Search

The article focuses on the impact the paper "The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology," written by Judith Stacey and Barrie Thorne in 1985, had on the study and teaching of sociology. The paper argued that sociology, in contrast to other social sciences, had warded off attempts by feminist scholars to transform the field's theoretical and conceptual frameworks. A discussion of a study of the paper, which took place at the 2005 meeting of the American Sociological Association is presented.

This paper has two main objectives. One is to consider the central place of human rights in today's global order and the other is to articulate a theoretical framework that will make sociological sense out of current human rights discourse and practice. Human rights emerged from, but need to be distinguished from, societal rights, and they are to be viewed as social claims upon social power arrangements. In advancing our perspective, special attention is given to the place of organizations in human rights theorizing; at the same time, we delineate some of the highly contested aspects of the endeavor to institutionalize a set of human rights principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based upon participant-observation in a research project that conducted AIDS prevention among street- based drug injectors, this paper analyzes the challenges presented in the application of an underdog sociological perspective in a quasi-human service agency. The directors of the AIDS Project incorporated the principles of Becker's labeling theory (1963) and the epistemological foundations of naturalist ethnography into the agency's outreach and research design. As such, this paper explores the bounds of the promoted "underdog sympathy." In addition, since the agency hired mostly former "underdogs" to conduct street outreach, the author examines conflicts in theoretical knowledge claims between the administration and staff. Whereas the outreach staff members embraced more lay-oriented psychological and therapeutic concepts, their experiential authority was dismissed by the sociologist administrators, belying formal claims to privileging underdog perspectives. Inasmuch as the directors dismissed the outreach workers' experiential knowledge, the directors were engaged in "ontological gerrymandering" (Woolgar and Pawluch 1985): selectively distinguishing objective reality from subjective claims. This paper focuses on two issues that represent the difficulty in applying an underdog sociology: 1) the dynamic construction of drugs, addiction, and recovery; and 2) collective representations of drug using clients. Employing Gouldner's (1967) critique of labeling theory, this paper deconstructs empirically the role of interests in the production of knowledge and contradictory sociological sentiments toward "deviants" in an applied setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is addressed to a neglected aspect of that social psychology, namely, the "meaning" for individuals and groups of the nature of the stratification system and of their particular place in it. More specifically, in this paper researchers intend to explore ways in which groups perceive the dynamics of their social class system as measured by their opinions about interests of the participating classes and ways in which those interests lead to social harmony or conflict. This is, then, a study which in the classical literature of sociology would be called an investigation into "class consciousness" but which, because of the ambiguity in the meaning of that term, prefer to speak of as a study of "images of class relations." The setting to which this data relates is the Soviet Union. Although official dogma holds that class relations in the U.S.S.R. are profoundly different from those in "capitalist" countries and that the nation is approaching a classless society, there is ample evidence that Soviet social structure includes a fully elaborated social class system.

Medical scientists have predicted that parents will soon be able to pre-select the sex of their children (sex control). Social scientists have in turn projected some its potential soda! consequences in terms of the sex ratio, the birth rate, the proportion of first-born males, and family relationships. This paper will critically assess some of those projections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper, inmate social roles and social organization in a women's prison will be described in some detail, comparisons of this is informal social structure will be made with relevant literature on the social roles assumed by male prisoners and the social structure inside the prison setting will be viewed in relation to the external environment. The study of deviance in the prison setting has typically been concerned with male forms of deviation. Indeed, with the exception of analysis of the "fringer" role and the recently reported study of a women's prison which describes the homosexual adaptation of female inmates, scientific description and analysis of the informal organization of the adult female prison have been overlooked. This formulation derives from case studies of single institutions and therefore, it is extremely difficult to ascertain the validity of conclusions drawn as previous writers have not explored systematically the interaction of the external culture with the conditions for survival faced by the prison aggregate.

It is general practice in sociology to regard deviant behavior as an alien element in society. Deviance is considered a vagrant form of human activity, moving outside the more orderly currents of social life. Deviation, can often be understood as a normal product of stable institutions, a vital resource which is guarded and preserved by forces found in all human organizations. From a sociological standpoint, deviance can be defined as conduct which is generally thought to require the attention of social control agencies that is, conduct about which "something should be done." Deviance is not a property inherent in certain forms of behavior; it is a property conferred upon these forms by the audiences which directly or indirectly witness them. Sociologically, then, the critical variable in the study of deviance is the social audience rather than the individual person, since it is the audience which eventually decides whether or not any given action or actions will become a visible case of deviation. This research paper attempts to focus the attention on the sociological question: how does a social structure communicate its "needs" or impose its "patterns" on human actors?

The article discusses engagements and contradictions of Society for the Study of Social Problems. A primary challenge is transcending the notion of an applied social science. That term implies that social science outlooks and findings are translated into ideas and language that could be used by action organizations. The clear implication is that social science teaches activists and that it does not learn from action and activists. A second contradiction, challenge or tension, lies in the thin, but crucial, line between commitment and partisanship. Commitment is to an issue or a class or identity group. A third contradiction is between knowing the world one analyze and not knowing it. Gaining deep knowledge is no easy matter. One can learn about the past and present. It is important to operate on the principle that concrete knowledge about concrete things is basic. It doesn't substitute for knowing theories, but then, theories don't substitute for specific knowledge, even as one recognizes the uncertainties embedded in what passes for knowledge. One should not rely on what similarly minded people say is knowledge. Knowing what the critically minded say may be useful to know and evaluate.

The article focuses on social problem as an enterprise. It explores what constitutes a social problem and moreover, how to confidently define the contours of legitimacy for ameliorative activity. The article is, with varying degrees of explicitness, guided by the author's vision of how to apply the cui bono criterion to social science as a moral enterprise. It also explores how social problems might be discovered and addressed responsibly by asking to whom the social scientist owes loyalty. While there may be other ways to resolve the objectivist-subjectivist controversy, the author propose to do so by using seven culturally universal value preferences to guide disciplinary and professional behavior in the study, and ameliorative pursuit of what constitutes a social problem. It also frames the means to evaluate both social scientists' conceptualizations, as well as their personal and professional initiatives toward socially responsible ameliorative activities in addressing social problems.