Excellent and meaningful sociology from all over the world

Abstract

Since 1986, International Sociology has pursued the objective to fill a void in the field of sociological publications by searching out the best contributions to sociology worldwide. While trying to make sociological work from all latitudes more visible, International Sociology has increased its position among academic journals, demonstrating that truly international forums can be a reference in our discipline. The work of Christine Inglis to this end has been remarkable, achieving high scientific standards with great geographical expansion with regard to submissions and publishing articles from more than 50 countries. Now the helm of this amazing ship is moving from Asia Pacific Sydney to Mediterranean Barcelona, and we are eager to continue navigating the journal in the same direction and respond to the ISA mandate of enhancing a scientific platform for global sociology. Lately the social sciences have been under threat, not only for the imposition of market oriented criteria, but also for citizens’ demands of contributions from research on societal issues. However, sociological theories and research have already contributed to reduce inequality or to improve human conditions in a particular region, locality or social sector. Through International Sociology, scholars from all over the world will contribute to overcome this threat by analyzing how these social improvements are being achieved in their contexts as a result of the implementation and/or the influence of sociological research results. Impact issues are becoming increasingly demanded in science, with the advance of concepts such as public knowledge, usable knowledge, or social impact. These concepts are, in fact, at the very origin of our discipline, and sociology has thus a lot to contribute. In this new period, our journal is eager to welcome research that include good examples of social impact and reflection papers that shed light to this debate. Weber has already explained how dominance of the instrumental rationality from the modern state and capitalist enterprises generates loss of meaning. The social sciences cannot be instrumentally used by state and enterprises, but rather recreate their original meaning in the framework of current society. Social sciences were born with the rise of democratic revolutions and the moral grounds of equality, justice and freedom: citizens wanted to govern themselves and for that they needed to know themselves. Sociology has provided the analyses that allow both the understanding and the transformation of 589888 ISS0010.1177/0268580915589888International SociologyEditorial research-article2015