Review article: Comparing the Durkheimian and Marxist traditions

Solidarity and Schism: 'The Problem of Disorder' in Durkheimian and Marxist Sociology , David Lockwood     

Minimum spectral connectivity projection pursuit

Statistics and Computing - We study the problem of determining the optimal low-dimensional projection for maximising the separability of a binary partition of an unlabelled dataset, as measured by...     

Encyclopaedia,genealogy, tradition: a sociocultural critique of MacIntyre's three moral discourses

The paper provides a critical account of Alasdair MacIntyre's moral theory. It argues that, contrary to his position, the three discourses that he examines, as attempts to provide moral guidelines to one's life trajectory are complementary, under late‐modern conditions, rather than contradictory.     

Reflexive modernization and the third way: the impasses of Giddens' social-democratic politics

In the light of a critical account of Giddens’ three recent books on politics (1994, 1998, 2000) this paper argues that it is possible to formulate a third way, that is different both form the ad hoc mixture of neo‐liberal and conventional social‐democratic recipes found in the Blair/Schröder type of discourse, as well as from Giddens’ utopianism that is blind to political economy realities. This alternative version of the third way, guided by a non‐economistic holistic framework should stress the continuous relevance of the Left‐Right divide, ie, the continuities between early and late modernity and between the old and new emancipatory struggles against tyranny, exploitation and cultural/symbolic manipulation. It should also attempt to elaborate new reform proposals (in the area of the work, welfare, democracy, the life world) that take seriously into account the contradictions and present distribution of economic, political and cultural power, both on the national and the global level.     

Post-Parsonian Theory

Sociological Forum -     

Restructuring structuration theory

The article looks critically at Giddens's duality of structure notion which is at the centre of his structuration theory. It argues that the concept of subject/object dualism, which is not seriously considered by structuration theory, is as essential as the concept of duality for an understanding of how actors orient themselves to rules and resources as a virtual order, as well as to sets of interactions in time and space.     

Common genetic effects on risk-taking preferences and choices

Although prior research has shown that risk-taking preferences and choices are correlated across many domains, there is a dearth of research investigating whether these correlations are primarily the result of genetic or environmental factors. We examine the extent to which common genetic factors account for the association between general risk-taking preferences and domain-specific risk-taking preferences, and between general risk-taking preferences and risk taking choices in financial investments, stock market participation and business formation. Using data from 1898 monozygotic (MZ) and 1344 same-sex dizygotic (DZ) twins, we find that general risk-taking shares a common genetic component with domain-specific risk-taking preferences and risk-taking choices.

     

Divisive clustering of high dimensional data streams

Clustering streaming data is gaining importance as automatic data acquisition technologies are deployed in diverse applications. We propose a fully incremental projected divisive clustering method for high-dimensional data streams that is motivated by high density clustering. The method is capable of identifying clusters in arbitrary subspaces, estimating the number of clusters, and detecting changes in the data distribution which necessitate a revision of the model. The empirical evaluation of the proposed method on numerous real and simulated datasets shows that it is scalable in dimension and number of clusters, is robust to noisy and irrelevant features, and is capable of handling a variety of types of non-stationarity.