Word: sociologists
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...activities-legal and illegal-are estimated to bring in more than $30 billion a year. The strength of the Mafia is based less on the corporate structure of a criminal organization than on the social organization of Sicily and southern Italy, whence most of the Mafiosi spring. There, notes Sociologist Francis Ianni, the rule of law is replaced by a social structure that is regulated by a code: each man must protect the family's honor and avenge any sullying of that honor. The code, says Ianni, is "an integrative behavioral system which binds families to each other throughout...
Most nonprofessional killings are impulsive-done in a flash of anger triggered by a minor insult or a quarrel over money, love or sex. Many are committed by people who, Sociologist Stuart Palmer says, "tend to be overconforming most of the time"-which may help to explain their extreme violence when their rebellious impulses finally break out. Often the killer does not intend to kill; in at least 20% of the cases, he is acting in self-defense...
...University of Pennsylvania Sociologist Erving Goffman, that hoary punch line is a legitimate scientific query. In fact, Goffman has been asking -and answering-just such questions for years. He believes that greetings and goodbyes, congratulations and condolences, along with the other little ceremonies of daily life, serve serious purposes: they grease the wheels of social intercourse and help each person to create an acceptable image of himself in the eye of his fellows...
...Goffman's rituals represent only a normal attempt to save face. Because of this concentration on image making, some of Goffman's critics find him trivial and limited. "People just do not go around with their attention constantly focused on how they are being regarded," objects Berkeley Sociologist Herbert Blumer. All the same, Blumer considers Goffman "an innovative scholar" who "can take human interplay which appears humdrum and show it to be intricate, dynamic and dramatic." Indeed, Goffman's work may be not so much social science as social commentary. In the words of one behavioral scientist...
...clear and dispassionate study of low well-educated women perform, or don't, in serious professions and why. The author, a sociologist, examines in pragmatic and professional terms the attitudes of men, the confusion created by a multiplicity of feminine roles, the illogical shifts in what jobs are considered suitable for women...