretician as a more objective, direct and actual form of description of the social reality compared to those offered by Emile Durkheim. Special attention is given to their critique of Durkheim's dualism and their reference on intersubjectivity and consensuality of reflexive sociology which does not see the social world in the binary form (individuality-sociability). Main thesis of this paper is that the analysis of these two sociologists have neglected Durkheim's own insights on this issue, and that, on the other hand, some of the critical remarks related to Durkheim's sociological position can already be read in the works of his contemporaries within the classical sociological discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology can no longer avoid engagement with biological ideas, but it can incorporate them where they are useful. Most biologically inspired explanations of sociological processes from outside the discipline are simple and, moreover, too reliant on biological rather than sociological models of social processes. Yet, it is possible to engage these efforts by developing sociological concepts and theories that meet those using evolutionary theory from biology. This paper argues that the heavy reliance on Darwinian natural selection limits sociological explanations, although this approach can help sociologists understand the evolved behavioral propensities of humans as evolved apes. These behavioral propensities cannot, however, explain the evolution and dynamics of the layers of sociocultural phenomena studied by sociologists, and efforts to do so with Darwinian notions of natural selection on individual organisms will always be inadequate. As an alternative, we propose that there are other types of natural selection inherent in the organization of what Herbert Spencer termed superorganisms. We label these Durkheimian, Spencerian, and Marxian selection, and they explain what Darwinian selection cannot: the dynamics and evolution of sociocultural phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The imagery of ‘otherness’ played a significant role in modern Europe's cognisance of the orient, the colonised, the feminine and the homosexual which were viewed as threats to the values of a ‘rational, progressive and civilised’ society. But how was ‘the non-European other’ represented in classical sociology's canons authored by the trinity of Durkheim, Weber and Marx? The paper focuses on Durkheim's examination of the Hindu sati as an altruistic suicide, Weber's theorisation that the European Protestant Christianity could only produce rationality and capitalism, and Marx's non-reflexive neglect of the progressive pre-modern from India's pre-colonial past. A critical post-colonial reading of the selected texts identifies the ahistorical, orientalist, racialised, colonialist and historicist fault lines that crisscross the sociological canons. The time is ripe to rectify the denial of subjecthood to the ‘non-western other’ that we often encounter in the sociological canons. The paper concludes that the ‘non-western other’ is capable of being a subject in her own right. The critical engagement with the sociological canons is a small step towards building the ground for a more reflexive and historically specific global sociology in the post-colonial era. As an intellectual endeavour of the post-colonial era, global sociology should be vigilant about global capitalism's tendency towards obliterating the diverse ways of thinking and acting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a comparison of the views of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim on socialism; these two have yet to be compared on this topic. They offered shared critiques of socialism, but differed in assessment of its overall worth, with Durkheim being more welcoming. After considering possible explanations for this divergence I argue it reflects the contrasting methodologies adopted by both. Whilst Weber places questions of the 'value' of socialism solely in the conscious of the individual, and therefore beyond sociology, Durkheim sees this as a social question and therefore part of the practical concerns of sociologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the nature of the relationship between the scholar of religion and her subject is described by using the metaphor "distance" and identifying the multi-faceted appearances of the metaphor in the study of religion. Four celebrated works by Eliade, Lévi-Strauss, Müller and Durkheim are the four case studies via which the manifold appearances of distance are analyzed. The paper claims that all four scholars start their studies from a constitutive "distance of objectification." Along with this foundational appearance, distance shows itself in four different ways in these four case studies. In Eliade's work, "experiential distance" shows itself as a gap to be closed through phenomenological reduction (epoché). In Lévi-Strauss' study "linguistical distance" discloses itself between the linguistical layers of myth and science. In Müller's translation project, there is a huge "temporal distance" between today and the times to which these books belonged. Finally, Durkheim's method of studying Australian totemism while being in France reveals an intricate problem of "spatial distance." All these four corresponding types of distances appear in accordance with the first, founding distance of objectification. The closure of these different appearances of the phenomenon "distance" seems neither desirable nor possible. Distance, with is manifold appearances and ubiquity, is relevant in the study of religion from all points of view. Therefore, the insider-outsider metaphor as a measure for the soundness of different accounts emerges useless; the forms of distance are existential, and an insider has no inherently privileged or unbiased access to the religious phenomena in any sense. Methodology of religion has to be developed in a way to use, rather than close, the ever-present distances it encounters. This corresponds to Jonathan Z. Smith's "manipulating the differences," as opposed to closing them, which would be a methodological fallacy in the study of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the possibility of culturally normative patterns of recognition, interaction and action, while also being excited, enthused or intoxicated sufficiently to be inhabited as collective rather than egoistic beings. Our paper begins by investigating the central features of Durkheim's theory - including his interest in the ritual steering of these processes - as developed most fully in his last major study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. We then develop our own analysis of Durkheim's concern that modernity has stimulated a rise in 'abnormal' forms of embodied intoxication that fail to attach individuals to the wider societies in which they live, and demonstrate the utility of our analytical framework by employing it to assess the recent resurgence of charismatic Christian revivalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers effervescence as a central category in Émile Durkheim's sociology, identifying its uses and functions in relation to collective representations. The aim of the paper is: 1) to contextualize the concept in the field of crowd psychology in 19th century France; 2) to trace the semantics of the concept in the different uses developed by the author; 3) to analyze the distinctive feature of effervescence in relation to nonconceptual collective representations; and 4) to characterize the opposite concept: vie sérieuse. This approach allows us: a) to consider the function of social effervescence without focusing its comprehension solely on the effects that it generates; b) to identify how collective representations work in integrating and regulating social processes, and c) to focus the understanding of collective representations in relation to communication processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the implicit religiosity of compulsive buying. Much of the extant literature on the subject focuses on biological and/or psychological factors. I argue that the cycle of behaviour in compulsive buying, which oscillates between euphoria and depression, can be paralleled with Durkheim's exposition of collective effervescence. In my paper I argue that many ofthe behaviours expressed in the cycles of compulsive buying can be described as religious, and that the sense of fulfilment striven for in the pursuit of commodity after commodity can be viewed as a desperate need to heal the self and, invariably, to find salvation. My understanding of the religious is discussed in a relationship between the sacred and the profane in the context of Durkheim and then Bataille, which leads me to the conclusion that compulsive buying is an implicitly religious activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public health researchers have used a number of concepts derived from the work of Durkheim, such as anomie and social capital. One concept that has not been deployed in public health discourses is that of the cult of humanity-Durkheim's religion in a society organised around organic solidarity. This paper discusses Durkheim's views on religion and science, and the cult of humanity. The cult of humanity is characterised as having humanity at the centre of worship and combining elements of religion and science. Medicine and complementary therapies are identified as possible candidates to fulfil the role of the cult of humanity, but the institution of public health seems to be a particularly apt candidate. The paper concludes by discussing the way in which this analysis provides insight into the dual advocacy and academic functions of public health, the tension between individual choice and constraint and the buffering role of public health in relation to other social institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the professional and political challenges facing the sociological study of deviance. Drawing on the sociological formulations of Emile Durkheim, and using a number of empirical demonstrations, the paper suggests that the study and interpretation of non-conformist and deviant behavior be repackaged and reframed within social processes of change and stability. To do that, it is recommended to use the constructivist approach, emphasizing the concepts of symbolic-moral universes and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper concentrates on Paul Huvelin's work as a response to, and adaptation of, Emile Durkheim's sociology. The author used a study of Huvelin to illustrate certain problems which Durkheim's ideas posed for sympathetic jurists. The paper considers how one particular legal scholar tried to overcome these, using elements of Durkheim's thinking to develop general sociological insights about law and its history.

This paper is concerned with the principles on which the curriculum should be based. It argues that the fundamental issue is the relationship between the knowledge on which the curriculum is based and the everyday knowledge that learners bring to school or college. The approaches to knowledge of two educational theorists, the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, and the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, are discussed. While pointing out some of the limitations of their approaches, the paper argues that their attempts to integrate the objectivity and the historicity of knowledge must remain at the heart of future curriculum debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first place, I discuss the main papers and books on Durkheim published in recent years, where no attention is given to the phenomenological interpretations of his work. Then I expose different phenomenological readings of Durkheim, some of them positive (for instance, Tyriakian's), some negative (Monnerot and others), some ambivalent (like Schutz's). Later I find that there is in Durkheim an implicit practice of phenomenology, inspired by Descartes' Meditations on first philosophy. Consequently, I support Tyriakian's thesis that there is in Durkheim an implicit phenomenological approach, despite his positivism. Then I wonder whether this tacit approach produces a phenomenological ontology of the social world. I find that it actually does, especially in what regards to social facts considered as things. I argue that Durkheim's conception of social things is consistent with Husserl's notion of ideal objectivities. I conclude that Durkheim's rule of considering social facts as things is part of his phenomenological legacy and that it does not contradict the idea that they also are 'states lived'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a paper which aims to conduct an examination of Emile Durkheim's use of Social Darwinism in the argument of his `The Division of Labour in Society', which attempts to identify the causes of occupational specialisation. How the paper is structured; Evaluation of the relationship between Social Darwinism and Durkheim's overall theoretical position; Early attempts to utilize Social Darwinism.

This paper is an exploratory study of the ways pregnant women in American society are elevated to a sacred status and symbolically marked as moving through a rite of passage. Utilizing insights of Emile Durkheim, Henri Hubert, Marcel Mauss, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, and Arnold Van Gennep, it analyzes interviews with four women pregnant six to seven months and two women who had recently given birth. The analysis underscores how changes in the ways these women were treated by others, and changes in their dietary and hygienic habits, acted to place them in a special social category. The paper suggests that further research is needed into the roots of these sacralizing behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of this frame of analysis in expanding our understanding of many of the burning social dilemmas currently revolving around the event of pregnancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09436-2 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pentecostalism has ‘bucked the trend’ predicted by Émile Durkheim and others that religion would decline and disappear in a secular modern age. In searching for the clues as to why this happened, this paper outlines Durkheim’s thought on the phenomenon that sparks religious life – effervescence – and his belief that in the secular future societies would make use of this phenomenon to create instances of ‘secular sacralisation’. Following these ideas, the author traces the development of Pentecostalism, a religious phenomenon that has harnessed the power of effervescence and grown explosively in the ‘secular’ age. Thus, Pentecostalism has appropriated (in part) the role that Durkheim believed society itself would have to fill in a future, secular age, and has reinforced the link between effervescent experience and a transcendent divine entity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this paper is to assess Durkheim's approach to religion and the validity of the time-honoured principle of the social determination of mental representations. The thesis to be defended is that Durkheim was essentially right in understanding religious ritual as a symbolic language. But he was wrong both in his social deterministic theory of mental representations and in his definition of religion as an exclusively social phenomenon. As current evolutionary sciences have amply demonstrated, human mental architecture has been shaped by a long evolutionary process and cannot be easily reconfigured through cultural indoctrination. Two consequences can be derived from this. First, religious ideas can successfully colonise human minds thanks to their ability to parasitize on biologically evolved human cognitive structures. Second, due to their counterintuitive properties, this colonisation can only succeed if those ideas are culturally transmitted through a special language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synthesizing Durkheim's notion of "sacred symbol" with Walter Benjamin's theorization of "authenticity," this paper proposes the theoretical construct, "authentic symbol," to account for the symbolic function of Holocaust relics in contemporary Holocaust pilgrimage. The symbolic function of four kinds of relics (the sites, witness/survivors, human bodily remains and accessories) is examined and compared in three different contexts: The March of the Living Holocaust tours organized for Diaspora Jewish teenagers, the Masa tours organized for Israeli teenagers and the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. Different ritual experiences are found to predominate in each of the three contexts, which significantly correlate with how symbols are processed by participants and the different ideological and practical aims of the tours and displays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One hundred years after its publication, Émile Durkheim's later sociology of religion continues to exert an enormous inluence on religious studies. Indeed, the impact of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life has been so pervasive that sociology lost sight of most of the other work done by the L'Année sociologique team in the sociology of religion. The contributions of the collaborators have been really important. This holds true especially for Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss who played a leading role within the Durkheim-school, particularly with respect to the study of religion. In our paper we would like to show that Hubert and Mauss preigured several of the crucial arguments of Durkheim's later sociology of religion (such as the equation of society and the sacred). In the conclusion, we present Mauss' own evaluation of their collective work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on a paper given in December 2013 at a German–Italian workshop on Jürgen Habermas’ theory. Massimo Rosati had been studying Jürgen Habermas’ thought and classical sociology in the Durkheimian tradition for years. Because of his own Durkheimian reading of communicative action, he had been unsurprised when Habermas began to write systematically on religion. In this article, he addresses the new post-secular sensitivity to the remnants of mimetic and mythic worldviews within theoretical ones and discusses the sacred as a universal historical structure of human consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars have not infrequently called attention to the master metaphors in Durkheim’s writing, those figures, typically drawn from biology, physics and chemistry, which structure his sociological thought. Less attention has been given to the work that metaphors do in Durkheim’s texts, or to Durkheim’s fundamental ambivalence about metaphor. This paper argues that Durkheim depends on metaphor to construct the building blocks, and not just the overall architecture, of his argument in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912). His conception of the ‘gods’ of totemism makes the theory relevant to modern European religion, and his construction of the concept of the sacred depends on electrical and epidemiological metaphors. I argue that Durkheim’s theory of social representation (the central argument of the book) is a theory of metaphorical relations between social organization and the organization of the cosmos. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I provide a critical examination of Warren Schmaus’s recently systematized “functionalist” approach to the study of collective representations. I examine both the logical and the conceptual viability of Schmaus’s brand of “functionalism” and the relation between his rational reconstruction and philosophical critique of Durkheim and the latter’s original set of proposals. I conclude that, due to its reliance on certain problematic philosophical theses, Schmaus’s functionalism ultimately falls short of providing a coherent alternative to the Durkhemian position or serving as a useful starting point from which to understand the origins of abstract categories in concrete experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There are two major categories of explanation for organisational performance: structural and individual. With the shift away from systems-theoretic accounts that occurred in the 1980s, structural explanations have been replaced increasingly by the individualism of leadership and leader-centric explanations, especially when it comes to schools. In this paper, we argue that leader-centric accounts involve a commitment to methodological individualism and that there are four serious problems with this view. First, it is logically difficult to describe individual actions without recourse to structures. Second, methodological individualism fosters a centralised mindset inviting the attribution of leadership where none may exist. Third, evidence for distributed cognition compromises leader-centrism. And fourth, administrative tasks themselves are often highly structured. In response to these problems, we urge a more balanced approach to organisational functioning, one that involves both structures and individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]