What might be involved in creating a new sociology of Paris? Paris is a particularly good subject for a new urban sociology. It is a gritty, diverse, and dynamic city, and a city displaying unceasing chaotic surges and currents of social life. It is a global city, both in Saskia Sassen's sense (strong networked interconnection …
Regional interconnectedness
Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit are part of a large economic region in the upper Midwest of the United States, which is sometimes referred to as the Great Lakes Region. There are hundreds of lesser cities within this regional system -- Erie, Toledo, Rockford, Grand Rapids, .... What are the economic interdependencies that exist among these …
A crisis in sociology?
Alvin Gouldner thought there was a "coming crisis in sociology" -- but that was almost forty years ago, in 1970 (The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology). And in 1996 Immanuel Wallerstein closed out the century by chairing the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences, issuing a report that called for some radical …
Scientific misconduct as a principal-agent problem
How does an organization assure that its agents perform their duties truthfully and faithfully? We have ample evidence of the other kind of performance -- theft, misappropriation, lies, fraud, diversion of assets for personal use, and a variety of deceptive accounting schemes. And we have whole professions devoted to detecting and punishing these various forms …
Continue reading "Scientific misconduct as a principal-agent problem"
Marx and the Taipings
It is interesting to observe how Europe's greatest revolutionary, Karl Marx (1818-1883), thought about China's greatest revolution in the nineteenth century, the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864). We might imagine that this relentless advocate for underclass interests might have cheered for the poor peasants of the Taiping Heavenly Army. But this was not the case. Marx wrote …
What is a norm?
The role of norms in social behavior is a key question for sociology. Is a norm a sociological reality? And do individuals behave in conformance to norms? We can offer mundane examples of social norms deriving from a wide range of social situations: norms of politeness, norms of fairness, norms of appropriate dress, norms of …
Analyzing peasant consciousness
painting: Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners (1857) painting: Edward H. Corbould, Hetty and Captain Donnithorne in Mrs. Poyser's Dairy James Scott is a scholar who has shed more light on the mentality and agency of rural people than almost any other since the reinvigoration of peasant studies in the 1970s. Scott's book The Moral Economy of …
Institutions, procedures, norms
One of the noteworthy aspects of the framing offered by Victor Nee and Mary Brinton of the assumptions of the new institutionalism is the very close connection they postulate between institutions and norms. (See the prior posting on this subject). So what is the connection between institutions and norms? The idea that an institution is …
The new institutionalism
The new institutionalism in sociology is a particularly promising prism through which to understand a lot of social behavior and change. Victor Nee and Paul Ingram define the approach in these terms in "Embeddedness and Beyond" in The New Institutionalism in Sociology: Specifying the mechanisms through which institutions shape the parameters of choice is important …
Norms and deliberative rationality
Why do people cooperate? That is, what motivates individuals to come together to share labor and resources in pursuit of a common good from which they cannot be excluded -- fighting fires, hunting marauding tigers, cleaning up a public beach? Standard rational choice theory, and its application to problems of individual rationality in group settings, …
Understanding Society 