校园异类语言的社会学解读

当前,校园里到处充斥着各种各样的“异类”语言,这类语言在青少年群体中有着极强的生命力和传播力,业已引起了家长和学校的高度重视。本文在社会学的视野下对这类语言进行了相关分析,并提出相应的对策建议。     

The Mechanisms of Suicide: A Realist Approach

This article pursues two aims, a major and a minor one. The major one is to read some important results in the sociological literature on suicide, namely those obtained by Durkheim in 1897, Giddens in 1966 and Pope and Danigelis in 1981, as Context–Mechanism–Outcome configurations. The realist interpretation of the theories of suicide is deemed to be fundamental for the explanation of this social phenomenon, if one wishes not to be misled by the (false) laws which have repeatedly been designated to govern it, e.g., the married are more immune than the unmarried, and, above all – being clamorously labelled ‘Sociology's One Law’ – the one declaring ‘Protestants kill themselves more often than Catholics’. The minor aim is to show that the synthesis of Boolean data, as can be performed for example by QCA (qualitative comparative analysis), is perfectly compatible with the realist synthesis; when not quite constituting its rigorous formalization.     

Sociological Theories of Poverty in Urban America

ABSTRACT

Since the 1950s, American sociologists have developed a substantial literature on poverty in urban American communities. This literature review examines some of these sociological theories of poverty and identifies four major explanations of urban poverty: social stratification, (including segregation and racism); lack of access to social capital; cultural and value norms; and social policies. The literature review concludes with a conceptual framework that focuses on multiple relationships that link theory to practice related to the reduction of poverty in inner-city communities.     

The Life Course: A Sociological Introduction

Abstract

Recognition of the deleterious effects of domestic violence on women's mental health has highlighted the potential benefits for women of collaboration between mental health and domestic violence services. Yet the different histories, knowledge bases, and organisational cultures of the mental health and domestic violence sectors present formidable challenges to the development of effective collaborative work. This article draws on a large research enquiry, involving four separate but related studies, which explored aspects of collaboration between these two service sectors. It focuses particularly on data collected in interviews with practitioners from mental health and domestic violence services who were participants in an action research study (one of the four studies), which was aimed at discovering the factors that contributed to enhanced collaboration and the benefits of this for women who experience both domestic violence and mental health issues.     

女大学生卖淫现象的社会学解读

按一般的社会常识理解女大学生卖淫现象,不符合主流话语构造的情境对实践者行动的规制,需要从社会生活的另类情境中寻求答案。日常生活情境中的经济、社会、文化等因素生产的关系结构与女大学生自身信念相互勾连而形成的个体实践感,决定了女大学生选择卖淫行动,并可了解和把握此现象的社会本质。     

Testing a Sociological Explanation for Rising Rates of White Mortality

This article is a response to Young's (2016) essay on high white death rates in Kansas. I argue that a focus on external causes would further help researchers theorize about how and why certain behavioral factors link declining white populations to various mortality changes. Additional work that examines changing mortality patterns by sex and race and that extends analyses to the entire nation will provide further tests of Young's thesis. In this context, I encourage researchers to consider how intergenerational comparisons and cohort effects may produce some of the observed patterns.     

The Diffusion of Cricket to America: A Figurational Sociological Examination

Abstract  This paper examines the historical development of cricket in America and seeks to explain why, despite having a significant initial impact, the game ultimately became culturally marginal. It is argued that class and cricketing relations in England in the mid-nineteenth century had a significant and hitherto unacknowledged impact on the diffusion of the game to America, and that this unplanned social process can only be understood in the light of the specific interdependencies between the British and Anglo-Americans, between upper and lower class English immigrants, and between English immigrants and "Native White Americans". Correlatively, this analysis spreads new light on the establishment of baseball as America's national game, illustrating a greater level of dependence on the English and English sport than is traditionally attributed.     

Doing Sociological Films: A Proposal

This essay in an attempt to define, termino‐logically and methodologically, a certain sociological way of producing videos.

The aim is to clarify the possibility of making cinematographic products as sociological practice; trying to transcend the “autodeceit” caused by the cine‐eye. This is a methodological proposal that confronts the risk of misunderstanding reality, through the paradoxical adoption of a method based upon theatre and fiction.     

The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic: A Sociological Analysis

A new type of sex crime was discovered in the United States in the 1980s – the sexual abuse of young children in ghastly rituals performed by devil worshippers who happened to be their day care providers. ‘Ritual abuse’, as this new sex crime came to be termed, appeared to be epidemic during that decade; hundreds of day care centers were investigated and scores of providers were arrested and prosecuted. This article asserts that the day care ritual abuse scare was a moral panic, in fact, the ‘purest example’ of a moral panic in that the putative threat to children had to be wholly constructed. Using the key sociological elements set out by Cohen (1972/2002), this article analyzes the day care ritual abuse moral panic and concludes by discussing additional key elements that will facilitate future sociological analyses of moral panics.     

Politics and Celebrity: A Sociological Understanding

Many social commentators have denounced the election of entertainment celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Venture, and Al Franken to political offices as indicative of American democracy’s collapse, treating the political victories by these celebrities as evidence of America’s preference for entertainment over political deliberation. This essay reviews the scholarly literature on celebrity and politics to provide a better understanding of this important topic. As the literature demonstrates, this conflation of celebrity and politics is not a recent phenomenon, as politicians have long employed dramaturgical elements to mobilize constituencies. Indeed, celebrities and politicians share many similarities. Both must construct public personalities appealing to their audiences and employ similar actors and strategies to help create these personalities. While some scholars working in this field agree with the concern that celebrity’s presence in politics inhibits serious political discourse, other scholars contend that the use of celebrity performances by politicians may actually attract a wider segment of society to meaningfully participate in politics. The essay concludes by suggesting that future works in this area should adopt a cultural sociology framework to empirically study the meaning of celebrity for different social groups in order to gain a stronger understanding of celebrity’s sociopolitical impact.     

Estate Inheritance: A Sociological Lacuna*

Estate inheritance, a frequently mentioned but rarely examined feature of stratification systems, has been a neglected area of research in sociology. In this paper, several possible causes of the sociological neglect are discussed. The treatment of inheritance patterns in functionalist and conflict theories of stratification is analyzed, and an overview of existing research on inheritance is presented. Finally, a conflict theory of stratification that incorporates the phenomenon of inheritance is proposed, and avenues for further research are suggested.     

Sovereignty and Martyrdom: A Sociological Sketch

This paper has two goals: to develop a sociological conception of martyrdom and to use that concept to interpret the history of sovereignty in the West. While recent research on the topic has focused on martyrdom as a terrorist tactic associated with radical Islam, I redress these trends by analyzing martyrdom as a social process, focusing on cases of martyrdom in European history, and cultivating a new perspective on the relationship between religion and politics in the historical development of sovereignty in the West.     

Conspiracy: A Dramaturgical Explanation

This article explores the psychosocial significance of conspiracy theories and explanations from a dramaturgical perspective. Using a modification of Burke's dramaturgical pentad—(a) plot line, (b) directorial assumption, (c) social context, (d) dramatic genre, and (e) dramatic resolution—two variants of conspiracy are presented. Each is available to make sense of group tensions. The dramaturgy of conspiracy theories as a paranoid's story depicts group tensions as a function of the obsessive suspiciousness of a group, which finds a favorable hearing in a quick-fix culture. In this drama, the rationality of the objective and dispassionate analyst is seen as the antidote. The dramaturgy of conspiracy explanations as a viable sense-making heuristic depicts group tensions as a result of the turn to postmodernism. In this drama, rational expertise and the official version of the facts is the source, rather than the solution, of problems.     

The Colour of Poverty: A Study of the Poverty of Ethnic and Immigrant Groups in Canada

This article uses a case-study approach in relation to the migration of Indian doctors to the UK in order to illustrate the complexity and multi-levelled nature of explanations for international migration.
It argues that whereas, at the level of discursive consciousness, the movement of Indian doctors to the UK appears an economically driven and shapedphenomenon akin to other examples of highly skilled international migration, when the practical consciousness of participants is investigated through qualitative methods, the migration can also be seen as a cultural and social phenomenon.
Although migrants move to better themselves, they also make choices based on factors such as the kind of novels they read as children or taken for granted familial obligations rooted in the everyday life of their culture.     

North Central Sociological Association Presidential Address: What the World Needs Now: A Model of Rational Altruism

Abstract

This address challenges the widely held view that social-economic rationality is rooted in egoistical behavior. Based on an examination of the concept of altruism in sociology, the discussion features the outlines of a formal alternative model of motivation. The model includes altruism as a legitimate “rational choice.”     

First Episode Psychosis: A Magical Realist Guide Through Liminal Terrain

This paper presents a narrative of a client, ‘Eva’, who experienced what is termed by psychiatry a first episode psychosis. As a family and relationship counsellor practicing narrative therapy with its backdrop of post‐structuralism and curiosity of exploring new entry points for narratives of identity, I tentatively sought new ways to engage with Eva's story. My endeavour in meeting with ‘First Episode Psychosis’ is described through adopting a listening position from a reading of magical realist literature. This extends Michael White's political exploration of ethnographer Arnold van Gennep's liminal spaces (in the rites of passage metaphor) to understand units of experience, units of meaning, and the fluidity of identity in psychosis, which is contextualised as a response to events in the client's story.     

Review Essay: Sociological Uses of a Sociological Memoir

Qualitative Sociology -