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The article discusses the sociological study of disasters, such as 2005's Hurricane Katrina. According to the author, disasters allow researchers a unique glimpse into the social conditions of a place and time. It is suggested that the challenges disasters present can reveal important information about organizations, social institutions, and individuals. Details on the motivations and methodologies of sociologists specializing in disaster research are also presented.

Sociological study of normal routine behavior informs us of the mechanisms through which safety and social order are maintained. From ethnographic studies of public sites such as the New York subway system, we learn how workers' routines fit or do not fit into official security-era policies coming from above. Suggestions are provided for concrete mechanisms likely to enhance security while providing collateral benefits of enhanced efficiency and pleasure to members of the public. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a reply by the authors to a commentary on their study, History Repeats Itself, But How? City Character, Urban Tradition, and the Accomplishment of Place, published in the December 2000 issue of the American Sociology Review. The researchers disagree with the commentary's statement regarding sense of history and, more concretely, how its author assembles and interprets data. For doing history, the author wants to find the independent variable that explains why one place comes to differ from another. The word capital is used in the commentary as proxy for the variable at work. In the Ventura case, investment in petroleum represents the capital that explains almost everything, and the author recognizes the data to show why, Santa Barbara's character can be explained by the capital introduced by wealthy immigrants and the interests of a tourism industry. For this main case, the author argues that a difference in the geographic distribution of petroleum exploitation within each country meant that things had to end up as they did; little or nothing is gained from all of our meandering through the institutional, political, and aesthetic aspects of place. The study focuses on the processes by which past choices come to be taken as givens to the point that outcomes seem as though they could have been no different.

An attempt is made to record conditions under which various forms of racial integration occur in a changing community and the relationship between those conditions and the means by which members of the two races attempt to cope with the challenges of sharing biracial social environments. Racial headcounts are reported for various kinds of social settings and impressions are provided of the nature and differential consequences on blacks and whites of biracial interaction in such environments. Racial integration is found to be very limited in frequency and intensity, despite biracial propinquity. It is especially limited in those circumstances where interpersonal behavior is ordinarily informal, spontaneous or intense. Transracial solidarity occurs only in circumstances in which cross-racial cues of similarity, reliability and trust are strong relative to other opportunities for social solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a letter to the editor commenting on the article by sociologist Allan Mazur's.