Past and present currents of sociology: 70 years of Current Sociology

This review paper marks the 70th anniversary of Current Sociology, the first journal founded by the International Sociological Association (ISA). The past seven decades have been a time of immense change within sociology and around the world, and the shifts within the structure and content of the journal mirror these transformations. Current Sociology today is a vastly different publication to the bibliography focused journal of 1952, and remains one of the top global sociology journals, and a proudly international publication. This short overview traces the history of Current Sociology across the decades, highlighting the work of the editors in guiding the development of the journal, and providing a glimpse into the development of the discipline, and the social developments of the past 70 years.

Political sociology in a time of protest

We live in a time of protest. Relative to sociology, political science has traditionally paid little attention to ‘extra-institutional’ forms of political behaviour. For its part, sociology has tended to prioritize the explanation of mobilization processes over political outcomes. Using bibliometric records from 14 political science and sociology journals over the last two decades, this study demonstrates that protest has witnessed a resurgence of interest in political science and that both sociology and political science now share a focus on the outcomes of protest. The article lays out key trends in this research agenda and suggests what is missing, arguing that a political sociology of protest should integrate recent findings from both disciplines to better understand elite decision-making, the mediation of protest information and protestor aims.

From Measures of Association to Multilevel Models: Sociology Journals and the Quantitative Literacy Gap

While most sociology majors must take a statistics course, the content of this course varies widely across departments. Starting from the assumption that sociology students should be able to engage effectively with the sociological literature, this article examines the statistical techniques used in 2,804 journal articles—from four generalist sociology journals from 1990 to 2019 and 11 additional sociology journals from 2019—in order to assess which techniques have risen or fallen in prevalence. Although stalwarts such as ordinary least squares regression, chi-square tests, and t tests maintain strong presences, the rise of logistic regression, interaction effects, and multilevel models has been dramatic. After assessing the proportion of articles students hypothetically could understand given various levels of statistical training, the article ends with suggestions for how to revamp the statistics course to help our students become more numerate citizens, both in their sociology courses and in the world at large.

On the Mortality of Cited Works, Cited Authors, and Writing Authors in Sociology

In this study I take a demographic perspective, analyzing age and mortality of books and articles which are cited, the authors that receive citations, and the authors writing the citations in the full published volumes of 73 sociology journals. I give a new operationalization of dates of deathβ for cited authors and cited works, as well as dates of rebirthα and document risk of death0.1 across the life course for cited works, cited authors, and writing authors in these journals. I report the top 1% cited works and cited authors, and on their untimely deaths. I discuss why sociologists should study sociology’s past and provide a Python package knowknow for replication and extension of these findings.

Climate change in sociology: Still silent or resonating?

Since Lever-Tracy’s call for stronger sociological engagement with climate change in 2008, the number of climate-related contributions to leading sociological journals has increased. Yet, they still represent a small percentage of contributions overall. Reviewing the 37 articles published in eight top-ranked sociology journals until 2018, the authors of the present article identify five main subfields of research: (a) reflections on the role of the social sciences, (b) politics, (c) economy and consumption, (d) media and public perceptions, and (e) global flows. They conclude that the rise in contributions since 2008 indicates that climate change creates some resonance in the disciplinary core of mainstream sociology but that most sociological climate change research is undertaken and published in inter- and transdisciplinary spaces beyond the boundaries of the discipline. Emphasizing that climate change research can provide important epistemic resources for the discipline, the authors argue that sociology would benefit from being more responsive to it.