sociology

How can we explain the variations between judicial decisions in criminal matters? Using the method of natural experiment, economist Arnaud Philippe sets out to identify the factors that influence decisions and determine criminal sanctions. At the risk of forgetting sociology?

Two hundred years after its emergence in the West, capitalism has become a culture in the broad sense, a way of life, and an ideology. It permeates all spheres of society, including work and politics, and insinuates itself in children through education and the family.

Pierre Bourdieu declared that sociology has the power to reflect on itself, and in particular to reflect on its own scientificity. Four rare or previously unpublished texts serve to illustrate this doctrine, the implications of which are still open to debate.

The unconscious, according to Bernard Lahire, is “socially structured.” This principle makes possible an individual sociology of dreams that requires—like all psychoanalytic interpretation—the presence of a third party to grasp the forces bearing down on the dreaming subject.

Care, which refers both to a kind of work and a social relationship, covers a wide range of realities and often precarious activities. Helena Hirata subjects this polysemic term to piercing and uncompromising sociological scrutiny.

Can sociology be a science just like the rest? Against the grain of the dominant epistemology, which defines the specificities of sociological thinking in terms of their differences with the so-called “hard” sciences, Dominique Raynaud argues that a single scientific model is possible.

Poverty and great social inequality are being created at this very moment in the routines of small children. Talking, eating, socializing, taking care of oneself, keeping oneself clean, dressing, obeying, and learning: children’s sociological future is determined by the adoption of even the most trivial of habits.

A French qualitative strand of research opens new paths to understanding wealth accumulation in the post-Piketty era and renews our vision of elite groups and beyond.

Critical of capitalism and nationalism, the work of Thorstein Veblen focuses mainly on the analysis of institutions: their strengths, their weaknesses, and the way they manage to stabilize and build up in spite of their failures.

Flames, disbelief, dread. A cathedral burns and tears flow. But why does our architectural heritage and its disappearance move us so greatly? The sociologist Nathalie Heinich offers some answers.

Challenging the essentialist conception of transgendered people as “born in the wrong body,” Miquel Missé proposes a sociology of the body that emphasizes the burden of social norms.

Marc Joly’s book engages a vigorous debate with Jean-Louis Fabiani’s critical reading of Bourdieu’s theoretical legacy. Both authors seem to disagree on the precise boundaries of Bourdieu’s determinism and the space he leaves to liberty, resistance and reflexivity.

The first two years of Bourdieu’s teaching at the Collège de France were less a general introduction to his concepts than a long immersion in his method, at the intersection of reflexivity, symbolics and structural analysis.

Surinder Jodhka brings new perspectives to the scholarship on caste and helps understand how this social institution has evolved and transformed itself in modernizing India. By empirically looking at the lived reality of caste, he reveals to what extent it is a constitutive element of everyday politics.

To understand the symbolic revolution Manet launched, it is necessary to break with traditional representations of art history. This requires an intellectual revolution in its own right. Thus behind Manet, there lurks another heresiarch: Bourdieu himself.

At a time when gender is on the debating table, the Dictionnaire genre et science politique [Dictionary of gender and political science] does more than just summarise current knowledge in the field. The book reminds us that politics has always had gender-related divisions that define it, and that the recent inclusion of gender issues in the political arena raises new questions.

Was Max Weber a champion of modern capitalism and the triumph of Western rationality? Two recent books reply with a resounding “no,” as they seek to correct, on very different grounds, exaggerated interpretations of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Between literary and sociological experimentation, the publication of the email exchange that led to the book by Howard S. Becker and Robert R. Faulkner on jazz repertoires reveals the secrets of the creative process.

How can art, creativity and genius be subject to sociological and economic analysis? According to Pierre-Michel Menger, their rational status can be based on the idea of uncertainty. In Nathalie Heinich’s view, although Menger’s project has both theoretical density and captivating reflections on artistic life, it sometimes fails to get very deeply into the subject, because it does not pay enough attention to the point of view of the actors, especially when it comes to the issue of recognition.

Since the 18^th century, India has been portrayed in contradictory ways. While scholarly knowledge is based on the philological study of texts, literary Orientalism expresses its fascination for a society well-known to preserve the values of order and hierarchy. For Roland Lardinois the anthropology of Louis Dumont illustrates the ambiguity of these discourses.

The quality of an explanation depends much on the relationship between the sociologist and her informants. The more unequal it is, the more she will resort to “third person” explanations—a tendency most visible among the fathers of the discipline. Yet listening to the actors does not necessarily mean turning to a “soft” sociology—because actors are able to map and explain the social space in which they live.

Sociologist Bénédicte Zimmerman’s empirical studies of employer groups and participative management reveals how the tension that exists between the individual and the collective is being reshaped in today’s flexible organizations. “Flexicurity” is not a mere word. And freedom at work is not just a matter of autonomy.

In her latest book, Saskia Sassen undertakes a ruthless demystification of economic globalization. She argues that globalization is embedded in institutions and places and reveals the nature of contemporary social conditions while indicating there are future options open for individual and collective action.

Basing his discussion on a reading of recognized classics in social science, Howard Becker offers a critique of the new ways in which sociological work is to be funded in the United States and calls for the respect of the fundamentally inductive nature of qualitative research.