150 years ago, a French-Jewish teenager told his father, a rabbi in the town of Épinal, that he had decided against entering rabbinical school, thus breaking with a family tradition that stretched ...

A few years ago I was planning a book on market capitalism—one that would demonstrate its inestimable virtues. But in a moment of candour it occurred to me that I had not exposed myself sufficiently ...

This essay examines Durkheim's functionalism, to argue that it cannot be adequately understood through later movements of structural functionalism, especially Parsonian functionalism. Concretely, for ...

If I wanted to be controversial, as a sociologist, I might say that serial murder is “functional” for society. However, a less inflammatory way to say the same thing is that serial murder can be ...

Galen Watts receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA). Queen's University, ...

While Emile Durkheim is well known as an important theorist in the development of modern sociology, it is noted that few sociologists and even fewer educators recognize his significant contribution to ...

In partnership with social media networks and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, a nonprofit research project is seeking to show that predictive analytics can identify U.S. veterans of Iraq and ...

Pro sports teams are like what religion and sociology scholars call "totems"—symbols of greater entities that communities gather around for identity and unity. The Super Bowl, professional sports' ...

In his book Suicide, French sociologist Emile Durkheim discussed the nature and the consequences of economic crisis. Steven Lukes, Professor of Sociology at New York University, debates Durkheim’s ...