bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Multiphrenia
Authors: Gergen Kenneth J.
Published: September 2017

The concept of multiphrenia originated in Kenneth Gergen's 1991 volume,
The Saturated Self
. In that work Gergen proposed that technological developments of the past century increasingly expose the individual to multiple opinions, values, and ways of life. In doing so, they draw the individual into a growing array of relationships, projects, and commitments. Further, in this socially saturated condition, the person is immersed in an extended world of “ought,” or criteria for social acceptability. As a result, the traditional ideal of a single, coherent self is gradually replaced by a sense of self as fragmented and decentered. The term multiphrenia was used, in particular, to refer to the individual's experience of conflict in values, ideals, opinions, and motives. Not only does such conflict leave one awash in reaching decisions, it also generates a sense of pervasive inadequacy and a suspicion of “best rational choice.” The concept was specifically not intended to designate a disease, but rather an increasingly common form of cultural life. Although Gergen's account exuded a certain nostalgia for a simpler and more coherent life, his analysis also gave way to a more inviting view of the future. Specifically, he proposed that in undermining the tradition of the singular, unified self, the condition of multiphrenia lends itself to understanding oneself as created within relationships. In effect, in the postmodern context, relationships may eclipse the self in their importance. Promise was located here in terms of the potential for global relations, a potential realized in the interlinking of people from around the world. Such optimism has been questioned, as critics are concerned about the way in which the state of multiphrenia may support neoliberal and capitalist ideals of infinite expansion (Keupp, 2003). Others see the state as a disorder, as it neglects what they consider the necessity of unity and purposiveness in one's life (Renner and Laux, 2000). Invited, then, is resistance against the multiphrenic state, despite the increased insinuation of communication technologies in our lives. Research does provide support for Gergen's account of changes in the individual's value commitments (Ovadia, 2003). Thus, one confronts the challenge of constructive confrontation with a technology that promises to undermine longstanding and highly valued traditions.
MacIver, Robert Morrison (1882–1970)
Authors: Williams Malcolm
Published: September 2017

Robert MacIver was born in Stornoway, Scotland, and began his professional career in Aberdeen, but spent most of his life in Canada and the United States at the universities of Toronto and Columbia. Though a prominent sociologist in his lifetime, his legacy since has been somewhat muted, possibly because his European style of sociology has featured less prominently in the subsequent development of US sociology (Brewer 2007: 10). Nevertheless, MacIver made a lasting and important contribution to the sociology of community, political sociology, and methodology.
MAUSS
Authors: Graeber David , Vandenberghe Frédéric
Published: September 2017

The anti‐utilitarian movement of the MAUSS – an acronym for Mouvement Anti‐Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales – was founded by Alain Caillé and an alliance of largely francophone intellectuals in 1981 to counter the hegemony of utilitarianism in the social sciences (rational choice) and society (neoliberalism). Its organ, theRevue du MAUSS, is a biannual journal devoted to the study of the gift in which anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and political philosophers on the left explore the contours of an alternative science and society not based on self‐interest and egoism. While the group has always operated as a collective and encouraged collaborative writing and research, Alain Caillé has remained its most prominent exponent and has, over the last quarter century, worked to develop Marcel Mauss's classic essay on the gift (Mauss 1924) into a full‐blown political sociology of associations that considers the triple obligation – “to give, accept, and return the gift” – as the bedrock of social life (Caillé 2000, 2009; Godbout & Caillé 1992).
MAUSS
Authors: Vandenberghe Frédéric
Published: September 2017

The antiutilitarian movement of the MAUSS – an acronym for Mouvement Anti‐Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales – was founded by the economist, political scientist, and sociologist Alain Caillé in 1981 to counter the hegemony of utilitarianism in the social sciences (rational choice) and society (neoliberalism). Its organ is theRevue du MAUSS, a biannual journal devoted to the study of the gift in which anthropologists, sociologists, economists, political scientists, and psychoanalysts on the left explore the contours of an alternative science and society that are not based on self‐interest and egoism, but rather on struggle and altruism.
Meta‐Power
Authors: McGinty Patrick J.W. , Burns Tom R. , Hall Peter M.
Published: September 2017

In the social sciences, power and control are typically conceptualized in terms of the capacity or right of one agent (individual or collective) to get another agent to act in some specified way or even to act against her own will (Max Weber). In various ways, the most prominent contemporary analyses (for instance, Peter Blau and Robert Dahl, among others) view power as principally one actor's control of the behavior of another actor. This approach to power captures only a limited part of the phenomenon. In reaction, Talcott Parsons (1963) redefined power as mobilization of resources to achieve collective goals, and broadened the concept to include cooperative efforts and larger institutional venues. While an improvement, this too missed key aspects involving groups, organizations, and states.
Microcredit
Authors: Hsu Becky
Published: September 2017

Microcredit is the practice of distributing very small loans to people who have a very low income as a means of poverty alleviation and economic development. Microcredit is a subset of the broader category of microfinance, which includes all financial services such as insurance and money transfers. The very poor often do not have access to any financial services, and microcredit enables individuals to borrow for a profit‐making enterprise in hopes of beginning an upwards spiral out of poverty. In 2009, there were an estimated 150 million borrowers in 10,000 microfinance institutions (PlaNet Finance 2009).
Microcredit
Authors: Hsu Becky Yang
Published: September 2017

Microcredit is the practice of distributing very small loans to people who have a very low income as a means of poverty alleviation, global aid, and development. Microcredit is a subset of the broader category of microfinance, which includes all financial services such as insurance and money transfers. The very poor often do not have access to any financial services, and microcredit enables individuals to borrow for a profit‐making enterprise, in hopes of beginning an upward spiral out of poverty. One hundred and fifty million people have participated as borrowers in microfinance programs (Armendariz and Labie, 2011).
Mediology
Authors: Vandenberghe Frédéric
Published: September 2017

The neologism
médiologie
was coined in 1979 by the French essayist, novelist, and political agitator Régis Debray in
Le Pouvoir intellectuel en France
(Debray 1979/1981). The invention of the label predated the foundation of the new interdiscipline of mediation studies in 1991, the launch of a new journal,
Cahiers de médiologie
(now defunct), and the gathering of some of France's most interesting philosophers and sociologists of technology, notably Bernard Stiegler, François Dagognet, Pierre Lévy, and Bruno Latour, around his project. Situated at the crossroads of philosophy, theology, anthropology, archaeology, history, sociology, political sciences, semiotics, media, and cultural studies, mediology is a relatively autonomous discipline that analyzes the totality of the processes of mediation that make possible the transmission and diffusion of ideas. With its focus on the interplay between social and technological forces that connect culture to practices, it is, first and foremost, a political sociology in the Marxist tradition that analyzes how ideas are transformed into a material force that can change the world. Taunting communication scholars working in the poststructuralist tradition of Roland Barthes, it presents the new interdiscipline as a materialist successor science to media studies that integrates the semiotic analysis of contents within a more encompassing philosophy of the history of the technologies of the transmission of culture across generations. It tries to understand how new methods of transmission and transportation provoke change in mentalities and behaviors, and also, inversely, how a cultural tradition provokes, assimilates, or modifies a technical innovation.
Microblogging
Authors: Gorman Lyn , Gorman Caroline
Published: September 2017

Microblogging emerged as one of the activities enabled by “Web 2.0” during the first decade of the twenty‐first century. It can be seen as a particular type of “online social networking,” and it is a form of blogging, with specific parameters. The defining feature of microblogging is that microblogs are short messages sent via the Internet, such as a short sentence, or a link to a website, an image, or video. No doubt one reason for the popularity of microblogging is mobility, with applications suited to mobile devices; the short messages can be posted and delivered via SMS (Short Message Service) on a mobile/cellphone, as well as via the respective websites.
Nature
Authors: Franklin Adrian
Published: September 2017

The sociological analysis of nature as it is used in the modern West (by specific cultures and space(s)) is fraught with definitional problems, notably the seemingly very different and overlapping senses of the word nature. “Nature,” says Williams (1983: 219), “is perhaps the most complex word in the language.” However, on the same page, he is able to show that it is usually not difficult to distinguish its varied meanings: “indeed it is often habitual and in effect not noticed in reading.” Three meanings can be distinguished: (1) nature as an essential quality of something; (2) nature as a force at large in the world; and (3) nature as the world itself including objects, humans, and non‐human organisms.
New Social Movement Theory
Authors: Buechler Steven M.
Published: September 2017

New social movement theory (NSMT) emerged in the 1980s in Europe to analyze distinctive social movements that appeared from the 1960s onward. These movements were seen as “new” in contrast to the “old” working‐class movement. New social movements (NSMs) are organized around race, ethnicity, youth, sexuality, countercultures, environmentalism, pacifism, human rights, and the like. NSMT is a distinct approach to the study of social movements, albeit with significant internal variations (Cohen, 1985; Klandermans, 1991; Larana, Johnston, and Gusfield, 1994).
Non‐Resident Parents
Authors: Smyth Bruce
Published: September 2017

Family life has undergone dramatic change in recent decades, especially in relation to family structure. Marked increases in union dissolution and nonmarital childbearing have resulted in a growing number of children living apart from one of their parents. Most non‐resident parents are fathers but with resident fathers becoming one of the fastest‐rising family forms in many western countries, non‐resident mothers too are increasing in number.
Norms
Authors: Dandaneau Steven P.
Published: September 2017

Norms are informal rules that guide social interaction. They are, as Cristina Bicchieri (2006) calls them, “the rules we live by.” As such, norms constitute a critical component in the makeup of human cultures and therefore play a highly significant role in determining what it means to be human. When codified, norms are rendered laws or other types of institutionalized regulatory strictures. When conceived without moral consequence, the term can also refer to mere behavioral regularities, even though adherence or lack thereof to these can and often does result in significant consequences (e.g., it would be highly unusual as well as probably harmful to name an American child Adolf Osama or, depending on one's constructed gender, Sue). Variously defined even by sociologists themselves, there is perhaps no other sociological concept more regularly and widely deployed in everyday talk, nor one about which more has been written and discussed. It is therefore not surprising that a concept as equally vague as it is elemental to the sociological enterprise is also one that is the subject of continuous theoretical debate.
Neurath, Otto (1882–1945)
Authors: Henning Michelle
Published: September 2017

The distinctive contribution of Otto Neurath to sociology, philosophy, and a wide range of other fields has been largely obscured since World War II, when his own work was rapidly eclipsed by criticisms and revisions. Hayek, in his
Road to Serfdom
(1944), presented Neurath as a naïve advocate of social and economic planning, Horace Kallen saw in Neurath's Unity of Science movement a coercive tendency akin to totalitarianism, and Adorno and Horkheimer's critique of instrumental reason targeted Neurath and the Vienna Circle, of which he was a key member. After Neurath's sudden and untimely death, the Unity of Science movement lost sight of Neurath's emphasis on the social and human sciences; the Vienna Circle became increasingly associated with the ideas of Rudolf Carnap, who survived him; and in the English‐speaking countries, Neurath's work was principally remembered through A. J. Ayer's popularization and critique of logical positivism.
Nostalgia
Authors: Tsekeris Charalambos , Lydaki Anna
Published: September 2017

The term “nostalgia” is Greek in origin and composed of two words:
Nostos
, return to the native land; and
Algos
, which signifies a painful condition (sorrow, suffering, mourning, or grief). So it is indeed possible “from the force of the sound Nostalgia to define the sad mood originating from the desire to return to one's native land” (Hofer 1934: 380–1). However, nostalgia is not a singular or fixed condition (Koselleck 1985). The work of many scholars (such as David Anderson, Fred Davis, Jeffery Dean Webster, and Mary E. McCall) has indeed demonstrated the significant multiplicity of its modes, meanings, and interpretations, raised by the highly divergent experiences and expectations created by the modernization process: “The presence of multiple and different nostalgias among individuals and communities of social groups throughout Western modernity has to be acknowledged” (Tannock 1995: 454).
Observation, Participant and Non‐Participant
Authors: Hammersley Martyn
Published: September 2017

As a method of inquiry, observation is an alternative or complement to the use of interview, documentary, or questionnaire data. It is usually conceived as taking place in “natural” rather than experimental situations, even though experiments necessarily rely on observation by the experimenter. At a minimum, observation involves a researcher watching and listening to actions and events within some context over some period of time, and making a record of what has been witnessed.
Occupational Mobility
Authors: Treiman Donald J.
Published: September 2017

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

Occupational segregation refers to the differential distribution of groups defined by ascribed characteristics (e.g., sex, race/ethnicity) across occupations. The
level
of segregation indicates the strength of the association between group membership and occupations. Levels vary on a continuum bracketed by perfect segregation and perfect integration. Perfect segregation occurs where occupation and group membership correspond perfectly, such that no occupations are populated by more than one group. Perfect integration occurs if there is no association between occupation and group membership, where this typically means that each group holds the same proportion of positions in each occupation as it holds in the labor force.
Occupations, Scaling of
Authors: Ultee Wout
Published: September 2017

In their empirical research on societal stratification, sociologists in national sample surveys often ask people about their present occupation, first occupation, the occupation of their father and of their mother, and the occupation of their spouse and their siblings. The occupational titles obtained in this way nowadays are coded according to the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) issued by the International Labor Office, or the equivalent of this classification used by official national bureaus of statistics. The 1988 ISCO reduces occupational titles to 10 major groups, 28 sub‐major groups, 116 minor groups, and 390 unit groups. Major groups are given one digit, unit groups four digits. Since these groups are no more than nominal ones and not attuned to questions in sociology about societal phenomena like downward mobility and “marrying up,” sociologists have developed scales that rank occupations from higher to lower.
Older Adults, Economic Well‐Being of
Authors: Crystal Stephen
Published: September 2017

In the contemporary world, and especially in the developed countries with their aging populations, providing for the economic needs of the elderly has become a central and increasingly controversial social problem. Expenditures aimed at meeting these needs – directly through income benefits such as those provided by Social Security in the US, and indirectly through tax expenditures and in‐kind programs such as health benefits – constitute a dominant share of public spending in the developed countries, and will increase further as the large post‐World War II birth cohort reaches old age and the proportion of retirees to workers increases. While economists have been more prominent than sociologists in the literature on the size and distribution of the elderly's economic resources, these issues pose fundamental sociological questions, and sociological perspectives are vital in understanding the processes that shape these outcomes. Work in the neoclassical economic tradition, for example, has often begun with the assumption that consumers are rational, well‐informed utility maximizers who actively organize their economic affairs and choices so as to optimally distribute consumption over the life course (Modigliani 1988). (Under some versions of economic life cycle theory, utility maximizing would be predicted to result in spending one's last dollar on the last day of one's life). As sociologists might suspect, such models tend not to do well in predicting actual patterns of accumulation and spending down of savings over the life course.
Opportunities for Learning
Authors: Gamoran Adam
Published: September 2017

Central to the sociology of education are questions about how schools operate to produce learning. Sociological models of schooling recognize that school systems are complex organizations, with a technical core consisting of classrooms in which teaching and learning – the core technology of schooling – take place. The concept of opportunities for learning provides a key to answering questions about how schools and classrooms can produce higher rates of learning (educational productivity), and about why some students learn more than others (educational inequality).
Organizational Failure
Authors: Ackroyd Stephen
Published: September 2017

By organizational failure is usually meant failure against some measure of performance, or failure to achieve a goal that is normally expected. Thus, a company can be identified as failing if it is not profitable, or a school if it does not educate students in sufficient numbers to a required level. Clearly, such
measured
organizational failure might be purely nominal (and/or imposed), an artifact of the application of performance criteria, rather than a
substantive
failure of organization as such. Thus, the internal working of an organization might be highly efficient given the resources available; but, nonetheless, because it does not reach a prescribed level of performance, it is deemed to fail. If the price of an indispensable commodity suddenly makes production at a saleable price impossible for a firm, failing profitability is almost inevitable and, for a small or new organization, bankruptcy (the most commonly used indicator of failure) is likely.
Organizational Failure
Authors: Ackroyd Stephen
Published: September 2017

There is a distinction between the failure of an organization to meet some measure of performance and the substantive failure of an organization. Companies, for example, are usually judged to be failing if they are not profitable; they are usually deemed to have failed and are wound up, but it is possible to find organizations that are permanently failing by reference to performance criteria such as this. Today organizations that tend to fail against performance criteria are often regarded as opportunities for learning, and remedial action is taken prior to failure to meet performance targets. However, it is actually quite difficult to find examples of substantive organizational failure in the absence of some potent and usually external cause. This is because organizations tend to adapt themselves and to retain their coherency even in adverse circumstances.
Organizational Learning
Authors: Rizova Polly S.
Published: September 2017

Organizational learning is a construct employed to depict a set of rational and non‐rational processes relevant to the creation, retention, and transmission of knowledge in organizations. The concept has been linked to organizational performance, sustainable competitive advantage, organizational transformation and corporate renewal, organizational and technological innovation, and entrepreneurship among other themes. Change, adaptation, and learning have all been used to denote the process by which organizations adjust to their environments; organizational change is often understood as a manifestation of learning. Various conceptions of learning have been advanced in the field; for instance, learning as improving, learning as recording knowledge, and learning as the evolution of knowledge. Research in the area seeks to understand how learning in formal organizations takes place, what its sources are, and what its effect is on the performance and maintenance of organizational stability. For quite some time organizational learning and learning organization were used interchangeably; lately, a somewhat tentative agreement has been established that the two terms are not to be confused. Whereas in the former the emphasis is on learning, and more specifically on the process of learning in organizations, the latter stresses the organization per se. Among the questions addressed by the scholars of organizational learning are: what are the essence and the bases for organizational learning – rational, subconscious, or experiential? Who is the agent of learning – the individual, the organization, or both? How does organizational learning manifest itself? How is knowledge in organizations acquired, retained, and transferred? What affects the ability of organizations to learn?
Organizations as Coercive Institutions
Authors: Soeters Joseph
Published: September 2017

Coercive organizations are the state's instruments used to ensure safety and public order both of its borders and within its borders. As such, these organizations are authorized to approach the general public in a coercive manner and – in the last resort – they are legitimized to use force and violence against those who intend to harm the interests of the state and its citizens. The military, the gendarmerie (Carabinieri, Guardia Civil, Jandarmerie), and the police as well as fire guards and forest rangers all belong to this specific category of organizations. The police and fire guards traditionally have an internal role, whereas the military has as its primary task protecting the state against threats from abroad. However, these distinctions are not always and everywhere clear. In many countries, including in Western Europe, the military is sometimes called upon to perform internal tasks, whereas police officers increasingly are sent to distant regions outside their own nation‐state.
Organizations and Sexualities
Authors: Hearn Jeff
Published: September 2017

In one sense, the recognition of sexuality as a central feature of organization(s) is relatively recent, prompted by a range of disciplinary and theoretical positions. Foremost of these is second wave feminism, highlighting concerns with women's control over their bodies and sexuality, and critiques of the sexualization of organizations, and sexist uses of sexuality, in advertising and other organizational displays. A second force for change has been LGBTQI+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, plus further unspecified non‐normative gender and sexuality identities) new sexual social movements. Another stimulus has been poststructuralist and postcolonial theory. The most profound impact of such moves has been in problematizing sexuality, especially heterosexuality, and essentialized, naturalized views of sexuality, and, with queer theory, “homosexuality” too. Yet in another sense, the centrality of sexuality for organization(s) seems to be rediscovered every few years, as if a new insight (see Zetterberg, 1966).
Organizations as Social Structures
Authors: Martin Randy
Published: September 2017

Organizations as social structures is a perspective that focuses on the hardware of human association, the durable factors that govern people's ways of being together as they achieve common goals by coordinated means. As it has been understood in the literature, social structure is what permits the organization's persistence over time; it describes relations among differentiated positions, and references an agency or institutional will that transcends that of individuals. Structure implies wholeness rather than aggregates, predictable patterns of transformation, self‐regulation, and closure. Structure itself is a term borrowed from architecture, hence the spatial emphasis on prescribed places that people can inhabit. But if the architect designs the structure before it is inhabited, the organizational cognate can be discerned only after the fact by means of analysis. As the building goes up, its structure is visible to the untrained eye. Only the effects of social structures are visibly manifest in human responses to institutional circumstances – their material is not so much physical as latent. Organizational studies would need to be devised to disclose the plans and patterns of the social edifice.
Outliers
Authors: Kirk Roger E.
Published: September 2017

An outlier is an observation or measurement that is unusually large or small relative to the other values in a data set. Outliers occur for a variety of reasons. They can represent, for example, an error in measurement, data recording, or data entry, or a correct value that just happens to be extreme. Outliers can seriously affect the integrity of data and result in biased or distorted sample statistics, inflated sums of squares, distorted
p
values and effect sizes, and faulty conclusions. Alternatively, they can be the most interesting finding in the data. History records many scientific breakthroughs that have resulted from following up on extreme observations.
Outliers
Authors: Kirk Roger E.
Published: September 2017

An outlier is an observation that appears to deviate markedly from other observations in a sample. Outliers occur for a variety of reasons. They can represent, for example, measurement errors, data recording errors, or data entry errors, or a correct value that just happens to be extreme. Outliers can seriously affect the integrity of data and result in biased or distorted sample statistics, inflated sums of squares, distorted
p
values and effect sizes, and faulty conclusions. Alternatively, outliers can be the most interesting finding in the data. History records many scientific breakthroughs that have resulted from following up extreme observations.
Online Social Networking
Authors: Gorman Lyn
Published: September 2017

Online social networking developed as a globally significant phenomenon in the first decade of the twenty‐first century. It refers to the use of social network sites (SNSs) – such as Facebook and MySpace – for online communication as well as for the establishment and extension of friendships and personal networks. SNSs are defined as “web‐based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi‐public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.” These sites share properties of persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences (boyd 2007; boyd & Ellison 2007). Researchers differ over what counts as a social network site in the dynamic web environment. The following focuses on what are most commonly acknowledged as SNSs. It does not include photo‐ and video‐sharing sites (such as Flickr and YouTube), virtual worlds (Second Life), social bookmarking (
del.icio.us
), or aggregating services (FriendFeed), nor does it provide detailed coverage of microblogging, although one example of this – Twitter – became increasingly prominent toward the end of the decade (see boyd 2009b for a regularly updated bibliography of research on Twitter and microblogging).
Obesity
Authors: Qvortrup Matt
Published: September 2017

Obesity has traditionally been seen as a medical and physiological condition. As far back as 1924, the editors of theJournal of the American Medical Associationeditorialized that “obesity” was purely the result of “malfunctions in normal metabolic processes” (American Medical Association 1924: 1003). In recent years this view has changed. Sociologists have increasingly recognized that obesity can be seen as a social construct (Crossley 2004) or even be analyzed as a “social fact”, in Durkheim's sense of the word.
Online Dating
Authors: Morrison Matthew
Published: September 2017

Online dating refers to Internet websites or mobile smartphone applications where people can search for and locate potential romantic partners with the objective of meeting in person and forming a relationship. Online dating is a recent phenomenon, having existed only in the last 15 years or so, but it is now becoming part of everyday life. In fact, online dating is beginning to eclipse traditional ways people meet, such as through school, family, and friendship connections. Indeed, Rosenfeld and Thomas (2012) found that between 2007 and 2009, 22 percent of heterosexual couples met online. For same‐sex couples in those same years, over 61 percent met online – eclipsing friends and even the bar as the initial encounter.
Organization, politics of
Authors: Ackroyd Stephen
Published: September 2017

Although many organization theorists have overlooked it, the existence of politics and political systems in organizations have been noted so often they are best regarded as universal. Indeed, that there is politics in and around organizations is a significant feature of them, which has implications for general social theory.
Parental Involvement in Education
Authors: Catsambis Sophia
Published: September 2017

Scholarly interest in parental involvement was sparked in the late 1960s, when the seminal Coleman report (Coleman et al. 1966) found family social background to be the most important predictor of children's academic success in the United States. Educational inequalities by social class are found in most countries and such findings prompted researchers’ efforts to identify what aspects of family background are responsible for children's educational success (Gonzalez 2004). Some focus on economic resources, family structure, or parental education, while others investigate parental involvement in children's education.
Pareto, Vilfredo (1848–1923)
Authors: Mozetic Gerald , Weiler Bernd
Published: September 2017

Vilfredo Pareto is famous for his seminal contributions to neoclassical and mathematical economics, his analysis of power, and his inquiry into the psychological and social foundations of human conduct. Born in Paris, where his father, a Genoese
marchese
, supporter of Mazzini and a civil engineer, lived in political exile, Pareto grew up in a bilingual and liberal aristocratic milieu. Upon his family's return to Italy in the 1850s he received a broad humanistic education and studied mathematics, physics, and engineering in Turin. After his graduation in 1870 Pareto moved to Tuscany, where during the next two decades he worked in upper managerial positions for a railway and an iron company. In this period he traveled extensively, frequented the aristocratic salons of Florence, studied the works of Comte, Spencer, Darwin, and J. S. Mill, joined the Italian Adam Smith Society to spread laissez‐faire economics, and began to write articles on various economic and policy issues. His political ambitions to be elected to the Chamber of Deputies remained unsuccessful. In 1890 he met the economist and leading Italian proponent of marginalism, Pantaleoni. Pantaleoni introduced Pareto to Walras, whom Pareto succeeded as a professor of political economy at the University of Lausanne in 1893. In the following years Pareto wrote his main works:
Cours d'économie politique
(1896–7)
, Les Systèmes socialistes
(1902–3),
Manuale di economia politica
(1906), and
Trattato di sociologia generale
(1916). With age, Pareto grew disillusioned with the workings of the democratic system, especially in Italy and France, and became increasingly conservative. After their rise to power the Fascists conferred honors upon Pareto, using his concept of elites, his critique of parliamentary democracy, and his ideas concerning the function of violence in history for their own purposes. Though Pareto sympathized with the advent of Fascism, it should be noted that he died only a couple of months after the March on Rome, and that his fervent support of laissez‐faire economics as well as his conviction that the state should protect the civil liberties of the individual ran counter to totalitarian ideologies.
Park, Robert E. (1864–1944) and Ernest W. Burgess (1886–1966)
Authors: Kivisto Peter
Published: September 2017

Robert Ezra Park and Ernest Watson Burgess advanced American sociology during its formative period and made lasting contributions to ethnic studies, urban sociology, and the study of collective behavior. Their methodological preference was for ethnography, while they articulated a theoretical perspective shaped in particular by human ecology.
Passing
Authors: Rousseau Nicole
Published: September 2017

Passing is a process by which an individual crosses over from one culture or community into another undetected. The historical connotation of the term, however, is intimately connected with black America, and “passing,” “crossing over,” or “going over to the other side” typically refers to a black person whose appearance is such that they can
pass
for white. The vivid language of the term itself evokes many images: passing one's self off as white; choosing to pass over into white society; the passing away of a person's black identity, reborn as white. As drastic a choice as this “social death” may seem, for some blacks in segregated America, there was little choice (Gaudin n.d.).
Peace and Reconciliation Processes
Authors: Darby John
Published: September 2017

The use of the term peace process may be recent, but the concept is as old as war. Sophisticated conventions on ceasefires and peace negotiations were already well established and accepted when theIliadwas composed. The negotiations preceding the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 had some resemblance to contemporary peace processes: they lasted for four years; the principal negotiators never met; and they adopted approaches similar to the “proximity talks” and shuttle diplomacy used at Dayton for Bosnia and in Northern Ireland, with the main parties separately quartered in Münster and Osnabrück. More than three centuries later, these techniques and approaches were formalized and designated as peace processes. Harold Saunders recounts how the term “negotiating process” was used by those working with Henry Kissinger in the Middle East in 1974. Eventually, finding the phrase too narrow, “we coined the phrase peace process’ to capture the experience of this series of mediated agreements embedded in a larger political process” (Crocker et al. 2001).
Peacemaking
Authors: Gillespie Wayne
Published: September 2017

Peacemaking is a state of existence or a way of being that is based on love and compassion; in particular, this mode of life calls for an end to human suffering through nonviolent means. It is a philosophy that encourages personal transformation and guides everyday life. Yet the peacemaking perspective also influences broader social changes and informs academic theorizing, research, and public policy. As it applies to criminology, peacemaking takes as its basic assumption that crime is suffering; since the way of peace necessitates an end to suffering, peacemaking criminology envisions an end to crime through the abolition of all suffering. Richard Quinney is the main theorist associated with peacemaking criminology.
Peer Review and Quality Control in Science
Authors: Turner Stephen
Published: September 2017

Peer review is a practice used in the evaluation of scientific and scholarly papers in order to select papers for publication in scholarly journals. The practice has also been extended to other domains, such as the evaluation of grant proposals, medical practice, book publication, and even to such areas as teaching evaluation. The primary area that has been of interest to sociologists, however, has been publication in scientific journals. The practice is usually understood to have begun in the seventeenth century in the Royal Society in London, but it has also been claimed that there have been precursors to this practice. In the popular mind, peer review in science is a means of “bullet‐proofing” research, as a
Wall Street Journal
article once put it, that is to say as a guarantee of quality. But within science it has a very different meaning.
Peer Review and Quality Control in Science
Authors: Turner Stephen , McCreery Gregory
Published: September 2017

Peer review is a practice used in the evaluation of scientific and scholarly papers in order to select papers for publication in scholarly journals. The practice has also been extended to other domains, such as the evaluation of grant proposals, medical practice, book publication, and even to such areas as teaching evaluation. The primary area that has been of interest to sociologists, however, has been publication in scientific journals. The practice is usually understood to have begun in the seventeenth century at the Royal Society in London, but it has also been claimed that there have been precursors to this practice. In the popular mind, peer review in science is a means of “bullet‐proofing” research, as a
Wall Street Journal
article once put it. That is to say, peer review is thought to guarantee quality. But within science it has a very different meaning.
Performance Ethnography
Authors: Pelias Ronald J.
Published: September 2017

Performance ethnography takes as its working premise that a theatrical representation of what one discovers through participant‐observation fieldwork provides a vibrant and textured rendering of cultural others. Performance for the performance ethnographer is typically understood as an aesthetic act within a theatrical tradition. In western cultures this artistic endeavor calls upon actors through their use of presentational skills to evoke others for the consideration of audiences. Not to be confused with the ethnography of performance which examines cultural performances as objects of investigation, performance ethnography relies upon the embodiment of cultural others. As such, it is a method of inquiry that privileges the body as a site of knowing.
Pietism
Authors: Willaime Jean‐Paul
Published: September 2017

The word Pietism is applied to that religious awareness that developed from within Protestantism, in particular in the seventeenth century. It constituted neither a unified theological tendency nor a structured orientation. This awareness expresses a desire for a more intense and practical expression of piety, which has been articulated throughout the ages and in a number churches. It can be said that Pietism is a reaction to the mundane and intellectualist tendencies of Protestantism, a reaction which stresses the personal religious experience of each believer as well as the mediation of the Bible in everyday Christian behavior. Pietism does not stem only from the development and intensification of inner life, but also in the founding of schools, orphanages, and missions. It represents a theology of the heart, which is relatively indifferent to doctrinal matters and for which the fundamental criterion is authenticity. Sociologically, Pietism is a popular and enterprising movement that crosses a range of diverse Protestant denominations. It is particularly manifest in Lutheranism, Methodism, and in the many revivalist religious movements that have punctuated the history of Protestantism.
Plastic Sexuality
Authors: Hawkes Gail
Published: September 2017

The concept of plastic sexuality is developed theoretically by Anthony Giddens (1993). “Plastic” refers to the malleability of erotic expression, in terms of both individual choice and frameworks of social norms. “Flexible sexuality” is argued to emerge in the context of the social changes in late modernity and postmodernity. It stands in contrast to the features associated with modernist sexuality, conceptualized as fixed, by biology or by social norms. “Fixed sexuality” is associated with the binaries of modernity – either heterosexual or homosexual, either marital (legitimate) or extramarital (illegitimate), either committed or promiscuous, either normal (coital) or perverse (anal, autoerotic, sadomasochistic).
Play
Authors: Henricks Thomas
Published: September 2017

Within the social sciences, play has been one of the most elusive phenomena to define and study. Some scholars have described play as a pattern of individual behavior or social interaction, which features contest, improvisation, and fantasy. Others have characterized play as a pattern of experience or awareness, so that some participants in a shared activity may be playing while others are not. Still other researchers have focused on cultural frameworks or scenes of play, with the understanding that all that happens within those settings should be deemed playful. A list of such settings includes sports and games; gambling; festivals, parties, and masquerades; artistic and musical expression; jokes, rhymes, and storytelling; teasing and other forms of disrespect; rough‐and‐tumble behaviors; dramatic role performance and make‐believe; and adventurous pursuits like mountain‐climbing and skydiving. Many of the daily activities of young children are commonly characterized as play, and playfulness is an important trait of many species of mammals.
Police
Authors: Sun Ivan Y.
Published: September 2017

Police have been traditionally defined as the social agency of a government that is responsible for maintaining public order and preventing and detecting crime. This definition emphasizes the social control function that police are supposed to perform in a society. It has been severely challenged, however, mainly because of the finding of a small number of studies conducted in the 1950s and 1960s. Though police are often portrayed as law enforcers and crime fighters, the large‐scale observational study mounted by Reiss and Black showed that they spend a large amount of their time in handling non‐crime‐related incidents (Reiss 1971; Black 1980).
Police
Authors: Sun Ivan Y. , Farmer Ashley K.
Published: September 2017

The police have been traditionally defined as the social agency of a government that is responsible for maintaining public order and preventing and detecting crime. This definition emphasizes the social control function that the police are supposed to perform in a society. It has been challenged by findings from a few observational studies conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, which showed that, despite being commonly portrayed as law enforcers and crime fighters, the police spend a large amount of their time in handling noncrime‐related incidents (Reiss, 1971; Black, 1980).
Political Economy
Authors: Ramella Francesco
Published: September 2017

Political economy refers to a current of studies that analyzes, in a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, the relationships between economic and sociopolitical phenomena and their modes of regulation in different institutional contexts. Over the past few decades, this current has spread to various fields of the social sciences, especially those of economics, political science, and sociology. The origin of the term, however, is strictly connected to the birth of economics. Its first use is usually traced back to the French economist Montchrétien who, in the
Traicté de l'oeconomie politique
(1615), made reference to it as “the science of the acquisition of wealth”: a
political science
connected to public economy and state finances. Later on, classic economists affirmed the scientific autonomy of the new discipline with respect to politics but retained the denomination. It was with the “marginalist revolution,” that is, with the neoclassical economists, at the end of the nineteenth century, that the original denomination started to be substituted by the term
economics
. The advent of neoclassical economics – with its strict focalization on markets and rational decisions of self‐interested actors – also implied an increasing disciplinary specialization and a marked division of labor within the social sciences.
Political Economy of Science
Authors: Woods Brian
Published: September 2017

Science has never been at the forefront of political economy and usually only appears as an “exogenous shock,” or is suppressed by an assumption within the theory of the firm of a given stock of scientific and/or technological knowledge from which firms make their choices and then employ them in producing a given volume of output. Nonetheless, some theorists and empiricists have explored (in very broad terms) the role of science and technology in economic growth, the relations between science, technology, the state, and capital, and science and development.
Political Sociology
Authors: Calder Ryan , Lie John
Published: September 2017

Political sociology analyzes the operation of power in social life, examining the distribution and machination of power at all levels: individual, organizational, communal, national, and international. Defined thus, political science becomes a subfield of sociology. Parsons (1951), for example, treated the political as one of the four principal domains of sociological analysis. In practice, however, political sociology has developed as a sociological subfield, with its distinct concerns and fashions.
Politics
Authors: Murphy Peter
Published: September 2017

The discipline of sociology has generated few outright political classics. The most splendid of all of the sociological classics, Weber's
Economy and Society
, contributed a great deal to the understanding of political behavior. Yet it is not a political work in the same sense as Aristotle's
Politics
or Hobbes's
Leviathan
.
Economy and Society
sometimes hints at but never enumerates the “best practical” regime. Aristotle and Hobbes had no doubt that such a regime existed, even if they disagreed about what it was. Weber's comparison of traditional, charismatic, and procedural authority bears a passing resemblance to the comparison of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy perennially made by the great political thinkers. But the resemblance is limited.