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This paper aims to elucidate some of the similarities between the Bourdieusian and a psychoanalytical approach to understand the individual and the social, and to describe Bourdieu's relation to psychoanalysis. The paper begins by reflecting upon the way a research on anorexia was received and perceived by some psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Such a case study puts into light several analogies between Bourdieu's theoretical position, his epistemological style and psychoanalysis. Then, some texts by Bourdieu, especially a discussion with the psychoanalyst and sociologist Jacques Maître, are analysed in order to further explore Bourdieu's position vis-à-vis psychoanalysis and to assess the influence of psychoanalysis on his conception of the individual habitus. Finally, the paper discusses the possible contradictions arising between these borrowings and the principles of Bourdieusian epistemology. The paper thus suggests that the Bourdieusian approach is better analysed as a 'sociologization'of psychoanalysis rather than as an approach complementing or integrating psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and criticise, from the standpoint of certain subsequent developments both in Marxist theory and in the state of intellectual dispute in sociology, one of the most eloquent and much-discussed statements of the situation in the sociology of the late sixties: Alan Dawe's 'Two Sociologies'.[2] I shall argue that Dawe does correctly identify two major tendencies in sociological thought, but that these tendencies are not, as Dawe seems to have supposed, either mutually exclusive, or jointly exhaustive of the theoretical space open to social theorising.[3] I shall try, in other words, to argue that Dawe's 'two sociologies' are better understood as variant forms of one sociology, and also that fundamental alternatives to this 'one sociology' exist and are beginning to be explored. Further, I aim to show, within the limits of a paper of this length, that there are fundamental defects in each of the variant forms of sociology which Dawe identifies, and, finally, that the links Dawe supposes to exist between epistemologies ('meta theory') and traditions of substantive enquiry are misconceived in his paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists and futurists have come to see that ‘fabrications’ of the future as entirely open to being remade in the present have become more difficult to sustain in a complex and contingent world. Rather, new and more nuanced conceptualizations of the future are required. To contribute to that task, I draw inspiration from Rittel and Webber’s 1973 paper in which they analyze social problems as ‘wicked problems’ to explore how sociologists have found the future to be difficult and tricky, both conceptually and empirically and have sought to overcome those difficulties through various analytical strategies. I discuss the onto-epistemological status of the future in sociology, tracing major shifts in theorizing of the future and suggest that what makes the future so wicked – so difficult and pernicious - is that it is an ‘entanglement of matter and meaning’. In doing so, I draw on insights from STS (science and technology studies) and other fields of inquiry to propose a new conceptual language in which to do the sociology of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the theoretical approach to the concept of lone motherhood is adopted from ‘new’ family sociology where families are understood to be dynamic processes constituted by webs of relationships. I analyse life stories written by lone mothers in order to examine the meanings that they give to their lone motherhood in relation to their larger family context. This approach reveals that, along with the concept ‘family’, the category ‘lone motherhood’ can be questioned. The life stories show that as with all families, the representations of ‘the lone mother family’ vary. Lone motherhood emerges less as a distinct family form and more as an experience coloured by the lone mother's position in a web of family relationships, as well as her place in her broader personal, social and historical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the merits of a sociology informed by humour, linking these merits to sociological issues of representation and the ways in which humour has pedagogical and epistemological relevance for the depiction and construction of the everyday lifeworld. The works of Erving Goffman, C. Wright Mills, and Peter Berger are treated as exemplifying the use of humour in sociological work. Significantly, while having different perspectives on the social world, they all worked within a particular milieu (post-war American sociology) and enjoyed a readership beyond the confines of academic sociology. We argue that humour is an essential element of the everyday lifeworld and that sociology's task is to highlight the contradictions, paradoxes and ironies in which ordinary social actors live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both the nature of philosophical and sociological discourses are undergoing a profound change, attuned to the gradual substitution of the postmodern sensibility for the cultural climate dominant during the modern age. In particular, philosophy sustained by legislative reason recedes, replaced by a philosophical style informed by interpretative reason; a movement in many respects reminiscent of the Pyrrhonian Crisis of the 16th-17th centuries. The passage from the orthodox consensus of modern sociology to a postmodern sociological strategy parallels this transformation. The present change, however, affects the very relationship between philosophy and sociology. From the search for the foundations of cognitive certainty, the outspoken domain of philosophy guided by the legislative reason, epistemological concerns move to the communicative problems of communally founded cognitive systems - the acknowledged realm of sociological investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses about the issue of positivism. It is inadvisable to proclaim a doctrine dead: that it is treated, by some, as though it were dead tells, perhaps, that it is unfashionable; but a doctrine that is unfashionable today is, among sociolog

The article discusses the relationship between theoretical speculation in sociology and the accumulation of the relevant information used to test it. The main purport of this article has been to stress the deductive or inductive process of inference which link relevant information to the theoretical speculations it is intended to test and relevant sociological theories to the personal experience they are intended to explain. The assessment of a work's objectivity also begins with the examination of internal evidence, although in this case the reader considers the scholarship rather than the research skills of the author.