Since the decline of the two main doctrines, Marxism and Modernization theory, various new sociological paradigms have emerged. While most of them are oriented toward the de-construction of the modern knowledge, mathematical sociology is an exception in its firm connection with the modern project that we may develop a rational system of knowledge through mathematical reasoning. Then, we may ask ourselves, what has been achieved by mathematical sociology? In a sense, it should be unsatisfactory, because the foundationalistic project of establishing a mathematical modeling of sociological system has failed. The social world is not founded on some law-like mechanisms. De-constructionists may be right in their assertion that there is no basis on which the grand story of the society could be founded. However, this does not validate the de-constructionist view of social theory where “truth” has no meaning. Instead a constructivistic view of social inequity is presented in this paper that “truth” is, as any other “ideal-existences” which constitute a community, a constitutive conception in the scientific community, and that a social theory is an attempt of constituting “the truth” about how a social world is constituted.

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     What is the condition that distinguishes human being from other animals? It is the basic negativity: i.e. the basic prohibition for which there is no reason. The domain where a basic negativity is valid defines the boundary of social system. Therefore, the quest for the origin of the basic negativity is the research for the origin of human sociality. This paper is preparation for this research. According to the theory of ‘selfish gene’ in sociobiology, the primitive sociality is possible between individuals in each animal species. We can define the sociality proper to human being as the difference from the primitive sociality. By contrasting two cases of sacrificial murders ? the infanticide of chimpanzees and murder of Christ ?, I will propose a hypothesis that human sociality is marked as the success of projection of the instance of the third person into the transcendental level. On the one hand, we can interpret the infanticide in chimpanzees as repetitive failures of the projection of the instance of the third person, if we compare it with the unique sexual behavior in bonobos that can be considered as a kind of functionally equivalent alternative for the infanticide. On the other hand, the murder of Christ can be interpreted as deconstruction of the projection of the instance of the third person. Two cases elucidate the mechanism of the projection of the instance of the third person from both sides.

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     The most magical word in sociology is “system”. In this paper, we empirically reconsider Niklas Luhmann's system theory, which is the most elaborate theory in this area, using his “interaction system” as example.
     Luhmann's theory is really radical attempt which deconstructs the concept of “action”, and presents an elaborate model of society. However, tracing his logic exactly, there are some leaps and inadequate premises, especially about the existence of system. These make us reexamine fundamental sociological concepts, not only “action” and “system”, but also “communication” and “society”.

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     The enormous success of the term “discourse” in contemporary sociology and neighboring areas is very much due to the impact of Michael Foucault's Discourse Analysis, which aimed at a critical deconstruction of modernity through the concrete descriptions of strategically vital historical figures and their transformations. However, its speedy popularization is in itself a symptom that the notion of “discourse,” whose critical force lay in its resistance to conceptuality and the conceptual impulse toward total perspective, has been hammered down to an inert flatness. This powerful drive for flattening subversion ( or rather flattening it out into a conceptual “subversion”) - which also lurked in Foucault's own thought - indicates how difficult it is for us in contemporary society to discharge our own imagination for a transcendent viewpoint, whose omniscience is assumed to ensure the observation of society in its totality. By sketching out the present state of totality/omniscience in our sociological imagination, this essay seeks for a course to revive Discourse Analysis' potential capabilities - i.e., multiple dismantlings of the very assumption for totality/omniscience.

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     In 1964 or 1965, H. Sacks advanced the idea of sociology as an inquiry into those procedures by which reproducible phenomena are produced. The idea of Conversation Analysis developed from it. In this paper I attempt to show the following points: (1) that inquiry is a conceptual, as opposed to empirical, one, or aims at what Wittgenstein called a ‘perspicuous representation’ of conceptual connections; (2) while both commonsense and sociological accounts of action are, like action as such, normative phenomena produced in the application of the grammar of concepts, Sacks' inquiry concerns the grammar (normative structures) of concepts and in these terms differs in its logical status from traditional sociological as well as commonsense accounts; and (3) the data Conversation Analysis uses to investigate the organization of interaction are reminders of the grammar of concepts rather than proofs for any hypotheses.

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     It is not easy to answer the question “What is cultural studies ?”. Because “cultural studies does not speak with one voice, it cannot be spoken with one voice, I do not have one voice with which to represent it”.
(Barker,2000:4). In this paper I try to go back to the historical “roots” (new left movement and thought, British culturalism, French structurism and post-structurism and so on) and draw the “outline” of this “multi- or post-disciplinary” (Barker, op. cit.).
     Through this research I'll try to make my position clear on the theories and practices of cultural studies “movement” and want to point out what it means to Japanese sociology.

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     In this article feature, definition and possibilities of postmodern feminism is discussed. The article especially focuses on how postmodern feminism can be applied to contemporary Japanese feminist issues such as beauty contest and prostitution. Postmodern feminism here means discussions emerged in the 1990s in the U.S. influenced by postmodern philosophy, such as Derrida and Lyotard, criticizing naturalized dualism. Postmodern feminists claims anti-essentialism and the emphasis on differences among women. The analysis by Butler, Scott and Spivak provide good examples. Yet few Japanese feminists have used postmodern feminist framework. But the framework will be helpful to rethink contemporary Japanese feminist issues. Japanese feminism in the 1990s suffered from two criticism. One is criticism from minorities views and the other is from liberalist views. Consideration of differences among women of which importance postmodern feminism prove will provide a good basis of consideration to the both views. Examining especially the arguments on beauty contest and prostitution, I show that the framework of postmodern feminism can provide the good criticism toward Japanese liberalist division such as choice/coercion, private/public, and that the framework sheds light on some feminist issues in Japan.

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     This article indicates the significance of sociological thinking on normative questions, especially questions around boundaries of 4 fields of society (politics, economy, family and the other voluntary relations), and shows some exercises.

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     In Erkenntnis und Interesse (1968), Jurgen Habermas made a plan for the critical sociology (critical social theory) as a research program which unified the theory and the practice. On the plan he tried to justify three categories of knowledge guided by interests, that is, the science guided by technological knowledge interests, the hermeneutics guided by practical knowledge interests, and the critical sociology guided by emancipative knowledge interests. This plan, however, was abandoned because of his turn away from the epistemology to the communication theory and the unification of the theory and the practice was not carried out. The failure of the plan was deeply rooted in the idea of “human subjects” which inherited from Hegelian-Marxian historical philosophy. But if such historical philosophy were abandoned, we would make a new plan for the critical sociology on the base of his plan without giving up the request of the unification of the theory and the practice. In fact much of recent critical researches seem to move to the direction beyond the dualism modern/postmodern.

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     In recent social movement studies, there are animated discussions about political opportunity strucuture(POS). But the concepts are ambiguous and the former discussions do not answer if and how POS affects social movement in West European countries. This paper will classify POS in three dimensions and analyze the eighteen West European countries by a Boolean analysis to solve the above problems. The results shows that (1) social movements frequently occur when open and closed POS are mixed, (2) in a protest cycle, former movements is differrent from later movements about the effect of POS.

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     This paper proposes an automatic coding system for occupational data obtained in SSM (Social Stratification and Social Mobility) survey and needed to be translated into occupational codes, as an example of supporting systems for coding a quantity of answers from an open-ended question which require statistical processing. The proposed system is characterized by three points; 1)it can understand the occupational data by natural language process such as morphological and semantic analysis by case frame, 2)it presents the definitions of categories (occupations) by case frame and constructs a dictionary, 3)it constructs thesaurus for each predicates and slots in the dictionary to make relation to the dictionary with answers. This system showed relative efficiency in using on 1995 SSM data (the precision 84.1%, the recall 62.0% in raw data), and will be improved by accurate inputting, rich rules and vocabulary in the dictionary and the thesaurus. The effects of this system in coding work; 1)decreasing work loads, 2)assuring consistency, 3)showing explicit rules, are the solve for the problems in open-ended questions. In addition, this system can be useful for checking the results of SSM occupational data already coded by human hands.

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     Missing data occur from a refusal or nonresponse in the process of social surveys. The amount of missing data is recently increasing, and raising serious problems for sociological researchers. They mostly treat respondents that include missing data as “incomplete cases,” and exclude them all from an analysis. This procedure gives a bias to the result of any analysis. In this paper, we show that the imputation of missing data by log-linear models is useful for appropriate treatment of missing data. We took a contingency table of intergenerational mobility in education as an example and compared the results of two analyses; one considered an impact of missing data, the other didn't at all. We found that the analysis excluding missing data overlooked the large amount of downward mobility. Especially, the mobility from secondary education of fathers to compulsory education of children was distorted.

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     This article argues that, during repeated unanimous consensus makings, evaluating strategies that assign a whole weight to a specific individual are evolutionarily stable. Evaluating strategies represent ways of evaluating alternatives with respect to others' utilities. I derive the following three conclusions: first, when a consensus is reached by two individuals, the maximin strategy evolves rather than the utilitarian strategy or the selfish strategy. Second, this result is robust for consensuses comprising two or more individuals. Finally, in general, concerns for a specific individual evolve.

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     Three aspects must be concerned when we deal with structuring of groups. One is the kind of relations (e.g., friendship, trust); another is the form of structure (e.g., symmetry, transitivity) and their measures; and the last is the discrepancy between the values of the measures from the values in random states. In this article, we deal with trust relation inside the groups, and investigate their density, symmetry, and transitivity. Then, we compare structural variables with variables from an anonymous one-shot prisoner's dilemma game. One of our findings shows that as the transitivity of trust relation in groups becomes higher, the subjects' cooperation ratio also becomes higher. However, higher transitivity does not help the subjects improve the accuracy of their predictions about the other subjects' behaviors (either to cooperate or defect). This suggests that people rely on the structure of the group but not on each person's trustworthiness.

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     This note extends the concept of evolutionarily stable strategy from symmetric two-player random matching games to games with more than two players. First, I extend the definition of evolutionarily stable strategy. Second, I show, as the necessary and sufficient condition of the definition, the procedure to check whether a strategy is evolutionarily stable or not.

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