It is widely assumed that there is a high level of medical pluralism in contemporary society. For example, both orthodox and non- orthodox medicines are simultaneously available to the public. What forms the boundaries that demarcate orthodox medicines from non-orthodox ones? These issues arise...

This article encourages sociologists to take a hybrid approach to the incorporation of public sociology into the discipline. The idea of public sociology rests upon a double conversation between sociologists as public actors, and the involvement of the \'extra-academic\' world into the dialogue....

Critical realism and analytic sociology support what can be called explanation by mechanism (EbM). EbM consists of three distinct theses. The elaboration thesis says that mere observation of interdependencies cannot be considered a full explanation because it does not give a description of how...

Abductive and retroductive inference are innovative tools of analysis which enable researchers to refine and redevelop social theory. This paper describes and demonstrates how to apply these tools to strengthen sociological theory-driven empirical research outputs. To illustrate how abductive...

Critical sociolinguistics (conceived as Critical Discourse Analysis: CDA), which has a focus on inclusive and exclusive language within social practice, can be used to shed light on underlying aspects of recent debates about the appointment of homosexual bishops in the UK and USA. One strand of...

This article proposes and demonstrates an approach to understanding everyday life that takes as its starting point the sensory aesthetics of place. In doing so it advances a video-ethnography approach to studying 'invisible' elements of everyday domestic life through the prism of the sensory...

This paper examines personal experience as both a sociologist and forester collecting data in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico. It builds on writings where researchers have taken an introspective or auto/biographical approach to problematizing their own involvement. My findings illustrate...

AbstractAlthough re-studies are relatively rare in sociological research, they can be very valuable resources for understanding social change. However, they also raise methodological questions about the validity of comparison given the inevitable changes in both social and analytical contexts...

The central objective of this paper is to attempt to counter an overly-rigid theoretical approach in data analysis. Implicit in the push to identify and follow one proper theoretical stream is the idea that one\'s particular theoretical approach will always be plausible and contains an inherent...