Meanwhile, the authors' antidote to the American sicknessa quest for democratic community that draws on our diverse civic and religious traditionshas contributed to a vigorous scholarly and popular debate. Attention has been focused on forms of social organization, be it civil society, democratic communitarianism, or associative democracy, that can humanize the market and the administrative state. In their new Introduction the authors relate the argument of their book both to the current realities of American society and to the growing debate about the country's future. With this new edition one of the most influential books of recent times takes on a new immediacy.\

Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

Institutional theory is an increasingly utilized theoretical lens for entrepreneurship research. However, while institutional theory has proven highly useful, its use has reached a point that there is a need to establish a clearer understanding of its wide-ranging application to entrepreneurship research. Therefore, we will initially review the existing entrepreneurship literature that employs institutional theory to both understand the current status of the field, its current shortcomings, and where we need to move in the future. We then summarize and discuss the articles in this special issue and how they contribute to this process of advancing institutional theory and its application in entrepreneurship research.

https://ir.nctu.edu.tw:443/bitstream/11536/14109/1/000276860600001.pdf

Institutional Theory and Entrepreneurship: Where Are We Now and Where Do We Need to Move in the Future?:

The authors describe an evolving theoretical framework that has been called one of the best kept secrets of academia: cultural-historical activity theory, the result of proposals Lev Vygotsky first articulated but that his students and followers substantially developed to constitute much expanded forms in its second and third generations. Besides showing that activity theory transforms how research should proceed regarding language, language learning, and literacy in particular, the authors demonstrate how it is a theory for praxis, thereby offering the potential to overcome some of the most profound problems that have plagued both educational theorizing and practice.

/pdf/vygotsky-s-neglected-legacy-cultural-historical-activity-32amo9jh2f.pdf

“Vygotsky’s Neglected Legacy”: Cultural-Historical Activity Theory:

Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion. By Rodney Stark and Roger Finke. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 343 pp. $48.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper). At a recent American Academy of Religion meeting, after a brilliant paper was presented on God and religious experience, the speaker was asked this question by an academic: "But how can you say these things in our postmodem, anti-enlightenment, pluralistic age?" Acts of Faith secures the thesis that not just talk about, but devout belief in, God is rational, widespread, and shows no sign of abating. For a vast number of well-educated, articulate human beings talk of God is not very difficult at all. Acts of Faith is an important treatment of the sociology of religious belief and should be considered required reading by anyone interested in the social standing and assessment of religion. It overturns the conventions of a great deal of earlier sociological inquiry into religion and stands as a model of clarity and rigor. Rodney Stark and Roger Finke begin by documenting the social and intellectual history of atheism, noting how history, sociology, and psychoanalysis have been employed to exhibit the irrationality of religious belief. They underscore how many of these projects have done little more than presup- pose the credulous nature of religion. There is something darkly humorous about the many techniques employed by "intellectuals" and social scientists to explain why religion persists and even grows amidst "modernity." Stark and Finke's analysis is devastating. From the outset through to the last chapter the writing is crisp and at times quite amusing. Here is a passage from the introduction, lamenting the fact that many sociologists focus their work on fringe religious groups: A coven of nine witches in Lund, Sweden, is far more apt to be the object of a case study than is, say, the Episcopal Church, with more than two million members. Some of this merely reflects that it is rather easier to get one's work published if the details are sufficiently lurid or if the group is previously undocumented. A recitation of Episcopalian theology and excerpts from the Book of Common Prayer will not arouse nearly the interest (prurient or otherwise) than can be generated by tales of blondes upon the altar and sexual contacts with animals (p. 19). Stark and Finke have written a text that abounds in technical case studies, while at the same time giving us a book that is a pleasure to read. The introduction and first three chapters alone are a tour de force. They expose the blatant inadequacy of sociological work that reads religious belief as pathology or flagrant irrationality. They challenge the thesis of impending, virtually inevitable secularization, for instance, in part by refuting the claim that in the distant past almost everyone was religious. …

Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion

In diesem Beitrag verdeutliche ich meine Besorgnis uber zahlreiche Umformungen der Grounded Theory (GT), die mit deren Rezeption durch Methodologien der qualitative Datenanalyse (QDA) einhergehen, und hieraus folgende Erosionen. Ich skizziere zunachst einige Beispiele hierfur, um danach die essentiellen Bestandteile der klassischen GT-Methodologie zusammenzufassen. Ich hoffe, dass dieser Beitrag meine Besorgnis uber die wachsende, aber meines Erachtens missverstandene Einvernahme von GT durch QDA-Methodologien veranschaulicht und zugleich als einfuhrender Leitfaden fur Novizen und Novizinnen dient, die daran interessiert sind, die grundlegenden Prinzipien der GT nachzuvollziehen. \nURN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs040245

Remodeling Grounded Theory

Interaction ritual chains

Qualitative Sozialforschung: Ein Arbeitsbuch

For more than two decades sociological debates over religion and secularization have been characterized by a confrontation between (often American) critics and (mostly European) defenders of secularization theories. At the same time, there was a remarkable rise in public debates about the role of secularism in political regimes and in national as well as civilizational frameworks. Against this backdrop this paper presents the conceptual framework of “multiple secularities” with a view to refocusing sociological research on religion and secularity. We will demonstrate that it can stimulate new ways of theorizing the relationship of religion and secularity in a variety of modern environments. Arguing for a reformulation of this relationship within the framework of cultural sociology, we conceptualize “secularity” in terms of the cultural meanings underlying the differentiation between religion and non-religious spheres. Building on Max Weber we distinguish four basic ideal-types of secularity that are related to specific reference problems and associated with specific guiding ideas. Finally, we illustrate the use of the concept with regard to selected case-studies.

Multiple secularities : toward a cultural sociology of secular modernities

Atheismus und religiöse Indifferenz

L'auteure se refere a une etude sur les conversions a l'islam realisee en Allemagne et aux Etats-Unis. La conversion a l'islam en Occident se situe dans un double cadre: celui de la religion et de la culture de provenance, et celui de l'islam en tant que nouvelle vision du monde choisi par le converti. Le syncretisme et la lutte symbolique sont concus ici comme les deux differentes facons d'adopter l'islam et de se situer par rapport au cadre de reference originaire. Sur base de trois etudes de cas qui representent des types differents de lutte symbolique, l'auteure explique comment l'adoption de l'islam devient un moyen d'articulation des problemes de desintegration de son propre contexte social, et permet la symbolisation d'une distance maximale a l'interieur de ce contexte.

Monika Wohlrab-Sahr

Papers

Interaction ritual chains

Qualitative Sozialforschung: Ein Arbeitsbuch

Multiple secularities : toward a cultural sociology of secular modernities

Atheismus und religiöse Indifferenz

Conversion to Islam: Between Syncretism and Symbolic Battle