Sociology’s self-imposed moral dilemma

A dilemma confronts sociologists in the review and publication of their works. On the one hand, sociologists are expected to be open and fair in the review process; on the other hand, because we rely on a peer review process, and because peers are apt to know the work of one another, this will impede the practice of making “open and fair” judgments. The article points out that peer review is especially apt to impede new and critical thinking. Other implications are also discussed.     

Becoming an Academic: Early vs. Later Professional Experiences

Abstract

This paper investigates the relevance of both formal training and current career conditions for the professional activity of an academic. We focus on the socialization of a sample of Ph.D. sociologists submitting papers for publication. Using regression procedures, we relate productivity of the training faculty, current publication pressures, sex, and year of degree to publication-related activity. We find that current publication pressures is a better predictor of professional activity than is productivity of the training faculty. In addition, sex appears to mediate professional socialization experiences.     

Trend-Soziologismen

An excursive contentanalysis of the media suggests evidence of a strong and widespread public interest concerning sociological issues: the quest for social positioning, cultural and economic change or practical “tools” for management and marketing. But this public need for sociological explanation and consulting is only to a minot degree satisfied by professional sociologists. The majority of the media-released results are distributed by representatives of a profession named “trend-“ or “future-research”. A closer look at the work and publication-strategies of these consultants indicated that the most active protagonists like Matthias Horx not only claim to be “sociologists”, but undertake strong attacks against professional and academic sociology and social scientists. The claim to conduct authentic sociological research and using techniques of “social research” helps to legitimate the publication of the superficial results of this sociologistic research in newspapers, magazines, and media-websites. Thus for professional sociology the question arises what to fo and how to react. One strategy could repeat the practice of the so called “Third Culture” of the international science-community’s members who have started a widely renowned public discourse to meet public demands of being scientifically informed.     

Mathematical Sociology in Japan: Its Powerful Development and a Problem

Mathematical sociology in Japan was born in the mid-1970s and has actively developed since then. Mathematical sociologists in Japan have studied various topics of mathematical sociology as well as of quantitative sociology. The Japanese Association for Mathematical Sociology (JAMS) was established in 1986. It holds semi-annual conferences and publishes Sociological Theory and Methods, its official journal. Thus, the JAMS is a platform for mathematical sociologists in Japan to present and publish papers, contributing to the institutionalization of mathematical sociology in Japan. It has also co-sponsored five joint conferences with the Section on Mathematical Sociology of the American Sociological Association. Based on these activities, mathematical sociology in Japan could be judged to be vibrant domestically and internationally; it has a bright future. I argue, however, that mathematical sociologists in Japan have tended to confine themselves to areas where mathematical modeling is relatively easy. These areas are not necessarily attractive to sociologists in other fields. I propose that mathematical sociologists in Japan should tackle social phenomena that other sociologists think are critical to sociology so that they further contribute to advances in the discipline.     

L. L. Bernard and the original American sociologist

The original version of The American Sociologist (TAS) has been overlooked by contemporary sociologists. L. L. Bernard edited the publication from 1938 to 1947. This article describes the contents of this publication and places these materials in historical context. While there were profound differences between Bernard’s publication and the later TAS, both publications dealt with issues in the sociology of sociology. His research has ranged from criminology and the sociology of law to the sociology of science, and several previous articles of his have appeared inThe American Sociologist. specializing in sociological theory and deviance. His articles have previously appeared inThe Review of Social Theory andRural Sociology. Gideon Sjoberg gave generous encouragement and direction throughout this project. Others who offered helpful suggestions at various phases of the writing include: Jessie Bernard, Alfred McClung Lee, Irving Louis Horowitz, David Carpenter, and two anonymous reviewers.     

Sociological computing: An opportunity missed?

Rapid advances in sociological computing are changing virtually every aspect of scholarly sociological work. These changes offer an opportunity for sociologists to improve the quality of their work and bring new insights and approaches to bear on important sociological problems. Nevertheless, sociologists display a profound ambivalence toward computer work by other sociologists. Left unchecked, this ambivalence threatens to turn sociological computing into an opportunity missed. Inadequate rewards, lack of training, and a general failure to understand the importance of computing in sociology threaten to stifle the development of quality soft-ware, push sociologists competent in computing into other fields, and jeopardize the quality of sociological scholarship. This article documents these ambivalent tendencies and proposes reasonable steps the discipline should take to assure that sociological computing does not become an opportunity missed.     

ALVIN GOULDNER AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF IDEAS: Lessons from Enter Plato

Alvin Gouldner's 1965 book Enter Plato is one of the most important contributions ever made to the sociology of ideas. Overshadowed soon after its publication, however, by Gouldner's more controversial work, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology , the earlier book has suffered neglect. In an effort to correct this situation, we situate Enter Plato against the backdrop of other mid-twentieth-century works in the sociology of knowledge and related areas, arguing that Gouldner's study was one of the first sustained responses to Robert K. Merton's call for a sociology of knowledge that would steer a middle course between the abstract, speculative tendencies of the field's European founders and the relatively atheoretical contributions of their American counterparts. We build on this interpretation to offer a contemporary sociological appraisal of Enter Plato , considering its positive and negative lessons for sociologists of knowledge and ideas at the present time.     

A Sociology of the Periphery Versus a Peripheral Sociology: Rural Sociology and the Dimension of Space1

Abstract Rural sociology is intrinsically concerned with the spatial dimensions of social life. However, this underlying research tradition, particularly the use of space as a research strategy, has been insufficiently addressed and its contributions to general sociology are little recognized. I outline how concern with space, uneven development, and the social relationships of peripheral settings have provided substantive boundary and conceptual meaning to rural sociology, propelled its evolution, and left it with a legacy of strengths, weaknesses, and challenges. A willingness to tackle the dimension of space and the thorny problems it raises often sets rural sociologists apart from other sociologists. This research tradition contrasted with general sociology's concern with developing generalization, aspatial covering laws, and proto-typical relationships of modern or Fordist development settings. Conceptual openings have left sociologists questioning their past agenda. Coupled with the “creative marginality” inherent in the questions and contexts addressed by rural sociologists, this makes the subfield central to contemporary sociology.     

Can there be a sociological concept of interest?

This article raises the question of whether it is possible to have not only an economic concept of interest but also a sociological one, and, if so, what such a concept would be like. By way of an answer, the history of how sociologists have tried to use the concept of interest in their analyses is traced, starting with Gustav Ratzenhofer in the 1890s and ending with Pierre Bourdieu and John Meyer today. This focus on what sociologists have to say about interest represents a novelty as the conventional histories of this concept pass over the contribution by sociologists in total silence. The various attempts by sociologists to use the concept of interest are divided into two main categories: when interest is seen as the driving force in social life, and when interest is seen as a major force in social life, together with other factors. I also discuss the argument by some sociologists that interest is of little or no importance in social life. The different strategies for how to handle the concept of interest in a sociological analysis are discussed in the concluding remarks, where it is argued (following Weber and Bourdieu) that interests can usefully be understood to play an important role in social life, but together with other factors.     

Professional purpose and academic legitimacy: Ross’s social control and the founding of American sociology

The community of inquiry moved through two phases between 1876 and 1911, and Ross emerged as a transitional figure. From Spencer's text through the 1896 work of Franklin Giddings, sociologists sought identity. Only through comparison with other social sciences could sociologists realize the true scope of their own discipline. Sociology was grounded in biological, and thus social, determinism. Human institutions were categorized but were not controlled. Recently received his doctorate in American intellectual history at Florida State University.     

Emotions and Nationalism: Armenian Genocide as a Case Study

Until recently, sociologists have paid surprisingly little attention to the relationship between emotions and nationalism. Existing accounts remain homogeneous, linear and nonrelational. To remedy this gap, this article compares public controversies in Turkey over the Armenian genocide at two historical moments: its semi‐centennial anniversary in 1965, and the publication of an article in 2004 by the Armenian‐Turkish journalist Hrant Dink that led to his assassination in 2007. It demonstrates that the genocide, and the conflicting epistemic structures that it incites, is a source of anxiety for Armenians due to their actual displacement within the nation. It is also a source of anxiety for Turks due to the perceived threat of displacement within the nation. These relational anxieties over the nation played an important role, during these two events, in reproducing hierarchical and exclusionary configurations, experiences, and representations of nationhood. During the 1965 semi‐centennial, Armenians reacted to the mainstream Turkish public's anxieties by pledging their loyalty to the state. Dink's assassination in 2007, on the other hand, showcases how an attempt by the excluded to redefine the what and who of the nation united otherwise separate social sections around a nationalist front.     

Revisiting regional traditions: An emerging sociology of the great plains

Meliorism, empiricism, ethnography, locality, and reform characterized Midwestern American Sociology at the turn of the twentieth century. Almost a century later, the mini-regional Great Plains Sociological Association, through its refereed publication, The Great Plains Sociologist (TGPS), maintains a variant of this tradition. We examine the first decade (1988-1997) of published articles (N=52) in TGPS with a focus on authorship, affiliations, editorship, and components of the earliest Chicago sociology and its diffusion to the University of North Dakota and the region through the work of John Morris Gillette. The results show that TGPS is uniquely a publication representing empirical studies, of homespun social issues, involving local samples, by sociologists and criminologists affiliated with a range of colleges and universities in and around the Dakotas and that a sociology of the Great Plains is emerging. Implications for the journal, state and mini-regional associations, and the discipline are discussed. Morten G. Ender research areas are social psychology, military sociology, and undergraduate education. Shihluang Huang research areas are drug laws/policies, systems analysis, corrections, and community corrections. Both authors served on the faculty at the University of North Dakota where this project was completed.     

Formalism in the social sciences,rhetorically speaking

Even formal methods in economics, which sociologists have been tempted to adopt, are “rhetorical,” in the sense of “argued to other scholars, not proven forever and ever.” The rhetoric of inquiry, in other words, is not confined to flowery language. Two examples of formal methods that have defective rhetorics are significance tests (in which the sociologists are far ahead) and existence theorems (in which the sociologists are in danger of imitating the economists’ errors). Much effort in economics is spent on a rhetoric without conclusions. A more humanistic economics — or sociology—would examine all the arguments, whether mathematical or not. He is also director of the Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry.     

Sebastião Salgado and Visual Sociology

This paper links the work of Sebastião Salgado, recipient of the 2010 American Sociological Association (ASA) Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues, with the discipline of sociology. I reflect on Salgado’s biography, method, and concerns in order to demonstrate how his work contributes to the awareness and understanding of social issues. Toward this end, I summarize sociology’s record of involvement with visual documentation. Prior to 1915, the American Journal of Sociology regularly included photographs that provided visual documentation of environments under study. However, as sociology moved away from social reform activities and toward scientific investigation, the regular publication of photographs ceased. During the 1930s and 1940s, photographic projects in disciplines and social movements beyond sociology developed a variety of methods that would prove useful to sociology. During the 1970s, sociologists once again began to use visual methods in their teaching, research, and publication, putting sociology in the position to both contribute to and benefit from insights and social commitments that have distinguished Sebastião Salgado as a globally significant photographer and social activist during the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries.     

The Importance of Race Among Black Sociologists*

This paper explores the importance of race and racial attitudes among sociologists by attempting to document the existence of what has been called a “black insiders doctrine” and showing that black sociologists are more likely than their white counterparts to subscribe to this doctrine. Data in this paper are based on a survey questionnaire administered during the winter of 1978. The findings show that: (1) race is a strong predictor in determining how sociologists perceive the role and characteristics of black sociologists and (2) black sociologists do not think highly of whites who study race relations.     

Berle and Means revisited: The governance and power of large U.S. corporations

In The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), Berle and Means warned of the concentration of economic power brought on by the rise of the large corporation and the emergence of a powerful class of professional managers, insulated from the pressure not only of stockholders, but of the larger public as well. In the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, Berle and Means warned that the ascendance of management control and unchecked corporate power had potentially serious consequences for the democratic character of the United States. Social scientists who drew on Berle and Means in subsequent decades presented a far more benign interpretation of the rise of managerialism, however. For them, the separation of ownership from control actually led to an increased level of democratization in the society as a whole. Beginning in the late 1960s, sociologists and other social scientists rekindled the debate over ownership and control, culminating in a series of rigorous empirical studies on the nature of corporate power in American society. In recent years, however, sociologists have largely abandoned the topic, ceding it to finance economists, legal scholars, and corporate strategy researchers. In this article, I provide a brief history of the sociological and finance/legal/strategy debates over corporate ownership and control. I discuss some of the similarities between the two streams of thought, and I discuss the reasons that the issue was of such significance sociologically. I then argue that by neglecting this topic in recent years, sociologists have failed to contribute to an understanding of some of the key issues in contemporary business behavior. I provide brief reviews of four loosely developed current perspectives and then present an argument of my own about the changing nature of the U.S. corporate elite over the past three decades. I conclude with a call for sociologists to refocus their attention on an issue that, however fruitfully handled by scholars in other fields, cries out for sociological analysis.     

Emotions, embodiment and the sensation of society

The study of emotions has attracted an increased amount of attention from mainstream sociologists in recent years, both because of its potential to provide an added dimension to the analysis of such subjects as social conflict, gender inequalities and the organisation of the workplace, and as a result of its relevance to theoretical and methodological debates which have long characterised the discipline. This paper suggests that some of the core questions facing this subject can be interrogated productively by engaging critically with the work of one of the most important ‘founding figures’ of the discipline, Emile Durkheim. What Collins (1988) refers to as the ‘underground wing’ of Durkheim's work has yet to be fully utilised or developed by sociologists concerned with emotions, yet it provides us with a suggestive and provocative means of reconceptualising the gulf that often exists within contemporary work on emotions as malleable and controllable, on the one hand, and that concerned with emotions as intransigent ‘somatic states of being’, on the other. As such, Durkheim's writings constitute an important resource for sociologists concerned with the ongoing project of ‘embodying’ the discipline.     

Archaeology and World-Systems Theory

Archaeology has tremendous potential for developing world-systems approaches to non-Western and noncapitalist societies because it has the ability to both explore non-Western and noncapitalist societies with the sophistication of anthropology and to explore societies in existence long before the capitalist world-system began to evolve. I suggest that sociologists stand to gain by learning about non-Western and noncapitalist societies, particularly as they are understood by archaeologists. World-systems theory provides a common framework within which archaeologists and sociologists can both work. This article explores recent work in world-systems archaeology that sociologists might find particularly valuable.     

Economics as a Multi-Paradigmatic Science: the ‘Best Kept Secret’ of Irrational Choice

The article reexamines the prevailing perception of traditional economics as the science of rational choice among contemporary economists and sociologists, especially rational choice theorists. It proposes that conventional economics is not exclusively the theory of rational choice but also one of irrational choices in the economy. The article aims to contribute toward a fuller understanding and appreciation of classical and neoclassical economics, especially among sociologists, as composite rational choice-irrational choice theory and in that sense a multi- rather than single-paradigm science, thus no different from sociology and other social (and physical) sciences. This may be relevant or interesting to sociologists given that their rational choice colleagues, like economists, extol the “virtues" of conventional and modern economics as a single-paradigm, theoretically unified science around “rational choice” and criticize the “vices” of sociology as plagued by competing paradigms and theoretical disunity. The article supports many economic sociologists’ view or intuition of conventional economics as complex rational-irrational choice theory and multi-paradigm science, and disconfirms rational choice theorists’ interpretation and generalization of it as “rational choice theory” only and single-paradigm unified science.