Durkheim's Work Research Articles

Emile Durkheim's Work from Romanian Social Pedagogical Perspective

We propose a global analysis of Durkheim's work, the founder of the sociological orientation, who influenced decisively the sociological theory and practice at the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. In the sociology history, we insistently talk about a stage until Durkheim and another stage post Durkheim, which indirectly constitutes an acknowledgment of Emile Durkheim's sociological work. From the methodological perspective, this historical change is important if Emile Durkheim promotes a new paradigm – the sociocentrism.

Emile Durkheim's Sociological Thinking Evolution from a Pedagogical Perspective

In the work's economy, an important specific perspective is the historic one. Thus, we shall concentrate on Durkheim's work historic analysis, made by several Romanian and foreign authors, which will help us correctly placing Durkheim's sociology within the great sociological and psychological thinking systems. At the same time, it will help us identify the importance of the paradigm he proposes within the sociological thinking system – the classical functionalism paradigm – which will influence the education sociology apparition and development.Durkheim's most important and substantial merit consists in supporting and demonstrating the fact that sociology must be conceived as a general science of the social. This approach becomes exemplary for understanding pedagogy as a general science of education.This thesis, which today is unanimously accepted, has been hardly to assert within the historic conditions where Durkheim created his sociological work during the 19th-20th centuries.

Émile Durkheim between Gabriel Tarde and Arnold van Gennep: founding moments of sociology and anthropology

This article will situate Durkheim's work by revisiting two debates that influenced his attempt to define and give direction to sociology and anthropology: the debates between Durkheim and Gabriel Tarde and the debates between Durkheim and Arnold van Gennep. The battle between Tarde and Durkheim has in recent years been the object of several conferences and publications. This has happened alongside a much needed Tarde revival in sociology. However, Tarde was only one of Durkheim's opponents. For a long period, following Tarde's death in 1904, Arnold van Gennep represented the strongest critique of Durkheim's project. This ‘debate’ is little known among anthropologists and social scientists. The aim of this article is to situate Durkheim and the birth of the social sciences in France between both of these two figures. The aim is therefore also to bring together two disciplinary debates that for too long have been kept artificially separate in our understanding of Durkheim as ‘founding father’ of both anthropology and sociology. Arnold van Gennep and Gabriel Tarde opposed Durkheim independently from the perspectives of anthropology and sociology, but also from what can be reconstructed as a shared ‘philosophy’ of relevance still today. The article will discuss how so, and will highlight the convergences between the critiques of Durkheim offered by Tarde and van Gennep.

Representações Sociais: Uma Instigante Leitura com Moscovici, Jodelet, Marková e Jovchelovitch

This article delves into Serge Moscovici and his masterpiece Social Representations of Psychoanalysis from a balanced perspective. The theory of social representations, seen as an invaluable source, has its roots in the works of Durkheim, Levy-Bruhl, Piaget, Vygotsky and Freud, amongst other authors who belong to the new ´´generation´´ of researchers in the field. Moscovici introduced the concept of social representation in his major study of how psychoanalysis turned out to be a frame of reference in France. The critical reading of Moscovici´s work portrays three perspectives, and adopts a theoretical approach to Irvana Markova (2003, 2006), Denise Jodelet (2005) and Sandra Jovchelovitch (2008), for such authors contributed substantially to develop deep reflections on knowledge itself, on the meaning of knowledge, on what leads knowing to thorough knowledge.

Politics, Work and Family: Gendered Forms of Mobilisation of Working-Class Women in Southern France

In 2008, the Molex company announced the closure of its French site at Villemur-sur-Tarn. The 283 workers then began a long struggle to save their jobs but failed to prevent their redundancy. This article analyses the ways in which gender influences men's and women's capacity to resist when faced with the brutality of redundancy and the loss of social bonds that follows job loss. Studying gendered configurations within the factory, the context of the strike, and workers' families, it puts forward a rereading of the work of Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel on the unemployed of Marienthal and of the work of Durkheim on suicide that is inflected by the theoretical advances developed by gender studies, notably concerning the conception of ‘work’ as a vector of social integration. Considering domestic tasks and political commitment as forms of labour, it argues for a triangulated analysis of work, political mobilisation and the family, three spheres that generate the social bond, in a way which moves us beyond the classic division between public and private and allows us to track in finer detail the effects of the crisis on a social group, the workers, too often considered as homogenous (and male).

Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Limits of Social Constructionism

The sociology of knowledge is a heterogeneous set of theories which generally focuses on the social origins of meaning. Strong arguments, epitomized by Durkheim's late work, have hypothesized that the very concepts our minds use to structure experience are constructed through social processes. This view has come under attack from theorists influenced by recent work in developmental psychology that has demonstrated some awareness of these categories in pre‐socialized infants. However, further studies have shown that the innate abilities infants display differ in systematic and theoretically significant ways from adults' explicit knowledge. This paper moves beyond the constructionist/nativist dichotomy by outlining the complex relationships between innate intelligence and explicit knowledge. I end by suggesting that there are four, distinct ways the social world influences thought‐ facilitation, division, specification, and construction.

MORALITY, MARKETS, AND THE ASC: 2011 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS TO THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CRIMINOLOGY*

This Presidential Address explores the possibilities for fruitful multilevel theorizing in criminology by proposing an integration of insights from situational action theory (SAT), a distinctively micro‐level perspective, with insights from institutional anomie theory (IAT), a distinctively macro‐level perspective. These perspectives are strategic candidates for integration because morality plays a central role in both. IAT can enrich SAT by identifying indirect causes of crime that operate at the institutional level and by highlighting the impact of the institutional context on the perception‐choice process that underlies crime. Such multilevel theorizing can also promote the development of IAT by revealing the “micro‐instantiations” of macro‐level processes and by simulating further inquiry into the social preconditions for institutional configurations that are conducive to low levels of crime. Finally, drawing on Durkheim's classic work on occupational associations, I point to the potential role of professional associations such as the American Society of Criminology in promoting and sustaining a viable moral order in the advanced capitalist societies.

Japan's reception of Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse

In Japan, Émile Durkheim's main work on the sociology of religion, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (hereafter Les Formes élémentaires) had a major impact on not only the field of sociology, but also on the fields of anthropology and the study of religion (Shūkyōgaku). However, the detailed circumstances of this impact are not well known outside Japan, probably due to the language barrier. This article delineates the process of Japan's reception of Les Formes élémentaires, particularly before the Second World War, and considers the significance of the effect this publication had upon academic disciplines in Japan, especially the study of religion.

The Jews, the Revolution, and the Old Regime in French Anti-Semitism and Durkheim's Sociology

The relationship between European sociology and European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is investigated through a case study of one sociologist, Émile Durkheim, in a single country, France. Reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism are distinguished and contrasted to Durkheim's sociological perspective. Durkheim's remarks about the Jews directly addressed anti-Semitic claims about them, their role in French society, and their relationship to modernity. At the same time, Durkheim was engaged in a reinterpretation of the French Revolution and its legacies that indirectly challenged other tenets of French anti-Semitism. In sum, Durkheim's work contains direct and indirect responses to reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism, and together these responses form a coherent alternative vision of the relationship between modernity and the Jews.

Durkheim and the birth of economic sociology

emile Durkheim's work has traditionally been viewed as a part of sociology removed from economics. Rectifying this perception, Durkheim and the Birth of Economic Sociology is the first book to provide an in-depth look at the contributions made to economic sociology by Durkheim and his followers. Philippe Steiner demonstrates the relevance of economic factors to sociology and shows how the Durkheimians inform today's economic systems. Steiner argues that there are two stages in Durkheim's approach to the economy--a sociological critique of political economy and a sociology of economic knowledge. In his early works, Durkheim critiques economists and their categories, and tries to analyze the division of labor from a social rather than economic perspective. From the mid-1890s onward, Durkheim's preoccupations shifted to questions of religion and the sociology of knowledge. Durkheim's disciples, such as Maurice Halbwachs and Francois Simiand, synthesized and elaborated on Durkheim's first-stage arguments, while his ideas on religion and the economy were taken up by Marcel Mauss. Steiner indicates that the ways in which the Durkheimians rooted the sociology of economic knowledge in the educational system allows for an invaluable perspective on the role of economics in modern society, similar to the perspective offered by Max Weber's work. Recognizing the power of the Durkheimian approach, Durkheim and the Birth of Economic Sociology assesses the effect of this important thinker and his successors on one of the most active fields in contemporary sociology.

Sociologismo e individualismo em Émile Durkheim

O presente trabalho pretende analisar o tema do individualismo na teoria sociológica de Émile Durkheim com vistas a compreender a validade das críticas direcionadas por seus principais comentadores à primazia do campo social, à preocupação com a ordem e à adoção de uma postura anti-individualista que permearia toda a extensão de sua obra. Para tanto, promovemos um diálogo entre as abordagens mais recentes da obra durkheimiana e as interpretações consagradas pela tradição sociológica, com o objetivo de verificar o peso que o sociólogo francês atribuía ao indivíduo e à sociedade em sua teoria.

The Sociology of Suicide

Since Durkheim's classic work on suicide, sociological attention to understanding the roots of self-destruction has been inconsistent. In this review, we use three historical periods of interest (pre-Durkheim, Durkheim, post-Durkheim) to organize basic findings in the body of sociological knowledge regarding suicide. Much of the twentieth-century research focused on issues of integration and regulation, imitation, and the social construction of suicide rates. Innovations in the twenty-first-century resurgence of sociological research on suicide are described in detail. These newer studies begin to redirect theory and analysis toward a focus on ethnoracial subgroups, individual-level phenomena (e.g., ideation), and age-period-cohort effects. Our analysis of sociology's contributions, limits, and possibilities leads to a recognition of the need to break through bifurcations in individual- and aggregate-level studies, to pursue the translation of Durkheim's original theory into a network perspective as one avenue of guiding micro-macro research, and to attend to the complexity in both multidisciplinary explanations and pragmatic interventions.

Social Solidarity and the Power of Contract

This article explores what social policy contracts reveal about contemporary forms of social solidarity, and what they tell us about the nature of social cohesion in Western societies today. Taking the workfare contract as its point of departure, and drawing on Emile Durkheim's work, it is argued that social policy contracts disclose elements of mechanical and organic social solidarity. They function in both punitive and restitutive ways, their exclusionary and inclusive features acting as important sources of contemporary social solidarity. By reference to empirical evidence regarding workfare in various countries, the article highlights the importance of structural factors in determining the success of this policy. It is argued that the moralistic nature of the workfare contract, and the forms of social solidarity it expresses, obscures these deeper structural issues, leaving in place the conditions necessary for the persistence of social suffering characteristic of the post‐Keynesian era. The contention is that contract has a de‐politicizing effect in the field of social policy.

From Solidarity to Social Inclusion: The Political Transformations of Durkheimianism

The article begins with Pierre Rosanvallon's account of the mutations of 'Jacobin ideology' and the function of sociology in criticising this in France at the end of the nineteenth century. I suggest it was not Durkheim's intention simply to criticise a 'Jacobin' form of political ideology. Rather, it was to construct an affinity between sociological explanation and social facts, such that sociological discourse would appropriate the sphere of the political and take part, by so doing, in the constitution of a participative social democracy. I then touch on the post-mortem academicisation of Durkheim's work in France between the wars, to ask if the emergent Durkheimianism neutralised Durkheim's original socio-political intentions. This leads to a discussion of the resurgent domination of the discourse of politics in the 1960s, as manifested in Aron's critiques of Durkheim and in his defence of constitutional law at the beginning of the Fifth Republic, but also to an examination of Bourdieu's attempt to retrieve Durkheim's original orientation and to revive the political dynamism of social movements. I comment on the analysis, made in the 1970s by Bourdieu (and Boltanski), of the construction of the dominant postwar ideology in French politics, which includes their critique of 'planification' and of the work, amongst others, of Jacques Delors. They saw the language used by the newly dominant political managers as exploiting the sociological discourse of 'solidarity' and 'social exclusion', not to realize its intentions, but to reinforce their own control. I briefly consider the argument's implications for an analysis of European Commission social policy initiatives during the presidency of Delors, comment on the British Conservative government's objections in the 1980s and 1990s to the very use of this language, and ask if the Labour government's adoption of the discourse of 'social inclusion' in 1997 was indicative of either a political or a social agenda. Finally, I return to Rosanvallon and situate his work politically within the ideological debate of 1995 between him and Bourdieu. It is to conclude with the suggestion that Rosanvallon's apparent disinclination to recognize the importance of Durkheim's work is indicative of his present position-taking, which necessarily entails a suppression of Durkheim's real intentions.

Pigs Hearts and Human Bodies: A Cultural Approach to Xenotransplantation

Animals have a significant presence in human lives, with many human interactions involving animals. This role of animals in social life, however, has largely been ignored and marginalised. In the words of Tovey (197), "to read most sociological texts, one might never know that society is populated by non-human as well as human animals". Human-animal relations are evident in everyday human uses of animals as companions, pets, meat sources, and entertainment. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it does demonstrate how humans create and perpetuate systems of human/animal difference which are, at times, contradictory and ambivalent. There are no consistencies in how humans view and understand animal bodies. These differences matter, as they have serious consequences for how humans view and treat animals. It also has dire consequences for animals. While humans and animals are different species, we still live together, co-evolve, and create shared histories. We are, in the words of Haraway, companion species. This exposes that animals are not just nature, but culture.

Differentiational Reductionism and the Missing Link in Albert’s Approach to Globalization Theory

In his article “‘Globalization Theory’: Yesterday's Fad or More Lively than Ever?” Mathias Albert raises significant issues with respect to the progress of globalization theory. He pays particular attention to four strands of the latter: varied globalization; global governance; global history; and global/world society; although he provides no rationale for the choice of these. Albert is eager to merge these strands with “the key themes of social theory, most notably functional differentiation and rationalization,” as well as with perspectives drawn from complexity theories. What he includes in the category of social theory (as well as complexity theory) is somewhat arbitrary. For example, there is no attention to various themes in Durkheimian theory that may well provide us with ideas highly relevant to the comprehension of globalization (Robertson 1993; Inglis and Robertson 2008). This limitation constitutes a diminution of the impact of Albert's contribution. Albert's approach derives essentially from the work of Luhmann, whose phenomenological reduction of “the world” to processes of differentiation (plus communication and rationalization) precludes direct and serious attention to central ingredients of what has come to be called globalization. Like many analysts Albert regards connectivity (or interconnectedness) as the pivotal feature of the latter. This leads to his completely neglecting the issue of global consciousness, which he could well have derived from the work of Durkheim. Omitting any focus on this aspect of globalization is very ironic at this particular juncture in global history and in the more specific frame of globalization theory. I speak here of the continuing and increasingly reflexive consciousness of the concrete world as a whole. In our time there has been an enormous jump in our awareness of the fate of the planet, the place of the earth in the cosmos, the numerous and increasing risks facing humanity, the human species relationship to both its animate and inanimate “environments,” and so on. In sum, Albert characterizes “society” as cultureless. This is not to conflate totally the ideas of consciousness and culture (Robertson 2007).

Inhabiting No-Man's Land

This article is a translation of the Editor's Introduction to the new Italian edition of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In it, the author maintains that though The Elementary Forms does not suggest how the experience of the sacred could be publicly recovered by citizens of modern democracies, it nonetheless recommends that modernity must remain open, with both courage and humility, to radical self-assessment in light of the centrality of ritual and the sacred to social life. The tentative suggestions to this end in Durkheim's work — the cult of the individual, loyalty towards democratic political values — are the best solutions available to us, though they are part of a way of life that cannot be satisfied either with its present or with its desired state, even when the latter appears fully consistent with its own ideal aspirations. Thus, The Elementary Forms points to the continued need for a more substantial reconsideration of modern Western identity.

Deaths of Authors and Lives of Texts

construct, for concrete reality that is both transsocietal and divided by unequal races, classes, sexes, and nations. Further more, on close reading, Durkheim believes in sacred nature of the personality-not the individual-the social, hence sacred, socially determined ideal half of spirit/body dichotomy through which he orizes individuals. In fact, individuating aspect of individuals-the body-is that which Durkheim opposes to collective, social aspect of individuals-the collective consciousness of within individ ual, which constitutes sacred, entirely so cial, personality. Durkheim's Ghosts Why does Charles Lemert look to Durkheim today? I believe it is because he finds that Durkheim's work is part of an intellectual revolution at turn of twentieth centu in modem division of labor-thereby form ing interdependent basis of modern social solidarity. However, he characterizes his work as study of society, and he believes that, be cause society contains entire universe within it, sociology is necessarily universal. Contemporary Sociology 37, 3 I Durkheim would disagree with this characteri zation of his work, and with undertaking of any work, called renaissance-general, un specialized. He insists that it is moral duty of all citizens to become specialized elements This content downloaded from 157.55.39.217 on Mon, 18 Apr 2016 08:40:17 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The impact of children on a parent's risk of suicide following death of a spouse, Belgium 1991–96

Since Durkheim's work on suicide, the family has widely been seen as providing partial protection against the development of tendencies to suicide. This study assesses the impact of parenthood (both number of children and age of youngest child) on suicide following the death of a spouse. Using data for Belgium in the 5 years following the 1991 census, the study adopts a nested case–control design with information on 3,800 suicides and 75,673 matched controls. The analysis takes into account several social–economic variables. The findings show that the impact of children on the elevated suicide levels found among widows and widowers relative to the still married can be positive or negative, and differs by both age and sex of the parent, age of the child or children, and time since bereavement.

The Elementary Forms of Globality

In an age of apparently endemic globalization and globality, any form of sociological theorizing centred on an understanding of the term `society' which took the latter as being always located within the boundaries of a particular nation-state, would be indictable as being imprisoned within the confines of a naïve and analytically unsatisfactory `methodological nationalism'. A superficial assessment of Durkheim's work might lead one to believe that of all the thinkers of the classical period of sociology, Durkheim is the most methodologically nationalist, and thus the most unpromising resource for analyses of globalization processes in the present day. However, this paper shows that such a view is a serious oversimplification of a multi-stranded oeuvre which contains within it intriguing elements that point towards a Durkheimian account of globalization processes and conditions of globality. While there are indeed methodologically nationalist strains in Durkheim's work, these are more than counter-balanced by certain other, more globally oriented, concerns. First, there are tendencies towards the development of a `cosmopolitan' political theory, a stance which has been fairly well remarked upon by other authors. Second, at a more explicitly `sociological' level, there are also certain orientations towards an account of the genesis and nature of social and cultural globality. This account is scattered throughout various locations in Durkheim's writings, most notably The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and the paper reconstructs what it takes to be Durkheim's embryonic project in `global sociology' to be found there and in some of his other works. Attention is drawn to the apparent debt Durkheim owed to Fustel de Coulanges in this regard. This paper concludes with the argument that Durkheim's endeavours to understand conditions of globality and planet-wide connectivity should be given serious attention in contemporary re-assessments of the capacities of classical sociologists to deal with globe-spanning processes and institutions.