bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Milk, Harvey (1930–1978)
Authors: Royce Tracy , Hidalgo Danielle Antoinette
Published: September 2017

Harvey Milk's brief but influential life continues to inspire sociologists and others working in numerous areas, including those who focus on social movements, social change, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) studies. Although Milk's political career was cut tragically short, he accomplished much during the final 11 months of his life while serving as the first openly gay Supervisor for San Francisco's District 5.
Narrative
Authors: Binkley Sam
Published: September 2017

A sociological interest in narrative has followed upon what is termed the post‐positive interpretive turn. With challenges to the presumed detachment and objectivity of social inquiry, skepticism about structural causality and quantification as shibboleths of sociological explanation, and with increasing demands for the foregrounding of the unique experiences and perspectives of actors themselves in accounts of social phenomena, the study of narrative has emerged as a key methodological and interpretive focus (Maines 1993). The “narrative turn” in sociological research has many precedents in the interpretive and qualititative traditions that preceded the institutionalization of sociology as a positive science in the the post‐World War II period. Thomas and Znaniecki's studyThe Polish Peasant in Europe and Americaand other classics of the Chicago School were celebrated works of interpretive research which highlighted the importance of narrative, though this tradition was largely marginalized with post‐war American sociology's embrace of quantitative research and other positivistic methodologies.
Negative Case Analysis
Authors: Athens Lonnie
Published: September 2017

Negative case analysis boils down to using a small set of powerful heuristic principles to generate scientific hypotheses that enjoy strong empirical support from the intensive study of a small sample of cases. Over the years, negative case analysis also has been referred to as analytic induction or the limited case study method. Regardless of the name, the researchers who use this method deliberately search for empirical cases that contradict a scientific law or a working hypothesis with the goal of improving the hypothesis or law as well as the underlying conception of the problem to which the law or hypothesis applies. Thus, researchers who use this method do not eschew the discovery of a negative case. On the contrary, they would welcome such a discovery because it not only gives them the opportunity to overturn an established scientific law, but it also gives them a chance to invent an alternative hypothesis that could potentially become a pathbreaking scientific discovery (Becker 1998: 194–212).
Nenko Chingin
Authors: Mouer Ross
Published: September 2017

Nenko chingin
was a central concept in discussions of Japanese‐style management in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. A shorthand for
nenko joretsu chingin seido
(literally, “age‐merit ordered wage system”), the term has commonly been rendered in English as the seniority wage system. It continues to be used to describe a variety of payment schemes which link age and merit to the wages received by Japanese employees in many established firms. Although the term is readily recognized by most employees in Japan, it is the first component of the term,
nenko
(meaning age and merit), that allows for interpretation and ultimately clouds debates about the importance of seniority in determining wages in Japanese firms. The first character of the Chinese compound for
nenko
is “?”–
nen
, which is read alternatively as
toshi
and means year or age. The second is “?” which means merit.
Networks
Authors: Chriss James J.
Published: September 2017

The concept of social networks finds its beginnings in the work of Georg Simmel. Simmel argued that a pure or formal sociology ought to take as its special focus the study of societal forms. Employing a geometric analogy, Simmel suggested that social forms can be identified and defined, thereby allowing the sociologist to group together a myriad of substantive phenomena under the broader or more abstract formal categories.
Neurosociology
Authors: Franks David D.
Published: September 2017

Neurosociology is an inquiry into the social dimensions of functioning brains and the fusion of brain functioning with minded behavior and self processes. Neurosociology puts individualistic tabula rasa theories of knowledge to rest. The environment may trigger responses, but the brain selects, interprets, edits, and changes the very quality of incoming information to fit its own requirements and limitations. Much of this “revisionism” is produced by its robust cognitive and emotional capacities. The “living content” of these capacities (meanings) are supplied by culture and human talk. Working brains develop only in interaction with other brains and the cultural content they produce (Brothers 1997). This makes experience more of a projection than a recording. Thus, the largely interpretive and culture‐dependent nature of selfhood, memory, and even sensed perception opens the door to neurosociology. It studies the effect of culture and learning environments on brain processes and neuronal structure, as well as the effect of brain processes in creating emergent social structures.
New Middle Classes in Asia
Authors: Embong Abdul Rahman
Published: September 2017

Asia is the world's largest continent with great complexity, diversity, and different levels of economic development. Such characteristics make it difficult to describe the continent – and by extension its new middle class – in any general way. Necessary as they may be, we should thus be careful when making generalizations about the Asian middle class lest we unwittingly gloss over its heterogeneity across regions.
New middle classes in Asia
Authors: Embong Abdul Rahman
Published: September 2017

Asia is the world's largest continent with great complexity, diversity, and different levels of economic development. Such characteristics make it difficult to describe the continent – and by extension its new middle class – in any general way. Necessary as generalizations may be, we should thus be careful when making them about the Asian middle class, lest we unwittingly gloss over its heterogeneity across regions.
New Religious Movements
Authors: Barker Eileen
Published: September 2017

The term new religious movement has been employed to refer to a number of distinguishable but overlapping phenomena, not all of which are unambiguously new and not all of which are, by at least some criteria, religious. There have, of course, always been new religions – Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam all started off as such. With the hindsight of history, it is possible to recognize periods that have been particularly prone to the growth of new religions. Examples would be the 1530s in Northern and Central Europe; England between 1620 and 1650 and again at the turn of the nineteenth century; the Great Awakening of the late 1730s followed by the Second Great Awakening of 1820–1860 in the United States; and a “Rush Hour of the Gods,” to borrow Neill McFarland's (1967) term, arrived in Japan when the new religions that had been suppressed during World War II became liberated in the mid‐1940s, then, roughly 30 years later, they were joined by what are now referred to as the Japanesenewnew religions (Shimazono, 2004).
Nihonjinron
Authors: Yoshino Kosaku
Published: September 2017

The Japanese term
nihonjinron
refers to discourses on the distinctiveness of the society, culture, and national character of the Japanese. As such,
nihonjinron
have manifested themselves periodically from the Meiji era (1868–1911) to the present, while continually undergoing changes in form. In its narrower and most recent sense, the term refers to the vogue of such discourses during the 1970s and the early 1980s, when a very large quantity of works on the unique qualities of the Japanese inundated bookstores – the so‐called
nihonjinron
boom. In the aftermath, a period of critical reaction to the
nihonjinron
set in, and this in turn has had a large impact on the ways in which Japanese society and culture are discussed today.
Networked Individuality
Authors: Adolf Marian
Published: September 2017

Networked Individuality (NI), while not a tightly defined term, usually denotes an increasingly prevalent mode of communication‐based sociation within modern societies against the background of the ascent of the new media – especially social network sites. The concept connects the social theoretical notion of individualization to the central role of media‐borne communication for establishing and maintaining social relations. As such, it takes into account the network‐architecture of contemporary forms of societal organization that converge with a media infrastructure giving rise to new ways for the individual to connect to others. NI draws on a long research tradition in communication studies as well as sociological theory. It seeks to join the findings of both perspectives. The proliferation of the Internet is accompanied by a two‐sided process of individualization that, on the one hand, consists of increasingly personalized media‐reception and communicative activity. On the other hand, the network organization of the Internet creates possibilities for reintegration by giving the users the opportunity to constantly refer to content circulating on the Internet and increasingly by referring to information about the individual itself. Adopting a network perspective that accounts for the many‐faceted and idiosyncratic communication behavior emerging today, NI denotes new ways of communicative engagement and social integration.
National Self‐Determination
Authors: Conversi Daniele
Published: September 2017

Self‐determination is a principle in international law according to which a people ought to be able to determine its own future and political status, in freedom from external interference. The right of peoples to self‐determination is a cardinal principle in international law, embodying the right for all peoples to decide their own political, economic, and cultural development.
Occupational Mobility
Authors: Treiman Donald J.
Published: September 2017

Occupational mobility refers to changes in the kind of work people do across generations (
inter
generational mobility) or over the course of people's lives (
intra
generational or career mobility). This entry focuses on intergenerational mobility, a topic that has given rise to a large and truly international research literature despite difficult conceptual and measurement issues.
Occupations
Authors: Rytina Steven
Published: September 2017

Occupation refers to the kind of work usually done for a living. Type of work provides one of the best single indicators of the overall life situation of workers. This rests on a thesis that is powerful (but varies in validity) – type of work is a key cause and consequence of relative position with respect to stable inequalities or social stratification.
Oligarchy and Organization
Authors: Rucht Dieter
Published: September 2017

In the classical Greek period, oligarchy (literally, the rule by a few) usually had a negative connotation. In Aristotle's typology of political systems, oligarchy refers to a rule that mainly serves the interests of the rich at the expense of the large majority of the community. By contrast, aristocracy, though also being a rule by a small minority, was understood as a government of “the best” in service of the public good. In common language from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages to the present, oligarchy denotes a political regime in which the power is concentrated in the hands of a small group, regardless of whether this power is based on wealth (usually referred to as a plutocratic system), weapons, or other sources of influence and control. In line with Aristotle's understanding, many political theorists and sociologists use the term oligarchy in a pejorative sense, denoting a degenerate rule to the disadvantage of the political community at large.
Oral Sex
Authors: Curtis Bruce
Published: September 2017

Oral sex is broadly defined as oral‐genital stimulation. Cunnilingus refers to oral‐vaginal stimulation, fellatio to oral‐penile stimulation, and analingus to anal‐lingual stimulation. Across the sweep of sexual practices in human societies both historically and cross‐culturally, oral sex figures in an extremely wide variety of forms, themselves valued in very different ways. The focus here is on oral sex within heterosexual relations, but oral sex plays an important part in homosexual relations. In some historical configurations of sexual practices in South Asia, for instance, the tasting of another man's semen was thought to stimulate the desire for heterosexual intercourse. In another configuration, fellatio was seen as a substitute for heterosexual intercourse, something to be received from a eunuch, but certainly not by a man from his wife. In the west, oral sex was often subject to legal prohibitions against “sodomy,” both hetero‐ and homosexual, and in some states in the United States it remains a criminal offense.
Organization Theory
Authors: Greenwood Royston
Published: September 2017

Organization theory is concerned with organizations, the relationship between organizations and their environment, the effects of those relationships upon intra‐organizational functioning, and how organizations affect the distribution of privilege within society. A central concept isorganizational form. The ability of societies to respond to social and economic problems depends upon the availability of diverse forms. Organization theorists are thus interested in the range of organizational forms, their capabilities and consequences, in how new organizational forms arise and become established, and in who controls them for what purposes.
Organization Theory
Authors: Greenwood Royston
Published: September 2017

Organizations are a central and unique institution within modern society and organization theory focuses upon understanding the variety of organizational forms through which collective efforts are accomplished. Emphasis is given to the relationships between organizations and their technical, resource, and institutional environments. Organizations are not necessarily passive recipients of environmental demands but are instruments through which contexts can be shaped. Organization theory addresses multiple issues, ranging from organizational design and governance, outcomes such as innovation and corruption, and the political and distributive implications of organizations.
Organizational Communication
Authors: Mumby Dennis K.
Published: September 2017

The term organizational communication denotes both a field of study and a set of empirical phenomena. The former is a largely US‐based subdiscipline of the field of communication studies (though programs are being established in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Europe, and China); the latter refers broadly to the various and complex communication practices of humans engaged in collective, coordinated, and goal‐oriented behavior. In simple terms, organizational communication scholars study the dynamic relationships between communication processes and human organizing. Communication is conceived as foundational to, and constitutive of, organizations, while organizations are viewed as relatively enduring structures that are both medium and outcome of communication processes. While research has focused traditionally on corporate organizational forms, recently the field has broadened its scope to study nonprofit and alternative organizations.
Orientalism
Authors: Chua Peter
Published: September 2017

Orientalism is the study of the “Orient” and its “eastern” arts, languages, sciences, histories, faiths, cultures, and peoples by Christian theological experts, humanist scholars, and natural and social scientists since the 1500s. Orientalist writers consider the “Orient” as consisting of societies geographically east of Christian Europe to be explored, acquired, and colonized for their raw materials, abundant labor, and pieces of seemingly opulent civilizations in decline. These colonial explorations resulted in man‐made, imaginary geographies and political demarcations such as the Near East, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Far East, the Pacific Isles, the New World, and the “Dark Continent.”
Outsider‐Within
Authors: Ryan J. Michael
Published: September 2017

Patricia Hill Collins's idea of the outsider‐within has quickly become a classic in feminist theories. Developed primarily in her book
Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice
(1998), the term was originally used to describe the location of individuals who find themselves in the border space between groups; that is, who no longer have clear membership in any one group. Dissatisfied with this usage because of its resemblance to early sociology's “marginal man,” Collins later modified the term to “describe social locations or border spaces occupied by groups of unequal power” (1998: 5). Rather than static positions, these locations contain a number of contradictions for the individuals who occupy them. While individuals in these unique locations appear to be members of the dominant group based on possession of the necessary qualifications for, and apparent rights of, member standing, they do not necessarily enjoy all of the experiential benefits afforded to formal members. Collins uses the example of blacks in the United States; while they have basic citizenship rights, they are often treated as second‐class citizens.
Outsourcing
Authors: Nikolova Natalia
Published: September 2017

Outsourcing refers to the fundamental decision to contract out specific activities that previously were undertaken internally. In other words, outsourcing involves the decision to reject the internalization of an activity and can be viewed as vertical disintegration. As it means to obtain by contract from an outside supplier, it is also called contracting out or subcontracting.
Ogburn, William Fielding (1886–1959)
Authors: Bannister Robert C.
Published: September 2017

William Fielding Ogburn, sociologist and statistician, was born in Butler, Georgia, to Charlton Ogburn, a planter and merchant, and Irene Florence Wynn, both descendants of prominent southern families. After receiving a BS at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia (1905), and a PhD at Columbia University (1912), Ogburn taught at leading universities in the United States and abroad, chaired the Social Science Research Council, and served as advisor and researcher for numerous government agencies. Appointed at the University of Chicago in 1927, he was a major proponent of statistical, value‐neutral sociology. More than a quantifier, he was also a social theorist whose interests ranged from Freudian psychology to the impact of technology on society. He was elected president of the American Sociological Society (1929) and the American Statistical Association (1931), the only person to hold both positions.
Parsons, Talcott (1902–1979)
Authors: Lidz Victor
Published: September 2017

Talcott Parsons was the preeminent sociological theorist of his generation. He developed a “general theory of action” that still serves as a comprehensive framework for understanding human social relationships and behavior. First adumbrated in articles published in the late 1920s, the theory was elaborated to a high level of analytic complexity in books and essays published over the next 50 years. Several works, including
The Structure of Social Action
(1937),
The Social System
(1951),
Economy and Society
(by Neil J. Smelser, 1956), and essays collected in
Politics and Social Structure
(1969) remain landmarks in the history of sociology. Parsons was interested in the relations between sociology and other social sciences, including economics, political science, psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology, and he contributed basic ideas to each of these disciplines. At Harvard University, where he served on the faculty from 1927, he became in 1947 the founding chair of the Department of Social Relations, an international center of interdisciplinary teaching and research in sociology, clinical and social psychology, and social anthropology until it split up in 1968.
Patient‐Physician Relationship
Authors: Gallagher Eugene
Published: September 2017

No topic is more central to a general understanding of medicine in modern society than the patient‐physician relationship. Few topics have so actively focused the attention of social scientists, the thinking public, and medical/health practitioners. No other topic is so closely keyed to the emergence in the 1950s of medical sociology as a distinct, important, and very sizable field of research, teaching, and public policy relevance in sociology.
Pluralism, American
Authors: Gerteis Joseph
Published: September 2017

Pluralism refers to the condition of living amid diversity and also to a positive appreciation for that condition. Historically, pluralism was understood as a divergent goal from assimilation, however much these concepts have coincided in practice. Assimilation – or “Americanization” in an older language – deals with difference by insisting that newcomers or outsiders blend into the dominant society. From the pluralist viewpoint, social and cultural differences are to be accepted and appreciated, and group cultures maintained. (This cultural notion of pluralism contrasts with the political use of that term, which refers to a situation where power in a society is not held by a single group, but is instead distributed across a number of competing groups.)
Pluralism, British
Authors: Hogan Trevor
Published: September 2017

The civil societies of most modern nation‐states in the world today are “pluralist” if by this we mean the linguistic, ethnic, and subjective dimensions of culture. Cultural definitions of pluralism, however, address neither social factors of hierarchy, status, and power nor the politics of managing cultural difference and diversity in representative democracies. Communal democracies (like Malaysia) are different to the pluralist liberal democracies of the new world such as Canada and Australia. Arguments about political pluralism as normative goal and practice have largely emanated from liberal democratic societies. British and American pluralism are the two leading examples across the last century.
Poetics, Social Science
Authors: Brady Ivan
Published: September 2017

Poetics in an Aristotelian sense is a system of normative rules for composition. A more practical and theoretically useful definition is to see poetics as a collection of choices concerning style, composition, and thematics made at different levels by an author or a group (Hallyn 1990: 14). These choices help to determine (and are determined by) aesthetic and related representational interests in speech or writing, or both, that is, by
poesis
– the cognitive process of “being” and “doing” in variable contexts, a dynamic and reflexive process of construction, selection, and representation. The composite is an action plan for constructing the work. Putting it into place in the social sciences begs several problems simultaneously, including the place of aesthetic interests in the subject matter traditionally corralled by social scientists, the points of entry into research, and the visibility of the authors in representations.
Polanyi, Karl (1886–1964)
Authors: Stanfield James Ronald , Stanfield Jacqueline Bloom
Published: September 2017

Karl Polanyi was born in Vienna on October 21, 1886 and spent his childhood in Budapest. His formal university studies were in law, which he practiced for a very brief time after graduating in 1910. Informally he immersed himself in the rising tide of radical and modern liberal dissent and engaged in political activities, notably on behalf of the short‐lived National Citizenss' Radical Party, which was formally chartered in June 1914. Polanyi's political and legal career was interrupted by World War I in which he served in the Austro‐Hungarian army. Thereafter he began a relationship with the radical activist Ilona Ducyznska, whom he married in 1923.
Political Economy and Sport
Authors: Sage George H.
Published: September 2017

For over 350 years the term political economy has been used to articulate the interdependence of political and economic phenomena. The first published use of the term “political economy” is found inTreatise on Political Economyauthored by a French writer, Antoyne de Montchrétien, in 1616. The first publication in English using this term was Sir James Steuart's bookInquiry Into the Principles of Political Economyin 1767. Political economy is considered to be the original social science because the broad theoretical visions of society articulated by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries predated the splintering of social science into narrower disciplines of economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology.
Political Opportunities
Authors: Meyer David S.
Published: September 2017

Political opportunity theory and political process accounts of protest movements emphasize the influence of the world outside a movement on the emergence, development, claims, and ultimate impact of a social movement. The wisdom, creativity, and outcomes of activists' choices, briefly their agency, can be understood only by looking at the political context and the rules of the games in which those choices are made, that is, structure. Although the theory has been defined and specified with great variety, depending on a case, cumulative development has slowed. Returning to a curvilinear conception of the influence of opportunities on outcomes will help build theory. Recent research on repression and grievances, often in the context of undemocratic or less capable states, has added additional richness to the concept and will aid in theoretical development.
Population and the Environment
Authors: Curran Sara R.
Published: September 2017

The relationship between population and environment is a topic that has garnered attention from many disciplines, including sociology, economics, ecology, history, anthropology, demography, and geography. An early and important essay, which continues to serve as an intellectual starting point for characterizing the population and environment relationship, is T. R. Malthus's “First Essay on Population” (1798). In it, Malthus draws a direct link between population and environment, stressing that the growth of human population tends to outstrip the productive capabilities of land resources. However, Malthus also argues that growth rates will change in response to reduced natural resource quality and quantity.
Malthusian theory
predicts that changes in population growth occur because famine increases mortality or decreases fecundity or social behavior shifts to decrease family sizes, through delayed marriage, non‐marriage, or reduced fertility. Although this framework has undergone significant challenges, it remains one of the central paradigms within the field.
Positivism
Authors: Fuller Steve
Published: September 2017

Positivism is the name of a social and intellectual movement that tried to learn from the mistakes of the Enlightenment project that eventuated, first, in the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution of 1789, and second, in the irrationalism of the Weimar Republic following Germany's defeat in World War I. While it has been customary to distinguish between the quasi‐political movement called “positivism” originated by Auguste Comte in the 1830s and the more strictly philosophical movement called “logical positivism” associated with the Vienna Circle of the 1930s, both shared a common sensibility, namely, that the unchecked exercise of reason can have disastrous practical consequences. Thus, both held that reason needs “foundations” to structure its subsequent development so as not to fall prey to a self‐destructive skepticism.
Postcolonialism and Sport
Authors: King C. Richard , Moraga Jorge E.
Published: September 2017

Although subject to much conceptual and political debate, postcolonialism simultaneously refers to a range of sociohistorical conditions associated with empire, its aftermath, and reconfiguration, and a set of theories designed to question the naturalness of the categories and practices central to such contexts. Significantly, both have implications for the sociology of sport, because athletics almost invariably has animated colonial cultures.
Postmodern Consumption
Authors: Venkatesh Alladi
Published: September 2017

The origins of postmodernism cannot be traced to a single source or set of circumstances. At first glance, the different trails may appear diffused, disparate, and disconnected. A closer look might reveal a common pattern woven by those different threads. Postmodernism is generally viewed as a reaction against or rejection of modernist tendencies in philosophy, social and cultural theory, literature, and politics (Featherstone 1991). Postmodernism is closely related to poststructuralism, whose origins are slightly different but whose arguments are very similar – so much so that in the eyes of many, postmodernism subsumes poststructuralism and therefore they are treated interchangeably. The last quarter of the twentieth century witnessed the most intense excursions into postmodern ideas. Among the many key figures are Derrida (deconstruction and the decentered subject), Foucault (regimes of truth), Jameson (cultural logic of late capitalism), Kristeva (language and construction of identity), Deleuze and Guattari (desiring machines), Cixous (l'ecriture feminine), Butler (queer theory), Rorty (questions of representation), Gehry (postmodern architecture), Baudrillard (the economy of signs and simulacrum), Lyotard (the problematic of science and legitimation), Greenblatt (new historicism), Said (Orientalism), Harraway (cybogs and posthumanism), and Featherstone and Bauman (consumer culture).
Postmodern Organizations
Authors: Linstead Stephen
Published: September 2017

Postmodern organizations are organizations that have broken with the traditional principles of organization as defined by modernist theory dominated by rationalism; they are also characterized by having developed new and original forms and practices in response to the changing environmental conditions of postmodern society. Such organizations can be identified both by the extent to which they are not epistemologically modern and by the extent to which they adopt and create new and different patterns of operation and regulation. Nevertheless, the continued persistence of modern methods of organizing is not to be doubted. Postmodern organizations, then, may themselves be hybrids of modern and postmodern modes of organizing, and coexist in mixed populations that include organizations that still run on predominantly modern lines. Furthermore, just as there was a variety of versions of modernism, there are different responses to the challenges of postmodernity, which display radicalism on both the right and the left. Boje and Dennehey (1999) follow Pauline Rosenau in distinguishing betweenskepticalandaffirmativeversions loosely based on Nietzsche's passive and active nihilisms, and there is also a fertile and heterogeneous middle ground. This said, we can attempt a broad and cautious typology of the familiar features of each, as shown in table 1.
Postmodern Sexualities
Authors: Plummer Ken
Published: September 2017

Sexuality is often located within various epochs – classic, premodern, modern, and the like – and the most recent stage has been controversially identified as “postmodern.” Here human sexualities are not seen as well‐fashioned patterns, solid identities, grand truths, or essential natures. In contrast, new social accounts of sexualities usually offer up more modest, constructed, and fragmented narratives of sexualities. For example, those found in the modern sexological world – from Freud to sexology – try to develop scientifically a knowledge of sexuality. Such views have haunted much of the modern world's analysis of sexuality, seeing it as an autonomous sphere of reality. For postmoderns this is a deeply flawed idea: “sex” is no longer the source of a truth, as it was for the moderns with their strong belief in science. Instead, according to William Simon in
Postmodern Sexualities
(1996), human sexualities have become “destabilized, decentred and de‐essentialized.” Sexual life is no longer seen as harboring an essential unitary core locatable within a clear framework with an essential truth waiting to be discovered; instead it is partial and fragmented, with little grand design or form. Indeed, it is “accompanied by the problematic at every stage” (Simon 1996: 20). As he argues: “all discourses of sexuality are inherently discourses about something else; sexuality, rather than serving as a constant thread that unifies the totality of human experience, is the ultimate dependent variable, requiring explanation more often than it provides explanation.”
Power
Authors: Powell Jason L.
Published: September 2017

Power is an “essentially contested and complex term” (Lukes 1974: 7) that cuts right across social science disciplines. The literature on power is marked by a deep disagreement over the basic definition of power. Some theorists define power as getting someone else to do what you want them to do (power over), whereas others define it more broadly as an ability or a capacity to act (power to). Thomas Hobbes's (1985 [1641]: 150) definition of power as a person's “present means … to obtain some future apparent Good” is a classic example of this understanding of power, as is Hannah Arendt's definition of power as “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert” (1970: 44). Feminist theorists of power Stacey and Price (1983) define power as the more or less one‐sided patriarchal ability to position women's lives through the actions of men over them. Conversely, Michel Foucault (1977) suggests that power itself is “relational” in that whilst one social actor may exercise power with other individuals, we also need to be aware that all other individuals have “power” in their social relationship that can be expressed through “resistance.”
Power Elite
Authors: Powell Jason L.
Published: September 2017

As a concept, “power elite” can be defined as a small group of people who control a disproportionate amount of power, wealth, and privilege and access to decision‐makers in a political system. In a pathbreaking book, Mills (1956) claims that the US power elite consists of elite members of society characterized by consensus building and the homogenization of viewpoints. This power elite has historically dominated the three major sectors of US society: economy, government, and military. Elites circulate from one sector to another, consolidating their power as they go. Mills rejects pluralist assertions that various centers of power serve as checks and balances on one another – the power‐elite model suggests that those at the top encounter no real opposition and it implies a concentration of power, wealth, and prestige in the hands of the wealthy and powerful in American society. Mills wrote that the power elite refers to “those political, economic, and military circles, which as an intricate set of overlapping small but dominant groups share decisions having at least national consequences. Insofar as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them” (Mills 1956: 18).
Practice
Authors: Biernacki Richard
Published: September 2017

Practice is a rich if contested term on which sociologists converge when they endeavor to portray human action in its cultural and institutional settings. Concepts of practice highlight the influence of taken‐for‐granted, pre‐theoretical assumptions on human conduct. Such covert assumptions embrace everything that is left out of economists’ standard portrayals of intellectual calculations based on personal goals and known facts. For example, theorists of practice highlight the influence of bodily experience, practical know‐how, and institutionalized understandings of self and agency. Among the diverse theorists whose research has sustained this turn to practice are Garfinkel, Bourdieu, Foucault, Swidler, and Giddens. Their practice‐centered views of social life share three major themes.
Prejudice
Authors: Jennings Laura
Published: September 2017

Prejudice is a judgment formed about someone or something on the basis of perceived group membership. Prejudice can be negative, as in the case of racist or sexist ideology, or positive, as in the case of preference for a particular ethnic food, and can thus either help or harm a person so judged. Some writers, in defining prejudice, stress an irrational component; others maintain that it is incorrect to do so, because prejudice is often rooted in a quite rational self‐ or group interest. Others still point out that prejudice requires a positive bias toward one's own group in order for one to define another group negatively, through opposition; sometimes this bias is used to deny one's own prejudice even as one is acting on it.
Preparatory Stage
Authors: Vail D. Angus
Published: September 2017

While George Herbert Mead never explicitly mentions this stage of development, many contend that he implies it in several of his seminal writings on the social, not biological, root of the self. According to Mead, the self arises from a process of interaction among one's consociates. As an individual develops a facility for language, he or she begins to understand the symbolic meanings of social objects and eventually develops the capacity to make him/herself into a social object. In Mead's model, children begin to show signs of developing a self when they learn how to play at the roles of important people in their lives. At this
play stage
they show elementary understanding of role‐taking, but their understanding of complex rules and subtle differences of individual positions in social settings is limited. As they develop more sophisticated understandings of social settings, they enter a
game stage
where they learn to take account not only of individual roles, but also of the abstract rules that make those divergent roles make sense in a given situation. Mead calls this set of rules the
generalized other
. The
preparatory stage
precedes these phases in the social genesis of the self, representing a stage of mimicry where a child, in essence, is preparing him/herself for the more complex, subtle, and sophisticated social tasks that are starting to become a part of his or her routine.
Prevention, Intervention
Authors: Kaufmann Franz‐Xaver
Published: September 2017

The terms “prevention” and “intervention” are used in many social sciences, from international politics to social work. They concern certain classes of intentional behavior by collective actors which are considered as interfering with given situations. Prevention means measures or actions to reduce potential risks, i.e., to hinder the future happening of certain kinds of damage, e.g., accidents at work, deviant behavior, or the spreading of contagious infections. Intervention, by contrast, means the interference with some actual situation or process in order to change the course of an ongoing problematic event “to its best.” From an analytical perspective, both terms are rather equivalent: prevention in the ordinary sense means an interference in earlier stages of an assumed causal process than intervention.
Primary Groups
Authors: Elliott David L.
Published: September 2017

Primary group is a concept principally characterized by intimate, face‐to‐face, and geographically local social ties that tend to be enduring and to provide primary socialization and social support. Three main conceptual dualities – primary versus secondary groups, strong versus weak ties, and the psychological drive for safety versus the drive for competence and efficacy – along with the role of all of these in the development of the modern institution of individual personages, help to place the concept of primary group in its historical and theoretical context. These three dualities are closely related to each other, and each pair of dualities has been found to be mutually reinforcing and to have attributes that vary by context and penetrate across the dualities. Primary groups were central to Charles Horton Cooley's sociology, while Georg Simmel emphasized their connection with secondary groups, which includes both formal organizations and social circles.
Primate Cities
Authors: Timberlake Michael
Published: September 2017

A primate city usually refers to a city that is disproportionately large in terms of population size relative to other cities contained within a given geographically bounded area, such as a region, a nation, or even the globe. Occasionally, other qualities of cities than relative population size are used to identify primacy, for example, indicators of the relative concentration of important organizations, such as headquarters for leading corporations. While the term is often applied to cities considered excessively (and pathologically) large, this is not technically appropriate. In fact Jefferson (1939), who first used the term, argued that primate cities play an important generative role with respect to national development.
Primitive Religion
Authors: Clarke Peter B.
Published: September 2017

The evolutionary character of theories of primitive religion is present in the sociological literature from the beginning. It is evident, for example, in the writings of the so‐called founding father of sociology, Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who believed that religion originated in fetishism or the worship of inanimate things, then developed into polytheism which in turn developed into monotheism (Comte 1853). The view that religion evolved from polytheism to monotheism is, of course, much older than the formal beginnings of sociology and anthropology as academic disciplines. It is present in the Scottish philosopher David Hume'sThe Natural History of Religion(1759). The nineteenth‐century theorists – they would today be classified as armchair anthropologists and sociologists – most closely associated with the construction of the concept of primitive religion were less concerned about religion per se and its nature and more about finding proof with which to discredit the so‐called higher religions and in particular Christianity. Their intention was to discover the origins of primitive religion or religion in its most basic or elementary form in order to show that it was profoundly mistaken and arose from ignorance or some emotional need and that the so‐called higher religions which derived from such erroneous ideas and behavior did not therefore merit the assent and commitment of rational and emotionally mature and balanced people. In fact, religion held society back.
Professors
Authors: Hermanowicz Joseph C.
Published: September 2017

Professors are people with academic appointments at institutions of higher education. Compared to just half a century ago, higher education is differentiated on many counts, including the professorial role. While definitions delimit boundaries, they are sometimes ambiguously drawn. Professors in the US context typically hold advanced terminal degrees in the specialty in which they hold rank as assistant, associate, or full professors, those ranks constituting an ascent in an institutional career. Yet vast numbers of people with academic appointments occupy roles, sometimes without advanced terminal degrees, as lecturers or instructors, or, increasingly, as temporary or part‐time adjuncts or affiliates of a unit within colleges and universities. Thus the application of the term “professor” can be more liberal or restrictive, but this complexity raises core theoretic questions about the very topic of professors in contemporary society: Who are they? What roles do they perform? What is the academic profession to which these individuals purportedly belong? How has the profession changed over time in its form and function? Answers to these questions become even more complex when they are extended across national boundaries, and perhaps explain why little systematic comparative work on higher education faculties has been attempted.
Property Crime
Authors: Copes Heith , Lavender Logan
Published: September 2017

Property crimes are defined as those offenses where offenders take money or property from victims without the use or threat of force. They include a long list of behaviors such as burglary, larceny‐theft, motor vehicle theft, arson, shoplifting, fraud, embezzlement, and forgery. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines the first four of these offenses as Part 1 property crimes. The remaining offenses are classified as Part 2 property crimes in the Uniform Crime Report (UCR). Part 1 crimes make up the property crime index published yearly in the UCR. Most data collected by the FBI on property crime are concentrated around Part 1 offenses.
Property, Private
Authors: Barbalet Jack
Published: September 2017

Property implies ownership, to which rights attach. These rights may take usurpatary, moral, or legal form. The types of things that can be owned as property, and therefore subject to property rights, are enormously varied. Depending on the particular circumstances, they might include, for instance, a human person, a person's capacities (especially for labor), the products of another's labor, any material of use or exchange, land, options, patents, ideas, and so on. The structure of ownership is also variable. In ancient societies, classically described as the “indian village community” in Maine's
Ancient Law
(1861), co‐ownership or communal property prevailed. In peasant societies, on the other hand, the household rather than the community is typically the unit which exercises controlling rights over productive possessions. From early capitalist societies private property arose as the dominant form of ownership in which individual persons exercise rights over their objects of possession. In late capitalist societies corporate and public property forms emerge, combining elements of both communal and private property. Corporate property is communal insofar as ownership rights are shared by a number of proprietors, each of whom can exercise or dispose of their rights as they choose as individuals without collective constraint, and similarly use the benefits of their ownership as they individually see fit. Public property excludes private ownership and only nominally involves co‐ownership, as various forms of statutory authorities exercise such property rights, putatively on behalf of the public, subject to legal and political controls.
Protest, Diffusion of
Authors: Soule Sarah A.
Published: September 2017

The term diffusion as it is used by social scientists refers to the spread or flow of some innovation, through direct or indirect channels, across actors in a social system (Rogers 1995). Diffusion of protest, then, implies that social protest (or some element thereof) is spreading across (or flowing between) some set of actors in a social system.
Protestantism
Authors: Willaime Jean‐Paul
Published: September 2017

Of the 2 billion Christians in the world today, Protestants make up about a quarter, while Roman Catholics represent a little over a half. If Protestant Christendom appeared in the sixteenth century within European Latin Christianity and represented a number of fractures within it, then it would be wrong to associate modern Protestantism with western society (especially with North America). Protestantism has become a world phenomenon, present in Asia (more than 25 percent of South Korea's population is Protestant), Latin America (at least 10 percent of its population), and Africa (17 percent of the population). In the year 2000, out of every 100 Protestants, 31 were in Africa, 25 in Europe, 17 in North America, 12 in Asia, 12 in Latin America, and 3 in Oceania (where they represent 42 percent of the population, the highest proportion in any continent) (Hillerbrand 2004).