Sociological approaches to risk and uncertainty are well-developed. These approaches have played an important role in analysing the significance of risk and uncertainty in modern social life. However, it is approaches based on rational actor perspectives in New Public Management that have become pre-eminent in handling social risks in recent UK policies. This paper tackles the puzzle of why soc...

This article is an overview of the contributions of photography to sociology and a discussion of potential uses of photography in sociological research. Visual sociology, after contributing to several studies in the early decades of American sociology, disappeared to reemerge during the 1960s. In the meantime, the use of visual methods in ethnographic description, the study of social processes ...

In examining the research literature on occupational health and safety (OHS), this paper argues that the growth in the number of specialists in OHS has resulted in an emphasis on policy and practice away from more scholastic concerns previously addressed by academics in the disciplines of psychology and sociology. A hiatus has occurred, and this is evidenced by the general absence of studies in...

Through the in-depth analysis of the features of Huabei rural industrialization, the unique factory regime in Baigou, Hebei, and the resulting special workers, this paper reveals two dilemmas the migrant workers in Baigou and larger Hubei area face: Because of the interpersonal network of labor market, personalized trade, familial labor process, and patrimonial management, the workers are unabl...

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...

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...