This is the centennial for the Association, so the meeting theme should be sufficiently expansive to address a wide historical sweep, and yet have sufficient focus to provide a framework in which to address key aspects of the social history of the discipline—its contemporary situation and its potential future development.
Each of the three elements from the title ["Comparative Perspectives, Competing Explanations"] is designed to produce a fruitful meeting frame:
First, the notion of “comparative perspectives” is itself “accordion-like” and can fit a number of purposes and goals. There is the international aspect, so that we can incorporate a comparison of American sociology with international developments. There is the internal evolution of perspectives inside of the United States, which would include the development and emergence of challenging and oppositional perspectives in the discipline, from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, to Sociologists for Women in Society, to the Association of Black Sociologists, to name but a few organizational manifestations of the challenges of the last half century. There are others that will surely surface from the general call.
Second, there is the notion of “competing explanations.” Competing explanations (from psychological to biological to economistic), and their resonance or lack thereof in public policy debates (among the general population, political activists, and community organizers) is the way in which this whole matter of the significance of the discipline—including its variable status with such funding sources as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and a full range of private foundations—is segue to:
Third, “What could be characterized as the ‘rising and declining significance of Sociology’”? Here, we encourage an explicit look back across the full century to try to account for the various periods in which there was a sense of ascendancy and a receptivity (along a continuum, of course) in the various arenas noted above. The “declining significance of sociology” is deliberatively provocative and could be the source of some scintillating debates and contestation.
-Troy Duster, ASA President and 2005 Program Committee Chair
