Click Here to Read: Margaret Humphreys on Wikipedia.

Click Here to Read: ‘People should sort this mess’: Margaret Humphreys has spent 23 years campaigning for the victims of forced childhood migration. This week, finally, Gordon Brown is due to apologise on behalf of Britain for separating them from their families by Aida Edemariam on The Guardian website on 19 February 19, 2010.

Click Here to View: Margaret Humphreys – Oranges and Sunshine- Continue reading Social Work Saturday: Margaret Humphreys

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Sociology and Anthropology Monday
William I. (Isaac) Thomas (13 August 1863 – 5 December 1947) and Florian W. (Witold) Znaniecki (15 January 1882 – 23 March 1958)

It is fitting that Thomas and Znaniecki be treated together since their collaborative work The Polish Present in Europe and America represents the first major in-depth study of emigration and the establishment of an immigrant population in the United States. A classic of sociology, its methodology was largely dependent on the data provided by the emigrants themselves in the form of letters, diaries and other autobiographies, newspaper reports, etc. in which the subjective experiences are treated as series data for an objective study.

W. I. Thomas studied English and Classics at the University of Tennessee and continued his studies in classics and Continue reading Sociology and Anthropology Monday: William I. (Isaac) Thomas and Florian W. (Witold) Znaniecki

Martin Lipset was another one of those brilliant undergraduate students whose debating skills in particular and critical acumen more generally were honed at the Alcove One of the cafeteria of the City College of New York in the late thirties and early forties. The unifying factor of those 30-50 City students who congregated at Alcove One was not ideological purity (although they were all people of the left of varying and indeed conflicting stripes) but rather their strident opposition to Stalinism. Lipset came to Alcove One as a kind of Trotskyist but left the party after his first year at City. In an autobiographical essay published in 1996 Lipset suggests that his life work as a sociologist, more narrowly, as a political sociologist, had been motivated by three questions which he posed while an undergraduate student at City and as a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University under the supervision of Robert K. Merton and Philip Selznick. Continue reading Sociology and Anthropology Monday: Seymour Martin Lipset (1922-2006)

Alfred (Louis) Kroeber (1876-1960) was an American anthropologist born in Hoboken, New Jersey to parents of German Protestant extraction. Fluent in both English and German (which was the predominant language of use growing up in his childhood home) he received a classical training in Latin and Greek and other humanistic subjects. He became interested in studying anthropology through his contact with Franz Boas in the latter’s class on linguistics at Columbia University. Kroeber was the first to complete a doctorate in anthropology at Columbia, a path soon to be followed by many of Boas’ students who later went on, like Kroeber, to become leading anthropologists in the United States. Less well-known is the fact that Kroeber became interested in psychoanalysis, underwent a personal analysis and was the first person to practice as a psychoanalyst in the Bay area in California: Continue reading Sociology Monday: Alfred Kroeber

C. (Charles) Wright Mills (1916-1962) was one of the most significant sociologists and sociological theorists to challenge the Parsonian consensus in American sociology during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Waco Texas he completed his doctoral dissertation in the sociology of knowledge on the relationship between pragmatism and sociology, having been influenced in his thinking by the writings of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead among others. In 1945 he was appointed to a research position at the Bureau of Applied Research at Columbia University headed by Paul Lazarsfeld. In the following year Mills became an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Columbia and remained a faculty member in that department until his death in 1962. Continue reading Sociology and Anthropology Monday: C. Wright Mills

Sociology and Anthropology Monday: Talcott Parsons

 Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) was a dominant figure in American sociology from the late 1930s until the mid-1960s. He became a lightning-rod for criticism by a younger, more radical generation of sociologists who were just coming into their own against the backdrop of the anti-nuclear and peace campaigns of the late fifties and early sixties, the civil rights movement of the mid-fifties to mid-sixties, the student movement during the sixties and the rise of feminism, and the growing opposition to the War in Vietnam from the mid-sixties. This diverse group Continue reading Sociology and Anthropology Monday: Talcott Parsons

Merton eschewed the grand theory approach of one of his mentors and advisors, Talcott Parsons, in favour of a theory of the middle range, under the influence of his colleague, Paul Lazarsfeld, at the Bureau of Applied Research at Columbia University of which Merton was associate director. In addition to middle range sociological theory, Merton was known as an Continue reading Sociology and Anthropology Monday: Robert King Merton

Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936) was a co-founder – with Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart and Max Weber – and first president of the German Sociological Society (1909). He is best known and remembered for his pairing of social groupings into Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society) a pairing that has often been linked to Durkheim’s mechanical and organic solidarity, Henry Sumner Maine’s status and contract and even Spengler among others’ distinction between culture and civilization. But different sorts of will, two different kinds of underlying drives, forces, impetus’ which propel different Continue reading Sociology and Anthropology Monday: Ferdinand Tönnies

Nathan Glazer (1923- ) is professor emeritus at Harvard University. Born in New York City and raised in the Bronx, he attended CCNY (entering the freshman class in February 1940) and was a “member” of Alcove One where the anti-Stalinist left tended to congregate to debate the issues of the day. He was also a member of Avukah, the student Zionist organization, and edited its journal. Through these contacts he came to know and for a time worked with Zellig Harris, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, who later moved to Israel. Harris introduced him to Eric Fromm who acquainted him with members of the Institut für Sozialforschung, the Continue reading Sociology and Anthropology Monday: Nathan Glazer

Daniel Bell was one of the most influential sociologists and public intellectuals in the post-war era. His most famous works include The End of Ideology(related to the Cold War) in which he argued that the imperative of the new, post-war economy narrowed the field of ideology so that real ideological and political choices would be significantly attenuated by the technological imperatives of the new organization of production; The Coming of Post-Industrial Society in which he discussed the impact of the shift from industrial societies in which the production of goods is the dominant activity to post-industrialism which is largely based on the training for and delivery of services by the application of science and technology in the most advanced economies in the last quarter of the 20th century; and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism in which he posited Continue reading Sociology Monday: Daniel Bell (1919-2011)