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Discipline, Field, Nexus: Re-Visioning Sociology
Abstract
This article proposes a re-visioning of sociology and of its relationship to the late-modern world it inhabits. I first problematize the claim that sociology is a discipline in any ordinary sense of the term, indeed, that social science can be reasonably cleaved into "disciplines" on the model of natural science. I then explore the thesis that sociology and kindred pursuits have been constituted as fields. Finally, I argue that among the fields of social scientific inquiry, the sociological terrain is of great import, as a nexus whose permeability, dense connectivity to other fields and critical transdisciplinarity are prime assets. By implication, the remedy for centrifugal tendencies that worry some sociologists is greater clarity on matters of social ontology and, on that basis, a coherent methodology (critical realism) that can strengthen sociology's capacity to understand our troubled world and to defend and enrich democratic practices that may portend a better future. © 2013 Canadian Sociological Association/La Société canadienne de sociologie.
... Among other influences, Canadian sociology has strong ties to its European and American roots while also attempting, at times, to distance and differentiate itself from them (McLaughlin, 2005). In his overview of the broader global history of the discipline, Carroll (2013) notes that it was between the French Revolution and World War I that sociology became one of five disciplines institutionalized in Europe and North America (alongside history, economics, political science, and anthropology). Towards the later nineteenth century, the disciplines largely separated from each other and became more territorial, with sociology specifically claiming a special expertise about the forms of existing social orders and the ability to criticize them (Carroll, 2013). ...
... In his overview of the broader global history of the discipline, Carroll (2013) notes that it was between the French Revolution and World War I that sociology became one of five disciplines institutionalized in Europe and North America (alongside history, economics, political science, and anthropology). Towards the later nineteenth century, the disciplines largely separated from each other and became more territorial, with sociology specifically claiming a special expertise about the forms of existing social orders and the ability to criticize them (Carroll, 2013). While Carroll (2013) does not see the sociology of this time as being "critical" itself, he does suggest that the desire to define, differentiate and draw up an area of expertise for sociology (perhaps the critique of social structures) partially set the backdrop for a more "critical" sociology to emerge. ...
... Towards the later nineteenth century, the disciplines largely separated from each other and became more territorial, with sociology specifically claiming a special expertise about the forms of existing social orders and the ability to criticize them (Carroll, 2013). While Carroll (2013) does not see the sociology of this time as being "critical" itself, he does suggest that the desire to define, differentiate and draw up an area of expertise for sociology (perhaps the critique of social structures) partially set the backdrop for a more "critical" sociology to emerge. ...
In plotting the course for the discipline of sociology, sociologists over the past two decades have called for the practice of “public sociology” (Burawoy in American Sociological Review, 70(1), 4–28, 2005), for disciplinary convergence around a critical methodology (Carroll in Canadian Review of Sociology, 50(1), 1–26, 2013) and the devotion of our scholarly efforts to issues of social justice (Romero in American Sociological Review, 85(1), 1–30, 2020). While public, critical, and social justice-oriented work is important, these disciplinary mandates can serve to marginalize other types of sociological work that are valuable as well. In this climate, work coming from perspectives that are not as left leaning politically, or that does not seek to advance any political agenda may be seen as less valued or legitimate, and scholars who choose to separate their political agendas from their research may experience marginalization (McLaughlin in Canadian Journal of Sociology, 30(1), 1–40, 2005; Pawluch in The American Sociologist, 50, 204–219, 2019). Inspired by the work and doctoral mentorship of Dorothy Pawluch, this paper seeks to both understand the historical development of the field of Canadian sociology and consider the value and place of the interpretive tradition within it. Through reflecting on the research of others and my own experiences as a graduate student, I argue that the “chilly” climate Dorothy (Pawluch in The American Sociologist, 50, 204–219, 2019) alludes to for scholars who operate outside of a politically informed “social-justice agenda” does exist, but that mentorship can help mediate this chill for interpretive leaning students. Finally, I suggest that the branch of the interpretive tradition which asks researchers to suspend their own perspectives and privilege the position of others still has value for Canadian sociology. It can both produce deep, meaningful research contributions and provide students with tools for engaging in productive intellectual debate and transformative encounters with difference.
... It describes in explicit detail the nature of the fact that sociology has in fact been fractured down to the point that it is unsure of how to define itself. Carroll takes a positive approach to his understanding of this fragmentation of sociology into a loosely collection of sub fields by arguing that its place in the social sciences is one of an interdisciplinary permeation that seeps into other fields and bind together scientific inquiries from other aspects of social study (Carroll 2013a). In his extolling of the possibility of a transdisciplinary nexus of critical understanding, Carrol cites globalization, capitalism, and other features of late modernity that have effectively lent to the erosion of the 'bounded society' that fluid, tangible social fact that Durkheim mandated we study in its entirety. ...
... In his extolling of the possibility of a transdisciplinary nexus of critical understanding, Carrol cites globalization, capitalism, and other features of late modernity that have effectively lent to the erosion of the 'bounded society' that fluid, tangible social fact that Durkheim mandated we study in its entirety. He encourages fellow sociologists to embrace this nature of the discipline as a means of defining a new future for the practice of the science of sociology (Carroll 2013a). However, he does reference (if at least on the periphery) the contemporary existence of a fear of identity crisis. ...
... In Carrol's original essay, and in a subsequent re-visitation in 2016, he does put out the call for sociology to redefine itself in terms of its reflexive and critical metacognition (Carroll 2016(Carroll , 2013a. He calls for us to align with the idealized vision of sociology put forth by Bourdieu and Mills, in that we strive for a transdisciplinary critical examination of ourselves as we strive to study and understand the intersection of history and biography in our science. ...
The purpose of this study was to provide exploratory understanding of the nature of academic prestige in the field of sociology, and to provide insights into the history of the discipline. The primary research question was: does academic prestige act as a factor in controlling academic knowledge production in the field of sociology? It was hypothesized that sociology, following the great depression would begin expanding in terms of the diversity of specialized subfields, and that social contextual factors influenced the amount of prestige allotted to specific topical areas throughout history. A sociohistorical content analysis of conference proceedings published by the American Sociological Association was performed. A total of 2387 presentations from the years 1920-1960 were coded across six variables (region, type of university, home state of university, prestige score, gender of presenter, and thematic topic), and then analyzed with multiple correspondence analysis and descriptive statistics. It was found that sociology as a discipline has diversified as hypothesized. Academic prestige was found to have fluctuated across subfields and was mapped to highlight this phenomenon. Finally, a new conceptualization about the nature of prestige and the interactional behavior of institutions was developed from the results of the study through a grounded theory approach. Finally, predictive comments about the implications of these findings in the field of higher education were made.
... This paper takes recent sociological debate about transdisciplinarity (Carroll 2013;Puddephatt and McLaughlin 2015;Mišina 2015) as a springboard for elaborating on the sociological relevance of metatheory and metatheorising, with particular attention to Critical Realism. Sociologists need to more forcefully acknowledge the importance of engaging with metatheory if they are to think more productively and creatively about how the philosophical assumptions which shaped the production of theories, research design, research practice, and the organisation of our field facilitate and delimit the production of insights about the multifaceted nature of sociological objects and practice. ...
... Résumé. Mobilisant les récents débats sur la transdisciplinarité (Carroll 2013, Puddephatt et McLaughlin 2015Mišina 2015), cet article porte sur la pertinence sociologique de la métathéorie et de la métathéorisation. Notre attention se pose spécifiquement sur le réalisme critique. ...
... Recently, American sociologist Phillip Gorski (2013), drawing attention to a spate of foundational texts, has advocated CR's potential for sociological enquiry. William Carroll (2013) has done something similar within the Canadian context. As CR is a metatheory it has implications, Carroll (2013) argues, for how we conceptualise what it is that sociological enquiry does and could possibly describe and explain. ...
... This paper takes recent sociological debate about transdisciplinarity (Carroll 2013;Puddephatt and McLaughlin 2015;Mišina 2015) as a springboard for elaborating on the sociological relevance of metatheory and metatheorising, with particular attention to Critical Realism. Sociologists need to more forcefully acknowledge the importance of engaging with metatheory if they are to think more productively and creatively about how the philosophical assumptions which shaped the production of theories, research design, research practice, and the organisation of our field facilitate and delimit the production of insights about the multifaceted nature of sociological objects and practice. ...
... Mobilisant les récents débats sur la transdisciplinarité (Carroll 2013, Puddephatt et McLaughlin 2015Mišina 2015), cet article porte sur la pertinence sociologique de la métathéorie et de la métathéorisation. Notre attention se pose spécifiquement sur le réalisme critique. ...
... Carroll contends the objects of social science are located within the same "singular" domain and that all social scientists study the same thing, albeit different parts or "facets" of that same thing. This object -"human phenomena in its fullness", the "human condition, in all its diversity" (Carroll 2013:10) -transcends disciplinary boundaries. Whereas natural science enquiry responds to ontological factors in that its object of study -the natural world -is stratified, necessitating the formation of specialisms, fragmentation within social science is not grounded in ontological factors as social reality is not stratified in the way that the organisation of the social sciences would suppose (Carroll 2013:8-10, 18). ...
This paper takes recent sociological debate about transdisciplinarity (Carroll 2013; Puddephatt and McLaughlin 2015; Mišina 2015) as a springboard for elaborating on the sociological relevance of metatheory and metatheorising, with particular attention to Critical Realism. Sociologists need to more forcefully acknowledge the importance of engaging with metatheory if they are to think more productively and creatively about how the philosophical assumptions which shaped the production of theories, research design, research practice, and the organisation of our field facilitate and delimit the production of insights about the multifaceted nature of sociological objects and practice. As metatheorising promotes the neglected procedure of conceptualisation (as opposed to operationalisation) and because it is transdisciplinary (shedding disciplinary boundary maintenance while remaining rigorous and methodical), it should be routinely utilised by social scientists to yield conceptual synthesis and fuller, more adequate forms of explanation of their particular objects of investigation.
... ' (1994). These are representative of the troubling discoveries repeatedly made across generations of sociologists, largely involving observations about sociology's perceived irrelevance, serial crises, theoretical incoherence, and lack of an agreed upon core (Bauman, Jacobsen, and Tester 2014;Becker and Rau 1992;Carroll 2013;Davis 1994;Deflem 2013;Kalberg 2007;Keith 2000;Michalski 2008;Rule 1994;Stinchcombe 1994;Turner 2004). ...
... For one, as others have argued, boundaries between the disciplines should be more porous and less intensely protected (Carroll 2013;Michalski 2008). As Stewart Lockie reminded readers of this journal, the current context of rapid global environmental change 'demands outright disciplinary promiscuity and the exploration of entirely new ways of doing science' (2015, 1). ...
... Though overshadowed by specializing trends, one can find traces of this view throughout sociology's historyfrom Comte to the present. Understood this way, some contemporary scholars insist, sociology can usefully serve as the center around which other social sciences are organized (Carroll 2013;Quilley and Loyal 2005). ...
Despite decades of activity, environmental sociology has not yet achieved its original goal of reorienting the discipline to account for human–ecosystem interdependence. Here, I review critical assessments of the status of efforts in sociology, and beyond, to understand and communicate about socio-environmental processes. I argue that meaningful advances in environmental sociology are not possible without a more fundamental re-conceptualization of sociology and its core. With reference to Norbert Elias’ work on relations among the sciences, I show that sociology’s disciplinary isolation has been a significant obstacle to advancement. Situating sociology and its subject matter among adjacent sciences and theirs reveals fundamental premises, suggests alternative core concepts, and forms the basis of a general theory of socio-environmental processes, all conspicuously absent to date. I provide an overview of the concepts and theory, offer a visual model to convey it, and conclude by suggesting possible implications for the social sciences.
... At the same time, there have been arguments for more politically engaged research practices, in which sociologists might better connect with the publics they serve and strive to bring about progressive social change (e.g., Burawoy 2005). These ideas were creatively brought together by William Carroll (2013), who argued that sociology should embrace its potential as a transdisciplinary "nexus" of ideas in the wider social sciences and humanities, guided by the philosophical foundation of critical realism, to solve pressing social problems of the twenty-first century. We consider this argument and provide a two-pronged critique; first, of the unquestioned virtue of transdisciplinary knowledge, and second, of the narrow emphasis on critical realism. ...
... Drawing on Immanuel Wallerstein's (1996) argument for "opening the social sciences," William Carroll (2013) argues that unlike the natural sciences, the social science disciplines are not demarcated from their neighboring disciplines because they reflect natural reality, but are instead politically and socially constructed. In brief, empirical reality consists of a variety of ontological levels, starting from the level of basic physical perspective, Sharon always believed in the importance of intellectual and political plurality in our discipline. ...
... As such, the social science disciplines are not really demarcated by ontological differences, since all of them focus on the same emergent level of reality: the linguistically and culturally enabled human species. Carroll (2013) points out that these disciplines came into being in the nineteenth century along with industrial and political revolutions, colonialism, and capitalist expansion, and were organized in ways that were complicit with the ideology of neoliberalism. Today, economics, politics, and culture are increasingly intertwined in our condition of late modernity, and artificially dividing these realms only leads to partial, or worse, distorted, views of the human condition. ...
While some scholars believe in a transdisciplinary future for the social sciences and humanities, we argue that sociology would do well to maintain its disciplinary borders, while celebrating the plurality of its intellectual, social, and political content. Although a pluralist position can threaten disciplinary coherence and increase fragmentation, we argue the counterbalance ought to be convergence around shared institutional norms of knowledge production. Establishing these norms is not easy, since there is a great deal of institutional ambivalence at play in the field of sociology. As such, sociology is pushed and pulled between two poles of at least four major continuums of knowledge production, which include the following: (1) interdisciplinary versus discipline-based research; (2) political versus analytical scholarship; (3) professional versus public/policy sociology; and (4) local/national versus global audiences. Since both sides of these ideal-typical continuums contain their own pathologies, we propose adopting a balanced position to correct for the shortcomings of each. Rather than imposing one philosophical or theoretical paradigm for the field, we suggest that embracing the "chaos" of our diverse forms of knowledge and centralizing and integrating findings will serve to strengthen our collective efforts in the long term. © 2015 Canadian Sociological Association/La Société canadienne de sociologie.
... hence, Manicas argues, modern higher education is intimately linked with the state's reaction to the growth of the new and unprecedented social problems of industrial capitalism. 8 third, he argues that the development, organizational model that would eventually be followed in the social sciences, leading to the compartmentalization of the latter (see Carroll 2013). as Mills (1959, 84) noted, the social sciences split into academic specialties in the early twentieth century, and this 'curious division of academic departments may have helped social scientists fragment their problems', 'scattering' the attention of social scientists and narrowing their vision (1959,85,87). ...
... such a scattering of attention through fragmentation has become an important feature of the professionalization, bureaucratization and organization of the university today, including studies of crime and its control. Many (Carrabine, simon 1988) have remarked on this characteristic aspect of criminology, and Carroll (2013) has recently commented on this development for social science more generally, arguing that fragmentation makes little sense from a knowledgeproduction point of view, but that it makes political sense in relation to the growth of capitalist states that require specialized knowledges of utility within an increasingly complex division of labour. indeed, the increasing numbers of specialisms today that look at crime, criminality and crime control have displaced criminological expertise and threaten criminology's policy relevance (haggerty Criminal justice studies and criminology, born of this fragmentation at a time when higher education was moving away from training in classics and philosophy toward vocational training (see Morn 1995), appeared as useful informationa scientistic view of science was entrenched to inform the model of knowledgeproduction (challenged to some extent, but not defeated, in the 1960s with the rebirth of interactionist social science, in the 1970s with advances in Marxist and feminist scholarship, and in the 1980s with the rise of postmodernism). ...
The quality of mind advanced by Mills facilitates ‘refractive thinking’. It is beneficial and necessary to reflect on this type of thinking for criminal justice studies and criminological enquiry, especially if we are to defend them as rigorous and insightful fields of enquiry that can produce new or deeper understandings, more adequate explanations, and holistic descriptions of social issues of consequence stemming from criminalization and criminal justice administration as well as related practices. Importantly, we must identify and then reject the organizational features of criminology and criminal justice studies that impugn refractive thinking and the development of what Mills termed ‘intellectual craftsmanship’. To employ the criminological imagination is to think in a refractive way, and this refractive thinking is one of the greatest promises of the sociological imagination, one that has to be realised within criminology. A major obstacle to the development of refractive thinking -- an insightful and imaginative form of thought and practice -- is the scientism that pervades criminology and justice studies.
... The blurred boundaries of sociology and disagreements over its core has brought about concerns about the survival of sociology internationally (Burawoy 2005;Carroll 2013). In Norway, however, sociology is one of the largest social science disciplines measured by the number of researchers employed in Norwegian universities, university colleges and research institutes. ...
This paper analyses the interrelations between academic disciplines and society beyond academia by the case of sociology in Norway. For that purpose, this paper introduces the concept of disciplines’ societal territories, which refer to bounded societal spaces that are shaped by the knowledge of a discipline, premised on the linkages between the discipline and its audience. By mapping sociologists’ reported contributions to societal changes beyond academia, the paper firstly shows how societal territories are established by sociologists’ recurring engagement with certain topics and research users. Secondly, it traces the interactions between researchers and their users, and identifies four ideal typical pathways by which the cognitive territory of Norwegian sociology is transformed into societal territories. A key observation is that the establishment of societal territories is co-determined by the structures of research use among its audience. As for the case of sociology in Norway, questions therefore arise over the interdependency between sociologists as knowledge ‘suppliers’ and the ‘demand side’ for research, and the autonomy of the sociological discipline in selecting its focus of attention.
... Since the mid-2000s, Anglo-Canadian sociology has engaged in spirited debates about its history, institutional health, intellectual-philosophical foundations, and contemporary political relevance (Carroll 2013;Creese, McLaren and Pulkingham 2009;Davies 2009;Helmes-Hayes 2016;Hiller 1982;Lachapelle and Burnett 2018;Matthews 2014;McLaughlin 2005;Michalski 2016;Stanbridge 2014;Wilkinson et al. 2013). This wideranging introspection notwithstanding, Canadian sociology has only begun to address its relation to Indigenous ideas, scholarship, and politics (Andersen and Denis 2003;Denis 2015;Ramos 2006Ramos , 2008Voyageur 2011;Wilkes et al. 2017). ...
Over the past decade Canadian sociology has engaged in spirited debates on the sociology of sociological research, but it has barely begun to address its relation to Indigenous theorizing, scholarship, and politics. How does the discipline deal with the settler colonial history and current realities of Indigenous social lives, and where is the place in our field for Indigenous voices and perspectives? Drawing on Coulthard's politics of recognition and Tuck's damage-centered research, we present here the first systematic empirical analysis of the place of Indigeneity in the Canadian Review of Sociology and the Canadian Journal of Sociology. We situate the presence of Indigeneity in Canadian sociology journals in the sociopolitical context of the time, and examine how imperialism, statism, and damage are oriented within the two journals. Most importantly, we challenge the silence in the discipline's intellectual frames and research programs with respect to Indigenous theorizing about the social world.
© 2020 Canadian Sociological Association/La Société canadienne de sociologie.
... It might be tempting to generalize this suggestion to Canadian sociology, which contains its own traditional and positivist corners (Mišina 2015: 543;Puddephatt and McLaughlin 2015). However, we contend rigid disciplinary boundaries (Carroll 2013), national policy priorities and the sprawling, car-centric country itself offer more convincing explanations. ...
This special issue of Canadian Journal of Sociology on ‘Contentious Mobilities’ showcases Canadian scholarship that investigates mobilities in the context of unequal power relations. Mobilities become contentious when they confront the systematic exclusion of others, advance unconventional mobile practices and defy or destabilize existing power relations. Increasingly, mobilities are contentious in relation to rapidly changing economies, societies and environments. This special issue stages an overdue encounter between the mobilities paradigm and research on sociopolitical contention. Simultaneously, this special issue addresses an empirical gap, featuring Canada as a prolific and influential site for leading-edge research. Five key themes emerge amongst the diverse papers in this issue: life and death, employment-related mobility, intersectionality/in(visibility), governance, and automobility. Further, we identify five potential topics for Canadian mobilities, including climate change, disaster, technology and travel, the good city and methods.
... № 2. С. 95-121 включенности российских исследователей в мировое академическое пространство. Теоретическую основу нашего исследования составили работы в области социальной эпистемологии (см., например : Fuller, 2002), а также контент-анализа в целях демаркации предметных полей наук (Carroll, 2013;Brown, Jones, 2015 и др.). ...
The paper is devoted to modeling the subject field of academic discipline basing on the case of accounting. It is shown that interdisciplinary approach, interpretative and critical studies, constructivist paradigm are now popular in accounting studies. In addition to traditional financial and organizational aspects, accounting, in the new interdisciplinary framework, is also studied as a socio-economic institution.
... By contrast, sociological theory in Québec is more concerned with formulating public policy (Brym and Saint-Pierre 1997) and maintaining intellectual traditions. Various common vantage points have been proposed to bring unity to the discipline, such as "critical and leftist tradition" (McLaughlin 2005:4), critical realism (Carroll 2013), or a renewed form of staples theory (Matthews 2014). None has carried the day, however, and new rounds of criticisms and responses follow (Puddephatt and McLaughlin 2015;Stanbridge 2014;Tindall 2014). ...
Using theory syllabi and departmental data collected for three academic years, this paper investigates the institutional practice of theory in sociology departments across Canada. In particular, it examines the position of theory within the sociological curriculum, and how this varies among universities. Taken together, our analyses indicate that theory remains deeply institutionalized at the core of sociological education and Canadian sociologists' self-understanding; that theorists as a whole show some coherence in how they define themselves, but differ in various ways, especially along lines of region, intellectual background, and gender; that despite these differences, the classical versus contemporary heuristic largely cuts across these divides, as does the strongly ingrained position of a small group of European authors as classics of the discipline as a whole. Nevertheless, who is a classic remains an unsettled question, alternatives to the "classical versus contemporary" heuristic do exist, and theorists' syllabi reveal diverse "others" as potential candidates. Our findings show that the field of sociology is neither marked by universal agreement nor by absolute division when it comes to its theoretical underpinnings. To the extent that they reveal a unified field, the findings suggest that unity lies more in a distinctive form than in a distinctive content, which defines the space and structure of the field of sociology.
... Concurrently, beginning in the 1990s, we can discern a growing emphasis on movements and collective agency of various types, and a tendency, directly acknowledged by some special-issue editors (e.g., Adam and Matika-Tindale 2011; Lyon and Wood 2012), toward scholarship that is, at once, sociological and interdisciplinary. Whether the latter might be taken to indicate the decline of a coherent sociological community, or perhaps the elaboration of sociology's own promise as a crucial nexus bridging across disciplinary silos (as in Carroll 2013), is yet another topic for ongoing debate. ...
Cet article introduit le numéro spécial consacré au 50e anniversaire de la Revue canadienne de sociologie. Nous y retraçons l'histoire de la revue au travers d'une analyse sommaire de ses éditeurs successifs et des articles et numéros spéciaux publiés au fil des ans. Depuis sa fondation, la Revue permet de suivre les plus récents développements du champ de la sociologie canadienne. L'analyse démontre que si les trente premières années de la Revue ont vu s'effectuer une transition du concept de culture à celui de relations de pouvoir en tant que thème central, les deux dernières décennies ont quant à elles été le lieu d'une diversification des perspectives théoriques et méthodologiques ainsi que d'un retour du “moment culturel”, s'insérant dorénavant dans le cadre d'une analyse plus générale des relations de pouvoir. Les articles du présent numéro illustrent et discutent ces développements.
This article introduces the fiftieth anniversary issue of the Canadian Review of Sociology ( CRS ). It tracks the development of the CRS through rudimentary analyses of its editors, articles, and special‐issue themes. The CRS has provided a venue both for keeping pace with developments in Canadian sociology and for leading sociological research into new fields. If the first three decades of scholarship were marked by a transition from culture to power as an organizing motif, the two most recent decades have seen a diversification that recovers the cultural moment within a broader analysis of power, and that offers a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Articles featured in this issue exemplify and reflect on these developments.
... In Jose Lopez and Garry Potter's introduction to critical realism, John Scott-who has authored a widely read textbook on network analysisbriefly mentions SNA but without linking it to critical realism (Scott, 2005: 83). Finally, a small number of political economists who draw inspiration from critical realism have employed SNA methods (see Carroll, 2010;2013;de Graaff & Van Apeldoorn, 2011) but (again) without reflecting on the extent to which the two are compatible. In sum, SNA has gone largely unnoticed among critical realists, and the SNA literature does not in any way draw on critical realist terminology or scholarship. ...
Social network analysis (SNA) is an increasingly popular approach that provides researchers with highly developed tools to map and analyze complexes of social relations. Although a number of network scholars have explicated the assumptions that underpin SNA, the approach has yet to be discussed in relation to established philosophies of science. This article argues that there is a tension between applied and methods-oriented SNA studies, on the one hand, and those addressing the social-theoretical nature and implications of networks, on the other. The former, in many cases, exhibits positivist tendencies, whereas the latter incorporate a number of assumptions that are directly compatible with core critical realist views on the nature of social reality and knowledge. This article suggests that SNA may be detached from positivist social science and come to constitute a valuable instrument in the critical realist toolbox.
In der heutigen soziologischen Situation Südafrikas sind einige Merkmale von Bedeutung. Methodische Orientierungen und Präferenzen, Fragmentierung und Spezialisierung, Zusammenarbeit und Internationalisierung sind die wichtigsten davon. Qualitative Methoden sind der bevorzugte Ansatz für Soziologen in Südafrika. Was die wichtigsten Forschungsbereiche betrifft, so ist die südafrikanische Soziologie eher fragmentiert als fokussiert oder spezialisiert. Die Zusammenarbeit zwischen Soziologen ist nicht so stark wie in den naturwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen des Landes. Der Zusammenhang zwischen quantitativer Methodik und Zusammenarbeit ist in den Forschungspublikationen südafrikanischer Soziologen offensichtlich. Die Zusammenarbeit findet weniger innerhalb der soziologischen Fachbereiche statt, sondern eher zwischen der Soziologie und anderen Fachbereichen. Die Internationalisierung der südafrikanischen Soziologie ist noch nicht sehr weit gediehen, aber südafrikanische Soziologen nehmen aktiv an internationalen soziologischen Aktivitäten teil.
In contrast with the widely shared conviction that the natural sciences are useful for understanding and dealing with problems of a biophysical nature, there is far less confidence in the social sciences’ ability to help prevent or mitigate human social problems. Exploring why, this chapter examines obstacles to comparable advancements in the social sciences, especially within sociology. The most important step to overcoming these obstacles, it argues, is to situate human social life within its biophysical contexts. As an added benefit, doing so suggests a more adequate structure for the social sciences, one based firmly in reality.
Interdisciplinary programmes have proliferated across post‐secondary education in recent decades. Despite this, little attention has been paid to the manner in which interdisciplinary programmes promote themselves to external constituents. To study this process, we conduct a content analysis of the online self‐descriptions of 203 credential‐granting interdisciplinary programmes across the Canadian university sector. We find that these entities embrace contrasting logics of superior knowledge, labour market outcomes and customisation. We interpret these findings through the lens of contemporary theorising within organisation studies, noting that their ambidexterity bodes well for their continued existence within the sector.
The issues of institutionalization and demarcation of the boundaries of academic disciplines in recent years have received a significant interest, within the framework of new waves of epistemological and institutional research and interdisciplinarity. The aim of this work is to model the process of academic discipline’s institutionalization and the structure of its institutions by the case of accounting discipline, in the international and Russian context. Due to the specific nature of the subject, we will use the institutional approach as well as the associated social network approach within which discipline is viewed as the result of the interaction of individual actors, their groups and networks in the subject discourse. The paper identifies the reasons for interest in demarcating the boundaries of academic disciplines in general, and accounting in particular. The institutional structure of accounting is defined as a set of institutions of accounting practices (techniques and professions) and accounting knowledge (science and the dissemination of knowledge (education and professional communication)). The stages of development of all these institutions are structured; special attention is paid to the institutions of accounting knowledge. It is shown that today accounting, institutionally, is a mature academic discipline, a separate part of economic science and practice. The main features of accountants’ academic community network organization are revealed: its tightness facilitates the exchange of knowledge within the community, but also hinders the search for new objects and methods of research and interdisciplinarity. The features of the development of accounting institutions in the Russian academic environment are discussed. The importance of the results is due to the possibilities of social construction in society and in markets that are provided by all economic disciplines, including accounting. The model of the structure of institutions and networks presented in this work can be extended to other disciplines that will help overcome the existing gap between the content of domestic and foreign ideas about their institutional nature and subject fields, as well as the revision of Russian national educational and research classifications, the content of training programs in economic disciplines, including accounting.
Abstract. The issues of institutionalization and demarcation of the boundaries of academic disciplines in recent years have received a significant interest, within the framework of new waves of epistemological and institutional research and interdisciplinarity. The aim of this work is to model the process of academic discipline’s institutionalization and the structure of its institutions by the case of accounting discipline, in the international and Russian context. Due to the specifics of the subject, we will use the institutional approach, as well as the social-network approach, close to it, within which discipline is viewed as the result of the interaction of individual actors, their groups and networks in the subject discourse. The paper identifies the reasons for interest in demarcating the boundaries of academic disciplines in general, and accounting in particular. The institutional structure of accounting is defined as a set of institutes of accounting practices (techniques and professions) and accounting knowledge (science and the dissemination of knowledge (education and professional communication)). The stages of development of all these institutions are structured; special attention is paid to the institutions of accounting knowledge. It is shown that today accounting, institutionally, is a mature academic discipline, a separate part of economic science and practice. The main features of the accountants’ academic community network organization are revealed: its tightness facilitates the exchange of knowledge within the community, but it hinders the search for new objects and methods of research and interdisciplinarity. The features of the development of accounting institutions in the Russian academic environment are discussed. The importance of the results is due to the possibilities of social construction in society and in markets that are given by all economic disciplines, including accounting. The model of the structure of institutions and networks presented in this work can be extended to other disciplines that will help overcome the existing gap between the content of domestic and foreign ideas about their institutional nature and subject fields, as well as the revision of Russian national educational and research classifications, the content of training programs in economic disciplines, including accounting.
This paper argues that the current calls for a practice turn in IR are, while positive in many respects, are problematic and potentially limiting because they are premised on: a confused understanding of the role of philosophy and realist philosophy in particular and a restricted view of the role of sociological investigation. This arises from the problematic tendency of to lapse into advocacy of an anti-realist philosophical and sociological imagination. We suggest that the problems that practice theorists point to should lead not to knee-jerk anti-realism but rather can motivate a reinvigorated conversation with realism. This entails revisiting the role of philosophy, realism and sociology in the study of practices. We argue that far from being antithetical to practice theory, a reconsideration of realist philosophy helps make sense of the role of practice and provides those advocating practice theory with better tools to deal with the challenges which motivated the development of these theoretical stances. Reconsidering realism entails, however, a reconsideration of a wider social ontology within which practice takes place, and openness to the role of philosophical and theoretical abstractions in teasing out the role of practice.
This article aims to modeling the subject field of accounting of academic discipline, in the international and Russian context. To demarcate the boundaries of discipline, two approaches are used: the disciplinary matrix approach and the paradigmatic approach. Disciplinary matrix is presented in the form of a set of research programs and themes, traditional and developing in the last two decades. It is shown that the trends in accounting discipline development in the new millennium are interdisciplinarity and "social turn" in research. Three principal dimensions are identified that determine the paradigmatic basis of Western research. Telling on epistemology, there is a transition from functionalism to interpretative and critical research; from the view of methodology, we can observe the replacement of the normative paradigm by the positivist one and visible progress of the constructivist approach. It is shown the multiparadigmality of the accounting researches is to be determined mainly by the plurality of ontological paradigms and the transition from traditional financial and organizational paradigms to the presentation of accounting as a social practice and an institution. Differences in the representation of accounting subject field in foreign and Russian publications are discussed.
A few characteristics are significant in the contemporary sociological scene in South Africa. Methodological orientations and preferences, fragmentation and specialization, collaboration, and internationalization are the major ones. Qualitative methodologies are the preferred approach for sociologists in South Africa. As far as the key research areas are concerned, South African sociology is more fragmented than focused or specialized. Collaboration among sociologists is not as strong as in the natural science disciplines in the country. The association between quantitative methodology and collaboration is obvious in the research publications of South African sociologists. Rather than within sociology departments, collaboration prevails more between sociology and other departments. Internationalization in South African sociology is yet to take deep root, but South African sociologists are active participants in international sociological activities.
The modest literature on the history of Canadian Sociology takes the appearance of a named academic discipline as its object. Canadian Sociology is held to have had some precursors in the 1880s, but really to appear only in the 1920s. It is described as a foreign import and as an activity first of intellectual speculation and moral reform. Observational and analytic practice are absent before 1880. The activities of state agents and government departments in the social field are not discussed. This article offers a richer account through an examination of the larger field from which Sociology was extracted, "the social science," which was practiced actively in colonial Canada from the early nineteenth century. The social science shaped and was itself shaped by colonial conditions. The article outlines three interrelated moments in social science to carry its claims: inventory-making, the emergence of "population-thinking," and "reflexive government." Attending to the social science underlines the complex and convoluted relations of sociology with state power.
The aim of the paper is to review the current Canadian debate about the future of sociology, centered on two sets of claims: William Carrollâ's vision for a transdisciplinary future of the social science and humanities (i.e. the transdisciplinarity argument) (Carroll 2013); and Antony J. Puddephatt & Neil McLaughlin's counter-vision for a sociology bound by its traditional disciplinary boundaries (i.e. the traditionalism argument) (Puddephatt and McLaughlin 2015). The paper provides an analysis of the debate in question and argues that Carroll's and Puddephatt & Neil McLaughlin's reflexive diagnostics regarding the future of sociology offer two distinct, and competing, understandings of the discipline's nature, purpose and relevance, as well as two different sensibilities regarding an audience the discipline of sociology is, or ought to be, speaking to. In addition, an argument put forth is that Carroll's public-political and Puddephatt & McLaughlin's professional-organizational models of sociology have important implications both for mapping out the future trajectories of the discipline, and for gauging sociology's role and position within, and relationship to, the 'universe' of society.
How has English Canadian sociology changed from 1966 to 2014? Has it become more intellectually fragmented or cohesive over time? We answer these questions by analyzing cocitation networks extracted from 7,141 sociology articles published in 169 journals. We show how the most central early specialties developed largely in response to John Porter's The Vertical Mosaic. In later decades, the discipline diversified, fragmented, and then reorganized around a new set of specialties knit together by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The discipline was most intellectually fragmented in periods where multiple specialties were emerging or declining concurrently (i.e., 1975 to 1984 and 1995 to 2004), and was more structurally cohesive from 2005 to 2014 than in any previous period.
Comment est‐ce que la sociologie canadienne‐anglaise a‐t‐elle changé entre 1966 et 2014? Est‐elle devenue plus intellectuellement fragmentée ou cohérente avec le temps? Nous répondons à ces questions en analysant des réseaux de co‐citation qui ont été déduits de 7,141 articles publiés par 169 journaux. Nous démontrons les spécialités primordiales se sont développées en réponse de The Vertical Mosaic de John Porter. Durant les décennies suivantes, la discipline s'est diversifiée, fragmentée et puis s'est réorganisée autour d'une nouvelle série de spécialités liées ensemble par le travail de Pierre Bourdieu. La discipline était la plus intellectuellement fragmentée durant les périodes où plusieurs spécialités émergeaient ou déclinaient concurremment (par exemple de 1975 à 1985 et de 1995 à 2004). Par contre, elle était plus cohérente que tous les autres périodes entre 2005 et 2014.
South African sociology has a long and varied past. Over a period of nearly a century it has gone through several phases. Sociology as a course of study is offered widely in the country and sociologists - mainly at universities - have made a significant contribution to the development of the sociological literature through their research. The major outlet for this research is the South African Review of Sociology (SARS), which is the official journal of the association of sociologists in the country. Although there is some understanding of what South African sociologists are currently studying, there has been no systematic or scientific attempt to examine their endeavors. Using a novel bibliometric approach, this article analyzes the research articles that have appeared in SARS in the post-apartheid era over a period of 18 years. The findings relate to the backgrounds of the authors (race, gender, sectoral, institutional and departmental affiliation) and to the nature of the articles (collaboration, methodology, and topics). The inferences that are drawn from these could assist in determining the directions sociological research is taking in the country.
Academics frequently serve as expert witnesses in legal cases, yet their role as transmitters of social scientific knowledge remains under‐examined. The present study analyzes the deployment of social science within British Columbia's polygamy reference trial where research is used to support the assertion that polygamy is inherently harmful to society. Within the trial record and the written decision, the protection of monogamy as an institution is performed in part through the marginalization of qualitative methodology and the concurrent privileging of quantitative studies that purportedly demonstrate widespread social harms associated with the practice of polygyny.
Les universitaires servent souvent témoins experts dans les cas juridiques, mais leur rôle comme les transmetteurs de connaissance en sciences sociale restent sous‐examinés. La présente étude analyse le déploiement de sciences sociale dans l'essai de référence de polygamie de la Columbia britannique où la recherche est utilisée pour soutenir l'assertion que la polygamie est naturellement malfaisante pour la société. Dans le record de procès et la décision écrite la protection de monogamie comme une institution est exécutée partiellement par la marginalisation de méthodologie qualitative et le privilégier d'études quantitatives qui démontrent que la polygamie est intrinsèquement néfastes pour la société.
How many times do I have to tell you that this is a BOOK.
I have sent you my LIST OF PUBLICATIONS so you can STOP MAKING THESE MISTAKES.
IDON'T NEED YOU OR YOUR INSULTING SUGGESTIONS ABOUT 'INCREASING MY PROFILE'!!!!!
unless you rectify these errors, of your making, I will simply leave.
In recent years, the concept of boundaries has been at the center of influential research agendas in anthropology, history, political science, social psychology, and sociology. This article surveys some of these developments while describing the value added provided by the concept, particularly concerning the study of relational processes. It discusses literatures on (a) social and collective identity; (b) class, ethnic/racial, and gender/sex inequality; (c) professions, knowledge, and science; and (d) communities, national identities, and spatial boundaries. It points to similar processes at work across a range of institutions and social locations. It also suggests paths for further developments, focusing on the relationship between social and symbolic boundaries, cultural mechanisms for the production of boundaries, difference and hybridity, and cultural membership and group classifications.
A number of commentators have suggested that the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist regime of political economy has had positive consequences for sociology, including the reinforcement of critical sociologies (Burawoy, 2005; Steinmetz, 2005). This article argues that, although disciplinary hierarchies have been destabilized, what is emerging is a new form of instrumental knowledge, that of applied interdisciplinary social studies. This development has had a particular impact upon sociology. Savage and Burrows (2007), for example, argue that sociological knowledge no longer has a privileged claim to authority and is increasingly in competition with social knowledge produced by the private sector and agencies of the public sector. The response of many sociologists to such claims has been to reassert the importance of the discipline as the purveyor of critically relevant knowledge about society. The article traces how the idea of internal critique within sociology has developed to embrace ‘knowing capitalism’ (Thrift, 2005), at the same time as declaring the impossibility of sociological knowledge. The critique of sociology also becomes the critique of critique and what remains is the instrumentalization of knowledge. Where many sociologists continue to claim a special interest in critical knowledge, the article suggests that, in contrast, we potentially confront the problem that such knowledge may itself be facing a crisis of reproduction.
ABSTRACT Swedberg‟s two-volume,collection of essays covering,New Developments,in Economic Sociology contains some excellent material, worthy of study by both economists and sociologists. However, there are definitional and conceptual problems in the whole project of „economic sociology‟ exacerbated,by the disappearance,of any consensus,concerning,the boundaries,between,the disciplines of sociology and economics. Neither has „economic sociology‟ acquired an adequately clear identity through the use of distinctive concepts or theories. Its future prospects are further questioned by recent changes within economics itself, including greater attention to institutional structures, and the abandonment of strictly self- interested and context-independent rationality. - 1 - Prospects for Economic Sociology:
Humanity and the very notion of the human subject are under threat from postmodernist thinking which has declared not only the 'Death of God' but also the 'Death of Man'. This book is a revindication of the concept of humanity, rejecting contemporary social theory that seeks to diminish human properties and powers. Archer argues that being human depends on an interaction with the real world in which practice takes primacy over language in the emergence of human self-consciousness, thought, emotionality and personal identity - all of which are prior to, and more basic than, our acquisition of a social identity. This original and provocative new book from leading social theorist Margaret S. Archer builds on the themes explored in her previous books Culture and Agency (CUP 1988) and Realist Social Theory (CUP 1995). It will be required reading for academics and students of social theory, cultural theory, political theory, philosophy and theology.
This book examines the intellectual contribution made by Frankfurt School Critical Theory to our understanding of modern life. Thematically organized and offering a strong mix of historical and contemporary material, it considers the work of both the first and second generation. While the work of the latter is often taken to exceed that of the former, the author suggests that insights gleaned by both, regarding the human subject, offer a significant alternative to post-modern ideas.
We are now in a position to return to the question posed in the first chapter of the character and scientific status of the reorientation of social thought that took place at the end of the nineteenth-century. There is little doubt that such a reorientation did in fact take place, and that this reorientation did not simply involve a change in a number of elements of a given system. It involved a fundamental change in the ‘structure of the theoretical system’ (Parsons, 1949, p. 7). According to Parsons this change was marked by the substantive advance represented by the emergence of a voluntaristic theory of action out of the convergence of the earlier positivistic and idealistic theories of action. However, I hope to have shown in the course of this book that the development of marginalism and of Weberian sociology was not marked by such a substantive scientific revolution. The substantive foundation of marginalism and of Weber’s sociology continues to be the naturalistic conception of the social relations of production of capitalist society that characterised nineteenth-century classical political economy, vulgar economy, sociology and historicism. The end of the nineteenth-century saw a reorientation of social thought, not a scientific revolution. In Parsonian terms this reorientation was marked by a reformulation of the relationship between the theory of action and the theory of social structure.
Responding to the growing gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study, the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. These public sociologies should not be left out in the cold, but brought into the framework of our discipline. In this way we make public sociology a visible and legitimate enterprise, and, thereby, invigorate the discipline as a whole. Accordingly, if we map out the division of sociological labor, we discover antagonistic interdependence among four types of knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public. In the best of all worlds the flourishing of each type of sociology is a condition for the flourishing of all, but they can just as easily assume pathological forms or become victims of exclusion and subordination. This field of power beckons us to explore the relations among the four types of sociology as they vary historically and nationally, and as they provide the template for divergent individual careers. Finally, comparing disciplines points to the umbilical chord that connects sociology to the world of publics, underlining sociology's particular interest in the defense of civil society, itself beleaguered by the encroachment of markets and states.
The common, of course, was the land owned by everyone in the village. By the late middle ages, feudal lords were claiming this land as their own private property. In universities today, we can discern two opposing kinds of scholarship: that which studies the people who steal a goose from off the common (‘Goose From Off the Common Studies’, or G.F.C. for short) and that which studies those who steal the common from the goose (‘Common From the Goose Studies’, or C.F.G. for short). If the ‘mainstream’ in practically every discipline consists almost entirely of the former, Marxism is our leading example of the latter.
This paper explores the disciplinary status of social psychology through an analysis of the history of the boundary relations of psychology, sociology, and social psychology. After outlining some research on the nature of scientific disciplines, on the role of rhetoric in the constitution of disciplines, and on "boundary work," I consider the singular importance of social psychology as a discipline for the analysis of boundary relations, examining its units of analysis and its "disciplining." The boundaries of the disciplines of social psychology were seen as fluid, contingent, local, and contestable, reflecting the thematic preoccupations, disciplinary origins, and meta-theoretical commitments of social psychologists, of the parent disciplines, and of those who represent disciplinary practices. (C) 2000 John Wiley Br Sons, Inc.
Dialectics has to do with how the "bigger picture," both spatially and temporally (past and future), enters into and affects whatever we perceive directly and immediately. All the categories associated with dialectical thinking help bring some part of this bigger picture, to which we all belong, into focus. Special attention is given here to how to study the socialist/communist future that lies "concealed" inside the capitalist present as a necessary part of the dialectical analysis of capitalism.
Dialectics has to do with how the "bigger picture,"both spatially and temporally (past and future), enters into and affects whatever we perceive directly and immediately. All the categories associated with dialectical thinking help bring some part of this bigger picture, to which we all belong, into focus. Special attention is given here to how to study the socialist/communist future that lies "concealed" inside the capitalist present as a necessary part of the dialectical analysis of capitalism.
C. Wright Mills' classic The Sociological Imagination has inspired generations of students to study Sociology. However, the book is nearly half a century old. What would a book address, aiming to attract and inform students in the 21st century? This is the task that Steve Fuller sets himself in this major new invitation to study Sociology. The book: " critically examines the history of the social sciences to discover what the key contributions of Sociology have been and how relevant they remain " demonstrates how biological and sociological themes have been intertwined from the beginning of both disciplines, from the 19th century to the present day " covers virtually all of sociology's classic theorists and themes " provides a glossary of key thinkers and concepts. This book sets the agenda for imagining Sociology in the 21st century and will attract students and professionals alike.
Responding to the growing gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study, the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. These public sociologies should not be left out in the cold, but brought into the framework of our discipline. In this way we make public sociology a visible and legitimate enterprise, and, thereby, invigorate the discipline as a whole. Accordingly, if we map out the division of sociological labor, we discover antagonistic interdependence among four types of knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public. In the best of all worlds the flourishing of each type of sociology is a condition for the flourishing of all, but they can just as easily assume pathological forms or become victims of exclusion and subordination. This field of power beckons us to explore the relations among the four types of sociology as they vary historically and nationally, and as they provide the template for divergent individual careers. Finally, comparing disciplines points to the umbilical chord that connects sociology to the world of publics, underlining sociology's particular investment in the defense of civil society, itself beleaguered by the encroachment of markets and states.
'Social construction' is a central metaphor in contemporary social science, yet it is used and understood in widely divergent and indeed conflicting ways by different thinkers. Most commonly, it is seen as radically opposed to realist social theory. Dave Elder-Vass argues that social scientists should be both realists and social constructionists, and that coherent versions of these ways of thinking are entirely compatible with each other. This book seeks to transform prevailing understandings of the relationship between realism and constructionism. It offers a thorough ontological analysis of the phenomena of language, discourse, culture, and knowledge, and shows how this justifies a realist version of social constructionism. In doing so, however, it also develops an analysis of these phenomena that is significant in its own right.
This paper explores complexity and a strategy for non-linear analysis with a consistent ontological, epistemological and methodological orientation. Complexity is defined and approaches in the natural sciences, ecosystems research, discursive studies and the social sciences are reviewed. In social science, theoretical efforts associated with problems of social order (Luhmann), critical sociology (Byrne) and post-structuralism (Cilliers) as well as representative studies are examined. The review concludes that there is need for an approach that will address morphogenesis and facilitate analysis of multilateral mutual causal relations. The remainder of the paper approaches these matters by outlining Archer's approach to morphogenesis, Maruyama's morphogenetic casual-loop model of epistemology and illustrating Maruyama's method for analysis which employs both positive and negative feedback loops. The result is a strategy based on morphogenetic causal loop models that can be used to analyze structuring and the connections through which structures may be reproduced or transformed.
This paper interrogates influential contemporary accounts of interdisciplinarity, in which it is portrayed as offering new ways of rendering science accountable to society and/or of forging closer relations between scientific research and innovation. The basis of the paper is an eighteen-month empirical study of three interdisciplinary fields that cross the boundaries between the natural sciences or engineering, on the one hand, and the social sciences or arts, on the other. The fields are: 1) environmental and climate change research, 2) ethnography in the IT industry and 3) art-science. In the first part of the paper, in contrast to existing accounts, we question the idea that interdisciplinarity should be understood in terms of the synthesis of two or more disciplines. We stress the forms of agonism and antagonism that often characterize relations between disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, and distinguish between three modes of interdisciplinarity. In the second part we outline three distinctive logics or rationales that guide interdisciplinary research. In addition to the logics of accountability and innovation, we identify the logic of ontology, that is, an orientation apparent in diverse interdisciplinary practices in each of our three fields towards effecting ontological transformation in the objects and relations of research. While the three logics are interdependent, they are not reducible to each other and are differently entangled in each of the fields. We point to the potential for invention in such interdisciplinary practices and, against the equation of disciplinary research with autonomy, to the possibility of forms of interdisciplinary autonomy.
"This book undertakes the first general assessment of ecological economics from a Marxist point of view, and shows how Marxist political economy can make a substantial contribution to ecological economics. The analysis is developed in terms of four basic issues: (1) nature and economic value; (2) the treatment of nature as capital; (3) the significance of the entropy law for economic systems; (4) the concept of sustainable development. In each case, it is shown that Marxism can help ecological economics fulfill its commitments to multi-disciplinarity, methodological pluralism, and historical openness. In this way, a foundation is constructed for a substantive dialogue between Marxists and ecological economists."--BOOK JACKET.
Principles of Scientific Sociology represents a major attempt to redirect the course of contemporary sociological thought. It is clear, well-organized, innovative, and original in its discussion of the context and methods of sociology conceived as a natural science. Wallace delineates the subject matter of sociology, classifies its variables, presents a logic of inquiry, and advocates the use of this logic for the acceptance or rejection of hypotheses or theories and for the solving of human problems. Social scientists, including political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, social psychologists, and students of social phenomena among nonhumans, will find this work indispensable reading. Principles of Scientifc Sociology emphasizes the relationship between pure and applied sociological analysis. The essential contributions of each to the other are specified. Relationships between the substantive concepts of the sociology of humans, on the one hand, and the sociology of nonhumans, on the other, are systematized. In an attempt to put sociological analysis on a firm scientific basis, the book contains a concluding chapter focusing on central premises of natural science and their applicability to sociology. Wallace identifies the simple elements and relationships that sociological analysis requires if it is to lead to an understanding of complex social phenomena. On this basis, he considers the substantive elements and relations that comprise structural functionalism, historical materialism, symbolic interactionism, and other approaches to social data. He develops groundwork for standardizing these elements so that the contexts of different analyses may become rigorously comparable. The result is a fine, one-volume synthesis of sociological theory.
Drawing on recent work in the sociology of science, we propose a sociological approach for understanding the process by which statistical methods were originally incorporated into the social sciences in America. In a departure from past accounts, which have viewed early statistical developments in the United States as part of the history of separate academic disciplines, we analyze interdisciplinary relations and local institutional conditions in turn-of-the-century America to elucidate the adoption and use of statistical methods by James McKeen Cattell in psychology, Franz Boas in anthropology, Franklin H. Giddings in sociology, and Henry L. Moore in economics. We argue that these four thinkers were doing boundary work to legitimize their disciplines in a competitive interdisciplinary field, where they confronted the "newcomer's dilemma" of conformity versus differentiation in relation to other disciplines. All four innovators turned to statistical methods to demonstrate compliance with acceptable scientific models and at the same time carve out a distinctive mode of statistical analysis to differentiate their own discipline from the others. Our analysis also shows that these developments occurred only under certain local institutional conditions. Cattell, Boas, Giddings, and Moore were faculty members at Columbia University at a time when the University had gained a competitive lead in the area of statistics over rival universities. Determined to preserve this institutional advantage, Columbia provided a conducive setting for the interdisciplinary process of the incorporation of statistical methods into the social sciences.
PART ONE: INTRODUCING CRITICAL REALISM Introduction Key Features of Critical Realism in Practice A Brief Introduction PART TWO: POSTMODERN-REALIST ENCOUNTERS Introduction Realism for Sceptics Postmodernism and the Three 'PoMo' Flips Essentialism, Social Constructionism and Beyond PART THREE: Social Science and Space Introduction Space and Social Theory Geohistorical Explanation and Problems of Narrative PART FOUR: CRITICAL REALISM: FROM CRITIQUE TO NORMATIVE THEORY Introduction Critical Realism and the Limits to Critical Social Science Ethics Unbound For a Normative Turn in Social Theory
In the Cultural Boundaries of Science, Gieryn lays out a next generation of controversy studies building on the foundation set in the 1970's and 1980's by British STS scholars like Harry Collins. Gieryn, like his predecessors, looks at how controversies become settled but through the innovative lens of boundary-work, in which parties vie for the epistemic authority of science. Only after the dust settles does science, that prize offering real world stakes in reputations, money, and status, become a concrete set of practices attributed to a restricted community. He makes his case by using a separate chapter to look at how this process unfolded in five historical controversies, including the debate around cold fusion when science temporarily reached beyond its traditional community to encompass the mass media and national politics. [Nitin&Chad STS 901-Fall 2006]
Interdisciplinarity has been a key term in the ecological debate ever since its advent in the early 1960s. The paper addresses these historical links and how the two terms ‘interdisciplinary’ and ‘ecology’ have influenced each other. The later concept ‘sustainable development’ is also truly interdisciplinary, including physical, biological, socio-economic and cultural, as well as normative, mechanisms, contexts and effects operating at scales ranging from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Policies to promote sustainable development need to be based on the type of interdisciplinary thinking that has been advocated for several decades within the ecological debate. This applies not least to research into the sustainability aspects of urban development, the case discussed in this paper. Despite longstanding requests for interdisciplinarity, the development within the academic world has proceeded in the opposite direction. Many of the most influential metatheoretical perspectives virtually prohibit, or at best strongly discourage, the inclusion of insights about certain parts of reality. Here, critical realism could play a very important role as an underlabourer of interdisciplinarity.
The concerns of this paper come from an attempt to develop sociological inquiry from women's standpoint and to create a sociology for people. It is a project that must rely on the possibility of “telling the truth.” The poststructuralist/postmodernist critique of representation and reference creates a fundamental problem for this project. It challenges the very possibility of a sociology committed to inquiry into the actualities of the social as people live them.
The poststructuralist/postmodernist critique of the unitary subject of modernity is central. It is argued that the subject and subject‐object relations are inescapably in and of discourse and language. Both subject and object are discursively constituted and there is no beyond to which reference can be made in establishing the truth of statements. Rather subjects are constituted only in discourse and are fragmented, multiple, diverse. This paper argues that, though the unitary subject is rejected, an individuated subject survives though multiplied and that a central failure of poststructuralism/postmodernism is to come to grips with the social as actual socially organized practices.
Using the theories of George Herbert Mead and Mikhail Bakhtin, the paper goes on to offer an alternative understanding of referring and “telling the truth.” Observations of sequences in which people are identifying an object for one another are described to demonstrate the radically and ineluctably social character of the process. The argument is then extrapolated with further examples to offer an alternative account of referring. A description of using a street map in an actual context of “finding our way” exemplifies how a science might be inserted into a local practice. Telling the truth, it is argued, is always and only in just such actual sequences of dialogue among people directly present to one another or indirectly present in the texts they have produced. My own and others' observations are used to reconceptualize “referring” in general as integral to a social act of finding and recognizing an object as a local performance. In conclusion, I suggest that the example of a map offers to sociology a model that does not displace and subordinate people's experience but can be used by them to expand their knowledge beyond it.
This paper is premised on the view that it is premature to write about the end of modernity. Moreover it is argued that, for all the flaws of early Enlightenment philosophy, what Jurgen Habermas has termed the `project of modernity' should be seen as incomplete, rather than abandoned. Drawing more generally on Habermas' theories, five metatheoretical theses are outlined and elaborated. These, it is suggested, might set the parameters for a fin-de-siècle sociology, geared above all to the rationalisation of the lifeworld, which is both credible and critical in orientation.
Taking the lead from complexity theory and complex systems methodology, the article argues that we are engaged in a contradictory process when encountering, analysing and dealing with complexity. We face opposite tendencies that indicate an in-built dynamic between the increase of complexity and its reduction. The increase partly comes through evolution, defined as the transmission of information and partly from the desire for a human-built world that functions more efficiently. The reduction of complexity is due partly to the necessity of minimizing unwanted and unintended consequences of its increase, and partly due to the continued re-alignment between social systems and their environments. The article examines the public debate about human stem cell research, the debates in the 18th century about the free circulation of commodities and opinions, and the attempts to provide answers to the question debated between Einstein and Freud: why war? The article concludes by arguing that the plea for a re-alignment of scientific disciplines will not suffice. Instead, the study of the co-evolution between science and society offers itself as a strategic research site by focusing on the dynamic interplay between the increase of complexity and its reduction.