Applied Sociology Research Articles

La Visitation: Inequality and the Social Fabric of Marseille

Unlike many other major metropolitan centers in France, Marseille has not suffered high rates of collective violence and rioting in its public housing estates ( cités). Yet it is also true that the cités of Marseille are as feared and stigmatized as any in France. This article explores research on the city’s housing estates and presents original ethnographic work that helps to explain Marseille’s exceptionalism. I find that local efforts at community education by active residents of La Visitation, a typical mid-sized Marseille cité, enhance social cohesion and neighborhood pride, despite persistent problems of underemployment among its young residents. I also describe a successful effort to use a produced video (an application of visual sociology) to draw attention to and support for residents’ local initiatives.

“When You Come to the Fork in the Road, Take It . . .” Aspirations for Applied and Clinical Sociology

This 2016 presidential address presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology (AACS) looks forward to possible alternative forms of the discipline. Not intended as a purely academic article, this essay provides an overview of five “aspirations” that the presenter has for applied and clinical sociology and AACS: 1. A sociology that uses its perspectives and tools creatively. 2. Applied sociology will more aggressively mine the human stories that make human social life. 3. Applied sociology will ethically engage action and “doing” to produce positive social change. 4. Applied and Clinical Sociology will demonstrate its value, broaden its functional appeal, and create paths to diversity. Known for its integrative nature as a problem-solution-focused being, AACS will be a model twenty-first-century organization. 5. Sociology will clarify its core and demonstrate its direct value. Support solutions to societal and client problems. The address provides some novel, sometimes humorous, ways to achieve these aspirations.

Legal representation and trial outcomes: a bourdieusian analysis of chinese criminal court practices

Based on a rare survey of criminal justice practitioners from one large coastal province in China, this study provides an application of Bourdieusian sociology of juridical practice in Chinese criminal courts. We test whether and how criminal trial outcomes can be predicted by using variables measuring various forms of Bourdieusian capital. We found that measurements based on self-reported efficacy of legal representation practices during the pretrial and trail stages (as activated judicial capital), more so than those indicating respondents’ personal and professional statuses (either inherited or acquired capital), yield greater and more consistent impact on the trial outcomes. Implications for future theory, methodology and Chinese rule of law reform are discussed.

Encouraging Inclusiveness in Doing Sociology

Presidential Address at the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology Annual meeting in Pittsburgh, PA, October 11, 2014. The following address provides my thoughts about how the discipline of sociology could enhance it effectiveness as an agent of positive social change while simultanously increasing its professional legitimacy.

The Great Ones All Had Them

Applied sociology has moved slowly in developing the next generation of applied sociologists. A mentoring program geared at shepherding may promote the field and help to retain the next generation of applied sociologists. First, I will list some of the great philosophers, sociologists, and agents of social change and their mentors. Second, I will describe sociologist George Herbert Mead’s social self and link that concept to the significance of storytelling. Third, I will provide a definition of mentoring and describe several types of mentoring models. Fourth, I will summarize results from empirical studies that demonstrate mentoring’s effectiveness. Finally, this address offers a call for action that we create mentoring opportunities, actively recruit new members, and retain current ones.

Legal interpreting at a turning point

MON TI is an academic, peer-reviewed and international journal that is published by three Spanish universities with T&I programs (Universitat d’Alacant, Universitat Jaume I de Castelló and Universitat de València). MON TI has a special topic for each issue. In past years these have included ‘Multidisciplinarity in Audiovisual Translation’ and ‘Applied Sociology in Translation’. This issue, MON TI ’s seventh, is the first one dedicated to legal interpreting.

Social Change and Progress in the Sociology of Robert Nisbet

This article discusses the ideas of progress and social change in the sociology of Robert Nisbet. It contends that Nisbet is a unique figure in US sociology given his conservative political views, his historicist understanding of social and political thought and his interest in the moral texture of sociological ideas. In terms of structure, the article proceeds in three steps. Firstly, it reconstructs the central tenets of Nisbet’s conception of social change, history and progress by looking at the role of metaphors and analogies in the construction of scientific statements. Secondly, the piece revisits his analysis of the rise of modern social institutions in America as an empirical application of sociology’s key distinction between community and society. Here, I pay special attention to Nisbet’s assessment of America’s transformation after WWI, as in his view the Great War paved the way for the definitive modernisation of American society. Finally, the article compares Nisbet’s arguments, as developed in the previous two sections, with Karl Lowith and Strauss’s critique of modern thought. I contend that mutual lessons can be learnt through an engagement between these philosophical critique of modern social science and Nisbet’s own critique of sociology.

Integrating Experiential Learning and Applied Sociology to Promote Student Learning and Faculty Research

Although the benefits of experiential learning for students are well documented, such courses are sometimes seen as a professional burden for faculty because they are very labor- and time-intensive endeavors. This paper suggests, however, that the time investment in experiential learning courses can be made more efficient if faculty members treat these courses not as discrete teaching moments but as long-term applied research projects that simultaneously advance students' research skills and faculty research agendas. We discuss our experiences using applied research and experiential learning as an example.

Sociology as Conversation: Zygmunt Bauman’s Applied Sociological Hermeneutics

Sociology as Conversation: Zygmunt Bauman’s Applied Sociological Hermeneutics

Realization of Copyright in Russia in the Sphere of Scientific Articles: The Experience of Applied Sociological Analysis

In this paper we on the basis of expert interview method generalize and analyze real social practices of Russian scientific journals linked to the realization of copyright allocation when publishing scientific articles. It was found that conclusion of written copyright agreement is performed only in exceptional cases and there are three types of such cases. The analysis of copyright allocation between an author and a journal showed the dependence of the allocation on the journal’s policy. As a rule, practically all the property rights, except for the right for author’s copy, are passed to journal. We also analyze the conditions for allocation of journal’s issues in the Internet. We have established that policy of Russian journals often includes granting of open access to articles. Main types of violations committed by Russian authors in respect of journals are generalized. The authors of the paper come to the conclusion that despite the fact the legislative framework concerning turnover and protection of intellectual property in the Russian Federation is by and large formed, the everyday practice in this area demonstrates significant stagnation in implementation of legally set standards. The realization of copyright in the sphere of publication of scientific articles in Russian journals in everyday practice is mainly regulated by the system of informal standards. Among them there are still the standards applied in the Soviet times.

Assemblage Thinking and the City: Implications for Urban Studies

The last decade has seen an increasing interest in the application of assemblage thinking, in geography, sociology, and urban studies. Different interpretations of the Deleuzian concept of assemblage give rise to the multiple articulations of the term in urban studies so far. This paper aims to review the recently published research on assemblage theory and explore the implications of assemblage thinking in urban studies. The study thus provides an overview of the most significant contributions in the area, including a succinct bibliography on the subject. The paper concludes that assemblage can be effectively adopted as a way of thinking in urban studies to provide a theoretical lens for understanding the complexity of the city problems by emphasising the relations between sociality and spatiality at different scales.

Vampires and Witches and Commandos, Oy Vey: Comic Book Appropriations of Lilith

Recent scholarship has identified multiple levels of interplay between American Jews and sequential art stories (comics). Many comics are now widely understood to be artifacts of the evolving Jewish American experience; this interplay is understood to have grown out of the cultural history, sociology, and social-psychology of the Jews who created, produced, and consumed these comics. But relatively little research has been done on the appropriation and incorporation of Jewish Tradition (Heb. Mesorah ) in comics and how this incorporation mirrors the changing relationship of Jewish culture to American (predominantly Protestant) culture. Using textual and visual criticism, supplemented by the selective application of Jewish studies, mythological studies, sociology, and feminist theory, the authors offer insight into an aspect of that appropriation by tracking a single figure from Jewish folklore that comic writers and artists have drawn on, again and again: Lilith, first wife of Adam, hypersexual transgressor, demon mother, infanticide, and evil personified. Lilith’s trajectory and revision through pulp visual narratives over the past forty years sees her evolve from the traditional demon harridan into a feminist antihero, a mother seeking redemption from her daughter, and, eventually, an American superhero teammate. Her literary-visual transformations offer a pop culture perspective on Jewish Tradition’s evolution from a despised to an accepted element in American culture. Moreover, the continuous hybridization of Lilith’s story with Christian motifs, classical mythology, contemporary issues, and American history is a marker of a larger rapid and distinctively American assimilation of Jewish Tradition into the American intellectual and imaginative canon.

The Cost of Collaboration: Reflections Upon Randall Collins’ Theory of Collective Intellectual Production via Émile Durkheim: A Biography

The Cost of Collaboration: Reflections Upon Randall Collins' Theory of Collective Intellectual Production via Emile Durkheim: A Biography Marcel Fournier, Emile Durkheim: A Biography. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. 700pp.When instructing his junior colleagues, Emile Durkheim argued that there was no point in reviewing a book for L'Annee Sociologique only to itemize or describe the contents. There also had to be a theoretical contribution. The commentary, he said, should reflect and advance the wider agendas of the sociological discipline that they were pioneering. With fidelity to this spirit, it seems ceremonially appropriate to reflect on a noted application of Durkheimian sociology using Marcel Fournier's newly translated biography of Durkheim as our stimulus.In his social theory, Durkheim magically squared the circle between group morality and individualism in modernity. By insisting that the core value pattern of organic solidarity was the cult of the individual, he suggested that there was no contradiction between intense group belonging and personal freedom, between collective life and individual accomplishment. Yet after reading Fournier, one wishes that what works so proficiently in theory could fare better in practice. Durkheim's life is revealed as one in which group belonging had an ambivalent and surprisingly complex relationship with his own opportunities for creativity.Let's begin with a thought experiment. Imagine the following as a method to improve scholarly output and deep thinking. A truly brilliant and driven individual is placed in a cell. Books and food are passed through a hole in a door. Perhaps there are writing materials. Social interaction is minimized. This is not an absurd suggestion. It is a method used historically by monastic orders for precisely such a reason. Now, imagine a parallel universe in which the same scholar is engaged in intensive intellectual interaction. The scholar leads a team of students in collective activities, shares ideas, and experiences plenty of solidarity. Which method will lead to the maximum volume of quality work? kind of output can each system of intellectual production sustain? Which path will generate the new ideas and books that will stand the test of time and still be read a century hence? Emile Durkheim provides an interesting test with which to reflect upon this very issue.Conveniently, we have a new resource for our task. First published in French in 2007, Marcel Fournier's monumental biography of Emile Durkheim is now available in English. It provides an exhaustive and thoroughly useful year-by-year account of his professional life.For a long time, the best source of detailed biographical information has been that of Steven Lukes from the mid-1970s. Efforts by Giddens, Coser, and Alexander also stand out as oft-cited texts. These authors were concerned, albeit at varying levels of intensity, with reconstructing Durkheim's thought or getting to its essence. The animating questions were: What did he really mean? and Has scholarship interpreted him correctly? They also situate Durkheim in terms of his contribution to social theory on, for example, the sources of social order, the nature of modernity, and forms of solidarity. Driven by current theoretical concerns, biographical information in such works has operated largely as a context or resource for particular readings of the master.Fournier has a somewhat different approach. His organization is chronological rather than thematic. His interpretations of Durkheim's ideas have a defttouch. One might use the term diplomatic. Avoiding controversy, he aims at consensus and somehow floats above ongoing disputes, such as whether or not Durkheim's move to a religious sociology marked a deep epistemological break from his earlier stance as a positivist student of social facts. Indeed, Fournier barely refers to present-day scholarship. One might have expected him to discuss ongoing efforts to reconfigure Durkheim as a theorist of the body, sexuality, or multiculturalism. …

When and Where I Enter: Teaching the Concepts of Critical Pedagogy and Applied Sociology Through Study Abroad Programs

When and Where I Enter: Teaching the Concepts of Critical Pedagogy and Applied Sociology Through Study Abroad Programs

The Applied Sociology of Tourism. The Up Skills of the Facilitator in the Italian Hospitality Industry

The sociology of tourism can be considered applied sociology. Therefore, it is necessary to ascertain the up skills of the sociologist in the process of tourism planning. The present paper refers to the idea of philosophic practitioner as a theoretical model and considers the sociologist as a facilitator of local tourism development. To this purpose, I discuss some topics and working tools that can be used when the sociologist is asked to help local stakeholders create significant involvement of the local community. In particular, I propose some self-assessment tools to be included in a tourism process centred on local participation. The paper focuses on fundamental questions concerning the techniques of bottom up regulation and the techniques to facilitate the passage from individualism to collaborative marketing in order to attract visitors suitable to the destination. The discussions are based inductively on tourism economic policies initiated inItalyto create collaboration between local institutions and enterprises aimed at integrating local resources (accommodation structures, transport, gastronomy, art and archaeology, etc.) and creating districts or systems of Made inItalyhospitality. The results indicate the sociologist of tourism as a facilitator of the collaborative partnership in support of the destination management. Many difficulties in creating tourism districts or systems are due to the absence of this type of professional figure.

PRZEKŁAD AUDIOWIZUALNY JAKO WYZWANIE DLA WSPÓCZESNEGO TŁUMACZA. NARZĘDZIA ORAZ METODY WYKORZYSTYWANE W PROCESIE TRANSLATORYCZNYM

The main objective of this paper shows in diachronic perspective the methods applied in audiovisual translations such as dubbing, voiceover and subtitling as well as including the secondary aids such as audio description (AD), narration, surtitles in operas, sign language and subtitles for the hard–of–hearing together with simultaneous interpreting applied in live programmes or TV interviews. Th is article is a comparative study and has many references to audiovisual translations as practised in Spain and Poland.The author also analyzes programmes and tools aiding the translation process, emphasising the role of the translator, whose application of linguistic equivalents and sociology of culture makes him the co-author of the end result.

The application of the Simulated Society method in Social Sciences: a commitment to its coordinated implementation from related legal disciplines

The adjustment of Spain to the European Higher Education Area has involved important changes in the educational paper of the professors, in the methodology and educational aims and in the systems of evaluation. This project answers to these needs of adjustment and explains how a new educational methodology (Sim Soc) has been applied to the Double Degree of Law and Administration and Management (DADE) of the University of Saragossa, of a way coordinated between both Law subjects -Constitutional law and Public International law-, with the collaboration of Economic subjects -Applied Economy and Sociology-.

Lawrence A. Scaff, Max Weber in America

Lawrence A. Scaff, Max Weber in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011, 311 pp. $28.63 hardcover (978-0-691-14779-6) In this handsomely produced work, Scaff has managed an unusual accomplishment of elevating what is proper to a lengthy footnote into a highly credible treatise on Weber's grand tour of America. The visit was made with his wife Marianne between August 20 and November 27, 1904. On journey home to Germany, Weber noted that he had travelled 5,000 miles in US and had spent 180 hours, mostly on railroad (p. 181). His overall conclusion was that trip was well worthwhile. Scaff's labour of love in documenting this trip confirms its significance. It is proper that an American should write this study which offsets Weber's seemingly impregnable German character. From Scaff's analysis, a less stern and more humane figure emerges, notably of a traveller who is deeply anxious to learn about all facets of American way of life. The first and more substantial part of study deals with visit itself and second with evolution of Weber's reception in US. The two parts combine admirably and what emerges is a work of meticulous scholarship where all aspects of visit are exhaustively and comprehensively covered; fruits of labour appearing in highly detailed bibliographical notes. Additionally, at end of study Scaff provides a detailed itinerary of American journey (pp. 252-6). To understand significance of this study, reference needs to be made to growth, of late, of minor cottage industries which have sprung up around Durkheim, Weber and Simmel. These reflect a growing interest in contextualizing their works. This application of sociology of knowledge to discipline itself has led to a need to attend to biographies of these thinkers and to explore shaping of their canonical works with a view to drawing out sounder understandings of their reception. This work is a significant contribution to these shifts in sociological expectations and sensibilities. Scaff has produced a judicious, very complete and absorbing study, which, unexpectedly, effects a re-casting of image of Weber as an inveterate ethnographer who treated US as an extensive site for fieldwork. Many new and illuminating insights emerge from this study which fully deserves widest readership in sociology. The 1944 musical, Meet Me in St. Louis and Weber have one thing in common: both were concerned with World's Fair held there in 1904. As part of Fair, a Congress of Arts and Science was convened in September of that year. As Scaff indicates, it was a huge affair with 128 sections covering spectrum of academic thought, with some 300 papers being delivered (p. 54). The invitation to Weber in 1903 to give a paper formed pretext of his American trip. The timing of visit was doubly significant, as Scaff indicates. Weber's trip occurred between writings of Part I and II of The Protestant Ethic (pp. 16-20; 184-190). The experience of America, his explorations of elective affinities between Protestantism, and character and moral basis of capitalism in a democratic ethos fleshed out his theoretical material for study. The second matter of significance is that trip marked rejuvenation of Weber and his return to public life after his melancholic illness. Springing to life again, Weber re-cast his image to re-emerge, unexpectedly, as a highly engaged intellectual, one deeply curious and anxious to take every opportunity to investigate this progressive nation and to explore all its social, cultural, political, educational, and religious facets. Scaff indicates well that these American investigations left a mark on Weber in ways that influenced his later highly productive sociological career. On trip, Weber was inveterately curious about religion in US and Scaff makes interesting point that the complex biography of 'Protestant Ethic' thesis can be pursued further in Weber's habit of observing religious services and practices (p. …

Sociology

Sociological careers vary widely within and outside of the academy. The decision to pursue a sociological career and the path the career takes are influenced by extraneous variables. This address is a retrospective look at the 2011 Association of Applied and Clinical Sociology (AACS) president’s sociological career from the rise of the actable idea to his speech at the 2011 AACS conference.

Investigating the Apathy toward Applied Sociology

The number of students either majoring in or enrolling for applied sociology degrees at the undergraduate level is small. This paper investigates two questions spurred by this dilemma: what factors have led to a proportionately low number of students majoring in applied sociology? And what steps can applied sociologists take to increase student interest in applied sociology as a major? A review of literature around the problem indicates that sociology may be invisible to the general public, including many college-bound students, and what can be seen of the sociological world portrays an image that does not appeal to that student “market.” Research conducted through e-mail-based questionnaires sent to sociology students and department heads reinforces the notion that the sociological community is failing to act cohesively and reveals a few potential steps applied sociologists could take to help their recruitment efforts.