The mounting loss of the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples presents environmental as well as ethical issues. Fundamental among these is the sustainability of indigenous societies and their ecosystems. Although the commercial expropriation of traditional knowledge grows, rooted in a global, corporate application of intellectual property rights (IPRs), the survival of indigenous societi...

I propose to approach economic sociology as the application of social stratification, organizational theory, and the sociology of development to the study of the organization of economic activity. I begin by reviewing the growth of specialty fields in sociology during the postwar period. I then outline the origins and major tenets of a comparative economic sociology that breaks with specializat...

The discussion in the sociology of science about the role of model systems in biology provides an invitation to reflect on whether and how they operate in sociology in comparison to other disciplines. This paper shows that sociology too relies on objects of study that receive a disproportionate amount of attention and implicitly come to stand in for a specific class of objects. But, unlike othe...

In this article we revisit Alvin Gouldner’s The Corning Crisis o,f Wvstern Sociology ( I 970). I n part, this article is an attempt to apply Gouldner’s own lessons about the sociology of knowledge to his own work, situating it with respcct to the dominant epistemological unconscious of late 1960s American sociology as well as thc broader historical context of a still-vibrant Fordist inode of so...

In this paper it is argued that mischaracterization concerning the use of science in the U.S. policy process has lead to unreasonable expectations about the role that scientific information can play in the development of environmental and public health policies. This in turn has lead to implementation of misguided and self-defeating policy initiatives designed to ensure the objectivity or “soun...

How do we characterize and explain the behavioral patterns of the Chinese bureaucracy amid China’s great transformation over the past three decades? The prevailing “tournament competition” model presented in the literature emphasizes the role of incentive design to explain bureaucratic behaviors. We develop an alternative model of “muddling through”—characterized by a reactive response to multi...

Decision making process in agriculture is fundamentally concerned with achieving integrated, productive and sustainable use of financial, biological and social capital at different levels. As our understanding and knowledge of the environmental and production resource base has improved, the need for integrated approaches to management has been more widely appreciated. The intensification of agr...

Starting from a paper about closing the gap between sociology and medicine in Brazil and the United Kingdom that was published in 1971, a historical update was made with the aim of reflecting on the new shapes of health-related teaching and research within the social and human sciences, in these two countries. The methodology was qualitative and the study was developed using secondary data. The...

Public health is a broad field that touches several different medical disciplines such as epidemiology, public health informatics, health statistics, environmental protection (ecology), sociology, health promotion, disease prevention and organization of health care for nosological groups of the population. In Europe and the world today is developed a fairly extensive network of scientific and p...