Teaching, research, and service: Expectations of assistant professors

In this article, we critically evaluate the expectations of assistant professors as perceived by junior and senior faculty (n=22) across seven disciplines at two universities. Our research shows that there are similarities and differences within Sociology departments, across disciplines, and across the teaching and research schools where we collected our data. In one respect, Sociology is no different than the other departments where we interviewed faculty members—ambiguity abounds in terms of expectations for junior faculty. Scholarship expectations for tenure and promotion to associate professor vary much more greatly across rank, discipline, and institution than do those for teaching or service. Based on our findings, we offer several suggestions for improving the transition to the role of Assistant Professor in Sociology. Our suggestions focus on change within graduate programs, hiring institutions, and Sociology as a discipline. While our results are consistent with prior research in many cases, we note that the generalizability of our findings is limited given the number of interviews conducted and the purposive sampling design utilized. However, we hope that our results will provide additional information that may help others as they prepare to begin their roles as assistant professors.     

Using student subjects in experimental research: a challenge to the practice of using students as a proxy for taxpayers

The tax discipline has accepted the practice adopted in the economics and psychology disciplines of using student subjects for experimental research purposes. However, in other social science disciplines (e.g. accounting, management or consumer research), experimental research that uses students as a substitute for another group has been widely criticised as having little external validity. In this research, data are compiled from journal articles over a 20?year period to investigate the extent to which tax experiments use student subjects and the potential implications from this practice. Three research questions are addressed. First, do tax studies using student subjects justify or explain the use of student subjects? Second, are policy recommendations or other extrapolations to the tax-paying population made from the student subject results? Third, is any acknowledgement made of the potential limitations of using student subjects? The findings indicate that approximately half of the tax experiments investigated used student subjects. Of these, approximately 80% provided no justification for their chosen subject sample. A similar proportion did not acknowledge any limitations from the use of a student sample. Around half of the papers using student subjects extrapolated their findings to the general tax-paying population or provided tax policy recommendations. In addition, the research indicates that the tax discipline has not had the same level of robust debate on the use of student subjects in experimental research as that seen in other disciplines. This potentially limits the external validity and utility of many of the tax research experiments undertaken to date.     

Interdisciplinary agendas in visual research: re-situating visual anthropology

In this article I review recent literature on visual research methods in the social sciences to explore two questions. First, I examine how recent interdisciplinary exchanges have portrayed the founding disciplines in visual research and representation through a focus on visual anthropology (and to a lesser degree visual sociology). Second, I critically survey the common aims and interests of academics promoting visual methods from/for their disciplines. As we delve into the “new” visual research literature, it becomes clear that contemporary visual researchers from different disciplines have common interests: reflexivity; collaboration; ethics; and the relationship between the content, social context and materiality of images. I shall argue for a more collaborative interdisciplinary approach to visual research whereby disciplines might learn from each other without seeking narrative foils to assert the supremacy of their own discipline at the expense of others.     

Embodiment, experience and theory: in defence of the sociological tradition

This paper examines whether the theoretical analyses and ambitions of sociologists of the body are increasingly making obstructive and irrelevant the subject boundaries and methodological conventions associated with their parent discipline. Concerns about the utility of the discipline have been expressed by a number of body studies emanating from within and outside of sociology. These imply that it is necessary to reject the dominant problematic of sociology and utilise non disciplinary resources if we are to understand issues surrounding the ‘lived experience’ of embodiment. In opposing this rejection of sociology, if not the use of other intellectual resources, I argue that the discipline contains much valuable theorising about experience which has yet to be developed by body theorists. Many of sociology's central concepts, indeed, evoke dimensions of human experience that remain highly pertinent to an understanding of the individual and societal significance of the body in the contemporary era. In order to illustrate this argument, I focus on the writings of Durkheim and Simmel. Their work is rarely central to writings on the body, but provides good examples of the diversity of theoretical approaches within sociology that remain relevant to body theorists. Specifically, I want to use it to develop the outlines of a theory of embodiment as a medium for the constitution of society which has at its centre a concern with human experience. I conclude by reassessing the strategic options sociologists of the body confront in developing their analyses.     

Aggression in the academic workplace: a psychodynamic analysis of social work

Abstract

Aiming to promote quality collegial relationships in tertiary education, this theoretical study draws on the peer-reviewed literature to provide a psychodynamic analysis of workplace aggression in the social work discipline. Because the study assists academics to identify their aggressive practices and the aggressive practices of their colleagues, the findings can be of relevance to other practice-based disciplines. Elaborating on the causes and effects of the disciplinary, institutional and individual forms of aggression, this study identifies the avoidance of the emotional pain in work with clients as the main reason behind the active or passive–aggressive behaviours in the discipline. Academics act out this defensive manoeuvre through denying the existence of knowledge gaps in the discipline, denying the inextricable link between empirical research and theories of practice, teaching exclusively theories unsupported by empirical studies, and resisting to set boundaries on active and passive aggression. The study proposes the advancement of research-into-practice mindedness in social work schools, the requirement that prospective social work academics gain considerable practice experience before entering academia, the need for academic leadership positions to require peer-reviewed publications in both teaching and practice and the need for Schools to publish a volume of empirical research to be accredited as providers of social work education.     

Paradigm shifts,feminist phase theory,and the missing variable in women's studies curriculum transformation projects

Feminist phase theory describes the process of integrating women's studies scholarship as a series of identifiable stages, for both individuals and disciplines. Literature on the revolutionary and paradigm-shift potential of women's studies scholarship suggests important disciplinary differences in its construction, adoption, and diffusion. We reformulate feminist phase theory in paradigm shift terms, then operationalize and contrast two versions of it. Our analysis and review indicate that the missing variable in women's studies transformation projects is the participants' discipline. Data from our integration project show faculty in interpretive disciplines scoring higher on degree of integration of women's studies scholarship but not changing as a result of the project itself, while those in positivist disciplines do change but have lower absolute scores. These findings indicate a need for different integration strategies based on discipline. Empirical support for one sequential ordering in feminist phase theory argues for the importance and centrality of women-focused scholarship.An earlier version was presented at the 84th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, California, August 1989.     

Philosophy of social work – a new and advantageous field of training and research

Within the field of social work, there is a long tradition for co-operating with the neighbouring disciplines psychology, psychiatry and sociology. This cooperation has been fruitful and made it possible to reach synthesis in form of holistic theories and multimodal approaches. This article examines the need to establish a closer contact with philosophy also. The author argues that philosophical assumptions make up a kind of cognitive frame that determines professional reasoning in the field of social work. When philosophical aspects are overlooked, the consequence may be shallowness and vagueness in professional reasoning. According to the author, future social workers will reach a more solid understanding of social work theories, the problems the clients are facing and possible relief measures if they as students undergo a thorough philosophical training. Furthermore, social work may be strengthened as an academic discipline if some undetected philosophical presuppositions are traced, clarified and evaluated.     

Sociology's misfortune: disciplines, interdisciplinarity and the impact of audit culture

This paper is about tendencies to the subversion of sociology as a discipline. It connects external factors of the wider socio-political environment of higher education in the UK, especially those associated with the audit culture and new systems of governance, with the internal organization of the discipline. While the environment is similar for all social science subjects, the paper argues that there are specific consequences for sociology because of characteristics peculiar to the discipline. The paper discusses these consequences in terms of the changing relationship between sociology and the growing interdisciplinary area of applied social studies as a form of 'mode 2 knowledge'. It argues that while sociology 'exports' concepts, methodologies and personnel it lacks the internal disciplinary integrity of other 'exporter' disciplines, such as economics, political science and anthropology. The consequence is an increasingly blurred distinction between sociology as a discipline and the interdisciplinary area of applied social studies with a potential loss of disciplinary identity. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this loss of identity is associated with a reduced ability to reproduce a critical sensibility within sociology and absorption to the constraints of audit culture with its preferred form of mode 2 knowledge.     

Getting Unstuck: Interdisciplinarity as a New Discipline

Most disciplines and subdisciplines consider their particular specialization to be valuable in itself and superior to other disciplines. But compared with the huge leaps in the physical sciences, the social/behavioral sciences and humanities have made little progress. Since many of the physical science advances were the result of the merging of disciplines, perhaps interdisciplinarity should be tried. One path to connecting disciplines, subdisciplines, and micro‐macro levels is suggested by Spinoza's idea of part/whole methodology, exactly balancing concrete instances with abstract theses. Ideas by B. Pascal, A. Koestler, A. N. Whitehead, and E. O. Wilson may also be helpful. Any discipline, subdiscipline, or level can serve as a valuable stepping‐off place, but to advance further, integration with at least one other viewpoint may be necessary. Two brilliant examples are The Civilizing Process, by the sociologist Norbert Elias, and Freudian Repression, by the psychologist Michael Billig. Koestler's idea of “bi‐sociation” may prove to be particularly rewarding. The way that Virginia Woolf's depiction of role‐taking in interior monologue preceded the idea in social science is an extraordinary example. The need for integration may be the single most important issue facing social science, the humanities, and their subdisciplines. Given the scope of the social/behavioral problems faced by humanity, the sooner the better.     

Navigating the gendered academy: women in social work academia

ABSTRACT

Women fare less well than men across all academic disciplines: they are less likely to be promoted, they earn less, and many more professors are men. There has, however, been little analysis to date of the experience of women in social work education, a discipline that has historically had higher representation of female staff and students. This study set out to explore women in the social work academy through a case-study of social work education in Scotland. A mixed-methods approach was used, including a review of relevant literature; an online survey of women and men academics in social work education; and semi-structured interviews with female social work leaders, past and present. The study found that women in the social work academy faced the same pressures as other women in higher education; some of these pressures were also shared by men. Most significant, however, was the extent to which women in social work academia experienced twin challenges, firstly, as female academics and secondly, as female social work academics in a discipline that struggles for recognition in the academy. We conclude that this makes for a contradictory and, at times, ambiguous experience for women as they navigate the gendered academy.     

Teaching ergonomics to undergraduate physical therapy students: new methodologies and impressions of a Brazilian experience

Being ergonomics a scientific discipline based on knowledge of several areas, it is important to use education methodologies that promote critical thinking and reflective during the educational process. The article discusses the importance of interdisciplinarity in undergraduate courses in health care in particular in disciplines that address the ergonomics issue. The aspects of the introduction of new education methodologies, as well as case studies in undergraduate courses in Brazil, are discussed in this study. Based on the literature review conducted, some proposals for action in the interdisciplinary teaching of ergonomics in Physiotherapy courses are presented.     

Existing and Emerging Methods for Integrating Theories within and between Disciplines

Abstract

Our conceptual systems (including theories, models, policies, and schema) all help us to understand our world. For highly complex situations such as those found in natural systems and service systems, it is important to understand them from an interdisciplinary perspective because these real-world systems do not respect the boundaries of any single discipline. While many conceptual systems exist, they have not proven to be highly effective for understanding issues that are the focus of their disciplines. Still fewer conceptual systems have been developed that cut across disciplinary boundaries — and they have not been shown to be any more effective than their mono-disciplinary companions. This article investigates emerging and existing methods for creating and integrating theories within and between disciplines. This includes ‘soft’ methods (ad-hoc, cherry-picking, and intuitive) as well as ‘rigorous’ (formal grounded theory (FGT), reflexive dimensional analysis (RDA), and integrative propositional analysis (IPA)). The article demonstrates that soft methods are relatively easy to use, but they do not produce conceptual systems of great or lasting value. In contrast, it is proposed that rigorous methods are more likely to yield conceptual systems which are measurably more systemic, more useful, and more effective for understanding and engaging the highly complex systems of our world.     

A relational approach to social impact: Moving beyond instrumental and consumer approaches

Social impact can be understood as the real or perceived, intended or unintended, relational and agentic consequences that emerge from organizational decisions or actions for individuals, communities, and societies. Inherent here is the recognition that social impact aligns with consequences, whether it be on individuals, communities, and societies, and that these consequences stem from organizational decisions and behaviors. Drawing on wider social impact scholarship, this paper identifies two approaches—instrumental and consumer—that have provided lenses on how organizations make decisions about social impact and related consequences, and the level of involvement stakeholders have in these decisions. This paper proposes that the understanding of social impact should evolve to reflect the relational worldview advocated in the public relations discipline, which is one that emphasizes the importance of organizations, individuals, and communities contributing to a fully functioning society. A relational lens shows that social impact can be understood as changes—whether they be intended or unintended, anticipated or unanticipated, positive or negative—in the way people live, experience, sustain, and function within their society, resulting from organizational decisions and consequent behaviors as co-determined by organizations and their stakeholders. The relational approach requires the adoption of a relational perspective on identifying, predicting, evaluating, managing, and reporting on social impact, operationalized via the seven-step Relational Framework of Social Impact conceptualized in this paper. While social impact is a relatively new term in the public relations literature, this paper highlights how public relations scholarship is well placed to enrich the social impact discipline due its emphasis on fostering a fully functioning society.     

Translating transgender: Using Western discourses to understand Samoan fa'afāfine

The analysis of gender as a socially constructed category is one of the foundations of the sociological project. The concept of transgender is of particular interest, in that it reveals that sex is not necessarily constitutive of gender. Gender nonconformity in non‐Western contexts particularly demonstrates that the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality are conceptualised in Western discourses are open to challenge. However, academic research about non‐Western transgender identities and populations often ultimately replicates specific heteronormative and/or Western ways of seeing the world. In this article, I discuss how Samoan fa'afāfine have been represented by various academic disciplines, using a sociological perspective to deconstruct discourses commonly used in this process, which include Orientalism, essentialism, and functionalism. I then outline research that allows for a more nuanced understanding of the lived experience of fa'afāfine, situating them within the broader Samoan cultural context and paying attention to how fa'afāfine themselves construct and maintain their identities. I conclude that this more holistic approach should be taken with all representations of non‐Western and Western nonheteronormative identities and populations.     

Preparing Social Work Students for Interdisciplinary Practice

Summary

This article reports findings of an MSW interdisciplinary practice curriculum experiment. A diverse group of students at ten schools of social work were provided with specialized fieldwork and training. The agencies represented a broad array of services, fields of practice client populations and professional disciplines. Students encountered frequent interdisciplinary disputes and often found social workers coordinating interdisciplinary teams, a role upon which social work curricula rarely focus. This specialized experience seems to have not only enriched students' preparation for interdisciplinary work, but also deepened their understanding of social work as a unique discipline.     

Discussion of Paper by Warman and Rousseau

The story of trauma, in contemporary culture, has shifted, from one of painful, formative experience, to one of injustice and the imperative to rectify an untoward event. Journalists, politicians, and memoirists have become adept at making a narrative of trauma, at finding the story that focuses away from the experience of the wounds to the injustice of having been wounded. As a result, people tend to seek stories of suffering that have a beginning, middle, and, most important, an end, rather than stories of suffering that are not dramatic, that are not moral, but that have a lasting impact. People coming for therapy or analysis, too, look for the dramatic explanation for their suffering, to be the hero in their own narrative. And those of us who treat the sufferers too often protect ourselves from the universality of pain by looking for the trauma story. In recent therapeutic culture, the trauma story has been of a formulaic kind, which is in keeping with our culturally preferred relationship to trauma.

In this article, I draw from two treatments to illustrate the power of our cultural trauma narrative and my own implication in it.     

Protest in an Information Society: a review of literature on social movements and new ICTs

New Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are changing the ways in which activists communicate, collaborate and demonstrate. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, among them sociology, political science and communication, are working to understand these changes. The diversity of perspectives represented enriches the literature, providing an abundant repertoire of tools for examining these phenomena, but it is also an obstacle to understanding. Few works are commonly cited across the field, and most are known only within the confines of their discipline. The absence of a common set of organizing theoretical principles can make it difficult to find connections between these disparate works beyond their common subject matter. This paper responds by locating existing scholarship within a common framework for explaining the emergence, development and outcomes of social movement activity. This provides a logical structure that facilitates conversations across the field around common issues of concern, highlighting connections between scholars and research agendas that might otherwise be difficult to discern.     

American sociology in chaos: Differentiation without integration

American sociology is a chaotic discipline. There is disagreement on foundational issues that give disciplines coherence. For example, sociologist disagree on the appropriateness of a scientific orientation, the role of activism and ideology in inquiry, the best methodologies to employ, the primacy of microversus macro-levels of analysis, the most important topics to study, and many other contentious issues. The recent call for a “public sociology” in which four wings of the discipline—policy (applied), professional (scientific), critical (ideological), and public (civic engagement) sociologies—are to be integrated is less of a remedy for what troubles sociology than an admission that we are a discipline divided (Burawoy, 2005). Among the social sciences, economics is the most coherent, with the other social sciences revealing varying degrees of incoherence or chaos. Sociology is probably the least integrated of the social sciences, although cultural anthropology has increasingly become much like sociology. In this paper, my goal is to offer an explanation for how sociology came to it present state and what, if anything, can be done to integrate the discipline. Let me begin by outlining what makes a discipline coherent. Jonathan H.Turner is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. He is primarily a theorist, and his substantive interests include the history and structure of American sociology. He can be reached at jonathan.turner@ucr.edu.     

Parental mental health and child protection—making the links through training

This article refers to the impact on single discipline working on professional understanding of mental disorder, particularly as it relates to child protection. The dilemmas of bringing a multi‐agency group with diverse experiences and knowledge base together into one training event are considered, with suggestions as to how the difficulty might be addressed. Topics of common concern are identified and training techniques and methods described. The benefits and outcomes of joint training across disciplines and agencies is acknowledged in relation to child protection and parental mental disorder Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sociology and the Nation-State in an Era of Shifting Boundaries

Academic disciplines and nation-states resemble one another in the sense that both emerged worldwide as overarching categories for conferring collective identities about a century ago. During the past quarter century, however, the status of both has been challenged. Disciplines like sociology have been challenged by more salient intellectual boundaries organized around subdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and supradisciplinary lines—a fact that helps account for sociology's response to external threats to the discipline with a sense of being in crisis. Nation-states have been similarly challenged by new jurisdictions organized around subnational, transnational, and supranational lines. Even so, these changes constitute a process of differentiation, not displacement; disciplines and nation-states are likely to persist in serving important functions. albeit reduced in scope.