Political Sociology Meets Public Policy

Xml Warehousing Meets Sociology

In this article, we describe a novel application of XML and Web based technologies: a sociological study of the W3C standardization process. We propose a new methodology and tools, to be used by sociologists to study the standardization process, illustrated by the W3C XQuery Working Group. The novelty of our approach has many facets. Information Technology (IT) has received little attention fro...

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...

Job Design Meets Organizational Sociology

The world of work has seen a vast transformation in the three decades since Hackman and Oldham published their foundational research on work redesign. At the broadest level, the US has nearly completed the transition from a manufacturing to a service economy foretold by Daniel Bell (1973). By 2010, perhaps as little as 10 per cent of the American workforce will be employed in agriculture and ma...

Political Choice, Public Policy, and Distributional Outcomes

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...