Cosmopolitan sociology and the classical canon: Ferdinand Tönnies and the emergence of global Gesellschaft

How relevant are figures from the classical sociological canon for present day efforts to found cosmopolitan forms of sociological thought? According to the critique of Ulrich Beck, the classical sociologists remain far too wedded to nation‐state‐centred ways of thinking to play an important role in the development of cosmopolitan sociology. This paper argues that such a critique fails to account for the ways in which certain classical sociologists were attuned to the emerging cosmopolitical conditions of their own time, were not wholly wedded to nation‐state‐based conceptualizations, and thus can function as both groundings of, and inspirations for, cosmopolitan sociological endeavours. The apparently unpromising case of Tönnies is focused on, the paper showing how he outlined an account of how and why a planet‐spanning condition of Gesellschaft developed a position which diverges from and counterpoints Marx's analysis of similar phenomena in important ways. The stereotype of Tönnies as an arch‐conservative is also dissolved, allowing him to be considered as one of the most important antecedents of contemporary cosmopolitan sociological practice and a canonical figure still relevant for present‐day purposes.     

The sociology of grit: Exploring grit as a sociological variable and its potential role in social stratification

This paper proposes the currently fashionable psychological notion of “grit” as a potentially useful variable in sociological analysis and explores its potential for contributing to addressing sociological concerns. Grit, comprising perseverance and passion toward long‐term goals, has received growing attention within academia and from the general public as a strong predictor of achievement. Grit captures an important, noncognitive, underdeveloped aspect of agency not included in life course or stratification studies. Grit can contribute to our understanding about how the subjective beliefs that are typically treated as agency are actually translated into volitional action that constructs one's life course, a crucial potential life course mechanism. This paper suggests incorporating grit into sociological understanding of individual‐level aspects of stratification, moving beyond its current conception anchored fully in psychology, to further understand what it is, where it comes from, and why it is sociologically useful.     

Sociological Research on Feminism and the Women’s Movement: Ideology,Identity, and Practice

This article provides an overview of sociological research on three aspects of feminism: feminism as an ideology; feminism as an identity; and feminism as a practice. I summarize the main contributions of sociological research in each of these areas, and highlight the overarching contributions for understanding contemporary feminism. Three contributions are key. First, sociological research highlights the existence multiple varieties of feminism –“feminisms” as opposed to a singular “feminism.” Second, this research reveals that feminist ideologies, identities, and movements are each dynamic – they have changed historically, and continue to change in response to shifting socio‐political, economic, and technological landscapes. Third, sociological research demonstrates that feminism is alive and well, and in many senses thriving, in the contemporary United States. Though some aspects of feminism are more widespread than others, sociological research challenges the notion that feminism, on the whole, has declined. As an ideology, an identity, and a practice, feminism remains strong in the contemporary United States.     

The lynching of African Americans in the U.S. South: A review of sociological and historical perspectives

Research in sociology and history on the lynching of African Americans by White mobs in the U.S. South around 1900 has in recent decades grown and matured into a substantive research area in its own right. This article has four purposes. The first purpose is to review dominant sociological and historical approaches in the lynching literature. One key feature of this literature is its bifurcation into one strand of social scientific sociological lynching research and one strand of culturalist historical lynching research. As a consequence of this bifurcation, the study of lynching long lacked sustained interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology and history. The second purpose of this article is to review recent sociological studies that attempt to bridge the disjuncture between sociological and historical approaches otherwise characterizing lynching scholarship. The third purpose of this article is to review other recent studies moving sociological lynching scholarship beyond dominant approaches and foci, including investigations of averted lynchings and investigations of the individual‐level characteristics that made African Americans more or less vulnerable to White lynch mobs. The last purpose is to suggest how the contributions of lynching research have implications for understanding present‐day racial injustices and inequalities.     

Provoking misunderstanding: a comment on Black's defence of value‐free sociology

This paper is a response to a recent article dealing with the concept of value‐free sociology by Donald Black. It argues that while a defence of Weber's position on the role of values in sociological research is necessary and important, what is offered by Black is counter‐productive in important respects. This is because it encourages some of the misunderstandings that it is aimed at remedying and, even more importantly, offers a simplistic discussion of what are complex issues.     

Alternative family patterns; Their lot in family Sociology and in the life‐worlds of ordinary people

Family sociological discourses have tended to view and interpret alternative family patterns in various ways. Modem role theory of the 1950s regarded them as deviant behaviour; liberal theory normalized them while postmodern theory obscures the distinction between the family and its alternatives. All forms of sociological discourse fail to capture the essense of everyday social reality as lived and experienced by ordinary people. This reality is one where the traditional family model co‐exists with various alternatives, often in combination.     

Revitalizing sociology: urban life and mental illness between history and the present

This paper proposes a re‐thinking of the relationship between sociology and the biological sciences. Tracing lines of connection between the history of sociology and the contemporary landscape of biology, the paper argues for a reconfiguration of this relationship beyond popular rhetorics of ‘biologization' or ‘medicalization'. At the heart of the paper is a claim that, today, there are some potent new frames for re‐imagining the traffic between sociological and biological research – even for ‘revitalizing’ the sociological enterprise as such. The paper threads this argument through one empirical case: the relationship between urban life and mental illness. In its first section, it shows how this relationship enlivened both early psychiatric epidemiology, and some forms of the new discipline of sociology; it then traces the historical division of these sciences, as the sociological investment in psychiatric questions waned, and ‘the social' become marginalized within an increasingly ‘biological' psychiatry. In its third section, however, the paper shows how this relationship has lately been revivified, but now by a nuanced epigenetic and neurobiological attention to the links between mental health and urban life. What role can sociology play here? In its final section, the paper shows how this older sociology, with its lively interest in the psychiatric and neurobiological vicissitudes of urban social life, can be our guide in helping to identify intersections between sociological and biological attention. With a new century now underway, the paper concludes by suggesting that the relationship between urban life and mental illness may prove a core testing‐ground for a ‘revitalized' sociology.     

Why do nations matter? The struggle for belonging and security in an uncertain world

This paper explores the reasons why national forms of identification and organization (might) matter in the contemporary era. In contrast to the majority of macro‐sociological work dealing with this topic, I develop an analytical framework that draws together recent research on everyday nationalism with micro‐sociological and psychological studies pointing to the importance of routine practices, institutional arrangements and symbolic systems in contributing to a relatively settled sense of identity, place and community. The second part of the paper focuses on the hierarchies of belonging that operate within a given national setting. Of particular interest is the largely taken‐for‐granted status of the ethnic majority and the degree to which it underpins claims to belonging and entitlement that are used to secure key allocative and authoritative resources.     

Sociology and the European Court of Human Rights

This article offers a sociological analysis of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Adopting a sociological jurisprudence approach, the article aims to demonstrate the unique and valuable contribution that sociology can make to understanding key aspects of international human rights law. Whilst the article seeks to develop an agenda for critical sociological research on human rights law, it also aims to persuade those charged with the supervision of human rights of the value of sociological analysis. To achieve this, the article focuses on three separate but inter‐related aspects of ECtHR jurisprudence: first, it considers the ECtHR's approach to consensus in its adjudication of human rights complaints; second, it examines the social control implications of the ECtHR's decisions and judgments; and third, it assesses how conceptualizations of social identity are often foundational to the ECtHR's reasoning.     

Soap Opera,Then and Now

This essay examines the sustained sociological relevance of US daytime soap operas, a seemingly dead or dying generic form that continues to influence the entertainment landscape as well as media scholars from across the academy. The essay begins by examining soaps' longstanding resonance with three‐core sociological concerns: identity, community or sociality, and cultural legitimacy. It then discusses scholarly research opportunities associated with the recent decline of the genre and concludes by examining current debates in soap opera scholarship.     

Sociological Factors Affecting Agricultural Price Risk Management in Australia*

Abstract The highly volatile auction system in Australia accounts for 85 percent of ex‐farm wool sales, with the remainder sold by forward contract, futures, and other hedging methods. In this article, against the background of an extensive literature on price risk strategies, we investigate title behavioral factors associated with producers' adoption of price risk‐management strategies (specifically futures and forward contracts) for selling wool. This research presents a behavioral model based on Diffusion of Innovations, the Theory of Reasoned Action, and the Theory of Planned Behavior. We found that the auction system is used as a price risk‐management tool because other selling methods are considered more risky. We also report on a curious relationship between risk and complexity in terms of wool producers' intentions to use forward contracts. We explored sociological factors in conjunction with focus‐group data in an attempt to understand this relationship. This exercise yielded some interesting findings on the impact that trust, habit, social cohesion, and networks have on decision making in the rural community. The significance of this article lies in its application of core sociological theory in a new research context: the Australian wool industry.     

A state of limbo: the politics of waiting in neo‐liberal Latvia

This article presents an ethnographic study of politics of waiting in a post‐Soviet context. While activation has been explored in sociological and anthropological literature as a neo‐liberal governmental technology and its application in post‐socialist context has also been compellingly documented, waiting as a political artefact has only recently been receiving increased scholarly attention. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a state‐run unemployment office in Riga, this article shows how, alongside activation, state welfare policies also produce passivity and waiting. Engaging with the small but developing field of sociological literature on the politics of waiting, I argue that, rather than interpreting it as a clash between ‘neo‐liberal’ and ‘Soviet’ regimes, we should understand the double‐move of activation and imposition of waiting as a key mechanism of neo‐liberal biopolitics. This article thus extends the existing theorizations of the temporal politics of neo‐liberalism.     

Public Concern with Animal Well‐Being: Place,Social Structural Location,and Individual Experience*

Abstract While sociologists and the public at large are increasingly interested in the life conditions of animals, conceptual and empirical development of the topic is limited. This paper seeks to further develop the sociological research on attitudes toward animal well‐being. We build on insights from contemporary stratification theory to explain the nature of animal attitudes and their determinants. We also extend past work by examining a broader range of factors related to attitudes about animal well‐being, focusing on place, other social structural factors, and individuals' unique animal‐related experiences. Data are from a survey of over 4,000 Ohio residents conducted in 2002. We find that childhood experience has the greatest place‐based effect on attitudes. Other findings highlight the importance of social structural factors, suggesting support for the “underdog hypothesis.” Women, people experiencing economic hardship, those with less education, younger and middle aged people, and blacks tend to be more concerned with animal well‐being. Individualized, experiential variables are also important. Our results reflect the complexity of attitudes about animals and point to the need for greater sociological attention to factors left largely unexplored in previous studies, including childhood place‐based factors, economic hardship, and individuals' unique animal‐related experiences     

Varieties of Field Theory and the Sociology of the Non‐profit Sector

This paper reviews the use of field theory in the sociological study of the non‐profit sector. The review first shows how field theory, as a conceptual framework to explain social action, provides a valuable sociological counterweight to prevailing economic and psychological orientations in the interdisciplinary scholarship on the non‐profit sector. However, despite its certain shared assumptions, field theory in sociology encompasses three distinct, albeit interrelated, approaches: the Bourdieusian, New Institutionalist, and Strategic Action Fields perspectives. I comparatively outline the key analytical assumptions and causal claims of each version of field theory, whether and how it recognizes the specificity of the non‐profit sector and then delineate its application by sociologists to the non‐profit sector. I show how scholars' employment of each articulation of field theory to study non‐profit activity has been influenced by pre‐existing scholarly assumptions and normative claims about this third space. The article concludes by summarizing the use of these varieties of field theory in the sociology of the non‐profit sector and by identifying future directions in this line of research.     

Exploring the links between intertemporal fluctuations in export earnings and infant mortality: The case of the Sudan

The sociological studies of Third World quality of life have shared a tendency to assume that variations in the determinant variables follow smooth paths over time. However, an elaborate literature indicates that part of the explanation of variation in macro‐sociodemographic dependent variables (including quality of life indicators) may lie in erratic departures from trends in some macroeconomic determinants. This article represents an attempt to explore the nature of the effect of excessive fluctuations in export earnings and income on infant mortality rate using a single‐country time series data. The OLS model estimation findings indicate that instability in income has a systematic and significant adverse effect on infant mortality, whereas instability in export earnings exhibits a consistent lack of significance. These results indicate that the explanation of declines in development or quality of life indicators may also lie in aspects of development that are somehow overlooked in recent sociological studies of the Third World.     

Basic‐Level Categories,Mirror Neurons,and Joint‐Attention Schemes: Three Points of Intersection Between G.H. Mead and Cognitive Science

Recent research in cognitive science has provided broad empirical support for the model of cognition and self‐development formulated by G.H. Mead. This is demonstrated specifically through three distinct cognitive mechanisms: basic‐level categories, mirror neurons, and joint‐attention schemes. These mechanisms illustrate a form of embodied sociality that underscores the intersubjective foundation of mind and self articulated by Mead. Research on basic‐level categories, mirror neurons, and joint‐attention schemes further extends Mead's relevance outside standard sociological and social psychological circles to the field of cognitive science and its emerging focus on sociality and social interaction.     

Between the Living and Undead: How Zombie Cinema Reflects the Social Construction of Risk,the Anxious Self,and Disease Pandemic

The zombie film has become an important component of contemporary popular culture. The sociological nature of the themes addressed by these films reflect prominent social concerns, and lend themselves to sociological analysis as texts themselves. This article examines the zombie film genre, its history, predominant themes, and its illustration of sociological dynamics related to identity, collective behavior, disease, contagion, and the privileges that come from social inequality. Particular attention is placed on what the zombie films, themselves, can tell us about society and how they illustrate sociological principles. First, we examine the origins and history of zombie cinema. Next, we move to a discussion of the central narrative devices around which zombie films are organized. In particular, we focus on two narratives in zombie films: those that emphasize zombie possession; and those that focus on the sociological risks of zombie pandemics. The discussion then moves to an analysis of zombies as selves, and how zombie films express cultural anxieties about selfhood, loss of autonomy, and threats of de‐individualization. We then explore the roles of power and privilege in the social epidemiology of zombification, paying particular attention to how those who succumb to zombiedom illustrate the sociological dynamics of health disparities in the real world. Finally, the sociology of infectious disease is used to address how zombiedom correlates with real disease outbreaks, what we know about the social aspects of infectious disease transmission, and the sociology of pandemics.     

A Sociology of No‐Self: Applying Buddhist Social Theory to Symbolic Interaction

Although fraught with complexity, the self is a central phenomenon of discussion and analysis within sociology. This article contributes to this discourse by introducing the Buddhist ideas of anatta (no‐self) and prattyasamutpāda (interdependence) as analytic frameworks to deconstruct and rethink the self within sociology. We argue that the sociological self, most clearly articulated by symbolic interactionism, is premised on a self‐other dualism. This dualism leads to a conceptualization of the self as constantly threatened and anxious. Using these Buddhist concepts we propose an alternative interpretive schema, a sociology of no‐self, for analyzing social interaction and understanding the roots of social angst.