International Sociological Association

About: International Sociological Association is a nonprofit organization based out in Madrid, Spain. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Ideology & Sustainable development. The organization has 20 authors who have published 18 publications receiving 783 citations. The organization is also known as: ISA.

A Widening Gap: Republican and Democratic Views on Climate Change

Abstract: (2008). A Widening Gap: Republican and Democratic Views on Climate Change. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development: Vol. 50, No. 5, pp. 26-35.

The Breakdown of Class Politics

Abstract: This paper reviews debate in the 1990s over whether, why, and how much class is declining in its impact on politics. One position is the “null hypothesis” of many at Berkeley and Oxford: the impact of class has not changed. The other position is that “post-industrial society” is transforming politics and redefining class. To focus, the paper does not seek to inventory themes in abstract, but stresses core points made by actual proponents in the exchange. Over the decade many issues were resolved; others were not. Social inequality persists, and inequality of income has risen; but the motor of politics is less clearly jobs. Consumption and other post-industrial concerns have entered and transformed politics in many countries worldwide. How political parties have changed their appeals away from “class” is a key issue, as is the drop by about half in the size of the traditional working class in most Western countries since 1945. From this exchange lessons emerge for conceptualizing and measuring these dynamics in the future.

Breaking Conversational Norms on a Portuguese Users Network: Men as Adjudicators of Politeness?

Abstract: This article examines messages exchanged via asynchronous CMC at a Portuguese university that would be considered impolite in face-to-face interaction (cf. Brown & Levinson, 1987; Culpeper, 1996; Oliveira, 1985, 2003; Oliveira Medeiros, 1994). A comparison by gender was conducted of the degree and nature of participation in the university Users' network, focusing on transgressions and chastisement involving inappropriate message content, message form and address form selection. Although women participate less often in discussions on the network, messages posted by women are more often treated as transgressions, while men more often initiate responses demonstrating concern with established norms of politeness and the importance of adhering to them. These results confirm traditional gender roles of men as interactionally dominant and representative of “authority,” but do not support findings for English-language CMC that women are more concerned with politeness than men (Herring, 1994; Smith, McLaughlin & Osborn,1997); rather, Portuguese men on the university network assume the role of “politeness adjudicators.”

Authority by the Numbers: Porter on Quantification, Discretion, and the Legitimation of Expertise

Abstract: What explains the prestige, power, and ubiquity of quantification in the modem world? Like many straightforward, well-asked questions, this one is complicated to answer. But Theodore Porter, a historian of science, has come up with an original, provocative, and surprisingly parsimonious answer. Numbers, Porter argues in this carefully crafted, elegantly written book, are a technology of distance. Their authority derives from their capacity to create and overcome distance, both physical and social. To scientists dispersed around the world, numbers offer the common language of quantity, while imposing a universalizing discipline that transcends the physical and cultural distance between them. This discipline that brings proximity erects at the same time, however, a new form of distance because it erases the local, the personal, and the particular. Standardizing calculations makes the characteristics of those creating and manipulating the numbers less salient, inserting distance between the numbers and their users. This simulta-