Suchergebnisse

The numerous cases of fraud in science that have been reported in scientific & general publications generate suspicion that the institution of science is not self-policing. According to the functionalists, particularly R. K. Merton, the scientific community regulates itself through observance of the norms of universalism, communism, organized skepticism, & disinterestedness. However, the growing specialization of science, competition for research grants, interpenetration of science, government & business, rewards for original research rather than replications, acceptance of authority, & unquestioning commitment to paradigms & ideologies, present few barriers to its perpetration & many temptations for it. The results of fraud in science are not only loss of truth, but, where science is relevant to technology & policy, loss of economic resources & even of life. AA.

Originally published in 1993, this book opens a new and major line of interpretation, showing that Georg Simmel is the essential sociologist of the postmodern age. The authors trace the important contributions that Simmel's writings can make to current studies of intellectual ethics, textual methodology, sociological theory, philosophy of history and cultural theory

With regard to the American presidency, the prestige media perform the primary function of nonpartisan interested mediation between the president and his supporters and the loyal opposition to the president. This article draws on the formal sociology of Georg Simmel as a theoretical background, the American prestige newspapers as a resource, and the presidency of G. W. Bush before and immediately after 9/11/01 as a case study. When, as in the instance of the crisis following the 9/11 skyjackings, there is no partisan opposition to the president, the prestige media take up that role as interested mediators to try to ensure what they as representatives of hegemonic capitalism consider to be the proper functioning of the office.

A selective appropriation of postmodernist theories is undertaken with special reference to their applicability to macrosociology and to other branches of sociological inquiry that employ conceptions of social and cultural totality. The appropriation is premised on the thesis that theories of culture, such as postmodernism, can contribute to sociology by their analyses of cultural form, providing sociology with general descriptions of what social processes must mediate and with guidance on how to grasp its own cultural form(s). Three notions of cultural totality, "bricolage" (Claude Lévi‐Strauss), "discursive formation" (Michel Foucault), and "deconstruction" (Jacques Derrida), are considered. All have in common a description of cultural form that stresses nonsystematic order. They are contrasted to Talcott Parsons'modernist and systematizing macrotheoretic reflection on culture and society. A deconstruction of Parsons yields the alternative of a less‐than‐systematic, postmodernized (macro)‐ sociology.