Areas of Specialization:
- Social Movements / Collective Behavior
- New Religious Movements
- Quantitative Methodology
- Historical-Comparative Methodology
- Sociology of Knowledge
Curriculum Vitae
Courses Taught
Winter Semester 2002/03 (University of Göttingen)
Theory and Methodology of International Comparative Research
What a Lousy Study! Rubbish! Goodness Criteria in Social Research
Summer Semester 2002 (University of Göttingen)
Conference Papers
Patterns of Movement Recruitment
Why dense networks help recruitment to new social movements, but obstruct recruitment to the New Age movement
presented at the ASA Annual Meeting 1999
ABSTRACT
While most social movements recruit their members
from dense, submerged networks, movements rooted in Middle America -- such
as New Age and other marketed social movements -- recruit individuals who
precisely lack an embeddedness in dense, emotionally gratifying networks.
As a consequence of these differential recruitment patterns, Middle American
movements do not contain grassroots groups. Such grassroots groups have significantly contributed to
the successful production of collective action by new social (and to a lesser extent poor people's) movements.
Stiftung Volkswagenwerk and Ford Foundation or STATA Corporation and SPSS, Inc.: Who Rules Sociology?
A Supply-Side Driven Critique of the Discipline´s Segmentation
presented at the
ASA
Annual Meeting 1999
ABSTRACT
Genesis and consequences of sociology´s segmented differentiation are
discussed. It is argued that sociology´s current differentiation is not
a result of theoretical considerations, but instead has been largely determined
by social developments. In particular, social movements have increased
their grip on sociological theory, as many activist scholars have a greater
allegiance to their movement than to the academy. The commercialization
of sociological literature has put some additional extra-scientific pressures
on the discipline. As a consequence, sociology has become organizationally
proliferated along lines that have little to do with intra-disciplinary
developments. This dysfunctional segmentation has led to a weakening of
sociology towards other extra-disciplinary influences. Namely, particularly
in so-called «quantitative sociology,» a growing dependency on commercial
enterprises in the fields of data collection and data analysis can be observed.
From Organziation to Identity
presented at the
MSS
Annual Meeting 1998
ABSTRACT
The quality of the relationship between the organization of a social
movement and its collective identity is still largely unexplored. The central hypothesis of this essay posits
that resource poor movements enjoying little
institutional support are likely to develop universalistic and
traditionally coded collective identities, while movements whose members command considerable
amounts of tangible resources and cultural capital tend to develop
primordially coded identities. The plausibility of this hypothesis is
illustrated
with the cases of the New Age and feminist movements.