The idea of philosophical sociology

This article introduces the idea of philosophical sociology as an enquiry into the relationships between implicit notions of human nature and explicit conceptualizations of social life within sociology. Philosophical sociology is also an invitation to reflect on the role of the normative in social life by looking at it sociologically and philosophically at the same: normative self‐reflection is a fundamental aspect of sociology's scientific tasks because key sociological questions are, in the last instance, also philosophical ones. For the normative to emerge, we need to move away from the reductionism of hedonistic, essentialist or cynical conceptions of human nature and be able to grasp the conceptions of the good life, justice, democracy or freedom whose normative contents depend on more or less articulated conceptions of our shared humanity. The idea of philosophical sociology is then sustained on three main pillars and I use them to structure this article: (1) a revalorization of the relationships between sociology and philosophy; (2) a universalistic principle of humanity that works as a major regulative idea of sociological research, and; (3) an argument on the social (immanent) and pre‐social (transcendental) sources of the normative in social life. As invitations to embrace posthuman cyborgs, non‐human actants and material cultures proliferate, philosophical sociology offers the reminder that we still have to understand more fully who are the human beings that populate the social world.     

Sociological social work: a cartoon

I trace an account of social work—and sociology—that I believe holds a promise for re-forming the relationship between the two. I develop the argument in two ways. First, taking 1920s Chicago as a case study, I will attempt ‘a history of the present’ to suggest how the relationship between sociology and social work came to be as it is. I will suggest that the practice of some (both familiar and forgotten) people in 1920s and 1930s sociology and social work is best explained as a form of ‘sociological social work’. Second, after tracking this genealogy, I suggest an agenda for sociological social work that consists of straining to enact certain kinds of inter-disciplinary relationships, developing methodological social work practice, hearing occasional sociological frontier conversations and shared theorising. I illustrate how these arguments challenge both sociology and social work and both theory and practice.     

Ethnomethodology and sociology: an introduction

Arising as a powerful challenge to programmatic views of sociology that sought to determine stable laws underpinning social order, ethnomethodology set out an alternative programme to reveal social order as a dynamic, contingent ‘ongoing accomplishment’. This programme was neither micro nor macro, but was concerned with different contexts of accountability in which both individuals and institutions are given identity and reproduced. Recognising everyday life as an achievement, collective sense making, and the central importance of talk as a social process, ethnomethodology had an impact on all those arenas of sociology where ordinary interaction is an element. This introduction to the special section discusses the contributions of each of the papers – which cover mundane reasoning, social learning, the early acquisition of social competence, and the application of membership categorization analysis to gender – in relation to the continuing relevance of Garfinkel's legacy to contemporary sociological theory and practice.     

Race for Cures: Rethinking the Racial Logics of ‘Trust’ in Biomedicine

This article examines the normative underpinnings of ‘trust talk’, asking how biomedical discourse constructs racial group boundaries and what implications this has for our understanding of the politics of medicine more broadly. Drawing upon a 2‐year multi‐method study of the world's largest stem cell research initiative and extending key insights from the sociology of race–ethnicity and social studies of science and medicine, this paper identifies three ways in which discourse in the stem cell field constructs racial group boundaries – through diversity outreach, clinical gatekeeping, and charismatic collaborations. In so doing, the paper also explicates counter‐narratives – medical racial profiling, subversive whiteness, and biopolitical minstrelsy – as forms of discursive resistance that challenge the normative underpinnings of recruitment discourse.     

Method and Measurement in Sociology,fifty years on

In this article, we revisit Aaron Cicourel’s classic text Method and Measurement in Sociology. We consider the legacy and influence of the book in the context of the continued and urgent significance of such properly methodological inquiry. We examine, in particular, the ways in which Cicourel’s concern with decisions of measurement – as a situated, contingent and unavoidably practical accomplishment – makes a critical contribution to the understanding of measurement within sociology and serves as continued inspiration for the sociology of contemporary measurement practices in the context of proliferating regimes of institutional performance measurement and league tables, risk assessment and audit. We recommend a critical engagement with this text in the sociological examination of social inquiry – avoiding both overly subjective interpretations of social phenomena and the arbitrary application of crude categories to complex forms of organisation – and in sociology’s continued warrant to critically engage with the practices in and through which social reality is (re)produced.     

Control and responsibility: moral and religious issues in lay health accounts

In sociological work of an empirical nature the concept of control tends to have a taken-for-granted quality. Similarly in the field of medical sociology when control is mentioned in relation to health and illness it is often presented in a unidimensional manner. This article analyses the relationship between control and responsibility for health in the lay accounts of male Glaswegians. Activist and fatalist dimensions were found in their thinking. However, activist thinking was seen to have three strands: personal activism, social activism, and religious activism. Further, fatalistic thinking was not about passive submission but rather the belief that control lay outwith the person in the realm of the social, natural or supernatural worlds. These findings demonstrate the subtle ways in which people relate to issues of control and responsibility in the health realm – a subtlety which is not fully brought out either in the theoretical or empirical work of social scientists researching in the health field.     

The Field of American Media Sociology: Origins,Resurrection, and Consolidation

This contribution is written against the backdrop of the historic dispersal of early American media sociology out from the core concerns of the discipline and into various importer academic disciplines (including communication, journalism, and media studies) and an ever‐growing pervasiveness of media in everyday life which is reflected by a resurgence of sociological scholarship in the United States since the early 2000s. The article divides the field in works that study media inwards – along the threefold dimensions of production and technologies, communication and discourse, reception and effects – and works that study media outwards. We argue that this latter perspective, examining broader theoretical, methodological, and substantive social implications of mass‐mediated communication, is the most promising one for a mature field of American media sociology. On this basis, we conclude with some suggestions regarding possible new, and as of yet understudied, lines of inquiry for future media sociologists.     

The problem of order: Understanding how culture predicts social action

How is social order possible? Scholars in a variety of sociological subfields have sought to address this question, known as the problem of order, building theories and evidence that have tended to center either structural forces or human agency. I explain how this dichotomy has shaped the direction and extent of our scholarly progress, focusing on debates and developments in sociological social psychology and cultural sociology, and consider how theoretical and empirical developments in these fields enable us to revisit the problem of order in pursuit of new questions and answers. The great promise of this work is in its ability to identify the micro–macro linkages that enable personal agency and social change, while also explaining why the social order is so durable and how we arrive at and enact a shared definition of the situation as often as we do given individual differences and self‐complexity.     

Using humanist sociology in the classroom

This essay examines the nature, organization, and activities of humanist sociology from an interventionist perspective as I used it within my sociology and criminology classes. While sociological humanism stresses the role of human agency (Ballard 1987; Zald 1991), identity (Stone 1988), reflexivity (Friedrichs 1987; Homan 1986), and social structure in determining and defining a social activity such as teaching, standard discussions of sociological humanism neglect to discuss how social agency can be taught in the classroom and beyond (McClung Lee 1976, 1988). My argument is that sociological humanism should be understood as more than individual appreciation of identity or liberal reformist political perspectives. The future of sociological humanism must become part of a critical interventionism to attack social forms of domination and oppression both inside and outside of the classroom. I demonstrate how some of this can be accomplished while examining my own teaching practices. Assistant professor of sociology at the University of Dayton and also an affiliate of their Criminal Justice Studies Program.     

Bureaucratic power in note‐writing: authoritative expertise within the state

What produces the power of senior civil servants at ministries of finance, positioned at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy? Max Weber has claimed that a hierarchical organization, meritocratic recruitment and procedural work provide bureaucracies with legitimacy. In particular he insisted on the role of Fachwissen (disciplinary knowledge) obtained through formal education. However, he also argued for the role of Dienstwissen, forms of knowledge and skills stemming from the experience of service in itself. Weber did not elaborate on this concept in detail, and few analysts of governmental expertise have examined this notion. We draw on the practice‐turn in sociology, combining the study of governmental expertise with micro‐sociological studies of administrative practices. By analysing interviews with 48 senior civil servants at the British, French and Norwegian ministries of finance about their daily practices, this article demonstrates that bureaucratic note‐writing and the procedural evaluation of such notes constitute a key form of expertise that yields authority. The study provides an analytical framework for understanding what administrative expertise consists of, how it is integral to procedural work, the forms bureaucratic hierarchies take in practice and how these three dimensions provide authority.     

Sociological Introspection and Emotional Experience

Although social constructionists now study emotions, they neglect what emotion feels like and how it is experienced. This paper argues that social constructionists can and should study how private and social experience are fused in felt emotions. Resurrecting introspection (conscious awareness of awareness or self-examination) as a systematic sociological technique will allow social constructionists to examine emotion as a product of the individual processing of meaning as well as socially shared cognitions. Examining introspection as a sociological process, this paper argues that introspection can generate interpretive materials from self and others useful for understanding the lived experience of emotions. Findings from four studies–one, self-introspective, and the other three, interactive introspective examinations with co-investigators–provide information about the subjective part of emotion. They demonstrate the advantages of introspection in dealing with the complex, ambiguous, and processual nature of emotional experience.     

The Sociologies of Knowledge,Science, and Intellectuals: Distinctive Traditions and Overlapping Perspectives

This article reviews sociological approaches to the production, evaluation, and diffusion of knowledge in the arena of scholarly production – the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. At first glance, sociological approaches to scholarly knowledge production seem to congeal around the hard sciences, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other. I eschew this polarization and construct an analytic frame of reference for analyzing the sociological dimensions of scholarly production more generally. This article maps successive phases of sociological approaches to scholarly production, by overlaying and distinguishing among theories in the sociology of knowledge, sociology of science, and sociology of intellectuals. I analyze classical theorists’ emphases on class analysis and the social function of intellectuals; mid-century adaptations of functionalism, social structure theory, and institutional theory to analyze intellectual and academic life; critical and reflexive theories, including feminist critiques of science and knowledge; recent emphases on how social movement politics and social networks influence intellectual change; theories of the university as a professional arena and a field of culture production; and studies of knowledge-making practices in group research situations. In addition to arguing for more theoretical and methodological precision in analyses of scholarly and scientific knowledge-making, I conclude with cautionary tales and future prospects for sociological studies of modern academic life.     

Immigrants,Immigration, and Sociology: Reflecting on the State of the Discipline*

The growth of the field of immigration in multiple directions and across disciplines and areas presents an opportune juncture to pause and reflect on the central role sociology has played in the study of immigrants and immigration, as well as to assess the contributions that immigration research has made to sociology. This essay discusses three subfields in sociology in which the sociological study of immigrants has contributed to bring new light to long‐standing questions: family, religion, and ethnic and racial studies. At the same time, it brings up areas – culture and arts, social movements and civic engagement, and citizenship, belonging and the state – in which immigration scholars in sociology could establish a more vibrant intellectual dialog with those subfields. Far from exhausting the discussion, these comments are intended to offer potential avenues for further research and discussion.     

The demographic transformation and the sociological enterprise

The dramatic demographic changes of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States are creating a multiracial, multicultural society. This article examines the intellectual challenges for sociology posed by the emerging racial diversity brought about by these population trends. The problem is that conventional sociological frameworks no longer apply in this increasingly complex social world of rapid population changes, diversity, and polarization. Most significant, conventional American sociology, which has focused on white society rooted in western culture, is challenged by three large racial/ethnic categories. We argue that diversity must be incorporated into our sociologies. This requires two new approaches: (1) Sociology must be recentered, that is, it must move away from the notion that whites have the universal experience against which all others are measured; and (2) Sociologists must apply to diverse populations the same kind of sociological analysis that they apply to mainstream categories. This means that we demythologize by dispelling common myths about those outside the mainstream and that we uncover the mechanisms that construct social differences.     

Social Solidarities

This study explores the concept of social solidarity by elaborating on five propositions about mutually supportive social relationships. These five propositions are that social solidarity was a key issue for the founding figures of the discipline of sociology in the 19th century; that this sociological interest in social solidarity has continued down to the present day; that in the development of sociological analyses of social solidarity there has also been fruitful engagement with neighbouring disciplines; that social solidarity can sometimes be associated with social problems as well as with desirable social outcomes; and that the nature and causes of social solidarity are matters of important on-going debate.     

Intimacy,home, and emotions in the era of the pandemic

While much of the sociological scholarship on intimacy has been understood in the normative sense of foregrounding and supporting human closeness, this article points to the role intimacy has as a sociological concept to better understand regulatory ties between the subject and the institution. While subject and institution are treated by modernity as distinct entities, separated by the boundary between private and the public, the article elucidates their mutual engagements by reviewing the work on intimacy in the sociology of emotions. Discussing the scholarship on intimacy from this perspective enables us to understand private suffering as a social problem linked to the collective recognition of subjective feelings. To illustrate the point, the article briefly reflects the public discourse on home upended by world-wide stay-at-home orders to contain the spread of coronavirus disease 2019. While this article neither analyzes these orders, nor judges their legitimacy, it takes the particular situation as a chance to review the sociological discussion on the emotional boundaries of home, foregrounding the concept of intimacy. Intimacy is presented as a key sociological category for understanding collective recognition of people's emotions, which impacts the way emotions are seen as relevant and legitimate in public discussions of social problems.     

Facing Each Other: Japanese and Russian Sociologies

The history of sociology as a subfield has long aimed to describe the historical developments of the discipline, within which national traditions offer unique voices while also contributing to a global sociology. How do various sociological paradigms and national traditions approach social reality in similar and different ways? This paper examines Russian and Japanese contributions to the history of sociology by reviewing some of their major concepts and perspectives. On this basis, this paper seeks to probe into the past and present self-understandings of the two sociological traditions, as well as their potentials for a more active role in global sociological discourse. Both countries have a history of protracted isolation, which has made them more or less invisible in the international sociological community. However, Russian and Japanese sociological traditions exist and are ready to be tapped, even as their production and mobilization of intellectual resources remain strongly embedded in their politics, cultures, and societies. A broader aim of this paper is to enhance mutual understandings and future collaborations between sociologists in Russia and Japan.