Sociologist Quotes

Cooperation is in fact the living and productive pulsation of the multitudo. Cooperation is the articulation in which an infinite number of the singularities are composed as productive essence of the new. Cooperation is innovation, richness, and thus the basis of the creative surplus that defines the expression of the multitudo.

A standing army is like a standing member. It's an excellent assurance of domestic tranquility, but a dangerous temptation to foreign adventure.

Every time we buy something we deepen our emotional deprivation and hence our need to buy something.

Research is something that everyone can do, and everyone ought to do. It is simply collecting information and thinking systematically about it. The word 'research' carries overtones of abstruse statistics and complex methods, white coats and computers. Some social research is highly specialised but most is not; much of the best research is logically very straightforward. Useful research on many problems can be done with small resources, and should be a regular part of the life of any thoughtful person involved in social action.

A rational religion is a scientific impossibility...

Treating caste as a form of race is politically mischievous; what is worse, it is scientifically nonsensical.

Theories are just disposable tools in the production of knowledge

Manuel Castells

Particular individuals who might never consider dropping out if they were in a different high school might decide to drop out if they attended a school where many boys and girls did so.

James Samuel Coleman

It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him.

Paul Lazarsfeld

Almost all war making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat - including men - from reluctant citizens...

Institutions are social structures that have attained a high degree of resilience. [They] are composed of cultural-cognitive, normative, and regulative elements that, together with associated activities and resources, provide stability and meaning to social life. Institutions are transmitted by various types of carriers, including symbolic systems, relational systems, routines, and artifacts. Institutions operate at different levels of jurisdiction, from the world system to localized interpersonal relationships. Institutions by definition connote stability but are subject to change processes, both incremental and discontinuous.

William Richard Scott

As technology advances the entire concept of authority in industry may have to change. In process firms the relationships between superior and subordinate was much more like that between a travel agent and his clients than that between a foreman and operators in mass production. The process foreman's job was to arrange things within limits, set by the plant, which both he and the operators accepted.

We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend gained weight, you gained weight. We discovered that if your friend's friend's friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend's friend's friend became happy, you became happy.

Nicholas A. Christakis

The main problem actors face is uncertainty caused by difficulties in finding suppliers and customers and in controlling their own firm.

Moving further away from realist models, we come to some core ideas of modern sociological institutionalism (see DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Powell & DiMaggio, 1991; Scott, 2001; Jepperson, 2002; Hasse & Kruecken, 2005). Here, actors are substantially empowered and controlled by institutional contexts, and these contexts go far beyond a few norms or network structures. Further, these contexts are by no means simply constructions built up by the contemporary actors themselves, but rather are likely to have prior and exogenous historical origins.

High-consequence risks form one particular segment of the generalised 'climate of risk' characteristic of late modernity - one characterised by regular shifts in knowledge-claims as mediated by expert systems.

Anthony Giddens

Today, as in the Gilded Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective responsibility for employees - just as government has for its citizens.

The manipulation of statistical formulas is no substitute for knowing what one is doing.

Hubert M. Blalock, Jr.

While [bureaucratic] solutions have been frequently criticized by those within and without the organization, no alternative way has been found to cope with the problem of organizing large numbers of people to produce goods and services efficiently.

When the knowledge base of an industry is both complex and expanding and the sources of expertise are widely dispersed, the locus of innovation will be found in networks of learning, rather than in individual firms.

Walter W. Powell

There is a crisis in American leadership in the middle of the twentieth century that is partly due, I think, to the declining authority of an establishment which is now based on an increasingly castelike White-Anglo Saxon-Protestant (wasp) upper class.

E. Digby Baltzell

They [human beings] are unwilling to gamble that God made those people who are skilled at rational argumentation uniquely virtuous. They protect themselves and others from cleverness by obscuring their preferences.

I think that few people are aware how early it is right to respect the modesty of an infant.

Harriet Martineau

If both new and true, it is not significant.

Robert K. Merton

Men make their own history; but they make it under given conditions, and they become entangled thereby in a fate which is in part the result of other men having made their own history earlier.

Reinhard Bendix