Processual Sociology

Processual Sociology
Author: Andrew Abbott
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2016-03-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 022633662X

For the past twenty years, noted sociologist Andrew Abbott has been developing what he calls a processual ontology for social life. In this view, the social world is constantly changing-making, remaking and unmaking itself, instant by instant. In 'Processual Sociology', Abbott first examines the endurance of individuals and social groups through time and then goes on to consider the question of what this means for human nature.

Processual Sociology

Processual Sociology
Author: Andrew Abbott
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2016-03-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022633676X

For the past twenty years, noted sociologist Andrew Abbott has been developing what he calls a processual ontology for social life. In this view, the social world is constantly changing—making, remaking, and unmaking itself, instant by instant. He argues that even the units of the social world—both individuals and entities—must be explained by these series of events rather than as enduring objects, fixed in time. This radical concept, which lies at the heart of the Chicago School of Sociology, provides a means for the disciplines of history and sociology to interact with and reflect on each other. In Processual Sociology, Abbott first examines the endurance of individuals and social groups through time and then goes on to consider the question of what this means for human nature. He looks at different approaches to the passing of social time and determination, all while examining the goal of social existence, weighing the concepts of individual outcome and social order. Abbott concludes by discussing core difficulties of the practice of social science as a moral activity, arguing that it is inescapably moral and therefore we must develop normative theories more sophisticated than our current naively political normativism. Ranging broadly across disciplines and methodologies, Processual Sociology breaks new ground in its search for conceptual foundations of a rigorously processual account of social life.

The University Revolution

The University Revolution
Author: Eric Lybeck
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2021-05-12
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1351017535

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351017558, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Few institutions in modern society are as significant as universities, yet our historical and sociological understanding of the role of higher education has not been substantially updated for decades. By revisiting the emergence and transformation of higher education since 1800 using a novel processual approach, this book recognizes these developments as having been as central to constituting the modern world as the industrial and democratic revolutions. This new interpretation of the role of universities in contemporary society promises to re-orient our understanding of the importance of higher education in the past and future development of modern societies. It will therefore appeal to scholars of social science and history with interests in social history and social change, education, the professions and inequalities.

Time, Memory, and the Processual Approach in Historical Sociology

Time, Memory, and the Processual Approach in Historical Sociology
Author: Jiří Šubrt
Publisher: Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
Total Pages: 150
Release: 2024-02-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 8024657511

Within this publication, which is published to commemorate a milestone in Jiří Šubrt’s life, the editor Lucy Císař Brown has organised selected contributions by the author into four thematic areas: a) historical sociology: its development, content and professional focus; b) sociological issues of time, temporality and collective memory; c) theoretical discussions concerning conceptual problems and dilemmas in contemporary social sciences; d) developmental trends affecting the shape of contemporary societies and their historical development. What connects these thematic areas into one whole, giving the book a unified character, is Šubrt’s approach to sociology which emphasises the historical and processual perspective.

The Sociology of Howard S. Becker

The Sociology of Howard S. Becker
Author: Alain Pessin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2017-05-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022636299X

Howard S. Becker is a name to conjure with on two continents —in the United States and in France. He has enjoyed renown in France for his work in sociology, which in the United States goes back more than fifty years to pathbreaking studies of deviance, professions, sociology of the arts, and a steady stream of books and articles on method. Becker, who lives part of the year in Paris, is by now part of the French intellectual scene, a street-smart jazz pianist and sociologist who offers an answer to the stifling structuralism of Pierre Bourdieu. French fame has brought French analysis, including The Sociology of Howard S. Becker, written by Alain Pessin and translated into English by Steven Rendall. The book is an exploration of Becker’s major works as expressions of the freedom of possibility within a world of collaborators. Pessin reads Becker’s work as descriptions and ideas that show how society can embody the possibilities of change, of doing things differently, of taking advantage of opportunities for free action. The book is itself a kind of collaboration—Pessin and Becker in dialogue. The Sociology of Howard S. Becker is a meeting of two cultures via two great sociological minds in conversation.

John Dewey and the Notion of Trans-action

John Dewey and the Notion of Trans-action
Author: Christian Morgner
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2019-10-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030263800

Engaging with several emerging and interconnected approaches in the social sciences, including pragmatism, system theory, processual thinking and relational thinking, this book leverages John Dewey and Arthur Bentley’s often misunderstood concept of trans-action to revisit and redefine our perceptions of social relations and social life. The contributors gathered here use trans-action in a more specific sense, showing why and how social scientists and philosophers might use the concept to better understand our social life and social problems. As the first collective sociological attempt to apply the concept of trans-action to contemporary social issues, this volume is a key reference for the growing audience of relational and processual thinkers in the social sciences and beyond.

Conceptualizing Relational Sociology

Conceptualizing Relational Sociology
Author: C. Powell
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2013-12-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 113734265X

Edited by François Depelteau and Christopher Powell, this volume and its companion, Applying Relational Sociology: Networks, Relations, addresses fundamental questions about what relational sociology is and how it works.

The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology

The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology
Author: François Dépelteau
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 677
Release: 2018-01-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319660055

This handbook on relational sociology covers a rapidly growing approach in the social sciences—one which is connected to the interests of a large, diverse pool of researchers across a range of disciplines. Relational sociology has been one of the key foundations of the “relational turn” in human sciences since the 1980s, and it offers a unique opportunity to redefine the basic epistemological and ontological principles of sociology as we know it. The contributors collected here aim to elucidate the complexity and the scope of this growing approach by dealing with three central questions: Where does relational sociology come from and what are its principal concerns? What are the main theoretical and methodological currents within relational sociology? What have we studied in relational sociology and what are the results?

Varieties of Social Imagination

Varieties of Social Imagination
Author: Barbara Celarent
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2017-03-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 022643396X

In July 2009, the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) began publishing book reviews by an individual writing as Barbara Celarent, professor of particularity at the University of Atlantis. Mysterious in origin, Celarent’s essays taken together provide a broad introduction to social thinking. Through the close reading of important texts, Celarent’s short, informative, and analytic essays engaged with long traditions of social thought across the globe—from India, Brazil, and China to South Africa, Turkey, and Peru. . . and occasionally the United States and Europe. Sociologist and AJS editor Andrew Abbott edited the Celarent essays, and in Varieties of Social Imagination, he brings the work together for the first time. Previously available only in the journal, the thirty-six meditations found here allow readers not only to engage more deeply with a diversity of thinkers from the past, but to imagine more fully a sociology—and a broader social science—for the future.