Search

The article responds to sociologist Andy Pickering's comments, partly because of the inherent intellectual stimulation of exchanging ideas with such a distinguished colleague, but partly also because of the need for much greater interchange between the two fields, the sociology of environment and technology, on the one hand and the sociology of science on the other. Pickering's comments raise three important points about the analysis of Iron Mountain, Michigan. First, he praises what he calls papers symmetry in noting the importance of physical⁄environmental as well as social factors in understanding social outcomes. Second, he argues that people have not taken this point far enough, in large part because, he believes, the social is not sufficiently at stake in papers. Third, he argues that a fruitful antidote would be to trace the evolution of actual practices, in detail, over time.

Most sociologists encounter mathematics in their use of quantitative data, and it is clear that both descriptive and inferential statistics are essential to the enterprise of sociology. However, many sociologists are less aware of the value of mathematical thinking for understanding social structures and social processes. A few examples of mathematical thinking may illustrate how some mathematics can help to organize and extend sociological thinking. These topics provide only a few indications of how sociological thinking about a wide range of issues can benefit from mathematics. The distinguished authors in this special issue provide a few interesting perspectives on mathematical thinking in sociology. For a more comprehensive exploration of mathematical sociological theory, readers are referred to the special issue of the "Journal of Mathematical Sociology," that was devoted to that topic.

The author tries to show how sociology's failure to make the kind of progress characteristic of natural sciences, such as physics, is a result in part of differences in the type of phenomena studied and the fact that sociologists are more likely than physicists to use noncognitive criteria in selecting both their research problems and the solutions to those problems. In this article, the author says sociologists are more likely to use noncognitive criteria in selecting both problems and solutions to the problems, in part because they participate in the phenomena that they study. He sees one of the reasons why sociologists can not develop general laws as the rapid change in the social phenomena they study. A theory of gender inequality that may have been correct in the 1960s is not correct today because the phenomenon has changed. According to the author, another social scientist misportrays the natural sciences as having more consensus on terms and concepts than they actually do at the research frontier.

The article presents comments of various sociologist on issues related to sociology, presented in the American Sociological Association (ASA) roundtable conference. On the question of general agreement of sociologists on what and how to study, Stanford M. Lyman commented that much of conventional sociology has abandoned the discipline's original interest in providing an empirically-tested theory of social reality in the name of a reified conception of methodology. On another question related to conception of order, Herbert Blumer said that, from the standpoint of symbolic interactionism, human group life is a process in which objects are being created, affirmed, transformed and cast aside. Guy Oakes, commented on Weberian rule.

The article presents a report on demography as the discipline. As a field with its own body of interrelated, concepts, techniques, journals, and professional associations, demography is clearly a discipline. But by the nature of its subject matter and methods demography is just as clearly an “interdiscipline,” drawing heavily on biology and sociology for the study of fertility; oil, economics and geography for studies of migration;, and on the health sciences for analyses of mortality. Despite the fact that population theory flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demographers in the earlier part of the twentieth century tended to eschew theory, which they left to economists and sociologists. Assessing the state of the field almost three decades ago, Philip Hauser and Otis Dudley Duncan noted a number of problems, among which were "the marginal role of the demographer in his discipline of origin." In part this has been due to the demographer's high degree of specialization, which has stimulated an affinity toward disciplines less familiar to sociologists. Within the academe it has led to a number of natural organizational experiments wherein demography has been variously located in departments ranging from public health to rural sociology; even on occasion constituting quasi departments.

Fifty years ago, Robin M. Williams Jr. described eight notable changes in U.S. sociology, one of which was the “widespread diffusion of a relatively clear and sophisticated conception of the place of values in sociological study, as an object of research, as a factor in behavior, and as an element to be controlled in the prosecution of research” (Williams, 1958:621). In this essay, I ask what has become of that rising interest in the sociological study of values? I follow three distinct trajectories of sociological research on values, briefly describing the contributions of each, and identifying several lines of inquiry that strike me as particularly important and promising for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I point to contradictions in American individualism not unlike those suggested by Robin M. Williams Jr. I go on to suggest how twenty-first-century sociologists might better understand this aspect of American exceptionalism: not as an egoistic, asocial individualism, but as a covenantal, social voluntarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The determinants of and variations in processes of cultural valorization are of increasing interest to sociologists. In the case of high-culture literary texts, the central evaluation process takes place through canon formation. We explore the mechanisms of canon formation and of cultural valorization processes more generally by analyzing the critical history of Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Published in 1937 to lukewarm reviews, the novel is currently considered a core canonical text. We specify three processes involved in the reconstruction of Hurston's novel and in the establishment of the African American literary canon: (1) the application of new evaluative criteria, (2) the reconstruction of textual meaning through newly available interpretative strategies, and (3) changes in the institutional and organizational environment that allowed new claims on high-status critical positions to be made by those previously outside the literary hierarchy. The implications of this study for theoretical models of cultural valorization in sociology are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the book "Visions of the Sociological Tradition" by the author of the book himself. The first public discussions of the book showed that many critics found it difficult to grasp its overall structure. Although the author found this disappointing, one must admit that the book poses exceptional demands. It is dense; it weaves a maze of complex arguments; it leaves a fair amount of work to the attentive reader. So he is grateful to the book review editor of the journal "Sociological Forum" for this chance to clarify some of its less apparent features as well as to reflect on its personal and public meanings. The author feels that it has more integrity and offers a more complete expression of his thought than any of his other productions. Given the core impulse behind the book, it should be evident that to his mind the most important objective of the work is to enhance connections. This is true for students, sociologists, national publics and the international community alike. He has in mind connections of three sorts; between past and present authors, among the diverse units of disciplines or nations and across the international community.

African American sociologists are beginning to confront the use of "African American/Black" as a homogeneous sociological category. In doing so they are laying the ground for improvements in social scientific research in general One aspect of that improvement involves the use of people of African descent as subjects for theoretical statements about humanity at large rather than merely about other African descendent populations. Another aspect involves confronting the extensive segregation within the discipline around the research done by African American scholars. This introduction discusses the implications of these issues for African American scholars and for the discipline as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interdependence of sociology and its society is an old story. In some sense all societies have a sociology in that there are shared ideas of social boundaries and some notions of the way the group can influence the individual and roles, shape attitudes and behavior. Sociology and society are deeply "in" one another, mutual in their determination. Society and its sociology, of whatever form, are not two things, but an evolving process of knowledge, action, and substance. In the modern context, the sociology-society process has speeded up, as description and analysis more rapidly feed back into the social order from which they come. That professional sociology is a part, however small, of this two-way enterprise is one of the reason it can never be normal science. Sociology's initial rise after World War II as another positivist endeavor was part of the heady American optimism that a "science of man" could solve human social problems. World events have given a new life to the sociological project, even if sociologists only play small roles in them.

This article focuses on the author's view on the non cumulation of social science literature. He says that when he was a graduate sociology student many years ago, he visualized the literature as an ever growing mountain of sociological findings that would continue to grow until, someday, the discipline had obtained reasonably complete and perfect knowledge about the workings of society. He says that others held more sensible versions of this image, but the hope that scientific research could be cumulative was for-ever destroyed by Thomas Kuhns, a sociologist, finding that the paradigmatic atoms that underlie everyday normal science are overthrown and replaced periodically. He says that empirical researchers regularly carry out research that repeats findings already reported by earlier sociologists. Moreover, they do so not to replicate previous findings. He further says that only social theory seems to be exempt from this rule, for theoretical writings often build on the ideas of past major theorists.

Calling attention to the relatively few contributions made by sociologists to the study of nuclear issues, a political scientist suggests a number of areas and questions that sociology may be particularly well equipped to deal with. The study is divided into a canvas of questions that come from the first 45 years of the nuclear age, and then assesses the questions that may emerge in an evolving "post-Cold War" era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the book "The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology," by Langdon Winner. The issues Maximum Headroom, six feet, Carter, a post-modern siliconraker, raised about economic power, organization, democracy, and technology burn for Langdon Winner. Reading the book should make them bum for the rest of the people. Generally, the book is about the meaning of technology for the way people live and about fundamental questions of political freedom and moral choice in a world of incessant technological advance, replete with possibilities for productivity and horror. Sociologist Max Weber would approve the books analysis. Instead Winner's edifice of political critique and social analysis is founded on a reasonably coherent set of points he wants to make about technology in the modern world. Well argued and wonderfully written, the book is an important addition to scholarship on technology and politics. Of late, sociologists are asking new questions about technology and about possibilities for limiting its untoward effects. Winner wants to ensure that people should not forget the larger political issues.

Sociological literature normally feature so many words and numbers, but few pictures. Given sociology's complex subject matter and frequently imprecise ideas, much more visual representation of arguments and findings are expected. The best example of such writing is sociologist Edward Tufte's book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information." What is to be sought in designs for the display of information is the clear portrayal of complexity. Tufte uses various ways through which graphs can represent complex numerical relationships by using good design. Although Tufte makes no claims about photographs, drawings, maps, and other representations of concrete objects, presumably simple principles apply to them. An apt illustration conveys a complicated pattern quickly and substitutes for the many words or numbers than the description of that pattern would otherwise require. Professional sociology, for all its concern with places, activities, and people, boasts precious few examples of effective integration between words and pictures. Although photographs adorn sociological textbooks, critic Douglas Harper complains, these are the worst places to look when considering how to use photographs in research. The relationship between text and images in sociological books are generally casual according to Harper.

The original young Turks, political reformers and ardent nationalists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, gave a term that for some time has had a wide and varied usage. In America, voices of young Turks have often been heard and sometimes heeded, in political parties, Congress, labor unions, professional and scholarly organizations. Frequently young Turks are taken to be merely youthful dissenters or youngsters on the rise. In the 1970s, Marxism and neo-Marxism flourished in history and the social sciences, especially among graduate students and young academics. Marxist sociologists are young Turks only in a restricted sense. The main target of their revolt lies in the area of scholarship, not in the organizational status quo. In research and theoretical writings they are bent to demonstrate the scientific validity of a Marxist approach and to challenge opposing conceptions and findings.