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The article responds to sociologist Andy Pickering's comments, partly because of the inherent intellectual stimulation of exchanging ideas with such a distinguished colleague, but partly also because of the need for much greater interchange between the two fields, the sociology of environment and technology, on the one hand and the sociology of science on the other. Pickering's comments raise three important points about the analysis of Iron Mountain, Michigan. First, he praises what he calls papers symmetry in noting the importance of physical⁄environmental as well as social factors in understanding social outcomes. Second, he argues that people have not taken this point far enough, in large part because, he believes, the social is not sufficiently at stake in papers. Third, he argues that a fruitful antidote would be to trace the evolution of actual practices, in detail, over time.

The goal of this paper is twofold. The first is to point out that American sociologists, as indicated in textbooks and published scholarly papers, often confuse the history of sociology as a profession with the history of social thought, so that the first is totally absorbed in the second with detrimental effects to both. The second goal concerns demonstrating that our understanding of sociology's growth in the U.S. during the late 19th century is not as accurate as it might be were documents of the period examined more carefully than has typically been the! case. As an example of this faulty historiography, the widely held contention that the University of Chicago sociology department was "the first" to be founded in the U.S. is shown to be untrue. A case is made for Frank Blackmar's efforts at the University of Kansas as prior to Small's, and in some ways equally fascinating regarding the scope and definition of the discipline in its earliest days. The point, then, of the paper is to help reinterest American sociologists in the history of their profession as distinct from the history of its ideology or theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a sociologists' reflection of a sociologist on qualitative field research. Reflections will include some methodological and epistemological considerations that are connected with field work, while building the realness of the description and conclusions, i.e. constructing the quality of qualitative research. The intellectual process of doing research will be characterized by analysis of: 1. description of investigated reality (tales of the field), 2. analytical process, 3. usage of commonsense research procedures (so called triangulation procedures), which are used in the field by the researcher and during analysis or writing a research report to adequately "re - present" researched reality. The three above mentioned stages of representation of reality are interwoven to create one complex intellectual process, which is called "field research". The quality of qualitative research is the intellectual process where some procedures are used to create the accountability of research conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the gradual emergence of the theory of the New Class out of sociologist Alvin Gouldner's prior work. The most striking feature of Gouldner's work, taken as a whole is its iconoclasm. Thus, he rejected professionalism in sociology, as well as the party line in Marxism and objectivism in them both. His dichotomous definition of intellectuals in The Future of Intellectuals, as both a speech community and as a cultural bourgeoise is an attempt to express this double identity at a general theoretical level. Gouldner's assessment of the repression of Marxism is implied in his early work on bureaucracy. On the whole, even given his iconoclasm, Gouldner remains loyal to the ideal of a scientific and effective sociology. By the late sixties, however, Gouldner had begun to distinguish two theoretical traditions in Marxism. One source of the reflexive impulse is doubtless the perception of a scientifically inexplicable gap between available data and accepted theory. He first begins to examine the connection between social theory and the profession of sociology in a critical way in his well-known Anti-Minotaur essay. His specific contribution to the New Class theory is his attempt to fuse this rich tradition with the sociology of professions, the sociology of science, the thesis of the managerial revolution, human capital theory and a theory of linguistic segregation.

The meaning of sociology as a vocation, as seen through the career of Carroll 0. Clark is the focus of this paper. As the chairperson of the Department of Sociology at the University of Kansas for over three decades, Clark had an extraordinary influence on the shape of the department at Kansas and the discipline in the Midwest. Through an examination of his career at Kansas, it is shown that sociology for Clark was indeed a calling a calling to which he devoted passionate enthusiasm and unwavering commitment. Also explored is Clark's role as a public intellectual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]