Peter Berger declared himself a humanistic sociologist throughout much of his career, including in his important book with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. This isn't exactly a common identification for an American sociologist in the 1950s. So how did he get there? This is an interesting question …
Esser’s sociology
Sociology in Germany seems to be particularly prolific today, and this extends to the contributions that German sociologists are making to the sub-discipline of analytic sociology. One of the leaders who has played a key role in this active field is Hartmut Esser. Esser's Soziologie. Spezielle Grundlagen 3. Soziales Handeln (2002) is particularly important, but …
Weber in America
Lawrence Scaff offered a fascinating preview of his forthcoming book, Max Weber in America, at a sociology seminar in Ann Arbor this week. Scaff has written extensively on Weber in the past, and this current research is particularly intriguing and stimulating. The book offers a careful reconstruction of Weber's visit to the United States in 1904, …
Merton’s sociological imagination
Robert Merton began life as Meyer Schkolnick, son of impoverished Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, and he became one of the most influential American sociologists of his generation. He is most often associated with a couple of phrases that came to embody common knowledge in the social sciences -- "theories of the middle range," …
Sociology in China
Social investigation has a history in China that extends into the Ming-Qing dynasties and earlier, in the form of reports by scholar-officials on local conditions. Scholars undertook to provide descriptions of agricultural conditions, farming methods, famines, drought and flooding, the conditions of the poor, banditry, and many other topics of interest to the state or …
International social science
Last month the International Social Science Council (ISSC) launched a major review of the status of the social sciences worldwide (link). The report was commissioned and partially funded by UNESCO. The full report is available as a PDF file, and it is an important piece of work. It includes review essays by leading social scientists …
Concrete sociological knowledge
Is there a place within the social sciences for the representation of concrete, individual-level experience? Is there a valid kind of knowledge expressed by the descriptions provided by an observant resident of a specific city or an experienced traveler in the American South in the 1940s? Or does social knowledge need to take the form …
The disciplines of economics
Economics is sometimes presented as the most "scientific" of the social science disciplines. It is mathematical, it involves sophisticated models, it makes use of enormous data sets, and it is invoked in the formulation of social and economic policies in much the way that the science of mechanics is invoked in the building of bridges. …
What makes a sociological theory compelling?
In the humanities it is a given that assertions and arguments have a certain degree of rational force, but that ultimately, reasonable people may differ about virtually every serious claim. An interpretation of Ulysses, an argument for a principle of distributive justice, or an attribution of certain of Shakespeare's works to Christopher Marlowe -- each …
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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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Understanding Society 