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8The Human Face of KnowledgeTradition and Discovery 47 (3): 19-20. 2021.This is a brief response to comments by Struan Jacobs and Peter Blum on The Calling of Social Thought, Rediscovering the Work of Edward Shils, a recent collection of essays edited by Christopher Adair-Toteff and Stephen Turner. It identifies a distinctive contribution of Shils to the larger problem of the tacit.
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7Weber on ActionAmerican Sociological Review 48 (4): 509-519. 1983.Weber's writings on action and the explanation of action do not present a particularly coherent view. In his earlier writings, from 1903-1907, he is under the sway of a juristic conception of cause based on the probability doctrines of von Kries, and this is reflected in his writings on action, which de-emphasize problems of interpretation and stress the analytic uses of methods of causal analysis. In the Logos essay, problems of interpretation and problems of cause and probability are discussed…Read more
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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. 2001.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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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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7The Disobedient Generation: Social Theorists in the SixtiesHuman Studies 30 (4): 467-470. 2005.The late 1960s are remembered today as the last time wholesale social upheaval shook Europe and the United States. College students during that tumultuous period—epitomized by the events of May 1968—were as permanently marked in their worldviews as their parents had been by the Depression and World War II. Sociology was at the center of these events, and it changed decisively because of them. The Disobedient Generation collects newly written autobiographies by an international cross-section of w…Read more
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7Shils, EdwardIn J. D. Wright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), Elsevier. pp. 884-888. 2015.Edward Shils was a prominent American sociologist and social theorist who spent much of his career in Britain. He was the translator of Karl Mannheim and collaborator with Talcott Parsons. His own social theory concentrated on the relation of primary groups and intellectuals to the center of society, which he conceived of in terms of its charismatic character. Unlike Parsons, he was especially concerned with the conflicts between the social attachments of people, and especially with those involv…Read more
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6Defining a Discipline: Sociology and its Philosophical Problems, from its Classics to 1945In Stephen Turner & Mark Risjord (eds.), Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, Elsevier. pp. 3-69. 2007.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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6ExplanationIn John Lachs Robert B. Talisse (ed.), Encyclopedia of Social Theory, Wiley-blackwell. 2005.
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6Classic Sociology: Weber as an Analyst of CharismaIn Michael Harvey & Ronald E. Riggio (eds.), Leadership Studies: The Dialogue of Disciplines, Edward Elgar Publishing. 2011.
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6The Tradition of Post-TraditionIn H. Paul & A. Veldhuzien (eds.), The Age of the Post. A History of Post-Concepts in the Humanities and Social Sciences, . 2021.
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6The Continued Relevance of Weber’s Philosophy of Social ScienceEtica E Politica 7 (2): 1-20. 2005.Only a few writers have attempted to construct a comprehensive philosophy of social science, and of these Weber is the most relevant to the present. The structure of his conception places him in a close relationship to Donald Davidson. The basic reasoning of Davidson on action explanation, anomalous monism, and the impossibility of a “serious science” of psychology is paralleled in Weber. There are apparent differences with respect to their treatment of the status of the model of rational action…Read more
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6What 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. 2017.
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6Book Review : Theoretical Logic in Sociology, Volume 4: The Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons. By Jeffrey C. Alexander. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Pp. xxv + 530. $39.50 (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 15 (4): 513-522. 1985.
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6In this reply to the commentary in the volume, some intellectual, historical, and biographical context is provided for the writings discussed. This includes a brief account of the trajectory from Sociological Explanation as Translation, and a discussion of the general problem of the substrate of social explanation and the status of social theories as ideal-typical constructions with a problematic relation to this substrate. On this basis, the themes of practices, normativity, and the problem of …Read more
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6The Human Face of Knowledge A Response to Jacobs and BlumTradition and Discovery 47 (1). 2021.This is a brief response to comments by Struan Jacobs and Peter Blum on The Calling of Social Thought, Rediscovering the Work of Edward Shils, a recent collection of essays edited by Christopher Adair-Toteff and Stephen Turner. It identifies a distinctive contribution of Shils to the larger problem of the tacit.
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6Rural Sociology: A Slightly Personal HistoryIn Johannes Bakker (ed.), Rural Sociologists at Work: Candid Accounts of Theory, Method, and Practice, Routledge. 2015.This chapter presents a brief history of American Rural Sociology. It discusses the key early figures, such as C.J. Galpin, Kenyon Butterfield, Dwight Sanderson, and Thomas Carver Nixon. But the focus is on the next generation, and the distinctive institutional character of rural sociology as it developed in the twenties and thirties, and evolved in relation to events in the postwar period. Rural sociology shared many features with the “Social Survey” movement, including its commitment to commun…Read more
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6Relativism in the Social SciencesIn Martin Kusch (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism, Routledge. 2020.Relativism is central to the social sciences for the simple reason that customs and morals are diverse, and explaining this diversity is one of its major tasks. The explanations have relativistic implications, but they vary according to the type of explanation. In the nineteenth century evolutionary explanations dominated: differences were relative to stages. The social determination of ideas followed from these accounts, but could be logically separated from them. In the twentieth century, acco…Read more
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5Praxis and PracticesIn John Lachs Robert B. Talisse (ed.), Encyclopedia of Social Theory, Wiley-blackwell. 2005.
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5Charles Abram EllwoodIn John Arthur Garraty & Mark Christopher Carnes (eds.), American National Biography: supplement 1, Oxford University Press. pp. 458-459. 1999.
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5Blind Spot? Weber's Concept of Expertise and the Perplexing Case of ChinaIn Fanon Howell & Hector Vera (eds.), Max Weber Matters: Interweaving Past and Present, Routledge. 2008.This chapter analyses the Church's efforts in opposing The Da Vinci Code as a concerted bid to reinforce the ideological bulwark surrounding millennia-old structures of episcopal governance. It postulates that it was Church leaders sensing a challenge to Roman Catholicism's traditional manner of organizing and exercising power in the form of depersonalized office charisma that provoked the criticisms they mounted worldwide against The Da Vinci Code. Weber's discussion of models for the instituti…Read more
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5Progress in sociology?In Yafeng Shan (ed.), New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress, Routledge. 2022.The question of whether sociology progresses, and how, has been an issue within sociology itself. In this chapter, the reasons for this are explored. The first set relates to the status of ‘theories’ in sociology, which, despite historical aspirations to universality, are not predictive systems that generate puzzles but second-order definitions and ideal types, which abstract over intelligible world of the subjects. They can loosely be said to progress in the sense of providing new ways of frami…Read more
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5Uljana Feest, ed. Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen. Heidelberg: Springer, 2010. Pp. 309. $139.00 (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 1 (1): 135-139. 2011.
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5The Blogosphere and its Enemies: The Case of OophorectomyThe Sociological Review 61 (S2): 160-179. 2013.The blogosphere is loathed and feared by the press, expert-opinion makers, and representatives of authority generally. Part of this is based on a social theory: that there are implicit and explicit social controls governing professional journalists and experts that make them responsible to the facts. These controls don't exist for bloggers or the people who comment on blogs. But blog commentary is good at performing a kind of sociology of knowledge that situates speakers and motives, especially …Read more
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