Alvin W. Gouldner (1920--1980) was a prolific sociologist of the post-World War II era who spent the early part of his career (the 1950s) in the field of industrial sociology. A case study of Gouldner's early life and career is useful insofar as it intertwines with the development of industrial sociology as a distinct subfield within sociology. Through this analysis we are also better able to u...

The emergence of agent technology and its increased use in business applications arises the question whether (and how) the existence of intelligent agents may affect the definition, the structure, the interaction patterns, and the dynamics of social systems of enterprises. This paper aims to work out some of the relationships between Organizational Sociology, and the use of organizational metap...

This article is an overview of the contributions of photography to sociology and a discussion of potential uses of photography in sociological research. Visual sociology, after contributing to several studies in the early decades of American sociology, disappeared to reemerge during the 1960s. In the meantime, the use of visual methods in ethnographic description, the study of social processes ...

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 chapter surveys the new institutional economics, a rapidly growing literature combining economics, law, organization theory, political science, sociology and anthropology to understand social, political and commercial institutions. This literature tries to explain what institutions are, how they arise, what purposes they serve, how they change and how they may be reformed. Following conven...

There are two main streams of research related to alliance performance. From economic sociology perspective, relational capital is the dyadic factor determines alliance performance. Strong relational capital leads to good alliance performance. From organizational learning theory or competence-based theory perspective, alliance capability is the firm’s ability to achieve good alliance performanc...

In this paper we aim to gain insight in the effects information systems have on organizational learning. A theoretical framework is proposed that may serve to explore the role of information systems in processes of organizational learning. Based on the sociology of knowledge [5], learning is conceived as the process of constructing and reconstructing organizational knowledge, which can be furth...