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This paper represents a preliminary attempt to bring the field of mathematics within the scope of the sociology of science. An analysis is performed to determine whether citations are a rough measure of quality in mathematics. Citations to work published by mathematicians who have been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences are compared with those to the work of a random sample of university-based American mathematicians. The study examines productivity and citation counts, to determine if there is a relationship between a mathematician's age and achievement, and to test the claim that younger mathematicians are more apt to do important work. Finally, this paper explores the difficulties peculiar to the sociological study of mathematics, which account for the reluctance of most sociologists of science to study this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a citation-context analysis of journal articles from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Examining publications from the sociology of health and medicine, the study draws a number of conclusions about the state of sociology, inter-country relationships between knowledge workers, and national systems of sociological knowledge production. It finds that core–periphery relations define significant features of sociological work, impacting on citation patterns, inter-country collaboration and the selection of reference materials. Core–periphery relations are also found to influence the sociological production of knowledge across the Australian university sector. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers and evaluates Jeffrey Alexander's strong program in cultural sociology, which represents an exercise in paradigm formation and an ambitious attempt to refound American sociology along interpretive lines. Cultural sociology is assessed according to four axes, namely its social constructivist epistemology, culturalizing methodology, analytical realism, and internal and external positioning. In addition to discussing the accomplishments and limitations of cultural sociology in all these areas, the paper indicates ways to strengthen it by setting it in conversation with other and more explicitly critical currents of thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexander's invitation to a sociology of evil begins from the premise that the social sciences have long neglected direct analyses of evil. They have focused instead on questions of the good and treated its other as an absence or residual category. His most direct foray into this field must be read against his strong program in cultural sociology and his more concrete analysis of the development of narratives of the Holocaust as a moral 'trauma drama'. I argue that the analytic frame Alexander constructs in 'Towards a Sociology of Evil' is too narrow to achieve the ambitions declared in 'The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology'. A multi-dimensional social theoretical approach to evil must recognize that while its significations are clearly culturally variable, they also refer to something beyond the limits of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of social theory is too often given to celebrity hunting, the polemical vulgarizing of one's putative enemies, or the precocious production of totalizing and redemptive theories purporting to rescue social theory from its perennial crises of meaning, naming and explanation. The constructive task of social theory, however, can be both more modest and productive when attention is given to its substantive concern to provide codes, narratives and explanations of modernity, in all its pluralist and democratic dimensions. This is in effect the self-description of Jeffrey Alexander's own work. This paper provides an empathetic account of Alexander's approach to the practice of social theory via a synopsis of his collected essays in Fin de Siècle Social Theory (1995). In particular, it claims that Alexander's critique of the reductionist propensities of Pierre Bourdieu's macro-sociological theory is exemplary in its constructive cast as a systematic analysis of the universalizing contents of the conceptual and methodological claims themselves. Herein lies the use of reason itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces developments in Jeffrey Alexander's cultural sociology. The aim is to introduce the reader to the key components of this theory as it developed from a functionalist focus on societal values through semiotics and linguistic structuralism to a theory of cultural trauma and collective performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper retraces the conceptual development of Jeffrey Alexander's cultural sociology. It centres on three major conceptual achievements: first, the distinction between inside and outside and its more peculiar variants (like system and environment or friend and foe); second, the elaboration of the temporal axis as a distinct dimension of cultural analysis; and finally, the close focus on performativity that took centre-stage in cultural analysis during the last years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of US hate crime legislation reveals a significant overall trend involving: (1) the inclusion of a notion of hate motivation on the part of the offender; (2) the provision for enhanced penalties; and (3) the identification of particular victimized groups who are listed in state and federal hate crime statutes. Whether or not a person is recognized as a hate crime victim in US statutes has been shown to be heavily influenced by the strength of social movements based on politicized identities. It is argued that this alignment problematizes the position of victims who are the targets of hate crimes yet who fail to organize on the basis of identity politics, lack political clout, have insufficient moral status, or who see hate crime legislation as an ineffective way of dealing with their particular concerns. This paper examines the barriers to achieving hate crime victim status for persons who are targeted because of their occupations or sexual orientation. The specific examples I will use are doctors and other workers in abortion clinics, sex workers and paedophiles. These widely disparate groups have been selected as examples to highlight some of the moral status, politicized identity and social movement and lobbying strength issues that are currently involved in being recognized as a victim of hate in the US. It is argued that Australia should not proceed down the track of introducing hate crime legislation. Hate crime legislation is the source of serious social disquiet and acrimony in the US. There are inequities built into the alignment between proving hate intent and the enhanced penalty approach that involve giving higher symbolic status to some bodies and not others. As the experience in the US shows, this has a dangerous potential to undermine social cohesion and community faith in equality before the law as well as creating a breeding ground of resentment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine how immigrant Punjabi-Sikhs make sense of themselves as yellow cabbies in New York with two complementary frameworks—Hill Collins' "matrix of domination" and insights from the literature exploring the interplay between race and ethnicity. The cabbies discussed their immigrant status, non-whiteness, and social class as influential, emphasizing the effects of all three forms of marginalization as occurring simultaneously. They deployed "money" to frame this subordination and to negotiate dimensions of social location and identity. The transnational space they occupied emerges noteworthy too in their identity making. This analysis, based on interviews with 56 cabbies, advances scholarship on race and immigration/transnationalism, Asian and South Asian American identities, specifically research on immigrant Sikhs of lower socioeconomic status, attention on whom is scant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses economic sociology. Economic sociology has been undergoing a dramatic revival in recent years, partially because American sociologists, in particular, have begun to produce innovative studies of market behavior, but also because sociologists on both sides of the Atlantic have begun to engage with the aggressive claims made by economic models of social behavior. It is somewhat ironic to note that as neo classical economics began to move increasingly towards the mathematical models of economic behavior in the middle of the last century, sociologists gradually realized that their empirical skills equipped them to study that which economists were leaving behind, namely real life markets. Traditionally, only economists were considered capable of addressing intricacies of market exchange while sociologists had to make do with residual cases, such as labour market institutions, or the black box of business administration, both areas where sociology subsequently thrived.

Rates of crime for Blacks in the United States in the post-slavery era have always been high relative to Whites. But explaining, or minimizing, this fact faces a major problem: individual excuses for bad acts point to deficiencies, in the agent, which are perhaps forgivable, such as mental deficiency or a deprived childhood, but at the price of treating the agent as less than a full member of the moral community. Collectivizing excuses risks implying group inferiority. The history of attempts to provide an explanation of crime that mitigates blame without undermining full participation to the moral community is long and convoluted, leading to the presently widespread claim that crime is itself a product of victimization through pervasive racism. Three basic strategies – rejection of comparison, attribution to racially invariant causes and explanation by reference to uniquely Black conditions, such as subculture or extreme stigmatization – are identified and their ethical implications distinguished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents how job readiness programs—as anchors of the devolved organizational landscape of neoliberal poverty governance in the United States—endeavor to instill within the poor not simply the virtue of work, but the virtue of thrift, and thus orient them to "both sides of the paycheck." Using a comparative ethnographic study of two community-based, government-funded nonprofit job readiness programs, we show that this pedagogic focus on budgeting is central to the overall goal of conditioning clients to embrace and endure a degraded labor market. Recognizing that most participants will remain poor with or without low-wage employment, these programs suggest that it is as crafty consumers that participants may retake control of their lives. Despite the programs' differing target populations and racialized and gendered logics, both attempt to accommodate participants to the dictates of the neoliberal economic order: jobs are hard to find and, even if you get one, wages will not be enough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an introduction to academic papers clustered around sociologist Jeffrey Alexander's work and the project of American cultural sociology and published in the scholarly "Thesis Eleven" periodical. Consistent energy towards renewal; European current in American sociology; Youthful engagement with Marxism at Harvard University; Horizon of culture as the unifying theme; Premise of the intelligence of everyday action.

This is an article about the history of US sociology with systematic intent. It goes back to World War II to recover a wartime narrative context through which sociologists formulated a ‘trauma’ to the discipline and ‘blamed’ qualitative and values-oriented research for damaging the scientific status of sociology. This narrative documents a discussion of the changes that sociologists said needed to be made in sociology as a science to repair its status and reputation. While debates among sociologists about theory and method had always been contentious, the wartime narrative insisted for the first time that sociology be immediately unified around quantitative approaches. The narrative of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ science that developed during the war not only undermined the efforts of social interactionists to theorize social action and social justice, but also derailed Parsons’ pre-war effort to bridge differences. The moral coding that is the legacy of the narrative stigmatized important approaches to sociology, leading to a ‘crisis’ in the 1960s that still haunts the discipline. Disciplinary history has overlooked the wartime narrative with the result that the role played by World War II in effecting this crisis has gone unrecognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on an ethnographic study of the process by which a young man became a drug dealer in a in a small northeastern US city. Drug dealing was the principal occupation in his predominantly black neighborhood. This process is treated as an initiation into a criminal career that involved not only the mastery of specific steps of drug dealing but also learning the expectations of the local interaction order framing the space where he lives. Approached in this way, one young man’s story offers a window into the local interaction order of a drug-dealing space: a set of local social practices that must be routinely mastered in the area where he grew up. The pervasiveness of drug-dealing practices in the local interaction order offers valuable insight into how and why male youth in this locale would enter the drug trade and are at considerable risk of arrest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard American disciplinary history holds that the ‘founding fathers’, inspired by ‘great men theorizing European modernity’, created a sister discipline in Europe’s image. This article proposes an alternative history, which locates the founding of American sociology in the writings of ‘pro-slavery imperialists’ Henry Hughes and George Fitzhugh. A methodologically nationalistic sociology of ‘race relations’, which isolates the study of race from issues of ‘general’ sociological concern, has substituted for sustained engagement with sociology’s colonialist and imperialist past. Racism has been made an anachronistic survivor in tradition, rather than a constitutive part of modernity. Rehabilitating this lost history is therefore vital for creating a new, global historical sociology, as is questioning the conceptual matrix that isolates the study of race and racism from issues of general sociological concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have recently called attention to the changing nature of the American university in the wake of the current economic downturn. Considering the transformative nature of knowledge production in the United States, we introduce the concept of intellectual closure in illustration of the unintended outcomes of individual decisions and career trajectories as they operate under the forces of social closure. Intellectual closure is defined as subtle and hidden forms of constraint on individual agency. Intellectual closure includes calculative thinking about how to publish in flagship journals, avoidance of high-risk projects, and preference for short-term projects with more immediate rewards. Structural constraints, specifically within sociology, are enabling the emergence of narrower perspectives and eroding former professional norms as individual decisions aggregate, unintentionally, to constitute a more competitive discipline with narrower definitions of productivity and quality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous research has shown that nativist ideology racializes nonwhite immigrants, but little research has looked at how color-blind racist discourse shapes how people accomplish this while maintaining a race-neutral identity. This study examines how online discussion forum participants of an anti-immigrant organization in the United States use color-blind racist discourse. The qualitative analysis of 200 threads (2,168 posts) shows that forum participants use the color-blind discursive tactic of diminishing the importance of race through rhetoric of legality, cultural racism, and reverse racism. This rhetoric frees forum participants to conflate illegal, criminal, and Hispanic. This neutralizes contradictions in their claims of a race-neutral stance, which is most evident in their discussions of Puerto Rico whereby participants reinforce a dichotomy between citizen and Latino. While color-blind racism has been used to explain race relations between white and nonwhite citizens, this research shows how the ideology extends to include nonwhite immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, sociology was becoming established as a discipline in the United States and Great Britain. This article looks closely at the lives and work of two prominent sociologists at this time, Patrick Geddes and Lester F. Ward. As sociology was becoming established in academic departments, neither Ward’s nor Geddes’ thought managed to survive intact. A number of factors played into this process, especially the overall broadness of their perspectives, as well as the incompatibility of several of their key concerns, including gender, religion, race and education, with the eventual trajectory of the sociology and the scholars who were involved in consolidating the discipline as such. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The antiterrorist policy of the George W. Bush Administration established a relationship between democracy and security that implied the limitation of the former as a necessary condition for the achievement of the latter. This strategy led to the diminishing of the basic liberties promoted by liberal democracy through legal means with the putative objective of guaranteeing the ‘security’ of American citizens. A key starting point of these policies can be found in undercover operations carried out abroad by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of State at the beginning of the Cold War. This article focuses on the continuities and ruptures between the official discourse of the G. W. Bush Administration and that of the first years of the Cold War, focusing on the realist and liberal patterns present in those discourses. This leads to an analysis of the relationship between democracy and national security under the antiterrorist policy implemented by the G. W. Bush government, approached from a power elite perspective. The aggressive foreign and homeland policies of the US government were based upon a booming military–industrial pole, closely bound to free market expansionism and liberal democracy as key dimensions in the reproduction of capitalism. Included in this consideration are the 2002 and 2006 National Security Strategies, the Patriot Act (2001), and the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (2003) (or ‘Patriot Act II’) put in place by the G.W. Bush Administration, as well as the National Security Strategy (2009) established by President Obama. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study tested the effects of mirror-induced self-focus on participants' tendency to self-stereotype. Americans high and low in identification with their nationality rated themselves and the group "Americans" on traits that varied in stereotypicality and valence. Participants made these ratings under one of three conditions: (1) while facing a mirror, (2) while facing a mirror with an American flag visible, and (3) while not facing a mirror. High identifiers were more likely to endorse stereotypic traits and to rate themselves as similar to their national group when self-focused. In contrast, low identifiers were less likely to endorse stereotypic traits and to rate themselves as similar to their national group when self-focused. These patterns were limited to traits negative in valence. Correlational analyses indicated that self/group ratings were most similar when high identifiers were self-focused. Implications for the distinction between personal and social identity are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an attempt to make sociological sense of the 2008 American election - particularly of the phenomenological observation of extraordinary enchantment and almost amorous attraction which unlikely members of the American population displayed for Obama, from the early days of the campaign onward. I draw on charisma theory to argue that sociology has something surprising to say on the phenomenon, and on the metaphor of the pipe to add detail about the technology of attraction that was in play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview of the recent phenomenon accounted to some Ibero-American observatories, an institution working on issues related to information, communication, and culture in the U.S. It likewise shows the results of some research which seeks to analyze the diversity of 61 observatories concerning their geographical location, notable research themes, and area of operations. The purpose of this study lies in exploring the profile and the situation of observatories in terms of informational, communicational, and cultural matters. In addition, the subject of the study is guided by an interest in gauging the development of a novel type of entity, which comes into being abruptly from the second half of the 1990s in countries like Spain, Brazil, and Argentina.

This article is inspired by Edna Bonacich's theoretical attention to the 'big picture,' substantive dissection of the garment industry and ethical call for public sociology. The article focuses on the newest developments in the US anti-sweatshop movement by delineating the progress of two movement organizations: United Students Against Sweatshops and Sweatfree Communities. The article argues that the development of these movements has been toward progressively addressing the underlying causes of sweatshop, causes that are tied into globalization. Most importantly movements have recently begun to specifically challenge the undermining of union strength and the use of vulnerable labor. This progression has shifted the US movement toward action directly supportive of worker empowerment rather than simply improved conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An awareness of the significance of location in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge has brought a new dimension to recent work on the sociology of science. But the importance of speech in scientific enterprises has been less well developed. This article explores the idea of 'spaces of speech' by underscoring the connections between location and locution. It develops a case study of how Darwinian evolution was talked about in different sites using examples from Ireland and the American South during the latter part of the 19th century. These reveal how sites enable and constrain what may be said, and heard, about particular scientific claims, and how they are crucial to understanding the circulation of scientific claims in public arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between theology and sociology on two levels. The first is in terms of the general disciplinary closure that has marked much of their coexistence, despite the many topics on which they potentially meet. The second level is more specific and concerns the tension in Britain between religious sociology, in which sociology is put to serve faith, and the secular sociology of religion, where religion is studied scientifically. This tension has been addressed before with respect to the history of sociology in France and the United States, but the British case, hitherto relatively unknown, illustrates the potential there was for a more fruitful relationship between sociology and theology in Britain that went undeveloped as the secular sociology of religion eventually replaced early religious sociology. The existence of religious sociology has been written out of the history of the discipline in Britain, such that when theology and sociology began a more serious engagement in the 1970s in Britain and elsewhere, particularly as biblical studies discovered sociology and as theologians and sociologists first met jointly, this earlier dialogue was entirely overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been made of the 'Southern difference' in cultural and sociological images of the North American landscape. Everything is different there: the cuisine, the music, the religion, and the politics. Moreover, the South was the crucible in which two of the definitive North American experiences were formed: the Civil War (1861-5) and the Civil Rights Movement a century later. This article poses another important category, in addition to 'race and space' — namely, the concept of tragedy, and the correlative rendering of the South as 'America's tragic landscape'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexander's call for a cultural sociology that goes beyond hermeneutic reading to an understanding of how cultural texts are instantiated in action is considered in relation to earlier attempts to establish a tradition of symbolic analysis in American sociology. The sociological provenance of the dramaturgical model that Alexander appropriates from performance studies serves to underline the precariousness of cultural sociology as a project within the American academy. Alexander's thesis on the critical importance of 'refusion' to the life of societies is endorsed, as is his argument that the specificity of 'post-traditional' societies cannot be elided by drawing directly on conceptual tools developed in analysis of ritual in 'traditional' societies. His argument for sociological agnosticism in relation to the moral qualities of symbolic action, on the other hand, is called into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author of this article attempts to politically refunctionalize Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in a critical and humanist direction. Starting with the same elements of the wilfully impoverished language of ANT, he slightly modify them, so that, as in the Jewish theologoumenon, they eventually enter into a new constellation which considers humans and perhaps non humans as well from the point of view of their redemption. The author starts with Wittgenstein and adopts his paratactic way of presentation. It is hypothesized that the network of entangled confusions between humans and non humans cannot go on indefinitely.

The author discusses the implications of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack for sociology, by referring to the writings of Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington, two American theorists who are both connected to the U.S. foreign policy establishment. According to Fukuyama, the emergence of United States as the sole superpower does not mean that everybody is ready to accept liberal democracy. Huntington, on the other hand, tackles the need to develop a much better understanding of the Islamic world. The author concludes that sociology becomes impoverished without a historical perspective but the events of September 11 can only be fully understood through such perspective.

English. The author looks at Latina women in the United States and their contributions to the mosaic of religious social patterns. The underlying assumption here is that Latinas/os, like other ethnic groups, have made their mark shaping religious practices. The article builds on notions that gender, ethnic, and race foci in our research expand our knowledge of the nuances in the mosaic of religious practice. The sociology of religion would be left behind if it did not challenge the restrictive ways the field has looked at religious practice and expression. What methodological approaches and what questions we ask are important to enriching research on religion in the United States and elsewhere. Here the author suggests that both questionnaire and focus group interviewing are particularly useful in studying a multiethnic and multilingual community, because the'two-pronged approach brings out the complexity of religious beliefs and practice. French. L'auteure analyse la manière dont les femmes sud-américaines vivant aux Etats-Unis ont contribué à la mosaïque socio-religieuse de ce pays. L'hypothèse sous-jacente est que les 'Latinos' ont, comme d'autres groupes ethniques, marqué de leur empreinte le 'paysage' religieux actuel. L'article est fondé sur la notion selon laquelle le 'genre', l'origine ethnique et la race sont des angles d'analyse susceptibles d'améliorer notre connaissance des pratiques religieuses et de leurs nuances. La sociologie des religions ne ferait pas son travail si elle ne tentait pas de remettre en question le cadre parfois étriqué dans lequel elle a tenté d'analyser les pratiques et les expressions religieuses. Les approches méthodologiques suggéreés et les questions poseés sont importantes pour l'étude des religions, que ce soit aux Etats-Unis ou ailleurs. L'auteure soutient que le questionnaire et les entretiens avec le groupe cible sont des techniques... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the speech given by Ken Plummer at the memorial celebration of the life of William Simon, one of the most influential sociologists of sexuality of the 20th century, in Houston Texas. Contribution of Simon in sex education; Context of the book entitled 'Sexual Conduct'; Perspective of Simon on sociology and on sexology.

This article presents information on the impact of popular music on society. Theorists and social critics have looked to popular music as a strong supporter of the status quo, noting that composers and players have been financially supported by the dominant institutions of their societies or that the music, by focusing attention in a non political sphere, actually detracted from the creation of revolutionary ideology and substituted the symbols of "false pop consciousness" for it. Despite the long standing concern with popular music and Its effects on society, there has been a surprisingly small amount of theory and research devoted to it in sociology. Western sociology most especially American sociology, has had a difficult time with the study of culture in general and more general difficulty has encompassed and swallowed up most attempts to study popular music. Today the sociology of popular music is at a peculiar crossroad. There seems to be an awakening interest in this area of study, perhaps because of a turning away from the political and economic issues that nearly totally pre-occupied sociology in the 1960$ and on into the mid 1910s, to a more general concern with the study of culture. Social scientists are now beginning to realise that the popular music industry is now the largest entertainment industry in the world - bigger than film or television - and that studies concerning the effects on society must taken popular music into account.