Chinese Sociologists In The First Half Of The 20th Century

This book offers a biographical, intellectual and academic history of sociology in the late Qing and Republic of China period. The 46 sociologists featured in this volume are chosen from the pantheon of notable scholars who labored in this burgeoning field. Each of the 46 chapters is devoted to introducing one sociologist. Every chapter begins with a short biography that sheds light on how one sociologist became the scholar they were and earned their place in not only sociology, but also, for some of them, other fields in the social sciences and the humanities. This is followed by a review and analysis of the representative works by this sociologist, and how those laid the foundation for and contributed to the early development of a particular field of research in sociology as we know it today. The book weaves together a history of this academic discipline in China over those turbulent decades that organically combines personal details, methodological development, institutional changes and also larger social, economic and intellectual trends.

After Western hegemony in Social Sciences we are living in a global change. From the Chinese experience in sociology the author is opening a transnational space to produce a Post-Western Sociology. This is a scientific revolution in the social sciences.

This book is rooted in an epistemological approach to sociology in which the boundaries between Western and non-Western sociologies are acknowledged and built on. It argues that knowledge is organised in conceptual spaces linked to paradigms and programmes which in turn are linked to ethnocentred knowledge processes; that until recently Western approaches, including Post-Colonial, French Social Science and American approaches, have dominated non-Western theories; and that Western theories have sometimes seemed incapable of explaining phenomena produced in other societies. It goes on to argue that the blurring of boundaries between Western and non-Western sociologies is very important; and that such a Post-Western approach will mean co-production and co-construction of common knowledge, the recognition of ignored or forgotten scientific cultures and a "global change" in sociology which imposes theoretical and methodological detours, displacements, reversals and conversions. The book brings together a wide range of Western and Chinese sociologists who explore the consequences of this new approach in relation to many different issues and aspects of sociology.

This volume provides a compendium of papers presented at the 36th World Congress of the International Institute of Sociology, papers which address issues related to the age of globalization and social change, including cultural diversities, migration and equality, social transformation, and national identity.

Sociology is involved in a process of internationalisation. The rapid devlopment of China has provided the “China's experience” and the production of a new sociology. In this book a new dialogue between European and Chinese sociologists is opening up new horizons for Western thought.

While each chapter seizes the dialectic of enlightenment and counter-enlightenment at work in the global world, the volume insists on the moral, intellectual, structural, and historical resources that still make cosmopolitanism a real possibility even in these hard times.

Within this text, the contributors provide a historical perspective on the development of anthropology and sociology since their introduction to Chinese thought and education in the early twentieth century, with an emphasis on the 1930s and 1980s. The authors offer different windows on theoretical and research agendas of anthropologists and sociologists of the PRC and Taiwan, shaped as much by their political context as by disciplinary training. In examining the careers of several individual scholars, they also make note not only of their creative contributions, but also of the resonance of their intellectual concerns with contemporary issues in sociology and anthropology (culturalism, frontiers, women). Finally, the volume is organized loosely around the problem of how to translate these disciplines into a Chinese context(s), the issues of "indigenization" (bentuhua) or "making Chinese" (Zhongguohua), which have haunted the two disciplines since their establishment in the 1930s because of the contradictory expectations that they generate. This is where the case of China resonates with similar concerns in other societies where the disciplines were imported from abroad as products of a Euro/American capitalist modernity, conflicting with aspirations to create their own localized alternative modernities.

This book presents a collection of essays of how the city-state of Singapore's societal dynamics have evolved from the time of its birth as a nation in 1965 to the present. Key areas of Singapore society are explored, contributing to the understanding of the social organisation of the city. This study reveals a shift from the modernisation studies in the 1970s to a more political-economic turn, as a consequence of the influence of dependency and world systems theories. Topics covered include: urban studies, family, education, medical care, class and social stratification, work, language, ethnic groups, religion and crime and deviance.