This volume presents an original study in the sociology of time: a case-description and conceptual analysis of the ways in which the temporal frameworks we customarily take for granted structure social reality. The study is based on the author's observation of the activities of medical professionals in a large teaching hospital: there, he collected data to show that the rhythms of organizational life have particular moral and cognitive dimensions, beyond simple regulative functions. While individuals customarily adapt to a variety of contexts for anchoring events in time, the temporal coordination necessary for collective efforts enforces social controls at multiple levels. This "sociotemporal order," an inherent constituent of social life, offers researchers and theoreticians alike a fresh and rewarding analytic perspective. Patterns of Time will be valued for its several distinctive achievements. Foremost among these is a demonstration of the importance of "temporality" as a topic in its own right. Because measurements of time are a commonplace of social life, sociologists have tended to ignore the significance of temporality as a feature of social organizations. Zerubavel's work is a corrective to this neglect. In addition, the author's imaginative integration of ethnographic description and theoretical analysis bridges the gap between contrasting methods that has characterized much recent sociological and anthropological work. Finally, because of the author's selection of the hospital setting, sociologists of medicine and the professions will find his study useful for its rich and well-observed ethnography, as well as its novel analytical approach.

Erving Goffman is the most cited American sociologist. There is no shortage of studies exploring Goffman’s scholarship but no extant biography of Erving Goffman. The chief reason is that a man who looked behind the facades people erect to protect their private selves, zealously guarded his own backstage. This book is the first comprehensive biography of Goffman, an intellectual of Russian-Jewish descent, who turned the “Potemkin village” trope into a powerful research program. The present study shows how key turns in Goffman’s career reflected dramatic events in his family and personal history. It is based on the materials gathered in the Erving Goffman Archives, a repository curated by the author who has been collecting documents and conducting interviews with Goffman’s relatives, colleagues, and friends. The archival work turned up documents which improve our understanding of Goffman the scholar, the teacher, and the man. The approach adopted in this investigation sheds new light on Goffman’s scholarship which has had an enormous and continuous impact across the social sciences and humanities.

Observed through a temporal lens, organizational life fluctuates among moments of instantaneity, enduring continuity, and imagination of distant times. This movement stems from the fact that actors are continually faced with multiple intersecting temporalities, obliging them to make choices about what to do in the present, how to understand the past they emerge from, and how to stake out a possible future. Although scholars have widely recognized actors' multitemporal reality, it remains to be more fully theorized into an integrative framework. In this book, Tor Hernes takes up this challenge by combining foundational ideas from philosophy, sociology, and organization theory into an integrative theoretical framework of organizational time. Based on a review of the literature, his definition of time includes four dimensions: experience, events, resource, and practice. He provides examples of how these four dimensions evolve through mutual interplay and how they are underpinned by what he calls narrative trajectory. He then discusses implications for key topics in organizational research, including materiality, leadership and continuity and change. Organization and Time is for scholars and advanced students of organization studies, management studies, technology studies, and sociology.

On its initial publication, Forgive and Remember emerged as the definitive study of the training and lives of young surgeons. Now with an extensive new preface, epilogue, and appendix by the author, reflecting on the changes that have taken place since the book's original publication, this updated second edition of Charles L. Bosk's classic study is as timely as ever. Book jacket.

Originally published in 1988, The Rhythms of Society reflects the time-obsessed age we lived in when it was written. The contributors, drawn from a range of disciplines, develop a common sociological approach to examine time in a range of cultures, sub-cultures and historical periods. With time even more of an issue now, this can be read today with an eye to the future.

Drawing on the work of the Roundtable on Evidence-Based Medicine, the 2007 IOM Annual Meeting assessed some of the rapidly occurring changes in health care related to new diagnostic and treatment tools, emerging genetic insights, the developments in information technology, and healthcare costs, and discussed the need for a stronger focus on evidence to ensure that the promise of scientific discovery and technological innovation is efficiently captured to provide the right care for the right patient at the right time. As new discoveries continue to expand the universe of medical interventions, treatments, and methods of care, the need for a more systematic approach to evidence development and application becomes increasingly critical. Without better information about the effectiveness of different treatment options, the resulting uncertainty can lead to the delivery of services that may be unnecessary, unproven, or even harmful. Improving the evidence-base for medicine holds great potential to increase the quality and efficiency of medical care. The Annual Meeting, held on October 8, 2007, brought together many of the nation's leading authorities on various aspects of the issues - both challenges and opportunities - to present their perspectives and engage in discussion with the IOM membership.

Eviatar Zerubavel argues that most of the distinctions we make in our daily lives and in our culture are social constructs. He questions the notion that a clear line can be drawn to separate one time or object or concept from another, and presents witty and provocative counterexamples in defense of ambiguity and anomaly.

"A pathbreaking book on an important subject which, surprisingly, has been paid little attention by social scientists. Zerubavel writes with both learning and lucidity. His book is a pleasure to read." -Peter Berger "Others have written about the structuring of time, but few so insightfully and compellingly as Zerubavel." -Neil J. Smelser "This is a jewel of a book, one of the most important contributions to cultural sociology in recent years. Professor Zerubavel's easy blend of history, religion, science, politics, and social values makes this a study a delightful voyage of unexpected discovery and new awareness. It hink the title has misled some people into thinking this is a book on music or something of the sort. All the more reason to rejoice at this reissue in paperback." -David S. Landes "Hidden Rhythms is an exciting study of a subject that has net yet gained the attention it deserves among sociologists and other social scientists . . . Zerubavel's book has the distinctive merit to discuss earlier approaches to the study of schedules and calendars and to add a series of extremely shrewd observations and calendars to add a series of extremely shrewd observations of his own on the sociology of time. His work seems indispensable for all those social scientists who have become conscious of the central position of the temporal dimension in the life of people and their society." -Lewis A. Coser "Eviatar Zerubavel's Hidden Rhythms is an original and highly imaginative analysis of the role time schedule plays in social life. Continuing the distinctive focus on social time Zerubavel develops in Patterns of Time in Hospital life, he provides in Hidden Rhythms more penetrating and profound analysis of the subtle and diverse significance of time in organizing our social relationships and lives. A joy to read." -Peter M. Blau

In recent years there has been a growing interest in cognition within sociology and other social sciences. Within sociology this interest cuts across various topical subfields, including culture, social psychology, religion, race, and identity. Scholars within the new subfield of cognitive sociology, also referred to as the sociology of culture and cognition, are contributing to a rapidly developing body of work on how mental and social phenomena are interrelated and often interdependent. In The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Sociology, Wayne H. Brekhus and Gabe Igantow have gathered some of the most influential scholars working in cognitive sociology to present an accessible introduction to key research areas in a diverse field. While classical sociological and newer interdisciplinary approaches have been covered separately by scholars in the past, this volume alternatively presents a broad range of cognitive sociological perspectives. The contributors discuss a range of approaches for theorizing and analyzing the "social mind," including macro-cultural approaches, interactionist approaches, and research that draws on Pierre Bourdieu's major concepts. Each chapter further investigates a variety of cognitive processes within these three approaches, such as attention and inattention, perception, automatic and deliberate cognition, cognition and social action, stereotypes, categorization, classification, judgment, symbolic boundaries, meaning-making, metaphor, embodied cognition, morality and religion, identity construction, time sequencing, and memory. A comprehensive look at cognitive sociology's main contributions and the central debates within the field, the Handbook will serve as a primary resource for social researchers, faculty, and students interested in how cognitive sociology can contribute to research within their substantive areas of focus.

Why do we eat sardines, but never goldfish; ducks, but never parrots? Why does adding cheese make a hamburger a "cheeseburger" whereas adding ketchup does not make it a "ketchupburger"? By the same token, how do we determine which things said at a meeting should be included in the minutes and which ought to be considered "off the record" and officially disregarded? In this wide-ranging and provocative book, Eviatar Zerubavel argues that cognitive science cannot answer these questions, since it addresses cognition on only two levels: the individual and the universal. To fill the gap between the Romantic vision of the solitary thinker whose thoughts are the product of unique experience, and the cognitive-psychological view, which revolves around the search for the universal foundations of human cognition, Zerubavel charts an expansive social realm of mind--a domain that focuses on the conventional, normative aspects of the way we think. With witty anecdote and revealing analogy, Zerubavel illuminates the social foundation of mental actions such as perceiving, attending, classifying, remembering, assigning meaning, and reckoning the time. What takes place inside our heads, he reminds us, is deeply affected by our social environments, which are typically groups that are larger than the individual yet considerably smaller than the human race. Thus, we develop a nonuniversal software for thinking as Americans or Chinese, lawyers or teachers, Catholics or Jews, Baby Boomers or Gen-Xers. Zerubavel explores the fascinating ways in which thought communities carve up and classify reality, assign meanings, and perceive things, "defamiliarizing" in the process many taken-for-granted assumptions.