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This paper looks at the program for social psychology presented by Floyd Allport in his Social Psychology of 1924. It contextualizes Allport's program in terms of intellectual currents of the time and the views of his teachers at Harvard University, specifically the philosopher Ralph Barton Perry and the psychologists Edwin B. Holt and Hugo Münsterberg. Finally, the paper analyzes responses to Allport's program at the time and later, retrospective responses. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a considerable rise in discourses concerning trust from a range of academic disciplines and perspectives. Unfortunately, many of these literatures have talked past, rather than to, each other. This paper develops an analysis of trust in economic activity through a dialogue between the disciplines of economics and sociology. It outlines the relationship of trust to economic co-operation and identifies a number of types of trust. The potential benefits of these different types of trust to advanced capitalist economies are identified. Consideration is given to the processes of trust creation and destruction in market economies. Particular emphasis here is on how far trust can be symbiotic with, or contradictory to, power and the market. With an analysis of the key properties of individual agents which make them more or less prone to trusting behaviour, the paper is then able to identify the critical factors likely to underlie high-trust and low-trust economies. This has important public policy implications given the potential benefits which trust can have for advanced economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper identifies and examines various multiple renditions of the so-called Weber Thesis of an historical association and convergence between ascetic Protestantism, above all Calvinism, and the emergence and development of modern capitalism as an economic spirit and system. Specifically, it detects at least four different versions and formulations or interpretations, thus casting doubt in the common view of the Weber Thesis as a single and monolithic theory or hypothesis. The paper also considers the status of the multiple versions of the Weber Thesis in post-Weberian and contemporary sociology and related disciplines like economics and history. It concludes that the weaker, relaxed renditions of the Weber Thesis have attained a greater success and more endured in contemporary social science than have its stronger, stricter versions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents instructions for authors for submitting manuscripts for publication in the periodical "The Journal of Historical Sociology." Four copies of the manuscript should be sent to the responsible editors. All contributions should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 100 words, and a brief biographical note including institutional affiliation. Once a paper has been accepted for publication, authors must provide publishers with a final text that strictly conforms to the guidelines provided in the article.

The article announces Fay Dennis and Marie Le Clainche Piel as the winners of the 2021 Mildred Blaxter New Writer's Prize, with their articles covering drug fatalities and treatment fatalism and social conditions of receiving an anonymous face transplant.

This article provides guidelines for the authors who contributes to the "The Journal of Historical Sociology (JHS)." A typical JHS article will contain little by way of extended literature review , will say something substantial and new about its empirical subject-matter, will be aware of the theoretical implications of its topic without turning into an abstruse discussion of pure theory, and will be of interest to readers beyond a specialist geographical or disciplinary audience. About paper submission, four copies of the manuscript should be sent to the responsible editors . All contributions should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 100 words, and a brief biographical note including institutional affiliation. These should each be typed on separate sheets. Unsolicited manuscripts cannot be returned. Articles should normally be no longer than 10,000 words or 35 double-spaced standard north American letter-size page; review essays or "Issues and Agendas" pieces no more than 6,000 words. Longer submissions will be considered on their merits, but their chances of acceptance are much less. Submissions are first read by responsible editors, and may be rejected without further review.

Cultural Theory, as developed by Mary Douglas, argues that differingrisk perceptions can be explained by reference to four distinct cultural biases: hierarchy, egalitarianism, individualism, and fatalism. This paper presents empirical results from a quantitative survey based on a questionnaire devised by Karl Dake to measure these cultural biases. A large representative sample (N = 1022) was used to test thisinstrument in the French social context. Correlations between cultural biases and perceptions of 20 social and environmental risks were examined. These correlations were very weak, but were statistically significant: cultural biases explained 6%, at most, of the variance in risk perceptions. Standard sociodemographic variables were also weakly related to risk perceptions (especially gender, social class, and education), and cultural biases and sociodemographic variables were themselves inter correlated (especially with age, social class, and political outlook). The authors compare these results with surveys conducted in other countries using the same instrument and conclude that new methods, more qualitative and contextual, still need to be developed to investigate the cultural dimensions of risk perceptions. The paper also discusses relationships between perceptions of personal and residual risk, and between perceived risk and demand for additional safety measures. These three dimensions were generally closely related, but interesting differences were observed for some risk issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a critical analysis of the book "The Handbook of Sociolinguistics," edited by Florian Coumas. An issue which concerned some potential investigators of social dimensions of language use was that of the scientific and disciplinary statuses of the two principal contributing enterprises, namely, linguistics and sociology. The author finds the treatment of the topic on macro-issues weak and missing critical references. The paper on language and identity missed an opportunity to identify some critical sociolinguistic questions and relevant literatures.

ABSTRACT. The aim of the paper is to present the economic sociology of Alfred Marshall (1842-1924). Three topics are discussed in the paper: Marshall's ideas of how preferences are generated, the theory of action, and finally the introduction of a fourth factor of production, organization. Throughout the paper Marshall's broad perspective is demonstrated. It is argued that Marshall's approach encourages a closer connection between sociologists interested in economic phenomena and economists. This conclusion is strengthened because of the resemblance of Marshall's analysis to those offered by Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a commentary to Benjamin Singer's essay on the criterial crisis in academe. It highlights several issues about which young academics and their elders routinely kitbitz at campus watering holes. Singer's lament is fundamentally an embroidery on lunchroom complaints and coffeehouse chatter dressed up with headings and a fine bibliography. Cynics may conclude that his article a good example of the "proliferation of journals and redundant and useless papers." And others may wonder, in the interests of reflexivity, whether Singer's paper was submitted to other journals before it was accepted by Sociological Inquiry and whether the paper as published was exempt from the vagaries and vicissitudes of peer review that Singer deplores. Since Singer suggests that few published papers are ever read, he will no doubt be surprised that his was discovered among the hundreds of sociological journals in our university library and that my reading of his work prompted the following observations about sociological publishing and tenure decisions.

This short article pleads for research rather than rumor regarding Parsons' alleged role regarding the admittance to United States of an ex-Soviet citizen in 1948 or 1949. Some evidence on background issues that could be found among the Parsons papers at Harvard University Archives is being presented verbatim. I argue that the point is to refrain from fabrications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article responds to sociologist Andy Pickering's comments, partly because of the inherent intellectual stimulation of exchanging ideas with such a distinguished colleague, but partly also because of the need for much greater interchange between the two fields, the sociology of environment and technology, on the one hand and the sociology of science on the other. Pickering's comments raise three important points about the analysis of Iron Mountain, Michigan. First, he praises what he calls papers symmetry in noting the importance of physical⁄environmental as well as social factors in understanding social outcomes. Second, he argues that people have not taken this point far enough, in large part because, he believes, the social is not sufficiently at stake in papers. Third, he argues that a fruitful antidote would be to trace the evolution of actual practices, in detail, over time.

The article comments on the essay "Durkheim's Division of Labor in Society," published in the March 1, 1994 issue of the journal "Sociological Forum." The author of the article feels that it has several dimensions. It begins by touching several dimensions like the quality of the translations, meta-theoretical aspects and contexts of the pioneering book and its meta-theoretical assumptions and one major research technique, empirical indicators. The paper opens with a rebuke to the translator. It takes no notice of the basic theoretical contributions of the work. It had a dismal quality of the translation. The graduate student evidently resonated to writer Emile Durkheim's early recognition of the importance of identifying indicators and devices indices of conceptualized social realities as a basic procedure in theory-based empirical enquiry. Two kinds of reductionist theories were rejected as both were categorized as undermined by facts.

Presents a preface to the March 1, 1992 issue of the journal "Sociological Forum."

This paper examines the relation between positivistic and interpretive sociology, using the stress research literature as a case study. Analyzing the cultural history of the stress concept, it uncovers four central themes: anxiety, performance, adjustment, and mentalism, Examining the self-criticismc made by scientific students of stress, it focuses on the problems of temporal order, confounding, and interaction. Comparison of the cultural and scientific literatures shows that while some of the positivists' complaints derive from general methodological choices, others come from inescapable aspects of the culture's general idea of stress. Considering the past development of stress research, the paper argues that positivism and interpretation have not been Cartesian opposites but interpenetrating fractals. It then speculates about what this relation implies for future positivistic studies, both in the stress literature and more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the paper of sociologist Serge Moscovici on social psychology. Moscovici believes that social psychology was once becoming an influential crossroads discipline, one that could shape and nurture other social sciences such as economics, anthropology and sociology. Moscovici's solution to the problem of how to become a powerful discipline seems to be along the lines of getting back to basics. Throughout his paper, Moscovici urges other social psychologists to consider the importance of creating rich descriptions garnered through careful, painstaking observations. In various ways an inductivist model of science within a positivist-empiricist framework informs Moscovici's views of the ideal social psychology. Moscovici seems to believe that the positivist-empiricist mode of scientific method is unchallenged within social psychology and sciences more generally. The author stresses the similarities between Moscovici's philosophy of science and that of the most traditional mainstream laboratory social psychologist.

This paper is a response to the challenges laid down by Hannah Cooke in a paper in the Journal of Advanced Nursing entitled 'Boundary work in the nursing curriculum: the case of sociology' (Cooke 1993a). In her paper, Cooke noted that the outlook of nursing and sociology are inimicable because nursing's concentration on individuals is at variance with sociology's concern with wider social issues. We argue that it is possible for nursing research to give due attention to social structures without losing its focus on individuals. One methodology that could facilitate this broadening of nursing's epistemological boundaries is critical realist ethnography, which works under the assumption that the relationship between social structures and individual actors involves a two-way process, in that while the enablements and constraints imposed by structures influence individual actions, those actions in turn either maintain or transform social structures. To demonstrate how such a methodology could be applied in nursing research, we work through a case study concerning the theory-practice gap, arguing that the gap is neither the result of clinicians' ignorance of nor antipathy to theory, but is largely generated by the lack of resources enjoyed by nurses, which in turn is a reflection of the social structure of capitalism within which nurses operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents author's reply to sociologist John Lovering comments on the paper on flexible production organization and regional development. Lovering does not dispute the internal logic of the analysis of the relationship between market uncertainty and vertical disintegration. He merely asserts that firms are complex phenomena and might respond in ways different from those that author proposed depending on context and that the author's analysis is of necessity closed to these alternative possibilities. The claim that wider social and political influences are banished from author's analysis by ceteris paribus assumptions is incorrect. Lovering criticizes the work for its presumed insensitivity to the contingencies of real empirical outcomes.

The article comments on R.E. Pahl's paper on the adequacy of theory in urban and regional research. The paper displays all the characteristics usually associated with that particular mode of argumentation. Sweeping charges are leveled against targets who are never clearly identified. All of the substantive propositions are asserted rather than demonstrated. Many of his detailed allegations are actually open to empirical test although most of the evidence known contradicts Pahl's conclusions. His account of class analysis is alternately misleading and fanciful. And finally, the paper is impenetrably vague about what, if anything, provides a more satisfactory alternative.

Previous research on adopter categories has found several relationships between time of adoption and various social, economic, and demographic characteristics of the adopters of innovations. This paper extends the focus to include the spatial dimension in the context of two approaches to explaining innovation diffusion. The communications approach emphasizes information flows, whereas the market and infrastructure approach stresses the availability of the innovation to potential adopters. The study produces two major findings: (1) that locational characteristics are an important aspect of both explanations and therefore should be considered along with the traditional set of variables in describing adopter categories; (2) that the conceptual model associated with adopter categories should be broadened to reflect marketing strategy characteristics as well as innovativeness characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an index of various literature on rural sociology.

In the wake of dramatic changes in public opinion and social custom over the past 40 years, why do many white Americans continue to oppose efforts to bring about racial equality? One possible explanation centers on self-interest: from this perspective, whites' resistance to racial change reflects their perception that blacks pose real and tangible threats to their personal lives-to their neighborhoods, their jobs, their children's education, and their safety. Another possible explanation centers on "symbolic racism": from this perspective, whites' opposition to racial change reflects their endorsement of racist sentiments and traditional American values, particularly individualism. This paper argues against the first explanation, for the second, and more generally that our under- standing of the American dilemma would be enhanced by frequent and vigorous empirical confrontations among an expanded set of alternative explanations. With this objective in mind, the paper concludes by promoting several such explanations, each of which has a strong claim on the research agenda of the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an analysis of the Final Report of the Commission on the Review of the National Policy Toward Gambling. After discussing the origins and political environment of the Commission, the paper focuses on the relationship between the Commission's recommendations and the results of its own research. The author argues that the research was used only where it fitted the Commission's views and was ignored where it did not. The paper concludes with a discussion of the structural factors that led to this outcome. Criticizing the banal and unsubstantiated policy views of public commissions is easy sport . . . I do so only to make a simple point: public commissions, on the record, have either made no use of social science . . . made some use but in ways irrelevant to its policy conclusions . . ., or made use of relevant but unconvincing research. (Wilson, 1978) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article continues the discussion of the informetric distributions begun in a companion paper. In the earlier paper, the informetric distributions were introduced and found to be variants of a `single distribution. It was suggested that this might be explained in terms of that distribution being unusually resilient to ambiguity. in this paper the notion of resilience to ambiguity is made precise. By way of introduction, a number of simple examples of resilience, taken from the social sciences, are discussed. This approach is then applied to the Informetric distributions themselves. it is argued that the form taken by the informetric regularities does Indeed make them insensitive to the wide range of ambiguities that occur when measuring the output of social activity, and that this ubiquitous form is unusual in having this property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We review the problems of citation analysis. Most of them have either not been studied or have received only cursory attention. Since major error results when these problems are not taken into account, users of citation-based literature should proceed cautiously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that children, as an important social group, repay study in connection with the sociology of health and illness. The paper outlines the neglect of children within medical sociology and goes on to open up a discussion towards a sociology of child health. The paper makes three main points. First, consideration of the case of health and illness helps understanding of children's social positioning as a minority group. Secondly, children present a clear case for considering people as embodied health care actors. Thirdly, taking account of children in the sociology of health requires rethinking the division of labour and inter-generational relationships within it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article the authors comment on the views of sociologists Rona Campbell and Sam Porter, on a paper on feminist theory and the sociology of human reproduction written by them. The authors clarify that while feminists and midwives may hold ideas in common, feminist and midwifery practice are diverse and contested fields and there is no intrinsic affinity between the two. In their earlier paper they argued that feminism is not disinterested in its response to midwifery. It is further argued that differences which have become increasingly vociferous within feminism have tended to be neglected within the sociology of health and illness, and proposed that post-structuralist approaches might provide a fruitful, although certainly not unproblematic, counterpoint to a range of modernist feminist perspectives as they relate to gender and reproduction. In response to Campbell and Porter's criticism for ignoring recent midwifery and social science research on midwifery practice, it is clarified that the authors never intended to question midwifery's credentials in working with childbearing women.

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]

Along with Ward, Giddings, and Keller, William Graham Sumner has been considered a social evolutionist. The Science of Society, supposedly written by Sumner with Keller, has been traditionally utilized to document his evolutionary orientation. However, two recently discovered unpublished Sumner manuscripts show that the mature Sumner rejected almost all the basic premises of social evolutionism. This paper concludes that Sumner rejected social evolutionism during the last decade of his career and that the evolutionary orientation found within The Science of Society, which was published 17 years after his death, was the result of Keller's thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines ‘alternative institutions’ in a variety of institutional domains as participatory-democratic modes of organization. Grounded in comparative data, it posits structural conditions, both internal to an organization and in its environment, which support or undermine the achievement of its collectivist-democratic ideals. While the literature on social movement organizations well demonstrates the fragility of democratic systems and their tendency toward oligarchization, goal displacement, and organizational maintenance, this work suggests, in propositional form, conditions which militate against these all-too-common transformation patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are witnessing the emergence of a 'new nursing'. In part, this has been associated with the adoption of a 'holistic' model of health and a commitment to a holistic curriculum within nurse education. The role of sociology within the nursing enterprise has been the subject of much debate. This paper seeks to further this debate by arguing that sociology is invaluable to nursing for many reasons but that its value may be undermined as a consequence of being overly constrained within the nursing arena, at the mutual expense of both sociology and the long term interests of nursing itself. This paper will suggest that central to an understanding of how this 'surplus constraint' of sociology occurs is an understanding of the manner in which the holistic model has been adopted in much of nursing and nurse education. The 'indeterminacy' of the holistic model is such that it has empowered a questionable eclecticism, marginalized philosophical controversies within nursing theory, disguised difficult epistemological and ontological conflicts associated with competing claims to truth and facilitated the operation of a form of power whereby sociology has been excluded, at the very moment of its apparent inclusion. This paper goes on to argue that the value of sociology to nursing is dependent upon: firstly, a more systematic and rigorous discussion of its relationship to, and role within, nursing and secondly, a movement away from an implicit 'assimilation' model regarding the incorporation of sociology into nursing towards a more 'multicultural' approach. Only under such circumstances may sociology's value to nursing be realized but in a manner that places an importance on maintaining the ontological and epistomological integrity of the sociological tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on a qualitative research study, Children, Parents and Risk. This study looks at the ways in which risks to children are understood and managed by children and parents. The paper focuses on two areas of the research—gaining access and interviewing—in order to show how the research process itself has constituted an important source of data on childhood and risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to provide an overview of ethical issues related to social research with children. It sets the discussion in the context of current debates about researching children in the UK, and explores the extent to which children should be regarded as similar to, or different from, adults in social research, focusing on how children are positioned as vulnerable, incompetent and relatively powerless in society in general, and how this conceptualisation of children needs to be taken into account in social research. The paper concludes with some practical and methodological suggestions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the implications of Ludwig von Bertalanffy's general systems theory for the current debates on the nature of organizational transparency as an element of good governance. If transparency implies the exchange of information, then it may be taken, at a metaphorical level, to constitute a dimension of metabolism theorized by Bertalanffy's open systems model. Yet, the model likewise lays bare some of the limits of transparency idea. Bertalanffy's work on the nature of emergent properties, his critique of the stimulus–response scheme, and his perspectivistic account of the systemic perception of the environment all point in the direction of the impossibility of full transparency. Later systems‐theoretic work on operational closure and self‐referentiality has reinforced and even radicalized these insights, which are shown to resonate with some of the key arguments in the contemporary economics, sociology of knowledge, and business ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that unique locations of digital interactions constitute distinct information‐technological media. I first apply a close reading of Couch's () work to digital sociology, and then analyze three popular social media networks: www.Imgur.com, www.Reddit.com, and www.Twitter.com. I close with a theoretical application of Couch's paradigm for analyzing the qualities of information technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lay perceptions and experiences of social location have been commonly framed with reference to social class. However, complex responses to, and ambivalence over, class categories have raised interesting analytic questions relating to how sociological concepts are operationalized in empirical research. For example, prior researchers have argued that processes of class dis-identification signify moral unease with the nature of classed inequalities, yet dis-identification may also in part reflect a poor fit between 'social class' as a category and the ways in which people accord meaning to, and evaluate, their related experiences of socio-economic inequality. Differently framed questions about social comparison, aligned more closely with people's own terms of reference, offer an interesting alternative avenue for exploring subjective experiences of inequality. This paper explores some of these questions through an analysis of new empirical data, generated in the context of recession. In the analysis reported here, class identification was common. Nevertheless, whether or not people self identified in class terms, class relevant issues were perceived and described in highly diverse ways, and lay views on class revealed it to be a very aggregated as well as multifaceted construct. It is argued that it enables a particular, not general, perspective on social comparison. The paper therefore goes on to examine how study participants compared themselves with familiar others, identified by themselves. The evidence illuminates social positioning in terms of constraint, agency and (for some) movement, and offers insight into very diverse experiences of inequality, through the comparisons that people made. Their comparisons are situated, and pragmatic, accounts of the material contexts in which people live their lives. Linked evaluations are circumscribed and strongly tied to these proximate material contexts.The paper draws out implications for theorizing lay perspectives on class, and subjective experiences of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commercialization of emotions is not a new phenomenon but in Denmark there is a new general trend to tell and sell personal stories in the media. Personal deprivation and crises are also major topics in sports media. This paper focuses on sports biographies as a book genre that is reviving in popularity. The paper approaches the topic through the biographies of one Danish athlete: the former professional cyclist, Jesper Skibby, who writes about his doping disclosure and shares his personal dilemmas as a former elite sportsman. The thematic text analysis orientates around social interactions, emotions, and personality constructions. Inspired by microsociology with a Durkheimian flavor of Goffman and Hochschild, themes including 'face work,' 'interaction rituals,' and 'emotions management' are discussed. The analysis claims that sharing personal information in the media is not only a means of confession and reclaiming status but is also business and management - on an intimate level. Telling the story of the corrosion of a sporting character has become a hot issue, an entertainment, and not least a commercial commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conferences play a pivotal role in the production and circulation of knowledge and in shaping and establishing academic and professional disciplines. As collective events, they facilitate intense moments of interaction where scientific and medical knowledge can be observed in the making. This paper calls attention to conferences as fascinating sites for sociologists of science, technology and medicine. By bringing together authors who look at conferences from different areas within the social sciences and using a variety of data gathering methods, this paper provides a comprehensive introduction to the field of conference studies and hopes to inspire greater reflection about the nature of conferences and their potential within research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To think about anything requires an image or concept of it, a model. To think about a thing as complex as a social system most people use a model of something similar, simpler and more familiar. Traditionally, two types of models have been used in efforts to acquire information, knowledge and understanding of social systems: mechanistic and organismic. But, in a world of accelerating change, increasing uncertainty and growing complexity, it is becoming apparent that these are inadequate as guides to decision and action. The growing number of social crises and dilemmas that we face should be clear evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with the way we think about social systems. In this paper we describe and try to explain the deficiencies of the two traditional ways of thinking about social systems. We then develop a third type of model, one we believe does not suffer from these inadequacies, a social system model which seeks to penetrate beyond the nature of machine and organisms to understand social systems in their own right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks Canadian sociology. It responds to several articles within the issue by sociologists Karen Stanbridge, D. B. Tindall, and Neil McLaughlin commenting on the author's previously published essay "Committing Canadian Sociology". According to the author, most of the critiques leveled at him in these articles are based on issues of epistemology rather than substantive sociological explanation. Topics discussed include sociologist Harold Innis, sociological methodology, and the relationship between ideographic and nomothetic explanation.

This paper calls for more direct, careful, sustained research on geographies of children, young people and popular culture. I present three sets of empirical and conceptual resources for researchers developing work in this area. Part 1 signposts classic work from cultural/media studies, marketing and sociology, which has been centrally concerned with meanings of popular culture designed for children and young people (e.g. via critiques of the gendered content of iconic popular cultural phenomena). Part 2 foregrounds nascent conceptualisations of social-material geographies of childhood and youth. I argue that these conceptualisations can extend and unsettle classic work on popular culture, by questioning how popular cultural texts, objects and phenomena matter. Halfway through the paper is a 'commercial break'. Here, I present some personal reflections on working at the intersection between the ideas discussed in Parts 1 and 2. With reference to a specific popular cultural artefact (the Toys 'Я' Us Christmas toy catalogue), I argue that both meanings and matterings are crucial for geographers engaging with children and young people's popular cultures. In conclusion, I argue that more geographers should engage with the literature and issues outlined in Part 1, but also that the geographical concepts discussed in Part 2 demand new modes of research, thinking and writing in relation to popular cultural texts, objects and phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents a list of books on linguistics and sociolinguistics.

The article presents a list of books related to social sciences. Some of them are, "Handbook of World Philosophy-Contemporary Developments Since 1945," by John R. Burr, "Shall We Believe in God and the Meaning of Ltfe?," by Max Kochman, "Responsibilities to Future Generations: Environmental Ethics," edited by Ernest Partridge.

In 2013, the International Boxing Association (AIBA) prohibited the use of headguards for elite male Olympic boxing competitions. Could the removal of the headguard from elite male boxing competitions potentially cause increased injury risk for boxers? The aim of the literature review is to analyse current knowledge about the use of protective headgear and injury prevention in boxing, in order to determine if there are increased injury risks associated with headguard use. Peer-reviewed studies (language: English, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Dutch) published from 1980 and onwards were considered. Five academic databases and grey literature sources were searched, and articles were assessed for methodological quality. Only studies that included boxers as the study population with headguards as a factor were considered. A total of 39 articles were included in the review. The analysis of the reviewed literature indicates that headguards protect well against lacerations and skull fractures, while less is known about the protective effects against concussion and other traumatic brain injuries. Most of the analysed studies however use indirect evidence, obtained through self-report or observational techniques with relatively small non-representative samples. There are almost no randomised control trials, longitudinal research designs or samples from recreational boxing. Therefore, AIBA's decision to remove the headguard has to be seen with caution and injury rates among (male) boxers should be continuously evaluated. Highlights Research does not sufficiently support the statement that boxing without protective headgear is safer than boxing with a headguard. Headguards protect well against facial cuts and skull fractures. The systematic review indicates that headguards provide some protection against linear impacts to the head. The headguards protective effects against concussion are however uncertain. A research agenda is proposed. Priority areas include a focus on longitudinal research designs, randomized control trials, samples from recreational competitive boxing, as well as further research into coaches' and athletes' experiences and perspectives on headguards and injuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the fact that the speciality of obstetrics is considered to be a high risk area, indeed it is estimated that in the UK, maternity services account for massive 60% of all the NHS litigation claims burden; scholarly activity in childbirth performance as part of the risk society is relatively underdeveloped when compared to other areas of health. It is the extent of the influence of risk upon the maternity services that makes this underdevelopment especially striking. In an effort to present childbirth as a worthwhile site for empirical investigation and theoretical discussion, this paper attempts to review the sociology of childbirth and to consolidate some of the multidisciplinary contributions made to date on childbirth within the risk society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore how racially gendered classed power-relations structure history, knowledge and American Sociology's historical memory and disciplinary knowledge production. In order to do so, this paper will 1) utilize Cabral's (1970) theory of history to center humanity as historically developed into a racially gendered classed capitalist world-system, 2) employ intersectionality as a heuristic device to see how knowledge is manipulated to normalize dehumanization as well as to perpetuate exploitation and privilege by denying ' Othered' ' knowledges, and lastly 3) sociologically imagine this racially gendered classed process in the 'institutional-structure' of American Sociology by exploring the ancestry of the concept of 'intersectionality.' In all this paper argues 1) American Sociology under theorizes history, a central aspect of the sociological imagination and production of new sociological knowledge, 2) American Sociology reproduces a dehumanized theory of history per Marx's 'historical materialism' and 3) the structure of American Sociology's knowledge is racially gendered classed, as illustrated in the collective memory of the concept of 'intersectionality.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-examines the sociological study of resistance in light of growing interest in the concept of affect. Recent claims that we are witness to an 'affective turn' and calls for a 'new sociological empiricism' sensitive to affect indicate an emerging paradigm shift in sociology. Yet, mainstream sociological study of resistance tends to have been largely unaffected by this shift. To this end, this paper presents a case for the significance of affect as a lens by which to approach the study of resistance. My claim is not simply that the forms of actions we would normally recognize as resistance have an affective dimension. Rather, it is that the theory of affect broadens 'resistance' beyond the purview of the two dominant modes of analysis in sociology; namely, the study of macropolitical forms, on the one hand, and the micropolitics of everyday resistance on the other. This broadened perspective challenges the persistent assumption that ideological forms of power and resistance are the most pertinent to the contemporary world, suggesting that much power and resistance today is of a more affective nature. In making this argument, it is a Deleuzian reading of affect that is pursued, which opens up to a level of analysis beyond the common understanding of affect as emotion. I argue that an affective approach to resistance would pay attention to those barely perceptible transitions in power and mobilizations of bodily potential that operate below the conscious perceptions and subjective emotions of social actors. These affective transitions constitute a new site at which both power and resistance operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to contribute to the sociology of nations, a literature that is only starting to carve out its place in the social sciences. The paper offers a reconceptualization of 'nations' as 'national cultures', employing an evolutionary perspective and a systemic framework in which 'nations' are understood as cultural systems of a special kind. National cultures are intimately tied to natural languages, and the acquisition of a national culture occurs as part and parcel of the acquisition of a natural language. Acquiring a natural language is a prerequisite for learning other cultural systems (artefactual languages as well as other natural languages). National cultures function as metacultures. They are also the reference cultures for modern states and their citizens, a political dimension of nations that is of paramount importance, though it will only be touched on in this paper. National cultures should be considered as the most fundamental type of cultural system today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]