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Sociologists

Famous Sociologists - Strong shoulders to stand on

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The following article will present the best 97 sociologist. Connecting studies, biographies and life of each scientist.

Addams, Jane [1860-1935]

Adorno, Theodor W. [1903 - 1969]

Aron, Raymond [1903 - 1983]

Bauman, Zygmunt [1925]

Baudrillard, Jean [1929 - 2007]

Becker, Howard S. [1928]

Bell, Daniel [1919 - 2011]

Benedict, Ruth Fulton [1887 - 1948]

Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas

Bhaskar, Roy [1944 - 2014]

Blau, Peter [1918 - 2002]

Blumer, Herbert [1900 - 1987]

Boltanski, Luc [1940]

Boudon, Raymond [1934-2013]

Bourdieu, Pierre [1930 - 2002]

Castells, Manuel [1942]

Coleman, James S. [1926 - 1995]

Collins, Randall [1941]

Comte, Auguste [1798 - 1857]

Cooley, Charles Horton [1864 - 1929]

Coser, Lewis [1913 - 2003]

Crompton, Rosemary [1942 - 2011]

Crozier, Michel [1922 -2013]

Dahrendorf, Ralf [1929 - 2009]

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt [1868 - 1963]

Durkheim, Émile [1858 - 1917]

Elias, Norbert [1897 - 1990]

Elster, Jon [1940]

Etzioni, Amitai [1929]

Ferguson, Adam [1723 - 1816]

Foucault, Michel [1926 - 1984]

Fromm, Erich [1900 - 1980]

Garfinkel, Harold [1917 - 2011]

Geertz, Clifford [1926 - 2006]

Geiger, Theodor [1891 - 1952]

Giddens, Anthony [1938]

Goffman, Erving [1922 - 1982]

Goudsblom, Joop / Johan [1932]

Gouldner, Alvin W. [1920 - 1980]

Gramsci, Antonio [1891 - 1937]

Habermas, Jürgen [1929]

Halbwachs, Maurice [1877 - 1945]

Hall, Stuart [1932 - 2014]

Haraway, Donna J. [1944]

Homans, George, C. [1910 - 1989]

Horkheimer, Max [1895 - 1973]

Ibn Khaldun [1332-1395]

Inglehart, Ronald [1934]

Kanter, Rosabeth Moss [1943]

Kearl, Michael C.

König, René [1906 - 1992]

Latour, Bruno [1947]

Lefèbvre, Henri [1901 - 1991]

Gerhard E. Lenski [1924]

Lévi-Strauss, Claude Gustav [1908 - 2009]

Luhmann, Niklas [1927 - 1998]

Malinowski, Bronislaw [1884 - 1942]

Mann, Michael [1942]

Mannheim, Karl [1893 - 1947]

Max Weber [1864-1920]

Marcuse, Herbert [1898 - 1979]

Martineau, Harriet [1802 - 1876]

Marx, Karl [1818 - 1883]

Mauss, Marcel [1872 - 1950]

McLuhan, Marschall [1911 - 1980]

Mead, George Herbert [1863 - 1931]

Mead, Margaret [1901-1978]

Merton, Robert King [1910 - 2003]

Michels, Robert [1876-1936]

Millett, Kate [1934]

Mills, Charles Wright [1916 - 1962]

Moreno, Jacob Levy [1889 - 1974]

Morgan, Lewis H. [1818 - 1881]

Offe, Claus [1940]

Pareto, Vilfredo [1848 - 1923]

Park, Robert Ezra [1864 - 1944]

Parsons, Talcott [1902 - 1979]

Popper, Karl Reimund [1902 - 1994]

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques [1712 - 1778]

Schütz, Alfred [1899 - 1959]

Simmel, Georg [1858 - 1918]

Sorokin, Pitirim Aleksandrovič [1889 - 1968]

Spencer, Herbert [1820 - 1903]

Sumner, William Graham [1840 - 1910]

Taylor, Frederick Winslow [1856 - 1915]

Thomas, William Isaac [1863 - 1947]

Tocqueville, Alexis de [1805 - 1859]

Toffler, Alvin [1928]

Tönnies, Ferdinand [1855 - 1936]

Touraine, Alain [1925]

Toynbee, Arnold [1852 - 1883]

Unger, Roberto Mangabeira [1947]

Veblen, Thorstein [1857 - 1929]

Walby, Sylvia

Wallerstein, Immanuel [1930]

Ward, Lester Frank [1841 - 1913]

Willis, Paul

Znaniecki, Florian Witold [1882 - 1958]

References

Addams, Jane [1860-1935]

BiographyJane Addams

Jane Addams was one of the vice presidents of the Chicago Liberty Meeting that led to the formation of the Central Anti-Imperialist League in Chicago. She later served as a vice president of the national Anti-Imperialist League (1904-1919).

In 1889, Addams co-founded Hull House, one of America’s first settlement houses. She was later a co-founder and first president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (1919-1935). She is also remembered as the first American Woman to receive the Nobel Peace Price.

Adorno, Theodor W. [1903 - 1969]

By Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno

Adorno Live (videos)

  • About Music [1:41] (with English annotation)
    Adorno speaks about popular music, Joan Baez and the idiotism of singing songs against war.
  • Über die zwischenmenschliche Kälte [3:10]
  • [1956] Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, part 1 [9:58], 2 [10:04], 3 [10:01], 4 [9:49], 5 [7:24]
  • About Beckett and the deformed subject [0:36]
    Adorno speaks in a TV talk show about the plays of Beckett and the necessary reduction of the plays because of blunted human beings and deformed subjects. Translated in English he says: “Everyone says Beckett is a reduction of tecnique to the extreme, I said that myself and it is nothing special about it to say that. But this reduction is what the world makes out of us, to talk with Karl Kraus. This is what the world is doing to us. These human stubs. These humans that lost their ‘I’ - they are the products of the world they live in.”
  • [2003] Der Bürger als Revolutionär [55:46] 
    A film by Meinhard Prill and Kurt Schneider.
  • [2003] Wer denkt, ist nicht wütend... [58:24]
    A film by Meinhard Prill and Kurt Schneider.

Bibliographies

On Adorno

Aron, Raymond [1903 - 1983]

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By Aron

Aron Live (videos)

Biographies & Bibliographies

On Aron

Bauman, Zygmunt [1925]

By Bauman

Bauman Live (videos)

  • [2009] About immigrants and wasps [10:30]
    Fragment of a speech From Assimilation to...? A Brief History of European Ambitions and their Frustrations, held at the Spaces, Connections, Control Inaugural Symposium at Goldsmiths College, University of London, 28 November 2009.
  • [2010] Selves as Objects of Consumption, part 1 [14:51], 2 [14:21], 3 [14:48], 4 [14:45],5 [14:33], 6 [2:25], 7 [10:01], 8 [7:29]
    Bauman gives a lecture Selves as Objects of Consumption in the Tolerance Center of Vilnius Gaon Jewish State Museum. The lecture was organized by Lithuanian Member of the European Parliament Prof. Leonidas Donskis, publishing house Apostrofa and Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania). Thetranscript of this lecture was created by James C.
  • [2011] The Global Factory of Wasted Humans, part 1 [13:01], 2 [10:05], 3 [13:45] 
    Bauman talks about The Global Factory of Wasted Humans in a filmed conference published on the French video portal “Audiovisual Research Archive”. For Bauman the production of ‘human waste’ — or more precisely, wasted lives, the ‘superfluous’ populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts — is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the ‘developed countries’. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, ‘redundant population’ is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity’s global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about ‘immigrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and the growing role played by diffuse ‘security fears’ on the contemporary political agenda. See his book Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts [2004].

On Bauman

Baudrillard, Jean [1929 - 2007]

By Baudrillard

  • [1981] On the Murderous Capacity of Images
    Excerpt from Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images and the Precession of Simulacra, in: Thomas Docherty (ed.) [1993] Postmodernism: A Reader New York: Columbia Univ. Press
  • [1986] America
    Excerpts compiled by Chris Turner from the original in French, Americe
  • [1991] The Seismic Order
  • [1992] Hystericizing the Millennium
    Originally published in French as part of Jean Braudillard, L’Illusion de la fin: ou La greve des evenements. Paris: Galilee, 1992. Translated by Charles Dudas (York University).
  • [1992] Reversion of History
    Originally published in French as part of Jean Braudillard, L’Illusion de la fin: ou La greve des evenements. Paris: Galilee, 1992. Translated by Charles Dudas (York University).
  • [1992] Rise of the Void towards the Periphery
    Originally published in French as part of Jean Braudillard, L’Illusion de la fin: ou La greve des evenements. Paris: Galilee, 1992. Translated by Charles Dudas (York University).
  • [1992] Thawing of the East
    Originally published in French as part of Jean Braudillard, L’Illusion de la fin: ou La greve des evenements. Paris: Galilee, 1992. Translated by Charles Dudas (York University).
  • [1992] Strike of Events
    Originally published in French as part of Jean Braudillard, L’Illusion de la fin: ou La greve des evenements. Paris: Galilee, 1992. Translated by Charles Dudas (York University).
  • [1993] Pataphysics of Year 2000
    Originally published in French as part of Jean Braudillard, L’Illusion de la fin: ou La greve des evenements. Paris: Galilee, 1992. Translated by Charles Dudas (York University).
  • [1994] Radical Thought
    Translation of Jean Baudrillard’s La Pensee Radicale, published in Sens /Tonka (eds.) [1994] Collection Morsure, Paris.
  • [1994] Plastic Surgery for the Other
    This article first appeared in Jean Baudrillard / Marc Guillaume [1994] Figures de l’alterite. Paris: Descartes et Cie.
  • [1994] No Reprieve for Serajevo
    Published in Liberation, January 8, 1994. Translated by Patrice Riemens.
  • [1995] Vivisecting the 90s: An Interview with Jean Baudrillard
    An interview by Caroline Bayard and Graham Knight (Mc Master University, Hamiltion, Canada. Published in Research in Semiotic Inquiry 16(1/2), Spring 1996.
  • [1996] Disneyworld Company
    An essay.
  • [1996] Baudrillard on the New Technologies
    An interview with Claude Thibaut in Cybersphere
    Originally published in Style 29:314-27.
  • [1997] A Conjuration of Imbeciles
    This article originallly appeared as “La conjuration des imbeciles” in Liberation on May 7, 1997. Translated by François Debrix.
  • [1997] The End of the Millennium or the Countdown
  • [1997] Global Debt and Parallel Universe
    Published in French by Liberation, Paris. Translated by François Debrix.
  • [2003] The Violence of the Global
    Initially publishad als “La Violence du Mondial”, in Braudrillard [2002] Power Inferno. Paris: Galilée, pp. 63-83.
    Terrorism is analysed as a contemporary partner of globalization.

Baudrillard Live

  • The Murder of the Real, part 1 [9:05], 2 [9:08], 3 [9:06], 4 [9:07], 5 [7:35], 6 [4:01]
    Audio recording of a 1999 lecture given at Wellek Library of University of California, Irvine.
  • Violence of the image, part 1 [9:57], 2 [10:01], 3 [10:00], 4 [9:56], 5 [9:47], 6 [9:59], 7[9:48], 8 [8:09], 9 [9:12]
    Baudrillard talking about the violence of the image, the violence to the image, aggression, oppression, transgression, regression, effects and causes of violence, violence of the virtual, 3d, virtual reality, transparency, psychological and imaginary. Open Lecture given by Baudrillard after his seminar for the students at the European Graduate School, EGS Media and Communication Program Studies Department, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, in 2004.

On Baudrillard

Bi(blio)graphy

Becker, Howard S. [1928]

Bell, Daniel [1919 - 2011]

By Bell

On Bell

Benedict, Ruth Fulton [1887 - 1948]

Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas

  • [1963] Invitation to Sociology. A Humanistic Perspective
    New York, Anchor Books, Doubley & Company, Inc.
    An invitation to understand society in a disciplined way for people who are naturally interested in the events that engage people’s ultimate beliefs, their moments of tragedy and grandeur and ecstasy, but who are also fascinated by the commonplace, the everyday. Social reality has many layers of meaning. The discovery of each new layer changes the perceptions of the whole The fascination of sociology lies in the fact that its perspective makes us see in a new light the very world in which we have lived all our lives.
  • [1966] Society as a Human Product 
    From: Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. [1966] The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, pp. 51-55, 59-61.
    In these fragments the autors explain what it means that man produces himself, i.e. the homo socius. They also argue that the causes of the emergence, maintenance and transmission of a social order can only be understood when you analyse the orgins, functions and processes of institutionalization. The origin of institutionalization is explained by the argument that all human activity is subject to habitualization. This processes of baibualization precede any institutionalization. Institutionalization itself is defined as a reciprocal typication of habitualized actions by types of actors.
  • [1990] Reflections of an Ecclesiastical Expatriate
    In: The Christian Century, October 24, 1990, pp. 964-9.
  • [1997] Epistemological Modesty: An Interview with Peter Berger
    In: The Christian Century, October 29, 1997, pp. 972-8.
    Berger explains why the modern challenges is how to live with uncertainty. “The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude. There is a middle ground between fanatism and relativism.” That’s what is ment by “epistemomogical modesty”, you can belief certain things, but you are modest about these claims.
  • [1998] Protestantism and the Quest for Certainty
    In: The Christian Century, August 26-September 2, 1998, pp. 782-796.
    Berger explains a big mistake he made in his career as a sociologist. He once believed that modernity necessarily leads to a decline in religion. But he also explains one big insight: pluralism undermines the taken-for-granted of beliefs and values. In the article the mistake and the insight are related.
  • Kessel, David H.
    Berger’s Motifs of Sociological Consiousness
    Kessel explains his fascination for a classic in sociology, Berger’s Invitation to Sociology. In a few word he stresses the importance of Berger’s ideas about how to think sociologically...especially critically. The four motifs or themes of “sociological consiousness” are illustrated from Berger’s book.
  • Peter L. Berger Room
    A listing of online publications on Peter Berger.

Bhaskar, Roy [1944 - 2014]

Blau, Peter [1918 - 2002]

Blumer, Herbert [1900 - 1987]

Boltanski, Luc [1940]

  • [1989] Justesse et Justice dans le travail [pdf]
    Introduction of Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thévenot [1989] “Justesse et justice dans le travail”. Cahier du centre d’études et de l’emploi. Paris: PUF, 33, p. V-VII.
  • [1991] De la justification [pdf]
    Preface of Luc Boltanski & Laurent Thévenot [1991] “De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur”. Paris: Gallimard, p. 6-39. It explains how the book has been written.
  • La sociologie politique & morale de Luc Boltanski
    A site dedicated to the sociology of Luc Boltanksi, created by A. Rousseau and P. Wright, students of the IEP in Toulouse. It offers analysis of his work, a biography and bibliograhpy, and links to online texts.
  • Juhem, Philippe [1994] Un nouveau paradigme sociologique?
    In: Cahier de sociologie politique de Nanterre, vol 1, 1994, p. 82-106.
    Article on the importance of the work of Luc Boltanksi and Laurent Thévenot.
  • Wikipedia: Luc_Boltanski

Boudon, Raymond [1934-2013]

Bourdieu, Pierre [1930 - 2002]

  • Bourdieu Google Group 
    A forum for the discussion and debate inspired by the philosophical and sociological thought of Pierre Bourdieu and his work in all its aspects: aesthetic, artistic, cultural, scientific, social, philosophical and political.
  • Champs
    A mailing list for the exchange of information about the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu. Moderated by Raphaël Desanti.
  • Pierre Bourdieu - sociologue énervant
    A portal on Bourdieu, presented by Le Magazine de l’ Homme Moderne. The site presents many original texts of Bourdieu.

By Bourdieu

Bibliographies

Bourdieu Live (videos)

  • Sociolgy is a Martial Art, part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 (YouTube)
    A documentary about Bourdieu’s life. Filmed over three years, director Pierre Carles’ camera follows Bourdieu as he lectures, attends political rallies, travels, meets with his students, staff, and research team in Paris, and includes Bourdieu having a conversation with Günter Grass. The title of the film stresses the degree of Bourdieu’s political engagement. He took on the mantle of Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre in French public life, slugging it out with politicians because he considered those lucky enough to have spent their lives studying the social world could not be indifferent to the struggle for justice. It is a vital documentary that is useful in various courses in social sciences.
  • Sur la domination masculine [8:13]
  • Les jugements de goût [10:58]
  • Une proposition pour l’enseignement du futur [10.5.1985]
  • Pierrie Bourdieu, part 1 [15:00] | 2 [15:00] | 3 [18:46] 
    Dominique Bollinger interviews Pierre Bourdieu [1991]

On Bourdieu

Castells, Manuel [1942]

By Castells

Castells Live

Bi(bli)ography

On Castells

Coleman, James S. [1926 - 1995]

Collins, Randall [1941]

  • Homepage of Collins at the Sociology Department of the University of Pennsylvania
  • The Sociological Eye - The blog of Collins.
    “The sociological eye holds up a periscope above the tides of political and intellectual partisanship, spying out the patterns of social life in every direction.”
  • Wikipedia: Randall_Collins
  • [1974] The Basics of Conflict Theory 
    From: Randall Collins [1974] Conflict Sociology. New York: Academic Press, pp.56-61.
  • [1975] Outline of Organizations in Conflict Sociology 
    From: Randall Collins [1975] “Organizations” in Conflict Sociology: Toward an Explanatory Science. New York: Academic Press.
  • [1979] The Late Twentieth-Century Credential Crisis 
    From: Randall Collins [1979] The Credential Society. New York: Academic Press, pp. 191-204.
  • [1984] The Role of Emotion in Social Structure
    In: Ekman, Paul / Scherer, Klaus R. / Erlbaum, Lawrence [1984] Approaches to Emotion, Chapter 18
    New Jersey London: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  • [1992] Weber’s Last Theory of Capitalism: A Systematization
    In: Granovetter, Mark / Swedberg, Richard [1992] The Sociology of Economic Life, Chapter 3.
    Westview Press.
  • [1992] Foreword
    In: Hilbert, Richard A. [1992] The Classical Roots of Ethnomethodology: Durkheim, Weber and Garfinkel.
    University of North Carolina Press.
  • [1993] Liberals and Conservatives, Religious and Political: A Conjuncture of Modern History
    In: Sociology of Religion 54(2):127.
  • [1994] Four Sociological Traditions
    New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • [1998] The Multiple Fronts of Economic Sociology --> [MOVED TO ?}
    Editorial essay in the Economic Sociology Section of the ASA.
  • [2000] Waller, David V.: Predictions of Geopolitical Theory and the Modern World-System
    In: Derluguian, Georgi M. / Greer, Scott, L.: Questioning Geopolitics: Political Projects in a Changing World-System, Chapter 4.
    Westport/London: Praeger.
  • [2000] Interview with Randall Collins conducted by Alair Maclean & James Yocom
  • [2005] Interaction Ritual Chains [Amazon]
    Princeton University Press
    Collins presents a theory that attempts to develop a »radical microsociology«. Successful rituals create symbols of group membership and pump up individuals with emotional energy, while failed rituals drain emotional energy. Each person flows from situation to situation, drawn to those interactions where their cultural capital gives them the best emotional energy payoff. Thinking, too, can be explained by the internalization of conversations within the flow of situations; individual selves are thoroughly and continually social, constructed from the outside in.
    The first half of this book is based on the classic analyses of Durkheim, Mead, and Goffman and draws on micro-sociological research on conversation, bodily rhythms, emotions, and intellectual creativity. The second half discusses how such activities as sex, smoking, and social stratification are shaped by interaction ritual chains. Collins addresses the emotional and symbolic nature of sexual exchanges of all sorts: from hand-holding to masturbation to sexual relationships with prostitutes.
  • [2005] The Sociology of Almost Everything
    Four Questions to Randall Collins about Interaction Ritual Chains.
    In: Canadian Journal of Sociology Online, January-February 2005.
  • [2009] Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory [Amazon]
    Collins gives a comprehensive explanation of violence and its dynamics, drawing upon video footage, cutting-edge forensics, and ethnography to examine violent situations up close as they actually happen. Violence comes neither easily nor automatically. Antagonists are by nature tense and fearful, and their confrontational anxieties put up a powerful emotional barrier against violence. We are guided into the disturbing worlds of human discord: domestic abuse, schoolyard bullying, muggings, violent sports, and armed conflicts. The fog of war pervades all violent encounters, limiting people mostly to bluster and bluff, and making violence, when it does occur, largely incompetent, often injuring someone other than its intended target. Violence can be triggered only when pathways around this emotional barrier are presented. Collins explains why violence typically comes in the form of atrocities against the weak, ritualized exhibitions before audiences, or clandestine acts of terrorism and murder — and why a small number of individuals are competent at violence.
  • [2011] Emotional energy and the cult of free will
    In: The Sociological Eye, January 8, 2011
  • [2011] Interaction Rituals and the New Electronic Media
    In: The Sociological Eye, January 25, 2011
  • [2013] Material interest are ambigious motives: Social interaction ritual focus is better predictor of political behavior
    In: The Sociological Eye, October 1, 2013
  • [2013] Goffman and Garfinkel in the intellectual life of the 20th century
    In: The Sociological Eye, October 29, 2015
  • [2015] Why does sexual oppression exist?
    In: The Sociological Eye, February 15, 2015
  • Soziologische Klassiker / Collins, Randall (in wikibooks)

Comte, Auguste [1798 - 1857]

By Comte

On Comte

Bibliography

Cooley, Charles Horton [1864 - 1929]

Coser, Lewis [1913 - 2003]

Crompton, Rosemary [1942 - 2011]

Crozier, Michel [1922 -2013]

Dahrendorf, Ralf [1929 - 2009]

By Dahrendorf

  • [1959] Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society
    Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.
  • [1959] Classes in Post-Capitalist Society [extract]
    From: Ralf Dahrendorf [1959] Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 241-8.
  • [1968] Gibt es noch Klassen? - Die Begriffe der “sozialen Schicht” und “sozialen Klasse” in der Sozialanalyse der Gegenwart [pdf] or html
    In: Seidel, B. / Jenkner, S. [1968] Klassenbildung und Sozialschichtung. Darmstadt, pp. 279-96.

Dahrendorf Live

  • [1989] Reflections from a Life in Science and Politics [50:31]
    Dahrendorf talks with UC Berkeley’s Harry Kreisler about his formative experiences and the ideas that have shaped in career in the academy and in public service. Recorded April 4, 1989.
  • [2008] 50 Jahre für die Freiheit
    Die Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung für die Freiheit feierte am 19. Mai 2008 ihren 50. Geburtstag mit einem Festakt in Bonn.

On Dahrendorf

  • Schnellenbach, Jan [2005]
    The Dahrendorf hypothesis and its implications for (the theory of) economic policy-making
    In: Cambridge Journal of Economics, 29(6): 997-1009. 
    According to Dahrendorf, a principal commitment to the market order and to an open society protecting individual liberties is largely undisputed today, at least in the western hemisphere. This, however, does not result in a convergence of economic policies towards some common ideal model. This hypothesis is difficult to reconcile with orthodox economic approaches to economic policy-making. Schellenbach argues that if the scope of analysis is extended to epistemological problems, then a decentralised experimentation with policies can be reasonable. Given the fact that selection mechanisms are imperfect and that diversity can be sustained, a dilemma may occur for neoclassical economics: if individuals internalise preferences for inefficient policy measures, a decision between the sovereignty of individual preferences and efficiency may have to be made.
  • Wikipedia: Ralf_Dahrendorf

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt [1868 - 1963]

By Du Bois

Biography & Bibliography

  • Biography - Thomas Hampson
  • A Biographical SKetch - Gerald C. Hynes
  • Du Bois central
    A site is maintained by the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at University of Massachusetts Amherst to commemorate the life and legacy of the pioneering sociologist, playwright, and black civil rights campaigner W. E. B. Du Bois. It offers free access to a biography, photographs and large collection of digital materials relating to Du Bois. A particular strength is the online collection of ebooks and articles by Du Bois. These include key writings on the evolution of Negro leadership, racism in America in the 19th and early 20th centuries and the formation of black civil rights movements in the USA .
  • WebDuBois.org
    Annotated links to online writings by and about W.E.B. Du Bois. The site includes links to works of social science, literature, biography, and political activism. Editor: Robert W. Williams.
  • W.E.B. Du Bois Stamp
  • W.E.B. Du Bois: The Activist Life - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
    An online exhibit on the life and legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois based on his papers.
  • W.E.B. Du Bois - Learning Center | Facebook
  • Wikipedia: W.E.B._Du_Bois

On Du Bois

Durkheim, Émile [1858 - 1917]

General Sources

  • The Durkheim Pages 
    Devoted to the presentation of information concerning Emile Durkheim. Contents: Some full texts, a complete bibliography of Durkheim’s work, a timeline describing important events related to Durkheim and the Third French Republic, a glossary of terms and concepts, a bibliography of secondary material, news, a list of Durkheim scholars and mailing list, and Durkheimian Studies information. Editor: Robert Alun Jones (Univ. of Illinois, USA).
  • Emile Durkheim
    An informative undergraduate source for the thought, concepts, and writings of Durkheim. Contains both secondary information and over 70 Durkheim quotes on various topics linke anomie, religion, the division of labor, suicide, and others. Editor: L. Joe Dunman (Murray State University, USA).

Biographies

  • Coser, Lewis [1977] The Person 
    From: Lewis A. Coser [1977] Masters of Sociological Thought, pp. 143-44.
  • Gravitz, Madeleine [1977] Émile Durkheim, Sa vie et son oeuvre 
    In: idem [1996] Méthodes des sciences sociales. Dalloz.
  • Jones, Robert Alun [1986] Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work
    Excerpts from Robert Alun Jones [1986] Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works. Beverly Hills. CA: Sage Publications, pp. 12-23.

Bibliographies

By Durkheim

On Durkheim

Elias, Norbert [1897 - 1990]

Elster, Jon [1940]

Etzioni, Amitai [1929]

By Etzioni

On Etzioni

Ferguson, Adam [1723 - 1816]

Foucault, Michel [1926 - 1984]

Biography / Bibliography

By Foucault

  • [1967/84] Of other Spaces: Heterotopias [English and French version]
    From: Dits et écrits 1984: 46-9. Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec.
  • [1969] The Archaeology of Knowledge
    Introduction and first three chapters: The Unities of DiscourseDiscursive Formations and The Formation of Objects.
  • [1973] I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother: A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century [Amazon] - Google Books 
    See also the interview (1976) with Foucault on this book.
    To free his father and himself from his mother's tyranny, Pierre Rivière decided to kill her. On June 3,1835, he went inside his small Normandy house with a pruning hook and cut to death his mother, his eighteen-year-old sister, and his seven-year-old brother. Then, in jail, he wrote a memoir to justify the whole gruesome tale. Michel Foucault collected the relevant documents of the case, including medical and legal testimony, police records, and Rivière’s memoir. The Rivière case occurred at a time when many professions were contending for status and power. Medical authority was challenging law, branches of government were vying. Foucault’s reconstruction of the case is a brilliant exploration of the roots of our contemporary views of madness, justice, and crime.
  • [1974] Truth and Judicial Forms [Excerpt}
    In: Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume Three. Translated by Robert Hurley. The New York Press.
  • [1974] The Crisis of Medicine or the Crisis of Antimedicine?
    Foucault Studies, 1:5-19, December 2004. 
    Translated by Edgar C. Knowlton, Jr., William J. King, and Clare O’Farrell.
    The first lecture given by Foucault on social medicine in Oktober 1974 at the Institute of Social Medicine, Biomedical Center, of the State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Originally published in Portuguese translation as “Crisis de un modelo en la medicina?”, Revista centroamericana de Ciencas de la Salud, 3, January-April 1976, pp. 197-209; and in Spanish as “La crisis de la medicina o la crisis de la antimedicina”, Educacion Medica y Salud, 10(2), 1976, pp. 152-70. The version in Dits et écrits, (Paris, Gallimard), vol. III, pp. 40-58 is a retranslation of the Portuguese back into French.
  • [1975/7] Discipline and Punish: III. Panopticism (Surveiller et Punir)
    A chapter from Foucault’s Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
    New York: Vintage Books.
  • [1975] Body/Power
    Interview from “Power/Knowledge, Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977”. Interviewers: editorial collective of Quel Corps?
  • [1977] What is an Author? [Excerpt]
    In: Donald F. Bouchard (ed.) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. New York: Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 124-7.
  • [1978] What is Enlightenment? | Qu’est-ce que les Lumières ?
    Translation of Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? by Methew Hensen.
    In: P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 32.50.
  • [1980] Howison Lectures: Truth and Subjectivity [audiofiles] 
    October 20-21, 1980
  • [1981] Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason
    In: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, edited by Sterling McMurrin, pp. 225-254. Vol. II. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1981
  • [1982] Retrospective
    Dictionaire des philosophes 1984, pp. 942-4.
  • [1982] Technologies of the Self
    Lecture at Vermont University in October 1982.
  • [1983] The Subject and Power
    In: Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, edited by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, pp. 208-226. 2nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  • [1983] Rabinow Seminars & Recordings
    May 5-11-21, 1983
  • [1983] The Culture of the Self [audiofiles]
    Listen to the discourses and discussions recorded on 12 th and 19th April at the Berkeley Language Center.
  • [1983] Self Writing
    In: Dits et écrits, 4: 415-430.
  • [1983/1999] Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia
    6 lectures given by Michel Foucault at the University of California at Berkeley, Oct-Nov. 1983
  • [1984] Polemics, Politics and Problematizations
    An interview conducted by Paul Rabinow in May 1984.
    In: Essential Works of Foucault, edited by Paul Rabinow. Vol. 1: Ethics. The New Press, 1998.
  • [1984] History of Sexuality Vol. 2, Introduction
    In: History of Sexuality Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, edited by Robert Hurley. Vintage Books, 1990.
  • [1984] The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II - First Lecture
    In: Lectures at the Coll`ge de France, edited by Graham Burchell. Picador, 1984.
  • [1984] What is Enlightment?
    In: P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, New York, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 32-50.
  • [1994] The Order of Things, Preface
    In: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Books.
  • [2002] Attention Foucault!
    Radio programs broadcasted during January 2002 by France Culture. You can listen some of the courses by Michel Foucault and other interviews.
  • [2004] Michel Foucault
    Interview by Sylvain Bourmeau (6 november, 2004).
  • [2006] Madness, the absence of an œuvre
    In: Jean Khalfa (ed.) [2006] History of Madness. Routledge.
  • [2008] This is Not a Pipe
    Translated & edited by James Harkness. University of California Press. Translation of: Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

Foucault Live

On Foucault

Fromm, Erich [1900 - 1980]

By Fromm

  • [1939] Selfishness and Self-Love [pdf]
  • [1942] Character and the Social Process
    Appendix to Fear of Freedom.
  • [1944] Individual and Social Origins of Neurosis [pdf]
    In: American Sociological Review, ix(4), August 1944.
  • [1957] The Humanistic Science of Man
    Fromm outlines the program of a new institute for the science of man.
  • [1958] The Influence of Social Factors in Child Development(German version)
  • [1959] Freedom in the Work Situation
    In: Michael Harrington and Paul Jacobs (eds.) [1959] Labor in a Free Society, pp. 1-16.
    Fromm explains why the only alternative to the danger of robotism is humanistic communitarianism. “Changes in ownership must be made to the extent necessary to create a community of work, and to prevent the profit motive from directing production into socially harmful directions. Income must be equalized to the extent of giving everybody the material basis for a dignified life and thus preventing economic differences from creating a fundamentally different experience of life among various social classes. Man must be reinstituted in his supreme place in society - never a means, never a thing to be used by others or by himself.”
  • [1962] Erich Fromm’s Humanist Credo (German version)
    In: Erich Fromm [1962] Beyond the Chains of Illusions New York: Simon and Schuster, pp. 174-82.
    Fromm explains what he believes in. “I believe in freedom, in men’s right to be himself, to assert himself and to fight all those who try to prevent him from being himself. But freedom is more thant the absense of violent oppression. It is more than ‘freedom from’. It is ‘freedom to’ - the freedom to become independent; the freedom to be much, rather than to have much, or to use things and people.”
  • [1974] Die Zukunft des Menschen und die Frage der Destruktivität [pdf]
    Interview by Robert Jungk on Fromm’s contribution to the question of human agression.
  • Internationale Erich Fromm Gesellschaft
    A site from Germany that includes a biography, a bibliography, online reading, and a Fromm forum. Some of the articles are original writings by Fromm some of which were published here for the first time. The collection of secondary literature about Fromm comprises papers previously published in the “Yearbooks of the Erich Fromm Society“ or that were printed in the “Fromm Forum”. The best place to start. In German and English language.

Fromm Live

On Fromm

Garfinkel, Harold [1917 - 2011]

  • Harold Garfinkel Papers - Online Archive of California, Los Angeles
  • [1967] Some essential features of common understandings(summary)
    From: Harold Garfinkel [1967/84] Studies in Ethnomethodology.Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp. 38-44, 75.
    Garfinkel demonstrates why common understandings cannot possibly consist of a measured amount of shared agreement among persons on certain topics. In many matters we can understand each other in a conversation although we don’t mention the specific matters. We can understand certain matters on the basis of not only of what was actually said but what was left unspoken. Garfinkel explains how this is possible and how professional sociologists can rediscover common sense knowledge and common sense activities.
  • [1967] Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities (summary)
    From: Harold Garfinkel [1967] Studies in Ethnomethodology. Polity Press, ch. 2. 
    When you examine the exchange that takes place in a conversation between two people, you realize soon that there are many things that are understood between these people than are actually mentioned (especially when these people have a standing relationship). We can understand matters on the basis of what was unspoken. This points to underlying properties of conversational exchange and the rules which govern them in daily live. The rule governed activities of everyday life constitute the moral order of society. To test his hypotheses, Garfinkel sent forth a legion of students to conduct conversational breaching experiments. Students were instructed to question everything they were being told by asking what was meant. One of the conclusions of these experiments was that background knowledge is important and is understood as such when it is shared. However, the possibility of common understanding does not consist in demonstrated measures of shared knowledge of social structure, but consists instead and entirely in the enforceable character of actions in compliance with the exigencies of everyday life as a morality. Common sense knowledge of the facts of social life for the members of the society is institutionalized knowledge of the real world.
  • [2007] Four releations between literatures of the social scientific movement and their specific ethnomethodological alternates
    In: Stephen Hester / David Francis (eds.) [2007] Orders of Ordinary Action - Respecifying Sociological Knowledge.
  • Ethnomethodology (SocioSite)
  • Obituary in UCLA [28.4.2011] | ASA | New York Times [3.5.2011] | Guardian [13.6.2011]
  • Wikipedia: Harold_Garfinkel

Geertz, Clifford [1926 - 2006]

  • YouTube: Interview with Clifford Geertz, part 1 | part 2
    Filmed in May 2004 in Cambridge.
  • HyperGeertz - WorldCatalogue
    A comprehensive, contextual and referential bibliography and mediagraphy of the works and public statements by one of the most important social scientists of our time, Clifford Geertz. Presented by Ingo Mörth and Gerhard Fröhlich (Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, Austria).
  • [1964] Ideology as a Cultural System
    In: Apter, David Ernest (ed.) [1964] Ideology and discontent. New York: Glencoe. pp. 47-76.
  • [1973] Emphasizing Interpretation
    From: C. Geertz [1973] The Interpretation of Cultures.
  • [1973] Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture
    In: Geertz [1973] The Interpretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basis Books. pp. 3-30.
    Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. Geertz’s concept of culture is -in the good old tradition of Max Weber- is essentially a semiotic one. Culture is a complex web of significance, and therefor its analysis is no a matter of experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive science in search of meaning. Geertz borrows the notion of ‘thick description’ from Gilbert Ryle to grasp the meaning(s) of culture(s).
  • [1976] Art as a Cultural System
    In: Modern Language Notes 91(6): 1473-99.
  • [1991] Clifford Geertz on ethnography and social construction
    Interview by Gary A. Olson, in Journal of Advanced Composition. 11(2): 245-68.
    Why is Geertz’s work so eminently appealing to many of us? It might be because his preoccupation with seeing science and scholarship as rethorical, as socially constructed.
  • [1999] A Life of Learning
    Charles Homer Haskins Lectur for 1999. American Council of Learned Societies, Occasional Paper No. 45.
    In the course of patching together his scholarly career Geertz has learned at least one thing: it all depends on the timing. In his improvised life he discovered that the study of cultures involves discovering who they think they are, what they think they are doing, and to what end they think that they are doing it. Therefore it is necessary to gain a working familiarity with the frames of meaning whitin which they enacht their lives.
  • [2000] Passage and Accident: A Life of Learning
    Chapter I of “Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics”
  • [2000, May] Indonesia: Starting Over
    In: The New York Review of Books, May 11, 2000.
  • [2000] I don’t do systems
    Interview with Geertz by Arun Micheelsen.
  • [2001] Life Among the Anthros
    A review of “Darkness in Eldorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon”, by Patrick Tierney. In: The New York Review of Books, February 8, 2001.
  • [2004] Frazer Lecture [video]
  • [2006] The interpretation of cultures: selected essays
  • Windschuttle, Keith [2002]
    The ethnocentrism of Clifford Geertz
    In: The New Criterion, 21(2)
    Article on Geertz’ Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. He discusses Geertz’ concept of thick description: human gestures often have multiple layers of meaning that can only be described through the symbols used by a culture. Together with sharp descriptions of all his other contributions, it is an intellectual portrait of Geertz.
  • Yarrow, Andres L. [2006] 
    Clifford Geertz, Cultural Anthropologist, Is Dead at 80
    New York Times, november 1, 2006.
  • Wikipedia: Clifford Geertz

Geiger, Theodor [1891 - 1952]

Biography & Bibliopgraphy

By Geiger

On Geiger

Giddens, Anthony [1938]

By Giddens

Giddens Live

On Giddens

Bi(bli)ography

Goffman, Erving [1922 - 1982]

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

By: Erving Goffman

New York: Doubleday, 1956, pp. 22-30, 70-76.

Front

I have been using the term “performance” to refer to all the activity of an individual which occurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observers and which has some influence on the observers. It will be convenient to label as “front” that part of the individual’s performance which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance. Front, then, is the expressive equipment of a standard kind intentionally or unwittingly employed by the individual during his performance. For preliminary purposes, it will be convenient to distinguish and label what seem to be the standard parts of front.

First, there is the “setting,” involving furniture, decor physical layout, and other background items which supply the scenery and stage props for the spate of human action played out before, within, or upon it. A setting tends to stay put, geographically speaking, so that those who would use a particular setting as part of their performance cannot begin their act until they have brought themselves to the appropriate place and must terminate their performance when they leave it. It is only in exceptional circumstances that the setting follows along with the performers; we see this in the funeral cortege, the civic parade, and the dream like processions that kings and queens are made of. In the main, these exceptions seem to offer some kind of extra protection for performers who are, or who have momentarily become, highly sacred. These worthies are to be distinguished, of course, from quite profane performers of the peddler class who move their place of work between performances, often being forced to do so. In the matter of having one fixed place for one’s setting, a ruler may be too sacred, a peddler too profane.

In thinking about the scenic aspects of front, we tend to think of the living room in a particular house and the small number of performers who can thoroughly identify themselves with it. We have given insufficient attention to assemblages of sign-equipment which large numbers of performers can call their own for short periods of time. It is characteristic of Western European countries, and no doubt a source of stability for them, that a large number of luxurious settings are available for hire to anyone of the right kind who can afford them. One illustration of this may be cited from a study of the higher civil servant in Britain:

  • The question how far the men who rise to the top in the Civil Service take on the “tone” or “color” of a class other than that to which they belong by birth is delicate and difficult. The only definite information bearing on the question is the figures relating to the membership of the great London clubs. More than three-quarters of our high administrative officials belong to one or more clubs of high status and considerable luxury, where the entrance fee might be twenty guineas or more, and the annual subscription from twelve to twenty guineas. These institutions are of the upper class (not even of the upper-middle) in their premises, their equipment, the style of living practiced there, their whole atmosphere. Though many of the members would not be described as wealthy, only a wealthy man would unaided provide for himself and his family space, food and drink, service, and other amenities of life to the same standard as he will find at the Union, the Travellers’, or the Reform.

Another example can be found in the recent development of the medical profession where we find that it is increasingly important for a doctor to have access to the elaborate scientific stage provided by large hospitals, so that fewer and fewer doctors are able to feel that their setting is a place that they can lock up at night.

If we take the term “setting” to refer to the scenic parts of expressive equipment, one may take the term “personal front” to refer to the other items of expressive equipment, the items that we most intimately identify with the performer himself and that we naturally expect will follow the performer wherever he goes. As part of personal front we may include: insignia of office or rank; clothing; sex, age, and racial characteristics; size and looks; posture; speech patterns; facial expressions; bodily gestures; and the like. Some of these vehicles for conveying signs, such as racial characteristics, are relatively fixed and over a span of time do not vary for the individual from one situation to another. On the other hand, some of these sign vehicles are relatively mobile or transitory, such as facial expression, and can vary; during a performance from one moment to the next.

It is sometimes convenient to divide the stimuli which make up personal front into “appearance” and “manner,” according to the function performed by the information that these stimuli convey. “Appearance” may be taken to refer to those stimuli which function at the time to tell us of the performer’s social statuses. These stimuli also tell us of the individual’s temporary ritual state, that is, whether he is engaging in formal social activity, work, or informal recreation, whether or not he is celebrating a new phase in the season cycle or in his life-cycle. “Manner” may be taken to refer to those stimuli which function at the time to warn us of the interaction role the performer will expect to play in the oncoming situation. Thus a haughty, aggressive manner may give the impression that the performer expects to be the one who will initiate the verbal interaction and direct its course. A meek, apologetic manner may give the impression that the performer expects to follow the lead of others, or at least that he can be led to do so.

We often expect, of course, a confirming consistency between appearance and manner; we expect that the differences in social statuses among the interactants will be expressed in some way by congruent differences in the indications that are made of an expected interaction role. This type of coherence of front may be illustrated by the following description of the procession of a mandarin through a Chinese city:

  • Coming closely behind ... the luxurious chair of the mandarin, carried by eight bearers, fills the vacant space in the street. He is mayor of the town, and for all practical purposes the supreme power in it. He is an ideal-looking official, for he is large and massive in appearance, whilst he has that stern and uncompromising look that is supposed to be necessary in any magistrate who would hope to keep his subjects in order. He has astern and forbidding aspect, as though he were on his way to the execution ground to have some criminal decapitated. This is the kind of air that the mandarins put on when they appear in public. In the course of many years’ experience, I have never once seen any of them, from the highest to the lowest, with a smile on his face or a look of sympathy for the people whilst he was being carried officially through the streets.

But, of course, appearance and manner may tend to contradict each other, as when a performer who appears to be of higher estate than his audience acts in a manner that is unexpectedly equalitarian, or intimate, or apologetic, or when a performer dressed in the garments of a high position presents himself to an individual of even higher status.

In addition to the expected consistency between appearance and manner, we expect, of course, some coherence among setting, appearance, and manner. Such coherence represents an ideal type that provides us with a means of stimulating our attention to and interest in exceptions. In this the student is assisted by the journalist, for exceptions to expected consistency among setting, appearance, and manner provide the piquancy and glamor of many careers and the salable appeal of many magazine articles. For example, a New Yorker profile on Roger Stevens (the reale state agent who engineered the sale of the Empire State Building) comments on the startling fact that Stevens has a small house, a meager office, and no letterhead stationery.

In order to explore more fully the relations among the several parts of social front, it will be convenient to consider here a significant characteristic of the information conveyed by front, namely, its abstractness and generality.

However specialized and unique a routine is, its social front, with certain exceptions, will tend to claim facts that can be equally claimed and asserted of other, somewhat different routines. For example, many service occupations offer their clients a performance that is illuminated with dramatic expressions of cleanliness, modernity, competence, and integrity. While in fact these abstract standards have a different significance in different occupational performances, the observer is encouraged to stress the abstract similarities. For the observer this is a wonderful, though sometimes disastrous, convenience. Instead of having to maintain a different pattern of expectation and responsive treatment for each slightly different performer and performance, he can place the situation in abroad category around which it is easy for him to mobilize his past experience and stereo-typical thinking. Observers then need only be familiar with a small and hence manageable vocabulary of fronts and know how to respond to them, in order to orient themselves in a wide variety of situations. Thus in London the current tendency for chimney sweeps and perfume clerks to wear white lab coats tends to provide the client with an understanding that the delicate tasks performed by these persons will be performed in what has become a standardized, clinical, confidential manner.

There are grounds for believing that the tendency for a large number of different acts to be presented from behind a small number of fronts is a natural development in social organization. Radcliffe-Brown has suggested this in his claim that a “descriptive” kinship system which gives each person a unique place may work for very small communities, but, as the number of persons becomes large, clan segmentation becomes necessary as a means of providing a less complicated system of identifications and treatments.

We see this tendency illustrated in factories, barracks, and other large social establishments. Those who organize these establishments find it impossible to provide a special cafeteria, special modes of payment, special vacation rights, and special sanitary facilities for every line and staff status category in the organization, and at the sametime they feel that persons of dissimilar status ought not to be indiscriminately thrown together or classified together. As a compromise, the full range of diversity is cut at a few crucial points, and all those within a given bracket are allowed or obliged to maintain the same social front in certain situations.

In addition to the fact that different routines may employ thesame front, it is to be noted that a given social front tends to become institutionalized in terms of the abstract stereotyped expectations to which it gives rise, and tends to take on a meaning and stability apart from the specific tasks which happen at the time to be performed in its name. The front becomes a “collective representation” and a fact in its own right.

When an actor takes on an established social role, usually he finds that a particular front has already been established for it. Whether his acquisition of the role was primarily motivated by a desire to perform the given task or by a desire to maintain the corresponding front, the actor will find that he must do both.

Further, if the individual takes on a task that is not only new to him but also unestablished in the society, or if he attempts to change the light in which his task is viewed, he is likely to find that there are already several well-established fronts among which he must choose. Thus, when a task is given a new front we seldom find that the front it is given is itself new.

Since fronts tend to be selected, not created, we may expect trouble to arise when those who perform a given task are forced to select a suitable front for themselves from among several quite dissimilar ones. Thus, in military organizations, tasks are always developing which (it is felt) require too much authority and skill to be carried out behind the front maintained by one grade of personnel and too little authority and skill to be carried out behind the front maintained by the next grade in the hierarchy. Since there are relatively large jumps between grades, the task will come to “carry too much rank” or to carry too little.

An interesting illustration of the dilemma of selecting an appropriate front from several not quite fitting ones may be found today in American medical organizations with respect to the task of administering anesthesia. In some hospitals anesthesia is still administered by nurses behind the front that nurses are allowed to have in hospitals regardless of the tasks they perform — a front involving ceremonial subordination to doctors and a relatively low rate of pay. In order to establish an esthesiology as a speciality for graduate medical doctors, interested practitioners have had to advocate strongly the idea that administering anesthesia is a sufficiently complex and vital task to justify giving to those who perform it the ceremonial and financial reward given to doctors. The difference between the front maintained by a nurse and the front maintained by a doctor is great; many things that are acceptable for nurses are infra dignitatem for doctors. Some medical people have felt that a nurse “under-ranked” for the task of administering anesthesia and that doctors “over-ranked”; were there I an established status midway between nurse and doctor, an easier solution to the problem could perhaps be found. Similarly, had the Canadian Army had a rank halfway between lieutenant and captain, two and a half pips instead of two or three, then Dental Corps captains, many of them of a low ethnic origin, could have been given a rank that would perhaps have been more suitable in the eyes of the Army than the captaincies they were actually given.

I do not mean here to stress the point of view of a formal organization or a society; the individual, as someone who possesses a limited range of sign-equipment, must also make unhappy choices. Thus, in the crofting community studied by the writer, hosts often marked the visit of a friend by offering him a shot of hard liquor, a glass of wine, some home-made brew, or a cup of tea. The higher the rank or temporary ceremonial status of the visitor, the more likely he was to receive an offering near the liquor end of the continuum. Now one problem associated with this range of sign-equipment was that some crofters could not afford to keep a bottle of hard liquor, so that wine tended to be the most indulgent gesture they could employ. But perhaps a more common difficulty was the fact that certain visitors, given their permanent and temporary status at the time, outranked one potable and under-ranked the next one in line. There was often a danger that the visitor would feel just a little affronted or, on the other hand, that the host’s costly and limited sign-equipment would be misused. In our middle classes a similar situation arises when a hostess has to decide whether or not to use the good silver, or which would be the more appropriate to wear, her best afternoon dress or her plainest evening gown.

I have suggested that social front can be divided into traditional parts, such as setting, appearance, and manner, and that (since different routines may be presented from behind the same front) we may not find a perfect fit between the specific character of a performance and the general socialized guise in which it appears to us. These two facts, taken together, lead one to appreciate that items in the social front of a particular routine are not only found in the social fronts of a whole range of routines but also that the whole range of routines in which one item of sign-equipment is found will differ from the range of routines in which another item in the same social front will be found. Thus, a lawyer may talk to a client in a social setting that he employs only for this purpose (or for a study), but the suitable clothes he wears on such occasions he will also employ, with equal suitability, at dinner with colleagues and at the theater with his wife. Similarly, the prints that hang on his wall and the carpet on his floor may be found in domestic social establishments. Of course, in highly ceremonial occasions, setting, manner, and appearance may all be unique and specific, used only for performances of a single type of routine, but such exclusive use of sign-equipment is the exception rather than the rule.

Note:

  1. H. E. Dale, The Higher Civil Service of Great Britain(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 50.
  2. David Solomon, “Career Contingencies of Chicago Physicians” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1952), p. 74.
  3. J. Macgowan, Sidelights on Chinese Life (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1908), p. 187.
  4. Cf. Kenneth Burke’s comments on the “scene-act-agent ratio,“ A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), pp. 6-9
  5. E. J. Kahn, Jr., “Closings and Openings,” The NewYorker, February 13 and 20, 1954.
  6. See Mervyn Jones, “White as a Sweep,’ The New Statesman and Nation, December 6, 1952.
  7. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, “The Social Organization of Australian Tribes.’ Oceania, I, 440.
  8. See the thorough treatment of this problem in Dan C. Lortie,“Doctors without Patients: The Anesthesiologist, a New Medical Specialty” (unpublished Master’s thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1950). See also Mark Murphy’s three-part Profile of Dr. Rovenstine, “Anesthesiologist,” The New Yorker, October 25, November 1, and November 8, 1947.
  9. In some hospitals the intern and the medical student perform tasks that are beneath a doctor and above a nurse. Presumably such tasks do not require a large amount of experience and practical training, for while this intermediate status of doctor-in-training is a permanent part of hospitals, all those who hold it do so temporarily.

Reality and Contrivance

In our own Anglo-American culture there seems to be two common-sense models according to which we formulate our conceptions of behavior: the real, sincere, or honest performance; and the false one that thorough fabricators assemble for us, whether meant to be taken unseriously, as in the work of stage actors, or seriously, as in the work of confidence men. We tend to see real performances as something not purposely put together at all, being an unintentional product of the individuals unself-conscious response to the facts in his situation. And contrived performances we tend to see as something painstakingly pasted together, one false item on another, since there is no reality to which the items of behavior could be a direct response. It will be necessary to see now that these dichotomous conceptions are by way of being the ideology of honest performers, providing strength to the show they put on, but a poor analysis of it.

First, let it be said that there are many individuals who sincerely believe that the definition of the situation they habitually project is the real reality. In this report I do not mean to question their proportion in the population but rather the structural relation of their sincerity to the performances they offer. If a performance is to come off, the witnesses by and large must be able to believe that the performers are sincere. This is the structural place of sincerity in the drama of events. Performers maybe sincere —or be insincere but sincerely convinced of their own sincerity— but this kind of affection for one’s part is not necessary for its convincing performance. There are not many French cooks who are really Russian spies, and perhaps there are not many women who play the part of wife to one man and mistress to another; but these duplicities do occur, often being sustained successfully for long periods of time. This suggests that while persons usually are what they appear to be, such appearances could still have been managed. There is, then, a statistical relation between appearances and reality, not an intrinsic or necessary one. In fact, given the unanticipated threats that play upon a performance, and given the need (later to be discussed) to maintain solidarity with one’s fellow performers and some distance from the witnesses, we find that a rigid incapacity to depart from one’s inward view of reality may at times endanger one’s performance. Some performances are carried off successfully with complete dishonesty, others with complete honesty; but for performances in general neither of these extremes is essential and neither, perhaps, is dramaturgically advisable.

The implication here is that an honest, sincere, serious performance is less firmly connected with the solid world than one might first assume. And this implication will be strengthened if we look again at the distance usually placed between quite honest performances and quite contrived ones. In this connection take, for example, the remarkable phenomenon of stage acting. It does take deep skill, long training, and psychological capacity to become a good stage actor. But this fact should not blind us to another one: that almost anyone can quickly learn a script well enough to give a charitable audience some sense of realness in what is being contrived before them. And it seems this is so because ordinary social intercourse is itself put together as a scene is put together, by the exchange of dramatically inflated actions, counteractions, and terminating replies. Scripts even in the hands of unpracticed players can come to life because life itself is a dramatically enacted thing. All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.

The recent use of “psychodrama” as a therapeutic technique illustrates a further point in this regard. In these psychiatrically staged scenes patients not only act out parts with some effectiveness, but employ no script in doing so. Their own past is available to them in a form which allows them to stage a recapitulation of it. Apparently a part once played honestly and in earnest leaves the performer in a position to contrive a showing ofit later. Further, the parts that significant others played to him in the past also seem to be available, allowing him to switch from being the person that he was to being the persons that others were for him. This capacity to switch enacted roles when obliged to do so could have been predicted; everyone apparently can do it. For in learning to perform our parts in real life we guide our own productions by not too consciously maintaining an incipient familiarity with the routine of those to whom we will address ourselves. And when we come to be able properly to manage a real routine we are able to do this in part because of “anticipatory socialization,” [1] having already been schooled in the reality that is just coming to be real for us.

When the individual does move into a new position in society and obtains a new part to perform, he is not likely to be told in full detail how to conduct himself, nor will the facts of his new situation press sufficiently on him from the start to determine his conduct without his further giving thought to it. Ordinarily he will be given only a few cues, hints, and stage directions, and it will be assumed that he already has in his repertoire a large number of bits and pieces of performances that will be required in the new setting. The individual will already have a fair idea of what modesty, deference, or righteous indignation looks like, and can make a pass at playing these bits when necessary. He may even be able to play out the part of a hypnotic subject [2] or commit a “compulsive” crime [3] on the basis of models for these activities that he is already familiar with.

A theatrical performance or a staged confidence game requires a thorough scripting of the spoken content of the routine; but the vast part involving “expression given off” is often determined by meager stage directions. It is expected that the performer of illusions will already know a good deal about how to manage his voice, his face, and his body, although he —as well as any person who directs him— may find it difficult indeed to provide a detailed verbal statement of this kind of knowledge. And in this, of course, we approach the situation of the straightforward man in the street. Socialization may not so much involve a learning of the many specific details of a single concrete part — often there could not be enough time or energy for this. What does seem to be required of the individual is that he learn enough pieces of expression to be able to “fill in” and manage, more or less, any part that he is likely to be given. The legitimate performances of everyday life are not “acted” or “put on” in the sense that the performer knows in advance just what he is going to do, and does this solely because of the effect it is likely to have. The expressions it is felt he is giving off will be especially “inaccessible” to him. [4] But as in the case of less legitimate performers, the incapacity of the ordinary individual to formulate in advance the movements of his eyes and body does not mean that he will not express himself through these devices in a way that is dramatized and pre-formed in his repertoire of actions. In short, we all act better than we know how.

When we watch a television wrestler gouge, foul, and snarl at his opponent we are quite ready to see that, in spite of the dust, he is, and knows he is, merely playing at being the “heavy,” and that in another match he may be given the other role, that of clean-cut wrestler, and perform this with equal verve and proficiency. We seem less ready to see, however, that while such details as the number and character of the falls may be fixed beforehand, the details of the expressions and movements used do not come from a script but from command of an idiom, a command that is exercised from moment to moment with little calculation or forethought.

In reading of persons in the West Indies who become the “horse“ or the one possessed of a voodoo spirit, [5] it is enlightening to learn that the person possessed will be able to provide a correct portrayal of the god that has entered him because of “the knowledge and memories accumulated in a life spent visiting congregations of the cult’; [6] that the person possessed will be in just the right social relation to those who are watching; that possession occurs at just the right moment in the ceremonial undertakings, the possessed one carrying out his ritual obligations to the point of participating in a kind of skit with persons possessed at the time with other spirits. But in learning this, it is important to see that this contextual structuring of the horse’s role still allows participants in the cult to believe that possession is a real thing and that persons are possessed at random by gods whom they cannot select.

And when we observe a young American middle class girl playing dumb for the benefit of her boy friend, we are ready to point to items of guile and contrivance in her behavior. But like herself and her boy friend, we accept as an unperformed fact that this performer is a young American middle-class girl. But surely here we neglect the greater part of the performance. It is commonplace to say that different social groupings express in different ways such attributes as age, sex, territory, and class status, and that in each case these bare attributes are elaborated by means of a distinctive complex cultural configuration of proper ways of conducting oneself. To be a given kind of person, then, is not merely to possess the required attributes, but also to sustain the standards of conduct and appearance that one’s social grouping attaches thereto. The unthinking ease with which performers consistently carry off such standard-maintaining routines does not deny that a performance has occurred, merely that the participants have been aware of it.

A status, a position, a social place is not a material thing, to be possessed and then displayed; it is a pattern of appropriate conduct, coherent, embellished, and well articulated. Performed with ease or clumsiness, awareness or not, guile or good faith, it is none the less something that must be enacted and portrayed, something that must be realized. Sartre, here, provides a good illustration:

  • Let us consider this waiter in the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tightrope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe. There is nothing there to surprise us. The game is a kind of marking out and investigation. The child plays with his body in order to explore it, to take inventory of it; the waiter in the cafe plays with his condition inorder to realize it. This obligation is not different from that which is imposed on all tradesmen. Their condition is wholly one of ceremony. The public demands of them that they realize it as a ceremony; there is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavor to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Society demands that he limit himself to his function as a grocer, just as the soldier at attention makes himself into a soldier-thing with a direct regard which does not see at all, which is not longer meant to see, since it is the rule and not the interest of the moment which determines the point he must fix his eyes on (the sight “fixed at ten paces”). There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear tha the might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition. [7]

Note:

1. See R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure(Glencoe: The Free Press, revised and enlarged edition, 1957), p. 265ff.

2. This view of hypnosis is neatly presented by T. R Sarbin, “Contributions to Role-Taking Theory. I: Hypnotic Behavior,” Psychological Review, 57, pp. 255-70.

3. See D. R. Cressey “The Differential Association Theory and Compulsive Crimes,” Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology and Police Science, 45, pp. 29-40.

4. This concept derives from T. R. Sarbin, “Role Theory,” in Gardner Lindzey, Handbook of Social Psychology (Cambridge: Addison-Wesley, 1954), Vol. 1, pp. 235-36.

5. See, for example, Alfred Metraux, “Dramatic Elements in Ritual Possession,” Diogenes, 11, pp. 18-36.

6. Ibid., p. 24.

7. Sartre, op. cit., p. 59.

Erving Goffman Biography

On Goffman

 

Goudsblom, Joop / Johan [1932]

  • Wikipedia: Johan Goudsblom
  • Bibliography - by Willem Kranendonk
  • [1969] Interview with Norbert Elias 
    In: Sociologische Gids 17(2): 133-40.
  • [1989] Twenty Years of Figurational Sociology in the Netherlands [1969-1989] 
    In: Society as Process. A Bibliography of Figurational Sociology in the Netherlands (up to 1989). Amsterdam 1990.
  • [1992] Fire and Civilization [Amazon]
    People became truly “human” by learning to domesticate fire and cook food. Other great transformation — the birth of agriculture and the industrial revolution — represent huge leaps forward in our relations with fire. Goudsblom examines Homer and the Hebrew Bible, the Vestal Virgins and pioneering Roman fire brigades, the role of Hell-fire in Christianity’s “civilizing campaign” and developments from the age of steam to “fire-powered” cars and nuclear fusion. Even today, bush and forest fires caused by short-sighted farming policies or sheer high spirits contribute to the disastrous international wood shortage. This work of wide-ranging scholarship both illuminates such current concerns, and makes readers look again at the whole course of human history.
  • Botsende beschavingen [30:01]
    Anil Ramdas talks with Johan Goudsblom, Arend-Jan and Pieter Boekestijn and Pieter Pekelharing about clash of civilizations based on Samuel Huntington’s article Clash of Civilisations. In the political debate is always about mass immigration from Muslim countries and the so-called ‘Islamization’ of European culture. Where does this fear come from and does Western culture really needs protection?

Gouldner, Alvin W. [1920 - 1980]

Gramsci, Antonio [1891 - 1937]

Habermas, Jürgen [1929]

By Habermas

Habermas Live

On Habermas

Biography & Bibliography

Halbwachs, Maurice [1877 - 1945]

Hall, Stuart [1932 - 2014]

By Hall

Hall Live

  • [1983] The Spectre of Marxism [52:05] - Jason Adams
  • [2006] Representation & the Media [6:34]
    Hall focuses on the concept of ‘representation’ —one of the key ideas of cultural studies— and shows how reality is never experienced directly, but always through the symbolic categories made available by society.
  • [2006] Race, the Floating Signifier, part 1 [5:06], 2 [9:29], 3 [7:48], 4 [10:18], 5 [9:59], 6 [9:59], 7 [2:52]. 
    Hall argues against the biological interpretation of racial difference, He asks us to pay close attention to the cultural processes by which the visible differences of appearance come to stand for natural or biological properties of human beings. Drawing upon the work of writers such as Frantz Fanon, he shows how race is a ‘discursive construct’ and, because its meaning is never fixed, can be described as a ‘floating signifier’.
  • [2006] Interview by Pnina Werbner [38:12]
  • [2011] Stuart Hall
    Stuart Hall talking to Laurie Taylor on Thinking Allowed, BBC Radio 4, 21.3.2011 [28:30]
  • [2012] The Saturday interview: Stuart Hall by Zoe Williams
    The Guardian, 11.2.2012
  • [2014] The Stuart Hall Project, 1 [14:59] | 2 [14:59].

On Hall

Haraway, Donna J. [1944]

By Haraway

Haraway Live

On Haraway

Homans, George, C. [1910 - 1989]

Horkheimer, Max [1895 - 1973]

By Horkheimer

Horkheimer Live

  • Zu Marx und zur Kritischen Theorie [1:52]
    Translation: “This sociology went beyond the critical theory of society conceived by Marx in order to reflect reality more adequately. For, one point is very important: Marx had the ideal of a society of free human beings. He believed that this capitalist society would necessarily have to be [overcome] by the solidarity spelled by the increasing immiseration of the working class. This idea is wrong. This society in which we live does not immiserate the workers but helps them to build a better life.
    And apart from that, Marx did not see that freedom and justice are dialectical concepts. The more freedom, the less justice, and the more justice, the less freedom. The critical theory which I conceived later is based on the idea that one cannot determine what is good, what a good, a free society would look like in the society which we now live in. We lack the [theoretical, philosophical] means. But we can bring up the negative aspects of this society, which we want to change.”
  • Philosophie als Kulturkritik, part 1 [10:22], 2 [9:58], 3 [10:08], 4 [9:57], 5 [9:26], 6[9:56], 7 [9:36], 8 [4:29]
  • Philosophie und Religion, part 1 [9:51], 2 [10:01], 3 [9:41],4 [10:11], 5 [8:11]
  • Die Zukunft der Ehe [33:07]
  • Max Horkheimeron Critical Theory - Ric Brown
  • [1967] Karl Marx 1967 eine notwendige Aufklärung [40:39]

On Horkheimer

Bi(bli)ography

Ibn Khaldun [1332-1395]

Inglehart, Ronald [1934]

Kanter, Rosabeth Moss [1943]

Kearl, Michael C.

  • The Times of Our Lives - Investigations into Socio-chronology
    A sociology of time and social rythms by Michael Kearl (Trinity University, USA). A study of time and the various timetables and rhythms that shape our behaviors and thoughts. The issues are: the different meanings we give to each day of the week & months of the year; the “quality time” that working parents worry about sharing enough of with their children; the pressure we feel to be “on time” in the face of dreaded deadlines; the various social clocks whose tickings seem to govern our lives, such as the ages at which we believe we should be married, have children, or be “peaking” in our careers; the emergence of “flexitime” and four-day weeks in the world of work; and the types of time that religions impose to fortify the moralities of their members, such as eternity in heavens or hells, purgatory time, or escaping the cycle of death and rebirth.
  • Sociological Tour Through Cyberspace
    Michael Kearl takes you on a trip through Sociology as it exists on the Net. You won’t be disappointed. He will show you that the cyberspace medium can truly be a ‘theater of ideas’.
  • Sociology of Death and Dying
    An exploration in how death is an indicator of life. Essays, commentary, graphs and links on the death issues of our time: abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, life expectancies of different groups, genocide and more. Also cross-national study in progress examining why belief in life after death greatest among Americans.
  • A Sociological Social Psychology
    A sociological perspective written by Michael Kearl. A very good place to start with.
  • Marriage & Family Processes
  • Social Gerontology
  • Social Inequality
  • Gender & Society
  • Race & Ethnicity
  • Sociology of Knowledge
  • Demography

König, René [1906 - 1992]

By König

On König

Latour, Bruno [1947]

Lefèbvre, Henri [1901 - 1991]

Gerhard E. Lenski [1924]

Lévi-Strauss, Claude Gustav [1908 - 2009]

Luhmann, Niklas [1927 - 1998]

By Luhmann

  • Causality in the South
    Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, 1995:1. 
    Policies of development using legal and monetary mechanisms have not been very successful. Resistance against modernization has been explained by factors such as “tradition”, “culture”, “mentalities“. For Luhmann these are more or less tautological explanations. He proposes to replace them by the factor “social construction of causality“. Relations between causes and effects can no longer be treated as objective aspects of the world and as a question of true or false judgment. Rather, causality is an infinity of possible combinations of causes and effects which requires highly selective attribution processes to be of any cognitive or practical value. In Luhmann’s mind causality is a medium of loosely couples possibilities which requires the selection of forms, i.e. tight couplings, of interesting causes and interesting effects.
  • [1995] Kausalität im Süden
    In: Soziale Systeme 1(1): 7-28.
  • [2000] Das Medium der Religion. Eine soziologische Betrachtung über Gott und die Seelen[pfd]
    In: Soziale Systeme 6(1): 39-53.
  • [2008] Are There Still Indispensable Norms in Our Society?
    In: Soziale Systeme 14(1): 18-37. Translation of “Gibt es in unserer Gesellschaft noch onverzichtbare Normen?” (1993).

Luhmann Live

On Luhmann

Malinowski, Bronislaw [1884 - 1942]

By Malinowski

Bi(bli)ography

On Malinowski

Mann, Michael [1942]

Mannheim, Karl [1893 - 1947]

Max Weber [1864-1920]

Weber’s Texts

Books & articles on Weber

 

 

Weber Research

Max Weber Studies

  • A journal committed to the application and dissemination of the ideas of Max Weber. Edited by David Chalcraft, Sam Whimster and Austin Harrington.
  • Wikipedia: Max_Weber

References: Biography and Bibliography

 

 

Marcuse, Herbert [1898 - 1979]

By Marcuse

Marcuse Live

  • On the Frankfurt School, part 1 [8:35], 2 [8:55], 3 [9:47], 4 [9:43], 5 [7:08]
  • [1967] Liberation from the Affluent Society [8:21]
    Marcuse’s lecture at the 1967 London “Dialectics of Liberation” conference, first 8 minutes, from Peter Villon’s DVD distributed at the Oct. 2009 Toronto Marcuse conference, which includes discussion with the audience afterward.
  • Herbert Marcuse im Gespräch mit Ivo Frenzel und Willy Hochkeppel [47:02]
  • Adorno obit - 1969 [3:39]
    Marcuse thinks that the working class of modern western societies has been integrated into capitalism and does not want to change the running system. According to Marcuse, Adorno saw it the same way. Fighting capitalism has become a matter of personal resistance. Marcuse talks about the merits of Adorno, of how his radical, uncompromising thinking made him immune to corruption by his late fame, of how he represented the best of pre-war European culture.

On Marcuse

Bi(bli)ography

Martineau, Harriet [1802 - 1876]

By Martineau

On Martineau

Marx, Karl [1818 - 1883]

  • Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe
  • Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels 
    All the works of Marx & Engels in chronological order. Includes the complete range of the 43 volumes of the German edition MEW.
  • Cyber Marxism Links 
    An independent platform for radical change. There’s a small list of links on Karl Marx, Rosa Luxembourg, Anarchism, Feminism and liberation movements. Editors: Adriaan Boiten and Noemi Vedi. Dutch and English version.
  • Marx and Engels’ Writings 
    A collection of writings in economic and social theory, presented by: EServer.
  • Marx-Engels-Marxismus Forschung, Japan 
    Michio Akama has created a nice index of Japanese contributions to marxist inspired science. Some articles are full text and free, but you won’t understand much if you don’t speak Japanese.
  • Marxism Page
    Contains plain text files of marxist classics, introductions to marxist politics, contemporary marxist material etc. You can even listen to The Internationale if you like (and read the lyrics or background of the song). Created by: Rick Kuhn.
  • Marxist Sociology Section of the ASA
    A resource and meeting point for Marxist scholars from the American Sociological Association. The site provides information on the people of the Marxist Section, Announcements (newsletter, session new), and about Marx and Marxist Theory.
  • Marxist Internet Archive - Colorado
    Contains a library (a chronology of the works of Marx and Engels), a biographical archive, a photo gallery, other marxist writers (like Lenin, Riazanov, Trotsky, and Pannekoek) and a search engine that searches the entire Marx/Engels Internet Library.
  • Spoon Marxism Space, The (Operations closed, but archive available) 
    A marxism space designed to enable diverse yet focussed and experimental discussions on a broad range of issues pertinent to marxism. It is conceived as an environment which increases flexibility, enables more participation, and encourages focus while still promoting cross-fertilization. The site also contains papers in the marxism space archive, archives of discussions and online marxism resources.
  • Beamish, Bob [1998] - (Dept. of Sociology, Queen’s University, Ontaria, Canada)
    The Making of the Manifesto 
    In: Socialist Register, 34: 218-39.
    A paper presented for the virtual seminar of the Progressive Sociologists’ Network to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. The “Manifesto”, the most widely read and defining single text in the history of modern socialism, was first published in February, 1848.
  • Leys, Colins / Panitch, Leo [1998]
    The Political Legacy of the Manifesto
    In: Socialist Register, 34, 1998,
  • Karl Marx Haus 
    Museum in Trier, Germany.

Mauss, Marcel [1872 - 1950]

McLuhan, Marschall [1911 - 1980]

General Resources

McLuhan Live

On McLuhan

Mead, George Herbert [1863 - 1931]

Mead, Margaret [1901-1978]

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world, indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
  • [1949] Male and Female
    Mead explains: “What is it to be a man? What is it to be a women?”
  • [1962] Creative Intelligence: Female 
    Listen to the introduction and questions recorded in 1962 at the Berkeley Language Center (The Silent Revolution: Creative Man in Contemporary Society, 1962)
  • Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture
    An online exhibition that commemorates the 100th anniversary of Margaret Mead’s birth, presented by the Library of Congress (USA). It contains a selection of materials from the extensive Mead collection of the LOC. The collection includes manuscripts, diaries, letters, field notes ,drawings, prints, photographs, sound recordings, and film.
  • Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples
    Download archival footage of Margeret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History.
  • The Women of the Hall: Margaret Mead
    A short biography.
  • A list of books by and about Margaret Mead
    Presented by Malaspina Great Books Home Page.
  • Welty, Gordon [1990] 
    The Attack on Mead and the Dialectics of Anthropology
    In: Science and Nature 9:14-24.
    A discussion of Derek Freeman’s 1983 attack on Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa(1928). Focus is on the history and significance of the doctrine of Popperian falsifiability in anthropology. Welty argues that the ‘falsifiability’ canon has a longer history than Popperians acknowledge, dating back at least to Claude Bernard’s ‘Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine’ [1865]; moreover, this canon entails a dialectical conception of science and its development. In light of these dialectical considerations, it is claimed that Boasian anthropology is the negation of Biologism (sociobiology), and that the dialectical negation of both these doctrines (biologism and Boasian anthropology) is social evolutionism and its philosophical recapitulation, historical materialism.
  • Wikipedia: Margaret _Mead

Merton, Robert King [1910 - 2003]

By Merton

On Merton

Michels, Robert [1876-1936]

By Michels

On Michels

Millett, Kate [1934]

Mills, Charles Wright [1916 - 1962]

By Mills

On Mills

Moreno, Jacob Levy [1889 - 1974]

Morgan, Lewis H. [1818 - 1881]

Offe, Claus [1940]

Pareto, Vilfredo [1848 - 1923]

Bi(bli)ography

By Pareto

On Pareto

Park, Robert Ezra [1864 - 1944]

By Park

Biographies & Bibliographies

Parsons, Talcott [1902 - 1979]

Popper, Karl Reimund [1902 - 1994]

By Popper

  • [1934/1959] The Logic of Scientific Discovery
    London/New York: Routledge
  • [1972] Science: Conjectures and Refutations
    Popper explains the apparent progress of scientific knowledge—how it is that our understanding of the universe seems to improve over time. This problem arises from his position that the truth content of our theories, even the best of them, cannot be verified by scientific testing, but can only be falsified. If so, then how is it that the growth of science appears to result in a growth in knowledge?
  • [1994] Prague Lecture

On Popper

Bi(bli)ography

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques [1712 - 1778]

By Rousseau

On Rousseau

Schütz, Alfred [1899 - 1959]

Simmel, Georg [1858 - 1918]

By Simmel

On Simmel

Biographies & Bibliographies

  • The Person
    From: Lewis A. Coser [1977] Masters of Sociological Thought, pp. 194-95.
  • Georg Simmel Online 
    Presented by: Sociology in Switzerland. Some major works of Simmel in German language. Editing committe: Christoph Brönnimarin, Hans Geser, Jürgen Stremlow (Sociological Institute, Zürich, Switzerland). It contains: Zur Soziologie der Familie (1895); Zu einer Theorie des Pessimismus (1900); Sozialismus und Pessimismus (1900); Persönliche und sachliche Kultur (1900); Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (1908); Philosophische Kultur (1919).
  • Wikipedia: Georg Simmel

Sorokin, Pitirim Aleksandrovič [1889 - 1968]

Spencer, Herbert [1820 - 1903]

By Spencer

Biographies & Bibliographies

On Spencer

Sumner, William Graham [1840 - 1910]

By Sumner

  • [1883] What Social Classes Owe Each Other
    Harpers & Brothers.
  • [1883] The Forgotten Man | mirror
    Responding to an invitation from Harper's Weekly the previous fall, Sumner drafted eleven short essays during January 1883 for a series on the relations of workers and employers, each being about 2,000 words in length for which be was paid $50 apiece. After appearing in serial form through the early spring, they were collected as What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (New York, 1883). An expanded version of two of the essays of which he was especially proud, this address was given before audiences in Brooklyn and New Haven on January 30 and February 8 or 9, 1883, and were reprinted in Forgotten Man, ed. Albert Galloway Keller, pp. 465-495.
  • [1886] Laissez-Faire
    Sumner clarifies the meaning of the expression laissez-faire, a maxim of action more and not a dogma. Laissez-faire is against all dogmas and in favour of continuous experimentation by those who are involved in all sorts of activities and in taking the appropriate decisions. To replace the experimental process with commands from a political centre is not only a manifestation of hubris but a sign of utter discomforting madness.
  • [1887] State Interference
    Sumner was aware of the growing interference of the state in people’s life. At that time individualism was already under attack, probably because, “we have reached a point where individualism is possible.” The state, as the self-appointed representative of the mass society, was then reacting to the menace constituted by a society of individuals who could do very well without a growing bureaucratic apparatus meddling in everybody's affairs. Unfortunately state rulers and state bureaucrats won the day; but now the wind has changed and individualism is presently not only possible but indispensable for overcoming the mass of waste, privileges, inequities and insecurities engendered by state interference and dominance.
  • [1906] Social Norms
  • [1906] Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Ussages, Manners, Customs, Mores and Morals
    Boston etc.: Ginn and Company
  • [1919] Forgotten Man and Other Essays. 
    Edited by A. G. Keller. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries.
  • [1963] Social Darwinism: Selected Essays of William Graham Sumner. 
    Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
  • [1914] The Challenge of Facts, and other essays | Archive

On Sumner

Taylor, Frederick Winslow [1856 - 1915]

  • F. W. Taylor Collection 
    The F. W. Taylor Project is preserving and disseminating the F. W. Taylor Collection at the Stevens Institute of Technology by establishing the on-line Taylor archive to digitally store and represent the contents of the collection. The Taylor archive is described in the Classified Guide to the Frederick Winslow Tayler Collection. Editor: Doris Oliver.
  • [1911] The Principles of Scientific Management [Archive.org] | idem [Text provided by Eric Eldred]
  • [1911/1919] Shop Management
    New York/London: Harper & Brothers
  • [1912] The Charterhoud of London
    New York: Dutton
  • Frank and Lillian Gilbreth
    The Gilbreth’s motion studies on how a task was done, and how best to eliminate unneeded, fatiguing steps in any process. Their work is commonly linked with Taylor’s time studies and grouped within the various ‘laws and principles’ of scientific management. See also the illustration of Gilbreth’s motion studies in domestic spaces: Dr. Gilbreth's Kitchen.

On Taylor

Thomas, William Isaac [1863 - 1947]

 “...if men define situations as real,
they are real in their consequences”

 

By Thomas

Biographies & Bibliographies

On Thomas

Tocqueville, Alexis de [1805 - 1859]

By Tocqueville

On Tocqueville

Bi(bli)ography

Toffler, Alvin [1928]

Tönnies, Ferdinand [1855 - 1936]

Touraine, Alain [1925]

Toynbee, Arnold [1852 - 1883]

  • Toynbee Hall
    The official Toynbee site.
  • Wikipedia: Arnold_Toynbee
  • [1884] Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England | mirror
    Discusses the industrial and agrarian revolution at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. The first part deals with Adam Smith (England on the eve of the Industrial revolution and the causes of wealth), the second part deals with Malthus (distribution of wealth and causes of poverty), the third part deals with Ricardo (doctrine of rent and wages and theories of economic progress).
  • Library of Congress Citations
  • Marshall, Alfred [1887] 
    On Arnold Toynbee
    From: A. Marshall On Arnold Toynbee, introduced and edited by John K. Wothaker, Marshall Studies Bulletin 8: 45-8.
  • Creative Quotations from Arnold Toynbee (1852-1883)
    For instance: “It is a paradoxical but profound true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.”

Unger, Roberto Mangabeira [1947]

By Unger

  • Roberto Mangabeira Unger 
  • The Work of Roberto Unger
  • [2011] We Go To Sleep And Drown Our Sorrows In Consumption
    The European, 24.10.2011
    A conversation with Cora Currier about the tragic narrowing of political imagination and the need to generate change without crisis. Unger postulates that “all the fundamental problems of the European societies, and the world as a whole, require the reinvention of the conventional institutional arrangements for the organization of democracies, market economies, and civil societies.”
  • [2013] What next for the left?
    The Economist, 26.12.2013
    Unger argues argues that social democracy is flawed and that the left needs an entirely new programme.
  • [2014] What is Wrong with the Social Sciences Today?
    Social Science Space / Bites, 9.1.2014
    Unger discusses what is wrong with the social sciences today, arguing that they have degenerated into a pseudo-science. “The fundamental problem with the social sciences today is that they have severed the link between insight into what exists and imagination of what might exist at the next steps – the adjacent possible. ... The result is that the predominant methods in the social sciences lead them to be a kind of retrospective rationalisation of what exists. ... I’m saying that regardless of the political intentions of the social sciences, the intellectual practices that they now have available to them are largely deficient in what should be the vital element. The vital element is structural imagination – imagination of how structural change takes place in history and of how we can understand the prevalence of the existing arrangements without vindicating their necessity or their authority. ”
  • [2014] Lunch with the FT: Robertop Mangabeira Unger
    The Financial Times, 3.10.2014
  • YouTube

On Unger

Bi(bli)ograpy

Veblen, Thorstein [1857 - 1929]

Biographical information

  • Veblen: McMaster University Archive
  • Veblenite, The
    A Veblen project page that introduces his personality and work, and shows the importance of his thoughts at the present time. It also places all of Veblen’s works as a repository to everyone’s disposal (as far as not copyright protected). The project is managed by Ralf J. Schreyer.

Walby, Sylvia

Wallerstein, Immanuel [1930]

Ward, Lester Frank [1841 - 1913]

Willis, Paul

Znaniecki, Florian Witold [1882 - 1958]

Biographies & Bibliographies

By Znaniecki

On Znaniecki

References

Google Scholar - Stand on the shoulders of giants

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