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10Weber's Influence in Weimar GermanyJournal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 18 (2): 147-156. 1982.The thesis that Weber was without influence in Weimar Germany is examined. It is shown that in contemporary published assessments and in private statements in interviews contemporary sociologists regarded him as important. The many dissertations on Weber and the enormous secondary literature are noted. This literature, which was contributed by some of the best minds of the day, included both the philosophical and sociological aspects of Weber's work. It is concluded that the thesis that Weber wa…Read more
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9The Concept of Face ValidityQuality and Quantity 13 (1): 85-90. 1979.The concept of “face validity”, used in the sense of the contrast between “face validity” and “construct validity”, is conventionally understood in a way which is wrong and misleading. The wrong view had relatively limited consequences for research practice per se. However, it is a serious obstacle in theoretical discussions of certain “philosophical” or “foundational” issues. In this brief note I would like to point out the logical defect in the conventional position and correct it by making th…Read more
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11Durkheim among the StatisticiansJournal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 32 (4): 354-378. 1996.
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7Blau's Theory of Differentiation: Is It Explanatory?The Sociological Quarterly 18 (1): 17-32. 1977.This paper examines Blau's recent attempt to construct a deductive theoretical explanation of structural differentiation in formal organizations. Blau claims that certain generalizations are explanatory, and cites certain philosophers in support of this claim. A closer examination of these philosophers' views shows the resemblance between these generalizations and explanatory scientific generalizations to be only superficial. They can be better understood as descriptions of patterns. These patte…Read more
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33Commentary: Social Theory and Underdetermination: A Philosophical History and ReconstructionIn Michiru Nagatsu & Attilia Ruzzene (eds.), Contemporary Philosophy and Social Science: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, Bloomsbury Academic. 2019.
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13Beyond the Academic EthicIn Fabian Cannizzo & Nicholas Osbaldiston (eds.), The Social Structures of Global Academia, Routledge. 2019.In the early 1980s, Edward Shils, together with others, undertook the task of defining what he called ‘The Academic Ethic’. It is perhaps best to think of this task in terms defined by Alasdair MacIntyre in many of his writings, in which he observes that the formulation of an ethic typically came at the point where it was no longer a matter of general tacit acceptance but was becoming lost. Shils’s exchanges with his friends and collaborators who commented on the project bear this out: they unde…Read more
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7What Do Narratives Explain? Roth, Mink and WeberIn Krzysztof Brzechczyn (ed.), Towards a Revival of Analytical Philosophy of History. Around Paul A. Roth’s Vision of Historical Sciences, Brill-rodopi. 2017.
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3Ellwood's EuropeIn Cherry Schrecker (ed.), Transatlantic Voyages and Sociology: The Migration and Development of Ideas, Routledge. 2010.Charles Ellwood is usually described as a junior member of the founding generation of American Sociology. Ellwood fulfils many of the standard stereotypes of the American sociology student of the era. He was born on a farm and, after winning a state scholarship, went to Cornell, as he himself noted, ‘because it was virtually the state university of New York’.1 He then went directly on to the University of Chicago, where he was converted only partially from his concerns with social problems to a …Read more
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6The Maturity of Social TheoryIn Charles Camic & Hans Joas (eds.), The Dialogical Turn: New Roles for Sociology in the Postdisciplinary Age, Rowman & Littlefield. 2003.
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2Expertise and Political Responsibility: The Columbia Shuttle CatastropheIn Sabine Maasen & Peter Weingart (eds.), Democratization of expertise?: exploring novel forms of scientific advice in political decision-making, Springer. pp. 101-12. 2005.
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7Throwing out the Tacit Rule BookIn Karin Knorr Cetina, Theodore Schatzki & Eike von Savigny (eds.), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, Routledge. 2000.Davidson’s remark is fairly conventional stuff in contemporary philosophy, but the argument that informs it is elusive. Is this a kind of unformulated transcendental argument, which amounts to the claim that the ‘sharing’ of ‘language,’ in some unspecified sense of these terms, is a condition of the possibility of ‘communication’ in some unspecified sense of this term? Or is it a kind of inference to the best explanation in which there are no real alternativesan inference, so to speak, to the on…Read more
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4The Uniqueness of Capitalism, External Ethics, the Rational Organization of Work, and Consistent Theodicies: An introduction to Weber on Religion and EconomicsIn J. Neusner (ed.), Religious Belief and Economic Behaviour, University of South Florida. pp. 3-18. 1999.
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2From Education to Expertise: Sociology as a "Profession"In T. C. Halliday & M. Janowitz (eds.), Sociology and Its Publics: The Forms and Fates of Disciplinary Organization, University of Chicago Press. pp. 373-407. 1992.
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14Understanding the TacitRoutledge. 2013.This book outlines a new account of the tacit, meaning tacit knowledge, presuppositions, practices, traditions, and so forth. It includes essays on topics such as underdetermination and mutual understanding, and critical discussions of the major alternative approaches to the tacit, including Bourdieu’s habitus and various practice theories, Oakeshott’s account of tradition, Quentin Skinner’s theory of historical meaning, Harry Collins’s idea of collective tacit knowledge, as well as discussions …Read more
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3Truth and DecisionIn D. E. Chubin & E. W. Chu (eds.), Science Off the Pedestal: Social Perspectives on Science and Technology, Wadsworth Publishing. pp. 175-188. 1989.
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10Decisionism and Politics: Weber as Constitutional TheoristIn Sam Whimster & Dr Scott Lash (eds.), Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, Routledge. 2014.The N ational Assembly held in the Frankfurt Paulskirche in 1848, which opened w ith high hopes for the unification o f Germ any on parliam entary constitutional principles, was left to die a year later, in the telling phrase o f D onoso Cortes, ‘like a street w om an in the gu tter’. In the period o f reaction that followed, during w hich the Paulskirche convention came to be described as the ‘parliam ent o f pro fessors’, one o f its m em bers, Georg G ottfried Gervinus, was accused, in a tri…Read more
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89The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American SociologySage Publications. 1990.Tracing the history of American sociology since the Civil War, the authors of this important volume explain the field′s diversity, its lack of unifying paradigms, its broad, eclectic research agenda and its general weakness as an institutional force in either academia or the policy arena. They highlight the equivocal and often contradictory missions that sociologists prescribe for themselves and the variable nature of human, financial and intellectual resources available to the profession.
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25The Politics of ExpertiseRoutledge. 2013.This book collects case studies and theoretical papers on expertise, focusing on four major themes: legitimation, the aggregation of knowledge, the distribution of knowledge and the distribution of power. It focuses on the institutional means by which the distribution of knowledge and the distribution of power are connected, and how the problems of aggregating knowledge and legitimating it are solved by these structures. The radical novelty of this approach is that it places the traditional disc…Read more
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11Weber, the Germans, and Anglo-Saxon ConventionIn Ronald M. Glassman & Vatro Murvar (eds.), Max Weber's political sociology: a pessimistic vision of a rationalized world, Greenwood Press. pp. 39-54. 1984.
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18The Calling of Social Thought: Rediscovering the Work of Edward Shils (edited book)Manchester University Press. 2019.Edward Shils was a central figure in twentieth century social thought. He held appointments both at Chicago and Cambridge and was a crucial link between British and American intellectual life. This volume collects essays by distinguished contributors which deal with the major facets of Shils' thought, including his relations with Michael Polanyi, his parallels with Michael Oakeshott, his defense of the traditional university, his fundamental philosophical anthropology, and his important work on …Read more
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10American Sociology: From Pre-Disciplinary to Post-NormalPalgrave Macmillan. 2014.American Sociology has changed radically since 1945. This volume traces these changes to the present, with special emphasis on the feminization of sociology and the decline of the science ideal as well as the challenges sociology faces in the new environment for universities.
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17Sociology Responds to FascismIn Dirk Kasler & Stephen Turner (eds.), Sociology Responds to Fascism, Routledge. 1992.We know a lot about the sociology of fascism, but how have sociologists responded to fascism when confronted with it in their own lives? How courageous or compromising have they been? And why has this history been shrouded in silence for so long? In this major work of historical scholarship sociologists from around the world describe and evaluate the reactions of sociologists to the rise and practice of fascism.
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27Causality In Crisis?: Statistical Methods & Search for Causal Knowledge in Social Sciences (edited book)Notre Dame Press. 1997.These essays critically reassess the widely accepted view that statistical methods of analysis can, and do, yield causal understanding of social phenomena. They emphasize the historical, philosophical and conceptual perspectives that underlie and inform current methodological controversies.
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26Causation, Value Judgments, VerstehenIn Edith Hanke, Lawrence Scaff & Sam Whimster (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber, Oxford University Press. 2019.Weber’s “methodological writings” are some of the most influential parts of his work; they are his philosophical and technical explication of the basic problems of social science and history and their relation to other forms of knowledge, as well as the relation of knowledge to action and values. They explain his basic concepts, such as ideal type, values and value-free science, Verstehen, and the notion of causality that is appropriate to social and historical concepts. These ideas have often b…Read more
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6Defining a Discipline: Sociology and its Philosophical Problems, from its Classics to 1945In Stephen P. Turner & Mark W. Risjord (eds.), Handbook of Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, Elsevier. pp. 3-69. 2006.The beginning of the 20th century coincides with the establishment of the modern disciplines of the social sciences, chiefly in the United States but on a smaller scale in Western Europe as well. These disciplinary structures, which varied from country to country, provide the organizing principle of this handbook.The immediate context of the disciplinarization of sociology was the transformation of two fields, statistics and history, which shed large chunks of content as they took their current s…Read more
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20Cognitive Science and Social TheoryIn Wayne E. Brekus & Gabe Ignatow (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, Oxford University Press. 2019.
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9Tacit KnowledgeIn Byron Kaldis (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences, Sage Publications. 2013.
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9Cause, Teleology, and MethodIn T. M. Porter & D. Ross (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, Cambridge University Press. pp. 57-70. 2003.The model of social science established in methodological writings of the 1830s and 1840s formed an ideal that has endured to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Subsequent authors have been obliged to excuse the social sciences for their failure to achieve this ideal model of science, to reinterpret the successes of social science in terms of it, or to construct alternative conceptions of social science in contrast to it. The ideal was worked out in two closely related texts, Auguste Com…Read more
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