bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Immigration
Authors: van Amersfoort Hans
Published: September 2017

People have always been on the move. Sometimes they migrated over great distances, sometimes only a few miles, sometimes in regular circular movements in rhythm with the seasons, sometimes never to return to their place of departure. The study of such a general phenomenon requires a perspective from which to select the characteristics that we want to analyze. In studies on the micro level, the focus is primarily on individuals: the migrant's decision whether to leave or to stay, his or her process of adaptation to the new environment, and so on. Sociologists, however, tend to concentrate on migration and its causes and consequences as a social phenomenon. The unit of analysis is not the individual migrant but the migration flow, not immigrants as individuals but immigrant populations and their characteristics. The volume of the migration flow, its demographic structure (e.g., only young males, whole families, etc.), and the homogeneity or heterogeneity of the immigrant population (the mix and levels of educational attainment) are all relevant variables for the description of immigration as a social phenomenon that cannot be studied at the individual level.
Immigration and Language
Authors: Stevens Gillian , Ortman Jennifer M.
Published: September 2017

Languages are a means of communication, and provide access to cultural and social resources. The use of specific languages can also signify speakers' national and racial heritages. Because all but the very youngest migrants learn to speak in their country of origin, their language skills at the time of migration may not overlap with the language skills demanded in their country of destination. Any disparity between migrants' language skills and those of the receiving society results in a complex and multifaceted response involving individuals, communities, and societies. Individual‐level responses include language learning and language shift. Societal‐level responses to immigrants' languages may be formalized in policies governing the use of languages in various social domains. In a few cases, the languages themselves change.
Individualism
Authors: Zinn Jens
Published: September 2017

Individualism emphasizes the importance of the individual, for example the individual's freedom, interests, rights, needs, or beliefs against the predominance of other institutions in regulating the individual's behavior, such as the state or the church. A range of theories in different societal domains contributes to the dissemination of individualistic ideas in society. In particular, economic and political liberalism are vehicles of individualism.
Induction and Observation in Science
Authors: Tudor Andrew
Published: September 2017

One of the most persistent commonsense accounts of science is that in which scientists are understood systematically to assemble observations and arrive at reliable generalizations based upon them. Sometimes, wrongly, this simple inductive‐empiricist view is laid at the door of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and dubbed “Baconian inductivism.” In fact, Bacon's views were considerably more complex than this, but the hare that he set running – inductive inference as the heart of scientific method – has subsequently been pursued by all manner of hounds. The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711–76) was preeminent among the early pursuers, and to this day “Hume's problem” continues to preoccupy philosophy of science. In the mid‐twentieth century, there was a period when the seemingly more powerful hypothetico‐deductive model of scientific inquiry appeared to have run inductivism and Hume's problem to exhaustion. However, it rapidly became apparent that the issues surrounding inductive inference had a peculiar capacity to reemerge from the coverts of deductive certainty, not least where the nature of observation itself was questioned. Into the space thus created have hastened newer, more relativistic epistemologies and, in full cry, the sociology of science.
Industrialization
Authors: Indergaard Michael
Published: September 2017

Industrialization is the process by which an economy shifts from an agricultural to a manufacturing base during a period of sustained change and growth, eventually creating a higher standard of living. Sociology's founders were keenly interested in the causes, correlates, and consequences of industrialization, which they considered a major development in the broader social transformation producing modern society.
Inequalities in Marriage
Authors: Duncan Melanie L. , Shehan Constance L.
Published: September 2017

In heterosexual marriages, spouses often experience gender‐based differences in rights and responsibilities, particularly in the areas of power and decision‐making; access to and control over household resources; allocation of time to paid employment, household labor, and childcare; and likelihood of experiencing severe violence at the hands of their partner. A major source of these differences lies in the patriarchal authority that is culturally bestowed on men. Cultural and socioeconomic changes in the United States and other western nations are likely contributing to a decline in the role of patriarchy in shaping marital roles and responsibilities in heterosexual marriages. In same‐sex marriages, which are receiving increasing social support and legal recognition, inequalities that exist are typically attributable to other traits or behaviors of spouses. These social changes may result in an increase in marriages in which rights and responsibilities are distributed more equally.
Inequality, Wealth
Authors: Wilterdink Nico
Published: September 2017

In all human societies beyond a certain minimum size, material possessions (such as land, animals, houses, tools, and consumption goods) are distributed unequally among individuals and groups. Insofar as these possessions have a monetary or exchange value, this unequal distribution can be described as inequality of wealth. Besides, and related to, income inequality, wealth inequality is an aspect of economic inequality which in turn is a dimension of social inequality in the wide sense.
Wealth
can be defined as the monetary value of the sum total of assets or goods belonging to a certain unit. This unit may vary from a national society (national wealth) to an individual person (individual wealth).
Personal wealth
is the wealth owned by an individual person or a consumption unit consisting of more than one person (a household or family).
Wealth inequality
is usually understood as the unequal distribution of personal wealth in a society.
Infertility
Authors: Greil Arthur L.
Published: September 2017

Infertility is a term used by medical professionals to refer to the physical inability to conceive a child or to successfully carry a child to term. Some demographers employ “infertility” to mean childlessness, regardless of childbearing intentions, reserving the word “subfecundity” to describe the inability to have desired children. Although infertility must necessarily manifest itself in the female partner, either the man or the woman or both may have the reproductive impairment. A specific male factor is identified in from twenty percent to forty percent of those cases where a cause can be found. Since a major cause of infertility is female tubal factors related to sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) spread through heterosexual intercourse, it is likely that men contribute to infertility in more than half of all infertile couples. It is thus ironic that, in many parts of the world, infertility is considered to be a “woman's problem.”
Infertility
Authors: Greil Arthur L.
Published: September 2017

Infertility is a term used by medical professionals to refer to the physical inability to conceive a child or to successfully carry a child to term. Most medical professionals consider a couple to be infertile if they have failed to conceive after 12 months of unprotected intercourse.

Estimates of 12‐month infertility range from 3.5 to 16.7 percent in industrialized countries and from 6.9 to 9.3 percent in developing societies Individuals, but especially women, often experience infertility as a catastrophic role failure which can come to permeate every aspect of life. Ethnographic work suggests that stigma and suffering of infertility may be more pronounced in developing societies. From 42 to 76.3 percent of infertile women in industrialized societies report that they have been to a physician or a clinic to seek treatment. While reproductive impairments are actually more common among minority groups and those with lower incomes, whites and those with higher incomes are most likely to seek treatment. While the proportion of infertile women in industrialized societies has remained stable, the demand for medical treatment has increased in most industrialized societies. Treatment of infertility is often expensive, time consuming, and invasive.
Information Society
Authors: Mackay Hugh
Published: September 2017

The information society is a key way in which contemporary social transformation is conceived. Used commonly by policymakers, journalists, and futurists as well as sociologists, the notion encompasses a diversity of arguments which have in common that they see information, and information technology (IT), as at the heart of the burgeoning social order. Greater volumes of data are being communicated by a fast‐growing range of technologies, with profound social consequences for nearly every aspect of social life. On the basis of the growth of information flows and technologies, information society theorists argue that the changes underway represent not just quantitative but qualitative social change – transforming almost every realm of social life, including households, communities, education, health, work, surveillance, democracy, and identities. Together, these changes are seen as constituting a new form of society, comparable to the shift from an agrarian to an industrial society. Rather than tightly defined, the scope of information society debates ranges widely and overlaps with other approaches to understanding contemporary social change. Other terms (“post‐industrial society,” “knowledge society,” and “network society”) carry similar and often overlapping meanings; while for some social theorists, different labels (“late modernity,” “postmodernity,” or “globalization”) better characterize contemporary social transformations. Even those who focus on the “information society” use the term to refer to different social processes.
Information Technology
Authors: Lyon David
Published: September 2017

Information technology (IT) is generally taken to be a technical system for storing, transmitting, or processing information. As such it could refer to the paper documents and files of a bureaucratic organization, or even to hieroglyphs on rocks in the ancient world. While such broad meanings remind us of the larger context of human interaction with information, in the twenty‐first century IT usually refers to electronically based systems that draw upon a combination of computing power and telecommunications. Indeed, IT is now central to many systems that are increasingly integrated, producing a fusion of what was once referred to separately as electronic media and information and communication technologies.
Infotainment
Authors: Langman Lauren
Published: September 2017

One crucial aspect of modern life has been a concern with broader events and the people who live in social worlds beyond our local community or nation. Thus information about people and events from wars to disasters to sports that are typically outside our limited range of contacts has meant that people are interested in the news. But news has become a commodity that is provided by media organizations and consumed by audiences. There are a vast number of sources of information, from the more general and typically serious “hard news” outlets that provide carefully researched information about the economy, government, major political events, crises, and natural disasters that impact on people's lives, to those that supply lighter, “soft news” and celebrity gossip, typically of affairs, dysfunctional personal lives, and fashion choices.
Insecurity and Fear of Crime
Authors: Robert Philippe
Published: September 2017

Insecurity and fear of crime are expressions designating the apprehension elicited by crime and, by extension, the field of research devoted to studying it.
Institutional Review Boards and Sociological Research
Authors: Blumberg Corwin Zoë , Tierney William G.
Published: September 2017

Institutional review boards (IRBs) are charged with ensuring the rights of volunteers who participate in research conducted through a university. Originally conceived after World War II to deter possible abuses in biomedical research, human subject review has expanded to research in the social sciences. The role of IRBs in research is not without controversy, especially as it pertains to sociological studies. Tension between IRBs and researchers centers on how the two parties interpret what constitutes research and the effects of IRB regulation on research in general.
Institutional Theory, New
Authors: Carter Chris , Clegg Stewart
Published: September 2017

Emerging from the sociology of education in the 1970s, new institutional theory (NIT) has become one of the foremost positions within the mainstream of American management studies. It seeks to explain the ways in which institutions are created, sustained, and diffused. NIT's antecedents lay in the institutional theorizing of writers such as Philip Selznick a generation before. Adherents of NIT are keen to draw a distinction between “new” and “old” institutionalism. While old institutionalism emphasized politics and the role of conflict, NIT took legitimacy as its master concept. The old institutionalism focused on the existence of a negotiated order between different interest groups, while in its place NIT sought to understand the way in which the quest for legitimacy is a driving force behind the isomorphism of organizations. NIT is interested in understanding the means through which the socially constructed external environment enters the organization by “creating the lens through which actors view the world and the very categories of structure, action, and thought” (Powell & DiMaggio 1991).
Institutionalism
Authors: Ingram Paul
Published: September 2017

There are many definitions of institution in sociology. Most of them are subsumed in the following: institutions are persistent social facts that regulate social behavior. “Persistent” indicates the role of institutions in stabilizing social life. “Social facts” capture the idea that institutions are the product of interaction and association and that they exist externally to individuals. “Regulate social behavior” represents that institutions sanction certain forms of social behavior and discourage others.
Intellectual Property
Authors: Rojek Chris
Published: September 2017

Any form of literature, science, music, film, or computer program can be protected by copyright to prevent third parties from making copies without written permission. Copyright is the law of authorship and dates back to the Statute of Anne (1709) passed in England to protect the rights of authors and publishers from piracy. The law has been progressively elaborated in Europe and North America to grant copyright for a fixed term to the estate of deceased authors and protect authors from the violation of their rights through new technologies of reproduction and exchange. However, the balance between the rights of authors and freedom of information is a delicate one and is regularly subject to legal challenge. In the US the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech and a free press, has been used by litigants as the basis to contest the reach of copyright.
Intergenerational Conflict
Authors: Silverstein Merril
Published: September 2017

Intergenerational conflict refers to the collective tension, strain, and antagonism between older and younger generations over what constitutes the fair distribution of public resources across age groups. Intergenerational conflict is most often invoked in the context of the generational equity debate, an ongoing public dialogue about the cost and fairness of entitlement programs for the older population. One of the opening salvos in the debate over generational equity was the observation that the well‐being of older and younger Americans diverged over the third quarter of the twentieth century as a result of public policies that favored older adults and lifted them out of poverty (Preston 1984). The popular press concluded from this that older adults had gained at the expense of younger adults, and it was not uncommon in the 1980s and 1990s for the elderly to be portrayed as a leisure class of affluent retirees unfairly benefiting from the taxes paid by a struggling working‐age population.
Internet
Authors: Slevin James
Published: September 2017

The Internet is a global network of interconnected computer hardware and software systems, making possible the storage, retrieval, circulation, and processing of information and communication across time and space. From a sociological perspective, the Internet is not synonymous with a global information machine as it is in some popular accounts. A sociological account encompasses the constituent Internet technologies and attends to these as social phenomena. It also includes the information and other content which is produced, transmitted, and received by individuals and organizations using the Internet. Finally, a sociological account of the Internet includes the socially and historically structured contexts and processes in which the production, transmission, and reception of information and communication are embedded.
Internet Medicine
Authors: Hardey Michael
Published: September 2017

The engagement of medicine with information and communications technologies (ICTs) can be traced to the early part of the twentieth century when attempts were made to send X‐ray images through the phone lines. By the 1970s, the desire to overcome the constraints distance imposed on contact between clinicians had produced a new specialist area of practice labeled “telemedicine.” Since the emergence of the Internet, telemedicine has came to denote medical practices that use, for example, email, teleconferencing, and remote diagnosis. As Giddens (1991) notes, scientific disciplines in advanced modernity generate ever more subdisciplines. Consequently, specializations have emerged organized around telepsychiatry, teleneurology, teleorthopedics, medical informatics, and so forth. Despite this differentiation, a useful distinction can now be made between telemedicine and what is know as e‐health. This recognizes the Internet as a key driver in the new “information age” where the “electronic” flows of information and capital form the “new economy” of the twenty‐first century (Castells 2001). The prefix “e” has since become attached to activities that use the Internet to make interactive links between producers and consumers, so that together with e‐commerce the category e‐health has quickly become established. It can be defined sociologically as involving theoretically grounded and empirically informed attempts to understand the dynamic, emergent, and pluralistic nature of knowledge about health and illness that is mediated by the Internet. From this, four key themes that continue to frame research and debates within e‐health are evident.
Interpersonal Relationships
Authors: Orbuch Terri L.
Published: September 2017

In any relationship, two participants are interdependent, where the behavior of each affects the outcomes of the other. Additionally, the individuals interact with each other in a series of interactions that are interrelated and affect each other. Individuals form many different kinds of relationships with other people, some of which are intimate and close (e.g., parent–child, spouse–spouse, friendships) and others which are not intimate and close (e.g., neighbor, teacher–student). Most of the research on interpersonal relationships has focused on those relationships that are close, intimate, and have high interdependence. In an influential book, Kelley and colleagues (1983) define a close relationship as one that is strong, frequent, and with diverse interdependence that lasts over a considerable period of time. In sociology, although the classic distinction between primary and secondary relationships has been expanded in the public realm (fleeting, routinized, quasi‐primary, and intimate‐secondary relationships), these close relationships (as described above) also can be categorized as primary groups, which provide support and nurture and socialize individuals to the norms of society.
Interpersonal Relationships
Authors: Orbuch Terri L.
Published: September 2017

In any relationship, two participants are interdependent, where the behavior of each affects the outcomes of the other. Most of the research on interpersonal relationships has focused on relationships that are close, intimate, and have high interdependence. In the 1960s the initial focus of research was on the interpersonal attraction process, primarily between strangers meeting for the first time. More recently, relationships have received considerable attention in sociology and the other social sciences. Research since 1980 illuminates several themes. First, an expanding body of literature demonstrates that relationships are vital to the physical and mental health of individuals. Second, current research emphasizes specific relational processes that are relevant at various stages of the life course of a relationship. A third new direction has been to concentrate on making the dyad the unit of analysis rather than the individual. Fourth, current research has emphasized the construction of meaning within relationships for relationship quality and stability. Last, a fifth new direction in relationship research has been to assess the larger environmental and structural conditions that can be harmful or beneficial for a couple's well‐being (e.g., socioeconomic status, ethnicity/race, social policies, sociopolitical factors), along with diverse family and couple relationships.
Intertextuality
Authors: Hills Matt
Published: September 2017

The concept of intertextuality has been significant within a range of theoretical debates (Orr 2003). Though often assumed to be a matter of one text directly citing or quoting material from another, intertextuality has also been theorized as underpinning the general condition of textuality itself. As French structuralist Julia Kristeva (1969) argues: “Every text takes shape as a mosaic of citations.” This has become a crucial concept in structuralist attacks on the authority of the author (Barthes 1977; Allen 2000). It is argued that language and textuality, as structuring systems, should form the proper objects of analysis, and not authorial agency.
Intimate Union Formation and Dissolution
Authors: Seltzer Judith A.
Published: September 2017

Ten years ago studies of couple relationships emphasized marriage formation and dissolution (both separation and divorce). Marriage is still the dominant heterosexual couple relationship, but increases in rates of nonmarital cohabitation, the growing recognition of couple relationships between individuals who do not live together, sometimes called LAT (Living Apart Together) couples, and same‐sex unions have broadened the area of inquiry to include these other unions as well. A benefit of the broader perspective is that it allows for comparisons between marriage and less institutionalized relationships, such as cohabitation, to assess effects of social context and laws on couples' well‐being.
Investigative Poetics
Authors: Hartnett Stephen
Published: September 2017

In his Beat‐inflected manifesto,Investigative Poetry, Edward Sanders (1976) argued that “the essence of investigative poetry” is to create “lines of lyric beauty [that] descend from data clusters,” hence both seducing and empowering readers with “a melodic blizzard of data‐fragments.” As illustrated inAmerica, his epic collection of data‐fragment‐strewn poems, Sanders (2000) hoped to merge poetry with the pedagogical imperative to teach his readers their national history and the political goal of empowering them to re‐enliven the great traditions of activism and artistry celebrated in his poems. By interweaving the emotional power of poetry with the pedagogical power of historical scholarship and the political power of fighting for social justice, Sanders'sAmericaembodies the theory explored in hisInvestigative Poetry, thus providing a model for writing layered, historically dense, yet beautiful, political poems (Bernstein 1990; Monroe 1996; Hartnett & Engels 2005).
Incest
Authors: Maryanski Alexandra
Published: September 2017

The word “incest” is derived from the Latin
incestum
and refers to sexual contact between close relatives. After Captain James Cook introduced the Polynesian word “taboo” into the English lexicon in 1777, the phrase “incest taboo” became the moral label for a forbidden carnal act. Why the need for such formal censorship? Emile Durkheim highlighted its importance when he emphasized that “all repression of incest presupposes familial relations recognized and organized by society” (1963: 27).
Internet addiction
Authors: Fisoun Virginia
Published: September 2017

The term “Internet Addiction Disorder” (IAD) has recently appeared as a psychosocial problem and is used to describe the chronic, progressive disorder associated with the addictive use of the Internet and its continuance, despite the undesirable effects on the individual's life, or loss of control over use. Goldberg first used the term IAD in 1996 (King 1996: 3) and refers to the condition as one that causes “decreased occupational, academic, social, work‐related, family‐related, financial, psychological, or physiological functioning.”
Japanese‐Style Management
Authors: Mouer Ross
Published: September 2017

Japanese‐style management (JSM)(
nihonteki kei‐ei
) is a loosely defined term used to indicate the way employees are managed in firms and other organizations in Japan. Accordingly, its meaning changes as micro‐economic realities change. At the same time, the term is used to distinguish from management practices in Japan more generally (
nihon no kei‐ei
or
nihon ni okeru kei‐ei
) those employment practices that are alleged to be uniquely Japanese (
nihonteki
) and to have a peculiarly Japanese cultural imprint. Using the term to indicate the packaged set of practices which are described below, many acknowledge that what they refer to exists mainly in Japan's large firms. In this context, JSM was popularly used in the 1970s to delineate a number of interrelated practices demarcating the way work was organized in Japan (or at least in Japan's largest firms) from how it was conceived elsewhere.
Johnson, Charles Spurgeon (1893–1956)
Authors: Jo Deegan Mary
Published: September 2017

African American race relations authority and academic administrator Charles Spurgeon Johnson was born in Bristol, Virginia on July 24, 1893. The grandson of a slave and the son of a Baptist minister, Johnson was inspired by religious ideals and a commitment to end social inequality. He graduated from Wayland Academy and studied at Virginia Union University, both in Richmond, Virginia. He completed a BA in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1917. After America entered World War I, he enlisted in the army. He returned to the university in 1919 and begin his graduate studies with Robert Ezra Park.
Journaling, Reflexive
Authors: Janesick Valerie J.
Published: September 2017

Journal writing as a reflexive research activity has been called reflexive journaling by many sociologists and researchers in training. It has been most used by qualitative researchers in the social sciences and other fields since these professionals are seeking to describe a given social setting or a person's life history in its entirety. Qualitative research has a long history of its own which includes discussion of the techniques of the qualitative researcher. Reflexive journaling has been one of the most described and often used techniques (Janesick 2004). It has proven to be an effective tool for understanding the processes of qualitative research more fully, as well as the experiences, mindsets, biases, and emotional states of the researcher.
Journaling, Reflexive
Authors: Janesick Valerie J.
Published: September 2017

Journal writing as a reflexive activity is a mainstay for many qualitative researchers across numerous disciplines. Researchers in the social sciences and other fields call this reflexive journaling or the researcher reflective journal. Qualitative research has a long history of its own which includes deep discussion of this technique (Janesick, 1995, 2011). It has proven to be effective for researchers setting out to understand their own process in the research project more fully. It is also an effective tool for documenting experiences, values, biases, and the emotional state of the researcher. In some projects, researchers also ask participants to keep a reflective journal. Thus the journal is a means of documenting the coresearcher process and gives equal weight to researcher and participants.
Japan Sociological Society
Authors: Inoue Shun
Published: September 2017

The Japan Sociological Society (JSS) is the nationwide organization for sociologists in Japan, with a membership of 3,695 as of 2013. Sociology in Japan has a history of over 120 years, since the first chair of sociology was established in 1893 at the Tokyo Imperial University (today's University of Tokyo). During the 1920s there was a steady increase in empirical research, and the JSS was founded in 1924. The first general meeting was held the following year, and meetings have been held annually since, except during the last stage of World War II. The society's journal was first published in 1924 as
Shakaigaku Zasshi (The Journal of Sociology);
since 1950, when it changed its name to
Shakaigaku Hyoron (Japanese Sociological Review)
, it has been published quarterly.
Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804)
Authors: Walsh Philip , Fuller Brian
Published: September 2017

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was born in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad), where he spent his entire life, first as a student and
Privatdozent
, later as professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. The fourth child of an intensely religious family, Kant rose beyond his humble origins – his father was a harness‐maker – to become one of the most important figures of the European Enlightenment. The trilogy of his main works, the
Critiques – Critique of Pure Reason
(Kant, 1978 [1781]),
Critique of Practical Reason
(Kant, 1976 [1788]) and
Critique of Judgment
(Kant, 1973 [1790])‐are at the roots of a system of thinking that has become an indispensable reference point for all subsequent philosophy. But Kant's philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics were also instrumental in laying the foundations of the human sciences, and classical sociology in particular was inspired by Kant. His philosophy has remained influential throughout the development of sociological thought during the twentieth century and is still an important source of ideas and inspiration within contemporary social theory.
Kindergarten
Authors: Burkam David T.
Published: September 2017

The idea of a kindergarten originated in 1840, after the German educationalist Friedrich Froebel opened a Play and Activity Institute for children between the ages of three and seven to develop their mental, social, and emotional faculties. The term is now used in many parts of the world for the initial stages of a child's classroom schooling. In some countries kindergarten is part of the formal school system, but in others it usually refers to preschool or day care programs. In France and Germany, for example, such programs are separate from the schools and are often run by churches and local community groups. In India, Mexico, and the United States kindergarten programs are available through both public and private schools.
King, Martin Luther (1929–1968)
Authors: Stanfield John H.
Published: September 2017

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not only an internationally renowned civil rights leader, but was also a public sociologist par excellence. King was born into a family and local community of socially involved ministers, deeply dedicated to issues of racial justice, in Atlanta, Georgia. His father was the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, located in the now famous Auburn Avenue black community in Atlanta, who along with peers such as the Rev. William Borders, pastor of the Wheat Street Baptist Church, and John Dobbs, informally called the Mayor of Sweet Auburn, created a community culture that was highly critical of the racial status quo. It was in the Auburn Avenue community that King developed his lifelong commitment to social justice that would become refined as he was educated and went through the experiences of being a leader of a powerful social movement. This is important to keep in mind since often, while analyzing the contributions of King, it has been common to forget, or to undervalue, the influences of his community of origin. It was here that he was exposed, at an early age, to highly educated black men who took bold public stances against the racial oppression of their day.
Kitsuse, John I. (1923–2003)
Authors: Groenemeyer Axel
Published: September 2017

John I. Kitsuse was one of the premier and most influential contributors to the social constructionist movement from the 1960s, which changed the way sociologists approached the study of social problems, normality, deviance, and control. He is primarily known as one of the founding fathers of the labeling approach to deviant behavior in the 1960s and for his contributions to the perspective of constructivism on social problems from the 1970s on.
Knowledge Management
Authors: Sillince John
Published: September 2017

Knowledge management seeks to increase organizational capability to use knowledge as a source of competitive advantage. The field has risen to prominence along with the “knowledge worker,” who is someone who does work which involves knowledge which is socially complex, causally ambiguous, and tacit. Relevant theories include social capital theory and the resource‐based view of the firm. Practitioner approaches to knowledge management emphasize ways of creating, diffusing, using, and evaluating knowledge.
Kondratieff Cycles
Authors: Wallerstein Immanuel
Published: September 2017

It is an elementary truism that no phenomena are absolutely stable. Whatever we measure in the real world shows fluctuations, whether we are speaking of basic economic phenomena (such as prices, production, employment, or investment), politico‐military phenomena (such as wars, free trade policies, or geopolitical arrangements), or cultural phenomena (such as puritanical mores or family patterns). The question is always whether we can ascertain the existence of any kind of rules or systemic pressures that govern the ups and downs of phenomena, including the explanation of the fluctuations and their timing and frequency.
Krafft‐Ebing, Richard von (1840–1902)
Authors: Plummer Ken
Published: September 2017

Richard von Krafft‐Ebing was an influential Viennese psychiatrist who invented a massive taxonomy of non‐procreative sexual classifications in his influential text,
Psychopathia Sexualis with specific reference to the Antipathy Sexual Instinct: A Medico‐Forensic Study
(1886). Never a sociologist, he gathered some 1,500 “clinical” case studies, developing a simplified version of life stories/autobiography as a tool for gathering unique subjective worlds of sexuality which could then be placed in the public domain (Plummer 1995). Many were introduced – in a fairly random way – as newly discovered medical perversions and disorders such as masochism, fetishism, necrophilia, sadism, inversion, and even heterosexuality – combining, for example, a wide range of case studies from men who were attracted to handkerchiefs with detailed case studies of necrophiliac murders. It was the first book of its kind and played a very significant social role in bringing to recognition an array of diverse sexualities. Much of this is discussed very critically in Foucault's key work,
The History of Sexuality
(1978), where Krafft‐Ebing is implicitly seen as a key figure in creating the sexual confessional, the medical construction of sexual perversion, and the contemporary organization of sexual discourses. For Foucault's influential work, Krafft‐Ebing was a theorist of the Victorian “repressive hypotheses.”
Labeling
Authors: Calhoun Thomas , Konty Mark
Published: September 2017

In the sociology of deviance the concept of labeling is used in two interrelated ways. One involves the labeling of people as
deviants
. When people are so labeled, they are judged to be deviant by some standard and the label has important sociological and psychological consequences. The other is the labeling of actions as
deviance
. When actions are labeled as such, there tends to be an actual or assumed non‐normative behavior, and that reaction reflects the feeling and attitude of a person or group toward that behavior.
Labor Movement
Authors: Fantasia Rick , Voss Kim
Published: September 2017

The labor movement is a broad, multidimensional social formation that is generated from the social structures of work and industry in a society. It may comprise both legally recognized and formally sanctioned institutions (like trade unions, political parties, and works councils) as well as less formal groupings of workers and their allies (industrial actions, organizations of strike supporters, dissident movements within unions, cultural forms, etc.). Labor movements operate at the intersection of economic practice, civil society, and the state. They are more or less firmly institutionalized in any given society in any given historical period, and can be partly characterized by the extent to which extra‐institutional practices are permitted and have been incorporated into the routine operations of industrial and labor relations. The social and organizational composition of a labor movement as well as the degree to which its practices have been institutionalized are thus two important analytical axes through which the social logic of a labor movement can be discerned.
Laboratory Studies and the World of the Scientific Lab
Authors: Lee Kleinman Daniel
Published: September 2017

The most prominent laboratory studies – produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s – continued a trend in the sociology of science and technology away from attention to the institutional character of science and toward a sociological understanding of the process of knowledge production itself and the “technical core” of science. To comprehend the process through which knowledge is
constructed
, these studies undertook ethnographic investigations of the work that goes on in scientific laboratories. Among the central findings of this body of scholarship are: (1) contrary to standard images of science, which suggest that the methods, practices, and outcomes of science are universal (or trans‐contextual), knowledge production occurs at a local level and is subject to local variation; (2) instead of the characterization of science as fundamentally logical and rational, science is the product of contingent factors; (3) scientific work does not merely read its results from nature, but instead nature is transformed in the laboratory; (4) if the view of science as “reading off nature” amounts to an understanding of science as a descriptive practice, the early laboratory studies show, by contrast, that scientific results are the product of construction.
Laborism
Authors: Beilharz Peter
Published: September 2017

Laborism refers to the theory and practice of the labor movement, articulated as its own kind of socialism or social protection. Laborism is best understood as the project which seeks to defend and extend the interests of workers and their families under capitalism. Laborism is peculiar to Anglo imperial cultures, such as Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. Its intellectual advocates are often associated with the ideological trend of reformism called Fabianism in these countries, or progressivism in the United States. The peculiarity of laborism as an Anglo phenomenon is that it results from the shift a hundred years ago of the labor movement into politics. Laborism, or labor socialism, as the defensive cliché indicates, is what labor parties do.
Lacan, Jacques (1901–1981)
Authors: Monnier Christine A.
Published: September 2017

Jacques Marie Emile Lacan received his medical degree in psychiatry in 1932 based on a doctoral dissertation analyzing a famous case of paranoid psychosis. This work marked the beginning of a clinical and theoretical career in psychoanalysis that would span over 50 years and make him one of the major, and most controversial, figures of the post‐World War II French intellectual milieu. Lacan defined his approach as a “return to Freud.” By this, he did not simply mean the establishment of a literal Freudian orthodoxy, but the rediscovery of Freud's most controversial and subversive insights. He also succeeded in underlining the importance of Freud, beyond the field of psychoanalysis, to other human and social sciences. It is therefore not surprising that his conceptual developments integrated insights from the arts (Surrealism), philosophy (Spinoza, Hegel, Heidegger, Merleau‐Ponty), linguistics (Saussure, Jakobson), anthropology (especially in the structuralist anthropology initiated by Lévi‐Strauss), and mathematics. Such a wide range points to two major difficulties in studying Lacan: first, he constantly redefined his concepts to integrate insights from other fields; second, this integration made Lacan notorious for his deliberately “unreadable” style.
Latent Growth Curve Models
Authors: Christ Oliver , Schlueter Elmar
Published: September 2017

Longitudinal methods permit the systematic study of stability and change over time and thus are a powerful tool for examining processes underlying social phenomena and the causal relation between different constructs. There are many different statistical methods to analyze longitudinal data (for an overview, see Crowder & Hand 1996; Menard 2002). Most of these techniques are related to applications of the general linear model to continuously distributed repeated measures (e.g., repeated
t
tests, ANOVA, multiple regressions, autoregressive models). A major shortcoming of these methods is that they are fixed‐effects models assuming that there are no interindividual differences in change. One prominent and powerful method to overcome this shortcoming are latent growth curve models (LGMs; synonymous terms used in literature are “latent curve models” or “latent trajectory models”) as one variant of structural equation modeling (Bollen & Curran 2006). With LGM it is possible to analyze individual trajectories and related processes of change over time. Meredith and Tisak (1990) first proposed LGM based on the seminal work of Tucker and Rao in 1958. LGMs are based on the assumption that a set of observed repeated measures taken on a given individual over time can be used to estimate an unobserved underlying trajectory. This assumption can be formally expressed as
Latinidad and Consumer Culture
Authors: Peñaloza Lisa
Published: September 2017

Latinidad, most literally, is the identity of Latinos/as. More figuratively, it is a sensibility and way of being‐in‐the‐world that expresses who one is and what one's culture is about. This quality emanates from a community of very diverse people and is used by them to relate to one another, drawing from their similarities, even as they contest it based on their differences. Born at the multiple intersections of Native American peoples, Europeans, and blacks, it connotes an amalgam of ritual traditions and values –amor,familia,respeto,compromisos,pasion; that is, love, family, respect, accomplishment, and a passion for living – at once very real, yet imagined, dynamic and organic. The geographical coordinates of its diaspora are no less complex, in pertaining to those of Latin American ancestry in the US and in Central and South American nations, the Caribbean, Spain, and, to a lesser degree, southern Italy and France. Like other social phenomena, it is individually and collectively engineered and reproduced; internally by Latinos/as, and externally, as attributed to us by non‐Latinos/as. When linked to consumer culture, the body of work has sparse but long roots, and has gained in abundance and currency with the rapid growth of the people.
Lazarsfeld, Paul (1901–1976)
Authors: Starks Brian
Published: September 2017

Paul Lazarsfeld, founder of the Bureau for Applied Social Research at Columbia University, was a pioneering empirical sociologist. Trained as a mathematician and initially self‐identifying as a psychologist, Lazarsfeld only later came to recognize himself as a sociologist.
Lechner, Norbert (1939–2004)
Authors: Alfie Miriam
Published: September 2017

Norbert Lechner is a model of a lucid social scientist who can articulate an excellent and always updated theoretical perspective with a critical sense and empirical analysis. His thoughtful research is an authentic exploration of the complex and often contradictory political and social reality of Latin American countries. He is notable for the depth of his analysis, its conceptual precision, and the high degree of independence of his discourse regarding the political actors. His work provides an example of scientific research in thematic areas where social representations, expectations, and previous conditions can overdetermine the analysis.
Lefebvre, Henri (1901–1991)
Authors: Ryan Michael T.
Published: September 2017

Henri Lefebvre had the good fortune to live a long, intellectually productive life in a century of political disasters that drove most intellectuals on the left to despair or worse. Lefebvre was one of the most original Marxist theorists to think with Marx beyond Marx about the changes taking place in capitalism since Marx's death in 1882. He appropriated in a critical manner the concepts of some of the most important social theorists. Lefebvre also developed concepts of his own: everyday life, the production of social space, difference, modernity, and reproduction of the relations of production. He completed his Diplôme d'Études Supérieures at the Sorbonne in 1924 and his dissertation in 1954. Lefebvre considered himself a philosopher/sociologist, and this led him to emphasize conceptual analysis on sociological issues. He became a member of the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1928 and was excluded from it in 1958 for participating in too many oppositional groups to the PCF. He was appointed to a research position in 1948 in the Center of Sociological Studies (CES) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). In 1960 he established the Research Group on Everyday Life at the CES. In 1965 he was appointed to the sociology chair as well as to the directorship of the Institute of Urban Sociology at the University of Paris at Nanterre. Henri Lefebvre was one of the most important influences, along with Guy Debord and the Situationist International, on the student movements and May events in France in 1968 that raised questions about the bureaucratization of private life in the “bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.” His most important publications are:Critique of Everyday Life, Vols. 1–4 (1947, 1961, 1981, 1992);The Production of Space(1974);The Urban Revolution(1970); andThe Survival of Capitalism(1976).