Various critiques of American sociology, most recently that of Alvin Gouldner, argue that the domain assumptions of the field stemming from the functionalist approach of Talcott Parsons have imposed an essentially conservative system maintenance set of concerns on the field. Gouldner suggests that Parsons's approach reflects a lifelong opposition to socialism. In fact, Parsons's personal history belies these contentions. Further, a variety of survey studies, including a major unpublished one by Gouldner, indicate that sociologists as a group have been the most left-disposed field in academe, an occupation which is to the left of other strata. Within sociology, the "achievers," those at the most prestigeous schools, who have published most, and have the most research funds, are to the left of others in the field. This pattern reflects a general characteristics of intellectual life in which the most successful people hold more unorthodox socially critical views, behavior which may stem from a link between c...

The politics of American sociologists

Information needs and gathering patterns of academic social scientists, with special emphasis given to historians and their use of U.S. Government publications

The study identifies 621 authors who contributed 1,423 periodical articles and monograph publications to the geographical literature on Nigeria between 1901 and 1970. Publications/author relationship shows a perfect Bradford distribution comprising fifty‐three core authors having each six publications or more and among them contributing 38 per cent of all items. The significance of these results for retrospective bibliographical searches and their methodological implications for documentation studies in general are suggested and briefly discussed.

The productivity of geographical authors: a case study from nigeria

During the past three hundred years the journal article has become the main institutionalized form of formal scholarly communication. Potential contributions to a discipline acquire credibility because they have been published in a reputable journal (Zuckerman and Merton, 1971). Who published what and where therefore becomes a central question in the understanding of scholarly, and in particular scientific, disciplines. There have recently been

Career contingencies and the fate of sociological research

The article reports the findmgs of a study on the subject of role parity in international collaborative research projects. Two dimensions of role relationships in research settings—the centrality of research roles and the locus of decision making-have been examined within a theoretical framework. The data are based on the research roles of 65 U.S. university professors and their counterparts. The data are separately examined for the counterparts from the industrialized and developing nations.

Role Parity in International Social Science Collaborative Research Research Roles of U.S. Researchers and Their Collaborators

Sciences, by their very nature, attempt to transcend national boundaries. It is, as William V. Consolazio points out, 'a truism that science is international' (1965: 322). Wilbert Moore has recently suggested that sociology has become 'remarkably international' (1966: 476). Sociology will, according to Moore, increasingly become international because men will increasingly be facing similar problems and finding similar solutions. If sociology, or any other discipline, were to become more international than it presently is we might assume that one way in which this process would be manifest is through an increasing concentration upon the works of a number of men who make fundamental trans-national contributions

Mark Jay Oromaner

Papers

Comparison of Influentials in Contemporary American and British Sociology: A Study in the Internationalization of Sociology