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The expression “spiritual, but not religious” (SBNR) has gained considerable traction among sociologists of religion and culture, media outlets, and the broader public in recent years. Though the expression itself has achieved wide appeal, few studies have explored what SBNRs believe about God, religion, or spirituality. This paper uses survey data from Wave IV of the Baylor Religion Survey (2014) and draws from the theory of “cultural omnivorousness” to show that SBNRs have significant sociotheological differences when compared to those who are both religious and spiritual (RAS). The expression “spiritual, but not religious” is more than a manifestation of religious deinstitutionalization or “believing without belonging.” Rather, being “spiritual, but not religious” involves sociotheological boundary work that distinguishes SBNRs from traditional monotheists. When compared to RAS respondents, SBNRs are more likely to view God as a higher power or cosmic force instead of a personal being and are more likely to adopt an individualistic ethic as opposed to finding moral authority in God or Scripture. By examining the historical context and sociotheological characteristics of SBNRs, this paper locates a boundary between SBNRs and RAS monotheists and offers theoretical reasons why SBNRs engage in sociotheological boundary work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does society work? How do groups emerge within society? What are the effects of emotions and memory on our everyday actions? George Homans, like us, had a perspective on what society is, except that he was a sociologist. Homans theory, which is an exchange theory, is based on a few propositions about the fundamental actions of individuals, and how values, memory, and expectations affect their behavior. In this paper, as Homans predicted, our main interest and purpose are to find out whether these propositions lead to the emergence of groups. To do so, computationally, Based on Homans' prepositions, we provide the opportunity for each agent to exchange with other agents. That is, each agent transacts with familiar agents based on his previous history with them and transacts with newly found agents through exploration. The importance of our work is that we have scrutinized the consequences of an actual sociological theory through the eyes of simulation. At the end of our investigation, we discuss other possible directions for further research. • In this paper, we tried to give a quantitative answer to the question whether the Homans' theory was incomplete? • Our work aims to interpret Homans' sociological theory in algorithmic and arithmetic form. • We tried to interpret how important each part of the theory is with their absence consequences and find their accordance with some known sociological facts. • The simulation results show that Homans' propositions actually had direct effects on the structure of the network and gives a reasonable model to derive social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper addresses the influence of national traditions, styles or culture on the use of foresight in decision-making processes. Inspired by sociologists’ contributions on national culture, the paper demonstrates that two dimensions of national culture, power distance and uncertainty avoidance, are useful in the characterisation of the context in which national foresight exercises are carried out. The paper is based on two Danish cases: The Danish Government's Globalisation Strategy, from 2005, and the Danish Research 2015 process, from 2008, which focus on priority settings for strategic research. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Where to draw the boundary line between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ has perplexed sociologists, ecologists and geographers through the ages. This paper was inspired by environmental sociologist, Alan Irwin, who suggests that we shift our focus from asking ‘where to draw the line’ between what is considered ‘natural’ and ‘social’ to exploring the ‘very process of line-drawing’ as it occurs within specific socio-ecological contexts (). Nature conservation initiatives in the form of “protected areas” provide remarkable insights into attempts to devise and manage conceptual and spatial-geographic boundaries between nature and society. Here, I discuss Ireland’s contribution to the Natura 2000 network of protected ecological sites. I show how line-drawing in Natura 2000, from EU right down to local levels, is a highly contingent, contested and uncertain process; how both ‘nature’ and ‘society’ can frustrate attempts to draw and maintain these boundaries and the conflicts, uncertainties and dilemmas thrown up in the process. The paper ends by considering the extent to which this “boundary-work” analysis provides an insightful, though incomplete picture of the experiences of and challenges posed by Natura 2000 on-the ground, while posing some more philosophical questions about nature–society boundaries and the challenges they pose to nature conservationism. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: As a sociologist dealing with futures studies, Wendell Bell encountered considerable obstacles because his topic – the future, imagined, projected and shaped – poses significant problems for contemporary sociology. The paper discusses Bell''s engagement with these disciplinary difficulties and his search for conceptual and methodological solutions. The paper anchors Bell''s achievements in a wider historical context, identifies some of the new challenges facing sociology and considers some openings for change in our knowledge practice. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Drawing on fieldwork at a forecasting office of the National Weather Service, this paper analyzes the sociocognitive organization of meteorological perception and expertise via the notion of “screenwork” in the hopes that it may provide a common constructivist ground on which sociologists and neuroscientists will be able to comfortably study visual perception at work. Three key intersecting areas of research are examined in the process: the practice of looking, visual expertise, and visual decision-making. The paper concludes by employing the metaphor of the collage to further elaborate on the link between screenwork and expert visualization. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper is an emic, interview-based study of computer scientists’ and sociologists’ accounts of the functions of citations in their writing. Twelve informants took part in the research, commenting upon their citations in one of their own articles. Informants were not provided with functional checklists, and were free to ascribe as many functions to each citation as they wished. Eleven citation functions are identified and described, and evidence of inter- and intra-disciplinary similarities and differences is provided. While the computer scientists used citations to direct their audience to further reading more often, the sociologists’ texts featured more cases of critical citations. The type of paper informants were writing (e.g. theoretical/empirical), the anticipated audience, and the publication outlet resulted in intra-disciplinary differences. Over half of the citations in both fields were said to have more than one function. The insights and implications of the study are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Otis Dudley Duncan, who died in November 2004, had enormous impact on the practice of quantitative reasoning in sociology and demography today. This paper traces the influence of Duncan as a quantitative sociologist within the context of the history of science. I locate Duncan's philosophy of social science within the tradition of "population thinking" that was begun by Charles Darwin and introduced to social science by Francis Galton. As part of this exploration, I distinguish two approaches to statistical analysis (emanating from the two main philosophical views of science): Gaussian or typological thinking, and Galtonian or population thinking. I examine in detail Duncan's views of quantitative reasoning in the social sciences, particularly his opinions on social measurement, path analysis, structural modeling, econometrics, and the Rasch model. An important theme of the paper is that Duncan quickly realized the difficulties and limitations of quantitative methodology in social science. In particular, he was bothered by inherent population heterogeneity that makes it futile to draw "law-like" inferences from statistical analyses in social science.. Thus, Duncan was disdainful of the search for supposedly universal laws of society that would mimic those of the physical sciences, because he believed that such laws did not exist and would be meaningless. Instead, to Duncan, the main use of statistical tools was to summarize systematic patterns of population variability. The paper draws heavily on Duncan's previously unpublished personal communications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Income inequality is one of the central concerns of sociologists and stratification researchers. While most of the analyses in sociology cover the economic and demographic influences on income inequality, less research has sought to understand the impact of public policies. A major factor absent from the research in both economics and sociology is the role of state-level minimum wages. Neoclassical economic theorists hypothesize that a minimum wage will increase income inequality, while institutional economists argue that a minimum wage reduces economic inequality. This paper uses decennial state data covering 1960-2000 to test the hypothesis that states with higher minimum wages have lower levels of family income inequality. The results confirm the institutional hypothesis that state minimum wages reduce family income inequality. Estimates presented in the paper indicate that the effect of the state minimum wage is non-linear and it should be greater than $4.00 (2001 CPI) to be redistributive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural studies have highlighted a rural idyll as something to which many aspire, perhaps as a vision of a good place to live or as a repository of values. But harking back to an imagined past is recognized as normative and power-infused, often serving the interests of the powerful. How far should this nostalgia for an imagined golden age of indeterminate date inform a vision for a desired future? This paper seeks to begin, and indeed to provoke, discussion of what might constitute visions for rural futures, or our collective imaginaries of rural places into the twenty-first century, of a Good Countryside to work towards. What morality might underpin such imaginaries? And how might we approach such a task? One approach might be to employ utopian thinking as a means of identifying and imagining desired alternative futures, drawing upon Levitas' argument for utopia as a form of anticipatory consciousness - the not yet - in contrast to the essentially backward looking rural idyll. Four registers from urban studies - repair, relatedness, rights, re-enchantment - are then taken as a point of departure for deliberation on what morality might underpin a Good Countryside, and whether this might differ between urban and rural contexts. A discussion ensues on how to proceed in practice, both in eliminating evils and in pursuing collective forward dreaming and anticipatory consciousness, for example through place-shaping or networked rural development. Finally, the discussion reflects on what scholarly and practical roles rural sociologists might play in these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Only recently have sociologists begun to examine the social origins of educational mismatches in more detail. This research not only repeatedly found, but also investigated why individuals from lower social origin more often have a higher level of education than required for their job (overeducation), and why individuals from a higher social origin more often realize high positions despite having a lower level of education than required for their job (undereducation). While these studies provide additional and valuable empirical insights into the effect of social origin on both types of mismatch separately, to date there has been no investigation on general sociological meaningful conditions, under which the social origin unfolds an effect on undereducation and overeducation in the first place. This paper addresses this gap by examining the relevance of intergenerational stability for the effect of social origin on mismatches. It does so by drawing on arguments from sociological theories on intergenerational (im-)mobility, data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the period 1990–2017, and two different measurement methods for educational mismatches. The empirical results show evidence of substantial heterogeneity in the effect of social origin on educational mismatches: A higher parental status is found to be advantageous only for employees with intergenerational stability in social classes and/or occupational tasks. This indicates that the intergenerational transmission of class-specific traits and occupational skills contribute to the effect of social origin on mismatches. The results show no effect of parental status on educational mismatches among employees who are intergenerationally mobile and make up half of the German labor force under investigation. Since this heterogeneity is also found among workers who immigrated to Germany as adults, parental networks within Germany and the corresponding social capital can be ruled out as the main driver behind this finding. Although educational attainment is the most important pathway of intergenerational status maintenance, the results suggest that educational mismatches offer a means of identifying systematic deviations from this pathway. Individuals who follow in the footsteps of their high-status parents are more likely to be employed either at or above their level of education. In the light of the strong heterogeneity revealed, complementary explanations and routes for further research to investigate the link between intergenerational (im-)mobility, social origin and educational mismatches are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the relationship between historians, philosophers and sociologists of science, and indeed scientists themselves. I argue that (i) they co-habit a shared intellectual territory (science and its past); and (ii) they should be able to do so peacefully, and with mutual respect, even if they disagree radically about how to describe the methods and results of science. I then go on to explore some of the challenges to mutually respectful cohabitation between history, philosophy and sociology of science. I conclude by identifying a familiar kind of project in the philosophy of science which seeks to explore the worldview of a particular scientific discipline, and argue that it too has a right to explore the shared territory even though some historians and sociologists may find it methodologically suspect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that the failure to integrate history and philosophy of science properly may be explained by incompatible metaphysics implied by these fields. Historians and sociologists tend to be historicists, who assume that all objects of research are variable in principle, while philosophers look for permanent and essential qualities. I analyse, how the historicists and essentialist approaches differ with regard to the research objects of general history, history of science and science itself. The implied historicism makes some radical pronouncements by Latour on ontological variance understandable. I will also consider, whether there could be something like a historicist philosophy of science. The historicisation of the natural world proves most challenging, but both certain traditional disciplines and some recent advances in physical and life sciences indicate compatibility with historicism. One should note that historicism does not alter how ‘truth’ is understood. Historicism does not question the reality of objects either; only their eternality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years growing sociological interest in new forms of cultural distinction has led some to argue that the advantages previously conveyed by the consumption of ‘high’ culture ‘or ‘omnivorousness’ are being overwritten by the possession of what has been termed ‘emerging cultural capital’. So far, though, this term has only been discussed in passing within empirical work and remains in need of further analytical specification. This special issue seeks to both critically interrogate and develop this concept by bringing together the work of leading cultural sociologists around four key themes: the role of age and generation in the formation of cultural capital; the power of visual display for distinction; the significance of new elite cultures; and the need for methodological pluralism to apprehend the expressions and mechanisms of distinction. This editorial introduction outlines the descriptive terrain on which the concept of emerging cultural capital has rested until now before exploring the common themes that sit across all five papers in the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural eclecticism has been the focus of most sociological debates pertaining to cultural practices since the publication of Richard Peterson's first articles on the topic. Underlying these debates surrounding results, the prevailing definitions and methods are particularly striking for their… eclecticism. And although it is not explicitly stated, it appears that sociologists disagree over the parameters of inquiry – how the object of study is constructed and all manner of methodologies, rather than over hypotheses and whether or not they are valid. In this paper, we shall extend and systematize assertions that appear in various works on omnivorousness. Our aim is to determine the theoretical implications of the three groups of choices that seem critical in statistical methods of studying cultural eclecticism: choices concerning indicators of taste; methods of constructing a scale of cultural legitimacy; and indicators of cultural omnivorousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This paper considers an aspect of culture rarely formally studied by sociologists: the organization of sensory experience. • We develop and employ a novel technique aimed at measuring music experience. • We analyze the dimensionality of the distribution of reported experiences. • Analyses reveal three dimensions of experience, which appear to stretch between poles that correspond to binaries of embodied experience. The theories of William James and John Dewey regarding the nature of experience suggest that there is an aspect of the organization of culture that sociologists have not yet studied formally, namely the structuring of sensory experience. We propose a way of trying to measure respondents' experience of "textural" music, as opposed to their preferences, evaluative judgments, or associations. We employ a novel data-gathering approach as part of 61 in-depth interviews, and then analyze the dimensionality of the distribution of reported experiences. We find three dimensions, all of which seem to touch upon fundamentally meaningful binaries of embodied experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For years, sociologists have studied mobility patterns and status attainment to determine empirically how well societies meet meritocratic ideals. Few studies, however, have examined whether people believe they live in a meritocratic society. In this paper, we use the 1987 and 2010 General Social Survey to examine people's perceptions of meritocracy in the U.S. Although most Americans agree that getting ahead depends on meritocratic elements like hard work, their beliefs vary in strength. They disagree even more about the importance of non-meritocratic elements such as family wealth, and race. Furthermore, Americans layer these beliefs on top of each other to create a variety of perspectives on meritocracy. Young, upper class Whites are most likely to see the U.S. as a place where meritocratic elements rule. Older, lower class minorities, in contrast, are most likely to believe that non-meritocratic elements dominate. There are also Americans who believe strongly in both types of elements and those who do not believe strongly in either. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A classic experiment by Milgram shows that individuals can route messages along short paths in social networks, given only simple categorical information about recipients (such as “he is a prominent lawyer in Boston” or “she is a Freshman sociology major at Harvard”). That is, these networks have very short paths between pairs of nodes (the so-called small-world phenomenon); moreover, participants are able to route messages along these paths even though each person is only aware of a small part of the network topology. Some sociologists conjecture that participants in such scenarios use a greedy routing strategy in which they forward messages to acquaintances that have more categories in common with the recipient than they do, and similar strategies have recently been proposed for routing messages in dynamic ad hoc networks of mobile devices. In this paper, we introduce a network property called membership dimension, which characterizes the cognitive load required to maintain relationships between participants and categories in a social network. We show that any connected network has a system of categories that will support greedy routing, but that these categories can be made to have small membership dimension if and only if the underlying network exhibits the small-world phenomenon. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we explore the differences in high school dropout rates among white, black and Hispanic students in 275 U.S. Metropolitan Statisocal Areas (MSAs) in 2000. Our analysis focuses on the impact of community and labor market conditions. in hopes of providing insight into the relationship between place and educational outcomes. The explanatory power of our regression models is mixed across racial groups, performing best for whites and Hispanics. Our results also indicate that community factors - most importantly, same-race adult educational attainment in the community, teenage birth rates and residential stability - have a greater impact on dropout rates than labor market factors. Our results suggest that as education reform moves toward broad-based solutions to improve student outcomes including dropout rates. it will be increasingly important to address the structural origins of inequality outside of schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 2001 and 2006 there was an ‘epidemic’ of complete withdrawal from daily life among numerous children in refugee families seeking asylum in Sweden. It became embedded in many distinct controversies, including the politics of immigration, and acrimonious disagreements between pediatricians dealing with individual families, and government-employed sociologists commissioned to report on what was going on. Most of the cases resolved themselves when an amnesty was agreed in 2006, although there remain many doubts about the statistics. After describing this phenomenon, the paper proposes a (non-exclusive) model called Imitation & Internalisation. Most of the children may have begun by imitating others who had fallen ill, but soon internalized it to the extent that it became an integral part of their psychophysical and social constitution. The model can be applied to phenomena as diverse as hypnotism, the placebo effect, and catching faith by association with believers (Pascal’s wager). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Genotype–environment interaction (G×E) refers to situations in which genetic effects connected to a phenotype are dependent upon variability in the environment, or when genes modify an organism''s sensitivity to particular environmental features. Using a typology suggested in the G×E literature, we provide an overview of recent papers that show how social context can trigger a genetic vulnerability, compensate for a genetic vulnerability, control behaviors for which a genetic vulnerability exists, and improve adaptation via proximal causes. We argue that to improve their understanding of social structure, sociologists can take advantage of research in behavior genetics by assessing the impact of within-group variance of various health outcomes and complex human behaviors that are explainable by genotype, environment and their interaction. Insights from life course sociology can aid in ensuring that the dynamic nature of the environment in G×E has been accounted for. Identification of an appropriate entry point for sociologists interested in G×E research could begin with the choice of an environmental feature of interest, a genetic factor of interest, and/or behavior of interest. Optimizing measurement in order to capture the complexity of G×E is critical. Examining the interaction between poorly measured environmental factors and well measured genetic variables will overestimate the effects of genetic variables while underestimating the effect of environmental influences, thereby distorting the interaction between genotype and environment. Although the expense of collecting environmental data is very high, reliable and precise measurement of an environmental pathogen enhances a study''s statistical power. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: While neuroscientists, cognitive anthropologists, and behavioral psychologists have begun to examine the dialectical relationship between space and cognition, sociologists have remained curiously silent. Sociologists concede that cognition affects our relationship to space, but seem less willing to explore how space might affect us cognitively. In this paper I argue that the spatial configuration of our environment facilitates particular cognitive modes. I examine what I call structured versus unstructured spaces. I also focus on the structuring of space and whether that structuring is imposed or implied. The structure of the space and the articulation of that structure interact to produce different modes of thought. This relationship between space and cognition has important implications for how and, perhaps, why we use culture. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Many research have been conducted on occupational attainment by sociologists. This has helped to increase our understanding of the supply, job seeker or holder, side of the labor market. Recent concerns with job matching and labor market transactions, that is, with job assignment, have focused attention on the need to address the demand side as well. Such a shift in theoretical and substantive focus requires some shift in research methodology and data. This paper argues that the continued development of employer surveys can add immeasurably to research on job matching. The purpose here is to examine what we have learned about labor markets from employer surveys and to argue for further efforts to gather data from the demand side. The development of employer surveys is discussed, some of the empirical findings and generalizations that have emerged from these studies that may not have been discovered using more conventional procedures are described, and research directions using employer surveys are suggested.

The article presents response by the authors to the critical comments made by sociologists R.S. Burt and William M. Bittner on the works of the authors. First, Burt and Bittner questioned the scope of the authors' article. They argue that one cannot extend the scope of the conclusions from one network analysis to other systems. In authors' view, this misses the point entirely. In the series of papers written on informant accuracy the authors have never drawn conclusions about the structure of any group studied, let alone extended any conclusions about social structure to other groups or to the world at large. What authors have been studying is not groups, but the methods by which most researchers have gathered data about groups. It is about these methods that authors have drawn a global generalization from their seven data sets: the method by which data are traditionally obtained (some variant of "who do you interact with") does not yield any reliable information whatsoever about who people in the group actually interact with.