Contemporary American Sociology Research Articles

Recovering John Dewey’s Lost Vision for Social Science in Contemporary American Sociology

Recovering John Dewey’s Lost Vision for Social Science in Contemporary American Sociology

The denial of slavery in contemporary American sociology

American sociology has largely neglected enslavement as a topic of study, despite slavery’s being one of the most foundational, pervasive, and far-reaching social institutions in the West. In this paper I explain this scholarly neglect as stemming from three factors. First, disciplinary parochialism has blinded US sociologists to the complex interweaving of enslavement with the systems of oppression that sociology has decided to care about. Second, presentism, an ahistorical “account” of the past that culminates in a preference for present-day events and institutions, has relegated slavery to history. Finally, theoretical frameworks that revise enslavement as “ennobling” erase the long-term effects of psychological and physical violence on the descendants of enslaved peoples.

Social Structure and Culture in the Study of Race and Urban Poverty

This essay proposes a critical analysis of issues, evidence and policy perspectives pertaining to social structure, culture and agency in the study of race and urban poverty in contemporary American sociology.

Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach. By Douglas V. Porpora. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 249. $35.99 (paper).The Relational Subject. By Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret S. Archer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 356. $37.95 (paper).

<i>Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach</i>. By Douglas V. Porpora. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 249. $35.99 (paper).<i>The Relational Subject</i>. By Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret S. Archer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 356. $37.95 (paper).

Socioeconomic Attainments of Japanese Brazilians and Japanese Americans

This paper investigates the socioeconomic attainments of Japanese Brazilians and Japanese Americans. The findings indicate that Japanese Brazilians have higher levels of education and wages than white Brazilians, while Japanese Americans have higher levels of education and wages than white Americans. These results are inconsistent with a conventional “white supremacy” model that is popular in contemporary American sociology. We argue that that model needs to be reformulated to more systematically encompass class characteristics such as education given their salience in the twenty-first century. When smaller demographic minority groups are able to obtain high levels of a scarce class resource that is greatly valued in a competitive economy, racist relations against them in the labor market may be ameliorated. In this case, the cost of discriminating against the minority greatly exceeds the gain by not discriminating. With “white supremacy,” white employers and white employees are rewarded with a long-term racial dividend by engaging in short-term public goods behaviors (i.e., a discriminatory “united front”) that promote institutionalized racism. Because economic transactions with a very small minority group are so limited, whites as a whole do not commonly receive much long-term economic gain from discriminating against them. The maintenance of institutionalized racism against a very small minority group with high levels of class credentials therefore breaks down as individual whites are more economically rewarded by hiring and transacting with productive members of the minority group in the short-term rather than waiting for a long-term racial dividend that is likely to be trivial.

Causality in Contemporary American Sociology: An Empirical Assessment and Critique

Using a unique data set of causal usage drawn from research articles published between 2006–2008 in the American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, this article offers an empirical assessment of causality in American sociology. Testing various aspects of what we consider the conventional wisdom on causality in the discipline, we find that (1) “variablistic” or “covering law” models are not the dominant way of making causal claims, (2) research methods affect but do not determine causal usage, and (3) the use of explicit causal language and the concept of “mechanisms” to make causal claims is limited. Instead, we find that metaphors and metaphoric reasoning are fundamental for causal claims-making in the discipline. On this basis, we define three dominant causal types used in sociology today, which we label the Probabilistic, Initiating and Conditioning types. We theorize this outcome as demonstrating the primary role that cognitive models play in providing inference-rich metaphors that allow sociologists to map causal relationships on to empirical processes.

What Is a Person? Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up By Christian Smith The University of Chicago Press. 2011. 528 pages. $40 cloth

With this book, Smith has made a seminal contribution to the field of work for social scientists who want, on the one hand, to insulate the realm of the human from the materialist reductionism of the evolutionary biological and psychological sciences and, on the other, to give up the obfuscating nonconcepts that are today almost always used in idealist arguments. The tendency in much of contemporary American sociology to imagine human endeavor as mostly or wholly inexplicable by reference to its material level has nearly always had its origins in a fundamentally religious notion of human exceptionalism, but these origins are usually carefully hidden away. Going forward, as it becomes harder for those who want to escape materialism to find an audience willing to accept their increasingly feeble attempts at a compromise position, the consistent among them will perhaps follow Smith, who has here produced a book on social theory that wears its theism unapologetically on its sleeve.

Whither Tocqueville in American Sociology?

This essay addresses the declining influence of Alexis de Tocqueville on contemporary American sociology. While Tocqueville was must reading some decades ago, inspiring several classic sociological studies published in the 1950s and 1960s, and while he remains an authoritative source in other social science disciplines, he has virtually disappeared from present-day sociology. Sociologists, it would seem, have left behind works such as Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the French Revolution despite Raymond Aron’s (Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. I, Anchor Books, New York, 1968) insistence that Tocqueville be counted among the discipline’s founders. While Meyer (J. Cl. Socio., 3:197–220, 2003) presumed to have addressed this subject, his argument sheds no light on the matter as he ignores the driving concern of Tocqueville’s work, namely, the tensions between the principle of equality and human freedom. I argue that conceptually sociologists today are in no position to reflect critically on equality and its relation to freedom. Since the turbulent 1960s egalitarian commitments have become embedded in the discipline and are thereby shielded from critical inquiry. At the same time, a conceptual fixation on power effectively pushed to the periphery the kinds of questions Tocqueville raised about the problem of authority in democracy and how authority may be encouraging of human freedom. Committed to advancing the principle of equality, however understood, and seeing nothing in authority but power, sociologists espouse faith in egalitarian, mass democracy whereas Tocqueville sought a critical understanding of it. This is much to the detriment of present-day sociologists, so many of whom demonstrate in their own work and professional behavior the democratic dilemmas Tocqueville warned us about.

Structural and institutional tendencies in the contemporary American sociology

This article analyzes some of the most salient structural and institutional features and tendencies in the contemporary American sociology. Such analysis is based on the argument that American sociology has been functioning as a global sociological incubator in which many of the most prominent sociologists in the various national sociological traditions have been educated and professionally developed. It is argued that the institutional structure of contemporary American sociology is established during the previous two (the Chicago and the Parsonian) stages of its development. The present structural and institutional tendencies are analyzed as a result of the efforts of American sociological community to adapt them to the structural changes in the American Society as a whole, and in particularly to the changes in the habitat in which sociology articulates itself as science and as a profession. From this perspective the analysis is focused on aspects of the professional institutions, professional demography, membership in professional associations, professional labor market and of the professional ethics. For this purpose the author utilizes the very reach ASA data-base Trend Data on the Profession, which contains 39 indicators. The article concludes that the data-base describes positive institutional tendencies in the contemporary American sociology. Such tendencies rebuilt sociologist's self-confidence. Yet, this time the enthusiasm and the excitement are far away from exaltation. Following the arguments developed by P. Berger, A. Abbott and others, the author concludes that current institutional tendencies in the American sociology are strongly affected by the globalization. One of the main global challenges of the institutional structures of American sociology is the robust and well till recently marginalized European sociology.

Book Review: A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology, edited by Ted R. Vaughan, Gideon Sjoberg, and Larry T. Reynolds. New York: General Hall, 1993

Book Review: A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology, edited by Ted R. Vaughan, Gideon Sjoberg, and Larry T. Reynolds. New York: General Hall, 1993

Book Review: A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology

Book Review: A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology

A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology.

A Critique of Contemporary American Sociology.

Legal Theory and Social Theory

While social theory and legal theory were once closely intertwined, contemporary American sociology pays scant attention to recent developments in legal theory. But the problems that legal theory currently wrestles with are very similar to those with which sociology is now centrally concerned. This essay reviews major schools of thought in contemporary legal theory to introduce sociologists to some potentially useful literatures on the meaning of rationality; on critical theory; on the importance of gender, race, and class in understanding social institutions; on the interpretive turn; on the relationship between structure and agency; and on the revival of pragmatism.

Some Reflections on the Feminist Scholarship in Sociology

The emergence of the women’s movement in the 1960s presents two challenges to sociology. The more obvious task is the analysis of a social movement: How did private problems get transformed into a collective protest at that particular historical moment? This article, however, addresses itself to the contribution of a social movement to the sociology of sociology. Feminist sociologists, in representing a disadvantaged group, claim to look at society from a new angle of vision. What was the impact upon the discipline of sociology of this new perspective? Feminist criticism of mainstream sociology revealed not only vast lacunae in our knowledge but flawed interpretations of social phenomena. Feminist theoreticians have extended their criticism to some epistomelogical positions of contemporary American sociology. The purpose of this article is two-fold. It illustrates some contributions to sociology by feminist scholars (including a few precursors). Secondly, some changing trends in feminist orientations are discerned and analyzed from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge.

Integrating Sociological Practice into Traditional Sociology Courses

During the past decade we have witnessed a renewed interest in practical applications of among both academic and nonacademic professional sociologists. Some evidence of this trend was offered recently by Friedman, when he described how practice. . . is arguably the single most striking development in contemporary American sociology (Friedman 1987, p. 11). Beside the renewed interest in sociological practice, however, teachers and students also have begun to show a concern about the practical applications of and about the relevance of in general. As Ruggiero and Weston (1986, pp. 224-225) note, this concern stems from (among other factors) the increased conservativism among current students, a concomitant concern with pragmatic rather than social issues, a replacement of an expressive orientation with a more instrumental orientation, and the increased competitiveness in the job market for liberal arts graduates. As a result, many students are shifting their interest away from dealing with race relations, social problems, and the militaryindustrial complex (i.e., broad social issues) to more vocationally oriented courses (Fleming andFrancis 1980; Olzak 1981; Ruggiero and Weston 1986, p. 224). Clearly, the classroom has become an arena for application and relevance in addition to its traditional concern for explanations of social life through research and theory. The theme of the 1988 Annual Sociological Practice Association conference was continuing the progress/ensuring the future. If we want to continue the progress and ensure the future of sociological practice, one place to start is traditional undergraduate courses. Indeed, in light of the aforementioned academic and non-

The Mixed Legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology

This article examines the legacy of the Chicago School of Sociology. Because the Chicago department so dominated sociology in the 1920s and 1930s, it created the mold or template on which new departments, or the expansion of older ones, were modeled in the 1930s and in the post-World War II period. The legacy of this situation is mixed: On the one hand, the Chicago department made sociology a legitimate discipline in a hostile academic environment, whereas, on the other hand, it helped create a discipline so diversified in substantive specialties, so atheoretical, and so concerned with narrow research and quantitative methods that serious problems of intellectual and organizational integration confront contemporary American sociology.

Provincialism and Internationalism in Contemporary American Sociology

This study examines the relative degree of culture-boundedness in mainline American sociological research in 1985 compared with British research at the same time and with American research two decades earlier Culture-boundedness is defined in terms of two dimensions: (a) the extent to which data are included from societies other than the local society (non-localism) and (b) the extent to which the possibilities of international influence and of variations in other societies are acknowledged (conditionalism). Cross-classification of dichotomies of these dimensions yields four types of research: provincialist (local, unconditional), contextualist (local conditional), generalist (non-local, unconditional) and internationalist (non-local, conditional). Classification of all substantive articles in the top two sociological journals in both countries indicates almost twice as much provincialist research in the United States than in the United Kingdom and little reduction in US sociology provincialism from the level in 1965. The implications of these findings and the importance of incorporating international data and perspectives in sociological research are discussed.

From Market to Manager

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. 608 pp. In 1965 John Higham drew attention to a new genre then emerging in American historical writing: "Deriving partly from studies in entrepreneurial and business history and partly from contemporary American sociology, this kind of history is less concerned with motives than with structure and process. It shows men managing and being managed through rational systems of control and communication. Perhaps we may call this the new institutionalism; for it is bringing back to life a morphological study of organizations, now freed from the formalistic, evolutionary emphasis of 19th century scholarship. Although institutionalists thus far have not gone much beyond the monographic level," he continued, "the breadth and importance of their contribution seem sure to grow."1 There is no better example of the accuracy of Higham's prediction than The Visible Hand. It is a model institutional history, a magisterial historical synthesis and interpretation of modern corporate enterprise, and a penetrating examination of the interaction of technology and administrative structure in economic and organizational growth.

Nicholas C. Mullins. Theories and theory groups in contemporary American Sociology. New York: Harper &amp; Row, 1973. Pp. x + 337. $9.95

Journal of the History of the Behavioral SciencesVolume 11, Issue 4 p. 405-406 Book Review Nicholas C. Mullins. Theories and theory groups in contemporary American Sociology. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. Pp. x + 337. $9.95 Roger L. Geiger, Roger L. Geiger Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. 06520Search for more papers by this author Roger L. Geiger, Roger L. Geiger Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. 06520Search for more papers by this author First published: October 1975 https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6696(197510)11:4<405::AID-JHBS2300110415>3.0.CO;2-1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume11, Issue4October 1975Pages 405-406 RelatedInformation

Theories and Theory Groups in Contemporary American Sociology

Theories and Theory Groups in Contemporary American Sociology