Max Weber and the Sociology of Music

The sociology of music has been an area largely left to European sociologists. In an effort to generate greater domestic interest in the field, an examination of Max Weber's methodology and an update to his study of music is proposed. Fewer occupations or cultural projects are more social than making music, and the domestic sociological community's absence from the debate is deplorable given the dominant position our country possesses regarding musical production. Weber's Sociology of Music, which combines urban theory, class/labor theory, rationalization theory, and even climatic changes, is an excellent place to begin a thorough discussion of the social components of music. Our present understanding of cultural theories, urban theories, and Habermas's Communicative Action Theory can be employed to improve on Weber's theory; toward a new approach for the study of the sociology of music.     

曼纽尔·卡斯特研究述评

为了促进网络社会的研究和加深对信息时代的理解,深度理解信息社会学家、网络社会学家曼纽尔·卡斯特的相关思想理论具有重要意义。首先说明了研究曼纽尔·卡斯特的意义和作用;然后介绍了曼纽尔·卡斯特的学术历程及主要理论——新都市社会理论、信息社会理论和网络社会理论,评介了国内外对卡斯特研究的现状;最后提出了对卡斯特的研究建议。     

Gender and Power: Sex Segregation in American and Polish Higher Education as a Case Study

This article presents a comparative case study of the manifestation of sex segregation in higher education in the United States and in Poland from the end of the 19th century to the 1930s. The study is guided by a theoretical framework, which is organized around a concept of power and derived from The Sources of Social Power by Michael Mann (1986). In the United States, well-developed capitalism, democracy, and the ideology of separate spheres underlay the high collective power of men, their distributive power over women and—consequently—high levels of sex segregation in higher education. Contrastly, in Poland, weak capitalism and lack of democracy meant less collective and distributive power of men, which produced lower levels of educational sex segregation.     

Durkheim's contribution to the sociological analysis of history

Emile Durkheim has long been viewed as one of the founders of the so-called variables-oriented approach to sociological investigation. This view ignores his considerable achievements using the methodology of “case-based” historical analysis, most prominent among them, his lectures on the history of French education (The Evolution of Educational Thought).In this paper I first outline the intimate relationship that Durkheim envisioned between historical and sociological investigation. I then turn to his work on French education for substantive illustrations of his approach. Finally, I explore certain points of intersection between Durkheim's approach to history and present-day concerns, especially in regard to the role of culture in history and the opposition between prospective and retrospective (“teleological”) strategies of historical analysis.     

The “fetus-infant”: Changing classifications ofIn Utero development in medical texts

This paper examines several aspects of the changing cultural classifications of reproduction through a close reading of obstetrics textbooks. Through the discursive construction of the fetus in obstetric texts, medical accounts are beginning to classify the fetus as a baby. In investigating this transformation, I focus upon two cognitive processes: the splitting of the fetus apart from the pregnant woman and the concurrent lumping of two distinct mental entities—a fetus and an infant into one new medical category: the fetus-infant. In addition, textual evidence shows a shift in cognitive orientation away from classifying fetuses based on gestational age to an emphasis on what I term functional age. Further, new knowledge enables physicians to affect functional age, making the fetus with mature function in utero conceptually no different from a baby. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Sociological Association Meeting, Washington, DC, August, 1995.     

加拿大的女权主义社会学

本文将加拿大女权主义社会学的发展分为４个阶段进行了讨论，指出了各阶段的主要内容和特点，分析了加拿大女权主义社会学多元文化的趋势，并讨论了女权主义社会学的多样性与差异性的问题     

Visualizing Structure: Reading Surfaces of Social Life

This paper reports on the use of aerial photographs to study the social structure of a dairy farm neighborhood in St. Lawrence County, New York. The paper compares information from aerial photographs of farmsteads and farm work to data gathered in a sociological survey. I examine how the visual data compares to other sociological information; how photographs, in this research, amplify, supplement, or contextualize nonvisual data.     

Paradigm shifts,feminist phase theory,and the missing variable in women's studies curriculum transformation projects

Feminist phase theory describes the process of integrating women's studies scholarship as a series of identifiable stages, for both individuals and disciplines. Literature on the revolutionary and paradigm-shift potential of women's studies scholarship suggests important disciplinary differences in its construction, adoption, and diffusion. We reformulate feminist phase theory in paradigm shift terms, then operationalize and contrast two versions of it. Our analysis and review indicate that the missing variable in women's studies transformation projects is the participants' discipline. Data from our integration project show faculty in interpretive disciplines scoring higher on degree of integration of women's studies scholarship but not changing as a result of the project itself, while those in positivist disciplines do change but have lower absolute scores. These findings indicate a need for different integration strategies based on discipline. Empirical support for one sequential ordering in feminist phase theory argues for the importance and centrality of women-focused scholarship.An earlier version was presented at the 84th annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, California, August 1989.     

论当前中国女性主义文学批评的问题

当前国内对女性主义批评的责难有不少并不恰切。中国当代女性主义文学批评真正的不足表现在两方面:一是批评观念先行,批评视点及方法较单一,未充分重视作品内部全部的复杂因素,批评的“文学性”学术品味不足;二是信息大量重复,缺乏沟通与学术尊重,表现出学术态度的轻率浮躁,文学批评的坦诚性不足。这是真正的危机所在,不克服这两方面的问题,调整批评策略,中国的女性主义文学批评或者说“性别诗学”研究难以持续发展。     

克隆技术的伦理学思考

随着科学的发展,思想的解放,作为20世纪人类生命科学三大发明之一的克隆技术,越来越受到世人的关注。针对这一热点话题,剖析技术本身的利弊,最终得出自己的见解:支持治疗性克隆,反对生殖性克隆,从而使克隆技术回到造福人类的这一初衷上。