I propose to approach economic sociology as the application of social stratification, organizational theory, and the sociology of development to the study of the organization of economic activity. I begin by reviewing the growth of specialty fields in sociology during the postwar period. I then outline the origins and major tenets of a comparative economic sociology that breaks with specializat...

The discussion in the sociology of science about the role of model systems in biology provides an invitation to reflect on whether and how they operate in sociology in comparison to other disciplines. This paper shows that sociology too relies on objects of study that receive a disproportionate amount of attention and implicitly come to stand in for a specific class of objects. But, unlike othe...

Introduction Ten years ago, when I was just becoming interested in the relation between child development and socioeconomic status, I attended a small workshop sponsored by the McDonnell Foundation to discuss new directions in developmental cognitive neuroscience. At the time I knew virtually nothing about development or SES but, since the meeting was so small and informal, I decided to present...

In this article we revisit Alvin Gouldner’s The Corning Crisis o,f Wvstern Sociology ( I 970). I n part, this article is an attempt to apply Gouldner’s own lessons about the sociology of knowledge to his own work, situating it with respcct to the dominant epistemological unconscious of late 1960s American sociology as well as thc broader historical context of a still-vibrant Fordist inode of so...

Starting from a paper about closing the gap between sociology and medicine in Brazil and the United Kingdom that was published in 1971, a historical update was made with the aim of reflecting on the new shapes of health-related teaching and research within the social and human sciences, in these two countries. The methodology was qualitative and the study was developed using secondary data. The...

POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY IS DEAD. The old kind, anyway. What counted as political sociology in the past just is not practiced anymore. Generalizing wildly, political sociology used to be the study of how voters, classes, movements, parties, and so on influenced the state—be it political leaders, policy, administration, and so forth. In Canada, this kind of political sociology was represented by both...

The article is devoted to contemporary issues of learning and teaching economic sociology in higher education. The article draws attention to the theoretical and methodological problems of economic sociology. The author analyzes the current global social issues of economic development. The article outlines the prospects of development of teaching economic sociology. These prospects are related ...

This essay treats Burawoy’s advocacy for public sociology as a social problems claim. Using a social constructionist approach, I examine the rhetorical strategies Burawoy uses to construct the discipline in a way that makes public sociology seem not only relevant, but integral to what sociologists do. Sociology’s history, ethos and practitioners are framed in ways that make its commitment to th...

Eighteen years experience of teaching medical anthropology at a Hungarian medical school offers insight into the dynamics of interference between the rationalist epistemological tradition of biomedicine as one of the central paradigms of modernism and the cultural relativism of medical anthropology, as cultural anthropology is considered to be one of the generators of postmodern thinking. Traci...