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Delves into history to find out if sociological knowledge can be applied successfully to policy making. Explains that society is based on the use of multiple knowledge structures and belief systems. Cites examples of centres which were set up in the USA to improve understanding and knowledge in a specific area, which could then contribute towards policy making and, ultimately, improved practice. Discusses the application of knowledge at various points in history, indicating that ruling elites are not motivated by knowledge (intellect) but by sentiment, and that this is still the case today. Refers to various literary works on sociological practice. Advocates that modern social research should be driven by policy issues and that sociologists should seize the opportunity, presented by decentralization, to become policy makers in their own communities.

Loretta Bass, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma, earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Connecticut in 1998. Dr. Bass focuses her research on children and stratification issues in West Africa and the U.S. For her dissertation, Working for Peanuts: Children’s Work in Open-Air Markets in Senegal, she collected and examined both qualitative and quantitative data of child workers and their families. Dr. Bass lived in Senegal from 1994 to 1996, and completed follow-up research in Senegal during the summer of 2000. Her chapter in this collection draws on this research. Her research has appeared in the Population Research and Policy Review, Political Behavior, Anthropology of Work Review, and the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy.Marilou C. Legazpi Blair is the Assistant Director of Institutional Research at Erie Community College. She received her Ph.D. from Penn State, and has performed a substantial amount of research on issues of child development. Aside from her interests in adolescent status attainment, she has also studied the impact of immigration on both adults and children in the United States. She is currently involved in an examination of adults who return to school for the continuation of uncompleted degree work.Sampson Lee Blair is an Associate Professor at The State University of New York at Buffalo. As a family sociologist, most of his research to date has focused on family relationships, and particularly those between parents and children. More recently, he has been involved in studies of justice issues within the familial context. He recently completed his term as editor of Sociological Inquiry, and is scheduled to be a co-editor of Social Justice Research next year.Sally Bould is Professor of Sociology at the University of Delaware with a joint appointment in the department of Individual and Family Studies. She has published numerous articles in the area of the family, family policy and poverty policy. Another article on this research concerning families and neighborhoods will appear in the 2003 Journal of Family Issues. She is the author of the book, Eighty-five Plus, which examines issues of state and family responsibilities for the oldest old and several articles on the oldest old population in the United States, including disability, caregiving and living arrangements. Currently she is a member of the board of The Carework Network.Tiffani Chin recently finished her Ph.D. in Sociology at UCLA. Her dissertation examined how children’s peer cultures intersect with the schools’ social, academic, and evaluative objectives to influence children’s educational experiences. She is currently a Post-Doctoral Scholar with the Middle School Transition Study, studying oppositional culture and students’ transition from elementary school to middle school. Chin is the author of “‘Sixth Grade Madness’: Parental emotion work in the private high school application process” (Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, April 2000) and a co-author of Tutoring Matters: Everything you ever wanted to know about how to tutor (Temple 1999).Amitai Etzioni is the first University Professor of The George Washington University. He served as president of the American Sociological Association from 1994 to 1995, was Senior Advisor to the White House from 1979 to 1980, and was guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in 1978–1979. From 1958 to 1978, he served as Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. He is the editor of The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities, a Communitarian quarterly. He is the author of twenty-one books, including The Monochrome Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Next: The Road to the Good Society (New York: Basic Books, 2001), The Limits of Privacy (New York: Basic Books, 1999), and The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996), which received the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 1997 Tolerance Book Award.David A. Kinney received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Indiana University-Bloomington and did post-doctoral work at the University of Chicago. He is currently Associate Professor of Sociology at Central Michigan University and a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life at the University of Michigan. His publications have appeared in Sociology of Education, Youth and Society, Personal Relationships During Adolescence (Sage), and New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development (Jossey-Bass). He is currently conducting ethnographic research with children and their parents in a study of how families manage work, home life, and children’s activity involvement in a fast-paced society.Jennie Jacobs Kronenfeld is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, Arizona State University. She holds a doctorate (1976) and a master’s (1973) in sociology from Brown University and a B.A. (1971) in sociology and history from the University of North Carolina. She has published over ninety articles and book chapters in medical sociology, public health, medicine, and health services research. She has authored or co-authored fifteen books, on topics such as the social and economic impact of coronary artery bypass surgery, the federal role in health policy, public versus private models of service delivery in several different human services areas, controversial issues in health care policy and schools and child health services. Her current research interests include health policy issues, especially access to health care and child health care issues, and research on preventive aspects of health care.Yun-Suk Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is completing his doctoral dissertation on the role of familial relationship in the effect of performance of household tasks on subjective outcomes for children and married people. His research includes comparing several measures of time spent on housework, and studying about changes in working time. In the fall of 2002, he became a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Cornell Employment and Family Careers Institute.Anna B. V. Madamba is a Research Associate at TIAA-CREF in New York City. With a doctorate in demography, most of her research interests are in the field of educational attainment and performance. Her current research involves the examination of the academic performance of children of single mothers.Kimberly A. Mahaffy is Assistant Professor of Sociology. Her research interests are gender, transitions to adulthood, and adolescent sexual risk taking. She recently edited a special issue for the Journal of Mundane Behavior entitled Mundane Sex. She teaches statistics, research methods, social psychology, social problems, and a senior seminar in gender and adolescence at Millersville University of Pennsylvania.Sarah H. Matthews is Professor of Sociology at Cleveland State University. Her current research focuses on the everyday lives of children whose mothers are in a drug treatment program. Her earlier research in the sociology of aging has appeared in gerontology and family journals. Her research on relationships among members of older families is reported in a forthcoming book, Sisters and Brothers/Daughters and Sons: Meeting the Needs of Old Parents.Kathleen M. Mathieson is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology, Arizona State University. She holds a master’s degree in Sociology from ASU. Her research interests focus on medical sociology, including concerns of aging, child health and mental health as impacted by work and family conflicts. She has published on the maintenance of functional independence for the elderly, and has presented papers on this topic as well as on child health and child health policy issues.Meredith Phillips is Assistant Professor of Policy Studies and Sociology at UCLA. Phillips’s research focuses on the relationship between social inequality and academic success. Her current projects include a mixed-method study of the academic achievement of college students at a highly-selective university, an ethnographic study of the development of oppositional culture during students’ transition from elementary to middle school, and a statistical study of the distribution of school quality nationally. Phillips is the co-editor of The Black-White Test Score Gap (Brookings, 1998).Katherine Brown Rosier is currently Assistant Professor of Sociology at Central Michigan University. Her recent book, Mothering Inner-city Children. The Early School Years, was published in 2000 by Rutgers University Press. Other publications have appeared in The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Human Development, The Journal of Comparative Family Studies, and several other journals and edited volumes. While continuing to write on experiences of low-income African American children and families, she is also conducting research and writing a book with colleague Scott L. Feld on Louisiana’s Covenant Marriage.Barbara Schneider is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and the Co-Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children, and Work. Author of several books, articles and monographs, Dr. Schneider is concerned with encouraging the cognitive and social development of America’s children by reshaping the responsibilities of families, schools, and society. Most recently Dr. Schneider has completed two books, The Ambitious Generation: America’s Teenagers, Motivated but Directionless, and Becoming Adult: How Teenagers Prepare for the World of Work. In both works she discusses how adolescents develop attitudes, skills and expectations about their adult careers.Kimberly A. Scott, Ed.D. is Assistant Professor in Hofstra University’s Foundations, Leadership, and Policy Studies department. She specializes in sociology of education, sociology of childhood, and qualitative research methods. Her research interests include examinations of race, class, and gender influences on the social and academic self-development of elementary school students. She has publications in Equity and Excellence, Journal of Negro Education, and Childhood: A Global Journal of Childhood Research. Currently, she is co-authoring a Rowmann and Littlefield book with Sarane Book entitled, Sociology of Children and Childhood.Linda J. Waite, Ph.D. is the Lucy Flower Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Center on Parents, Children and Work at the University of Chicago, where she also directs the Center on Aging. She is past Chair of the Family Section of the American Sociological Association and Past President of the Population Association of America. Her current research interests include the working family, especially dual-career couples with children and the impact of job characteristics on parenting. She is also interested in the role of the family at older ages in functioning of individuals, intergenerational transfers and exchanges, and employment. She has published widely on the family, including an award-winning book with Frances Goldscheider, New Families, No Families: The Transformation of the American Home. Her most recent book, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially, with Maggie Gallagher, won the 2000 book award from the Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education.

In a recent essay entitled “Value‐relevant Sociology”, David Gray (1983:405–416) argues that if sociology has to be socially relevant, “it is essential that sociology becomes consciously value‐relevant, not value‐free.” He maintains that sociologists cannot analyse the consequences of social structure, forces, and change in a value‐free context if their works are to be relevant for social policies. He then goes on to say, “Between the extremes of value‐free, non‐relevant, sometimes trivial, sociology on the one hand, and immediate response to pressing socioeconomic problems and prevailing political winds on the other, where does the significant sociology lie?” (1983:406). For Gray, both extremes are inappropriate for a worthy academic discipline.

This chapter critically considers two conceptions of sociological labor as they have recently been articulated in two competing visions for public sociology. I use the contrast between Ben Agger's and Michael Burawoy's recent professions of public sociology as a lens through which to critically understand the way in which the narratives produced by sociological labor govern the emergence of knowledge, which would be the basis of transformation.

This paper aims to synthesize the knowledge published in the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy since its inaugural issue to current issue, i.e. from 1981 to 2021, using a structured and systematic review technique.

In order to achieve the objective of this paper, the authors have analysed the bibliometric metadata of 1,583 research documents published during the last four decades in International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy by employing a structural and quantitative literature review technique, i.e. bibliometric. Particularly, the authors used performance analysis and network analysis (intellectual and social network analysis).

Findings reveal the performance metrics, i.e. productivity and citation performance of various constituencies of IJSSP such as authors, institutes, research articles etc. In addition, the authors constituted certain knowledge networks such as keywords co-occurrence, strategic map and social network.

Present systematic and objective review reveals the evolution and pattern of research publication in IJSSP, and this will help in predicting and setting the future course of knowledge creation such as emphasis on a particular theory or framework, reexamining the established assumptions and so on.

In the wake of changing social policy dynamics, the present systematic synthesis helps in understanding the possible emerging areas of concerns both for practitioners and policymakers.

The present study is a first attempt that considers the entire research corpus of the journal and synthesizes it objectively and systematically.

For sociological perspectives on globalization to do justice to its many facets, they must be informed by an understanding of modern societies as simultaneously complex, contingent, and contradictory – as modern capitalist societies. As is becoming ever more apparent, such an understanding of modern societies is the necessary precondition for identifying the defining features of globalization. Yet, for the most part, the history of the social sciences did not produce research agendas, theories, and methods designed to grasp complexity, contingency, and contradiction as core dimensions of modern social life that continually reinforce each other. The social sciences did not evolve as ongoing efforts to grasp the gravity each dimension exerts on concrete forms of political, economic and cultural life, and how the force of each depends on the constant exchange of energy with the other two. To the extent that scrutinizing the impact of globalization on the future – and possible futures – of human civilization is the primary challenge for social scientists to confront today, the current condition presents a unique, and perhaps most unusual opportunity to conceive anew the promise of each and all the social sciences, as elucidating how the complex, contingent, and contradictory nature of modern societies, in the name of advancing social justice, has engendered a regime of managing “social problems.”

For perspectives on globalization to do justice to its many facets, they must be informed by an understanding of modern societies as simultaneously complex, contingent, and contradictory – as modern capitalist societies. As is becoming ever more apparent, such an understanding of modern societies is the necessary precondition for identifying the defining features of globalization. Yet, for the most part, the history of the social sciences did not produce research agendas, theories, and methods designed to grasp complexity, contingency, and contradiction as core dimensions of modern social life that continually reinforce each other. The social sciences did not evolve as ongoing efforts to grasp the gravity each dimension exerts on concrete forms of political, economic, and cultural life, and how the force of each depends on the constant exchange of energy with the other two. To the extent that scrutinizing the impact of globalization on the future – find possible futures – of human civilization is the primary challenge for social scientists to confront today, the current condition presents a unique, and perhaps most unusual opportunity to conceive anew the promise of each and all the social sciences, as elucidating how the complex, contingent, and contradictory nature of modern societies, in the name of advancing social justice, has engendered a regime of managing “social problems.”

Sociology of sport does not exist as a (sub)discipline or course of study in the Netherlands. Scholars who call themselves sport sociologists engage in a variety of research and related publication activities. Many of these might not strictly fit under some understandings of the title “sociology” since they focus on sport management, policy implementation, and change. In this chapter, I describe how sociology of sport research tends to be defined and how that research is used to defend government spending on sport participation. This instrumental approach means the results of Dutch research using critical perspectives are often heard only internationally. I explain how the structure of Dutch academia, which limits the number of associate professors and professors, relies primarily on external funding for research and makes such funding difficult to obtain if it does not fit within a specified perspective, and limits who is able to engage in research and the type of research that is produced. I show how this structure in combination with the emphasis on an instrumental function of sport has largely shaped much of the research and has limited the use of a variety of theoretical frameworks and the development of a robust and coherent body of knowledge about the sociology of sport in the Netherlands.