Sociology

Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17
First version: 9 February 2003

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Somewhat unfairly, this notebook also serves as my dumping-ground for general issues related to all the social sciences, as well as "social theory" (so far as I can make out: sociology unburdened by any but the most stylized facts).

See also:
• Agent-Based Modeling
• Archaeology
• Collective Cognition
• Complex Networks
• Cultural Criticism
• Cultural Minorities
• Economics
• Historical Materialism
• Human Ecology
• the Information Society
• Institutions and Organizations
• Memes
• Methodology for the Social Sciences
• Nationalism
• Non-Rational Persuasion
• Peasant Revolts, Rural Insurgenices
• Political Elites
• Psychoceramics
• Religion
• Social Contagion, Information Cascades, Diffusion of Innovations, Etc.
• Social Networks
• Social Neuroscience
• Sociology of Science
• Technology and Society
• Thought and Society
• Transmission of Inequality
• World History

Recommended, big picture:
• Stanislav Andreski
  • Elements of Comparative Sociology
  • Social Science as Sorcery
• Raymond Boudon [Ideology and Self-Persuasion are excellent books which show people can have good reasons to believe bad ideas, due to their training and experience, social position, etc. ("Satisfying" is a very compressed summary of the main argument of Self-Persuasion.) It's a "cold" theory of ideology, and a quite convincing one, especially since it shows why some of the most effective ideologies are ones with actual scientific content, which "hot" theories must find puzzling. Social Change is a sensible plea to give up theories of social change, development, etc. in general, in favor of models which can account for particular processes through the aggregation of individual adaptive actions.]
  • The Analysis of Ideology
  • The Art of Self-Persuasion
  • Theories of Social Change: A Critical Survey
  • The Unintended Consequences of Social Action
• William Bruce Cameron, Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking
• Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity
• Ernest Gellner
• Jon Elster
  • "Marxism, Functionalism and Game Theory: The Case for Methodological Individualism," Theory and Society 11 (1982): 453--482 [JSTOR]
  • Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences
• John H. Goldthorpe, Sociology as a Population Science
• Peter Hedström, Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology
• Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg (eds.), Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory
• 'Abd-ar-Rahmân Abû Zayd ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah [There's a fine translation available from Princeton UP. See also Muhsin Mahdi's Ibn Khaldûn's Philosophy of History]
• Jack Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict
• Stanley Lieberson, A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change [A detailed, empirical examination of changing fashions in names, mostly in developed western countries in the 20th century, which succeeds, I think, in demonstrating that the causes of these changes were largely endogenous; that these cultural changes were not signs of any social changes. One way to think of this --- though it is not how Lieberson puts it, at any rate not here --- is by analogy with neutral models in evolutionary biology. A neutral model specifies a set of evolutionary mechanisms other than natural selection and adaptation, and so lets us see what kind of evolutionary changes we would expect if everything were adaptively neutral (hence the name); deviations from neutral models let us identify actual adaptive evolution. (Neutral models, ideally anyway, provide severe tests of hypotheses about adaptation.) When dealing with cultural evolution, people have generally supposed either that cultural changes are adaptations to something else ("society"), or at least that it reflects changes in something else. This has led to an awful lot of just-so stories, and uncritical analogy-mongering, often under the name of "critical theory". No doubt things have sometimes happened "just so", but when? A good set of neutral models --- which Lieberson begins to construct here --- provides a good battery of tests for separating the base shaping the superstructure (or whatever) from culture doing its own oblivious thing.]
• John Levi Martin, Social Structures
• Otto Neurath, Empiricism and Sociology
• Ned Polsky, Hustlers, Beats, and Others
• Thomas Schelling, Micromotives and Macrobehavior
• Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons
• W. G. Runciman, The Social Animal [See under memes]

Recommended, close-ups:
• Richard Alba, The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream
• Stanislav Andreski, Military Organization and Society
• Raymond Aron
  • Progress and Disillusion
  • The Century of Total War
  • Main Currents in Sociological Thought
    1. Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville, and the Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848
    2. Durkheim, Pareto, Weber
• Jenna Bednar and Scott Page, "Can Game(s) Theory Explain Culture? The Emergence of Cultural Behavior Within Multiple Games", Rationality and Society 19 (2007): 65--97 [PDF preprint via Prof. Bednar]
• James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technical and Economic Origins of the Information Society
• Bennett M. Berger, An Essay on Culture: Symbolic Structure and Social Structure
• Albert J. Bergesen, "Durkheim's Theory of Mental Categories: A Review of the Evidence", Annal Review of Sociology 30 (2004): 395--408 [Commentary]
• Raymond Boudon
  • "A 'satisfying' theory of social knowledge"
  • "The Sense of Values"
• William A. ("Buzz") Brock and Steven N. Durlauf, "Interaction-Based Models," SFI Working Paper 00-05-028 ["By interactions, we refer to interdependencies between individual actions that are not mediated by markets"]
• Rogers Brubaker, Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities
• Bruce G. Carruthers and Arthur L. Stinchcombe, "The Social Structure of Liquidity: Flexibility, Markets, and States", Theory and Society 28 (1999): 353--382
• James A. Davis, "What's Wrong with Sociology?", Sociological Form 9 (1994): 179--197 [JSTOR. --- My comments, 2024.]
• Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields", American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 147--160 [JSTOR. Comments under Institutions and Organizations]
• Steven N. Durlauf and H. Peyton Young (eds.), Social Dynamics
• Jeremy E. Fiel, "Decomposing School Resegregation: Social Closure, Racial Imbalance, and Racial Isolation", American Sociological Review 78 (2013): 828--848 [Comments]
• Linton C. Freeman, The Development of Social Network Analysis: A Study in the Sociology of Science https://pinboard.in/u:cshalizi/b:e6d42d961690
• Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
• John H. Goldthorpe, On Sociology
  1. Critique and Program
  2. Illustration and Retrospect
• Roger V. Gould, "The Origins of Status Hierarchies: A Formal Theory and Empirical Test", American Journal of Sociology 107 (2002): 1143--1178 [Comments]
• Gary King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data
• Michael W. Macy and Robert Willer, "From Factors to Actors: Computational Sociology and Agent-Based Modeling," Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 143--166
• Charles Manski, Identification for Prediction and Decision [Review: Better Roughly Right Than Exactly Wrong]
• Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study
• Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements
• Samuel L. Popkin, The Rational Peasantt: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam
• Patrick Sharkey, Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality
• T. R. Rochon, Culture Moves: Ideas, Activism and Changing Values
• W. G. Runciman, "The Diffusion of Christianity in the Third Century AD as a Case-Study in the Theory of Cultural Selection", European Journal of Sociology 45 (2004): 3--21 [More on Runciman's theory of cultural selection.]
• Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Information and Organizations
• Charles Tilly
  • Democracy
  • Durable Inequality
  • Trust and Rule
  • Why?
• Stephen Turner [Social theory. But useful for figuring out what could possibly count as good sociological explanations, and what attempts really are question-begging, or even mind-boggling. In particular, he nicely punctures the whole shared-mental-objects idea, found in Durkheim, Bourdieu, etc., etc.]
  • The Social Theory of Practices: Tradition, Tacit Knowledge, and Presuppositions
  • Brains/Practices/Relativism: Social Theory after Cognitive Science [But most of the arguments he bases on connectionist learning would work just fine with symbolic learning systems]
• Terry Williams [Exemplary field-work, harrowingly related]
  • The Cocaine Kids
  • Crackhouse: Notes from the End of the Line
• William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears
• Erik Olin Wright, Understanding Class

To read, history of sociology, and works of historical interest:
• John Patrick Diggins, Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy
• Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theory
• Irving Louis Horowitz, The Decomposition of Sociology
• Thomas G. Masaryk, Constructive Sociological Theory: The Forogtten Legacy of Thomas G. Masaryk [ed. Jonathan B. Imber. In addition to being the first president of Czechoslovakia, and an interlocutor of Karel Capek, Masaryk was at the time a sociologist of enough importance for his clash with Durkheim over suicide to be noteworthy...]
• Robert K. Merton
  • On Social Structure and Science
  • Social Theory and Social Structure
• Vilfredo Pareto, Mind and Society
• Lawrence A. Scaff, Max Weber in America
• Georg Simmel
  • Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms (ed. Donald N. Levine)
  • George Simmel Online
  • "How Is Society Possible?"
  • "The Metropolis and Mental Life"
• Max Weber, Economy and Society
• William F. Whyte, Participant Observer: An Autobiography

To read, mathematical models / why is sociology not a mathematical science?
• E. Ben-Naim and S. Redner, "Dynamics of Social Diversity", cond-mat/0503451
• Jonah Berger and Gaël Le Mens, "How adoption speed affects the abandonment of cultural tastes", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) 106 (2009): 8146--8150 [PDF reprint via Dr. Berger]
• Raymond Boudon, Mathematical Structures of Social Mobility
• Christofer R. Edling, "Mathematics in Sociology," Annual Review of Sociology 2002
• Robert L. Goldstone and Marco A. Janssen, "Computational models of collective behavior", Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (2005): 424--430 [Brief review on agent-based models]
• Petter Holme and Andreas Gronlund, "Modelling the dynamics of youth subcultures", physics/0504181
• James Montgomery, Mathematical Models of Social Systems
• Paul E. Smaldino, Modeling Social Behavior: Mathematical and Agent-Based Models of Social Dynamics and Cultural Evolution
• W.-X. Zhou, D. Sornette, R. A. Hill and R. I. M. Dunbar, "Discrete Hierarchical Organization of Social Group Sizes", cond-mat/0403299

To read, social evolution:
• Richard Newbold Adams
  • Energy and Structure: A Theory of Social Power
  • The Eighth Day: Social Evolution as the Self-Organization of Energy
• Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society
• Allen W. Johnson and Timothy Earle, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State
• W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory [I've read vol. 1, and am making my way through vol. 2.]

To read, how did sociology get this way (which is not quite the same thing as the intellectual history of the field):
• Raymond Boudon, The Crisis in Sociology
• Christian Smith, The Sacred Project of American Sociology [This must've made him a lot of friends...]
• Stephen P. Turner, "De-intellectualizing American sociology: A history, of sorts", Journal of Sociology 48 (2012): 346--363

To read, not otherwise or not yet classified:
• Andrew Abbott
  • The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor [I need to finish this one of these decades]
  • Time Matters: on Theory and Method
• Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
• Elijah Anderson
  • Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City
  • Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community
• Raymond Aron
  • Democracy and Totalitarianism [= Sociologie des societes industrielles]
  • The Elusive Revolution; Anatomy of a Student Revolt
  • The Imperial Republic; The United States and the World, 1945--1973
  • In Defense of Decadent Europe
  • On War
• Patrik Aspers, Orderly Fashion: A Sociology of Markets
• Roger Bartra and Claire Joysmith, The Imaginary Networks of Political Power
• Clare Birchall, Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip [review]
• Clifford Bob, The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media, and International Activism [From the blurb: "How do a few Third World political movements become global causes celebres, while most remain isolated? This book rejects dominant views that needy groups readily gain help from selfless nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Instead, they face a Darwinian struggle for scarce resources where support goes to the savviest, not the neediest. Examining Mexico's Zapatista rebels and Nigeria's Ogoni ethnic group, the book draws critical conclusions about social movements, NGOs, and 'global civil society'."]
• Raymond Boudon
  • Education, Opportunity and Social Inequality
  • The Uses of Structuralism
• Milos Brocic, "Alienation and Activism", American Journal of Sociology 125 (2023): 1291--1334
• Sun-Ki Chai, Choosing an Identity: A General Model of Preference and Belief Formation
• Matthew A. Chamberlin, "Symbolic Conflict and the Spatiality of Traditions in Small-scale Societies", Cambridge Archaeological Journal 16 (2006): 39--51
• Randall Collins, Macrohistory: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run
• Lewis Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict [Seems a clear case of functionalism gone mad to me, but Coser was supposed to be good, and anyway it deserves a fair trial before being shot.]
• Charles Crabtree, S. Michael Gaddis, John B. Holbein, Edvard Nergard Larsen, "Racially Distinctive Names Signal Both Race/Ethnicity and Social Class", Sociological Science 9 (2022): 454--472
• Diana Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing
• Arthur J. Deikman, The Wrong Way Home: Uncovering the Patterns of Cult Behavior in American Society
• Louis Dumont, Homo hierarchius: The Caste System and Its Implications
• Jon Elster
  • "Merton's Functionalism and the Unintended Consequences of Action"
  • Sour Grapes
  • Ulysses and the Sirens
• Felix Elwert, Tamas Keller and Andreas Kostdam, "Rearranging the Desk Chairs: A Large Randomized Field Experiment on the Effects of Close Contact on Interethnic Relations", American Journal of Sociology 128 (2023): 1809--1840
• Diego Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
• Carel B. Germain, Human Behavior in the Social Environment: An Ecological View
• Amin Ghaziani, "An 'amorphous mist'? The problem of measurement in the study of culture", Theory and Society 38 (2009): 581--612
• Roger V. Gould, Collision of Wills: How Ambiguity about Social Rank Breeds Conflict
• Georges Gurvitch, The Social Framework of Knowledge
• Russell Hardin, One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict
• Michael Hechter, Principles of Group Solidarity
• Peter Hedstrom and Peter Bearman (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Analytical Sociology
• Frank Henderson, Honor
• Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts
• Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications
• Lawrence King, Gábor Scheiring, and Elias Nosrati, "Deaths of Despair in Comparative Perspective", Annual Review of Sociology 48 (2022): 299--317
• Elliott A. Krause, Death of the Guilds: Professions, States, and the Advance of Capitalism, 1930 to the Present
• Robert Layton, Orde and Anarchy: Civil Society, Social Disorder and War
• Peter V. Marsden, "The Sociology of James S. Coleman", Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005)
• John Levi Martin, The Explanation of Social Action
• Rory McVeigh, Michael R. Welch, Thoroddur Bjarnason, "Hate Crime Reporting as a Successful Social Movement Outcome", American Sociological Review 68 (2003): 843--867
• John W. Mohr, Christopher A. Bail, Margaret Frye, Jennifer C. Lena, Omar Lizardo, Terence E. McDonnell, Ann Mische, Iddo Tavory and Frederick F. Wherry, Measuring Culture
• Linda D. Molm, Coercive Power in Social Exchange
• Barrington Moore, Moral Aspects of Economic Growth, and Other Essays
• Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration
• Andrew J. Perrin and Katherine McFarland, "Social Theory and Public Opinion", Annual Review of Sociology 37 (2011): 87--107
• Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies
• Eric H. Rambo, "Symbolic Interests and Meaningful Purposes: Conceiving Rational Choice as Cultural Theory", Rationality and Society 11 (1999): 317--342
• Dawn T. Robinson, "Control Theories in Sociology", Annual Review of Sociology 33 (2007): 157--174
• Fabio Rojas, Theory for the Working Sociologist
• Martin Ruef, The Entrepreneurial Group: Social Identities, Relations, and Collective Action
• Peter St. Jean, Pockets of Crime: Broken Windows, Collective Efficacy, and the Criminal Point of View
• Jane C. Schneider and Peter T. Schneider, Reversible Destiny: Mafia, Antimafia, and the Struggle for Palermo
• Edward Shils, The Constitution of Society
• Richard Swedbeg
  • The Art of Social Theory
  • Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology
• Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters
• Charles Tilly
  • Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties
  • The Politics of Collective Violence
  • Social Movements, 1768--2004
• Stefan Timmermans, Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths
• Jonathan H. Turner, A Theory of Social Interaction
• Stephen P. Turner, Understanding the Tacit
• Sidney Verba, Small Groups and Political Behavior: A Study of Leadership
• Harrison C. White, Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action
• John Willinsky
  • If Only We Knew: Increasing the Public Value of Social Science Research
  • Technologies of Knowing
• Robert Wuthnow, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism
• Viviana A. Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy