Sociological Challenges Research Articles

Assessing the sociology of sport: On media and representations of sportswomen

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, Toni Bruce – one of the leading scholars in understanding how media fashion gendered understandings of sport – considers the development of sociology of sport research on media with particular focus on representations of sportswomen. The trajectory of research strategies to study media representations of sportswomen has evolved, to become interdisciplinary, intersectional and theoretically sophisticated. A key challenge for sociology of sport research, both generally and with regards to media specifically, has been to gain traction and exposure beyond the boundaries of the field. While media-centred studies have risen on the research agenda, new challenges remain in engaging understandings of increasingly interactive media in the experience of sport. The future of research on media and sportswomen will face ongoing challenges, given the consistency of mainstream media marginalization of women’s sport; such findings portend the need to broaden the sociological frame to include a ‘psychodynamic dimension’ to understand better how emerging theoretical interest in affect or emotion may help explain how well worn representational grooves about women and sport have remained surprisingly entrenched in culture.

Assessing the sociology of sport: On sport participation and disabilities in France

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, Stéphane Héas, a leading French scholar on sport participation and the rights and opportunities of people with disabilities and minorities to engage in sporting activity, considers the trajectory and challenges of sociology of sport in France with special reference to the needs of these populations. It is noted that while studies of sport and physical activity that engaged “a sociological gaze” were relatively late in coming to France, research engaging socio-cultural understandings of sport has accelerated in recent years. A key challenge to research in this area has been to redress the relative neglect of studying the opportunities and participation of people with disabilities and other minorities in sport and physical activity. In the future, the sociology of sport holds the promise of being able to support meaningful policy changes to enable equity and opportunity for these populations.

A new reading of Spencer on ‘society’, ‘organicism’ and ‘spontaneous order’

Herbert Spencer represented societies as ‘social organisms’, but he also interpreted social life as a ‘spontaneous order’. This new reading of Spencer argues that these positions are not incompatible. The sociological challenge he tackled was how to conceptualise order, pattern and change in the mutually interdependent lives of social individuals as moral beings. Many critics, including Tönnies, Durkheim and Bosanquet, overlooked the subtlety of Spencer’s thought on the social organism and socially minded individuals, including its focus on ‘transcendental physiology’ and morphological variety. As a legacy, we behold mythical accounts of Spencer, either as an exponent of a reified ‘social system’ or as a mouthpiece for ‘laissez-faire’, and amoral ‘individualism’. This article suggests that individuals were understood to be neither ‘atomic’ nor amoral but capable of altruism and beneficence and to exhibit a ‘social self-consciousness’ within societies whose structures were mutable. If correct, Spencer’s contribution to the history of sociology has been commonly misjudged, and his basic thought retains value for sociology today in respect of ideas of individualism, holism and ‘society’.

Refashioning sociological imagination: Linguality, visuality and the iconic turn in cultural sociology

One of the key challenges of meaning-centred cultural sociology is facing the findings of contemporary anthropology, archaeology, art history and material culture studies. Specifically, the increasingly pressing task is to recognize the sociological limitations of the semiotic framework laid bare by those disciplines. The traditional structuralist focus on discursive codes and the assumption of arbitrariness of cultural sign is of limited service in understanding the power of complex representational economies and especially in the task of explaining its variability. The language- and communication-centred framework downplays the fact that many signifiers credited with causal social power are inescapably embedded in open-ended but not arbitrary patterns of material signification. There is ample evidence delivered by the recent studies within the aforementioned fields that such signifiers are ‘not just the garb of meaning’, to use the insightful phrase of Webb Keane. Rather, the significatory patterns and their material and sensuous entanglements co-constitute meanings that inform social action. Therefore, more integrative and multidimensional models of culture in action are needed. Some specific explanatory models have been explicitly formulated by a series of intertwined conceptual ‘turns’ in human sciences: material, performative, spatial and iconic, among others. By showing that meanings are always embedded in and enacted by the concrete assemblages of materiality and corporeality, they enable sociologists to transcend the linguistic bias of classical structuralist hermeneutics. This paper discusses the importance of iconicity for developing such an integrative perspective without abandoning some constitutive insights of the linguistic turn. I focus on the transformative works of contemporary scholars like Daniel Miller, Webb Keane, Ian Hodder, and Jeffrey Alexander, as well as on my own research, to illustrate the implications of the aforementioned paradigmatic ‘turns’. In particular, I aim at elaborating a key principle of material culture studies: different orders of semiosis are differently subject to determination and/or autonomous logic of the cultural text. As a result, differently structured signifiers are responsive to distinct modes of ‘social construction’ and historical transformation. We need to keep paying attention to the Austinian question of how to do things with words, but we cannot keep doing it as if things social were at the same time not done with images, objects, places, and bodies and all that their specific character and use imply. Fleshing out the so-expanded sociological imagination helps us to activate the full potential of understanding and explanation that the concept of culture possesses, and thus, to decisively turn culture on.

Development Sociology at the Subnational Scale

Sociologists have long studied subnational development across the United States focusing on state and market forces that contribute to spatial inequality and uneven development. Subnational research is central to development sociology's concern with the present neoliberal stage of capitalism and to numerous theoretical, substantive, and policy issues that revolve around poverty and prosperity within the nation. Yet the body of work faces a number of challenges. Research is fragmented and its potential for building broader development sociology overlooked. We provide a critical analysis of this research tradition focusing on its theoretical development and identifying a wave of shifts in economic structure and the state that require new engagement. Our analysis raises challenges for development sociology as a broader field of study. Profound state and market changes are unfolding within the United States but they remain under-theorized with implications for limiting progress in the field as a whole. We identify a series of questions that offer promising directions for future research.

Sociology of religion by Joachim Wach

Joachim Wach (1898-1955), one of classics of religious studies, devoted much of his scientific life to the study of sociological aspects of religious experience, the social functions of religion, the development of sociological challenges of systematic religious and sociological implications of the research methodology of religion. The article presents basic concept of the sociology of religion German-American religious scholar.

Beyond capital? The challenge for sociology in Britain.

This article offers a 'local', British, reading of Piketty's landmark book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, suggesting that the challenge it offers to sociological approaches to inequality is more fundamental than hitherto recognized. The variations in 'national trajectories' exposed by Piketty reveal Britain to be anomalous in terms of standard approaches to the path dependencies embedded in different welfare regimes. Using the recent work of Monica Prasad on 'settler capitalism' in the USA and the tax and debt-finance regime associated with it, the article suggests that colonialism and empire and its postwar unravelling has had deep consequences for British social stratification, albeit largely neglected by British sociologists. Finally, it points to the fact that the form of tax and debt-finance regime that has become reinforced in Britain is at the heart of recent radical reforms to higher education. These are the currently unexplicated conditions of our future practice as sociologists and, therefore, an obstacle to building a critical sociology on the foundations laid out by Piketty.

Piketty's challenge for sociology.

This paper argues that Piketty's book should not simply be seen as that of an economist, but that it contains significant resources for sociologists to draw upon. These are firstly, this approach to social science and his use of visualizations which chime closely with recent claims about the power of description. Secondly I consider his conceptualization of time and history - which in rebutting epochal arguments about the speed of contemporary change allows for a much better appreciation of the 'long durée'; and finally his conceptualization of social classes and privilege through his elaboration of a sociology of accumulation and inheritance. In all these ways, Piketty's work assists in developing an account of elites and wealth which should be highly productive for future sociology.

International Relations Pluralism and History-Embracing Amateurism to Strengthen the Profession

This article approaches the possibility of achieving pluralist International Relations research through engagements with history/History. There are serious sociological and disciplinary challenges to achieving pluralism, most importantly related to the need to make a mark and a career in one specific discipline and the constant diversification of disciplines. Even so, drawing on the literature of amateurism, understood as engaging in an activity for the love of it, it is argued here that a spirit of engaged amateurism in dealing with history offers an important opportunity for exploring commonalities and fostering pluralism both within the discipline and across disciplinary boundaries.

Cycles of Conflict

In a new theory of conflict escalation, Randall Collins engages critical issues of violent conflict and presents a compellingly plausible theoretical description based on his extensive empirical research. He also sets a new challenge for sociology: explaining the time dynamics of social interaction. However, despite heavy reliance on the quantitative concept of positive feedback loops in his theory, Collins presents no mathematical specification of the dynamic relationships among his variables. This article seeks to fill that gap by offering a computational model that can parsimoniously account for many features of Collins’s theory. My model uses perceptual control theory to create an agent-based computational model of the time dynamics of conflict. With greater conceptual clarity and more wide-ranging generalizability, my alternative model opens the door to further advances in theory development by revealing dynamic aspects of conflict escalation not found in Collins’s model.

After the crisis? Big Data and the methodological challenges of empirical sociology

Google Trends reveals that at the time we were writing our article on ‘The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology’ in 2007 almost nobody was searching the internet for ‘Big Data’. It was only towards the very end of 2010 that the term began to register, just ahead of an explosion of interest from 2011 onwards. In this commentary we take the opportunity to reflect back on the claims we made in that original paper in light of more recent discussions about the social scientific implications of the inundation of digital data. Did our paper, with its emphasis on the emergence of, what we termed, ‘social transactional data’ and ‘digital byproduct data’ prefigure contemporary debates that now form the basis and rationale for this excellent new journal? Or was the paper more concerned with broader methodological, theoretical and political debates that have somehow been lost in all of the loud babble that has come to surround Big Data. Using recent work on the BBC Great British Class Survey as an example this brief paper offers a reflexive and critical reflection on what has become – much to the surprise of its authors – one of the most cited papers in the discipline of sociology in the last decade.

“Scientific Atheism” in Action

This paper discusses the methodological challenges of Soviet sociology of religion in the period between 1960 and 1989, when it was charged with the contradictory task of investigating the actual standing of religion in Soviet society and, at the same time, with proposing methods through which the official “scientific atheism,” deeply rooted in Marxism, could be imposed upon the very populations that were the subject of its inquiries. The authors propose an insight into the actual practices of the researchers, based on little-known archival materials from the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History. The materials adduced by the authors show the various ways in which Soviet believers were surveyed and in which questionnaires were constructed, illustrating the modes of argumentation used in atheist propaganda conducted alongside such surveys, and giving a rare glimpse into the methodological discussions that were taking place at conferences organized by the Institute of Scientific Atheism. The authors track also the sociological conceptions and typologies adopted by Soviet sociology.

В условиях роста незащищённости на рынке труда и неравенства между хорошими и плохими работами: интервью с Арне Каллебергом

Arne Kalleberg was interviewed by Tatiana Karabchuk and Andrey Shevchuk, senior fellows at the Higher School of Economics. This interview was conducted during the international conference “Embeddedness and Beyond: Do Sociological Theories Meet Economic Realities?” (Moscow, 25-28 October 2012), where Prof. Kalleberg presented his new research “The Growth of Precarious Work: A Challenge for Economic Sociology”.In the interview Arne Kalleberg clarified the difference between job security and job stability and explained why it is better to draw a distinction between job security and employment security instead. Additionally, Prof. Kalleberg accounted for the growth of nonstandard employment and put this concept into historical context. Prof. Kalleberg stressed consequences of this tendency for both individuals and organizations. As a contribution to existing theoretical debate on this theme, Prof. Kalleberg suggested his own notion of “flexicurity”. Flexicurity is a meta-policy, combining greater flexibility for employers and protections for workers.Moreover, Prof. Kalleberg discussed his recent book “Good Jobs, Bad Jobs”, which addresses the problem of growing inequality and polarization in both economic and non-economic job characteristics. Prof. Kalleberg also shared with us his future research plans. His next research direction deals with the idea of precarious work and focuses on international comparisons. Finally, Prof. Kalleberg recommended some of the most relevant and interesting books in this research field.

21世紀における東アジア社会学の機運と挑戦

21世紀における東アジア社会学の機運と挑戦

Arguably big biology: Sociology, spatiality and the knockout mouse project

Following the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP), a critical challenge has been how to make biological sense of the amassed sequence data and translate this into clinical applications. A range of large biological research projects, as well as more distributed experimental collaborations, are seeking to realise this through translational research initiatives and postgenomic approaches. Drawing on interviews with key participants, this article explores the biological assumptions, sociological challenges and spatial imaginaries at play in arguments around one of these developments, which is using genetically altered mice to understand gene function. The knockout mouse project (KOMP) is a large-scale initiative in functional genomics, seeking to produce a ‘knockout mouse’ for each gene in the mouse’s genome, which can then be used to answer questions about gene function in mammals. KOMP is frequently framed as one successor to the HGP, emblematic of the ambitions of internationally coordinated biological research. However, the development of new technologies for generating and managing genetically altered mice, alongside the challenge of asking biologically meaningful questions of vast numbers of animals, is creating new frictions in this extension and intensification of biological research practices. This article introduces two separate approaches to the future of international research using mutant mice as stakeholders to negotiate the biological, sociological and spatial challenges of collaboration. The first centres on the directed research practices and sociological assumptions of KOMP, as individual researchers are reorganised around shared animals, databases and infrastructures. The second highlights an alternative vision of the future of biomedical research, using distributed management to enhance the sensitivities and efficiencies of existing experimental practices over space. These exemplify two different tactics in the organisation of an ‘arguably’ big biology. They also critically embody different sociological and spatial imaginaries for the collaborative practices of international translational research.

Martin Reppenhagen, Auf dem Weg zu einer missionalen Kirche: Die Diskussion um eine “missional church” in den USA. BEG Beiträg e zu Evangelisation und Gemeinde-Entwicklung, Band 17. Neukirchen-Vluyn, Deutschland: Neukirchener Verlag, 2011, 412 pp.

Martin Reppenhagen, Auf dem Weg zu einer missionalen Kirche: Die Diskussion um eine in den USA. BEG Beitrag e zu Evangelisation und Gemeinde-Entwicklung, Band 17. Neukirchen-Vluyn, Deutschland: Neukirchener Verlag, 2011, 412 pp. Martin Reppenhagen has been, since 2004, wissenschafdicher Mitarbeiter at the Institut zur Erforschung von Evangelisation und Gemeindeentwicklung at the Universitat Greifswald. This book is a shortened and revised version of his 2010 PhD dissertation from the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universitat Greifswald under the supervision of Michael Herbst. This connection is important, for it situates well the content and intent of the work under consideration. The text itself has eight chapters, which might be loosely outlined as follows: the first four chapters (which constitute half the book) are scene-setting and rehearse the major diagnostic concerns underlying and the genealogies informing the contemporary missional church discussion. The major fifth chapter paints a picture of its central theological thrusts. Chapters 6 and 7 might be seen as concrete examples of how missional church theory is worked out. Chapter 8 draws implications for the German context. Reppenhagen introduces the work by noting the relatively recent interest within the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD) in the missional church discussion. The work seeks, then, not to reinvent the wheel, but to introduce the insights from the established American discussion into the German context. In his second chapter, Reppenhagen begins by defining key concepts used in the discussion, including mainline, church, and Christendom, before turning, in the third chapter, to the historical context and development of American mainline Christianity. Starting with the foundation of America as a nation, and thus with separation of church and state, he examines the roots of American church structures within European forms of Christianity, continues through the growth of the churches after World War II, and concludes with their decline since the 1960s. Now in the present, Reppenhagen turns to the variety of sociological challenges confronting the American churches, such as denominationalism, privatisation and individualisation of faith, the secularisation thesis, the culture wars, the religious market thesis, and a pluralist society. Chapter 4 continues this historical work by outlining the development of the Gospel and Our Culture Network with special emphasis on Lesslie Newbigin's contribution. After a brief biographical sketch, Reppenhagen addresses key themes in Newbigin's work. The intent with this first half of the book, it seems, is to introduce the discussion to a German audience unfamiliar with the context and back story, setting the scene for the task of translating these developments into a German context. The material is more summary description than evaluation or construction. With his 130-page fifth chapter, titled Missional Church--A Paradigm Change, the tone shifts from historical development to the central theological moves made within the missional church discussion. As with the earlier material, the approach is one of identification and summary and Reppenhagen highlights such concepts as missio Dei, incarnational mission, the nature of the church as a witness to Christ and to the kingdom of God, and the church as a contrast society, along with questions of praxis and leadership. Though some of this material crosses over work done earlier, Reppenhagen displays a good acquaintance with the breadth of the discussion. Yet, insofar as this chapter accomplishes the burden of the theological work, sometimes the critical developments would benefit from further investigation and refinement. Two examples might suffice. Reppenhagen does include potential weaknesses in missional church theory and practice. His approach is balanced. The critical voices he employs, however, seem in the main to be those of missional church exponents defending themselves against such charges. …

XVIII World Congress of Sociology : “Facing an unequal world: Challenges for Global Sociology”

Call for Papers:XVIII World Congress of Sociology : “Facing an unequal world: Challenges for Global Sociology”, Yokohama, Japan, 13-19 July 2014For more details regarding the sessions organised by RC51 please have a look on the official ISA-Website and for more detailed information: the RC51-Website If you have questions about any specific session, please feel free to contact the Session Organizer for more information, and please consider the deadline for on-line abstracts submission: September 30, 2013 24:00 GMT.

Sociology of Education: Outlines Towards a Diagnosis and Thoughts on Some Major Challenges

Sociology of education in Norway has traditionally been preoccupied with the classic problems related to education and the reproduction of social inequality. As the general social scientific and political focus on inequality decreased, the sociology of education also became less visible. At the same time, the sociology of youth evolved, and brought with it a shift from theories of reproduction towards theories of individualization and cultural detachment. New challenges for sociology of education are also discussed. These are related to the educational system's position as the main socialization arena for young people, as well as new developments within educational policy, and thus within school. What kind of identities are “produced” within the educational system?

Research Trends and New Challenges of Sociology of Body

본고는 몸이 사회학의 핵심 주제로 부상하게 된 배경과 사회학 내에 ‘몸의 사회학’이라는 독립적인 영역을 구축하는 데 기여한 지금까지의 연구성과 및 한계를 검토하고, 이후에 수행되어야 할 새로운 과제를 모색해본다. 몸은 오랫동안 사회학적 탐구 영역에서 배제되어오다가 1980년대에 이르러 사회학의 핵심 주제로 부상(浮上)하였다. 그것은 탈(脫)이원론적 존재론의 등장과 후기 자본주의의 문화적 결과에 기인한 것이다. 지금까지 수행되어 온몸에 대한 연구들은 ‘근대 권력과 몸’, ‘후기 자본주의와 몸’, ‘페미니즘과 몸’ 등 세 가지로 범주화할 수 있다. 이들은 데카르트적 신화에 대한 도전과 사회구성주의적 관점을 공통의 전략으로 내세워 유폐되었던 몸을 사회학적 상상력의 구심점으로 호명해냄으로써 몸에 대한 광범위하고 활발한 논의를 이끌어냈다는 점에서 매우 의미 있다.<BR> 이제 기술과학과 몸의 관계에 대한 심층적인 연구가 본격화되어야 한다. 오늘날 우리 몸은 추출해내고, 분리하고, 해독하고, 재조직하고, 다운로드 하고, 기계와 접속하고, 강화할 수 있으며, 자본 또는 화폐, 상품, 원료로 치환될 수 있는 것으로 간주된다. 이는 우리 몸을 정보로 환원시킨 결과이며, 정보 자체를 원료로 삼는 자본주의의 새로운 얼굴, ‘정보 자본주의’의 본질과 맥을 같이한다. 그러므로 고도기술 시대의 몸은 정보화 패러다임의 프리즘을 통해 보아야 하며 이를 논증하기위한 이론 틀을 구축하는 것이 필요하다.

Digital Futures? Sociological Challenges and Opportunities in the Emergent Semantic Web

In the context of recent debates about the ‘data deluge’ and the future of empirical sociology, this article turns attention to current activities aimed at achieving far-reaching transformations to the World Wide Web. The emergent ‘Semantic Web’ has received little attention in sociology, despite its potentially profound consequences for data. In response to more general recent calls for a critical politics of data we focus our enquiry as follows: first, we explore how sociological analysis of the artefacts and tools that are currently being developed to build a Semantic Web helps us to uncover the potential effects of this ‘next generation’ web on knowledge, data and expertise; and second we consider what a Semantic Web might offer to sociological research. We conclude by considering some implications of multidisciplinary engagement with the Web for the future of sociology.