Американская Социологическая Ассоциация: История и Деятельность

Non profit organization

The American Sociological Association (ASA) is a non profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology. Founded in December 1905 as the American Sociological Society at Johns Hopkins University by a group of fifty people, the first president of the association would be Lester Frank Ward. Today, most of its members work in academia, while around 20 percent of them work in government, business, or non profit organizations. ASA publishes ten academic journals and magazines, along with four section journals, including the American Sociological Review and Contexts. The ASA is currently the largest professional association of sociologists in the world, even larger than the International Sociological Association. The ASA consists of over 13,000 members—composed of researchers, students, college/university faculty, high school faculty, and various practitioners—while its 52 special interest sections contain more than 21,000 members. The "American Sociological Association Annual Meeting" is an annual academic conference held by the association consisting of over 6,000 participants. Sociologists debated whether there was a need for a separate organization from the American Economic Association, American Political Science Association and the American Historical Association, which most sociologists at the time were members of. In 1953, during the annual meeting in Berkeley, California, each of the (living) past presidents of the society would compose a voice recording to address the coming generation of sociologists.

In 2005, in celebration of the association's 100th anniversary, ASA published a 201 page book entitled A History of the American Sociological Association, 1981 2004. The publication picks up where the 1981 Rhoades history concludes, continuing the story and capturing the association's history from 1981 through 2004. It is the culmination of over two years of detailed research by Katherine J. Rosich. The objective of this volume would be to describe and report on the major events in the life of ASA during the last two decades of the 20th century, leading up to a new century and millennium, as well as to commemorate the ASA's 100th anniversary in 2005.

The ASA is governed by a code of ethics and ethical standards, which has been revised since 1970, with the first ASA code of ethics being written in 1970. The Committee on Professional Ethics worked to write this code and upon completing and approving it in 1997, the code focused on three goals, which would be to make the code more educative, accessible/easier to use, and more helpful for sociologists to understand ethical issues.

ASA style is a widely accepted format for writing university research papers that specifies the arrangement and punctuation of footnotes and bibliographies. Standards for ASA style are specified in the ASA Style Guide, which is designed to aid authors in preparing manuscripts for ASA journals and publications.

The Annual Meeting of the ASA is held each August to provide opportunity for professionals involved in the study of society to share knowledge and new directions in research and practice. It provides networking outlets for nearly 3,000 research papers and 4,600 presenters. The meeting is spread across four days and covers 600 program sessions. All ASA Committees and Task Forces meet during the annual meeting. The ASA Council and several Constitutional Committees meet mid year during the winter months in Washington D. C.

In 1993, then doctoral student Rik Scarce was jailed for more than five months as a result of following the ASA's code of ethics. Scarce's Ph. D. research was on the radical environmental movement. Based on an FBI investigation of an Animal Liberation Front break in, federal prosecutors argued in court that Scarce may have engaged in conversations with individuals believed to be involved with the incident. Prosecutors demanded that Scarce testify to a federal grand jury about those conversations, but Scarce refused to answer three dozen questions, citing the ASA Code of Ethics and the First Amendment as his reasoning for remaining unresponsive. Scarce's refusal to answer resulted in a contempt of court citation and 159 days spent in jail. He was never suspected of wrongdoing and—in keeping with contempt of court practice—he was never read his Miranda rights, arrested, or tried. In early 2010, ASA publicly expressed outrage over a controversy involving Frances Fox Piven and Glenn Beck, asking Fox News to stop Beck's comments. An article written by Piven concerning mobilization of unemployed individuals had spurred the commentary by Beck. ASA suggests in their public statements that the line should be drawn at name calling and that political commentators should instead rely on gathering evidence related to the topics and then drawing the proper conclusions. In January 2012, a United States district court ordered Boston College to turn over material from the "Belfast Project", an oral history project pertaining to the violence in Northern Ireland. Boston College filed an appeal in February 2012, challenging the district court's decision. ASA became involved in the case to help protect human participants from the subpoena of confidential project research data. The statement by the ASA council cited the potential damage this ruling would have on social science research by stifling the ability to study controversial topics. ASA is looking for an affirmation by the court for confidentiality in research.

Within the Environmental sociology section of the ASA, an ad hoc Committee on Racial Equity investigated racial and ethnic diversity within the section in response to critique that the section was overwhelmingly white. Their assessment of the professional climate for scholars of colour concluded that the section was a 'white space' characterized by the overwhelming presence of whites and dominated by white leadership. They concluded that this situation acts as a barrier to inclusion of people of colour in the field, and that the field of environmental justice was likewise marginalised.