Daniel Little
The topic of the historicity of academic disciplines has come up numerous times in this forum. It is a conviction of mine that disciplines demonstrate a great deal of path dependency over time in their evolution. We can think of a discipline as being constituted at a time by some or all of these elements: …
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Is sociology as a discipline different in France than in Germany or Britain? Or do common facts about the social world entail that sociology is everywhere the same? The social sciences feel different from physics or mathematics, in that their development seems much more path-dependent and contingent. The problems selected, the theoretical resources deployed, the …
Paul Draus and Juliette Roddy have been involved in street-level sociological research in Detroit for over ten years. Roddy is an economist and a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Ojibwe Indians. She studies substance use, recovery and re-entry in the city of Detroit and teaches health policy and health economics in the …
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I often find handbooks in the social sciences to be particularly valuable resources for anyone interested in thinking about the big issues and challenges facing the social sciences at a particular point in time. Editors and contributors have generally made intelligent efforts to provide articles that give a good understanding of a theme, methodology, or …
I've just spent several interesting days at the second science and humanities conference of the Mexican Academy of Sciences in Mexico City (link). My thanks to Dra. Rosario Esteinou, Chair of the Social Sciences Section of the Mexican Academy of Science, for inviting me to participate. This forum is a very interesting effort to bring together researchers across …
Neil Gross has a remarkably good ear for philosophy. And this extends especially to his occasional treatments of the influences that helped shape the discipline of philosophy in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. His sociological biography of Richard Rorty is a tour de force (Richard Rorty: The Making of …
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Sociology is a discipline with a short history and a very dense and complex tree of topics and methods. So writing its history — even limited to the past century and a half — is extremely challenging. And the idea that the discipline has worked itself out as the methodical development of ideas advanced by …
Is there any reason to think that a course in philosophy of social science can be helpful for a graduate student in sociology or political science (or education, public health, or public policy)? Is this part of philosophy a useful contribution to a PhD education in the social sciences? I think there are several reasons …
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Social theory is a well-defined field that is centered on a group of core thinkers that we might refer to as "luminaries". These are figures from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries like Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Simmel, and Tarde; mid-century thinkers like Bourdieu, Foucault, Gramsci, and Habermas; and more recent thinkers such as Tilly, Merton, …
Pierre Bourdieu's sociology has influenced a broad range of sociologists (and philosophers) since the appearance of Outline of a Theory of Practice in 1972 (with an English translation in 1977). Generally speaking his work seems to fall on the synchronic rather than diachronic side of the social sciences -- more about "reproduction" than "transformation", in Phil …
Understanding Society 