Search

This article presents a commentary on a paper by Robert A. Stebbins in a previous issue of The American Sociologist which provided an account of professional and amateur sociology in the U.S. The British organization, Mass Observation existed in a relatively nonintrusive society with (as compared to the U.S.) greater concern for one's own and other people's privacy. Canada and Great Britain may in this respect have more built-in defenses against the risks of some kinds of amateur sociology that the U.S. would have. However, according to the commenter, Stebbins already anticipates this objection by requiring amateurs to be supervised and to start with a certain amount of instruction and proper cautionary comments. By engaging primarily in the use of unobtrusive measures and observations, the amateur will avoid the risks of harm to which Stebbins is already sensitive. The commenter relates that one of the public areas in which he has encouraged such unobtrusive observations is in churches, where the observer in outward appearance is similar to the congregation and hence not seen as an intruder. According to him, he has had a fair amount of experience with undergraduate amateurs of the sort described.

This article reviews the state of law and society studies in Britain by revisiting the arguments raised by C.M. Campbell and Paul Wiles in the late 1970s. It argues that the divide they identified between theoretically-oriented “sociology of law” and a-theoretical or empiricist “socio-legal studies” has widened, discusses some of the cultural and institutional reasons, and makes some practical recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports that the neglect of the biological infrastructure of human action and social relations is just one of several deficiencies in contemporary sociology. The key text of the British sociology of health is the Black Report on health inequalities. This is admittedly an official, administrative report rather than sociological literature as such. However, it was largely authored by Peter Townsend, who is of course a key figure in the orthodox sociological pantheon, supported by Cyril Smith, another sociologist who was influential as Secretary of the Social Science Research Council during the 1970s in shaping and disseminating the orthodox, constructivist assumptions of social analysis. The report systematically exaggerates the extent of inequality. It alleges a class gradient in inequalities in instances where none is present. It relies on types of statistical analysis that should be regarded as inadequate in an undergraduate research project. Not least, it is misleading because of its naive sociological imperialism and its studied inattention to biology and psychology.