Karl Marx Imagined The social world is more complex and heterogeneous than most parts of the natural world, with diverse causal processes, different tempos of change, and multiple influences on a given outcome of interest. If we want to understand, say, why American psychiatry came to have the institutions and prescriptions that it currently has …
Rethinking Analytical Sociology
My current book Rethinking Analytical Sociology has now appeared in print, and an ebook version is available on the Elgar website here. The book is intended to provide a sympathetic but critical review of analytical sociology as a relatively new sub-discipline within sociology. Here is a video preview of the book. https://youtu.be/pDpnkY2AIEA The book argues that the …
Experimental methods in sociology
An earlier post noted the increasing importance of experimentation in some areas of economics (link), and posed the question of whether there is a place for experimentation in sociology as well. Here I'd like to examine that question a bit further. Let's begin by asking the simple question: what is an experiment? An experiment is …
Youth studies
One of the smaller sub-fields within sociology is "youth studies." This strikes me as an intriguing area of research, and it seems as though the possible questions for inquiry here have only begun to be tapped. Youth issues have come up in earlier posts, including disaffected youth (link), engaged youth (link), and the problem of …
The street and the ring
Loïc Wacquant offers a fascinating piece of urban ethnography in Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. It is his account of his three-year experience while a sociology graduate student at the University of Chicago of participating in the Woodlawn Boys and Girls Club, a boxing club for young men who are serious about …
Alford Young on race and sociology
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 …
Raymond Aron as historian of sociology
How can we best tell the story of the development of sociology as an empirical social science? Raymond Aron undertook to do so in Main Currents in Sociological Thought (2 volumes) by reviewing the main sociological ideas of the greats: Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Pareto, and Weber. The book was first published in France in 1965 as Les …
Marketing Wittgenstein
Who made Wittgenstein a great philosopher? Why is the eccentric Austrian now regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers? What conjunction of events in his life history and the world of philosophy in the early twentieth century led to this accumulating recognition and respect? We might engage in a bit of Panglossian intellectual …
Sociologists on race
It is apparent that society in the United States is racialized in deep ways that greatly disadvantage the African-American population in the country, from health to longevity to education level to income and wealth levels. The disparities in all these areas of life are well documented (for example, here). Moreover, they seem to be more durable …
Race and the Chicago School
The Chicago School of sociology has often gotten a fair amount of credit for bringing the study of race into the academic discipline of sociology in the early decades of the twentieth century. Robert Ezra Park, in particular, is taken as a pioneer with his theories of a "race relations cycle", his work with Booker …
Understanding Society 