The following is a shortened version of a plenary lecture by Steven Brint presented at the inaugural meeting of the Portuguese Sociology of Education Society in Lisbon, January 23, 2009. You have asked me to speak about the current state of the sociology of education in the United States. The temptation is great in such an assignment to applaud the subdiscipline for following one’s own cherishe...

This article addresses the relationship between technology and institutions and asks whether technology itself is an institution. The argument is that social theorists need to attend better to materiality: the world of things and objects of which technical things form an important class. It criticizes the new institutionalism in sociology for its failure to sufficiently open up the black box of...

first, it is argued that the rule of patterns, the natural consequences of matterialization of science,and the deliberate deviation of the western social sciences from theology are singled out as the factors which have led to the total ignorance of such subject as theology and sociology. similar cases happen in philosophy and science. due to the prevailing cultural atmospher in the west, such a...

First, this article will outline the metaphysics of "the social" that implicitly and explicitly connects the work of classical and contemporary cosmopolitan sociologists as different as Durkheim, Weber, Beck and Luhmann. In a second step, I will show that the cosmopolitan outlook of classical sociology is driven by exclusive differences. In understanding human affairs, both classical sociology ...

mainstream sociology under positivism has sought to provide universal theory, in one hand, and the historiography has attempted to narrative description of events, in the other hand. pathological studies show that both are suffering from extremism; so that mainstream sociology have neglected to study of special affairs and historiography  has not been able to build and provide theoretical gener...

we need sociology theories, for that understand of sociology and politic problems. french sociologist pierre bourdieu's theory practice and symbolic power are our best resource; for understanding social and political fields. this article reviews the language and symbolic power; indicating its function in social and political fields. we need sociology theories, for that understand of sociol...