Neil Gross
Colby College

​Some section chairs, I have noticed, are as good at writing inspiring and informative pieces for their section’s newsletters as they are at crafting powerful works of sociological scholarship. That’s not me. Although a long time ago I had a stint editing Perspectives, I find the conventions of the genre elusive, and the pressure to say something profound about the state of the field too much to bear. I begin with this confession to forewarn you that what follows is neither well-composed nor profound. But perhaps it will do its job of giving you a sense for why I put together the panels I did for the meetings in Montreal.

John Mohr
University of California,
​Santa Barbara

In the first part of this essay (Perspectives, Fall 2015), I suggested things are looking pretty good for sociological theory, an optimism grounded in my appreciation of emergent sociological sub-fields where interesting theoretical work is being paired with innovative new measurement regimes to create different kinds of sociological insights.  I pointed to the field of computational sociology (or Big Data social science) as an example.  In this second part, I offer a few reasons why I think this area of research will continue to need more and better theory in the years ahead. I highlight three causes, what I call: (1) the paradigm effect, (2) the data effect, and (3) the culture effect. 
 

Andrew Perrin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

It is a strange artifact of the ASA structure that we have a distinct section on sociological theory. For some time in our discipline's history, virtually everyone in the discipline was mostly doing things that are now labeled “theory.” And a nod to theory-building remains a hallmark of most empirical work in sociology, even as formal training in theory becomes less central. Theory-as-specialty is sometimes understood as a ritualistic paean to disciplinary forebears: the textual touchstone for graduate students before moving on to real sociology. Sometimes, by contrast, it is the work every sociologist does to abstract or generalize empirical findings, or to set them in context. How ought we understand, even promote, theory-as-specialty in the context of a discipline that understands theory in these ways?