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

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

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

The article looks at the efforts to extend the ideas of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim following his death on November 15, 1917. It is noted that some of the latest works of Durkheim were retrieved by his nephew, Marcel Mauss, from a depository of Durkheim's papers held by his daughter, Marie. Marie's second son Étienne Halphen got interested in his grandfather's works, particularly in the circumstances surrounding the life of the sociologist. A booklet titled "Hommages à Émile Durkheim" was published in 1988.

Today Pierre Bourdieu is well known as one of the most important social scientists of the 20th century. One of the outstanding qualities of his work has been his innovative combination of different methods and research strategies as well as his analytical skills in interpreting the obtained data (his ‘sociological gaze’). In this paper, we attempt to retrace the development of an extraordinary way of doing social research and show the benefit of Bourdieu's visual sociology for his empirical fieldwork and sociological theory. The article particularly stresses the significance of his photographic archive, which has long been ignored within the appreciation of Bourdieu's work. Studying Bourdieu's photography gives access to his œuvre in several new ways: not only can we understand how Bourdieu became an unconventional sociologist practicing his craft in the midst of a colonial war. Bourdieu's visual anthropology also offers an insight into the status nascendi of Bourdieu's sociology in all its elementary forms and contents. Through his photography Boudieu demonstrated the concepts of ‘habitat and habitus’, the material and symbolic living conditions of the Algerian population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a sociology based on interaction that visualizes and models relations between actors. Whereas interaction is approached by classical scholars, we had to wait until the 1970s and the birth of computer science to see social networks analysis develop. This article investigates the influence of SNA in France from the 1980s and wonder if there is a French school of SNA? To do so, we first resume social networks history and highlight its contribution to sociology. Second, we analyze the trajectory and profile of five 'disciplinary entrepreneurs,' whose role in the field is important as they master three necessary languages for SNA: English, Mathematics and Computer Science. Third, in order to put back those individuals in their social structures, we cross SNA with the different French sociological tradition(s) (according to topics and methods). Last, we wonder if the institutionalization process succeeded in the creation of institutions from which a French SNA would be able to expand? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a theory of interdisciplinarity and examines relations between historians and sociologists in Germany and France over the course of the twentieth century, focusing in on several key moments of interdisciplinary activity. Interdisciplinary engagements are motivated by scholarly problems, field-specific interests and battles, and pressures and inducements coming from states, businesses, and scientific institutions. Analysis of the most productive moments of cross-disciplinary interaction suggests that they occur when disciplines are equal in power and when scholars are motivated by scholarly problems and disciplinary conflicts to move beyond their disciplines. More generative forms of interdisciplinarity are dialogic and processual, characterized by a fusion of perspectives; less productive forms are externally induced, involve asymmetrical partners, and are organized around division of disciplinary labor rather than an interpenetration of perspectives. The most productive interdisciplinary conjunctures result from serendipitous resonances and contingent synchronicities between subfields of semi-autonomous disciplines. It is thus impossible to produce the most fruitful forms of interdisciplinarity deliberately. The article examines three cases of symmetrical, processual interdisciplinarity involving sociology and history. Two of these cases were located in the French academic field, first between the wars, and then again after 1980. The other case of dialogic collaboration between historians and sociologists begins in Nazi Germany and continues after 1945 into the 1960s, leading to the formation of West German Historische Sozialwissenschaft. Examples of unbalanced interdisciplinarity include German “History-Sociology” during the Weimar Republic, in which sociologists’ opening to history was not reciprocated by professional historians and Historische Sozialwissenschaft after 1970. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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

The development of anthropology in France and North America during the early to mid 20th century showed both similarities and pronounced differences. In both cases anthropology matured alongside sociology, a relationship that would prove increasingly problematic as the century wore on. In France, in particular, another important influence was art and literature, especially the Surrealism of the 1920s and 1930s. This was less the case in North America, but in both countries, anthropology occupied a medial position between science and the humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on archival materials and personal testimonies, I reconstruct the conditions under which Bourdieu came to receive the Gold Medal of the National Center for Scientific Research, France’s highest science prize, in 1993 as a signal case study of the existential predicament and institutional trappings of scholarly consecration. Bourdieu’s award speech and the ceremony at which he read it present a triple interest for the history and sociology of sociology. They illustrate how a shaping figure in the discipline personally experienced, reflexively viewed, and practically navigated the nexus of science, authority, and power. They mark 1993 as a pivot-year in Bourdieu’s intellectual evolution, leading to a new agenda foregrounding the state as paramount symbolic power, the alchemy of group formation, and the unfinished promise of democratic politics; and they help explain why he ventured more forthrightly into civic debate in the 1990s. Bourdieu’s ambivalent acceptance of the prize also illustrates his conception of the ‘Realpolitik of reason’ and put an emphatic end to the eclipse of Durkheim by restoring sociology to its rightful place at the scientific zenith in the country of its birth. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article approaches post-war debates about the relationship between normative political theory and empirical political science from a French perspective. It does so by examining Raymond Aron's commentaries on a series of articles commissioned by him for a special issue of the Revue française de science politique on this theme as well as through an analysis of his wartime dialogue with the neo-Thomist philosopher, Jacques Maritain. Following a consideration of Aron's critique of contemporary approaches to this issue in France, we discuss his own distinctive attempt to draw normative theory and empirical science into the same orbit by tracing the interaction of these two elements in his work from the late 1930s to the mid-1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two young men met on a quay at the port in Conakry, Guinea in 1946. One, waiting dockside, was Mamadou Madeira Keita, a low-level civil servant and archivist. Years later, when he was a political prisoner in the Malian Sahara, some would argue that he was “the first francophone African ethnographer.” The other, descending the gangplank, was the Frenchman Keita had come to meet. Georges Balandier was unknown then, but would soon become a leading figure in the fields of sociology and anthropology. The encounter between Keita and Balandier was foundational for both men. Conakry incubated a canonical intervention—Balandier's 1951 article “La Situation Coloniale”—that some attribute an ancestral role in a particular francophone tradition of postcolonial thought. Conakry, and Guinea at large, was also the crucible in which a powerful anti-colonial politics were forged by Madeira Keita and his allies. In this particular corner of West Africa, anti-colonial politics and an emergent, politically engaged social science conditioned each other, like the two strands of a double helix, each a necessary yet ultimately contingent element of the other's structure. Though these links did not last long, they had important effects. This article, by emphasizing the contingencies of the two men's intertwined biographies, seeks to carry out Balandier's dictate to emphasize the “concrete” nature of this particular situation in order to understand how and why anti-colonial politics and an innovative sociology converged and ultimately diverged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sociology once debated ‘the social’ and did so with a public readership. Even as late as the Second World War, sociologists commanded a wide public on questions about the nature of society, altruism and the direction of social evolution. As a result of several waves of professionalization, however, these issues have vanished from academic sociology and from the public writings of sociologists. From the 1960s onwards sociologists instead wrote for the public by supporting social movements. Discussion within sociology became constrained both by ‘professional’ expectations and political taboos. Yet the original motivating concerns of sociology and its public, such as the compatibility of socialism and Darwinism, the nature of society, and the process of social evolution, did not cease to be of public interest. With sociologists showing little interest in satisfying the demand, it was met by non-sociologists, with the result that sociology lost both its intellectual public, as distinct from affinity groups, and its claim on these topics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1877, the young Alfred Espinas defended a philosophical study, ‘doctorat ès lettres’, at the Sorbonne University, entitled Des Sociétés animales. This was to become one of the principal sources of French organicist sociology. The paradox, however, is that this work seems to be fundamentally a study of natural science. Espinas tried to justify his position theoretically through two types of reciprocally exclusive and uncomplementary arguments. The first one consists in showing that only certain kinds of animal groupings belong legitimately, if not academically, to sociology. The second one has a greater audacious and uncontrollable dimension. It consists in asserting that all pluricellular organisms are true societies. In this article we first focus on the role played by cellular theory in such a ‘sociologization’ of biology, concerning the extension of sociology. Second, we examine the importance of such confusion within the fields of extension, in aiming to explain the conceptual transfers between social sciences and life sciences, in the second half of the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Little is known about the world's first sociological society, émile Littré's Société de Sociologie (1872-4). This article, based on prosopographic research, offers an interpretation of the foundation, political-intellectual orientation and early demise of the society. As indicated by recruitment and texts by its founding members, the Société de Sociologie was in fact conceived more as a political club than a learned society. Guided in this by Littré's heterodox positivism and the redefinition of sociology he proposed around 1870, the Société de Sociologie was intended first and foremost to accompany intellectually the political changes that Littré considered imperative in the early years of the Third Republic (1870- 1940). This expectation found little echo among the members of the society, and it seems possible that Littré himself and his closest associates were the ones to interrupt the society's meetings. Some of its members' general studies on the status of the social sciences and their main divisions were continued in the framework of the journal La Philosophie positive (1867-83), but the authors most committed to those studies were on the margins of the Littré network. Neither the dominant positivist republicanism, centered around Littré and Dubost, nor the general sociology of the more peripheral members of the network (Mesmer, Roberty, Vitry) represented an important intellectual contribution to the formation of academic sociology in France. Given that the Société de Sociologie did contribute to diffuse the project of a sociological science and developed forms of sociology coherent enough to be rejected by the pioneers of university sociology, the group constitutes a significant case of failure in the history of the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the importance of historical analyses of organization in contemporary organizational science. It states that Max Weber, one of the forefathers of sociology and organizational theory, believed that understanding contemporary institutions came through studying their history. It mentions that modern organizational researchers have abandoned researching historical studies due to the professionalization of sociology and in finding its own identity independent from history and other disciplines. It examines the historical evolution of organizations and differences in work organizations in France and Germany. It mentions that some differences are due to the apprenticeship system of guilds that existed in Germany due to the lack of state-run schools in Germany.