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The aim of this chapter is to look at the British sociological professoriate, describing its changing composition as it expanded, its career patterns, productivity, attitudes towards teaching and research, and exits. The professors are divided into four cohorts by birth (up to 1930, 1931–44, 1945–49 and 1950 +). The details of the survey on which our description is based are in Appendix 1 below. Trends in national origin, religion, type of education, qualifications, publications, preference for research, political outlook, view of decline of sociology, attitudes to career, and comparison with alternative careers are tabulated.

This chapter poses the question: How we can analyze, conceptually and empirically, whether or not certain types of change have occurred? It points out research areas to further address how, why, and in what dimensions such transformation has occurred. It first addresses how the amount or degree of ‘change’ be conceptualized, as compared to the amount or degree of ‘not change’. Three concepts are introduced: novelty, destruction, and renewal. The chapter then explains six points about how flexibility and stability can be understood from a paradigmatic perspective on the innovating and transforming economy.

This chapter explores the theme raised by senior administrators that student culture is both an indicator of and contributor to each Catholic institution’s distinctive Catholic culture and identity. It assesses the claim by administrators that Catholic colleges and universities provide a uniquely inclusive and value-laden education that permeates all aspects of the collegiate experience and transforms the lives of students. The chapter looks at policies and behavioral standards and enforcement mechanisms in a number of areas including alcohol use, sexual intimacy among students, invitations to outside speakers, and the awarding of honorary degrees. It also explores the role of Catholic moral teaching in student culture at Catholic institutions, and offers strategies to enhance the distinguishability and inheritability of religious culture in all four models of Catholic institutions.

The evolution of dialectic over the course of the 16th century had significant ramifications for the study of theology. Throughout German-speaking Europe, the rhetorical dialectic popularized by the textbooks of Philipp Melanchthon and others in the first half of the 16th century was gradually followed by greater attention to the logical works of Aristotle, only to be challenged by the Ramism that became popular in Reformed schools at the end of the century. The evolution of Basel’s university curriculum reflected this development. The education of Basel’s future clergy proceeded by stages, focusing on grammar and philology at the Latin school, on rhetoric and dialectic while they were candidates for a bachelor’s degree, and advanced dialectic and natural philosophy in preparation for receiving the master’s degree.

Having examined the long-term institutional layering and sedimentation that has occurred, this chapter sets out to map out the topography of the state as it currently exists. In doing so, it succeeds where numerous parliamentary, official, and academic studies have failed. It also provides a new conceptual tool — in the form of the Russian Doll Model — through which different degrees of delegation can be represented and through this, the ‘drift’ of functions across a ‘spectrum of autonomy’.

When a number of social scientists were given synthetic data that fitted the universal law of gravitation, they all missed the underlying pattern. Yet they found results satisfactory and complete by the current social science norms: high R ², degree of significance of input factors, and the direction of their impact. The design of this experiment can be criticized, but it still should give us pause. If some social phenomena existed that were of the form most prevalent in physics, then the quantitative methods currently dominant in social sciences might not suffice to discover them.

When do we care for others as we care for ourselves? William Hamilton showed that we should be expected to care for our family members in proportion to our degree of relationship to them. Such reasoning explains why eusociality evolved independently at least twelve times in the order Hymenoptera, which includes ants, bees, and wasps, but only three times elsewhere in the animal kingdom. It also verifies Thomas Hobbes' answer to the question: Why cannot mankind live sociably one with another as bees or ants?

This chapter explains the preferential attachment mechanism in application to growing networks. Illustrating models show that proportional preferential attachment in recursive networks leads to scale-free architectures, while the uniform attachment of new nodes results in exponential degree distributions.

One of the most striking features of English from a cross-cultural perspective is the proliferation of various linguistic tools for qualifying one's statements, hedging one's assertions, and differentiating the strength of one's assent to a proposition. This applies in particular to epistemic verbal phrases like I suppose, I gather, I imagine, I presume, and so on. This chapter traces the rise of such epistemic qualifiers in the history of English, linking it, in particular, with the enormous influence of Locke's ideas concerning degrees of probability, degrees of assent, the limitations of human knowledge, and the need to always distinguish between knowledge and judgment. The chapter undertakes a fine-grained semantic analysis of a large number of expressions like I suppose, I gather, I presume, I assume, I bet, I guess, and so on, and discusses their cultural underpinnings, in a cross-cultural and historical perspective.

Most of those political philosophers who have tried to make sense of claims about degrees of freedom have proposed that the individual options available to the agent be weighted in terms of their values (whether the subjective values of the agent, objective values or the values of the agent’s society). Most prominent among these authors are Charles Taylor, Amartya Sen, Richard Arneson and Richard Norman. This value-based approach to measuring freedom can be shown to conflict with the view that we are interested in measuring freedom only because freedom has non-specific value. It therefore renders degree-of-freedom statements normatively superfluous. Moreover, even if interpreted as a way of making purely rhetorical sense of such statements, the approach has counterintuitive implications.

Some of the authors who adopt the value-based approach to measuring freedom think of freedom as the absence not only of constraints that are external to the agent but also of constraints that are internal to the agent. Most prominent among these authors is Charles Taylor. On Taylor’s view, freedom coincides with self-mastery or self-determination or “positive freedom”. As well as leading to illiberal judgements of degrees of freedom, the tendency to roll together internal and external freedom into a single quantitative attribute can be shown to be logically inseparable from the value-based approach to measuring freedom. Given the arguments of chapter 5, this rules out internal constraints as a kind of constraint that can be relevant in measuring degrees of overall freedom.

Approximately every three years US News and World Report publishes its rankings of master's degree programmes in public affairs. As part of its ‘America's best graduate schools’ series, the most recent US News rankings of public affairs programmes appeared in 2008. Earlier rankings were published in 2004, 2001, 1998, and 1995. What were the intentions of those introducing these rankings, what form did the rankings take and what intended or unintended effects did they have? This chapter begins by considering the background, rationale, scope, and methodology of the US News ranking programme, and what those who introduced it intended and anticipated the rankings would do. It then describes a ‘general theory’ of academic rankings, setting out the book's findings in the context of that theory, and considering those findings in the light of what effects were anticipated or intended by those who introduced the rankings.

This chapter continues the close analysis of discourses on “religion” and related categories such as “politic order” and the “commonweal” and shows how in significant texts of the period there was nothing like a modern concept of the nonreligious secular, or some conceptual or social space from which an attitude of neutrality could be taken toward some putatively separate domain called “religion.” The commonweal or politic body, based on a holistic analogy with the well‐functioning human body, is embedded in a God‐given hierarchical cosmos that legitimated rank and degree long after the Reformation. The editor of these texts, C. H. Williams, is aware of the problem of using modern concepts such as “class” to represent the realities of the early modern period. Yet editorial needs of the twentieth century in effect compel him to classify these texts according to modern categories, thus creating a contradiction between what the texts imply and what we need them to mean.

This chapter presents the educational experience and achievements of the Northwest alumni. Children in foster care are at high risk for school failure because of childhood deprivation and other adversities, frequent school changes, and lack of educational supports. Because of the extended time in care (an average of over six years), educational achievement is particularly relevant for the Northwest alumni. The educational achievement of alumni is tabled at the end of the chapter.

This chapter discusses some themes from Roy Sorensen's book Vagueness and Contradiction. While agreeing with Sorensen that the major premise in a Sorites argument must be false, it rejects the consequences that Sorensen draws from this: that vague predicates have sharp boundaries, and that the phenomenon is to be explained in terms of ‘truthmaker gaps’. It is argued that ‘gappy’ theories of a variety of kinds, including McGee and McLaughlin's theory, misrepresent the phenomenon of vagueness. Further, some of the problems Sorensen raises disappear on a degree-theoretic approach to vagueness.

Much of the literature on vagueness has taken for granted that semantic and epistemic approaches to vagueness are fundamentally at odds. If we can analyze borderline cases and the Sorites paradox in terms of degrees of truth, then we do not need an epistemic explanation. Conversely, if an epistemic explanation suffices, then there is no reason to depart from the familiar simplicity of classical bivalent semantics. This chapter questions this assumption, showing that there is an intelligible motivation for adopting a many-valued semantics, even if one accepts a form of epistemicism. The resulting hybrid view has advantages over both classical epistemicism and traditional many-valued approaches.