Researchers Deserve a Better Critique: Response to Larzelere,Gunnoe, Roberts,and Ferguson (2017)

This commentary addresses the critique by Larzelere, Gunnoe, Roberts, and Ferguson (2017 Larzelere, R. E., Gunnoe, M. L., Roberts, M. W., &; Ferguson, C. J. (2017). Children and parents deserve better parental discipline research: Critiquing the evidence for exclusively “positive” parenting. Marriage &; Family Review, 53, 24–35. doi:10.1080/01494929.2016.1145613[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]: Marriage &; Family Review, 53, 24–35) ostensibly concerning the quality of research on “positive parenting” but actually critiquing physical punishment research. The critique revealed that the authors have a poor understanding of positive parenting. After explicating the different meanings of that term and describing what positive parenting is, we then address each of their four critiques of the physical punishment research. Each critique was flawed in multiple ways. After identifying their errors and correcting misinformation, we then raise broader issues about children’s right not to be hit and how professional organizations are increasingly recognizing the need and calling for an end to all physical punishment of children.     

Reflections on The Reproduction of Mothering—Twenty Years Later

The Reproduction of Mothering attracted readers from a wide variety of backgrounds—ordinary women seeking to understand themselves; psychoanalysts and psychotherapists; feminist scholars from a range of disciplines including literature, philosophy, political theory, sociology, and anthropology; and social and cultural theorists. These reflections address all these readers. I restate what I see as the main contribution of the book, suggesting why it has had enduring appeal. In so doing, I also respond to criticisms or areas or unease articulated by feminists, social scientists, and psychoanalysts. In concluding, I point to tensions faced by feminists, psychoanalysts, and other proponents of liberatory change, between psychological Understanding and social and political advocacy.     

Interactionism in the Twenty‐First Century: A Letter on Being‐in‐a‐Meaningful‐World

Half a century after its crystallization, interactionism faces new challenges. While elements of this theoretical tradition have percolated into the broader field of sociology, some of its most radical promises have been ignored. This essay provides a blueprint for how to approach interactionism today: not as a historical remnant, but as a living tradition with much to offer contemporary scholarship. Yet to do so, we argue, interactionism must develop some of its core tenets, offering more explicit links both to the sociology of culture, and to other areas in sociology. Focusing on our own experiences and writings, we point to ways in which the careful study of interaction can provide a font of ideas for the broader sociological discipline. We address the significance of affordances, situational webs, group commitment, embeddedness, and disruption, and show how such reorientation can help us better analyze oppression and privilege.     

Crime,Politics, and Punishment: Criminological Research for Political Sociologists

As a sociologist studying the intersection of crime, punishment, and politics, it is often surprising to me how many aspects of political sociology and the study of crime and punishment overlap, and yet, there is often limited cross‐fertilization of the two fields. For the sake of brevity in this discussion, I refer to those who study crime, deviance, law, criminal justice, and punishment as criminologists. My goal is to provide an extremely brief “primer” on criminology for political sociologists, in the hopes that a short reading of some issues and research in criminology may stimulate additional theorizing and research, as has so often happened when I have read political sociological work. To do this, I begin with a brief discussion of overlaps in political sociological and criminological perspectives. Following this, I highlight some examples of criminological research which incorporates politics, and would likely interest political sociologists, Then, I highlight a hot button issue in criminology – sex offenses – and suggest some ways that political sociologists could examine recent legislation on sex offenders and conclude with brief discussions of a few additional areas of overlap for the two disciplines.     

DOMESTICATING WOMEN, CIVILIZING MEN: Rousseau's Political Program

I argue in this study that when Rousseau's oeuvre is read as a whole, the novels as well as the conventional texts of political theroy, it reveals a political program for reform of the ancient regime. This reform is founded on a reform of domestic mores. Rousseau's attendant conception of the relations between private and public spheres is more unified than that found in modern sociology. Rousseau shows that the domestic role of women is a structural precondition for a “modern” society.

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Reframing the whistleblower in research: Truth‐tellers as whistleblowers in changing cultural contexts

Whistleblowing is fraught with conceptual dilemmas, including those who may be considered whistleblowers and fundamental concepts associated with the term. Whistleblowing is a dynamic concept, set within and deeply related to culture, yet scholarship has focused primarily on whistleblowing and its ramifications within management and organizational settings, as opposed to engaging with the wrong‐doing disclosed and conceptualizing how we assign meaning to whistleblowers/ing in changing landscapes of societal values and cultural institutions. To grasp the cultural sociological understanding of what constitutes whistleblowing, these themes and how they are shaped need to be drawn out in scholarship. Thus, the purpose of this review is to determine through which disciplines, lenses and discourse whistleblowing has been developed in academia and to identify gaps in disciplines and methods, highlighting how these affect our broader understanding of whistleblowing. This review article offers preliminary insight into how people engage in meaning‐making connected with terms such as whistleblowing, abuse and corruption through the lens of the #MeToo movement. The article encourages further research in disciplines such as sociology, political theory, human rights, socio‐legal studies and particularly, within cultural sociology.     

Middle mass and the pitt: a critical review of Peter Saunders's sociology of consumption

This review provides critical commentary on the sociology of consumption recently developed by Peter Saunders in the new edition of his Social Theory and the Urban Question and elsewhere. Comment is made on the politics of socialized consumption, the sociology of consumption sector cleavages and the concept of a privatized mode of consumption. Note is also made of the methodological critique of realism and the assertion of a Weberian alternative which underpins the contribution. It is argued that although the approach provides some insights it tends to get locked into a series of unproducive conceptual and methodological polarities in its attempt to undermine the supposed hegemonic position of Marxism within contemporary urban studies.     

Mapping Gender and Migration in Sociological Scholarship: Is It Segregation or Integration?

A review of the sociological research about gender and migration shows the substantial ways in which gender fundamentally organizes the social relations and structures influencing the causes and consequences of migration. Yet, although a significant sociological research has emerged on gender and migration in the last three decades, studies are not evenly distributed across the discipline. In this article, we map the recent intellectual history of gender and migration in the field of sociology and then systematically assess the extent to which studies on engendering migration have appeared in four widely read journals of sociology (American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Demography, and Social Forces). We follow with a discussion of these studies, and in our conclusions, we consider how future gender and migration scholarship in sociology might evolve more equitably.     

Abandoned not: media sociology as a networked transfield

ABSTRACT

The relationship between the disciplines of communication and sociology has been primarily described as being abandoned by sociologists. This article historicizes the alleged sociological abandonment of communication and media research and centers on media sociology as the key manifestation of an ongoing vibrant relationship between the two disciplines. It has two goals. First, I examine the contours of the abandonment notion since Berelson vs. Schramm, Riesman, and Bauer in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1959. I demonstrate the diversity and the depth of media sociology and argue that an US-centric positivist understanding of media sociology has led to the exaggerated and misleading notion of abandonment, which homogenizes theoretical discourse and discounts scholarly contributions from outside of the US. Personal and collective memories have also documented institutional and organizational growth of media sociology. Second, I propose to conceptualize media sociology as a networked transfield driven by questions transcending disciplinary little boxes. Rather than returning to the Lazarsfeldian media effect paradigm, media sociology as a networked transfield driven by questions will allows scholars take advantage of structural holes for synthesis and innovation.     

Who Controls Whom? History and Educational Technologies

Abstract

Considering the lack of research on the historisation of educational technologies, the current study attempts to fill this void. To do so, the following research question is posed: To what extent have educational technologies and local histories controlled one another? Data for this question came from a naturalistic enquiry into a university in the Saudi Arabian public sector. Having analysed documents, interviews, and observations by means of the grounded theory technique, two key themes emerged: local histories controlling educational technologies and educational technologies controlling local histories. The consideration of both themes brought forth a theoretical proposition — that there are political dynamics between educational technologies and micro histories, with one continuously directing and driving the other. The recommendation is therefore that policymakers, scholars, and commentators should be more cognisant of the political tensions between local histories and educational technologies.     

Relational sociology,pragmatism, transactions and social fields

Starting from the idea that relational sociology has been founded on various and incompatible social ontologies, I argue that it is at risk of losing its raison d'être if we do not answer two fundamental practical and ontological questions: (1) Why do we need relational sociology? and (2) What do we study in relational sociology? In this respect, I propose a deep, transactional sociology partly and freely inspired by the work of J. Dewey which clearly detaches relational sociology from social determinism and co-determinism.     

Three Ecologies: Urban Metabolism and the Society‐Nature Opposition

This article is an intellectual history of two enduring binaries—society‐nature and city‐countryside—and their co‐identification, told through evolving uses of the concept of “urban metabolism.” After recounting the emergence of the modern society‐nature opposition in the separation of town and country under early industrial capitalism, I interpret “three ecologies”—successive periods of urban metabolism research spanning three disciplines within the social sciences. The first is the human ecology of the Chicago School, which treated the city as an ecosystem in analogy to external, natural ecosystems. The second is industrial ecology: materials‐flow analyses of cities that conceptualize external nature as the source of urban metabolism's raw materials and the destination for its social wastes. The third is urban political ecology, a reconceptualization of the city as a product of diverse socio‐natural flows. By analyzing these three traditions in succession, I demonstrate both the efficacy and the limits to Catton and Dunlap's distinction between a “human exemptionalist paradigm” and a “new ecological paradigm” in sociology.     

Quebec Sociology: A Discipline and its Object

Quebec sociology and Quebec society are categorically distinct from other sociologies and countries. Both are “communities,” both have French-speaking majorities, and both exist in Anglo-Saxon environments. As well, Quebec sociology has always been and continues to be obsessed by the national question. Interpretations proposed by sociologists—predominantly French-speaking—of and about the Quebec Question have never been independent of the struggles in which they have taken place. In fact, sociological readings of nationalism in Quebec appear to be a direct consequence of their social position and relationship with political power. Through the prism of sociology, the French-speaking collectivity in Canada has been, successively and simultaneously, characterized through categories of race, ethnic group, society, and nation. 2 This article presents five ways in which sociologists have represented Quebec society. First, the Pioneers: Léon Gérin and Marius Barbeau, or the Quebec “Difference” as a handicap. Second, the characterization of Quebec through race, territory, and soul. Third provides the external perspectives of Miner and Hughes. Fourth will examine the Laval (Quebec) School. Finally, this article will examine Quebec Society as either an ethnic or civic nation. Each theme has been set chronologically in specific periods of Quebec sociology: the Pioneers (Part 1 and 2, before 1940); the institutionalization of academic sociology (Part 3 and 4, 1940-1969); and the “nationalization” and professionalization of sociology (Part 5, 1970 to the present).     

Interview with Andrew Samuels

Andrew Samuels is Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex, Visiting Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies at Goldsmith's College, University of London and a Jungian Analyst in London. We were lucky to have Andrew participate very generously in the Brisbane Family Therapy Conference in September, 1998. Andrew has written widely on psychological and psychotherapeutic themes, and has opened up new areas around the relations between therapy and politics. In his book The Political Psyche (1993) he poses the questions: Is there a special psychology of and for politics and culture? If so, what does the clinical practice of analysis and therapy with individuals or small groups contribute to the forming of such a psychology? ... In what way is the personal political—and in what way is the political personal? We interviewed Andrew in Brisbane just one week before the 1998 Federal Election, with talk of Howard, Beazley and Hanson pervading conference conversations. It was a great time to have Andrew around. But first we had to clear up a few matters about Jung.     

Sensational signs,authority and the public sphere: Settler colonial rhetoric in times of change

The article explores the emotional regimes of settler colonialism in post‐apartheid South Africa. The focus is on apocalyptic fears of the imagined eradication of whiteness. These fears are articulated in response to postcolonial/decolonial interpellations of abject whiteness, and are made visible in a range of sensational signs that circulate online and offline. The signs cluster around two themes that are central to the ideologies of settler colonialism: land (and its feared loss), and (white) bodies (and their feared disappearance). Following Sarah Ahmed (2004a,b), emotionally charged signs can be seen as actions (akin to words in speech act theory). In contrast to Jürgen Habermas’ conception of the public sphere as an idealized place of rational debate, the article argues that a combination of affect‐emotion‐feeling and the performance of ‘reason’—what Aristotelian rhetoric refers to as pathos and ethos—are integral for understanding public‐political discourses of whiteness at a time when white privilege has been called out globally (and locally), and white dominance has lost its stronghold.     

Free agent or ‘conscious automaton’? Contrasting interpretations of the individual in Spencer's writing on social and moral life

Herbert Spencer remains an important and intriguing figure in thinking about political, social and moral matters. At present his writings in relation to idealist thought, social policy, sociology and ethics are undergoing reassessment. This article is concerned with some recent interpretations of Spencer on individuals in social life. It looks in some detail at Spencer's work on psychology and sociology as well as on ethics, seeking to establish how Spencer understood people as social individuals. In particular the neglect of Spencer's denial of freedom of the will is identified as a problem in some recent interpretations. One of his contemporary critics, J.E. Cairnes, charged that Spencer's own theory of social evolution left even Spencer himself the status of only a ‘conscious automaton’. This article, drawing on a range of past and present interpretative discussions of Spencer, seeks to show that Spencerian individuals are psychically and socially so constituted as to be only indirectly responsive to moral suasion, even to that of his own Principles of Ethics as he himself acknowledged. Whilst overtly reconstructionist projects to develop a liberal utilitarianism out of Spencer to enliven political and philosophical debate for today are worthwhile—dead theorists have uses—care needs to be taken that the original context and its concerns with the processes associated with innovation (and decay) in social life are not thereby eclipsed, the more so since in some important respects they have recently received little systematic attention even though the issues have contemporary relevance in sociology.     

Sebastião Salgado and Visual Sociology

This paper links the work of Sebastião Salgado, recipient of the 2010 American Sociological Association (ASA) Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues, with the discipline of sociology. I reflect on Salgado’s biography, method, and concerns in order to demonstrate how his work contributes to the awareness and understanding of social issues. Toward this end, I summarize sociology’s record of involvement with visual documentation. Prior to 1915, the American Journal of Sociology regularly included photographs that provided visual documentation of environments under study. However, as sociology moved away from social reform activities and toward scientific investigation, the regular publication of photographs ceased. During the 1930s and 1940s, photographic projects in disciplines and social movements beyond sociology developed a variety of methods that would prove useful to sociology. During the 1970s, sociologists once again began to use visual methods in their teaching, research, and publication, putting sociology in the position to both contribute to and benefit from insights and social commitments that have distinguished Sebastião Salgado as a globally significant photographer and social activist during the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries.     

'Totalitarianism', Treason and Containment in Catch-22 (and 1984)

Abstract

Critical writing on Catch-22 has often centred (quite naturally and understandably, it must be said) on concepts such as paradox, black humour and the absurdity of the human condition. Although these approaches have certainly not been without profit and have produced interesting readings, they have also tended to obscure, under the generic nature of such frameworks, the novel's patent political concerns — concerns which, moreover, are not at all unrelated to the usual critical preoccupations. In a similar way, although Catch-22 criticism has often relied heavily on the detection of literary allusions and influences at work in the text, a most obvious source of influence seems to have been generally ignored. This essay attempts to offer a different reading of Catch-22 based on the assertion that what the novel is really about is 'totalitarianism'. Its starting point is, therefore, a parallel reading bringing together Heller's best-known book with one of the central literary texts on 'totalitarianism' — George Orwell's 1984. Focusing initially on the similar way(s) in which the two novels construct what is called a 'totalitarian' atmosphere, the essay proceeds to briefly demonstrate the bearing of the 'totalitarian' problematic on another important '60s novel, E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times, and to offer a fuller reading of Catch-22, including a summary excursion into the difficult question of how the student of '60s American fictions should approach the concept of 'totalitarianism'.     

Political extremism — left, center, and right

This paper formalizes Lipset’s theory of political extremism and applies its axioms and derivations to guide empirical research. A latent structure analysis of measures of the issues from a survey of the 1992 U.S. electorate produced a three-class Left-Center-Right classification of voters. Given that ideological consistency may indicate a propensity toward political extremism, this study finds that this propensity now is strongest in the Right class and not in the Left and Center classes. He taught political sociology and search methodology at the University of Calfornia, Santa Barbara. His publications include theoretical and emjpirical analysis of political and social process and he has edited A Handbook of Social Science Methods.