Drawing upon a theoretical approach that emphasizes the importance of ideas and political processes in policymaking, the focus of this piece is on how a sociological concept – social exclusion – has been mobilized and manipulated by the EU. Tracing both the sociological and social policy ‘lives’ of the concept, the paper develops an explanation for the EU’s turn to social exclusion that centers...

A clear tension exists between the traditional process-oriented view of interface design and the emerging improvisation-oriented view of interface activity, which arises particularly from sociological investigations of computer-based work. This paper attempts to address this disparity and begin to bridge the gap, focussing on technological foundations and implications, in a way which makes the ...

In recent developments in the realism-constructionism debate, attempts have been made by individual scholars on both sides to assimilate the other side’s insights into one’s own position. With respect to epistemology, such attempts have so far failed. Situated in this context, this article proposes a general approach in which valid insights from constructionism, discourse theory, and pragmatist...

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 ...

OBJECTIVES Patient's therapeutic behavior determines the quality of self care in diabetes. The sociological approach can contribute to a better understanding of the internal logic of patient's behavior. The objective of our work is to study patients representations of their illness and its treatment in Moroccan type 2 diabetic patients. Our study concerns 307 type 2 diabetic patients. METHOD ...

Quantitative analyses of large data sets make use of both linguistic and sociological categories in sociolinguistic studies. While the linguistic categories are generally well-defined and there are sufficient tokens for further definition based on mathematical manipulation, the social characteristics such as socioeconomic class or ethnicity are neither. The familiar problem of grouping speakers...