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The multiple problems that the planet is currently experiencing—climate crisis, conventional and unconventional wars, planetary disenchantment with political systems, growth of inequality, increase in all kinds of intersectional violence, destructuring of the political economy of morality, etc.—are not a favorable scenario for thinking about hope. This paper nevertheless offers a summary presentation of the sociology of hope, presenting some of its central sources and components as well as a proposed study agenda for the future. This article seeks to foster discussion of what could be the central axes of a sociology of hope. To achieve this purpose, the following argumentative strategy was chosen: (a) the "place" of hope is explored in some classics of sociology, (b) the central components of a sociological investigation of hope are synthesized, and (c) an agenda is presented as a summary for a future development of a sociology of hope. The article seeks to draw attention to the urgency of hope as an important element for the future of sociology and social sciences in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following reflections by Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann, this paper is concerned with the changing meaning of the profession as a sociological category for analyzing modern society. Professions are practical academic occupational groups oriented to certain social values, to which a special significance for society was attributed in the social sciences for a long time, thus marking a connection between professions' research and theory of society. This paper now describes that the causal relationship between profession and society is limited to a historically relatively early period. In the transition to modern society, this close network of relationships begins to dissolve, and now professions operate in the context of some function systems of society whose task is the professional assistance of single clients, such as in the fields of health, law, and pastoral care. However, the professions' highlighted position in the knowledge and action structure of single function systems seems to dissolve more and more today so that one can ask whether we can speak here already of an end of the social form profession. This would correspond with the observation that actually the professions no longer appear at all in the newer theories of society and therefore their function as an important mechanism of social structure formation is no longer attributed to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networks influence health-related behavior, such as obesity and smoking. While researchers have studied social networks as a driver for diffusion of influences and behavior, it is less understood how the structure or topology of the network, in itself, impacts an individual's health behavior and wellness state. In this paper, we investigate whether the structure or topology of a social network offers additional insight and predictability on an individual's health and wellness. We develop a method called the Network-Driven health predictor (NetCARE) that leverages features representative of social network structure. Using a large longitudinal data set of students enrolled in the NetHealth study at the University of Notre Dame, we show that the NetCARE method improves the overall prediction performance over the baseline models—that use demographics and physical attributes—by 38%, 65%, 55%, and 54% for the wellness states—stress, happiness, positive attitude, and self-assessed health—considered in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to investigate the logic behind lay people’s ideological position taking and how this is determined by class position. I therefore examine to what extent there exists a similarity between the configuration of the political field and the structure of the space of social classes. The paper includes a brief description of the two most salient political alignments today, namely the old economic alignment and the new cultural alignment, and an explanation of how this two-dimensional political structure pertains to the rise of the new middle class. Directly related to this, I also present a discussion on the importance of the ethical habitus to understand the mechanism behind class determined political position taking. Subsequently, based on survey data and using multiple correspondence analysis, I empirically reproduce this political structure for Flanders (Belgium). Finally, relying on the visualized regression technique, I demonstrate that there exists a clear structural similarity between the political field and the space of social classes, which is a strong indication that the class-engendered ethical habitus is, in fact, the underlying factor that gives structure to the variations in political attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper offers a defence of sociology through an engagement with Actor Network Theory (ANT) and particularly the critique of ‘critical’ and politically engaged social science developed by Bruno Latour. It argues that ANT identifies some weaknesses in more conventional sociology and social theory, and suggests that ‘critical’ and ‘public’ orientated sociologists can learn from the analytical precision and ethnographic sensibilities that characterize ANT as a framework of analysis and a research programme. It argues, however, that Latour et al. have too hastily dispensed with ‘critique’ in favour of a value neutral descriptive sociology, and that the symmetrical and horizontalist approach adopted in ANT is particularly ill‐suited to the development of scientific knowledge about social structures. It argues that a more straightforwardly realist sociology would share many of the strengths of ANT whilst being better able to interrogate, empirically and normatively, the centres of contemporary social power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of whether one can generate networks with a given global structure (defined by selected blockmodels, i.e., cohesive, core-periphery, hierarchical, and transitivity), considering only different types of triads. Two methods are used to generate networks: (i) the newly proposed method of relocating links; and (ii) the Monte Carlo Multi Chain algorithm implemented in the package in R. Most of the selected blockmodel types can be generated by considering all types of triads. The selection of only a subset of triads can improve the generated networks’ blockmodel structure. Yet, in the case of a hierarchical blockmodel without complete blocks on the diagonal, additional local structures are needed to achieve the desired global structure of generated networks. This shows that blockmodels can emerge based only on local processes that do not take attributes into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Size estimation is particularly important for populations whose members experience disproportionate health issues or pose elevated health risks to the ambient social structures in which they are embedded. Efforts to derive size estimates are often frustrated when the population is hidden or hard-to-reach in ways that preclude conventional survey strategies, as is the case when social stigma is associated with group membership or when group members are involved in illegal activities. This paper extends prior research on the problem of network population size estimation, building on established survey/sampling methodologies commonly used with hard-to-reach groups. Three novel one-step, network-based population size estimators are presented, for use in the context of uniform random sampling, respondent-driven sampling, and when networks exhibit significant clustering effects. We give provably sufficient conditions for the consistency of these estimators in large configuration networks. Simulation experiments across a wide range of synthetic network topologies validate the performance of the estimators, which also perform well on a real-world location-based social networking data set with significant clustering. Finally, the proposed schemes are extended to allow them to be used in settings where participant anonymity is required. Systematic experiments show favorable tradeoffs between anonymity guarantees and estimator performance. Taken together, we demonstrate that reasonable population size estimates are derived from anonymous respondent driven samples of 250-750 individuals, within ambient populations of 5,000-40,000. The method thus represents a novel and cost-effective means for health planners and those agencies concerned with health and disease surveillance to estimate the size of hidden populations. We discuss limitations and future work in the concluding section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Micro-blogging systems have become one of the most important ways for information sharing. Network structure and users’ interactions such as forwarding behaviors have aroused considerable research attention, while mention, as a key feature in micro-blogging platforms which can improve the visibility of a message and direct it to a particular user beyond the underlying social structure, is seldom studied in previous works. In this paper, we empirically study the mention effect in information diffusion, using the dataset from a population-scale social media website. We find that users with high number of followers would receive much more mentions than others. We further investigate the effect of mention in information diffusion by examining the response probability with respect to the number of mentions in a message and observe a saturation at around 5 mentions. Furthermore, we find that the response probability is the highest when a reciprocal followship exists between users, and one is more likely to receive a target user’s response if they have similar social status. To illustrate these findings, we propose the response prediction task and formulate it as a binary classification problem. Extensive evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of discovered factors. Our results have consequences for the understanding of human dynamics on the social network, and potential implications for viral marketing and public opinion monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A host of power relations are structurally imposed upon the imprisoned and these produce vulnerabilities that require considerable energy and attention. This paper argues, however, that ‘vulnerable populations’ is a politically reactive legal category in the context of research with prisoners. In turn, this form of categorical vulnerability is often misaligned with ‘actually existing vulnerability’ or 'relational vulnerability' in the context of prison life. Substantive ethical, methodological and practical problems result from this misalignment, as I illustrate through the case of my research with former prisoners in Athens, Georgia. I seek to prove two claims in support of my central argument. First, actually existing vulnerability is fundamentally relational and it involves the researcher, the researched, collaborators, and (often distant) people and social structures that were not necessarily directly involved in the research process. Second, vulnerability is a spatially and temporally contingent process. The essay reviews the peculiar history by which prisoners came to be categorized as a ‘vulnerable population’ in the United States, in addition to recounting my first-hand experiences during the research process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Observed friendship choices are constrained by social structures and thus problematic indicators for underlying personal preferences. In this paper, we report on a study demonstrating the causal effects of preference in friendship choice based on an online field experiment. Specifically, we tested two important forces that govern friendship choices: preference for shared group identity (operationalized as the desire to befriend others sharing the same place-of-origin identity) and preference for high status (operationalized as the desire to befriend others from high-status institutions). Using an online field experiment in one of the largest social network service websites in China, we investigated the causal preference effects of these two forces free from structural constraints. The results of our study confirm the preference effects on friendship choice in both of the two dimensions we tested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the work of the Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke as an inspiration for developing an ethical–aesthetic critique of organization. Haneke's practice of film-making is located in the tradition of an ‘ethical parrhesia’, the courageous and often dangerous ‘truth-telling’, which aims at the transformation of being. Haneke's approach is then illustrated with an analysis of his filmThe White Ribbon.This example is taken to illustrate an ethical critique of moral organization and for analysing strategies that seek to instigate the open-ended moral reflection. By discussing implications of this form of critique, the paper contributes to the development of a critical aesthetics of organization that seeks to open a reflexive space on how we are formed in social and organizational life, and at what costs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While natural sciences such as physics hold causality for granted as one of the most fundamental principles to make adequate theories of the real world, social sciences, first of all, sociology have not this advantage. Of course, humans are subjected to causality insofar as they are physical entities too, but moreover they are endowed with free will that essentially complicates their behavior and social activity. Unlike causality, logistics should take the same place in social sciences. Conscious beings behave rationally and act logistically as well as they possess some physical experience (including causality) and socially structured knowledge. Thus, free will is restricted not only by causality and other physical laws but also logistics. This paper argues for a logistical approach to the society and models the state as a power hierarchy (mathematical ideal). The state can exist, function, and be stable over time only as a hierarchy. Then sovereignty emerges as a logistical phenomenon whose ‘dynamical magnitude’ is naturally decomposed by the societal strata of the society and the mankind as a whole. Further, any state-based legal system (SLS) can be analyzed in structuralism tradition by means of logical-algebraic modeling. When the states as a set of the self-sufficient (logistically complete) sovereign hierarchies confront in the international law field (ILF) it leads inevitably to incompleteness of the ILF. In sum, the logistical theorem on war can be elicited. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It has been argued that the social sciences have undergone a “mobility turn” over the last decade: a paradigm shift in which movement is seen to have become increasingly important to our social worlds. For the most part, housing studies is yet to extensively engage with this “paradigm shift”. In an attempt to engage with the ideas that the “mobility turn” has thrown up for housing studies this paper grapples with two key questions. First, where does housing studies fit in the new mobilities paradigm in the social sciences? And, second, how can housing studies contribute to this paradigm shift? This paper does this through an examination of how a politics of mobility can be usefully employed and extended by housing researchers. Looking specifically at two current dimensions of this politics: mobility as a right, and mobility as a resource, this paper argues that a third dimension – mobility as governmentality – should be introduced to the mobility turn’s politics of mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the course of this paper, I examine the concepts of ‘discourse’ and the ‘subject’ in relation to social organization and action. The paper argues that these concepts represent a form of explanation that reduces the complexity of the social. Through a reconnection with processes relating to social organization and action, the paper argues that the current ‘deepening’ of subjectivity can be informed by sociological ideas. Indeed, the paper makes the claim that moves to develop the concept of subjectivity through ‘interiority’ and ‘relationality’ would benefit from a dialogue with interactionist ideas. The paper discusses three programmes of work that illustrate how subjectivity can be informed through a reconnection with interactionist sociology.Subjectivity (2009) 26, 69–86. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.33 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper defines and explores reproductive loss and, drawing on a social sciences perspective, reflects on the lack of attention that has been given to the subject within the study of human fertility. The authors argue that whilst reproductive loss (broadly defined) is exceptionally common, scholars have - with some exceptions - focused on the study of reproductive 'success', and continue to do so. The paper examines the implications of this for policy, practice and the role of healthcare professionals and focuses on the significance of appreciating difference and diversity in the study of reproductive loss and the importance of placing such experiences within the social structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper draws its inspiration from the provocation which Merton offered sociology both to engage with empirical data and to perform analyses adequate to guide intervention beyond the particular case. Whilst contemporary STS is very different both in its models of theory and its forms of methodology, this paper suggests Merton's concerns with engagement and adequacy provide a useful way to interrogate current approaches. Specifically, the paper explores some recent anthropological conceptions of ethnographic fieldwork that have provided potent models for the study of scientific and technological cultures. These multi-sited approaches have also provided the opportunity to develop new notions of intervention and explore alternative ways of making contributions to development of theory and practice. In the process of pursuing the goals of engagement and adequacy notions of ethnography have however become stretched. This sense of detachment from methodological canons accentuates the need for methodological debate and skill-sharing in STS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Elder-Vass's “For Emergence: refining Archer's account of social structure,” is the latest of a number of papers which together constitute a family quarrel in the cognitive space After Postmodernism among realist social scientists. In the case under examination here in “Elder-Vass's Move and Giddens's Call”, the concern is the structure and agency problem in the social sciences. The debate continuing in Elder-Vass's paper represents the proponents of the resurrection of Durkheim's social realism under the auspices of Bhaskar's Transcendental Realism; the debate that continues here as a response to the Elder-Vass paper, opposes the latter's attempt to advance the argument for social realism under the canopy of Harre's Immanental realism. The theme of this response is this: Elder-Vass fails to realize the promise of reconciling social structural realism and social relational realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of social capital in professional-client relationships. We consider exploring the effects of social capital on the creation of human capital, a subject which is worthwhile investigating within all professions. In this paper, we concentrate on what are known as the structural and attributive dimensions of social capital and aim to understand their effects on the knowledge acquisition of professional practitioners. We analyse the association between social capital and human capital (i.e., knowledge acquisition) in the context of the lawyer-client relationship. Through the application of social capital theory, this paper seeks to advance our knowledge of the relations between professionals and clients. More importantly, the study contributes to improving our understanding of the role of social capital in influencing a lawyer's ability to retain and win new clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a conceptual investigation into the notion of a network as a form of social organization for the production of excellent research. This metaphor has been particularly attractive to social scientists and managers of cooperative research, because it seems to connote what is organic, flexible and libratory in communication and in the philosophy of language. The paper criticizes this preconception. In particular, it shows that, while Wittgenstein's philosophy may indeed encapsulate the virtues that partisans for the networking trope admire, they are mistaken in thinking that they can claim his authority for the use they make of this figure. The thought that they can do so results from inattention to features of the development of his ideas about language, particularly his fervent anti-scientism. I conclude that an over-stretched use of the metaphor obscures its constraining signification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how Japanese social documentary photographer, Hashiguchi George (b. 1949) explores his own society and culture much like a visual sociologist. Little known outside of Japan, Hashiguchi implicitly poses questions and provides pictorial responses to problems of social order and Japanese social organization. Much of Hashiguchi's work includes portrait photography accompanied by written transcriptions of questions answered by his subjects. Working as a sociological ethnographer with a survey approach, he produces a unique overview of Japanese society. The paper addresses the kinds of sociologically centred questions and interpretations found in Hashiguchi's work as well as his methods, portrait style, aesthetic preferences and model of documentation. Comparisons are made to German photographer, August Sander. Hashiguchi strives to present readers with a sense of considerable sociocultural diversity in light of stereotypic reductions of Japan as a homogeneous entity. Examples are discussed from several of Hashiguchi's photo‐texts, namely, 17's Map (1988), Children's Time (1999), Shoku 1991–1995 (Work) ( 1969 ) and Yume (Dream) (1997). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper suggests that the state is subject to assessment according to principles of social justice because state institutions or practices exercise forms of power over which no particular person has control. This rationale for assessment of social justice equally applies to legally optional or informal social practices. But it does not apply to individual conduct. Indeed, it follows that principles of social justice cannot provide a basis for the assessment and guidance of individual choice. The paper develops this practice-based conception of the subject of justice by rejoining G. A. Cohen's influential critique of Rawls’ focus on the“basic structure” of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this volume generally represent new developments in anthropology and cultural theory. Inevitably, in an evolutionary flowering, divergence can occur. Two of the papers represent a very new approach to theory for anthropology. This note discusses issues related to construction of theory that distinguish those papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proportional hazards models are powerful methods for the analysis of dynamic social processes and are widely used in sociology to estimate the effects of covariates on event timing (e.g., time to arrest, birth, marriage). The proper statistical modeling of failure time data is an important analytical issue in sociology, but to date the field has largely neglected the application of these models to multiple failure time data in which the conventional assumption of the independence of failure times is not tenable. This paper critically describes a class of models known as variance-corrected proportional hazards models that have been developed by statisticians to take into account a lack of independence among failure times. The purpose is to provide an exposition and comparison for sociologists of several such models and associated methods for handling multiple failure time data that can be readily estimated in commonly available statistical software packages. We pay special attention to the data requirements necessary for estimation of the models. The paper concludes with an illustrative application of the models to analyze the arrest patterns of a sample of California Youth Authority parolees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses spatial inequality as an emerging specialty area in sociology. Rural sociologists have long attended to spatial inequalities. The authors tend to view their work as uniquely centered on the rural experience, as opposed to occupying the forefront of spatializing stratification theory and of sociology as a whole. First the development of sociological interest in spatial inequality is discussed, providing an overview of factors that have contributed to a spatial trend in the study of stratification. Then, the implications for rural sociology are discussed, describing how rural sociologists contribute to research on spatial inequality, and distinguishes the approach of rural sociology from those of other subfields and disciplines. Finally, some examples of research in this emerging specialty area are highlighted by drawing from papers included in this issue. The authors call for the development of research based on qualitative approaches to provide deeper insights into the processes linking space with stratification, both from the perspective of people who are disadvantaged and from the standpoint of those who enjoy an advantage because of such a connection. They encourage the development of international and cross-national research on spatial inequality to broaden the understanding of the links between space and inequality.

So far there have usually been only two answers to the question of what to do with dichotomies in sociology, either embrace them or attempt to synthesize them. However, this has produced merely an endless vacillation between the two positions, and a paradoxical constant reproduction of dichotomous thinking, rather than its transformation. This paper works towards a 'third answer' to the question, first, by outlining how the concept of the 'Hobbesian problem of order', as proposed by Talcott Parsons, underpins all sociological dichotomies, and why it is important to re-read Hobbes and revisit the so-called 'problem of order'. Second, it explains how Bruno Latour's model of the 'Constitution' of modern thought helps us to understand the dynamics of oppositions like nature/society or agency/structure, and how the problems with dichotomies derive from only perceiving part of the Constitution, rather than all of it. The paper concludes with a discussion of one example of a type of sociology that does operate across all of Latour's Constitution because it is based on a different conception of what is problematic about social order, Norbert Elias' 'figurational sociology', as well as some observations about what we might do with sociology's Constitution from this point onwards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most characteristic features of contemporary debates in the social sciences is the growth of interest in non-class forms of social division and identity, accompanied by an increasing focus on ethnic and gender inequalities. This paper attempts to provide a frame for incorporating such divisions into stratification theory by placing the notion of 'social division' at centre stage and redrawing its boundaries. The paper pays particular attention to ethnicity and class for the purposes of the argument. It is argued that a theorisation of social divisions can show how non-class forms of division and identity constitute central elements of the stratification system of modern societies. Such an approach also marries better with the wealth of evidence that scholars of ethnicity and 'race' have been collecting on the importance of race/ethnicity as structuring social location and differential and unequal social outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study of a psychiatric intervention as an example of an institutional ethnography of psychiatric work. Institutional ethnography, a mode of inquiry outlined by Dorothy Smith (1987), is conceived here as an approach to the analysis of work in institutions as the contingent, local and context-bound insertion of a particular "case" - a patron, a pupil, a client, a patient - into both institutional and other social (e. g. gender, class) relations. The case presented in this paper, shows how a psychiatric factual account is the outcome of a process of the recognition, and/or the production, of "mentionables," followed by the documentary interpretation of mentionables as symptoms. Subsequently it is demonstrated that, and how, the recognition of mentionables depends on non-professional interpretations which by their nature express other social (such as gender, class, etc.) relations. This description of psychiatric diagnostic work is produced by means of a method of discourse analysis that consists of the juxtaposition of the various institutional texts (the two reports) with the transcript of the interview. An analysis of only the interview data would undoubtedly have resulted in some insights about psychiatric interviewing but would have shown neither how the interview functioned as a stage in the institutional process of (re)writing reports nor how ideological evaluations entered the diagnostic process. On the other hand, an analysis of only the two reports would have resulted in some insights about psychiatric reporting but would not have shown how these reports were produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay describes institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry pioneered by Dorothy E. Smith, and introduces a collection of papers which make distinctive contributions to the development of this novel form of investigation. Institutional ethnography is presented as a research strategy which emerges from Smith‘s wide-ranging explorations of the problematic of the everyday world. Smith‘s conception of the everyday world as problematic involves a critical departure from the concepts and procedures of more conventional sociologies. She argues for an alternative sociology which begins with the standpoint of the actor in everyday life, rather than from within a professional sociological discourse aligned with the society‘s ruling institutions. The familiar sociologies of everyday life do not suffice for this purpose, since they deal with local settings and social worlds, but stop short of examining how these are knitted into broader forms of social organization. In contrast, institutional ethnography examines how the scenes of everyday life are shaped by forms of social organization which cannot be fully grasped from within those scenes. The principal tasks of institutional ethnography include describing the coordination of activities in the everyday world, discovering how ideological accounts define those activities in relation to institutional imperatives, and examining the broader social relations in which local sites of activity are embedded. The four papers which follow demonstrate that specific contributions to institutional ethnography can be made in relation to a wide array of topics, methods, and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task essayed in this paper is a discussion of problems encountered, and solutions arrived at, during the course of the project.
The qualifications are necessary at the outset. Firstly, the demands of the 'problem and solution' approach encourage the deployment of the 'chronological lie'. Some, even much of what I discuss was only perceived in terms of problem and solution after the event. Secondly, there are many research situations where, one might say, a kind of 'principle of complementarity' obtains--that is where, when a solution to one sort of problem is approached closely, another sort of problem inevitably increases in magnitude. In the latter part of the paper certain problems will be discussed in these terms. That discussion looks at ways of optimizing the inevitably approximate fit between an external reality and what is observed. However, it should be noted that other interpretations of these observational problems are possible? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to develop a statement of those conditions that facilitate and those that obstruct the internationalization of social science knowledge. The topic merits investigations if for no other reason than that the internationalization of culture of all forms is an increasingly visible and salient phenomenon in our time. This process is evident at many levels, the spread of science and technology, fueled by the intensity of international economic competition; the diffusion of ideologies, notably those of democracy and modernization; the growth of common norms associated with growing economic and political interdependence, and the growing flow of persons through migration and tourism and the diffusion of culture, especially popular culture, through the expanded international system of the media, especially television. This paper distinguishes among three aspects of knowledge-research, training and learning - and the content and quality of knowledge. Research refers to the formal creation and codification of knowledge. Considered analytically, this activity is not attached to any special kind of social structure; knowledge has been created and codified informally, for example, in peasant agriculture and traditional crafts, and chroniclers and historians have accumulated facts and lore about societies for many centuries.

Since third sector research emerged as a full-fledged interdisciplinary academic field during the late 1980s, a separation has usually been maintained-in common with many other social science disciplines-between communities of researchers who are primarily concerned with the study of the third sector in rich Western countries and those who work on the third sector in the so-called developing world. Whilst internationally focused researchers tend to use the language of 'non-governmental organizations', those in domestic settings usually prefer the terms 'non-profit organization' or 'voluntary organization', even though both subsectors share common principles and are equally internally diverse in terms of organisations and activities. Whilst there has long been common-sense logic to distinguishing between wealthier and poorer regions of the world based on differences in the scale of human need, the 'developed' versus 'developing' category can also be criticised as being rather simplistic and unhelpfully ideological. As the categories of 'developing' and 'developed' countries become less clear-cut, and global interconnectedness between third sectors and their ideas grows, this paper argues that we need to reconsider the value of maintaining these parallel worlds of research, and instead develop a more unified approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Positive leadership is considered a fundamental factor which contributes significantly to the development of healthy organizations. Positive leadership has been address via other leadership models, primarily transformational and authentic leadership, with which some affinities have been established. Although there is a large body of literature on positive leadership, especially related to its practical aspects, the construct is not properly delimited and there are only a few relevant contributions on how to measure it. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a pilot study to examine the psychometric properties of a reduced version of the PLAS (Positive Leadership Assessment Scale). Results from a confirmatory factorial analysis show that a five-correlated factors model achieves a good fit with the empirical data (on a sample of Spanish students). Likewise, this study also offers a range of evidence of validity, showing a relationship with the constructs of both transformational and authentic leadership and engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a broad framework for thinking sociologically about emancipatory alternatives to dominant institutions and social structures, especially capitalism. The framework is grounded in two foundational propositions: (1) Many forms of human suffering and many deficits in human flourishing are the result of existing institutions and social structures. (2) Transforming existing institutions and social structures in the right way has the potential to substantially reduce human suffering and expand the possibilities for human flourishing. An emancipatory social science responding to these propositions faces four broad tasks: specifying the moral principles for judging social institutions; using these moral principles as the standards for diagnosis and critique of existing institutions; developing an account of viable alternatives in response to the critique; and proposing a theory of transformation for realizing those alternatives. The idea of 'real utopias' is one way of thinking about alternatives and transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crisis of 2008 is said to have brought the state back in, and its resurgence, in turn, is seen as revealing post-neoliberal tendencies. This analytical framework implies a conception of market and state as two distinct modes of social organization, and the perennial question about such a conception is whether the market has autonomy vis-à-vis the state, or the state vis-à-vis the market. Their social constitution as distinct forms of social relations is not raised. This paper argues that the capitalist state is fundamentally a liberal state. This conception entails class as the determining category of its form and content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we address the question of the relative importance of within and between country differences in income and material deprivation in the European Union in the context of recent suggestions that insufficient attention has been paid to the latter. In particular, we respond to the argument that the 'state bounded' relative income approach obscures the significance of EU-wide reference groups. Making use of EU-SILC 2004, we have sought to quantify the magnitude of relevant within and between country differences and their relative impact. Overall, our analysis supports the view that the predominant frame of reference is a national one. The limited impact of European reference groups observed in our analysis does not require explanation in terms of the emergence of a European social stratification system. Furthermore, the significance of such comparisons depends not only on the expectations of those affected by European inequalities but on the degree of legitimacy afforded to ensuing demands. While an EU-wide income-threshold can provide information regarding progress of the Union towards greater social cohesion, its usage for this purpose does not require a strong sense of European identity. Given the current status of the European Social Model, it would seem unwise to attribute an undue degree of policy relevance to the relatively modest impact of EU-wide reference groups revealed in our analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional and largely rural patterns of relationships seem to persist in Japan despite economic and political modernization. Infused within modern technology, ideology, and apparently modern organizational forms, one discerns the persistent, if not determining, influence of native values and social patterns. Following a genealogical approach, inspired by Nietzsche and Foucault, this paper goes beyond the opposition between universalist and multiculturalist models of modernization, in order to identify certain indigenous principles of social organization manifest in both "traditional" and "modern" social formations of Japan. The persistence of these basic principles, such as the 'frame orientation," and the emphasis on wa (harmony, peace), is traced through the historical process of Japan's modernization in various realms of social life — the economy, political life, and popular culture. e analysis recent structural shifts in Japanese society, while still affirming the principles of Japan's "alternative modernity," also implies that major changes in its basic organizing principles might be under way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines ways in which Cicourel's approach to understanding the construction of socially distributed knowledge in workplaces and institutions opens up possibilities for examining basic processes of social structuration. I focus on one particular dimension of that problem: how what gets to count as knowledge (of different kinds) is directly implicated in the dimensions of structuration that involve the construction and definition of categories and relations of social difference and social inequality. I draw on the notions of resources, trajectories, and discursive spaces to illustrate how Cicourel's ideas about distributed knowledge linking interactional orders and processes to institutional ones has allowed me to ask how distributed knowledge is linked to distributed power. I illustrate this approach with a discussion of such an analysis of categorization and stratification in a French-language minority high school in Ontario (Canada), drawing on fieldwork conducted in the early 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper will try to explain the difficulty based on the polisemic nature of the notion of complex systems and its broadly used in diverse disciplines such as: Physics, Biology, Sociology, Economics, and Social Psychology, and Clinic Psychology, due to the indetermination and the difficulty for its terminological use for the evaluation of social organizations, and other type of systems or webs, like natural systems, or animal, because this objects, are of different nature because of the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The structure of generalized kinetic models is developed to enquire how effectively theycan be used in the fields of human reactions and of the social sciences. In particular, a specific model is designed to describe the dynamics of a composite, structured society such as that of a competing bipartisan political system. The model structure contains terms with localized interactions and mean field terms. The first part of the paper deals with the mathematical framework. In the second part, a comprehensive model is proposed. Finally, some results of a set of simulations are mentioned and a critical analysis towards research perspectives is formulated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Most of the research on masculinity in Ireland stresses the influences of family, work and education in the construction of gender (Ferguson, 1998; Ferguson and Synott, 1995; Ferguson and Reynolds, 2001; McKeown et al., 1998, Owens, 2000). Although the impact of the entertainment media is regularly alluded to, there is a dearth of empirical work in this area. While it is generally agreed that mediated images play a highly influential role in young people's lives, both the nature and the scope of this influence remain unclear in the absence of concrete ethnographies of reception. This paper discusses the findings of a quantitative and qualitative investigation into Irish male teenagers' consumption and reception of a broad range of media texts and discusses these findings in relation to the relevant literature. It points to the shortcomings of both `hypodermic needle' theories, which claim direct media influence, and of some active audience theories, which posit consumers as impervious to ideological influence. Contrary to popular discourses which frame the media as an autonomous, regressive force that lags behind a more progressive reality, the findings presented here suggest that mediated fictions are part of wider `gender scripts' (Nixon, 1996) that both inform and are informed by the social structures within which (male) viewers are immersed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interpretive approach to political science provides accounts of actions and practices that are interpretations of interpretations. We develop this argument using the idea of ‘situated agency’. There are many common criticisms of such an approach. This paper focuses on nine: that an interpretive approach is mere common sense; that it focuses on beliefs or discourses, not actions or practices; that it ignores concepts of social structure; that it seeks to understand actions and practices, not to explain them; that it is concerned exclusively with qualitative techniques of data generation; that it must accept actors' own accounts of their beliefs; that it is insensitive to the ways in which power constitutes beliefs; that it is incapable of producing policy-relevant knowledge; and that it is incapable of producing objective knowledge. We show that the criticisms rest on both misconceptions about an interpretive approach and misplaced beliefs in the false idols of hard data and rigorous methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the phenomenon of polls desertion, exploring both its causes and its impact on the social and political landscape. It is argued that while the Greek poleis were highly vulnerable to ecologically and socially induced stress and catastrophe, they were at the same time remarkably resilient in a way that their individual inhabitants could not be. It is argued that this social resilience was a product of relations with other communities which stowed as a kind of buffer against risk; it is thus the communal response to stress and catastrophe that enables social resilience. A variety of relations between communities contributed to social resilience, including kinship, sympoliteia, and isopoliteia, but it is argued that the koinon was the most effective social structure in achieving this end, by institutionalizing economic and political relations between communities that allowed for diversification and redistribution of both populations and resources. In writing the history of abandonment in the Classical and Hellenistic poleis, evidence is drawn from literary and epigraphic sources as well as intensive and extensive survey, excavation and studies of landscape change in antiquity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on an education programme aimed at addressing aspects of the diverse and disrupted educational backgrounds of women in a local prison. The programme, which has been primarily sociological in content, is designed to give participants some idea of what university education involves, but without any of its formal requirements. It has not run altogether smoothly. The problems encountered have prompted this reflection on the storytelling nature of the interaction between educator and participants, that is, on the narrative nature of both the lectures being given and the women's responses to them. This is explored in terms of Tennant's (1998) notion of the situated self in adult education. It is argued that, where prison education is commonly a site of conflict between educational models aimed, at one limit, at correcting individual pathology and, at the other, at analysing oppressive social structures, the narrative approach adopted in this programme offers participants a middle way--an opportunity to reflect on the self in a way that locates their own experiences within wider social structures. The approach rests, however, on the ability of participants to construct narratives of their lives in relation to wider public narratives. It is argued that the different responses of young and older women to the programme (resistant and enthusiastic, respectively) may have arisen, at least in part, from their differential abilities to craft life stories in the context of the programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agent-based models (ABMs) have been attracting the attention of researchers in the social sciences, becoming a prominent paradigm in the study of complex social systems. Although a great number of models have been proposed for studying a variety of social phenomena, no general agent design methodology is available. Moreover, it is difficult to validate the accuracy of these models. For this reason, we believe that some guidelines for ABMs design must be devised; therefore, this paper is a first attempt to analyze the levels of ABMs, identify and classify several aspects that should be considered when designing ABMs. Through our analysis, the following implications have been found: (1) there are two levels in designing ABMs: the individual level, related to the design of the agents' internal structure, and the collective level, which concerns the design of the agent society or macro-dynamics of the model; and (2) the mechanisms of these levels strongly affect the outcomes of the models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two main objectives. One is to consider the central place of human rights in today's global order and the other is to articulate a theoretical framework that will make sociological sense out of current human rights discourse and practice. Human rights emerged from, but need to be distinguished from, societal rights, and they are to be viewed as social claims upon social power arrangements. In advancing our perspective, special attention is given to the place of organizations in human rights theorizing; at the same time, we delineate some of the highly contested aspects of the endeavor to institutionalize a set of human rights principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of a fourfold typology referring to different definitions of the social-structure concept, and of a critique of Giddens's and Bourdieu's strategies for transcending the divide between objectivist and subjectivist sociologies, this paper argues that rapprochement rather than transcendence is the way to overcome the existing fragmentation and for bringing closer together structural/structuralist and interpretative paradigms in the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces Niklas Luhmann's final work, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (The Society of Society). According to Luhmann, sociologists have failed to produce even a partially adequate theory of society. Epistemological obstacles and humanist concerns for rationality and justice have prevented true progress in the discipline. With his "radically antihumanist, radically antiregional, and radically constructivistic "social system theory, Luhmann intends to bring about a sociological enlightenment. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft focuses on communication as the only genuinely social phenomenon. Social systems differentiate and evolve as they communicate in three separate dimensions: the social, temporal, and functional. The path of evolution results from a history of variation, selection, and restabilization within these dimensions. Communication, bit by bit, produces social structures that, recursively, produce future structures. Society is communication. Sociology, as the science of society, is communication about how different societal systems operate, communicate, evolve, and maintain their boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her paper, Molm raises whether behavioral sociology is an appropriate perspective for distinctly sociological analysis or does it lead to psychological reductionism. In the first section of the paper, where she distinguishes behavioral sociology from behavioral psychology, Molm adopts a sociological focus that is in agreement with my conception of it. The discussion in the second section of the paper seems to depart from the sociological perspective of the first section. Most of Molm's paper deals with microsociological studies, and her contribution which should be acknowledged is that she recognizes the dangers of psychological reductionism. In concluding her article, she notes that a main difference between behavioral and other sociologists is the methodological one that the former tend to prefer laboratory experiments and the latter research in natural settings. The nature of the explanatory theory depends on the conception of social structure. The theory seeks to explain the pattern of structure of social relations in terms of the structure or distribution of social positions.

Though necessarily selective, I want to present a biography of the research which principally focusses on 24 families with an epileptic child, to illustrate changing perspectives, emergent problems and some of the solutions, or attempted solutions, to overcome them, indicating my position then as it was; and how, in the light of an examination o[ the data, revisions in procedures and interpretations were required. In particular, the paper focusses on the problems of making sense of extensive data, much of which is biographical, collected on one of these families. Analysis of these accounts suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a procedure for facilitating the generation of theory useful to family sociologists. This procedure is based upon a linguistic model, and it utilizes the metaphor of literary genre as a guide. A distinction is made between the construction and the generation of sociological theory. The suggestion is made that the generation perspective may enhance the ability of theorists to find subtle interconnections among phenomena and thereby to extend fields of sociological knowledge along novel paths. The procedure itself depends first upon the construction of a binary lexicon. One such lexicon consists of one matrix of concepts describing social structure from the perspective of stabilization of social relations and a complementary matrix describing structure from the perspective of destabilization. From these matrices, one concept is chosen as a metonym or as a metaphor to act as a basis for deriving connections among the other concepts in the matrices. The manipulation of concepts from both matrices permits the development of propositions suggesting ironies and contradictions in social relations. Examples of the use of this procedure are presented, and some unresolved problems are described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]