Search

In this article, the author responds to the sociologist Bryan S. Turner's comments on his article related to the inter generational conflicts. Turner's interpretation, and suggestion that he was drawing attention away from structural issues, is rooted in a paradigm which is inadequate to the task of properly describing how life course processes are integral to general social arrangements. In his paper, the author took issue with the assumptions and arguments of age stratification and generational conflict theorists. These writers see age and generation related self interest as underpinning a growth in age based conflict. The dimensions of such conflict are seen to cleave around people's current relations to work and welfare. In his response to the author's paper Turner re-asserts the salience of intra-generational cohesion and inter-generational difference in shaping consciousness and action in efforts to secure social advantage. Turner insists that age and generation are important components of social stratification and should be incorporated in theory accordingly.

The paper argues that sociologists have constructed their accounts exclusive of nature. This pre-ecological sociology is critically examined and explained. It has resulted from disciplinary specialization and revulsion at biological determinism, with the trend away from systems sociology to human-agency sociology being an aggravating factor. Sociology as if nature did not matter has also been influenced by the assumption prevailing in modern societies of the plasticity of the relationship of humans to their natural environment. This sociology has been the sociological expression of modern societies careless of nature. The growing awareness that social constructions unleash dynamic processes of nature - processes beyond human control that bear on social action - has the potential of radically transforming such sociology. The paper proposes the reconstruction of sociology in which nature matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents John Goldthorpe's response to several comments about his paper which analyzed the uses of history in sociology. According to Goldthorpe, his main concern was to show that history and sociology necessarily differed in the nature of the evidence that they used or, more precisely, in the ways in which this evidence came into being. He claims that in his paper, he emphasizes that historians cannot hope to produce descriptions that are free of general ideas about social action, process and structure. His argument concerning the differences in evidence available to historians and sociologists is that the latter have the possibility of engaging in research that itself generates evidence, over and above, not as distinct from, that of exploiting relics. Goldthorpe clarifies the argument with which his paper began was that (i) pace Abrams and Giddens, history and sociology are not the same thing; (ii) that one important way in which they differ is the nature of the evidence on which historians and sociologists draw; and (iii) that sociologists, in being able to generate their own data in the present, rather than being restricted to the relics of the past, are in a position of advantage that should be recognized and not given up without good reason.

Alan Fox is one of the most prolific and original British sociologists of industry and employment. Fox's largely derivative writings on macro-sociology have received considerable attention in the literature. In comparison his original micro-sociological theory of the role played by trust in organizational integration has been neglected. This paper presents a critical evaluation of Fox's microsociological theory of 'trust dynamics' in organizations. The paper identifies conceptual, theoretical and methodological weaknesses in Fox's complex argument and concludes that Fox's theory is invalid. The paper also suggests that trust in organizational life is probably more significant as an aspect of 'social integration' than, as Fox contends, as an aspect of' 'system integration'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the career of the concept scientific community through three discernible stages. The formative stages is presented by Ludwik Fleck's Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. It was learned that one of the early expositions of the theme that scientific knowledge is socially conditioned, Fleck's work revolves around the correlative concepts of thought collective and thought style. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was discussed. Stage three in the career of the concept scientific community is marked by criticism and the development of alternative models. During the 1960s and 70s, the view prevailed among metascientists that scientific knowledge is produced by communities of specialists. In the works of leading contemporary philosophers of science, as in many historical studies, the existence of scientific communities was assumed without question or argument. Kuhn's paper represents a watershed in the histories of both the concept itself and the entire discipline of sociology of science. Social integration in science was considered a result of a consensus about strategic norms or standards. Findings on the examination of the concept scientific community through the related works of Kuhn and Fleck, the Polish scientist and scientist knowledge, was presented.

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]

Upon his death in 1920, at the age of 56, sociologist Max Weber left behind a huge and untidy mass of personal papers and scholarly manuscripts, some of the latter in the process of being edited for publication by Weber himself, others intended for intensive reworking, others yet superseded drafts. The intended characteristics of the book "Max Weber Gesamtausgabe," in the first of the publications listed below: they are those of a critical-historical edition, intended not to replace the several collections of Weber's writings currently available for the use of students, but rather to serve the needs of scholars, including the editors of such future collections. The edition is to include three sections: Writings and Speeches; Manuscripts of and notes from lecture courses. In the first section, the arrangement of material will embody a compromise between chronological and thematic grouping; that is, the numbering of volumes will reflect the shifts in the prevailing concerns of Weber's scholarly and publicistic activity, but each volume may contain again, in chronological sequence writings and speeches. From a number of years in so far as they bear on its chief theme. Each volume will contain editorial material which elucidates the circumstances of each piece of writing or speech, indicates the state of the relative sources and eventual discrepancies among them, and clarifies or corrects such parts or points in the text as might baffle or mislead even a relatively informed contemporary reader.

This paper is an analysis of the role of language in historical class formation in light of the recent developments in postmodern social theory and historiography. Revisionists from within this perspective have questioned if not abandoned E. P. Thompson's class struggle analysis, arguing that he fails to account for the constitutive character of language in the construction of collective identities. They oppose his account of the making of the English working class with alternative histories emphasizing populist and other non-class identities. Drawing on the Bakhtin Circle of literary studies, and returning to Thompson's own writings, I argue that we can incorporate language into class struggle analysis as a critical mediating force. I maintain that class struggle occurs largely within a hegemonic discursive formation, and that class consciousness and identity thus in part are formed through counter-hegemonic strategies of resistance to ideological domination. To illustrate this theory I analyse the role of language in the class struggles of the silk weavers of the Spitalfields district in London in the 1820s. I analyse how the silk weavers articulated a class consciousness through their counter-hegemonic struggles with the large capitalists and the language of political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dorfman is eulogized as the creator and curator of the definitive account of Veblen's life and work. He argued that Veblen was the archetypal marginal man and that this explains his dissenting contribution. Dissemination of Dorfman's pathography of Veblen led to its hegemony - until now. Andrew Veblen was the first to challenge Dorfman's portrait of his younger brother's life in the mid 1920s. He asserted that his family were not linguistically, socially or economically deprived. However, it was not until Dorfman's private papers became publicly available in the 1990s, that his flawed view of Veblen became more widely and comprehensively contested. An alternative appreciation of Veblen is advanced with reference to his experiences in general and the works of Bellamy, Morris and Ibsen in particular. Data sources include Dorfman's original tome, Andrew Veblen's extensive correspondence with Dorfman, and Veblen's own writings. It is concluded that Veblen's radical views are entirely congruent with his life experiences during an era of capitalist transformation. The moral of this saga is that a dose of Veblenian scepticism is essential to intellectual health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to reassess Norbert Elias's central theme of the `civilizing process' with reference to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. My argument is that the process of `civilization' must be seen as thoroughly ambivalent, following Zygmunt Bauman's use of the latter term to denote the possibility of assigning an object or event to more than one category. The practice of naming and classifying social behaviours or processes as `civilized' or `barbarous' is am- bivalent, because they can never be placed so unequivocably in one or the other category - certainly not in a social scientific way. I then trace out ambivalences in the three central features of the `civilizing' process as Elias conceives it - the monopolization of means of violence, the removal of physical violence `behind the scenes', and the lengthening chains of interdependence between people. I shall argue that these ambivalent features are as much potential forces of destruction as they are of internal pacification and `civilization'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comment on a previous article that appeared in the September 1996 issue of the British Journal of Sociology. According to the author, the more interesting issues raised by sociologist Andre Beteille's paper have less to do with the mismatch between class and status than with the question of how two conceptions of status, the one focusing on unequal social esteem and the other on the equal rights of citizenship should be related to each other in a general theory of social stratification since it is not unreasonable to anticipate some difficulty when the same general concept is used to describe a major aspect of inequality and also an antidote to it. The common feature of status relations in all societies is that they are exhibited fundamentally through acts of defense, acceptance and derogation. But such interactions vary according to how they are sanctioned and maintained, and the kinds of privileges and disabilities with which they are associated. No one would wish to deny that within the limits set by the rights of citizenship, inequalities of esteem, and more particularly the social networks in which they are grounded, continue to exert their influence for the reasons Beteille so well adduces.