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This paper assesses the theoretical and policy significance of one of Robert Merton's most influential contributions to modern sociology, the anomie or ‘strain’ theory of deviant behavior. The enduring theoretical significance of strain theory lies in its sociological completeness. Strain theory preserves the interconnection between culture and social structure which is neglected or defined away by cultural and control theories of deviance. In its emphasis on socially structured contradictions in the relations of consumption, strain theory is also broadly consistent with and complements more conflict-oriented theories of crime and deviance. A major weakness of Merton's argument is its failure to clearly distinguish the etiological significance of the distribution of opportunities (mobility) and the distribution of outcomes (equality), which has led to misinterpretations of the policy implications of strain theory. Ironically, these problems are revealed through a kind of self-criticism that applies the basic tools of Mertonian functional analysis to strain theory. The paper concludes that, ambiguities notwithstanding, for purposes of theoretical integration and substantive insight, strain theory remains an important sociological perspective on deviance, especially when set in the context of Merton's broader sociological legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that interpretive sociology should review its model of consciousness in the light of the new feminist scholarship on women's experience of self and society. The thesis of the paper is that there is a fundamental conflict in women's consciousness between meaning systems inherited from the culture and those that are acquired through lived experience. This paper demonstrates that interpretive sociology's model of consciousness does not account for the conflicts posed by the feminist perspective and suggests future issues for research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the contemporary culture of heroin addiction in the United States, using a revised portion of the general theory of action. The concept of a cultural action system is introduced and somewhat reformulated. The micro evolution of heroin culture from its generating conditions in inner-city street youth culture is reviewed. An LIGA analysis of the system of heroin culture is presented. There is a summary with concluding remarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First place winner of the 2004 Alpha Kappa Delta Graduate Student Paper Competition Poor body image affects women of all races, ethnicities, socioeconomic statuses, and cultural backgrounds. Researchers have found that body image can influence a woman's self-confidence, her assertiveness, and her attitudes regarding eating and exercise habits. Much research has examined White women's body image perceptions, but less research has examined this issue among women of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The goal of this study is to examine and explore the factors that influence university women's perceptions of their bodies. Semistructured interviews were conducted in the spring of 2004 ( N=11). Results indicate that participants have struggled to achieve positive perceptions of their bodies as adults, tend to feel that women of all races and ethnicities are increasingly held to a similar standard of beauty (i.e., thin and White), and believe that images of the female body depicted in the media have significant effects on the way women perceive their own bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research identifies a "great paradox" in attitudes toward environmental regulation: some people close to environmental risk nevertheless oppose environmental regulation for partisan reasons. Does this pattern hold in large survey samples? Unexpectedly, we do not find evidence for it. Instead, we find that Republicans who report higher levels of personal environmental harm also report stronger support for environmental regulation. This pattern holds across varied measurement specifications, and it is weaker for Democrats, suggesting that exposure to environmental harm might directly challenge and change partisan opposition to environmental reform. We present a theory and research agenda that accounts for these "green elephants in the room." Our work, as we will demonstrate, crosses at least three disciplinary boundaries: social psychology, cultural sociology, and political science. A conceptual replication of results is provided in the Appendices S1 and S2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology subdisciplines are notorious for being siloed in their respective fields of study. This is sometimes more noticeable in those arenas that surprisingly (to some) do not make sense, as there are bound to be greater sociological insights gleamed from an intra‐subdisciplinary approach that allow for better synthesis of theory(ies) or even epistemology(ies). In this piece, we issue a challenge to the need for more sociological engagement that weaves together the cultural, those structured stories that render our lives and the order of those lives meaningful, and the racial, those storied structures of white supremacy that give rise to that order of our lives and undergird our identities and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

B Steve Derné b is the Professor of Sociology, State University of New York - Geneseo. B Jeroen van der Waal b is Full Professor of Sociology of Stratification in the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam. B Amy Adamczyk b is the Professor of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Programs of Doctoral Study in Sociology and Criminal Justice at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. [Extracted from the article]

Stemming from Max Weber (1946 [1919]), many sociologists understand legitimate violence as monopolized by the state. The literature has established that for the state to maintain legitimacy it must either demonstrate sustained efficacy or have its legitimacy based on the values of its citizens (Lipset 1963a). The statistics on gun control in the United States (Giffords Law Center 2020) and sociological literature (e.g., Hill et al. 2020a, 2020b) demonstrate the sustained inefficacies of gun rights. Thus, this article investigates the legitimacy of these rights in terms of voters' political values. I use a case set (Small 2009) of 120 voters interviewed in Arizona from 2013 to 2015. My analysis is an example of qualitative secondary analysis (Duchesne 2017; Belot and Van Ingelgom 2017; Davidson et al. 2019). My findings confirm and extend the literature on the bases of legitimate violence in the United States (e.g., Shapira and Simon 2018; Carlson 2019). Furthermore, my findings provide evidence of voter socialization into a political culture that uses public, declarative, and non‐declarative forms of culture in conjunction (e.g., Lizardo 2017). These findings also bridge the sociological literature on values (Wuthnow 2008), political sociology (Lipset 1963a), the sociology of culture (Miles 2015), and moral psychology (Haidt 2012). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on culture identity and dress. The sociology of dress is a vibrant field, exploring intriguing theoretical, methodological, and empirical domains. During the mid-twentieth century, clothing scholars began investigating the sociological and psychological implications of dress and appearance. In 1989, a group met to discuss the direction of the analysis of dress. The published papers from that meeting considered a wide range of topics, including identity, social psychology, cultural anthropology and sociology, semiotics, affect and cognition, social construction of gender, literary analysis, as well as qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Recent textbooks in the area continue to thaw from sociology and other fields to refine theories of dress and human behavior. Related to the misperception that dress only applies to the psychology of the self is the notion that dress is trivial both substantively and theoretically. Perhaps sociologists' neglect of dress might also be linked to a misperception that it is nonrational behavior similar to other actions that do not lend themselves to systematic analysis. Again these articles provide a contrasting view. In organizational and institutional settings, such as greedy organizations, total institutions, and mass media, dress and all it symbolizes are debated and discussed in ways that can be studied scientifically. Further, all of the articles have identified patterns in how dress is used in identity embracing and distancing that can be incorporated into broader theoretical frameworks.

This article uses data from in-depth interviews conducted with the parents of a sample of 88 ninth-grade students from public, private, Catholic, and Christian high schools in two different suburban communities. This research investigates the ways in which parents understand education and how they make sense of schooling options for their children. It shows both how families who choose schools make the selection among various alternatives and why some families seem not to choose schools. This research finds that the financial and information resources of families are not enough in and of themselves to explain school-choice behavior. While these resources are indeed used by families as they make school choices, such measures do not capture the cultural dimension of school choice. In this context culture is understood as the lens through which people make sense of the social world. The decision to activate resources and the direction in which those resources will be activated are mediated by culture. In particular, as these school-choice stories show, the school-choice decision is influenced by the past educational experiences of the parents and by their religious faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the relationship between the position of the artist in a social relations structure and the concept of art critics. This study uses network analysis to examine the correspondence, based on Bourdieu's theory of cultural production, between artists positions in a structure of social relations and the critics conceptions of their work. Shared gallery memberships among fine art photographers yield person-by-person matrices that are partitioned into structurally equivalent blocks. Three types of actors emerge: "stars" who have large loose-knit networks of bridge ties, "invisible collegians" who inhabit small dense cliques, and "strugglers" who have difficulty maintaining any sort of foothold in the network. Critical reviews of the photographers in the population are then analyzed for stylistic references, and the photographers are matched to stylistic categories. Interpretation gives us clues as to the views of the others with regard to this positioning in the social world--congregation and individuation. By placing an artist within a stylistic category, the outside observer is also placing the artist within a mental topography.

This article begins with an autobiographical reflection about what sociology has meant to me as an Iranian intellectual. Sociology has enabled me to think critically about my country's politics and culture, appreciating its strengths without overlooking its unjust and injurious aspects. That experience shapes my answer to the question. Saving Sociology?" If there is anything in sociology that I would like to save -in both senses "to keep" and "to rescue"-it is sociology as a critical, reflective discipline, a discipline that not only studies society hut also contributes to its change. As the contemporary world moves toward a "global" society, we arc increasingly lacing the dilemmas of multiculturalism. Sociologists often investigate other societies or (like myself) look back at their own from a `spatial and cultural distance. This situation has created a dilemma for many scholars: Should we criticize problems stemming from "indigenous" beliefs and practices of other societies. Cultural relativism argues that different cultures provide indigenous answers to their social problems that should be judged in their own context. While this approach correctly encourages us to avoid ethnocentrism, it has led to inaction towards the suffering of oppressed groups. Reflecting on the relativist approach to sexual dominance. I question some cultural relativist assumptions. Discussing how "indigenous" responses to male domination in many cases disguise and protect that domination. I will challenge the "localist" approach of relativism and argue for a universalist approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides information on the results of a study on cultural dimensions of protests. The discussion in this article draws from the debates in the sociology of culture about the autonomy, malleability, and the boundaries of culture. It draws on several empirical analyses to illuminate lacunae in recent theoretical formulations and to propose alternatives. Culturalist perspectives on social protest have made great strides in correcting the structuralist and instrumentalist bias of earlier resource mobilization accounts. However, they remain limited by narrow definitions of culture, structure, rationality, and politics. Conceptualizing social categories in dichotomous terms obviously precludes analysis of the interplay of each side of the dichotomy. It also defines each term by analogy to other dichotomized terms. Thus, with no attempt to substantiate the claims implicitly made, culture becomes "subjective" and structure "objective," self-consciously normative orientations become "cultural" and strategic ones "acultural," and culture becomes "deep" and politics "superficial." The most compelling challenges to these dichotomies come from actual social movements, and this article concludes by joining the chorus of those calling for more empirical work, especially comparative, on the circumstances in which culture inspires, impedes, and shapes collective action.

This article focuses on the contributions of Howard S. Becker in the field of sociology. Becker's first and most intensive interest in the general science of sociology and in the most fundamental puzzles it addresses, and not in some specialties alone. He is most indulged in the concept of culture. The fundamental sociological question is focused on two related issues: first, he is concerned with the nature of the social order, and how humans can conceptualize it sociologically; second, Becker is interested in how the social order exists, how and why stability is maintained or changes. Although Becker regards culture the same way as other sociologists have, he takes the characterization seriously into his everyday sociology. Becker is a relativist. But he does not stop at the level of the phenomena. He is interested in the essence of the society. To better dig into the role played by Becker in sociology, the author of this article stated all his books, teachings and ideologies. Becker' s perspective on photography as a research technique grows out of his commitment to field work.

James P. Spradley developed a systematic program for using personal experiences as data for cultural analysis. According to the program, the diversity of urban culture can be studied using ethnographic interviewing, participant observation and life history techniques. Spradley studied a Kwakiutl chief, tramps, cocktail waitresses, and deaf people and stimulated the study of variety in modern society. Teaching and research are integrated in Spradley's work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Talmon's concept of ‘totalitarian democracy’ is generalized, to make it applicable to the variety of counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, we expanded Talmon's concept of political liberty into a more general desire for ‘liberation,’ offered in different forms by these movements. Accordingly, the movements are classified by two variables: the direction of liberation (inner or outer) to which they aspired, and the degree of their attempt to monopolize the means of its realization (monopolistic or pluralistic). Four types of movements are identified and examined for their potential for totalitarian democracy: (1) Movements of Self-Fulfillment, (2) Cults of Self-Realization, (3) Radical Protest Movements, (4) Revolutionary Movements. Marked differences in totalitarian potential were found, the lowest in movements of self-fulfullment and the highest in cults of self-realization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the sociological concepts of religion and magic. The development of the psyche is the paradigm for the development of culture. If the development of politics within society has been from kinship forms of social cohesion to nonkinship forms of cohesion, that is because the human psyche in its early stages cannot imagine a world that is not family-centered; only with the development of the ego and its drives for separation and individuation does a nonfamily form of society become possible and, for the ego, desirable. If the sacred systems of early cultures are only vaguely or ambiguously moral, whereas more developed religious systems are deliberately and consciously moral, this developmental sequence can not be unrelated to the development of the moral sense as the human psyche matures from infancy to adulthood. Both magic and religion are fundamentally concerned with power; both postulate a degree of power that does not really exist, namely omnipotence; both systems of belief have as one of their central purposes the attainment of omnipotent power for the believer.

This article discusses the sociological issue of religious and economic symbolism in the western world. Christianity has been conducive to the facilitation of evolutionary contributions because of its ambivalence toward "the world," that is, essentially toward the erotic, toward the intellect, and toward wealth and things economic. Ambivalence is important as compared to simple acceptance because, although the erotic, the intellect, and the production of wealth are all indispensable, they all also involve dangers. Erotic, economic, and intellectual--are both indispensable and dangerous, hence the objects of profoundly ambivalent attitudes. Being ambivalent, Christianity recognized the dangers-often overplaying them-but did not simply reject or, better, did not renounce these potentials for progress. Marxism, especially in the communist versions, is religious or quasi-religious and may or may not be regarded as a version of Christianity. In any case, there is considerable parallelism between Christian symbolism and Marxist ideology, although Marxism is comparatively one-sided or "absolutist."

This article focuses on theoretical perspectives concerning the nature and functions of law. Many terms are available for the normative aspect of "social structure." Some writers prefer a definition of "law" broad enough to apply to at least some of the normative structure in any society. Other writers prefer a more restrictive definition, such that one might be able to say that some societies do not have "law" or that they have it only in embryonic form. The cultural value system that is maintained through the spending of generalized value commitments of individuals and collectivities, has some kind of "religious" basis. In highly evolved cases, however, codes of law are "secularized," in the sense of being differentiated from religion, even though religion may and typically does provide indirect support for secularized legal systems. The fundamental distinction between internal and external problems is referred to as the "horizontal" axis of differentiation because it can be conceived graphically and metaphorically as a line dividing the internal subsystems "above" from the external subsystems "below."

An integrated conceptual framework acceptable across different disciplines and theoretical perspectives is presented. The scheme promotes one aspect of organizational environments, the cultural context, as crucial to explaining organizational structure or behavior. By cross- tabulating member consensus and community consensus consistent predictions regarding survival, ‘character,’ and goal behavior are achieved for a diverse range of case studies. It is suggested, therefore, that community consensus be treated as a common denominator in future attempts to ferret out the necessary and sufficient conditions associated with particular organizational structures and behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The deleterious effects of joint bias in favor of statistical inference and against replication are becoming well known. The acceptance of numerous Type I errors into the literature is by far the most serious of these. Data on the contents of three major journals support the contention that a joint bias for statistical significance tests, for rejections, and against replication exists in modern sociology. This finding replicates that of Sterling (1959) for psychology. A speculative analysis of the dynamics of publication decisions suggests that a compact format for reporting replications might make their publication more attractive to editors, and thus increase their frequency in the literature. A possible format for briefly reporting replication studies is suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last 25 years the sensitivity training movement has steadily expanded. Growing out of the behavioral sciences, selected interrelated concepts underlie its development and distinguish it sharply from group therapy. The central role of feedback is carefully defined and described and its impact upon individual members as well as upon the evolving group culture are explicated in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social institutions of modern technological culture often fail to provide adequate opportunity for the exchange of emotions and personal feelings of affect and esteem. The widespread development of alternative institutions such as sensitivity training can be seen as an attempt to compensate for the scarcity of this type of interpersonal communication. Reasons for this scarcity are examined in terms of a structural model of individual and societal resource differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the rehabilitation of the physically disabled as a process of socialization. It has been suggested that many conditions influence the course and outcome of socialization. Differences in socialization result from qualitative as well as quantitative variations in factors such as the antecedent life experiences of novices and agents, the structure of the relationships between novices and agents, the social organization of the socialization setting, the cultural and subcultural definitions of the role in question, and the course of novice and agent interaction during the socialization process. A conceptual scheme for the study of socialization and to use this scheme to organize a description of the readjustment of paraplegics has been presented. The conceptual scheme has been presented in broad outline and the analysis of paraplegics is confined to major changes which they have experienced. The initial decisions that influence this scheme include that the work of the symbolic interactionists provides an advantageous base for a psychological theory of socialization, that socialization should be treated as a process rather than as a static phenomenon, and that every attempt should be made to keep the scheme sufficiently general to be applicable to socialization into any new role.

This article presents information related to historical sociology of science. The sociology of science, not unlike the general discipline of sociology, studiously has avoided comparative/historical investigations. Notwithstanding the fact that comparative/historical work has merited the most prestigious awards available in the profession,' this style of work does not fill the pages of sociology journals. Rather, work in the sociology of science generally has focused on factors contributing to productivity on the part of individual scientists, the normative structure of science and the social organization of science. Most studies, including recent ethnographic analyses, focus on a selected science in a particular country. Yet, however interesting ethnographic investigations may be in generating certain kinds of insights concerning the "constructed" or craft like quality of science, they simply cannot generate hypotheses about the embeddedness of science in larger cultural traditions and institutions.