Ideology and General Theory: The Case of Sociological Functionalism

1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
George A. Huaco
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
General Theory ◽  
Symbolic Interaction ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
World War ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
American Sociology ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S

It is a commonplace of our recent past that functionalism and the second system of Talcott Parsons (a distinctive version of functionalism) rose to power or attained hegemony in American sociology shortly after the end of World War II, retained this hegemony through the 1950s and 1960s, and lost a near-exclusive hold in the early 1970s when many of the younger sociologists abandoned a holist or transindividual perspective in favor of an interpersonal face-to-face context (associated with the social psychological concerns of symbolic interaction and ethnomethodology). What accounts for this? Why did functionalism and the second system of Parsons capture the intellectual allegiance of so many intelligent men and women in American sociology precisely at the end of World War II? What explains the almost total hegemony of this persuasion of general theory for more than two decades? Finally, what accounts for the fact that many younger sociologists withdrew their allegiance to these views at the end of the 1960s or early 1970s?

Family and Childhood

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret L. King
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Childhood And Youth ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Annales School

Scholars largely neglected the history of the family until after World War II, when they began to employ theoretical perspectives imported from the social sciences. In the 1960s, two principal figures triggered its study: Philippe Ariès, associated with the French Annales school, and Peter Laslett, cofounder at Cambridge University, England, of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Since that period, studies have proliferated on the history of family and household in Europe and its subregions and on the related topics of childhood and youth.

scholarly journals Racial and Social Prejudice in the Colonial Empire

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-44
Author(s):  
Patrícia Ferraz de Matos
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Interracial Marriage ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Social Prejudice ◽  
Scientific Fields

This article analyses the issue of miscegenation in Portugal, which is directly associated with the context of its colonial empire, from late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. The analysis considers sources from both literary and scientific fields. Subsequently, aspects such as interracial marriage, degeneration and segregation as well as the changes brought about by the end of World War II and the social revolutions of the 1960s are considered. The 1980s brought several changes in the attitude towards Portuguese identity and nationality, which had meanwhile cut loose from its colonial context. Crossbreeding was never actually praised in the Portuguese colonial context, and despite still having strong repercussions in the present day, lusotropicalism was based on a fallacious rhetoric of politically motivated propaganda.

The existentialist public administrator

2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 432-451 ◽  
Author(s):  
William L. Waugh
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Management Technique ◽  
Public Administrators ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Officials ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
The Social ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Societal Problems

The philosophical roots of existentialism can be found in the writings of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. Sartre used existentialism to frame the social and political issues of the day after World War II and Camus helped popularize the philosophyʼns focus on individualism and personal freedom. Existentialism provided justification for challenging public officials and regimes and was embraced again by public administrators and citizens frustrated by the failures of foreign and domestic policies in the 1960s and 1970s. Today existentialism and transcendentalist phenomenology remain strong alternatives to empiricism as a methodology in the study of human behavior. They provide a philosophical basis for determining and applying ethical standards, as well as a basis for encouraging public administrators to address major societal problems rather than being overly focused on management technique and administrative process.

Building the Population Bomb

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Klancher Merchant
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
Population Control ◽  
Reproductive Justice ◽  
World War ◽  
Population Growth Rates ◽  
The Social ◽  
Environmental Integrity ◽  
The 1960S

Building the Population Bomb examines how human population came to be understood as a problem in the twentieth century, how it became an object of intervention for governments, scientists, and nongovernmental organizations, and how some forms of intervention got coded as legitimate while others were recognized as coercive. It traces the emergence and growth of two scientific perspectives on population from the 1920s to the present. The first, rooted in the natural sciences, considered the world’s population as a whole in relation to natural resources. The second, rooted in the social sciences, considered national population growth rates in relation to economic growth. These two perspectives converged briefly after World War II, convincing world leaders that population growth posed a barrier to economic development and a threat to worldwide peace and environmental integrity. The book documents how this overpopulation consensus attracted vast sums of money to demography and population control, and teases out the differences between population control, birth control, and family planning. It concludes with the fracturing of this consensus at the end of the 1960s, constituting the factions that structure today’s debates over whether the world’s population is growing too quickly or not quickly enough, and over what should be done about it. The book documents how population growth came to take the blame for the world’s most complex and pressing problems, and how efforts to solve “the population problem” have diverted attention and resources from the pursuit of economic, environmental, and reproductive justice.

Max Weber in America

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence A. Scaff
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
The United States ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
Science And Culture ◽  
Source Of Information

Max Weber, widely considered a founder of sociology and the modern social sciences, visited the United States in 1904 with his wife Marianne. The trip was a turning point in Weber's life and it played a pivotal role in shaping his ideas, yet until now virtually the only source of information about the trip was Marianne Weber's faithful, but not always reliable, 1926 biography of her husband. The book carefully reconstructs this important episode in Weber's career, and shows how the subsequent critical reception of Weber's work was as American a story as the trip itself. The book provides new details about Weber's visit to the United States—what he did, what he saw, whom he met and why, and how these experiences profoundly influenced Weber's thought on immigration, capitalism, science and culture, Romanticism, race, diversity, Protestantism, and modernity. It traces Weber's impact on the development of the social sciences in the United States following his death in 1920, examining how Weber's ideas were interpreted, translated, and disseminated by American scholars such as Talcott Parsons and Frank Knight, and how the Weberian canon, codified in America, was reintroduced into Europe after World War II.

Identity Discourses and Diasporic Aesthetics in Black Paris: Community Formation and the Translation of Culture

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-58
Author(s):  
Bennetta Jules-Rosette
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Total Population ◽  
Small Population ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
African Immigration ◽  
Identity Discourses ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
The 1960S

Diasporic African communities in France are a byproduct of the demise of the colonial enterprise and the social and economic reconfiguration of France after World War II. Prior to the 1960s, African immigration to France was sporadic, encompassing students, intellectuals, and a small population of workers and war veterans. The 1960 census recorded a total of 18,000 sub-Saharan Africans residing in France (Dewitte 18). By 1982, the African immigrant population had leapt to 127,322 (INSÉÉ, Recensement général). The 1990 census aggregated North and sub-Saharan Africans, for a total population of 1,633,142 (INSÉÉ, Recensement de la population). None of these figures include the substantial and ongoing presence of Afro-Antilleans in France.

A “Glimpse through an Interstice Caught”: Fictional Portrayals of Male Homosexual Life in Twentieth-Century Sydney

PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 344-347
Author(s):  
Garry Wotherspoon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Mardi Gras ◽  
Male Homosexual ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Homosexual Activity ◽  
The 1960S

Sydney is probably best known nowadays for its annual gay and lesbian mardi gras parade, beamed worldwide to millions of TV and Internet viewers, marking it as one of the iconic gay cities of the contemporary world. And while Sydney also had a reputation from its earliest convict-colony days as a city with high levels of homosexual activity—one early chief justice damned it as a “Sodom” in the South Pacific (UK, Parliament, 18 Apr. 1837, 518; question 505)—only in the last two or three decades have Sydney's homosexual or gay subcultures openly flourished and, perhaps grudgingly, been accepted. Indeed, from its earliest days until some years after World War II, Australia was in the grip of Victorian moralistic attitudes, only finally broken by the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and the social movements from the 1970s.

Nature Behind Barbed Wire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie Y. Chiang
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Us History ◽  
War Relocation Authority ◽  
The Social ◽  
Japanese Ancestry

The mass imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in US history. Removed from their homes on the temperate Pacific Coast, Japanese Americans spent the war years in ten desolate camps in the nation’s interior. Although scholars and commentators acknowledge the harsh environmental conditions of these camps, they have turned their attention to the social, political, or legal dimensions of this story. Nature Behind Barbed Wire shifts the focus to the natural world and explores how it shaped the experiences of Japanese Americans and federal officials who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency that administered the camps. The complexities of the natural world both enhanced and constrained the WRA’s power and provided Japanese Americans with opportunities to redefine the terms and conditions of their confinement. Even as the environment compounded their feelings of despair and outrage, they also learned that their willingness (or lack thereof) to transform and adapt to the natural world could help them endure and even contest their incarceration. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story. Japanese Americans and WRA officials negotiated the terms of confinement with each other and with a dynamic natural world.

The Social Identity of Hosts and Patrons

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christel Lane
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Organizational Identity ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Segregation ◽  
Social Mixing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Post War ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter analyses inns, taverns, and public houses in their social context, exploring their organizational identity and the social positions of their owners/tenants. It examines how patrons express their class, gender, and national identity by participation in different kinds of sociality. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century hostelries afforded more opportunities for cross-class sociability than in later centuries. Social mixing was facilitated because the venues fulfilled multiple economic, social, and political functions, thereby providing room for social interaction apart from communal drinking and eating. Yet, even in these earlier centuries, each type of hostelry already had a distinctive class character, shaping its organizational identity. Division along lines of class hardened, and social segregation increased in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to World War II. In the post-War era, increased democratization of society at large became reflected in easier social mixing in pubs. Despite this democratization, during the late twentieth century the dominant image of pubs as a working-class institution persisted.

Epistemic competitions over Jewish Holocaust survivors’ stories in interviews

2021 ◽  
pp. 095792652199214
Author(s):  
Kim Schoofs ◽  
Dorien Van De Mieroop
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Identity Work ◽  
Epistemic Authority ◽  
World War ◽  
Master Narratives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Specialist Knowledge ◽  
Expert Status ◽  
The One

In this article, we scrutinise epistemic competitions in interviews about World War II. In particular, we analyse how the interlocutors draw on their epistemic authority concerning WWII to construct their interactional telling rights. On the one hand, the analyses illustrate how the interviewers rely on their historical expert status – as evidenced through their specialist knowledge and ventriloquisation of vicarious WWII narratives – in order to topicalise certain master narratives and thereby attempt to project particular identities upon the interviewees. On the other hand, the interviewees derive their epistemic authority from their first-hand experience as Jewish Holocaust survivors, on which they draw in order to counter these story projections, whilst constructing a more distinct self-positioning to protect their nuanced personal identity work. Overall, these epistemic competitions not only shaped the interviewees’ identity work, but they also made the link between storytelling and the social context more tangible as they brought – typically rather elusive – master narratives to the surface.

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