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The article presents a reply to a critique by Steve Fuller of a paper published by the authors on the early history of sociology in Great Britain. They dispute Fuller's contention that the earlier paper had misstated the opinions on evolution and eugenics held by Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford, two pioneering British sociologists. Fuller is accused of using academic secondary source research selectively, choosing to cite information that supports his point of view. He is also faulted for suggesting that Geddes was a supporter of the forced sterilization for the eugenically unsound.

In the telling of the inscription of feminism into sociology, both space and time intervene. Institutionally some departments appear to be at the vanguard of feminist thought, others, as if feminism never happened. These uneven manifestations tell a story about people, place, power and struggle. Even feminism itself operates on different temporalities: while many feminists now ‘forget’ to address ‘woman’ as an object of their research, using instead debates from feminist theory about gender, life itself or relations, others continuing to generate important information on where women are and what they do. The gap between these two positions of object/no object is vast. Yet the perception of objects/subjects and their recognition through citation is central to the achievement of feminism within academia and this is where the struggle continues, as this paper shows. By showing how feminism has impacted upon sociology in a variety of ways: institutionally, theoretically, methodologically, politically, practically, it unearths how many different struggles on many different fronts continue. Rather than accepting the defeat or dilution of feminism this paper shows how feminism has inscribed some of the darkest and deepest recesses of sociology. But also how this is an achievement reliant upon repetition and attrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on some of the significant ‘moments’ and ‘problems’ and ‘characters’ and places which mark out a history of the sociology of education. It further explores some of the historical conjunctions of knowledge and practice to which the sociology of education contributed in its uneasy relations with schools and teachers and education policy. Three sets of tools and sorts of analysis, drawn from the work of Bernstein, Foucault and Bourdieu, are deployed to explore some of the turmoil and conflict which has characterised the sociology of education at different points in its history focusing on three of these. They are, the 1930s/1960s (Political Arithmetic), the 1970s (the New Sociology of Education) and the 1980s ‘flight to policy studies’ and particularly one aspect of this which produced the notion of ‘school effectiveness’. The paper suggests some of the ways in which the sociology of education has played its part in the government and the detailed management of the population, through the changing construction of an unrelenting gaze (focused initially on families) and the concomitant development of a body of expert professional knowledge (teacher education) and, latterly, the management of the institutions of management (schools) and of the professionals themselves (teachers). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author offers a critique of the papers by Maggie Studholme, John Scott and Christopher T. Husbands on the foundations of British sociology. He takes a differing view of Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford, two scholars who pioneered early sociology in Great Britain. He examines early concepts of sociological principles of concern to Geddes and Branford, such as eugenics and evolution. He faults the writers of the papers for misstating the positions Geddes and Branford, suggesting that they did so in an attempt to restyle the reputations of the early sociologist, casting them in a politically correct light.

The Google Books N-gram corpus contains an enormous volume of digitized data, which, to the best of our knowledge, sociologists have yet to fully utilize. In this paper, we mine this data to shed light on the discipline itself by conducting the first empirical study to map the disciplinary advancement of sociology from the mid-nineteenth century to 2008. We analyse the usage frequency of the most common terms in five major sociology categories: disciplinary advancement, scholars of sociology, theoretical dimensions, fields of sociology, and research methodologies. We also construct an overall index deriving from all sociology-related key words using the principal component method to demonstrate the overall influence of sociology as a discipline. Charting the historical evolution of the examined terms provides rich insights regarding the emergence and development of sociological norms, practices, and boundaries over the past two centuries. This novel application of massive content analysis using data of unprecedented size helps unpack the transformation of sociocultural dynamics over a long-term temporal scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The case argued in this paper is not that the concerns of the founders of sociology are uniformly and in every particular still our own (Runciman, 2008), but that the concepts and methods used to address just one of their concerns were both ground breaking and of enduring value (Shilling and Mellor, 2001, 2011, for example, make a similar claim). Such a concern focused on the kind of morality grounded in a capitalist social order and, by implication, how it might be theorized. This generated in the process the uniquely sociological operationalization of what had seemed hitherto a philosophical concept: human dignity, along with the freedom and autonomy that attend it. Certainly, the priorities differed in each of the contributions to this endeavour but, in coming at the problem from different standpoints, the concept of dignity came to appear more rounded, more substantive and more relevant to the human condition in all its historical specificity. Quite crucially, there is also in these sources from the classical period of sociology an intimation of method: both the way in which human dignity is to be 'perceived' within an inter-personal dialectic at a micro-level and, at a macro-level, how we can discern that dignity transcends artificial confinement by any one aspect of life (be it economic, political or cultural).1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research programmes in the social sciences and elsewhere can be seen as ‘set-ups’ which combine inscription devices and thought styles. The history of inscription devices without consideration of changing and often discontinuous thought styles effectively takes the historical dimension out of the history of thought. Perhaps thought styles are actually more important than the techniques of inscription that arise from them. The social sciences have relied upon multiple modes of inscription, often using, adapting or extending those invented for other purposes, such as the census. But the strategic prioritisation and deployment of specific inscriptions in analysis and argument has inescapably been dependent on particular thought styles; of which by far the most significant over the course of the first half of the twentieth century was eugenics with its specific problem of ‘population’. This paper describes the way that Alexander Carr-Saunders took up the problem of population within early attempts to develop sociology. We ask whether Carr-Saunders can be considered a ‘precursor’ of a sociologist. The history of British sociology takes different shapes – as indeed does the very idea of a history of sociology – depending on how one answers this question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the contribution of Elizabeth Bott's Family and Social Network to the elaboration of modern British sociology. I show that although Bott is often identified as one of the key figures in the emergence of social network analysis, this misunderstands her contribution. I show how her work drew strongly on key aspects of the research programme of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, and that it was her use of the in-depth interview, allied to an interest in probing class identities, which was to be seminal. This case study is used to show how a focus on the practical inscription techniques mobilised by social scientists can give a radically different perspective on the discipline than approaches which focus on schools of thought or ‘great men’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented to the issue, which draws heavily from papers read at a 1979 conference held in Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Hull University in England.

Today Pierre Bourdieu is well known as one of the most important social scientists of the 20th century. One of the outstanding qualities of his work has been his innovative combination of different methods and research strategies as well as his analytical skills in interpreting the obtained data (his ‘sociological gaze’). In this paper, we attempt to retrace the development of an extraordinary way of doing social research and show the benefit of Bourdieu's visual sociology for his empirical fieldwork and sociological theory. The article particularly stresses the significance of his photographic archive, which has long been ignored within the appreciation of Bourdieu's work. Studying Bourdieu's photography gives access to his œuvre in several new ways: not only can we understand how Bourdieu became an unconventional sociologist practicing his craft in the midst of a colonial war. Bourdieu's visual anthropology also offers an insight into the status nascendi of Bourdieu's sociology in all its elementary forms and contents. Through his photography Boudieu demonstrated the concepts of ‘habitat and habitus’, the material and symbolic living conditions of the Algerian population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I present a future-oriented look at sociology and anthropology's historical appropriation of the concept of organism. The ‘future’ of which I speak is one in which the biological and technological are blending together. In cultural and science studies, the figure of the ‘cyborg’ is often discussed in this context. But the cyborg tends to be treated as a specifically ‘postmodern’ innovation, whereas the organism has always invited the cyborg's ontological ambivalence. This sensibility goes back to the dawn of both the modern biomedical sciences and the social sciences. I begin on the relatively familiar terrain of the role that emerging medical conceptions of the organism in the mid-nineteenth century played in the formation of such founding figures of sociology and anthropology as Emile Durkheim and Franz Boas. I then move to the specific ‘relativization’ of Darwin's theory of evolution that fostered turn-of-the-century conceptions of the social organism, including that emergent entity, the ‘superorganism’, which figures prominently – albeit differently – in the attempts to characterize the uniquely ‘human’ character of culture and technology. Finally I look at one very explicitly ‘constructivist’ approach to the social organism promoted by the distinguished chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, who was in turn anathematized by Max Weber in one of the original episodes of sociology's disciplinary boundary maintenance. The pride of place that Ostwald gave to ‘catalysts’ in consolidating and enhancing social organisms – from business firms to academic disciplines – earns his perspective a second look in our time. I end with directions for further exploration, which include reviving Norbert Wiener's cybernetic vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on historical changes to the study of elites in sociology, generally focusing on the post-World War II period in the United States and Great Britain. It reveals that studies of elites have been hampered by an overly broad use of the term "elite" beginning in the 1980s. Topics considered include elite groups and their access to power, decision making, and social structures of societies. Notable theories of sociologists including Michel Foucault, John Scott, Vilfredo Pareto, and Gaetano Mosca are considered.

The article presents an historical overview of sociological studies of the corporate elite of Canada for the post-World War II period. It considers theories from books such as the 1965 "The Vertical Mosaic" by John Porter, the 1975 "The Canadian Corporate Elite" by Wallace Clement, and the 1981 "Canadian Capitalism" by Jorge Niosi. Topics explored include social relationships, capitalization, capitalists, intellectuals, and social classes. The impact of political neoliberalism and economic reform after 1979 on corporate structures is considered.