Intellectuals’ Political Orientations: Toward an Analytical Sociology

Political Sociology Is Dead. Long Live Political Sociology?

POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY IS DEAD. The old kind, anyway. What counted as political sociology in the past just is not practiced anymore. Generalizing wildly, political sociology used to be the study of how voters, classes, movements, parties, and so on influenced the state—be it political leaders, policy, administration, and so forth. In Canada, this kind of political sociology was represented by both...

Analytical Sociology and The Rest of Sociology

The programme of analytical sociology brings sharp focus to fundamental issues insociology as a scientific discipline. Its practitioners offer a clear paradigm of how sociologicalexplanations ought to proceed, from individual actors to social outcomes. This essay considerslimitations of the approach as a general framework for all sociological research, however. Theessay surveys ...

Toward an Historical Sociology of Business Culture

Andrew Carnegie had the good fortune to possess contacts among the rich and famous on both sides of the Atlantic, wealth enough to buy the good favor of reporters, and media savvy. But he also had the ill fortune in the 1890s to need all these resources, for in that decade both his public image and his business philosophy were under challenge. At the beginning of the decade bad news kept coming...

Elite Theory in Political Sociology

Elite theory‟s origins lie most clearly in the writings of Gaetano Mosca (18581941), Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), and Robert Michels (1876-1936). Mosca emphasized the ways in which tiny minorities out-organize and outwit large majorities, adding that “political classes” – Mosca‟s term for political elites – usually have “a certain material, intellectual, or even moral superiority” over those th...

of Political and Military Sociology