Sociological Foundations Research Articles

Durkheim: une sociologie d’État

It is traditional to discuss the relation between Durkheim and Weber as ‘founders of sociology’. At first sight, it might seem odd to couple Durkheim and Hegel. But it can be instructive to compare their approach to issues involving modern individualism, society and the state. In general, they subscribe to a combination of rationalism and developmental ethics, in which the rational is immanent in the real, despite the possibility of ‘contingent’ or ‘pathological’ departures from ‘normality’. More specifically, in the case of the state, they see one of its main historical roles as the emancipation of the individual in a development of the individual personality. At the same time they picture the state as ‘the brain’ of society and insist on its relative autonomy and independence from individuals. Instead, in a critique of direct democracy, they look to a web of intermediate groups and corporations. A basic problematic in their work, and a continuing source of reflection, is how to achieve a balance between individual rights and a necessary authority and legitimacy of public power. In both cases this balance rests, as a matter of principle, on confidence in the skills and civic virtue of political leaders.

Spectres of Transnationalism: Changing Terrains of Sociology of Law

The growth of ‘legal transnationalism’– that is, the reach of law across nation‐state borders and the impact of external political and legal pressures on nation‐state law – undermines the main foundations of sociology of law. Modern sociology of law has assumed an ‘instrumentalist’ view of law as an agency of the modern directive state, but now it has to adjust to the state's increasingly complex regulatory conditions. The kind of convergence theory that underpins analysis of much legal transnationalism is inadequate for socio‐legal theory, and old ideas of ‘law’ and ‘society’ as the foci of sociology of law are no longer appropriate. Socio‐legal theory should treat law as a continuum of unstable, competing authority claims. Instead of taking ‘society’ as its reference point, it should conceptualize the contrasting types of regulatory needs of the networks of community (often not confined by nation‐state boundaries) that legal transnationalism addresses.

The Founding Fathers of Sociology: Francis Galton, Adolphe Quetelet, and Charles Booth: Or What Do People You Probably Never Heard of Have to Do with the Foundations of Sociology?

The theme of the 2008 meeting of the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology was “Engaging Sociology: Applied Sociology's Past, Present, and Promise.” The theme suggests that applied sociology has a past that is different from the parent discipline of sociology, and given how the history of sociology has come to be taught and remembered, that is an understandable suggestion. The argument of this paper, however, is that the discipline of sociology itself—as it is actually practiced today—originated mainly in applied work, in the work of nineteenth century social reformers whose contributions to the field have been largely forgotten, people such as Francis Galton, Adolphe Quetelet, and Charles Booth. These, I argue, are the Founding Fathers of the discipline as I have practiced it for the past thirty-five years.

A Chinese Political Sociology in Our Times

Since the Treaty of Westphalia and the advent of state personality, and since the French revolution and the advent of citizenship, and the idea that each personality—state or citizen—had rights, political sociology has recognized and grappled with individual personalities. They may be drawn into systems of states, but they remain states; they may be socialized in an Hegelian progression into communitarian groupings and loyalties, but they remain citizens. Each personality has right of freedom against violation by others and each personality has right of redress against others. With the independence of most of the world since Westphalia, and with the spread of democracy after the fall of Communism, there has been an apparent triumph for the idea of personality and its legal character. The key tenet here is that all the units of personalities may choose to aggregate themselves to others, but they may also choose to be alone, even to an extent renegade. Externally driven regime change is a highly controversial policy, and citizens cannot be deprived of their individual freedoms except by elaborate due process that demonstrates they have first impugned the rights of others. Autonomy, individualism, and the rights of a legal personality were concepts that created both the sociology of citizens in society and the political sociology of states in an international system. So triumphant did the cojoint concepts of individualism and rights seem, that it was easy to assert that their practice was merely the embodiment of some higher Kantian universe of rights. However, the Treaty of Westphalia is just a little over 350 years old, and the French revolution almost 220 years old. These are youthful foundations for an international political sociology that seems historically fixed. What if, in that era, a Chinese as opposed to …

Ultimate referentiality

A brief and selective conceptual glance at the history of sociological foundation shows that a certain assumption about the `ultimate referentiality' of society has been at the heart of sociology. The late modern responses to, and reactions against, foundationalism in various schools in the human and social sciences provide a springboard for a new beginning in sociological inquiry. Drawing on radical phenomenology and postmetaphysical hermeneutical philosophy, this article summons attention to the concept of ultimate referentiality as the point of moorage that supposedly secures our theoretical postulates in a presumed locus in the `real' — namely, `society'. Given our late modern crisis of metaphysical claims about ultimate foundations, the article makes an invitation to an interpretative sociological renewal with an acute sensitivity toward praxis. The article provisionally makes a number of suggestions with respect to the modes of sociological practice that would render the discipline attuned to our age.

In search of sociological foundations for the project of humanity

In search of sociological foundations for the project of humanity

Sociological foundations of normative institutionalism in political science

The article discusses sociological foundations of normative institutionalism in political science. Section 1 introduces different types of institutionalism. Section 3 compares the old with the new institutionalism. Since new institutionalism is sociological in nature, section 4 links new institutionalism with social behavior. Section 5 discusses common features of all types of institutionalism. Sections 6-8 lays out main elements of normative institutionalism. Section 9 concludes by highlighting the relevance of new institutionalism for political science. .

Analysing global economic organization: embedded networks and global chains compared

This article analyses the network epistemologies that underlie several frameworks for studying global economic organization. Specifically, the embedded network of the new economic sociology is compared with various global chain constructs that seek to emphasize the connectedness of actors and activities across space. I argue that the micro-sociological foundations of the new economic sociology make embeddedness a problematic concept for analysing economic organization at a global level. I then contrast the embedded network as a trust-based governance structure with the construct of the global commodity chain, which understands network governance in terms of power relations or ‘drivenness’. Finally, I explain how the recent theory of global value chain governance by Gereffi, Humphrey and Sturgeon (2005) departs from the macro-sociological tradition that oriented earlier chain frameworks: this theory, which focuses on the coordination of inter-firm dyads in a global value chain, returns to a micro-oriented understanding of governance, but one that draws more from transaction cost theory than from the new economic sociology.

Hannah Arendt, Sociology and Political Modernity

Hannah Arendt has only rarely been regarded as an important critic of sociology, and is generally classified as a political theorist. This article argues that Arendt's engagement with the theoretical foundations of sociology both constitutes an important critique of certain sociological tendencies derived from its classical origins and is central to understanding the development of her own social and political thought. Arendt's theory of activity is initially reconstructed and defended as the basis for her criticism of the tendency of many sociological paradigms to conflate the activity of fabrication with that of action. Her critique of the explanatory assumptions underlying the concept of a `social process' is then applied to recent theorizing within historical sociology, with particular reference to the problematic assumptions surrounding the concept of sovereignty.

Durkheim on the Environment

Pioneer environmental sociologists, Riley E. Dunlap and William R. Catton Jr., successfully laid the foundation of environmental sociology by pointing out the anthropocentric bias of mainstream sociology. The exemplary intellectual source of this bias could be found in the works of French sociologist Émile Durkheim whose methodological dictum stated that social facts could only be explained by other social facts. Here we call for a re-evaluation of Durkheim's role as perpetrator of the anthropocentric bias behind the Human Exemptionalist Paradigm dominating mainstream sociology. We do this from several directions but mostly by re-visiting his foundational writing on the topic, his inaugural lecture in sociology given at the University of Bordeaux in 1887. Our critical examination of that lecture makes it clear that Durkheim's idea of “social facts” was far richer, more nuanced, and more mindful of biological and other environmental factors than typically recognized in the sociology literature. We conclude that it might profit scholars to re-visit Durkheim, not as the party guilty for dismissing the environment, but as a foundation for understanding the dynamics between human and environmental systems.

The Foundation of an Interpretative Sociology: A Critical Review of the Attempts of George H. Mead and Alfred Schutz

George H. Mead and Alfred Schutz proposed foundations for an interpretative sociology from opposite standpoints. Mead accepted the objective meaning structure a priori. His problem became therefore the explanation of the individuality and creativity of human actors in his social behavioristic approach. In contrast, Schutz started from the subjective consciousness of an isolated actor as a result of a phenomenological reduction. He was concerned with the problem of explaining the possibility of this isolated actor’s perceiving other actors in their existence, their concreteness, and the motives for their behavior. I treat these two approaches and their associated problems as equally relevant. My evaluation is based on their success in solving their specific problems. The aim is to decide which of the two approaches provides the more adequate foundation for an interpretative sociology.

Anthropological dimension of ethnic conflicts

The aim of the paper is to comprehend ethnic conflicts through their anthropological dimension, especially through Durkheim's differentiation of sacred and profane, as well as their ambivalence. Beside Durkheim himself, the author also bases his analysis on other theorists who more or less share Durkheim's views. Main theoretical framework of analysis is basically an attempt to develop and 'apply' to that end a very inspiring anthropological standpoint of Mary Douglas. Sociological foundations from which the empirical material is extracted and on which the value of the basic hypothesis, as well as the applied notion apparatus, are illustrated and checked, are ethnic conflicts that followed dissolution of the second Yugoslavia. While the author claims neither exhaustiveness nor completeness in the explanation of such a complex phenomena, he limits the objective to verifying the hypothesis that mixture of sacred and profane is one of the causes, and at the same time manifestations, of ethnic conflicts in ethnically and religiously heterogeneous environment, that has, besides, undergone difficult and uncertain process of transformation from socialistic to capitalistic system. In that context, the attention is drawn to inter-entity relations in post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as to some of the causes and possible outcomes of sharp polarization in contemporary Serbian politics, which are examined within the very same theoretical framework. .

How can one be European? Reflections on the Pillars of European Civic Identity

Abstract: The citizenship of the EU is not only a set of rights, but also of civic behaviours and representations. In this article, I analyse these moral and sociological foundations of EU citizenship, stressing the limits of classic interpretations in terms of ‘identification to’ or ‘support for’ the EU. Instead, I suggest reading the evolution of EU citizenship as a process of political recognition. Such an analytical framework, inspired by recent works of Axel Honneth and Paul Ricoeur, leads one to understand this process as a threefold evolution: critical assessment of one's own national identity; transformation of the perception of other nationalities; and identification to the EU. Such a reading also compels us to pay attention to the limits of these processes: mutual recognition is an unending process which does not exclude the persistence of nationalistic reactions, hegemonic temptation and the revival of xenophobic attitudes vis‐à‐vis other Member States and third countries. I conclude that any project to render EU identity thicker needs to take care of the risk of jeopardising the fragile acquis.

Foundations of British Sociology 1880–1930: Contexts and Biographies

‘This paper provides an overview of aspects of the history of British sociology. In particular, it tries to answer critical historical work by among others, Perry Anderson and Philip Abrams, which sought to explain the supposed indigenous ‘failure’ to develop academic sociology in Britain before the 1960s. It is argued that a narrowly academic reading of the history of sociology cannot do justice to its role in the service of social administration and public enlightenment and may exaggerate the degree to which sociology from its foundations was conceived as a purely intellectual discipline. The paper points to a thriving sociological culture in Britain in the generation before the First World War, though it was one in which many contributions came from philosophers, natural scientists and political economists rather then self-proclaimed ‘sociologists’. It ends with a brief review of Patrick Geddes and Victor Branford, a founder of the Sociological Society and editor of the Sociological Review, whose biographies and eclectic social and international interests tell us something about the personalities and political interests of early British sociological pioneers.'

A Framework for Ethical Conformity in Marketing

The extant marketing literature provides little guidance for theory development or practice with regard to questions of ethical conformity and the resulting market response. To begin to bridge this research gap, we advance a theoretical framework of ethical conformity in marketing, appealing to marketing ethics, management strategy, and sociological foundations. We set the stage for our theoretical arguments by considering the role of normative expectations related to marketing practices and behaviors held by societal constituents. Against this backdrop, we propose drivers of conformity in marketing, including practices consistent with both overconformity and underconformity. The framework allows us to advance testable research propositions by which questions of ethical conformity may be explored. We conclude by suggesting additional future research needed to develop the domain, specifically in the form of empirical inquiries uncovering firm strategic decisions with ethical implications.

Variables, Mechanisms, and Simulations : Can the Three Methods Be Synthesized ?

This article offers a critical analysis of four contemporary sociological debates. Systematic analysis of the relevant literature suggests the existence of a project for reformulating the methodological foundations of empirical quantitative sociology. This reconstruction shows the emergence of the following idea: an alliance of variable analysis, mechanism methodology, and simulation techniques would be of great help in resolving some of the impasses that “standard” empirical quantitative sociology encounters. This thesis is then tested for quantitative sociology of social stratification: where there are “irrefutable signs” that the idea is becoming acceptable. Lastly, a link is established between these recent debates and older, similar proposals for resolving the problem, and the question of why the soundness of these proposals has only recently been recognized is examined.

Philosophy and History of Education: Time to bridge the gap?

In this article, the relationship between philosophy and history of education is delved into. First, it is noted that both disciplines have diverged from each other over the last few decades to become relatively autonomous subsectors within the pedagogical sciences, each with its own discourses, its own expositional characteristics, its own channels of communication, and its own networks. From the perspective of the history of education, it seems as though more affiliation has been sought with the science of history. The history of education, in any event, has in the past few years become more historicizing and less ‘educationalizing’. According to the author, (who is not a philosopher of education) there are signs that indicate that such an analogous line of reasoning, mutatis mutandis, also applies for the philosophy of education. Does this mean that there are no longer any bridges from the one area to the other or that none are possible? Probably not. In the second portion, it is shown that the modern or even postmodern ‘new cultural history of education’, with its often ironical and demythologizing traits uses or can use a considerable amount of ‘grand theory’ (à la Foucault). Indeed, the development of an adequate conceptual apparatus that also has to cope with the problem of ‘presentism’ assumes a constant dialogue with the past and for this a philosophical‐interpretative (casu quo, hermeneutic) approach is still the best situated. Inversely, the Foucauldian perspective shows that philosophy in general and philosophy of education in particular equally hardly do without history. Within the reflection on pedagogical praxis, the historical and the philosophical thus probably will continue to rely on each other—if only as allies against the dominance of short‐winded empirical‐quantitative research. Still, it would be naive to think that, from this possible alliance, the fragmentation of historically developed knowledge systems with their own sociological and institutional foundation of scientific activities can be rectified in a trice.

Rethinking Tourism Education: What Should Schools Teach?

Tourism education at universities tends to focus on enabling students for future careers in the industry. Little attention has been devoted to the meaning of tourism education. This paper attempts to promote awareness of overlooked perspectives and critical issues in tourism education by examining two possible approaches to educating future tourism professionals. It discusses tourism education from the perspective of employability as the primary goal. The paper also elaborates on the perspective of providing students with a philosophical and sociological foundation for decisionmaking strategies, as well as for professional preparation.

Teoria i socjologia kultury Antoniny Kłoskowskiej

The Author portrays Antonina Kłoskowska as a theorist and sociologist of culture. He writes about her early inspirations and traces her later fascinations: socio-cultural formation of individual character, personality, national character; search for mutual relations — theoretical and empirical — between various dimensions of culture within a global culture and the developed concept of culture as a symbolic and autotelic phenomenon. Drawing from the achievements of international sociology and continuing the Polish sociological tradition Kłoskowska formulated the theoretical and methodological foundations of sociology of culture as an independent field of sociological research.Her studies which laid a foundation for intensive contacts between the sociologists of culture and representatives of other fields of liberal arts formed several generations of students of culture in Poland.

No fear of comparisons or context: on the foundations of historical sociology

Exploring the role of comparative history in macro‐social inquiry, Theda Skocpol suggested, in the early 1980s, that historical sociology aimed to derive causal regularities in history without assuming a ‘preconceived general model’. This triggered off a debate on the foundations of historical sociology. Starting from a sketch of the historical and theoretical background, this essay analyses the various positions that evolved in this debate. The analysis relies on an analytical framework that maps various understandings of theory in the social sciences. Three positions are discussed: standard, social‐philosophical and pragmatist conceptions of social science theory. We conclude that both standard scholars (the early functionalists and the later rational choice theorists) and social philosophers fail to overcome the fear of comparisons and context. Pragmatists, in contrast, have no such fear, since they avoid high‐level notions of theory and allow only internal analogies when they analyse historical developments.