No abstract

The authors review all known studies applying optimal matching or alignment (OM) techniques to social science sequence data. Issues of data, coding, temporality, cost setting/algorithm design, and analytic strategies are considered, and substantive findings are reviewed. The authors conclude that OM techniques have produced interesting results in a wide variety of areas, the most promising being studies of careers and of sequentially organized cultural artifacts.

A wide variety of work in social science concerns sequences of events or phenomena. This essay reviews concepts of sequence and methods for analyzing sequences. After a brief definitional discussion, I consider sequence literatures from various areas. I then discuss recent methodologies for sequence analysis. I review stepwise approaches like Markovian and event history analysis as well as whole sequence approaches resting on new developments in biology and other fields.

In this article I generalize ecological theory by developing the notion of separate but linked ecologies. I characterize an ecology by its set of actors, its set of locations, and the relation it involves between these. I then develop two central concepts for the linkage of ecologies: hinges and avatars. The first are issues or strategies that ''work'' in both ecologies at once. The second are attempts to institutionalize in one ecology a copy or colony of an actor in another. The article investigates the first of these concepts using two detailed examples of hinge analysis between the professional and political ecologies. Both concern medical licensing, the first in 19th-century New York and the second in 19th-century England. For the avatar concept, the article analyzes four less detailed cases linking the professional and university ecologies: computer science, criminal justice, clinical psychology, and applied economics.

No abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Sociological Theory. This paper argues that the dominance of linear models has led many sociologists to construe the social world in terms of a "general linear reality." This reality assumes (1) that the social world consists of fixed entities with variable attributes, (2) that cause cannot flow from "small" to "large" attributes/events, (3) that causal attributes have only one causal pattern at once, (4) that the sequence of events does not influence their outcome, (5) that the "careers" of entities are largely independent, and (6) that causal attributes are generally independent of each other. The paper discusses examples of these assumptions in empirical work, considers standard and new methods addressing them, and briefly explores alternative models for reality that employ demographic, sequential, and network perspectives.icist" (or "methodologist") are arbitrary polar terms designed to refer quickly to ideal-typical positions. They do not, obviously, embody a formal sociology of sociology.2 Much of theorists' disaffection with methods reflects not opposition to quantification, but to the common belief that standard linear models are the only possible formalization for theories. Although there are other approaches, few have wide application (see Freese [1980] and Freese and Sell [1980] for reviews of formal sociological theorizing). Most classic work on theory and theory construction (e.g., Hage 1972; Abell 1971; even Stinchcombe 1968) has employed the GLR view of social reality. I should note that I assume throughout that theory exists to provide comprehensible and logically rigorous accounts of facts. Definitions of comprehensibility, logicality, and facticity are of course debatable. Some theorists believe that empiricists' "facts" are uninteresting or artifactual while some empiricists believe that theorists' theories are incomprehensible and esthetic. But despite their disagreements about content, the two sides

In some rural riots, as in the French [riots] of 1789, the path of disturbance actually followed well-trodden and traditional routes.1 The notion that riots and other collective disturbances follow a common script is standard historical and sociological fare. In the passage from which this quote is drawn, Rude describes a script proceeding from general grievances to triggering events and on to a fixed repertory of rick-burning, machine-breaking, and so on. Throughout his earlier chapters he presents stories of individual riots, on the evidence of which this generalized sequence rests. But one may well ask when we can really speak of such a fixed sequence of events. How would we identify such a sequence quantitatively? How could we discover if the characteristic sequence in rural riots differed sharply from that of urban disturbances? How might we analyze the effects of the occupations of participants on such sequences of events? The answers to such questions are not easily found. The 2 Most attempts to explain riots and revolutions have focused on structural factors. E.g., Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, I979); Jeffery M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution (New York, I975). This is true even of Rude's own work, e.g., The Crowd and (with Eric J. Hobsbawm) Captain Swing (New York, I968). For overviews of the "compare by cases" method, see Skocpol and Margaret Somers, "The Uses of Comparative History in Macrosocial Inquiry," Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXII (1980), 174-197; Arthur Stinchcombe, Theoretical Methods in Social History (New York, 1978), 89-97. An overview of the sequence problem is Abbott, "Sequences of Social Events: Concepts and Methods for the Analysis of Order in Social Processes," Historical Methods, XVI (1983), I29-I47.

No abstract