Sociological Community Research Articles

What Is Sociological about Music?

The sociology of music has become a vibrant field of study in recent decades. While its proponents are well aware of this field's contributions and relevance, we focus here on demonstrating its merit to the broader sociological community. We do so by addressing the following questions: What is music, sociologically speaking? How do individuals and groups use music? How is the collective production of music made possible? How does music relate to broader social distinctions, especially class, race, and gender? Answering these questions reveals that music provides an important and engaging purchase on topics that are of great concern to sociologists of all stripes—topics that range from the microfoundations of interaction to the macro-level dynamics of inequality.

Children’s Citizenships

During the 1970s and 1980s, sociological studies in Italy were exclusively concerned with ‘adolescence’ as distinct from the general category of ‘childhood’. In the 1990s, local administrations and national government promoted new opportunities for children’s participation in society, and sociologists began to analyse the various aspects of this participation. Since the 1990s, sociological research has included the legal and political bases of children’s citizenship and rights, forms of interaction promoting children’s participation, ways of including children in mainstream cultural tendencies, children’s observations of their social context, intercultural situations involving children, deviance and the labelling of children. The expansion of childhood sociology, however, has been slow, and the political impulse which supported children’s participation has partially evaporated. Childhood sociology in Italy remains marginal in scientific research and university teaching. Its future depends partly on renewed political commitment to promoting children’s participation; however, its main obstacle is the lukewarm interest within the sociological community.

Co-authorship trends and collaboration patterns in the Slovenian sociological community

The article deals with some processes generating increases of research collaboration one of the most characteristic tendencies of modern science. The major empirical focus is the increasing tendency of co-authorship in sociology in Slovenia. Bibliometric analyses, based on two joint national research information systems (SICRIS and COBISS), shows the amount of co-authored publications in the field of sociology increased over the last two decades. Blockmodeling of co-authorship networks in sociology has shown that the sociologists who are not systematically tied to strongly connected and well-established research groups produce the most excellent scientific publications in their field.

Misused and missed use — Grounded Theory and Objective Hermeneutics as methods for research in industrial marketing

Since qualitative research methods have always found strong representation within sociology it is warranted to look at the sociological discussion in order to challenge and enrich qualitative research in industrial marketing. With this mission in mind, we discuss two sociological concepts that constitute influential schools within the German-speaking sociology of language community: Grounded Theory and Objective Hermeneutics. The analysis of their suitability for research in industrial marketing along several dimensions shows that while both methods target the reconstruction of meaning, they pursue different paths. Grounded Theory strives to discover higher-ranked social patterns, while Objective Hermeneutics is concerned with universal motives underlying a specific interaction.

Sociologists in the Press

Stimulated by debates on public sociology in the recent years I studied contributions of sociologists in daily newspapers in Austria. Although sociologists are rather present in the Austrian press, I argue this remains without noticeable effects on public opinion formation; the topics sociologists write and talk about are rather arbitrary and they lack factual content. Although my data refers to sociologists in the Austrian press, the study's conclusions might be true to the wider sociological community: Through such exposure, a public profile of sociology cannot evolve. Furthermore, the article discusses criteria that prevent and complicate the relationship between sociologists and the press: avoidance of publicity, the problem of values and ideology, incompatibilities of language-games, divergence of relevance criteria, and deficient cultural empathy.

Refining the attribution of significance in social impact assessment

Clarifying and improving how significance is attributed to social impacts provides greater robustness and objectivity to the social impact assessment (SIA) process. This is beneficial for a discipline that still grapples with credibility issues compared to other disciplines that are also commonly presented as chapters in environmental impact assessment (EIA) reports. This paper provides a practitioner's perspective on refining how the significance of social impacts is attributed. The discussion emphasises the need to define social receptors and community resources. It highlights the human elements in the variables influencing significance, namely magnitude and sensitivity criteria. SIA practitioners with specialist skills in community development or sociology are best suited to using wellbeing and vulnerability as key magnitude and sensitivity criteria.

Place Attachment and Community Attachment: A Primer Grounded in the Lived Experience of a Community Sociologist

On the surface, the constructs of place attachment and community attachment appear to be quite similar; however, there are substantial differences between the multidisciplinary place literature and community sociology literature it comes from. For scholars trained in a relatively single-disciplinary area such as community sociology, the immensity and complexity of place literature can be difficult to navigate. This article is a primer on these two constructs, written from the perspective of a community sociologist. To give context to place attachment, an overview of the place literature is presented, including brief descriptions of various strands of place scholarship, along with the primary debates within the scholarship. Place attachment and related place concepts are introduced, followed by a brief review of the work on community attachment seen in community sociology. After contrasting the two, the overlap between constructs is discussed. The reader is left with suggestions for future work.

KANEKO, Isamu: Community Sociology on the Social Unrest and Difference in Present Age——Some Prescrptions from Social Capital theory——

KANEKO, Isamu: Community Sociology on the Social Unrest and Difference in Present Age——Some Prescrptions from Social Capital theory——

On Diversity, Empathy, and Community: The Relevance of Johann Gottfried Herder

Abstract The writings of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) foreshadowed several of the dominant theories of sociology, social psychology, aesthetics, linguistics and literary theory. His ideas impacted generations of thinkers, but today he is uncelebrated, mostly unknown. His writings on populism, expressionism, and pluralism are relevant to contemporary sociology, especially community sociology. Here we consider his views on the nature and meaning of community, and his methods of studying and interpreting communities. These include an emphasis on the essential particularity of human communities and their connection to wider systems and networks. Herder urges special attention to the elements of context (place, time, language, culture) within which communities are situated. Herder's is an embedded particularism, a focus on individuality and diversity within larger unities. He also sensitizes us to the multivalence and multiplicity of social phenomena. As the proper stance for community research he counsels involvement and empathy rather than objectivity and emotional distance, and he urges researchers to be sensitive to data from all of their senses, not merely sight. Drawing upon Herder's writings, we conclude with several important methodological principles relevant to improving current work on the nature and conceptualization of communities.

In Search of a Public Environmental Sociology: Ecological Risks in the Twenty-First Century

The twenty-first century poses many chal lenges to the human community. However, none of these challenges are more daunting than those posed by environmental hazards and risks. Environmental degradation, com munity contamination, and ecological disas ters will increasingly cause social problems by disrupting communities, families, and individ uals and exacerbating historical patterns of social inequality. In turn, these trends will generate new forms of social disorganization and personal distress. European social theo rists, such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, have addressed these untoward charac teristics of late modernity by specifying new risks that signal transglobal, trans generational, uninsurable, irreversible, and manufactured consequences that seriously threaten the future of the human community by undermining ontological security (Gid dens 1990; Beck 1992). American sociologists, most notably Kai Erikson and Charles Perrow, have documented the dire social conse quences of disastrous environmental degra dation in terms of collective trauma and normal accidents (Erikson 1976; Perrow 1984). Indeed, the ongoing disaster we have come to know as Hurricane Katrina reawak ened the sociological community and the gen eral to a host of anthropogenic envi ronmental risks that increasingly threaten the vulnerable social fabric of the modern world (Picou and Marshall 2007). How should the social sciences, in general, and sociology, in particular, respond to these inevitable catastrophic environmental risks? At present, there seems to be little concern with risk within our emerging models of both public and applied sociology. In order to go beyond these models, sociology's under standing of environment-society relationships needs to be reframed and the potential con tributions of sociology for identifying and mitigating the disastrous consequences of ecological risks should become an area of inquiry for sociological practice. A environmental sociology would promote,

Actual or potential neighborhood resources and access to them: Testing hypotheses of social capital for the health of female caregivers

This study considers three commonly overlooked aspects of neighborhood social capital: actual or potential network resources, access to such resources, and their potentially negative implications, as they bear on the health of adult female caregivers of children. Drawing upon Bourdieu's social capital theory and urban and community sociology research, two sets of related hypotheses are formulated and tested. The first set examines specific resources that inhere within neighborhood social relations by testing hypotheses concerning four forms of social capital (social support, social leverage, informal social control, and neighborhood organization participation) and their respective associations with daily smoking and perceived health. The second set assesses the importance of one's access to the neighborhood networks that possess such resources by testing hypotheses regarding how residents' neighborhood attachment moderates the association between social capital forms and these health outcomes in positive and negative ways. Analyses of the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A.FANS) linked with tract level census data indicate that specific social capital forms were directly associated with positive and negative health outcomes. Neighborhood attachment significantly moderated relationships between several social capital forms and health, indicating that a female caregiver's degree of network integration matters in both health promoting and health damaging ways. In addition to illustrating the utility of a Bourdieusian perspective for formulating explicit, testable hypotheses regarding how social capital may matter for health, these findings suggest that future public health studies of neighborhood social capital need to consider (1) the actual or potential resources that inhere within relationships, and (2) the role of access to such resources for promoting or compromising health.

Classical Sociology and the Nation-State

This article revisits the claim, largely accepted within the sociological community for over thirty years now, that classical sociologists had no clear concept of the nation-state and thus were unable to conceptualize its rise, main features and further development in modernity. In contradistinction to this standard view, which in current debates receives the name of methodological nationalism, I advance a re-interpretation of classical sociology's conceptualization of the nation-state that points towards what can be called the opacity of its position in modernity. Marx understood the historical elusiveness of the nation-state as he believed that it had already passed its heyday as political struggles were fought between Empires and the Commune. Weber captured the sociological equivocations that arose from the historical disjuncture between the nation and the state. And Durkheim, finally, tried to come to terms with the nation-state's normative ambiguity via the immanent tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. The conclusion is that, even if not thoroughly unproblematic, classical sociologists were able to avoid the reification of the nation-state's position in modernity precisely because they were not obsessed with conceptualizing modernity as such from the viewpoint of the nation-state.

Researching Race: Identifying a Social Construction through Qualitative Methods and an Interactionist Perspective

Although much of the sociological community now views race as a social construction, empirical research does not always identify it in this way. Many practices of designating a research participant's race approach this process uncritically, implicitly framing race as uncomplicated. Although this is more common in survey‐based work, in this article I explore the tendencies and difficulties of studying race using qualitative methods. I discuss two prevalent but potentially problematic ways of “operationalizing” race in qualitative methodology, and then elaborate on the difficulties of identifying race in practice, using examples from my own ethnographic research. I suggest that symbolic interactionism provides a unique perspective from which to express race as socially situated, as long as this process is approached reflectively.

From social networks to network society: A review of the macro network approach in sociology

Traditional sociological theories are no longer fully capable of explaining social changes in the modern world. For this reason demands for new social theories is growing. In this article the author analyses one of these attempts, by reviewing new macro social network theories. Since our sociological community is not familiar enough with network theory, the first part of the paper is devoted to outlining the history of the social network approach in general. In the second part of the paper the more recent macro social network approach is discussed as represented by its most important proponents.

A Comparative Analysis of Existing Standards For High School Sociology Curricula

Academic sociologists have recently increased their focus on improving high school sociology. Reform efforts include networking between teachers and universities, improving curriculum, and enhancing teacher training. I propose that this list be expanded to include setting curricular standards. Current trends in educational reform center on standards-based education, and although many social science disciplines have adapted to this trend, sociology's focus on standards is limited to undergraduate education. I analyze the existing state sociology standards by measuring them against the American Sociological Association's (ASA) Advanced Placement Sociology course, the National Council for Social Studies standards, and the sample learning goals from Liberal Learning and the Sociology Major Updated (McKinney et al. 2005). The results indicate that there are some substantial differences in the learning goals set forth by the ASA and those set forth by the states. I suggest that since the academic sociological community is in an ideal position to address high school social studies content in a variety of disciplines, we should expand our efforts in this area.

Lata 1959–1960 widziane oczyma łódzkiego socjologa. Na podstawie pamiętników Jana Lutyńskiego

The text contains excerpts of Jan Lutyński’s diary from the years 1959–1961. Professor Lutyński (1921–1988) describes the situation of sociological community in Łódź after political changes brought by the 1956 events. He writes about the struggles with censorship, about the distinction between private and public life and dilemmas brought by it, about students of sociology at the University of Łódź in 1959, and about the mood in the academe and the influence of the communist party (PZPR) on the faculty in those times.

Spanish Academic Publishing in Sociology

This article analyses the situation of publications in the realm of sociology in Spain. On the one hand, it looks at the development of Spanish sociological production and its public over time in relation to the process of the discipline's institutionalization ie country. On the other hand, it examines comparatively the different editorial sectors that have to do with Spanish sociological work: the commercial, institutional and university sectors. Finally, the article demonstrates that by contrast with the Anglo-Saxon model of editing, Spanish sociological editing suffers from less of an editorial drive for the initiation of projects and the promotion of published works, as well as from less rewarding relationships between authors and editors. This unsatisfying situation is interpreted in relation to certain weaknesses of the Spanish sociological community that can be attributed to the problematic institutionalization of sociology in Spain.

Identity: articulating cybernetics and sociology

PurposeTo establish the concept of identity as the bridging concept of cybernetics and sociology.Design/methodology/approachThe approach is a pincers movement. On the one hand, it is argued that there has been a move towards an identity society; identity is a foundational concept for an understanding of contemporary society. On the other hand, the paper argues that in the work of Beer, identity became the key to his proposal that the VSM is the optimal form of variety management in a social system. The study is based on an extension and application ofFinalizierungstheorieto the problem.FindingsIdentity is the key concept for the articulation of cybernetics and sociology. There has been a singular failure to apply cybernetic ideas to sociological materials in a manner that has met with the approval and satisfaction of the sociological community. Beer's formulation of the identity phenomenon and its extrapolation in the social sphere proposes a solution to this long‐standing problem.Practical implicationsThe approach allows for a broad ranging multi‐level research programme in sociological cybernetics to be formulated and pursued in a manner congenial to the accumulation of a substantial knowledge base ranging from micro‐ to macro‐issues.Originality/valueThis paper presents a unique synthesis of cybernetics and sociology building on and extending the work of Beer in the field of managerial cybernetics.

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.

Globalization: A Triumph of Ambiguity

This article is a critical analysis of the definition of globalization in sociological studies. It argues that sociologists, unlike economists, have not achieved a commonly accepted definition of globalization. This seriously hinders the development of empirical studies. The ambiguity of the concept of globalization is rooted in three dialectics: globalization-as-a-process vs globalization-as-a-condition; globalizationas-reality vs globalization-as-futurology and one-dimensional globalization vs multi-dimensional globalization. These dialectics are rarely made explicit in different studies on globalization, which contributes to an accumulation of confusion rather than an accumulation of knowledge. The article aims to provide a theoretical framework in which concepts of globalization can be positioned through the formal analysis of a commonly used definition. Conceptual limitations that arise from the choice of a specific concept are highlighted, such as the underestimation of the present when globalization is considered a process, the neglect of internal contradictions when globalization is seen as a multidimensional concept; and the dangers of determinism and ignorance of unique features when the processes of globalization are defined by their sole destination. It challenges the sociological community to position research on globalization within this proposed framework.