Search

Life story methods in Europe commonly belong to the field of biographical sociology. This paper points out that biographical sociology is missing from American sociology and describes in-depth two well-known methods in this field in Europe, the narrative interview and objective hermeneutics. The absence of biographical sociology from U.S. sociology should be remedied, it is argued, for the following reasons: First, an analysis of biographical patterns could counteract the heavy emphasis on social structure in American sociology and enrich certain subfields within it. For example, some of the concepts used in European biographical sociology, such as the concept of the 'trajectory' can be related to conceptions of agency set forth by American and British sociologists and thus enrich sociology overall. Second, biographical sociology can help counteract the heavy orientation towards quantitative research in American sociology without falling into the pitfalls of purely interpretive methodologies. And third, biographical sociology can significantly enrich the still missing link between culture and cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its emergence in the first half of the twentieth century, there has been considerable discussion of the viability and value of analytic induction (AI) as a conceptualisation of social scientific method; one which challenges the correlational approach to causal analysis characteristic of much quantitative work. However, less attention has been given to the philosophical sources on which Znaniecki, Lindesmith, and other exponents of AI relied. This paper explores some of these, and focuses in particular upon the use made of Lewin's distinction between Aristotelian and Galileian forms of science. The status of AI is ambiguous in relation to this; and it is a distinction that raises some fundamental issues more generally about the methodology of social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pays tribute to U.S. professor and editor Stanford Lyman, who died on May 9, 2003. Contributions to 'The Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior.'

Lack of clarity about underlying philosophical commitments leads to lack of clarity at other levels of analysis. Here I show that the literature on so-called 'causal mechanisms' is rife with conceptual problems, stemming from insufficient rigor with respect to the metaphysics of causation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006-2008 in the American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that (1) 'variablistic' or 'covering law' models are not the dominant way of making causal claims, (2) research methods affect but do not determine causal usage, and (3) the use of explicit causal language and the concept of 'mechanisms' to make causal claims is limited. Instead, we find that metaphors and metaphoric reasoning are fundamental for causal claims-making in the discipline. On this basis, we define three dominant causal types used in sociology today, which we label the Probabilistic, Initiating and Conditioning types. We theorize this outcome as demonstrating the primary role that cognitive models play in providing inference-rich metaphors that allow sociologists to map causal relationships on to empirical processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much social theory tends to emphasize the external goods of social practices, often neglecting the internal goods of those practices. For example, many analyses of religious rituals over-emphasize the instrumental and individualistic ends of prayer and liturgy by describing such religious practices as effective means for achieving external ends like positive emotions, psychological benefits, social status, or social capital. By contrast, we use a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics perspective to analyze the relational goods, such as trust and intimacy, which are expressed and sustained through ritualized social practices. Using ethnographies of Haitian and Ghanaian Christians in the U.S., we demonstrate that prayer and liturgy can also be understood as constitutive-ends practices, practices in which human persons engage to sustain relations with others because there are goods inherent to those relationships. We further argue that in many religious practices, the end goals and the means-i.e. specific aspects of the practice-are inseparable. Our approach to developing theory combines critical engagement with numerous other theorists and also exploring how well various theories can explain the motivations and experiences of participants in the religious rituals where we conducted our ethnographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Dewey is always included as critical player in the development of psychology in America. But his relationship to this development is nearly always misunderstood. I argue that there is a double irony in this. Contrary to the received opinion, Dewey played no role in the development of American psychology. The confusion depends upon the view that American psychology “got its mind from Darwin” and dealt with “a mind in use.” It also depends on the assumption, related to this, that Dewey was a powerful advocate of the view that “the social sciences would produce the kind of positivist knowledge that could establish rational control over society and history” (Ross, 1991). In part I, I reconsider Dewey’s place in the development of American psychology. In part II, I argue that Dewey came to believe that psychology ill served what became his primary intellectual goal, that philosophy must address not the problems of philosophy, but the problems of humankind. Instead of getting answers from “scientific psychology,” the problems he was interested in addressing would respond to a new conception of inquiry, work which culminated in his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. The second irony then is this: Having abandoned even the more refined forms of behaviorism, the cutting edge of current work in psychology is so–called “cognitive psychology.” But, remarkably, not only does Dewey’s Logic give us prophetic insights into the most fruitful of these approaches, an ecologically oriented, biologically grounded cognitive science, but shows us decisively why “symbolic” AI models must fail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]