Sociologist Quotes

A fundamental problem in such studies stems from the long tradition that has regarded artistic productions as social facts. By regarding such productions as social facts the analyst is relieved of the burden of demonstrating what meanings these productions have for the artist and his audience. It is too frequently assumed that such meanings can be identified by a capable analyst, independent of the interpretations brought to such works by the artist or his audiences. In my judgement artist productions must be seen as interactional creations; the meanings of which arise out of the interactions directed to them by the artist and his audience.

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

Theories are just disposable tools in the production of knowledge

Manuel Castells

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

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.

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

Being frozen into the passive position of an object whose very existence depends on the eye of its beholder turn the educated modern Western women into a harem slave.

Fatema Mernissi

The world has become a photographable present, and the photographed present has been entirely eternalized. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it.

Siegfried Kracauer

Whenever there is an absolute truth at stake, the manners become careless. This applies both to the owners as well as their opponents of that truth and to all people involved.

System theories have been applied to a wide spectrum of empirical cases and policy issues. Parsons and his followers, in particular, applied their systems theory to diverse empirical phenomena in sociology as well as in other disciplines: modernization, economics, politics, social order, industrialization and development, Fascism and McCarthyism, international relations, social change and evolution, complex organizations, health care, universities, religion, professions, small groups, and family as well as abstract questions such as the place of norms in maintaining social order both historically and cross-nationally. Marxian theory and dynamic system theories have also been applied to a spectrum of diverse empirical and policy subjects.

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.

When buffering, leveling, and forecasting do not protect their technical cores from environmental fluctuations, organizations under norms of rationality resort to rationing.

James D. Thompson

Even though fathers, grandparents, siblings, memories of ancestors are important agents of socialization, our society focuses on the attributes and characteristics of mothers and teachers and gives them the ultimate responsibility for the child's life chances.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot

A group of women who valued motherhood, but valued it on their own timetable, began to make a new claim, one that had never surfaced in the abortion debate before this, that abortion was a woman's right. Most significantly, they argued that this right to abortion was essential to their right to equality -- the right to be treated as individuals rather than as potential mothers.

Love is the supreme value around which all moral values can be integrated into one ethical system valid for the whole of humanity.

Pitirim Sorokin

In the face of this fact, is there not some justification for the opinion that the United States owe their very existence to the Jews? And if this be so, how much more can it be asserted that Jewish influence made the United States just what they are—that is, American? For what we call Americanism is nothing else, if we may say so, than the Jewish spirit distilled.

What I am and what I know I owe to my father's library and to my mother's salon.

Nicolaus Sombart

Education doesn't have aims. It is the aim of other things.

When three generations are present in a family, one of them is bound to be revolutionary.

Elise M. Boulding

We didn't rally them there. We never went looking for trouble. We only rallied on our own street, but we always won there.

William Foote Whyte

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

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

Hubert M. Blalock, Jr.

To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose,

C. Wright Mills

If both new and true, it is not significant.

Robert K. Merton

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

Harriet Martineau