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Activating social ties is a critical mechanism for satisfying individuals' social, emotional, and material needs. Researchers have offered a number of hypotheses around tie activation about when and why particular supporters step in to help, ranging from strategic activation via functional specificity to opportunistic mobilization. To date, few studies have examined multiple tie activation strategies in tandem. This project focuses on people facing complex, compounding health and social problems, who may have to rely on multiple forms of activation to get their support needs met. We draw on a sample of 92 participants who are affiliated with one of two Care Management programs in the Western United States. Using name generators in a survey, we elicit participants' social networks and find they utilize a number of methods to secure critical support needs, including calling on kin ties to borrow money and help with daily tasks, relying on strong and proximal ties for almost all types of support, and using functional specificity for health support. We then draw on qualitative interviews to gain a deeper understanding of the ways alters provide support and why egos elicit support from some alters and not others. Future research should continue assessing this population's social networks with the aim of leveraging social support to help manage chronic conditions, provide access to resources, and increase their sense of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine how immigrant Punjabi-Sikhs make sense of themselves as yellow cabbies in New York with two complementary frameworks—Hill Collins' "matrix of domination" and insights from the literature exploring the interplay between race and ethnicity. The cabbies discussed their immigrant status, non-whiteness, and social class as influential, emphasizing the effects of all three forms of marginalization as occurring simultaneously. They deployed "money" to frame this subordination and to negotiate dimensions of social location and identity. The transnational space they occupied emerges noteworthy too in their identity making. This analysis, based on interviews with 56 cabbies, advances scholarship on race and immigration/transnationalism, Asian and South Asian American identities, specifically research on immigrant Sikhs of lower socioeconomic status, attention on whom is scant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rates of crime for Blacks in the United States in the post-slavery era have always been high relative to Whites. But explaining, or minimizing, this fact faces a major problem: individual excuses for bad acts point to deficiencies, in the agent, which are perhaps forgivable, such as mental deficiency or a deprived childhood, but at the price of treating the agent as less than a full member of the moral community. Collectivizing excuses risks implying group inferiority. The history of attempts to provide an explanation of crime that mitigates blame without undermining full participation to the moral community is long and convoluted, leading to the presently widespread claim that crime is itself a product of victimization through pervasive racism. Three basic strategies – rejection of comparison, attribution to racially invariant causes and explanation by reference to uniquely Black conditions, such as subculture or extreme stigmatization – are identified and their ethical implications distinguished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The succession of extraordinary traumatic events, such as the poles defrosting, the fires in Australia and Amazon, the COVID-19 pandemic, the financial global crises revival, the Black Lives Matter movement, seems to call for science (to solve problems) and schooling (to make time to the unemployed) for help. Science and schooling are some of the big successes of post-modern culture and states. Given these successes, questions remain. Why do they not deliver hope? We are left to ponder (a) why these extreme events takes us by surprise; (b) why those who have been afforded the best education ever are so anxious, so frozen; (c) why is it that our best policies, science, and minds continue to fail us when it comes to solving the problems associated with the environment, this pandemic, capitalism, and racism; and (d) given the promise of science, why are we so in need of solutions? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents how job readiness programs—as anchors of the devolved organizational landscape of neoliberal poverty governance in the United States—endeavor to instill within the poor not simply the virtue of work, but the virtue of thrift, and thus orient them to "both sides of the paycheck." Using a comparative ethnographic study of two community-based, government-funded nonprofit job readiness programs, we show that this pedagogic focus on budgeting is central to the overall goal of conditioning clients to embrace and endure a degraded labor market. Recognizing that most participants will remain poor with or without low-wage employment, these programs suggest that it is as crafty consumers that participants may retake control of their lives. Despite the programs' differing target populations and racialized and gendered logics, both attempt to accommodate participants to the dictates of the neoliberal economic order: jobs are hard to find and, even if you get one, wages will not be enough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the unfortunate absence of Nietzsche from sociological theory as it is practiced and reproduced in American sociology. The first part discusses how Talcott Parsons erased the presence of Nietzsche from Weber's work as part of a larger ideological maneuver to provide a theoretical grounding for the belief in American exceptionalism. The second part of the article compares and contrasts Nietzsche to the conventional sociology of Weber and Durkheim in order to demonstrate how Nietzsche's work provides sociologists with valuable material to be used for a critique of conventional sociological theory. American sociology is long overdue for a sustained engagement with Nietzsche. Such an undertaking is particularly relevant for those concerned with the on-going project of reconstructing a critical social theory that has emancipatory aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an article about the history of US sociology with systematic intent. It goes back to World War II to recover a wartime narrative context through which sociologists formulated a ‘trauma’ to the discipline and ‘blamed’ qualitative and values-oriented research for damaging the scientific status of sociology. This narrative documents a discussion of the changes that sociologists said needed to be made in sociology as a science to repair its status and reputation. While debates among sociologists about theory and method had always been contentious, the wartime narrative insisted for the first time that sociology be immediately unified around quantitative approaches. The narrative of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ science that developed during the war not only undermined the efforts of social interactionists to theorize social action and social justice, but also derailed Parsons’ pre-war effort to bridge differences. The moral coding that is the legacy of the narrative stigmatized important approaches to sociology, leading to a ‘crisis’ in the 1960s that still haunts the discipline. Disciplinary history has overlooked the wartime narrative with the result that the role played by World War II in effecting this crisis has gone unrecognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on an ethnographic study of the process by which a young man became a drug dealer in a in a small northeastern US city. Drug dealing was the principal occupation in his predominantly black neighborhood. This process is treated as an initiation into a criminal career that involved not only the mastery of specific steps of drug dealing but also learning the expectations of the local interaction order framing the space where he lives. Approached in this way, one young man’s story offers a window into the local interaction order of a drug-dealing space: a set of local social practices that must be routinely mastered in the area where he grew up. The pervasiveness of drug-dealing practices in the local interaction order offers valuable insight into how and why male youth in this locale would enter the drug trade and are at considerable risk of arrest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard American disciplinary history holds that the ‘founding fathers’, inspired by ‘great men theorizing European modernity’, created a sister discipline in Europe’s image. This article proposes an alternative history, which locates the founding of American sociology in the writings of ‘pro-slavery imperialists’ Henry Hughes and George Fitzhugh. A methodologically nationalistic sociology of ‘race relations’, which isolates the study of race from issues of ‘general’ sociological concern, has substituted for sustained engagement with sociology’s colonialist and imperialist past. Racism has been made an anachronistic survivor in tradition, rather than a constitutive part of modernity. Rehabilitating this lost history is therefore vital for creating a new, global historical sociology, as is questioning the conceptual matrix that isolates the study of race and racism from issues of general sociological concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construct of place has largely been under-utilized, and, therefore, under-theorized, in social science discussions regarding systematic racial oppression, but we need to consider physical space or symbolic (i.e. social/political) place in our ideas about both racial identity formation and racial relations. During the Jim Crow era, blacks were expected to ‘stay in their place’, and that place was always subservient to the position of whites. Despite advances by racial/ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged groups, vestiges of this American Jim Crow belief system still operate in society. The author contends that recent widespread voter suppression efforts commencing en masse since 2010 are not a rejection of black bodies per se but a response to perceived black (and brown) bodies out of place. The article provides a framework to help illuminate the presence of continued systematic pushback against the advances of minorities amidst a growing discourse of colorblindness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the racial identities of middle class Mexican Americans, and provides a focus on how racial oppression plays a significant role in the formation, negotiation, and organization of these identities. This article sheds light on how Mexican Americans continue to experience racism despite being middle class and achieving socioeconomic parity with many middle class whites. Drawing on 67 semi-structured open-ended interviews (one to three hours each) in Phoenix and San Antonio this article shows how middle class Latinos/as negotiate racialized identities and racial oppression. This research concludes that these middle class Mexican Americans utilize different identity practices to navigate racism and racial hierarchies. These practices are attempts to access white coded middle class resources and to maintain and/or shift their positions in the race and class hierarchies of the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a citation-context analysis of journal articles from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Examining publications from the sociology of health and medicine, the study draws a number of conclusions about the state of sociology, inter-country relationships between knowledge workers, and national systems of sociological knowledge production. It finds that core–periphery relations define significant features of sociological work, impacting on citation patterns, inter-country collaboration and the selection of reference materials. Core–periphery relations are also found to influence the sociological production of knowledge across the Australian university sector. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars have recently called attention to the changing nature of the American university in the wake of the current economic downturn. Considering the transformative nature of knowledge production in the United States, we introduce the concept of intellectual closure in illustration of the unintended outcomes of individual decisions and career trajectories as they operate under the forces of social closure. Intellectual closure is defined as subtle and hidden forms of constraint on individual agency. Intellectual closure includes calculative thinking about how to publish in flagship journals, avoidance of high-risk projects, and preference for short-term projects with more immediate rewards. Structural constraints, specifically within sociology, are enabling the emergence of narrower perspectives and eroding former professional norms as individual decisions aggregate, unintentionally, to constitute a more competitive discipline with narrower definitions of productivity and quality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous research has shown that nativist ideology racializes nonwhite immigrants, but little research has looked at how color-blind racist discourse shapes how people accomplish this while maintaining a race-neutral identity. This study examines how online discussion forum participants of an anti-immigrant organization in the United States use color-blind racist discourse. The qualitative analysis of 200 threads (2,168 posts) shows that forum participants use the color-blind discursive tactic of diminishing the importance of race through rhetoric of legality, cultural racism, and reverse racism. This rhetoric frees forum participants to conflate illegal, criminal, and Hispanic. This neutralizes contradictions in their claims of a race-neutral stance, which is most evident in their discussions of Puerto Rico whereby participants reinforce a dichotomy between citizen and Latino. While color-blind racism has been used to explain race relations between white and nonwhite citizens, this research shows how the ideology extends to include nonwhite immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glaeser and Vigdor (2012) recently declared ‘the end of a segregated century’. Because America has returned to 1910 segregation levels, it has allegedly achieved transcendence over racism. After all, the authors note, government no longer endorses housing discrimination, all-white neighborhoods are extinct, and white racial attitudes have liberalized. Despite the proclamation, many questions regarding segregation remain unanswered by Glaeser and Vigdor. Namely, how can segregation be conceptualized and its measurement improved, what might alternative methods for analyzing it yield, and why does it matter in the first place? To prompt an overdue substantive and methodological discussion, we undertake a case study analysis of Cook County, Illinois to address these questions. Our analytic goal is to illuminate how segregation is a much more complex matter than many analyses reflect, and when this is taken into account, it becomes readily apparent that any assertions of racial transcendence are quite premature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we outline the ‘walls of whiteness’ that make it difficult to teach the sociology of race and racism and make it difficult for students at historically white colleges and universities (HCWUs) to wrestle with these important issues. Most white students enter HWCUs surrounded by these walls – protecting them from attacks on white supremacy – that have multiple layers and therefore are even more difficult to penetrate; yet they must be penetrated. With a few exceptions, the institution of American higher education does not threaten those walls. Instead, college education often bolsters them through curricular and extracurricular experiences, residential and disciplinary isolation, institutional symbols, cultural reproduction, and everyday practices such as grading and classroom interactions. We identify these walls in this article and make suggestions regarding strategies to begin their dismantling. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, sociology was becoming established as a discipline in the United States and Great Britain. This article looks closely at the lives and work of two prominent sociologists at this time, Patrick Geddes and Lester F. Ward. As sociology was becoming established in academic departments, neither Ward’s nor Geddes’ thought managed to survive intact. A number of factors played into this process, especially the overall broadness of their perspectives, as well as the incompatibility of several of their key concerns, including gender, religion, race and education, with the eventual trajectory of the sociology and the scholars who were involved in consolidating the discipline as such. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article sets out to explain why after the 1978 assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk, it is the latter who has achieved world recognition. At the time of their assassination Moscone was the more well-known figure, an American politician with a national reputation. The theories of social drama and cultural trauma are applied in this explanatory process. These theories provide a framework for analyzing how this incident became a significant event locally and nationally. The fact that Milk was one of the first openly gay people to hold public office in the United States meant that his life and death would have significance for a wide group of people. Individuals and organizations associated with gay liberation became carrier groups which created the Harvey Milk story and how it was told. Such carrier groups saw to it that Milk was remembered, and remembered in a particular way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the heated debate regarding ‘illegal immigration’ in the US, arguments and accusations have abounded regarding economics, citizenship, criminality, and culture, but race has remained conspicuously sidelined in public discussion. I argue that race is in fact central to the debate on immigration, both by those opposed to any legalization of undocumented workers in the US and those who favor a temporary worker (‘work visa’) program. In this article, I examine how both anti-immigration and pro-work-visa groups framed the immigration debate as reported in newspaper articles in the particularly contentious period from December 2005 to November 2006. I performed a content analysis of three newspapers representing three different regions and three differing histories of immigration: the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, and the Raleigh News & Observer. Using Blumer’s group position theory, I examine the patterns within the discussion for evidence of preservation of racial group position on the part of both anti-immigration and pro-work visa advocates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore how white activists’ racial identity struggles might disrupt effective antiracist action in multiracial organizations. Drawing on data collected through participant observation and interviews, we examine the struggles of a small, multiracial antiracist organization that protests the Cleveland baseball franchise’s ‘Indians’ name and Chief Wahoo mascot. White activists’ racial consciousness, or awareness of white racism and white privilege, compels them to participate in the group; their ways of participating, however, ultimately may hamper the organizational effectiveness of the Committee of 500 Years of Dignity and Resistance. Specifically, white activists’ racial consciousness makes them reluctant to adopt necessary leadership roles. Borrowing from literature on white racism, white racial consciousness, and multiracial organizing, we illustrate the complex nature and potential pitfalls of multiracial alliances formed to protest racism in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars of the medicalization of social problems have paid inadequate attention to medicalization’s multiple dimensions – discourses, practices and identities – and to the multiple levels of analysis at which it occurs – macro, meso and micro. As a result, scholars of a given social problem typically examine only a few aspects of its medicalization, fail to recognize changes in medicalization, and miss occasions where medicalization and demedicalization occur simultaneously. Moreover, by conceptualizing medicalization as a category or state rather than a continuous value, and failing to specify the threshold at which a phenomenon becomes ‘medicalized’ or ‘demedicalized’, scholars have discouraged attention to demedicalization. The article provides a new typology of medicalization and illustrates its utility through an analysis of two episodes in American abortion history. Previous analysts of these episodes miss many aspects of medicalization and disagree about whether these episodes involve medicalization or demedicalization. The typology helps resolve these differences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Trade policies have long been configured into the history of Latin America. In virtually all such policies, US interests can be readily discerned. Recent experiences in a neoliberal context have witnessed a rearrangement of interests, forces, and scenarios at the global level. The weakening of the role of the state in allocating resources and in defining national agendas has been notable. Wherever proposals for democratization have appeared and have sought to distance themselves from hegemonic policies, the issues of free trade and commerce begin to reveal important aspects of interrelationship between development, regional integration, cooperation, and security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The antiterrorist policy of the George W. Bush Administration established a relationship between democracy and security that implied the limitation of the former as a necessary condition for the achievement of the latter. This strategy led to the diminishing of the basic liberties promoted by liberal democracy through legal means with the putative objective of guaranteeing the ‘security’ of American citizens. A key starting point of these policies can be found in undercover operations carried out abroad by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Department of State at the beginning of the Cold War. This article focuses on the continuities and ruptures between the official discourse of the G. W. Bush Administration and that of the first years of the Cold War, focusing on the realist and liberal patterns present in those discourses. This leads to an analysis of the relationship between democracy and national security under the antiterrorist policy implemented by the G. W. Bush government, approached from a power elite perspective. The aggressive foreign and homeland policies of the US government were based upon a booming military–industrial pole, closely bound to free market expansionism and liberal democracy as key dimensions in the reproduction of capitalism. Included in this consideration are the 2002 and 2006 National Security Strategies, the Patriot Act (2001), and the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (2003) (or ‘Patriot Act II’) put in place by the G.W. Bush Administration, as well as the National Security Strategy (2009) established by President Obama. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on Alberto Melucci’s argument that to understand a social movement, we must look at the period before emergence as a social movement, this article examines labor activists’ efforts to reform the foreign policy program of the AFL-CIO: has sufficient groundwork been laid that a serious possibility of an alternative globalization movement can emerge from within US Labor?This article discusses general efforts to challenge the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy program. It examines the work of US Labor Against the War (USLAW) since its founding in 2003, the California State AFL-CIO’s formal repudiation of the AFL-CIO foreign policy program in 2004, and then efforts at the 2005 National AFL-CIO Convention to keep California’s ‘Build Unity and Trust With Workers Worldwide’ resolution from being fairly discussed at the Convention. Based on evidence presented, it then evaluates whether there is an alternative globalization movement emerging within US Labor or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herbert Blumer was a key figure in what came to be identified as the Chicago School of Sociology. He invented the term ‘symbolic interactionism’ as a label for a theoretical approach that derived primarily from the work of John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley. But his most influential work was methodological in character, and he is generally viewed today as a prominent critic of positivism, and of the growing dominance of quantitative method within US sociology. While this picture is broadly accurate, it neglects an important strand in his methodological thinking. He was committed to the goal of a science of social life, while at the same time he was uncertain whether such a science is possible. In his Appraisal of Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant, he identified a serious dilemma facing this project: the problem of how a scientific approach can be made compatible with the distinctive nature of human social life. In the first chapter of his most influential book, Symbolic Interactionism, he advocates a naturalistic approach to case study, and seems to treat this as avoiding the dilemma. However, there is evidence to suggest that, even towards the end of his life, he regarded the problem as still unresolved. In this article, I examine both sides of Blumer’s dilemma, and whether his attitude towards it changed. However, my interest here is not only historiographical. I evaluate Blumer’s arguments and show that his intellectual struggle with this issue remains relevant today, despite the shifts that have taken place in social science methodology and the philosophy of science since his death. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A study tested the effects of mirror-induced self-focus on participants' tendency to self-stereotype. Americans high and low in identification with their nationality rated themselves and the group "Americans" on traits that varied in stereotypicality and valence. Participants made these ratings under one of three conditions: (1) while facing a mirror, (2) while facing a mirror with an American flag visible, and (3) while not facing a mirror. High identifiers were more likely to endorse stereotypic traits and to rate themselves as similar to their national group when self-focused. In contrast, low identifiers were less likely to endorse stereotypic traits and to rate themselves as similar to their national group when self-focused. These patterns were limited to traits negative in valence. Correlational analyses indicated that self/group ratings were most similar when high identifiers were self-focused. Implications for the distinction between personal and social identity are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the sociology of religion. In particular, the author discusses the study of this field of research in universities and institutions in the United States. The author cites two special issues by the journals "Sociology of Religion" and the "Journal of Scientific Studies of Religion" that recount the history of the sociology of religion from the 1980s to 2009. According to the article, the sociology of religion is integrated into sociological research in universities in the United States in contrast to other countries.

This article is an attempt to make sociological sense of the 2008 American election - particularly of the phenomenological observation of extraordinary enchantment and almost amorous attraction which unlikely members of the American population displayed for Obama, from the early days of the campaign onward. I draw on charisma theory to argue that sociology has something surprising to say on the phenomenon, and on the metaphor of the pipe to add detail about the technology of attraction that was in play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the construction of American sociology, particularly the social theory network. The author explores the concept of civil society in reference to ideas expressed in the book "The Civil Sphere," by Jeffrey C. Alexander. He offers an analysis of the theories expressed in the book.

The article provides an overview of the recent phenomenon accounted to some Ibero-American observatories, an institution working on issues related to information, communication, and culture in the U.S. It likewise shows the results of some research which seeks to analyze the diversity of 61 observatories concerning their geographical location, notable research themes, and area of operations. The purpose of this study lies in exploring the profile and the situation of observatories in terms of informational, communicational, and cultural matters. In addition, the subject of the study is guided by an interest in gauging the development of a novel type of entity, which comes into being abruptly from the second half of the 1990s in countries like Spain, Brazil, and Argentina.

This article is inspired by Edna Bonacich's theoretical attention to the 'big picture,' substantive dissection of the garment industry and ethical call for public sociology. The article focuses on the newest developments in the US anti-sweatshop movement by delineating the progress of two movement organizations: United Students Against Sweatshops and Sweatfree Communities. The article argues that the development of these movements has been toward progressively addressing the underlying causes of sweatshop, causes that are tied into globalization. Most importantly movements have recently begun to specifically challenge the undermining of union strength and the use of vulnerable labor. This progression has shifted the US movement toward action directly supportive of worker empowerment rather than simply improved conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An awareness of the significance of location in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge has brought a new dimension to recent work on the sociology of science. But the importance of speech in scientific enterprises has been less well developed. This article explores the idea of 'spaces of speech' by underscoring the connections between location and locution. It develops a case study of how Darwinian evolution was talked about in different sites using examples from Ireland and the American South during the latter part of the 19th century. These reveal how sites enable and constrain what may be said, and heard, about particular scientific claims, and how they are crucial to understanding the circulation of scientific claims in public arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between theology and sociology on two levels. The first is in terms of the general disciplinary closure that has marked much of their coexistence, despite the many topics on which they potentially meet. The second level is more specific and concerns the tension in Britain between religious sociology, in which sociology is put to serve faith, and the secular sociology of religion, where religion is studied scientifically. This tension has been addressed before with respect to the history of sociology in France and the United States, but the British case, hitherto relatively unknown, illustrates the potential there was for a more fruitful relationship between sociology and theology in Britain that went undeveloped as the secular sociology of religion eventually replaced early religious sociology. The existence of religious sociology has been written out of the history of the discipline in Britain, such that when theology and sociology began a more serious engagement in the 1970s in Britain and elsewhere, particularly as biblical studies discovered sociology and as theologians and sociologists first met jointly, this earlier dialogue was entirely overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between the official teachings of religious bodies and the beliefs of individual adherents in the United States today? At first glance, this question appears rather straightforward. One simply needs to identify religious bodies, specify their teachings and empirically establish the connection between those teachings and adherents' beliefs. But establishing any of these elements is anything but simple. To begin to untangle this knotty subject, the author first uses a restrictive definition of religious bodies, teachings, and beliefs, focusing on the core doctrinal teachings of clearly identifiable religious denominations. He then steps back and takes a broader view of the situation using a less restrictive definition, exploring the influence of affiliation with religions "families" on individuals' moral beliefs. The author concludes with some thoughts about how both religion and the sociology of religion in America are moving beyond beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers comments of the author on Hurricane Katrina and focuses on what one might expect from the U.S. public inquiries and official investigations in the aftermath of disaster. The huge disaster and the many actors involved, can prolong the series of investigations. Moreover, the massive redressive measures are likely to continue producing second-order overflows. The wave of scrutiny and blame that Katrina unleashed will prove impossible to contain quickly or neatly.

The author provides commentary about the book "Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology." The author critiques the book's main argument, which is that U.S. sociologists have produced three waves of scholarship and sociological theory. The author believes that the essays in "Remaking Modernity," with the exception of a couple, do not address the main question of defining historical sociology. The author argues that "Remaking Modernity" makes a generational argument that a new third wave of scholars is replacing the second wave. The author compares "Remaking Modernity" to "Vision & Method in Historical Sociology," by Theda Skoepol, which is representative of second wave scholarship. The author analyses the citations of the contributing authors and finds that the top authors cited in "Remaking Modernity" are Chuck Tilly, Theda Skoepol, Max Weber and Karl Marx.

Much has been made of the 'Southern difference' in cultural and sociological images of the North American landscape. Everything is different there: the cuisine, the music, the religion, and the politics. Moreover, the South was the crucible in which two of the definitive North American experiences were formed: the Civil War (1861-5) and the Civil Rights Movement a century later. This article poses another important category, in addition to 'race and space' — namely, the concept of tragedy, and the correlative rendering of the South as 'America's tragic landscape'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simmel develops his concept of the stranger in an overly structural and reductionist manner. Contrary to Simmel's suggestion, there is an indeterminate relation between structural exclusion and the attribution of strangeness. After showing that 'the stranger' must be rethought in a cultural-sociological way, this essay demonstrates an alternative approach. Articulating a 'discourse' that structures Western projections of strangeness, I explore its relation to colonialism, racial and class domination, and national conflict in modern Western history. This approach suggests an alternative, not only to Simmel but to Merton's and Coser's earlier structural-functional reconceptualization of stranger theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the long-standing tension in Jeffrey Alexander's work between theoretical multidimensionality and socio-cultural idealism has intensified in his recent writings, to problematical effect. Whilst Alexander has shifted of late towards a more substantive and normative style of thinking, his new emphases continue to be grounded in arguments pitched at the general theoretical level. One of these involves a particular reading of the nature of post-positivist meta-theory today, and the other, within this, is a determined effort to distinguish a project of 'cultural sociology' from 'sociology of culture' approaches. I take issue with both of these theoretical moves, showing that they are rhetorically and conceptually flawed, and of a strongly idealist cast. They also run counter to those aspects of Alexander's outlook that do seem more robustly multidimensional and sociologically promising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexander has made a major contribution to the development of a neo-Durkheimian cultural sociology. Two central elements have been: the semiotic analysis of sacred symbols and rituals that evoke the solidarity attached to the idealized nation; analysis of structures and processes that constitute a civil society. Some questions can be raised. The first concerns the tensions between ethnic-nationalisms and the kind of culture of civil society that is said to be congruent with the liberal-democratic state. Secondly, not all groups share the binary constructions of the civil code of liberal democracy. Thirdly, more attention needs to be given to the relationship between the rational public sphere and the spheres of entertainment and popular culture. Cultural studies of popular genre, such as television talk shows, reveal that, rather than exhibiting universal characteristics of liberal-democratic society, these public cultural performances reproduce the particularities of national differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces developments in Jeffrey Alexander's cultural sociology. The aim is to introduce the reader to the key components of this theory as it developed from a functionalist focus on societal values through semiotics and linguistic structuralism to a theory of cultural trauma and collective performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Commentators are in general agreement that Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus and practice is too deterministic, but they have failed to provide a workable template for revisions. Here the French novelist Marcel Proust is proposed as a phenomenological corrective. There are strong family resemblances between his approach to social life and that of Bourdieu. In Remembrance of Things Past, however, Proust offers an understanding of action that is more sensitive to contingency, self-reflexivity, change, desire and the layering of the self. Attention to this will pay dividends for those seeking to creatively reconstruct Bourdieu's project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexander's invitation to a sociology of evil begins from the premise that the social sciences have long neglected direct analyses of evil. They have focused instead on questions of the good and treated its other as an absence or residual category. His most direct foray into this field must be read against his strong program in cultural sociology and his more concrete analysis of the development of narratives of the Holocaust as a moral 'trauma drama'. I argue that the analytic frame Alexander constructs in 'Towards a Sociology of Evil' is too narrow to achieve the ambitions declared in 'The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology'. A multi-dimensional social theoretical approach to evil must recognize that while its significations are clearly culturally variable, they also refer to something beyond the limits of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers and evaluates Jeffrey Alexander's strong program in cultural sociology, which represents an exercise in paradigm formation and an ambitious attempt to refound American sociology along interpretive lines. Cultural sociology is assessed according to four axes, namely its social constructivist epistemology, culturalizing methodology, analytical realism, and internal and external positioning. In addition to discussing the accomplishments and limitations of cultural sociology in all these areas, the paper indicates ways to strengthen it by setting it in conversation with other and more explicitly critical currents of thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alexander's call for a cultural sociology that goes beyond hermeneutic reading to an understanding of how cultural texts are instantiated in action is considered in relation to earlier attempts to establish a tradition of symbolic analysis in American sociology. The sociological provenance of the dramaturgical model that Alexander appropriates from performance studies serves to underline the precariousness of cultural sociology as a project within the American academy. Alexander's thesis on the critical importance of 'refusion' to the life of societies is endorsed, as is his argument that the specificity of 'post-traditional' societies cannot be elided by drawing directly on conceptual tools developed in analysis of ritual in 'traditional' societies. His argument for sociological agnosticism in relation to the moral qualities of symbolic action, on the other hand, is called into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of social theory is too often given to celebrity hunting, the polemical vulgarizing of one's putative enemies, or the precocious production of totalizing and redemptive theories purporting to rescue social theory from its perennial crises of meaning, naming and explanation. The constructive task of social theory, however, can be both more modest and productive when attention is given to its substantive concern to provide codes, narratives and explanations of modernity, in all its pluralist and democratic dimensions. This is in effect the self-description of Jeffrey Alexander's own work. This paper provides an empathetic account of Alexander's approach to the practice of social theory via a synopsis of his collected essays in Fin de Siècle Social Theory (1995). In particular, it claims that Alexander's critique of the reductionist propensities of Pierre Bourdieu's macro-sociological theory is exemplary in its constructive cast as a systematic analysis of the universalizing contents of the conceptual and methodological claims themselves. Herein lies the use of reason itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper retraces the conceptual development of Jeffrey Alexander's cultural sociology. It centres on three major conceptual achievements: first, the distinction between inside and outside and its more peculiar variants (like system and environment or friend and foe); second, the elaboration of the temporal axis as a distinct dimension of cultural analysis; and finally, the close focus on performativity that took centre-stage in cultural analysis during the last years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I pursue three aims in this article: (1) a contextualization of Jeffrey Alexander's cultural sociology within the broader trajectory of his intellectual development; (2) a sketch of the key ideas of his approach to cultural analysis against the backdrop of contemporary debates regarding culture and social structure; and (3) an appreciation and critical assessment of Alexander's program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A comparison of social work practice in rural areas of the United States and Australia reflects similar characteristics. Findings add support to the assertion that there are particular qualities to practice in the rural context that are embedded in the subtleties of shaping social work roles to fit into rural culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information about the book "Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama," by Stephen Hilgartner. Hilgartner's book is great, not just because it is about an interesting subject, but because it reveals and celebrates the development of the field, the maturity of the field, it is Latourian, but it is not actor networks. It links up with classical sociology, the man himself, Erving Goffman. The book combines organizational analysis with discourse analysis impeccably, and throws in new literary forms for good measure. Most important are the questions that it raises a litany of some of the most significant issues for science studies. Everyone knows that knowledge, claims generated from research studies are important, these are High Science. Media science is important, press releases, science writing and so forth, this is Low Science. The subject of the study is the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Now it is considered to be part of the National Academies. This NAS is indeed a national resource, unbelievably understudied.