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In this essay I will present some ideas on the themes of unity and disunity in our field. It will be a sociological analysis of our own house, a kind of sociology of knowledge about sociology. I will not only consider internal features of the discipline but also will move out of doors and consider our institutional embeddedness in the academy, as well as in larger societal, political, and cultural environments. It is rare that sociologists use their own tools to analyze themselves, but it important and profitable to do so. I use the terms “unity” and “disunity” in the title. Neither term is very clear in its meaning. My subject is sufficiently complex, however, that a single term with a single referent will not do. By “unity” I mean commitment to a common culture and mission, a sense of solidarity, lack of conflict, and a generally positive attitude toward others in one’s social category (in this case, other sociologists). By “disunity” I mean the opposite of each of the factors making for unity.

This chapter discusses the relevant literature in the books and learned journals of sociology, social psychology, psychology, and psychoanalysis. It explores sometimes invoke personality factors to account for the linkage between social change processes and behavioral outcomes and analyses the employ them to account for behavior that influences social change processes. The chapter reviews research on what might be regarded as the simplest kind of social change: shifts in the relationship between a person and the balance of rewards and deprivations in his or her environment. Despite a lingering appreciation of the importance of the “great man” in historical causation, research linking the individual person with processes of social change has been scattered and generally meager. The study of social change and personality also shows evidence of discontinuities in paradigmatic emphasis—discontinuities, moreover, that reflect certain general theoretical and ideological developments in the social and behavioral sciences.

DOI 10.1515/cjpp-2012-0045 Calif. J. Politics Policy 2013; 5(1): 124–131 Neil J. Smelser Clark Kerr’s World of Higher Education Reaches the 21st Century: Chapters in a Special History By Sheldon Rothblatt (Editor) Foreword by Varthan Gregorian Springer: Dordrecht, The Netherlands, pp. xv+249 This reflective work on Clark Kerr, his times, his historical significance, his legacy, and the fate of his accomplishments during the past half-century is especially to be welcomed, on four counts: After a lifetime of recurrent adulation and vilification, the appreciation of Kerr’s historical accomplishments has solidified into the appropriate view that he was the most creative and outstanding leader of higher education in the 20th century. The editor, Sheldon Rothblatt, is the ideal person to bring together this current assessment – most eminent historian of higher education, career-long citizen of Kerr’s University of California, and friend and confidant of Kerr over several decades. The contributors, who will be identified in this essay, are outstanding schol- ars and thinkers, knowledgeable about Kerr and his work and the recent history of higher education generally. Rothblatt’s selection of this cast guaranteed that the scope of the book is international, not parochial. There are tangible historical signs – and much hysterical dread – that Kerr’s world, as enunciated in The Uses of the University (1963) and embodied in the California Master Plan for Higher Education, is endangered, perhaps crumbling, over the past decades under the weight of adverse historical forces. It is most important to address and evaluate the historical evidence as well as the signifi- cance of that evidence, 50 years later. This book makes many contributions to unraveling the questions posed by the unhappy diagnosis. 1 Recapitulation The volume defies simple summary, so I present a very general overview, then take up some selected themes. In an appreciative Foreword, Vartan Gregorian

This article is a revision of the previous edition article by J.L. Wood, volume 4, pp. 2204–2208, © 2001, Elsevier Ltd.

Mass media and sports have become increasingly entwined in modernity, now forming what can be called the media sports cultural complex. While television, the most powerful contemporary medium, has made sports increasingly accessible to audiences, there is scholarly concern that it now dominates and even degrades sports. Political economic analysis has, therefore, been an influential approach in this scholarly field, but it is also important to engage with the dimensions of sports that recognize how it works in diverse ways as culture. Therefore, analysis of media sports meanings, ideologies, and uses is important in an increasingly globalized and digitized environment.

This essay pursues three topics emanating from the economic sociology of Talcott Parsons. The first section summarizes the essentials of this sociology, tracing its development from his early works on capitalism through the publication of Economy and Society in 1956. Special attention is given to the transition from a focus on causal ‘factors’ to a focus on the economy and society as social systems. The second section summarizes and analyzes a chapter on class, markets and the economy, written in 1978-9, a short time before his death, and intended for a never-published book on the American societal community. Continuities and discontinuities between his earlier work and his final ideas on the subject are noted. In addition, a number of my own criticisms, also written in 1979, are elaborated. The third section identifies some threads of Parsonian theory - found both in his economic sociology and in his more general writings - that have relevance for the economics and politics of a globalized world. In particular, both the applicability and limitations of Parsons’s ideas on the dimension of solidarity in the international system are addressed.

In this article some links between comparative methods, interdisciplinary studies and the internationalization of sociological knowledge are explored. The most fruitful comparative approach, it is argued, is neither positivistic nor relativistic, but should involve systematic incorporation of contextual analysis in selecting indices and explanatory variables. It is demonstrated that in order to carry out such contextual analysis effectively, the researcher is impelled toward both an interdisciplinary approach and international collaboration.

My objective in this essay is to weave two tales?one retrospective, chronicling the main contours of our field in the twentieth century, and one imaginary, guess ing what the twenty-first century will be like. Tales of such breadth and complexity, however, cannot be woven with only one or two threads. The stories I wish to tell about sociology must involve at least five separate strands in order to reach any measure of intelligibility

This article challenges the widely held assumption that globalization is creating a new type of world society at the expense of the nation-state. Arguments assembled to support this challenge include the reminder that vast social changes are inevitably incremental in character; that increasing complexity rather than revolutionary transformation is the theme of contemporary social changes in the world; that the staying-power of sovereign states is impressive, and that a number of factors including the international terrorist threat are shoring them up; and with respect to cultural change the prospect is for continuity of processes already under way rather than radical transformation.

Readers of this volume will easily discern the difficulties of fruitful articulation between psychoanalysis and sociology on all dimensions— theoretical synthesis, collaborative research, practical applications, and no doubt friendships and visiting patterns among their respective practitioners. As a person whose primary identification has been that of a sociologist, but also as one who became a psychoanalyst and remained intellectually active in that field, I appreciate these difficulties as much as the next. Yet I have remained committed to both fields, and have made a number of efforts to use both in order to generate knowledge. In this essay, I attempt to discuss this marriage and along three dimensions: Biographical-personal, or how predispositions and events brought me to pursue both fields. Theoretical-cultural, or how the core assumptions and methods of the psychoanalytic and sociological approaches mainly discourage but leave some room for positive articulation. Practical-intellectual, or an account of the specifics of the avenues I actually pursued in discerning the social edges of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic edges of sociology.

▪ Abstract This essay engages the daunting task of encapsulating and reflecting on the 25 year history of the Annual Review of Sociology. After giving a short account of my own involvement in ARS, I give a brief rendition of what sociology as a field has been during the past quarter century—that is, what was “out there” to be reflected in the pages of ARS. I lay out some statistics on trends in the size, countries, and universities represented, coauthorship patterns, and gender ratios in ARS. These statistics are very informative but contain few surprises. Next I trace and analyze an issue that has commmanded the attention of editors of ARS throughout its history—unity or diversity of sociology as a discipline. Finally I conclude that the ARS does indeed reflect the field in ways that can be documented, but that this process of reflection is subject to many imprecisions generated by the editorial process itself.

This article introduces this issue of American Behavioral Scientist in several ways: (a) It provides background information about the conference on which the issue is based, (b) it provides an intellectual and historical context for the idea of the public representation of culture and history in American society, (c) it develops several substantive propositions (derived from different articles in the issue) dealing with factors that produce cententious conflicts over the public representation of culture and history, and (d) it summarizes the articles in the issue in the order that they appear.

After identifying a number of distinctive processes of social change - and their associated social problems - that may be expected to continue into the next century, the argument turns to the role of social-science knowledge in understanding and dealing with such problems. The author develops a critique of the utilitarian model of applied social science - a model based on supposed analogies with the natural sciences and engineering. Next, the logic of a `social problem' is dissected into the necessary ingredients it must have to qualify as a problem. As an alternative to the utilitarian model, the author suggests that social-science knowledge provides multiple points of entry in understanding the social-psychological and political dynamics by which social problems are recognized and dealt with as such.

Sono passati vent'anni da quando pubblicaiComparative Methods in the Social Sciences(Smelser 1976). Il libro riscosse un certo interesse da parte della sociologia e della scienza politica. Tuttavia, dovrei mettere in chiaro che la sua pubblicazione fu in qualche modo singolare. Nella mia carriera non mi sono mai considerato un metodologo, malgrado in alcuni periodi abbia insegnato metodologia. E benché ritenga che il messaggio di quel volume sia congruente con gran parte della mia ricerca sostantiva, avevo scritto ben poco sui metodi di comparazione prima dell'uscita del libro, e niente ho scritto sul tema in seguito. L'invito a tenere una lezione presso l'Istituto Universitario Europeo mi ha offerto una gradita opportunità di passare in rassegna alcuni sviluppi occorsi dopo la seconda metà degli anni Settanta e di elaborare nuove riflessioni su alcune tematiche metodologiche nelle scienze sociali comparatistiche. Queste mie riflessioni si svilupperanno in quattro parti:a)alcune informazioni sui precedenti della stesura del libro e un'analisi retrospettiva dei suoi contenuti e dei suoi scopi intellettuali;b)una rassegna dei contributi alla letteratura sulla metodologia comparatista che sono apparsi in seguito;c)un tentativo di mettere ordine in questa letteratura confusa;d)una breve riconsiderazione finale di un paio di problemi centrali che verranno allo scoperto in questa presentazione.