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Title: Associate Professor
Member of Graduate Faculty in Sociology, New Brunswick Member of the Graduate Faculty in Liberal Studies, Newark Office: 621 Hill Hall E-Mail: icohen@rci.rutgers.edu Office Telephone: 973-353-5422 (I am accessible at my home number
which is available upon request.) Education Ph.D. University of Wisconsin-Madison 1980
I am a social theorist with extensive commitments to research and education in classical and contemporary theory and social thought. My interests have developed in three phases: 1) Classical social thought was my earliest interest with special attention to the works of Max Weber. 2) I next focused on structuration theory, the sociological ontology originated by Anthony Giddens with whom I studied as a graduate student visitor to the University of Cambridge. I continue writing more broadly in the general area of theories of action and social praxis today. 3) Most recently I have shifted course yet again. I have compiled extensive research in the sociology of solitude, a topic that opens exciting new perspectives on fundamental themes in social theory. (See below) I also am involved as both General Editor and the editor of a volume in a publishing series entitled Modernity and Society (see below).
Following several years of research, I am drafting a manuscript with the working title of Disengaged Involvement: On the Sociology of Solitude I regard solitude as a general feature of social life, albeit like all other general features of social life solitude assumes highly specific and distinctive forms in each culture and civilization. I maintain that attention to solitude changes the way sociologists attend to the constitution of social action and praxis. I am struck by the new ways in which solitude is needed and pursued by members of advantaged, cosmopolitan social classes today. Finally, I am also struck by the pathologies of solitude and the new light they shed on the persistent, but familiar modern conditions of egoism, anomie, alienation, and loneliness. The problems of solitude are particularly acute among the unemplyed and the elderly in modern societies. I also am engaged in a great deal o editorial work. Currently I serve as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology. I also serve on the International Advisory Board of Sociology: Journal of the British Sociological Association and as an Associate Editor for Theory Culture and Society. On another editorial front, I serve as General Editor of the Modernity and Society series, a group of text-readers edited by distinguished theorists for Basil Blackwell Ltd. The series is designed to build bridges for graduate students and advanced undergraduates from the classics by Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Tocqueville, et. al., to contemporary theories of modernity by Bell, Berger, Wallerstein, Mann, Giddens, Bourdieu, and Habermas among others. Each volume will contain an extensive editorial essay and carefully selected primary source texts. I am currently preparing my own volume in the series (forthcoming 2003). Editors also include, Robert Antonio, Mustafa Emirbayer, and Steven Kalberg. Finally, in July of 2002 I accepted an invitation to present a series of four workshops at Tblisi State University in the Republic of Georgia in support of their graduate and undergraduate programs in sociology Representative Recent Publications The Sociology of Solitude Disengaged Involvement: On the Sociology of Solitude (in progress for Polity Press in U.K.) See also "Detached Involvement" Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association August 2000, Washington, D. C. Structuration Theory and Theories of Action "Structuration" extended entry in George Ritzer (ed). Sage Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2004) "Theories of Action and Praxis." In A Companion to Social Theory, Bryan S. Turner (ed.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000 pp. 73-111. (Substantially expanded from the first edition published in 1996) Ira J. Cohen and Mary F. Rogers, "Autonomy and Credibility:
Voice as Structuration Theory: Anthony Giddens and the Constitution of Social Life. London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989. Translated into Spanish: Teoría de la Estructuración; Anthony Giddens y la Constitución de la Vida Social. Translated by Ángel Carlos González Ruiz; Iztapalapa: Universidad Auónoma Metropoliatana 1996. Classical Social Theory "The Underemphasis on Democracy in Marx and Weber" in A Weber-Marx Dialogue, Robert J. Antonio and Ronald M. Glassman (eds.). Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 1985: pp. 274-299. "Max Weber on Modern Western Capitalism" Introductory
Essay in: Max Weber, General Economic History. New Brunswick:
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Ira
J. Cohen, Ph.D.