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This essay responds to Wacquant's call for a 'Carnal Sociology'-an approach best realized through a method Wacquant calls 'enactive ethnography.' In this essay, I explore the ways in which certain aspects of Wacquant's carnal sociology-specifically the sentient, the sedimented and the situated-can enhance our understanding of cognition and meaning-making. I reference an ongoing research project on the deciphering of olfactory messages to make my case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wacquant's vision of carnal sociology and enactive ethnography draws heavily from embodied mind theories in neurocognitive science and philosophy of mind. However, it also resonates with feminist epistemologies, such as sociologist Dorothy Smith's view that sociology should begin with and from the body. While both carnal sociology and the neurocognitive traditions it draws from ignore decades of feminist contributions to embodied epistemologies, I argue that feminist thought has much to contribute to materially grounded accounts of corporeal knowledge. Attention to feminist thought should also help enactive ethnographers consider the limits to the method, and the ethical and political complexities of embodied, situated knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Loïc Wacquant's provocative call for a flesh and blood sociology holds promise for ethnographers willing to engage their bodies while doing research. Specifically, it allows ethnographies to experience the same bodily and emotional sensations as their study participants, which then improves their understanding of how bodily crafts inform human life. However, a 'carnal' approach may encounter three obstacles: first, mainstream researchers who are trained in traditional observational methods and writing; second, the time, effort, and thought needed to methodologically link the researcher's body to the research; and third, the fear of ethnographers wanting to avoid being labeled as 'narcissistic' and 'unscientific.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article elaborates the social ontology and methodology of carnal sociology as a distinctive mode of social inquiry eschewing the spectatorial posture to grasp action-in-the-making, in the wake of debates triggered by my apprenticeship-based study of boxing as a plebeian bodily craft. First I critique the notions of (dualist) agent, (externalist) structure, and (mentalist) knowledge prevalent in the contemporary social sciences and sketch an alternative conception of the social animal, not just as wielder of symbols, but as sensate, suffering, skilled, sedimented, and situated creature of flesh and blood. I spotlight the primacy of embodied practical knowledge arising out of and continuously enmeshed in webs of action and consider what modes of inquiry are suited to deploying and mining this incarnate conception of the agent. I argue that enactive ethnography, the brand of immersive fieldwork based on 'performing the phenomenon,' is a fruitful path toward capturing the cognitive, conative, and cathectic schemata (habitus) that generate the practices and underlie the cosmos under investigation. But it takes social spunk and persistence to reap the rewards of 'observant participation' and achieve social competency (as distinct from empirical saturation). In closing, I return to Bourdieu's dialogue with Pascal to consider the special difficulty and urgency of capturing the 'spirit of acuteness' that animates such competency but vanishes from normal sociological accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A substantial intellectual movement has been growing in the social sciences around the adoption of mechanism- and process-based explanations as complements to variable-based explanations, or even as substitutes for them. But once we have recognized the validity and dignity of studying mechanisms and processes, what is the next step? Recently, both political scientists’ and sociologists’ discussions have begun to turn away from correlation to mechanism-based approaches to causation. But there is still a widespread assumption that mechanisms are unobservable. We maintain that ways can be developed to observe the presence or absence of mechanisms either directly or indirectly. In this paper, by way of example, we put forward four methods—two direct and two indirect—for measuring mechanisms of contention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides responses by Charles Tilly, author of "Why?: What Happens When People Give Reasons...and Why" to book critiques in this issue. Tilly discusses his motivations for undertaking this book project, which was designed to introduce sociological analysis to a general readership outside of historians and sociologists. According to the author, "Why" was written to elucidate commonly used social explanations and the reasons that people give for events.

This article evaluates the methodological philosophy and strategy of Paul Willis's classic, Learning to Labour . We use King, Keohane, and Verba's Designing Social Inquiry as a litmus test, showing how Willis's work meets, diverges from, and innovatively reconstructs “good social science research.” Drawing from Learning to Labour and Willis's writings on methodological issues, as well as key texts on the science of sociology, this article evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of a reflexive method and the potential this method holds for qualitative work in sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narratives produced by autobiographical occasions are different from the sort of accounts produced in the everyday presentation of the self. If the accounts of everyday life are episodic and typically situationally specific, autobiographical narratives are broader in scope and involve efforts to make sense of a range of episodes. Although autobiographical narratives may be more or less coherent, more or less comprehensive, they are nonetheless not simply stories about events: they are stories about lives. In this sense, autobiographical occasions, no matter how frequent, are not part of everyday life. Much of the narrative turn in sociology has been preoccupied with giving voice to those for whom a voice has been denied. Here, autobiographical narratives have been taken as a way to create selves for those-most importantly women and people of color-to whom selfhood has often been denied. Many of those who have led this narrative turn in sociology are proposing narrative as a mode of analysis, as a means of capturing sequences and acknowledging agencies of a sort left out in more conventional sociological styles.

"When we say "politics of memory," how many of us really mean that memory could constitute a politics? We aren't thinking of memory as some autonomous force that in and of itself dictates a political situation. Recent developments in sociology of memory further emphasize the blurred lines between past and present. Just as Emile Durkheim discarded the idea of the lonely suicidal individual, the sociology of memory, in exploring the social aspects of the mental act of remembering, rejects the existence of "mnemonic Robinson Crusoes." Memory is "a perpetually actual phenomenon,' writes Pierre Nora, "a bond tying us to the eternal present. It is common knowledge now that our memory of the past is affected by our present social environment. Scholars highlight this structured character of past recollections: The "relational setting" in which actors are located affects the depth, tone, and the very facts of their memories. This article can be seen as an attempt to build upon these recent developments in the domain of the sociology of memory. At the same time, it provides a more finegrained analysis of the structuring and relational character of collective memories.

Due to the fragmentary nature of research findings and conceptual models, the Durkheimian legacy remains undervalued in contemporary spatial theory. The paper addresses this neglect by proposing a unified Durkheimian model of place which can be applied to case history and comparative analyses. It draws together the fragmented insights of Durkheimian theory to characterize four elementary forms of place: sacred, profane, liminal and mundane. These place/space identities are maintained and transformed through rituals and narratives which depend upon contingent human actions for their sustenance. The paper concludes with an extended case study which deploys the model to explain the changing meanings of the site of the Bastille (Paris, France) over the past two centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

In this article, the author talks about her experience in the field of sociology. When she started college in 1970 she thought she would become a psychologist. She was, after all, interested in how people thought and felt about things. She learned that talking to people about things that interested her was called "research" and she could get course credit for doing it. For instance, she thought she was the only woman missing out on the sexual revolution, so she did interviews with female undergraduates on "premarital sex." The author talks about the best way to communicate sociological analyses to those outside sociology circle. Storytelling, whether in fiction or nonfiction, is a time-tested way to get readers to care. As she has learned in teaching courses in race, class, and gender, writings that "show" more than "tell" a story of interaction, inequality, and power get students to listen and then to understand that life is more than a drama of personalities. In the author's experience, field work is done best when one knows who he is and what he feels throughout the research.

This essay presents a method for integrating visual representations of social and cultural realities into sociological analysis. It unites strategies of documentary photography with those of grounded theory-based field research and demonstrates the consonant interactionist and interrogatory stance of the visual sociologist. The documentary photographic method of using “shooting scripts” to structure the visual field project is shown to have a complementary relationship to a grounded theory method, and both, together, offer the visual sociologist a structured way of initiating and sustaining photographic field work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Those who use autobiographical perspectives in the practice of sociology and related disciplines have noted, with concern, the association of their work with self-indulgence (Devault, 1994; Jackson, 1990; Okely, 1992; Kreige, 1991). This paper elaborates this concern by directing analytic attention to the nature of the charge of self-indulgence. The paper reads as an autobiographical defense of autobiographical sociology. It uses the naming of my own work as self-involved as a point of departure for explicating the implications of this regulatory practice. The device of irony is used to expose how self-indulgence, as a critique invoking highly insular relations of readership, authorship and subject/object distinction, relies on the conventions of a traditional masculine academic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information regarding the March 1, 1996 issue of the journal "Quantitative Sociology." In the spirit of a long standing sociological tradition, the authors question how they have come to understand human behavior and portray it, they question their responsibility to respondents, they question how the self is expressed and situated within the text, and they question how voice may be suppressed by the settings studied. Ethical and moral dilemmas abound in the social research enterprise so much so that they sometimes seem to he taken-for-granted. Personal involvement with the people leads to grapple in isolation, with obligations and responsibilities to people with whom one formed intimate ties. Most concerns revolve around questions of harm, privacy, consent, deception and confidentiality. Rather than submit to formal codes of conduct that would limit the ability to study "messy" complex social realities, one prefers to solve dilemmas situationally, perhaps justifying his choices in the belief that ethical and moral dilemmas are an inescapable, part of the fabric of conducting social research.

It is informed that since the end of World War II, American sociology has increasingly been divided into two camps. One side has been mainstream positivistic research typified by large survey research studies but including various studies of pre-existing data bases compiled by government agencies and other formal organizations. The second type of research has consisted typically of one or two person studies with little or no funding and minimal resources. Ethnographic and in depth interview studies are the prototypes of this sort of research. These qualitative studies have typically lacked very explicit and highly standardized methodologies and have been based on more theoretical than methodological planning. Although theoretical studies have some enormous advantages, even those who are most committed to them must recognize that, as typically conducted, they have important theoretical and practical limitations. One common problem is the difficulty in knowing whether one's findings are universal to the types of settings or groups studied or whether they are particular to the occasion under study, i.e., whether or not the results are representative.

The article focuses on computing in qualitative sociology. There are no convenient and reliable programs for organizing or marking up bulk text without destroying the context created by the narrative. People can use unstructured data, which allows for greater flexibility in describing complex situations, and helps to ensure that people do not throw away or misrepresent important aspects of data. Hypertext was invented in the mid-1970's, a technological visionary whose ideas are always worth thinking about. Think of a hypertext system as a super-duper footnoting machine. It can have multiple windows open at once, each with a different block of text in it. Windows can be on screen but closed. In addition to the basic ability to tie passages of text together and retrieve them, a hypertext system to support qualitative research will have to provide several additional facilities. At a minimum, a good system will have to handle hierarchical structure, navigation through the structure, path-walking and clustering, arranging by category and cluster, and suitable reporting facilities. Handling hierarchy means supporting clustering of marked passages into groups, and nesting of groups within one another. It also includes the ability to break up a group into its component sub-groups, and to rearrange the hierarchy. These abilities are precisely analogous to the features provided by good outlining programs.

Insights about the observer's self can prove useful for understanding others who are the subjects of sociological inquiry. This organizational sociologist studied a midwestern lesbian community using participant observation and in depth interviewing. Subsequent problems with preparing the findings led to development of an analytic technique for dealing with the data. The argument here is that we have much to learn from close examination of the interrelationship between observer and observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems of managing chronic illness at home are addressed in terms of the concept of "work:" what types and subtypes of work, entailing what tasks, who does them, how, where, the consequences, the problems involved. Three types of work and consequences of their interplay are discussed: illness work, everyday life work, and biographical work. Theoretical concerns of the sociology of work are addressed as well as the substantive issues of managing chronic illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of whether sociology can in principle become a quantitative science. I distinguish several senses in which a contrast between quantitative and qualitative science might be understood. I focus on the central-and traditional-sense: can sociology become a nomological science, in the way physics is? I argue that it cannot, on the ontological ground that the determinants of human actions cannot be analyzed in purely causal terms. In the article I try to characterize this difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Durkheim's concept of group mind is rhetorically offensive to conventional empiricism, there are many familiar examples in the social science literature of purposes, norms, etc. that are not the property of individuals but of a collective praxis The concept of group mind, properly conceived in terms of collective praxis, provides a useful antidote to the individualizing tendencies of subjectivist sociology, and by revealing the connection between "structures" and "meanings" can help heal the rift between subjectivism and objectivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reads Chaim Perelman's theory of argumentation in order to formulate the task of social theorizing as responsible discourse. Taking rationality as sound argument which proceeds in terms of a link between speaker's intentions (the audience) and the public, the first part examines Perelman's notions about the relativity of facts to particular traditions of communication which link speakers, argumentation, and publics. Accepting that this view, shared by many sociologists, allows for no general criterion of rationality to be used as a principle for responsible speaking, the second part discusses how a choice for one or another tradition of reasoning in sociology might responsibly be made. This criterion for choosing is presented in terms of the relative generality and breadth of intended audiences and the relative openness to criticism of traditions of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the literature attempting to explain revival phenomena has resorted to psychological explanations to the exclusion of sociological factors. The purpose of this paper is to provide an explanation of revival behavior employing a normative framework. Four propositions are stated, each the prerequisite for the next. First, sinner and the revival culture must interact, and definitions of self and others must be forged. Second, structural facilities must be available for learning the Christian role. Third, opportunity structures must present themselves to afford the expression of appropriate behaviors that are in accord with pre-established patterns. Fourth, the status passage from salvation to sanctification is an orderly one, requiring that a sinner be saved before sanctified. The position taken Is that in order to arrive at adequate explanation, revival behavior must be observed as a social process. Therefore, the necessary requisite of the participant observation strategy is noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In examining the electronic revolution in Western Classical music, this article considers many of the important issues which Weber addresses in his work on the sociology of music--particularly the definitional problems related to Weber's concept of rationalization and the disenchantment of the world. The article examine Weber's concepts of rational action and rationalization in relation to music, then through analysis of developments in electronic music, raises questions regarding Weber's conclusions regarding the effect of rationalization in Western culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An acceptable reductive analysis does no more nor less than find the constitutive elements of a phenomenon. It should focus on observables, including indirectly given data but not including merely convenient assumptions. It should state propositions which refer to variables which are generalizable. Using these criteria, behaviorism is found to be wanting. In contrast, Pareto's model of five significant residues provides for a constitutive analysis which uses observables and generalizable variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the authors discuss what is qualitative sociology and why the journal "Qualitative Sociology," has been named so. Qualitative sociology is the endeavor to apprehend the basic elements constituting human social relations. It proceeds by self-awareness, reflective participation in relationships of meaning with the human actors who are under study, whether directly through participant observation or, less directly, through hermeneutic interpretation, historical reconstitution, or theoretical analysis. It respects the meanings in terms of which the activities under study, as instances of human activity, are configured and anticipates the creativity of all situated human endeavors. It emphasizes reflective creativity and expects the vitality of creative conduct to reside in particulars, but connects the possibility of creativity to ongoing institutions that may be large and complicated. Qualitative sociology thus must encompass the fields of macroanalysis and theoretical generalization, even if it is most often practiced in the form of ethnographies of specific situations.

This section presents information on several contributors to the fall 2005 issue of the journal Qualitative Sociology, including Tamara Sniezek.

The editor worry about a lot of things 1991 was a pivotal year. She gave birth to her daughter, Alyssa Thomas. Several months later Jonathan Imber and she became co-editors of "Qualitative Sociology." She felt overwhelmed, but delighted, with very different kinds of new obligations and responsibilities. "Qualitative Sociology" has always been an independent enterprise not affiliated with an organization. The generosity and service to the profession of so many individuals have allowed this journal to flourish and to have a fine reputation within the discipline. After 22 years, QS is highly respected in the discipline and regarded in ways that the founders might not have envisioned. For example, it also has an international audience and readership. These issues have helped shape various aspects of qualitative scholarship. The journal remains committed to publishing work which represents the full range of qualitative approaches to social inquiry both methodologically and theoretically. It has been a great honor to facilitate the scholarship of authors and to help shape in a small way the discipline of sociology as an editor.

When the author met sociologist Leo Chall, almost fifty years ago, at Ohio State, Leo was still an undergraduate, just back from the war, still in his uniform, his major piece of clothing. He was soon admitted to the graduate school. His professional career began with his M.A. thesis, an analysis of reactions, in several countries, to the Kinsey report, then much discussed. His contribution to sociology is enormous: he opened to readers of English a sociological literature as understood by its authors as just that.

This article presents a commentary about a review of the book "The Technological Conscience," by Manfred Stanley. The reviewer wants the reader of the book to note the unquestioned identification of social science with the very idea of science. He did use the word unquestioned to describe Stanley's reconciliation of social science with science.

This article introduces a series of articles about sociology and other related topics.