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This article critically examines recent arguments by Andrew Abbott, Jensen Sass, and Tariq Modood proposing a normative sociology, one that not only adopts an evaluative stance towards the phenomena it investigates, but also makes explicit and seeks to justify the values on which its evaluations rely. I argue that, while these proposals are to be welcomed in some respects, they fail to address two key issues: On what reasonable basis can it be assumed that there are single correct answers to value questions?; and What distinctive intellectual authority can sociologists claim to be able to discover those answers? I also point out that these recent advocates for a normative sociology pay insufficient attention to the opposing position, a commitment to 'value-neutrality', as proposed most notably by Max Weber. I argue that, while this is frequently ignored or dismissed out of hand, it represents a much more coherent and cogent view, even if its advocates have rarely fully lived up to its demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The greatest conceptual challenge that moral panic studies has struggled with over the past half century is the problem of disproportion. Since the field's inception, moral panics have been conceptualized as disproportionately conservative overreactions to ostensibly insignificant problems. It did not take long for critics, many of whom were working in moral panic studies or related fields of inquiry, to point out that disproportion is construed in a normative rather than empirical manner, and to supplement the conventional focus on conservative overreactions by drawing attention to either conservatively conditioned underreactions (missing panics) or socially progressive overreactions that are cultivated on the political left rather than the right (good moral panics). This article explains how the dynamics of disproportionate social reactions are more complicated than conventional moral panic scholars and their critics alike have recognized. By theorizing the nuances involved in disproportionate social reactions, the article develops a provisional framework to encourage theoretical and conceptual investigations into different kinds of moral boundary violations. The focus of analysis is on the problem of disproportion as it appears in moral panic studies, but scholars working with a broader range of realist, materialist, and/or critical perspectives will recognize and identify with the normative challenges posed by the problem of disproportion in their respective areas of inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black Sociology has reemerged as a vital scientific endeavor to understand the social conditions of Black people. One approach to Black Sociology identifies five principles that are rooted in the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory (ASL) at Atlanta University. Another approach permits scholars to use any Black scholar from the Black intellectual tradition and apply it to sociological phenomena. While both approaches provide generative analytical lenses, they do not engage one another leaving the utility of Black sociology bifurcated, without clear theoretical and methodological boundaries. Reviewing 20 ASL publications, I articulate seven principles that define Black sociology as the scientific analysis of systems of oppression and social power developed at ASL. To do this, I add a validity principle, a Black sociological standpoint, and a practitioner principle that clearly defines Black Sociology's intellectual boundaries as a scientific/intellectual movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Thorpe argues sociology lacks a "language of society as a whole." He holds that positivist sociologists de-legitimated holistic theories or broad normatively oriented "social theories," leaving the discipline without discursive means to critically assess and deliberate its overall directions and those of society. Thorpe does not address holistic theory directly or explain how it differs analytically from standard "sociological theory." My intent is to clarify these matters by extending facets of his argument to illuminate the interdependence between holistic theorizing and empirical-historical social science, which is necessary to create the type of "reflexive sociology" that Thorpe argues would make sociology more cosmopolitan and capable of addressing the turbulent sociopolitical conditions in the interregnum after neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book examines changes in the "content and status of sociology" in the United States in the present and recent past. The author understands the present as an era in which relatively organized capitalism has "given way to the disorganization, "de-civilizing," and "wilding" of post-modern post-normalcy. Sociology in the previous period was oriented toward reinforcing the sense of normalcy both epistemologically and substantively. A "normal science" of repetition, teleological modernization, and value-free science resonated with the experience of "social normalcy." In the more recent period, crises have proliferated throughout social space, with implications for sociology, undoing its metaphysical foundations and throwing into question all the disciplinary divisions upon which normal science had been organized. In response, sociology has seen the emergence of two new variants: a hyper-normalized sociology that doubles down on "statistical prowess" and "the application of quantitative techniques to novel domains"; and a post-normal sociology that rejects positivism and value-freedom and that is aligned with particular social movements and identities. This post-normal sociology, Thorpe argues, complements rather than contradicts corporate neoliberalism and works together with hyper-normal sociology in marginalizing critical sociology. In response, I argue that Thorpe mischaracterizes academic freedom and understates its importance, underestimates the heterogeneity within US sociology today, and overstates the historical unprecedentedness of the present condition of "postnormal" polycrisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]