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This paper aims to understand the influence of institutional and organisational embeddedness on research productivity of Italian sociologists. We looked at all records published by Italian sociologists in Scopus from 1973 to 2016 and reconstructed their co-authorship patterns. We built an individual productivity index by considering the number and type of records, the impact factor of journals in which these records were published and each record’s citations. We found that sociologists who co-authored more frequently with international authors were more productive and that having a stable group of co-authors had a positive effect on the number of publications but not on citations. We found that organisational embeddedness has a positive effect on productivity at the group level (i.e., sociologists working in the same institute), less at the individual level. We did not found any effect of the scientific disciplinary sectors, which are extremely influential administratively and politically for promotion and career in Italy. With all caveats due to several limitations of our analysis, our findings suggest that internationalisation and certain context-specific organisational settings could promote scientist productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author of this paper discusses the current state of historical sociology in Russia reflected in the respective section of the Sociological studies journal. After noting the potentialities of the discipline, the author summarizes the overall output of the 20 years' long existence of this section. The basic preoccupation in the initial phase of the section's existence was to get - and convey to readers - a clear understanding of the essence and functions of contemporary historical sociology (HS in the text below), to introduce its potentialities to the Russian sociologist audience. However, even today there are few regular contributors, authors tend to delve into minor issues, and even resort to long surpassed views on the discipline. A most urgent issue for Russian historical sociology today is, according to the author, to draw lessons from Russia's recent centuries to understand the essence of Russia's present as it is penetrated by its past: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under the circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" (K. Marx). This is the essence of the enigmas to be deciphered by historical sociologists. The author formulates some such enigmas (like the proverbial Russian rake repeatedly stepped-upon) observable in recent (as well as earlier) events in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to establish that, besides the fundamental Schopenhauerian inspiration of the work, declared by the author himself and borne out exhaustively by academic research, the final chapters of the novel Una Vita (1892) converge with a series of studies and theoretical works brought out by doctors and sociologists at the end of the 19th century, from Enrico Morselli (1879) to Emile Durkheim (1897). What emerges clearly from the depiction of the suicidal instincts of the main character of the novel is an unconscious dynamic based on the fulfilment of a moral imperative, in which throughout is reflected and masked his self-destructive narcissism, a condition Freud was to elucidate in Mourning and Melancholia (1917). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some sociologists contributing to the foundations of relational sociology on the international stage have been recently remarking a kind of affinity between both notions of social relation and social life: they particularly refer to the pioneering views of Georg Simmel, who is largely mentioned and concerned in the following paper. The interaction among social subjects generates unexpected and emergent forms which sociologist must detect and inquiry: the interactive feature of any relation refers to the "content" of the social relation itself. Form and content stand for social life. This paper aims at addressing and deepening relational perspective, as regarded by Pierpaolo Donati, towards a Lebenssoziologie: in short, it hints to concern sensu strictissimo social relations as forms of social life. This lucky locution (i.e. Lebenssoziologie), adopted by Scott Lash more than ten years ago into a new interpretation of Simmel's social theory, concerns social life in terms of stream which fits with analysis on such themes as media and ICT. In this contribution, Donati's relational sociology is challenged and thematised in relation of a critical and relational Lebenssoziologie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Socioloski Pregled is the property of Srpsko Sociolosko Drustvo 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.)

The decline of interest among sociologists in the works of Talcott Parsons over the last several decades has been driven in substantial respects by a belief that he was personally conservative in his political views and that his theoretical formulations were rigidly tied to a conservative view of social order. The present paper reviews Parsons' major political involvements through the course of his career from his student days through the last decade of his life. The review demonstrates that Parsons was a typical academic liberal of his time and that his liberalism was expressed especially in several major applied essays. In the 1930s, he was an early and active opponent of Nazism. During World War II, he taught professionals to administer occupied territories and nations effectively. After the war, he advocated for government support of the social sciences, citing the important contributions they had made to the war effort. In the 1950s, he wrote a famous critical analysis of the Joseph McCarthy movement in American politics. In the 1960s, he contributed supportive essays to the Civil Rights movement. Later in the decade and in the 1970s, he contributed to the protection of academic freedoms while also proposing accommodations to the demands of the student movement for more "relevant" teaching and greater participation in university governance. Throughout his career, he taught and worked closely with students of various political views and sought to protect their rights of freedom of political expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades of his life, Talcott Parsons was often indicted as conservative. More recently, his analyses of contemporary society have been perceived as obsolete. In the present paper, I argue that both these accounts are wrong. Parsons's biographical and intellectual profile is clearly – and rather consistently – that of a New Deal liberal. His "ate" works, moreover, articulate an original view of the integrative processes in modern societies that is still both theoretically compelling and politically relevant. Parsons's view of modernity has made possible the development of a sophisticated theory of societal pluralism, able to deal analytically with the astonishing variety of structural strains (and resources) arising from an increasingly diverse – in racial, religious, ethnic, sexual and moral terms - membership in contemporary societies. His sociological enthusiasm for inclusion has never been blind to the likelihood of backlashes and the strength of discontent such inclusion may bring. His work provides thus some important directions in the current storm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although attempts to complement the concept of reflexivity with social embeddedness have been made by many sociologists, theoretical tools for coming to grips with ‘temporally embedded’ aspects of reflexive activity have yet to make an entrance in the sociological arena. This paper intends to rectify this deficiency by spelling out how laypeople’s reflexive orientations draw onpastlived experiences in the social world. Margaret Archer’s celebrated approach to reflexivity struggles to accommodate this dimension of reflexive agents since its clear ‘subjective–objective distinction’ is hostile to any talk of reflexivity as beinghistorically constituted. A complementary account that allows us to map out and systematize temporal processes concerning reflexivity is, therefore, apt, an account that must address the fact that: reflexive activity does not start from scratch, in a vacuum, each time it operates; and, effects of previous lived experiences are at the heart of the mediatory process of reflexivity. By drawing on phenomenologically inspired sociology, and borrowing Schütz’s notion of ‘stock of knowledge’, I intend to flesh out how my account of reflexivity can be reconciled with the durable effects of sociotemporal embeddednesswithoutsacrificing the subjective and agentic qualities of reflexive activity. One immediate upshot of this ‘reconciliation’ is an empirical project that links a variety of reflexive orientations to multiple ‘time points’ (relevant lived experiences) and offers the prospect of penetrating deep intohowsocialization processes, identity formation and life trajectories actually transpire through temporality and reflexivity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of MATRIZes is the property of Universidade de Sao Paulo, Programa de Pos Graduacao em Ciencias da Comunicacao 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.)

In a context marked by an unprecedented crisis of the social sciences, the work of the sociologist Cyril Lemieux clearly stands out for his ambition to relaunch their project through a systematic reading of their history guided by a pragmatic redefinition, nourished by the philosophy of the second Wittgenstein, of the holistic perspective previously advanced by Emile Durkheim. The paper presents and discusses the theoretical core of this pragmatic Durkheimism, by clarifying the general notion of “grammar” and by elucidating the specific regime of “public grammar”. The latter turns out to occupy a strategic position, insofar as it enables defining the duty of the social sciences, which encapsulates the political task that sociology assigns to them: increasing the degree of reflexivity of practices, in order to work to their lucid transformation with a view to collective emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Vortex is the property of Escola de Musica e Belas Artes do Parana 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.)

Copyright of Intersecoes: Revista de Estudios Interdisciplinares is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) 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.)

'Global Projects' and 'Global Virtual Teams' are revolutionizing the construction industry. An increasing number of multi-national engineering firms are adopting this business model due to the possible advantages of cost and time optimization. However, literature identifies several challenges that the project teams endure in temporarily organizing while transitioning through time and space, some of which include cross-cultural differences in teams and limited richness of the communication media. Perceiving virtual project execution as a multi-variable construct, organizational theorists and sociologists adopt a socio-technical approach to understand the dynamics of action embedded in the process and recommend implementation of pre-process, during process or post process intervention strategies to enable performance. In this paper, we address this research concern through an experimental study conducted across two global universities, National Institute of Construction Management and Research, Pune, India and Washington State University, USA. Around 24 students from each university in ten teams collaborated virtually for a period of 2.5 weeks to develop a 3-dimensional Revit model and a 4-dimensional BIM model in Autodesk Revit and Navisworks, respectively, for a multi-storey residential building. The study aimed to investigate the role of project teams in organizing and coordinating projects tasks and taking a socio-technical approach, explored the role of a BIM Execution Plan as a pre-process intervention strategy. Data collected through qualitative survey post the experiment was qualitatively analyzed using ethnographic coding techniques. Findings showed that the project and team challenges primarily stemmed from coordination issues and institutional differences. Members significantly mitigated the issues through a proactive approach and a priori planning. The BIM Execution Plan allowed members to instantly get involved with the tasks and plan the process apart from being able to foresee the complexity. Teams emphasized the importance of implementing a detailed BIM Execution Plan during the planning phase for a collaborative and successful project outcome and further observed that pre-process intervention strategy such as a BIM plan was the needed impetus for members to collaborate and coordinate project tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sociology's formative period between 1830 and 1930, evolutionary analysis organized much theorizing and research. This line of work ended abruptly in the 1920s but, over the last decades, has come back into the discipline somewhat piecemeal with the reintroduction of more sophisticated stage models of societal evolution, functional analysis, human ecological analysis, and other new lines of evolutionary inquiry outlined in this paper. Our goal is to demonstrate that revitalized paradigms of the past can still be useful with modest reconceptualization, while at the same time new intellectual movements in the other social sciences, especially economics and psychology, incorporating evolutionary ideas from biology provide sociology with an opportunity to develop its own approach to evolutionary analysis that avoids the problems that let to the demise of this line of inquiry in the 1920s, as well as the problems of other social sciences applying their more narrowly focus models to sociological problems. Indeed, sociology can become a leader in the social sciences in developing more sophisticated theoretical and methodological approaches to incorporating biology and evolutionary analysis into the social sciences. When presented in a new, more sophisticated guise, old approaches like functionalism, stage models of societal evolution, and ecological models can be seen as still having a great deal of explanatory power, while revealing a progressive and future orientation that should appeal to all contemporary sociologists. It is time, then, for sociology to remember its past in order to move into the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sport sociologists are often required to interpret, question and respond to the ways in which fairness and eligibility concerns in elite sports are represented in policy frameworks produced by sports governing bodies. Drawing on Carol Bacchi's critical policy analysis framework, 'what is the problem represented to be?', this paper explores the importance in developing a critical eye and reading about representations of women athletes with particular differences of sex development (DSD) with elevated testosterone levels and the idea of regulating their testosterone levels in the female classification. Through using the above critical policy analysis line of questioning, this analysis aims to consider what the problem of women athletes with relevant DSDs with elevated testosterone levels in female elite sports is represented to be; what the assumptions underlying these representations of the problem are; how these representations of the problem have come about; what is left unproblematic in this problem representation; what the lived effects produced by these representations of the problem are; and how these representations of the problem have been produced, disseminated, defended, questioned, disrupted and even could be replaced. The critical policy analysis argues that the continuing persistence of policies marking particular women with DSDs as a problem, is related in part to societal views defining particular bodies and athletic abilities in the female classification as either 'right' or 'wrong' and in need of fixing. In moving forward and redressing the problem, it requires the embodiment of biomedical ethics and human rights advocacy work by sports governing bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the Run has spurred public debates about the ethics of ethnography. The controversy surrounds the fact that the sociologist/ethnographer drove a participant who was armed with a gun and the intent to commit murder. Ethical concerns are not new to ethnography. A previous generation of sociologists and ethnographers faced similar dilemmas: Did those who studied jazz bands also take drugs with the band members? Did those who studied gangs have knowledge of criminal activity to which the police might prefer to be privy? And yet, with new technologies and media-sharing platforms, ethnographers face increased scrutiny. The paper, as a result, focuses on debates regarding perennial ethical conundrums: what to tell, whether to tell, and to whom it might be told. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that sociology is intricately related to social justice. To paraphrase Mills (The sociological imagination, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002), by revealing the ways in which experiences which are normatively framed as "private troubles" are in fact "public" or social issues, sociologists expose the structures of power which shape individual lives. These structures are not only evident in easily identifiable material, social and environmental inequalities but also in what appear to be individual "health" experiences such as mental distress and self-injury. I draw on qualitative research to explore a social justice perspective of self-injury via the intersections of social class, gender and sexuality and the oppressions and injustices inherent to them. Next, I turn my attention to social justice responses to self-injury, and I explore the importance of user-led interventions for developing social justice oriented responses to both mental distress and self-injury, and the ways in which these have been marginalised in medical and sociological perspectives. Finally, I argue that with the urgency of social justice interventions never more apparent, sociologists and social researchers should be working as allies with rights movements both within "mental health" and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on my experience doing research in an area that was the scene of a massacre: Bentalha, a hamlet twenty kilometres away from the Algerian capital Algiers. This massacre took place on 22 and 23 September 1997 during the Black Decade (1991-2001), a period of the Algerian Civil War when 150,0001 people were killed, some 7,000 disappeared, and approximately one million were internally displaced. After a background section on the history of this conflict, the paper describes the setting where my fieldwork took place. This article discusses my experiences in the field, as well as the emotions such as frustration, fear, anxiety, and vicarious traumatisation that I experienced in the process. It also addresses questions of self-reflexivity, positionality, and insider/outsider status. I am writing from the perspective of an Algerian sociologist trained in France, yet my experience of doing fieldwork 'at home' could be useful to other scholars doing or planning fieldwork in dangerous parts of countries or societies with which they are intimately connected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has examined various elements of Twitter; however, no scholarship has explored how sociologists currently use the platform. This empirically driven paper explores how individuals that self-identify as sociologists on Twitter use the popular micro-blogging social media site. A total of 152,977 tweets from Twitter profiles of 130 sociologists were collected and examined using qualitative media analysis. The potential use of Twitter allows the sociologist to become both the generator and interlocutor of dialogue with publics. We frame our data analysis and discussion around the core theme of expertise - namely, the role that expertise plays in the use of Twitter by sociologists. Our findings indicate that when sociologists used Twitter as sociologists (i.e., drawing upon their stated research expertise) little direct engagement with publics occurred. Thus, while sociologists appear to be using Twitter as a space for public sociology, the use of this interactive platform is mostly limited to the generation of content, a finding consistent with Burawoy's traditional form of public sociology. Suggestions for future research are noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Sociology is the property of Canadian Journal of Sociology 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.)

Rural sociologists and geographers have conceptualised different rural development trajectories including “the agri-industrial model”, “the post-productivist model” and “the rural development model”. Alternative food networks (AFNs) are increasingly recognised as a “forerunner” and a critical component of the emerging “rural development model” in the West. Meanwhile, Marsden and Franklin [2013. Replacing neoliberalism: theoretical implications of the rise of local food movements.Local Environment, 18 (5), 636–641] pointed out that there is a “local trap” in the current conceptualisation of AFNs that overemphasises their local embeddedness and heterogeneity. This “local trap” marginalises AFNs and, therefore, hinders their potential for transforming the industrialised conventional food system. The convergence and scaling-up of fragmented AFNs have been recognised as important ways to address this marginalisation issue and thus have attracted considerable attention. However, current studies of the convergence of AFNs focus mainly on the role of food-centred organisations without recognising the role of the emerging “rural development” initiatives in the convergence of AFNs. Based on in-depth interviews with key stakeholders and analysis of secondary data, this paper uses the New Rural Reconstruction Movement (NRRM), an emerging alternative rural development movement in China, as an example to illustrate how the NRRM opens up a novel space for the convergence of AFNs. We argue that the interrelationship between AFNs and rural development is indeed reciprocal. The NRRM, following the “rural development” trajectory, functions as a hub for the convergence and scaling-up of various alternative food initiatives. Strategies for achieving convergence include constructing a “common ground” for these initiatives, establishing national alliances and organisations, sharing knowledge and exchanging personnel among them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the decolonial turn among sociologists, we have yet to engage a vast amount of thought produced by anti-colonial movements. The circumvention of much of this thought indexes overly restrictive understandings of what constitutes social theory, and I diagnose three ways in which this plays out. Anti-colonial movement texts provide striking demonstrations of this limitation, and of what is lost as a result. Through a close study of a banned 1970s pamphlet from Pakistan, I show that critically deepening the decolonial project through an engagement with movement texts raises ethical questions about the academy's relationship to political struggle and demands new methodologies of archival retrieval that recognise the scattered, fragmented condition of texts subject to colonial violence. If addressed, southern movement texts reveal counter-infrastructures of knowledge production replete with counter-political vocabularies that challenge homogenising academic definitions of the Global South and enrich our theories of decolonial praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up the story of a numerical indicator of system water losses called Non-Revenue Water (NRW), which is becoming an important measure for benchmarking South African Water Service Authorities (WSAs). The aim of this paper is, in the first place, to document the adoption of NRW as a Performance Indicator (PI), showing how it reflects a shift in the domestic regulatory framework in South Africa and the assumed priorities of water managers in line with the dominant governmental rationality in the sector. However, in drawing this discussion towards the theme of commodification I also show that the NRW audit enables a new way of seeing and speaking about "public water," while the story of its uptake tells us a something about the development of contemporary governmental norms, and the forms of the resistance that shape it. On the one hand then, the article links the enthusiasm for NRW auditing in South Africa to a wider movement in the development and usage of audits and indicators as technologies of government at a distance. On the other hand, and stepping to a higher level of abstraction, I argue that the uptake of NRW must be read in relation to a contested set of processes marked by struggles over the commodification of water, and which sometimes turns up in the numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology and economics have sought to develop the interconnection between economics and society both theoretically and mathematically-scientifically. The aim of this paper is to analyze the interactions between sociology and economics with examples of research from both economists and sociologists. They tried to implement integration with indicators and variables that include the behavior of social actors and the construction of the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Fine was among the most original social theorists in Britain of the past 30 years, and the aim of this paper is to offer a first systematic assessment of his intellectual contribution. There are sound intellectual reasons to explore Fine's scholarship. He maintained a problematic relation with mainstream sociology and, against the reduction of sociology to questions of method, culture, or class, he argued that sociologists must continue to ask difficult normative questions as part of the social world they ought to explain. And there are also pressing political concerns that justify a reconsideration of his writings. Global politics is currently marked by a populist wave that decries the very ideas and values that were central to Fine's social theory: the need to uphold the rule of law at home and abroad, the politics of cosmopolitan solidarity, and the significance of antisemitism and its relationships with different forms of authoritarian politics. My main argument is that there is a dialectics of universality that drives forward Fine's intellectual project. By this, I mean that a universalistic idea of humanity—an all‐inclusive conception of all human beings—is the most important normative intuition of modern times. This idea of humanity moves forward in history through a dual process of emancipation and domination: successful forms of social, legal, and political inclusion help make visible previous dynamics of exclusion but may also create or recreate discriminatory practices. Building on the work of French historian Michael Löwy on heterodox Jewish thinkers, I explain the three main tenets of Fine's work: (a) his reconstruction of critical social theory; (b) the notion of cosmopolitan solidarity; and (c) the significance and main features of modern antisemitism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While sociologists have had a longstanding interest in religious leadership and congregational authority structures, most of the research in this area ignores the fact that many congregational leaders started the congregations they lead. Being in this unique position, founding pastor, likely gives them unusual authority to shape church policy and practice in, as yet, unexamined ways. Using three waves of the National Congregational Study, we examine differences between congregations led by their first (i.e., founding) pastor and congregations led by subsequent pastors hired by or assigned to those congregations. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is one of the final volumes in the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe and is entitled Verstehende Soziologie und Werturteilsfreiheit. It is ostensibly on Weber's methodological writings but most of the contents appear to be rather minor pieces— a large number of conference comments, small contributions, and several book reviews. Yet, this is an important work because of those pieces as well as the two major essays on methodology: "Über einige Kategorien der verstehende Soziologie" (1913) and "Der Sinn der 'Wertfreiheit' der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften" (1917), both of which were originally published in the journal Logos. As with all of Weber's writings on methodology, these two essays are difficult to comprehend; yet, they are critical for grasping Weber's sociology. The first one sets out Weber's conception of "understanding" in history while the second explains why he believes his distinction between facts and values is critical for scholars. He suggests that we may not understand everything that occurred in history but we can understand enough; if we did not, then there would be no historical discipline. His words concerning the need for intellectual honesty are as important today as when he wrote them more than one hundred years ago. This book is a worthy companion to the forthcoming volume Zur Logik und Methodik der Sozialwissenschaften and is crucial for understanding Weber's path to sociology. It is a worthy final addition to the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe. And, it is a worthy successor to the Gesammelte Schriften zur Wissensschaftslehre. For anyone hoping to understand how Weber became the famous sociologist, this book is necessary reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is there a connection between biography and sociology for Peter Berger? The short answer, as demonstrated by his own memoir, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist, is "yes." But in his book, he traces this connection to his own arrival and training at the Graduate Faculty of the New School. I would like to suggest that the process begins earlier in his life. Known for his work on the sociology of knowledge, the examination of how "society influences thought," I suggest an examination of how one's biography influences thought, the environment in which Berger grew played a major role in his self-awareness, adjustment, human development, and identity. The paper applies this approach, along with Berger's concept of the sociology of knowledge to sketch a possible understanding of his ideas and work that emerge as a product of his life experiences. The idea here is that people's lives help frame and explain their own thinking and the way they see the world. Who one is, where and how one has lived and those with whom one has interacted create not only one's personality and identity but also epigenetically the blueprint of one's way of perceiving reality and shaping ideas. The intersection of the social and biographical facts of one's life create the person and his ideas, both the objective and subjective structures of meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Española de Sociología is the property of Federacion Espanola de Sociologia 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.)

The professionalization of veterinary medicine in Britain has been little studied by sociologists, although as a classic instance of an occupation that has achieved exclusionary social closure it merits examination from a neo- Weberian perspective. Therefore, this paper explores how it has attained this position through state action in an historical and contemporary context using neo-Weberianism as a theoretical lens. In charting the different stages and forms of professional regulation in veterinary medicine, group self-interest is identified as a central driver, following the neo-Weberian idiom. However, contrary to the position adopted by some neo-Weberians, the professionalization process is seen as being more complex than simply being interest-based, with the public interest being upheld. As such, through the case of veterinary medicine, it is claimed professional self-interests and the public interest can be co-terminous and mutually achieve a dynamic equilibrium. They do not have to form part of a zero-sum game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Myth is a meta-language that shapes our cultures and the way we individually and collectively make sense of reality. This paper presents the methodologies of French anthropologist and sociologist Gilbert Durand as a way to unveil how ancient myths contribute to the symbolic construction of societal leaders in times of crisis. To do so, it analyses the controversy of the selection of Time magazine's Person of the Year, which confronted the figures of Julien Assange and Mark Zuckerberg. The myth analysis of their Wikipedia biographies will show that despite the fact these two personalities are considered almost opposites, the structure of the collective shared narratives about each of them follow the structure of the myth of Hermes, one shaping the grand narrative of the postmodern era. Realizing why and how the myth of Hermes promotes our contemporary leaders, sometimes apparent antagonists, contributes to better understanding of the unconscious drives of their symbolic construction, and enabling critical engagement with the rationales of their emergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a partial transcription of a long conversation between the sociologist Zsuzsa Berend (University of California, Los Angeles) and the anthropologist Corinna Sabrina Guerzoni (Western Fertility Institute, Los Angeles) on US surrogacy. It is the outcome of an interview occurred on 6th October 2017 in Los Angeles, transcribed and revised by both the authors. The text analyzes some fundamental concepts that Berend explored in her book The Online Word of Surrogacy (2016) and offers some food for thought to read the US commercial surrogacy with other lenses. Berend's study offers an in-depth analysis of compensated surrogacy in the US and unique perspective for a better understanding of the experiences and points of view of the women directly involved in this assisted reproductive practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is organized in three stages. In the first part, I outline the evolution of the notion of altruism with its critical dimension of political economy by following the intellectual sequence from Auguste Comte to Pierre Bourdieu, through Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. In the second, I consider the forms of transaction to which these sociologists report altruism and its derivatives. In the last section, I examine recent developments on altruism as a result of developments on performativity on the one hand and market design on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American sociology has largely neglected enslavement as a topic of study, despite slavery's being one of the most foundational, pervasive, and far-reaching social institutions in the West. In this paper I explain this scholarly neglect as stemming from three factors. First, disciplinary parochialism has blinded US sociologists to the complex interweaving of enslavement with the systems of oppression that sociology has decided to care about. Second, presentism, an ahistorical "account" of the past that culminates in a preference for present-day events and institutions, has relegated slavery to history. Finally, theoretical frameworks that revise enslavement as "ennobling" erase the long-term effects of psychological and physical violence on the descendants of enslaved peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Przeglad Socjologiczny is the property of Lodz Scientific Society / Lodzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe 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.)

Despite long-standing prejudices against doing so, it is time for sociology to reconnect with its roots in biological and evolutionary thinking. Sociology emerged as a discipline when the notion of evolution was actively used in biology, geology, and emerging social sciences. Throughout the nineteenth century, many of the most prominent early European sociologists examined the social universe from an evolutionary perspective; and this perspective was borrowed in much of early American sociology in the last decades of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century. By the end of the second decade of the twentieth Century, however, evolutionary analysis was rapidly disappearing in sociology in the United States, and by the 1930s, it was pretty much dead. And for the remainder of the twentieth century, it was viewed with a great suspicion, especially evolutionary approaches that sought to incorporate ideas from biology into the field. Despite the revival of stage models of societal evolution and the emergence of new ecological approaches in the 1960s and 1970s, evolutionary ideas from biology were still rejected by most American sociologists though much of the twentieth century. In this paper, we first present the history of this rejection of evolutionary, with the goal of encouraging sociologists today to recognize the distortions and misrepresentations of Darwinian and Spencerian ideas that fueled intellectual prejudices for so many decades. These prejudices only get in the way of sociology in the twenty-first century, where biological ideas have begun to pervade the social sciences. Thus, American sociologists should now take stock and reconsider how much evolutionary and biological analysis can help sociology and, equally if not more important, how an informed evolutionary sociology can influence those in the other social sciences and even those in the biological sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

W e used to talk. B y " we " I mean cultural sociologists and scholars in the humanities, and by "used to talk" I mean acknowledge each other's existence, at times perhaps even generously so. There are different versions as to what happened, one of which is a bit more intellectual than the other, although neither of which are entirely right. The more intellectual version is that for a brief spell in the late 1980s and early 1990s it looked like our interests might converge. At around the same time, many of us stopped being scolds about popular culture, deciding instead that it was more fruitful and interesting to engage the world than to police it. Some of us were also asking similar questions, be it about the role of authors and their ability (or lack thereof) to enforce, guide, or push readers into certain meanings, or about the role of interpretive communities and groups either to buffer against the impingement of those meanings or to generate localized meanings all anew. So we congregated around folks such as I. A. Richards, Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauss, Mikhail Bakhtin, Stanley Fish, Roland Barthes, or Michel Foucault, and sometimes we even cited each other too, and then it just all kind of petered out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historia Contemporanea is the property of Historia Contemporania 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.)

In response to the flash crashes and market manipulations blamed on high-frequency trading (HFT), algorithms have been brought inside the regulatory perimeter. This paper focuses on the most ambitious regulation directed at the practice: the algorithm-tagging rule in the German High-Frequency Trading Act. Fifteen interviews with stakeholders in the Act’s implementation serve to reconstruct how regulators defined an algorithm and help pose the question of to what extent regulatory definitions and data need accurately to represent financial practices to be useful. Although tentative in its findings, the research suggests that the algorithm-tagging rule may be providing valuable signals in the noise to trade surveillance officers and having virtuous effects on the cultures of trading firms. The conclusion argues that sociologists of finance should adopt a more balanced approach when evaluating regulatory technologies and heed MacKenzie’s 2005 call to open up their black boxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we will delve into Theodor W. Adorno's sociology. The general aim is to study Adorno's theory of society and its relation to sociological interpretation. What primarily distinguishes Adorno from other sociologists (of his time and today) is that he considers society to be the fundamental concept of the discipline. Theorising on the post-liberal capitalism of his time, Adorno proposes the concept of the exchange society, which is understood as an antagonistic totality that reproduces itself through the suffering it inflicts on socialised individuals. Within texts dating back to the 1960s, such as 'Society', Adorno engages in an exploration of comprehensive sociology and the sociology of social facts, reciprocally examining them. He confronts one with the other in a proposal of an interpretative model of the comprehensibility or incomprehensibility of society. This intellectual confrontation, while avoiding synthesis, leads Adorno to two main outcomes. First, it yields a diagnostic perspective on social theory, portraying capitalist society as simultaneously rational and irrational, comprehensible and incomprehensible. Second, it hints at a sociological interpretation of specific phenomena. In addition to exploring this central theme in Adorno's sociology, we will also shed light on his distinctive approach to classic texts and concepts. Specifically, Adorno links to the received terminologies but incorporates them into constellations that imbue them with eloquence by revealing the underlying objective moments they encapsulate. The theoretical significance of this article lies in the aim to demonstrate that Adorno's contributions to sociology are not merely borrowed from philosophical contemplations. Instead, they arise from an immanent critique of the sociological tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically evaluates the idea that the division between objectivity and subjectivity can illuminate the relationship between social scientific and lay perspectives on the social world. It examines a conceptualization which associates objectivity with a grasp of the features of the object of investigation and associates subjectivity with the potential for lay actors to suffer from misapprehensions. The article explores how this division is used in critical social science, such that the critical perspective of the sociologist is seen as objective, whereas the perspectives of lay actors are seen as subjective and always potentially problematic. The article explores Michael Burawoy's analysis of objectivity and subjectivity within the context of a critical social scientific appraisal of the labour process. Contrary to Burawoy's approach, this article postulates that a meaningful dialogue between sociologists and lay actors can only be achieved if the objectivity of social scientific accounts is not assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Sociology is the property of Sage Publications Inc. 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.)