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Christian Smith's paper 'The Incoherence of 'Culture' in American Sociology' is a valuable provocation that can prompt us to reflect on the role of concepts and on the role of agreement on the definition of concepts in scientific research. In this comment paper, I raise questions about Smith's empirical expectation that sociologists should agree on a concept of culture based on debates in the sociology of science. I also suggest that in terms of the future agenda for the sociology of culture, we should distinguish between dialogue and clarification on the one hand, which I agree is needed, and standardization on the other hand, which seems incompatible with open-minded empirical research. Rather than work on agreement on what culture is, we might work on clarifying relevant distinctions among dimensions of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a commentary on Christian Smith's 'The Conceptual Incoherence of 'Culture' in American Cultural Sociology.' This paper accepts Smith's finding of conceptual incoherence at the disciplinary level and argues that it is a symptom of empiricism in American sociology. The paper suggests we employ conceptual analysis as practiced by analytical philosophy and proceeds to show how the use of that methodology can resolve the problem regarding the meaning of culture. In the end, the paper defends a conception of culture along the lines of Archer's (1996) intelligibilia, interpreted as action and its products bearing social reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With Mozart-like versatility, Charles Tilly's brilliant investigations covered a remarkable range of topics and methodologies. This paper highlights two of Tilly's lesser-known contributions: as cultural analyst and as feminist scholar. It also introduces his concern with the place of normative arguments in social research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of papers on epistemology and professional practice of sociology with topics such as the role of the journal "New Zealand Sociology" in creating a national sociology in the country, the concept of culture in contemporary sociology and conflict sociology.

This paper considers Charles Tilly as an important but underappreciated theorist of nationalism. Tilly's theory of nationalism emerged from the 'bellicist' strand of his earlier work on state-formation and later incorporated a concern with performance, stories, and cultural modeling. Yet despite the turn to culture in Tilly's later work, his theory of nationalism remained state-centered, materialist, and instrumentalist-a source of both its power and its limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses whether and to what extent the field of the sociology of deviance is "dead," relevant to sociology generally, or intellectually vital, and, if it is less vital than it once was, how and why it declined in vigor, and what might be done to return it to its glory days. It also addresses the implications of the election of 2004 for the field of deviance studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selected writings from Reuel Denney's work as a social analyst are reviewed in order to establish and highlight his often-overlooked contributions to sociology. Denney's cultural studies of Americans at play, with specific reference to his writings on the subcultures of football and hot-rodding, and on television and the electronic media, advertising and architecture, are reviewed in examining some major themes emphasized in his sociology. These writings are discussed against the backdrop of Denney's early life experiences drawn from his autobiography to better enable readers to gain an appreciation of his sociological thinking. The beginnings of a Denney postmodern are sketched as a conclusion to this paper's major contention that Denney anticipated much of today's sociology as cultural studies. As one of Reuel's students, nearly forty years ago, I hope that this article serves not only to highlight Denney's contributions and place within the discipline of sociology, but also that my personal recollections will serve to reveal the strong attachments we students felt toward him as our teacher, mentor, and friend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From his 1940–1942 studies of Race, through his 1967 study of an "inter-sexed" person called Agnes, Garfinkel's research was always politically engaged. When Garfinkel was Parsons' PhD student at Harvard (1946–1952) and later during a period of collaboration with Parsons (1958–1964), both theorized culture as a domain of social interaction independent from social structure and resting on its own implicit social contract. This conception of culture grounded their respective "voluntaristic" and "reciprocity" based approaches to specifying assembly processes for making social categories in a way that put the empirical assembly of categories under a microscope and made social justice a scientific concern. Garfinkel emphasized the importance of social contract aspects of Parsons' theory – adapted from Durkheim – and with his studies in ethnomethodology, planned to contribute an empirical foundation for aspects of Parsons' position that were criticized for their abstraction. Nevertheless, important differences remained. Parsons' model required assimilation and consensus, thus inadvertently enforcing existing inequalities. Garfinkel, by contrast, was deeply concerned with "structural problems" like inequality, and treated assimilationist positions as scientifically and ethically unsound. His research documented reciprocity as a pre-requisite for successful interaction, while treating "troubles" generated by inequality as an important key to understanding social order writ large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists widely agree that poverty is the effect of structural factors; however, understanding the ways in which poverty is experienced and constructed with reference to culture remains a compelling area of scholarship. In a society where culture of poverty ideas retain popularity, attributing meanings and behavior to people in poverty is complicated and contentious. Many scholars adroitly navigate these waters, but we lack clear guidelines on how to examine the behavior and perceptions of people in poverty without misrepresenting and potentially stigmatizing research subjects. I argue that to avoid problems of overgeneralization and what I call "unacknowledged comparison," we must engage with multiple points of observation and empirical comparisons. In addition, it makes sense to center sets of circumstances that affect behavior rather than generalizing the behavior or the culture that influences that behavior. Finally, I argue that the unit of analysis should be at the relational level rather than the individual level. The implications of failing to attend to these issues include continued misunderstanding of and unwarranted stigmatization of people in poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The meaning of the concept 'culture' as used in American sociology is incoherent. Despite the advances and maturing of cultural sociology, the central idea of 'culture' itself remains conceptually muddled. This article demonstrates this critical point by analyzing the definitions, meanings, and uses of the word 'culture' in the field of cultural sociology's most significant, recent edited volumes, handbooks, readers, companions, annual review chapters, and award-winning books and journal articles. Arguing for the scholarly importance of conceptual coherence, this article calls for more disciplined and cooperative theoretical work to clarify and move toward a more standardized meaning of 'culture' in American sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his contribution to this issue, Smith argues that sociology's house of culture is built on a foundation of sand. In my brief response to Smith, I dispute the claim that culture is in trouble and question the methods and motives behind Smith's critique. I then indicate the common ground characterizing the work of contemporary culture scholars. Drawing upon my fieldnotes and observations of culture in action, I define culture as a suprasubjective system of signification creating intersubjective senses or ideas that are distinct from the materiality, function, immediacy, or face value of any particular people, objects, words, thoughts, and actions. I argue that this culture concept, which I see as theoretically consistent with the work of most cultural sociologists and sociologists of culture, satisfies many of Smith's requirement that an acceptable culture concept specify culture's location, powers, limits, and relationship to subjectivity, and clearly theorize meaning and its relationship to culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This investigation will discuss the emergence of an economistical perspective among the dominant approaches of organization theory in the United States since the inception of 'organization studies' as an academic discipline. It maintains that Contingency theory, Resource Dependency theory, Population Ecology theory, and Transaction Cost theory analyze predominantly for-profit organizations within the context of the current economic environment. It further holds that the political and cultural environments, as well as the role of communities, are widely neglected by the economistical perspective. The New Institutionalism departs from this line of thinking and offers an implicit critique. With this focus, this article addresses a sociology of knowledge theme and aims to account for this theoretical limitation by drawing on social developments in the American economy, in American politics, and in the academy. Finally, this study argues that the economization of organization studies is strongly supported by the increasing proliferation of American business schools. Here the science of organization studies has found its new institutional home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Sanders Peirce proposed a semiotic that directed attention to the person or people who are providing interpretation, making place for the social and cultural. Following Peirce, we consider the meanings and consequences the term 'community' has in an international context. We argue that English affords a richer set of meanings to community, which was not paralleled in the languages of Southeast Asia. The encounter between English and Southeast Asian languages has lexical consequences, but more momentous are the cultural changes they index. In Southeast Asian cultures, there is less need for 'community' to take on broader meanings, since those cultures assume social relationality. Thus, the spread of English 'community' could be associated with a rise of individualism in these other cultures, but it could also impoverish the Anglophone West, which would be denied alternative frameworks in which associational and affective meanings of community are unnecessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes the "public intellectual" trope as a theoretical case study, and traces how it has been used in the elite public sphere of the contemporary United States since its coining in 1987. The analysis challenges the notion that the "public intellectual" is primarily about broad democratic publics. It documents instead how the trope is used to frame meaning and practice within specific intellectual publics, namely science, higher education, and journalism. By focusing on the play of tropes around the "public intellectual" and examining the authoritative cultural members who use the trope, the trope analysis identifies principles and strategies under contest in the journalistic, academic, and political fields of the contemporary United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author takes a look at some aspects of sociologist Talcott Parsons's comparative and evolutionary analysis focusing on the analysis of dynamics of social change, evolution, and of comparative institutions, and above all on the analysis of modernity, of the modern social order, a subject central to his evolutionary analysis--from the point of view of "Multiple Modernities." Such an analysis will also enable one to examine critically some of Parsons's contributions to the problem of the relation between culture and social structure; or of the place of cultural components in the structure of social action. These contributions developed on several levels. The first and most general and crucially important such level was the emphasis that culture does not constitute a distinct "entity" but rather a central analytical component dimension of any action and social interaction. The second level was the analysis of the relations between the cultural and structural dimensions of social action in terms of the major pattern variables espoused above all in the book "Towards a General Theory of Action"--as well as later in "Social System."

Any evaluation of sociology as a discipline ought to focus hot only on the way sociology is produced, but also on how it is consumed. In this article, we examine the degree to which sociological concepts have been incorporated into the vernacular of American society, the impact of sociological techniques and methods on politics and society, and the relationship between sociology and public policy. While sociologists often point to the problems caused by a certain alienation from the general culture--for example the notion that sociology is written in an obtuse language that the public cannot comprehend--we point to the problems that develop when sociology is too readily incorporated into American culture and society. The danger is that the more popular sociology is, the less likely it will be to maintain the sharp intellectual edge that made its incorporation possible in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dramatic demographic changes of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States are creating a multiracial, multicultural society. This article examines the intellectual challenges for sociology posed by the emerging racial diversity brought about by these population trends. The problem is that conventional sociological frameworks no longer apply in this increasingly complex social world of rapid population changes, diversity, and polarization. Most significant, conventional American sociology, which has focused on white society rooted in western culture, is challenged by three large racial/ethnic categories. We argue that diversity must be incorporated into our sociologies. This requires two new approaches: (1) Sociology must be recentered, that is, it must move away from the notion that whites have the universal experience against which all others are measured; and (2) Sociologists must apply to diverse populations the same kind of sociological analysis that they apply to mainstream categories. This means that we demythologize by dispelling common myths about those outside the mainstream and that we uncover the mechanisms that construct social differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a set of wide ranging reflections and empirical research on the nature of knowledge in the field of sociology. The author's engagement with the problem of sociological knowledge was deeply influenced by his encounter with Pitirim Sorokin's study "Social and Cultural Dynamics." Sorokin situated what he regarded as the crisis of sociology within the much broader crisis of Western culture.