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An Opinion on Public Opinion Polls

If you’ve ever taken a survey, you know what it’s like to feel limited in giving an opinion: a simple “agree” or “disagree” doesn’t always capture the complexity of opinions; a few blank lines may leave too much room for you to be clear in your response; or maybe you don’t have an instant opinion [...]

Cleveland Abductions

It's a heart-warming story. Three young women, long since given up for dead by the authorities are found alive and well 10 years after their disappearance. It's a horrific story. Three young women are abducted and subjected to a decade of imprisonment, degradation, sexual abuse and forced pregnancy. Guess which bits the media have focused on.

VotD: Length of the Average Dissertation

Nathan Yau at Flowing Data links to this lovely analysis of average dissertation lengths at Minnesota. Here’s the key chart: Two random thoughts about this. 1. History, as befits its reputation, really is a bit of an outlier in having long dissertations, with Anthropology a close second, and 2. Sociology has one of the widest [...]

theories of great social actors

When I visited Millsaps College a few weeks ago, I got into a discussion about international relations theory with my host, political scientist Michael Reinhard. I asked him why we (social scientists) needed to study famous political leaders, like Julius Caesar or Winston Churchill. His argument was intriguing. He said that highly successful social actors [...]

Sociological Science is coming

Jenn Lena broke the news before I could.  I’ll add my excitement and say that creating an open source sociology journal with a fast and limited review process that allows online comments and community engagement is something that needed to happen. And it IS happening. In Fall 2013 you can submit your papers to Sociological [...]

Classifying the classifiers

The largest ASA section just chose the biggest winners: The Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in the Sociology of Culture is awarded to Lynette Spillman for Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations (University of Chicago Press, 2012). The Clifford Geertz Prize for the Best Article in the Sociology of Culture [...]

More Certain About Uncertainty

May 7, 2013 Posted by Jay Livingston It’s nice to have your hunches confirmed by real data.Two years ago, the Republicans were blaming the slow recovery on “uncertainty.” The job creators (businesses), so their theory went, were not creating jobs because they were uncertain about regulations and taxes that might be in store. Show More Summary

Feeling Good with God

When Tanya Marie Luhrmann, a Stanford anthropologist, studies religion, she’s not asking whether God is real. Rather, she wants to know how believing in a higher power affects the lifecourse. Writing in The New York Times, Luhrmann argues that the positive effects of church attendance go beyond simply increasing social capital through community interaction—it can [...]

jaap blonk performs schwitter’s ursonate (1922-33)

The original poem is here. Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

do black phds make more than black mds?? no, not really

Last week, we had a discussion about academia and social mobility. Is it the case that low SES individuals are well served by a career in academia? My response is no. Graduate education is highly uncertain. Even if you get the degree there’s a good chance that you might be adjuncting. You might have to [...]

reviving resource dependence theory

A while ago I asked, “what happened to resource dependence theory?” Although resource dependence theory seemed to be the dominant macro-organizational theory of the late 1970s, by the early 1990s the theory was eclipsed by institutional theory and population ecology. In the previous post, I offered some reasons for why this might have happened, but [...]

Five Books on Marx and Marxism

It was that there Karl Marx's 195th birthday yesterday, and things would be remiss if this blog didn't mark it in some way. So here are my five favourite books on Marx and Marxism. Selections from the Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci...Show More Summary

Fisking Dan Hodges on UKIP and Labour

I quite like Dan Hodges corner at the Telegraph. He writes well and is one of the few hard Blairite commentators around willing to give it straight. But he's often badly, dangerously wrong. With his 1997 route map to electoral victory out, Dan is terrified of anything that sniffs of social democracy. Show More Summary

Thinking Critically About Statistics and Their Sources

By Sally Raskoff In the sciences, we use theory and methods to empirically assess “reality”. While we can often play with data to explore the relationships between our concepts(our variables), it is important to frame what we’re doing with good...

map of american dialects with way too much information

  Click here for the original picture. Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

New Blogs

You all know what the first Sunday of the month means... 1. Birmingham Socialist Party (Socialist Party) (Twitter) 2. Cosmarxpolitan (Unaligned) 3. Doug Wright Save Your Services (Unaligned) 4. Free Steve Topley (Unaligned) 5. Life Under Thatcher (Compass) (Twitter) 6. Show More Summary

valdedictorians and class background

The Chronicle of Higher Education features a study of valedictorians and finds that class background affects where they apply to college: Poorer students remain underrepresented at America’s top colleges, research has shown. And their...Show More Summary

BNP to Enter UKIP

It will no doubt be a cack-handed operation, but that is - apparently - what the BNP are planning to do. This from Nick Griffin's "analysis" of Thursday's election results on the BNP's website. Join us – or do this! If, for whateverShow More Summary

Boogie Wonderland

No Keynes Please, We’re Straight

May 4, 2013 Posted by Jay Livingston Hard money, a strong currency, Spartan-like austerity, concern that inflation will weaken the dollar. It’s not just that the conservative analysis of the crisis has been wrong or that the conservative solutions have been disastrous (even the Austerians in Europe have had second thoughts). Show More Summary