Search

This paper presents an overview of contemporary sociological issues in fire safety. The most obviously social aspects of fire safety-those that relate to the socioeconomic distribution of fire casualties and damage-are discussed first. The means that society uses to mitigate fire risks through regulation are treated next; focusing on the shift towards fire engineered solutions and the particular challenges this poses for the social distribution and communication of fire safety knowledge and expertise. Finally, the social construction of fire safety knowledge is discussed, raising questions about whether the confidence in the application of this knowledge by the full range of participants in the fire safety design and approvals process is always justified, given the specific assumptions involved in both the production of the knowledge and its extension to applications significantly removed from the original knowledge production; and the requisite competence that is therefore needed to apply this knowledge. The overarching objective is to argue that the fire safety professions ought to be more reflexive and informed about the nature of the knowledge and expertise that they develop and apply, and to suggest that fire safety scientists and engineers ought to actively collaborate with social scientists in research designed to study the way people interact with fire safety technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can outcome equality (say, in welfare) ever be unjust? Despite the extensive inquiry into the nature of luck egalitarianism in recent years, this question is curiously under-explored. Leading luck egalitarians pay little attention to the issue of unjust equalities, and when they do, they appear not to speak in one voice. To facilitate the inquiry into the potential injustice of equalities, the paper introduces two rival interpretations of egalitarianism: the responsibility view, which may condemn equalities as unjust (when they reflect unequal levels of personal responsibility); and, the non-responsibility view, which does not. It then teases out the implications of these two views, in the hope of establishing that the latter is at least as plausible as the former. The paper thus establishes that the egalitarian ideal can be plausibly formulated in a way that condemns only (certain) inequalities but never equalities, and that this formulation is both coherent and attractive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the postulation of irreducible, distributed cognitive systems (or group minds as they are also known in the literature) is necessary for the successful explanatory practice of cognitive science and sociology. Towards this end, and with an eye specifically on the phenomenon of distributed cognition, the debate over reductionism versus emergence is examined from the perspective of Dynamical Systems Theory (DST). The motivation for this novel approach is threefold. Firstly, DST is particularly popular amongst cognitive scientists who work on modelling collective behaviors. Secondly, DST can deliver two distinct arguments in support of the claim that the presence of mutual interactions between group members necessitates the postulation of the corresponding group entity. Thirdly, DST can also provide a succinct understanding of the way group entities exert downward causation on their individual members. The outcome is a naturalist account of the emergent, and thereby irreducible, nature of distributed cognitive systems that avoids the reductionists' threat of epiphenomenalism, while being well in line with materialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an overview of papers on epistemology and professional practice of sociology with topics such as the role of the journal "New Zealand Sociology" in creating a national sociology in the country, the concept of culture in contemporary sociology and conflict sociology.

This paper offers a sociological perspective on data protection regulation and its relevance to design. From this perspective, proposed regulation in Europe and the USA seeks to create a new economic actor-the consumer as personal data trader-through new legal frameworks that shift the locus of agency and control in data processing towards the individual consumer or 'data subject'. The sociological perspective on proposed data regulation recognises the reflexive relationship between law and the social order, and the commensurate needs to balance the demand for compliance with the design of computational tools that enable this new economic actor. We present the Databox model as a means of providing data protection and allowing the individual to exploit personal data to become an active player in the emerging data economy. [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]

In this volume, Wolff-Michael Roth provides a critical but partial reading of Tony Brown's book Mathematics Education and Subjectivity. The reading contrasts Brown's approach with Roth's own conception of subjectivity as derived from the work of Vygotsky, in which Roth aims to 'reunite' psychology and sociology. Brown's book, however, focuses on how discourses in mathematics education shape subjective action within a Lacanian model that circumnavigates both 'psychology' and 'sociology'. From that platform, this paper responds to Roth through problematising the idea of the individual as a subjective entity in relation to the two perspectives, with some consideration of corporeality and of how the Symbolic encounters the Real. The paper argues for a Lacanian conception of subjectivity for mathematics education comprising a response to a social demand borne of an ever-changing symbolic order that defines our constitution and our space for action. The paper concludes by considering an attitude to the production of research objects in mathematics education research that resists the normalisation of assumptions as to how humans encounter mathematics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter of a police officer (Oakland, CA) in September 1968. He was sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison. For 22 months, he was incarcerated at California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, CA under 'lock-up'-a system which gave him very limited interaction with the general prison population. During this time, Newton had no direct contact with members or leaders of the Black Panther Party. Furthermore, he was restricted to ten persons on his visiting list, nine of whom had to be members of his immediate family. The author of this paper was the tenth person on Newton's visiting list. For the entire period of his incarceration, I visited with Newton almost every Friday from 9:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. Following each visit, I would record a detailed memoir of our discussions, the general circumstances in the prison, and my reflections on everything that had transpired. This paper discusses the 22 months Huey P. Newton was in California Men's Colony. It describes how we organized our sessions so the conversations would be of value to him during the following week. It also includes a description of some of the major ideas we shared, including how Newton developed some of his decisions about the Black Panther Party as well as his personal life. Finally, the paper includes my own observations about Newton and how he managed his life as an inmate 'lock-up' in a maximum security prison. Newton was released in August 1970 following the reversal of his conviction by the California Appellate Court. He died in 1989. He was 47 years old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an essay about Harold Garfinkel's heritage. It outlines a response to Eric Livingston's proposal to say goodbye to ethnomethodology as pertaining to the sociological tradition; and it rejects part of Melvin Pollner's diagnosis about the changes occurred in ethnomethodological working. If it agrees with Pollner about the idea that something of the initial ethnomethodology's program has been left aside after the 'work studies' turn, it asserts that such a turn has nonetheless made possible authentic discoveries. So the paper speaks for a better integration of the two versions of ethnomethodology separated by Pollner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the historical development as well as the analytical and ideological uses of 'industrial society' as an object of knowledge. The binary opposition traditional society/industrial society and the latter tripartite division traditional, industrial, post-industrial society have been central to the development of sociology as a discipline. Like all analytical concepts 'industrial society' is both a way of seeing and not seeing. It focuses attention on some social attributes and processes rather than others. The first objective of this paper is to evaluate whether or not this object of knowledge focuses attention on crucial aspects of social life, or whether, instead, it shrouds and distorts more than it reveals. The second objective is to evaluate the ideological import of the concept. Did it, and does it still, provide a realistic and achievable model of the way we ought to live together? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a new global evaluation methodology for constructing composite indicators. Given the limitations in the construction of wellbeing indicators that include a gender perspective, this paper proposes separate measures for men and women, using new linear programming models to improve the traditional Data Envelopment Analysis models. We obtain composite indicators using common weights (which are most and least favourable) so that the indicators' values are able to discriminate between all units and provide a global vision of each one. This approach does not require prior knowledge of the weights for initial indicators, nor does it require a normalization method. Thus, the new composite indicator is less subjective than others. For the practical implementation of this proposal, we use the countries of the European Union as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do abstract philosophies turn into lived reality? Based on 2 years of ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews of vipassana meditation practitioners in Israel and the United States, the paper follows the process through which meditators embody the three main Buddhist tenets: dissatisfaction, impermanence and not-self. While meditators consider these tenets central to Buddhist philosophy, it is only through the practice of meditation that the tenets are experienced on the bodily level and thereby are 'realized' as truth. This realization takes place in the situated environment of the meditation center, where participation in long meditation retreats facilitates the production of specific subjective experiences that infuse the knowledge of Buddhist tenets with embodied meaning. The paper illustrates how abstract concepts and embodied experience support one another in the construction of meditators' phenomenological reality and suggests a general framework for studying the variety of relations that exist between the conceptual and embodied dimensions of different types of knowledge. [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]

Invitation to Sociology makes known that sociology is a coherent and value-added academic discipline. In exploring the continuing relevance of Invitation to Sociology, the time is ripe to reconsider sociology as a value-added intellectual enterprise. This paper answers this question: What does sociology have to offer beyond what the humanities and its sister social sciences already provide? This paper answers this question by identifying the four elements that compose the sociological tradition. These elements are social action; embeddedness; social problems; and social construction. I argue that these elements are more pronounced in sociology than in any other academic discipline, and hence contribute to the value-added character of sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses fear in a village in central Nepal during the ‘People’s War’. Spanning the years from 1999 to 2008, the paper illustrates how the different phases of the insurgency and individual circumstances resulted in people’s relationship with fear changing over time. By presenting a chronological analysis of fear, the authors draw attention to the interrelationship between fear, temporality and sociality and show that fear is always contextually situated, differently experienced through time and related to personal circumstances. Villagers had strongly developed coping strategies which they drew upon to support themselves and decrease their fear. Some people, however, suffered such a degree of structural violence that experiencing fear was seen as a privilege. Others denied their fear as part of their performance of manliness while others coped by ridiculing fear. Although a certain amount of suspicion and mistrust lingered, most people recovered from the impact of chronic fear. They fully returned to their field and forest work as well as their previous social activities following the peace agreement of 2006. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to present unusual achievements of three women sociologists who won the Nobel Peace Prize. Its goal is also to contribute to a long standing discussion of the role sociologists as public intellectuals. By focusing on Addams, Balch and Myrdal’s scholarly and public life, the paper demonstrates what social scientists can offer in the role of public intellectuals and debates what are the source of intellectuals’ public standing. The paper concludes by arguing that these three intellectuals’ successful achievement of their goals was possible because of their professional credential and because of their courage to take on risky actions for purposes to institutionalise social or cultural change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the meaning that interactive software agents and robots have in the context of mental therapy. This theoretical discussion is undertaken from a psychological and sociological perspective. It investigates what happens when interactive agents are introduced into current social situations. Methods of mental therapy vary from therapeutic conversation between clients and human therapists to interaction between clients and therapeutic animals such as dogs. This paper focuses on applications of interactive software agents and robots that substitute as autonomous artifacts behaving like humans for human therapists. In addition, some implications and policies for applications of interactive software agents and robots in mental therapy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research over several decades about subjective life satisfaction has led to the conclusion that the majority of people seem to be satisfied with their lives when their social and physical needs are met. In empirical studies which have used self-report instruments, this trend is reflected in respondents’ consistent preference for the positive end of scales. This led to the suggestion that there is a normative range for life satisfaction, which should hold true for general population data and, therefore, serve as a reference point, or a gold standard, for comparison (Cummins "Social Indicators Research," 35, 179–200, 1995, "Social Indicators Research," 43, 307–334, 1998). Subsequent research has shown that Western and non-Western samples generally conform to the normative range, but more data are needed from Chinese societies. In an attempt to remedy this situation, this paper investigates normative life satisfaction there. This paper reanalyses published and unpublished data from various Chinese societies (People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Taiwan) in order to confirm whether or not they lie within the normative range for non-Western countries. The results provide support for the relevance of Cummins’s normative range in Chinese societies. That the normative range generalised to the present study is a very useful finding, as it supports its utility for Chinese samples, and adds support to a theoretical explanation – i.e. the Wellbeing Homeostatisis theory—in Chinese groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we apply bargaining theory to a certain model of coalition formation. The notions of a feasible government and a stable government are central in the model considered. By a government, we mean a pair consisting of a majority coalition and a policy supported by this coalition. The aim of this paper is to establish which stable government should be created if more than one stable government exists or, in case there is no stable one, which feasible government should be formed if more than one feasible government exists. Several bargaining procedures leading to the choice of one stable (or feasible) government are proposed. We define bargaining games in which only parties belonging to at least one stable (or feasible) government bargain over the creation of a government. We consider different bargaining costs. We investigate subgame perfect equilibria of the bargaining games defined. It turns out that the prospects of a party depend on the procedure applied, and on the bargaining costs assumed. We also apply the coalition formation model to the Polish Parliament after the 2001 elections and apply the different bargaining games for the creation of a government to this example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the challenges that African Americans face teaching predominantly white classes at the tertiary level, and argues that these challenges can be resolved by establishing strong ties between students and teachers. While it is largely black faculty who incur the costs of this relationship building, the paper notes that they probably are not the only beneficiaries. White students are likely to benefit as well, as is society at large. The paper’s analysis suggests that black faculty face work that is outside the scope of what white faculty must do. Such work can be viewed as another dimension of the burden of delivering a “hidden curriculum” for their predominately white institutions of employment (Brayboy, Journal of Black Studies 34: 72–86, 2003). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis of the ideas of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead with regards the relationship between experience, meaning, language and thinking. It discusses how experience, meaning, language and thinking are based on the creative and constructive actions of individuals. Unlike what is the case in so-called radical constructivism, it is argued that the actions of the individual should be understood in a transactional way. The paper shows the implication of a transactional constructivism for education, arguing that education is the medium in which the creative and constructive actions of individuals come together in a social environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Public Management (NPM) has often been favorably contrasted with European Public Administration (EPA). This paper attempts to balance this Anglo-American perspective with a relatively new European critique of NPM which its authors call the Neo-Weberian State (NWS). Despite their differences in some key respects, however, it is argued that the NPM and NWS are similar in their sweeping paradigmatic character, their ambiguities and internal inconsistencies, their inability to go beyond instrumental rationality and incorporate forms of hermeneutic and critical reason, and in their advocacy of bureaucracy via participation under certain historical conditions, hence consistent with Weber’s characterization of modern organization and management. The paper, based on the authors’ rendering of critical social theory, provides a fresh means for bridging the two perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been renewed interest over the past 5 years among sociologists in empirically examining the status of sociology in high school. The few studies that have recently been conducted, however, have focused almost exclusively on high school sociology teachers. The nature and structure of the courses themselves have been largely ignored. Given the American Sociological Association’s recent attempts to develop and implement an Advanced Placement course, it seems especially important to examine the characteristics of existing sociology courses. This paper uses the results of a national mail survey to describe and discuss three aspects of the nature and structure of a random sample of sociology courses that were offered during the 2005–06 school year: instructional materials and pedagogical resources, teaching techniques, and course content. I demonstrate that these aspects of the courses look remarkably similar across the country: Teachers rely overwhelmingly on standard introductory textbooks to structure their courses. They are also apt to utilize supplemental materials from textbook publishers and from newspapers and newsmagazines, and to use a combination of lecture and discussion in their sociology classes. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on societal path dependencies tend to focus on mechanisms that anchor and stabilize national trajectories while paying less attention to transnational interactions and multilevel governance. This paper explores processes of path transformation in societies that are presumed to have the characteristics of open systems. Two pairs of case studies are presented and compared. The first illustrates institutional change through collision, when a national path meets with another. The second describes the emergence of transnational institutional paths and the impact of that process on national institutions and their (potential) transformation. The results indicate that path transformation often stems from a gradual succession and combination of incremental steps and junctures – change is gradual but consequential. They also point to increasing co-evolutionary interaction between national path transformation and transnational path creation. This implies a need for analytical tools that are adapted to the analysis of multi-level, nested processes of institutionalization and de-institutionalization. The paper suggests that the concept of path generation allows for a better specification of the conditions for change in existing societal paths and for the emergence of new paths in the case of open systems than the concept of path dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How has sociology evolved over the last 40 years? In this paper, we examine networks built on thousands of sociology-relevant papers to map sociology's position in the wider social sciences and identify changes in the most prominent research fronts in the discipline. We find first that sociology seems to have traded centrality in the field of social sciences for internal cohesion: sociology is central, but not nearly as well bounded as neighboring disciplines such as economics or law. Internally, sociology appears to have moved away from research topics associated with fundamental social processes and toward social-problems research. We end by discussing strategies for extending this work to wider science production networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social shaping of technology (SST) approach to analysing technological development lends itself to an understanding of the relatively negotiated, heterogeneous, and local character of technologies, politicising the mediated nature of sociotechnical change. Here, conditions of actor engagement lie at the heart of analysing technology in social context—that is, the occasions, strategies, and scope of influence that are afforded different actors, by way of how particular problems come to be defined and resolved. In this paper we examine the framing of a number of concrete technology assessments (TAs) from Denmark, from the realms of general TA and health technology assessment (HTA). Our examination of the TA initiatives is directed towards the relatively open-ended and consequently explorative and qualitative stance that SST takes in characterising the boundaries between the technical and the social. The paper goes on to discuss a possible place of ethical inquiry in TA, based on the understanding of technological development that SST affords. In the reflexive approach to addressing technology’s relation to society, technology no longer maintains a universally reducible character in time or in social space. Through the possibility of analytically and practically opening up for otherwise seemingly locked actor-positions SST gives room for a more differentiated questioning and treatment of ethical issues in which technology may be implicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methodologically, the most advanced social science discipline is considered economics, especially its neoclassical version. A number of practitioners in the other social sciences, especially sociology and political science, perceive economics as a scientific exemplar in methodological (and theoretical) terms. This methodological exemplar has been, particularly in the last decades, attempted to emulate by some of these social scientists. The outcome of this emulation, by adopting and extending its methods, of neoclassical economics in parts (but not all) of sociology, political science, and elsewhere has been rational choice theory as a general social paradigm. This paper tries to show that many misapplications of the methodology of neoclassical economics in rational choice theory have ensued from such methodological emulation. That neoclassical economics does not necessarily contain or lead to a mathematical rational choice model is the core argument of this paper. The paper fills in a gap created by the current literature's focus on the methodological bases of mathematical rational choice theory in neoclassical economics. [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]

Several philosophers have recently claimed to have discovered a new and rather significant problem with virtue ethics. According to them, virtue ethics generates certain expectations about the behavior of human beings which are subject to empirical testing. But when the relevant experimental work is done in social psychology, the results fall remarkably short of meeting those expectations. So, these philosophers think, despite its recent success, virtue ethics has far less to offer to contemporary ethical theory than might have been initially thought. I argue that there are plausible ways in which virtue ethicists can resist arguments based on empirical work in social psychology. In the first three sections of the paper, I reconstruct the line of reasoning being used against virtue ethics by looking at the recent work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. The remainder of the paper is then devoted both to responding to their challenge as well as to briefly sketching a positive account of character trait possession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Colin Sumner (1994) argued that the sociology of deviance "died" in 1975. This paper critically examines Sumner's argument and finds that it does not mean what it he claims it means. In fact, it is about a decline in the supposed ideological function of the field for the ruling elite and not its declining intellectual vitality. Miller, Wright, and Dannels (2001) claim to test Sumner's argument and find some empirical support for it. This paper finds Wright et al.'s tests flawed and suggests alternative explanations for their findings. Some implications of this issue for the current state of the field are discussed. While the sociology of deviance has declined in theoretical vitality since the 1960s and 1970s, it leaves a legacy of influence in other fields, it remains an ongoing academic enterprise, it still attracts a fair number of students, and its textbooks are cited in the field of sociology. [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]

The power which narratives of mystical experience exert on our thinking derives from the central place of emotions within them. These narratives are crucial to the phenomenon of healing: not as cure, but as a means of accepting, understanding, and minimising suffering. Contemporary religious thought draws heavily on social theory but this paper shows not only that “mystical” emotions have escaped the attention of sociology, but also that sociology is unable to provide an adequate account of them or of their place in overcoming pain of all kinds. It does so by comparing three very different books about the emotions: Deborah Lupton's The Emotional Self (1998), Jack Barbalet's Emotions, Social Theory and Social Structure (1998), and the fourteenth century Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. The last of these illuminates what the other two call “the extra-discursive, embodied and unconscious” dimensions of emotions. The first part of the paper makes a general comparison and the second turns to a range of specific emotions: shame and guilt, sorrow and depression, anger, fear, and anxiety, and the positive emotions of joy, love, and desire. This comparison helps explain how people live with chronic suffering and transcend it. It also shows that sociology, by making society itself a “thing” and elevating it to God-like status, cannot provide the critique of theology which was one of its original intentions, nor fully account for the healing influence of “mystical” phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to explain why and how the middle class in Korea decisively joined the democratic movement in 1987 by drawing special attention to the role played by the “middling grassroots” (MG). MG was formed out of the common experience of student activism and contesting subcultures, which were widely dispersed over Korean university campuses during the 1980s. In addition, this paper examines the contrasting views on the Korean democratic transition by Bruce Cumings and Adam Przeworski. This substantive analysis attempts to show how such discord can be resolved by working out a mediating variable between action and social structure. It is suggested that the concept of MG is a good example of such a mediating variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies some deficiencies in the theory of value as found in traditional economics, specifically the fallacy of absolute value and its spurious resolution that treats prices as a priori parameters rather than as variables to be explained. One is a fallacy of omission, the other of commission, which together comprise the epistemological paradox of the modern neoclassical theory of value. This paper advances a different, sociological approach to economic value or market prices as a possible corrective to this paradox. Such an approach has origins in sociological economics or economic sociology, the main premise of which is that social influences in the economy affect the formation of value or price. This paper therefore explores the seldom examined social underpinnings of price formation and of market processes generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that a satisfying structural account must be distinguished from an account that simply focuses on structures, paradoxically, a sound structural account must pay close attention to actors. Consideration of specific accounts of the Nicaraguan revolution supports this claim. The paper also suggests the plausibility of the observe argument that agenital accounts of revolution must attend closely to structures. Structural account is defined as one developing the thesis that specific structures have a significant impact on the likelihood of a successful social revolution. This structural thesis is stated in formal terms, particular accounts will differ regarding the specific structures stressed and in the degree of impact upon outcomes attributed to structures. An agenital account, on the other hand, seeks to show that revolutionaries are casually important for the occurrence of revolutions. The two approaches need not be mutually exclusive. In the broad form presented in the paper, the structural and agenital theses may seem toothless. But as soon as a theorist specify the sorts of structures that affect the probability of revolution, the degree to which that probability is structurally influenced or the possible impact of agency upon the probability, it debates on the pre-conditions of revolution.

In this paper I argue that the lack of interest, among analytic moral philosophers, in the contingencies of our moral present, produces an impoverished moral philosophy, unable to address the moral problems and quandaries of ordinary people. What is needed to remedy this is a broadening of the scope of the moral philosopher's thought to include a rich attention to moral phenomena of the present. One such phenomenon, attended to by sociologists and critical journalists over the past few decades, is the contemporary proliferating genre of psychologically oriented self-help literature. I display a range of sociological responses to self-help in order to point out aspects of morality that are made visible in these discussions, whereas they often remain invisible in standard moral philosophy. The aim is not to suggest a specific methodology for including such material into philosophical discussions, but rather to urge philosophers to reconsider the range of materials they attend to in their work, in order to produce a more lively engagement with and understanding of contemporary morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shikake is a design approach that proposes solving problems by inducing spontaneous behavior, rather than by relying on the use of extensive resources or expertise. This paper contributes to the study of Shikake principles and examples by describing a methodology for their formalization in the declarative, logic-based language of Answer Set Prolog (ASP). Modeling qualitative theories and principles such as Shikake in the precise language of ASP can play a significant role in indicating possible areas for their future refinement and improvement, as shown here. Our formalization is used in creating a system, ShAsp, that can automatically determine if a design is a Shikake or not, as illustrated by two examples and one counterexample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the participation by sociologists in several major conferences, mostly held in New York, that focused on issues related to science, democracy and faith between the late 1930s and the early post-World War II period. These events offered sociologists an opportunity to showcase the discipline to leading scholars, public figures, and other intellectuals and public audiences outside the discipline. Amidst widespread uncertainty and a quest for answers to significant social and economic problems, sociologists revealed that they were no more adept than other intellectuals to provide definitive pathways out of potential catastrophe. At the same time, the conferences and related events demonstrated that sociologists had analytical tools and insights that could be useful in framing questions and orientations that were of interest not only to scholar bodies, but also served as potential reference points for social policy and community development. These activities, in helping to legitimize the discipline and reinforce the boundaries within which it operated, did so in a manner that also separated and privileged sociologists, as professionals or experts, from broader publics in ways that narrowed the discipline's main foci and lessened its capacity to adopt more democratic public roles. [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]

Ethnomethodologists (or at least many of them) have been reticent about their theoretical sources and methodological principles. It frequently falls to others to make such matters explicit. In this paper I discuss this silence about theory, but rather than entering the breach by specifying a set of implicit assumptions and principles, I suggest that the reticence is consistent with ethnomethodology‘s distinctive research ‘program‘. The main part of the paper describes the pedagogical exercises and forms of apprenticeship through which Garfinkel and Sacks aimed to develop ethnomethodology as a practice. These efforts were not entirely successful, partly because ethnomethodological ‘practice‘ required an engagement with other fully-fledged practices. Aside from the difficulties of mastering such practices, it was unclear what an ethnomethodological study would add to, or take from, them. Whether successful or not, ethnomethodological research points to the specificity of discourse and action in any given practice which a general theory is bound to misconstrue. Current disputes about cultural constructivist versions of natural science illustrate the problems that arise when the terms of a general theory are used to describe and evaluate specific domains of practice. The paper concludes by recommending ethnomethodology as a way to dissolve an unbridgeable gap between cultural theories and socially located practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study of a psychiatric intervention as an example of an institutional ethnography of psychiatric work. Institutional ethnography, a mode of inquiry outlined by Dorothy Smith (1987), is conceived here as an approach to the analysis of work in institutions as the contingent, local and context-bound insertion of a particular "case" - a patron, a pupil, a client, a patient - into both institutional and other social (e. g. gender, class) relations. The case presented in this paper, shows how a psychiatric factual account is the outcome of a process of the recognition, and/or the production, of "mentionables," followed by the documentary interpretation of mentionables as symptoms. Subsequently it is demonstrated that, and how, the recognition of mentionables depends on non-professional interpretations which by their nature express other social (such as gender, class, etc.) relations. This description of psychiatric diagnostic work is produced by means of a method of discourse analysis that consists of the juxtaposition of the various institutional texts (the two reports) with the transcript of the interview. An analysis of only the interview data would undoubtedly have resulted in some insights about psychiatric interviewing but would have shown neither how the interview functioned as a stage in the institutional process of (re)writing reports nor how ideological evaluations entered the diagnostic process. On the other hand, an analysis of only the two reports would have resulted in some insights about psychiatric reporting but would not have shown how these reports were produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay describes institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, and introduces a collection of papers which make distinctive contributions to the development of this novel form of investigation. Institutional ethnography is presented as a research strategy which emerges from Smith‘s wide-ranging explorations of the problematic of the everyday world. Smith‘s conception of the everyday world as problematic involves a critical departure from the concepts and procedures of more conventional sociologies. She argues for an alternative sociology which begins with the standpoint of the actor in everyday life, rather than from within a professional sociological discourse aligned with the society‘s ruling institutions. The familiar sociologies of everyday life do not suffice for this purpose, since they deal with local settings and social worlds, but stop short of examining how these are knitted into broader forms of social organization. In contrast, institutional ethnography examines how the scenes of everyday life are shaped by forms of social organization which cannot be fully grasped from within those scenes. The principal tasks of institutional ethnography include describing the coordination of activities in the everyday world, discovering how ideological accounts define those activities in relation to institutional imperatives, and examining the broader social relations in which local sites of activity are embedded. The four papers which follow demonstrate that specific contributions to institutional ethnography can be made in relation to a wide array of topics, methods, and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the fragmentary nature of research findings and conceptual models, the Durkheimian legacy remains undervalued in contemporary spatial theory. The paper addresses this neglect by proposing a unified Durkheimian model of place which can be applied to case history and comparative analyses. It draws together the fragmented insights of Durkheimian theory to characterize four elementary forms of place: sacred, profane, liminal and mundane. These place/space identities are maintained and transformed through rituals and narratives which depend upon contingent human actions for their sustenance. The paper concludes with an extended case study which deploys the model to explain the changing meanings of the site of the Bastille (Paris, France) over the past two centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks what a sociology of modernity could sensibly look life if it existed. Briefly, the paper follows Agnes Heller both in acknowledging the deep-seated crisis of representation and in insisting on the possibility to strive for an understanding of entire social formations over long periods of time. It starts by highlighting two features of this end of an era literature. First, in describing contemporary society the ephemeral, the fugitive, the fleeting, the contingent nature of the postmodern condition is emphasized. The present is distinguished from the past by being more in motion, less fixed, what was bound is set free, what was orderly and perspicuous becomes chaotic and undecipherable, what was taken for granted and for undoubtedly real has to be questioned and, often enough, assumes an air of pervasive unreality. The second part of this article is devoted to an assessment of the theoretical significance of postmodernity. As in the case of the historical claim, the author argues that there is a considerable significance, though often less in the exact terms of such works but rather in terms of a sensitizing with regard to issues that are neglected or repressed in a social science that often was all too modern.

In this paper I have attempted to present, without too much violation of their original intent by my own interjections, a balance of viewpoints between those who maintain that creative sociology is conservative and those who claim that it is revolutionary (a) in the Kuhnian sense of paradigm change and (b) in the political sense.
Is it possible, on the basis of the fairly representative sample of views presented here to answer the question posed in the title of this paper: "Creative Sociology": Conservative or Revolutionary? Do the spokesmen for each side provide adequate evidence upon which one may decide? With regard to the issue of paradigm change, the answer is "no." If, as appears to be the case, a group of theorists claim to have developed a revolutionary paradigm, which will replace existing paradigms, then the burden of responsibility for support of their claim must rest on them. So far, they have not provided support which makes it possible to accept or deny their claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human interaction and communication involve space in multiple ways. This paper examines the spatial and interactional order of a covertly video-taped police interrogation. When the participants enter the interrogation room and become engaged in the interrogation process, the room itself is a constraint and a resource for interaction. While interacting within a built environment, the participants appropriate their material surroundings in ways that constitute a spatial order and make possible certain arguments. This paper examines how the physical structure of the interrogation room is differentially appropriated, used, and filled in by the participants‘ territorial and postural manoeuvers over the course of their interaction; and how the spatial structures thus created by the bodily appropriation of the physical locale are subsequently formulated by talk and thereby used as a metaphorical resource to frame the participants‘ situated experience. Through this embedded process, the interrogators move the suspect toward confession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that the publication of the lectures of sociologist Harvey Sacks has been started by the journal "Human Studies," which begins a process which will eventually make publicly available all, or virtually all, of the lectures by Sacks on conversation and related topics in social science. Most of the lectures in this larger corpus were originally delivered to classes at the University of California, first to sociology classes at the University of California in Los Angeles campus, and then after 1968 to classes in the School of Social Science at the Irvine campus of the University. When he wrote papers, Sacks imposed standards of formality and precision that were extremely hard for him to meet to his own satisfaction. Most of the papers he published on his own were work-ups of lectures, for example, the paper on story-telling, the paper on puns, etc. He drafted on his own as papers he was never sufficiently satisfied with to publish. Sacks' 1964-65 lectures can be furnished two sorts of intellectual reference points, one is his own intellectual development and ones in the intellectual context around him. Several features of these landmarks in Sacks' intellectual terrain, and of the early lectures, display some of the most potent influences on his thinking at that time. These lectures, then, have more than merely historical interest as embryonic versions of later developed work. These series of lectures began a most remarkable, inventive and productive presentation of a strikingly new vision of how to study human sociality.

The aim of the author in this paper is to examine patterns of collaboration more systematically by analyzing 45 multi-party arguments out of a total of 75 that were gleaned from videotapes of unsupervised reading groups in a first-grade classroom. Fifty-four children from eight groups in three classrooms of one elementary school participated in the study. The subjects were Caucasian, native speakers of English and from middle class American families. This paper has aimed to remedy a neglect of multi-party disputes by addressing how those involved in a two-party argument may collaborate with others who are co-present. Collaboration is a complex phenomenon. In the first place, one have seen that disputes, although initially produced by two parties, do not consist simply of two sides. Rather, given one party's displayed position, stance, or claim, another party can produce opposition by simply aligning against that position or by aligning with a counterposition. This means that parties can dispute a particular position for different reasons and by different means. It is therefore possible for several parties to serially oppose another's claim without achieving collaboration. A second complexity, then, is just that collaboration is a negotiated phenomenon.

Erving Goffman had a fullness of perspective on the social world, an inveterate taste for the texture of social reality. These qualities drew him into the orbit of the linguistic turn, and the companionship of linguists; yet he remained always his own man, as much a critics as anything else. From first to last his own vision of an intact sphere of reality governed his participation. It can be seen in his first paper to signal his involvement in a loose confederation at Berkeley in the early 1960s, one that became the basis of a continuing network of sociolinguistic activity. The paper, The Neglected Situation, was his contribution to a symposium at the 1963 meetings of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco, California, and was published the next year in a special number of the American Anthropologist. In this paper, as in his conversation at the time, Erving welcomed the emerging attention to the social dimension of language, but issued a warning. Research that correlated this or that aspect of speech with this or that aspect of participant and setting would entail an infinite ingress. One would always be entering upon the social reality of speech without ever encompassing it. States of talk have their own constraints and configurations that are not reducible to partial correlation.

The central argument of this paper has been that the epistemic structure of science cannot be adequately captured, let alone sufficiently understood, independently of its social, political, and institutional aspects. The argument has also been that for the most part, the major traditions of science studies have tried to isolate and to study the system of science in a reductionistic and piecemeal fashion. This situation will not be corrected by merely developing more new hybrid disciplines, although this too is called for. Neither will this situation be corrected by developing specific and detailed research hypotheses from models outlined in this paper. What is called for is a far greater sense of awareness and appreciation of the fact that science is, above all, a holistic phenomenon. Unless one is first aware and appreciative of this, it is unlikely that one will frame the kind of research hypotheses necessary to search for the interaction effects in the first place.