The Paranoid Style Revisited: Pseudo‐Conservatism in the 21st Century

Fifty years ago, the Pulitzer Prize‐winning historian Richard Hofstadter published the seminal essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” In this and related works he examined the rhetoric animating the extreme right‐wing of the country's electorate. In this article I revisit Hofstadter's claims regarding the marginalization of the paranoid style and its connection to status‐based politics. A review of the most popular “pseudo‐conservative” commentators, survey data, the rise of the Tea Party, and the intransigence of the present day Republican Party suggests that a worldview that was once extreme has now become “mainstreme” within the political culture.     

The anatomy lesson: a note on the Merton thesis1

In the sociology of science, the historical analysis of the rise of seventeenth-century experimental science has been dominated by the research of Robert Merton, who argued that Protestant asceticism paved the way for scientific world-views. Merton was criticized by L.S. Feuer who claimed that science was in fact the outcome of hedonism not asceticism. This article supports the Merton thesis on the basis of a note on the historical development of anatomical dissections with special reference to public dissections in Holland m the seventeenth century. The principal difficulty for both Merton and Feuer is that scientific medicine in pre-modern societies was not differentiated from either religion or law. The anatomy lesson was in fact a juridical and moral drama.     

Organizations and Alienation: The Mediation Hypothesis Revisited*

It is a widely accepted premise of mass society theory that voluntary associations play an important integrating role in modern society by mediating between the individual and the remote influences on life, work, and politics. There are two major variants of the mediation hypothesis: (1) purely social interaction within organizations lessens alienation in immediate relationships; (2) interaction accompanied by political exposures reduces alienation in the political domain. Controlling for social class, activity in instrumental, political groups is associated with significantly lower levels of political alienation. Activity in nonpolitical, social organizations is found to have more general attitudinal consequences—both for levels of social alienation and for estrangement from political processes. These patterns suggest that, despite the consistent effects of SES on nonalienative beliefs, voluntary associations provide independent settings of social and political integration.     

Surgical Identity Play: The Anatomy Lab Revisited

The anatomy lab has been studied by sociologists interested in professional socialization since the 1950s. This is because the act of dissecting a cadaver is thought to be foundational for both the student's medical knowledge and the development of the student's professional identity. In this paper, I revisit the anatomy lab both historically and ethnographically. Drawing on theoretical insights from the laboratory ethnography tradition within science and technology studies, I show that students use material artifacts in the lab to support their “surgical identity play.” This activity is structured by the laboratory's performative architecture even while it is unsupervised by anatomy faculty. While many analyses of professional socialization focus on how students learn to interact with patients during their training, I show that the anatomy lab experience is an important form of professional socialization because here students learn to employ surgical instruments, language, and dress, and begin to relate to each other as colleagues.     

Openings Revisited: The Foundations of Social Interaction

Twenty years after its publication, the “openings” research of Miller, Hintz, and Couch (1975) continues to be the conceptual foundation of the New Iowa School of Symbolic Interation. However, we believe that this work has been misread. Returning to the original work, we offer a new reading of this groundbreaking research that broadens the scope of the analysis and more closely defines the hierarchical structure of social interation found in all social encounters.     

Community Readiness Assessment: The Scoring Process Revisited

The Community Readiness Model is an innovative and widely embraced approach to determining a community's stage of readiness to address a particular community issue and match that stage with an appropriate intervention. The current study used this approach in five communities experiencing cancer health disparities. In each community, leaders were interviewed and their qualitative data scored to determine the community's stage of readiness. Two methods of triangulation, investigator and interdisciplinary, were used to increase the scoring process's rigor. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the consensus portion of the scoring process, these meetings were content analyzed. The results have important implications for scoring team composition, provide insight into consensus reaching strategies, and offer recommendations for addressing potential challenges.     

The Secret Life of Focus Groups: Robert Merton and the Diffusion of a Research Method

Focus groups became popular in social research in the 1980s. Robert Merton has pointed to the continuities and discontinuities between focus groups and the wartime use of ‘focused interviewing’ he and his colleagues developed at the Bureau of Applied Social Research. Using a variety of sources, the paper attempts to chart the ways in which focused interviewing came to be taken up, diffused and modified in marketing research before re-emerging into sociology as the focus group.     

Business IN Society: The Social Contract Revisited

Abstract

Perhaps no theoretical perspective better supports evolving expectations of corporate social responsibility than social contract theory. Centuries old, this dominant theory has proven to be highly influential in Western contexts, as it encompasses both institutional and moral consideration. The relationship between business and society has become increasingly significant in recent years as businesses must respond to rapid global change, pressing externalities, and serious societal concerns, many of which cannot be adequately attended to by any party alone. This paper offers an evolutionary perspective of the social contract in light of modern day realities and shifting societal expectations. Implications are derived from both moral and pragmatic arguments to suggest that the implied social contract is meaningfully evolving in new directions both in terms of theory and practice, most particularly regarding business purpose, leadership, and social responsibility.     

Globalisation Continues: The Maastricht Globalisation Index Revisited and Updated

Globalisation is a complex process which leads to an increasing connectedness and interrelatedness in the political, economic, social and cultural, technological, and environmental domain on many different scales. While this is a truly global phenomenon, it also has different impacts and manifestations in different geographic localities. As a result, different nations exhibit different levels of globalisation or connectedness. Further, perspectives on globalisation are manifold and change over time, therefore it is crucial to continuously reflect upon and revise existing methodologies. Composite indices are a powerful tool to capture and measure complex concepts that allow for monitoring complex systems over time and yield relative rankings and comparisons. This article presents a revised and updated Maastricht Globalisation Index for 117 countries and three points in time—2000, 2008, and 2012—including a new calculation methodology and data. Results show that globalisation still continues but has slowed down, due to the recent economic crisis.     

The Enduring Social Psychology of Robert K. Merton: Motivating Sentiments,Reference Groups and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Robert K. Merton (1910–2003) gained renown as a distinguished sociologist, especially in connection with the paradigm of “structural-functionalism” and he publicly self-identified as a “structuralist.” This paper calls attention to an emphasis in Merton’s work that sociologists have often overlooked, namely, his social psychology. I argue that, throughout his long career, Merton consistently pursued social psychological issues, including how non-logical action, appeals to shared sentiments and collective definitions of situations affect life in organized groups. I shall characterize his earlier analyses as “Harvard style,” and his later social psychological works as “Chicago style,” as a heuristic means of calling attention to interesting variations in framing. Merton’s formulations have impacted numerous subfields of sociology, and some (e.g., “self-fulfilling prophecies,” “the Matthew Effect”) remain influential even today. Examining Merton’s social psychology will contribute both to a fuller appreciation of his career and also to a more complete history of social science in the United States.     

The Correspondence Between Religious Orientation and Socio-Political Liberalism and Conservatism*

Evidence of correspondence in the general population between religious and sociopolitical liberalism and conservatism is as yet inconclusive. This may in part stem from failure to appropriately assess both religious liberalism and socio-political liberalism-conservatism. Upon taking steps to correct these shortcomings, it was found that, for a semi-rural population in west-central Illinois, Christian conservatism was significantly and positively related to socio-political status quo orientation and to conservative political party preference. Conversely, Christian liberalism was found to be significantly and positively related to socio-political change orientation and to liberal political party preference. It was also found that a slight increment in the majority of these relationships occurred for individuals having experienced unfulfilled occupational expectations. This latter finding is interpreted to suggest that the encountering of adverse circumstances, potentially emanating from the social system, operates to increase the correspondence between religious and socio-political liberalism and conservatism.