Economic sociology as public sociology

Public sociology—an approach to sociology that aims to communicate with and actively engage wider audiences—has been one of the most widely discussed topics in the discipline in recent years. The Handbook of Public Sociology presents a comprehensive look at every facet of public sociology in theory and practice. It pays particular attention to how public sociology can complement more traditional types of sociological practice to advance both the analytical power of the discipline and its ability to benefit society. The volume features contributions from a stellar list of authors, including several past presidents of the American Sociological Association such as Michael Burawoy, a leading proponent of public sociology. The first two sections of the Handbook of Public Sociology look at public sociology in relation to the other three types of practice—professional, policy, and critical—with an emphasis on integrating the four types into a holistic model of theory and practice. Subsequent sections focus on issues like teaching public sociology at various levels, case studies in the application of public sociology, and the role of public sociology in special fields in the discipline. The concluding chapter by Michael Burawoy, a past president of the American Sociological Association and a leading proponent of public sociology, addresses current debates surrounding public sociology and presents a constructive vision for the future that embraces and improves upon all four types of sociology. The Handbook of Public Sociology with its examination not only of public sociology but also of how it can enhance and complement other types of practice, transcends differences in the field and will appeal to a wide range of academics, students, and practitioners.

The theme of this year's meeting of the powerful 13,000 member strong American Sociological Association (ASA) was ‘public sociologies’. The term public sociology was invented in the United States to criticise and counter mounting professionalisation. In many countries of today the term public sociology is not necessary as sociology is presumed to be public. In order to illustrate this point the ASA invited representatives from different regions of the world to discuss the distinctive configurations of national public sociologies and the issues they address. Seven panels were drawn from East Asia, India, Latin America, Palestine, post-communist societies, the United States and South Africa.

This chapter offers a potted history of public sociology by describing it as an old idea which became a new debate, following Michael Burawoy's presidential address at the 2004 annual meeting of American Sociological Association. It traces the public sociology debate to reflect on the evolution of sociologists' anxieties about the public nature of the discipline. It also emphasizes how to resist the temptation of thinking that sociology suddenly acquired a public deficit in the 21st century The chapter argues how public sociology has always been plagued by an existential crisis regarding its identity, purpose, and target audience. It raises questions in the context of sociology's disciplinary history and contemplates its future, digital or otherwise.

:The intention of the article is to explore trends in economics and sociology, as well as other science disciplines, like history, psychology and anthropology, and investigate the interdisciplinary exchanges that have taken place, leading to convergences and divergences between academic subjects. The “imperialism of economics” is increasingly approaching traditional academic fields of history, psychology, and sociology. However, the article concludes that sociology’s public reputation may have declined, while simultaneously economics is shifting its attention to the social dimension of economic behavior and moving toward the other social sciences; a process which has been coined “social-scienciation.” The argument is that those developments can also be seen as chances to upgrade the social sciences “around” economics. The described process also aligns with recent talk about a need for interdisciplinary studies when this article adopts a different take on the issues of interdisciplinarity and embeddedness.

In this article, we explore how free trade is performed and maintained as a dominant market institution. Drawing from the notion of performativity in sociology of economics and rhetorical analysis in institutional research, we explore the maintenance of free trade as a state-mediated legitimation process. Our analysis of the US presidents’ speeches over the last 30 years reveal that American presidents recurrently adopted three broad rhetorical strategies to enable free trade. Through ontological strategies, they emphasized how the properties of free trade should be; through cosmological strategies, they conveyed the inevitability of globalization and integration with the global markets, and finally through value-based strategies, they linked free trade to the cultural template of American exceptionalism. Our findings extend the previous marketing literature on market creation by illustrating the rhetorical strategies to perform markets and the role of a powerful political actor in enabling and maintaining a market institution.

After decades of benign neglect, the issues of economic and social inequalities have re-entered the stage of mainstream political attention and debate in the western heartlands of the capitalist system over the past couple of years. On the face of it, this is no accident or surprise. The renewed attention on economic and social inequality unfolds against a background of very slow, partial and highly uneven “recovery” from a major financial crash which emerged in the north-Atlantic core in 2007–2008. In this setting we observe that the growing attention to issues of inequality in recent times is not unrelated to the manifest amplification of the longer-term trend towards increased economic inequalities that has become more evident in the period since 2008. This article will draw on (engage with) recent work and debates in neighbouring academic fields (political economy, economic sociology, political studies) concerning the sources, meaning and implications of growing economic inequalities. It pays particular attention to the high-profile work of Thomas Piketty on inequality trends. The article will consider the implications of such research and inequality trends for what now passes as liberal economic and political theory and also for the study, forms, conceptualisations and practice of political communication.

The American Sociological Association (ASA) is currently the largest and most influential membership organization of professional sociologists in the USA. The ASA began its organizational life in 1905 when a small group of self‐selected scholars representing several existing scholarly organizations (including the American Economic Association, the American Historical Association, and the American Political Science Association) proposed a separate and independent American Sociological Society (ASS) (“Organization of the American Sociological Society” 1906). The first ASS Annual Meeting convened December 27–29, 1906, in Providence, Rhode Island, with 115 members and a full program of scholarly papers. In 1959 the organization's name was formally changed from the American Sociological Society to the American Sociological Association. As of March 2008, the ASA reported 10,830 paid members (of which 3,247 were students) and had a portfolio of short‐ and long‐term investments of about $5.8 million, a significant proportion of which supports ongoing ASA programs.

Abstract: This article seeks to explain why membership in the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association (CSAA) has declined despite a growing number of sociology and anthropology professors in the country. The author argues that four factors are likely responsible for the trend: (1) external competition from sociology organizations in the United States; (2) internal competition from the Canadian Journal of Sociology; (3) a changed environment in which the need for professional organizations is less pressing; and (4) the growth of insufficiently inclusive and pluralistic reform movements in the CSAA in the 1970s and 1980s. Resume: Cet article tente d'expliquer pourquoi l'adhesion a l'Association canadienne de sociologie et d'anthropologie (ACSA) a lentement decline depuis les annees 1970 en depit du fait que le nombre de professeurs en sociologie et en anthropologie au pays a pour sa part augmente. L'auteur de cet article fait l'hypothese que quatre facteurs sont responsables de cette tendance, a savoir: (1) la competition de la part des organisations academiques et scientifiques americaines; (2) la competition livree au Canada meme par le Canadian Journal of Sociology; (3) l'emergence d'un nouveau contexte dans lequel le besoin d'organisations professionnelles est desormais plus faible; (4) une radicalisation des mouvements de reforme au sein du ACSA dans les annees 1970 et 1980. ********** The Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association (CSAA) is the official organization of Anglo-Canadian sociology. As is evident from the trend lines in Figure 1, it has fallen on hard times. The trend lines trace (1) individual membership in the CSAA and (2) the number of sociology and anthropology faculty members in Canada over time. They show that, 25 years ago, there were about as many CSAA members as sociology and anthropology faculty members in Canada. (1) Since then, CSAA membership has fallen while the number of faculty members in sociology and anthropology has grown. Specifically, individual membership in the CSAA grew modestly in the 1980s, reached a high point of 1,165 in 1993, and then dropped precipitously--fully 39%--by 2002. Meanwhile, the number of full- and part-time faculty members in Canadian departments of sociology and anthropology grew steadily by 12% between 1977-78 and 1995-96. By the turn of the 21st century, it seems that not even half of sociology and anthropology faculty members in Canada were members of the CSAA. (2) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] I believe four factors were chiefly responsible for declining membership in the CSAA in the 1990s: external competition, internal competition, a changing organizational environment, and the growth of unprofessionalism. Let us consider each of these factors in turn. (1) External competition. Both Anglo-Canadian and Quebecois sociologists form small villages in comparison with the large urban agglomeration that is sociology in the United States. Due to differences in language and intellectual tradition, the attractions of American sociology hardly threaten Quebecois sociologists. However, these protective barriers are largely absent in the Anglo-Canadian case. Many Anglo-Canadian sociologists regard the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and Social Forces as the top sociology journals in the world. They would like nothing better than to publish in them. The American Sociological Association (ASA) has held conferences in Toronto and Montreal, and regional American associations such as the Pacific and Midwestern Sociological Associations have held conferences in Vancouver and Windsor. The ASA meetings in particular are large, diverse, and well organized. They are staged in just a few major cities and cater to every intellectual taste. Thousands of participants flock to them every year from around the world. Then there are American graduate schools and the American job market, both of which have been attracting promising and accomplished Anglo-Canadian scholars for decades with the lure of famous colleagues, abundant research opportunities, and comparatively high salaries. …

Social Science in Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes: A Reply to the ASA’s Missed Opportunity to Promote Sound Science in Court by Mitchell, Monahan, and Walker

The current call for public scholarship and community engagement by universities and disciplinary organizations has created opportunities to develop innovative ways to integrate research, instruction, and outreach. This article discusses a collaboration among scholars at the University of Kentucky and alternative agrifood movement organizations that has evolved as they pursue an alternative agrifood system in Kentucky. This collaboration made instructional programs in sociology and the honors world food issues track places in which both students and instructors can examine problems of the conventional agrifood system, conduct research, and develop collaborative relationships with community activists. We draw on Burawoy's discussion of public sociology and its interface with professional, critical, and policy sociologies. Supplementing our discussion with literature from social movements and science studies, we demonstrate how this integrated approach can render sociological knowledge and skills useful as critical support of alternative agrifood movements. We argue that the experiential classroom is an excellent site for the critical examination within the agrifood movements of oppositional culture. This, in turn, makes possible students' recognition of injustice in the existing agrifood system.

Journal Article Anomie, Authoritarianism, Prejudice, and Socioeconomic Status: An Attempt at Clarification Get access Edward L. McDill Edward L. McDill Vanderbilt University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 39, Issue 3, March 1961, Pages 239–245, https://doi.org/10.2307/2573215 Published: 01 March 1961

THIS paper has arisen from two interests, one applied and the other theoretical. An assumption of a recent emphasis in cooperative extension work in agriculture and home economics, variously called and home and the and home unit approach, is that effective work in assisting families to make the best use of their resources requires the involvement of both husband and wife. Stated another way, the attainment of both farm and family goals requires joint discussion and consensus on the part of husband and wife. From a theoretical point of view this paper utilizes the concepts of status and role to explain the extent of joint involvement of husband and wife under varying conditions of size of farm business, indebtedness, and level of living. Students of the family have attempted to show how participation in decision-making is a function of cultural values and social structure.' The general notion is that the wife's participation in major decisions concerning the family is associated with the extent of patriarchalism in the family and the status of the wife. With greater emphasis upon democratic values and with increased education and social contacts of the wife, her status in the family becomes more comparable with that of the husband. Based upon this reasoning one would expect husband-dominated decision-making to be negatively associated with the adoption of technological changes on the farm and in the home. No significant associations were found between husband-dominated decisions and adoption of improved farm practices, however, in a study among farm owners in Wisconsin.2 On the other hand, Hill and associates show that communication between husband and wife is affected by the wife's feeling of respect for the husband and by her modesty, and that the extent of communication is positively associated with the acceptance of birth control measures among Puerto Rican families.3 Due to the inconsistencies of empirical findings with the implications of certain theoretical notions, two alternative hypotheses were tested. Stated in null form these are: Hypothesis 1: Joint involvement of husband and wife in major decisions is not associated with the social status of the wife as indicated by educational level and formal social participation. Hypothesis 2: The greater the degree of * revision of a paper presented at a joint session of the Rural Sociological Society and the American Sociological Society, Washington, D. C., August, 1957. Data for the paper were obtained as a part of a study of the evaluation of a farm and home development extension program for young farm families supported by the Cooperative Extension Service in Agriculture and Home Economics and by the Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station. The Numerical Analysis Laboratory provided assistance in computations for the study. Nancy Wood, Project Assistant, assisted in the techniques of analysis. 1 James S. Brown, The Farm Family in a Kentucky Mountain Neighborhood, Lexington: Kentucky Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 587, 1952, p. 32; Carle C. Zimmerman, Family and Civilization, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947, Chapter 7; 0. A. Oeser and F. E. Emery, Social Structure and Personality in a Rural Community, New York: The Macmillan Co., 1954, Chapter 8; Eleanor Godfrey, A Construction of Family Types and Their Empirical Validation, doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1950; and Marion Levy, The Family Revolution in Modern China, Camhridvn. Mass: Harvard University Press. 1949. 2 E. A. Wilkening, Changes in Farming as Related to Familism, Family Decision-Making and Family Integration, American Sociological Review, 19 (February, 1954), pp. 29-37, and Adoption of Improved Farm Practices as Related to Family Factors, Madison: Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 183, 1953, Appendix Table 9. 3 Reuben Hill, Kurt Back and J. Mayone Stycos, Intra-family Communication and Fertility Planning in Puerto Rico, Rural Sociology, 20 (Sept.Dec.. 1955), nnp 25R-271.

The major objective of this paper is to describe with a high degree of specificity the more significant economic, demographic and social determinants, and dimensions of crime areas in a large urban community. The basic data include two series of crime statistics, offenses known to the police and arrests, totaling over 65,000 cases, along with detailed economic, demographic, and social statistics from the 1950 decennial census. A 38 x 38 correlation matrix, based on 20 crime indices and 18 economic, demographic, and social variables was derived. This matrix was analyzed by the principal axes technique. Eight factors were extracted and retained for orthogonal rotation. To determine how the basic dimensions derived for the community as a whole are related to specific areas, standard factor scores for each of the eight factors were computed for the 93 census tracts in the city. (Abstract Adapted from Source: American Sociological Review, 1960. Copyright © 1960 by the American Sociological Association) Urban Crime Crime Trends and Patterns Ecological Factors Environmental Factors Demographic Factors Socioeconomic Factors Sociocultural Factors 07-02

The deterrent effect of criminal law is dependent upon communication to the public of the threat and application of sanctions. I test this argument for murder and capital punishment by examining monthly homicide rates and television publicity devoted to executions from 1976 through 1987. Despite the power of television as a source of news in the United States, the results of this study do not support either the deterrence argument, which contends that capital punishment reduces killings, or the brutalization argument, which contends that capital punishment promotes killings. Homicide rates were not found to be related to either the amount or the type of execution publicity over the period. (abstract Adapted from Source: American Sociological Review, 1990. Copyright © 1990 by the American Sociological Association) Homicide Rates Capital Punishment Television News Deterrence 1970s 1980s 10-99

This paper explores the question of whether death penalty statutes passed after the 1972 Supreme Court decision in Furman v. Georgia successfully eliminate racial disparities in capital cases. Over 600 homicide indictments in twenty Florida counties in 1976 and 1977 were examined, focusing on homicides between strangers (nonprimary homicides). Those accused of murdering whites are more likely to be sentenced to death than those accused of murdering blacks. This trend is due primarily to the higher probability for those accused of murdering whites to be indicted for first degree murder. When controlling for race of the victim, the data do not clearly support the hypothesis that race of the defendant is strongly associated with the probability of a first degree murder indictment or the imposition of the death penalty. (abstract Adapted from Source: American Sociological Review, 1981. Copyright © 1981 by the American Sociological Association) Racial Differences Racial Factors Racial Discrimination Correctional Decision Making Sentencing Criminal Justice System Capital Punishment Death Penalty Black-White Comparison Caucasian Adult Caucasian Offender Caucasian Violence African American Adult African American Offender African American Violence Homicide Offender 1970s 07-02