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Australian settlement policy has stressed social cohesion for new refugee-background migrants, including the importance of integration into rental housing. The authors argue that the transitory nature of rental property is an obstacle for many migrants of African background, for it is the inability to have land on which to plant a tree, that there is non-belonging. For spiritual continuity, and in order for connection to the living-dead ancestors to be real, it is critical to have a home and land. Through the use of story and proverb, the article argues that Congolese ways of knowing the non-material world offer a point of radical departure from Western ways of knowing and experiencing belonging to place, particularly in the post-colonial context of Australia, where belonging has become inimically tied to possession of a home and land. Further, the authors argue that the decisions as to what is known are embedded in questions of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reconstructs the re-birth of Industrial Sociology in Germany after the Second World War in a comparative perspective. Although sharing the main context conditions and maintaining a constant and fluent exchange with their colleagues in other countries, the German intellectual traditions and specific institutional context motivated several particular interests and perspectives that shape a distinct German Industrial Sociology until today. The dominance of qualitative in-depth research, the focus on the emancipative potentials in high-skill-based work organization, the cooperative industrial relations tradition and the constant attempts to link employment studies with general social theory on modern capitalist society and social change characterize German Industrial Sociology. The richness of distinct national institutional settings for comparative social research on employment regimes may be another lesson to be learned from critical reconstruction of labour sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a response of the author to writer Steven Friesman's stimulating article 'Poverty in Pauline Studies." The article has made the author think how the economic aspects of Pauline Study could be explored. He feels that reflection on recent sociological work on poverty may help to make further the project that Friesman sets out to accomplish. According to the author Friesman gives a thought provoking political contextualization of the twentieth-century study of Pauline communities. His description of the early German situation is very illuminating.

This text of a lecture describes the importance of Zygmunt Bauman's work for sociological theory and intellectual debate in Germany. The main points are: (1) the tension between the German Sonderweg thesis and Bauman's analysis of the Holocaust; (2) the relationship between Bauman's theory of modernity/postmodernity and the writings of Elias, Horkheimer/Adorno and Beck; (3) a critique of Bauman's neglect of democratic alternatives within modernity, particularly American intellectual and political traditions; and (4) a discussion of Bauman's emphasis on pre-societal sources of morality in his postmodern ethics and the pragmatist understanding of intersubjectivity and morality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces several essays and writings of Georg Simmel. The work of Simmel has often been depicted in English-speaking circles as a contribution to formal sociology. This view of Simmel as the sociologist who laid the foundations for the analysis of social forms such as the dyad, triad and mass, the miser, stranger and the poor, competition, sociability and conflict, has long been the conventional wisdom which has dominated the Anglo-Saxon reception of his work. With some notable exceptions, sociological theory textbooks in Great Britain and the U.S. often give only a passing reference to his writings or treat his work merely as a preparatory foundation for conflict theory, exchange theory and interactionism. The reception of Simmel's work in post-war Germany was initially dominated by U.S. sociology with the key influence being Talcott Parson's estimation of what he regarded as the classic figures of sociology. It was only when conflict theory and exchange theory were developed as an alternative to functionalism in the late 1950s and 1960s that Simmel's sociology was brought back to Germany from the U.S. This prepared the way for the more nuanced reception of his work in Germany in the late 1970s and 1980s.

The article presents an interview of a Professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld, Niklas Luhmann. Generally, Luhmann tries to combine and transcend central features of systems theory, especially structural-functionalism, cybernetics, theories of social evolutionary and what might broadly be conceived as phenomenology. The conversation with Niklas Luhmann was recorded at the University of Alberta in 1977 and has been edited for publication. Responding to a question regarding concepts of system social, system environment, and world and boundary, Luhmann told that the best way to start is to refer to two forms or two areas of discussion which he tries to combine--the one is a tradition focusing on communication--and the other is the system-environment differentiation, coming from more or less organismic theories or from cybernetic sources. According to Luhmann, the two areas don't contradict each other but require each other. Luhmann conceives of society as one of the social systems.

This paper deals with the relationships between the German Labour Movement of the late nineteenth century and the contemporary natural sciences. The view of the natural sciences and of their role in society, developed by the Labour Movement, is sketched: they are considered to be ah important driving force of social progress, in their technical/economic aspects, as well as in their ideological/political aspects. The relationship between natural sciences and socialist theory of the time is analyzed -- particularly the attempts made to model socialist theory after the example of the sciences, in order to confer on it a comparable objectivity. In the third section, the similarities and differences between the contemporary bourgeois understanding of science and the view of science developed by the Labour Movement are discussed. The paradox that a radical movement like the labour Movement is prepared to acknowledge the authority of the natural sciences, produced and applied by their political opponents, can be partially explained by noting that the sciences are not just a weapon in, bur also the object of, its political struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the question of the scientific formation of the clergy, the problem of mental aptitudes is posed. Here are the results, in the German case, of a enquiry and the comparisons which they permit with other studies of the same problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]