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Decades of scholarly efforts to reignite the theoretical integration between sociology and biology have come to partial fruition in the birth of evolutionary sociology at the turn of the twentieth-first century. This paper examines one of the most elaborated versions of the paradigm—"new evolutionary sociology" (NES)—proposed by Jonathan H. Turner and colleagues. NES emphasizes purposeful, multilevel selective pressure targeted at corporate units, groups, or societies—rather than the blind, Darwinian natural selection on individuals—from which institutional systems are developed. Despite its contribution, NES possesses conceptual lacunae that have fettered NES in specific and evolutionary sociology in general from becoming a novel and truly evolutionary-cum-sociological paradigm in explaining social phenomena. This paper identifies three conceptual hiatuses of NES, in that it lacks due deliberation of (1) the gene-culture interaction that bridges individual behaviors—via natural, sexual, group, and multilevel selections—with the emerging sociocultural formations; (2) the epistemic role of fitness as a post factum propensity in empirical analysis; and (3) the concept of causal mechanism utilized to explain the diverse paths leading to the emergent phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper charts the changing intersections between sociology and science and technology studies (STS) using computational textual analysis. We characterize this "quali-quantitative" approach as a Big Data method, as this calls attention to the commixture of textual and numeric data that characterizes Big Data. The term Big Data, too, calls attention to the increasing privatization of both data and data analytics tools. The data mining was done using a commercial analytics tool, IBM SPSS Modeler, that to the best of our knowledge has not yet been used for STS or sociological research. The identification of intersections occurred as part of a larger project to analyze political-economic and epistemic changes within STS, focusing on academic publishing. These epistemic changes were identified qualitatively, through 76 interviews with STS scholars, and quantitatively, through a computational analysis of three decades of STS journals (1990–2019). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Blau and Duncan's seminal work on social mobility, researchers have used subjective measures of occupational prestige to understand either the change or stability in generational socioeconomic statuses. While subjective measures of occupational prestige have been developed, the creation of measures of educational status and prestige that might serve as parallels to these measures has received less attention. In this paper, we attempt to create such a measure and then use it to test the relationship between educational status (measured through the status of college majors) and three important post-baccalaureate outcomes: income, educational attainment, and occupational prestige. Our results, based on a survey of 718 undergraduate seniors, shows that majors differ in prestige just as occupations do. Then, using the National Survey of College Graduates, we confirm that those differences are meaningful in predicting early career incomes, the attainment of an advanced degree, and the prestige rating of college graduates' occupations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]