Eastern Sociological Society Presidential Address: Globalizing Gender Issues: Many Voices,Different Choices1

Why are the important gender inequality issues different in various countries around the world? This question is answered using a comparative perspective on extant research about gender inequalities in the regions of the world. Just as there is diversity among individual women, based on their intersecting axes of age, race, ethnicity, class, marital status, sexual orientation, religion, or other characteristics, I argue that there is diversity across countries in their gender inequalities based on intersecting axes of transnational, regional, cross‐cutting, and unique national issues that structure gendered or feminist concerns within any country. Global and regional dynamics are the interrelated foundations on which broad gender inequalities are built. Major transnational dynamics include neoliberal economics, migration, and violence, while regional patterns include nation building and gendered inequalities in education and property ownership. On the other hand, unique national trajectories and cross‐cutting themes, found in a few nations in each region, add much greater variation to those basic inequalities. Some of those cross‐cutting themes are problems generated by health status and health services, the relationship of religion to the state, and war or militarism.     

从社会学的引进与发展看改良思想的演变趋向(1895-1937)

十九世纪末社会学传入中国以来,社会学理论对中国改良思想的发展和走向产生了重要影响。维新派思想家将社会进化论应用于政治改革理论中,试图以政治制度改革推动社会变革。而二十世纪二三十年代留学欧美的社会学专业学者则将社会学的实证主义方法应用到中国社会基层,主张通过"自下而上"的方式,以社会改革推动政治变革。这一改良方式的变化也影响到了整个中国思想文化界。关注基层、投入农村、投身民众教育成为当时的一种社会潮流。     

On the almost inconceivable misunderstandings concerning the subject of value‐free social science

A value judgment says what is good or bad, and value‐free social science simply means social science free of value judgments. Yet many sociologists regard value‐free social science as undesirable or impossible and readily make value judgments in the name of sociology. Often they display confusion about such matters as the meaning of value‐free social science, value judgments internal and external to social science, value judgments as a subject of social science, the relevance of objectivity for value‐free social science, and the difference between the human significance of social science and value‐free social science. But why so many sociologists are so value‐involved – and generally so unscientific – is sociologically understandable: The closest and most distant subjects attract the least scientific ideas. And during the past century sociologists have become increasingly close to their human subject. The debate about value‐free social science is also part of an epistemological counterrevolution of humanists (including many sociologists) against the more scientific social scientists who invaded and threatened to expropriate the human subject during the past century.     

Book Reviews

Critical appraisal of research studies forms a central role within the application and uptake of evidence‐based approaches within health and social care. While there are established checklists for evaluating quantitative research, this is not the case for qualitative research. This article outlines the process of developing an evaluative tool for qualitative studies, reflecting the uniqueness of the associated paradigm, and illustrates its use by reference to three qualitative research papers appraised within a systematic review of community‐based rehabilitation services. At its centre are concerns with the context of the study and the way the data are collected and analysed. Use of such an evaluative template opens the way for the quality of qualitative research to be judged in a systematic manner and for qualitative research to take its rightful place within debates over what works, where, when and how within health and social care policy and practice.     

“Difficult,Messy, Nasty,and Sensational”

Feminist publishing played an important role in the feminist art movement of the 1970s and into the 1980s, and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics was a key journal in this landscape. This paper argues that Heresies is important not only because it was a forum for some of the most influential feminist art women of the period, but because it experimented with an editorial structure that required participants to reckon with the discomforts of difference. Editors of the periodical took seriously the feminist critique of hierarchically structured organizational cultures and both promoted and practiced collective publishing. Moreover, through an emphasis on editorial statements, I consider how Heresies gives expression to the affective entanglements of the women involved in Heresies' specific form of collaboration and collective feminist politics. An examination of the editorials as sites of affective intensity helps to come to an understanding not of what women were thinking, writing, and making, but how they may have felt about their work and their relationships with women with whom they worked.     

The Family and Medical Leave Law

Abstract

This essay asks whether the Family and Medical Leave Law (1993) is feminist social policy, as it was touted to be by its political supporters. The study takes three approaches to feminism outlined by Lorber in her 2001 text, Gender Inequality: Feminist Theories and Politics, which considers women in their roles as mothers and workers. Data taken from a Department of Labor FMLA utilization study are then analyzed in the context of these three approaches to feminism. I conclude that the FMLA is not feminist in a substantive way despite its symbolic value.     

政治社会学的研究对象及基本内容评述

政治社会学的研究对象 ,是政治的社会基础 ,以及政治与社会的互动关系。而政治社会学的基本内容 ,则是政治社会学研究对象的具体化 ,是政治与社会之间的基本关系在各个具体领域的表现及其本质规律的揭示     

关于建立"中国转型社会学"学科的设想——兼评90年代中国社会转型研究

本文从我国社会转型期的社会实践和社会学理论发展出发,认为现在已具备了建立一门作为"转型学"分支学科的"中国转型社会学"或社会转型学的条件,指出建立这一学科具有重要的现实意义和学科意义.文章继而对"中国转型社会学"的理论与应用研究进行了学术梳理和定位,还对"中国转型社会学"的研究与发展的技术、经济社会和文化背景作了学理分析和前景展望.最后,提出了中国社会学家应抓住转型期社会创新所提供的学术创新的机会,发挥社会学家的想像力与社会观察力,以实现社会学者的社会责任和历史使命.     

The Chicago School,So-Called

Many sociologists believe in the myth of a Chicago School, a unified and coherent body of thought and research practice carried on at the University of Chicago from the 1920s through the 1960s. Chicago never constituted such a coherent system and is better understood as a school of activity, a group of people who cooperated in the day-to-day running of a major department.     

A feminist revisiting of the insider/outsider debate: The “outsider phenomenon” in rural Iowa

This article draws upon findings from an ethnographic study of two towns in rural Iowa to examine the adequacy of the insider/outsider distinction as a guideline for evaluating and conducting ethnographic research. Utilizing feminist standpoint and materialist feminist theories, I start with the assumption that, rather than one “insider” or “outsider” position, we all begin our work with different relationships to shifting aspects of social life and to particular knowers in the community and this contributes to numerous dimensions through which we can relate to residents in various communities. “Outsiderness” and “insiderness” are not fixed or static positions, rather they are ever-shifting and permeable social locations illustrated in this case study by the “outsider phenomenon.” Community processes that reorganize and resituate race-ethnicity, gender and class relations form some of the most salient aspects of the “outsider phenomenon.” These dynamic processes shaped our relationships with residents as ethnographic identities were repositioned by shifts in constructions of “community” that accompanied ongoing social, demographic, and political changes.