Sociology, as conceived by Comte, was to put an end to the anarchy of opinions characteristic of liberal democracy by replacing opinion with the truths of sociology, imposed through indoctrination. Later sociologists backed away from this, making sociology acceptable to liberal democracy by being politically neutral.The critics of this solution asked ‘whose side are we on?’ Burawoy provides a n...

Many prior researchers have criticized business planning, arguing that it interferes with the efforts of firm founders to undertake more valuable actions to develop their fledgling enterprises (Bhide, 2000; Carter, Gartner, and Reynolds, 1996). In this paper, we challenge this negative view of business planning, arguing that business planning is an important precursor to action in new ventures....

Online peer production projects, such as Wikipedia and open-source software, have become important producers of cultural and technological goods. While much research has been done on the way that large existing projects work, little is known about how projects get started or who starts them. Nor is it clear how much influence founders have on the future trajectory of a community. We measure the...

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s of papers relating to these issues are invited for consideration for the conferenceand should be sent to Andrew Sayer at the address below by the extended deadline of1 March 2005 Conference organiser: Andrew Sayer, Professor of Social Theory and Political Economy,Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, LA1 4YD, U.K. [email protected] Conference secretary: Pennie Drink...