One of the most important developments in recent sociological theory is the relationship between ‘social structure’ and ‘social agency.’ According to George Ritzer (1996), this issue has been mostly investigated among European theorists, while, on the other side, the parallel issue of the ‘micro-macro linkage’ has attracted the main interest in American sociological theory. Again, according to ...

The relevance of sociological theory for explaining the recent dramatic changes in Eastern Europe is at hand. The impact of the downfall of communism has been compared with those "Great Transformations" along which sociology evolved as a "science of crisis par excellence" (Habermas). The actual elaboration of a sociological theory of post-communist transformation and its relation to East Europe...

This research studies the sociological factors involving in boys  juvenile delinquency in Golestan (Northern province of Iran). Delinquent behavior treats the health of family and society and causes family disorder. It tries to understand the role of family and peer groups in delinquency. As we see in Sutherland theory of differential reinforcement association and Hirshi social control verif...

This paper outlines initial interventions to prevent drug and alcohol abuse in organizations. Grounded in sociological theory, the first intervention is to define the nature of the problem through data gathering and analysis, particularly self-reports of drug and alcohol use by the organization's members. The self-report data, when compared with national data, provide a base of information from...

the “social” from its embeddedness in biophysical reality. In comparison to the many attempts at formalist unification that have taken place in sociology since the middle of last century (e.g. Parsons, Luhmann, Coleman), behavioral realist pleas are both a relatively new entry into the disciplinary contest

In the literature on aging there have been almost simultaneous calls for researchers to make more explicit links between theory and research and for researchers to incorporate diversity in their work. Although gerontologists have begun to document diversity, theory is often absent from this research. In this article, the author examines sociological aging theories of inequality and argues that ...

Despite the lip service which many sociologists pay to Popper’s hypothetico-deductive model (HDM) of theory testing, few if any major social theories have been definitively falsified. The reason is that sociological explanations do not fit the deductivist model of explanation: They do not contain universal or statistical ‘‘covering laws’’ from which falsifiable hypotheses could be deduced. Soci...

Sociological theories seldom inform public health interventions at the community level. The reasons for this are unclear but may include difficulties in finding, understanding or operationalising theories. We conducted a study to explore the feasibility of locating sociological theories within a specific field of public health, adolescent risk-taking, and to consider their potential for practic...

1 I Background Sociological legacies Long before there was a conception of sustainable development, sociologists (as well as other social scientists) were conducting research on development issues (such as modernization, socioeconomic development, distorted development, unequal development, etc.) as well as sustainability issues (pollution, environmental degradation, resource depletion, key res...