The genome and social structure

Beautifully written and very interesting indeed is Daniel Adkins and Stephen Vaisey's recent paper, 'Toward a Unified Stratification Theory' Sociological Theory, 27(2): 99-121. They make a fundamental point, and they make it very well. This is that "while both genome and social background influence the status attainment process, the relative importance of these factors is determined by the surrounding structure of the society (p99)" What follows from this is a clever debunking of genetic determinism, and, I would guess, a nice proto-rejection of the kinds of biological reductionism that also underpin the growing paradigmatic claims of the neurosciences. It's a paper worth reading.

'Unification' is an interesting theme in recent sociological writing, and I'd draw attention to a previous 'Paper of Note' which was lost when my blog crashed at the end of 2008 and all text was lost. This was Guillermina Jasso's wonderful article, 'A new unified theory of sociobehavioural forces' in European Sociological Review (2008, 24(4):411-434). If ever a paper might have encouraged me to give up ethnography and discourse analysis in favour of mathematical sociology, then this was it.