What does it mean to live for sociology, today? In attempting to answer this question I return to Max Weber’s famous lectures delivered toward the end of his life—one on science as a vocation and the other on politics as a vocation. He presented ‘‘Science as a Vocation’’ in November 1917 toward the end of World War I and the more pessimistic ‘‘Politics as a Vocation’’ in January 1919 after Germ...

Culture is a significant concept for sociologists because it both identifies a fundamental set of ideas about what sociologists' study and suggests a major reason for the existence of Sociology itself – that human social behaviour can be explained in the context of the social groups into which people are born and within which they live their lives. In this Chapter we're going to explore a range...

The article examines the impact of study for Levittown urban sociologist Herbert Gans on Denise Scott Brown’s thought. It scrutinizes Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steven Izenour’s ‘Remedial Housing Architects or Learning from Levittown’ conducted in collaboration with their students at Yale University 1970. Taking as its starting point endeavour to redefine functionalism ‘Architecture Patterns Sy...

OLKC possesses three unevenly developed tributaries. The most dominant are intraorganizational and inter-organizational. We contribute to the urban-regional political economy of OLKC. Regional knowledge places are multilayered interconnected locations of possibility. Understanding their evolution and future requires analytic resources which draw from critical realism, comparative historicized s...

Social scientists have mostly taken it for granted that William Foote Whyte's sociological classic Street Corner Society (SCS, 1943) belongs to the Chicago school of sociology's research tradition or that it is a relatively independent study which cannot be placed in any specific research tradition. Social science research has usually overlooked the fact that William Foote Whyte was educated in...