E-Book Overview
Winner of the 1993 Dartmouth Medal, this classic reference has been updated to reflect many changes in society and in the field of sociology in recent years. Articles covering core issues such as race, poverty, violence, economics, pregnancy and abortion have been updated and expanded, and completely new articles have been written on topics such as the Internet, privacy and epidemiology.
E-Book Content
Encyclopedia of Sociology Second Edition
Encyclopedia of Sociology Second Edition
VOLUME
5
Edgar F. Borgatta Editor-in-Chief University of Washington, Seattle
Rhonda J. V. Montgomery Managing Editor University of Kansas, Lawrence
SOCIOLOGY AMONG THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
of the ancestors is surprising, because ‘‘following advances in the division of labor and specialization, the works of the classics ceased to be directly useful to an average sociologist. To do correct research in a specialized branch of sociology one does not in fact have to read the works—bulky, often abstruse, and semi-philosophical in nature— written by Marx and Spencer, Simmel and Weber, Mead and Znaniecki. To do such research if suffices to master, on the basis of a possibly recent handbook, the standard techniques and the current theories of the middle range’’ (Szacki 1982, p. 360).
SOCIOLOGY AMONG THE SOCIAL SCIENCES The relationship between sociology and the other social sciences is in reality a relationship between sectors of different disciplines, not between whole disciplines. Sociology is one of the most open disciplines toward other disciplines. This openness is manifested in the citation patterns in academic publications, which allows one to measure the degree of coherence of a discipline, the relationship between specialties within a discipline, and the interactions among disciplines. If specialists in a subdiscipline tend to cit