bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sport, Alternative
Authors: Honea Joy Crissey
Published: September 2017

Alternative sports like skateboarding, BMX, and snowboarding began to gain popularity in the 1990s as alternatives to traditional sport forms. They embodied qualities that distinguished themselves from mainstream sports like participant control and less focus on competition. Since then, these sports have increasingly moved into the center of the sports world, even becoming Olympic events in many cases. Research on alternative sport originally focused on the tension between the authenticity of the original cultural forms and the process of co‐optation of the activities by corporate interests and sponsors. Since then, scholars have begun to move beyond this dichotomy to analyze the complexity of cultural production and the cultural politics of incorporation into mainstream sports. Other areas of inquiry include gender inequality and feminist movements within action sports, the role of alternative sport venues in urban development and gentrification and the development of action sport social justice movements. Most research has focused on young, western, white participants and thus more data are needed on the roles of race, sexualities, and age within alternative sports.
Sport, Amateur
Authors: Kidd Bruce
Published: September 2017

Amateurism in sport is at once ideology, a network of sports organizations, and a system of athletic eligibility. First articulated in Victorian England – there is absolutely no substance to the International Olympic Committee's oft‐made claim that amateurism governed the athletics of ancient Greece – amateurism melded the upper‐class desire for social hierarchy with the middle‐class belief in education, self‐discipline, and social responsibility. The amateur ideal has always been to improve individuals and society by instilling the values of hard work, team sacrifice, and fair play, and inspiring community pride through inspirational performances. Amateurism resonated with the aspiration to “rational” or “improving” recreation that led urban reformers and the respectable working class to start public libraries, adult education classes, community orchestras and theater companies, public playgrounds, and children's summer camps.
Sport and the Body
Authors: Markula Pirkko
Published: September 2017

Since the late 1980s, the body has been a central aspect of sport sociological analysis. Examinations of the sporting body have evolved through several theoretical traditions with normalization as the dominant theme for sociologists of sport. For example, inspired by the work of Norbert Elias, several sport sociologists have looked at how the (male) sporting body has become more civilized when molded through different figurations of power over time. This has evolved into further process sociological examinations of the inter‐relationships between the body, power, and identity construction. From a critical cultural studies’ perspective, some scholars have examined how the body has been shaped by the ideological construction of sport and by the dominant groups that maintain the current structure of sport. In addition, researchers using this approach have drawn attention to how different bodily identities – such as gendered bodies, lesbian/gay bodies, disabled bodies, ethnic bodies, and aging bodies – have been constructed within commercialized, globalized sport. More sophisticated theoretical applications such as critical race theory, intersectionality theory, and critical masculinity theory have also emerged to inform the analysis of identity construction as bodily representation.
Sport and Capitalism
Authors: Beamish Rob
Published: September 2017

As an analytic term, capitalism refers to the economic system that began to emerge in thirteenth‐century Europe and extends into the present. Sport is an abstraction that denotes a variety of cultural practices that occur and develop within the context of specific socioeconomic formations. “Sport” and various sports exhibit several particular tendencies and characteristics when they occur within capitalist socioeconomic formations.
Sport as Catharsis
Authors: Sachs Michael L.
Published: September 2017

The word catharsis comes from the Greek
katharsis
or
katairein
, which means a cleansing or a purging.
Webster's Dictionary
definition reads: “A discharge of pent‐up emotions so as to result in the alleviation of symptoms or the permanent relief of the condition.” Catharsis essentially refers to a release or discharge or cleansing of emotions, generally with the purpose of relieving the stress that develops from holding these emotions within the individual. English and English (1958) talk about “the relaxation of emotional tension or anxiety by any kind of expressive reaction.” We often refer to the cathartic nature of sport (and exercise), relieving stress or tension that might build up, or serving as a release for anger and hostility (that may be seen as acceptable on the playing field or in the arena).
Sport and Social Resistance
Authors: Sage George H.
Published: September 2017

Social resistance is a social phenomenon in which disadvantaged, exploited, and dominated groups contest the dominating practices that nation‐states, social institutions, social organizations, and traditional cultural practices have constructed. Resistance and acts of agency – meaning the capability of individuals to construct and reconstruct their world – against abuses of power, discrimination, inequality, social injustice, and autocratic control are pervasive features of human history. There are always ongoing struggles against domination through various forms of social resistance. As British social theorist Robin Williams (1977) asserted, dominance “does not just passively exist … It has continually to be renewed, recreated, defended, and modified. It is also continually resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not at all its own” (p. 112).
Sport as Work
Authors: Donnelly Peter
Published: September 2017

Sport and work are usually identified as opposites, but there are several ways that sport is work‐like and a number of ways that sport is related to work. Although it is commonplace to refer to professional sports as a business, popular resentment about the high salaries of some professional athletes in some sports is related to the sense that sport is not work. However, sport and work have become metaphors for each other; while businesses frequently use sporting metaphors to refer to competition, teamwork, productivity and “coaching,” Taylorism, the scientific management and measurement of work, found its way into coaching and training principles in sports.
Standardization
Authors: Epstein Steven , Timmermans Stefan
Published: September 2017

Standardization is a social and technical process of constructing uniformities across time and space through the generation of agreed upon rules. Modern life increasingly depends on the creation, institutionalization, use, dissemination, and contestation of diverse kinds of standards, and standardization is an omnipresent feature of a modernizing and globalizing world. The spread of standardization sparks numerous concerns about consequences. However, scholarship indicates that standards do not lead to a uniform world.
State and Economy
Authors: Campbell John L.
Published: September 2017

The literature on the relationship between states and economies is vast. This entry focuses exclusively on states and economies in advanced capitalist societies. In this context, sociologists tend to follow Max Weber in viewing nation‐states as organizations consisting of administrative, legislative, judicial, and military apparatuses that govern a finite territory, ultimately through the use of force if necessary. They tend to view economies as systems of material production that are organized around market exchange and the pursuit of profit, and that are embedded in a variety of surrounding institutions, including political ones. Research in the area of state and economy has focused on several questions: How does the economy affect the state? How does the state affect the economy? How are state–economy relations organized? How are state–economy relations changing?
Statistical Significance Testing
Authors: Poggio Andrew , Poggio John
Published: September 2017

The act of reasoning from factual knowledge or evidence is a process ubiquitous in the lives of individuals. In order to make good decisions and function effectively, one must make distinctions between events that are likely to occur and those that are not. If the morning sky is dark and threatening, one logically concludes that the forecast is for rain and thus one carries an umbrella. A student attends class on the assumption that the professor will be there. Most of the decisions a person makes involve subjective estimates of the probability of various events occurring based on specific observations. Statistical inference uses probabilistic reasoning in a more objective and precise fashion and allows the researcher to account for chance error in drawing inferences from a small set of observed data to a larger set of unobserved data.
Statistics
Authors: Gillespie Wayne
Published: September 2017

Statistics is a subfield of mathematics and a method of quantitative reasoning. Rooted firmly in a positivistic paradigm, statistical analysis is a fundamental aspect of the scientific method and was one of the hallmarks of modernity in the twentieth century. Primarily, statistics involves the collection, analysis, manipulation, and interpretation of data from experiment or observation. Statistics is a practical or applied discipline, and it is a socially constructed tool of the scientific method.
Status Passages
Authors: McCallion Michael J.
Published: September 2017

The term status comes from the Latin word meaning “to stand,” which helps to clarify how the term has come to be used in sociology as constituting a basic analytic unit in a social system (society), denoting a
position
that an individual holds (stands) in a particular institution or social structure. The concept of status had wide currency in the post‐World War II heyday of structural functionalism (Parsons 1951), and generally referred to a collection of specific institutional rights and duties (Linton 1936). The enactment of these rights and duties, on the other hand, was considered an individual's “role,” the more dynamic aspect of status. Status passages, therefore, refer to persons passing from one status to another (e.g., from being single to married).
Strain Theories
Authors: Agnew Robert
Published: September 2017

Strain theories argue that strains or stressors are a major cause of crime. Individuals engage in crime to reduce or escape from strains (e.g., theft to reduce monetary strain, running away to escape abusive parents), seek revenge against the source of their strain or related targets, or cope with the negative emotions caused by strain (e.g., illicit drug use). There are several major versions of strain theory in sociology, with these versions being distinguished in terms of the strains they examine. This entry describes the major versions of strain theory, beginning with Durkheim and ending with Agnew, whose general strain theory builds on previous strain theories.
Stress and Migration
Authors: Shuval Judith T.
Published: September 2017

Migration within and between different countries is an ongoing, worldwide phenomenon which is likely to continue well into the twenty‐first century and involve over 130 million persons. It is caused by population pressures, environmental deterioration, poverty, wars, persecution, and human rights abuses. Migration is a response to the flow of capital, technology, and cultural innovations in an interactive process across the globe. It links countries by flows and counter‐flows of people in sets of networks which are both interdependent and independent of each other. Countries of origin and destination are determined by historical ties based on earlier colonization, political influence, trade, investment, or cultural ties – as well as the present economic, social, and political contexts.
Stress and Work
Authors: Siegrist Johannes
Published: September 2017

While stress is a popular concept in everyday life that describes a feeling of pressure resulting from overload, it is also a scientific term of growing importance. In a scientific perspective, stress differs from the everyday notion in at least two important ways. First, stress defines a reaction to a challenge (stressor) from the external world or from within the organism that interrupts or threatens the usual behavior and normal functioning of a person and that requires specific efforts to meet the challenge. These efforts are termed coping. It is important to note that major stressors that are experienced in everyday life emerge from the social rather than the physical environment. Examples of such social stressors are interpersonal power, role obligations, competition between organizations, groups, or individuals, and social deprivation or inequality. Therefore, stress is an important sociological topic.
Strong Objectivity
Authors: Naples Nancy A.
Published: September 2017

The notion of strong objectivity was first articulated by feminist philosopher Sandra Harding. Strong objectivity builds on the insights of feminist standpoint theory, which argues for the importance of starting from the experiences of those who have been traditionally left out of the production of knowledge. By starting inquiry from the lived experiences of women and others who have been traditionally outside of the institutions in which knowledge about social life is generated and classified, more objective and more relevant knowledge can be produced. In fact, Harding (1986) and Hartsock (1983) argue that knowledge produced from the point of view of subordinated groups may offer stronger objectivity due to the increased motivation for them to understand the views or perspectives of those in positions of power.
Structural Equation Modeling
Authors: Fan Xitao
Published: September 2017

Structural equation modeling (SEM) has witnessed an exponential growth in its application in social and behavioral science research in the last two decades. Because of its versatility, SEM has been heralded as a unified model that joins methods from econometrics, psychometrics, sociometrics, and multivariate statistics (Bentler 1994). Many statistical techniques can be considered as special cases of SEM, including regression analysis, canonical correlation analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and path analysis (Bentler 1992; Fan 1996; Jöreskog & Sörbom 2001).
Structural Functional Theory
Authors: Lucas Jeffrey W.
Published: September 2017

Structural functional theory holds that society is best understood as a complex system with various interdependent parts that work together to increase stability. For most of the twentieth century the structural functional perspective (also called functionalism) was the dominant sociological approach in the US and Western Europe. Although the label structural functional theory has subsumed multiple perspectives, there are a few basic elements that generally hold for all functionalist approaches in sociology: social systems are composed of interconnected parts; the parts of a system can be understood in terms of how each contributes to meeting the needs of the whole; and social systems tend to remain in equilibrium, with change in one part of the system leading to (generally adverse) changes in other parts of the system.
Structuration Theory
Authors: Stones Rob
Published: September 2017

Structuration theory is a term used by the British sociologist Anthony Giddens in a series of publications in the 1970s and early 1980s as he attempted to define a distinctive approach to the study of social relations. Giddens wanted the term to both embrace and go beyond the more static notion of social “structure.” He wanted the praxis and dynamic qualities of agency also to be included within the term. Thus, both structure and agency are captured within the philosophy of structuration. Many commentators soon noted the striking similarity between Giddens's structuration theory and the work of Pierre Bourdieu in France. Bourdieu also wanted to go beyond the reification and objectivism of approaches that emphasized the pressures of the social milieu to the exclusion of individual and collective action. By creating a synthesis of the best from different traditions, Giddens was able to fashion a path between the deterministic tendencies of Marxism and Positivism, on the one hand, and the overly voluntaristic, free‐floating approaches of interpretive sociologies such as ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism, on the other. Bourdieu, working within the French post‐war intellectual scene, devised a path between the overly objectivist and dehumanizing tendencies of structuralism and Marxism, and the idealistic and subjectivist tendencies of existentialism, which put far too high a premium on the role of an individual's will power.
Suicide
Authors: Stack Steven
Published: September 2017

Suicide is among the top ten leading causes of death. According to recent data (2010), over 38,000 Americans take their own lives each year, or about 108 a day. Further, there are an estimated 250,000–600,000 suicide attempts each year. There are at least 5 million living Americans who have attempted suicide in the past. While Americans fear being murdered more than dying by their own hand, the suicide rate remains about double the homicide rate (12.3/100,000 vs. 5.3/100,000).
Sumner, William Graham (1840–1910)
Authors: Weiler Bernd
Published: September 2017

William G. Sumner, born in Paterson, New Jersey, is commonly regarded as one of the most influential American social scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In histories of sociology he is often portrayed or – as some would argue – misportrayed as a conservative apologist for “tooth‐and‐claw” capitalism and as the great Social Darwinist antipode to his progressive and reform‐oriented contemporary and fellow‐countryman L. F. Ward.
Starbucks
Authors: Simon Bryant
Published: September 2017

Starbucks didn't start out as a colossus, or even with that as an ambition. Gordon Bowker, Gerald Baldwin, and Zev Siegl, a couple of teachers and a Boeing employee, founded the company in 1971. Each wanted out of his job and each, influenced by Julia Childs, was into food, searching for products more real and more authentic than the highly processed goods jammed on to postwar supermarket shelves. Fresh roasted, whole bean coffee would be Bowker, Baldwin, and Siegl's rebuttal to the mass market, but it could have been cheese or bread. What mattered to them was more artisanal, more handcrafted foods. At first, Starbucks sold beans and grinders, coffee pots and filters. No drinks to go. No lattes. No frappuccinos. No scones.
Stereotype Threat
Authors: Kleyman Kerry S. , Kemmelmeier Markus
Published: September 2017

Stereotype threat describes a situation when members of a stigmatized group perform poorly on a task because they are concerned about confirming others' negative stereotypes about them. A central characteristic of stereotype‐threat situations is that individuals believe that their own performance is not only reflective of their personal qualities, but that it will also be viewed as indicative of the qualities of their entire group. Seeing one's own performance in this way can produce performance pressure, distraction, anxiety, and negative thinking – all leading to subsequent underperformance.
Scheler, Max (1874–1928)
Authors: Vandenberghe Frédéric
Published: September 2017

The German Catholic philosopher and social theorist Max Scheler may well be forgotten today, but in his time this creative though controversial figure was considered a genius and a giant. He stands in the midst of an intellectual current that connects the historical philosophies of life of Dilthey, Simmel, and Bergson with the phenomenologies of Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer, and his writings have significantly influenced those of Nicolai Hartmann, Edith Stein, Arnold Gehlen, Helmut Plessner, Karl Mannheim, and Alfred Schütz. Incredibly talented and productive, Scheler developed his own intuitive brand of phenomenology, proposed a material ethics of values as a systematic alternative to Kant's formal ethics, presented a series of subtle phenomenological investigations of emotions like shame, guilt, repentance, resentment, sympathy, love, and hate, reflected on faith, belief, and the essence of religion, founded the sociology of knowledge and visions of life as an autonomous discipline, laid the foundations of philosophical anthropology, and, toward the end of his life, sketched out a panentheistic metaphysics in which God progressively becomes, manifests, and realizes Himself in and through human history.
Scheler, Max (1874–1928)
Authors: Vandenberghe Frédéric
Published: September 2017

The German Catholic philosopher, phenomenologist, and social theorist Max Scheler is one of the most creative and versatile figures within the phenomenological movement. Standing in the midst of an intellectual current that connects the historical philosophies of life of Dilthey, Simmel, and Bergson with the phenomenologies of Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer, his writings have significantly influenced those of Nicolai Hartmann, Edith Stein, Arnold Gehlen, Helmut Plessner, Karl Mannheim, and Alfred Schütz.
Sociology of taste
Authors: Gronow Jukka
Published: September 2017

The importance of taste as a sociological concept has been most emphatically pointed out by Pierre Bourdieu. In his sociology, probably more than anywhere else, taste is a central theoretical concept of analysis. By distinguishing between good and bad, tasteful and tasteless, beautiful and ugly, taste classifies and orders the natural and social world. By taste one classifies oneself and is classified by others. Understood in this way, the sociological concept of taste shares many important features with its predecessor in classical philosophical aesthetics, the power of judgment. In this capacity, taste does not just refer to individual preferences, or dispositions (the term used by Bourdieu), or to some standards used in making choices in consumption. It is an important concept in bridging the gap between an individual's choices and his/her socially shared preferences or habits. In addition, it can refer to more or less automatic responses as well as to highly reflective acts of judgment, or to behavioral responses which share both these aspects at the same time.
Technological Determinism
Authors: Bryman Alan
Published: September 2017

Technological determinism refers to the thesis that the path of social change is directly influenced by technological developments. As such the thesis ascribes agency to an inert object, namely technology, in human affairs and their development.
Technological Innovation
Authors: Rizova Polly S.
Published: September 2017

The topic of technological innovation has been fascinating generations of scholars, managers, and policymakers ever since Schumpeter's influential
Theory of Economic Development
(1934) appeared in English. In it, he compellingly argued that the survival of firms as well as that of society is dependent upon their ability to perpetually find new uses for the existing resources and to recombine the latter in novel ways. The economic and social changes in the western world, particularly after the Industrial Revolution, are attributed to a considerable degree to technological innovations.
Theoretical Research Programs
Authors: Wagner David G.
Published: September 2017

A theoretical research program has three components: a set of interrelated theories, a set of substantive and methodological working strategies used to generate and evaluate these theories, and a set of models for empirical investigation and analysis based on these theories. Theoretical research programs are important to our understanding of how sociological knowledge grows. Programs are distinct from the broad, overarching metatheoretical strategies, such as functionalism and interactionism, which orient the construction of individual theories. Programs are more dynamic than strategies, the latter growing only very slowly and seldom in response to assessment of the theories that they generate. Programs are also distinct from individual theoretical arguments, or unit theories, such as Davis and Moore's theory of stratification or Lenski's theory of status crystallization. Although programs generally originate in a unit theory, they become much more complex as a network of interrelated theories emerges over time. Theoretical research programs provide accounts of social phenomena as diverse as affect control, status organization, network exchange, resource mobilization, revolution, and coalition formation in political action. They have become particularly common in recent work in sociological social psychology and in the study of group processes.
Theory and Methods
Authors: Markovsky Barry
Published: September 2017

Theories
organize and manipulate elements in a world of ideas and mental constructs, and express them through words and symbols. In contrast,
methods
organize and manipulate elements in the natural world of concrete objects and events, including people. Although “theory” has a variety of meanings in sociology, a definition that is both widely shared within the field and consistent with use in mainstream sciences is the following: A theory is a set of abstract, general, and logically related statements formulated to explain phenomena in the natural world. The term “method” is commonly used two ways in sociology, to denote: (1) a procedure enacted in the natural world for the purpose of yielding theoretically relevant observations; (2) an analysis of recorded observations that is intended to summarize or to make inferences about them. The first usage is loosely referred to as
research methods
. The second usage,
methods of data analysis
or
analytic methods
, encompasses the rather large palette of qualitative and quantitative techniques for working with empirical observations.
Tolerance
Authors: Karstedt Susanne
Published: September 2017

In 1598, Henri IV King of France decreed the Edict of Nantes that proclaimed the principle of tolerance as guiding principle of the state, its administration, and the life of its citizens. The Edict of Nantes established the principle of tolerance in order to end civil strife and religious conflicts, and to enhance the safety of all citizens, independent of their religious beliefs. Looking back over a period of more than 400 years, the Edict of Nantes is an astonishingly modern document. It granted equal access to the institutions of the state, public office, and educational institutions for all religious denominations, in particular for Protestants. As such, it is a document not only of the toleration of (religious) diversity, but also of the creation of those institutional safeguards and arrangements that underpin tolerance as a lived experience and practice of citizens.
Tönnies, Ferdinand (1855–1936)
Authors: Weinstein Raymond M.
Published: September 2017

Ferdinand Tönnies was born near Oldenswort, Germany, in the northern province of Schleswig‐Holstein. He came from a well‐to‐do farming family and grew up at a time when Germany was expanding as a colonial empire and undergoing profound changes such as population growth, urbanization, and industrialization. Tönnies's oldest brother was involved in mercantile endeavors and thus he experienced the world of the peasant farmer as well as the town merchant. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Tübingen in 1877, then returned to his native province, and later taught for over a half century as a private lecturer and professor at the University of Kiel.
Top Management Team
Authors: Díaz‐Fernández M. Carmen , González‐Rodríguez M. Rosario , Simonetti Biagio
Published: September 2017

Top management team (TMT) is a relevant managerial topic widely recognized in company environments and in the academic literature. In this framework, most practitioners and theorists pursue in‐depth knowledge of the notion of TMT and its internal functioning since it is a key driver to determine the company's strategic behavior and hence outcomes. Despite the relevance of TMT, no agreement can be found in the literature regarding the relationship beteween TMT, strategic pattern, and company performance. This is mainly attributed to methodological weakness in most of the empircal studies. New theories are emerging to solve that weakness to make the topic and the upper echelons theory, the main theory of TMT, continue in significance.
Totalitarianism
Authors: El‐Ojeili Chamsy
Published: September 2017

Totalitarianism refers to a political system in which the people are completely or nearly completely dominated by an all‐embracing state. Totalitarianism is often said to involve the lack of independent social sectors, the non‐existence of rights and pluralism, and the eradication of politics. The concept is frequently viewed as differing from authoritarianism in a number of ways: being more ideological; involving the domination of a single political party; seeing pervasive state intervention at every level; and being a peculiarly twentieth‐century political form.
Transcription
Authors: Skrla Linda
Published: September 2017

Transcription is the process of converting recordings of social or communicative human interaction into written text. Transcribing audiotaped or videotaped speech acts, conversations, interviews, or other forms of human engagement might be considered to be a relatively simple task, largely a chore or a secretarial matter. After all, to transcribe, one need only write down what was said by the parties involved in the interaction.
Transition from Communism
Authors: Olson Josephine E. , Hanson Frieze Irene
Published: September 2017

“Transition from communism” refers to the historical process of moving from a centrally planned economy to a market‐oriented economy with a dominant private sector. In most cases it has also meant a transition from a totalitarian state to a democracy. Transitions have taken place in European and Central Asian countries formerly under Soviet domination and also in East Asian countries such as China and Vietnam. The transition period is largely associated with the 1990s, but China's transition began in 1978, and transitions are far from complete in many countries. Discussion of the transition generally focuses on economic changes, but many political, legal, social, and psychological changes were also associated with the transition. The focus here is on the transitions in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Yugoslavia, and the former Soviet Union.
Total Institutions
Authors: Manning Peter K.
Published: September 2017

Total institutions is a concept developed and elaborated by Erving Goffman in
Asylums
. The research, the product of fieldwork, was done in a large public mental hospital and focused on the ways in which such institutions claim to be oriented to humane treatment, but in fact treat people as things to be processed. This is accomplished forcefully in a variety of ways such that the organization is divided into two social worlds: the secular world of the inmates and the sacred world of the staff. This divide is enforced by an arbitrary system of rules, exchanges, and rewards all of which maintain the self of the inmate as both worthless and incapacitated for life in civil society. Although much has changed in the treatment of the mentally ill, the concept remains relevant to understanding a wide variety of total institutions.
Technopolitics
Authors: Tsekeris Charalambos
Published: September 2017

Increasingly, technopolitics enters the complex political terrain of the twenty‐first century as an agonistic intersection of politics and technology, or as a conscious “strategic practice of designing or using technology to constitute, embody, or enact political goals” (Hecht 1998: 15).
Unemployment
Authors: Nordenmark Mikael
Published: September 2017

Unemployed persons comprise all those within the economically active population who are able and willing to work, and who are actively seeking jobs, but unable to find one. Unemployment and job loss affects millions of people every year throughout the world and the level of unemployment varies with economic conditions and other circumstances. The unemployment rate is expressed as a percentage of the total civilian labor force, where the latter includes both the unemployed and those with jobs (all those willing and able to work for pay).
Unemployment as a Social Problem
Authors: Allmendinger Jutta , Ludwig‐Mayerhofer Wolfgang
Published: September 2017

Most (post)industrial societies have been, to varying degrees, afflicted with unemployment during the past decades, and little indicates that this will change decisively in the years to come. This entry discusses definitions of unemployment, describes which groups are most affected by unemployment, and points out the divergence that exists between countries concerning the amount and the effects of unemployment, and finally it addresses labor market policies and the effects these have.
Uneven Development
Authors: Jacobs A.J.
Published: September 2017

Human settlements come in various shapes and sizes, ranging from sparsely populated rural areas to vast metropolitan regions with millions of residents which encompass hundreds of municipalities. They evolve within highly varied contexts and contain specific attributes, such as natural features, population densities, infrastructure, and proximity to other areas, which provide them with advantages and disadvantages as compared with other places. As Jacobs (2013) outlined in his Nexus City Model of Urban and Regional Development, as both the cores of, and nodes connecting political, economic, and social activities on all spatial tiers (i.e., the nexus), a multiplicity of factors impact the growth paths of cities and thereby, urban regions.
Urban Policy
Authors: Cochrane Allan
Published: September 2017

Urban policy actively shapes the ways in which people live in cities. As well as reflecting contemporary understandings of the role of cities in economic and social development, it also helps to create those understandings.
Urban Policy
Authors: Cochrane Allan
Published: September 2017

Urban policy actively shapes the ways in which people live in cities. As well as reflecting contemporary understandings of the role of cities in economic and social development, it also helps to create those understandings. Definitions of urban policy are elusive in part because the term appears so self‐explanatory. This entry reviews urban policy and its many meanings.
Urban Tourism
Authors: Lloyd Richard
Published: September 2017

Urban tourism refers to the consumption of city spectacles (such as architecture, monuments, and parks) and cultural amenities (such as museums, restaurants, and performances) by visitors. Studying urban tourism requires taking seriously leisure activities and transient populations, features of the city that much of past urban theory declines to address. However, a number of developments in recent decades have led tourism to assume a larger place in urban scholarship. As industrial manufacturing deserts dense urban areas, entertainment plays an expanded role in many city economies. Leisure and consumption for some means work and profits for others. The attraction and accommodation of visitors has become a central concern for public and private city elites. The sizable but fleeting population of visitors to the city has a surprising influence over local politics, investment choices, and the built environment.
Urbanism, Subcultural Theory of
Authors: Tittle Charles R.
Published: September 2017

Claude Fischer's (1975, 1995) urban theory is designed to explain how and why social relationships vary by size of population in settlements. According to the theory, urban life is bifurcated into public and private domains. In the public domain social relationships are typically superficial because people are usually interacting with others whom they do not know personally and may not see again. Such interactions are based mainly on the obvious roles people are playing at the time, such as bus rider, store clerk or customer, and pedestrian. Thus, the public domain, which varies directly with the size of the population, is characterized by anonymity, impersonality, tolerance, and lack of social bonding with others.
Utopia
Authors: Lovell David W.
Published: September 2017

Utopia is a type of imaginary ideal society. It generally takes a literary form, but it plays a role in social and political thought. From being playful, “utopian” has become a term of opprobrium, warning not just that a proposed scheme for improvement is impossible, but perfidious. For there is a wide range of (different and often incompatible) notions of what is “ideal,” and attempting to realize one person's dream may become another's nightmare.
Variables
Authors: Baur Nina , Lamnek Siegfried
Published: September 2017

A variable is a superordinated attribute, characteristic, or finding that exists in at least two distinct subordinated categories (classes, groups, units of measurement, values). In social research, variables are used to assign single cases to categories – all cases assigned to the same category count as “the same” (concerning this variable), all cases allotted to different categories are regarded as being dissimilar. In order to ensure that all cases are equivalently categorized, concepts have to be defined, operationalized, and measured. Correct measurement is important as statistical procedures make use of variables but only work correctly if data are free from distortion. There are multiple ways of classifying types of variables, for example, by the number and discernibility of their categories, their level of aggregation, their level of measurement, and how they can be operationalized and interpreted.
Violent Crime
Authors: Hansen Laura L.
Published: September 2017

Little strikes more fear in members of society than the possibility of becoming a victim of violent crime. Yet incidents of the most violent crime, murder, have progressively reduced since the 1990s in the United States. In this entry what constitutes a violent crime is discussed, including the narrow definitions offered by law enforcement, compared with a broader spectrum of definitions of violent sexual acts as presented by the World Health Organization. The most likely victims are discussed, by race, ethnicity, and sex. Additionally, the key variables are introduced that contribute to violence‐prone communities, including poverty, blocked opportunities, and gang presence.
Violentization
Authors: Athens Lonnie
Published: September 2017

Although every imaginable explanation of violent crime has been proffered at one time or another, it is rare to find one that is comprehensive enough to explain how violent criminals develop, how violent communities originate and change, and how violent criminal acts are committed. The theory of violentization (vz.) is relatively unique not only because it explains all three of these crucial matters, but also because it explains them in processual terms. By identifying how the stages in these processes unfold, it provides an opportunity for stopping their completion and, thereby, a potential means for stymieing the violent crime problem.
War
Authors: Knöbl Wolfgang
Published: September 2017

To find an uncontested definition of war is an almost impossible task. Although definitions characterizing wars as major and oftentimes longlasting conflicts between political groups (especially states or nation‐states) and carried out by armed forces seem to be useful and convincing at first sight, they are not without problems. The difficulty lies not so much in the vagueness of terms like “major conflict” (how many injured or dead people make a war?) or “longlasting conflict” (there were certainly wars in history that lasted decades; however, can there be wars that last only hours?). The real problem with such definitions is the close link between war and the state. This link is a nuisance for those social scientists who – as social anthropologists or historians – have to deal with conflicts in areas or periods without states. And it is an obstacle for sociologists and political scientists who deal with contemporary conflicts in regions where once existing states have vanished as sovereign political units and where a variety of groups use their potential of violence in an often gruesome way. Is this form of mass violence to be called “war”? Or is it another type of conflict? Thus, the problem of definition is on the agenda again.
Weak Ties (Strength of)
Authors: Tindall D. B. , Malinick Todd E.
Published: September 2017

Weak ties are relationships between individuals marked by relatively low intensity and emotional closeness. By contrast, strong ties are relationships that involve high levels of intensity and emotional closeness. The importance of weak ties to a variety of sociological phenomena has been most influentially articulated by Mark Granovetter (1973) in one of the best‐cited articles in sociology, “The Strength of Weak Ties” (SWT).
Wealth
Authors: Lachmann Richard
Published: September 2017

Wealth is relative material advantage, not an absolute level of well‐being. The greatest measure of wealth is the ability to live at a high level without working. In most societies, historical and contemporary, only 1–2 percent of people were wealthy. The period from the Great Depression to the 1970s was a rare interlude of relative equality.
Welfare Dependency and Welfare Underuse
Authors: Dean Hartley
Published: September 2017

Welfare dependency is a term that refers to the use that people make of publicly provided cash benefits (sometimes called cash transfers) or human services. Welfare underuse is the term applied when people who are entitled to publicly provided benefits and services fail to take them up.
Welfare Regimes
Authors: Lessenich Stephan
Published: September 2017

Thinking in terms of “regimes” and “regime types” has become popular in comparative welfare research since the late 1980s. Originally stemming from international relations studies (Krasner 1983), the “regime” concept has been discovered for and adapted to welfare state research mainly by Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping‐Andersen, who used it in his seminal work on
The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism
(1990) to characterize the institutional nexus of work and welfare in advanced capitalist societies. Building on a welfare regime's capacity to reduce the market dependency of individuals (“decommodification”), its implications for the structure of social inequality (“stratification”), and the relative importance of state, market, and the family (or households) in the production of social welfare, Esping‐Andersen claimed that the modern welfare state comes in three ideal typical variants: the “liberal,” the “conservative,” and the “social democratic” model. The great advance for welfare research brought about by this regime typology is twofold. On the one hand, the “three worlds” constitute a suitable tool for bringing order into the complex “real world” of welfare capitalism. On the other hand, and when it comes to specify the differences between advanced welfare states, the concept of welfare regimes focuses not simply on social expenditure data but on the qualitative aspects of welfare state policies, i.e., on the welfare state's relevance as a means of ordering social relations according to specific ideological convictions and normative principles. According to Esping‐Andersen, the relative weight of “liberal,” “conservative,” and/or “social democratic” convictions and principles in different national welfare regimes today depends on the power resources with which the respective social movements were able to engage in the “democratic class struggle” (Korpi 1983) around the welfare state, its emergence and its design, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Whiteness
Authors: Winant Howard
Published: September 2017

Like water to the proverbial fish, whiteness has been largely invisible in the modern world‐system of European creation, especially in the nations of the Global North and Global West. This invisibility is somewhat unique among the racial categories. The uniqueness does not consist of the “normalization” of whiteness: the idea that whiteness is the “default” racial status, that whites are “just people” who “don't have a race.” Nor does this uniqueness consist in the “transparency” of whiteness: the way in which whiteness is taken for granted in the world's powerful countries and thus not seen, again like water to the fish. In many places, especially where one racially defined group predominates, that group's raciality is also relatively invisible. Think of much of Africa, the Koreas, Han China, or Yamato Japan.
Women, Information Technology and (Asia)
Authors: Johnson Helen
Published: September 2017

New information and communication technologies (ICT) challenge and have the potential to promote change in women's social status and socioeconomic opportunities in various ways. Some sociologists argue that innovative ICT embody the key characteristics required to provide women with effective opportunities to participate in mainstream economic activities in Asian societies, others that ICT are yet another tool of masculinized social, economic, and political power that is merely perpetuating gender differentiation.
Work, Sociology of
Authors: Bonstead‐Bruns Melissa
Published: September 2017

Work is typically described as the activities involved in the production of goods and services. The sociology of work, then, involves the systematic study of the interrelationship between the people and institutions associated with the production of goods and services. The general heading of the sociology of work subsumes many topics, which can be separated roughly into individual‐level approaches and structural‐level approaches. Individual‐level approaches treat the individual as the unit of analysis and typically focus on ascribed characteristics such as gender, race, and age. They also commonly address achieved characteristics such as education, promotion, compensation, and other labor force outcomes. Individual‐level approaches may also examine the impact of work over time by looking at the life course or career trajectory of individuals.
World Conflict
Authors: Fellman Gordon
Published: September 2017

Fights of one kind or another show up in archaeological and anthropological studies of early societies as well as later ones. Usually limited to ritualized encounters, these conflicts seem more like sport than anything else; two groups of men fight, the action ending when someone is hurt.
Writing as Method
Authors: St. Pierre Elizabeth Adams
Published: September 2017

Writing as a method of inquiry refers to a research practice of foregrounding and investigating how researchers construct knowledge about people, themselves, and the world by writing. This concept, introduced by Laurel Richardson (2000 [1994]) and developed by Elizabeth St. Pierre (Richardson and St. Pierre, 2005) and others, brings the idea that writing is thinking from the humanities to the social sciences.
Whole Foods Market
Authors: Johnston Josée , Rodney Alexandra
Published: September 2017

Whole Foods Market (WFM) is the world's largest retailer specializing in natural and organic foods. WFM began with one store in Austin, Texas in 1980 and by 2014 had over 365 locations – mainly in the United States, but also Canada and the United Kingdom (WFM, 2014a). The chain was the country's first certified organic grocer and carries a wide range of USDA‐certified organic foods. WFM does not sell products containing harmful additives, artificial colors, preservatives, sweeteners, or hydrogenated fats (WFM, 2014b). A quality standards team maintains a list of chemicals that are banned from the store, and also bans meats produced using antibiotics, growth hormones, or under inhumane conditions (e.g., beak trimming broiler chickens) (WFM, 2014c).