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This article provides a critique and an addition to observations raised by Ballantine et al. in this issue. After reviewing the strengths of Ballantine et al.'s article about the need for a core in sociology, I argue that this debate has gone on long enough and needs to be reframed around areas of agreement. Three major curricular projects (that have already begun to move this discussion forward) are presented, including the American Sociological Association (ASA) High School National Standards; the ASA Task Force on "Liberal Learning and the Sociology Major, Updated, Third Edition"; and the Measuring College Learning (MCL) Project. A critical outcome of the MCL Project in sociology is the Sociological Literacy Framework, which is already changing conversations about sociology curricula and learning outcomes. The Sociological Literacy Framework is summarized, and use of this framework is discussed.

Lisa Jean Moore describes a class assignment for her Social and Cultural Change course in which she was required to accommodate the material limitations of teaching within a highly regulated and restricted environment. This assignment, carried out in a women's prison, could be adapted for traditional college settings and travel abroad programs, but Moore designed the assignment outside of her traditional classroom and was thus only able to create it and realize its potential within that particular context. She explains how the assignment was innovated and refined by the prison environment, which demanded deep reflection and expressive sociological production. Contrary to the author's preconceived notions, she found that prison does not preclude pedagogy but actually opens up unanticipated spaces and forms. Moore writes that beyond her grandest expectations, this assignment, the result of wrestling with the limitations of teaching in a maximum-security prison, produced a sensational and moving experience of sociological pedagogy for both the students and herself.

C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination (1959) represents one of the most influential texts of postwar American sociology. The title has become a catchphrase that stands for a style of thought that transcends both theoretical dogma and the constraints of mere methodological rule following. This article sets out to show that Mills' vision of the sociological imagination had more in common with the then dominant lines of scholarship than his broadside against Parsonian grand theory and Lazarsfeldian abstracted empiricism in the main part of the book would suggest. Among the tools that Mills introduced as fostering the sociological imagination were 2 × 2 tables. The article traces the use of such tables over time and across scholarly communities and shows that, contrary to Mills' own estimate, these tables describe a common nexus between his own work and that of Parsons and Lazarsfeld. All three scholars made ample use of this formal tool to construct sociological arguments at central places of their oeuvre. Given its shared use across otherwise divergent schools, the 2 × 2 table is a prime example for what historians of science have called paper tools, i.e. statistical formulas, algorithms, tables, diagrams, graphs, etc., that structure scientific research across different schools of thought and theoretical approaches. Drawing on the notion of paper tools, the article advances a post-Kuhnian perspective on the history of sociology that shifts the research focus from substantive ideas to formal tools and demonstrates elements of commensurability among presumably incommensurable schools of thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When writing a research paper, the author has to select information to include in the paper to support various arguments. The information has to be organized and synthesized into a coherent whole through relationships and information structures. There is hardly any research on the information structure of research papers, and how information structure supports rhetorical and argument structures. Thus, this study is focused on information organization in the Abstract and Introduction sections of sociology research papers, analyzing the information structure of research objective, question, hypothesis, and result statements. The study is limited to research papers reporting research that investigated cause–effect relations between two concepts. Two semantic frames were developed to specify the types of information associated with cause–effect and comparison relations, and used as coding schemes to annotate the text for different information types. Six link patterns between the two frames were identified—showing how comparisons are used to support the claim that the cause‐effect relation is valid. This study demonstrated how semantic frames can be incorporated in discourse analysis to identify deep structures underlying the argument structure. The results carry implications for the knowledge representation of academic research in knowledge graphs, for semantic relation extraction, and teaching of academic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]