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C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination (1959) represents one of the most influential texts of postwar American sociology. The title has become a catchphrase that stands for a style of thought that transcends both theoretical dogma and the constraints of mere methodological rule following. This article sets out to show that Mills' vision of the sociological imagination had more in common with the then dominant lines of scholarship than his broadside against Parsonian grand theory and Lazarsfeldian abstracted empiricism in the main part of the book would suggest. Among the tools that Mills introduced as fostering the sociological imagination were 2 × 2 tables. The article traces the use of such tables over time and across scholarly communities and shows that, contrary to Mills' own estimate, these tables describe a common nexus between his own work and that of Parsons and Lazarsfeld. All three scholars made ample use of this formal tool to construct sociological arguments at central places of their oeuvre. Given its shared use across otherwise divergent schools, the 2 × 2 table is a prime example for what historians of science have called paper tools, i.e. statistical formulas, algorithms, tables, diagrams, graphs, etc., that structure scientific research across different schools of thought and theoretical approaches. Drawing on the notion of paper tools, the article advances a post-Kuhnian perspective on the history of sociology that shifts the research focus from substantive ideas to formal tools and demonstrates elements of commensurability among presumably incommensurable schools of thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study identified the 100 most impactful global contributors to religion journals and mapped their respective disciplinary affiliations. To conduct this investigation, we performed a secondary data analysis of a Scopus-derived database featuring the world's leading scientists. The mean contributor published 51.93 papers, had an h-index of 13.57, and an hm-index 11.50. Most contributors were located in the USA with the most common disciplinary affiliations being religion, non-specialized (n = 22), sociology, non-specialized (n = 21), sociology of religion (n = 20), and theology (n = 11). The results reveal that religion discourse is populated by some of the leading scholars in the world. Leveraging their expertise can help advance the field's knowledge development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides insights on the contemporary relevance of Talcott Parsons's writings by analyzing 20 textbooks from Austria, Germany, Great Britain and the United States, published in 1999–2019. Whether having knowledge of Parsons is helpful to today's students and other interested readers, and what knowledge, deserves consideration. Therefore , the paper asks: Which future gains of readers did textbook authors envision when they chose, in their own present, to discuss (or not) sociological writings from long ago? In order to understand what future opportunities authors wanted to create for readers, as well as how they chose to discuss Parsons to this end, the paper draws on Niklas Luhmann's notion of memory. The analysis reveals several key competencies that student and other interested readers might acquire through having knowledge of Parsons' writings and its critiques. These potentials would have gone unnoticed if authors had assessed Parsons's relevance only according to whether he adequately considered conflict or not, as has been done in many debates about his work until today. Moreover, through analyzing how authors remembered Parsons, I distilled two key selective criteria: First, what must be remembered in order to enable readers to acquire those competencies? Second, which memories would be impeding for readers and thus be better left out? These criteria are relevant for research, as well. Looking at the future, it would be desirable that sociologists let Parsons assist them in their research in many different ways, if possible. As a result, we might see a revival of Parsons that enables genuine advancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this paper is to provide a biographical sketch of the late Hans L. Zetterberg and a historical background to a translation of an essay based on a lecture given by Zetterberg in Stockholm in 1995. In it, he recounts his time at the Department of Sociology at Columbia University in the years 1953–1964. This essay is full of insights into an inspiring and formative period for Zetterberg in the United States, particularly in the stimulating milieu that was Columbia, at this time the center of American sociology led by Robert K. Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld. In the introduction to this translated essay, I give a brief overview of the establishment of sociology as a discipline in Sweden, and the transfer of knowledge between the United States and Sweden (and Europe, more broadly), embodied in Hans Zetterberg. In the post-WWII years, American sociology, which had a strong positivistic imprint, played an important role in shaping the beginnings of Swedish sociology. However, the transfer of knowledge went both ways, with Zetterberg, a semi-central and often neglected figure, being both a significant contributor to sociology at Columbia in its period of greatest prominence, and in his native Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christian Smith's paper 'The Incoherence of 'Culture' in American Sociology' is a valuable provocation that can prompt us to reflect on the role of concepts and on the role of agreement on the definition of concepts in scientific research. In this comment paper, I raise questions about Smith's empirical expectation that sociologists should agree on a concept of culture based on debates in the sociology of science. I also suggest that in terms of the future agenda for the sociology of culture, we should distinguish between dialogue and clarification on the one hand, which I agree is needed, and standardization on the other hand, which seems incompatible with open-minded empirical research. Rather than work on agreement on what culture is, we might work on clarifying relevant distinctions among dimensions of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a commentary on Christian Smith's 'The Conceptual Incoherence of 'Culture' in American Cultural Sociology.' This paper accepts Smith's finding of conceptual incoherence at the disciplinary level and argues that it is a symptom of empiricism in American sociology. The paper suggests we employ conceptual analysis as practiced by analytical philosophy and proceeds to show how the use of that methodology can resolve the problem regarding the meaning of culture. In the end, the paper defends a conception of culture along the lines of Archer's (1996) intelligibilia, interpreted as action and its products bearing social reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'pure sociology' reflects some of the most important disciplinary concerns that have helped shape the intellectual development of sociology in the United States, particularly in the effort to establish disciplinary boundaries and achieve academic legitimacy. To flesh out the thesis, the current paper recounts briefly the early discussions associated with pure sociology before examining the various usages in the U.S. since the establishment of the discipline. While selected classical theorists employed the concept in framing their discussions, pure sociology represents a distinctively American idiom. The etymological history coincides with the institutionalization of sociology in U.S. universities, while informing key debates about the nature of sociological analysis throughout the past 120 years. Drawing upon an electronic search of multiple databases, a content analysis highlights the prevalence of the different meanings that mainly U.S. social scientists have attached to the concept. The paper then traces the varying trajectories of the many different usages over time, concluding with a discussion of the ascendance of Donald Black's theoretical paradigm that has appropriated the term with considerable success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pragmatism, especially the works of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, is in the midst of a revival in American sociology. American sociologists have drawn on these authors in their addressment of contemporary debates in the wider disciplinary field. Placing these contemporary applications of pragmatist thought alongside the broader intellectual tradition of pragmatic philosophy, however, demonstrates tensions associated with this revival. This paper draws on the work of John Dewey as a particularly stark case of the conflict between the philosophy of social science espoused by the original pragmatist philosophers and the use of their ideas in American sociology today. This treatment affords the opportunity to recover a vision for social science which has been overlooked in the contemporary pragmatist revival with deep implications for the practice of social science today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of caste played a prominent role in the early American sociology of race and race relations. The concept was developed largely through case studies of racially segregated communities in the American Deep South during the 1930s. While the concept of caste was largely abandoned by the middle of the 1950s, elements of a caste theory remain useful for both understanding contemporary work on race relations and the development of the sociology of race. This paper proposes a revised and expanded conception of caste grounded in the Black-White dynamic of American race relations. This approach builds on the performance circuit framework of economic sociology, arguing that "caste" refers to the roles, rules, and etiquette that govern economic interaction and give them meaning. The expanded approach develops three premises that highlight the consequences of caste. First, the entanglement of occupational and social roles is a key component of a racialized caste system. Second, deeply rooted racial animus prevents the social cohesion necessary to transition out of an economy defined by caste. Finally, the precarity of nominal class advancement within the dominated caste inhibits organizing that might challenge the overall system. This reevaluation of the caste concept resolves many of the limitations of the original caste school and bridges the divide between cultural and economic-based analyses of race relations in the early days of the American social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erving Goffman's written legacy bears on sociology as a whole, or so he argued in his Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association (Goffman, 1983). However, while being celebrated as important to the discipline, his work is also interpreted in inconsistent ways, often downplayed or marginalized, and even neglected. This paper claims that Goffman's "well known aversion to self-disclosure" (Shalin, 2013) does not justify overlooking his trajectory, from the unknown "margins" of a Canadian small town to the elusive "center" of American sociology—and much less does it justify still circulating assessments of his personality, crafted while overlooking his life experiences—and, especially, his writings. Anecdotal evidence of his "enigmatic" personality (Lemert, 2003), or "bad-boy outrageousness" (Berger, 1986), works as a derailing tactic, leading to unwarranted appraisals of Goffman's personality—and, more importantly, to the neglect of crucial aspects of his work. From a theoretical standpoint, Simmel's treatment of "the stranger" as a social relationship, and Merton's concept of "moral alchemy", are used here to try to make some sense of the mixture of celebration and neglect still surrounding "Goffman". Historical data was gathered in part from the "Erving Goffman Archives'' (Shalin, 2013). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The scope and structure of social theory are often analyzed as part of or preamble to theorizing proper. This paper takes an indirect approach to the metatheoretical question, "what does social theory look like in terms of scope and structure?" by analyzing a form of social theory that sociologists tend not to think of as social theory: namely, judge-made law produced in Federal appellate courts. We argue that judges engage in social theorizing on a routine basis, and that they arrive at some of their theoretical claims through a process of theorizing that has features in common with sociological theorizing. The social theorizing of judges holds up a mirror to our own. By recognizing and examining judicial social theorizing as a form of structured, social theorizing, we aim to facilitate a clearer understanding of the social conditions enabling (and constraining) the production of social theory within sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

urately measuring a population and its attributes at past, present, and future points in time has been of great interest to demographers. Within discussions of forecast accuracy, demographers have often been criticized for their inaccurate prognostications of the future. Discussions of methods and data are usually at the centre of these criticisms, along with suggestions for providing an idea of forecast uncertainty. The measures used to evaluate the accuracy of forecasts also have received attention and while accuracy is not the only criterion advocated for evaluating demographic forecasts, it is generally acknowledged to be the most important. In this paper, we continue the discussion of measures of forecast accuracy by concentrating on a rescaled version of a measure that is arguably the one used most often in evaluating cross-sectional, subnational forecasts, Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE). The rescaled version, MAPE-R, has not had the benefit of a major empirical test, which is the central focus of this paper. We do this by comparing 10-year population forecasts for U.S. counties to 2000 census counts. We find that the MAPE-R offers a significantly more meaningful representation of average error than MAPE in the presence of substantial outlying errors, and we provide guidelines for its implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

In 1945 Davis and Moore, following an earlier formulation by Davis, proposed a functional theory of stratification that was intended to account for what they contended was the "universal necessity" for social inequality in any social order. Beginning with an article by Tumin in 1953, the Davis-Moore theory elicited regular analysis, commentary, criticism, and debate through the 1970s. Although professional work on the theory has largely ceased since the late 1980s, the Davis-Moore theory remains perhaps the single most widely cited paper in American introductory sociology and stratification textbooks and constitutes "required reading" in hundreds, if not thousands, of undergraduate and graduate courses throughout the United States. The present paper traces the history of the debate and attempts to explain the theory's longevity and vitality in the face of what has amounted to largely negative assessments by other sociologists over the preceding fifty years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

While cognitive sociology is a relatively new area in U.S. sociology, the subfield has a lengthy history in French sociology. Developing a typology based upon the existing literature, we identify three branches of cognitive sociology in France. The first was initiated by Raymond Boudon, one of the scholars most responsible for popularizing the area, who envisioned cognitive sociology as helping delineate the role of beliefs in rational action. Second, another group of researchers seeks to found sociology upon a naturalistic basis, thus drawing upon the disciplines constitutive of cognitive science (e.g., psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive anthropology). Finally, the third approach to cognitive sociology in France takes inspiration from linguistics as a foundation for sociological investigations. We conclude the paper by discussing the relationship between these three sub-fields and by examining the relationship between French and American cognitive sociologies in order to identify fruitful directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the use of aerial photographs to study the social structure of a dairy farm neighborhood in St. Lawrence County, New York. The paper compares information from aerial photographs of farmsteads and farm work to data gathered in a sociological survey. I examine how the visual data compares to other sociological information; how photographs, in this research, amplify, supplement, or contextualize nonvisual data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a review of comparable degree productivity among several social and behavioral sciences, this paper concludes that sociology was uniquely affected by forces that lowered both the production of B.A.'s, M.A.'s, and Ph.D.'s and the quality of its graduate students. From the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, sociology suffered drastic declines in student numbers and quality. The increased careerism among students apparently accounts for a substantial portion of this decline, but through a very concrete mechanism: the expansion of business programs. The paper suggests that perhaps an absence of a serious commitment to teaching scientific sociology accounts for the loss of quality, since applied sciences have fared much better than has sociology. The recent ASA Task Force recommendations for curriculum redesign are reviewed, and a call is issued for revitalizing the scientific component of undergraduate sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is taken from Chapter 6 of the publication A Lucky Journey: The Sociological Enterprise, 1931-1980, which reflects on the progress of the American Sociological Review (ASR) as a publication from 1958 to 1960. The local editorial staff of the publication began with a contingent of ten scholars. These ten scholars included representatives of various sub-fields in sociology and of related discipline as well as specialists on Soviet Russia, Africa, India and Japan. Most of the day-to-day labor on the Review was done by editorial secretary Betty Vogel, Michael Olmsted, and their nominal boss. Michael Olmsted was more than a first-rate book review editor, he evaluated papers in his special fields with sagacity and designed an attractive cover to replace what had long been the dismal front of the publication. Solicitation of papers by prominent sociologists helped to upgrade ASR as a scholarly journal. Another change was the introduction of a division of the Review on the Profession which included not merely the obituaries or communications pertaining to the sociological guild, but both solicited submitted articles on the occupation itself. This innovation, according to the author, was consistent with his own growing interest in the sociology of sociology.

This paper focuses on the early stages of a social movement--the development of a militant faculty union. It is a socio-historical analysts of the major internal and external factors and the interaction between them that determined the course of the movement's development. Although the analysts is limited to one state university system, the structural and procedural characteristics are relevant to other universities faced with collective bargaining choices.
This research examines a faculty union as an insurgent group. An insurgent group is a movement organization which attempts to bring about structural change by thrusting new interests into the decision-making process (Jenkins and Perrow, 1977). The paper will analyze the key issues and events that enabled a small, rag-tag army to march into legitimate power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Submitting articles to journals has become a difficult and time-consuming process, as has reviewing and re-reviewing articles that too often get the dreaded R&R letter. The underlying problem here is as old as the discipline, particularly in American sociology. Very different criteria are used in producing scholarship and reviewing its merits for publication; and current ways of editing journals aggravate this fundamental problem. The Big Divide in sociology is between a discipline that seeks to be a science and one that does not; and there is no easy reconciliation among those on either side of this divide. In this paper, the effects of this divide on journal publishing are reviewed in terms of the consequences of the Big Divide for the discipline. A simple but radical proposal is offered at the end for how sociologists can be put out over their misery in having to deal with the consequences of this Big Divide in their departments, in professional meetings, and most importantly, in publishing their intellectual products in journals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tracks Mead's induction into the sociological canon, focusing in particular on American sociologists who made a concerted effort to reconstruct Mead as a systematic social theorist and apply his ideas to empirical research. It distinguishes two interpretive strategies of framing the classic and constructing the canon -- the politics of orthodoxy and politics of the open canon. The politics of orthodoxy aims to ascertain the original meaning and close the textual canon, creating a template relative to which alternative interpretations are judged incomplete, unorthodox, or wrongheaded. The politics of the open canon proceeds on the assumption that the classic text lends itself to conflicting interpretations, that room for the honest difference of opinion must be safeguarded, and that the capacity to further productive inquiry rather than the adherence to an orthodox view recommends a particular construal as viable and canon-worhty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents Paul Kay's reaction to several comments on his paper which appeared in a previous issue of The American Sociologist, which addressed the nonacademic employment among doctor of philosophy degree holders in the U.S. On the whole, according to Kay, there seems to be agreement among the commenters (a) that social science generally is facing an oversupply of doctor of philosophy degree holders and (b) that there is substantial adherence in some quarters to the claim that the glut can be alleviated by expanding nonacademic employment. Similarly, although some commenters express doubt regarding the degree to which what Kay describes for anthropology applies to sociology, most state or assume that the current employment situations of the two disciplines are essentially the same. That is, the consensus of the comments is that his argument is either right for both disciplines or wrong for both disciplines, but probably not right for one and wrong for the other. Several commenters are worried by the lack of statistical report. Kay admits that his paper presented no statistics. According to him, reliable data in this area are hard to come by especially on the demand side.

Published in 1899, The Philadelphia Negro provides an important template to examine both the use and promise of heterogeneity as one of the earliest pillars in the establishment of American sociology. In this paper, I locate the notion of heterogeneity within W.E.B. Du Bois's classic The Philadelphia Negro to demonstrate both the historical roots of the concept and also Du Bois's use of the concept as key to his production of new sociological knowledge. As will be shown, Du Bois explicitly and implicitly disrupts existing notions of heterogeneity and of a monolithic Black population by emphasizing the intraracial variation thereof; thus Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro intervention amplifies the role of heterogeneity as a tool for uncovering variation that produces incisive sociological theorization and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1915 and the late 1930s W.I. Thomas developed a theory of human motivation steering a middle course between determinism (biological or social) and unfettered free will. The theory of the four wishes posited that all human beings, across time and place, are driven by a set of connected wishes mediated by the social and physical environment. These are the wish for new experience, the wish for security, the wish for recognition, and the wish for response. Between 1917 when Thomas first published the wishes and the early 1930s when the wishes fell out of use, they were the dominant micro theory of motivation invoked by sociologists in the United States (particularly those associated with the Chicago School). This paper explores the rise and fall of Thomas's wishes in the context of the sociology of ideas, with particular emphasis on fluctuations in Thomas's professional status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stephen Turner's book, American Sociology, is valuable contribution to the history of the field. In this comment paper, however, I raise questions about two of its core claims: that the feminization of American sociology prevented its collapse, and that the discipline has a two-tiered status structure, with activist scholarship located primarily in the lower tier. We should be sure that Turner is right about these points before we accept his evaluation of the current state of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stephen Turner's rich and informative history navigates the complex and changing landscape of American Sociology. He discusses how political, social, and academic conditions enabled varying forms of sociology and what epistemological and methodological impacts these conditions had on different schools of sociology. Turner's book asks readers to reflect on what sociology is and what place elite and nonelite sociology should have in the discipline. Turner emphasizes the role of feminist sociology and 'activist scholarship,' arguing that current sociology is one where we have in part returned to our early 20th century reformist roots. This paper expands Turner's conversation about the contributions of feminist sociology. I offer this critique to function as an entry point through which to contemplate what elite sociology is, and how it relates to feminist sociology. I argue that Turner under-explores the contributions of feminist sociology by reducing its contributions to advocacy-based scholarship. By placing feminist sociology in opposition to elite sociology, he simplifies the important discussion of elite sociology, and loses sight of feminist sociology's theoretical and methodological strengths. Highlighting aspects of intersectional theory and institutional ethnography, I argue that new elites have emerged in opposition, contrast, and conjunction to the elite that Turner describes, and I hope to further a dialogue on what constitutes 'elite' sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Nisbet returned to full time teaching at the University of California, Riverside, in 1964, after ten years as Dean and Vice-Chancellor. The author was an undergraduate student in sociology at Riverside during the years 1965-67 and recalls Nisbet as a teacher. This was a prolific period in Nisbet's writing career and many of the ideas that appeared in his books were introduced and explored in the courses that he taught. Two of these courses - 'Community' and 'History and Systems of Sociology' - are discussed in detail. The presentation of the material in these courses provides insight into how Nisbet understood the themes of the sociological tradition and how he thought these were best communicated to students. The paper also considers how Nisbet, an avowed conservative, was perceived by some of his undergraduate students during a time of cultural ferment and political unrest in America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The US poultry industry based on flexible accumulation has been advanced as the model of agro-industrial development for agrifood globalization. Similarly, Mexico has been presented as a noteworthy example of the negative effects of neoliberal restructuring associated with the globalization project. In this paper we use both of these assertions as points of departure to guide an investigation of the case of the restructuring of the Mexican poultry industry. Informed by a commodity systems analysis, archival data and key informant interviews are used to generate an overview of the history of the poultry industry in Mexico. A sociology of agrifood theoretical framework informed by regimes theory is employed to analyze the events of the case. We conclude that neoregulation related to the IMF and NAFTA restructuring in Mexico facilitated the diffusion of the US model of poultry production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores article production by the entire population of US undergraduate sociology departments. The available literature suggests that undergraduate programs publish little, that this is concentrated among relatively few mainly liberal arts-departments, and that publication rates are increasing. We argue There are reason* to expect that social economic presence, reward policies, student quality, and faculty quality, si/e. and workload will affect productivity. Tracing publication of articles across the 1990s. few undergraduate departments are represented in 30 journals deemed important on the bases of reputation and citation rates Liberal arts schools do not predominate Ceteris paribus, public schools outpublished private schools Publication rates have not increased. Social economic presence, and student and faculty quality affect publishing, but salary, tenure structure, and workload do not Finally, faculty size suppresses per capita publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses whether and to what extent the field of the sociology of deviance is "dead," relevant to sociology generally, or intellectually vital, and, if it is less vital than it once was, how and why it declined in vigor, and what might be done to return it to its glory days. It also addresses the implications of the election of 2004 for the field of deviance studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using articles drawn from the years 1996-1999, this paper updates and expands Jack Niemonen's 1997 TAS analysis of the articles dealing with race and ethnicity in the four core sociology journals. We found a greater rate of publication and several new substantive areas incorporating race and ethnicity, but many of the patterns Niemonen identified remain in place. These articles are highly quantitative, rely heavily on U.S. Census categories, tend to explain racial and ethnic phenomenon as by-products of broader social forces (such as class-based stratification), and subsume these analyses under the headings of alternative subfields. Niemonen used these findings to offer a powerful critique of the status of race and ethnicity in sociology, the under-development of the racial and ethnic relations "problematic," and its marginalization within the discipline as a whole. To reassess these interpretations and conclusions, we examined the relationships between methodology and substance, and compared the main sample with a subset of more specialized articles focused on race and ethnicity. We found a close connection between quantitative methods and the use of Census definitions of race and ethnicity, but surprisingly few differences between the race and ethnic subset and the more inclusive main sample appeared. These findings allow us to offer support and some important qualifications to Niemonen's original conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia Communications, and Arthur Andersen are company names that have recently become metaphors for falsified balance sheets, corruption, and fraudulent bankruptcy. In this paper the main charges are summarized and illustrated by examples primarily from the Enron case. The analysis of the empirical evidence should answer the following questions:

-Are the bankruptcies of Enron or WorldCom the result of deceptive strategies for which certain individual executive managers are responsible? If so, the actors in the Enron drama would only be particularly greedy specimens of the homo oeconomicus.

While attention has been paid to the study of panic disorder (PD) with or without agoraphobia among Caucasians, surprisingly little empirical research within the United States has looked at the phenomenology of PD among minority groups. In this paper we present data we have collected and review other research on the phenomenology, social supports, and coping behavior among African-Americans with panic disorder. Our studies indicate that, in comparison to Caucasians, African-Americans with PD reported more intense fears of dying or going crazy, as well as higher levels of numbing and tingling in their extremities. African-Americans reported higher rates of comorbid post traumatic disorder and more depression. African-Americans also used somewhat different coping strategies (such as religiosity and counting one's blessings), less self-blame, and were somewhat more dissatisfied with social supports. The incidence of isolated sleep paralysis was, as per previous reports, higher in African-Americans. These findings, results of other research, and the implications for assessment and treatment are discussed within a semantic network analysis of panic (Hinton and Hinton 2002, this issue). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How will sociology fare in the twenty-first century? We love what we do. The problem seems to be in communicating the value of what we do to lay people outside the discipline. Sociology's future in part will be dependent upon its practitioners demonstrating its utility in the marketplace of everyday life, assessment and decision making. This paper offers a twenty-year perspective of one sociology department's work in a rural Appalachian region. While providing a brief overview of a series of initiatives, it explains in depth our involvement and contributions to a community-based health project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Detroit Area Study (DAS) has served for 25 years as one model of how a sociology faculty can combine productive research and graduate training within a single small unit. This paper outlines the current structure and costs of DAS, describes its math advantages and limitations, and suggests several ways in which other universities might develop units that are similar but not identical to DAS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper summarizes briefly the formal relationship between the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the seven regional sociological societies, suggests that little has resulted from the affiliation, and recommends (1) the ASA Committee on Regional Affairs be terminated, and (2) four other ways of linking the national and regional societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the American Catholic Sociological Review approached, the leadership of the Association for the Sociology of Religion decided to dedicate the last issue of Volume Fifty of Sociological Analysis to analyzing the various scholarly concerns involved in the change from the American Catholic Sociological Society into the Association for the Sociology of Religion. The special issue contained not only four major articles but also seven notes by former presidents that dealt with the sociological aspects of this transformation. With the exception of an article by Peter Kivisto, all of the analyses, explicitly or implicitly, endorsed the organizational move and its intellectual implications. The paper is an effort to provide some balance to the historical record as portrayed in the special issue and to make a contribution to a renewed attempt to construct a Catholic sociology as well as an association of Catholic sociologists. While the concerns that are found within the anniversary issue deserve a full-length treatment, what can be realistically offered here are only a short historical background and a few reactions to the arguments of its contributors.

This article focuses on the future of sociology archive as a discipline. The major U.S. university libraries now go to extraordinary lengths and expense to collect the papers of writers, even many who as yet have not been categorically identified as important. There is a serious lesson in this-one might even say, a vital one-for sociology as it confronts an uncertain future. As everyone of a certain age will recall, the saga of Roots, in book and television formats, single-handedly gave American blacks a collective sense of historical importance that up to that point was absent from mass culture. The new Holocaust Museum in Washington is the most eloquent and emotionally wracking contemporary expression of historical memory for public consumption on a grand scale. Other examples can be found at every juncture of the "culture wars" that have been raging in the United States since the 1960s. Every politically self-aware group is supposed to venerate its real or imagined past, both at individual and collective levels, not only because such joint expressions enhance self-conceptions but also owing to the strategic advantage.

This paper challenges the conventional academic wisdom that supports the "publish or perish" doctrine. Employing a theoretical framework derived from Berger and Luckmann (1966), other sources of legitimation are analyzed. While the doctrine is related to themes in the larger culture (i.e., a high mass production/consumption economy), this does not fully explain why research and publication receive such determined support from faculty, particularly since alternative means of evaluation exist. An explanation of the publish or perish doctrine is offered in terms of the use of esoteric knowledge (its product) to enhance and preserve professional authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I would like to try to sort out the conflict of two ways of knowing: on the one hand there are folk methods for constituting positive knowledge and on the other hand there are scientific methods of acquiring accurate, positive knowledge. Both methods try to solve the problem of subjectivity: privately, individually held states of knowing and understanding. In this endeavor, the very existence of social reality is at stake. If persons have, internally, states of understanding that are different from each other in any persistent and significant way, their behavior will be at cross purpose or to no human purpose and gradually behavior will drift irreconcilably apart. There are, of course, social controls by which to resynchronize behavior but in these, too, folk methods are challenged by scientific methods. I wish to emphasize that the human project requires both folk methods and scientific methods of knowledge constitution. The former could ensure collective praxis; the latter could contribute to the authentic self-knowledge of a social life world. Together they could reunite the alienated divisions of the knowledge process. I suggest some canons in the last section that may promote such reunification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comments on the history and accomplishments of the American Sociological Association. The most astonishing activity of the ASA is an annual production, the extravaganza called the national meetings. In the 1940s and 1950s the national convention was sometimes criticized for being a market fair at which young academics were forced to kowtow to the mighty for jobs, rather than being able to take delight in truly intellectual discourse. Over the decades, the business meetings of the ASA have remained unchanged in one important way. They always have been poorly attended, except for a few times in the late 1960s. This intense apathy is characteristic of a well run learned society. First it shows the good sense of sociologists, for there is little worth capturing at the business meeting. Second, most of the time the Council and the national staff have succeeded in attaining harmony with the vibrations of their constituents, and thus, they often have made entirely independent decisions that pleased the others anyway. Even in the high drama of business meetings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it should be noted, established sociology was the main target. In response to the sociologist's usual preference for egalitarian policy, the 1960's charges of elitism, and the sheer growth of research money, the number of papers or presentations has grown, certainly faster than the membership.

Stratification in science has received extensive attention from researchers in the sociology of science. The general research strategy involves identifying certain socio-personal characteristics of scientists such as professional age, highest degree, prestige of training and affiliated institutions, and relating these characteristics to the reward systems in science. Two identifiable reward systems in science involve (1) the bestowal of honorary awards, and (2) the access to, and recognition in, the formal communication system in science. These two systems both contribute to the overall stratification of the reward system but differ on at least two counts. This paper attempts to examine the stratification of the formal communication system in American sociology as it is related to the stratification of scientists. It is found that the visible journals in sociology are consistently stratified according to criteria such as rejection rates, articles rejected but eventually published in other sociological journals, order of submission preferences of ASA meeting authors, and cross-citation patterns in articles of the journals.

This paper suggests that the formulation and testing of hypotheses relating the functional role of cities in a society to other urban structure and process variables might be facilitated by substituting a continous variable approach to the functional system for the prevailing discrete typologies. Using variables indexing the scope of economic activities in U.S. communities at two points in time, we elaborate a technique for identifying the dimensions underlying an existing typology, and the 56 largest SMSA's are ranked along these dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the effects of restrictive voter registration laws has been largely passé for nearly a decade, apparently due to the widespread acceptance of Wolflnger and Rosenstone's (1980) study of voter turnout. Wolfinger and Rosenstone's research indicates that fully liberalized registration laws would produce a larger voting population, which would differ only marginally in its composition from the existing electorate. But their analysis only addresses turnout, not registration itself, and is based on a single sample of the American electorate, 1972. This paper focuses on the impact of restrictive laws on registration and turnout in presidential and nonpresidential election years during the period 1972-1982, relying on data from both the U.S. Census Bureau's Current Population Surveys and the National Election Studies. The results of the analyses do mark important points of difference from Woffinger and Rosenstone's findings. Ultimately, however, there is no escaping their conclusion that the implications of liberalized voter registration laws on the composition of the electorate would be relatively minor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a model of turnout that extends the Biker and Ordeshook (1968) model to account for the purchase of new information for assessing outcome-contingent benefits and that seeks to integrate the various institutional, sociological, psychological. and economic factors that have been advanced to account for turnout in American presidential elections. Personal and institutional data from the 1972 and 1976 ICPSR NES Panel Study and Vote Validation Survey are used to test the model. The results suggest that a variety of factors are important in influencing the turnout decision, including the perceived difference between the candidates (in 1976), sense of social duty, sense of attachment to relevant groups, political efficacy, resource constraints, residence, and the costs of registering (in 1976). Closeness of the election also seemed to have a significant impact in 1976. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines multiple characteristics of belief systems among people at different levels in the policy process using the same measures in the same time period. More specifically, it analyzes belief systems concerning the environment among the general public, several attentive publics, and state legislators in Idaho. The following belief system characteristics are probed: horizontal constraint among specific issue beliefs, and between general environmental orientations and party and ideology; vertical constraint between the general environmental orientation and specific issue beliefs; and the role of general orientations in screening incoming information. Legislators are more likely to connect their environmental beliefs to partisan and ideological orientations. However, attentive and general public respondents do exhibit substantial constraint within the environmental issue domain; individual self-placement on a preservationist-developmentalist dimension appears to provide a cohering force in orientations to the environment. While legislators exhibit greater belief connections with general political orientations, the results also suggest an order in the public's beliefs about the environment and in the nature of conflict over the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a series of articles on the contributions of early women in sociology in the U.S. The initial paper by Patricia Lengermann and Jill Niebrugge describes the social settlement movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in order to analyze settlement workers as practicing sociologists operating within a paradigm of the neighborly relation. Linda Rynbrandt and Mary Jo Deegan focus on Caroline Bartlett Crane, a Progressive Era reformer. In their analysis, the authors develop a characterization of Crane as an ecofeminist and forerunner of contemporary reform movements. They argue further that Crane deserves to been as a founding figure in sociology in the U.S. who associated with recognized pioneers, including Jane Addams and Charles Henderson. Barbara Richardson portrays Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as an applied sociologist with a distinctive emphasis on humanistic oekology. Richards focused on gender issues and the application of scientific methods for the solution of contemporary social problems. The final paper, by Erich Goode, departs from the overall theme and offers a rejoinder to an analysis of the death of the sociology of deviance.

The article discusses the creation of an intellectual biography of the U.S. sociologist Talcott Parsons. The researcher discusses Parsons' doctoral dissertation dealing with capitalism that was analyzed by sociologist Max Weber, and how Parsons' work delivered sociology from social Darwinism at the turn of the twentieth century. The author supports Parsons' work on the basis that he was a thinker and academician who did not use inconsistent analysis. The author utilized Parsons' archives at Harvard University, such as Parsons' paper "The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change."