his chapter is about material transfers among adult family generations. They occur either as inter vivos gifts or as bequests. These two types have often been analyzed separately despite good reasons to treat them together. The description and explanation of such transfers has been the subject of a broad range of theoretical approaches, including sociological theories of the social antecedents ...

the aim of this study was to show the interaction between the society, applicants and medical schools in terms of medical student selection. in this study, the trends to implement social factors in the selection process were highlighted. these social factors were explored through functionalism and conflict theories, each focusing on different categories of social factors. while functionalist th...

Despite the lip service which many sociologists pay to Popper’s hypothetico-deductive model (HDM) of theory testing, few if any major social theories have been definitively falsified. The reason is that sociological explanations do not fit the deductivist model of explanation: They do not contain universal or statistical ‘‘covering laws’’ from which falsifiable hypotheses could be deduced. Soci...

The supposed properties of 'genes' have led natural scientists to claim authority to explain the reasons of human action, behavior, and even human nature, which has traditionally been the object of study of the humanities. The aim of this paper is to discuss the possibilities of sociological theory dealing with the biological reductionism that establishes the strict articulation between 'human ...

Academic discourse on trust is fractured along disciplinary lines. Security theorists routinely use a definition of trust which, apparently, has little in common with any of the definitions of trust that appear in the sociological and psychological literature. In this essay, we extend a recently-proposed framework for the technical analysis of secure systems, so that its notion of trust is roug...

We investigate how sociological argumentation di ers from the classical rstorder logic. We focus on theories about age dependence of organizational mortality. The overall pattern of argument does not comply with the classical monotonicity principle: adding premises does not overturn conclusions in an argument. The cause of nonmonotonicity is the need to derive conclusions from partial knowledge...

this paper first focuses on the necessity of cooperation among human beings, and then offers objective and subjective reasons for higher cooperation among human beings compared to animals. the paper tries to proove that cooperation precedes war and is more normal than the latter. ln fact, the history of war and conflict both is shorter than the war in human societies, and more exceptional. war,...

The present study is an attempt to clarify some aspects of the controversy between holism and reductionism in sociological theory. What are the theoretical and non-theoretical motives behind classical holistic and reductionistic approaches to sociological theory? Are they chiefly ontological, epistemological, normative or of a more practical nature? An analytical framework making, it possible t...