The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (3 page)

people's experiences. Social transformation involves the mobilization and con-

struction of myths, namely a composite of shared knowledge, critique, and

visionary thinking.

The chapters in this final section are provocative, as they raise questions about scholars in their roles as researchers, teachers, mentors, and colleagues. To

mention one: how is our own vision of a better world ± or our ease with, or

our cynicism about, the present one ± conveyed to students in the classroom?

They also raise questions about the foundation of sociological inquiry and

understanding. Through this century the academy is bound to become more

diverse, with growing access to education by previously excluded groups. This

diversity itself will no doubt provide the foundations for creative dialogues,

contention, and new grounds for consensus.

Finally, the Appendix, ``Data Resources on the World Wide Web,'' prepared by

Kathryn Harker, is a listing of Internet sites for data sources for the purpose of research. It was designed, in part, to encourage international research. It includes listings of established research centers and government agencies that are likely to maintain and expand their databases. Therefore, we consider the listing as

helpful for the purposes of research, and as a source for descriptive comparisons for teaching.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Susan Rabinowitz, at Blackwell Publishers, suggested that I undertake this

project, and after consulting with Karen Edwards, a friend at the American

xvi

Preface

Sociological Association, and Robert K. Merton, who questioned the wisdom of

my doing it, I agreed. There is a great deal of exciting work in sociology these days, and, quite frankly, I thought of the venture as something like a sabbatical in which I would do an immense amount of reading. Because I did this for the

fun of it, royalties will be donated to the Minority Fellowship Program of the

American Sociological Association. Susan Rabinowitz was extremely helpful

and, after launching the project, turned me over to Ken Provencher. He was

my great ally and adviser. He is knowledgeable and wise, and was always

gracious and helpful. He made all of the truly bad moments turn out perfectly

fine, and I am truly thankful to him for his support. Rhonda Pearce and John

Taylor brought the project into home base.

For their kind suggestions in the early stage of this project, I am especially

grateful to Sylvia Walby and Gill Jones, and also Pierre Bourdieu, Hans Joas,

Elihu Katz, Amartya Sen, and Angelika von Wahl. This book is dedicated to

Professor Sen. His contributions to the social sciences are foundational.

The Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel

Hill, provided support for the preparation of the Appendix, for which I thank

the Chair, Arne Kalleberg. Several students, including John Hipp and Keri Iyall

Smith, were helpful with the electronic retrieval of graphs and manuscripts.

Most especially, I thank Anita Sharon ``Shea'' Farrell, who, with meticulous

care and good cheer, logged the manuscripts, cross-checked many references,

standardized the formatting, and kept up with the revisions as they arrived.

Judith R. Blau

Contributors

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naìm is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law,

Emory University. He is the author of Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil

Liberties, Human Rights and International Law; editor of Human Rights

in Cross-cultural Perspectives: Quest for Consensus; Human Rights in Africa:

Cross-cultural Perspectives (with Francis Deng). He has also published numer-

ous articles and book chapters on human rights, constitutionalism and Islamic

law and politics.

Contributors

Judith R. Blau is Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at

Chapel Hill and President of the US chapter of Sociologists without Borders, an

international NGO. She is the author of Architects and Firms (1984), The Shape

of Culture (1989), Social Contracts and Economic Markets (1993), and Race in

the Schools (2003), and has published articles on organizations, networks,

economic inequalities, crime, sociology of science, urban sociology, historical

sociology, medical sociology, and sociology of education.

Frederick H. Buttel is Professor and Chair, Department of Rural Sociology, and

Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

He is currently the President of the Environment and Society Research Commit-

tee (RC 24)of the International Sociological Association, and was previously

President of the Rural Sociological Society.

Charles Camic is Martindale-Bascom Professor of Sociology at the University of

Wisconsin-Madison. Currently, he is also Co- editor of the American Sociological Review. He has written extensively on the interrelationship between the institutional and intellectual development of American sociology in the 1880±1940

xviii

Contributors

period. He is completing a book on the early career of Talcott Parsons and has

begun research on a new intellectual biography of Thorstein Veblen.

William A. Darity, Jr is Boshamer Professor of Economics at the University of

North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Adjunct Professor in Sociology, and Research

Professor at Duke University. His research includes cross-national investigations of racial and ethnic economic inequality, North±South models of trade and

growth, the impact of financial crises on developing countries, economics of

the Atlantic slave trade, and the social-psychological effects of exposure to

unemployment. He has published more than 120 articles in professional journals

and several books.

Bonnie Thornton Dill, professor of Women's Studies and Director of the

Research Consortium and Gender, Race and Ethnicity at the University of

Maryland, College Park, conducts research on African American women,

work, and family. Her books include Women of Color in US Society, co-edited

with Maxine Baca Zinn, and Across the Boundaries of Race and Class.

Raine Dozier is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Washington.

She is working primarily in the fields of gender, sexuality, and culture.

Troy Duster is Chancellor's Professor of Sociology at the University of Califor-

nia, Berkeley, and Professor of Sociology, Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University. He has been a member of the

National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, and the Assembly

of Behavioral and Social Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences, and

served as Chair of the Advisory Committee on Ethical, Legal and Social Issues of the Human Genome Project.

Bonnie Erickson is a member of the Department of Sociology at the University of

Toronto. Her research interests include social networks, culture, work, gender,

and health. She has recently studied the role of different forms of culture in the workplace and the roots of culture in social networks (''Culture, class, and

connections,'' American Journal of Sociology, 1996), the widely varying gender

outcomes in the security industry, and social networks in a large alternative

economy.

Rick Fantasia is Professor of Sociology at Smith College in Northampton,

Massachusetts. The author of Cultures of Solidarity and various other writings

on labor and on culture, Fantasia is currently working on a study of the symbolic and material dimensions of American mass cultural goods in France and their

relationship to traditional sources of cultural authority.

August Gijswijt has published in the areas of the sociology of housing, public

administration, and environmental sociology. Between 1990 and 1998 he was

Contributors

xix

board member and secretary of the Research Committee on Environment and

Society of the International Sociological Association.

David M. Grant is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State Uni-

versity. His current research focuses on poverty and various aspects of urban

inequality, particularly racial inequality in the labor market. He received his PhD

from UCLA in 1998 and has published several articles on race and inequality in

Los Angeles.

Neil Gross is Assistant Professor, University of Southern California. His work

has appeared in Sociological Theory, the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Theory and Society, and the Annual Review of Sociology. His dissertation is a case study in the sociology of ideas.

Maureen Hallinan is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of Sociology

and Director of the Program on the Social Organization of Schools of the

Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame. She cur-

rently studies the determinants and consequences of the organization of instruc-

tion, and organizational effects on students' social relationships. Her previous research includes studies of cross- race friendships in middle and secondary

schools.

Kathryn Harker is a graduate student in the Sociology Department at the Uni-

versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include race and ethnicity, immigration, and the psychological wellbeing of adolescent immigrants.

Pamela Herd is pursuing a PhD in Sociology at Syracuse University. Her main

interest areas are aging, the welfare state, and care work.

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo is Associate Professor in the Department of Soci-

ology and in the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University

of Southern California. She is author of Gendered Transitions: Mexican

Experiences of Immigration, co-editor of Challenging Fronteras: Structuring

Latina and Latino Lives in the US and Gender Through the Prism of Differ-

ence.

Bert Klandermans is professor in Applied Social Psychology at Free University,

Amsterdam. He has published extensively on the social psychological principles

of participation in social movements and labor unions. He is the editor of the

book series Social Movements, Protest, and Contention, and author of The

Social Psychology of Protest.

David Knoke is Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. His

research interests are organizations and social networks. A current project is

the changing network of strategic alliances in the global information sector.

xx

Contributors

Recently published books, with several co-authors, include Comparing Policy

Networks, Organizations in America, and Change at Work.

Richard E. Lee is a Senior Research Associate at the Fernand Braudel Center and

Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Bing-

hamton.

Madonna Harrington Meyer is Associate Professor of Sociology, and Senior

Research Associate at the Center for Policy Research, at Syracuse University.

She is editor of Care Work: Gender, Labor and Welfare States. Her research

emphasizes financial and health security for older Americans, particularly

women and persons of color.

Debra C. Minkoff is Associate Professor at the University of Washington. She is

the author of Organizing for Equality: The Evolution of Women's and Racial-

ethnic Organizations in America, and articles on the organizational dynamics of

contemporary American social movements, particularly the civil rights and

feminist movements. Her current research is on the structure of the US national

social movement sector.

Barbara A. Misztal is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, School of Human-

ities at Griffith University, Brisbane. She is co-editor of Action on Aids (with D.

Moss)and author of Trust in Modern Society (1996)and Informality: Social

Theory and Contemporary Practice (2000).

Samuel L. Myers, Jr is the Roy Wilkins Professor of Human Relations and Social

Justice at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of

Minnesota, where he conducts research on racial economic inequality. Recent

co-authored publications include Faculty of Color in Academe and articles on

family structure, race and earnings disparities, racial differences in child abuse reporting, and the effect of race on alimony and child support appeals.

Melvin L. Oliver is Dean at the University of California±Santa Barbara. He

previously was Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los

Angeles and Officer at the Ford Foundation. He has published widely in the

areas of race and ethnic relations, poverty and inequality, and urban studies.

Siddiqur Rahman Osmani is an economist whose research interests include

poverty, inequality, nutrition, hunger, health, and generally the problems of

economic development. He has worked at the Bangladesh Institute of Develop-

ment Studies, Dhaka, and at the World Institute for Development Economics

Research, Helsinki. He is currently Professor of Development Economics at the

University of Ulster.

John Durham Peters is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the

University of Iowa. He is the author of Speaking into the Air (1999), and has

Contributors

xxi

received a Fulbright Fellowship to Greece, a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship to

England, and a Research Fellowship from the National Endowment for the

Humanities. He teaches courses on media, culture, and society, and social theory.