This article reports on the results of a recent practitioner survey in which respondents were asked to identify the three most important issues facing the discipline of sociology at that time and five years into the future. Respondents were drawn primarily from the Sociological Practice Association and the Sociological Practice section of the American Sociological Association. Responses are dis...

Rational choice or action theory may be understood as one possible interpretation of Weber's program, though it must be said a rather special one in that it invites us to adopt the least complex conception of social action that we can analytically get away with in arriving at a "causal explanation of its course and effects." It thus departs from many post-Weberian (and for that matter pre-Weber...

The main challenge, I think, to sociological theory or to social theory more broadly remains that of bridging the gap between what Mills (1959), nearly 60 years ago, called " grand theory " and " abstracted empiricism. " Over 200 years ago, Kant (1781) formulated a similar conception, that " thoughts without content are empty and perceptions without concepts are blind " (Gedanken ohne Inhalt si...

on an investigation designed to remedy some of the deficiencies in our knowledge of homosexuals. He interviewed six groups of 50 men each: homosexuals convicted of offences with adults, paedophiliacs convicted of offences with children, homosexual patients under psychiatric treatment, non-homosexual psychiatric patients, other homosexuals to whom none of the foregoing qualifications applied and...

Moral attributes such as honesty, being devoted to one's social duty and principles, responsibility for one's words and action are very important for civil servants. Morality as a basis for personnel management and the moral features of civil servants are of special value, especially during the deep political, social and economic reforms taking place in Russia. Global social changes are extreme...

The debate on abortion gets heated because some people feel that abortion should be abolished while others argue that is should be legalized. Those who against abortion reason that life begins at conception, and hence the unborn child has equal human rights with any other living person. This makes them state that abortion is murder and that those involved should be charged with murder in a cour...