John Levi Martin | |
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Born | June 25, 1964 |
Alma mater | Wesleyan University (B.A.) University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D.) |
Known for | cultural sociology, cognitive sociology, political sociology, sociological theory |
Awards | ASA Theory Prize for Outstanding Book 2010, 2012 |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Sociology |
Institutions | University of Chicago |
Doctoral advisor | Ann Swidler |
Other academic advisors | Michael Hout |
John Levi Martin (born 1964) is an American sociologist and the Florence Borchert Bartling Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of five books: Thinking Through Statistics, Thinking Through Methods, Thinking Through Theory, Social Structures, The Explanation of Social Action, the latter two of which have both won the Theory Prize for Outstanding Book from the ASA's Theory Section. [1] He has also written data analysis programs such as DAMN (Dyadic Analysis of Multiple Networks) and ELLA (Every-gal-and-guy’s Latent Lattice Analyser).
Martin studied at Wesleyan University and received a BA in sociology and English in 1987. While there he was influenced by notable political sociologist Herbert Hyman who died in 1985, and Martin received the Herbert Hyman prize for undergraduate sociology for his thesis: The Epistemology of Fundamentalism. He then attended the University of California - Berkeley, where he received a MA in 1990 and a PhD in 1997. His dissertation committee was Ann Swidler (Chair), Mike Hout, James Wiley, John Wilmoth. It was titled Power Structure and Belief Structure in Forty American Communes, and used the Urban Commune Data Set. [2]
John Levi Martin's current main areas of interest are field theory, social structures, and party formation. His previous work has been on classical theory, historical changes in sexual decision making and the economy, the shaping of belief systems, the use of race as a conceptual category in American sociology, the relationship between interpersonal power and attributions of sexiness, methods for the analysis of qualitative data, political psychology, and the division of labor in Busytown.
Action theory is an area in philosophy concerned with theories about the processes causing willful human bodily movements of a more or less complex kind. This area of thought involves epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, jurisprudence, and philosophy of mind, and has attracted the strong interest of philosophers ever since Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. With the advent of psychology and later neuroscience, many theories of action are now subject to empirical testing.
Robert King Merton was an American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor. In 1994 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science. He is considered a founding father of modern sociology and a major contributor to criminology.
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Computational sociology is a branch of sociology that uses computationally intensive methods to analyze and model social phenomena. Using computer simulations, artificial intelligence, complex statistical methods, and analytic approaches like social network analysis, computational sociology develops and tests theories of complex social processes through bottom-up modeling of social interactions.
The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing with "the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity." The sociology of scientific ignorance (SSI) is complementary to the sociology of scientific knowledge. For comparison, the sociology of knowledge studies the impact of human knowledge and the prevailing ideas on societies and relations between knowledge and the social context within which it arises.
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Verstehen, in the context of German philosophy and social sciences in general, has been used since the late 19th century – in English as in German – with the particular sense of the "interpretive or participatory" examination of social phenomena. The term is closely associated with the work of the German sociologist, Max Weber, whose antipositivism established an alternative to prior sociological positivism and economic determinism, rooted in the analysis of social action. In anthropology, verstehen has come to mean a systematic interpretive process in which an outside observer of a culture attempts to relate to it and understand others.
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Humanistic sociology is a domain of sociology which originated mainly from the work of the University of Chicago Polish philosopher-turned-sociologist, Florian Znaniecki. It is a methodology which treats its objects of study and its students, that is, humans, as composites of values and systems of values. In certain contexts, the term is related to other sociological domains such as antipositivism. Humanistic sociology seeks to shed light on questions such as, "What is the relationship between a man of principle and a man of opportunism?"
Neil Joseph Smelser (1930–2017) was an American sociologist who served as professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an active researcher from 1958 to 1994. His research was on collective behavior, sociological theory, economic sociology, sociology of education, social change, and comparative methods. Among many lifetime achievements, Smelser "laid the foundations for economic sociology."
Sociological theories are statements of how and why particular facts about the social world are related. They range in scope from concise descriptions of a single social process to paradigms for analysis and interpretation. Some sociological theories explain aspects of the social world and enable prediction about future events, while others function as broad perspectives which guide further sociological analyses.
Harrison Colyar White is the emeritus Giddings Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. White played an influential role in the “Harvard Revolution” in social networks and the New York School of relational sociology. He is credited with the development of a number of mathematical models of social structure including vacancy chains and blockmodels. He has been a leader of a revolution in sociology that is still in process, using models of social structure that are based on patterns of relations instead of the attributes and attitudes of individuals.
Mathematical sociology is the area of sociology that uses mathematics to construct social theories. Mathematical sociology aims to take sociological theory, which is strong in intuitive content but weak from a formal point of view, and to express it in formal terms. The benefits of this approach include increased clarity and the ability to use mathematics to derive implications of a theory that cannot be arrived at intuitively. In mathematical sociology, the preferred style is encapsulated in the phrase "constructing a mathematical model." This means making specified assumptions about some social phenomenon, expressing them in formal mathematics, and providing an empirical interpretation for the ideas. It also means deducing properties of the model and comparing these with relevant empirical data. Social network analysis is the best-known contribution of this subfield to sociology as a whole and to the scientific community at large. The models typically used in mathematical sociology allow sociologists to understand how predictable local interactions are and they are often able to elicit global patterns of social structure.
The sociology of immigration involves the sociological analysis of immigration, particularly with respect to race and ethnicity, social structure, and political policy. Important concepts include assimilation, enculturation, marginalization, multiculturalism, postcolonialism, transnationalism and social cohesion.
Social network analysis software is software which facilitates quantitative or qualitative analysis of social networks, by describing features of a network either through numerical or visual representation.
Sociology is a study of society, patterns of social relationships, social interaction and culture of everyday life. It is a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order, acceptance, and change or social evolution. Sociology is also defined as the general science of society. While some sociologists conduct research that may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, others focus primarily on refining the theoretical understanding of social processes. Subject matter ranges from the micro-sociology level of individual agency and interaction to the macro level of systems and the social structure.
David Reuben Jerome Heise is a social psychologist who originated the idea that affectual processes control interpersonal behavior. Additionally he contributes to both quantitative and qualitative methodology in sociology. He retired from undergraduate teaching in 2002, but continues research and graduate student consulting as Rudy Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Indiana University.
A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors, sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for analyzing the structure of whole social entities as well as a variety of theories explaining the patterns observed in these structures. The study of these structures uses social network analysis to identify local and global patterns, locate influential entities, and examine network dynamics.
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