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In the 1920’s Marxism, having become the state ideology of Soviet Russia, took a leading position among the political ideologies of Europe in terms of its influence on the minds and hearts of people. The teachings of K. Marx and F. Engels received various interpretations, among which “sociology of knowledge” in the interpretation of M. Scheler and K. Mannheim earned the most recognition in the academic environment. It originated in Germany in the mid 1920’s as a result of criticism of the Marxist “theory of ideology”, of “economist” limitations of the materialistic vision of man, of history and society. In the USSR “sociology of knowledge” was understood to be the most refined attempt to overcome Marxism. The essential characteristics of Marxism and “sociology of knowledge” as interpreted by K. Mannheim are revealed, while being subjected to comparative and critical analysis. The first reaction of Soviet Marxist sociologists to “sociology of knowledge” is analyzed. In the light of this reaction, it was presented as “social fascism”. The specifics of how the teachings of K. Marx and F. Engels existed in the USSR during the 1920s–1930’s are evaluated. “Historical materialism” is qualified as a sociological methodology of suspicion, and the practice of its application by the Bolsheviks as a form of discrimination and persecution in society based on social class and social group affiliation.

Philip Lowe died in February 2020, and so an academic career spanning five decades in environmental and rural social science and the sociology of knowledge came to an end. A pioneer of the social science of environmentalism since the early 1990s, Philip Lowe had been closely associated with the Centre for Rural Economy at Newcastle University in the UK and had been the intellectual force behind establishing rural economy as both a subject and mode of social science analysis. This article reflects on a career and the evolving concept of ‘rural economy’ as an economic form, a policy realm and a knowledge practice. Through this history, it presents an account of the contribution of Philip Lowe's research and writing that, as a result of his death, now stands as a bounded and complete body of work for the benefit of future generations of scholars.

In the last two decades, graduate programs in Social Science grew in number, while funding agencies began to push for its ‘internationalization’. This process is highly contradictious, and scholarship demonstrates how difficult it is to internationalize programs in the Humanities’ area. The present study discuss the main explaining factors behind the internationalization of scholars in Social Sciences. It analyzes a national on-line survey to describe the main aspects related to the internationalization of scholars careers and identify its dominant causes. The main results are the following: doing a post-doc abroad is more important to internationalization than studying for a short-time period during PhD period; The area of Anthropology is more internationalized than Sociology and Political Science, though it is not clear which are the causes for this result; professors in peripheral programs employ a low-cost approach to compensate for the lack of internationalization, Nas últimas duas décadas, ocorreu uma expansão dos programas de pós-graduação em Ciências Sociais e, ao mesmo tempo, uma crescente pressão, por parte das agências financiadoras, para a “internacionalização”. Tal processo não é isento de contradições, muitos já apontados na literatura, como a dificuldade de “internacionalizar” programas ligados às Humanidades. Neste sentido, o presente estudo discute os principais fatores explicativos da internacionalização de docentes das Ciências Sociais. Para tanto, desenvolve uma descrição dos aspectos relacionados à internacionalização da carreira dos professores e, ao final, identifica os fatores preponderantes para este processo, a partir de um survey on-line nacional. Os principais resultados são: realização de pós-doutorado no exterior é mais significativo para internacionalização do que doutorado-sanduíche; Antropologia tem indicadores de internacionalização maiores do que Sociologia e Ciência Política, embora não seja possível inferir as causas; docentes de programas tidos como periféricos compensam a dificuldade de internacionalização com estratégias de baixo custo".

The Conflict in Maluku on January 19th, 1999 affected the harmony of life of the Moluccas universally. As a result, the people of Maluku live segregated in their respective communities. However, there are still groups of people who continue to live in harmony within the framework of diversity, namely the Tamilouw people on Seram-Maluku Island. The social harmony found in Tamilouw which is multi-ethnic and multi-religious is inseparable from the role of actors, and the workings of a systematic social structure. This study aimed to find out how the actors construct in the frame of diversity to achieve social harmony in the daily lives of Tamilouw people. The discipline approach used was the sociology of knowledge, using the reality construction theory of Peter Berger and Luckmann. The research paradigm used was constructivism with a qualitative approach. Key informants were religious leaders, indigenous leaders, community leaders, indigenous people and migrants. Data collection was carried out using observation, interview, and documentation techniques. The techniques of data analysis was the data flow analysis model according to Miles & Huberman. Based on the research findings, data analysis and discussion, it can be concluded that: Social harmony maintained in Tamilouw, Seram-Maluku Island, is the result of the integration of four main actors, namely religious leaders, traditional leaders, government figures and youth leaders. These four actors have a network or bond of trust, work strategies and rules of prevailing norms.

Within different social science and humanities disciplines, there has been debate about the impact of feminist knowledges and scholarship by women in general. This study systematically investigates the differential impact of feminist thought on disciplinary domains in the social sciences and humanities. Using quantitative citation data from the Web of Science, we investigate the extent to which gender-related research is produced and circulated in the ‘centres’ of six disciplines: economics, history; international relations; political science; philosophy and sociology. We then analyse the production and circulation of knowledge produced in feminist disciplinary sub-fields. The study findings show gender inequality persists, evidenced by gender representation in editorial positions and authorship. The proportion of gender-related research articles published in sociology is significantly greater than in economics, history, international relations, philosophy and political science. Interdisciplinarity appears to mediate the status of feminist knowledge within disciplines. The marginalisation of feminist discipline subfields appears to be constituted through practices of strong disciplinarity.

As a result of an extensive fieldwork period in the Peruvian Andes, and of various research and teaching terms at different academic institutions in Perú, México, Bolivia and Nicaragua, the author develops a reflection upon specific practices within the collective of anthropologists. This paper analyzes the usage of professional strategies that respond to the anthropologist's need of linking the normative sphere of the discipline with essential elements of sociological nature, such as the ethnic factor or the central or peripheral condition of the anthropologist. The author initiates a search for explanations to this problem, starting from the conflictive framework of unsymmetrical relationships between metropolitan centers of production of theoretical knowledge and the centers where it is received, which persist unaltered to this day. This is done not only from the traditional politological perspective, but also from within the fields of epistemology and sociology of knowledge. En este artículo, el autor analiza determinadas prácticas en el colectivo de profesionales de la antropología, centrando su atención en el despliegue de estrategias que responden a la necesidad que tienen los antropólogos de articular el plano normativo de la disciplina con factores determinantes de carácter sociológico, como son el factor étnico o la condición central o periférica de los mismos. Partiendo del marco problemático de las tradicionales relaciones asimétricas mantenidas hasta nuestros días entre los centros metropolitanos de producción de conocimiento teórico y los centros receptores del mismo, el autor propone la búsqueda de explicaciones a dicha problemática, no sólo en el ámbito de la reflexión política, como generalmente se ha venido haciendo, sino también en los de la epistemología y la sociología del conocimento.

This chapter is a synthetical one, drawing on previous work on knowledge production in the Arab world in the last decade. It contributes to the debate about how scholarship in the Arab region has struggled with some dichotomies before being able to partially transcend them. The author presents different research trends that have evolved from mainstream critical “glocal” (global/local) trends to the more polarized ones of postcolonial and Islamic perspectives. When analyzing the latter, the author also highlights differences between the trends that existed or evolved previous to and immediately following the 2011 Arab uprisings—cognitively inspired movements that were induced by paradigm shifts in the Arab social sciences.

Inspired by hermeneutics tradition, qualitative as well as quantitative social research has realized that the subject matter of the social sciences is always interpreted by the actors studied. Social studies of science have also demonstrated that science itself depends on preinterpreted knowledge. In recent decades, it therefore became increasingly clear that any scientific methodology needs to account for the positionality of researchers and their methodology. In addition to the abstract armchair methodologies of scientific “reasoning,” reflexive methodology has been proposed as an approach to empirical study of more than just the procedures and methods of the very researchers who are doing research, such as the videography of videography. It is one goal of this paper to stress that reflexive methodology is not a self-contained method describing and analyzing the practical methodology of one’s action. To the degree that the analysis of the “real live” method is intended to guide research, reflexive methodology has also normative implications. As these normative implications have been referred to by the label theory of science, the second goal of this presentation is to delineate the idea of empirical theory of science., Historical Social Research Vol. 46, No. 2 (2021): Special Issue: Positionality Reloaded: Debating the Dimensions of Reflexivity in the Relationship Between Science and Society. Starting Point and Frequency: Year: 1979, Issues per volume: 4, Volumes per year: 1

How should we understand the academization of the social sciences around the turn of the twentieth century with regard to gender? In this article I argue in favour of a contextually broadened sociology of knowledge approach which highlights the importance of women’s extra-academic social research as a parallel and interconnected form of social knowledge to the new and male-dominated academic social sciences. Theoretically, the approach combines three perspectives: field theory, social movements research and historical studies of knowledge circulation. Empirically and methodologically, the study is prosopographically centred around nine female social researchers in Sweden 1900–1950 with an analytical focus on their aggregated career patterns, the gender-coded mechanisms of academic exclusion that were at play and three types of alternative arenas that were available for extra-academic social research during the period. It is concluded that we need to take this form of extra-academic social research into account to better understand the dynamics of the field of social knowledge as a whole, including the development of academic social science.

This thesis is on politics, but of a very particular type. Tied to our very perceptions of existence and ways of life, it stems from deeper differences and entanglements. Exacerbated by post-Cold War globalisation, said politics is explored here in the contexts of international development. Positing a better worlds problem, it asks how to realise a better world amidst a conflicting plurality of them. Whose ideas matter? Is it more reason or might that define whose better world is right? Structured into three essays, it trials a historical approach using development's English-language academic historiography as an intellectual history archive. Capturing better worlds as ontological, moral, and epistemological systems or logic scaffolds, essay one thus finds a growing liberal scientific positivist scaffold underlying historical development journal articles. In contrast, essay two traces distinctly Marxist scientific positivist scaffolds underwriting Cold War-era development history books. Finally, essay three adds a new post-structuralist scaffold that manifests in post-Cold War postdevelopment theory. Constituting the most extensive study of the Anglophone development historiography to date, these essays produce three overarching findings. First is the dominant influence of the three observed scaffolds, which reflect the politics surrounding their own places and times. Resulting in a highly fragmented and polemical historiography, its visions privilege local over global priorities; more about a Western New Left than a purported Third World. The second finding thus illustrates an embedded development. Resituating its theories in society highlights their production in Western social science for consumption around the world. Extended to the third finding of a development game, it highlights a politics inextricable from development theory as well as its underlying social sciences. Culminating in a larger metaphysical geopolitics at play, it ties to a politics of science, knowledge, truth, and expertise—including the political role of the university. The thesis thus closes by outlining a larger programme across interdisciplinary, international, and theory-practice divides. Ultimately, it entails returning with greater hindsight to the start: the search for a way to navigate our deeper entanglements and rising tempers in the twenty-first century.

Modern epistomology has been dominated by an empiricist theory of knowledge that assumes a direct individualistic relationship between the knowing subject and the object of knowledge. Truth is held to be universal, and non-individualistic social and cultural factors are considered sources of distortion of true knowledge. Since the late 1950s, this view has been challenged by a cognitive relativism asserting that what is true is socially conditioned. This volume examines the far-reaching implications of this development for the social sciences. Recently, cognitive relativism has become a key issue of debate in anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. In anthropology this is illustrated by a growing awareness of the similarity of all systems of knowledge. In philosophy it is exemplified by the realization that traditional monolithic and absolutist concepts of truth have increasingly lost any power to make sense and to convince. In sociology it is visible in a renewal of interest in a general sociology of knowledge. Yet, in spite of this convergence of interests, practitioners of these three disciplines have on the whole shown no inclination to reach a consensus on the terms of reference that could facilitate an interdisciplinary approach. "Cognitive Relativism and Social Science "aims to do just this. It is a working assumption of this volume that, as far as the subject of cognitive relativism is concerned, anthropologists, philosophers, and sociologists should join forces rather than try to deal with the challenges of cognitive relativism within strictly imposed boundaries that normally separate academic disciplines. Only when they work together will it be possible to treat the problems posed by cognitive relativism in an adequate way. This volume provides the results of attempts to communicate on cognitve relativism across disciplinary boundaries. This is must reading in the philosophy of social science and in social research theory.

There has been a resurgence of interest in the role of scientific knowledge and expertise in International Relations, but it is not clear what the theoretical value-added of this work is. This article places recent work on scientific knowledge and expertise in a longer-term perspective. The history shows that knowledge has played an important role in International Relations theory since Carr and Morgenthau, but that thinking has been trapped within a simple conceptual framework centered on tracing how knowledge shapes the beliefs and interests of international subjects. This mode of theorizing first entered International Relations via Mannheim and has been further developed by Foucauldian and practice-based approaches since the 1990s. Outlining the history of knowledge from Carr through Haas to the present makes it possible to identify the distinctive contribution of recent work: whereas International Relations has focused on how knowledge shapes subjects such as states and international organizations, recent work by Corry, Sending, and others reorients International Relations to the constitution of governance objects. On the object-centered view, knowledge plays a key role in the construction of the hybrid entities like the economy and the climate that structure the landscape of international politics.

This article reflects on the experience of the two authors as ‘experts’ during consultations on justice and security indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals. The authors examine how the tension between the indeterminacy of the concepts to be measured — justice and security — and the concreteness of indicators shaped the politics of the consultations. Participants used this tension strategically to destabilize notions of time, space and identity on which knowledge production rests. In doing so, they blurred the distinction between academics, advocates and policy makers. They did this to lay claim to some aspects of implementation while distancing themselves from others. The authors then juxtapose this with personal experience of researching South Sudanese citizens, who challenged and deconstructed that distinction. At the same time, experts at the consultations incorporated an image of these citizens as an ethical justification for the discussion. The authors argue that a more complex sociology of knowledge is required to understand how these global knowledge practices work from the global to the local. Such a sociology of knowledge acknowledges fluidity and grapples with how knowledge practices defer and delimit moments of decision; it requires an ethico-political — rather than just a political — critique.

In a recent CJS special issue developed around their paper titled “The Institutionalization of Symbolic Interactionism in Canadian Sociology, 1922-1979: Success at What Cost?” Helmes-Hayes and Milne (2017) document the emergence and establishment of symbolic interactionism (SI) in English-language Canadian sociology, and then consider its fragmentation and decline from 1979 into the present period. This is followed by commentaries from Jacqueline Low (2017), who gives a more optimistic impression of the present state of SI in Canada, and Neil McLaughlin (2017), who considers its sectarian nature as a social and intellectual movement. This is a worthy discussion in the history of Canadian sociology and the sociology of ideas. Certainly Canadian SI is an important part of our wider national sociology tradition, and it is important that we recognize its past, present, and future institutional development in light of as much evidence as possible.

Feminist sociologists claim that while feminist insights have been incorporated in sociological paradigms and women sociologists have been well-integrated into academia, sociological frameworks hav...

US-American sociology has largely failed to examine the transformation of mediated communication of the past 20 years. If sociology is to be conceived as a general social science concerned with analyzing and critically scrutinizing past, present, and future conditions of collective human existence, this failure, and the ignorance it engenders, is detrimental. This ignorance, we argue, may be traced back to the weak self-identity, institutionalization and position of media sociology in the discipline. Our argument here is threefold: 1) There was an opportunity structure for specialization, that is, a venerable research tradition in media sociology since the first half of the twentieth century. This tradition links back to classics in sociology and peaked at a time (1970s and 1980s) when the discipline differentiated institutionally and many new sections emerged in the American Sociological Association. 2) Despite this tradition, media sociology has not become established in sociology in the United States until recently. 3) Lastly, we locate reasons for non-establishment on three distinct but interconnected levels: the history of ideas in media sociology, institutional/disciplinary history, and disciplinary politics.

Over the last 20 years, an interdisciplinary debate in science and technology studies (STS), political economy, sociology of knowledge and economic geography has started to consider the economic as...

There is an extensive literature comparing the politics, sociology and economics of the United States and Canada, but very little work comparing the role that public intellectuals play in the space of public opinion and how their ideas are received in both nations simultaneously. Noam Chomsky provides a theoretically useful example of an established academic and public intellectual whose reputation is deeply contested in both countries. Our comparative case study offers leverage to contribute to debates on the sociology of knowledge, reputations, intellectuals, and the politics of professors using data from six major Canadian and American newspapers from 1995–2009 and an innovative coding of media portrayal. Earlier work has demonstrated that Chomsky is discussed as a public intellectual more prominently in Canada than in the United States (McLaughlin and Townsley in Canadian Review of Sociology, 48(4):341–368, 2011). Here we examine the comparative construction of a “public intellectual” reputation in the context of significant political change. We document small differences between the Canadian and American receptions of Chomsky, show change in the patterns of portrayal and number of publications over time, and offer an analysis of differences between political attacks and consecrations. We demonstrate more engagement with Chomsky’s political view in Canada than in the United States, a rise in Chomsky’s fame post 9/11, and illustrate clear political patterns in attempts to marginalize him.

Despite recent interest in political ethnography, most of the reflection has been on the ethnographic aspect of the enterprise with much less emphasis on the question implicit in the first word of the couplet: What is actually political about political ethnography and how much should ethnographers pre-define it? The question is complicated because a central component of the definition of what is political is actually the struggle to define its jurisdiction and how it gets distinguished from what it is not. In this article we aim to show how ethnography can actually lead us out of this conundrum in which the political is paradoxically both predefined and, at the same time, the open question that leads the process of inquiry. We do so by advancing a formal and relational approach that provides us with procedural tools to define the nature and specificity of the political bond not ex ante, but rather during the process of research itself. In the first part of the article we historicize the development of political ethnography as a distinct avenue for inquiry and show what have been the challenges to its normalization. This is followed by the article’s main section, which focuses on the four ways in which what is political has been conceptualized in contemporary socio-ethnographical literature. In the conclusion of the article, we advance a lowest common denominator definition proposal, with examples from other scholars as well as from our own research to illustrate how this approach would work.

This article argues that Chinese state intellectual approaches to medicine significantly influenced the institutional reception of Western medicine in early modern Japan. Confucian-inspired general reforms of government in late eighteenth-century Japan encouraged an increase in state medical intervention, including the introduction of Western medical practices, achieved primarily through the use of transnational Confucian intellectual knowledge apparatuses. Through a sociology of knowledge approach, this article analyzes the links between earlier private-sphere Chinese medical practice, late Chinese imperial state ideas on medicine, and early modern state-led medical Westernization in Japan. The article highlights the role of trans-Asian Confucian ideas, networks and practices in mediating new approaches to technical innovation, including those from the West. The position for Confucianism argued in the article thereby resonates with Bayly’s idea of the early modern information order of India, and Pollock and Ricci’s ideas on cosmopolitan discursive spaces in other parts of Asia.

This paper aims to discuss the revitalization of the logical reasoning’s epistemology of Islamic Jurisprudence using the sociology of knowledge' approach as the reconstructive effort to see the relation of the religious text and political context of Indonesian social reality. Based on the historical analysis of the diachronic data, comparing the various political phenomena in the past Islamic history to the nowadays situation, the study revealed that the logical reasoning of Islamic jurisprudence was always related dialectically with the human social life as a fact that Islamic studies have been able to change the paradigm and mindset of the civilization.

In today's corpus of economic geography textbooks published in the German-speaking countries, the spatial science approach is described as involving a neoclassical view of economics, a chorological explanatory strategy, (neo)positivist roots, and a focus on developments that have occurred since 1969. This approach has received sweeping criticism for its undersocialization, its spatial fetishism, and its exclusively quantitative methodology. The article proposes to abandon the dominant historiography of science, which focuses on national economies and takes a positivist perspective, in favor of a form of contextualization that has its roots in the sociology of knowledge. The article examines relevant publications in journals and textbooks to show that what has been known as the quantitative revolution did not become widely accepted among German-speaking researchers until the late 1970s, long after it originally began to emerge. This process was characterized by a shift toward a consultative perspective that researchers adopted in hopes of becoming involved in the spatial planning initiatives of the state. In the resulting usage context of the Keynesian interventionist state, a culture of economic geography experts developed that discussed methods and concepts in an innovative and pluralist manner.

This paper maps out the network of researchers on environmental security from the end of the 1980s to 2014, providing a systematic analysis of how the research is organized in this interdisciplinary field. Drawing on the Web of Science database, we generated a co-citation analysis that exhibits the cognitive structure of the field. Twenty interviews were conducted in order to uncover relationships of cooperation, rivalry and conflict so as to understand the structure of academic debates inside the field over time. The research findings highlight that central authors have had a long-lasting influence on the field despite the evolution of their productivity. We also found that the field is composed of six fairly structured groups as well as a few peripheral authors, which can in turn be distinguished by their epistemological and methodological choices, as well as geographical centre of gravity.

With this article we want to illustrate how the central publications of the European Union legitimate a role of Career Guidance Services (CGS) that help in establishing a desired form of social order. Using the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse, we reconstructed four typical metaphorical conceptualisations of CGS that go along with desirable and taken-for-granted subject positions. The results reveal the assigned active role of CGS in establishing a specific vision of and in transforming the European society. We conclude by outlining the ways in which critique is expressed within the discourse and by highlighting the inherent ambivalences of these practices of critique.

As Hartmann illuminates, it is important for sociologists to engage in public sociology. Yet, public audiences do not always receive research results in a passive and positive manner. Instead, as w...

The purpose of the study is to shed light on introduction of the concept of reception history to the philosophical historiography, taken within the framework of the current Heidegger studies in Ukraine and worldwide. The methodology combines elements of discourse analysis with traditional methods of historical and philosophical criticism. Scientific novelty is expressed in the following statements: 1) the problem of the recent history of reception of Heidegger's philosophy worldwide is missing in the Ukrainian historico-philosophical discourse; 2) the concept of Rezeptiongeschichte should be included to the framework of philosophical historiography as essential method of bridging the gap between the Ukrainian philosophy and the global intellectual trends; 3) transition of the philosophical hermeneutics from interpretation to reception deconstructs Hegelian notion of history of philosophy as philosophy into a much more pragmatic notion of history of philosophy as a filiation of intellectual history. Conclusions. The Ukrainian discourse of philosophical historiography still resists the urgency of the postmodern situation, finding an escape in idealistic metaphysics of history, which conceives the Heideggerian idea of sublime philosophizing as opposed to the mundane practices of calculating mind of science. This naїve Heideggerianism interferes with adequate development of Heidegger studies in Ukraine. However, it can be surpassed by shifting research focus from purist hermeneutics of texts and ideas to reconstruction of various receptions of Heidegger's thought worldwide. Such a shift can be backed by re-interpretation of philosophical historiography in terms of sociology of knowledge or intellectual history rather than hermeneutics and phenomenology.

This article discusses changing social perspectives on knowledge, from the old sociology of knowledge to current post-colonial debates. The authors propose an approach that sees knowledge not as an abstract social construction but as the product of specific forms of social labour, showing the ontoformativity of social practice that creates reality through historical time. Research in three southern-tier countries examines knowledge workers and their labour process, knowledge institutions including workplaces and communication systems, economic strategies and the resourcing of knowledge work and workforces. This research shows in detail the contested hegemony of the global metropole in domains of knowledge. It reveals forms of negotiation that reshape knowledge production, and shows the importance for knowledge workers of the dynamics of global change.

There appears to be a widespread belief that the social sciences during the 1950s and 1960s can be characterized by an almost unquestioned faith in a positivist philosophy of science. In contrast, the article shows that even within the narrower segment of Cold War social science, positivism was not an unquestioned doctrine blindly followed by everybody, but that quite divergent views coexisted. The article analyses two ‘techniques of prospection’, the Delphi technique and political gaming, from the perspective of a comprehensive set of ideas attributed to ‘positivism’. Both techniques were developed in the early 1950s by researchers at the RAND Corporation, a Californian think tank with tight relations to the US Air Force. Despite the closeness of origin, the two techniques show considerable differences in their basic epistemologies. The article thus concludes that more important than positivism in uniting US Cold War social science was the shared sense of urgency and of the potential of social science to put decision-making in foreign policy on a rational basis. In this sense, as far as the Cold War social sciences were of a piece, they were made so by the sense of danger and urgency of action evoked by the image of the Iron Curtain.

As a part of a larger research within the Horizon 2020 project Closing the Gap Between Formal and Informal Institutions in the Balkans, 38 semi-structured interviews with citizens of Serbia have been conducted in the period July – October 2017. These comprise the database used for analysis of “narratives of informality” – stories of how the research participants legitimize (or rationalize) informal practices (using connections and acquaintances to “get things done”, giving/receiving bribe, exchange of favors, etc.), supplemented by the analysis of participants’ attitudes towards informal practices, particularly when using them themselves. An insight into the respondents’ ideas of informality was gained through describing and understanding doxa – beliefs of an individual as “a quasi-perfect correspondence between the objective order and the subjective principles of organization (with which) the natural and social world appear as self-evident” (Bourdieu) or senso comune (Gramsci) – “naturalized”, unreflected, practical knowledge taking the form of self-explanatory content of common sense, that which is taken for granted, what “everybody knows“, the knowledge of the world that is undisputed – “just the way it is”, the domain of indefinite beliefs and incoherent views of the world, the knowledge which “legitimizes with the absence of legitimizing”. The assumption is that the “quality” of doxa, in the sense of its positive or negative orientation, has a large impact on the possibility of changes in formal practices and procedures – in some cases serving as a stimulus for change, and as an obstacle to changes in others – situations in which the new/imported rules remain “empty shells” with little influence in social life.

In this editorial for the Thematic Series: Cultural Sociology and China, we discuss the global growth of cultural sociology as a sociological sub-discipline, its current state and future prospects in mainland China, and the aims of this special issue in promoting the subfield’s further growth domestically in China.

Social science is often described as a product of nineteenth-century Europe and as a handmaiden to its imperial and colonial projects. However, centuries prior to the Western social science enterprise, Islamic imperial scholars developed their own “science of society.” This essay provides an overview of the historical and cultural milieu in which “Islamic” social science was born and then charts its development over time through case studies of four seminal scholars—al-Razi, al-Farabi, al-Biruni, and Ibn Khaldun—who played pivotal roles in establishing fields that could be roughly translated as psychology, political science, anthropology, and sociology. The axioms undergirding Islamic social science are subsequently explored, with particular emphasis paid to the relations between said axioms and the discursive tradition, “Islam.” The essay concludes with an exploration of how looking to social science enterprises beyond the “modern” West can clarify the purported relationships between social science and empire.

The sociology of generations has attracted an awakened interest in recent years, sparked in part by high-profile media and policy discussions about the problem of the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation. While this discussion tends to focus on resource issues arising from the existence of a relatively large cohort (for example, pensions and healthcare), it contains an implicit moral critique of the generation associated with the economic ‘boom’ of the Sixties. This article examines the development of the cultural script of the Baby Boomer problem in British newspapers over a 26-year period, to examine how shifts in the discourse about the Boomer generation relate to wider social, economic, cultural and political trends.

The ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of scientific knowledge has both exerted enormous influence on science studies, and been widely criticised for its apparent commitment to epistemological relativism. In this article we argue that the recent work of the pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom provides a potential resolution to these debates. Brandom’s work, we argue, meets the key commitments of the strong programme, including particularly commitments to symmetry and reflexivity, while also demonstrating how these commitments are compatible with a robust – but non-dogmatic, pragmatist – concept of objective knowledge. In so doing, it provides a theoretically developed account of why the traditions of empirical science studies that emerged from the strong programme need not be seen as undermining scientific objectivity, while it also supports a reflexive, critical sociological analysis of scientific practice.

Grand theorizing and empirical (quantitative or qualitative) research are often separately conducted. In this paper, the separation in question is traced from scholars' differential observance of the yardsticks of the philosophical, scientific and literary/historical methods respectively. The philosophical method relies on deduction and develops into grand theorizing by adding assumptions stemming from life experience, leading to conceptual fluidity. Contrarily, the scientific method relies on experiments, which produce more determinable outcomes as asserted by Popper's (1959) falsificationism. The literary/historical method shares this commitment to determinacy by providing in-depth understanding of space time-specific events/meanings. The roles of grand theorizing and empirical research are reviewed: grand theorizing provides categorical schemes, organizes assumptions into perspectives, uncovers hidden assumptions and generates arguments, while empirical research facilitates contextualized comparisons and generates theory. The other side of the story is then presented with the Central Dogma of Social Science, which limits the scope and determinacy of any social understanding with an inverse relationship. The central dogma constrains the possibility of social knowledge and, through institutionalized practice such as the acceptance of journal articles or staff promotion, academic development. For grand theorizing to 'survive', it needs to identify and reembrace its yardstick, which could then lead to confident communication with results generated by other methods.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show that Australia’s first two universities were connected to class status. It challenges the idea that these universities extended the “educational franchise” at their outset, by interrogating the characteristics of the student population in comparison with the characteristics of the population in the colonies. It looks at the curricula within the university system to show it is always “interested”, never neutral – it may be unique to the social, cultural, political and economic location of each university, but ultimately it benefits those who hold power in these locations. Design/methodology/approach – This research involves empirical analysis of characteristics of university students in Australia in the 1850s, including country of birth, religion, age, previous education and fathers’ occupation, as well as population demographics from the censuses that took place in the colonies of NSW and Victoria at that time. It also involves an analysis of the sociology of knowledge in nineteenth century Australian universities in light of this empirical data. Findings – Socio-political influences on the establishment of the first universities in Australia highlight the power of conferring legitimacy to particular areas of knowledge and to whom this knowledge was made available. Research limitations/implications – The research is limited to using the student data for the first three years of enrolment because in order to make comparisons between the student population and the population of the colonies, the student data needed to be from a time as close to the population census as possible. The Sydney census was in 1851, so student data from the University of Sydney was 1852-1854. The Melbourne census was in 1854, so student data from the University of Melbourne was 1855-1857. Originality/value – Australian historiography suggests that early universities in Australia were open to all, regardless of background. This paper challenges this orthodoxy through empirical findings and theoretical analysis.

The paper seeks to help correct a certain imbalance in the sociological literature on Calvinism and its derivations like Puritanism, neo-Calvinism, etc. This is the literature’s centering on Calvinism’s various social consequences and decentering on its own origins and conditions in society. As a corrective to this asymmetry in the literature, the paper assumes and explores the societal roots and factors of the emergence and early development and expansion of Calvinism. This is done on the grounds that the analysis of the societal determination, i.e., the point of origin of Calvinism, like other religion and ideology, is equally and even more important than that of its social effects or destination. In formal terms, the paper considers Calvinism to be a dependent variable, function of certain societal determinants and settings as the explanatory factor, thus correcting the prevalent treatment of it as the independent variable in the sociological literature. In so doing it adopts and applies the main premises and findings of the sociology of religion and knowledge to Calvinism. Its aim is to contribute to a more complete sociology of the Calvinist religion that explores both its social conditions and its social consequences.

In 2014Comparative Sociologypublished our analysis of microaggression complaints – a comparative and theoretical piece addressing microaggression complaints as a form of social control indicative of a distinct moral culture. The article attracted a surprising amount of attention in popular media, and with this attention came confusion and controversy. Here we respond to popular accounts of our work, addressing common criticisms and confusions as well as the sociological question of why the article produced such strong reactions. We conclude by clarifying the sociology of morality’s role in moral debates and suggesting ways that sociological knowledge can inform debate and guide reform.

What is the status of women scholars who study Canadian foreign policy (CFP)? Our study, the first of its kind to concentrate on the Canadian situation, addresses this question by studying publications and authorship. We assess the status of women in CFP since 1945 using the Canadian Foreign Relations Index, supplemented by studies on women in the academy. We show that the number of publications by women is substantially lower than those of men, and work by women remains underrepresented in the so-called “core” of what is traditionally defined as CFP. Regardless of the nature of the work, women scholars are less represented, and they appear to be disadvantaged by mixed collaborative work. These findings speak to the culture and personality of the discipline. They invite us to revisit assessments of the discipline as “mature” and “robust.”

When Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) was introduced by Arnould and Thompson (2005) it was part of a strategy to create legitimacy for interpretive research. It was argued that interpretive researchers needed to be more pragmatic in their attitude. This was a fundamental change in the scientific culture in this stream of research. This paper analyses these changes and studies how CCT represents a new and pragmatic attitude. It is shown how the changes intended by CCT can imply a shift from a focus on new groundbreaking research to an awareness of the consequences of realpolitik. This strategic move can be seen as an example of how scientific cultures try to move from a marginal position to the mainstream. The consequences of this attempt to manage science are analysed, and solutions to problems created by these changes are developed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.