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 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 does it mean to live for sociology, today? In attempting to answer this question I return to Max Weber’s famous lectures delivered toward the end of his life—one on science as a vocation and the other on politics as a vocation. He presented ‘‘Science as a Vocation’’ in November 1917 toward the end of World War I and the more pessimistic ‘‘Politics as a Vocation’’ in January 1919 after Germ...

Organization theory is a discipline on the boundary between economics of organizations, sociology of organizations, management and political science. She is interested in organizations, both commercial and non-commercial, in all their diversity (company, hospital, union, organization, administration, conventions). It analyzes their functioning, structure and development for the purpose of...

In a recent edition of this journal, Mannion and Braithwaite provide a succinct analysis of the emergence, and ultimately limited impact, of what they term the current ‘Safety I’ movement in healthcare. They describe the arc of this field from denial, through engagement via mechanisms and approaches imported from other industries, to the current situation where, despite ‘best efforts,’ error ra...

organization theory is a discipline on the boundary between economics of organizations, sociology of organizations, management and political science. she is interested in organizations, both commercial and non-commercial, in all their diversity (company, hospital, union, organization, administration, conventions). it analyzes their functioning, structure and development for the purpose of bette...

Despite the size and growth of political science and sociology relative to other disciplines, political science and sociology graduate students have received a declining share of funding for dissertation field research in recent years. Specifically, political science and sociology students are losing out to competitive applicants from humanities-oriented fields that provide strong training in a...