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This paper provides a descriptive overview of the various curriculum, teaching, advising and assessment changes implemented in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock through a series of recommendations made by the American Sociological Association in their 1990 monograph, Liberal Learning and the Sociology Major, under the Re‐forming‐the‐Major project supported by a grant from the American Association of Colleges. Curriculum changes structured new coursework concentrations and linked them with other community and academic programs. New critical thinking and collaborative learning modules were incorporated within all courses with specific demands required of all faculty. Also discussed are the multifaceted efforts to create a sense of community among faculty, staff and students within our program. An integral part of this effort was a systematic overhaul of our advising system and a stronger substantive (financial) support of our Sociology/Anthropology Club. An important by‐product of the program assessment activities was to develop a mechansim to assist faculty to buy into this change inducing initative. An Annual Review Menu was established to reward faculty for participation in new efforts and is also briefly presented alomg with some attendant problems.

The relationship between research pursued in sociology as an academic discipline and sociological research undertaken as a contribution toward social policy formation is a somewhat uneasy one in the USA. The author undertakes to examine the evolving relationship between the disciplinary and professional thrusts of the American sociological enterprise.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the potential of life story for the teaching of sociology to Social Work students. It contains the results of a teaching experiment in higher education which aims to foster sociological imagination among students.

The study employs a mixed methodology. The quantitative data came from a survey handed out to the students with closed and open questions. The qualitative information came from the contents of class exercises in which the students had to connect the theoretical contents of the course of sociology with the biographical narratives of different research subjects.

The results reflect student satisfaction or appreciation regarding the use of the life story as a teaching resource, as well as a successful acquisition of sociological skills and knowledge, such as critical thinking, micro-macro connection and the interplay between structure and agency.

Life story and narrative methods should be employed in post-secondary education as teaching instruments.

The study contributes to expand the reflection on narrative techniques as a pedagogical tool. The paper provides several examples of class exercises with biographical narratives that have demonstrated to be successful for teaching sociology in higher education.

A recurrent criticism of commercial citation indexes is their failure to cover citations found in monographic literature. There exists the possibility that citation‐based surveys of scholarly communication and influence which ignore references in monographs may produce partial results. The study examined the scholarly literature of sociology. Tens of thousands of references from monographs and leading academic journals were analysed. The relative rankings of authors who were highly cited in the monographic literature did not change in the journal literature of the same period. There is, however, only a small overlap between the most highly cited authors based on the journal sample and those based on the monograph sample. The lack of correlation suggests that there may be two distinct populations of highly cited authors.

Draws on interviews with 76 English professors in 4 US universities to document emerging definitions of multiculturalism and connect them to organizational conditions in each department. Suggests that findings showed that the professors assigned meaning to the ambiguous and contested word, multiculturalism, according to the principles of organizational convenience rather than poligical conviction. Emphasizes the power of institutional routines for withstanding ideological challenges and illuminates the mechanisms through which resistance operates.

Compares race relations in two suburban communities in order to show that middle‐class blacks meet with some success when they temporarily exchange their racial identity for a class‐based identity. Collects data through ethnography and individual interview to examine the conditions under which middle‐class blacks construct and assert a sub‐urban identity. States that success varies with the racial composition of the suburban community and the white neighbours’ level of the satisfaction with the community.

The purpose of this paper is to articulate a meaningful response to recent calls to “indigenize” and “decolonize” the Anthropocene in the social sciences and humanities; and in doing so to challenge and extend dominant conceptualisations of the Anthropocene offered to date within a posthuman and more-than-human intellectual context.

The paper develops a radical material and relational ontology, purposefully drawing on an indigenous knowledge framework, as it is specifically exemplified in Maori approaches to anthropogenic impacts on species and multi-species entanglements. The paper takes as its focus particular species of whales, trees and humans and their entanglements. It also draws on, critically engages with, and partially integrates posthuman and more-than-human theory addressing the Anthropocene.

The findings of this study are that we will benefit from approaching the Anthropocene from situated and specific ontologies rooted in place, which can frame multi-species encounters in novel and productive ways.

The paper calls for a more expansive and critical version of social science in which the relations between human and more-than-human becomes much more of a central concern; but in doing so it must recognize the importance of multiple histories, knowledge systems and narratives, the marginalization of many of which can be seen as a symptom of ecological crisis. The paper also proposes adopting Zoe Todd’s suggested tools to further indigenize the Anthropocene – though there remains much more scope to do so both theoretically and methodologically.

The paper argues that Anthropocene narratives must incorporate deeper colonial histories and their legacies; that related research must pay greater attention to reciprocity and relatedness, as advocated by posthuman scholarship in developing methodologies and research agendas; and that non-human life should remain firmly in focus to avoid reproducing human exceptionalism.

In societies where populations are coming to terms in different ways with living through an era of environmental breakdown, it is vital to seek out forms of knowledge and progressive collaboration that resonate with place and with which progressive science and humanities research can learn and collaborate; to highlight narratives which “give life and dimension to the strategies – oppositional, affirmative, and yes, often desperate and fractured – that emerge from those who bear the brunt of the planet’s ecological crises” (Nixon, 2011, p. 23).

The paper is original in approaching the specific and situated application of indigenous ontologies in some of their grounded everyday social complexity, with the potential value of opening up the Anthropocene imaginary to a more radical and ethical relational ontology.

The purpose of this paper is to describe, situate and justify the use of creative nonfiction as an overlooked but legitimate source of text for use in social inquiry, specifically within the ambit of narrative inquiry. What potential lies in using creative writing, creative nonfiction specifically, as a source of text in social research? How may it be subjected to modes of analysis such that it deepens understandings of substantive issues? Links are explored between creative nonfiction and the social context of such accounts in an attempt to trace how writers embed general social processes in their narrative.

Three exemplars from literary magazines are described in which whiteness is the substantive theme. The first author is a woman who writes about her relationship with her landscaper, the second story is written by a man who is overwhelmed by guilt after uttering a racial slur, and the third text is by a man who describes his attempts to help a homeless couple. The authors’ interpersonal experiences with people unlike themselves tell something significant about the relationship between selfhood and power relations.

No singular pattern emerges when analyzing these three narratives through the critical lens of whiteness. This is because whiteness is not a subject position or static identity but a practice, something that it is done in relation to others. It is a collective capacity whose value is realized only in dynamic relationship with others. As a rich source of narratives, creative nonfiction may generate insights about whiteness and middle classness and how their intersections give rise to complex and contradictory sets of social relations.

There is very little precedence for using creative nonfiction as text for analysis in any discipline in the social sciences despite its accessibility, its richness and its absence of risk. Inviting the sociological imagination in its project to link the personal to the political, it opens possibilities for the analysis of both in relationship to each other. As a common form of narrating everyday understandings, creative nonfiction offers something unique and under-valued to the social researcher. For these reasons, the paper is highly original.

The purpose of this paper is to present a narrative review of studies on the citing behavior of scientists, covering mainly research published in the last 15 years. Based on the results of these studies, the paper seeks to answer the question of the extent to which scientists are motivated to cite a publication not only to acknowledge intellectual and cognitive influences of scientific peers, but also for other, possibly non‐scientific, reasons.

The review covers research published from the early 1960s up to mid‐2005 (approximately 30 studies on citing behavior‐reporting results in about 40 publications).

The general tendency of the results of the empirical studies makes it clear that citing behavior is not motivated solely by the wish to acknowledge intellectual and cognitive influences of colleague scientists, since the individual studies reveal also other, in part non‐scientific, factors that play a part in the decision to cite. However, the results of the studies must also be deemed scarcely reliable: the studies vary widely in design, and their results can hardly be replicated. Many of the studies have methodological weaknesses. Furthermore, there is evidence that the different motivations of citers are “not so different or ‘randomly given’ to such an extent that the phenomenon of citation would lose its role as a reliable measure of impact”.

Given the increasing importance of evaluative bibliometrics in the world of scholarship, the question “What do citation counts measure?” is a particularly relevant and topical issue.