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The article presents an overview of writer Rue Bucher's professional career in sociology. Rue's professional career in sociology began when, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, she joined the National Opinion Research Center Disaster Team in 1952. This experience provided her with the data to write a thesis and one of her first publications, a paper entitled, Blame and Hostility in Disasters, which was published without revision by the American Journal of Sociology in 1957. In reading the body of Rue's work one cannot miss her fascination with the idea that the process of socialization exhibits the same features whether the person undergoing socialization is being inducted into the role of mental patient, graduate student in biochemistry or psychiatrist. The most clearly elaborated statement that Rue made in this context was that the structure of the organization in which the socialization process takes place is the factor which has the greatest effect on the outcome of the process.

This article discusses the negotiated order approach to organizational analysis in qualitative sociology. The approach represented in the concept of "negotiated order" tends to lead to a focus on the species rather than on the environment. Both, however, need to be embraced, by sociologists as much as by actors. Sociologists turnout to be rather good teachers, or at least rather good at producing appropriate documentary evidence to back up their claims to being good teachers. The author suspects that all studies of the social construction of data have given sociologists an edge in the generation of paper to fit performance indicators. Overall, sociology seems to be around the middle of the research rankings, which is about what would be expected from a discipline that is heavily represented in 1992 universities with a limited research tradition. For a discipline so identified with collectivism, sociologists are remarkable individualists who remain reluctant to learn from their own discipline's work. They know the importance of teamwork in successful organizations and they reject the lessons for their own.