Alford Young is professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and an expert on the life experience of inner-city African-American men. He is also chair of the department of sociology at Michigan. His 2006 book, The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances, is based on several …
Political polarization?
Is the American electorate "polarized" with regard to sets of political issues? McCarty, Rosenthal, and Poole accept the common view that we have in fact become more polarized in our politics over the past twenty years, and they offer an interesting theory of what is causing this polarization in Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology …
Sociology of knowledge: Berger
I've treated several approaches to the sociology of knowledge in the past month. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann describe their book, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, as fundamentally a contribution to this subject as well. So this post will examine the assumptions they make about the topic. Berger and …
Steinmetz on colonialism
George Steinmetz offers a comparative sociology of colonialism in The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. More specifically, he wants to explain differences in the implementation of "native policy" within German colonial regimes around the turn of the twentieth century. He finds that there are significant differences across three …
Scenario-based projections of social processes
As we have noted in previous posts, social outcomes are highly path-dependent and contingent (link, link, link, link). This implies that it is difficult to predict the consequences of even a single causal intervention within a complex social environment including numerous actors -- say, a new land use policy, a new state tax on services, or a sweeping …
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Skinner’s spatial imagination
images: presentations of Skinner's data by Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University, AAS 2010 G. William Skinner was a remarkably generous scholar who inspired and assisted several generations of China specialists. (Here is a link to a remembrance of Bill.) He was prolific and fertile, and there is much to learn from rereading his work. …
Current historical sociology: George Steinmetz
http://www.youtube.com/p/9565EDA9C3488652&hl=en_US&fs=1 George Steinmetz, professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, is a leading scholar in the contemporary field of historical sociology. His most recent book is The Devil's Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa, and his volume The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and …
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Styles of epistemology in world sociology
One of the basic organizing premises of the sociology of science is that there are meaningful differences in the conduct of a given area of science across separate communities, all the way down. There is no pure language and method of science into which diverse research traditions ought to be translated. Rather, there are complex …
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Causal realism for sociology
The subject of causal explanation in the social sciences has been a recurring thread here (thread). Here are some summary thoughts about social causation. First, there is such a thing as social causation. Causal realism is a defensible position when it comes to the social world: there are real social relations among social factors (structures, …
Alternative economists
Traditional neoclassical economics has missed the mark quite a bit in the past two years. There is the financial and banking crisis, of course; neoclassical economists haven't exactly succeeded in explaining or "post-dicting" the crisis and recession through which we've traveled over the past year and more. But perhaps more fundamentally, neoclassical economics has failed …
Understanding Society 