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This article discusses the field of sociology in Portugal as of December 1994 with focus on the Portuguese Sociological Association. As recent as 20 years ago, sociology was non-existent in Portugal. Since then it has shown a brisk development. Jos&eacute Madureira Pinto estimates that there are about 1,000 sociologists in Portugal today. About 40% are invloved in teaching and/or research at universities and colleges. The remainder, which has been increasing overall and relatively, can be found in central, regional and local authorities, companies and their associations, trade unions, consultancies, and so on. The idea that sociologists' professional status and activities are quite widespread in Portugal is confirmed considering that the majority of authors of nearly 200 papers presented at the recent second Portuguese Sociology Congress represent more than 50 institutions with which they work for. The situation has to be related to one of the specific traits of Portuguese sociology today--to avoid the separating demands of scientific research and professional activity. The Portuguese Sociological Association was founded by a few dozen of people on 1985. It was immediately accepted as a member of the International Sociological Association. Today it has about 700 members.

This article reports on the International Sociological Association's (ISA) Second Worldwide Competition for Young Sociologists. Two highlights should be mentioned first in this report on this year's Second Worldwide Competition for Young Sociologists, which was organized by Veronica Stolte-Heiskanen and ended with a two-week colloquium in Oerlinghausen. First, counting all Chinese papers into one, they were the largest group with seven finalist papers. Considering further that, for the first time, sociologists from Beijing were officially permitted to participate, then the strong Chinese participation with finalist quality essays is an important result for the World Congress in Bielefield and a point to note in future sociological ventures. Second, Nigerian sociology was represented by four participants which turned put to be an active, sociologically well trained group in the Oerlinghausen Colloquium organized by Steven Vaitkus. They were filled with the sociological imagination in its best conceptual sense. As already indicated in the Round Table on Nigerian Sociology and crowned by the recent election of Layi Erinosho onto the new Executive Committee of the ISA--Nigeria proves to be the first station of sociology in Africa.

This article offers views on launching the journal International Sociology. Instead of publishing exclusively authors interested in the analysis of socio-cultural diversity across the world, the journal prefers to publish papers by people motivated by their own national and cultural traditions, the summing-up of which will offer to the reader a more global and comprehensive view of contemporary sociology. A new science that since the eighteenth century was proposed as an effort to take into account the other's viewpoint. In launching a new journal, the International Sociological Association wants just to create a new possibility for sociologists across the world to be a better acquainted with each other's works. For that, a balanced editorial policy will be pursued to publish authors from diverse regions, age and sex groups, as well as theoretical orientations. The time has come to recognize that the Third World and the socialist world are part of the intellectual production system on which, undoubtedly, Western culture will continue to make a strong impression. The endeavor of the journal is to increase knowledge about contemporary societies and sociologies, by showing pluralistic paths of concern in sociology rooted in different historical and cultural traditions.

Sociology has been taught in Paraguay since 1900. In those years, it was included in the training of other humanities, such as law. Despite this early appearance, the education of sociology is now only 30 years old and exhibits an evolutionary lethargy. The discipline was institutionalized not because it was taught as a major course of study, but because of the publication of two national journals that have existed for more than four decades: Revista Paraguaya de Sociología (Paraguayan Journal of Sociology) and Estudios Paraguayos (Paraguayan Studies). These were the means through which the first sociological articles appeared and currently remain principal channels of knowledge in the field. The objective of this essay is to describe national sociological academic production by analyzing the last five issues of both publications. The classification of topics, methodologies, approaches, use of bibliographies, and types of articles was carried out using hand-coded qualitative text analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]