Studies in Comparative International Development, Spring 2006, Vol. 41, No. 1, pp. 76-98. Seán Ó Riain is professor of sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. His research has been primarily on the political economy of high-tech growth in Ireland and elsewhere, and on work and class politics among software developers. He is the author of The Politics of High Tech Growth: Deve...

This paper presents an analysis of nonprofit organizations—the organizational infrastructure of civil society—in East Central Europe, from one important respect: by placing them in the context of the comparative historical sociology of the region’s widespread informality. This involves two steps: (1) summarizing an argument about the role of informality in East Central European capitalism today...

The programme of analytical sociology brings sharp focus to fundamental issues insociology as a scientific discipline. Its practitioners offer a clear paradigm of how sociologicalexplanations ought to proceed, from individual actors to social outcomes. This essay considerslimitations of the approach as a general framework for all sociological research, however. Theessay surveys ...

religion, as a social phenomenon, affects society and is affected by it interactively. in iran, basically with religious norms and laws, many scholars and researchers concern with religion and level of religiosity. the paper is a comparative analysis of level of religiosity based on glynn and stark’s dimensions of religiosity, in three different generations in sari city: first generation (pre-r...

The science of anthropology has grown up from many distinct beginnings. At an early time men were interested in foreign countries and in the lives of their inhabitants. Herodotus reported to the Greeks what he had seen in many lands. Caesar and Tacitus wrote on the customs of the Gauls and Germans. In the Middle Ages Marco Polo, the Venetian, and Ibn Batuta, the Arab, told of the strange people...

Predictions for the future among intellectuals have swung in the recent past from an optimistic view of man's capabilities and a continuing abundance of material goods to a fatalistic pessimism regarding man's inability to respond adequately to current and imminent crises-the population explosion, limited food and resource supplies, and environmental pollution, to name a few. Among the various ...

The importance of merchant guilds for the commercial development of Europe is beyond doubt. However, there is still little agreement as to why they emerged, persisted and ultimately declined between the 11 and 18 centuries. Historical studies have focused on individual cases and idiosyncratic circumstances that restrict severely comparability, while economic approaches based on game or contract...

The recent development of child guidance clinics and behavior research centers presents students of human nature and social relations with new opportunities and new problems. The history of science seems to demonstrate that whenever a body of theoretical knowledge becomes oriented and useful with reference to a concrete human problem a period of rapid development ensues. The evidence for such a...

Abstract The article compares three influential theories used in sociology and psychology to categorize types of morality—Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thévenot’s justification theory , Shalom H. Schwartz’s basic human values Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations —to simplify the complexity presented by different categorizations, while retaining necessary nuance, translate concepts each into languag...