Analytic induction (AI) is an interpretation of scientific method that emerged in early twentieth-century sociology and still has some influence today. Among the studies often cited as examples are Becker’s articles on marijuana use. While these have been given less attention than the work of Lindesmith on opiate addiction and Cressey on financial trust violation, Becker’s work has distinctive features. Furthermore, it raises some important and interesting issues that relate not only to AI but to social scientific explanation more generally. (...) These concern, for example, the presence and nature of causal systems in the social world, the relationship between historical and generalizing approaches, the character and role of social scientific theories, and how they are generated. In this article Becker’s research is examined in detail, and these issues explored through comparisons with the work of Lindesmith and Cressey. (shrink)

By comparing some founding concepts underlying developing interest in the role of signs and symbols in social life, such as the nature of the sign in Charles Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure and in Emile Durkheim and George Herbert Mead, and then exploring recent developments in structuralism and symbolic interactionism, a critical appraisal of their theories of meaning is made in the context of an emerging semiotic sociology.

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...

Like some other human sciences, sociology has had a recurrent concern to clarify the ambivalent relationship between its professional accounts of social reality on the one hand and lay understandings of social reality on the other. Sociological ethnographers have claimed to accomplish this clarification by including in their accounts both direct representation and responsive interpretation of the vernacular voice of those human subjects whose actions and understandings comprise the focus of their inquiries. I briefly examine some of the practical and (...) textual strategies by which studies have accomplished this. I go on to note that the authenticity of ethnographic work has itself become a matter of dispute on the grounds of the ineradicable asymmetry between the professional voice of the researcher and the vernacular voice of research subjects. Drawing on work in literary theory, anthropology and feminist scholarship, a favoured solution to this problem has argued for the necessity of acknowledging the essentially dialogical character of the relationship between researchers and subjects and also of finding ways to make ethnographic texts reflect this character. This article draws attention to an alternative set of professional practices that prefer ‘co-construction’ to ‘dialogue’ as a term of art. Its use encourages and facilitates the close and detailed examination of the multiple ways in which subjects already speak of and for themselves and others within the local sites of their real-world activities. Studies of these matters accord the vernacular voice of human subjects renewed significance for sociological investigation as part of a radical ‘respecification’ of prior understandings of the proper relationship between vernacular and professional accounts of social reality. The article assesses the upshot of these claims for the current practice and future prospects of sociology as one of the human sciences. (shrink)

This article argues that the concept of moodiness provides significant resources for developing a more robust pragmatist theory of action. Building on current conceptualizations of agency as effort by relational sociologists, it turns to the early work of Talcott Parsons to outline the theoretical presuppositions and antinomies endemic to any such conception; William James and John Dewey provide an alternative conception of effort as a contingent rather than fundamental form of agency. The article then proposes a way forward to a (...) nonvoluntarist theory of action by introducing the notion of moodiness, highlighting how the concept permits a richer conceptualization of actors' prereflexive involvement in and relatedness to nonneutral, demanding situations. Effort is reconceptualized as a moment in a broader process of action, where the mood is fragile and problematical. Finally, the article draws all of these elements together in an outline of a unified portrait of the pragmatist action cycle that includes both creativity and moodiness as essential moments. (shrink)

The basic tenets of “classical” naturalism (exemplified in the work of Mead, Buchler, and Randall, among others) are delineated and distinguished from other versions of naturalism. Classical naturalism is also distinguished from reductive materialism and idealism. Nature is asserted to be indefinitely plural and not amenable to monistic or dualistic categorial schemes; that is, the principle of “ontological parity” is maintained. The method of inquiry of naturalism is outlined, along with the notion of truth as perspectivally objective. The metaphysical hypotheses (...) are then used to examine culture. Culture is found to be the specific environment of human being, arising out of, but irreducible to, other natural processes. Culture is described as the cumulative gestures of the human social organism as it discovers and creates itself in mutual constitution with other natural processes and products. (shrink)

This article offers an original, intellectual portrait of G. H. Mead. My reassessment of Mead’s thinking is founded, in methodological terms, upon a historically minded yet theoretically oriented strategy. Mead’s system of thought is submitted to a historical reconstruction in order to grasp the evolution of his ideas over time, and to a thematic reconstruction organized around three major research areas or pillars: science, social psychology and politics. If one re-examines the entirety of Mead’s published and unpublished writings from the (...) point of view of contemporary social and political theory, one can see that his contributions transcend the field of social psychology. Mead’s innovative insights on the communicative aspects of social life and individual conscience are yet to be fully explored by current social and political theorists. This is partly due to the fact that his was a system in a state of flux, ever escaping the final written form. (shrink)

This paper explores themethodological consequences of AmericanPragmatism for the social sciences. It alsocriticises some rival perspectives onmethodology of social research, in particularfalsificationist, realist and someanti-naturalist views. It is argued thatAmerican Pragmatism shows striking affinitieswith the genealogical method of history and thereflexive turn in cultural anthropology. It isalso argued that Pragmatism forces us to thinkdifferently about the relationship betweentheory and empirical research.