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Public Sociology features a wide-ranging discussion of the controversial model of a social science that reaches out to non-academic audiences, including both average citizens and policymakers. This approach has been greeted with enthusiasm by supporters, and with skepticism and anxiety among critics. Both perspectives are well represented in this volume.Some of the critical voices question whether public sociology is even a good idea. Others dissent, arguing for a strong program in professional sociology as an alternative. Still others express concern that public sociology promotes a liberal-left political agenda, despite its nonpartisan pretensions. Some elements of the model are queried, s...
Sorokin (1889-1968) rose from a peasant childhood in Russia to become one of the most erudite, insightful, and critical figures in the history of sociology. He was, however, considered both a pioneer and an outcast. Essays range from his early Russian years to his final works in the 60s, this collection provides a much-needed introduction to one of sociology's most controversial thinkers.
This edited volume highlights the work of ten forgotten and neglected social theorists in the hope of reinvigorating interest in their work and their potential contributions to the analysis of contemporary social issues. Each chapter includes a brief biographical sketch, an overview of the selected theorist’s work and significance, and the relevance of their work to one or more contemporary social issues. While other similar texts tend to focus primarily on intellectual biography, our emphasis here is on the scholar’s theories and their application to contemporary social issues. We provide a contextualization of each scholar’s work, using present-day social issues or problems. Many of these individuals played a significant role in the development of sociology. Our hope is to provide a resource that will help re-integrate these marginalized social theorists, rescuing them from obscurity and elevating their status.
Emphasizes critical approaches to the study of race, identity and self, as well as developments in interactionist theory, ethics and dramaturical studies.
The human sciences in the English-speaking world have been in a state of crisis since the Second World War. The battle between champions of hard-core scientific standards and supporters of a more humanistic, interpretive approach has been fought to a stalemate. Joel Isaac seeks to throw these contemporary disputes into much-needed historical relief. In Working Knowledge he explores how influential thinkers in the twentieth century's middle decades understood the relations among science, knowledge, and the empirical study of human affairs. For a number of these thinkers, questions about what kinds of knowledge the human sciences could produce did not rest on grand ideological gestures toward ...
Constructionist theory describes and analyzes social problems as emerging through the efforts of claimsmakers who bring issues to public attention. By typifying a problem and characterizing it as a particular sort, claimsmakers can shape policymaking and public response to the problem. Th is new edition of Images of Issues addresses claimsmaking in the 1990s, featuring such issues as fathers' rights, stalking, sexual abuse by the clergy, hate crimes, multicultural education, factory farming, and concluding with an expanded discussion of the theoretical debate over constructionism.
Robert L. Bartley Editor Emeritus, The Wall Street Journal As this collection of essays is published, markets, regulators and society generally are sorting through the wreckage of the collapse in tech stocks at the turn of the millennium. All the more reason for an exhaustive look at our last “bubble,” if that is what we choose to call them. We haven’t had time to digest the lesson of the tech stocks and the recession that started in March 2001. After a decade, though, we’re ready to understand the savings and loan “bubble” that popped in 1989, preceding the recession that started in July 1990. For more than a half-century, we can now see clearly enough, the savings and loans wer...
This book demonstrates that the most forceful contribution to George Gurdjieff's world-view is Sufism, understood as the tradition of seeking truth wherever it can be found, especially at the meeting place of the world religions. Gurdjieff's masterpiece, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, is philosophically analyzed in its use of literary devices to jolt the reader into radical transformation.
A doctor can damage a patient as much with a misplaced word as with a slip of the scalpel." In this statement, from Lawrence J. Henderson, a famous physician whose name is part of the basic science of medicine, epitomizes the central theme of The Word as Scalpel . If words, the main substance of human relations, are so potent for harm, how equally powerful they can be to help if used with disciplined knowledge and understanding. Nowhere does this simple truth apply more certainly than in the behavior of a physician. Medical Sociology studies the full social context of health and disease, the interpersonal relations, social institutions, and the influence of social factors on the problems of ...
In Harvard’s Quixotic Pursuit of a New Science, Patrick L. Schmidt tells the little-known story of how some of the most renowned social scientists of the twentieth century struggled to elevate their emerging disciplines of cultural anthropology, sociology, and social and clinical psychology. Scorned and marginalized in their respective departments in the 1930s for pursuing the controversial theories of Freud and Jung, they persuaded Harvard to establish a new department, promising to create an interdisciplinary science that would surpass in importance Harvard’s “big three” disciplines of economics, government, and history. Although the Department of Social Relations failed to achieve...