Reflexivity and the Sociology of Practice

Reflexive theories offer an alternative perspective on sociological intervention and an interpretation of current social conditions that open up new possibilities for the theoretical, professional, and societal recentering of sociological practice as what I will call the sociology of practice. From a reflexive perspective, sociological knowledge and everyday knowledge are related through a process of mutual transformation in ways that foster a convergence of theoretical and applied issues, redraw the boundaries between sociological and the extrasociological activities, and require new forms of lay–expert engagement in which lay knowledge plays a substantive role. Discursive models of engagement are typically advocated, but I argue that an interventive model of lay–expert engagement organized as the sociology of practice optimizes the possibility that engagement will meet reflexive criteria. The sociology of practice is recentered as a substantive body of knowledge relevant to the work of all sociologists and essential for ameliorating social problems.     

The paradox of Durkheim's manifesto: Reconsidering The Rules of Sociological Method

Conclusion In summary, my three formulations of Durkheim's The Rules of Sociological Method as a manifesto have progressively found it to be epistemologically and pedagogically embedded in its object of scientific interest. In the first and most limited formulation, Durkheim's text was a violent and strategic preparation for his vision of sociology, that laid its grounds, but was ultimately inessential to sociological practice itself. It marked what he hoped was a historical rupture in western thought, after which true sociological reason could get underway. In my second formulation his text was the creation of a precise sociological object and moral reality. And while constituting sociology's first action, the manifesto could then be superseded as this morality began to sustain itself. Nevertheless, more than in the first formulation, it actively produced a new social fact in European culture. Finally, in the third formulation, Durkheim's manifesto is an ongoing moment of sociology itself (in the sense of a Hegelian moment, which is fully visible only in its first conflict-ridden appearance, but subsequently constitutes an essential part of the phenomenon's makeup). This manifesto is sociology's first clear attempt to understand representation as the fundamental element of social life. As such, sociological images and language are more than new social facts, they are also collective representations themselves, that reveal how the collective both imagines itself and interprets its own images. In this last formulation, sociology is deeply intertwined with the phenomena it seeks to explain, and becomes increasingly so as it proceeds historically.The implications of understanding sociology as a collective representation are manifold. But among the most important is that sociology develops by way of a dialectical relation to its object. Not surprisingly, a century after the appearance of Durkheim's manifesto, popular mass culture is permeated with reified sociological language, while cultural and mass-media studies have become a central interest of contemporary social theory. One could even speculate what Durkheim might say about late twentieth-century North American or European culture, and the place of sociological images therein. Would he, like one might imagine Freud, despair at the popular tropes and metaphors that he helped produce? Would he see only a monster of his own creation? Unlike Freud, who might be able to condemn popular psychoanalytic language as itself an indication of an immature culture looking for therapeutic fathers, Durkheim formulated the inevitability of the reification and deification of sociological language. For example, he explains that his own time was dominated by the language of the French Revolution: ...society also consecrates things, especially ideas. If a belief is unanimously shared by a people, then ... it is forbidden to touch it, that is to say, to deny it or to contest it. Now the prohibition of criticism is an interdiction like the others and proves the presence of something sacred. Even today, howsoever great may be the liberty which we accord to others, a man who should totally deny progress or ridicule the human ideal to which modern societies are attached, would produce the effect of a sacrilege. He gives Fatherland, Liberty, and Reason as examples of the sacred language inherited from the Revolution. And although he understands that these ideas are historically contingent, he nevertheless defends their value, especially the value of Reason. Evidently, Durkheim is not troubled by the knowledge that thoughts are shaped by the sacred ideas of their time.Noting the popularity of his own texts in the undergraduate classroom, Durkheim might ask how they function now. He might ask how The Rules of Sociological Method is an academic collective representation. He might also ask more generally how the word society has come to be used as a moral reality, or a social fact. How do speakers gain a moral stronghold on conversation by invoking society as the overarching totem (signifying everything from tradition and order to constraint and oppression)? Durkheim would probably conclude that in its current usage society means many things, and perhaps is even reducible to a dada utterance. Society is the punishing god and the forgiving god; it is used to authorize the judge and justify the deviant. It is, most generally, the way our culture signals its attempt to formulate itself by way of its sacred images.And yet, to avoid concluding that sociology, as it proceeds, ultimately becomes another instance of the object it studies, one must see Durkheim as providing the opportunity within his images and tropes to make them more than religion or ideology. In other words, although social reality has traditionally been represented as the Judaeo-Christian god in western cultures, that does not mean that Society will in turn become the new god of the organically solidary collective. As Durkheim provided sociology with a basic manifesto orientation (in all three of my formulations of sociology as strategic, moral, and interpretive), he also provided the opportunity for sociology continually to change its object by studying it. While normally for scientists their influence on their object constitutes a disastrous error, because the data have been contaminated by the act of observation, Durkheim makes clear that sociology inevitably has this effect (indeed it has this moral obligation and responsibility). Sociology encourages a culture where the openness of human identities and practices is generally known, and where this openness does not lead to anomic despair. This was Durkheim's promise to his time - i.e., that looking at ourselves as agents of our collective condition provides an opportunity to produce sacred objects that are sacred by the very fact that they are patently produced collectively. While all collectives produce representations of themselves, what is peculiar to the sociological culture is that it is supposed to be able to identify these as such - it is supposed to see its own totem building. This requires a certain ironic orientation grounded in an insight that the collective could be drastically otherwise, without provoking a crisis of meaning. In this way, sociology is a system of beliefs without being an ideology or religion.And, of course, within a sociological culture change does occur. Once these sociological tropes are established, they undergo interpretation and reinterpretation as they are disseminated, circulated, and used in popular discourse. As the dialogue between academic language and popular language continues through time, sociologists are required to imagine sociological interventions that keep these images dynamic rather than ideological. Hence, as sociology contributes to the sacred language used by opinion (or doxa), it is neither reducible to opinion, nor fully distinguishable from it. Sociology seeks to influence the way opinion recollects its basis (i.e., social life), and in so doing must change its own language to continue to induce para-doxa.It is possible therefore that the tropes and images introduced by Durkheim have served many rhetorical purposes and need to be reinterpreted by each new generation of sociologists as they consider the particular sociological rules of method of their own time. But what is inexhaustible about the Durkheimian legacy is his insight that sociology must look for its effects at a general discursive level, remaining cognizant that it is a part of modernity's particular collective representations. Thus formulated, the grounds of sociological thought are necessarily present even in the most specialized of contemporary research, as each topic covertly speaks about collective representational desire. Sociology also meets its own limits (even the possibility of its own death) at the very point where it becomes self-conscious as a cultural practice - i.e., its various inevitable crises as to its relevance point to its entanglement in the representational anxieties characteristic of modernity in general. It seems to me crucial that sociological practitioners acknowledge and orient to this condition so that sociology remains vital to itself and to the collective life it studies. Or in stronger, more polemical words: sociology is a significant cultural force to the extent that it understands itself already to be one.

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Beyond the nature/society divide: Learning to think about a mountain

Sociological efforts to understand environment-society relationships fall primarily into four conceptual categories. The first three, involving analytical separation, analytical primacy, and balanced dualism, all draw distinctions between biophysical and social aspects of human experience, with subsequent analyses being based on thesea priori distinctions. The fourth or constructivist approach questions this naturalized dichotomy, calling attention instead to mutual contingency or conjoint constitution: What we take to be physical facts are likely to be strongly shaped by social construction processes, and at the same time, what we take to be strictly social will often have been shaped in part by taken-for-granted realities of the physical world. Technology offers important opportunities for tracing these interconnections, being an embodiment of both the physical and the social. The point is illustrated with a long-term historical analysis of a specific physiographic feature—a mountain—that has undergone little overtphysical change over the centuries, but has undergone repeated changes in its social meanings and uses. Few of the changes would have been possible in the absence of the mountain's physiographic characteristics; similarly, few would have occurred in the absence of changing sociocultural definitions and possibilities. The challenge for sociology is not just to recognize the importance of both the physical and the social factors, and certainly not to argue over the relative importance of the two, but to recognize the extent to which what we take to be physical and social factors can be conjointly constituted.The paper's subtitle is intended as a tribute to Aldo Leopold and to one of his most famous essays (1949).     

Biography as historical sociology

Conclusion William Fielding Ogburn was located on and helped to create the cutting edge of developments in twentieth-century American sociology — particularly its increasing emphasis on statistics and objectivist methodology. His life, which spanned the period within which the changes he advocated were institutionalized, can be seen as having significance as a marker of a transition. From this perspective, studying well-chosen individual lives has the same heuristic value as studying particular historical events. They can, to quote Philip Abrams, mark decisive conjunctions of action and structure;... moments of structuring at which human agency encounters social possibility and can be seen most clearly as simultaneously determined and determining. My analysis of Ogburn's advocacy of scientific sociology — one that differentiated science from both emotion and politics — reflected and reinforced his solutions to problematics in his personal life. His response to the separate spheres that defined gender relations in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, helped to construct a reflection of them in twentieth-century American sociology. It is in this way — through concrete social action within specific historical conditions — that personal life and gender shaped the intellectual and professional culture within which he lived and worked.Ogburn's life story suggests that action, particularly advocacy, is grounded, at least in part, in a personal agenda, but that personal agendas, just like any others, need to be understood sociologically. Ogburn's problem was not idiosyncratic. Indeed, it is because it was shaped by social conditions, rather than uniquely individual ones, that his solutions were more likely to be recognized, accepted, and institutionalized by his mostly male audiences. Tracing these connections within a concrete historical case, within a single biography, demonstrates how personal life is connected to action and, thus, needs to be included in any sociological theory of human agency.Ogburn's life coincided with a set of opportunities that made it possible for sociologists to gain a more prominent place in national affairs and to develop sociological knowledge in a particular direction. This development was, in turn, accompanied by the creation of a language and practice in which the scientific authority of sociology became associated with it being devoid of an appearance of politics and emotion. The emergence of this language and practice, and the beliefs on which they were based, however, cannot be explained solely by the circumstances that fostered them or the career opportunities that they made available. They reflect the practical actions of human agents within historically specific settings. But these agents must be recognized as gendered and the problematic of gendering must be incorporated into the history of American sociology.As Steinmetz has argued, the stories that we tell are important for what we do — and what we do not do — because they structure social consciousness and social action. As long as we write the history of American sociology as an ungendered narrative, we will not only misrepresent that history but we will also limit our capacity to understand and affect changes in it. Differentiation was (and is) a strategy more available to men than women and the norms and organization of professional life that embody that strategy need to be understood not as general but rather as gendered.There is a gender dimension to the history of American sociology to which more attention could usefully be given. Although the impact of political and professional interests has been widely recognized in this history, the impact of personal life in general and gender relations in particular have not been systematically incorporated into accounts of this process. Yet gender relations — and the meanings and actions that are shaped by them — are an important part of the story being told here and an important source of the energy that institutionalizing social change entails. Biography provides access to these personal and gendered dimensions of our professional history in ways that can more adequately acknowledge the complexities of the structuring process.

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How to Become a Forgotten Intellectual: Intellectual Movements and the Rise and Fall of Erich Fromm

The ideas and reputational history of German psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm are examined as a case study in the sociology of knowledge that explores how intellectual boundaries are constructed within and between disciplines in the modem academy, psychoanalytic institutes, and the journal and book reading publics and among the intellectual elite. The rise and fall of Erich Fromm is narrated using the foil of Michèle Lament's analysis of how Derrida became a dominant philosopher and influence on literary criticism. The example of how Fromm became a forgotten intellectual is used to examine various models of how reputations are constructed. My analysis highlights the importance of the sectlike culture of psychoanalysis and Marxism as well as the boundary-maintaining processes of academic disciplines, schools of thought, and intellectual traditions, and suggests a research agenda on orthodoxies and revisionism within intellectual movements more generally.     

On Being a White Person of Color: Using Autoethnography to Understand Puerto Ricans' Racialization

This article uses autoethnography to make larger conceptual/theoretical points about racial/ethnic identity categories for Puerto Ricans in the United States. I utilize Puerto Rican-ness to illustrate the limitations of U.S. race and ethnic constructs by furthering racialization analyses with seemingly contradictory categories such as white and people of color. I contrast personal experiences to those of racial/ethnic classificatory systems, the American imagery of Puerto Ricans, and simplistic, political identifications. Travel, colonial relations, intra-ethnic coalitional possibilities, and second-class citizenship are all aspects that expand on the notion of racialization as classically utilized in sociology and the social sciences. Although this is not a comparative study, I present differences between racial formation systems in Puerto Rico and the U.S. in order to make these points.     

When “justice” is criminal: Lynchings in contemporary Latin America

cross Latin America, the 1990s saw an increase in popular lynchings of suspected criminals at the hands of large crowds. Although it is often assumed that these incidents involve random, regrettable, and relatively spontaneous acts of violence or throwbacks to the past, I argue in this article that these represent purposeful, powerful, and deeply political acts. Most literature on the region tends to regard contemporary violence as a predominantly top-down phenomenon—by state against citizen, landowner against peasant, mestizo against Indian—yet these incidents reveal a new sort of violence that originates at the bottom. I argue that the lynchings suggest an attempt by embattled communities to reassert their autonomy after decades of repeated assault by state armies, local elites, the globalized economy, and other adversaries. By enacting these highly ritualized, unequivocally public displays of justice, marginalized communities seek not only to punish and to deter criminal activity, but perhaps more importantly, to reassert themselves collectively as agents rather than victims. In this way, lynchings may reveal a dark side of what passes for democracy in the region.     

Two methods in search of science

Conclusion In terms of the criteria for the growth of knowledge formulated by Popper, I have tried to demonstrate the superiority of the methodology of research program over the methodology of induction. Although the argument used Skocpol's and Trotsky's theories of revolution as illustrations, I constructed general claims organized around the contexts of discovery (induction versus deduction), justification (verification versus falsification and prediction), and scientist (external to or part of the object of knowledge). So long as philosophers of science were concerned to discover the scientific method, they could successfully compartmentalize these contexts. However, as soon as they became concerned to explain the development of scientific knowledge, they quickly discovered, as we have, that these contexts are irretrievably intertwined. So we require alternative categories for comparing methodologies. (a) Grounds of scientific objectivity I have tried to demonstrate that the method of induction stands on a false objectivity. While it claims to generate explanations that map the empirical world, it actually erects barriers to the comprehension of that world. Not the facts but methodological premises and arbitrary explanatory hunches become the hidden anchors for theoretical conclusions. The method is at odds with its aims. Paradoxically, the methodology of the research program, precisely because it is self-consciously anchored in a complex of moral values, a conceptual system, models (analogies and metaphors) and exemplars - what Skocpol refers to as blinders or heavily tinted lenses, what Lakatos refers to as negative and positive heuristics - creates a more effective dialogue with those historical patterns. Blindness comes not from pre-existing theories but from failing to recognize their necessity and then failing to articulate and defend their content. (b) Problem versus puzzle oriented science The method of induction claims to be outside and beyond theoretical traditions. Thus Skocpol reduces the classics of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim to inspirations, sources of hypotheses, and even to variables out of which a true macro sociology can be forged. Compelling desires to answer historically grounded questions, not classical theoretical paradigms, are the driving force [of historical sociology]. We select a problem that takes our fancy and induce its solutions from the facts. Since, in the final analysis there is only one theory compatible with the facts, there is no need to go through the falsification of alternative theories or put one's own theory through severe tests. The methodology of research programs, on the other hand, is concerned to solve puzzles, that is, anomalies thrown up by its expanding belt of theories, discrepancies between expectations and facts. The health and vitality of a research program depends not on the concealment, obfuscation, denial of anomalies but on their clear articulation and disciplined proliferation. Continual dialogue between theory and data through falsification of the old and the development of new hypotheses with predictions of novel facts is of the essence of a progressive research program. Trotsky's prophetic powers all originate in, even if they are not determined by his commitment to Marxism - a recognition of its anomalies and the need to solve them in an original manner. (c) Internal versus external history The method of induction regards the facts as irreducible and given, the problem is to come to an unbiased assessment of them. Science grows by the accumulation of factual propositions and inductive generalizations. This is its internal history. But the inductivist cannot offer a rational internal explanation for why certain facts than others were selected in the first place. Problem choice, as we said above, is part of the external history relegated to footnotes, prefaces, or to the sociology of knowledge. By contrast, the methodology of research programs incorporates into its internal history what is branded as metaphysical and external by inductivists, namely its hard core postulates and its choice of puzzles. What is reconstructed as scientifically rational in the one appears as scientifically irrational in the other.Although what is constituted as rational in research programs encompasses much more than the rationality of induction, nevertheless even here external forces necessarily influence the scientific process. This is particularly so in the social sciences where the object of knowledge autonomously generates new anomalies that the positive heuristic has to absorb. External forces can be seized upon as opportunities for the rational growth of knowledge, but they can also be the source of irrationality. Thus, research programs become degenerate when they seal themselves off from the world they study or when that world wrenches the research process from its hard core. Marxism is particularly sensitive to external history. Where it seeks to change the world it is more likely to be sensitive to anomalies than where it is a dominant ideology and thus more vulnerable to the repression of anomalies.Obviously the methodology of research programs has its own distinctive problems that energize its development. Is it possible to identify a single core to a research program or are there a family of cores and how does the core change over time? What is the relation between positive and negative heuristics? How easy is it to distinguish between progressive and degenerating research programs? How do we know that an apparently degenerating program will not recover its old dynamism? How does one evaluate the relative importance of progressive and degenerating branches of the same program? Is it possible to stipulate the conditions under which it is rational to abandon one research program in favor of another? Such probloems notwithstanding I hope I have made a case for the superiority of the methodology of research programs over the methodology of induction as a mode of advancing social science.

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The knower and the known

In this paper, I address a dilemma in the theory of knowledge and argue that this dilemma can be overcome by invoking the work of two well known social scientists—Marx (here considered as a sociologist) and Piaget (a psychologist). The dilemma considered is that of the relationship between what are here called independent (i.e., non-circular) and relational definitions; each form of definition has been the basis of a particular approach to the knowable (the independent definition being the basis of empiricism and the relational definition being the basis of Hegelianism) and each of these approaches can be shown to be unsatisfactory: empiricism, brilliantly successful in practice, runs itself, at the theoretical level, into the circular and the relational; while Hegelianism, although impregnable in logic, gains such impregnability at the cost of any delimitation and, hence of precision and refutability. It is argued that Marx (a follower of Hegel) as adapted by Piaget, can indeed overcome these difficulties and so present us with a theory of knowledge that makes possible an approach that is both successful in practice and reputable in logic.     

Challenges in Managing Nonprofit Organizations: A Research Overview

The topic of management and nonprofit organizations (NPOs) continues to fascinate scholars. This paper draws on varying theoretical perspectives to explore their respective contributions to our knowledge of NPOs. The two longstanding and contrasting disciplines of economics and sociology have contributed most, traditionally, to the study of NPOs. However, neither of these disciplines has resolved all the dilemmas associated with NPOs. The standard economic model does not apply well to the distinctive nonmarket situation of NPOs. The sociological perspectives offer interesting insight, but fail to develop plans of action for NPOs. However, both of these traditional perspectives are starting to be eclipsed by the focus on marketing research.     

The imperfect empiricism of the social sciences

The social sciences suffer from a methodological false consciousness that calls into question their progressive nature as cumulative, knowledge-building enterprises. While the practioners of social science believe that they accumulate knowledge through a classical scientific dialectic of hypothesis and evidence (scientific empiricism), they in fact assume their hypotheses to be true images of the nature of the social world, and they resist evidence that gainsays these images (imperfect empiricism). The idea that the social sciences progress, in a linear or dialectical fashion, is itself derived from the perspective of scientific empiricism. In reality the progress of the social sciences is problematic, if the movement of these sciences is viewed in terms of their actual practice of imperfect empiricism. Seen from the latter perspective, the social sciences are—at any particular moment in time—an aggregate of conceptual communities that communicate only imperfectly with each other and that assert the correctness of their point of view while disdaining that of the others. Since the progressive advance of knowledge is uncertain in these circumstances, the question is raised as to why the natural sciences that—according to Kuhn—are also practioners of imperfect empiricism work, while the social sciences apparently do not.     

Braudel's ecological perspective

Fernand Braudel, a leading figure in theAnnales school of French historiography, employed principles and practices from several social science disciplines in his historical studies. Significant among these was sociology. Although he did not formally recognize that a major element in his sociological perspective was human ecology, an analysis of his work reveals how extensively he employed an ecological paradigm. His success in using this paradigm demonstrates the utility of the principles of human ecology in historical and comparative studies and suggests strongly that fresh insights into contemporary social systems can be gained by combining Braudel's total history and ecology's holistic approaches.     

Predatory,developmental, and other apparatuses: A comparative political economy perspective on the Third World state

Disappointment over the contributions of Third World state apparatuses to industrial transformation and the increasing intellectual dominance of neoutiliarian paradigms in the social science has made if fashionable to castigate the Third World state as predatory and rent seeking. This paper argues for a more differentiated view, one that connects differences in performance to differences in state structure. The incoherent absolutist domination of the klepto-patrimonial Zairian state are contrasted to the embedded autonomy of the East Asian developmental state. Then the internal structure and external ties of an intermediate state — Brazil — are analyzed in relation to both polar types. The comparative evidence suggests that the efficacy of the developmental state depends on a meritocratic bureaucracy with a strong sense of corporate identity and a dense set of institutionalized links to private elites.     

Recovering from Homelessness: Determining the “Quality of Sobriety” in a Transitional Housing Program

Recent years have seen fundamental shifts in the objectives and delivery of assistance to the homeless. An early emphasis on emergency shelter and monetary housing assistance has been replaced by a focus on programs designed to blend shelter with an array of social services. In most instances, however, programs combining shelter and social services are designed as transitional; that is, they are intended to help homeless individuals and families move from a position of dependence to one where they can live independently. The emphasis in transitional housing programs is on making homeless people housing ready. This paper concerns the process of assessing housing readiness as observed during eighteen months of fieldwork in a federally supported transitional housing program for formerly homeless single adults. The detailed case study that follows supports three important findings. First, there was virtual unanimity among staff and residents that substance abuse was the cause of their homelessness and the key to its solution. Second, success within the program was defined and operationalized along very specific but well understood normative dimensions that have little to do with the material circumstances in which residents find themselves and everything to do with recovery. Third, recovery—the key to housing readiness in this environment—was measured not by objective measures, i.e., number of months sober, but rather by what was widely referred to as one's quality of sobriety, a subjective and consequently often hotly debated measure of attitude and outlook only loosely related to demonstrable abstinence from alcohol. This last finding, that ultimately housing readiness is a subjective judgment, both increases the discretion of shelter staff and generates a systematic disattention to the individual economic issues that are fundamental to an exit from homelessness.     

GLB + T?: Gender/Sexuality Movements and Transgender Collective Identity (De)Constructions

In the United States during the 1990s, there emerged a new form of collective political organizing and action around transgender identity. In this essay, the author depicts the dynamics of transgender activism during the mid-1990s based on original research in the form of a postmodern ethnography of transgender activism. Using data from field research, interviews, and observation, the author illustrates the way that transgender activism was characterized by simultaneous claims to a shared transgender quasi-ethnic identity and the complications thereof. In particular, the author details transgender social movement processes of identity—both processes of collective identity construction and deconstruction—demonstrating that transgender politics are not simply identity politics nor deconstructive (queer) politics. Using constructionist social movement literature, the author argues that in sexuality/gender studies we must expand our understanding of identity politics in order to understand the simultaneity of constructions and deconstructions of identity and gender/sexuality movements today.     

A Culturally Salient Polish Emotion: Przykro ['Pshickro]

The author analyzes, on the basis of naturally occurring examples, the Polish word przykro, which, she argues, plays an important role in Polish emotion talk. She compares and contrasts this word with its closest English counterparts, such as hurt, offended, sorry, and sad, and she shows how each of these English words differs in meaning from the Polish key word przykro. To be able to show, clearly and precisely, what these differences are, she relies on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), based on a set of empirically established lexical and grammatical universals. In doing so, she seeks to demonstrate the explanatory power of the proposed methodological framework (the NSM semantic theory). At the same time the author shows how language-specific lexical categories such as the Polish word przykro are linked with a culture's core values. She also shows the cultural implications of the lexical category hurt in Anglo culture, and discusses the cultural implications of the absence of a word like przykro in English, and of a word like hurt in Polish.     

Role distancing: Differentiating the role of the elderly from the person

Elderly participants in an extended care class at a senior citizen's center were observed to determine if some of them could continually distance themselves from the client role. Although earlier research suggests that people can use role distancing techniques to disassociate themselves successfully fromoccasionally played roles or certain aspects of a role, it is unclear whether or how people successfully disassociate themselvescontinually from enacted roles. Using a symbolic interactionist's definition of role, this paper attempts to 1) classify the circumstances which give rise to both occasional and continual role distancing; 2) specify the conditions under which disassociation from continually enacted roles may be successful; and 3) suggest the relevance of the data to studies on low-status occupations, deviance, and role theory.I am especially grateful to Melvin Seeman (UCLA) for his critical comments and extensive editorial advice and to Ralph H. Turner (UCLA) for his helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I also would like to thank Shulamit Reinharz for editorial assistance.     

From migrant enclaves to mainstream: Reconceptualizing informal economic behavior

The informal economy has developed in sociological theory to refer to clusters of illegal or quasi-illegal activities, usually unreported, by which people in some immigrant or ethnic communities earn income outside regular businesses and jobs. This article first extrapolates a set of characteristics beyond the legal status of such activities that define the informal economy. These provide a richer framework for future research and the basis for identifying informal economic activity in other sectors of the legitimate mainstream economy. In fact, informalization seems to have gone from marginal activities to a mainstream movement to make large sectors more fluid, network-based, and less regulated—the informalized economy. Its characteristics are identified. They overlap with the first set but differ principally in terms of extending Merton's proposition that different social structures exert different pressures to engage in non-conforming behavior. The article concludes with policy implications for fostering greater entrepreneurship in marginal migrant communities, and it suggests new ways for economic sociologists to study network transactions in modern corporations of informal economic activity through generative sociology.     

Individual minds and the social order

While Durkheim's concept of group mind is rhetorically offensive to conventional empiricism, there are many familiar examples in the social science literature of purposes, norms, etc. that are not the property of individuals but of a collective praxis. The concept of group mind, properly conceived in terms of collective praxis, provides a useful antidote to the individualizing tendencies of subjectivist sociology, and by revealing the connection between structures and meanings can help heal the rift between subjectivism and objectivism.     

Patriarchalism in imperial China and Western Europe

Conclusion My analysis suggests that Weber's typology of domination - the cluster of patriarchalism, charisma, and law - does not fit Chinese history as it does European history. The typology has particular relevance in Europe because Weber purposefully developed types of domination that reflected and synthesized essential elements of Western historical experience: the struggles between kings and nobles, between popes and priests, between leaders and followers of all types. Deeply aware of the patterns of Western history, Weber understood that his concepts of analysis constituted historical summaries, not simply ideas and abstract beliefs but distillations of patterns of actions and of the justifications supporting and channeling those patterns. Although Weber fashioned these ideal types from his knowledge of Western history, he wanted to make them genuinely trans-epochal and transcultural so that he could test, through comparative mental experiment and imaginative extrapolation, causal explanations about the course of Western history. That the generations of students of Western society continue to learn from and struggle with Weber's concepts and historical theories demonstrates that Weber was hugely successful in his work.But are Weber's typologies as useful in the analysis of non-Western societies as they are in that of Europe? I have only dealt with Chinese society, but for this society my analysis suggests that the answer to this question is no. As Weber defined them, patriarchalism, charisma, and law do not apply to China in the way that they apply to Europe. They do not represent summaries of Chinese history; they do not distill the debates and struggles of two millenia; they do not tap those shared understandings that informed Chinese patterns of action. And because they do not gain an equivalent grasp of Chinese as they do of Western history, they are less useful and often very misleading when one uses them to analyze and explain the course of Chinese history. If those concepts do not get at the same reality in China, what is the logical status of the conclusions drawn from using them to analyze China? As I have attempted to show in this paper, they can be used to indicate through comparison what configurations are absent from China. But they are less useful in developing a genuine understanding of Chinese history. Therefore, to understand China, and perhaps most non-Western societies, Weber's typology of domination and particularly his analysis of traditional domination, should not be used directly as a summary of an underlying reality. Weber's warning about the perniciousness of Marxian concepts and theories when they are thought of as empirically valid or real effective forces should be applied with particular vigor to Weber's own concepts and theories when applied to non-Western societies. But, by equal measure, if one assumes that Weber's typology of domination misrepresents non-Western societies in some regard, it still provides an example of the sort of conceptual framework needed to analyze the historical development of state structures in any society. Weber championed comparative research, because he believed without comparisons it was impossible to examine rigorously the course of history and to develop theories of historical change. Weber rightly believed that comparisons were only possible with generalized historical concepts. But to Weber, historical research does not lead to better or more general sociological theories. Instead, sociology, as Weber put it to a noted historian, can perform ... very modest preparatory work to an adequate historical analysis. Concepts must lead the way to historical explanations and not the reverse. Similarly, Weber's analysis of the West provides the preparatory work for a better understanding of non-Western society. In this sense Weber's concepts are indispensable for the analysis of non-Western society, not because they are the last word, but because, along with other products of Western sociology, they are the first word, words that are used only to have their meanings altered by subsequent research.

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