bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Consumption of Sport
Authors: Crawford Garry
Published: September 2017

Sport is hard to avoid. Sport‐related television shows and channels, magazines, newspapers, Internet sites, films, fiction and nonfiction books, advertising campaigns, and videogames 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, and much more, are commonplace in homes and places of work. It is evident that consumption does not necessarily have to be about economic exchange. Much of what makes someone a fan is what is located within her or his personal identity, memories, thoughts, and social interactions. Consumption has always been a part of sport support. Watching and following sport is in itself an act of consumption, but, moreover, throughout much of its history, sport support has involved other related acts of consumption. However, the question of whether sport audiences can be defined as “consumers” is fraught with controversy, and continues to be an ongoing debate.
Consumption, Tourism and
Authors: Molz Jennie Germann
Published: September 2017

Practices of tourism and consumption, and sociological interest in the relationship between them, have evolved as part of a broader shift within western societies from production‐centered capitalism, with its focus on work and the conditions of labor, to consumer capitalism, with its emphasis on leisure, image, taste, style, and consumption. Tourism is emblematic of the contemporary consumer culture that emerged over the past century in western postindustrial societies, and that continues to shape consumption patterns in the twenty‐first century.
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 actions and strategies used by collective actors to persuade or coerce authorities to support their claims. The notion of repertoires of contention grows out of the work of Charles Tilly, who introduced the concept to explain historical variations in forms of political contention used by challenging groups. The tactical repertoires of social movements include political persuasion, such as lobbying, voting, and petitioning; confrontational tactics such as marches, strikes, and public demonstrations that disrupt day‐to‐day life; and cultural forms of political expression such as rituals, music, art, theater, street performance, and practices of everyday life that inspire solidarity and oppositional consciousness. Protest tactics are one of the principle strategies used by challenging groups to mobilize constituencies and to forge solidarity, oppositional consciousness, and collective identity.
Convivium (Who Is Friends with Whom?)
Authors: Volker Beate
Published: September 2017

The degree to which people from different social strands have relations with each other indicates social cohesion. Therefore, the question of who is friends with whom is nontrivial. Compared to marriage, friendship is a non‐institutionalized relationship: there is no formal start of a friendship and one can break off or change a friendship without notifying any third parties.
Cool
Authors: Cashmore Ellis
Published: September 2017

Cool emerged in indifferent response to the great surge of optimism that followed World War II. It was driven by the rhythms of the bebop music of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, a rebellious, musical counterpart to the abstract expressionism of De Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline.
Corrections
Authors: Sumter Melvina
Published: September 2017

Corrections is the subsystem of the criminal justice system responsible for the care, custody, and control of juveniles and adults who have been accused of committing a criminal offense and offenders who have been convicted of committing a crime. As such, the apparatus of corrections, through either institutional confinement or non‐institutional alternatives, consists of a variety of agencies, institutions, programs, and services necessary to manage accused suspects and convicted offenders who are remanded to their care.
Correlation
Authors: Henson Robin K.
Published: September 2017

Correlation refers to the relationship between two or more variables. Many different forms of correlation exist, but they all reflect a quantitative, statistical means for describing relationships. There are many so‐called univariate (i.e., one variable) statistics which are useful for describing single distributions of scores, including the mean, median, variance, and standard deviation. In contrast, a correlation statistic, as a measure of relationship, is inherently at least
bivariate
(i.e., two variables) in nature.
Corruption
Authors: Hindess Barry
Published: September 2017

The most general meaning of corruption is that of impurity, infection, or decay. Corruption can happen to anything – a piece of fruit, a sporting event, a religious community, or a university – but the term is now most commonly used to suggest that there is something rotten in the government of the state. Thus, as conceptions of the naturally sound condition of government change, so too does the focus of concern regarding its corruption. In the social thought of western classical antiquity and early modern Europe, for example, corruption was seen as a disease of the body politic. It was a destructive social condition whose effects included improper behavior on the part of many individuals. During the modern period, however, politics has come to be seen in individualistic and economistic terms, with the result that corruption now tends to refer to the improper behavior itself, and especially to conduct which involves the use of public office for the purposes of illicit private gain. Some commentators (e.g., Euben 1989) deplore this change in usage, seeing it as reflecting the triumph of liberal individualism and a corresponding loss of concern with the public good.
Crime, Political
Authors: Tunnell Kenneth D.
Published: September 2017

Political crime is an illegal offense against the state with the intention of affecting its political or economic policies, or an illegal domestic or international offense by the state and its agents. Political crime is conceptualized as individual, occupational, and organizational. Individual political crimes benefit individuals. Occupational crimes, occurring within the context of agents’ legitimate occupations, also benefit individuals. Organizational political crimes benefit the organization as a whole rather than specific individuals.
Crime, Psychological Theories of
Authors: Oleson J. C.
Published: September 2017

Psychological theories of crime suggest that some offenses may be caused by mental factors or conflicts. Like biological theories, psychological theories of crime deal with causes at the individual level, but instead of associating crime with observable phenomena like brain abnormalities, psychological theories associate crime with abstractions like mental illness, intelligence, or personality.
Crime, Social Learning Theory of
Authors: Triplett Ruth
Published: September 2017

The social learning theory of crime basically argues that some people learn to commit crimes through the same process through which others learn to conform. The theory assumes that people are “blank slates” at birth, having neither a motivation to commit crime nor to conform. The theory then asks two questions. First, at the micro‐level, it asks why an individual commits crimes. The answer to this question stresses the process of learning, which involves the interaction between thought or cognition, behavior and environment. Second, at the macro‐level, social learning theory asks why some groups have higher crime rates than others. The answer to this question involves the concepts of culture conflict, differential social organization, and social structure.
Crime, Social Learning Theory of
Authors: Triplett Ruth
Published: September 2017

The social learning theory of crime argues that some people learn to commit crimes through the same process through which others learn to conform. The theory assumes that people, at birth, have neither a motivation to commit crime nor to conform. The theory then asks: Why does an individual commit crimes? The answer to this question stresses the process of learning, which involves the interaction between thought or cognition, behavior, and environment. Social learning theory is rooted in the work of the Chicago School theorists of the early twentieth century. It draws on symbolic interactionism as found in the works of Chicago School theorists such as George Herbert Mead. Symbolic interactionism is a social psychological theory that is based on the idea that all human behavior can be understood as the result of a process of communication. It argues that people communicate through the use of symbols and base their actions on the meaning of those symbols for them. Symbolic interactionists argue that meaning for symbols is learned in interaction with others, thus meaning is social in origin. Two theorists who build on this base are key to understanding social learning theories of crime: Edwin Sutherland and Ronald Akers.
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 to a subgroup of the population; 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 Realism
Authors: Morgan Jamie
Published: September 2017

Critical realism in its contemporary usage emerged out of debates in the philosophy of science in the 1970s (e.g., Harré & Madden 1975; Bhaskar 1997). It focused on what could be argued from the relative success of laboratory experiment to create artificial closed systems where causal relationships could be isolated and explored. It was argued that such closed systems of regular causal relations were rare outside the laboratory and that non‐social reality consisted of complex and stratified structures in open or variable and changing systems. The purpose of natural science method was to explain the powers of these structures as tendencies to act in particular ways. Because, in the ordinary course of things, regular outcomes were rare outside the laboratory it was then inferred that reality could be analytically distinguished into structures, the outcome of their complex interplay, and human experience, perception, or interpretation of those outcomes. It was then argued that this distinction could make sense of the difference between theory and the rest of reality in quite a different way than the philosophies of idealism or materialist empiricism (Morgan 2006). Idealism argues that reality is mind‐dependent, while materialist empiricism argues that reality consists of a series of external objects of sense perception that are the basis of causal laws. Critical realism argued that neither actually accounts for natural science method. Idealism could not account for how laboratory experiment, methods, and theories could also fail as well as succeed. Empiricism could not account for why laboratory experiment was necessary at all if reality could be reduced to sense perception of causal regularities. Accordingly, it was argued that reality was mind‐practice affected in a continuing interplay of theoretical research programs ofdepth reality. This approach, as part of a broader movement termed scientific naturalism, had major implications in the philosophy of science in terms of mediating between the important insights of different responses to the failure of logical empiricism and positivism, particularly by acknowledging Kuhn and Lakatos's focus on the sociological conditions of scientific method and theoretical development (Sayer 1992).
Cultural Capital
Authors: Weininger Elliot B. , Lareau Annette
Published: September 2017

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, working with various colleagues, developed the concept of cultural capital in the early 1960s in order to help address a particular empirical problem – namely, the fact that “economic obstacles are not sufficient to explain” disparities in the educational attainment of children from different social classes (Bourdieu & Passeron 1979 [1964]: 8). Bourdieu argued that, above and beyond economic factors, “cultural habits and … dispositions inherited from” the family are fundamentally important to school success (Bourdieu & Passeron 1979 [1964]: 14). In doing so, he broke sharply with traditional sociological conceptions of culture, which tended to view it primarily as a source of shared norms and values, or as a vehicle of collective expression. Instead, Bourdieu maintained that culture shares many of the properties that are characteristic of economic capital. In particular, he asserted that cultural “habits and dispositions” comprise a
resource
capable of generating “profits” they are potentially subject to
monopolization
by individuals and groups; and, under appropriate conditions, they can be
transmitted
from one generation to the next (Lareau & Weininger 2003).
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 representations of crime and criminal action; and the collectively shaped 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.
Culture
Authors: Spillman Lyn
Published: September 2017

Treating culture as meaning‐making, this entry traces interdisciplinary and disciplinary influences on cultural sociology, discusses three themes in sociological research on culture – cultural production, culture in action, and formal properties of cultural objects – and summarizes core topics, current emphases, and future directions in cultural research, theory, and methods.
Culture of Poverty
Authors: Wolff Kristina
Published: September 2017

The phrase culture of poverty was coined by Oscar Lewis (1965) to describe the combination of factors that perpetuate patterns of inequality and poverty in society. By focusing on the experiences of Puerto Ricans, Lewis illustrated how difficult it was for people to escape poverty due to the influence of cultural beliefs that support behaviors that contribute to people remaining in poverty. He described how the poor feel alienated in society. Because of their frustrations with their inability to transcend poverty, a culture develops which supports behaviors providing short‐term gratification and other conditions of poverty as “normal.” This is largely due to the conviction that it is impossible to improve their lives. These beliefs and behaviors are then instilled from one generation to the next, which eventually develops into a culture of poverty.
Culture, the State and
Authors: Mukerji Chandra
Published: September 2017

In studies of nationalist movements in politics, national cultures of political practice, cultural institutions and the state, national media and popular culture in politics, collective memory and national identity, and cultural sources of state power, cultural sociologists help to explain how states work: what forces shift political allegiances, how states enroll citizens into the political process, when and how national identities are formed around regimes, and by what means states exercise power.
Cyberculture
Authors: Esposti Piergiorgio Degli
Published: September 2017

Cyberculture is an ever‐changing concept, which is increasingly dominating modern society. This entry aims to shed some light on the contemporary meaning of this omnipresent term, whilst also drawing on some of its roots. The subject of cyberculture is of great interest for sociologists, computer scientists, and scholars in several other fields; the main themes of cyberculture explored in this entry are the creation of virtual communities, community networks, and virtual identities. The entry concludes with an emerging field of cyberculture study concerning the creation of a new political economy, which separates those with or without access to and knowledge of cyberspace – another layer of growing inequality within society.
Cybersexualities and Virtual Sexuality
Authors: Plummer Ken
Published: September 2017

Just as when photography and film were first introduced they generated the pornographic photograph and film, so as soon as the newer information technologies appeared, an erotic world of cybersex and intimacy appeared alongside and embedded within it. New information technologies are used in ways that can facilitate new patterns of sexualities and intimacies. And this is no small world. Surfing the Internet gives access to a medium full of intimate words and images: from guidance pages on infertility (over a million sites on sperm banks), to sites engaged in bride‐mail ordering; from images of the most “extreme” sexual fetishes (“Extreme” is indeed the name given to one such site), to access to potentially endless partners on email. The sheer range, number, and intense flow of unregulated intimacy and erotica of all kinds that becomes available at the press of a button could never have happened before in history.
Digital Sexualities, Cybersexualities, and Virtual Sexuality
Authors: Plummer Ken
Published: September 2017

The new language of digital sexualities is introduced and the forms it takes discussed. After a discussion of terminologies, digital sexualities are seen to have an impact on information, networking, representations, embodiment, and politics. Empirical studies of this field are briefly reviewed. Theoretical concerns are linked to change in time and space and global shifts in body and representations. The entry ends by raising some of the ethical and political issues of the new digital sexualities.
Cultural Lag
Authors: Moñivas Jesús Romero
Published: September 2017

The thesis of cultural lag formulated by the North American sociologist William F. Ogburn can be considered among the earliest sociological attempts to explain social change from social cultural premises and not from psychobiological ones. Indeed, social change is one of the most important theoretical problems in sociology. Almost all those sociologists who belonged to so‐called classical sociology sought to understand the process of social change (Sztompka 2004: 17).
Canetti, Elias (1905–1994)
Authors: Brighenti Andrea
Published: September 2017

Born in 1905 in a small village in Bulgaria along the Danube, into a Sephardic community, raised multilingually in Germany, England, Switzerland, and Austria, Elias Canetti was a truly European intellectual, as well as a stern critic of European culture. Best known as a writer of one novel, a few plays, various essays, several collections of aphorisms, and a monumental three‐part autobiography (for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1981), Canetti is increasingly being recognized in the social and political sciences for
Crowds and Power
(1960), a book which has been defined as “an unsettling masterpiece” (Rutigliano 2007: 15). An outsider to the academic establishment (yet in touch with prominent intellectuals such as Kraus, Musil, and Adorno), Canetti worked for almost 30 years on what he regarded as his main theoretical contribution. But despite a small number of committed supporters, the book was initially not very well received, mostly because of its antisystematic attitude and its idiosyncratic use of sources and references. More recently, Johann Arnason, Michael Mack, John McClelland, and David Roberts are among the scholars who have contributed most to an active reception of Canetti's thought into sociology and social theory.
Cultural Citizenship
Authors: Stevenson Nick
Published: September 2017

The idea of cultural citizenship in the social sciences has emerged through two main phases of debate. Firstly there was an attempt to extend the categories of citizenship to include questions of culture. Here there was a retracing of the debates on citizenship that was largely concerned with questions of rights and duties in the context of national societies to include issues related to culture. This work owed a great deal to attempts to link sociology and cultural studies found in the work of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and others. Here the study of “culture” became a central sociological concern and could no longer be left to literary studies given its importance in shaping people's dominant understandings of the world. According to Bryan Turner (2001), this debate was unambiguously concerned with the participation of citizens within an explicitly national culture. During this phase many authors argued that inclusion and exclusion were not just phenomena related to the operation of labor markets, the family, and immigration but also included cultural institutions and events such as libraries, sports, museum exhibitions, education, and the media. During phase one of the cultural citizenship debate, issues related to the commodification of culture, access to the relevant cultural capital, and the decline in cultural authority of the traditional arts dominated (Chaney 2002; Stevenson 1997). Here there was an overwhelming concern with the distribution of cultural competency (mainly along the lines of class), the provision of national public spheres through the media, and a concern about issues of cultural value given the rise of more political forms of popular culture during the 1960s. Cultural citizenship was crucially a normative category that aimed to develop the conditions for a popular participatory democracy and a culturally inclusive society. There was, of course, considerable disagreement about the extent to which capitalism could provide the material conditions for universal forms of participation. However, the possibility of mass forms of politics producing a more emancipated and culturally inclusive society seemed, no matter how distant, politically feasible. In particular cultural citizenship was linked to important debates within cultural, media, and urban policy and became concerned with questions of regeneration, participation, democracy, and voice.
Cultural Colonialism
Authors: Amsler Sarah
Published: September 2017

The term cultural colonialism refers to two related practices: the extension of colonial power through cultural activities and institutions (particularly education and media) or the asymmetrical influence of one culture over another. The latter is most often understood as the cultural domination of Southern societies by the global North in the context of global capitalism, but may also refer to the “internal” repression of marginalized cultural groups within a state or territory or to individual cultural identities. The term is sometimes used synonymously with “cultural imperialism” and includes more particular forms of cultural domination, including media, educational, academic, intellectual, scientific, and linguistic colonialism.
Clinical Sociology
Authors: Clawar Stanley S.
Published: September 2017

Clinical sociology is the application of sociological theories, research/methods, and interventions to social issues and problems presented by clients. Thus, clinical sociology is the same as all sociology except that it adds intervention, prevention, and social amelioration components to its framework. “Clinical” means a problem‐solving perspective. Clinical sociologists deal with what Thomas Szasz calls “problems in living” (Szasz 1970). Some sociologists prefer the term “sociological practice” or “applied sociology.” Others refer to it as “doing sociology.”
Community Gardening
Authors: Clement Matthew Thomas
Published: September 2017

The term “community garden” generally refers to an urban piece of land that is gardened/farmed collectively (Lawson 2005). In sociology, research on community gardening has a very recent history. According to the database published by CSA Sociological Abstracts, Taylor (1993) was the first sociologist to examine social issues related to community gardening. Her piece was the only one published in the 1990s. Sociological research in this field really took off in the beginning of the twenty‐first century. The increased attention to community gardening coincided with more social scientific research on urban agriculture, community‐supported agriculture, farmers’ markets, and local food systems in general. Nevertheless, the practice of community gardening long preceded academic interest. For instance, in the United States, a desire to integrate gardening into school curricula dates back to the end of the nineteenth century (Lawson 2005). Also in the United States, Lawson (2005) dates a revitalized interest in community gardening to the 1970s. The American Community Garden Association was founded in 1979. “Confronted with poor environmental and social resources,” Lawson writes, “some urban dwellers began to rethink their living environment in light of greater self‐reliance at both the individual and neighborhood levels” (2005: 219). “Urban decline” and “the failing conditions of the city” (2005: 218) provided the socioeconomic context in which community gardening activism reemerged in the United States.
Cities in Latin America
Authors: Davis Diane E. , de Durén Nora Libertun
Published: September 2017

Urban Latin America has changed dramatically over the latter half of the twentieth century. From 1950 to 1980 Latin American cities showcased high rates of migrant absorption, overurbanization, and national state domination of local politics and decision‐making. Urban growth concentrated in a few cities, reinforcing conditions of primacy and growing demands for urban servicing to meet the needs of an industrial economy primed for national economic growth. By 1990, decentralization policies devolved political decision‐making to smaller jurisdictions, giving local authorities more sway in urban servicing and policy‐making but also increasing municipal pressures to generate public sector revenues to finance local urban development. Since 2000, economic globalization has opened consumer and investment markets to make cities sites for real estate development and high‐end services, with these transformations occurring alongside a shrinking industrial economy and rising un‐ and underemployment. Today, Latin America's largest cities are modern and economically dynamic metropolises with architecturally iconic high‐rises and gated communities that could rival those seen in any major city of North America or Europe. Even so, they host a range of social problems associated with income inequality, structural unemployment, persistent housing informality, and violence, all of which hold the potential to negatively affect urban quality of life.
Daily Life Pollution
Authors: Hasegawa Koichi
Published: September 2017

Daily life pollution refers to the type of environmental contamination caused by the everyday life activities of ordinary citizens and consumers. In contrast with main pollution caused by industrial production processes, daily life pollution includes detergent pollution in rivers, lakes, or the ocean caused by washing clothes and landfill and incineration pollution caused by excess household garbage. Although the individual impact each citizen has on the environment is negligible, cumulatively their behavior can create severe environmental and social problems.
Death Penalty as a Social Problem
Authors: Girling Evi
Published: September 2017

The death penalty (also known as capital punishment) is the sentencing of offenders to death after conviction following due process of law. The practice of the death penalty has undergone two key transformations in modern times. The first one is an unremitting restriction on the kinds of crimes and categories of offender on whom the death penalty could be applied, leading to its eventual abolition in the majority of jurisdictions. The second shift is its transformation from brutal public displays of excess (famously depicted by Foucault in
Discipline and Punish
, 1977) to private, detached, and medicalized executions where pain and the body is elided, where execution is rendered a non‐event. Within the sociology of punishment these shifts have been mostly explained either by the cultural dynamic of the privatization of disturbing events or by the transformation in technologies of power from punishment as public and violent spectacle inflicting pain on the body to the emergence of disciplinary power and the surveillance of the soul.
Democracy and Organization
Authors: Courpasson David
Published: September 2017

Still a controversial issue, the idea that the “civilian” world might be becoming more democratic is juxtaposed with an opposite trend with respect to the organizational world. As Rousseau and Rivero, among others, put it: “Although we are increasingly likely to be governed by democratic political systems, our workplaces are seldom democratic” (2003: 116). The increasingly dominant corporate power (Bernstein 2000), the persistence and refurbishment of hierarchy and bureaucratic systems (Courpasson & Reed 2004), the endless reproduction of corporate elite (Ocasio 1994; Courpasson 2004; Davis et al. 2003) are all trends highlighting the fact that the post‐bureaucratic dream of decentralized power and of people's participation in the political decisions within organizations might be gone.
Demographic Techniques: Life‐Table Methods
Authors: Schoen Robert
Published: September 2017

A life table describes the survival of a hypothetical group of persons from birth, through successive ages, to the death of the last member. In doing so, it shows the implications of a set of age‐specific mortality rates for the probability of surviving from one age to another, and provides useful summary measures such as the expectation of life at birth. Beyond its wide use in studies of mortality, the life table has been used in studies of marriage, divorce, contraceptive use, and many other topics where it is valuable to examine how rates of decrement reduce the number of persons in a closed group.
Demographic Transition Theory
Authors: Weeks John R.
Published: September 2017

Although it dominated demographic thinking in the latter half of the twentieth century, the demographic transition theory actually began as only a description of the demographic changes that had taken place over time in the advanced nations. In particular, it described the transition from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates, with an interstitial spurt in growth rates leading to a larger population at the end of the transition than there had been at the start. The idea emerged in 1929, when Warren Thompson gathered data from “certain countries” for the period 1908–1927 and showed that the countries fell into three main groups, according to their patterns of population growth: (1) Northern and Western Europe and the United States had gone from high rates of natural increase to very low rates of natural increase, and were on the verge of depopulating at that time; (2) Italy, Spain, and the “Slavic” peoples of Central Europe showed some evidence of a decline in both birth rates and death rates but it seemed likely that the birth rates would remain higher than the death rates for some time to come; and (3) the rest of the world, where there was little evidence of control over either births or deaths. These latter countries, comprising about 75% of the world's population at the time, were “determined largely by the opportunities they have to increase their means of subsistence. Malthus described their processes of growth quite accurately when he said ‘that population does invariably increase, where there are means of subsistence … ‘” (Thompson, 1929:971).
Demography
Authors: Wight Vanessa R.
Published: September 2017

Demography is the scientific study of human population. The discipline uses empirical investigation to analyze populations and its processes. This includes the study of fertility, mortality, and migration and how these factors change over time and affect population size, growth, structure, and composition.
Demography: Historical
Authors: van de Walle Etienne
Published: September 2017

The history of population has long been of interest to historians and demographers. Historical writings were used to estimate the population of the Roman Empire, of China, and of the world over time. Local historians used monthly numbers of burials and baptisms in parish records to ascertain the effect of epidemics or food crises. Starting in the mid‐1950s, the work of the French demographer Louis Henry is generally credited for initiating a new discipline, historical demography, based this time not only on the careful accounting of vital events at the aggregate level, but also on the nominal linking of records. This became an essential tool of historians, and the appellation “historical demography” is often reserved for that auxiliary branch of history that deals with the quantitative aspects of past populations, whereas “demographic history” deals with more substantive aspects.
Department Store
Authors: Wiedenhoft Wendy A.
Published: September 2017

Department stores by definition offer a large variety of merchandise organized into specialty departments under one roof. The first department stores were unique not simply because of the variety of goods they offered, but also because their policies were “consumercentric.” Department stores instituted fixed prices – often advertised in newspapers – so consumers would not have to engage in the time‐consuming practice of haggling over the cost of the goods that they purchased. Catering to the whims of consumers, department stores established the “no questions asked” policy of merchandise exchanges and refunds, money‐back guarantees on purchased products, and free delivery. The first department stores offered cooking and knitting classes; some became “Saturday bankers,” cashing checks when banks were closed. Other consumercentric policies included personal attention by sales clerks and clothing alterations. These policies engendered consumer loyalty and trust, as did the participation by department store owners in local civic life (Rosenberg 1985; Leach 1993).
Development: Political Economy
Authors: Boatcă Manuela
Published: September 2017

The emergence of the idea of development in the West is closely linked to the evolutionary worldview taking shape in Europe as of the eighteenth century. Both notions have been constitutive for sociology as a discipline. Like evolution, development has taken on a variety of meanings. Their common denominator is the idea of continuous, orderly social change that proceeds in several clearly demarcated stages and entails an improvement of living conditions. Yet whereas most evolutionary theories implicitly are theories of development, the reverse does not apply. Massive criticism directed at evolutionism in the first half of the twentieth century, ultimately leading to its temporary discredit as an academic endeavor, prevented a resumption of the issue of development until the postwar era. During the 1950s, development again became central to both social scientific concerns and policy‐making. By the end of the twentieth century, growing skepticism toward classical development theory and modernization approaches led to more attention being devoted to the issue of underdevelopment both by scholars and policy‐makers. The entry synthesizes approaches to development from modernization theory and dependency approaches through world‐systems analysis and postdevelopment approaches.
Deviance
Authors: Goode Erich
Published: September 2017

To the majority of sociologists, deviance is defined as the violation of a social norm which is likely to result in censure or punishment for the violator. Behind this seemingly simple and clear‐cut definition, however, lurks a swarming host of controversies. A perusal of course curricula verifies that most sociologists who teach a course on deviance divide the field into two distinctly different perspectives: constructionist approaches and explanatory theories. The constructionist approach sees deviance as “subjectively problematic,” that is, “in the eye of the beholder,” and takes as its primary task an understanding of how judgments of deviance are put together, and with what consequences. Explanatory theories regard deviance as “objectively given,” that is, a syndrome‐like entity with more or less clear‐cut, identifiable properties whose causal etiology can be explicated by the social scientist. Each perspective has its own mission, agenda, enterprise, and methodology. And though these two approaches define deviance in superficially similar ways, their definitions point to sharply divergent universes of meaning. The enterprises in which these perspectives are engaged are in fact linked only by the objectively similar nature of their subject matter; conceptually and theoretically, they are worlds apart.
Deviance, Absolutist Definitions of
Authors: Little Craig B.
Published: September 2017

Absolutist definitions of deviance distinguish conformity from nonconformity by reference to an invariant moral standard. Some external agent such as a religious, philosophical, scientific, or international authority may establish the moral standard. From an absolutist perspective, a given activity, like homosexual behavior, might be considered deviant because the majority in a society claim it violates a religious dictate or even because it appears to affront a declared conception of the natural order. The sociologically relevant aspect of an absolutist position is that it places the basis for moral judgment on a behavior or practice beyond the social and cultural context of the society or social situation in which the behavior or practice takes place. Therefore, the definitional standard for proclaiming an activity deviant has nothing to do with the norms of the particular society or culture in which the activity occurs. Absolutist definitions of deviance assume that a given activity, according to the particular higher authority, is deviant for all time in all places.
Deviance, Academic
Authors: Heeren John W.
Published: September 2017

If we consider deviance as a breach of expectations, then any organization or occupation is likely to provide distinct opportunities for legal and/or ethical violations. College and university faculty members are professionals employed within the occupational context of higher education. Thus, the opportunities for deviance available to them derive from their roles in professional disciplines and in the occupational setting of the university. While some professors are more involved in teaching or governance at their home campus, others are more focused on research or other activities of nationwide professional associations. Both these “local” and “cosmopolitan” roles can produce deviant behavior.
Deviance, Crime and
Authors: Goode Erich
Published: September 2017

Deviance and crime are not coterminous; they are overlapping but conceptually and empirically distinct. Sociologists define deviance as the violation of a norm that is likely to elicit (from audiences) censure, condemnation, stigma, social isolation, or punishment. In contrast, crime is the violation of a formal code known as criminal law, instances of which are likely, if observed by agents of law enforcement, to result in police attention, apprehension, and possibly arrest and prosecution. Not all deviant acts are violations of the law; not all violations of the law are regarded as deviant, nor do all attract informal censure. In fact not all technical violations of the law attract even police attention, let alone arrest. We need to clearly and carefully define deviance and crime and delineate one from the other.
D
iderot Effect
Authors: Lorenzen Janet A.
Published: September 2017

Grant McCracken (1986, 1988) argues that, when a familiar consumption pattern is disrupted, by an expensive gift for example, individuals will seek to establish a new pattern of consumption, which conforms to the level of quality and status represented by that gift. McCracken calls this “the Diderot effect,” naming it after the French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–1784), who in 1772 wrote an essay entitled “Regrets on parting with my old dressing gown: or a warning to those who have more taste than money” (Diderot, 1964). Diderot received a new dressing gown as a gift from a friend, which compelled him to redecorate his entire study because the gift made everything in the room look old and shabby by comparison. The Diderot effect is thus a mechanism for overconsumption: Attempting to purchase goods that fit together in some subjectively coherent way results in greater consumer spending and continual trading up.
Deviance, Explanatory Theories of
Authors: Goode Erich
Published: September 2017

Sociologists define deviance as the violation of a norm that, if discovered, would typically result in punishment, scorn, or stigmatization of the offender. The normative violation can include acts, beliefs, and traits or characteristics, and it can be a violation of both formal norms (laws) and informal norms (folkways and mores). This definition opens two radically different though complementary missions or lines of inquiry: those that attempt to explain the causes of normative violations, and those that explore the dynamics underlying the social construction, accompaniments, and consequences of the norms, including laws, and their enforcement. Criminologists and sociologists who attempt to explain deviance and crime nearly always study non‐normative
behavior
, while constructionists look at the full gamut of normative violations – behavior, beliefs, and physical characteristics.
Deviance Processing Agencies
Authors: Rigakos George S.
Published: September 2017

Deviance processing agencies refers to a wide gamut of institutions and agencies both public and private involved in the identification, vetting, and dispensation of populations considered at risk, dangerous, or that presumably require monitoring and surveillance to mitigate potential harms. Deviance processing agencies have been considered in a more comprehensive manner since the 1960s and 1970s and constitute a central focus of inquiry for social theorists interested in governmentality risk and social control. During anti‐war student protests and the radicalization of academia in the 1960s and 1970s, sociologists and criminologists employed critical approaches often born out of a Marxian orientation (e.g., Spitzer 1975) to critically analyze developments in police practices, punitive legal measures, and inhumane prison conditions. They offered explanations of repressive state practices (Cooper et al. 1975) against dissidents and socially constructed deviants within the context of managing crises of capitalist legitimacy, the symbolic importance of the labeling process, and the inherently biased function of legal norms (Quinney 1974). By the 1980s, a rather substantial body of scholarly work tied to an evolving critical criminology movement analyzed and deconstructed the practices of criminal justice agencies, particularly in the context of rising crime rates, mass imprisonment, and punitive neoconservative crime control policies (Lowman et al. 1987).
Deviant Beliefs/Cognitive Deviance
Authors: Perrin Robin D.
Published: September 2017

Sociological discussions of deviance typically focus onbehaviorsthat violate norms and have been judged negatively by others. Cognitive deviance, on the other hand, refers to deviantbeliefs. The study of cognitive deviance “reveals that social rules apply not only to how one behaves but also to how and what one thinks” (Douglas and Waksler, 1982: 366). Deviant beliefs are important to study because they reveal basic social processes and affirm the belief structure on which the culture of a society is built. In addition, the study of deviant beliefs is important because deviance is often the first step toward social change. Today's deviant idea may well be tomorrow's norm.
Dialectic
Authors: Anderson Kevin B. , Hudis Peter
Published: September 2017

While its roots go back to the Socratic dialogues, dialectics as social theory begins with G. W. F. Hegel, and extends through Karl Marx to today. With Hegel, the dialectic takes the form of a double negation. Ideas or social forms face negativity from within. If the process deepens, the old idea or form is overthrown. However, such a first or bare negation remains a “formless abstraction” unless it develops some determinateness or specificity (Hegel 1969: 113). This requires going beyond “the first negation as negation in general,” to “the second negation, the negation of the negation,” which is “concrete, absolute negativity” (p. 116). This absolute negativity creates a new idea or social form in place of the old. Then the process may resume, with negation growing again within what has been newly created. Some have erroneously described this process as one of thesis‐antithesis‐synthesis, an expression Hegel himself never used (Pinkard 2000).
Direct Action
Authors: Moore Kelly , Woolley Kyle
Published: September 2017

Direct action is strategic political activity that is designed to draw attention to or change political and cultural relationships by bypassing extant political institutions and processes. Direct action uses physical and virtual means that are outside of existing political institutions; it is often used by groups that are prohibited from or have limited access to legal or full participation in institutionalized political activities. Examples of direct action include vigils, blockades, wildcat strikes, demonstrations, the occupation of buildings and other spaces, and the destruction of property.
Disability Sport
Authors: Nixon II Howard L.
Published: September 2017

Disability sport refers to any form of organized physical competition intended specifically for people with disabilities and contrasts with able‐bodied or mainstream sport, which is organized for people without disabilities. The historical lack of mainstream sports opportunities for people with disabilities is one of the important rationales for the development of disability sport. People are considered disabled, e.g., regarding physical mobility, sight, hearing, or mental functioning, when they have biomedical conditions or impairments that limit their ability to use certain skills, carry out certain tasks, or participate in certain activities or roles. Although their overall sports participation rates remain relatively low, people with disabilities have become increasingly involved in the pursuit of sport at various levels over the past few decades.
Disasters
Authors: Silver Hilary
Published: September 2017

Disasters are sudden, unexpected, localized, rare, and acute events that disrupt the environment and social structure, and inflict substantial harm on individuals, groups, and property. They differ from accidents in the greater scale of their individual and collective impacts. Roughly speaking, such catastrophes entail over a hundred deaths in a short period of time.