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This article discusses the American Sociological Association (ASA) as a portrait of organizational success and intellectual paralysis. There are many important things that the ASA does very well. Its conventions are now quite large and complicated, with more than 200 sessions and close to a thousand persons participating in the sessions. Planning for a convention starts four years in advance with the choice of a site, and program committees work hard for a year in setting up sessions and recruiting session organizers. The sessions have changed over the past few decades, as of 1981. In the early days, sessions were organized more casually, networks of acquaintances being used frequently as means to solicit papers for sessions. Now, participation has been placed on a more universalistic basis. More opportunities are provided for members to exchange ideas and information about work in progress through luncheon roundtables, workshops, and poster sessions. The ASA also is successful in publishing its journals and in running a monograph series. The journals do come out more or less on time and are delivered to the right addresses. If there is an establishment in the ASA, it is composed of persons who are well known, mainly through their scholarly works or other activities that bring them to the attention of the members. Although the ASA must be reckoned successful in a bureaucratic sense, it has not been successful in advancing the intellectual side of the discipline.

This section introduces the articles featured in the summer 2000 issue of The American Sociologist. As a new millennium unfolds, a global dialogue in sociology is underway that promises to enrich and renew culture-bound sociological imaginations. As Gary Marx notes, by 1911 Edward A. Ross, a towering figure in his day, had published a book for popular audiences about China as seen by a sociological traveler. Karl Marx brings this commentary up to date, and provides insight into a reality that Ross did not experience, namely, the teaching of sociology in Chinese universities. William Buxton has gathered together a fascinating set of materials about U.S. interest in Asia, with particular reference to Talcott Parsons, Harvard University and Japan. As he notes, these materials call into question simplistic views of Parsons as a Eurocentric thinker by documenting an ongoing encounter with Asia that extended from the 1940s through the late 1970s. One product of events at Harvard was a graduate-seminar paper written in 1941 by Marion Levy and rediscovered by him a half century later. In addition to its relevance for the emergent sociology of Asia, Levy's paper is a most interesting example of early functionalist analysis in U.S. sociology.

This section introduces the articles featured in the summer 2002 issue of The American Sociologist. This issue features six papers that explore several related themes in the intellectual history of sociology. The authors place particular emphasis on the enduring legacies of creative minds, while also tracing out unnoticed linkages between thinkers and intellectual traditions and pointing to unresolved tensions and lacunae within individual approaches. The articles combine a retrospective glance with a commitment to incorporating and further developing the insights of earlier work. There is also a happy blending of the personal, the conceptual, and the historical. Uta Gerhardt contributes an erudite and nuanced discussion of the relations between major figures who are ordinarily regarded as polar opposites: social-action and social-system theorist Talcott Parsons and members of the frankfurt School of philosophy, psychology, and sociology, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Jean-Francois Côté and Daniel Dagenais provide further insight into the development of critical sociology similar to that of the Frankfurt School within the context of contemporary Canada, especially Quebec.