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Classical sociology and the restoration of nature: the relevance of Émile Durkheim and Georg SimmelIn David Inglis, John Bone & Rhoda Wilkie (eds.), Nature: critical concepts in the social sciences, Routledge. pp. 4. 2005.
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Emotions and the Evolution of Human Auditory LanguageIn Sonya E. Pritzker, Janina Fenigsen & James MacLynn Wilce (eds.), The Routledge handbook of language and emotion, Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. 2020.
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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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9Handbook of Sociological TheorySpringer Verlag. 2006.Sociology is experiencing what can only be described as hyperdifferentiation of theories - there are now many approaches competing for attention in the intellectual arena. From this perspective, we should see a weeding out of theories to a small number, but this is not likely to occur because each of the many theoretical perspectives has a resource base of adherents. As a result, theories in sociology do not compete head on with each other as much as they coexist. This seminal reference work was…Read more
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The Mark of the Social: Discovery or Invention? (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 1996.Behavior, language, development, identity, and science—all of these phenomena are commonly characterized as 'social' in nature. But what does it mean to be 'social'? Is there any intrinsic 'mark' of the social shared by these phenomena? In the first book to shed light on this foundational question, twelve distinguished philosophers and social scientists from several disciplines debate the mark of the social. Their varied answers will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers,…Read more
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1Advances in Group Processes, Vol 21: Theory and Research on Human Emotions (edited book)Elsevier Science. 2004.
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12Contemporary sociological theorySAGE. 2013.The nature of sociological theory -- Functional theorizing -- The rise of functional theorizing -- Talcott Parsons' analytical functionalism -- The systems functionalism of Niklas Luhmann -- Efforts to revitalize functionalism -- Evolutionary and ecological theories -- The rise of evolutionary and ecological theorizing -- Ecological theories -- Stage theories of societal evolution -- Darwinian-inspired evolutionary theories -- Conflict theorizing -- The rise of conflict theorizing -- Early analy…Read more
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17Theoretical sociology: a concise introduction to twelve sociological theoriesSAGE Publications. 2014.What can sociological theory tell us about the basic forces that shape our world? With clarity and authority, leading theorist Jonathan H. Turner seeks to answer this question through a brief, yet in-depth examination of twelve major sociological theories. Readers are given an opportunity to explore the foundational premise of each theory and key elements that make it distinctive. The book draws on biographical background, analysis of important works, historical influences, and other critical in…Read more
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10The emergence and evolution of religion by means of natural selection (edited book)Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. 2017.Written by leading theorists and empirical researchers, this book presents new ways of addressing the old question: Why did religion first emerge and then continue to evolve in all human societies? The authors of the book--each with a different background across the social sciences and humanities -- assimilate conceptual leads and empirical findings from anthropology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary sociology, neurology, primate behavioral studies, explanations of human interaction and group …Read more
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14Theory Building in Sociology: Assessing Theoretical CumulationSAGE Publications. 1989.This volume, stemming from the annual meeting of the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association, addresses theoretical cumulation in two senses: } the rigorous empirical testing of theoretical models } the synthesis, extension and consolidation of the existing theoretical base of the discipline. This distinguished group of contributors, all leading scholars, have expanded upon the wisdom of the giants of theoretical sociology, and creatively broadened the base of theory in the field…Read more
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23Classical Sociological Theory: A Positivist's PerspectiveWadsworth Publishing Company. 1993.The theme of this collection of articles by Jonathan Turner is that sociology can be a true science, and it can develop abstract laws explaining the operative dynamics of the social universe. Rather that blindly worshipping sociology's masters, however, Turner attempts to reinvent sociology as a science that learns the valuable lessons of classical theory and then moves on.
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45The evolution of emotions in humans: A darwinian–durkheimian analysisJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 26 (1). 1996.Alexandra Maryanski's cladistic analysis of the last common ancestor to humans and apes reveals biological propensities in hominoids for autonomy, individualism, and weak-tie formation. The evolution of emotional capacities in humans, and the neuroanatomical bases for these capacities, are viewed as representing one of the many compensatory mechanisms for overcoming the low sociality contained in humans’ape ancestry. Speculation on the selection forces involved in hominids’growing capacity to us…Read more
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33Toward a general sociological theory of emotionsJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 29 (2). 1999.Key ideas from expectation-states theory, symbolic interactionism, dramaturgical analysis, power-status theories, attribution theory, and psychoanalytic theories are combined in an effort to generate a more general theory of emotional arousal in face-to-face interaction. The level of emotional arousal in interaction is seen to reflect the degree of incongruity between expectations, including expectations for confirmation of self, and actual experiences. Such arousal involves the conversion of pr…Read more
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66What makes a science 'mature'?: Patterns of organizational control in scientific productionSociological Theory 4 (2): 143-150. 1986.
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154The Sociology of Emotions: Basic Theoretical ArgumentsEmotion Review 1 (4): 240-254. 2009.In this article, the basic sociological approaches to theorizing human emotions are reviewed. In broad strokes, theorizing can be grouped into several schools of thought: evolutionary, symbolic interactionist, symbolic interactionist with psychoanalytic elements, interaction ritual, power and status, stratification, and exchange. All of these approaches to theorizing emotions have generated useful insights into the dynamics of emotions. There remain, however, unresolved issues in sociological ap…Read more
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21The production and reproduction of social solidarity: A synthesis of two rational choice theoriesJournal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 22 (3). 1992.
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48The mechanics of social interaction: Toward a composite model of signaling and interpretingSociological Theory 4 (1): 95-105. 1986.
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5The Data of Ethics: Herbert SpencerRoutledge. 2011.In this amazingly prophetic work, done late in his career, Herbert Spencer offers an approach to ethics that anticipates developments throughout the twentieth century. He moves away from the twin evils of ethical doctrines bequeathed to us by an ancient past that are simply no longer feasible but also avoids modern standards of ethical conduct that are simply impossible to attain. "By association with rules that cannot be obeyed," Spencer writes, "rules that can be obeyed lose their authority." …Read more
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47Some theoretical principles of societal stratificationSociological Theory 2 1-22. 1984.We propose that sociological theory should comprise a series of elementary and abstract principles on the operation of distinctive and generic social processes. These processes intersect and interact in varying combinations to create diverse social forms, including stratification. Six elementary principles, stated as simple equations, are developed for the social processes implicated in societal stratification
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119The offspring of functionalism: French and british structuralismSociological Theory 9 (1): 106-115. 1991.Durkheim's functional and structural sociology is examined with an eye to the two structuralist modes of inquiry that it inspired, French structuralism and British structuralism. French structuralism comes from Levi-Strauss's inverting the basic ideas of Durkheim and others in the French circle, including Marcell Mauss, Robert Hertz, and Ferdinand de Saussure. British structuralism comes from A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's adoption of Durkheimian ideas to ethnographic interpretation and theoretical spec…Read more