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علم الاجتماع النظري : مقدمة موجزة لإثنتي عشرة نظرية اجتماعية
يتحدث الكتاب عن علم الاجتماع الاقتصادي حيث يعتبر أحد فروع علم الاجتماع وأهمها، وله مداخله النظرية والمنهجية، شأنه في ذلك شأن أي تخصص من تخصصات علم الاجتماع الأخرى، مثل علم الاجتماع السياسي، وعلم الاجتماع الحضري، وعلم الاجتماع الريفي، وعلم الاجتماع التربوي، وعلم الاجتماع الديني، وعلم الاجتماع القانوني، وذلك خلال النصف الأول من القرن العشرين، حيث كانت بدايته بداية متواضعة في النصف الأول من القرن المذكور. وبمرور الوقت تطور ميدان الدراسة في هذا العلم تطورا ملحوظا، وخاصة بعد أن أرسى علم الاجتماع دعائمه المنهجية، وتطورت مداخله السوسيولوجية المختلفة على المستويين النظري والعملي.
BOOK
The More American Sociology Seeks to Become a Politically-Relevant Discipline, the More Irrelevant it Becomes to Solving Societal Problems
The long-standing divide between sociology as an activist discipline vs. sociology as a science is examined in light of the current trend for American sociology focus on a limited set of justice issues resulting from inequalities and discrimination against certain categories of persons. Increasingly, this trend is pushing sociology toward become an activist discipline and, as a result, an ideologically-oriented discipline in its teaching and research activities. The outcome of this trend is the growing marginalization of those committed to sociology as a science in departments and academic meetings, resulting in demoralization of sociology’s scientists and their escalating concern over their fate in a discipline increasingly mimicking a social movement organization. Even more damaging to sociology will be a loss of respect inside academia and a loss of relevance among publics not sharing American sociology’s political biases. Furthermore, the chance for sociology to use its vast store of knowledge to help clients of all types solve their organizational problems will be lost if sociology is defined as a political rather than scientific enterprise. Sociology will thus willingly leave the vast resource niche for applications of social science knowledge to disciplines that know little about social organization (i.e., economics and psychology). Sociology will endure, of course, but it will not realize its enormous potential for reshaping societies.
Journal Article
Principles of Inter-Societal Dynamics
World-system dynamics are re-conceptualized as inter-societal systems with some de-emphasis on the notions of core, periphery, and semi-periphery. This tri-part division has been useful in forcing sociology to rethink macro-level sociological analysis and in establishing the importance of considering inter-societal systems as a fundamental unit of human social organization, but this Weberian-like ideal type is constraining theoretical analysis. Moreover, core, periphery, and semi-periphery are not consistently found across a broad range of inter-societal systems, beginning with those among hunting and gathering societies and moving to the current capitalist inter-societal system. Furthermore, the often-implied view that the current geo-economic global system has replaced geo-political systems is overdrawn because geo-economics and geo-politics constantly intersect and interact in all inter-societal systems. Some illustrative general models are drawn for geo-political systems, while abstract principles for geo-political and geo-economic inter-societal relations are articulated. The goal of the paper, then, is to move current world-system analysis back, in a sense, to earlier conceptualizations of geo-economics and geo-politics and empire formations that have always existed among human populations and that now drive the dynamics of the globe today. In this analysis, the seminal work of Christopher Chase-Dunn is referenced as a source of inspiration for this small, but important, shift in analysis and modes of theorizing.
Journal Article
An Approach to Evolutionary Sociology and its Implications for Theorizing on Socio-Cultural Evolution
A theoretical research program is outlined that seeks to use the Modern Synthesis in explaining human evolution, but also recognizes its limitations in explaining the evolution of socio-cultural systems. The universe, from a human perspective, is composed of physical, biological, and socio-cultural dimensions, each revealing unique properties and dynamics. In the case of the socio-cultural universe, modern evolutionary theory is relevant for some explanations, but not to the degree assumed by socio-biology, evolutionary psychology, and even co-evolutionary models. The program proposed is built around social network theory, cladistic analysis, and comparative neuro-anatomy, and outlines where biological analysis is appropriate and useful. An understanding of the biological basis of human behavior will allow sociologists to develop theoretical approaches to explaining the emergent properties of the socio-cultural universe. The strategy outlined will allow us to see what a mature evolutionary sociology can do: develop abstract theoretical laws about the dynamics of selection on socio-cultural formations in human societies.
Journal Article
Returning the \Social\ to Evolutionary Sociology
Sociology can no longer avoid engagement with biological ideas, but it can incorporate them where they are useful. Most biologically inspired explanations of sociological processes from outside the discipline are simple and, moreover, too reliant on biological rather than sociological models of social processes. Yet, it is possible to engage these efforts by developing sociological concepts and theories that meet those using evolutionary theory from biology. This paper argues that the heavy reliance on Darwinian natural selection limits sociological explanations, although this approach can help sociologists understand the evolved behavioral propensities of humans as evolved apes. These behavioral propensities cannot, however, explain the evolution and dynamics of the layers of sociocultural phenomena studied by sociologists, and efforts to do so with Darwinian notions of natural selection on individual organisms will always be inadequate. As an alternative, we propose that there are other types of natural selection inherent in the organization of what Herbert Spencer termed superorganisms. We label these Durkheimian, Spencerian, and Marxian selection, and they explain what Darwinian selection cannot: the dynamics and evolution of sociocultural phenomena.
Journal Article
Sociological Theories of Human Emotions
Over the past three decades, five general theoretical approaches to understanding the dynamics of human emotions have emerged in sociology: dramaturgical theories, symbolic interactionist theories, interaction ritual theories, power and status theories, and exchange theories. We review each of these approaches. Despite the progress made by these theories, several issues remain unresolved: the nature of emotions, feeling, and affect; the degree to which emotions are biologically based or socially constructed; the gap between social psychological theories on emotions and macrostructural theorizing; and the relatively narrow range of emotions theorized, coupled with an equally narrow focus on the structural and cultural conditions producing these emotions.
Journal Article
The Old Institutionalism Meets the New Institutionalism
As key socio-cultural building blocks of human societies, institutions are distinct from organizations and, hence, are central to sociological inquiry. In recent decades, however, institutional analysis has increasingly moved toward the analysis of organizations, while treating “institutions” as the environments or fields of organizations. While the insights offered by contemporary organizational theorists have provided important keys to understanding how organizations, especially economic organizations, adapt to pressures within their environments, the authors argue that the Old Institutionalisms of functional theorizing has much to offer the New Institutionalisms. In this article, the Old Institutionalisms are revisited to construct a precise definition of institutions as well as posit a robust theory of institutional dynamics, a theory which supplements contemporary organizational analysis. Four dynamics stand out: the process of institutional autonomy, the intersection of stratification systems and institutions, modes of integration within and between institutions, and generalized symbolic media of exchange. In particular, the latter two occupy the authors' attention primarily as they have been under-theorized elsewhere.
Journal Article
Theoretical sociology : a concise introduction to twelve sociological theories
What can sociological theory tell us about the basic forces that shape our world? With clarity and authority, leading theorist Jonathan H. Turner seeks to answer this question through a brief, yet in-depth examination of twelve major sociological theories. Readers are given an opportunity to explore the foundational premise of each theory and key elements that make it distinctive. The book draws on biographical background, analysis of important works, historical influences, and other critical insights to help readers make the important connections between these monumental sociological theories and the social world in which we live. This concise resource is a perfect complement to any course that seeks to examine both classic and contemporary sociological theory.
eBook
Biology and American Sociology, Part I
Despite long-standing prejudices against doing so, it is time for sociology to reconnect with its roots in biological and evolutionary thinking. Sociology emerged as a discipline when the notion of evolution was actively used in biology, geology, and emerging social sciences. Throughout the nineteenth century, many of the most prominent early European sociologists examined the social universe from an evolutionary perspective; and this perspective was borrowed in much of early American sociology in the last decades of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century. By the end of the second decade of the twentieth Century, however, evolutionary analysis was rapidly disappearing in sociology in the United States, and by the 1930s, it was pretty much dead. And for the remainder of the twentieth century, it was viewed with a great suspicion, especially evolutionary approaches that sought to incorporate ideas from biology into the field. Despite the revival of stage models of societal evolution and the emergence of new ecological approaches in the 1960s and 1970s, evolutionary ideas from biology were still rejected by most American sociologists though much of the twentieth century. In this paper, we first present the history of this rejection of evolutionary, with the goal of encouraging sociologists today to recognize the distortions and misrepresentations of Darwinian and Spencerian ideas that fueled intellectual prejudices for so many decades. These prejudices only get in the way of sociology in the twenty-first century, where biological ideas have begun to pervade the social sciences. Thus, American sociologists should now take stock and reconsider how much evolutionary and biological analysis can help sociology and, equally if not more important, how an informed evolutionary sociology can influence those in the other social sciences and even those in the biological sciences.
Journal Article