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360 Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 42, Heft 4, August 2013, S. 360-361 Mitteilung Call for Papers "Organizational Consequences of Aging and Declining Populations" XVIII ISA World Congress of Sociology. From a theoretical point of view, especially Organizational Demography and Organizational Ecology seem to offer promising perspectives on these questions. Whereas Organizational Demography addresses demographic change in individual organizations, the Organizational Ecology analyses change in organizational populations. [Extracted from the article]

Pragmatics research has been following two separate lines: the cognitive-philosophical line and the sociocultural-interactional line. Joining recent efforts of integration in pragmatics research, this paper reinterprets from a socio-cognitive perspective Grice's theory of conversation (the Cooperative Principle with attendant maxims). The paper aims to incorporate social considerations into the theory, in the hope of enhancing its explanatory potential for information exchange in real-life discourse contexts. Focusing on cooperation as process, this paper examines Grice's theory of conversation in connection with his theory of meaning and looks into the social-normative basis of the conversational behavior predicted by Grice. The conversational maxims can be characterized as socio-cognitive in the sense of being both cognitive and normative. They are normative expectations whose breach commits the speaker to interpretive and social consequences. The maxims used to be thought of in terms of a simple dichotomy: they are either observed or not observed, and non-observance has often been equated with non-cooperation. The paper draws attention to the fact that non-observance comes in different types (violating, opting out, flouting, and so on). It matters communicatively and extra-communicatively which type the non-observance falls into, as different types of non-observance have different interpretive and social consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity is among of the most common explanations for political outcomes. Despite this, studies of politics often fail to clearly conceptualize or define identity, leading to tremendous variation in the use and application of the concept, much of which is at odds with fundamental tenets of research on the topic. Decades of research in psychology, sociology, and political psychology inform a family of related theories referred to as "Social Identity Theory" (SIT) which demonstrates that identity requires three conditions in order to affect attitudes and behavior: cognitive classification, psychological attachment to the group, and a social context that causes a group identity to become salient. In this paper, we build on these conditions to develop a typology to help identify when and for whom identity should be politically consequential. Using national election data from 2012, 2016 and 2020 we show that failing to differentiate between these concepts, particularly what we call Descriptive and Substantive identity, can lead to mistaken inferences about the behavior of identity groups in politics. Applying insights from SIT also promises to help advance an improved understanding of questions of race, representation, and intersectionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Die externe Begutachtung ist ein wesentliches Element des Berufungsverfahrens, das bei der Beurteilung der Legitimität der von der Berufungskommission erstellten Listenreihung der Bewerber:innen von kommissionsexternen Akteur:innen herangezogen wird. Mittels eines explorativen Forschungsprozesses wird die Frage beantwortet, wie die Kommission diese Legitimation herzustellen versucht. Es wird gezeigt, dass die Kommission unterschiedlichen Maßstäben der Legitimität unterliegt. Die Einhaltung des rechtlichen Rahmens dient der formalen Legitimation der Entscheidung; die inhaltliche Legitimation wird über die Einholung und Berücksichtigung der Fachexpertise hergestellt. Ferner wird gezeigt, wie diese Anforderungen über Praktiken der Kommission im Umgang mit dem Bewertungsprozess erfüllt werden. Die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse werden unter Einbeziehung bewertungssoziologischer Überlegungen diskutiert. External reviews are an essential element of the professorial appointment procedure, which is intended to support the decision-making process of the appointment committee. However, external reviews are also used by university bodies external to the committee to assess the legitimacy of the appointment committee's shortlist of candidates. Based on an exploratory research process, this paper examines how the appointment committee attempts to establish this legitimacy. It is shown that the committee is subject to different measures of legitimacy. On the one hand, the appointment committee must comply with the legal framework in order to formally legitimize the decision. On the other hand, the decision must be substantively legitimized by obtaining and considering the external reviews. The paper then reveals how these requirements are met through practices of the appointment committee in handling the valuation process. The findings are discussed in the light of sociology of valuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introductory article describes the theme of the papers featured in the volume 93, 1992 issue of the "International Journal of Sociology of Language." The papers are devoted to description of the processes of obsolescence and death in Native American language communities as opposed to some form of salvage description of the languages themselves. The author of this article notes that each of the papers is a fine example of the description of some aspect of language obsolescence, and some may well become classics in their own right.

This paper presents current work in philosophy of science in practice that focusses on practices that are detrimental to the production of scientific knowledge. The paper argues that philosophy of scientific malpractice both provides an epistemological complement to research ethics in understanding scientific misconduct and questionable research practices, and provides a new approach to how training in responsible conduct of research can be implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This introductory article discusses the theme of the papers featured in the volume 85, 1990 issue of the "International Journal of Sociology of Language." It is noted that Caribbean languages have been the subject of considerable study during the last three decades, the focus being creoles which draw the bulk of their lexicons from one or another European language. The present selection of papers maintains the said focus while extending the interest to retentions from languages of Africa and India brought to the region by slaves and indentured laborers and yielding to the pressures of creole and standard language alike in the territories represented.

Violence as a means of threatening the life and health of others is the foundation of power structures. According to a system theoretical understanding, however, physical violence becomes the basis for the power medium only when it is potentialized as a possibility for the political system. This potential threat contributes to the exodus of the political system through the formation of political organizations. This paper examines this hypothesis about violence and the political system from a historical, sociological perspective. I analyzed semantically the significance of Polizei, whose scope is said to have been limited from various governance practices, including welfare to the maintenance of security since the 19th century, in the development of labor protection policy, which was a precondition for the formation of the modern German welfare state. On the one hand, the work of the police in social policy was clearly distinguished from welfare on the level of political semantics; on the other hand, the appearance of other professionals made it possible for the police to continue to be involved in a wide range of social policy. These empirical findings show that the semantic differentiation of the political system with the potentialization of violence does not mean irrelevance and indifference to the environment; rather, it expands the scope of interest and makes it possible to relate to a more diverse range of subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from a non-dualistic view on embodiment this paper approaches the relationship between cognition, gesture, language, and cultural practice by analyzing the gestural construction of the cultural concept jeitinho in talk-in-interaction. After introducing our phenomenological view on embodiment and gesture in interaction, we give a short overview of some main studies broaching the issue of cultural matters before presenting the concept jeitinho as delineated in historical, sociological, and anthropological approaches. In the empirical section, we offer a fine-grained analysis of four videosequences taken from a conversation about jeitinho between two Brazilian and two German professors who have lived in Brazil for more than 20 years. We show that the gestural style of both Brazilian professors differs significantly from the gestural engagement of the German professors since they schematically embody a sinuous gesture style and construe the cultural concept jeitinho as a qualium by adopting a character viewpoint while the German participants remain observers regarding their gestural performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This introductory paper serves two main purposes. The first is to review the epistomological and methodological underpinnings of economic approaches to language issues, and to propose a definition of the economics of language as a field of research in its own right. The second purpose of this paper is to introduce the contributions gathered in this issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language -- the first instance ever, to my knowledge, of a scientific journal devoting an entire issue to the work of economists on language matters. Language and economic variables influence one another in a number of ways, a fact which inspires much of the existing research. However, the core paradigm of economics, which focuses on resource allocation, can be applied to the study of a broad range of language problems, even if economic variables play no part in them. This generates a definition of the economics of language emphasizing the use of economic concepts and tools in the study of relationships featuring linguistic variables. The paper advocates the use of such concepts and tools, while also stressing two important points. First, researchers need to exercise caution when applying the principles of economic modeling to language issues -- while such circumspection should be advocated in all forms of social research, it is crucial when studying language. Second, the endeavor must necessarily be an interdisciplinary one, precisely because of the exceedingly complex nature of language, both as a strictly linguistic and as a social phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section comments on the article, Levels of Analysis in Sociolinguistic Explanation: Bilingual Code Switching, Social Relations, and Domain Therapy, by L. B. Breitborde. The explicit aim of the paper is to reexamine the connections between code switching and situation. More specifically, the author addresses himself to the problem of how an abstract social system may be related to the individual's action. He does this by examining studies of Jan-Petter Blom and John J. Gumperz, and Joshua A. Fishman. Almost half of the paper is devoted to a summary and critical discussion of the Blom and Gumperz paper, while the rest is divided between an account of Fishman's paper and Breitborde's own work. After his initial summary of Blom and Gumperz's paper, Breitborde addresses himself to the concept of network, which he sees as being of crucial importance in Gumperz's work generally, as indeed it is. The main interest of those network studies to which Breitborde's paper refers is that they are mainly structural. With a view to explaining social behavior, they concentrate not on the social or personal attributes of the individuals in a social network, but rather on the character of the linkages which bind them to each other.

This paper presents a portion of the results obtained from the research project "Law in Literature: the representation of judges in literary narratives." The role of the magistrate in the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, written in 1886 by Leo Tolstoy, is discussed following the methodological premises of law in literature and the theoretical notion of "models of judges" formulated by François Ost. Thus, a part of the history of tsarist law and of Tolstoy's conflictual relationship to legal science is provided and reconstructed. Finally, this paper proposes an analytical reflection on the importance of this nineteenth-century novella for the comprehension of practical and interpretative problems within modern law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After briefly outlining Bernstein's personal and educational history, the paper goes on to review the scope of his work over the past 30 years, his theoretical contribution and his position among colleagues in the post-WWII era of British sociology. There follows a more detailed examination of the main tenets of his theory, pointing out that Bernstein's strategy was to present his ideas in the form of dichotomies, such as that between modes of socialization as personal or positional, and of linguistic codes as elaborated or restricted. The paper suggests that while critical issues in educational thinking and in sociology varied through the course of Bernstein's career, such as the study of socialization and its consequences for social reproduction, his dichotomizing remained a constant strategy throughout his writings. I end by briefly referring to my own work that offers some possible alternatives to Bernstein's dichotomies, concluding, however, that the enduring quality of Bernstein owes not a little to the appeal of his overly sharp theoretical distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper contributes to the study of responsibility as a social fact (Durkheim), combining research from social psychology, philosophy, and sociology. The pivotal concept is social reflection that serves to better understand how responsibility is performed in different social situations. The paper presents an experiment, providing evidence for, inter alia, the central complexity hypothesis: Under a complex perspective (implying increased social reflection) more responsibility is performed than under a less complex perspective (implying less social reflection). The paper concludes with considerations on the principle and unity of responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents a list of books and journals related to sociolinguistics.

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The subject of this study is work orientations, their change over time, as well as their distribution among the economically active citizens of Serbia. Particular attention is paid to work-motivated spatial mobility. The aim of this study is twofold: firstly, to determine which work orientations have been the most important for economically active individuals in the period of consolidation of the capitalist system in Serbia and to explore and explain the changes in their choices that have occurred since 2000; and secondly, to examine whether there are differences in prioritizing work orientations among actors with various social characteristics. The method of comparative analysis used in this paper was possible due to survey data collected during longitudinal research conducted by the Institute for Sociological Research in Belgrade over the last twenty years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Zeitschrift für Soziologie is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

While many studies from analytical sociology apply agent-based modeling to analyze the transformational mechanisms linking the micro to the macro level, we hold the view that both situational and action formation mechanisms can rather be unveiled by means of more advanced quantitative methods. By focusing on selective exposure to quality newspapers, our study has both an analytical and a substantive aim. First., our analytical aim is to amend the psychological mechanism of avoiding cognitive dissonance by social mechanisms allowing postulates on how the selective exposure effect might vary by particular social groups. Second, our substantive aim is to set the ground for a longitudinal analysis of selective exposure to quality papers by placing these social mechanisms in the context of social and cultural change. By referring to hypothetical data, we illustrate which kind of (multilevel) moderator effects would have to hold if our hypotheses were true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article introduces the topics featured in the September 1989 issue of "International Journal of the Sociology of Language." This issue focuses on the rich linguistic heritage of Latinos in the U.S. The Spanish-speaking population in the U.S. presents a complex sociolinguistic situation which should be the object of further study. It is precisely the growth and diffusion of the Spanish-speaking population throughout the U.S., coupled with increased use of Spanish in bilingual education programs, voting services, and the courts, that has caused the criticisms raised by supporters of the English-only movement in the last decade.

This section comments on the article, Levels of Analysis in Sociolinguistic Explanation: Bilingual Code Switching, Social Relations, and Domain Therapy, by L. B. Breitborde. The paper is a scholarly and stimulating contribution to the sociology of language. At the same time, it does not quite achieve its ambitious aim. It was a pleasure to read, and it is at the same time by no means difficult to disagree with one or two fairly substantial points made by Breitborde. The paper is stimulating inasmuch as it raises a central issue in the sociology of language. It shows that a seemingly limited sociolinguistic problem cannot be properly understood, much less solved, without reference to a social theory of language and, indeed, to general social theory. It is unlikely that anyone would be inclined to disagree with this proposition in general principle. The difficulty lies in the application of the principle to concrete issues. Breitborde's paper has the great merit that it does not merely express laudable sentiments but proceeds to apply the principle to the discussion of bilingualism. Evidently there can be no sensible objection to Breitborde's assumption that bilingual code switching is a communicative act.

Texts are products of systemic functional choices determined by contextual factors. To analyze how the context affects writers' lexico-grammatical choices, this paper attempts to study ditransitive patterns in the research article genre across medical science and sociology, a choice explained by the gap in the literature of genre analysis of ditransitivity. To this end, ditransitive patterns are quantified in a corpus of 245 academic articles from medical science and sociology published in 2011. The analysis shows that the object–prepositional object pattern dominates both disciplines, which can be explained by its being a compactness device enabling writers to observe the communicative functions of the research article genre. Across the two disciplines, the higher frequency of clausal patterns in sociology than medical science reveals the explicitness and persuasiveness of writers in sociology, which may be attributed to the different research methods, and the nature of knowledge accumulation in each discipline. These findings lead to the conclusion that the choices of ditransitive patterns are determined by the generic features of the research article genre and disciplinary specificities, though they are also influenced by the different research topics across disciplines and the category-selectional properties of ditransitives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Was ist der ‚Fall' in empirischen Fallstudien? Jenseits gebräuchlicher Handbuchdefinitionen schlagen wir vor, die (Re-)Konstruktion von Fällen als eine kontinuierliche Anstrengung zu verstehen und als casing zu charakterisieren. In diesem Beitrag heben wir die Rolle von casings für den Forschungsprozess hervor und fragen, wie, wann und warum in sozialwissenschaftlicher Forschung ‚gefällt' wird—Fragen, die ein pragmatisches Verständnis davon eröffnen, was Fälle und casings eigentlich sind und was sie leisten können. Anhand einer Diskussion zweier klassischer Fallstudien unterscheiden wir zwei Formen des casings (theoretisch vs. empirisch geleitetes casing) und stellen ein prozessuales Fallverständnis vor, das den gegenwärtigen Diskurs über ‚Prozessuale Soziologie' und ‚sozialwissenschaftliches Theoretisieren' methodologisch komplementieren möchte. What is the 'case' in case study research? Venturing beyond textbook explications of case as a technical term, we conceive the (re-)construction of cases as a continuous activity that we refer to as casing. In this paper, we focus on the role of casing in research processes, analyzing how, when, and why researchers invoke cases. Answering these questions affords a pragmatic understanding of what cases, and casings, actually are (and are good for). Re-reading two classic case studies, we distinguish different approaches of casing—theoretically guided casing and empirically guided casing—and propose a notion of casing that foregrounds the processual character of social scientific research, thereby making a methodological contribution to current discussions of processuality in social theory and discussions of theorizing as a process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though Niklas Luhmann's general sociology of law has made a substantial impact upon socio-legal scholarship in the Anglophone world in recent years, his first book on the subject to be translated into English has received relatively little attention. The paper presents this as something of an anomaly by highlighting both the relative accessibility of the book and the way in which it has proved foundational for systems theoretical accounts of law in world society. In tracing the book's reception in both Britain and North America, the paper identifies the general problems of timing and communication the book faced. But it also considers whether the relatively humanist undertones of the book's focus on the development of law from the interaction of individuals proves unsettling to the now relatively more accepted concept of law as autopoiesis. The paper concludes, however, that it is this which should recommend the book to a contemporary audience, as offering a more nuanced understanding of Luhmann's sociology of law and the potential contained therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an announcement for the Bundesfachschaftentagung der Soziologie, which will take place at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin, Germany, in November 2007.

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Copyright of Zeitschrift fur Wirtschaftspolitik is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Soziologie is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Soziologie is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Research in linguistic typology is providing us with ever-improving insights into the range of structures available in human languages. However, we do not yet have adequate explanations for why, of all possible structures available to human languages, particular languages avail themselves of particular structures, and not others. An interesting question is therefore: is the distribution of typological characteristics over languages simply random - or can we say something more intelligent about this distribution than just that? This paper sets itself the goal of attempting to begin to sort out what might be some of the social determinants of linguistic patterning. It argues that there is a prima facie case for examining the hypothesis that certain types of linguistic structures are more commonly associated with certain types of social structure than others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author of this paper attempts at verifying selected aspects of Basil Bernstein's sociolinguistic theory on the Polish language. Bernstein's basic hypothesis deals with the functioning of two speaking systems within one ethnic language, the appearance of which is conditioned by the social structure. In this hypothesis three elements urgently require more precise definitions: 1. the mechanism of the social conditioning of the two codes; 2. their linguistic nature; and 3. the mechanism of linking the linguistic features and the psycho-cognitive features of the two codes.