Aaron Cicourel: In my recent research papers, I talk about how patients loose their sense of social structure; their self-conception, their sense of agency. Hence, both cognitive, emotional, and cultural skills and knowledge are acquired in childhood and extended during early and middle adult life, before beginning to decline. The aging process differentially affects humans with some becoming gradually more cognitively, emotionally, and culturally compromised. To summarize, you cannot have culture without cognition, and vice versa.
Aaron Cicourel: In my recent research papers, I talk about how patients loose their sense of social structure; their self-conception, their sense of agency. Hence, both cognitive, emotional, and cultural skills and knowledge are acquired in childhood and extended during early and middle adult life, before beginning to decline. The aging process differentially affects humans with some becoming gradually more cognitively, emotionally, and culturally compromised. To summarize, you cannot have culture without cognition, and vice versa.
After receiving his B.A. in psychology and M.A. in sociology and anthropology from UCLA and his Ph.D. from Cornell University, Aaron V. Cicourel accepted posts as a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the UCLA Medical Center, Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, Assistant Professor to Associate Professor at the University of California at Riverside, Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara, Visiting Professor at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Associate Research Sociologist in the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC California at Berkeley, 1965-66, Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, 1987, Visiting Professor at Columbia University 1998, and has been Professor at the University of California at San Diego for 40 years, at the School of Medicine (Department of Pediatrics) as well as the departments of Cognitive Science and Sociology.
Cicourel held a Russell Sage Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center, 1957-58, was awarded a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship at London University in England, 1970-71 to study British Sign Language, a Guggenheim Fellowship at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1975-76, and was a Fulbright Lecturer at the Universidade do Bahia Brazil, 1986, and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. In November 2007, he was awarded Docteur Honoris Causa by Université de Fribourg, Swittzerland, and in 2008 he received Doctor Honoris Causa by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2005. He was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992. Currently he is an Emeritus Professor at the The Institute for Health and Aging, University of California, San Francisco, doing research on dementia, collective memory and social structure.
Cicourel’s publications have been translated into several languages; French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Having a conversation with Aaron Cicourel is
In the social sciences, publication in journals is where the politics are “heavy.” I learned about American social science “politics” very early on when John Kitsuse and I sent a paper to a “mainstream” journal.
Early in my career, I found it almost impossible to publish in American sociology journals. Hence, I started writing books and then able to publish extensively in applied linguistic journals and books. Sociologists, therefore, have seldom read a large part of my work.
Kitsuse and I finally were able to publish our paper in an American journal called
Sometimes, the patients would fight male “caregivers” on the wards. One night I was on overnight emergency duty, and was called while sleeping and told I was needed upstairs at the “closed” ward where the most psychotic patients lived. I went upstairs, and I opened the door and the male nurses were literally throwing patients across the ward, patients were jumping over barricades the male nurses had constructed in the corner of the ward using patients’ beds. It was terrible. I tried to get the patients to calm down and go to their beds. So I ordered everyone to stop fighting. I knew all of them. You had to be careful with some of the patients; they would be standing next to you and if you moved your arm suddenly (gesture), they might hit you. I called for help and personnel from other wards arrived.
My experience with psychiatric patients while serving in the U.S. Army also taught me about how bureaucratic authority could be manipulated such that an organization’s bureaucratic practices could be altered. The army patients could be easily abused because there was not sufficient oversight during evening and weekend hours. One patient was African-American and belonged to an evangelical sect in South Carolina. His religion required that he pray at different times of the day.
The patient told me that one evening at a previous military training camp, the soldier was praying by his bed. Other soldiers told him to be “quiet.” The soldier had become so involved with his prayers that he apparently became semi-unconscious as if in a trance. The officer gave him a direct order to stop his prayers. I assume the soldier could not hear the officer. The soldier was arrested. He resisted arrest and was physically abused and sent to a high security military prison where he continued his deep prayers and punished each time with solitary confinement. After some time, I do not know how long, he was sent to our hospital for a psychiatric examination. I was the first person assigned to interview the patient. I had seen persons like this soldier when I was an adolescent dating a girl who belonged to a small evangelical sect. The group held regular meetings in a small building that had been a grocery store and converted into an evangelical church. One night I was invited by the girl to come to the church so that after the religious service we could go for a walk. I arrived early and observed a member of the congregation involved in a trance as everyone chanted.
When I spoke to the soldier, I thought of the evangelical church I had known in Los Angeles and inferred that the soldier had been doing something quite similar. I spoke to a psychiatrist I knew about the patient. He said he would have the authority to do something soon. Chief Neuropsychiatric Officer, a Coronel, was be going on a leave of absence. A few weeks later, the Coronel was on vacation. I spoke to the Captain, now temporarily in charge of the Neuropsychiatric wards, to see if we could discharge the soldier. I had previously worked in the administrative section of Neuropsychiatry had learned how to discharge patients. I filled out the papers, the Captain signed the papers, and we were able to send the soldier home.
I also learned something about health and aging while engaged In dissertation work at Cornell University. Research with the aged was not part of a larger plan. I thought the aged would be a good group from which I could learn about how aging affected a persons conception of self. I was able to meet them at the Senior Citizens Center in Ithaca, New York. I would eat lunch with them every day, so I got to know the people there well, and selected some with high income, low income, and some had been in Cornell, they loved being there because it reminded them of their youth!
Field notes, for example, truncate the amount of information you seek to obtain and comprehend. Even information from videotapes and audiotape recordings are subject to limited capacity processing: by continually observing a video tape and listening to a recording over and over again we can increase but not eliminate information loss. The research is labor-intensive, and social scientists interested in large samples cannot tolerate having to engage in detailed probing of fixed-choice question to help offset the loss of information from survey data. Clinicians, for example, are constrained by the cost of obtaining detailed information, but what saves them is their clinical experience in making inferences from qualitative, analogical clinical intuition from many individual interviews. The clinician’s interaction with patients is contingent on moment-to-moment questions and responses and labor-intensive subtle healthcare delivery.
Surveys produce plausible correlations. But those correlations need additional research beyond tabulated outcomes. Although correlations always signify useful hypotheses, the question is how you then pursue them. Nobody wants to invest in qualitative data. I had a few interesting friends in the biology department at UCSD, especially what they call behavioral ecological study of nonhuman animals in the wild. They bring some animals into the laboratory for controlled experiments that further validate their findings of behavior in the wild. Biological behavioral ecologists are scientists who really do ethnography. Jeanne Altmann, a primatologist, published a very nice paper on how to sample behavior in the wild.
In 1975-76, I was fortunate to have received a Guggenheim award and conducted research on Sephardic Jewish communities in Malaga, Madrid, and Barcelona. I am trying to write a book on the Sephardic research. The fellowship enabled me to also conduct research in Madrid at the Hospital La Paz in the pediatric neurology clinic. The children at the La Paz Clinic enabled me to study one family in which two children had the enzyme Hurler-Hunter deficiency, and the third was normal but was a carrier of the gene. The family originally was from Bilbao. Another family with two children with San Fillipo patients were from Toledo. The Madrid family lived in an upper middle-income area, and the family in the Toledo lived in a low-income area very close to the Toledo train station where the husband was employed. The older patient from the Madrid family, 12 years of age, had to be observed continuously; unless watched continuously, she would destroy objects throughout the house, literally ran in front of a car when her mother and I went for a walk one day. The Madrid family was strongly affected; it was impossible to have a home or a social life. Only the wife’s mother could take care of the older child when the parents wanted to go out to dinner or be with their friends. Friends were never invited to their home. The Toledo family also had baby with a Down’s syndrome, but their social life appeared to be quite active.
I observed similar problems with Lesch-Nyhan and Hurler-Hunter patients in Southern California. The research was depressing and I could not motivate myself to publish my observations and field notes. The above examples and my current research on dementia convinced me that it was important to study the effect that neurobiology could have on a person with compromised cognitive and cultural development, and how cognition and culture would gradually “disappear” with elderly patients with severe dementia.
I inject a personal note. My own research on dementia has been influenced from observing and interacting with my older sister, two and one-half years older than me. She has extreme Alzheimer’s disease. I have watched her for over 12 upsetting years. I have learned considerably despite the pain of seeing someone you love losing their sense of self, their cultural ability to identify themselves as a cultural social self.
In a draft of a research paper I recently completed on Primary Progressive Aphasia, I talk about how patients lose their “sense of social structure.” The sociological lesson is that cognition and culture gradually disappear with progressive dementia. “Losing one’s sense of social structure” refers to a gradual loss of real-life cognitive and cultural performance. I believe sociology should integrate its level of analysis with other social sciences, particularly with cognitive science and developmental psychology, and strive to identify invariant elements of cognitive and cultural changes over the life cycle.
Thus physicians are obliged to truncate interviews by using fewer questions than they would like to ask, and often may ask leading questions. One advantage in diagnosing appropriately is often due to seeing patients at a time when the disease is at a state of development that their training has made possible to recognize that one or more possible illnesses may appear evident. Physicians pursue their skilled intuitive inferences in order to first eliminate alternative possible contributing pathophysiological possibilities, but often find they are unable to pursue questions requiring more extensive moment-to-moment probing to acquire more extensive analogical evidence about the patient’ subjective experiences motiving her or him to consult a physician.
The study of medicine is of special interest because it consists of achieving a diagnosis by first using analogical reasoning to understand the patient’s perspective of their symptoms and then seeks complex sources of basic and applied science to go beyond correlation outcomes. That is, seeking evidence within pathophysiology and biochemical research. An important sociological insight is the fact that clinical medicine is embedded in informal and formal daily life bureaucratic practices. Physicians have difficulty recognizing how the very way in which they conduct their work is in itself dependent on cognitive and cultural processes that frame the way healthcare delivery is accomplished.
Sociologists studying medical issues recognize but seldom focus on the study of diagnostic reasoning and treatment as bureaucratic practices constrained by monetary issues, local interpersonal relations and political (Congress and The White House) healthcare policies. Many medical sociologists focus on the role of differential economic, social and ethnic access to health care; cultural views of health care which can impede appropriate healthcare delivery. This focus, however, does not address how local and state politics and federal congressional, judicial, and executive office seldom engage in systematic studies of the role of the relentless internal activities of special interest groups. For instance, by doing ethnographic studies on how their huge monetary budgets diminish the quality and coverage of healthcare delivery. Social scientists are obviously aware of these special interests, but there are few long-term studies of how political lobbying groups, corporate money, congressional politics, and a president’s signing off statements about how a new law becomes interpreted is implemented state by state, county by county, and city by city by healthcare professionals, and within particular bureaucratically constrained health care facilities.
I strongly suggest you read a chapter I wrote about 10 years ago entitled “The ambivalent relationship between ethnomethodogy, conversational analysis, and mainstream sociology in North America.” The chapter was originally presented by French sociologists, several of whom were closely associated with Bourdieu, at the University of Liège, Belgium, February 2006 and published in
I took several Philosophy classes at UCLA. I learned about analytic philosophy, I audited a class with Reichenbach, and a few Visiting Professors from Oxford and Cambridge.
From my undergraduate studies in experimental psychology, I realized the necessity of understanding the role of theoretical issues and applied applications of mathematics for creating models and predictions. While studying for my master’s degree in sociology and anthropology at UCLA, I began taking advance methods classes in psychology, lower level mathematics such as trigonometry, a sequence of three classes in calculus, a course in advanced algebra, and auditing classes in differential equations and advanced calculus. I had also taken all of the statistics classes in psychology and sociology.
When I went to Cornell for my doctorate, I minored in mathematical statistics, My sociology adviser was Robin Williams and he was very supportive in my concern with finding a “metric” that would help me understand if daily life reasoning and decisions could be viewed formally without sacrificing the essential analogical nature of connected speech events, gestures, prosody, and facial expressions.
At Cornell, I also became intrigued with studying both formal and applied linguistics. The work of Franz Boas and his student Edward Sapir had already been familiar because of a course I taken at UCLA from an outstanding linguistic anthropologist named Harry Hoijer.
I believe that your own research enables the integration of cognitive and social levels of research. For instance you say “
I am not sure how to address the notion of “The Chicago School.” I guess the key element is their dedication to field research initially in localized urban settings, studying everything from watchmakers to street gangs. I no longer have enough knowledge of the different publications by this group to give you an adequate response except to say there is some kind of general belief that perhaps there is diversity, but I have too little information to know if the “group” has undertaken any kind of historical assessment for an approach that has existed for some 100 years. The tradition exists today in several locations, especially in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Anselm Strauss founded the department. Strauss was a very perceptive observer and could describe socially organized activities with clarity, but his use of interview material did not engage in word-for-word analyses of speech events and gestures in social interaction. My bias is to include local conditions preceding and following the interview fragments cited as data, and how participants were assessing each other’s activities and perspectives.
Herbert Blumer
I sensed a bit of tension with Howard Becker after an incident that happened years ago when I was revising my manuscript on
I met Goffman on New Year’s Eve 1957 at Harold Garfinkel’s house. A few weeks later, I gave a methods class to graduate students in nursing at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley. I told Goffman about lectures and he said he was on his way to Berkeley and could meet there for dinner one night. We had several meetings.
At the time, I was a post-doctoral fellow at the UCLA medical center and spent most of my time trying to write a book with Garfinkel on theoretical and methodological issues. We completed several chapters, but when I then went to Northwestern University for two years as a Visiting Assistant Professor, we corresponded and encountered several disagreements. Garfinkel visited us at Northwestern and stayed in our small apartment. We were unable to mend our differences, including the major one about the study of traditional theories, on methodological and substantive research. Garfinkel believed my criticism of traditional theories, methods and substantive areas was simply “remedial” and he was opposed to such research, preferring instead to ignore such concerns (see my chapter on “The ambivalent relationship between ethnomethodology, conversational analysis and mainstream sociology in North America” (2006).
In the fall of 1954, when Garfinkel arrived at UCLA as an Assistant Professor, I asked him if I could audit an undergraduate class on ”norms,” but he refused to let me audit the class. He used a term that annoyed me. He said I was
In the spring semester of 1955 after having finished my MA degree classes before going to Cornell University for my doctorate, I learned from my statistics Professor William Robinson that there was to be an informal seminar at his home with Garfinkel, Professor Richard Morris, and two graduate students to hear Harold’s presentation prepared for a departmental seminar.
I was pleased to have participated in Garfinkel’s research; it was different from anything I had learned about surveys, interviewing and ethnography. The “demonstrations” were similar to semi-experimental social psychological studies. I believe Garfinkel’s “demonstrations may have been adapted from his classes in experimental social psychology in the department of Social Relations at Harvard. After the informal session, he asked me to come to his office hours for a meeting. At the meeting, a few days later, he asked if I would be an unpaid assistant in a project with him on some new demonstrations he was about to begin. I was curious about what he was doing. He told me to read work by Alfred Schtüz.
Before leaving for Cornell he gave me Schütz’ home address in New York City and told to write Schütz and request a meeting. I wrote Schütz and he responded, suggesting a time and date. My wife Merryl and I went down to New York. She went to see a cousin and I went to Schütz’ apartment on the Upper East Side on 5th Avenue. I had 2 hours with him, and I was both fascinated and intimidated by the way he described the kind of background a person should have to understand phenomenology. He stated it would be very helpful if I knew Greek and Latin, and that French and German were also helpful. I told him I was fluent in Spanish, weak in French and starting to learn a little German.
I was surprised by his asking me how “was Mr. Garfinkel?” He noted that he had not heard from Garfinkel for a long time. He described several papers he was working on and gave me a few reprints and two unpublished papers. I asked about his teaching at the New School for Social Research and what he would recommend I study vis-à-vis research methods. He indicated that he had given considerable thought to how to interview subjects and that his work at a bank for many years had been very useful for learning how to pursue probing questions to learn more about a person’s understanding of an problem and the reasoning processes they seemed to follow. The discussion helped me understand the importance of creating a conversational context when seeking details about a topic and presenting clients with counterfactual ways of thinking about what they had reported earlier in the interview.
For the next few years, I puzzled about how Schutz’ way of interviewing was useful for understanding the notion of a world known in common and taken for granted. Garfinkel’s dissertation was an ingenious way to operationalize abstract sociological concepts by focusing on a research method that made problematic the problem-solving task that assumed instructions and practices required for the research task were self-evident, that is, a kind of trust needed to negotiate daily living even when local appearances and demands seemed counterintuitive or strange for the task at hand. In other words, suspend one’s taken for granted, self-evident aspects of the task at hand, and then present subjects with outcomes that appeared to contradict their expected reasoning. Subjects were deceived until the end of the demonstration. Deception that was essential for the success of the demonstration. In the U.S., such deception would probably be prohibited today.
At the same time, who were doing the folk songs? What sorts of conditions appeared to facilitate classical ballet, and what kinds of folk dancing could have preceded its emergence and development in selective parts of the world? One of the most important cases is American jazz. I grew up in a neighborhood with blacks, Latinos, and Asians. I used to go to nightclubs because I lost hair early and could take young women to a place that opened from 2 to 5 a.m. I can remember the songs, (
When Garfinkel learned I would be at Berkeley for one year, Sacks was a acting Assistant Profesor at UCLA, Garfinkel asked me to help Harvey Sacks obtain his doctoral degree.
I also joined my colleague in psychology, David Premack, about the Vice Chancellor’s decision not to allow Premack and myself to become directors of an existing but moribund center for research in human development. The new chair of biology was also unhappy because the Vice Chancellor was not supporting his recruitment of a new biochemistry colleague. In addition, Premack and I encountered considerable opposition establishing a new linguistics department. I began to think the Vice Chancellor would make it difficult for the campus to become a important research university. I then seriously decided to apply for a new position at UCSD. UCSD had established strong departments of linguistics, philosophy and psychology (among many others, especially in the physical and biological sciences, and I recognized a number of distinguished faculty had been hired. I was soon offered a position at UCSD and accepted. I remained until I retired as Professor Emeritus.
John Kitsuse was an American Professor of Sociology who contributed to the sociology of social problems, criminology and deviance. He is primarily known as one of the founding fathers of the labeling approach to deviant behavior in the 1960s and for his contributions to the perspective of constructivism on social problems from the 1970s on.
Kituse, J. & Cicourel, A. V. (1963) “A Note on the Uses of Official Statistics”,
Cicourel, A. V. (2013). “Origin and Demise of Socio-cultural Presentations of Self from Birth to Death: Caregiver ‘Scaffolding’ Practices Necessary for Guiding and Sustaining Communal Social Structure Throughout the Life Cycle”,
Jacob, F.; Monod, J. (1961), «Genetic regulatory mechanisms in the synthesis of proteins.» http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13718526, J. Mol. Biol. 3: 318–56, June 1961, PMID:13718526. Jacob, François.
David Premack is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He has focused on cognitive differences between the intelligence of animals and humans. Premack’s first publication was a new theory of reinforcement (which became known as Premack’s principle) and he later introduced the concept of Theory of Mind, with Guy Woodruff. A nonverbal method for testing causal inference designed by Premack made it possible to show that both young children and chimpanzees are capable of causal inference. He also showed that chimpanzees are capable of symbolic behavior. Premack, D., & Premack, A. J. (2003).
Noam Chomsky is an American Linguist, Philosopher, Cognitive Scientist, Logician, political commentator and activist. Sometimes described as the “father of modern linguistics”, Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem. He has spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently Professor Emeritus.
Altmann J. (1974). “Observational study of behavior: sampling methods”.
Martin Sereno is an American Professor of Psychology, Chair of Cognitive Neuroimaging and Director of the NeuroImaging Centre at University College London and Birkbeck College. His research aims to map visual, auditory, somatosensory and motor areas in the human brain, and he has pioneered new techniques in brain imaging.
Roy G. D’Andrade is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at UCSD and one of the founders of the theory of cognitive anthropology. A unifying theme in much of his work is the problem of identifying and describing cultural models (also known as folk models, or the often implicit, culturally shared ways that people assume the world works); in recent years he is particularly concerned with conceptualizing cultural models through schema theory. In 2002 he was awarded the NAS Award for Scientific Reviewing from the National Academy of Sciences.
Michael Tomasello is an American developmental psychologist, Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany. Tomasello gathered evidence to prove that strictly humans share two dimensions: reading intentions and interacting with others socially. Joint attention is another cognitive capacity that he explores. He found evidence to prove that infants can begin to engage in joint attentional interactions because they understand that others around them are also agents of joint attention. It means that infants have the capacity to identify with adults and distinguish the underlying goal of those around the infants through their actions. Books include
Cicourel, A. & Kitsuse, J. (1963)
Hans Reichenbach developed logical positivism in the XXth century, a scientifically inspired philosophy and an uncompromisingly empiricist epistemology. Criticism and justification of scientific methodology formed the core of almost all his philosophical efforts, which he promoted in a crescendo of books, in the journal
Robin M. Williams was a Sociology Professor at Cornell University and devoted much of his career and writing to studies of intergroup tensions, race relations, war and peace, ethnic conflict, and altruism and cooperation. His best-known works include
Jack Kiefer was a Professor at the the Department of Mathematical Statistics at Cornell University. He was a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association, President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Guggenheim fellow, and in 1973 he was named the first Horace White Professor of Mathematics at Cornell.
Harry Hoijer was student of Edward Sapir’s at the University of Chicago (PhD, 1931), He began his career in linguistics with intensive fieldwork on the Coahuiltecan language, Tonkawa, though shortly thereafter he turned to an intensive study of Athapaskan, including several Apache languages, Navajo, Sarsi, and Galice. Hoijer moved to the new Department of Anthropology at UCLA in 1940. He coined the term Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
Annette Karmiloff-Smith is a professorial research fellow at the Developmental Neurocognition Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. She argues against approaches that take a modality-specific approach to developmental disorders - approaches that state, for example, that autism arises because of a failure of the theory of mind module. She has argued that these approaches assume a “mosaic-like” approach to cognitive development - according to which different systems within the brain develop separately from each other, based purely on information coded in the genes. The real picture of development is much more complicated and comes about as a result of back-propagating interactions between gene, brain, behavior, and the environment; modules appear relatively late in development.
Howard Saul Becker is an American sociologist that is considered part of the second Chicago School of Sociology which also includes Erving Goffman, and Anselm Strauss. Becker’s 1963 book
Anselm Strauss was an American sociologist internationally known as a medical sociologist (especially for his pioneering attention to chronic illness and dying) and as the developer (with Barney Glaser) of grounded theory, a method of qualitative analysis widely used in sociology, nursing, education, social work, and organizational studies. He also wrote extensively on Chicago sociology/symbolic interactionism, sociology of work, social worlds/arenas theory, social psychology and urban imagery.
Herbert Blumer codified of the fundamental theoretical and methodological tenets of the sociological perspective that he called symbolic interactionism. Individual and collective actions of any scale or complexity reflect the meanings that people assign to things, as these meanings emerge in and are transformed within the context of human group life. Blumer incorporated these assumptions into his vision of social life as an ongoing stream of situations handled by people through self-indication and definition.He synthesized the pragmatist philosophy of Mead with Cooley’s notion of sympathetic introspection, particularly as it informs contemporary ethnography, to develop a sociologically focused approach to the study of human lived experience. Because his rendition of symbolic interactionism invariably portrays people as possessing agency, as reflective interactive participants in community life, he routinely called into question analyses of social life that rely on more stereotypical factors-oriented approaches.
George Herbert Mead is a major figure in the history of American philosophy, one of the founders of Pragmatism along with Peirce, James, Tufts, and Dewey. He published numerous papers during his lifetime and, following his death, several of his students produced four books in his name from Mead’s unpublished (and even unfinished) notes and manuscripts, from students’ notes, and from stenographic records of some of his courses at the University of Chicago. Mead’s theory of the emergence of mind and self out of the social process of significant communication has become the foundation of the symbolic interactionist school of sociology and social psychology.
Dalton, Melville. 1959. “Men Who Manage.” in
Leonard Broom was the second sociologist appointed to UCLA’s newly established department of sociology and anthropology. In 1955, he co-authored (with Philip Selznick, UC Berkeley) one of the first and most successful textbooks in sociology. As a Professor Emeritus at The Australian National University he became an active and influential voice in the development of sociology in Australia.
Egon Bittner studies led him to the University of California at Los Angeles where he did his PhD with Donald Cressey. He joined the Brandeis Sociology faculty in the 60s. He was best known for studies of the relationships between police and society. These studies, which elegantly bracketed conventional stereotypes of the police, proceeded from, but were not limited by ethnomethodogical premises and led Egon and many of his students to cruise about in squad cars and hang out in police stations to gather data. His research sought the behavioral bases of the uses and abuses of this application of force.
Richard Morris was a Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was the author of
John Rawls was an American philosopher, and taught at Harvard and Oxford. Theory of Justice (1971) is regarded as one of the primary texts in political philosophy. Rawls employs a number of thought experiments to determine what constitutes a fair agreement in which “everyone is impartially situated as equals,” in order to determine principles of social justice.
Cicourel, A. V. (1968)
Gino Germani emigrated from Italy to Argentina during Italian fascism, and taught sociology at the University of Buenos Aires. He created new lines of social research on modernization, secularization and political life of the modern society. In 1966 he escaped from Argentina’s coup d’état and became Professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Kingsley Davis was an American sociologist and demographer who coined the terms population explosion and zero population growth. His specific studies of American society led him to work on a general science of world society, based on empirical analysis of each society in its habitat.
Leo Löwenthal joined the Institute for Social Research in 1926 and became its leading expert on the sociology of literature and mass culture as well as the editor of the journal
Harvey Sacks was an American sociologist that pioneered extremely detailed studies of the way people use language in everyday life. Despite his early death in a car crash and the fact that he did not publish widely, he founded the discipline of conversation analysis. His work has had significant influence on fields such as linguistics, discourse analysis, and discursive psychology.
Gerald D. Berreman received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Cornell University in 1959 and was a UC Berkeley Emeritus Professor of Anthropology widely recognized for championing socially responsible anthropology and for his work on social inequality in India. He joined the UC Berkeley Department of Anthropology in 1959 and retired in 2001 after a distinguished career that featured a 41-year study of caste, gender, class and environment in and around the Indian village of Sirkanda and the urban area of Dehra Dun. Berreman was known for his campaign to establish an ethics code that said anthropologists’ primary responsibility should be to the people they study. He also was an early proponent of transparency in social science research.