Pure Sociology
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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and... more
This article employs Max Weber's ideal-type method to classify genocides based on their degree of mass killing, unilateralism, and ethnic liability. The identification of the elements of genocide draws from a general theory of genocide... more
This paper is a study of the topos of the king burning captives in the Assyrian royal inscriptions. This punishment is notable for both its rarity and its cruelty, being the only time that the royal inscriptions describe violence towards... more
Genocide is defined here as organized and unilateral mass killing on the basis of ethnicity. While some have focused on genocide as a type of deviance, most genocide is also social control-a response to behavior itself defined as deviant.... more
Occurring in a broad range of non-western and western countries, violence committed against women in the name of family honor has been viewed in several ways, including as a crime, as gendered violence, or as a violation of human rights.... more
This article focuses on intimate partner killings to address the question of why some killers subsequently commit suicide whereas others do not. Utilizing Blackian theories of conflict management and Manning's theory of suicide, it... more
Donald Black defines social control as any way of defining and responding to deviance, including various means of expressing grievances or otherwise handling moral conflict. Thus defined, social control is highly variable, and occurs in... more
Violence is a dynamic event, not a static state. The cause of violence, therefore, cannot lie in static variables such as individual propensities (eg self-control) or aggregate properties (eg inequality). But what changes cause violence?... more
Sociology began as a scientific discipline in large part by defining itself by what it was NOT, namely, psychology. This means that within sociology there has always been an uncertainty over whether subjective phenomena, including selves,... more
Domestic violence is the use of force between partners who live together as a couple. Most is a form of conflict management known as self-help: the handling of a grievance with aggression. Here I introduce two principles of domestic... more
Purpose À In this chapter, I apply theories of conflict and social control derived from the work of Donald Black to explain when suicide attacks will occur and who will carry them out.
In all large-scale genocides, rescuing occurs alongside killing. Some members of the aggressors' ethnic group even risk their own lives to save members of the targeted group. Killing and rescuing occur closely together, and even the same... more
The pure sociology perspective invented by Donald Black, a general theoretical framework for the prediction and explanation of social reality, has considerable potential for the scientific understanding of criminal behavior. Several... more
A value judgment says what is good or bad, and value-
Unlike older sciences such as physics and biology, sociology has never had a revolution. Modern sociology is still classical-largely psychological, teleological, and individualistic-and even less scientific than classical sociology. But... more
Corruption is a universal social phenomenon in terms of durability and distribution across societies, while the explanations offered in the different disciplines of social sciences are mostly particular and dedicated to specific types of... more
Despite growing awareness of the limitations of group-level analyses in ethnic studies, research on ethnic conflict has paid virtually no systematic attention to variation at the individual or micro level. Addressing that gap, the present... more
Academics have conflicts over ideas with some regularity, yet they contest only some of them. When will they do so? We draw on a theory of conflict management developed by Donald Black and others to explain the response to intellectual... more
Foreign fieldwork often comes with vast cultural differences between the researcher and participants. Such differences have implications for the success and findings of research. In this paper, we draw on our experiences doing fieldwork... more
Modeled after Donald Black’s Moral Time, a movement of organizational time is any change in organizational space. Organization takes three forms: inclusion, regulation, and distinction. Overorganization is an increase in an organization’s... more
Donald Black was invited to contribute an essay for this special issue on "The Pure Sociology of Right and Wrong" e a subject he introduced in 1976 with his now classic book, The Behavior of Law. But instead of writing a conventional... more