I just noticed the last paragraph of White’s “Notes on the Constituents of Social Structure” (1965), which we’ve been talking about this week.
Either-or intensities and infinitely sharp criteria of membership have been assumed in defining nets and cats. The realities of social structure are more blurred. The most revealing approach to these realities is through […]
In a classic discussion of scientists sampling the ground in the Amazon rainforest, Bruno Latour details the process through which physical bits of soil are turned into recorded measurements and data points for comparison and analysis. He remarks,
Stage by stage, we lost locality, particularity, materiality, multiplicity, and continuity, such that, in the end, there was […]
A video interview with Harrison White, conducted by a German blogger at the December 2007 Luhmann conference in Lucerne. Reptating goo, social networks, Niklas Luhmann, and your mother-in-law as reality point.
While at a conference in Germany over the weekend, I was initially quite chuffed by the greeting on my hotel-room TV:
But I quickly learned I am quite unable to compete on this front:
Somewhat more substantively, the conference, on norms and values, was attended by a bunch of interesting philosophers and political science types of a […]
Just ten days or so ago Henry wrote that Chuck Tilly had won the SSRC’s Hirschman Prize, and linked to a classic paper of his. Tilly died this morning. He had been battling cancer for several years.
Tilly was a comparative and historical sociologist, an analyst of social movements, a social theorist, a political sociologist, a […]
Via Sally Satel, here’s a bit from a Freakonomics discussion. Stephen Dubner asked a bunch of people, “How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made in the last century?” One of the respondents, Dan Ariely (a Professor of Management at MIT) cites some work about organ donation (emphasis added):
One of my favorite graphs in […]
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