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The prospect of public sociology is beginning to be widely discussed and debated. Critics put forth several reasons for skepticism, one of which is that the program of public sociology, under the leadership of Michael Burawoy, will infect sociology with a Marxist drift. This paper examines whether this drift in fact comports with Marx's ideas on the relationship between scientific knowledge, the role of intellectuals in the class struggle, and the type of political action he advocated. It finds that critics are fundamentally mistaken about the extent to which Marx's ideas are expressed in public sociology's program.

Open data and data sharing should improve transparency of research. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how different institutional and individual factors affect the data sharing behavior of authors of research articles in sociology and political science.

Desktop research analyzed attributes of sociology and political science journals (n=262) from their websites. A second data set of articles (n=1,011; published 2012-2014) was derived from ten of the main journals (five from each discipline) and stated data sharing was examined. A survey of the authors used the Theory of Planned Behavior to examine motivations, behavioral control, and perceived norms for sharing data. Statistical tests (Spearman’s ρ, χ²) examined correlations and associations.

Although many journals have a data policy for their authors (78 percent in sociology, 44 percent in political science), only around half of the empirical articles stated that the data were available, and for only 37 percent of the articles could the data be accessed. Journals with higher impact factors, those with a stated data policy, and younger journals were more likely to offer data availability. Of the authors surveyed, 446 responded (44 percent). Statistical analysis indicated that authors’ attitudes, reported past behavior, social norms, and perceived behavioral control affected their intentions to share data.

Less than 50 percent of the authors contacted provided responses to the survey. Results indicate that data sharing would improve if journals had explicit data sharing policies but authors also need support from other institutions (their universities, funding councils, and professional associations) to improve data management skills and infrastructures.

This paper builds on previous similar research in sociology and political science and explains some of the barriers to data sharing in social sciences by combining journal policies, published articles, and authors’ responses to a survey.

This chapter compares interdisciplinary research that engages genomic science from economics, political science, and sociology. It describes, compares, and evaluates concepts and research findings from new and rapidly developing research fields, and develops a conceptual taxonomy of the social environment.

A selection of programmatic and empirical articles, published mostly since 2008 in leading economics, political science, and sociology journals, were analyzed according to (a) the relationship they pose between their discipline and genomic science, (b) the specific empirical contributions they make to disciplinary research questions, and (c) their conceptualization of the “social environment” as it informs the central problematique of current inquiry: gene-environment interaction.

While all three of the social science disciplines reviewed engage genomic science, economics and political science tend to engage genomics on its own terms, and develop genomic explanations of economic and political behavior. In contrast, sociologists develop arguments that for genomic science to advance, the “environment” in gene-environment interaction needs better theorization and measurement. We develop an approach to the environment that treats it as a set of measurable institutional (rule-like) arrangements, which take the forms of neighborhoods, families, schools, nations, states, and cultures.

Interdisciplinary research that combines insights from the social sciences and genomic science should develop and apply a richer array of concepts and measures if gene-environment research – including epigenetics – is to advance.

This chapter provides a critical review and redirection of three rapidly developing areas of interdisciplinary research on gene-environment interaction and epigenetics.

In this chapter, I want to take some stock of the subdiscipline of environmental sociology. I believe that a productive approach to restoring some of the coherence of environmental sociology is to conceive of mainstream environmental sociology as reflecting several paradoxes. The bulk of this chapter will be devoted to a brief explication of environmental sociology's theoretical and empirical paradoxes. I will begin with three paradoxes that have played a major role in environmental sociology since the 1970s. However, many of the theoretical and empirical paradoxes of the subfield are relatively new ones – and some have not even been thought of as paradoxes. The thrust of the present chapter consists of something of a research agenda for environmental sociology for the next decade or so.

This study tested the hypothesis that the vocabulary of a discipline whose major emphasis is on concrete phenomena will, on the average, have fewer synonyms per concept than will the vocabulary of a discipline whose major emphasis is on abstract phenomena. Subject terms from each of two concrete disciplines and two abstract disciplines were analysed. Results showed that there was a significant difference at the ·05 level between concrete and abstract disciplines but that the significant difference was attributable to only one of the abstract disciplines. The other abstract discipline was not significantly different from the two concrete disciplines. It was concluded that although there is some support for the hypothesis, at least one other factor has a stronger influence on terminological consistency than the phonomena with which a subject deals.

There is hardly any other field of knowledge where there is more conflict or controversy between ideas and solutions proposed by theoreticians and statesmen than in politics. To date, adequate methodological tools have not been developed which enable the truth or validity of the liberal or conservative approaches to be tested. A new research programme using a simultaneous equilibrium versus disequilibrium approach is proposed which has full application in politics as well as in economics and the social sciences. This research programme shows the organic relationship between society, state, economy, money and form of government, and thus leads to a methodological unification of all the social sciences, to a new principia politica.

The economic science is again in a crisis and a new solution prolegomena to any future study in economics, finance and other social sciences has just been published by the International Institute of Social Economics in care of the MCB University Press in England. The roots of the major financial and economic problems of our time lie in an open conflict between theory and practice. In the 1930s and before the conflict was between classical theory and given realities. In the 1990s the conflict appears between the now prevailing modern, Keynesian theory and the actual realities. In addition during the twentieth century a great argument developed between the two schools of thought, argument which is not yet settled. In one sentence, the prolegomena tried and was successful to solve the conflict between theory and practice and the big doctrinal dispute of the twentieth century. It was a struggle of research and observation over half a century between 1947 and 1997.

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.”