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This paper charts the changing intersections between sociology and science and technology studies (STS) using computational textual analysis. We characterize this "quali-quantitative" approach as a Big Data method, as this calls attention to the commixture of textual and numeric data that characterizes Big Data. The term Big Data, too, calls attention to the increasing privatization of both data and data analytics tools. The data mining was done using a commercial analytics tool, IBM SPSS Modeler, that to the best of our knowledge has not yet been used for STS or sociological research. The identification of intersections occurred as part of a larger project to analyze political-economic and epistemic changes within STS, focusing on academic publishing. These epistemic changes were identified qualitatively, through 76 interviews with STS scholars, and quantitatively, through a computational analysis of three decades of STS journals (1990–2019). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American sociologist C. Wright Mills is one of the most important and controversial sociologists of the post-war period. Of Mills' works, one book stands out: The Sociological Imagination, published by Oxford University Press in 1959. Little known is that Mills drafted his book during a 12-month Fulbright visit to University of Copenhagen 1956-1957. In the rich biographical literature on Mills this is mentioned only in the passing, or not at all. Based on hitherto unused archival material, this paper offers the first detailed account of his Copenhagen-visit during the Cold War. Bringing together this bulk of new historical traces sheds new light on the year Mills himself referred to as a "pivotal moment." These 12 months in Copenhagen, amid the Cold War, was formative for Mills in two ways: First, Copenhagen was an entrepot to European center-left thinking both east and west of the Iron Curtain. Second, the stay in Copenhagen offered a 'space of selfhood', allowing Mills a necessary respite to develop his critical thinking. He did so in close cooperation with like-minded colleagues in Copenhagen. In the mid-1950s, the discipline was in the making in Denmark, and the visit of a prominent US scholar like Mills offered opportunities for Danish sociologist to further the discipline – and their standing within the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2024, Florida’s Board of Education eliminated the sociology course, ‘Principles of Sociology’ as one of its core requirements for obtaining a general social science education in its college and university system. Florida’s Commissioner of Education, Manny Diaz, led the charge, claiming that sociology has been ‘hijacked by left wing activists’ and is a purveyor of ‘woke ideology’. Some within the profession would agree with Diaz, and certainly, many university administrators would as well. Of course, there are varying representations of sociology, and what Diaz and others are targeting is critical sociology and its commitment to the interrogation of power. However, these political dynamics are not new. The history of critical sociology has reflected a similar pattern that it is being played out currently. The ebbs and flows of critical sociology’s place within the discipline, the state and profession’s suppression of it, its resurgence linked to external social and political forces, and its precarious existence within the university have been true of critical sociology since its origins. This paper offers a historical context for better understanding the current attack on the field of sociology and raises the question, what should critical sociologists do about it? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an investigation of attempts at endogenization and indigenization in the history of sociology in Japan. The author begins by presenting a short history of Japanese sociology. While the issues of endogenization and indigenization had been raised in the 1910s, imperialism and the militarization of the Emperor state and society blocked this form of development. Japanese social sciences have thus mainly followed the model of Western social sciences. The issue of indigenization gained attention after World War II and especially after the late 1960s, which was a time of reflection on the extreme influence of American sociology. In this context, this paper investigates the development of Kazuko Tsurumi's sociology, which is one of the best examples of work that deals with the issue of indigenization. Tsurumi analyzes social change from pre‐World War II to post‐World War II Japan by drawing on sociological functionalism. However, Tsurumi suggests that Kunio Yanagita's theory of folklore and ethnology provides a stronger explanatory framework than functionalism, and contends that Kumagusu Minaka has developed an approach rooted in East Asia. Tsurumi advances this indigenous development theory based on the work of Yanagita and Minakata, and at the same time internationalizes this theory. This paper concludes that Tsurumi's theory is an important medium between Western sociology and Eastern sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution to the symposium focuses on those facets of Martin Bulmer's work that sought to analyse the role of race and ethnicity in the development of sociological research. It highlights, in particular, his continuing interest through much of his scholarship with the work of the Chicago School and of key figures within it in the development of both conceptual and empirical research agendas in this field. This interest was intimately linked to his long-standing curiosity about the origins of sociological research and the links between sociology and social and public policy. The paper also explores Bulmer's engagement with questions about race and ethnicity. It also highlights his contribution to the development of the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies as a key forum for the publication of empirical and theoretical research on race and ethnic issues, linking the contributions of diverse national scholarly traditions together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the history of sociology in India to colonial anthropology and Indology. I argue that the compulsions of post-colonial society have also made specific demands on the discursive terrain of sociology. Fundamental to the pursuit of sociological knowledge in India, I believe, was a core debate about its mode of discursive practice – specifically, a debate between particularistic and universalistic orientations. From this point of view, I re-read the history of sociology in India. In doing so, I argue that close attention to the history of sociology helps us see the extent to which foundational western approaches to historical and comparative sociology have affected the historical development of sociology in India. Ironically, this has meant that the degree of historical self-awareness in Indian sociology has been limited. Hence, I discuss the grounds for the weak historical self-awareness in terms of historical sociology in India. I conclude by discussing how a strengthened tradition of historical sociology can be a tool to revitalize the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I describe the gradual monetization of the university and its implications for the discipline of sociology. I suggest that not only is money a guiding force for the decisions that university administrators, faculty and students make but that it is also a metaphor for the changes and challenges faced by sociologists today. The second part of the paper identifies strategies for grant success based on approaches that are common in the natural sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review paper marks the 70th anniversary of Current Sociology, the first journal founded by the International Sociological Association (ISA). The past seven decades have been a time of immense change within sociology and around the world, and the shifts within the structure and content of the journal mirror these transformations. Current Sociology today is a vastly different publication to the bibliography focused journal of 1952, and remains one of the top global sociology journals, and a proudly international publication. This short overview traces the history of Current Sociology across the decades, highlighting the work of the editors in guiding the development of the journal, and providing a glimpse into the development of the discipline, and the social developments of the past 70 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of caste played a prominent role in the early American sociology of race and race relations. The concept was developed largely through case studies of racially segregated communities in the American Deep South during the 1930s. While the concept of caste was largely abandoned by the middle of the 1950s, elements of a caste theory remain useful for both understanding contemporary work on race relations and the development of the sociology of race. This paper proposes a revised and expanded conception of caste grounded in the Black-White dynamic of American race relations. This approach builds on the performance circuit framework of economic sociology, arguing that "caste" refers to the roles, rules, and etiquette that govern economic interaction and give them meaning. The expanded approach develops three premises that highlight the consequences of caste. First, the entanglement of occupational and social roles is a key component of a racialized caste system. Second, deeply rooted racial animus prevents the social cohesion necessary to transition out of an economy defined by caste. Finally, the precarity of nominal class advancement within the dominated caste inhibits organizing that might challenge the overall system. This reevaluation of the caste concept resolves many of the limitations of the original caste school and bridges the divide between cultural and economic-based analyses of race relations in the early days of the American social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erving Goffman's written legacy bears on sociology as a whole, or so he argued in his Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association (Goffman, 1983). However, while being celebrated as important to the discipline, his work is also interpreted in inconsistent ways, often downplayed or marginalized, and even neglected. This paper claims that Goffman's "well known aversion to self-disclosure" (Shalin, 2013) does not justify overlooking his trajectory, from the unknown "margins" of a Canadian small town to the elusive "center" of American sociology—and much less does it justify still circulating assessments of his personality, crafted while overlooking his life experiences—and, especially, his writings. Anecdotal evidence of his "enigmatic" personality (Lemert, 2003), or "bad-boy outrageousness" (Berger, 1986), works as a derailing tactic, leading to unwarranted appraisals of Goffman's personality—and, more importantly, to the neglect of crucial aspects of his work. From a theoretical standpoint, Simmel's treatment of "the stranger" as a social relationship, and Merton's concept of "moral alchemy", are used here to try to make some sense of the mixture of celebration and neglect still surrounding "Goffman". Historical data was gathered in part from the "Erving Goffman Archives'' (Shalin, 2013). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines and rejects arguments made by contemporary sociologists in France about the appropriateness of Durkheim's sociology in general, and his sociology of religion in particular. A century after the publication of The Elementary Forms, social scientists, especially in Europe, contend that "individualized" spiritualities are the definitive feature of contemporary forms of modern, globalised religion and infer from this empirical evidence that Durkheim's "sociologism" is outdated. However, contemporary evidence indicates that collective religious expressions are colonizing the public spaces from whence they ostensibly had been withdrawn. Individualization, per se, is not only a contested concept but also a normative discursive technique of rationalization by which the great religions and new religious movements adjust to the "individualistic" values of modernity in global settings. This paper addresses the question of whether Durkheim really was wrong about the collective, yet complex nature and future of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent CJS special issue developed around their paper titled “The Institutionalization of Symbolic Interactionism in Canadian Sociology, 1922-1979: Success at What Cost?” Helmes-Hayes and Milne (2017) document the emergence and establishment of symbolic interactionism (SI) in English-language Canadian sociology, and then consider its fragmentation and decline from 1979 into the present period. This is followed by commentaries from Jacqueline Low (2017), who gives a more optimistic impression of the present state of SI in Canada, and Neil McLaughlin (2017), who considers its sectarian nature as a social and intellectual movement. This is a worthy discussion in the history of Canadian sociology and the sociology of ideas. Certainly Canadian SI is an important part of our wider national sociology tradition, and it is important that we recognize its past, present, and future institutional development in light of as much evidence as possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper traces the historical development as well as the analytical and ideological uses of 'industrial society' as an object of knowledge. The binary opposition traditional society/industrial society and the latter tripartite division traditional, industrial, post-industrial society have been central to the development of sociology as a discipline. Like all analytical concepts 'industrial society' is both a way of seeing and not seeing. It focuses attention on some social attributes and processes rather than others. The first objective of this paper is to evaluate whether or not this object of knowledge focuses attention on crucial aspects of social life, or whether, instead, it shrouds and distorts more than it reveals. The second objective is to evaluate the ideological import of the concept. Did it, and does it still, provide a realistic and achievable model of the way we ought to live together? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1938, Joseph Oldham, a leading British Christian ecumenist, formed a discussion group that came to be known as the Moot. The Moot met in a retreat setting for several long weekends each year until early 1947, its discussions carefully organized and convened by Oldham. More than anything else, the discussions of the Moot revolved around the topic of order and, more particularly, around the problem of how order might be restored in British society and culture in the context of a 'world turned upside down'. Oldham and most members of the group sought a central place for Christian ideas and ideals in British social life. A striking feature of the Moot was the intellectual stature and the diversity of interests of its members. Among its 16 or so regular members were Oldham (1874-1969), his close friend T.S. Eliot (1888-1963) and Karl Mannheim (1893-1947). Among the later 'visitors' to Moot meetings was Michael Polanyi (1891-1976), who first came to the 20th Moot meeting in June of 1944. This article presents several papers that were produced for the Moot discussion of 15-18 December 1944 by Eliot, Mannheim and Polanyi. These papers have intrinsic and historical interest, and are published together for the first time here. The initial paper, written by Eliot, treats the role in society of 'the clerisy' - a term borrowed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge that points to an intellectual elite or vanguard. Eliot requested that Oldham solicit responses to his paper from Mannheim and Polanyi. Mannheim's response was a set of detailed answers to four questions that Eliot posed at the end of his essay. Polanyi's response was a short, coherent essay, which he identified as 'my own position with respect' to Eliot's discussion; his essay outlines a brief account of the role of the clerisy in science. Eliot wrote short comments on the responses of both Mannheim and Polanyi. These five pieces, which have a natural unity, should be of interest to anyone working in the history of social thought. We have abridged only Mannheim's lengthy response and have eliminated a few lines of illustrative material from Eliot's reply to Mannheim, but these excisions in no way detract from the clarity of the authors' perspectives in this rich trilogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiments are generally thought of as actions or operations undertaken to test a scientific hypothesis in settings detached from the rest of society. In this paper a different notion of experiment will be discussed. It is an understanding that has been developed in the classical tradition of the Chicago School of Sociology since the 1890s, but has so far remained unexplored. This sociological understanding of experiment does not model itself strictly on the natural sciences. Rather, it implies a process of societal self-experimentation without a fixed setting of a sociological experimenter. The paper discusses this notion of experiment in relation to the recursive dependency of the application and the production of sociological knowledge. It is contended that this concept of a self-experimental society offers theoretical insights that could well prove fruitful for a sociological concept of experiment beyond the realm of the laboratory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the participation by sociologists in several major conferences, mostly held in New York, that focused on issues related to science, democracy and faith between the late 1930s and the early post-World War II period. These events offered sociologists an opportunity to showcase the discipline to leading scholars, public figures, and other intellectuals and public audiences outside the discipline. Amidst widespread uncertainty and a quest for answers to significant social and economic problems, sociologists revealed that they were no more adept than other intellectuals to provide definitive pathways out of potential catastrophe. At the same time, the conferences and related events demonstrated that sociologists had analytical tools and insights that could be useful in framing questions and orientations that were of interest not only to scholar bodies, but also served as potential reference points for social policy and community development. These activities, in helping to legitimize the discipline and reinforce the boundaries within which it operated, did so in a manner that also separated and privileged sociologists, as professionals or experts, from broader publics in ways that narrowed the discipline's main foci and lessened its capacity to adopt more democratic public roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After 1989, class appeared to be everywhere and nowhere. The messy consequences of the emergence of new classes and new types of economic inequalities were plain for all to see, but no one uttered the term "class." The concept appeared illegitimate because of associations with the old regime, even though it always had more success explaining developments in the capitalist world east Europe was entering than the state socialist world it was leaving. The media and academy adopted a discourse of "normality" instead: New rules resulted not from policy choices empowering certain groups at the expense of others but from necessity, and people just had to adapt. Because the economic collapse nevertheless elicited much anger and frustration, the absence of class talk contributed to a proliferation of nationalist talk, and thus had political consequences. The paper rehearses reasons for the decline of class analysis in the region, and notes the post-1989 fascination with the "middle class." It explores the evolution of class analysis during the communist period, culminating in the embrace of a stratification theory that resisted discussion of power, which made sense at the time but became a burden after 1989. Several critical class analyses of state socialism, from the 1930s to today, are then introduced, demonstrating both their relevance and their unfortunate absence from debates. New types of class analyses promoted by younger scholars and activists are emerging, however, and are discussed in the summaries of the other essays in this collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the relationship between two seminal figures in American sociology, in terms of its contribution to the movement to establish the science within the academic world. Using archival data, the analysis shows how Edward A. Ross and Pitirim A. Sorokin became acquainted and subsequently collaborated to expand the intellectual horizons and institutional base of sociology. Their collaboration is understood as intergenerational solidarity, which the paper argues is fundamental to an understanding of both the past and the future of organized sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that both Michael Banton and John Rex were ‘children of empire’, albeit in starkly different ways, and that these differences were at the core of their querulous exchanges over their long careers. The larger issue, however, concerns the impact of colonialism on sociology, especially in its formative years, and conversely, the role of sociology in providing erudite justification for colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between 1915 and the late 1930s W.I. Thomas developed a theory of human motivation steering a middle course between determinism (biological or social) and unfettered free will. The theory of the four wishes posited that all human beings, across time and place, are driven by a set of connected wishes mediated by the social and physical environment. These are the wish for new experience, the wish for security, the wish for recognition, and the wish for response. Between 1917 when Thomas first published the wishes and the early 1930s when the wishes fell out of use, they were the dominant micro theory of motivation invoked by sociologists in the United States (particularly those associated with the Chicago School). This paper explores the rise and fall of Thomas's wishes in the context of the sociology of ideas, with particular emphasis on fluctuations in Thomas's professional status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One hundred years after its publication, Émile Durkheim's later sociology of religion continues to exert an enormous inluence on religious studies. Indeed, the impact of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life has been so pervasive that sociology lost sight of most of the other work done by the L'Année sociologique team in the sociology of religion. The contributions of the collaborators have been really important. This holds true especially for Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss who played a leading role within the Durkheim-school, particularly with respect to the study of religion. In our paper we would like to show that Hubert and Mauss preigured several of the crucial arguments of Durkheim's later sociology of religion (such as the equation of society and the sacred). In the conclusion, we present Mauss' own evaluation of their collective work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines one aspect of early twentieth century debates over the meaning of scientific methodology and epistemology within the social sciences: the tendency of sociologists to invoke 'laboratory' as a multivalent concept and in reference to diverse institutions and sites of exploration. The aspiration to designate or create laboratories as spaces of sociological knowledge production was broadly unifying in early American sociology (1890-1930), even though there was no general agreement about what 'laboratory' meant, nor any explicit acknowledgment of that lack of consensus. The persistence of laboratory talk in sociology over decades reflects the power of 'laboratory' as a productively ambiguous, legitimizing ideal for sociologists aspiring to make their discipline rigorously scientific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing accounts of American sociology’s founding years during the early twentieth century assume that the discipline was ‘metrocentric.’ They assume that it was only interested in processes occurring within the United States; that American sociologists fell prey to state-centrist thought; and that, therefore, contextualizing America sociology’s emergence necessitates understanding relations, events, and processes within the confines of US territorial boundaries. By contrast, this paper shows the imperial and hence global aspects of early American sociological thought. Early American sociologists were interested in imperialism and, therefore, in cross-societal, transnational, and global processes and relations. Implicitly or explicitly they approached imperialism as a process by which social groups, not least ‘races,’ interacted and conflicted. They also saw it as a route towards new global forms. Early American sociology thus articulated a sociological imagination that looked beyond American society and to the wider world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Canadian Review of Sociology has been an important venue for scholarship on ethnicity and race. Through an analysis of publications dealing with both terms in the journal, between 1964 and 2010, the paper finds that publications have focused more on ethnicity than race, using a political economy approach, and quantitative methods. Over time, significant changes have occurred, including a move away from ethnicity to race and a move away from quantitative methods. Many of these changes have occurred in conjunction with policy and demographic changes in Canada and as a response to ongoing racial inequities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a study of the specialist field of the sociology of health and medicine, and examines its institutional development in Australia. A thesis is developed about the relationship between the field and the parent discipline of sociology. The formation of the discipline and the specialist field are proposed to have occurred in stages: the formative years, a period of inter-disciplinarity and collaboration, a stage of intensification and organisation, the years of institutional growth and specialisation, the decade of consolidation and fragmentation, and, its most recent phase, a time of 'new' internationalisation. Moreover, the institutionalisation of the sociology of health and medicine has closely followed the developmental trajectory of its parent discipline, even though its disciplinary boundaries have been, and continue to be, less rigid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

In this paper, we discuss the relations between reification and modernity en the sociological theories of Georg Simmel and Alfred Schütz. German history and Lukács' work, History and class conscience, are important references in this discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian sociologists have barely engaged with the resurgence of economic sociology in the USA and Europe. It might be argued that this lack of engagement arises from a robust local agenda, immune from metropolitan fashions This article argues that this is not the case. Rather, it arises from the enduring residualism of Australian sociology vis-a-vis economics In turn, this residualism is grounded in sociology's late beginnings in Australia, the dominant framework at the time of its institutionalization in the 1950s and 1960s, and the limited challenge presented by critical approaches from the 1970s. The article identifies four major lines of inquiry in the resurgence of economic sociology: network analysis, comparative political economy, field theory and performativity theory Notwithstanding their differences, these approaches direct attention to the social construction of markets. In turn, they challenge both mainstream economics and sociology. The papers in this Special Edition of the Journal of Sociology build upon these lines of inquiry in the Australian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Meso history is that branch of the history of sociology that focuses on social relations, that is, patterns of connection among groups, group members, and group meanings, as explanatory factors in the shaping of sociology. The methodology of meso history consists of strategies for discovering, documenting and patterning connections. This paper explores those strategies in terms of three moments generic to the research process in social science– moments of movement from intellectual curiosity to conceptualization, from research question to data collection and from data to presentation of findings–focusing on the distinctive permutations on this research process that occur in the practice of meso history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is on the notion of ‘addictive consumption’, conceived as a set of discourses that are embedded within wider socio-historical processes of governance and control. It examines the discursive convergences and conflicts between practices of consumption and notions of addiction, which it notes are consistently represented in terms of the oppositional categories of self-control vs. compulsion and freedom vs. determinism. These interrelations are explored with reference to the development of notions of addiction, and their relation to shifting configurations of identity, subjectivity and governance. Finally, it suggests that the notion of ‘addiction’ has particular valence in advanced liberal societies, where an unprecedented emphasis on the values of freedom, autonomy and choice not only encourage the conditions for its proliferation into ever wider areas of social life, but also reveal deep tensions within the ideology of consumerism itself.

Guenther Roth's study places Max Weber in an intricate network of ties among members of his lineage. This paper presents core findings of Roth's analysis of Weber's family relations, discusses the validity of Roth's core theses and some of the implications of his analysis for Weber as a person and scholar, and addresses how Roth's book may influence future approaches to Weber's sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine how mainstream sociology has used race as an explanatory factor by examining papers in the American Sociological Review between 1937 and 1999. We find a dramatic increase in the likelihood that sociologists will take race into account, and we suggest that methodological innovations are largely responsible for creating an environment in which it is taken for granted that analysts in many fields will “control for race.” This pattern of usage may reinforce an implicit conception of racial differences that we call “broad but shallow,” in that race is expected to matter almost everywhere, but its effect can be neutralized by the addition of a control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edward A. Ross, a key figure in the early history of American sociology, developed a conceptualization of natural and social changes of the material environment that is virtually forgotten today. In this paper, these topics are discussed and located vis-à-vis Ross's intellectual contemporaries and their general take on the nature/society relationship. It is argued that ecological and sociological ideas in the early twentieth century influenced one another and, in the case of Ross, produced a perspective of social change that tried to include the dynamics of nature. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section introduces the articles featured in the summer 2002 issue of The American Sociologist. This issue features six papers that explore several related themes in the intellectual history of sociology. The authors place particular emphasis on the enduring legacies of creative minds, while also tracing out unnoticed linkages between thinkers and intellectual traditions and pointing to unresolved tensions and lacunae within individual approaches. The articles combine a retrospective glance with a commitment to incorporating and further developing the insights of earlier work. There is also a happy blending of the personal, the conceptual, and the historical. Uta Gerhardt contributes an erudite and nuanced discussion of the relations between major figures who are ordinarily regarded as polar opposites: social-action and social-system theorist Talcott Parsons and members of the frankfurt School of philosophy, psychology, and sociology, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Jean-Francois Côté and Daniel Dagenais provide further insight into the development of critical sociology similar to that of the Frankfurt School within the context of contemporary Canada, especially Quebec.

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