By Jeffrey C. Alexander, Gary T. Marx, Christine L. Williams
Instructor, pupil, and chief, Neil Smelser stands as an iconic determine in sociology within the moment half the 20th century. The essays during this quantity, written via widespread students from all walks of the social sciences, show the variety and intensity of Smelser's influence—and his gigantic contributions to diversified fields corresponding to British heritage, social swap, collective habit, larger schooling, the financial system, and psychoanalysis.
Contributors: Jeffrey C. Alexander, Nancy J. Chodorow, Burton R. Clark, Yiannis Gabriel, Arlie Russell Hochschild, James M. Jasper, Christian Joppke, Alberto Martinelli, Gary T. Marx, Lyn Spillman, Piotr Sztompka, R. Stephen Warner, Christine L. Williams, Robert Wuthnow, Viviana A. Zelizer
Reviews:
"For approximately fifty years, Neil Smelser has been one of many world's such a lot extraordinary sociologists. His highbrow variety is impressive, and so too his effect over the self-discipline. The essays accumulated listed below are a becoming tribute accurately simply because they're intellectually wealthy, different, thought-provoking and unafraid of controversy. they give commanding perspectives of a dozen subfields, syntheses of vital strains of labor, and agendas for the future."—Craig Calhoun, President, Social technological know-how learn Council
"If the legacy of students is measured by means of the paintings in their scholars, Neil Smelser has performed rather well certainly. the nice diversity of issues coated during this quantity is a testomony to his sociological breath. This assortment will be learn for what it unearths in regards to the many dimensions of an highbrow existence good lived, in addition to for what it teaches concerning the earlier and the current of our discipline."—Michele Lamont, co- writer of Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of evaluate in France and the United States
"A impressive choice of essays giving expression to the variety and intensity of Neil Smelser's scholarly and highbrow fulfillment. The authors express how Smelser's multidisciplinary synthesis represents a precis of the achievements of economics, psychology and sociology within the moment half the 20th century."—Bryan S. Turner, writer of The physique and Society
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Extra info for Self, Social Structure, and Beliefs: Explorations in Sociology
Example text
Found . ” One woman describes the working-class jobs held by her mother and female relatives. Only one or two mothers are described as energetic and feisty. It may be the occupational hazard of psychoanalytic listening that one hears silences, shatterings, explosions, sadness, absence, and loss, just as it may be the occupational hazard of sociological looking that ones sees inequality, exploitation, power, and rents in the social fabric. In working on the social edges of psychoanalysis, or the psychoanalytic edges of sociology, it is always tempting (and always to be avoided) to cut through the social totality to elaborate psychological themes in common, or to cut through that which constitutes the psychic complexity of any individual to pick out certain patterns or elements in common, as I have just done.
Sociological eye, psychoanalytic ear 23 many students who wished to chart their own course of intellectual endeavor, was purely psychoanalytic: if you are fortunate enough to have found your identity and your passion, these are much more important on a human existential scale than the social and cultural constraints of a profession. I spend this time in personal autobiography to emphasize two elements in Smelser’s contribution. ) One element is the theoretical and professional commitment we share to psychoanalytic modes of thought in themselves.
As with social determinism, thinkers from a variety of fields have tended to assume that cultural meanings have determinative priority in shaping experience and the self. Even those who think in a more constructionist vein claim that actors create meaning by drawing upon available tangles or webs of cultural meaning. Meanings still come entirely from a cultural corpus or stock. People create and experience social processes and cultural meanings psychodynamically—in unconscious, affect-laden, nonlinguistic, immediately felt images and fantasies that everyone creates from birth, about self, self and other, body, and the world—as well as linguistically, discursively, or in terms of a cultural lexicon.
