Edward Westermarck (1862-1939) taught sociology and moral philosophy at the University of Helsinki; later, he taught sociology at the University of London. He initially sought graduate work in moral philosophy but quickly concluded that normative ethics must be based on empirical behavior and so turned to field work. As a pioneer in anthropological field work, he championed a comparative method...

This paper suggests that the sociological analysis of economic life may be improved by drawing on the theory of signs as developed by philosopher Charles Peirce. I take my point of departure from Georg Simmel’s essay “Sociology of the Senses” (1907) and raise the question if an economic sociology of the senses is possible and, if so, what it would look like. The different ways in which the sens...

This issue of SER contains three articles on public sociology and economic sociology, which all have their origin in a session on this theme that was held at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in August 2006 in Montreal. The reason for organizing this session was a sense that ‘new economic sociology’ has ignored many of the issues that are associated with the term ‘publ...

Do all disciplines fret over the state of their own intellectual and policy-relevant health? Is it a symptom of our hyper-reflexive and confessional times that collective anxiety has to be rehearsed over the track record, and present and projected performance of a group of scholars? Medical sociology’s lengthy reflections on the state of its own practice are recognizable as part of a more gener...

The aim of the article is to reflect on directions and principles research applied activity undertaken from perspective clinically oriented sociology social work; focus study question importance cooperation between welfare organizations, analyzed a dialogical perspective. empirical inspiration presented considerations are actions taken as part project 3D Cooperation. Model multisectoral in supp...

I am most grateful to the editors of the British Journal of Sociology for putting together such an impressive set of review papers about my book. I am very honoured by the very thoughtful essays written by such a distinguished group of scholars coming from sociology, political science, anthropology, history, geography and economics. I warmly thank all participants for their time and attention t...

Medical screening raises fundamental issues for sociological inquiry, but at present a well-developed sociology of medical screening is lacking. This special issue on the sociology of screening brings together an exciting collection of new work that tackles medical screening from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. In this opening paper, we begin by explaining what we mean b...

The processes of power are pervasive, complex, and often disguised in our society. Accordingly one finds in political science, in sociology, and in social psychology a variety of distinctions among different types of social power or among qualitatively different processes of social influence (1, 7, 14, 20, 23, 29, 30, 38, 40). Our main purpose is to identify the major types of power and to defi...