Charles Camic

Northwestern University | NU · Department of Sociology

To date, scholars who study the history of the human sciences have tended to neglect the day-to-day practices that social thinkers and humanists from the past engaged in as they developed their ideas. This neglect stands in striking contrast to an important body of contemporary research in the field of Science-and-Technology Studies (STS), which ha...

The paper examines Pierre Bourdieu’s extensive writings on the production of scientific knowledge. The study shows that Bourdieu offered not one but two - significantly different - approaches to scientific knowledge production, one formulated in his theoretical, or programmatic, writings on the subject, the other developed in his empirical writings...

ABOUT THIS BOOK Over the past quarter century, researchers have successfully explored the inner workings of the physical and biological sciences using a variety of social and historical lenses. Inspired by these advances, the contributors to Social Knowledge in the Making turn their attention to the social sciences, broadly construed. The result is...

This article considers the early intellectual career of Thorstein Veblen through the lens of his hitherto neglected 1895 English translation of System der Finanzwissenschaft (1889), an eight-hundred-page treatise on public finance by Gustav Cohn, a German historical economist of high reputation among his contemporaries. The article examines the aca...

The 38 selections in the volume include complete texts of all of Veblen's major articles and book reviews from 1882 to 1914, plus key chapters from his books The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) and The Instinct of Workmanship (1914). These writings present a wide range of Veblen's most significant contri...

Attentive observer that he was of discoveries occurring at the frontiers of the biological sciences a century ago, Thorstein Veblen, were he transported to our own time, would almost certainly be fascinated by the research of contemporary biological scientists, perhaps especially by the work of those in the thriving field of comparative genomics. F...

The Old Sociology of IdeasAssumption 1: The Sociology of Ideas is a Means, Not an EndAssumption 2: The Internal/External DistinctionAssumption 3: The Transparency of IdeasAssumption 4: The Focus on Macrosocial FactorsAssumption 5: Intellectuals as an Objective Social CategoryThe New Sociology of IdeasTenet 1: The Sociology of Ideas Is an End in Its...

L'A. examine de facon critique l'ouvrage d'Hans Joas : The Creativity of Action. Il s'efforce de mettre en lumiere l'influence de Talcott Parsons sur la perspective proposee dans ce livre. Il montre de quelle maniere ce dernier envisage la notion de creativite. Il estime que Parsons et Joas defendent une vision volontariste de la creativite. Il ana...

Alvin Gouldner's 1965 book Enter Plato is one of the most important contributions ever made to the sociology of ideas. Overshadowed soon after its publication, however, by Gouldner's more controversial work, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, the earlier book has suffered neglect. In an effort to correct this situation, we situate Enter Plato...

This paper characterizes the field of sociological theory since the mid-1980s as the site of eight active and diverse intellectual projects. These projects are (I) to construct general analytical tools for use in empirical social research, (II) to synthesize multiple theoretical approaches; (III) to refine existing theoretical research programs; (I...

Jeffrey Alexander and Giuseppe Sciortino take my 1992 ASR article as an occasion to mount a critique of tendencies that they discern throughout my recent writings on the early intellectual career of Talcott Parsons. I should like to reciprocate the compliment by using this commentary not only to address specific objections that they raise, but to s...

Previous research contends that when Talcott Parsons developed the substantive argument of The Structure of Social Action, he turned away from the theoretical emptiness of American social science and drew on the ideas of four European social thinkers- Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, and Marshall. Such research exemplifies the "content-fit model" of predec...

In the course of research using Talcott Parsons's papers at the Harvard University Archives, Charles Camic read "Prolegomena to a Theory of Social Institutions" in manuscript form. Given sociologists' continuing interest in Parsons's ideas, Camic suggested that ASR make the paper widely available. We are pleased to do so in this issue. Camic's prol...

In the half century since its publication, The Structure of Social Action has emerged as one of the classics of the sociological tradition. At the present time, however, there is scarcely any agreement about the status of the book's argument among all those who still appeal to the volume. After 50 years, the vast scholarship generated by Structure...

Talcott Parsons's methodological views, particularly as formulated in The Structure of Social Action, have recently become the center of scholarly disagreement, with sociologists portraying his approach as positivist and postpositivist, empiricist and antiempiricist, relativist and nonrelativist. Departing from these interpretations, this paper arg...

This article is a historical investigation of the concept of habit in sociology. Beginning with the claim that historians of sociology need to look beyond the now-famous ideas that appear in the foreground of the works of the sociological masters, the article examines the neglected idea of habit to document that this concept was long a staple term...

The nature of the relationship between ideas and the social conditions in which they develop has long been among the central concerns of fields like the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of intellectuals, and the social history of ideas. For generations, scholars in these areas have hotly debated the proper way of characterizing the form of thi...