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This paper critically scrutinizes the thesis put forward by Jennifer Platt in a recent article in The Sociological Review about the general relation between theory and method, based on her investigation of the specific example of functionalism and survey research in post-war US sociology. The present paper questions the extent to which Platt's analysis and general conclusions mask important levels of connectedness between theory and method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The second of two linked papers examining the interactions of psychiatry and the social sciences since World War II examines the role of NIMH on these disciplines. It analyses the effects of the prominence and the decline of psychoanalysis, and the impact of the psychotropic drugs revolution and the associated rise of biological psychiatry on relations between psychiatry and clinical psychology; and it explores the changing relationships between psychiatry and sociology, from collaboration to conflict to mutual disdain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although there is a thriving industry of classical sociology within the discipline of sociology, not much attention has been focused on the early American sociologists. This paper offers a six-fold typology of the uses of the classics within sociology, and argues that the neglect of early American sociology among contemporary sociologists requires correction. For reasons delineated, Lester F. Ward is the overlooked early American sociologist most deserving of renewed attention and study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of a social (or general) mind was prevalent in early American sociology from the 1880s through about the 1910s. As a concept, the social mind served as a proxy for what would later be defined and understood as culture and other collective phenomena such as social movements, crowd behavior, organizational behavior (e.g. ‘corporate actors’), and so forth. In the early stages of the development of sociology in America, sociologists such as Lester F. Ward and Franklin H. Giddings (1855-1931) were struggling to establish sociology as a legitimate science, and they needed to ground this new science of society in an object or reality that existed above the level of the individual members of society (for not doing so would bring the charge that sociology was nothing more than a watered-down version of psychology). In this paper I examine specifically Giddings' writings on the social mind, for they illustrate how subjectivist or idealist elements can be incorporated into an overtly positivistic or naturalistic theoretical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many sociology departments express concern about teaching and a desire to improve services to their undergraduate students, most find that the constraints of traditional reward systems stand in the way of maximizing such efforts. The Department of Sociology at the University of Kentucky has committed a full time, tenure track position to teaching and related duties. This paper describes this position, its responsibilities, and some of the benefits which have come from creating the position. By creating this position, the likelihood that the teaching program will work with the research program, rather than against it, is enhanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many writers hold that research method is necessarily determined by theory, and it is common to suggest the relationship between functionalism and survey method in post-war US sociology as an example of this. This paper questions the extent to which that method and that theory were in reality meaningfully associated, and argues against the position that theory and method are in general invariably connected in the way suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to find echoes of an innovatory moment in the past, or a discipline’s cutting edge in another’s worn down tool, or people in different fields quite unknown to one another following a similar intellectual trajectory over the same three or four years? A short case study of what looks uncannily like ‘independent invention’ is prefaced by reflections on replicatory practice in the social sciences. Some US sociological theorizing on the workings of fractal distinctions within disciplines, specifically across many foundational arguments in social science, finds a counterpart in UK anthropological theorizing on scale and replication in social phenomena at large. The conjunction is amusing; it could well be instructive. In any event, there is a challenge here to comparisons across disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the skills of graduate education that is most central to the evaluation of students is their ability to read and report on complex disciplinary texts. The display of comprehension is central to the judgment of competence, creating a status hierarchy. Demonstrating reading prowess is taken as a transparent indication of intelligence. Based on thirty-six ethnographic interviews with graduate students in sociology, history, and economics, we examine how informants think about the establishment of their scholarly reputations through self-presentational skills in discussing reading in seminars, articles, and eventually in the dissertation itself. The ability to read disciplinary texts and to situate those texts within disciplinary contexts is crucial for a validated selfhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors investigate how far the U.S. has come when it comes to race. Topics discussed include the election of Barack Obama as the first African American president, racial violence and civil rights revolution. Also discussed are the book "Slavery by Another Name" by Douglas A. Blackmon and the state-sanctioned white profit/black loss.

After its beginnings in the United States, medical sociology started to take hold in Germany in 1958 with a conference that resulted in the first book on medical sociology published in Germany. From uneasy marginality, the field has grown to include disciplines other than sociology—anthropology, economics, and political economy. Today, the field might best be called the "health social sciences." The main body of work employs the consensual perspective, but work done using a class conflict perspective is increasingly significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have contributed relatively little to our understanding of rising inequality of earnings and income in the United States. The author considers both why that has been the case and the degree to which it matters. Suggestions are offered about how a comparative perspective can help to shed some light on developments in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whiteness studies are trans-disciplinary, but here the focus is principally on sociology and social history. Firstly, I identify elucidate and synthesize the major ways in which whiteness in this literature has hitherto been problematized, to provide a sociological view of the multidisciplinary work so far. Five interpretations are identified; whiteness as absence, as content, as a set of norms, as resources and as a contingent hierarchy. Secondly, I make some proposals regarding the whiteness problematic's degree of pertinence to European settings, with a brief discussion of the Irish case. Finally, I argue that whiteness is useful if conceptualized in a way that sets it within the parameters of studies of racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both U.S. and Mexican sociologies allege that they are in the business of making true scientific knowledge claims about the social world. Conventional conceptions of science notwithstanding, I demonstrate that their claims to truth and scientificity are based on alternative epistemological grounds. Drawing a random sample of nonquantitative articles from four leading journals, I show that, first, they assign a different role to theories, and indeed they have dissimilar understandings of what a theory should consist of. Second, whereas U.S. sociology actively struggles against subjectivity, Mexican sociology maximizes the potentials of subjective viewpoints. Third, U.S. sociologists tend to regard highly and Mexican sociologists to eagerly disregard the principle of ethical neutrality. These consistent and systematic differences raise two theoretical issues. First, I argue that Mexican and U.S. sociologies are epistemologically, semantically, and perceptually incommensurable. I contend that this problem is crucial for sociology's interest in the social conditioning of scientific knowledge's content. Second, I suggest four lines of thought that can help us explain the epistemological differences I find. Finally, I argue that sociologists would greatly profit from studying epistemologies in the same fashion they have studied other kinds of scientific and nonscientific beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the sociological capstone course at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. A capstone course in the broadest sense grows together theoretical and empirical work from disparate areas in sociology, serves as a bridge to graduate work in the discipline, and helps students to assume more active lives as citizens and consumers of knowledge. The capstone course is required for all sociology majors in the university. As preparation for this course, students will have taken an introductory sociology course, a writing course in sociology or another discipline, and a variety of substantive courses in sociology. The substantive courses provide an in-depth examination of particular subareas in sociology, such as gender, madness, racial and ethnic relations, medical sociology and social movements. Majors also are required to take a course in research methods which is part of the university's quantitative reasoning program. After completing the capstone course, they must write a senior thesis, an in-depth exploration of a particular topic. The capstone course is part of the university's oral competency program and is structured as a seminar. Enrollment is limited to 20 to 25 students, the approximate number of majors.

The article presents information on the theoretical principles which are at the base of the research whose results are presented in the book "Distinction," and draw out those of its theoretical implications that are most likely to elude its readers, particularly here in the United States. Social science, be it anthropology, sociology or history, oscillates between two seemingly incompatible points of view, two apparently irreconcilable perspectives: objectivism and subjectivism. It can "treat social facts as things," or it can reduce the social world to the representations that agents have of it, the task of social science consisting then in producing an "account of the accounts" produced by social subjects. Rarely are these two positions expressed and above all realized in scientific practice in such a radical and contrasted manner. The "social reality" objectivists speak about is also an object of perception. And social science must take as its object both this reality and the perception of this reality, the perspectives, the points of view which, by virtue of their position in objective social space, agents have on this reality.

This essay examines some ethical problems prevalent in contemporary American sport. Thee topics are considered: (1) the ethical principles that should guide sport; (2) the ethical dilemmas that confront various constituencies in sport; and (3) the structural sources of unethical behaviors in sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares the social policy between U.S. and Great Britain. In Britain, the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science was set up in 1857 and typified the empirical tradition in English social science. The divorce between theory and policy is a tradition which has largely continued in Britain. It derives mainly from a desire among politicians to ameliorate existing conditions rather than institute radical social change. Furthermore, empirical sociology has itself so far failed to provide any effective theoretical framework for future work in social administration. The situation in the U.S. has been comparatively different; to begin with the development of academic sociology and the social sciences was much more rapid, possibly because of the proliferation of universities, and possibly because of the number of European scholars going in the U.S. Unlike in Great Britain, there have been two main streams in the American sociology; the first had been a tradition of empirical research based on studies of urban problems which is largely comparable with the blue book sociology of Great Britain. For a variety of reasons the political philosophy which prevailed in the U.S., meant that government intervention in social planning and welfare was regarded as something to be kept to a minimum.

The drop in the number of sociology majors in the U.S. has pushed many sociology departments to reduce their offerings in upper division courses and to increase their offerings in upper division courses to serve students majoring in other disciplines. This article explains a sociology program developed by a sociology department so other departments might consider implementing it, or some variation of it, to help maintain or increase enrollments in upper division sociology courses. The program may also be useful to departments at large institutions that are also experiencing the pinch of reduced enrollments in upper division courses. The program begins when decisions have been made as to what courses will be offered the next semester. For the first two semesters, this program yielded only a few students from other disciplines enrolling in the upper division courses. However, after these students had tried these sociology courses, there was an increase in enrollments in later semesters. The reaction from other faculty has been generally positive.