Suchergebnisse

The author reviews the primary frameworks through which North American sociologists have conceived of the relation between formal education and culture and explains how sociologists' preponderant conception of formal schooling as an individual-level phenomenon and a metrical quantity has come to constrain intellectual progress in much of the subfield. The author offers two analytic strategies that might help loosen this constraint.

The author reviews the primary frameworks through which North American sociologists have conceived of the relation between formal education and culture and explains how sociologists' preponderant conception of formal schooling as an individual-level phenomenon and a metrical quantity has come to constrain intellectual progress in much of the subfield. The author offers two analytic strategies that might help loosen this constraint. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2008 The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

AbstractWe integrate contemporary sociological scholarship on higher education to appraise universities as peculiar organizations, on three dimensions. Universities arepositionally centralto the institutional order of modern societies, providing working links between state, market, civil society, and private‐sphere organizations. Universities arepolysemic, embodying civic, economic, and sacred meanings simultaneously. And universities arequasi‐sovereign, enjoying a substantial margin of jurisdiction over their own boundaries and internal affairs. These insights are harmonious with classic insights on the character of academic organization and offer concise dimensions for observing variation in higher education systems across space and time.

Though both sociologists of the professions and social workers themselves would predict that social work will be concentrated where there is social "trouble," neither can fully account for variations in the allocation of social work and the mix of social work tasks we observed. Using our research in neonatal intensive care units, we offer an account of social work as organizationally based caring. We argue that social workers are interactional and legal shock absorbers, that they buffer their employing organizations' central processes and their most powerful personnel from the disruptions of social variability, and that they protect the hospital from legal liability.

AbstractThe massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior scholarship names academic leaders as key drivers of this expansion, yet the conditions for the possibility and fate of their activity remain under-specified. We fill this gap by theorizing what Randall Collins first callededucational entrepreneurshipas a special kind of strategic action in the US polity. We argue that the cultural authority and organizational centrality of universities in the US national context combine with historical contingency to episodically produce conditions under which academic credentials can be made viable solutions to social problems. We put our theorization to the test by revisiting and extending a paradigmatic case: the expansion of engineering education at Stanford University between 1945 and 1969. Invoking several contemporaneous and subsequent cases, we demonstrate the promise of theorizing educational expansion as an outcome of strategic action by specifically located actors over time.