Sociology and Social Problems

The Sociology of Social Inclusion

This article looks at social inclusion from a sociological perspective. It argues that sociology complements biological and other natural order explanations of social stratification. The article interrogates a variety of forms of social integration, including ostracism within 5th century B.C. Greece, 19th-century solidarism, and Goffman’s mid-20th-century work on stigma. It does so to demonstra...

Sociology and Non-Equilibrium Social Science

This chapter addresses the relationship between sociology and NonEquilibrium Social Science (NESS). Sociology is a multiparadigmatic discipline with significant disagreement regarding its goals and status as a scientific discipline. Different theories and methods coexist temporally and geographically. However, it has always aimed at identifying the main factors that explain the temporal stabili...

SOCIOLOGY IN SWITZERLAND Sociology of Work and Organization Organizations as Social Actors

Some Problems of and Futures for Urban Sociology: Toward a Sociology of Settlements

Forty years ago, Manuel Castells asked whether urban sociology had a subject matter and whether the term urban still had meaning—and this article reopens these and related questions. It also wonders why today’s American urban sociology has concentrated on cities, especially big ones, concurrently virtually ignoring the three other types of communities—suburbs, towns, and rural areas—in which a ...

Toward a Historical Sociology of Social Situations

rules. In both cases, though via different mechanisms, these systems gave actors a stable reference point toward which they could orient behavior. What changes in the less-institutionalized settings of postmodernity is that this stability gives way to situational contingency, and so trust becomes something that must be constantly achieved and reachieved, what Giddens (1994) refers to as the ide...