profession – Understanding Society

November 16, 2009November 3, 2010

Was Durkheim a professional sociologist?

At some point in the history of sociology there was a transition from the founding non-professional genius to the professional disciplinary researcher. Marx and Tocqueville certainly fall in the former category; Robert Merton, Mayer Zald, and Neil Smelser fall clearly in the latter. By some time in the mid-twentieth century sociology had become "professionalized." What …

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June 9, 2008August 11, 2022

The professions as an object of study

Several gifted sociologists over the past thirty years have made innovative contributions to the study of the "sociology of professions." Most recent among these is Andrew Abbott, whose book, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor, is a superlative contribution to sociological theory formation. Abbott has also given attention to …

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Understanding Society is an academic blog by Daniel Little that explores a series of topics in the philosophy of social science and the workings of the social world. Published continuously since 2007, the blog has treated a wide range of topics, from the nature of causal mechanisms to the idea of emergence to the political dynamics of right-wing extremism to the causes of large-scale technological disaster. Readers should consider the blog an example of “open-source philosophy”. It is an experiment in thinking, one idea at a time.

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March 19, 2023
Red-state authoritarianismThe atrocious actions taken recently by the governor of Florida demonstrate an unmistakable turn towards authoritarianism in the American far right. Prior tyrannies depended on physical violence, murder, groundless arrest, and political prisons. But “soft” authoritarianism doesn’t need mass violence in order to extinguish the reality of a constitutional republic of free and equal citizens. Florida is showing the way.#racism #fascism https://undsoc.org/2023/03/19/red-state-authoritarianism/
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March 14, 2023
Here is an interesting set of observations about LLMs and ChatGPT by talented and knowledgeable philosophers ...https://dailynous.com/2023/03/14/philosophers-on-next-generation-large-language-models/
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March 10, 2023
Here is an excellent and thorough treatment of the role of multinational corporations in Argentina's dirty war in the 1970s, *The Economic Accomplices of the Argentine Dictatorship* (Horacio Verbitsky and Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky, eds.). Especially interesting is the chapter by Victoria Basualdo, Tomás Ojea Quintana, and Carolina Varsky, "The Cases of Ford and Mercedes Benz".https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/the-economic-accomplices-to-the-argentine-dictatorship/CC122E28FEC3F4380F74C703BFFD909E
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March 10, 2023
Corporate ethics and corporate crimes ...During the "dirty war" in Argentina, multinational corporations played an active role in facilitating torture and murder against labor activists. This post reviews the judicial findings against two high executives in Ford Motor Argentina in 2018, finding them guilty of aiding the military dictatorship in kidnapping, torturing, and killing workers and union activists at a Ford factory.#crimes against humanityhttps://undsoc.org/2023/03/09/corporate-ethics-and-corporate-crimes/
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March 3, 2023
WEB Du Bois’ modernist data graphicsIn 1900 Du Bois prepared over 40 data graphics presenting his work on the status of African Americans in the United States. The results represent an amazingly modernist style of presentation of complex data. Battle-Baptiste and Rusert’s *W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America* offers superb access to these creations. Here is a blog post on the work….#Racehttps://undsoc.org/2023/02/28/w-e-b-du-bois-stunning-modernist-data-graphics/

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