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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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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Marc Bloch and the French social sciences
Marc Bloch was one of the twentieth century's most important and pathbreaking historians. Several features of his work are particularly important: his attention to the specifics of medieval economic institutions, his interest in historically specific customs and practices, and his interest in uncovering the social and technical characteristics of medieval agriculture. He helped to define …
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Understanding Society 