What is analytical sociology? Towards sociology as 'normal science'

What Is Economic Sociology

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 ...

Sociology as a Population Science.

John Goldthorpe is one of Britain’s most eminent sociologists and a strong advocate of quantitative sociology. In this concise and accessible book, he provides a new rationale for recent developments in sociology which focus on establishing and explaining probabilistic regularities in human populations. Through these developments, Goldthorpe shows how sociology has become more securely placed w...

Sociology as a Strict Science

Sociology and philosophy seem to have this in common: in spite of notable progress in special fields, the discipline as a whole lacks unity and fails to accumulate knowledge. Both disciplines are split into separate schools between which there exist no clearly defined relations and no notable increase of insight. Thus after an auspicious beginning Pitirim Sorokin’s (1927, 1942, 1947) attempt to...

What Kind of Combat Sport Is Sociology?

Criticism is not merely a good thing; the discipline requires it to advance. Precisely because it is so important, criticism must be held to high scholarly standards. As I will show, Wacquant’s review of Sidewalk quotes selectively and misleadingly and systematically misrepresents the work as a whole. The review is thoroughly inaccurate and unreliable. Forty years after Jane Jacobs wrote The De...