Search

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]

In some areas of social science, around half of studies can’t be replicated. A new test-fast, fail-fast initiative aims to show what research is hot — and what’s not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the work of two Indian sociologists who defined the contours of sociology in India in the immediate post-independence decades, M. N. Srinivas and A. R. Desai. It argues that their scholarship can be linked to sociology's legacy as anthropology in India and its embeddedness in the episteme of colonial modernity. It contends that Srinivas's methodology, the field view, attempted to make a break with earlier methods, such as book view. However, his three concepts, that of dominant caste, Sanskritization and Westernization were perceived as civilizational attributes and which had organized social change in India. A. R. Desai, a Marxist historical sociologist, made an incisive critique of capitalist exploitation and elaborated the material conditions that led to peasant and working-class revolts. However, his sociology could not unravel the caste-class linkages that organized the Indian 'social' which was embedded in Indian nationalism. This paper suggests that a definitive understanding of modernity emerges in Indian sociology in the late 70s when the feminist, dalit and tribal movements interrogated the material basis of contemporary India's developmentalism and its capitalist and exploitative character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of collaborative networks of demographers are relatively scarce. Similar studies in other social sciences provide insight into scholarly trends of both the fields and characteristics of their successful scientists. Exploiting a unique database of metadata for papers presented at six European Population Conferences, this report explores factors explaining research collaboration among demographers. We find that (1) collaboration among demographers has increased over the past 10 years, however, among co-authored papers, collaboration across institutions remains relatively unchanged over the period, (2) papers based on core demographic subfields such as fertility, mortality, migration and data and methods are more likely to involve multiple authors and (3) multiple author teams that are all female are less likely to co-author with colleagues in different institutions. Potential explanations for these results are discussed alongside comparisons with similar studies of collaboration networks in other related social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue gathers empirical papers that develop and employ digital ethnographic methods to answer core sociological questions related to community, culture, urban life, violence, activism, professional identity, health, and sociality. Each paper, in its own right, offers key sociological insights, and as a collection, this special issue demonstrates the need to bring ethnographic methods to digital communities, interactions, practices, and tools. Both as a topic and a methodological approach, "the digital" points us to the need to update, rethink, and grow qualitative sociology. The exemplary papers comprising this special issue exhibit this curiosity and expansiveness, with lessons and implications for an interdisciplinary set of fields and research problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of millions of papers shows that farflung collaborators produce fewer foundational discoveries than groups working together in person. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In educational research, there has been much stricture of neoliberalism as a scourge. In the higher education sector, the neoliberal turn has been observed as eroding academic freedom and deprofessionalising academics. Early career academics are often described as victims of neoliberalism. In this paper, we take a positive perspective through a deep dive into resilience that enables self-transformation and, potentially, system change. Our paper is situated in the Chinese higher education context where the "up-or-out" system has been put in place, mirroring the neoliberal university at a global range. We — a mid-career researcher and an early career academic — analyse our collective narratives generated through WeChat text and voice message. Drawing insight from Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, our narratives lead to four themes: capital accumulation and self-transformation, shaping the publication habitus, emancipation from symbolic violence, and resilience to symbolic domination. We conclude the paper with a call for sociology of resilience and recommendations for deneoliberalising higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation: Zeitschrift für Angewandte Organisationspsychologie (GIO) is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper aims at exploring existing literature on substance use prevention programs, focusing on refugee youth. A comprehensive search for relevant articles was conducted on Scopus, PubMed, and EBSCOhost Megafile databases including Academic Search Ultimate, APA PsycArticles, APA PsycInfo, CINAHL with Full Text, E-Journals, Humanities Source Ultimate, Psychology and Behavioural Sciences Collection, and Sociology Source Ultimate. Initially, a total of 485 studies were retrieved; nine papers were retained for quality assessment after removing duplicates. Of the nine studies that met the inclusion criteria, only three are found to partially addressed substance use prevention programs. The two substance use prevention programs that emerge from the study are Adelante Social and Marketing Campaign (ASMC), and Screening and Brief Intervention (SBI). Six others explored protective factors and strategies for preventing substance use. The study findings show that refugee youth held negative attitudes toward institutions that provide substance use prevention programs. This review concluded that refugee youth often experience persistent substance use as they are not aware of prevention programs that may reduce the prevalence and/or severity of such misuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central question in the science of science concerns how to develop a quantitative understanding of the evolution and impact of individual careers. Over the course of history, a relatively small fraction of individuals have made disproportionate, profound, and lasting impacts on science and society. Despite a long-standing interest in the careers of scientific elites across diverse disciplines, it remains difficult to collect large-scale career histories that could serve as training sets for systematic empirical and theoretical studies. Here, by combining unstructured data collected from CVs, university websites, and Wikipedia, together with the publication and citation database from Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), we reconstructed publication histories of nearly all Nobel prize winners from the past century, through both manual curation and algorithmic disambiguation procedures. Data validation shows that the collected dataset presents among the most comprehensive collection of publication records for Nobel laureates currently available. As our quantitative understanding of science deepens, this dataset is expected to have increasing value. It will not only allow us to quantitatively probe novel patterns of productivity, collaboration, and impact governing successful scientific careers, it may also help us unearth the fundamental principles underlying creativity and the genesis of scientific breakthroughs. Design Type(s) data integration objective • source-based data analysis objective • metadata search and retrieval objective Measurement Type(s) publication Technology Type(s) digital curation Factor Type(s) Knowledge Field • temporal_instant Sample Characteristic(s) Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data (ISA-Tab format) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we compare internationalization of academic journals in six fields of science. Internationalization was investigated through journals' concentration on publishing papers from particular countries, relationship between the geographical distributions of editors and authors, and relationship between language of publication and the geographical distribution of papers. Having analyzed more than 1,000 journals we can state that social sciences literature in the fields considered is still nationally and linguistically fragmented more than natural sciences literature, but in some cases the gap is not so big. One of the consequences concerning research output assessment is that usefulness of international databases having national disparity in coverage is still limited in social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1950s saw the emergence of the science-driven model of engineering education. In the following decades, the model has been continuously challenged to incorporate aspects such as liberal arts, information & communication technology, design, entrepreneurship, innovation, sustainability, industry 4.0, and more recently, online-learning. This has triggered several initiatives at institutional and national levels, and manifested in approaches and practices for transforming engineering education. One approach that appears to be gaining attention is design-centric engineering, with its emphasis on learning-by-doing, product design and entrepreneurial orientation. While literature points to several variants of design-centric engineering and challenges in implementation, it also calls for more empirical studies and deeper theoretical inquiry into the contradictions and paradoxes that this approach might present to the students at the micro-level, and guidance on how they might make sense and find pathways of action jointly with internal and external stakeholders. This paper throws light on the contradictions and paradoxes experienced by undergraduate engineering students while implementing a design-centric engineering program at a young public-funded institute in India, involving approximately 1500+ students over a period of six years. The paper also discusses the theoretical and pragmatic aspects of the approach adopted to encourage students to make sense of the contradictions and paradoxes, namely: (a) leveraging the affordance offered by one of the courses in the program—"Sociology of Design—to synthesize engineering, design and sociological perspectives; (b) turning the contradictions and paradoxes into sources of learning and change, informed by the theory of complex responsive processes; and (c) application of multiple methods such as rich pictures, reflective writing, self-organized interactions and data analysis to enable sense-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on 38 in-depth, qualitative interviews, this article explores how people working in the equality sector in England and Wales view and use the current law around sex and gender, and how they imagine law's future, particularly potential decertification, where the state would withdraw from certifying and regulating a person's sex/gender. Whilst situated in the bureaucratic strand of the literature, the paper also contributes to wider legal consciousness studies. This literature has generally focused on people's relationships to law in terms of domination, alienation and game-playing. Drawing on idioms and the language of touch, the paper unpacks the way in which equality actors talked about law not as remote or alienating, but as close and familiar; not as oppressive, but as "precious" and hard-won. Some also regarded law as a place of safety in unsafe times. These proposed 'attached to law' and 'protective of law' strands of consciousness enrich and extend Ewick and Silbey's classic 'before the law' narrative. The findings are also useful for critical legal and feminist scholarship. Combined with the equality sector's pragmatic and tactical use of law to problem-solve, this close and protective orientation towards law reproduces its hegemony. The paper concludes by exploring a recurrent refrain that, in relation to decertification, "we're not there yet" and that gender equality would need to be achieved before decertification would "fly". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the idea of sociological film that encourages sociological imagination, which refers to the capability to recognize the intersection of biography and history. The paper identifies six key dimensions of sociological film through a thematic analysis of different classic approaches to sociological imagination: sociological life, structure-actors relationship, critical perspective, academic awareness, fluidity of meaning, and promotion of sociological imagination. This paper provides concrete examples to demonstrate the distinctive features of sociological film and how it relates to, and differs from, other films that address social issues, including documentary films. The paper argues that sociological film is essential in fostering sociological imagination by offering a unique lens for analyzing and understanding social phenomena. Sociological film has the potential to inspire social change by increasing awareness about significant social issues and promoting critical thinking and reflection. The paper concludes by emphasizing the significance of collaboration between sociologists and filmmakers in advancing sociological imagination through the medium of sociological films. It highlights the importance of actively engaging with the public in visual research methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse and ideology are interrelated concepts in social sciences and the humanities and are even occasionally employed interchangeably. This paper sheds light on their relationship in academic discourse and examines the role of sociology as a scientific field in its conceptualization. Using bibliometric analysis, we examined 15,716 academic publications mentioning "discourse" or "ideology" in their title and written in English by American and British scholars between 1966 and 2015. The investigation focused on the two terms' conceptual environment, areas of usage, journals, and the organizations to which the authors were affiliated. First, we conclude that although some sociology researchers have attempted to create a sociological definition for the concept of discourse, sociologists are not its most active users. The same is true for ideology. These concepts have established niches in other disciplines (political science and history for "ideology," and educational science and linguistics for "discourse"). Second, throughout the years, the field of discourse studies has become more diversified and fragmented than that of ideology. Third, the leading organizations in both fields are prestigious American and British universities, which indicates that discourse and ideology are elements of the intellectual elites' language. Fourth, the concept of discourse was more frequently applied than that of ideology in the years 2010–2015, and we expect that it will remain popular among scholars in the next decade. As for ideology, we believe that new social challenges could foster the rediscovery of this concept in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central thesis of this paper is that human unconscious processes influence the behavior and design of artificial intelligence (AI). This thesis is discussed through the case study of a chatbot called Replika, which intends to provide psychological assistance and friendship but has been accused of inciting murder and suicide. Replika originated from a trauma and a work of mourning lived by its creator. The traces of these unconscious dynamics can be detected in the design of the app and the narratives about it. Therefore, a process of de-psychologization and de-humanization of the unconscious takes place through AI. This psychosocial approach helps criticize and overcome the so-called "standard model of intelligence" shared by most AI researchers. It facilitates a new interpretation of some classic problems in AI, such as control and responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of competitive computer and videogaming, also known as electronic sport (esport), has been rising rapidly during the past decades. Because of many parallels with traditional sports, like competitiveness, skill requirements, degree of professionalization, or the way it is portrayed in the media, esport has been adopted as part of the sport canon in many countries. Still, critics argue that playing computer games lacks the physicality commonly seen in traditional sports. A significant part of the competition is mediated through digital platforms and the spotlight shifts from the players' appearance and actions to their digital avatars. This paper takes on this issue by exploring existing evidence about the role of the body in esport via a scoping review approach. According to the findings of 47 studies, the body's role in esport is akin to that in traditional sport, including specific motoric requirements or biometric responses. Beyond that, the body can be seen as a link between the digital and physical worlds. Players embody digital avatars in the form of esport-specific movements, transfer of norms and ideals, and identification with the in-game characters. Future research can use this review as a basis for scientific approaches to individual phenomena regarding corporeality in esport and inter-corporeality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the recent body of research exploring strategic positioning, and the processes and factors which influence the development and content of university strategies and plans, with lessons then applied to open questions of institutional diversity and its determinants. Following a sector level analysis of the contents of university positioning documents, an in-depth case study is developed of a large Australian university, where the interaction of intra-institutional 'meso' layers is explored to show a confluence of factors contributing to positioning. The case demonstrates that institutional positioning involves the selective crafting of narratives for multiple purposes, including the seeking and portrayal of internal cohesion, identity enhancement, and resource seeking. Importantly, while cross-institutional comparison of positioning narratives portrays an undifferentiated and somewhat homogenous sector, positioning is found within the case institution to obscure what is significant internal diversity and complexity. The implications of these findings for research exploring institutional diversity, and policies seeking to stimulate it, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution is based on Robert Bellah's introduction to Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society (1973) and second on other references to the French sociologist in Bellah's work as well as in Bortolini's insightful remarks on the "homology" between Durkheim and Bellah. The publication of the book took place in a time of Durkheimian effervescence: Steven Lukes' Emile Durkheim.His Life and Work was published on the same year and a new Durkheimology appeared in the English-speaking world: attention shifted from methodology, as expressed in Suicide or in the Rules of Sociological Method, to morality with a focus on the moral basis on a non-pathological society. Bellah's statement is quite strong: Durkheim can "be seen as a theologian of French civil religion". The paper will examine's this point of view with respect to the state of French society at the turn of the century and Durkheim's social project. One side question concerns the choice of texts: the editor did not give enough weight to texts that might have strengthen Bellah's point of view, particularly l'Education morale. Bortolini mentions Bob's long and silent work on Durkheim and his critique of mainstream analysis of The Elementary forms of Religious Life, reducing religion to a mere projection of society (:142). The biographer insists on the ambivalent, if not contradictory, vision of Durkheim in Bellah's work, in which he finds a key to the interpretation of the oeuvre. The article focuses on how to account for its complexity, which is never as clear as in the interpretation of Durkheim's sociology in a post-rationalist direction. Bortolini's concept of role model/hero incarnated by the founding fathers (here Weber and Durkheim) is analyzed in connection with Parsons' reconstitution of a pantheon. The question of civil religion is reexamined in the light of the transatlantic transfers carrying different meanings of civil religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented on sociologists conceptualizing and studying hope along with several other papers on diverse topics. Topics include refection on the state of historical consciousness in U.S. sociology, and a discussion of the recent trend toward the pre-registration and registration of research designs; and study of "social pathology" such as poverty, illness, racial/ethnic discrimination.

An analysis of the publication records of academic editors shows that one-quarter of them publish 10% of their own papers in the journals they edit and reveals that fewer than 10% of editors-in-chief are women. Cross-discipline analysis of the publication habits of academic editors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology review process is broken. There are too many reviews per paper and the norm that all papers go through a revise and resubmit process burns through reviewers, slows down the publication process, creates distorted papers as authors try to satisfy incompatible demands, and puts too high a premium on novelty over methodological rigor. Editors should get fewer reviews per paper and make editorial decisions. No new reviewers should be added in reviewing a revised manuscript. Peer review should not be treated as an opportunity to receive editorial assistance and mentoring and instead should be focused on ensuring that published papers are correct. Asking for large numbers of reviews will not solve the problem that sociologists do not agree on their standards. The reviewer problem points to larger questions about the structure of sociology as a field, the need for more venues for publishing solid empirical work, and the importance of replications. It also points to the structure of academic publishing in which for-profit publishers make money by selling to university libraries the products of the free labor of university professors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the challenges posed within sociology and social research by the transformations created by the "data society". To this end, the paper outlines some of the most significant elements for new frontier research which sociology is forced to confront also in relation to the challenges for educational policies and skills. While leading literature decries the need to promote alphabetising data, otherwise defined as data literacy, the idea proposed here is that it is necessary to work towards understanding data. An understanding that highlights the role sociology has firmly set itself since its foundation, that of studying and explaining the complexity of the relationships that characterize social life in every context and period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2000, a controversial article about hormones and gender roles was published to stimulate debate about whether and how biological knowledge should be integrated in sociological research. Two decades later, this so-called biosociology debate is more relevant than ever, as biological knowledge has become widespread across societies and scientific disciplines. Hence, we as sociologists are regularly confronted with biological explanations that challenge our own explanations. Whether this happens in the scientific arena, the classroom, media, or even at social events, these situations often force us, individually, to take a stance on whether to meet such explanations with dialogue or opposition. One could therefore expect that sociologists have an interest in discussing these issues with their peers, but their lack of participation in the biosociology debate suggests otherwise. This paper explores possible reasons for this absence and how sociologists' views on biosociology are influenced by key agents – sociological associations and journals. Smith's "A Sacred project of American Sociology", and Scott's "A Sociology of Nothing" served as theoretical tools in the paper. A qualitative content analysis of presidential addresses of four sociological associations was conducted. The analyses suggest that sociologist avoid biosociology for widely different reasons, including fear that biosociology legitimizes oppression. This avoidance is probably reinforced by the leftish politization of the sociological discipline and the rightish politization of society. Overcoming obstacles to engagement in biosociology is required to safeguard the scientific integrity of sociology and enable sociologists to provide relevant contributions to research on the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociologies of quantification, university rankings, and infrastructure are a loosely connected set of scholarly endeavors. Research in these areas typically examines production of certain types of quantification, their effects, and institutionalization. Despite these commonalities, scholars have noted a lack of conceptual coherence, debates on how to study quantification, a need to examine their socio-epistemological prerequisites, and research that crosses organization and national boundaries. In this paper, I argue that institutional ethnography—an alternative sociology for people—provides a unifying ontology for the sociology of quantification and studies of rankings and metrics in higher education. Institutional ethnography examines socio-epistemological prerequisites of quantification and facilitates a collaborative transnational project due to its focus on the extra local coordination of action. I also share results of the first transnational institutional ethnography of university rankings and related metrics, demonstrating coordinated action across several junctures of what has been called a global university ranking surveillance assemblage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study identified the 100 most impactful global contributors to religion journals and mapped their respective disciplinary affiliations. To conduct this investigation, we performed a secondary data analysis of a Scopus-derived database featuring the world's leading scientists. The mean contributor published 51.93 papers, had an h-index of 13.57, and an hm-index 11.50. Most contributors were located in the USA with the most common disciplinary affiliations being religion, non-specialized (n = 22), sociology, non-specialized (n = 21), sociology of religion (n = 20), and theology (n = 11). The results reveal that religion discourse is populated by some of the leading scholars in the world. Leveraging their expertise can help advance the field's knowledge development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In line with recent trends in sociology of migration, the paper presents major research findings on Swedish immigrant organizations (SIOs) and their labor market integration activities. Analyses of engagement in these activities are particularly important as Sweden wrestles with significant problems of labor market marginalization, particularly among non-European migrants. Drawing on official data and interviews, we find surprisingly low incidence in direct labor market support but quite active indirect support. Our regression model shows significant correlation between region of origin and labor market activities, and further analyses using regional typologies indicate that SIOs' activities are partly driven by members' different modes of incorporation and relative integration, where Middle-Eastern SIOs stand out as particularly active. Our findings further indicate potential for scale-up of SIO-assistance in the Swedish Government's efforts towards increased immigrant labor market integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides insights on the contemporary relevance of Talcott Parsons's writings by analyzing 20 textbooks from Austria, Germany, Great Britain and the United States, published in 1999–2019. Whether having knowledge of Parsons is helpful to today's students and other interested readers, and what knowledge, deserves consideration. Therefore , the paper asks: Which future gains of readers did textbook authors envision when they chose, in their own present, to discuss (or not) sociological writings from long ago? In order to understand what future opportunities authors wanted to create for readers, as well as how they chose to discuss Parsons to this end, the paper draws on Niklas Luhmann's notion of memory. The analysis reveals several key competencies that student and other interested readers might acquire through having knowledge of Parsons' writings and its critiques. These potentials would have gone unnoticed if authors had assessed Parsons's relevance only according to whether he adequately considered conflict or not, as has been done in many debates about his work until today. Moreover, through analyzing how authors remembered Parsons, I distilled two key selective criteria: First, what must be remembered in order to enable readers to acquire those competencies? Second, which memories would be impeding for readers and thus be better left out? These criteria are relevant for research, as well. Looking at the future, it would be desirable that sociologists let Parsons assist them in their research in many different ways, if possible. As a result, we might see a revival of Parsons that enables genuine advancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Profit-oriented service sectors such as tourism, hospitality, and entertainment are increasingly looking at how professional service robots can be integrated into the workplace to perform socio-cognitive tasks that were previously reserved for humans. This is a work in which social and labor sciences recognize the principle role of emotions. However, the models and narratives of emotions that drive research, design, and deployment of service robots in human–robot interaction differ considerably from how emotions are framed in the sociology of labor and feminist studies of service work. In this paper, we explore these tensions through the concepts of affective and emotional labor, and outline key insights these concepts offer for the design and evaluation of professional service robots. Taken together, an emphasis on interactionist approaches to emotions and on the demands of affective labor, leads us to argue that service employees are under-represented in existing studies in human–robot interaction. To address this, we outline how participatory design and value-sensitive design approaches can be applied as complimentary methodological frameworks that include service employees as vital stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the interrelations between academic disciplines and society beyond academia by the case of sociology in Norway. For that purpose, this paper introduces the concept of disciplines' societal territories, which refer to bounded societal spaces that are shaped by the knowledge of a discipline, premised on the linkages between the discipline and its audience. By mapping sociologists' reported contributions to societal changes beyond academia, the paper firstly shows how societal territories are established by sociologists' recurring engagement with certain topics and research users. Secondly, it traces the interactions between researchers and their users, and identifies four ideal typical pathways by which the cognitive territory of Norwegian sociology is transformed into societal territories. A key observation is that the establishment of societal territories is co-determined by the structures of research use among its audience. As for the case of sociology in Norway, questions therefore arise over the interdependency between sociologists as knowledge 'suppliers' and the 'demand side' for research, and the autonomy of the sociological discipline in selecting its focus of attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Quality & Quantity was established in 1967 and in 2017 it completed its half century. The journal is interdisciplinary in nature and it mainly discusses methodological application of mathematics and statistics in the social sciences, particularly sociology, economics, and social psychology. It was created with the idea of advancing methodology of the various social studies. This study looks back journey of the journal from 1967 to 2017 aims to develop a bibliometric analysis of all the publications of the journal. Web of Science Core Collection database is used to collect data. The present study discovered the significant contributions of the journal in terms of impact, topics, authors, universities and countries. Utrecht University of Netherlands is the most productive university. Asian Universities are emerging and growing quickly in the recent years. Although USA leads among the countries but Europe leads among the six supranational regions. Finally, the visualization of similarities viewer software is used to present network visualization of the bibliographic coupling, co-citation, citation, co-authorship and co-occurrence of keywords. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christian Smith's paper 'The Incoherence of 'Culture' in American Sociology' is a valuable provocation that can prompt us to reflect on the role of concepts and on the role of agreement on the definition of concepts in scientific research. In this comment paper, I raise questions about Smith's empirical expectation that sociologists should agree on a concept of culture based on debates in the sociology of science. I also suggest that in terms of the future agenda for the sociology of culture, we should distinguish between dialogue and clarification on the one hand, which I agree is needed, and standardization on the other hand, which seems incompatible with open-minded empirical research. Rather than work on agreement on what culture is, we might work on clarifying relevant distinctions among dimensions of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Berliner Journal für Soziologie is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Nowadays, millions of people use Online Social Networks (OSNs) like Twitter, Facebook and Sina Microblog, to express opinions on current events. The widespread use of these OSNs has also led to the emergence of social bots. What is more, the existence of social bots is so powerful that some of them can turn into influential users. In this paper, we studied the automated construction technology and infiltration strategies of social bots in Sina Microblog, aiming at building friendly and influential social bots to resist malicious interpretations. Firstly, we studied the critical technology of Sina Microblog data collection, which indicates that the defense mechanism of that is vulnerable. Then, we constructed 96 social bots in Sina Microblog and researched the influence of different infiltration strategies, like different attribute settings and various types of interactions. Finally, our social bots gained 5546 followers in the 42-day infiltration period with a 100% survival rate. The results show that the infiltration strategies we proposed are effective and can help social bots escape detection of Sina Microblog defense mechanism as well. The study in this paper sounds an alarm for Sina Microblog defense mechanism and provides a valuable reference for social bots detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this position paper, I examine how the history, philosophy and sociology of science (HPS) can contribute to science education in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. I discuss shortcomings in the ways that history is often used in school science, and examine how knowledge of previous pandemics might help in teaching about COVID-19. I look at the potential of issues to do with measurement in the context of COVID-19 (e.g. measurement of mortality figures) to introduce school students to issues about philosophy of science, and I show how COVID-19 has the affordance to broaden and deepen the moral philosophy that students typically meet in biology lessons. COVID-19 also provides opportunities to introduce students to sociological ways of thinking, examining data and questioning human practices. It can also enable students to see how science, economics and politics inter-relate. In the final part of the paper, I suggest that there are strong arguments in favour of an interdisciplinary approach in tackling zoonoses like COVID-19 and that there is much to be said for such interdisciplinarity in school science lessons when teaching about socio-scientific issues and issues intended to raise scientific literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The revolutionary potential of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technique has created a resurgence in enthusiasm and concern in genetic research perhaps not seen since the mapping of the human genome at the turn of the century. Some such concerns and anxieties revolve around crossing lines between somatic and germline interventions as well as treatment and enhancement applications. Underpinning these concerns, there are familiar concepts of safety, unintended consequences and damage to genetic identity and the creation of designer children through pursuing human enhancement and eugenics. In the policy realm, these morally laden distinctions and anxieties are emerging as the basis for making important and applied measures to respond to the fast-evolving scientific developments. This paper argues that the dominant normative framing for such responses is insufficient for this task. This paper illustrates this insufficiency as arising from a continued reliance on misleading genetic essentialist assumptions that generate groundless speculation and over-reactionary normative responses. This phenomenon is explicit with regard to prospective human (germ line) genetic enhancements. While many normative theorists and state-of-the-art reports continue to gesture toward the influence of environmental and social influences on a person and their traits and capacities, this recognition does not extend to the substance of the arguments themselves which tend to revert to the debunked genetic determinist framework. Given the above, this paper argues that there is a pressing need for a more central role for sociological input into particular aspects of this "enhancement myth" in order to give added weight, detail and substance to these environmental influences and influence from social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper builds on Joel Isaac's analysis of "interstitial" arrangements that generate scientific knowledge, and also draws upon the networking model of theory groups articulated by Nicholas and Caroline Mullins. I consider how the "interstitial academy" at Harvard, as well as Talcott Parsons's navigation of it, facilitated his professional rise from a vulnerable young instructor in economics in 1927 to one of the most prominent social scientists in the United States in 1951. I examine Parsons's engagement with curriculum-building committees in sociology and social ethics, in "the area of social science" and in social relations, as well as with undergraduate courses on institutions and on sociological theory, including a graduate student discussion circle, and with seminars on Pareto, on rationality and on "basic social science." In some instances, Parsons's involvement as a newcomer or junior participant led to important peer alliances, or to the support of higher-ranking faculty and administrators who sponsored his advancement. In other instances, especially as his ascent progressed, Parsons played the more powerful role of "indispensable hub" who gained stature by organizing cross-disciplinary interaction. Parsons's interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration also placed him an initial administrative role that would prepare him to serve as chair of two academic departments. The final and most important outcome of the process of upward mobility was the creation of a "theory school" that elevated Parsons to a unique status as the most boundary-spanning theorist of the social sciences. The paper thus supplements existing accounts of the rise of Parsons while also offering a mode of analysis that might be widely applied to the careers of other social scientists, both contemporary and historical (e.g., to figures such as Jane Addams and W. E. B. DuBois), in diverse academic settings and national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Portugal, research productivity is nowadays essential for the positive assessment of academics, research units and study programmes. Academic inbreeding has been highlighted in the literature as one of the factors influencing research productivity. This paper tests the hypothesis that inbreeding is detrimental for research productivity, measured through the number of publications listed in Scopus. The study resorts to a database provided by the national Agency for Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education (A3ES), which comprises all academics teaching in all Portuguese institutions in the academic year 2015/2016. The sample selected for the analysis contains all academics with a PhD in Sociology (N=289). The study uses a special regression model for the analysis: the negative binomial logit hurdle. This was necessary given the large amount of academics with no publications or citations in Scopus, which were the dependent variables to assess research performance. The analysis provides separate results for the probability of inbred academics of having no papers/citations, and for the probability of producing more papers/citations than the non-inbred. Findings suggest that academic inbreeding, defined at the institutional level, has no negative effect on research productivity, contrary to what was expected. However, when defined at the national level, academic inbreeding is detrimental for the recognition and the impact of research: academics with a foreign PhD are more likely to have citations compared to academics who obtained their PhD in Portugal. A tendency was also noted that inbreeding might be more detrimental to research productivity in faculties of Economics than in Social Sciences and Humanities. [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 paper examines the ways in which men protect a masculine ideal as they discuss Military Sexual Assault. Rape is an under-reported crime, but significantly less likely reported by men who have been sexually assaulted. The Department of Defense released a report indicating a higher-than-expected number of reports of male-on-male sexual assault. Sexual assault in the military, referred to as Military Sexual Trauma (MST), is complicated by a rigid hierarchical system. I use Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze Reddit extracts made by military men discussing military sexual trauma, some of whom are victims. Forms of gender capital, represented through features of masculine discourse, are present in these extracts. Victimized men are less likely to use the word "rape" to define the experience and focus on other terminology that identify the violence of the experience or the structural dominance that demanded their compliance. In cases of military sexual assault, men reinforce hegemonic elements of gender capital by discursively evading sexual aspects of the violence and affirming homosexism, to distance themselves from the femininity they associate with being sexually violated. Militarized masculinities and their expectations demonstrate an unique relationship between men and their own victimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) decided to constitute sociology, a novel field, as 'scientific' early in his career. He adopted evolutionized biology as then practiced as his principal model of science, but at first wavered between alternative repertoires of concepts, models, metaphors and analogies, in particular Spencerian Lamarckism and French neo-Lamarckism. I show how Durkheim came to fashion a particular deployment of the French neo-Lamarckian repertoire. The paper describes and analyzes this repertoire and explicates how it might have been available to a non-biologist. I analyze Durkheim's very early writings between 1882 and 1892 in this context to substantiate my argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a study of the visions and expectations which have been put forward by experts about smart grids. Within the sociology of expectation, such visions are given performative significance, and as such these expectations can provide us with an idea of where smart grid development is intended to take us. In order to gain insight into these issues, this paper first undertakes a literature review of 40 smart grid research papers. Thereafter, the paper reviews the self-reporting of 19 smart grid demo projects within the ERA-Net research framework of the EU. The findings suggest that there are three distinct expert smart grid narratives about users, one economic, one technical, and one which consists of a social science critique. The first one seeks to facilitate for user rationality by economic incentives, whereas the second seeks largely to automate the consumption and thereby bypass the question of active users. Social science critique is found to evaluate imagined users and their potential correspondence with real ones. When actual failure of economic incentives is recorded in demo sites, the economic rationale narrative exhibits surprising resilience within the frameworks. Technical narratives reinforce the argument for bypassing the user with the aid of technology, thereby suggesting performativity at work. The discussion raises the question of the actual and perceived need for active users in the smart grid, and suggests that strategies for non-participation of end users in the smart grid are both relevant and necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper, I intend to systematically revisit Thomas Luckmann's account of the relation between phenomenology and sociology and to assess its strengths and weaknesses in terms of constructive criticism. In order to achieve this aim, I will proceed in three steps. First (1), I will reconstruct the Luckmannian approach by means of an exhaustive analysis of his programmatic texts. Second (2), I will identify its strengths and merits. And finally (3), I will discuss its shortcomings and try to correct them in two ways, namely, by bringing Luckmann into a dialogue with other sociological-theoretical and phenomenological accounts, and by counteracting some of his problematic claims with alternative insights contained in his own work. [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]

The purpose of this paper is to describe the topical structure across national sociologies and detect the topic clusters contributing to the intellectual divide of the discipline. I employed a hybrid methodological style consisting of latent semantic analysis, topic polarization index and simple correspondence analysis to extract and map the topical divides across American and British sociological journals. The textual data were drawn from 11,793 abstracts published in 4 American, and 4 British journals in a 40-year period. My analysis revealed divisive publication preferences across the American and British journals. Topics associated with theory, methods, race, health, social class, crime, income inequality, aging, suicide, social networks, social movements and social status, appeared to contribute the most to the intellectual divides across American and British sociologies. The polarizing publication preferences on the core topics of theory and methods support former findings claiming that there is a fundamental epistemological divide across the two national sociological traditions. American journals tend to publish papers with an emphasis of methodology, while British journals show preference on papers with a theoretical focus. Finally, my findings revealed that core sociological topics relevant to social institutions such as marriage and family, labor, education, and stratification such as gender, immigration and occupational mobility contribute to the intellectual fusion of American and British sociologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multiple simultaneous independent discoveries (MIDs), so well enunciated by Robert K. Merton in the early 1960s but already discussed for several hundreds of years, is a classic concept in the sociology of science. In this paper, the concept of multiple simultaneous independent errors (MIEs) is proposed, analyzed, and discussed. The concept of Selective Pessimistic Induction is proposed and used to connect MIDs with MIEs. Five types of MIEs are discussed: multiple errors in the interpretation of experimental data or computational results; multiple misjudgments of the value of another’s research results or conclusions; multiple cases of false anticipation of achieving a certain experimental result; multiples of ignoring or omitting relevant precedents; and multiple instances of failure due to a not-yet-conceived scientific concept or principle. Causal MIDs and MIEs are those that can be traced directly to antecedent knowledge. Acausal MIDs and MIEs are those involving a consequential and identifiable leap from antecedent knowledge. Examples of causal and acausal MIEs are provided, mostly but not exclusively from the discipline of chemistry. Comparisons are made between MIDs and MIEs. Topics for future research are discussed and implications of these concepts are proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subjective wellbeing has been linked, by studies at the national level, to incomes above the median, to frequent contact with friends and relatives, and to life stage, with a strong U-shaped function for subjective wellbeing over the life cycle. These national studies also have provided important thinking about the links between social capital and subjective wellbeing. Much less research has investigated the links between place satisfaction and local measures of social capital, and the effect of local (community and neighbourhood) characteristics on place satisfaction and subjective wellbeing. Thus, this paper examines social capital and social cohesion at the local level using Australian survey data with respondents’ evaluations of their community and neighbourhood relationships. The paper links measures of life satisfaction and place satisfaction to indices of local social capital. The results show that local social capital is strongly associated with place satisfaction and modestly associated with life satisfaction. The results add to the national studies by improving the understanding of how place matters in generating subjective wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Achievements and tensions derived from the internationalization of national scholarly communities have attracted extensive attention. However, very little is hitherto known about the effects of these processes on specific situated communities. Through a multi-method approach (bibliometrics and interviews), we provide a nuanced description of these effects on the becoming of university-based sociology in Valparaíso, Chile, during the last fifteen or so years. The paper pays special attention to the emergence of a particular form of internationalization based on international indexes and rankings that has gained influence on the day-to-day practices of the scholarly communities in that part of the scholarly (semi-)periphery. We thoroughly described the entanglements of individual trajectories and institutional framings in the practices and discourses of sociologists in Valparaíso. The article concludes by highlighting the tensions arising from the encounter of traditions and some trade-offs of the current form of internationalization for (semi-)peripheral communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multiple problems that the planet is currently experiencing—climate crisis, conventional and unconventional wars, planetary disenchantment with political systems, growth of inequality, increase in all kinds of intersectional violence, destructuring of the political economy of morality, etc.—are not a favorable scenario for thinking about hope. This paper nevertheless offers a summary presentation of the sociology of hope, presenting some of its central sources and components as well as a proposed study agenda for the future. This article seeks to foster discussion of what could be the central axes of a sociology of hope. To achieve this purpose, the following argumentative strategy was chosen: (a) the "place" of hope is explored in some classics of sociology, (b) the central components of a sociological investigation of hope are synthesized, and (c) an agenda is presented as a summary for a future development of a sociology of hope. The article seeks to draw attention to the urgency of hope as an important element for the future of sociology and social sciences in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article shows, first, how Sociology has approached the concepts of "hope" and "war" and how throughout the history of the discipline these terms have gone from being neglected to arousing considerable interest. Second, the paper analyzes how and why avant-garde artists understood the First World War as a motif of utopian hope to annihilate a civilization in crisis and to transform it through its aesthetic formalization. Third, the essay tries to find out whether that hope was preserved over time or, on the contrary, was soon dissolved as a result of the drama of the events. It is shown here that the savagery of the fighting dissolved all European values of modernity and progress, including artistic ones. In fact, theoretical and stylistic conceptions, aesthetic categories, ethical postulates, and artists' aspirations for conscience to rule the world were blurred. For the artistic avant-garde, utopian promises of a better world broke down. Consequently, this obliges sociologists to pay more attention to both phenomena—that of the war and that of the avant-garde—and to seek a more objective and critical interpretation of modernity, calling for its actualization, and of Sociology itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]