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Sociologists Claus Offe and Hans Wiesenthal in a widely-cited and influential paper, theorize that capitalists and workers have inherently different logics of collective action that give capitalists a decided advantage over workers in organizing to make claims on other groups and on the state in particular. Because workers necessarily face capitalists as individuals who sell their labor power, it is difficult for them to identify their common interests and act in concert. Offe and Wiesenthal reason that capitalists, however, share unambiguous common interests that can be collectively pursued with relatively little cost to any particular capitalist. This article contrasts Offe and Wiesenthal's structural class theory with a historical view rooted in social movement theory. By the logic of collective action, we mean relationships among interests, identities, and organization found in the processes by which groups make claims on each other for rights, resources, and recognition.

Erving Goffman had a fullness of perspective on the social world, an inveterate taste for the texture of social reality. These qualities drew him into the orbit of the linguistic turn, and the companionship of linguists; yet he remained always his own man, as much a critics as anything else. From first to last his own vision of an intact sphere of reality governed his participation. It can be seen in his first paper to signal his involvement in a loose confederation at Berkeley in the early 1960s, one that became the basis of a continuing network of sociolinguistic activity. The paper, The Neglected Situation, was his contribution to a symposium at the 1963 meetings of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, California, and was published the next year in a special number of the American Anthropologist. In this paper, as in his conversation at the time, Erving welcomed the emerging attention to the social dimension of language, but issued a warning. Research that correlated this or that aspect of speech with this or that aspect of participant and setting would entail an infinite ingress. One would always be entering upon the social reality of speech without ever encompassing it. States of talk have their own constraints and configurations that are not reducible to partial correlation.

Studies on societal path dependencies tend to focus on mechanisms that anchor and stabilize national trajectories while paying less attention to transnational interactions and multilevel governance. This paper explores processes of path transformation in societies that are presumed to have the characteristics of open systems. Two pairs of case studies are presented and compared. The first illustrates institutional change through collision, when a national path meets with another. The second describes the emergence of transnational institutional paths and the impact of that process on national institutions and their (potential) transformation. The results indicate that path transformation often stems from a gradual succession and combination of incremental steps and junctures – change is gradual but consequential. They also point to increasing co-evolutionary interaction between national path transformation and transnational path creation. This implies a need for analytical tools that are adapted to the analysis of multi-level, nested processes of institutionalization and de-institutionalization. The paper suggests that the concept of path generation allows for a better specification of the conditions for change in existing societal paths and for the emergence of new paths in the case of open systems than the concept of path dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central argument of this paper has been that the epistemic structure of science cannot be adequately captured, let alone sufficiently understood, independently of its social, political, and institutional aspects. The argument has also been that for the most part, the major traditions of science studies have tried to isolate and to study the system of science in a reductionistic and piecemeal fashion. This situation will not be corrected by merely developing more new hybrid disciplines, although this too is called for. Neither will this situation be corrected by developing specific and detailed research hypotheses from models outlined in this paper. What is called for is a far greater sense of awareness and appreciation of the fact that science is, above all, a holistic phenomenon. Unless one is first aware and appreciative of this, it is unlikely that one will frame the kind of research hypotheses necessary to search for the interaction effects in the first place.

This paper attempts to offer, through a reading of hedonism, an analytic conception of the difference which one author has referred to as the dialectic of speech and silence. In addressing the form of life of hedonism as one version of otherness and difference, the author seek not only to display an alternative conception of life and inquiry than that of hedonism, but also to show the authority or grounds of this papers possibility - even if such a showing inevitably and necessarily remains incomplete. The first section begins to make available authors understanding of hedonism as one theory of desire and difference through a presentation and consideration of two contemporary expressions of it. The Second section provides the theory, through a consideration of classical hedonism, for the practices encountered in the prior section.

The paper argues that a satisfying structural account must be distinguished from an account that simply focuses on structures, paradoxically, a sound structural account must pay close attention to actors. Consideration of specific accounts of the Nicaraguan revolution supports this claim. The paper also suggests the plausibility of the observe argument that agenital accounts of revolution must attend closely to structures. Structural account is defined as one developing the thesis that specific structures have a significant impact on the likelihood of a successful social revolution. This structural thesis is stated in formal terms, particular accounts will differ regarding the specific structures stressed and in the degree of impact upon outcomes attributed to structures. An agenital account, on the other hand, seeks to show that revolutionaries are casually important for the occurrence of revolutions. The two approaches need not be mutually exclusive. In the broad form presented in the paper, the structural and agenital theses may seem toothless. But as soon as a theorist specify the sorts of structures that affect the probability of revolution, the degree to which that probability is structurally influenced or the possible impact of agency upon the probability, it debates on the pre-conditions of revolution.

The paper places the model of the media field in the context of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's theory of fields, capital and habitus. It illustrates the media field approach by analyzing several field case studies. Through systematic comparison with other approaches to media research, it highlights the unique contributions offered by the field theory while pointing out some still unresolved difficulties. Bourdieu and associates developed a new paradigm for the sociology of journalism centered around the concept of the media field. Their basic thesis is that as journalism has become less autonomous from the economic field, its influence and pervasiveness have also increased. The news media serving as an agent of dominant power are undermining the autonomy of other spheres of cultural production and thus the optimal social conditions for the production of scientific knowledge and artistic innovation. In service of this intellectual project, Bourdieu and associates contribute to the Anglo-American tradition of news media research in various ways.

This paper asks what a sociology of modernity could sensibly look life if it existed. Briefly, the paper follows Agnes Heller both in acknowledging the deep-seated crisis of representation and in insisting on the possibility to strive for an understanding of entire social formations over long periods of time. It starts by highlighting two features of this end of an era literature. First, in describing contemporary society the ephemeral, the fugitive, the fleeting, the contingent nature of the postmodern condition is emphasized. The present is distinguished from the past by being more in motion, less fixed, what was bound is set free, what was orderly and perspicuous becomes chaotic and undecipherable, what was taken for granted and for undoubtedly real has to be questioned and, often enough, assumes an air of pervasive unreality. The second part of this article is devoted to an assessment of the theoretical significance of postmodernity. As in the case of the historical claim, the author argues that there is a considerable significance, though often less in the exact terms of such works but rather in terms of a sensitizing with regard to issues that are neglected or repressed in a social science that often was all too modern.

This article argues that the most significant central problems of sociology are inevitable, that they constitute necessary features of the discipline's epistemological and historical conditions of possibility. At the basis of the argument will be a reading of Michel Foucault's work on the location of the human sciences within a specific epistemological configuration and on the historical preconditions of their emergence. In particular, the article attempts to show that at the basis of the human sciences is a conception of man as both subject and object and that this dualism is a precondition of the field of inquiry. As such therefore, no resolution or synthesis of the dualism or duality may be located within the field of inquiry of the human sciences. To consider the conception of man as both subject and object, and the analogue of action and structure and their respectively derivative sociologies as a problem awaiting synthesis or resolution, is to pose for solution that which must remain insoluble within the terms of reference of the human sciences. The paper begins with a few comments on conventional conceptions of sociology's history and status as a science and then proceed to a discussion of a radically different conception derived from the work of Foucault.

Although there is a very large literature concerning Karl Marx's theory of alienation, there is unfortunately little agreement about even precisely what the theory is, let only how best to use it in empirical research. The purpose of the present paper is to try and identify the major issues concerning the theory. On a highly abstract level of generality, Marx's conception of alienation as it applies to individuals entails a separation between their person and their activity in general and their labour in particular, the products of both, which include such aspects of social structure as classes and the state as well as the immediate physical products of labour, other people in general and certain classes of them in particular, and themselves, including their future, fully developed selves. The problem with comparative-quantitative research into Marx's theory of alienation is not that non-Marxists have undertaken it. Nor is it that they have used the wrong unit of analysis, since Marx's theory has everything to do with individuals and much with their psychology. However, their equation of alienation with consciousness of it is grossly inappropriate, and their claim to have refuted Marx's theory in their own research is preposterous.

Over the past few years, the skepticism against the stance of value neutrality and the reception of the Frankfurt School in the wake of renewed attention to Marxism in a Critical Sociology has once again focused attention on the problem of the integration of theory and praxis in sociology. Bearing in mind social philosopher Karl Marx's famous statement, philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways, but the point is to change it, members of the Frankfurt School recognized the problem and perhaps difficulty, of praxis in sociology from the very beginning. This paper is primarily an attempt to present a critique of current approaches to field work and especially of participant observation. This particular focus is important for two reasons. First, ethnographic work has become of paramount importance given the sophisticated manipulation of people's lives today. The intricate organization of the work place, the divisive and paralyzing structure especially of the urban setting. The second reason for such an extended critique is that it would guide people to politically and methodologically adequate approaches to field work.

Today there is considerable questioning of the ultimate value and viability of secular campaign against human illusions. There is skepticism concerning what author regards as the virtues of disillusion - to the point where it is wondered whether individual human existence is possible without life sustaining illusions. There clearly exist in modern culture, strong trends towards unreason and often esoteric religiosity, especially among young people. Recently sociologists have noticed one element in this trend: the theologization of psychology, whereby the secular model of the psychotherapist as a stranger and adversary promoting individual rationality and autonomy gives way to the essentially religious prototype of the psychotherapist as an advocate and lover who, as the modern heir to the roles of shaman and priest, encourages heteronomous faith and integration within a community of belief. It is author's aim in this paper to contribute to the exposure and critique of the religious uses of sociological relativism and of what might well be called the theologization of sociology.

This article discusses a paper which offers arguments suggesting the universality of indexicality, a claim not yet fully granted even among ethnomethodologists themselves. Current ethnomethodological opinion on the distribution of indexicality is divided. Some writers argue that indexicality is a universal phenomenon, whereas others seem to take the view that in some areas of discourse, at least, non-indexical or literal description is possible. Human discourse is constitutively indexical. One immediate consequence of this is a possible simplification of the unwieldy terminology of ethnomethodology, which may now be defined as the study of reasoning and accounting processes, not of practical reasoning and practical accounting. Criticisms of "conventional sociology" by ethnomethodologists are at best criticisms of sins of omission. Indignant charges that "conventional sociology" glosses or that it is merely a "folk discipline" are incongruous.

In a pioneering article of 1980, Stanislav Andreski maintained that sociology can contribute to the study of international relations by showing how military situations are explained by some aspects of society. He added that the more intensively armed forces are involved in war, the less they become tools of internal repression. Since then, however, sociology has devoted little attention to the connection between two phenomena that bear enormous political significance. This article explores a type of praetorian thrust that is inversely linked not to civilianism but to militarism. The theoretical scheme presented in this paper, of a unique type of praetorian tendency, is based mainly on a comparison between the case of contemporary Israel and historical France, but also utilizing other historical cases, in order to answer the question, is a military coup possible in Israel? The common denominator of the two cases, French Algeria and Israel, which lends this article its sociological importance, is that under certain circumstances, armed forces may develop an actual or potential praetorian orientation even though the country in question is not backward and has a democratic regime.

This paper examines the gradual emergence of the theory of the New Class out of sociologist Alvin Gouldner's prior work. The most striking feature of Gouldner's work, taken as a whole is its iconoclasm. Thus, he rejected professionalism in sociology, as well as the party line in Marxism and objectivism in them both. His dichotomous definition of intellectuals in The Future of Intellectuals, as both a speech community and as a cultural bourgeoise is an attempt to express this double identity at a general theoretical level. Gouldner's assessment of the repression of Marxism is implied in his early work on bureaucracy. On the whole, even given his iconoclasm, Gouldner remains loyal to the ideal of a scientific and effective sociology. By the late sixties, however, Gouldner had begun to distinguish two theoretical traditions in Marxism. One source of the reflexive impulse is doubtless the perception of a scientifically inexplicable gap between available data and accepted theory. He first begins to examine the connection between social theory and the profession of sociology in a critical way in his well-known Anti-Minotaur essay. His specific contribution to the New Class theory is his attempt to fuse this rich tradition with the sociology of professions, the sociology of science, the thesis of the managerial revolution, human capital theory and a theory of linguistic segregation.

The article presents a case study in the diffusion of social "Scientific" research. The authors aims at a refinement and extension of researcher Michel Foucault's argument. His concern is not, however, with academic philosophy. Rather, he seeks to understand how statistically based academic studies in economics and sociology become part of politically charged social policy discussions and popular culture in the United States. The critique borrows and elaborates Foucault's information-processing metaphor and further develops his argument using the details of a recent example of distorted transmission. The author also offer explanations for such distortion and suggestions for its remedy. The academic survival of quantitative social researchers depends on their discovering social cause and effect relationships. Project directors in research organizations dependent on government funds must discover such relationships or risk decreasing the flow of such funds. Reporters will find a story in the discovery, not the absence, of such relationship. But relatively few discoveries of a social cause and effect relationship withstand a complete sensitivity analysis. So practices that slight such analyses become taken for granted. If a sensitivity analysis is done, it may not be very complete witness the attrition sensitivity analysis done by the researchers that neglects self-selection and subject-reporting.

In the sociology of sexuality, sexual conduct has received extensive theoretical attention, while sexual desire has been left either unattended, or, analyzed through a scripting model ill-suited to the task. In this article, I seek to address two related aspects of the problem of desire for sociology—what might roughly be referred to as a micro-level and a macro-level conceptual hurdle, respectively. At the micro-level, the sociology of sexuality continues to reject or more commonly gloss the role of psychodynamic processes and structures in favor of an insulated analysis of interactions and institutions. At the macro-level, the sociology of sexuality has yet to provide an analysis of the structural antecedents of sexual ideation. Scripting theory, grounded in a social learning framework, cannot provide a proper conceptual resolution to these problems but, rather, reproduces them. By contrast, I argue that an effective sociological treatment of desire must incorporate a more penetrating conception of the somatization of social relations found in Bourdieu’s notion of ‘embodiment’ and his corresponding analysis of habitus. In this vein, I develop the sensitizing concepts erotic habitus and erotic work, and apply these to a cross-section of feminist and sociological literatures on desire. I argue that a framework grounded in embodiment, but complimented by scripting theory, provides a promising lead in the direction of an effective sociology of desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elite college admissions exemplify processes of social closure in which status-group conflict, organizational self-interest, the strategic use of cultural ideals of merit, and broader social trends and contingent historical events interweave to shape institutional power in the United States. The Chosen, Jerome Karabel’s monumental study of the history of college admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton from 1900 to 2005, offers a political sociology of elite recruitment and a cultural and social history of the definition of merit that has guided these three schools and shaped much current thinking about college admissions. As Max Weber reminded us, the very definition of cultural ideals of an epoch bear the stamp of elite group domination: not cultural ideals but cultural interests and their strategic uses guide institutional power. The book provides an impressive empirical demonstration of that proposition: it identifies four different definitions of merit as organizational gatekeeping tools that have guided Harvard, Yale, and Princeton over the last hundred years and shows how these definitions were molded by status-group conflict and organizational interests. This essay outlines the central arguments of Karabel’s book; it identifies key contributions for our understanding of the history, culture, organizational interests, and politics of these three institutions; it highlights the social closure framework guiding the analysis; and it reflects on a fundamental ambiguity in Karabel’s thinking about meritocratic ideals as governing principles for modern stratified societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeffrey Alexander’s recent book on cultural sociology argues that sociologists must grant the realm of ideas autonomy to determine behavior, unencumbered by interference from instrumental or material factors. He criticizes the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as “weak” for failing to give autonomy to culture by reducing it to self-interested behavior that immediately reflects class position. However, Alexander’s arguments seriously distort and misstate Bourdieu’s theory, which provides for the relative autonomy of culture through the concepts of habitus and field. Because habitus is a set of durable dispositions conditioned by past structures, it may contradict the changed structures of the present. Further, the influence of the habitus is always mediated by the structure and strategies of the field of contest in which it is deployed, so that the same habitus may motivate different actions in different circumstances. However, Alexander is correct to argue that in Bourdieu’s theory culture generally serves to reproduce, not contradict social structures. Yet Bourdieu addresses this and other problems in his later work, in which he argues for the existence of certain cultural universals transcending particular structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational sociologists often treat institutions as macro cultural logics, representations, and schemata, with less consideration for how institutions are ”inhabited“ (Scully and Creed, 1997) by people doing things together. As such, this article uses a symbolic interactionist rereading of Gouldner’s classic study Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy as a lever to expand the boundaries of institutionalism to encompass a richer understanding of action, interaction, and meaning. Fifty years after its publication, Gouldner’s study still speaks to us, though in ways we (and he) may not have anticipated five decades ago. The rich field observations in Patterns remind us that institutions such as bureaucracy are inhabited by people and their interactions, and the book provides an opportunity for intellectual renewal. Instead of treating contemporary institutionalism and symbolic interaction as antagonistic, we treat them as complementary components of an “inhabited institutions approach” that focuses on local and extra–local embeddedness, local and extra-local meaning, and a skeptical, inquiring attitude. This approach yields a doubly constructed view: On the one hand, institutions provide the raw materials and guidelines for social interactions (“construct interactions”), and on the other hand, the meanings of institutions are constructed and propelled forward by social interactions. Institutions are not inert categories of meaning; rather they are populated with people whose social interactions suffuse institutions with local force and significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information about several authors who have contributed papers to the present issue of the periodical "Theory & Society." Some of them are Mansoor Moaddel and Jon Shefner. Moaddel is Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University. He is currently working on a comparative project on determinants of ideological production in the Islamic world. With financial supports from the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation and Bank of Sweden Foundation, he is carrying out surveys of attitudes and value orientations of the national representative samples of the Islamic publics in Egypt, Iran and Jordan. Shefner is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee. In addition to researching urban politics in Latin America, he has recently completed a study of a university community partnership in New Orleans. He continues to study both, politics of the poor and their interactions with nongovernmental organizations and is currently working on a book discussing the impact of politics from below on Mexico's democratization process.

Changes in collective categories of identity are at the core of social transformation. The causal linkages among identity change, institutional change, and change in modes of practice are, however, complex. Developing and adapting ideas from Pierre Bourdieu's work, this article shows the coexistence in tension of a plurality of elements within each collective identity category. On this basis, it proposes a typology of responses at the level of identity to socio-political change. This allows an explanation of patterns of identity change in terms of wider social processes and resource distribution, while remaining open to the sense and complexity of the individual's experience and the moments of intentionality that arise when individuals face choices as to the direction of change. The worth of the model is shown by analysis of modes of identity change in a society now experiencing radical change in socio-political structures, namely post-1998 Northern Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines the continuities between everyday life, routine politics, and contentious action. Focusing on a case study, the 6-day road blockade in the Argentine Patagonia in June 1996, the article dissects these connections through a thick description of (a) the intersection of this episode of popular protest with the biography of one of its key participants, and (b) the modes in which routine politics and local history have an impact on the origins and shape of the protest and on the activated identities of the actors who collectively voice their discontent during the protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to explore what Bourdieu’s political sociology could bring to the study of European integration. I first present, very briefly, some of the traditional approaches in European integration studies. Then I move to my interpretation of Bourdieu’s structural constructivist theory of politics through a discussion of political capital and political field, drawing parallels between these concepts and some of Max Weber’s ideas. In the third part, while discussing the works of some scholars inspired by Bourdieu’s theory, I present some structural constructivist studies of European integration. Structural constructivism provides theoretical tools for a critical analysis of European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of “fields,” this article proposes a model of analysis of the forms of politicization in the literary field based on the French case. In France, during the first half of the twentieth century, the writer has embodied the figure of the “Intellectual.” The first claim is that the politicization of the French literary field resulted from three factors: the autonomy it gained in the nineteenth century, its lack of professional development, and the competition with the newly emerging professions. These factors, joined to the specific features of the literary activity, account for the writers’ most typical mode of politicization: prophesying. This analysis adapts the Weberian concepts of “charismatic power” and of “prophetism” to the intellectual field, in the way suggested by Pierre Bourdieu’s interpretation of Max Weber’s theory of religion. The second claim is that the forms of politicization of writers depend on the position they occupy in the literary field: the way of being a writer conditions the way one engages in the political sphere. Four figures of committed writers are distinguished: the “notabilities,” the “aesthetes,” the “avant-garde,” and the “writer-journalists.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses a general problem in media sociology – how to understand the media both as an internal production process and as a general frame for categorizing the social world, with specific reference to a version of this problem in recent work on media within Bourdieu’s field-based tradition of research (work previously reviewed by Rodney Benson in Theory and Society 28). It argues that certain problems arise in reconciling this work’s detailed explanations of the media field’s internal workings (and the interrelations of that field’s workings to the workings of other fields) and general claims made about the “symbolic power” of media in a broader sense. These problems can be solved, the author argues, by adopting the concept of meta-capital developed by Bourdieu himself in his late work on the state, and returning to the wider framework of symbolic system and symbolic power that was important in Bourdieu’s social theory before it became dominated by field theory. Media, it is proposed, have meta-capital over the rules of play, and the definition of capital (especially symbolic capital), that operate within a wide range of contemporary fields of production. This level of explanation needs to be added to specific accounts of the detailed workings of the media field. The conclusion points to questions for further work, including on the state’s relative strength and the media’s meta-capital that must be carried out through detailed empirical work on a global comparative basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we assess how the concept of cultural capital has been imported into the English language, focusing on educational research. We argue that a dominant interpretation of cultural capital has coalesced with two central premises. First, cultural capital denotes knowledge of or facility with “highbrow” aesthetic culture. Secondly, cultural capital is analytically and causally distinct from other important forms of knowledge or competence (termed “technical skills,” “human capital,” etc.). We then review Bourdieu’s educational writings to demonstrate that neither of these premises is essential to his understanding of cultural capital. In the third section, we discuss a set of English-language studies that draw on the concept of cultural capital, but eschew the dominant interpretation. These serve as the point of departure for an alternative definition. Our definition emphasizes Bourdieu’s reference to the capacity of a social class to “impose” advantageous standards of evaluation on the educational institution. We discuss the empirical requirements that adherence to such a definition entails for researchers, and provide a brief illustration of the intersection of institutionalized evaluative standards and the educational practices of families belonging to different social classes. Using ethnographic data from a study of social class differences in family-school relationships, we show how an African-American middle-class family exhibits cultural capital in a way that an African-American family below the poverty level does not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to integrate identity-oriented and strategic models of collective action better by drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of classification struggles. On the one hand, the article extends culture to the realm of interest by highlighting the role collective identity plays in one of the key processes that strategic models of collective action foreground: the mobilization of resources. The article extends culture to the realm of interest in another way as well: by challenging the notion that labor movements are fundamentally different from or antithetical to the identity-oriented new social movements. On the other hand, the article also extends the idea of interest to culture. Rather than viewing collective identity as something formed prior to political struggle and according to a different logic, I show that collective identity is constructed in and through struggles over classificatory schemes. These include struggles between movements and their opponents as well as struggles within movements. The article provides empirical evidence for these theoretical claims with a study of the demise of the Workers Alliance of America, a powerful, nation-wide movement of the unemployed formed in the United States in 1935 and dissolved in 1941. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the late 1990s, Pierre Bourdieu had become the primary public intellectual of major social scientific status at the head of the anti-globalization movement that emerged in France and in other Western European countries. This article discusses how Bourdieu became a leading public intellectual, a role that seems to contrast with his early years as a professional sociologist. It explores what seemed to change in Bourdieu’s activities and outlook as sociologist and what seems to have remained constant. It identifies several institutional conditions that seemed necessary for Bourdieu to be able to play the kind of public intellectual role he did in his later years. Bourdieu’s movement from a peripheral position to a central location in the French intellectual field, the changing character of the field itself, the growing influence of the mass media in French political and cultural life, the failures of the French Socialists in power, a cultural legacy of leading critical intellectuals in France, a unifying national issue of globalization, and the political conjuncture in 1995 all intersected in ways that opened a path for Bourdieu to choose new and more frequent forms of political action. His responses to that combination of factors at different moments reveal both a striking continuity in desire to preserve the autonomy of intellectual life and a change in view and strategy on how best to do that. The article concludes with a brief evaluation of Bourdieu’s public intellectual role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karl Polanyi’s 1944 book, The Great Transformation , has been recognized as central for the field of economic sociology, but it has not been subject to the same theoretical scrutiny as other classic works in the field. This is a particular problem in that there are central tensions and complexities in Polanyi’s argument. This article suggests that these tensions can be understood as a consequence of Polanyi’s changing theoretical orientation. The basic outline of the book was developed in England in the late 1930s when Polanyi was working within a specific type of Marxist framework. However, as he was writing the book, he developed several new concepts, including fictitious commodities and the embedded economy, that led in new directions. Because circumstances did not give him the time to revise his manuscript, the book is marked by a tension between these different moments in his own theoretical development. The result is that Polanyi glimpses the concept of the always embedded market economy, but he does not name it or elaborate it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even as rational choice theory is increasingly used in sociology, finding its way into such diverse subdisciplines as the sociology of the family, religion, gender, crime, race, stratification and economic sociology, it remains hotly contested. It has spurred a rancorous debate that, at its worst "degenerates into a caricatured contrast between a cold and calculating egoist engaged at the breakfast table in a cost-benefit assessment of the value of continuing his/her marriage and an oversocialized goody-two-shoes programmed in early childhood to cherish values and conform to norms that sustain the social order by serving the common good. Although details vary slightly across authors, the claim that rational choice theory can supply sociology with a unifying general theory is fundamentally undergirded by an overall agreement on its core elements. A particularly clear formulation is provided by sociologist James March, who asserts that there are essentially four parts to a theory of intentional choice.

Even as rational choice theory is increasingly used in sociology, finding its way into such diverse subdisciplines as the sociology of the family, religion, gender, crime, race, stratification and economic sociology, it remains hotly contested. It has spurred a rancorous debate that, at its worst "degenerates into a caricatured contrast between a cold and calculating egoist engaged at the breakfast table in a cost-benefit assessment of the value of continuing his/her marriage and an oversocialized goody-two-shoes programmed in early childhood to cherish values and conform to norms that sustain the social order by serving the common good. Although details vary slightly across authors, the claim that rational choice theory can supply sociology with a unifying general theory is fundamentally undergirded by an overall agreement on its core elements. A particularly clear formulation is provided by sociologist James March, who asserts that there are essentially four parts to a theory of intentional choice.

This article explores the relation among ethnography, storytelling, and the meanings of protest. During the last decade, the interior of the country has become a veritable landscape of protest. Second, analysis of the stories of the riot, and of the different meanings that a single contentious episode can acquire, should help people reflect more broadly on the relations among storytelling, memory, and actors' self-understandings. Social scientists have taken good advantage of storytelling, mainly emphasizing its potential as a window into the meanings of extremely diverse collective and individual practices, from killing cats to reading the Bible, from cockfighting to prizefighting. Collective action scholars are also increasingly paying attention to narrative. The fighting words matter not only because they are the stuff through which the riot is continually constructed. Corruption cases were not merely material to read about and discuss with friends in coffee shops and during street rallies.

In this article, researchers seek to account for the paradox, involving the "industrialization" of the academy and the "collegialization" of industrial research. By exploring the nature and origins of this seeming contradiction, it is hoped to unearth important clues regarding the social positions that educated workers are likely to assume as capitalism comes to rely more heavily on scientific and technical expertise. Synthesizing findings from previous empirical work, one may conclude that a process of convergence is underway in which codes and practices of industry are infiltrating the academy, even as academic norms are increasingly governing the work practices of selected knowledge workers in high technology firms and industries. Researchers refer to the process as asymmetrical convergence because although codes and practices circulate in both directions, industry ultimately appears to have an upper hand in this process. Given the inchoate state of this convergence process and the institutional and organizational complexity it involves, the precise contours of any outcome are uncertain. The process is affecting and is likely to affect different varieties of institutions of higher education in different ways.

This article has as its main goal to contribute to a broad discussion of game theory and also to raise the question of whether it would be possible to develop a distinctly sociological version of game theory. By a broad discussion that is not limited to technical game theory but also includes games more generally and other approaches to analyzing reality in terms of games. By the expression a distinctly sociological version of game theory that is such that it will both draw on and renew the sociological tradition, just like economists have developed their own version of game theory and used it to improve economic analysis. This article is a companion piece to an earlier study in which the major works in game theory are analyzed from the perspective of sociology. In this second work, however, the focus has been shifted from game theory itself to the use that sociologists have made of game theory. Both studies are non-technical and built on the premise that game theory is of interest also to sociologists who are not trained in technical game theory. One can roughly distinguish between two periods in the use of game theory by sociologists. During the late l950's to the mid-l970's, a small number of sociologists became interested in game theory and started to use it and discuss it.

The purpose of this article is to contradict the supposed "naturalness" of scientific and professional development in economics. Cross-national surveys of opinion have already shown that economists in different countries tend to share different convictions about the economic world and the likely effects of economic policies or to see their mission as primarily "academic" or more "political." Available historical studies of national economics fields also suggest very diverse images of professionalization processes and disciplinary development. Overall, contrary to the frequent assumption that economics is a universal and universally shared science, there seems to be considerable cross-national variation in the timing and nature of the institutionalization of an economic knowledge field, forms of professional action of economists and intellectual traditions in the discipline of economics. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the study of the economy has evolved from a loose discursive "field" with no clear and identifiable boundaries, into a fully "professionalized" enterprise, relying on both a coherent and highly formalized disciplinary framework and extensive practical claims in administrative, business and mass media institutions.

This article explores the historical emergence of a "familial society" in Japan. In 1893, Goh Diagoro, chancellor of the Imperial Japanese Consulate-General in London, spoke to the Japan Society of London on the subject of family relations in Japan. In Goh's understanding, Christianity was the most important force creating Western moral prescripts and the structure of Western societies. Goh was neither the first nor the last to note the centrality of the family system to Japanese culture. Contemporary scholars mirror Goh's position with works examining the influence of the family system on corporate structure, government action,3 public culture,4 and a host of other sociopolitical phenomena in Japan. It is not that kinship forms every important social tie in Japan, rather, important social ties are understood using the family as a metaphor. Scholars often point out that even modern corporations in Japan organize themselves as family units with filial loyalty, paternal responsibilities, and emotional attachment encouraged through practices such as workers doing exercises in unison and pledging their allegiance to the company.

International migration has enormously increased in volume and diversity, playing a constitutive role in the globalization processes that are transforming economies, nation-states, and local cultures worldwide. A coherent explanatory framework is needed for the sociology of international migration, which would relate to mainstream theoretical agenda of the discipline. Thus, the initiation of international migratory flows is best accounted for by a combination of propositions from the world system, segmented labor market, neoclassical economics, and the new economics of migration theories, and, thus far unintegrated into the sociological theories of immigrations, the nature and effectiveness of emigration and immigration policies of sender and receiver states. A combination of specific propositions derived from the segmented labor market model and social capital and cumulative causation theories explains the perpetuation mechanisms of international migratory flows. The information about these worker, and trader-tourists and their environments in home and host countries has been gathered from national and sub-regional reports on the directions, intensity, and sociodemographic composition of Westbound migrations from post-communist Poland.

This article focuses on the phenomenological habitus and its construction. The concepts "habit" and "habitus," having almost disappeared from the sociological lexicon during the earlier part of the post-war period, are currently enjoying renewed interest in the social sciences. This is due, in large part, to the work of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. His work draws out the significance and relevance of the concept of habit for sociological purposes and in doing so makes a very appealing case for a habit or disposition based theory of agency. This is not intended as a phenomenological critique of Bourdieu, a call to replace his conception of habit with a phenomenological one nor a call for a full scale "marriage" of phenomenology with Bourdieu's sociology. Bourdieu formulates his concept of the habitus in the context of a critical engagement with structuralism and "social physics," on the one hand, and "social phenomenology" on the other. Against social physics and structuralism, he argues for a notion of competent and active agency.

An interesting body of literature in the social sciences has suggested an intimate connection between the institutions and process of the public sphere, on the one hand, and modern nationalism, on the other. The aim in this article is to contribute to this growing literature by considering one case of nationalist mobilization in post-communist Bulgaria. First, the author aim to summarize the development of an empirically-grounded sociological perspective on the public sphere and to demonstrate the usefulness of this perspective for the study of nationalism. Beyond that, however, the author's goal in this case study is to specify the conditions under which national rhetoric is an effective strategy in the modern public sphere. The author argues that this case study contributes to a more adequate understanding of the dynamic relationship between nationalism and the public sphere by indicating that the success of nationalist mobilization is contingent upon the ability pf a nationalist public to link persuasively its claims to the universalistic and democratic ideals that lay at the foundation of the public sphere.

Several historical sociologists have argued that the study of path dependence has important implications for social research. Analysts such as Ronald Aminzade, Larry Griffin. Larry Isaac, William Sewell, Margaret Somers, and Charles Tilly have suggested that many crucial social phenomena can be adequately explained only in terms of path dependence. Moreover, these scholars have argued that the field of historical sociology offers tools of analysis especially well suited for the study of path dependence. In making this argument, historical sociologists follow the lead of prestigious economic historians who have asserted that the analysis of path dependence opens whole new frontiers of research in economics. Unfortunately, analysts have yet to define the concept path dependence in a manner that demonstrates why path-dependent patterns and sequences merit special attention. Quite often, path dependence is defined as little more than the vague notion that history matters or that the past influences the future.

The article discusses identity politics and democratic transitions in Latin America in the context of women's strategic interests through community activism. The article contributes to debates within the revisionist feminist and social movement research on the place of grassroots political and social activity within the larger context of national political reform. The limitation and possibilities of popular sector women's movement in contemporary Latin America, with special reference to political mobilization of rural women have been presented. In seeking a broader understanding of democracy and democratization, the analysis focuses on the viability and efficacy of marginalized group's discourses of resistance and practices of social transformation. The author discusses the way in which cognitive changes regarding citizen's self-understanding of political efficacy and collective capacity affect mobilization potential and strategies of action. The article explores ways to consider more integrally identity politics and ideological struggle in both understanding regime transition as a process and adjudicating outcomes of popular mobilization strategies. The author holds that ideational contestation can have a demonstrable impact on the dynamics of social political change.

Sociology has been often defined as the study of civil society, identified since the \early nineteenth century with those areas of social life distinct and separate from the state. Sociology has also been described more invidiously as the science of leftovers consisting of areas that had not been preempted by economics, political science and law. Civil society includes in its scope the market economy, but by the end of the last century sociology had become identified with social life apart from both the economy and the state. Through the greater part of the twentieth century, the state/society distinction has been more than merely conceptual, for efforts to limit and even eliminate the dominance of the market by state intervention have been a major theme of the politics of democracies, the very source of the left/right division itself. At the opposite pole from anarchism as a doctrine and ideology but also projecting the nearly total dissolution of the division between state and society, has been the notion of totalitarianism, more important as a concept than as a political goal. let alone a fully achieved reality defined as the absorption of the traditional state and the penetration of the whole of social life by a hierarchically organized political-ideological movement claiming to represent the masses. Both major forms of totalitarianism called themselves socialist, but socialism in its original nineteenth-century form was conceived of as the subordination of the state and politics to the social question that is to the conflicts and sufferings arising out of the class inequalities produced by laissez-faire capitalism.

This article seeks to explain why blood banks and plasma companies reacted differently to the same information about the spread of a new disease through the blood supply in the United States. The article focuses on the recent work in economic sociology and the sociology of risk in order to give an account of these events. Using the concept of a "negotiated information order" to frame the analysis, author explains why blood banks and plasma companies acted as they did. The appearance of blood-borne AIDS was an instance of an awkward kind of uncertainty. Actors in the blood industry were not sure what was going on, and the available information was ambiguous. They constructed a set of standards, an information order, to evaluate information about the problem. Drawing on statements made to a commission of inquiry, as well as internal memos, minutes, and transcripts, the author shows that these standards were influenced by three factors: the external dependencies of these organizations, the exchange relations that bound them in different ways to their suppliers and recipients, and the organizational ties that linked them to other stakeholders in the blood industry.

During the last few years the interest for what in Europe is called Zivilcourage seems to have increased among the public at large. Social scientists, however, have shown little interest in this topic, something that is a pity since "civil courage" represents a fascinating phenomenon in its own right. The article shows what a sociological analysis of civil courage might look like. Such an analysis represents a challenge for several reasons. For one thing, there exists an important individual dimension to civil courage, which is hard to get at from a sociological perspective. At the moment of acting, for example, the individual typically stands alone. On the other hand, it is also clear that sociology is well equipped to bring out the social or group dimension of civil courage, especially the way that family, friends, and sympathizers stand behind and support the person who in some situation displays civil courage. There is finally also the fact that acts of civil courage often evoke a very strong sense of admiration. In an objective sociological analysis this admiration should be explained - but not be allowed to infuse the way that civil courage is analyzed.

This article describes the foundations for a conceptual framework to explain the military's role in reproducing social inequality, the military's active contribution to its construction and legitimization. Although relations between military organizations and civilian social structures often become matters of public debate, a compelling general account of the military's role in reproducing or transforming civilian social structures has yet to be articulated. Following an outline of the analytical gap, the main argument is propounded, which revolves around the five social implications of military service as these relate to the conjunction between two variables: the extent to which the military reflects civilian inequalities in its ranks and the extent to which power acquired in the military can be converted into social position in return to social life. The argument is illustrated by means of two relatively dichotomous military organizations, the people of the U.S. and the Israelis.

This article seeks to prove wrong skeptics which held that the concepts of civil society and the public sphere morally admirable but analytically useless as some skeptics have argued. An outline of a program for empirical research that proceeds from current work on those topics is provided. The argument unfolds in several steps. First, the authors aim systematically to inject the idea of an associational civil society, distinguished theoretically from economic and political institutions, into debates in sociological analysis. Second, they explore in detail the different categories of networks of publicity that are rooted within civil society. Third, the authors lay out a series of propositions for converting a model of institutional spheres and extra-institutional networks of publicity into a systematic program for empirical research.

This article explores why both women and men interpret the question of the relationship of gender and social theory, and specifically the gendering of social theory, as being a matter of increasing the presence of women in social theory. Increasing the presence of women may mean both increasing the theorizing of women and increasing the presence of feminists and feminism in social and political theory. The article begins with a brief discussion of feminist theorizing. However, it is also politically and conceptually important to consider how men theorize men, which is the focus of the article. By examining the fundamental relationships between author and topic, six discursive practices are distinguished. After examining each of these, the author concludes with some reflections on how men's critical theorizing on men can be further developed, and the implications of this discussion for the constitution of social theory.

The reflexive nature of intellectual work, whether actual or potential, places serious obstacles in the way of any objectivist, or generalizing, account of that work. That intellectuals, especially social theoretical ones such as Marx Weber and the moderate mandarins, do regularly, even if inconsistently, provide accounts of their own ideas means that one cannot ever entirely eliminate the study of exceptional intellectuals or, correlatively, of the exceptional features of any intellectual's thought. To neglect the exceptional, the starkly individualistic, dimensions of any intellectual movement cannot help but reduce that movement to its common ground, leaving out precisely those unreconciled, reflexive aspects that may be the most distinctive feature of an intellectual's life and work. Most especially, insufficient regard for the reflexive, idiosyncratic ideas of an intellectual makes it difficult to answer the very reflexive questions one wants to ask in assessing an idea or a movement.