bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–1986)
Authors: MacLean Vicky M. , Parker Patricia
Published: September 2017

The French existentialist philosopher, writer, and social essayist Simone de Beauvoir is most widely known for her pioneering work
Le Deuxième Sexe
(1949), published in English as
The Second Sex
(1953). Her exposé of woman as “Other” and her calling attention to the feminine condition of oppression as historically linked to motherhood are considered her major contributions to modern feminist thought. While not generally acknowledged as a sociologist, Beauvoir nevertheless contributed to sociology in
The Second Sex
,
The Coming of Age
(
La Vieillesse
, 1970), a study of old age, and, to a lesser extent, her writings on the media (Deegan 1991) and death and dying (Marks 1973). Simone de Beauvoir is also internationally read and widely known for her novels, autobiographies, and travelogues. In 1954 her novel
Les Mandarins
was awarded the Prix Goncourt, clearly placing Beauvoir among the most highly acclaimed French literary writers of her time. Beauvoir's theorizing corrects androcentric biases found in earlier gender‐neutral theoretical frameworks, particularly in her use of social categories to inform individually oriented philosophical theories of self‐determination and freedom (Walsh 2000). She systematically examined the historically situated or lived experiences of women relative to men. Deeply influenced by the existential philosophy of her lifelong companion Jean‐Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir extended Sartrean existential philosophy to encompass social and cultural determinants of the human condition. She used existential philosophy, as a guide for understanding herself as a woman and as a framework for understanding the condition of women more generally.
Beccaria, Cesare (1738–1794)
Authors: McShane Marilyn D. , Williams Frank P.
Published: September 2017

In 1738 Cesare Bonesana, Marchese di Beccaria was born into a noble family in Milan, Italy. His writings became associated with the Classical School of thought on crime and punishment. Many of his ideas laid the groundwork for the reform of courts and laws throughout the world as well as the enactment of constitutions and proclamations of individual freedoms in emerging nations such as the United States.
Biodemography
Authors: Carey James R.
Published: September 2017

Biodemography, the study of biological aspects of demographic processes and relationships, is one of a small number of subdisciplines arising from the social sciences that has embraced biology (e.g., evolutionary psychology, neuroeconomics). The field can be divided into two moderately overlapping subfields. The first is biological biodemography. Here researchers bring experimental methods (i.e., using model organisms such as fruit flies and laboratory rodents) and life history, ecological and evolutionary theories to bear on basic demographic questions pertaining to health, aging, and lifespan. The second subarea of biodemography is biomedical biodemography where the focus is primarily on the analysis of survey data on human health, epidemiology, and genetics. The biological measurements derived from these surveys are used as covariates in demographic analyses in much the same way that social and economic information is used.
Biosociological Theories
Authors: Machalek Richard
Published: September 2017

Biosociological theories integrate biology into sociological explanations of human social behavior. They do so by incorporating theoretical ideas and empirical discoveries from various branches of biology: evolutionary biology (especially sociobiology and behavioral ecology), ecology, ethology, neurobiology, endocrinology, and population genetics. In sociology, most biosociological theories are emerging in a new specialty area, known as
evolutionary sociology
.
Black Feminist Thought
Authors: Few April L.
Published: September 2017

Black feminist thought is a collection of ideas, writings, and art that articulates a standpoint of and for black women of the African Diaspora. Black feminist thought describes black women as a unique group that exists in a “place” in US social relations where intersectional processes of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexual orientation shape black women's individual and collective consciousness, self‐definitions, and actions (Collins 1991, 1998). As a standpoint theory, black feminist thought conceptualizes identities as organic, fluid, interdependent, multiple, and dynamic socially constructed “locations” within historical context (hooks 1984; Collins 1998; Smith 1998; James & Sharply‐Whiting 2000). Black feminist thought is grounded in black women's historical experience with enslavement, anti‐lynching movements, segregation, Civil Rights and Black Power movements, sexual politics, capitalism, and patriarchy.
Blumer, Herbert George (1900–1987)
Authors: Morrione Thomas J.
Published: September 2017

Herbert Blumer was president of the American Sociological Association (1956) and received its Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award in 1983. His pre‐eminent contribution to sociology and social psychology is his formulation of a distinctive theoretical and methodological perspective known as symbolic interactionism. Emphasizing the salience of individual and collective processes of definition in shaping action, he crafted enduringly relevant and discipline‐defining analyses of a host of subjects, including collective behavior, social movements, fashion, race relations, industrial and labor relations, social problems, morale, public opinion, social attitudes, social change, public sector social science research, and social psychology. Consistent with his pragmatist‐informed perspective, he assigned social interaction the central role in creating, maintaining, and changing social reality.
Body Modification
Authors: Vail D. Angus
Published: September 2017

Body modification practices have proved fertile ground for sociologists interested in deviance, social control, and the social construction of problematic behavior. Most of this literature fits within the symbolic interactionist tradition, focusing specifically on the ways that people negotiate definitions of body art such that it becomes scary or beautiful, dangerous or alluring, rebellious or inclusive, and so on. The vast majority of this work is framed in discussions of labeling and differential association orientations which explain social definitions and the processes through which body modifiers learn how to be successful in changing the ways their bodies look to themselves and those with whom they come in contact.
Braverman, Harry (1922–1976)
Authors: Wood Stephen
Published: September 2017

Harry Braverman, journalist, publisher, and a director of Monthly Review Press (1967–76), is best known for his book
Labor and Monopoly Capital
, published in 1974. This helped to continue the Marxist tradition within class theory at a time when it was being debated out of sociology by a mixture of alternative theories and empirical analysis centered on the rise of the middle class and the increasingly diamond‐shaped nature of the class structure, as well as by the emerging emphasis on subjectivity in sociology. It also refueled a Marxian current that had never been very strong in work sociology, which C. Wright Mills (in the late 1940s) had famously termed “cow sociology” for its instrumental, managerial emphasis on ways of improving employee performance.
Buddhism
Authors: Polichetti Massimiliano A.
Published: September 2017

Buddhism is a neologism, created in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century
ce
, from the Sanskrit word buddha, literally the awakened one. It is derived from an epithet attributed to Siddharta Gautama, born in Northern India – one of the dates accepted by scholars for his life being 563–483 – once gained the bodhi, or awakening. Far from designating a man or preexisting godhead, the term buddha defines all those beings who, starting from the same conditions of common beings, succeed through their own spiritual merits in being released from worldly pains to gain eternal bliss and omniscience.
Biosociology
Authors: Mazur Allan
Published: September 2017

In their broadest senses, sociobiology and biosociology refer to the modern study of biology as it relates – within a Darwinian framework – to social behavior. Sociobiology is the better‐known term, made famous when theNew York Timesgave prominence to controversy surrounding a 1975 book,Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, by Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson. Detractors argued that the book revived biological determinism, sexism, racism, and social Darwinism. Here biosociology is the preferred term because, etymologically, it refers to a subdiscipline within sociology, and it avoids the remnant negative connotations of sociobiology.
Burning Man
Authors: Chen Katherine K.
Published: September 2017

Burning Man, an annual weeklong event devoted to countercultural principles and art, offers a rich context for studying art, consumption, religiosity and spirituality, subcultures, collective action, and organizations. During the week leading to the Labor Day holiday, nearly 70,000 persons gather in the Black Rock Desert, forming Black Rock City, one of Nevada's largest, albeit temporary, cities. Toward the week's end, the event's eponymous bonfire consumes the Man, a 40‐foot‐tall, neon‐decorated, wooden figure that stands at the city's center.
Capital Punishment
Authors: Paternoster Ray
Published: September 2017

The first recorded execution on American soil was of Captain George Kendall, put to death in 1608 by firing squad. Since that time, there have been more than 15,000 known executions. About one‐third of executions in the United States have occurred since 1930. Figure 1 shows the number of executions that have taken place in the US from 1930 until the end of 2003. One important thing to note in this figure is that the frequency with which the death penalty has been used has varied substantially over time. There were between 150 and 200 executions per year in the US during the 1930s, but then there occurred a long‐term decline. There were no executions at all during the ten‐year period from 1967 to 1977 because state and federal courts were deciding whether the death penalty was constitutional. After 1976 there was a fairly consistent but slow increase in the number of executions up to a peak of 98 executions in 1999. There are two points to keep in mind about this, however. First, although the frequency of the death penalty has increased since 1976, the number of executions is nowhere near what it had been from the 1930s to the 1950s. Second, although the frequency of the use of the death penalty had begun an upward trend in 1976, the peak of this increase occurred in 1999. From 1999 to 2003 there has been another decline in the frequency of executions, with only 65 occurring in 2003.
Catholicism
Authors: Poulat Émile
Published: September 2017

Catholicism, along with Orthodoxy and Protestantism, is one of Christianity's three principal branches and statistically the most important. Today's use of the term is a recent, secularized means of referring to the Catholic Church, whose head is the pope and whose headquarters are in the Vatican City in Rome.
Chance and Probability
Authors: Turner Stephen
Published: September 2017

Chance is an informal concept, sometimes meaning probability, sometimes meaning randomness. Probability is a formal mathematical concept expressed in its most simple form as dependent probability, which is a number between 0 and 1 that represents the likelihood that, for example, a person with one property will have another property. Thus, the probability of a live birth being female is a dependent probability in which the two properties are live birth and female. Probabilities may also be assigned to beliefs. In this case, known as subjective probability, the number represents the strength with which we believe another belief to be true. This is the kind of probability that one employs in making a bet with a friend about whether or not something is true.
Change Management
Authors: Dawson Patrick
Published: September 2017

A key aim of change management is to manage processes towards a future that, even when anticipated and planned for, can never be fully foreseen. It is a paradox that continues to generate considerable debate and conceptual and definitional confusion.
Charisma, Routinization of
Authors: Gordon Ray
Published: September 2017

Weber (1978 [1914]) notes that those attributed charismatic authority are considered “extraordinary and endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities … regarded as divine in origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them [these qualities] the individual concerned is treated as a leader” (p. 241). In this sense, the social relationships directly involved with charismatic authority are strictly personal and irrational in character. Weber points out, however, that, if these relationships are not to remain a transitory phenomenon, then they and the charismatic authority they are involved with “cannot remain stable; they will become either traditionalized or rationalized, or a combination of both” (p. 246). What Weber means is that, over time, the charismatic leader will be superseded by either a bureaucracy vested with rational legal authority or by institutionalized structures into which the charismatic impetus will become incorporated. This rationalization or institutionalization process is what Weber refers to as the routinization of charisma.
Chicago School: Social Change
Authors: Abbott Andrew
Published: September 2017

Like most schools of thought, the Chicago School was not a unified and single‐minded orthodoxy. Although the idea of social change was essential to virtually all the Chicago writers, they defined it in various ways and then used those resulting concepts in quite varying places in their work. It was only William Fielding Ogburn who foregrounded the phrase itself in his writings. But for W. I. Thomas on the one hand and Robert Park and Ernest Burgess on the other, change was, if possible, even more central than it was for Ogburn. Yet, in the long run, both sociologists and popular literature have chosen to accept Ogburn's sense of social change as society‐wide upheaval and transformation (indeed, this is now the lay sense of the phrase). But that current meaning should not lead us to read the Chicago works teleologically. (For the standard account of the Chicago School in English, see Bulmer 1984; for more recent revisionist accounts with relatively current bibliographies, see Abbott 1999; Chapoulie 2001.)
Child Abuse
Authors: Polonko Karen
Published: September 2017

Research indicates that over one third of adults in the United States have been victims of child maltreatment including physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, and/or neglect as a child. This entry reviews the definitions and prevalence of child abuse, the multiple connections between less and more severe levels of abuse, and the serious negative consequences of all degrees of violence for the child throughout the life course. Traditional and human rights models of child maltreatment are compared, with implications for the cycle of child maltreatment across generations and child abuse prevention.
Child Custody and Child Support
Authors: Walker Janet
Published: September 2017

Since the 1960s, growing proportions of children worldwide have been experiencing their parents’ separation at an increasingly early age. In the United States and in many other western countries, between 40 and 50 percent of marriages end in divorce (Amato and Boyd, 2014). Parental separation entails a series of transitions and family reorganizations, including changes in parenting arrangements, residence, family relationships, and standard of living, that influence children's development and adjustment over time. All pose risks for children's outcomes.
Childhood
Authors: McNamee Sally
Published: September 2017

What is now known as the “new paradigm” of the sociology of childhood grew out of a rejection of traditional sociological and psychological theories of childhood. Children in earlier sociological accounts were subsumed into accounts of the family or the school – in other words, into the major sites of socialization. Children were, therefore, most visible when they were being socialized. Socialization, which is sociology's explanation for how children become members of society, parallels developmental psychology, in that children progress from incompetent to competent adulthood through the process of acculturation or socialization. In both socialization theory and developmental psychology there was no view of children as active social agents; rather, children were seen (if they were seen at all) as passive recipients of socialization. In addition, both socialization theory and developmental psychology fail to see the child as existing in the present – instead, the focus is on what children
become
. It has been said that socialization theory ignores children's role in socializing both themselves and others. In fact, it fails to take account of the child as a competent social actor. What was missing from sociology, then, was an account of the socially constructed nature of childhood which focused on children as social actors rather than passive “becomings.”
Citations and Scientific Indexing
Authors: Gómez‐Morales Yuri Jack
Published: September 2017

A classic analytical distinction between a citation and a reference reads: “if paper R contains a bibliographic footnote using and describing paper C, then R contains a reference to C, and C has a citation from R.” According to this, citation and referencing are relations among published texts. But whereas referencing is an intratextual relation between a written word, statement, description, or even an entire argument and a bibliographic reference, citation is an extratextual relation between a complete piece of scientific literature, namely a book or a journal article (just to mention classic forms), and many other pieces of literature of a later publication date. A reader can easily see a reference by inspecting a text; after all, referencing is a technical standard for editing publishable texts. But a reader cannot see citation directly. Whereas referencing, when it happens, takes place within a singular piece of edited and published material, citation, when it happens, is something that takes place across a section of published literature and it becomes visible for a reader, so to speak, as long as some kind of bibliographic control of that literature can be exerted. This is the purpose that a citation index accomplishes. A citation index is a form to organize and display a body of bibliographical references. These references are collected from reference lists of journal articles, books, and so on, and then organized alphabetically by author. Once this list is ready, under each of the entries one finds the record of published works that have cited them at some point.
Class
Authors: Vitt Lois A.
Published: September 2017

Class refers to a stratification system that divides a society into a hierarchy of social positions. It is also a particular social position within a class stratification system: lower class, working class, middle class, upper class, or other such class designations. It is a method of social ranking that involves money, power, culture, taste, identity, access, and exclusion. Conceptualizations of class belong not only to sociology, but also to the popular press, the marketplace, the political process, and to those who perceive themselves as being located within a particular class position. People who do perceive class distinctions are “class conscious” and may feel the impact of class in powerful ways. Others barely notice it or refuse to concede its existence despite living with its effects. To some people, class connotes differing economic circumstances, lifestyles, and tastes; to others it is about social status, esteem, and respect.
Class, Perceptions of
Authors: Bottero Wendy
Published: September 2017

How people perceive class inequality is not just a question of class consciousness but also entails the issue of consciousness of class (and inequality), of class as social description and social identity (Cannadine 1998: 23). When people describe their unequal worlds, they are often engaged in making claims about the relative worth of different groups and the fairness (or otherwise) of social arrangements. All accounts of hierarchy contain “images of inequality,” social pictures which classify and grade the members of society. These are politically loaded descriptions, and the images individuals draw partly depend on their social location and the agendas that they are pursuing.
Cognitive Balance Theory (Heider)
Authors: Munroe Paul T.
Published: September 2017

Balance theory explains how people tend to maintain consistency in patterns of their liking and disliking of one another and of inanimate objects. When patterns of liking and disliking are balanced, structures are stable. When they are imbalanced, structures are unstable and there is pressure to change in the direction that makes them balanced.
Collective Deviance
Authors: Goode Erich
Published: September 2017

In
Stigma
, Erving Goffman wrote of the “tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion,” these being imputed blemishes of identity that are “transmitted through lineages” which “equally contaminate all members of a family” (1963: 4). For Goffman, tribal stigma makes up one of three major types, the other two being “abominations of the body,” namely, “the various physical deformities” such as extreme ugliness and physical disability, and “blemishes of individual character,” such as mental disorder, homosexuality, alcoholism, radical political behavior, and dishonesty. With all stigmatized persons, “we” – meaning “normals,” persons who do not bear the stigmatizing trait – “exercise varieties of discrimination,” we “construct a stigma‐theory, an ideology to explain” their inferiority, and we “tend to impute a wide range of imperfections on the basis of the original one” (1963: 5). With tribal stigma, the members of some tribal categories stigmatize
all
the members of another simply on the basis of that membership alone.
Collective Memory
Authors: Schwartz Barry
Published: September 2017

Collective memory refers to the distribution throughout society of beliefs, feelings, moral judgments, and knowledge about the past. Only individuals possess the capacity to contemplate the past, but this does not mean that beliefs originate in the individual alone or can be explained on the basis of his or her unique experience. Individuals do not know the past singly; they know it with and against other individuals situated in conflicting groups, in the context of alienation, and through the knowledge that predecessors and contemporaries transmit to them.
Collective Memory
Authors: Schwartz Barry
Published: September 2017

Collective memory studies retain the emphasis of their founder, Maurice Halbwachs, by analyzing the many ways present conditions affect what we make of the past. Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, Halbwachs's “presentism” ran into neorealist opposition, largely in the fields of history and biblical scholarship, and to a lesser but significant extent in sociology. Corresponding to these emerging theoretical trends is an increasing reliance on survey research methods. The latter can never replace qualitative analyses, but its random sampling of unrelated individuals clarifies the question of what we mean when we refer to
collective
memory.

Individual minds are collective memory's building blocks, but collective memory is itself “superindividual.” Collective memory refers to the
distribution
throughout society of what individuals know, believe, and feel about past events and persons, how they morally judge them, how closely they identify with them, and how much they are inspired by them as models for their conduct and identity. Collective memory refers to neither a collection of individual ideas nor some “mysterious group memory” but to an emergent social fact which remains as individuals replace one another.
Collective Memory (Social Change)
Authors: Fowler Bridget
Published: September 2017

A group's or nation's collective memory is constituted by its images, concepts, and evaluations of the past. Although memory is only possessed and transmitted by individuals, it is shaped by group relationships. Individuals share their recollections with members of their group and rationally reorganize their stories of the past in accordance with others$@#*^%#@#rsquor; understandings of events (Coser 1992: 43).
Coming Out/Closets
Authors: Meeks Chet
Published: September 2017

The closet and coming out are key concepts in the sociology of sexualities and in lesbian and gay studies. The closet refers to the systematic repression of homosexuality. The closet exists when the state, science, the media, the criminal justice system, and other social institutions (school, family, etc.) work concertedly to construct homosexuality as a pathological social threat, and to institutionalize heterosexuality as the only $@#*^%#@#ldquo;normal$@#*^%#@#rdquor; and legitimate sexuality. Coming out refers to the individual and/or collective disclosure of homosexual identity as a way of combating the closet and its effects.
Communism
Authors: Lovell David W.
Published: September 2017

Communism will be examined in its two major guises: first, as a principle of social organization that has been advocated since at least the time of ancient Greece; and second, as a political movement and system of government that held power over a substantial part of the earth's surface during the twentieth century. Though communism may nowadays be most readily associated with the works of Marx and his disciples, Marx grafted a historically specific project of socialism onto an idea of great antiquity. The core proposition of communism is that the private ownership of property must cease because it is the major cause of social evils, including egoism, excess, and conflict. The ideal of a communist society substantially overlaps with utopia. However, the relationship between the communist ideal and the reality of communist states, by way of socialism, is not at all straightforward.
Community College
Authors: Deil‐Amen Regina , Tevis Tenisha , Yu Jinchun
Published: September 2017

Although American community colleges (formerly known as junior colleges) have existed since the late nineteenth century, little sociological attention has been paid to these institutions until recently. The conceptual frameworks that do exist highlight the juxtaposition of the community college's function of expanding access to higher education while also limiting opportunity for many students.
Computational Sociology
Authors: Sims Bainbridge William
Published: September 2017

A new sociological approach employs computer simulation and artificial intelligence in the development of theories and in empirical research. Much of the early work was carried out in the areas of social exchange and social networks. The initial methodology – variously called
artificial social intelligence
,
agent‐based modeling
, or
multi‐agent systems
– employs theory‐based computer models of human interaction. Computer and information scientists have recently developed similar techniques for analyzing empirical data, with names like
machine learning
,
recommender systems
, and
latent semantic analysis
. There is good reason to believe that computational sociology will spread beyond the specialized subfields that first adopted it and become a major approach in all areas of social research.
Computational Sociology
Authors: Bainbridge William Sims
Published: September 2017

Increasingly, computer and information science is providing new opportunities for sociologists, to develop and test theories, and to explore the new information society over the Internet. Artificial social intelligence is a general approach for evaluation of the logical implications and consistency of a theory, through the use of a technique such as multiagent computer simulation. Natural language processing is a set of techniques that can identify meaningful patterns in human language, typically written text, but also speech and gestures. Virtual worlds are a major new industry and form of online community, using visual simulations of real environments, where human behavior can be studied through such traditional methods as participant observation. Citizen science includes large numbers of volunteers in computer‐assisted research studies in many of the natural sciences, and has great potential for sociology as well.
Computer‐Aided/Mediated Analysis
Authors: Weitzman Eben A.
Published: September 2017

One of the key features of qualitative – non‐numerical – data is that they are messy and usually voluminous. We wind up with huge piles of texts: transcripts, field notes, documents, questionnaires, pictures, audio, video, and so on, and have to sort our way through them. Add to this the need to find a rigorous approach to the analysis of these large quantities of data, and the researcher faces a daunting task. Researchers from different disciplines and different methodological perspectives will take different approaches to this task, but in most cases, computers can help.
Conflict (Racial/Ethnic)
Authors: Stone John , Rizova Polly
Published: September 2017

Conflict is a basic process in social life and can be both destructive and cohesive. In some situations, it can be destructive for some groups and act as a cohesive force for others. Racial and ethnic groups may be the source and the result of the two faces of social conflict, acting as a boundary marker between groups that see themselves as distinctive in their interests and values from other such groups. Over the past 50 years, sociologists have grappled with a variety of perspectives on conflict that have emphasized various aspects of the destructive and the integrative nature of the process. Functional theorists have tended to downplay the purely negative forces while conflict theorists have tried to establish the central role of conflict as a means to challenge the status quo and bring about fundamental social change. Several attempts have also been made to refine and integrate the two approaches: pointing to the functions of social conflict or to elements of consensus and equilibrium found in both models.
Conjugal Roles and Social Networks
Authors: Milardo Robert M.
Published: September 2017

Social networks, or the kin, friends, and other close associates of primary partners (e.g., spouses), can have important influences on the internal character of a marriage or family. Elizabeth Bott (1971) was among the first to recognize this connection in a study conducted in the early 1950s that involved extensive interviews with 20 London families. In a now classic hypothesis, she argued that: $@#*^%#@#ldquo;The degree of segregation in the role$@#*^%#@#hyphen;relationship of husband and wife varies directly with the connectedness of the family's social network$@#*^%#@#rdquor; (p. 60). Spouses with separate networks, where members knew one another (i.e., highly interconnected or dense networks), were thought to have relatively separate conjugal roles, to perform household labor separately, and to engage in separate leisure activities. In contrast, spouses with low$@#*^%#@#hyphen;density networks were thought to have relatively joint conjugal roles and leisure activities.
Conjugal Roles and Social Networks
Authors: Milardo Robert M.
Published: September 2017

Social networks, or the kin, friends, and other close associates of primary partners (e.g., spouses), can have an important influence on the internal character of a intimate relationship or marriage. Elizabeth Bott (1971) was among the first to recognize this connection in a study conducted in the early 1950s that involved interviews with twenty London families. In a now classic hypothesis she argued: “The degree of segregation in the role‐relationship of husband and wife varies directly with the connectedness of the family's social network” (p. 60). Spouses with separate networks, where members knew one another (i.e., highly interconnected or dense networks), were thought to enact relatively separate conjugal roles, to perform household labor separately, and to engage in separate leisure activities. In contrast, spouses with low‐density networks were thought to have relatively joint conjugal roles, to jointly perform household labor, and share leisure activities.
Consumer Culture, Children's
Authors: Cook Daniel Thomas
Published: September 2017

Children's consumer culture refers to the institutional, material, and symbolic arrangements which organize a young person's involvement in, and movement through, the early life course in terms of commercial interests and values. Children are both subject to and arise as subjects in consumer contexts. The meanings which adhere to commercial goods are at once imposed on children, childhood, and children's social worlds and are taken up by children as resources with which they create selves, identities, and relationships.
Consumers, Flawed
Authors: Pugh Allison
Published: September 2017

Flawed consumers is a term coined by the theorist Zygmunt Bauman to signify prevailing social discourse about poor consumers, or those who, by virtue of their limited means, cannot participate fully in the consumer culture of the contemporary West. While not in extensive usage, the term captures what other scholars have also set out to do: portray and explain how low‐income people are pathologized and marginalized as consumer society expands.
Consumption and the Body
Authors: Wachs Faye Linda
Published: September 2017

The relationship between the body and material culture in the post‐industrial world is defined through consumption. How one experiences the body, manages corporeal identity, participates in social rituals as an embodied subject is, to a great extent, commodified. Changes in perspectives on the body are intertwined with the advent of consumer culture and the concomitant development of mass media and advertising. The growth of production during the industrial era necessitated a corollary growth in consumption. Markets for the expanding array of goods and services being produced were constructed through the attachment of meaning to consumer goods. The growth of markets driven by advertising profits resulted. The appropriation of meanings for advertising promotes what is termed the “floating signifier” effect (Baudrillard 1975) or the shift in the use value attached to objects such that any meaning or quality can be associated with any object. The body acts as both a carrier of these multiple and shifting meanings and a means for expression as the body becomes what Featherstone (1991) refers to as the “visible carrier of the self.”
Consumption, Food and Cultural
Authors: Blank Grant
Published: September 2017

Everybody eats to live, but food is more than nutrition. It is a basis for personal identity, a vehicle through which social structure influences individuals, an object that manifests long‐term cultural and social trends, and a foundation for social theory. Food is a powerful carrier of cultural meaning.
Consumption, Landscapes of
Authors: Ryan J. Michael
Published: September 2017

George Ritzer (2005) has built upon his notion of cathedrals of consumption to describe what he terms “landscapes of consumption,” or “geographic areas that encompass two, or more, cathedrals of consumption” (p. 149). This definition can be extended to define landscapes of consumption aslocales that encompass two or more cathedrals of consumption that allow, encourage, and even compel people to consume. The prototypical example of this would be the Las Vegas strip – an area where multiple cathedrals of consumption exist side by side in the same geographic setting and entice consumers not only through their individual appeal, but also through the techniques made possible by their synergistic proximity.
Consumption, Masculinities and
Authors: Doane Randal
Published: September 2017

Masculinities and consumption refer to the gendered sense of self constituted through the use of goods and services in the leisure time and spaces of modern life in the West. In markets of goods, hobbies, and sexual practices, individual choice is delimited by the social structure of gender, and these markets provide the symbolic boundaries for the practical embodiment of different masculinities. Masculinities here is offered in the plural, to emphasize how a hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1995: 77) is secured as a temporary solution to problems within a patriarchal order. As a rule, the sexual division of consumption has been dehistoricized, but in the past 30 years, men have embraced a highly commodified, stylized, and androgynous masculinity.
Consumption of Sport
Authors: Crawford Garry
Published: September 2017

In most advanced capitalist societies, sport is hard to avoid. Sport‐related media shows and channels, magazines, newspapers, Internet sites, films, fictional and non‐fictional books, advertising campaigns, video games, and even soap operas saturate our everyday lives. Sport is also a regular conversation topic for many families, friends, and work colleagues, and sport‐related goods (often demonstrating sporting allegiances) such as jerseys, scarves, hats, badges, jackets, ties, cups, mouse mats, pennants, etc., are commonplace in our towns, homes, and places of work.
Consumption, Youth Culture and
Authors: Milner Murray
Published: September 2017

Youth, especially teenagers, have been closely associated with certain forms of consumption linked to a distinctive youth culture that sets them off from both adults and younger children. This subculture centers on peer relationships – especially one's popularity or status – and the organization of these relationships into an array of cliques and crowds who use various lifestyle symbols to distinguish themselves from one another. Patterns of consumption often serve as key markers of both group identity and individual membership. August B. Hollingshead's
Elmtown's Youth
in the 1940s and James S. Coleman's
Adolescent Society
in the 1950s were among the first to identify the patterns and characteristics of youth subcultures.
Content Analysis
Authors: Wolff Kristina
Published: September 2017

Content analysis is a method of observation and analysis that examines cultural artifacts. One of the most common and frequently cited definitions describes this type of research method as “any technique for making inferences by systematically and objectively identifying specified characteristics of messages” (Holsti 1969: 26). This method emerged in the early twentieth century when researchers began studying the texts of speeches, political tracts, and newspapers. It quickly evolved into investigating the wide array of texts in society, including photographs, movies, diaries and journals, music, television, film, letters, law cases, manifestos, and advertisements. Primarily, anything that is in or can be converted to printed form can be examined using content analysis. This method has a long history in sociology as well as many other disciplines, including political science, history, law, and policy studies, as well as feminist studies.
Contention, Tactical Repertoires of
Authors: Taylor Verta
Published: September 2017

Social movement scholars use the concept of tactical repertoires of contention to refer to the strategies used by collective actors to persuade or coerce authorities to support their claims. The tactical repertoires of social movements include conventional strategies of political persuasion such as lobbying, voting, and petitioning; confrontational tactics such as marches, strikes, and public demonstrations that disrupt day‐to‐day life; violent acts such as bombing, rioting, assassination, and looting that inflict material and economic damage and loss of life; and cultural forms of political expression such as ritual, music, art, theater, street performance, and practices of everyday life that inspire solidarity and oppositional consciousness. If there is a single feature that distinguishes social movements from routine political actors, it is the strategic use of protest – or novel, dramatic, unorthodox, and non‐institutionalized forms of political expression. Because participants in social movements lack access to conventional channels of influence, they often disavow politics through proper channels.
Counterculture
Authors: Binkley Sam
Published: September 2017

Similar in meaning to the more inclusive term “subculture,” counterculture designates a group whose norms, values, symbolic references, and styles of life deviate from those of the dominant culture. Indeed, sociological commentary on the counterculture of the 1960s is so deeply informed by the rubric of subculture as to render the terms inseparable in many respects. Initially applied to the study of youth cultures in the sociology of deviance, subculture research drew heavily on the contributions of the Chicago School sociologists Robert Park and later Howard Becker, but also on the Durkheimian sociology of Robert Merton, whose formulation of Durkheim's concept of anomie provided the basis for delinquency and deviance. Subcultures were viewed as alternative moral formations in which the blocked status aspirations of disadvantaged working‐class youth were realized through appropriations and inversions of dominant moral codes. Whether criminal or retreatist, such groups were considered as aspirational, if innovative, in their aims. This largely American analysis of subculture received a more political interpretation in the works of the British Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, where blocked avenues of class agitation were expressed through styles of life in which symbols were appropriated and modified in their meanings (Hebdige 1979).
Crime, Hot Spots
Authors: Mazerolle Lorraine
Published: September 2017

Hot spots of crime are defined as “small places in which the occurrence of crime is so frequent that it is highly predictable, at least over a one year period” (Sherman 1995: 36). Hot spots are places like street corners, malls, apartment blocks, subway stations, and public parks that generate a large number of complaints to police. Research shows that about 3 percent of all places generate over half of all citizen complaints about crime and disorder to the police.
Criminology: Research Methods
Authors: Wooldredge John
Published: September 2017

Research methods are procedures for obtaining information on individual and/or aggregate phenomena for the purpose of: (1) creating a general explanation or
theory
to explain a phenomenon; (2) testing the applicability of an existing theory (examining how well it actually explains a phenomenon); or (3) testing the effectiveness of an existing social policy or program. Topics (1) and (2) are critical to the dialectic of scholarly knowledge in criminology and criminal justice. Somewhat unique to the field of criminal justice, however, is a heavier emphasis on (3) as a product of research. The phenomena of primary interest to criminologists include juvenile delinquency, adult criminality, and victimization, at both the individual and aggregate levels. The interests of criminal justice researchers appear more eclectic, only a few of which include police practices and effectiveness, the dynamics of criminal case processing, sentencing discrimination, inmate violence, and correctional program effectiveness.
Critical Theory/Frankfurt School
Authors: Langman Lauren
Published: September 2017

Critical theory, the legacy of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, is rooted in the philosophies of Kant and Hegel, and in Marx's critique of capitalism which claimed that it exploited and alienated workers, while its ideologies of reason, freedom, and democracy disguised its actual operations. “Critical theorists” integrated Weber's notions of rationality and Freud's theories of character and desire into a theory of capitalism and its culture. They looked at sociology, political science, philosophy, art, literature, and cultural studies, including film theory and popular culture, to fashion a multidisciplinary, multidimensional, dialectical social theory largely concerned with the alienation, domination, and commodification and dehumanization in modern societies (Kellner 1989). Critical theory thus embraced the notion oftotality: society was an outcome of a number of not always harmonious parts and levels; contradictions and tensions are seen as inherent. It iscriticalin the sense of critique as explicating what is not empirically given but apprehended through critical reason. Thus, unlike most social theories, it is very concerned with epistemology. Nor does it attempt “objectivity” because this is assumed both to promote and to hide domination. Rather, as anemancipatory theory, it seeks to foster the freedom, equality, and fraternity promised by the Enlightenment thinkers, these qualities being incompatible with late capitalism and hence undercut by technological logic, consumerism, and mass culture. It promotes a society where people may create democratic communities and realize their creative, unique human potentials.
Cultural Criminology
Authors: Ferrell Jeff
Published: September 2017

Cultural criminology explores the many ways in which cultural dynamics intertwine with the practices of crime and crime control in contemporary society; put differently, cultural criminology emphasizes the centrality of meaning and representation in the construction of crime as momentary event, subcultural endeavor, and social issue. From this view, the appropriate subject matter of criminology transcends traditional notions of crime and crime causation to include images of illicit behavior and symbolic displays of law enforcement; popular culture constructions of crime and criminal action; and the shared emotions that animate criminal events, perceptions of criminal threat, and public efforts at crime control. This wider cultural focus, cultural criminologists argue, allows scholars and the public alike to better understand crime as meaningful human activity, and to penetrate more deeply the contested politics of crime control.
Cultural Resistance
Authors: Duncombe Stephen
Published: September 2017

Cultural resistance is the practice of using meanings and symbols, that is, culture, to contest and combat a dominant power, often constructing a different vision of the world in the process. The practice is as old as history. The Hebrew Scriptures, for example, were a cultural means with which to create Jewish identity and then hold on to that identity in the face of Roman oppression. The stories of Jesus and Mohammed served similar functions. The modern theory of cultural resistance, however, was first articulated in the mid‐nineteenth century by Matthew Arnold.