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The article analyzes the Amherst papers in relation to development of Parsons' theory. A careful analysis of the Amherst papers reveals that the basic ideas and philosophical principles that Parsons followed throughout his life were already in place, some more fully developed than others, yet forming an integrally coherent pattern to a surprising degree. The clear existence in Parsons's Amherst papers of a metatheoretical framework predating his later professional writing calls into question some still existing myths about radical breaks in the development of Parsons's theory. In one version of this mythology, Parsons began his theory as a voluntarist, then became a structural-functionalist, later moved on to become a systems-theorist and ended up as a social evolutionist. Despite such claims, Parsons always was a voluntarist, even during his so-called structural-functionalist middle period. The Amherst papers reveal an amazingly complex and logically coherent theoretical system-in the mind of a twenty-year-young man-and testify to an extraordinary scope of philosophical depth, and intellectual maturity.

The article discusses economic and social theory of Talcott Parsons. Parsons's persistent attention to economic theory has been relatively neglected by critics of Parsons who, in attacking the alleged functionalism of Parsonian sociology, concentrated on the issues of value consensus and normative integration, believing that Parsons had relatively little interest in the economic base of society. This neglect of Parsons's economic sociology was probably intensified by the Marxist undercurrent of much so-called conflict theory. In recent years there has fortunately been considerable interest shown in Parsons's analysis of economic theory and more specifically in his economic sociology. At Amherst, Parsons came under the influence of the philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn, who prompted his students to consider broad questions relating to alternatives to industrial capitalist society and who created an educational environment within which students were involved in a general analysis of the social sciences. It was this engagement with institutional economics that marked Parsons's departure from biology into the social sciences as an academic career. Parsons was introduced to a broad spectrum of social theory relating to cultural and biological dimensions of human existence as explanations of social differentiation.

This paper elaborates an aspirations–capabilities framework to advance our understanding of human mobility as an intrinsic part of broader processes of social change. In order to achieve a more meaningful understanding of agency and structure in migration processes, this framework conceptualises migration as a function of aspirations and capabilities to migrate within given sets of perceived geographical opportunity structures. It distinguishes between the instrumental (means-to-an-end) and intrinsic (directly wellbeing-affecting) dimensions of human mobility. This yields a vision in which moving and staying are seen as complementary manifestations of migratory agency and in which human mobility is defined as people's capability to choose where to live, including the option to stay, rather than as the act of moving or migrating itself. Drawing on Berlin's concepts of positive and negative liberty (as manifestations of the widely varying structural conditions under which migration occurs) this paper conceptualises how macro-structural change shapes people's migratory aspirations and capabilities. The resulting framework helps to understand the complex and often counter-intuitive ways in which processes of social transformation and 'development' shape patterns of migration and enable us to integrate the analysis of almost all forms of migratory mobility within one meta-conceptual framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1979 the author spent the summer at a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar at Princeton with Richard Rorty, an experience which had numerous consequences, including a very Rortyan paper subsequently published in Human Studies called "Social theory," without wholes. Over this summer he has also worked on a manuscript that grew out a long article published in Human Studies on Max Weber and the fact-value distinction entitled "The limits of reason and some limitations of Weber's morality." The research that he was doing in the Princeton library was primarily concerned with filling in the context in which Weber had made his famous statements about fact and value, and also with examining the sequel of those writings in subsequent philosophy. This topic represents an important and distinctive strand in the tradition of continental philosophy, something that has now increasingly come to be recognized.

In this paper, we sketch a programme for AI-driven social theory. We begin by defining what we mean by artificial intelligence (AI) in this context. We then lay out our specification for how AI-based models can draw on the growing availability of digital data to help test the validity of different social theories based on their predictive power. In doing so, we use the work of Randall Collins and his state breakdown model to exemplify that, already today, AI-based models can help synthesise knowledge from a variety of sources, reason about the world, and apply what is known across a wide range of problems in a systematic way. However, we also find that AI-driven social theory remains subject to a range of practical, technical, and epistemological limitations. Most critically, existing AI-systems lack three essential capabilities needed to advance social theory in ways that are cumulative, holistic, open-ended, and purposeful. These are (1) semanticisation, i.e., the ability to develop and operationalize verbal concepts to represent machine-manipulable knowledge; (2) transferability, i.e., the ability to transfer what has been learned in one context to another; and (3) generativity, i.e., the ability to independently create and improve on concepts and models. We argue that if the gaps identified here are addressed by further research, there is no reason why, in the future, the most advanced programme in social theory should not be led by AI-driven cumulative advances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In some views in the history, philosophy and social studies of chemistry, Joseph Priestley is at least as well-known and cited for his objections to the new chemistry and his promotion of his own late version of the theory of phlogiston, as for his early series of discoveries about types of air for which he had become famous. These citations are generally not associated with any detailed indications about his late work from 1788 onwards and his late phlogistic theory, of which there has not been a detailed study. This paper undertakes a detailed study of Priestley's late work on water and related airs. He put forward a theory to support which his apparatus and initial substances would have needed to exclude impurities altogether. His theory did not take into account the solutions to the difficulties with the experiment which had been comprehensively understood and published by the phlogistian Cavendish several years previously, and with which the Lavoisians were in agreement. Priestley readily and fundamentally changed his interpretations of experiments in order to support the theory he currently favoured, and he was highly selective about replying about the criticisms of any opponent. This detailed analysis shows many divergences between his own practices and aspects of his objections to the new chemistry, which have implications for those stances in the secondary literature which do not question his objections. Accordingly, this study has implications concerning the nature of chemistry and other sciences, how they do progress and how they should progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the outline of an ontology of the social realm that aims to provide a new perspective to the study of social phenomena. It will be argued that in order to raise the impact of the social sciences, research should start from a new ontological discursive perspective. This implies that rather than dividing the social and psychological realm into different "disciplines", the social and the psychological realm need to be imagined as two sides of the same coin. And also, that space and time should not be regarded as the primary referential grid for the social sciences but conversations and people. Within this perspective the "substance" of the social realm can be imagined as a species-wide and history-long web of conversations between people (and other actors with personhood properties) in which speech-acts are the basic forces that create agents and structures. The power of speech-acts is in essence non-local: it does not matter much where and when they occur, but rather by whom and in which conversational contexts they are uttered. This can be captured by the metaphor of social entanglement where social events have particular bonds that transcend space and time. All of this resonates more with the probabilistic realm of quantum physics than with the Newtonian world were causality reigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I focus on some of Peter McHugh's most recent papers. This is work that is not yet widely known, some of which has not even been published as yet. I try to show that while the work does not in any way contradict his life-long commitments, it still has the capacity to be not at all predictable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few readers notice that in a celebrated essay, Goffman, in a footnote, acknowledges the Chinese source of his concept of face. Around the time that Goffman published 'On Face-work,' Merton urged that theory development requires, among other things, clarification or refinement of concepts. If culture is taken to be effectively related to action and meaning, it is necessary to go beyond the approach in which theories, concepts, and methods developed in one socio-cultural context are simply applied to data generated in another. The present paper shows that concepts from other cultures may challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, received wisdoms, and established conventions. The paper draws on semi-structured interviews with respondents in a number of sites in mainland China. Examination of the various notions of face articulated by respondents suggests possible developments in sociological conceptualizations of face neglected in previous discussion. It is shown that an individual's face generation and outcome may arise out of another individual's status or behavior. An individual's action may give rise to a collective face outcome and a collective's circumstances may have impact on an individual's face state. Additionally, it is shown that face itself may become an object of self-conscious deliberation and construction. The paper demonstrates that conceptualizations employed by Chinese subjects can lead to the identification or illumination of properties and relations neglected in mainstream cultural sociology. New directions of research and theorization are thus encouraged by incorporation of culturally extraneous experiences and categories into mainstream sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a comment on papers being published in this special issue concerned with interactional semantics. As these papers are concerned with abstractions, formulations, generalizations, and other uses of categorizations whereby participants' everyday understandings and interpretations come to the foreground of analysis, I explore the wider issue with which the papers wrestle. That issue is whether problems of meaning-related to subjectivity, intersubjectivity, mutual comprehension, and the like-are pervasive in interaction, or are limited and situational. I examine problems of meaning through the lenses of social theory and ethnomethodology, and take the position that analytic preoccupation with interpretation should be one that follows participants' own orientations to problems of meaning. This is different from but related to what each author argues in his own paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exploration of the relevance of Habermas's social theory for understanding meaning making in the context of shared online interaction. It describes some of the key ideas within Habermas's work, noting the central importance it gives to the idea of communicative action - a special kind of discourse in which there is 'no other force than that of the better argument' and no other motive other than 'the cooperative search for truth'. The paper then turns to the referencing of Habermas by educationalists in general and by supporters of online discussion in particular. It argues that a Habermasian perspective on meaning making is one in which participants strive for 'genuine consensus' by interrogating their own beliefs while actively engaging with opposing points of view. The value of this approach is that it introduces a concern for validity or truth into discussion of knowledge building and discriminates between emancipatory and strategic goals. While critics would argue that genuine consensus is not achievable, from Habermas we can better understand the importance of striving for such consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper considers whether, and if so how, the modelling of joint action in social philosophy - principally in the work of Margaret Gilbert and Michael Bratman - might assist in understanding and applying the concept of concerted practices in European competition law. More specifically, the paper focuses on a well-known difficulty in the application of that concept, namely, distinguishing between concerted practice and rational or intelligent adaptation in oligopolistic markets. The paper argues that although Bratman's model of joint action is more psychologically plausible and phenomenologically resonant, its less demanding character also makes it less useful than Gilbert's in our understanding of the legal concept of concerted practice and in dealing with the above difficulty. The paper proceeds in two parts: first, a discussion of the concept of concerted practices in European competition law; and second, a discussion of Gilbert and Bratman's models of joint action, including a comparative assessment of their ability to provide an evidentiary target and an evidentiary platform for concerted practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Charles Tilly's relationship to the schools of thought known as historicism and critical realism. Tilly was committed to a social epistemology that was inherently historicist, and he increasingly called himself a 'historicist.' The 'search for grand laws in human affairs comparable to the laws of Newtonian mechanics,' he argued, was a 'waste of time' and had 'utterly failed.' Tilly's approach was strongly reminiscent of the arguments developed in the first half of the 20th century by Rickert, Weber, Troeltsch, and Meinecke for a synthesis of particularization and generalization and for a focus on 'historical individuals' rather than abstract universals. Nonetheless, Tilly never openly engaged with this earlier wave of historicist sociology, despite its fruitfulness for and similarity to his own project. The paper explores some of the possible reasons for this missed encounter. The paper argues further that Tilly's program of 'relational realism' resembled critical realism, but with main two differences: Tilly did not fully embrace critical realism's argument that social mechanisms are always co-constituted by social meaning or its normative program of explanatory critique. In order to continue developing Tilly's ideas it is crucial to connect them to the epistemological ideas that governed the first wave of historicist sociology in Weimar Germany and to a version of philosophical realism that is interpretivist and critical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes the passing of Peter McHugh as an occasion to examine the intellectual development of his work. The paper is mainly focused on the product of his collaboration with his colleague and friend, Alan Blum. As such, it addresses the tradition of social inquiry, Analysis, which they cofounded. It traces the influence of Harold Garfinkel's Ethnomethodology on McHugh and on the beginning of Analysis. The collaboration with Blum is examined through a variety of coauthored works but most especially in the two books On the Beginning of Social Inquiry () and Self Reflection in the Arts and Sciences (). It also examines the relation of his independent writing before 1974, and since 1984 to the expression of the tradition of inquiry as exemplified in those two texts. The paper builds on some interview material with Peter McHugh and reflects on the influence of Peter the teacher as well as the theorist McHugh. Most especially, through its engagement with this material, it seeks to exemplify the dialectic and living nature of the program called Analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the empirical evidence that we currently have for various kinds of determinism that might be relevant to the thesis that human beings possess libertarian free will. Libertarianism requires a very strong version of indeterminism, so it can be refuted not just by universal determinism, but by some much weaker theses as well. However, it is argued that at present, we have no good reason to believe even these weak deterministic views and, hence, no good reason—at least from this quarter—to doubt that we are libertarian free. In particular, the paper responds to various arguments for neural and psychological determinism, arguments based on the work of people like Honderich, Tegmark, Libet, Velmans, Wegner, and Festinger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to ongoing discussions on feminism and the analysis of discourse. In particular, I examine Celia Kitzinger’s [(), Doing feminist conversation analysis. Feminism and Psychology, 10, 163–193 and () Doing feminist conversation analysis. In P. McIlvenny (Ed.), Talking gender and sexuality. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.] claims to be engaged in “feminist conversation analysis.” This paper identifies susceptibilities in her arguments at both the theoretical level and the level of data analysis. My argument is that Kitzinger fails to appreciate the fact that her enterprise is basically a formal analytic one and that as such it is both radically different from, and incommensurate with, ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA). Indeed her attempts to supplement feminism with EM/CA are unnecessary and counterproductive from an EM/CA position insofar as they crucially undermine its integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skilled cooperative action means being able to understand the communicative situation and know how and when to respond appropriately for the purpose at hand. This skill is of the performance of knowledge in co-action and is a form of social intelligence for sustainable interaction. Social intelligence, here, denotes the ability of actors and agents to manage their relationships with each other . Within an environment we have people, tools, artefacts and technologies that we engage with. Let us consider all of these as dynamic representations of knowledge. When this knowledge becomes enacted, i.e., when we understand how to use it to communicate effectively, such that it becomes invisible to us, it becomes knowledge in co-action. A challenge of social intelligence design is to create mediating interfaces that can become invisible to us, i.e., as an extension of ourselves. In this paper, we present a study of the way people use surfaces that afford graphical interaction, in collaborative design tasks, in order to inform the design of intelligent user interfaces. This is a descriptive study rather than a usability study, to explore how size, orientation and horizontal and vertical positioning, influences the functionality of the surface in a collaborative setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper derives from a study of organizational socialization and induction in universities. It uses some of the data from that study to critique social practice theory and to further develop a model to illuminate the characteristics of professional knowledgeability and practices underpinning daily life in universities. This is done through the analysis of a case study of one unusual sub-departmental workgroup in an unchartered English university: one that comprises both Deaf and hearing academics. Using such a case study highlights factors that are less evident in hearing-only situations, displaying important features in exaggerated form which exist less palpably in most micro-social situations in universities. As a result it offers a suitable locus for the modelling of the processes underlying much which is taken for granted in universities' daily life. The structure of the paper is as follows: it outlines the broader study from which this is derived and makes some general comments about using `unusual' case studies. It then goes on to describe the characteristics of workgroups in university contexts through the case study example and to explore their theoretical corollaries. Finally the paper considers the implications for aspects of the model developed, particularly in terms of local leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the problem of reflexivity in modern social inquiry in general and in sociology in particular. This problem is inherited from Weber's very conception of sociology, is transformed by phenomenology and ethnomethodology, deepened by the linguistic turn of hermeneutics and Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and has been the central concern of the work of Alan Blum and Peter McHugh. The issues and spectres raised by reflexivity are methodological arbitrariness, the need to take responsibility for one's own talk (and the cultural assumptions embedded in talk) and, finally, the deep fear of nihilism – the sense that with regard to inquiry (along with everything else in the world) nothing matters. As such, reflexivity raises the most fundamental issue that can be raised for modern social inquiry. Through an oriented interpretation of the work of Blum and McHugh and other contemporary social theorists (particularly Gadamer and Arendt), this paper works through what a dialectical engagement with these issues look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines Neil Smelser's paper on the history of American sociological theory. Smelser distinguishes three hegemonious stages: first, evolutionary theory, reaching from the beginnings of sociology until around 1900; second, positivism, dominating the first third of this century, and third, structural-functionalism, rising in the 1940s and 1950s and declining in the 1960s and 1970s. He also distinguishes a pluralist, nonhegemonious stage, extending from the decline of functionalism into the present. The inadequacies of Smelser's view of the past take their toll in his analysis of the present. He does not understand the historical relations among the major competing groupings so he shifts to such common sense categories as names, book titles, national grouping and lists of research topics. The national grouping that Smelser singles out, the Germans, are heavily centered on the Habermas-Luhmann dispute. This limits their theoretical range. The near-future of social theory is certain to be pluralist. The strength of Smelser's paper is in its statesmanlike simplification of the issues. The weakness, already implied in the strength, is that it does not have a firm grasp of the categories.

Even before trust became a buzzword, theoretical developments were made, which have instigated the development of two forms of trust which are described as personal trust and system trust/confidence. However, this distinction remained rather secondary in the overall literature. There is an overall lack on the historical developments of these forms of trust, their internal logic and how they interlink, overlap, or work against each other. The paper aims to advance these three aspects: first through a historical overview of the semantic of this distinction, followed by a theoretical reconstruction of the historical material and third by demonstrating how these theoretical concepts can be applied to political crises (Revolutions of 1989), thus revealing their logic and mutual interlocking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the 'cultural dope,' an ironic reference in Harold Garfinkel's Studies in Ethnomethodology to the rule-following actor in conventional sociological theories. In the nearly half-century since the publication of that book, the 'cultural dope' has been incorporated into numerous criticisms of 'models of man' in the human sciences. Garfinkel's account appeals to many writers because it seems to present an alternative picture of the actor: an individual who is self-aware, reflective, and skilled in the conduct of daily affairs. A problem with such a generalized picture of the actor is that it may seem to encourage uncritical acceptance of whatever 'the public' (or a broad segment of the public) happens to believe or support. This paper revisits Garfinkel's account of the cultural dope, and contrasts 'conservative' and 'radical' readings of what Garfinkel does with that figure. The 'conservative' reading leaves the edifice of a social-structural model largely intact, and provides an alternative, more complex, picture of individual action than that of a cultural dope. The 'radical' reading places relevant social structures in a dependent relation to the contingencies of action, and thus destabilizes the very theoretical edifice that sets up the problem of how to integrate individual actions with stable social structures. In line with the 'radical' reading, this paper suggests that Garfinkel creates serious difficulty for any generalized 'model of man,' regardless of whether it portrays the individual as active or passive, well-informed or ignorant, or reflexive or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper revisits and restates the Merton Theorem of American religious conservatism (Puritanism) and European fascism (Nazism) as functional analogues. The original formulation the Merton Theorem identifies and describes them as functional analogues in nativism or nationalism through exclusion of and aggression against non-native out-groups. The paper offers an extended restatement of the Merton Theorem in which American conservatism and European fascism function as functional analogues in that both represent the model of a closed, or the antithesis to an open, society, of which nativism is a special case. In the extended Merton Theorem they are functional analogues specifically in terms of such indicators or dimensions of a closed society as political absolutism, closure and oppression, religious absolutism and nihilism, moral absolutism and repression, and extremism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his very interesting paper Harry Kunneman argues for an alternative view on voluntary work which not so much stresses the economic aspect (as many present-day politicians do) but primarily its existentially meaningful aspect. To underpin this, Kunneman makes use of a broad range of hermeneutical, social-philosophical, complexity theoretical, biological and other ideas. This multipolar structure of the article might also prove to be its very weakness, because the rich train of thought remains highly abstract. This could be overcome by using examples and casuistry to elucidate and specify the many distinctions in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper surveys non-cooperative implementations of the core which tell an intuitive story of coalition formation. Under the core solution concept, if a blocking coalition exists those agents abandon the current allocation without regard for the consequences to players outside the blocking coalition. Yet in certain circumstances, these players have an incentive to prevent formation of any blocking coalition; a game analyzed in Lagunoff (Games Econ Behav 7:54–61, 1994) is vulnerable to such circumstances. To obtain all core allocations and only core allocations, a mechanism must either restrict the actions of non-members of a proposed coalition, or ensure that non-members are unharmed by the departure of the coalition. These requirements illustrate the core’s nonchalance toward agents not in blocking coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, compositional modelling (CM) has established itself as the predominant knowledge-based approach to construct mathematical (simulation) models automatically. Although it is mainly applied to physical systems, there is a growing interest in applying CM to other domains, such as ecological and socioeconomic systems. Inspired by this observation, this paper presents a method for extending the conventional CM techniques to suit systems that are fundamentally presented by interacting populations of individuals instead of physical components or processes. The work supports building model repositories for such systems, especially in addressing the most critical outstanding issues of granularity and disaggregation in ecological systems modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main contribution of this paper is a novel account of ontological dependence. While dependence is often explained in terms of modality and existence, there are relations of dependence that slip through the mesh of such an account. Starting from an idea proposed by Jonathan Lowe, the article develops an account of ontological dependence based on a notion of explanation; on its basis, certain relations of dependence can be established that cannot be accounted by the modal-existential account. Dependence is only one of two main topics of this paper, for it is approached via a discussion of the category of substance. On a traditional view, substances can be characterised as independent entities. Before the background of a modal-existential account of dependence, this idea appears problematic. The proposed notion of explanatory dependence is shown to vindicate the traditional approach to substance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is offered as a tribute to Joel Feinberg. The first section of the paper applies Feinberg’s analysis of freedom of expression to a contemporary case of academic freedom. The second section engages Feinberg’s work on rights and punishment. The paper ends with numerous quotations from Feinberg’s vast array of writings, words that express his ideas on a number of important problems that occupied his mind throughout his fruitful and influential career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of the concept of rationality in (especially classical) sociological theory. This exploration is prompted by widely held views, especially among economists and rational choice theorists, that classical sociology is the science of the irrational lacking a conception of rationality. By using pertinent examples (mostly) from classical and post-classical (or early contemporary) sociological theory, the paper casts serious doubt on such claims. Specifically, classical sociological theory is characterized by the following features in analyzing rationality: conceptual and methodological pluralism, theoretical and empirical richness, treating rationality as a complex social phenomenon, differentiating economic and noneconomic rationality, acknowledging the social character and foundation of (economic) rationality, and contrasting epistemological or scientific rationality and ontological or real-life irrationality, including the revelation of the irrationality of extreme (economic) rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methodologically, the most advanced social science discipline is considered economics, especially its neoclassical version. A number of practitioners in the other social sciences, especially sociology and political science, perceive economics as a scientific exemplar in methodological (and theoretical) terms. This methodological exemplar has been, particularly in the last decades, attempted to emulate by some of these social scientists. The outcome of this emulation, by adopting and extending its methods, of neoclassical economics in parts (but not all) of sociology, political science, and elsewhere has been rational choice theory as a general social paradigm. This paper tries to show that many misapplications of the methodology of neoclassical economics in rational choice theory have ensued from such methodological emulation. That neoclassical economics does not necessarily contain or lead to a mathematical rational choice model is the core argument of this paper. The paper fills in a gap created by the current literature's focus on the methodological bases of mathematical rational choice theory in neoclassical economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the growing social scientific interest in agency theory, this paper sets out to examine and critically evaluate recent approaches to agency within archaeology. To this end, the paper briefly outlines the foundational theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens before turning to discuss the central themes and issues that emerge from some of the more influential contemporary approaches to agency within archaeology. Drawing from these differing approaches, this paper seeks to establish conceptual clarity in archaeological thinking about agency through a discussion of the importance of distinguishing between intentions, consequences, meanings, and motives when seeking to understand the situated subjectivities of historical actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1885 and 1930, as sociology was becoming an academic discipline, sociology was also being practiced intelligently, innovatively, and self-consciously outside the academy in the social settlements that grew up in America's major cities. In this paper, we first define and give a brief overview of the settlement movement in America; second, we show how the settlement workers were sociologists in their self-definition and action and in their relations with other sociologists; third, in the body of the paper, we describe the sociology done by the settlements in terms of the empirical research they undertook and the theory they created. Our argument is that settlement sociologists produced empirical studies that were both substantively significant and methodologically pioneering; that they did so in terms of a coherent social theory unique in its focus on "the neighborly relation"; and that both their research and theory were part of a critical, reflexive, and activist sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the work of sociologists as expert witnesses and how sociological theory is used in criminal trials. The study describes how alternative sociological theories were propounded by sociologist expert witnesses and used by competing lawyers to establish the correct understanding of the case. The paper indicates that the sociological testimony was relevant to the deliberations and verdicts and details how the judge's and jurors' practical treatment of the law and evidence reconciled the adversaries' mutually exclusive, partisan positions and the theoretical bases for those positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, a number of interpreters with an interest in economics have given some attention the work of Alfred Schutz. As intimated in this literature, the orientation of his delimited thought on economics stemmed from contacts with the Austrian school during his Vienna years. Probably because of this connection, there exists among these interpreters an inclination uncritically to align Schutz with the Austrians' thought. What will be argued in this paper is that in adopting such an uncritical position, each of these readings fails adequately to situate Schutz's critique of economic analyses within the framework of his own social theory. It will become apparent that his treatment of economics turned out to be a mixture of defence and critique, and that his interpretation of the subject and the intellectual status he ascribed to it were considerably more ambivalent and ambiguous than has been noticed. In particular, Schutz expressed significant reservations about the highly circumscribed and artificial depictions of the world of human action that some economists espoused, especially within the confines of marginalist theory. When arraigned against the phenomenology of the life-world that he had developed, and against the "postulates" around which he had constructed his social theory, much of extant economics did not meet the requirements of a properly grounded social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Argument Web is maturing as both a platform built upon a synthesis of many contemporary theories of argumentation in philosophy and also as an ecosystem in which various applications and application components are contributed by different research groups around the world. It already hosts the largest publicly accessible corpora of argumentation and has the largest number of interoperable and cross compatible tools for the analysis, navigation and evaluation of arguments across a broad range of domains, languages and activity types. Such interoperability is key in allowing innovative combinations of tool and data reuse that can further catalyse the development of the field of computational argumentation. The aim of this paper is to summarise the key foundations, the recent advances and the goals of the Argument Web, with a particular focus on demonstrating the relevance to, and roots in, philosophical argumentation theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will focus on the establishment of a social event that refers in our case study to a social android robot simulating interaction with human users. Within an open-field study setting, we observed a shifting of interactive behavior, presence setting and agency ascription by the human users toward the robot, operating in parallel with the robots' different modulations of activity. The activity modes of the robot range from a simple idling state, to a reactive facetrack condition and finally an interactive teleoperated condition. By relating the three types of activity modes with three types of (increasing social) presence settings-ranging from co-location, to co-presence and finally to social presence-we observed modulations in the human users' interactive behavior as well as modulations of agency ascription toward the robot. The observations of the behavioral shift in the human users toward the robot lead us to the assumption that a fortification of agency ascription toward the robot goes hand in hand with the increase in its social activity modes as well as its display of social presence features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper explores the relationship between Condorcet and Jefferson to gain insight into the early development of social choice theory. Jefferson does not seem to have read or understood Condorcet's theoretical work, but studying the relationship leads to the identification of intellectual intermediaries and a different perspective on the creation of social choice theory in the French Academy of Sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I consider succinctly the main Marxist objections to Honneth's model of critical social theory, and Honneth's key objections to Marx-inspired models. I then seek to outline a rapprochement between the two positions, by showing how Honneth's normative concept of recognition is not antithetical to functionalist arguments, but in fact contains a social-theoretical dimension, the idea that social reproduction and social evolution revolve around struggles around the interpretation of core societal norms. By highlighting the social theoretical side of recognition, one can outline a model of critical social theory that in fact corresponds to the descriptive and normative features outlined by Marx himself. However, the price of this rapprochement for Honnethian critical theory is a greater emphasis on the division of labour as the central mechanism of social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the 'deprivation approach,' a person's death is bad for her to the extent that it deprives her of goods. This approach faces the Lucretian problem that prenatal non-existence deprives us of goods just as much as death does, but does not seem bad at all. The two most prominent responses to this challenge-one of which is provided by Frederik Kaufman (inspired by Thomas Nagel) and the other by Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer-claim that prenatal non-existence is relevantly different from death. This paper criticizes these responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite being a decade into the 21st century, sociological theory continues to be taught at the undergraduate and graduate level in nearly every program in the United States as if it were still 1970. 40 years ago, it made sense to dichotomize theory into two courses-'classical' and 'contemporary'-because the latter of the two only covered theory from about the 1930s to the 'present.' Today a literal and figurative time crunch has emerged that makes teaching theory difficult and at times, arbitrary based on the professor's training, mentor, ideological/epistemological biases, and structural factors like textbook choice and number of academic weeks allotted per course. That is, we spend a large amount of time debating who should be in or out, and not enough time preparing our students for the application of theory towards the ultimate goal: knowledge about the social world. Students, then, leave confused at how one uses theory, what theory actually is, and, often times, disengaged from theory because of the density with which some theories approach the social world. In the paper below, the time crunch and its tendency to produce a 'lost generation' of theorists is examined. After elucidating how the time crunch constrains sociology, four possible solutions are presented. This list of solutions is neither definitive nor exhaustive, and is meant to generate a rich discussion about the direction the discipline should head in the new century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The standard analysis of procedures (mechanisms), in the theory of implementation, focuses on the properties of the subset of possible outcomes. But since a given procedure may yield very different outcomes in different circumstances (preference profile, information or rationality of players), it may be useful to rely on fine-grained social preferences over outcomes in order to evaluate the procedure. This paper introduces the notion of cross-profile social ordering, and illustrates how this concept may be used for the assessment of procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a critical review of the burgeoning literature on social capital. While our focus is primarily on social capital's place in economics, we do consider its broader social science context. In recent years, social capital literature has produced many insights, however, a number of conceptual and empirical problems remain. In this setting, we trace a panorama of ideas of the principal theorists of social capital for then focusing us on the numerous critics whose it is the subject. Finally we provide recommendations for a prudent use of the concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the theoretically based QOL indicators projects can be classified in terms of six major theoretical concepts: (a) socio-economic development (b) personal utility, (c) just society, (d) human development, (e) sustainability, and (f) functioning. I explain the core aspects of these six theoretical paradigms and show how they help guide QOL researchers to select and develop QOL indicators that are significantly and qualitatively distinct. A taxonomy of QOL indicators guided by a given theoretical concept is likely to be very different from others taxonomies guided by different theoretical concepts. Thus, the objective of this paper to explain these theoretical paradigms and show how they guide QOL researchers to select and develop QOL indicators that are significantly and qualitatively distinct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years several approaches-philosophical, sociological, psychological-have been developed to come to grips with our profoundly technologically mediated world. However, notwithstanding the vast merit of each, they illuminate only certain aspects of technological mediation. This paper is a preliminary attempt at a philosophical reflection on technological mediation as such-deploying the concepts of 'transparency' and 'opacity' as heuristic instruments. Hence, we locate a 'theory of transparency' within several theoretical frameworks-respectively classic phenomenology, media theory, Actor Network Theory, postphenomenology, several ethnographical, psychological, and sociological perspectives, and finally, the 'Critical Theory of Technology.' Subsequently, we render a general, systematic overview of these theories, thereby conjecturing what a broad analysis of technological mediation in and of itself might look like-finding, at last, an essential contradiction between transparency of 'use' and transparency of social origins and effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latour is widely considered a critic and renewer of research in the social sciences. The ecologically minded Left has also acclaimed him as a theorist interested in bringing nature back both into sociological theory and into society and politics. To enable a more detailed discussion of Latour's claims, I will here outline his theory and the ways in which it is related to classical theory, such as Durkheim, and the methodology of the interpretive paradigm, such as Schütz. My thesis is that Latour's empirical studies may be read as unfolding the methodological consequences of the interpretive paradigm, and that his early work is a brilliant proof of Durkheim's theory of the morphology of social facts. Latour has now elaborated the insights he gained from concrete laboratory studies toward a general theory of the social, of society, and of politics. These generalizations have made his theory at least partly problematic. The political implication of Latour's theory of society is a generalization of the call for equality to encompass everything; in other words, Latour criticizes the exclusion of nonhuman entities from political representation. The paper closes by discussing the political consequences of this proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers Charles Tilly as an important but underappreciated theorist of nationalism. Tilly's theory of nationalism emerged from the 'bellicist' strand of his earlier work on state-formation and later incorporated a concern with performance, stories, and cultural modeling. Yet despite the turn to culture in Tilly's later work, his theory of nationalism remained state-centered, materialist, and instrumentalist-a source of both its power and its limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Tilly's social theories shifted over the course of his career from an early focus on quantitative and macro-sociological approaches to a later focus on relations and agency. His studies of state-making also shifted, from a focus on conflict and capitalism to explorations of democracy. This paper details these shifts and places them in the context of broader trends in comparative-historical and political sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]