A A c c c c o o u u n n t t s s Following the theme of August's ASA conference in Montréal, Great Divides, Transgress-ing Boundaries, our goal for this issue of Accounts is to foster a discussion of the boundaries between economic sociology and other areas within sociology. Economic sociology has expanded very rapidly in recent years, with explosions in section membership, publications, and oth...

John Goldthorpe is one of Britain’s most eminent sociologists and a strong advocate of quantitative sociology. In this concise and accessible book, he provides a new rationale for recent developments in sociology which focus on establishing and explaining probabilistic regularities in human populations. Through these developments, Goldthorpe shows how sociology has become more securely placed w...

In this paper, we argue that the metaphor form of a comparison (i.e., a topic-vehicle pair) is preferred over, and more comprehensible than, the simile form when the interpretive diversity for that comparison is high. Interpretive diversity refers to the richness of the figurative meaning of a comparison; it is high to the extent that more features or properties are related to the figurative me...

Previous Professor, Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University, 1993-2002. Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1990-1993. Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, 1985-1990. Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and College of Medicine, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1980-1985.

Sociology, as conceived by Comte, was to put an end to the anarchy of opinions characteristic of liberal democracy by replacing opinion with the truths of sociology, imposed through indoctrination. Later sociologists backed away from this, making sociology acceptable to liberal democracy by being politically neutral.The critics of this solution asked ‘whose side are we on?’ Burawoy provides a n...

Though the number of interpretive research in information systems (IS) has increased substantially in recent years, the development and proliferation of methodology guiding such research is relatively minimal. The IS research methodology in interpretive research is still not institutionalized. This lack of common standards poses problems both for IS researchers using the interpretive paradigm a...