Search results for ""Author Charles Camic""

This volume is a collection of original essays by sociologists and intellectual historians who have been leading figures in recent scholarship on the classical sociological theorists.

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This volume is a collection of original essays by sociologists and intellectual historians who have been leading figures in recent scholarship on the classical sociological theorists.

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A bold new biography of the thinker who demolished accepted economic theories in order to expose how people of economic and social privilege plunder their wealth from society’s productive men and women.Thorstein Veblen was one of America’s most penetrating analysts of modern capitalist society. But he was not, as is widely assumed, an outsider to the social world he acidly described. Veblen overturns the long-accepted view that Veblen’s ideas, including his insights about conspicuous consumption and the leisure class, derived from his position as a social outsider.In the hinterlands of America’s Midwest, Veblen’s schooling coincided with the late nineteenth-century revolution in higher education that occurred under the patronage of the titans of the new industrial age. The resulting educational opportunities carried Veblen from local Carleton College to centers of scholarship at Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, where he studied with leading philosophers, historians, and economists. Afterward, he joined the nation’s academic elite as a professional economist, producing his seminal books The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise. Until late in his career, Veblen was, Charles Camic argues, the consummate academic insider, engaged in debates about wealth distribution raging in the field of economics.Veblen demonstrates how Veblen’s education and subsequent involvement in those debates gave rise to his original ideas about the social institutions that enable wealthy Americans—a swarm of economically unproductive “parasites”—to amass vast fortunes on the backs of productive men and women. Today, when great wealth inequalities again command national attention, Camic helps us understand the historical roots and continuing reach of Veblen’s searing analysis of this “sclerosis of the American soul.”

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With the publication in 1937 of his first book, The Structure of Social Action, Talcott Parsons (1902-79) established himself as one of America's most important social theorists. Yet Parsons's essays from the decade preceding 1937 are virtually unknown to theorists and historians of sociology. By gathering the majority of Parsons's articles and book reviews published between 1923 and 1937, Charles Camic supplies the first comprehensive selection of the writings of the "early Parsons." In his superb introductory essay, Camic situates Parsons's early writings in their sociointellectual and biographical context. Drawing upon extensive historical research, he identifies three overlapping but relatively distinct thematic phases in the early development of Paron's ideas: that on capitalist society and its origins, that one the historical development of the theory of action, and that on the foundations of analytical sociology. Camic correlates the emergence of these phases to Parsons's experiences at Amherst College in the early 1920s, in London and Heidelberg during the mid-1920s, and at Harvard University in the important period from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s. Reproducing in full each of twenty-one selections, this volume charts the changes and continues in the early development of some of Parsons's most fundamental ideas.

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Over the past quarter century, researchers have successfully explored the inner workings of the physical and biological sciences using a variety of social and historical lenses. Inspired by these advances, the contributors to "Social Knowledge in the Making" turn their attention to the social sciences, broadly construed. The result is the first comprehensive effort to study and understand the day-to-day activities involved in the creation of social-scientific and related forms of knowledge about the social world. The essays collected here tackle a range of previously unexplored questions about the practices involved in the production, assessment, and use of diverse forms of social knowledge. A stellar cast of multidisciplinary scholars addresses topics such as the changing practices of historical research, anthropological data collection, library usage, peer review, and institutional review boards. Turning to the world beyond the academy, other essays focus on global banks, survey research organizations, and national security and economic policy makers. "Social Knowledge in the Making" is a landmark volume for a new field of inquiry, and the bold new research agenda it proposes will be welcomed in the social sciences, the humanities, and a broad range of non-academic settings.

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The discipline of sociology was born-and has been recurrently reconstituted-in response to the fragmentation of ideas about the social world. For two centuries, sociologists have sought refuge in "synthesis:" programs designed to integrate multiple perspectives within a unifying framework. Yet even as this cause has inspired many of the discipline's major thinkers, past and present, its objective has proven elusive, leaving nearly as many syntheses as synthesizers. This volume considers an alternative response that has recently developed within sociology to the crisis of intellectual fragmentation: "the dialogical turn." Rather than decry the multiplicity of social theories, research methods, and results, this response welcomes a plurality of orientations and approaches as the essential basis for establishing and maintaining productive dialogue. Examining this exciting development, The Dialogical Turn builds on the ideas of Donald N. Levine, whose extensive writings on the forms and functions of intellectual dialogue provide the point of departure for twelve original essays. Written by an internationally renowned group of scholars, these innovative chapters explore the dialogical possibilities for sociology both constructively and critically. The contributors assess the role of sociology in the conversation across contemporary academic disciplines, exploring the fundamental structural and conceptual reconstructions now taking place in sociology and neighboring fields.

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Max Weber's Economy and Society is widely considered the most important single work in sociology and among the most important in the history of the social sciences. This volume provides a critical and up-to-date introduction to Weber's magnum opus. While much has been published about the various parts of Economy and Society, this is the first book to cover all of its major sections and themes, as well as to discuss the methodological vision that unites them. In Max Weber's Economy and Society, a distinguished group of scholars illuminates the central arguments of Economy and Society and appraises their contemporary relevance for the analysis of the economy, the polity, law, religion, and social action. With essays that are both theoretical and empirical, this book will be of interest to those already familiar with Weber's work and to those encountering it for the first time.

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Max Weber's Economy and Society is widely considered the most important single work in sociology and among the most important in the history of the social sciences. This volume provides a critical and up-to-date introduction to Weber's magnum opus. While much has been published about the various parts of Economy and Society, this is the first book to cover all of its major sections and themes, as well as to discuss the methodological vision that unites them. In Max Weber's Economy and Society, a distinguished group of scholars illuminates the central arguments of Economy and Society and appraises their contemporary relevance for the analysis of the economy, the polity, law, religion, and social action. With essays that are both theoretical and empirical, this book will be of interest to those already familiar with Weber's work and to those encountering it for the first time.

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