Central Analytical Issues in the Generation of Cumulative Sociological Knowledge

Abstract

The growth of theories, methodologies, and substantive/empirical areas in sociology has not led to consensus about what sociology is or how to generate cumulative knowledge. Recourse to general or “grand” theories, conceptual frameworks, and methodological advances has not proven noticeably helpful in resolving this situation. Suggesting an alternative strategy, this paper delineates nine analytical issues central to “doing” sociology. The authors contend that systematic attention to these issues will increase the generation of cumulative sociological knowledge.     

Aesthetic Labor for the Sociologies of Work,Gender, and Beauty

Amid the growing literature on the costs and rewards of physical appearance for labor market outcomes, an economistic emphasis on looks as an investment strategy has gained prominence. The concept of aesthetic labor is a useful sociological intervention for understanding how the value of certain looks is constructed, and how looks matter for social stratification. Aesthetic labor is the practice of screening, managing, and controlling workers on the basis of their physical appearance. The concept advances research on the service economy by moving beyond a focus on emotions to emphasize worker corporeality. This article first untangles aesthetic labor from related concepts, including body work, emotional labor, and embodied cultural capital. Next is a review of three contexts in which scholars have applied aesthetic labor to the workplace: the organization, freelance labor, and the market. Because it situates the value of beauty in context, aesthetic labor foregrounds those power relations that define aesthetics, such as class, race, and gender. The concept incorporates insights from field theories of bodily capital, such that aesthetic labor denaturalizes beauty and seeks to explain the processes through which looks translate into economic and symbolic rewards.     

Opportunity Theory and Agricultural Crime Victimization*

Abstract A growing body of research lends support to opportunity theory and its variants, but has yet to focus systematically on a number of specific offenses and contexts. Typically, the more crimes and contexts to which a theory applies, the broader its scope and range, respectively, and thus generalizability. In this paper, we focus on agricultural crime victimization— including theft of farm equipment, crops, livestock, and chemicals—an offense that opportunity theory appears well‐situated to explain. Specifically, we examine whether key dimensions of the theory are empirically associated with the likelihood of victimization and also examine factors associated with farmers' use of guardianship measures. In contrast to much previous research, we combine multiple individual‐level measures of these dimensions. We conclude that the theory partially accounts for variation in agricultural crime victimization, depending on the type of crime, and that greater work is needed investigating how key dimensions of opportunity theory should be conceptualized and operationalized in rural contexts. The study's implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Seeing culture through the eye of the beholder: four methods in pursuit of taste

When it comes to making aesthetic decisions, people commonly account for their taste with intuition. A cultural good, symbol, or object is simply right and respondents “know it when they see it.” This article investigates the cultural meanings professional tastemakers see as they make such deliberations, while also illustrating the problems sociologists have in seeing culture. Using the case of fashion model casting and scouting, I present four methods to trace how cultural producers recognize and value models’ looks in the global fashion market, demonstrating how each method results in a different emphasis on how culture is used to acquire and deploy aesthetic sense. First, interviews capture justifications of aesthetic decisions, as well as general processes about day-to-day work routines, which are next tested with network analysis, the second method, which emphasizes structural arrangements in taste decisions. The third method, ethnography, discovers taste as a situated form of knowledge production and emphasizes culture in interaction. The fourth and related method, observant participation, sees taste as phenomenological as culture becomes embodied and tacit consciousness. Each of these methods is an optical device that renders a particular and complimentary account of taste and affords researchers a certain way to see how culture works.     

Social Exclusion and Parental Incarceration Impacts on Adolescents' Networks and School Engagement

Although prior research links parental incarceration to deleterious outcomes for children during the life course, few studies have examined whether such incarceration affects the social exclusion of children during adolescence. Drawing on several lines of scholarship, the authors examined whether adolescents with incarcerated parents have fewer or lower quality relationships, participate in more antisocial peer networks, and feel less integrated or engaged in school. The study applies propensity score matching to survey and network data from a national sample of youth. Analyses indicated that children with incarcerated parents have more antisocial peers; the authors found limited evidence that parental incarceration adversely impacts peer networks and school integration domains. The results suggest that the impacts of parental incarceration on adolescents' social lives have less to do with isolation than with the types of peers adolescents befriend. Findings provide support for the idea that parental incarceration may adversely affect children's social exclusion.     

Stress and Pressures in Mental Health Social Work: The Worker Speaks

Two-thirds of councils with social services responsibilities(CSSRs) took part in a UK survey of mental health social workers.A one in five sample of front line workers was drawn, and 237respondents completed a questionnaire and diary about theirwork context and content, and their attitudes to their work,their employer, mental health policy and the place of mentalhealth social work in modernized mental health services. Thequestions, that called for free-text responses, were completedin detail and at length. This paper reports the results of aqualitative analysis of these responses using NVIVO software.The paper is structured around the themes emerging from theanalysis: pressure of work; staffing matters; job satisfactionand well-being; recruitment and retention issues; and beingvalued. The conclusions are that the social workers value faceto face contact with service users, and that their commitmentto service users is an important factor in staff retention.The most unsatisfactory aspects of their work context arisefrom not feeling valued by their employers and wider society,and some of the most satisfactory from the support of colleaguesand supervisors. Without attention to these factors, recruitmentand retention problems will remain an unresolved issue.     

Improving the Quality of Live in Greater Soweto

Social Indicators Research -     

Ethnography as Precarious Work

Reflecting on a carnal ethnography of the fashion modeling market, I consider the analytic gains from observant participation and experimentation with the sociologist's body as a participant in a culture industry. The ambiguities and uncertainties of fashion modeling, as a highly competitive freelance labor form, parallel the risky position of insider ethnographer, in this case as a graduate student “studying up” among guarded cultural elites. These positions opened an analytic lens into sociological concepts of labor exploitation, value, and social hierarchy. However, in occupying an insider role within a stratified field, observant participants face risks in trying to move beyond their own experiences in order to interview informants. My changing position in the field, from subjugated worker to interviewer, highlights how power and inequality operate in the fashion world. First‐person narrative illuminates these analytic payoffs of insider ethnography.     

Where the wild things are! Do urban green spaces with greater avian biodiversity promote more positive emotions in humans?

Urban Ecosystems - Urban green space can help mitigate the negative impacts of urban living and provide positive effects on citizens’ mood, health and well-being. Questions remain, however,...