bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Stratification: Partner Effects
Authors: De Graaf Paul M.
Published: September 2017

Partner effects refer to the impact partners (spouses or partners in consensual unions) have on each other's life chances. In stratification research partner effects especially refer to the ways in which partners affect each other's labor market careers with regard to labor market supply and occupational status. Educational homogamy means that partners are similar with regard to their human capital and thus,
ceteris paribus
, an individual approach would predict a similarity with regard to the labor market careers of partners. However, couples face time budget problems when both partners have full‐time careers because of the domestic and caring tasks which have to be dealt with, especially when they have children. Couples must decide how to divide the paid and unpaid work, and in this decision process partner effects have proven to be important. The question is: how do partners mutually affect each other's career opportunities?
Stratification, Politics and
Authors: Brady David
Published: September 2017

One can divide this area into how stratification shapes politics and how politics affects stratification. Since at least Marx, of course, scholars have highlighted the reciprocal relationship between these two as well. Stratification in this context has meant a system of class inequality, the processes of class attainment, mobility, and disadvantage, and has involved class identities, mobilization, and structuration (how classes become real and manifest in the experiences, actions, and cultures of class members). Stratification and politics increasingly involves racial and gender stratification as well. Politics, in this sense, involves the collective and individual behavior in regards to the state, public authorities, and powerholders. Politics covers the ground from micro‐level political ideology to the macro‐level welfare state. As Wright explains, stratification and politics integrates the micro‐level interactions of locations, practices, and consciousness and the macro‐level interactions of structure, struggle, and formation. For our purposes, the focus here is on class voting, class ideology, power resources theory, and the political sources of economic inequality.
Stress and Health
Authors: Hall Jeffrey E.
Published: September 2017

Stress is an emotional‐psychophysiological state that occurs in a situational context when an individual is confronted with cues that elicit fear or anxiety responses. Medical sociologists are interested in stress because the situations that cause it are often social and increase a person's risk of disease by taxing or exceeding his or her adaptive capacities (Wheaton 1994). Admittedly, the word stress has other connotations, but this view captures the essential facets of an extensive body of research that has been expanding for almost a century.
Strong Objectivity
Authors: Naples Nancy A.
Published: September 2017

The notion of strong objectivity was first articulated by feminist philosopher Sandra Harding in 1987. Strong objectivity builds on the insights of feminist standpoint theory, which argues for the importance of starting from the experiences of those who have been traditionally left out of the production of knowledge. By starting from the lived experiences of women and others who have been traditionally outside of the institutions in which knowledge about social life is generated and classified, more objective and more relevant knowledge can be produced. It is argued that knowledge produced from the point of view of subordinated groups may offer stronger objectivity because of the greater motivation of these groups to understand the views or perspectives of those in positions of power.
Subcultures, Deviant
Authors: Berard T.J.
Published: September 2017

Deviant subcultures are sets of cultural traits that differ from social norms, or groups that display such traits. Subcultural analyses of deviance and crime have been an important dimension of sociology and criminology since the 1950s, providing insight into the group nature of much delinquency, deviance, and crime; the transmission of values conducive to deviance; and the many ways cultural variation relates to the nature and explanation of deviance, implicating social control and status relations as well as social problems. Subcultural analysis has become increasingly interdisciplinary, contributing not just to the understanding of gangs, street crime, organized crime, drug use, and criminal recidivism, but also culture, inequality and status, youth and generational relations, self and identity, music and fashion. The breadth of subcultural analysis contributes to the understanding of deviance and crime, benefiting from consideration of issues including self and identity, schooling and socialization, leisure and consumption, social control, and the ecological and cultural dimensions of inequality. The deviant subcultures literature is an ongoing interdisciplinary and international endeavor, contributing to the understanding of both deviance and culture by exploring how the distinction between the deviant and the conventional overlaps with other cultural distinctions such as those of status and social identity.
Suburbs
Authors: Friedman Judith J.
Published: September 2017

Social scientists in the US usually identify a city's suburbs as the municipalities (plus any “urban” unincorporated areas) that are located outside the political boundaries of that city, but are adjacent to the city or to its other suburbs. A city's suburbs form a band around the city that has (1) lower population density overall than the city, yet (2) predominantly urban land uses. Unless the city is located near another city, its suburbs end where farmland or open space predominates. The term suburb refers either to the entire band of suburbs around a city or to particular places within a suburban band. The term suburban also can refer to a way of life identified with suburbs.
Supermarkets
Authors: Isaacs Bronwyn Alison
Published: September 2017

Supermarkets are among the most ubiquitous and homogeneous of urban retail spaces. Changes within the supermarket industry have played a role influencing nutrition, as well as social and cultural life, especially as supermarket chains and corporations spread internationally and adapt their retail formats to cater to different consumer lifestyles. Over the past decade, researchers in sociology and other social science disciplines have developed a new critical perspective on the social and economic power of supermarkets. This literature pays increased attention to the globalization of supermarkets, as well as market centralization and the new regulatory responsibilities of supermarket corporations, which include the monitoring of food safety standards. Sociologists also analyze supermarkets as social and cultural authorities, examining the ways supermarkets operate as food educators and the ways in which consumer practices communicate class identity and cultural capital.
Suzuki, Eitaro (1894–1966)
Authors: Suzuki Yasushi
Published: September 2017

Eitaro Suzuki is one of the pioneers of Japanese rural and urban sociology. Graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1922, he taught at Gifu Agricultural High School and Seoul Imperial University. After World War II, he became a professor at Hokkaido University.
Symbolic Classification
Authors: Ghezzi Simone
Published: September 2017

Symbolic classification – literally, complex arrangements of symbols into wholes – refers to the process of classifying and ordering by means of which individuals are able to make sense of the natural and social world. They do so by means of models of categorization that are culturally and socially determined. Such categories are cast in concrete images that we may call symbols, which are, by definition, polysemic and relativistic because they convey different meanings.
Symbolic Classification
Authors: Ghezzi Simone
Published: September 2017

Symbolic classification refers to the process of classifying and ordering by means of which individuals are able to make sense of the natural and social world. This process occurs in different and locally defined ways, and therefore it varies cross‐culturally. Individuals are always inclined to impose an order on the objects of the natural and the social environment that surrounds them. They do so by means of models of categorization which are culturally and socially determined. Such categories are cast in concrete images that we may call symbols, which are, by definition, polysemic and relativistic because they convey different meanings. Durkheim and Mauss, alongside Hertz and Granet, were among the first scholars to reflect on the ways human beings come to classify symbolically by means of a system of categories. More recently Douglas, Alexander, and Heritier have moved away from the structural problem and have used symbolic classification to focus on issues of practice.
Symbolic Exchange
Authors: Ryan Michael T.
Published: September 2017

Symbolic exchange is the organizing principle, the cellular structure, of the earliest forms of society, the forms that Anthony Giddens designates as “tribal cultures.” The exchanges that take place within and between clans, within and between tribes, and between chiefs and other members of the tribe are more than economic exchanges as we know them in modern societies, and their circulation integrates the members of these societies. Marcel Mauss conceptualizes these exchanges as a form of gift giving, and the gift is a “total social phenomenon.” They are multidimensional: economic, moral, religious, mythological, juridical, political, aesthetic, and historical.
Surplus Value
Authors: Beamish Rob
Published: September 2017

Determining the source of social surplus was the most important scientific and political question addressed by classical political economists. Marx accepted British political economists' argument that a product's value is based on the amount of socially necessary, simple, abstract labor that is required for its production, measured as time. Marx's theory of surplus value stems from his theory of value and has four key elements: all commodities exchange as equivalents of value; workers do not have direct access to the means of production but are free to sell their ability to work (or labor power) in order to survive; like every commodity, labor power has a value; and workers and employers exchange equivalents with workers agreeing to work a specified period of time in return for their labor power's full value (employers do not create surplus value by paying workers below their value). The key to surplus value is the unique ability of labor power, in a system of equivalent exchange, to produce, throughout an entire workday, more value than the value exchanged with the worker (the bearer of labor power). According to Marx, labor power is the sole source of surplus value and thus workers and their labor power are the source of social surplus in capitalist societies.
Saturated Self
Authors: Gergen Kenneth J.
Published: September 2017

The concept of the saturated self was developed by Kenneth J. Gergen in his volume
The Saturated Self
(Gergen, 1991). It refers to the dramatic expansion in the range of relations (real, virtual, and imagined) in which the individual is increasingly immersed. This expansion is largely attributed to the accumulation of twentieth‐century communication technologies such as radio, television, the Internet, and cell phones (among others). The resulting transformation in everyday life includes an expansion and com‐plexification of the individual's repertoire of “ways of being” (e.g., attitudes, values, opinions, moralities, styles of relating), a compounding of evaluative standards applied to the self, an infinite expansion of opportunities, and an expanding sea of obligations. In Gergen's terms, one becomes
multiphrenic
. As a general orientation to life, the expansion in the range of realities, reasons, and moralities to which one is exposed leads to a consciousness of construction. Increasingly suspect are traditional claims to truth, objectivity, and reason. At the interpersonal level, the condition of saturation leads to a receding sense of authenticity and to a diminishing in the time and attention devoted to any particular relationship. The result is a loss of enduring emotional intensity and commitment.
Service Work
Authors: Korczynski Marek
Published: September 2017

Taking as a starting point the useful abstraction that all jobs involve work on one of materials, information, or people, service work can be defined as work that involves working on people. The presence of the service recipient within the labor process is the central definitional element of service work. Service work in this sense involves intangibility, perishability (service work cannot be stored), variability (of service recipient expectations and actions), simultaneous production and consumption, and inseparability (of the service recipient from the service process). Writers have taken one or more of these aspects and drawn up subcategories of service work, for example, mass services, service shops, and professional services.
Saint‐Simon, Claude Henri (1760–1825)
Authors: Pickering Mary
Published: September 2017

A self‐taught philosopher, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint‐Simon, helped inspire sociology, socialism, technocratic approaches to social organization, and the idea of a united Europe. He called for the refounding of knowledge, including the study of society, on the basis of the sciences, which he believed held the key to intellectual order and thus social stability after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Based on his analysis of history, he predicted that society in the future would be scientific and industrial. It would be a workshop in which everyone would take up useful activities. A perceptive analyst of modernity, Saint‐Simon left a significant legacy.
Social type (Simmel)
Authors: Silver Dan
Published: September 2017

Although Georg Simmel (1858–1918) did not articulate a concept of social type, his descriptions of configurations like the stranger, the adventurer, the metropolitan, the miser, and the spendthrift have stimulated sociologists who use the concept. Among these, it is perhaps Simmel's analysis of the stranger that has spawned the most literature, including Robert Park's type of the Marginal Man, Paul Siu's concept of the Sojourner, Alfred Schütz's concept of the Homecomer, and Lewis Coser's treatment of the Alien (Levine 1985: Ch. 5).
Strauss, Anselm L. (1916–1996)
Authors: Clarke Adele E.
Published: September 2017

American sociologist Anselm L. Strauss is best known for his work in qualitative research methods (grounded theory), medical sociology (chronic illness, dying, trajectories, healthcare organization and policy), sociology of work (articulation work, professions and careers), mesolevel theory (social worlds and arenas, negotiated or processual ordering), social psychology (transformations of identity, awareness contexts), Chicago sociology (symbolic interactionist theory), and urban sociology (American cities) (Baszanger 1998).
Strauss, Anselm L. (1916–1996)
Authors: Clarke Adele E.
Published: September 2017

American sociologist Anselm L. Strauss (1916–1996) is best known for scholarship in qualitative research methods (grounded theory), medical sociology (chronic illness, dying, trajectories, healthcare organization and policy), sociology of work (articulation work, professions and careers), mesolevel theory (social worlds and arenas, negotiated or processual ordering), social psychology (transformations of identity, awareness contexts), Chicago sociology (symbolic interactionist theory), and urban sociology (American visual culture) (Baszanger, 1998; Clarke, 2008).
Schizophrenia
Authors: Doubt Keith
Published: September 2017

Schizophrenia affects 1 percent of the world's population. It is not, as popular culture sometimes understands it to be, the rare phenomenon of split personality; nor is it now viewed by clinical psychologists, as it once was by some, as a person's creative, desperate response to an untenable family situation. Today, most medical researchers, physicians, and advocates in organizations such as National Alliance for the Mentally 111 view schizophrenia as a complex, physical pathology, a disease of the brain.
Sociocide
Authors: Doubt Keith
Published: September 2017

Violence has taken on an unfathomable orientation in recent conflicts in Bosnia Herzegovina, Rwanda, Chechnya, the Middle East, and now Iraq. Not only are houses destroyed, so is the prestige of the home. Not only are women and children killed, so are the city, its rituals and ways of life. Not only is a nation of people decimated, so are its places of worship and material culture. Finally, not only is a society lethally wounded, so are its social system and institutions. The violence in the first case is called domicide; in the second, urbicide; and in the third, genocide. In the fourth case it is necessary to introduce a new term: sociocide.
Status Shield
Authors: Kolb Kenneth
Published: September 2017

Arlie Hochschild coined the term “status shield” in her influential book,
The Managed Heart
, to describe how status serves to protect individuals from the “displaced feelings of others” (Hochschild 1983: 163). To articulate this concept, Hochschild cited the experiences of male and female flight attendants in relation to upset travelers. She argues that the men, because of their relatively greater status as men, were shielded from passengers’ anger and frustration in ways that their female colleagues were not. As a result, the female flight attendants found themselves to be “easier targets” (1983: 163) and “the complaint department, the ones to whom dissatisfaction is fearlessly expressed” (1983: 181). Hochschild also argues that this phenomenon is not exclusive to gender: “persons in low‐status categories – women, people of color, children – lack a status shield against poorer treatment of their feelings” (1983: 174). As a result, verbal abuse is more likely to be aimed at those with less status than those with more status.
Sexualities Across the Life Course
Authors: Carpenter Laura M.
Published: September 2017

Scholars who approach sexualities from a life course perspective are chiefly interested in how sexual and social experiences – such as childhood sex play, immigration, or divorce – at one point in a person's life affect their sexual beliefs and behaviors at later junctures. They are also concerned with how individuals’ sexual biographies are shaped by broader cultural and historical changes, such as the development of oral contraceptives or the gay rights movement.
Tatemae/Honne
Authors: Bachnik Jane
Published: September 2017

Tatemae/honne
distinguish between the world of social relations (surface reality) and the world of feelings (inner reality).
Tatemae
refers to formal principles or rules to which one is at least outwardly constrained, while
honne
conveys personal feelings or motives, which cannot be openly expressed due to
tatemae
. Rather than a discrepancy between a “false” exterior and “true” interior,
tatemae/honne
are better understood as conveying the existence of more than one kind of truth in social situations. Thus the “truth” of what is appropriate to say directly to others may be different from the “truth” in our hearts. Japanese cocoon their guests in
tatemae
so that a faux pas by a guest, even if it offends the host, will not be communicated directly in
tatemae
. Japanese accept that social communications may not correspond to personal feelings; moreover, they consider the surface reality to be just as “real” as the inner, private reality.
Teachers
Authors: Gordon Kristin
Published: September 2017

With over 3 million teachers working in the US public school system, teaching attracts considerable attention from sociologists. Many issues have been explored. Dominating the field are questions concerning teachers’ roles, quality, professional status, training, gender composition, pay, staffing, and placement. Teachers play multiple roles in the educational process. First, teachers impart academic skills and knowledge (human capital). Second, teachers socialize children in the lifestyles, values, and cultures of society (cultural capital). The importance of the academic, social, and cultural dimensions of this work for children raises one of the foremost questions in research on teachers: Does teacher quality matter? Early research studying the impact of teacher credentials and experience largely indicated that teacher quality did not consistently relate to student achievement. More recent exploration reveals that teacher preparation, particularly subject‐matter knowledge, does positively impact student achievement.
Teaching and Gender
Authors: Grant Linda , Renzulli Linda
Published: September 2017

The study of teachers and teaching has always been an important focus of sociology of education, but the analysis of links between teaching and gender has developed more recently. As Grant and Murray (1999) contend, K‐12 teaching and postsecondary teaching are two different occupations and thus relationships between gender and teaching differ at each level. Other researchers have studied gender as it affects pedagogy and curriculum at all levels of schooling. Finally, some scholars, especially those working from a feminist perspective, have explored what students learn about gender in schooling, and how teachers – intentionally or not – affect the gender climates of educational institutions.
Technology, Science, and Culture
Authors: Efron Noah
Published: September 2017

It is because the sciences, especially the natural sciences, were for so long, and by so many, taken to be divorced from culture that their great interpenetration with culture remains surprising and, in some circles, controversial. In recent decades, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of science have documented many ways in which cultural influences have affected the development of the sciences, and in which sciences have left an imprint on seemingly far‐flung aspects of culture. This scholarship has been vigorously, sometimes viciously, disputed by scientists and others who still see the sciences as largely unswayed by the cultures in which they are practiced. In the 1990s, this dispute became commonly, if rather grandly, known as “the Science Wars.”
Telephone
Authors: Green Nicola
Published: September 2017

The telephone was developed in 1876, and alongside communication technologies such as the telegraph and steam‐based transportation systems, it was one of the key technologies that contributed to the transformation of late nineteenth and early twentieth‐century western societies. The ability to transmit sound across long distances in real time was initially treated with either wonder or suspicion, but by the end of the twentieth century the telephone had become a taken‐for‐granted feature of everyday life in many parts of the western world. It is because of this ubiquity that sociologists have tended to neglect the telephone as a fundamentally social technology. More recently, however, sociologists have come to pay more attention to the extent of its significance in social communication, interpersonal interaction, social organization, and the regulation of social life.
Televangelism
Authors: Swatos William H.
Published: September 2017

Initially an American phenomenon, televangelism refers to the use of television for Christian missionary outreach, of an evangelical‐fundamentalist type, usually incarnated in a single leadership figure, which became particularly prominent in the 1970s as a result of shifts in broadcasting policies regulated by the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1960. Prior to that time, the FCC required the commercial broadcast networks to donate a portion of their airtime to “public interest” use. A convenient way to do this was for the stations to cooperate with large, mainstream religious bodies to produce a variety of non‐confrontational, non‐sectarian programs that could fit within this category. This ended when the FCC in 1960 ruled that the stations could count commercial programming toward their public interest quotas. The effect was to open a new market, wherein profit interests could redefine the public interest within category limits. Hence, “religious interest” could be met by allowing the religious interests with the most money to have the available slots. This was greatly enhanced as more broadcast frequencies became more easily available. So was born the parallel religious institution of the “electronic church,” with its most successful exponents eventually termed “televangelists.”
Theory Construction
Authors: Webster Murray , Markovsky Barry
Published: September 2017

In sociology, the term theory is used in a variety of ways, not all of which are mutually compatible. For present purposes we adopt a definition that is consistent with how the term is used by many sociologists, and by most scientists outside of our field: a
theory
is a set of explicit, abstract, general, logically related statements formulated to explain phenomena in the natural world.
Theory construction
is then the process of formulating and assembling components of theories into coherent wholes, or the process of revising and expanding theories in light of logical, semantic, and empirical analyses.
Third World and Postcolonial Feminisms/Subaltern
Authors: Morrissey Marietta
Published: September 2017

Sociological interest in feminism in the so‐called third world nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America has been conditioned by disciplinary reactions and responses to larger theoretical transformations in the academy. The consequence has been a shift from liberal feminist interpretations to more comprehensive understandings of the range of feminisms that have emerged in conditions of economic dependency, underdevelopment, and globalization. More recently, sociologists have begun to consider the complexity of women's positions and those of other powerless groups – the subaltern – through the lens of postcolonial studies.
Time
Authors: Clark Peter
Published: September 2017

Time‐reckoning systems contain benchmarks that indicate the passing of time and durational expectancies with respect to sequences, rhythmic features, and periodicities. There is no social ordering without temporal ordering, yet time comprises more than the chronological use of calendar and clock time (CCT) with which most of the world associates it. There are also very significant frames of action calculated through the heterogeneous events located within natural and task‐based processes (Gurvitch 1964; Dubinskas 1988; Clark 1985; Bluedorne 2003). Time reckoning is a multilayered, hierarchical, contingent relationship between past, present, and future processes (Gurvitch 1964; Clark 1985; Harvey 1989; Adam 2004). The present is constituted through the differences between the remembered past and images of the future. One aim of an organization or society should be to establish an accessible, robust repertoire of temporal recipes and heuristics which enable the actionable interpretation of those future events that are located in emergent processes and flows.
Time Series (in Education)
Authors: Capraro Robert M. , Navruz Bilgin
Published: September 2017

Time series analysis is an underused method in educational research. It is powerful for building a clear picture of school variable trends. It is through time series analytic methods that more vivid pictures of school funding, student learning, teacher development, and other important aspects of the educational process emerge. Through a deeper understanding of time series analysis, researches can make efficient use of existing data and develop more robust models.
Time‐Space
Authors: Slevin James
Published: September 2017

All social life exists in time and space. However, when sociologists attend to the “situated” character of social life, they do not treat time‐space simply as the temporal and spatial environment of the phenomena they study. They see time‐space as a constitutive feature in the production and reproduction of what people do and in the way they do things together. The ordering of social life comes about because social practices are routinely made to come together across time‐space as shared experiences. This binding of time‐space is expressed in the ways in which societies, institutions, and individuals organize time‐space, the communication systems they develop and use, and the forms of power they generate.
Totalitarianism
Authors: El‐Ojeili Chamsy
Published: September 2017

Totalitarianism is a concept designating a social order completely or nearly completely dominated by an all‐embracing party‐state. A totalitarian social order is said to lack independent spheres and associations, pluralism, rights, and genuine political contestation. Often seen as a relative of “authoritarianism,” totalitarianism is often distinguished as more ideological, involving domination by a single party, entailing more pervasive state intervention, and being a strictly twentieth‐century phenomenon. Totalitarianism is frequently viewed as a consequence of major social changes characteristic of the twentieth century – total warfare and mass mobilization, new technologies and techniques of communication, and the steep growth and spread of state intervention.
Totemism
Authors: Riccardo Gaetano
Published: September 2017

The word totemism denotes in a broad sense the complex of beliefs concerning the existence of a sort of kinship between a human group, or a single individual, and an animal or a plant serving as an emblem of this link. This relationship implies a range of rituals and taboos, especially alimentary and sexual ones, which bind those who recognize themselves as members belonging to the same totem. The word itself, in the variant
totam
, was used in 1791 by the English traveler J. Long to designate the link of kinship and the worship of plants and animals by the Algonquin Indians of the Ojibwa, in Eastern North America. Although the term referred to the clan totem, Long used it to describe individual totemism, that is to say, the belief in the existence of a personal link between a person and an animal (more rarely a plant), which is considered as a guardian spirit.
Traditional Consumption City (Japan)
Authors: Suzuki Yasushi
Published: September 2017

“Traditional consumption city” is one of the categories introduced by Susumu Kurasawa (1968) in his typology of Japanese cities in the early 1960s. His typology emphasizes that the patterns of historical development of cities determine their distinctive social structures. The traditional consumption city refers to cities founded during the feudal era. A contrasting type is the industrial cities that developed largely during the modernization that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868. (For simplicity, the following description has been updated, although the typology remains essentially the same as Kurasawa's original.)
Traffic in Women
Authors: Hagood Lee Susan
Published: September 2017

Traffic in women denotes the practice of transporting women away from their home to a distant location where they are coerced or forced into work or prostitution in slave‐like conditions to the profit of their traffickers. Some 2–4 million women are trafficked annually. Women typically are lured into initial cooperation through the deceitful promise of employment at better wages than available in their home area. Traffickers target impoverished regions with few employment opportunities and transfer women to more affluent areas with a market for their labor or sexual services. Some victims are sold into trafficking by relatives or fellow villagers. Most fall prey to criminal organizations with extensive international networks which profit greatly from this lucrative trade. In many regions, legal businesses participate in trafficking under the guise of tourism or entertainment. States profit through taxes on these businesses, and corrupt officials benefit from bribes to protect the industry. In some areas, military installations and peacekeeping operations provide a customer base for trafficking. The international community has responded to trafficking with a Protocol calling on states to enact laws to criminalize all involvement in traffic in women. Heads of state have labeled this growing practice a new slave trade requiring concerted international action.
Transcarceration
Authors: Menzies Robert
Published: September 2017

A concept that originated with the revisionist social control and new penology literatures of the 1980s and 1990s (Lowman, Menzies, and Palys, 1987), transcarceration refers to the widespread profusion of regulatory institutions, practices, authorities, and human subjects of control systems across and beyond traditional boundaries of state governance. Sociological writings on transcarceration owe their intellectual allegiance, in large part, to Michel Foucault's (1977) work on the rise of the disciplinary society and “carceral archipelago”; to Andrew Scull's (1984) deconstruction of mainstream narratives about community mental health and corrections movements; and to Stanley Cohen's (1985) mapping of the “master patterns” of contemporary deviancy classification and punishment schemes. Taking up these critiques, sociologists of law, critical criminologists, and mental health theorists and researchers have sought to explain the failings of the diversion, decarceration, rehabilitation, and reintegration enterprises of the late twentieth century – and of the post‐World War II liberal reconstructionist and civil libertarian political philosophies that these movements embodied.
Transition Economies
Authors: Lang Rainhart
Published: September 2017

Societies or economies in transition have been the focus of sociological research since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, which symbolized the demise of the state socialist system. The termtransition economiestherefore applies mainly to post‐socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, and also in East Asia, despite its wider use in the economic or sociological literature.
Transnational Movements
Authors: Davies Thomas
Published: September 2017

After introducing the long history of transnational movements, this entry provides an overview of some of the principal transnational structures and processes of transnational movements, as well as their impacts on governments, intergovernmental organizations, and corporations. The diversity of transnational movements and their influence is emphasized, as is their significance across regional contexts. The analysis considers the latest transformations in transnational movements, and concludes with discussion of significant challenges confronting these movements in the twenty‐first century.
Triangulation
Authors: Denzin Norman K.
Published: September 2017

Triangulation refers to the application and combination of several research methodologies in the study of the same phenomenon. The concept of triangulation, as in the action of making a triangle, may be traced to the Greeks and the origins of modern mathematics. Introduced in the social sciences in the 1950s (Campbell & Fiske 1959), heavily criticized in the 1980s (see Silverman 1985; Lincoln & Guba 1985; Guba & Lincoln 1989) and 1990s (Flick 2004), triangulation is a postpositivist methodological strategy. It has recently returned to favor as a new generation of scholars are drawn to a mixed, or multimethod, approach to social inquiry (Teddlie & Tashakkori 2003).
Trust
Authors: Cook Karen S.
Published: September 2017

A number of social theorists (e.g., Fukuyama 1995) argue that trust is somehow central to the production of social order in society. Trust fosters cooperative relations and lessens the need for monitoring and sanctioning. The strong argument that trust is
required
to produce cooperation, however, cannot be accurate since cooperation occurs in many settings in which there is very little trust. In such settings cooperation is secured by other mechanisms (Cook et al. 2005). In many instances these mechanisms include reliable legal institutions that back property rights and contracts, as well as professional associations that monitor and sanction improper behavior and block the violation of trust relations (e.g., for physicians, lawyers, and others whose clients are often vulnerable).
Trustworthiness
Authors: Hatch J. Amos
Published: September 2017

Trustworthiness is a concept that constructivist qualitative researchers have used to establish criteria for judging the adequacy of their scholarly inquiries. Trustworthiness is roughly equivalent to the concept of validity in traditional quantitative research, and the genesis of its development is rooted in attempts by qualitative researchers in the early 1980s to find ways to legitimize their work and persuade others to take it seriously. Constructivist researchers think of trustworthiness as a system of checks and balances that take form in four criteria that reframe traditional, positivist elements of validity.
Credibility
is the constructivist criterion that parallels internal validity in the positivist paradigm;
transferability
parallels external validity;
dependability
stands in for reliability; and
confirmability
takes the place of objectivity. Along with the substitute criteria are corresponding empirical procedures (e.g., prolonged engagement, triangulation, and member checks) designed to affirm the adequacy of qualitative reports.
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions
Authors: Avruch Kevin
Published: September 2017

Truth – or Truth and Reconciliation – Commissions are “bodies set up to investigate a past history of violations of human rights in a particular country – which can include violations by the military or other government forces or armed opposition forces” (Hayner 2002: 14). Such commissions focus on the past (usually on violations committed under a previous regime) and have strictly delimited mandates, both as to duration and what “counts” as violation. In the Chilean commission's mandate, for example, only cases where victims actually died under torture were to be counted as human rights violations and investigated. The majority of commissions were established by executive order (less frequently by legislatures) of the new government. In the case of El Salvador, the United Nations established the commission, and it was (untypically) headed by non‐Salvadorans. In a few cases an NGO established the commission, as in Rwanda and earlier in South Africa by the African National Congress to investigate its own abuses. In legal terms, Truth Commissions are to be distinguished from “tribunals” or other more strictly judicial entities, such as War Crimes Commissions, since they do not possess the formal power to prosecute or otherwise render “justice” – an important point to be discussed below. In a few cases, Truth Commissions operate alongside tribunals (East Timor and Sierra Leone), or parallel to other judicial processes (Rwanda).
Tarde, Gabriel (1843–1904)
Authors: Borch Christian
Published: September 2017

Gabriel Tarde developed a comprehensive general theory of society based on the notion of imitation. His sociological program was very influential in late nineteenth‐century French sociology as well as in early twentieth‐century American sociology, but later generations largely ignored his work, although a recent revival of Tarde's thought is detectable. Tarde's starting point was a cosmological theory of universal repetition. While the physical world is characterized by repetition through vibration, and organic life by repetition through heredity, social life for Tarde is characterized by repetition through imitation. Indeed, in his sociological masterpiece,
Laws of Imitation
, he defined society as imitation. Imitation constitutes a social bond in that it signifies how one person approaches another's taste, gestures, choices, and so on. Tarde applied his theory of imitation to various fields, such as crime, crowd behavior, power, and economics.
Thrift stores
Authors: Raulli Julie A.
Published: September 2017

Thrift stores vary considerably in consumer societies like the United States, from a single store owned by an individual or a non‐profit group, to dozens of stores across the country owned and operated by a large charitable organization or a for‐profit firm. Clothing, shoes, and household goods are some of the items commonly found in these shopping venues. In the United States thrift stores typically have been associated with the poor, a place where lower‐income shoppers or even the destitute could satisfy their material needs. In the early twentieth century, a US middle class that embraced disposability donated their discards to salvage charities that resold items in the thrift stores they operated (Strasser 1999). The thrift industry in the United States still largely depends on donations from middle‐ and upper‐income households, which is why recessionary periods are particularly problematic for both charitable non‐profit organizations and for‐profit firms that often employ non‐profit groups to secure a steady flow of store merchandise.
Uncertainty
Authors: Zinn Jens
Published: September 2017

Uncertainty is characterized by cognitive and emotional elements. Uncertainty indicates unclear, ambiguous, or contradictory cognitive constructions, which cause feelings of uncertainty.
Unemployment as a Social Problem
Authors: Allmendinger Jutta , Ludwig‐Mayerhofer Wolfgang
Published: September 2017

All industrialized or post‐industrial societies consider themselves to be working societies. Work – or more precisely,gainfulwork – defines an individual's worth and status. It is for most people the main means of earning a living and frequently the prerequisite to be eligible for social security coverage. Therefore, unemployment is a principal social and political challenge – in particular since the mid‐1970s, when most western countries experienced a marked increase in unemployment as a result of the so‐called first oil crisis. This followed an approximately 20‐year period during which it was generally assumed that the interwar economic and labor market crisis was a thing of the past. Since then, the western industrial countries have tried, with varying success, to come to terms with the problem of unemployment. The post‐socialist economies – to varying degrees as well – are also hit by unemployment.
Uneven Development
Authors: Jacobs A. J.
Published: September 2017

Uneven development refers to the inequitable spatial distribution of wealth and/or economic growth within a city, a metropolitan area, a nation‐state, or globally. The term also represents the simultaneous occurrence of economic and wealth expansion in one area accompanied by disinvestment and/or expanding poverty in another area. Urban scholars frequently have measured uneven development statistically, through an examination of the geographic distribution of income and employment within or among metropolitan regions, or by an analysis of changes in these and other variables among municipalities, over time. For example, Hill (1974) utilized zero‐order correlations to measure economic class and racial segregation by place within 127 American Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Jacobs (2003) compared the degree of place stratification in the Detroit and Nagoya Auto Regions by calculating the standard deviation divided by mean change in per capita income, population, and private employment in the two regions between 1969 and 2000 (i.e., the coefficient of variation) (see Jacobs 2005).
Urban
Authors: Parrillo Vincent N.
Published: September 2017

Urban
is one of those deceptive concepts that seem simple to grasp yet have many layers of complexity that are subject to varying interpretations, depending on one's theoretical and analytical predisposition. Derived from the Latin word
urbanus
(meaning characteristic of, or pertaining to, the city),
urban
essentially holds that same connotation to most people.
Urban Movements
Authors: Pruijt Hans
Published: September 2017

Urban movements are social movements through which citizens attempt to achieve some control over their urban environment. The urban environment comprises the built environment, the social fabric of the city, and the local political process.
Urban Political Economy
Authors: Nevarez Leonard
Published: September 2017

One of sociology's original and most fundamental questions is: how does the city shape social life? The answer provided by urban political economy is: as a mechanism in the accumulation of wealth, with all the power and inequality that results. “Political economy” generally refers to the scholarly paradigm that examines how material processes of production and exchange shape and are shaped by decisions made in economic and political institutions; with “urban,” this concern centers around material production
of
and
within
cities. Since the 1970s, urban political economy has influenced the field of urban sociology, bringing insights from other disciplines – particularly social geography (with its conceptualization of social space and place) and political science (the focus on government and law) – while retaining sociology's social constructionist framework. Sociology provides an especially hospitable discipline for urban political economy's investigation of the ways in which the city's economic and political relations cohere and evolve across institutional, legal, and territorial domains.
Urban–Rural Population Movements
Authors: White Michael J.
Published: September 2017

The movement of the population between rural and urban areas is both a major consequence and a major determinant of social change. From a sociological vantage point, this movement offers potential for significant transformation in sending and receiving communities alike, as various types of individuals (differentiated by age, sex, education, ethnicity, etc.) are added and subtracted from the community. For the individual, the relocation may bring attendant challenges, even as it brings new opportunities. Within the research community, the study of urban–rural population movement would be seen as a subdivision within the broader study of internal migration, urbanization, population redistribution, or migrant adjustment.
Urban Space
Authors: Agiurre Adalberto
Published: September 2017

It is not an easy task to provide a definition of urban space because such a definition must consider the social parameters of its constituent parts: urban and space. The difficulty of defining urban space is enhanced if one considers that urban space is an artifact of urbanization – a social process that describes the manner in which cities grow and societies become more complex. For example, a synergistic perspective of space situates the location of “urban” as an outcome of social and institutional forces associated with urbanization. In contrast, a structural perspective of space identifies “urban” as the product of social structures and relationships that typify urbanization. Combining the synergistic and structural perspectives results in the identification of social features associated with urban space: (1) diversity of social roles and relationships, and (2) institutional arrangements and social networks necessary for efficient social order. No matter which perspective one adopts, one thing is clear: urban space is a dynamic aspect of urbanization. Urban space involves synergistic and structural aspects.
Urban Way of Life (East Asia)
Authors: Suzuki Yasushi
Published: September 2017

Among the various definitions of the “urban way of life” in Japanese social science, Susumu Kurasawa's (1987) definition is most widely accepted in sociology. “Way of life” here refers to a way of coping with common and collective problems in the community. A “rural way of life” is characterized by a strong capacity of residents’ households to deal with common problems and their dependence on the mutual aid systems of laypeople in coping with collective problems. In contrast, the “urban way of life” is characterized by the low ability of households to sustain themselves, and their consequential dependence on the specialized systems of experts and professional institutions.