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This paper provides an overview of current debates and themes in literature relating to place-based stigma, including a reflection on terminology use. Generally, we rely on Loïc Wacquant's framing of territorial stigma as a feature of advanced marginality. In this paper, drawing on my own research in Toxteth, Liverpool, I offer a critique of the Wacquantian approach, highlighting the limits of the advanced marginality framing of place-based stigma. The paper considers the global reach of placed-based stigma and the temporal aspect of stigma that must be taken into consideration when we consider how stigma is currently applied to communities. A key feature of this paper is the foregrounding of the concepts of 'core' and 'event' stigma, which have generally been a feature of literature in business and management. I argue that our understanding of how communities become stigmatized can be enhanced by framing place-based stigma in this temporal sense. Understanding how stigma becomes adhered to particular spaces, places and landscapes is necessary if we want to comprehend how this stigma transfers to the communities inhabiting these geographies. This paper suggests that we must look to the past, and to the voices who shape the past, in order to understand the present and to plan for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nothing puzzles sociologists of religion more than the reasons and the patterns behind religious change. In the literature on secularization processes, it is broadly accepted that ongoing modernization has undermined many of the pillars of institutional religions, leading to widespread religious decline. While a considerable body of research investigates the "why(s)" of this decline, the main focus of this paper is on the "how." Drawing on CARPE, a harmonized dataset concerning church attendance with almost 2 million observations spanning over 40 years in 39 European countries, this article disentangles the contributions of period change and cohort replacement to the general religious decline. It shows that this decline reflects a real population dynamic based on generational replacement. It is not historical events or developments affecting everyone that undermine religion: new and less religious cohorts are replacing old and more religious ones. Like many other population dynamics, this process is described by an S-shaped curve and applies—with different speeds and levels—to almost all the European countries considered herein. These findings suggest that the effects of the processes of modernization on the mechanisms of religious socialization should be scrutinized more carefully when studying the reasons behind religious decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is not one historiography of post-war social science but two: one focused on the sociologists, the other on the people the sociologists studied. This second historiography peels back the abstractions of social scientists to reconstruct the everyday lives and the 'vernacular' speech of those studied. John Goldthorpe's paper in this roundtable provides an opportunity to reflect on the historical concerns, methods, and future of the new literature on post-war sociology and social transcripts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophical arguments regarding academic freedom can sometimes appear removed from the real conflicts playing out in contemporary universities. This paper focusses on a set of issues at the front line of these conflicts, namely, questions regarding sex, gender and gender identity. We document the ways in which the work of academics has been affected by political activism around these questions and, drawing on our respective disciplinary expertise as a sociologist and a philosopher, elucidate the costs of curtailing discussion on fundamental demographic and conceptual categories. We discuss some philosophical work that addresses the conceptual distinction between academic freedom and free speech and explore how these notions are intertwined in significant ways in universities. Our discussion elucidates and emphasises the educational costs of curtailing academic freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author presents various topics published in the Winter 1952-53 issue of the journal "Public Opinion Quarterly." In the first paper published in the issue, Paul F. Lazarsfeld expresses the hope of American sociologists that international communications research can help to fill certain methodological and substantive gaps which have not yet been successfully bridged in the domestic sphere. He stresses particularly the opportunities open in this new field for bringing social researchers and policy makers closer together in their endeavors in the area of social progress. The reader may look at this paper as an expression of mature speculation about the opportunities, hopes, and dangers in the new field. In the next two sections, the author moves into the work-a-day realm, encountering the people who, in spite of all the handicaps of an ill-defined field, unproven methods, and shortage of trained personnel, have gone ahead and contributed substantively to international communications research. In the section on "Techniques" some very pertinent problems of methodology are frankly stated. The issue is concluded by a short report on the first meeting of the Committee on International Communications Research, which took place during the last annual convention of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.

This paper argues that when sociologists study religious experience we cannot study "experiencing" -- religious experience in real time and its physical, mental, and emotional constituents -- and therefore must study retrospective accounts -- linguistic representations -- of religious experiences. It is in the nature of experiencing anti its linguistic expression that the two are loosely coupled and therefore we do not study phenomenological descriptions of experiences but how an experience is made meaningful. On this basis existing studs of religious experience are criticized, and an alternative, narrative approach to studying religious experience which is sensitive to its unique ontology is elaborated. The paper concludes with some brief suggestions for applying the narrative approach to studying the meaning of religious experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's response to the comments made by sociologists Walter Gove and Michael Swafford, to his article "Sex Differences in the Use of Psychiatric Outpatient Facilities," published in the December issue of the journal "Social Forces." Gove and Swafford claim that neither the data reported in our paper nor the more general literature supports the view that women have a greater likelihood of seeking psychiatric help than men when self-defined degree of impairment is controlled. According to the author, in the student data it is quite clear that women have a higher probability of seeking psychiatric help than men with the same levels of self-defined distress. No complicated analysis is required to demonstrate this fact. Moreover, according to the author, Gove and Swafford do document serious errors in the log-linear analyses reported in our original paper, analyses which tried to estimate the extent to which one particular aspect of propensity to seek help, an index of willingness to seek, plays a part in the greater probability of women than men seeking help at comparable problem levels.

This article appraises the book ""Atomic Power Development." Law and Contemporary Problems." This is a symposium by ten authors, each of whom is interested in some legal or social science aspect of nuclear energy. The separate contributions are diverse, ranging over the basic technical situation, the role of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, democratic control, public investment, public power, patent aspects, the role of the states, and foreign policy, all in relation to atomic power development. Despite this diversity, there is inevitably a considerable overlap of discussion in related articles. There is also substantial agreement on the technical and social facts but, as might be expected, the interpretation of these facts is not uniform and reflects variations in the authors' separate viewpoints. Sociologists will find the volume under review somewhat apart from their usual professional interests. Nevertheless, there is much basic material here for students of social change and of the impact of innovation on social structures.

The article presents various letters of sociologist Albion W. Small to his associate Lester F. Ward on the present state of sociology, and on the role that sociologists were playing in this earlier period. In one of the letter, Small suggests Ward that they would better reprint their 4th lecture from the journal "American Anthropologist." Small has quoted that they have reached a time in which it is scientific strategy to deal in a very elementary way with some rudimentary principles. In an another letter, Small suggests that their article on Anthropology should be omitted, on the ground that it had already been published. In one of the letter, Small assures Ward that he has received his papers and has left orders for the title to be arranged according to Ward's suggestion, viz., "Contributions to Social Philosophy." Ward adds that he has also ordered the Chapter-title for their second paper "Sociology and Cosmology," to be put on the cover of the journal but the full title to be put on cover of reprints.

This article explores the roots of the characterization of John Stuart Mill as a 'Neo‐Malthusian'. Making extensive use of the Norman E. Himes Papers, held at the Countway Library of Medicine, it shows that Himes, a U.S. sociologist and committed birth control campaigner in the inter‐war period, framed a characterization of Mill that endures to this day. The article demonstrates how and why Himes repeatedly took his arguments 'beyond the facts', partly in response to a dispute with the British birth control campaigner Marie Stopes, and established the practice of referring to Mill as a 'Neo‐Malthusian'. The article concludes by arguing that the term impedes more than it aids our understanding and Mill scholars would benefit from stripping away decades of accreted interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies ofgovernment that build upon the work of French thinker Michel Foucault have become very influential for criminological and sociological research and theorizing. However, because Foucault's archaeological texts—those prior to 1975—have, in large part, been neglected, many currents within his work that can be used to reformulate, strengthen and extend the analytic of government for the production of criminological knowledge have been left unexplored. This paper attends to the conception of indirect rule elaborated on in Foucault's archaeological texts and to how the ontologicalposition elaborated there is sympathetic to realist metatheory. The paper advances a post-empiricist and realist informed analytic of government that holds government to be a stratified process concerning more than the empirically apprehendable outcomes of management techniques, forms of social action and expertise, indirect mechanisms of rule, socio-political objectives, and the proximity of authorities from regulatory objects. In retrieving the neglected archaeological Foucault and illustrating the realist currents within his work, the paper provides some ‘theoretical preconditions’ and ‘metatheoretical coherence’ for future investigations of the institutions, practices, processes and objects of social ordering and rule that criminologists and sociologists routinely engage with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the key normative issues raised by empirical research into social mobility and meritocracy. Typically, sociologists working in this area are motivated by a concern with matters of social justice and equality of opportunity, but that concern tends to be rather vague and diffuse, which makes it difficult to assess the normative relevance of their findings. Surveying, in an accessible manner, five issues familiar to political philosophers that clarify the significance of sociologists' results, this paper explains why a regime of `perfect mobility' is not an appropriate benchmark for evaluating the extent to which a society offers its members social justice or equality of opportunity. Some of the mechanisms that produce an association between the social position of parents and children are unobjectionable and would exist even in an altogether just society. Sociologists do not endorse perfect mobility. But neither are they clear about the variety, and normative significance, of the various mechanisms that tend to generate inequalities in mobility chances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a photograph of sociologist Howard W. Odum. The photograph is published in the December 1954 issue of the periodical "Social Forces."

Sociologists and anthropologists often say that personality or individual behavior is the result of learning the culture. Another way to express this idea is to say that personality is a product of social conditioning. The typical sociological bias about personality is a heavy emphasis on social pressures on the individual. This common view in sociology, that personality is essentially a mold filled by social experience, is often conveyed to students by the sociological climate of opinion, an unspoken but communicated assumption. The purpose of this article is to point out some of the implications of the view of individual behavior in terms of a teachable organism moving in an environment in which the right moves are learned through reward and punishment. Briefly, this paper tries to point out that certain other assumptions about personality and culture are to be found associated with or are implicit in the idea that personality results from learning the culture. These assumptions, and the learning theory most commonly used, are in general mechanistic and reductionist. If sociologists are going to analyze personality as learning the culture, they will either have to accept the related assumptions or eliminate them on valid grounds.

Presents three "climate of opinion" studies that illustrate some of the possibilities, as well as some of the problems, that arise when survey analysts turn to the study of effects of social contexts. Description of the studies; Importance of surveys to sociologists; Valuable information that may be obtained from surveys when the right questions are asked; Comparison of the studies.

Contrary to the belief of many who have read George Homans' recent works, he is not the first sociologist to make explicit use of the concept of exchange. From 1883 to 1885 Albert Chavannes published in The Sociologist a series of papers titled "Studies in Sociology" which treated "The Law of Exchange" and three other social laws. Chavannes' use of the exchange concept was very similar to Homans'. Also, Chavannes emphasized the importance of a systematic empirical sociology but did not contribute to it as Homans has done. This comparison of the two men fills a gap in the history of American sociology and puts Homans' recent contributions in historical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information on the Education Day at the May meeting of the national conference of social work. Many of the papers presented at the conference were good and in them are found some durable contributions to the literature of the subject. This journal presents the two papers in its September issue. Sociologist John Dewey's paper appears earlier in this journal. A part of the paper was contributed by sociologist Joseph Kinmont Hart.

The article presents information on "International Congress of Sociology," D. Gusti, President of the 14th International Congress of Sociology, urged American sociologists to participate as actively as possible in the Congress. If they can not attend it personally, he asked them to send their papers to be read at the Congress and to be published in the volume of the Proceedings of the Congress. He indicates that so far the number of American papers is much smaller than that from European countries.

The article presents comments of the author on the article "Is Prediction Feasible in Social Work? An Inquiry Based Upon a Sociological Study of Parole Records," by Ernest W. Burgess. The paper by Burgess will be discussed from three points of view,its general methodological significance, its specific statistical methods and its limitations for practical purposes. Heretofore behavior has been studied principally in relation to specific factors, each factor being treated as an entity in itself and considered apart from any other factor. The results of this method have been largely negative, for the studies have shown that, when other things are equal, the difference between criminals and non-criminals on any one item is comparatively small. The next step evidently was to devise a method by which these small differences could be massed so that their combined effect could be seen. The significance of Burgess' paper is that it takes this next step, providing a method by which the massing or accumulation of factors can be measured or demonstrated. At the same time he has included a larger number of items than had been included in any published report and has used the composite rate as a basis of prediction. He has invented a scientific tool of very great utility both in the explanation of behavior and the administration of agencies which attempt to control behavior.

The article presents the author's response to comments on sociologist Gerhard Lenski's theory on the methodology of the status inconsistency by Martin D. Hyman. The paper of Hyman represents an important contribution to the status inconsistency literature because it raises the question as to whether the relative contributions of the various components of the theory can be sorted out empirically. The paper deals with a special case of the more general problem of identification of coefficients in simultaneous equations. The implications of Hyman's objections are much more disturbing than he apparently realizes, since there can be no purely empirical means of identifying the coefficients. There are simply too many unknowns, and unless a priori assumptions are made concerning some of the coefficients, no valid inferences can be made about the magnitudes of either the main effects of the status variables or those of the inconsistency variable. To be sure, the magnitude of the interaction term can be determined empirically. But, as Hyman points out, one cannot directly infer how much of this is due to the inconsistency component, nor can one split up this component according to the contributions of the high-low and low-high patterns.

The article announces that sociologist Shogo Takegawa has won the Institute of Social Science/Oxford University Press (ISS/OUP) prize for the best paper published in the "Social Science Japan Journal" (SSJJ) in 2010.

Political economists and economic sociologists remain thoroughly divided on the anticipated impact of the globalization of markets on their institutional form and character. In this paper, I extend and update earlier work on the en primeur market for Bordeaux wines, examining empirically the impact of the demonstrable globalization of the process of price formation on the institutional character of this most densely institutionalized of markets. I associate the process of globalization in this market with the influence of international wine critics, assessing the extent to which they might be seen to act in effect as agents of standardization in a market whose prices are more conventionally seen to be driven by the status and hierarchy bound up with long-standing systems of classification. I compare and contrast the 2005 en primeur campaign which took place in the midst of a global consumer boom which had seen so-called investment grade wines command unprecedented prices in international markets with the 2008 campaign which took place in a context of global recession, examining the role played by American wine critic Robert Parker in the process of price formation in each campaign. I show that Parker's impact has not waned, that he can be shown to exert a strong influence on both intra-vintage and inter-vintage reputational factors and that his role is analogous to that of a credit-rating agency in a more conventional futures market. Yet, I also show that the ‘Parker effect’ reinforces and works with the official classification schema, not against them. Parker, I show, has become part of the institutional embedding of this market—arguably as key to the process of both price and status formation today as the 1855 classification itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historically, sociologists have paid little attention to the role of non-cognitive characteristics in occupational attainment. This is in sharp contrast to the relatively large amount of research highlighting the importance of cognitive traits, such as lQ and educational qualifications, or characteristics related to social background, such as social class origin, sex or ethnicity. In this paper, I analyse data drawn from the British National Child Development Study (NCDS), and show that personality traits measured at childhood are a significant determinant of an individual's class destination (measured at age 42). I move on to provide a possible micro-level explanation for why personality traits should have an impact in processes of occupational and class attainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into immigration has for many years focused most of its attention on the issue of how immigrants adapt to host societies. This tendency is especially true in the work of sociologists. Yet if we acknowledge the growing ethnic diversity today in the United States and elsewhere, the most interesting questions arise as to how immigrants influence the host society -- not how they adapt to it. This paper proposes a sociological theory to account for such influence. For evidence it draws on a variety of empirical examples from research on ethnic communities in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the first three years of the British Journal of Social Work, 1971-74, as a starting point, this paper traces the difficulties which have beset the social work profession in establishing a sound coherent basis both for a generic foundation and for subsequent specializations. It examines the factors which have contributed to these difficulties, in education, in practice and in relation to external factors, notably political. It concludes that social work has been blown off course but that there are hopeful indications of a new impetus to restore and regenerate the essence of good practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In some forms of sociology, "culture" has come to replace "society" as the central object of study. This has encouraged an epistemological relativism that overrides a proper engagement with human ontology, while it has also allowed for the development of forms of reductionism where culture turns out to be determined by something deemed more fundamental, such as technology. Some influential contemporary accounts of the "information age" exhibit both these characteristics. The argument of this paper is that these do not offer a productive route forward for sociology in general, or for sociologists of religion in particular. It is argued that Durkheim's social realism not only helps to illuminate the inadequacy of those theories that ignore the human and religious dimensions of contemporary life in their intoxication with machine-mediated flows of information, but can also point towards a more productive way forward for the analysis of contemporary social and cultural realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews and reconstructs recent feminist work on welfare states and social policy regimes. We argue that the concept of "regime" should be stretched to incorporate the way that signs organize the relations among subjects authorized to operate on the field of power. We focus on feminist debates over the status of "tnaternalism " in welfare movements and states to put forward our expanded, culturalist conceptualization of gender regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comment on the article "Definitional Dependency Is Dead. Does Chaos Still Reign? A Possible Resolution of the Ratio-Correlation Dilemma," by Alexandar MacMillan and Richard L. Daft that appeared in the June 1984 issue of the journal "Social Forces." Authors welcome MacMillan and Daft's effort to reconcile and integrate authors' results with theirs. Their three recommendations, taken by themselves, seem quite appropriate, but not necessarily sufficient, for dealing with the ratio-correlation problem. Authors still disagree with some important points in their discussion of these recommendations, and so they are happy to have this additional chance to address the issues involved and to provide some clarification and possible resolution of the dilemma. MacMillan and Daft are correct about definitional dependency; it does not seem to be a problem because no inherent bias or systematic distortion exists in the relationship between organization size and measures of the administrative component. That seems clear from MacMillan and Daft's first paper and from authors. Definitional dependency, once thought to be problematic, now seems to be a dead issue. Despite the demise of definitional dependency, authors' paper highlighted a related issue that remains serious. It concerns the potential lack of consistency among the inferences about scale relationships that one using different analytic techniques on the same samples.

ABSTRACT This paper tests two divergent explanations of income: one model based on human capital variables, the other based on neo-Marxian, structural variables. In particular, our paper extends the work of political economists and the very recent work of sociologists (especially, Bibb and Form, Beck et al., and Wright and Perrone). Our sample was a national one drawn from a larger study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center; the final sample consisted of 763 members of the labor force (415 males and 348 females). While the human capital variables produced greater explained variance than the structural variables, in a combined model the structural variables increased the explanatory power by 27 percent. The structural model worked better for men; the human capital model worked better for women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a study which examined the relationship between the area, expanse of societies, the development of communication and transportation technologies and the size of their governments. Sociologists and ecologists have long discussed the important effects social density is presumed to have on major dimensions of social organization and recently a theoretical paper, implied that a social system's conduciveness to interaction might be estimated on the basis of three structural parameters, population size, the average distance between people and the technology available for overcoming distance. This paper will extend evaluation of the "structural conduciveness" approach, and its utility in explicating this aspect of organizational structure, by examining the effects of area-distance and contact technology on the relative size of governments. These two system parameters are presumed to have effects on social density which will be reflected in the relative size of the subsystems charged with monitoring and regulating system activity. The measure of administrative intensity to be used in this study is the percent of total population employed in government. This figure is analogous to the administrative intensity has been used as an index of administrative intensity in organization research.

The article presents comments of the authors on a series of the articles in tribute to scholar Gordon Hamilton by various sociologists. We are abundantly tired of hearing casework attacked, not because it is beyond reproach, but improperly and for the wrong reasons. We are abundantly tired of being urged as caseworkers to provide "new and innovative" services when these have been even less well tested than those caseworkers daily perform. We are abundantly tired of hearing casework faulted for failing to take on all sorts of roles when these belong not to casework alone but to the entire profession and, more-over, to the entire population of thinking men. We are abundantly tired, on the one hand, of being faulted for failing to reach the poor and on the other for violating human dignity by imposing casework on the poor and others without their request or consent. We are damned if we do and damned if we don't. We believe the social work profession must address itself vigorously to the critical problems of both helping those who ask for assistance and finding ways of helping larger numbers of people without violating their human dignity. But this series of papers in the main was helpful neither in identifying the central issues confronting casework today nor in relating specific aspects of casework to social work and the entire community.

Within the field of sociology a controversy exists concerning whether sociologists can any longer be so systematic as to engage in constructing unified theories of the nature of that part of the environment, which is perceived to be social. A social historian, Harry Elmer Barnes, wrote in one of his books that the book brings the history of sociological thought down to the era and stage where systematization was gradually but rather completely replaced by specialization in some more restricted field of description and analysis. It is not likely that there will be many more attempts to create systems of sociology; the era of systematic sociology has come approximately to an end. The paper postulates that the validity of systems is a function of the method of systems; error can be subsumed to be present always in systems. Researchers seek a percentage of compliance with empirical reality, which cannot exceed the conceptual control of the variables perceived, or the establishment of identity of variables with the true data; systems must seek an optimum between restriction to simple but thorough elementary generalities, which can be treated to numerical or logical exhaustion and expanding a radius of variables to and beyond a point prohibiting treatment to numerical or logical exhaustion in order to increase an area of meaning.

A number of recent articles in the journals indicate a growing interest in the sociologist who functions as teacher. True, these are too often of a very general nature, ending in such lofty exhortations as "The goal of the study of sociology... is to give the life of the student new meaning, to help him acquire liberal attitudes, to provide him with a scaffold of meaningful ideas which can illuminate for him the kind of world he is living in and the role he might play." The purpose of this paper is not to raise further theoretical points and approaches. It will report, instead, of a project carried out during the last month of the spring semester, 1948-49, among 110 students in the introductory course, consisting of four sections. Call it an exercise in international sociology or in social change, it may serve as primary material from which the roles of teacher, sociologist, and student may be more fruitfully considered in specific terms. It will open with a statement of the problem, next, a detailed program of the organization and procedures, third, student conclusions, last, some commentary on the effectiveness of the project.

This paper discusses the problem of multi-dimensionality in building an opinionnaire to scale the friendliness or unfriendliness of certain experiences which white people have toward African Americans. These so-called experience scales are tools created for the purpose of analyzing more objectively the background of this large something which sociologists are calling social attitude. In this case, social attitude of whites toward African Americans has been specified. The article proceeds upon the theory, made explicit elsewhere, that attitude may best be conceived as a high-level abstraction containing many aspects or dimensions. As a parallel case, the author mentions the contemporary efforts of psychologists in breaking the lump-mass "intelligence" into primary abilities or parts. In the case of attitude toward the African Americans, or tendency to act toward the African Americans, it is hypothesized that a person's paper-and-pencil reaction to an opinionnaire may not be closely related to other overt manifestations of his attitude toward that object, nor to his past experiences with the African Americans, either actually or as revealed by a paper-and-pencil test of experience.

The term "crisis" has been used in common parlance to designate important, decisive states of things, critical or culmination points, or turning points where the change is either favorable or unfavorable. Sociologists have been using the term in the analysis of group phenomena and more recently with special reference to group situations as they affect the individual personality. in this paper the main developments in the study of crises as group phenomena which bear upon individual behavior will be indicated. Also, studies dealing with phases of personality change where the change is related to group factors will be dealt with. This survey of literature may thus be regarded as preliminary to the development of a view of personality integration in terms of crises in the life of an individual. Sociologist, W.I. Thomas made the first extensive definition of crisis as a social-psychological concept. In an early article he describes crises as "incidents in group-life which interrupt the flow of habit and give rise to changed conditions of consciousness and practice." He describes the process by which shock disturbs the smooth-running of habit and calls for an adjustment on a new level. While his emphasis in this analysis is essentially on the side of the group significance of crisis, the individual aspects are not neglected as witnessed by the use of the terms "habit," "emotion," and "attention."

The article discusses the letters written by sociologists Franklin H. Giddings, Lester F. Ward, and Albion Small. These letters illustrates the relations existing between Giddings and Ward and Small. The correspondence of Giddings with Ward started after their initial meeting at a session of the American Economic Association where Giddings presented a paper on the "Sociological Character of Political Economy." Ward defended Giddings' paper in what was the first public endorsement of Giddings' sociological views. The excerpts from the letters of Small complete the illustration of the relationship between Giddings and Ward.

The problem of measuring change has been of continuing interest to sociologists. Changes in the occupational structure, for the most part, have been observed by means of percentage distributions, differences between percentage distributions, comparisons between expected and actual percentage distributions, and percentage change. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the primary advantages and disadvantages of these topics in the study of change and to introduce a new measure, the concept of affinity between occupations and other demographic categories, a measure, which not only overcomes some of the disadvantages of the conventional measures, but also is complementary to them. The measure of affinity can and does provide a simple and yet meaningful measure of changes in social structure over a period of several decades. It measures the extent and direction of changes, and above all, it reflects not only the proportion of workers in the occupational category but also the proportion of persons in the occupational class.

One of the principal aims of this paper is to demonstrate that statements affirming the cultural basis of abnormality apply better to what is commonly meant by "deviance" rather than to what the psychiatrist designates by the term "abnormal." Social scientists will generally agree that cross-cultural research would benefit from an objective, universal definition of personality dysfunction, one opening the way to measurement and facilitating comparative studies. Further, it can be expected that carefully undertaken comparative studies will fruitfully illuminate the social and cultural determinants of mental illness. While the construction of even a provisional and relatively culture-free definition of psychopathology scarcely comes within the competence of the sociologist or anthropologist, people have available for a start those signs of personality dysfunction that constitute the diagnostic tools of Western psychiatry. There can be no serious objection to employing such indicators, provided that people use them objectively.

This article assesses the characteristics of faculty members' publishing records at the start of a first assistant professor position in order to predict their continued publication productivity. Using data from nearly 500 US-based sociologists, we examine how indicators, such as number of published articles, the extent of sole authorship, journal placement, and doctoral pedigree, predict success in publishing. After accounting for year of PhD, primary research methodology, and demographic characteristics, the analysis finds that the total number of articles published at the time of hire is not a significant predictor of future productivity. But the number of sole-authored articles published at the time of hire is positively associated with subsequent publication. The analysis also finds that doctoral pedigree is negatively associated with the total number of articles published post-hire but positively associated with publishing in top sociology journals. The authors suggest that faculty with different doctoral origins pursue varied publishing 'scripts' in their careers. Sole authorship operates as a potent trigger at career onset for cumulative advantage. In the context of the reward system of science, a moral community identifies early solo work as a sign of work prowess, which begets further publishing success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data on the population of US sociology doctorates over a five-year period, we examine different predictors of placement in research-oriented, tenure-track academic sociology jobs. More completely than in prior studies, we document the enormous relationship between PhD institution and job placement that has, in part, prompted a popular metaphor likening academic job allocation processes to a caste system. Yet, we alsofind comparable relationships between PhD program and both graduate student publishing and awards. Overall, we find results more consistent with PhD prestige operating indirectly through mediating achievements or as a quality signal than as a "pure prestige" effect. We suggest sociologists think of stratification in their profession as not requiring exceptionalist historical metaphors, but rather as involving the same ordinary but powerful processes of cumulative advantage that pervade contemporary life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reply by the authors in response to the comments made by the Sociologists Kenneth Polk and Rolfe Laforge on their research done on ecological analysis of delinquency behavior. The authors will address themselves to each of the points, numbered by item, as they have been raised. On the issue of existing interaction models, the authors do not claim that interaction models are new, but do claim that "Predictive Attribute Analysis" (PAA) is relatively new. Although it is true that the authors did not address themselves to any theoretical issues in their paper, they by no means imply that the ecological study of delinquency should be "atheoretical." Perhaps the technique seems "mindless" because it could be used to examine many correlations that would be irrelevant. Dichotomizing variables is hazardous. Non-linear relations cannot be detected." The findings noted in the ecological study in their paper were not intended to be "predictions' in the sense that Laforge and Polk have implied in their discussion. There is little quarrel that, utilizing census tracts, PAA requires at the minimum a moderate sample size.

Sociologists Otis Dudley Duncan, in a very interesting paper, has proposed an index of "urbanization." Edgar M. Hoover, Jr. proposed similar techniques for the study of "localization." In view of the interest in these techniques and their possible use in other problems, sociologists attempts to present some intuitive justification of the index proposed, and also to suggest slight modifications for certain problems. When in fact the two Lorenz curves have this property, then any reasonable index of concentration will assign a higher value to the first distribution than the second. Sociologists may feel when the Lorenz curves cross they cannot make a definitive statement to the effect that one distribution is more concentrated than another. The use of an index will however usually assign a higher value to one of the distributions. These considerations lead to the suggestion that for certain problems an examination of the Lorenz curves will be more helpful in making meaningful comparisons, when such comparisons are justified.

Sociologists have long been interested in the theoretical possibility of a universal ritual. Despite a growing number of indicators of world society and globalization, there have not been attempts to observe and analyze the international reach of particular rituals. We propose an extension of the "interaction ritual chain" by theorizing how an interaction ritual might be created and diffused internationally. We look at the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, which created shared conditions of social distancing and emotional distress. We analyze a discontinuous chain of urban and national interaction rituals that focused attention on the efforts of healthcare workers fighting the virus. We count clapping and noise-making in 101 countries and 26 global cities. While we find similar ritual forms and international symbols of solidarity, there was also substantial evidence of conflict and particularism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the impact of the second national research assessment (VQR 2004–10), which was performed in 2011 by the Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes, on publication strategies by sociologists in Italy. We reconstructed all publications from Italian sociologists in Scopus between 2006 and 2015, that is five years before and after the assessment. We also checked academic tenure and promotions during the assessment. Our results showed the potentially distortive effect of institutional signals on publications given that Italian sociologists published more in journals that were considered influential for assessment, some, however, being of doubtful quality. Our findings would suggest that the use of informed peer review and ad hoc journal ranking could stimulate adaptive responses based on strategic journal targeting to ensure publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Race is central to economic life, but race is not central to economic sociology. We argue that economic sociologists should treat racism as a constitutive, structuring force, analytically co-equal with capitalism, patriarchy and nationalism. Our article has three aims. First, we document how canonical and award-winning works of economic sociology do not discuss race and racism, and do not engage with the contemporary sociology of race. Second, we identify six key insights from the sociology of race and suggest how they could influence economic sociology: the emergence of race out of racism, an understanding of racism as structural, the role of whiteness, the intersections between racism and other systems of oppression, the ideology of colorblind racism and the fundamental connections between racism and capitalism. Third, we conclude by discussing recent research that bridges the two subfields and lays the groundwork for an understanding of 'racialized markets' and 'racialized economies'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We need to pay more attention to the process of being sociologists and less atttention to rates of productivity. To support this statement, I present a case study of the processes in which I have been involved while studying Deadheads, fans of the former rock band, the Grateful Dead. To avoid negative sanctioning, I proceeded slowly with this research and therefore had time to engage students, the media, and Deadheads in sociological dialogue. As a result, my teaching, ability to communicate sociological ideas, opportunities to incite sociological thought, and data were enhanced. To fulfill the promise of sociology "to revolutionize how people think" (Johnson 1997), we need to engage publics in dialogue and to establish routine rewards for doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers of education as well as philosophers, sociologists and other theoreticians are searching for new models and interpretations of teaching, using new concepts, transversality being one of them. Some treat the new ways based on transversal competence as an augmentation of neoliberal power and its influence at school, some, on the contrary, struggle with the influence and creation of absolutely new modes. Following the latter approach developed by Wallin (2014), Cole (2013, 2018) and Bradley (2018), applying the Deleuzean and Guattarian philosophy to education as regards the concept of transversality, as well as abstract machine, line of flight, people‐yet‐to‐come and other concepts, I examine the educational capacity to apply new updated ways for educating the young generation. I present a multi‐modal experiment in a class using transversality. It is a practical teaching/learning method using multi‐modality in a philosophy class and integrating art. In practice, transversality is interpreted in two ways: radical, which means working with and within transversality in the creational machine, and soft, which refers to working for transversality, that is, the creation of circumstances for new possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent note, sociologist Eric Stiffler criticises the analyses of intentional and unintentional action proposed by the author. Stiffler presents a number of putative counter-examples to the author's analyses. Against he offers first of all the following two cases. He intentionally swat a fly even though he do not know at the time he swings the fly swatter that his swatting the fly will certainly result and he intentionally start the engine of his car even though he do not know that the engine will start when he turn the key in the ignition of his ancient and not entirely reliable automobile on a cold morning.

The article analyzes the stigma associated with involuntary childlessness and compares the perceptions and behavior of physically infertile women who are involuntarily childless. Previous sociological investigations have focused on the impact of stigmatization on couples who are voluntarily childless or childless by choice. However, with only a few exceptions, sociologists have overlooked the experiences of those who are involuntarily childless through infertility. Although infertility has been the subject of demographic, clinical and autobiographical works, systematic research is lacking on personal and social reactions to involuntary childlessness as a deviant status. In this paper, the addresses this deficit in the sociological literature by presenting evidence from a study of 71 involuntarily childless women. Following a brief discussion of some crucial analytical issues for sociological research on involuntary childlessness, the author shows how these women perceive their own or theft spouse's "problem" and analyze theft strategies for managing its potentially stigmatizing implications in interaction with others.