bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Politics and Sport
Authors: Houlihan Barrie
Published: September 2017

There are many definitions of politics which, while not mutually exclusive, highlight distinct understandings and orientations. The dominant definition limits politics to the study of the institutions of government at national and transnational levels. However, this narrow focus on the public sphere has been strongly challenged by, among others, critical theorists and feminists on the grounds that politics can also be defined more broadly as concerning any social relations which involve the exercise of power and authority. Such a definition expands the focus of the study of politics beyond the institutions of government to include institutions in civil society such as national sports federations, the World Anti‐Doping Agency, local sports clubs, and individual teams. A third definition emphasizes processes of decision‐making and would, for example, draw attention to the influence of the media and the role of interest groups and individuals in lobbying governments. Finally, there are definitions of politics that emphasize the outcomes of political processes, best summed up by Harold Lasswell as “who gets what, when, and how.”
Positive Deviance
Authors: Heckert Druann Maria , Heckert Daniel Alex
Published: September 2017

Positive deviance remains an intriguing concept with potential to foster new areas of research inquiry (Ben‐Yehuda 1990). The roots for the idea are not new; in fact, West (2003) maintains that the theoretical roots of positive deviance are contained in the seminal works of Durkheim, Simmel, and Weber. He contends, moreover, that these theorists recognized the synergies in deviance in that both positive and negative deviance occupy a “shared symbolic form.” For example, Weber analyzed charisma and argued that this type of legitimate authority can produce positive and negative deviants.
Post‐Industrial Society
Authors: Smith Michael R.
Published: September 2017

The concept of postindustrial society is part of a typology of social evolution. Agrarian societies were displaced by the Industrial Revolution and the social changes that accompanied it. By the early twentieth century the rich countries of Western Europe and North America had become “industrial societies.” Subsequent economic and social change undermined their core institutions. The social form that emerged has been labelled “postindustrialism.” The earlier writings on this subject focused primarily on the political consequences of the transitions. More recent work broadens the range of consequences of interest to include the character of employment, the fate of the welfare state, and the design of cities.
Postmodern Culture
Authors: Taylor Victor E.
Published: September 2017

Postmodern culture is a far‐reaching term describing a range of activities, events, and perspectives relating to art, architecture, the humanities, and the social sciences beginning in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast to modern culture, with its emphasis on social progress, coherence, and universality, postmodern culture represents instances of dramatic historical and ideological change in which modernist narratives of progress and social holism are viewed as incomplete, elastic, and contradictory. In conjunction with the end of modernist progress narratives, an insistence on coherence gives way to diversity and the dominance of universality is subverted by difference within a postmodern condition. Additionally, postmodern culture stands for more than the current state of society. Postmodern culture is characterized by the valuing of activities, events, and perspectives that emphasize the particular over the global or the fragment over the whole. This reversal of a modernist ideology necessitates a valuation of variation and flexibility in the cultural sphere. Primarily through the writings of Jean‐François Lyotard, whose seminal book
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(1984) remains the definitive exposition of the term and its significance to society, postmodern culture has come to be identified with a radical critique of the relationship between the particular and the universal in art, culture, and politics.
Postmodern Culture
Authors: Taylor Victor E.
Published: September 2017

Postmodern culture is global, although it takes shape initially in western culture in the late twentieth century. It is a far‐reaching phenomenon describing a range of activities, events, and perspectives relating to the arts, architecture, the humanities, politics, and the social sciences across world cultures. Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century and continuing to today, postmodern culture represents plasticity, diversity, eclecticism, antifoundationalist philosophy, and, for many, relativism. In contrast to modern culture, with its emphasis on social progress, coherence, and universality, postmodern culture represents instances of dramatic historical and ideological change in which modernist narratives of progress and social holism are viewed as incomplete, noncausal, elastic, and contradictory. In conjunction with the end of modernist progress narratives, an insistence on totality and coherence gives way to fragmentation and diversity and the dominance of universality in cultural schemes is subverted by difference within a postmodern condition. Additionally, postmodern culture stands for more than the current or present state of society. Postmodern culture is characterized by the valuing of activities, events, and perspectives that emphasize the particular over the global or the fragment over the whole. This reversal of a modernist ideology necessitates a Nietzschean revaluation of variation, difference, and flexibility in the cultural sphere. Primarily through the writings of Jean‐François Lyotard, whose seminal book
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(1984) remains the definitive exposition of the term and its significance to society, postmodern culture has come to be identified with a radical critique of the relationship between the particular and the universal in art, culture, and politics.
Postpositivism
Authors: Fararo Thomas J.
Published: September 2017

In the twentieth century the heritage of positivism as a philosophy of science underwent major changes. Earlier intellectual developments in the century led to logical positivism (and, with some variation in ideas, logical empiricism). The continuity with classical positivism was maintained in terms of opposition to metaphysics, but other and more specific doctrines were elaborated. A scientific theory, for instance, was said to be a formal deductive system with an empirical interpretation that enabled verification by appeal to observations.
Poverty and Disrepute
Authors: Harvey David L.
Published: September 2017

On the face of it, the association of poverty and disrepute seems obvious. Poverty's material misery is to be avoided, just as is the diffuse sense of shame that attaches to those who “never had what it took,” or “should have made it, but didn't.” Indeed, the commandment to succeed is central to Merton's (1968: 185–214) theory of deviance. His “Anomie and Social Structure” posits an endorsement of success among all classes and an equal aversion to failure. Hence, his “anomic adaptations” Conformity, Innovation, Ritualism, and Retreatism (Rebellion is another matter) revolve around achieving success or in finding an alternative route to success.
Praxis
Authors: Wortmann Susan
Published: September 2017

Praxis is most commonly associated with the ability of oppressed groups to transform their economic, political, and social worlds through a process of reflecting and acting on theoretically‐informed knowledge. In classical sociological theory, praxis is connected with Karl Marx and his emphasis on the revolutionary potential of the proletariat. In contemporary sociological theory, the term praxis is associated with a variety of critical theories. It is also tied to sociological methodologies, education, and the discipline of sociology, itself.
Print Media
Authors: Miller Dan E.
Published: September 2017

Print refers to the production of text and images by applying inked types or plates with direct pressure onto paper. The process of printing, reproducing a manuscript in printed pages, allows the rapid production of multiple copies of books, pamphlets, periodicals, and newspapers that can be distributed to a reading public. A
medium
(pl. media) refers to the materials and format through which significant symbols are arranged, formatted, presented, and delivered from one person to others. The printed page is a medium of mass communication. Words, visual images, and other symbols are arranged on printed pages as discrete units, most often in linear sequences that cumulatively construct observations, ideas, arguments, and stories. Produced in large numbers, printed pages are bound together and dispersed to people who, if literate, read the same text. In this way, the medium of print binds people together into a larger community.
Privatization
Authors: Holzner Burkart
Published: September 2017

Privatization is a transfer of public services provided by various levels of governments in national states to the private sector of business. It is a relatively recent transformation of governance and markets in countries worldwide. In fact, it is an extraordinary, rapidly expanding phenomenon that is rising in global waves, transferring ownership from governments to private enterprises.
Propaganda
Authors: Marlin Randal
Published: September 2017

The term propaganda arouses considerable interest and apprehension in modern society, conjuring up in the minds of many Orwellian images of totalitarian control. Any survey of contemporary popular usage is likely to find it used in a pejorative sense, as for example when labor and management call each other's information packages “propaganda.” But there also exists a more neutral sense of the term, tied to its derivation from the Latin wordpropagare, meaning “to propagate.”
Property, Private
Authors: Barbalet Jack
Published: September 2017

Property implies ownership, to which rights attach. These rights may take usurpatary, moral, or legal form. The types of things that can be owned as property, and therefore subject to property rights, are enormously varied and depending on the particular circumstances might include: a human person, a person's capacities (especially for labor), the products of another's labor, any material of use or exchange, land, options, patents, ideas, and so on. The structure of ownership is also variable. In ancient society, classically described as the “Indian Village Community” in Maine's
Ancient Law
(1905 [1861]), co‐ownership or communal property prevailed. In peasant societies, on the other hand, the household rather than the community is typically the unit which exercises controlling rights over productive possessions. From the beginning of capitalist societies private property arose as the dominant form of ownership in which individual persons exercise rights over their objects of possession. In late capitalist societies corporate and public property forms emerge, combining elements of both communal and private property. Corporate property is communal in so far as ownership rights are shared by a number of proprietors, each of whom can exercise or dispose of their rights as they choose as individuals without collective constraint, and similarly use the benefits of their ownership as they individually see fit. Public property excludes private ownership and only nominally involves co‐ownership as various forms of statutory authorities exercise such property rights, putatively on behalf of the public, subject to legal and political controls.
Prostitution
Authors: O'Connell Davidson Julia
Published: September 2017

The term prostitution is popularly used to refer to the trade of sexual services for payment in cash or kind, and so to a form of social interaction that is simultaneously sexual and economic. This makes prostitution a difficult cultural category, for in most societies sexual and economic relations are imagined and regulated in very different ways. Prostitution therefore straddles two quite different symbolic domains. Since these domains are highly gendered, the female prostitute has long represented a troubling figure, disrupting what are traditionally deemed to be natural gender binaries (active/passive, public/private, etc.), and stigmatized as unnatural, immoral, and polluting. Yet prostitution is often simultaneously viewed as an inevitable feature of all human societies, for it is held to meet the supposedly powerful and biologically given sexual impulses of men. Thus it is sometimes described as a “necessary evil” and considered to protect the virtue of “good” girls and women by “soaking up” excess male sexual urges which would otherwise lead to rape and marital breakdown.
Psychoanalytic Feminism
Authors: Wolff Kristina
Published: September 2017

Psychoanalytic feminism is a theory of oppression, which asserts that men have an inherent psychological need to subjugate women. The root of men's compulsion to dominate women and women's minimal resistance to subjugation lies deep within the human psyche. This branch of feminism seeks to gain insight into how our psychic lives develop in order to better understand and change women's oppression. The pattern of oppression is also integrated into society, thus creating and sustaining patriarchy. Through the application of psychoanalytic techniques to studying differences between women and men as well as the ways in which gender is constructed, it is possible to reorganize socialization patterns at the early stages of human life. Societal change, or a “cure,” can be developed through discovering the source of domination in men's psyche and subordination in women's, which largely resides unrecognized in individuals' unconscious.
Public Broadcasting
Authors: Allan Stuart
Published: September 2017

Precisely what counts as public broadcasting varies from one national media system to the next across the globe. Common to most definitions, however, is the understanding that it revolves around a public service ethos that may be contrasted with the economic (profit‐oriented) priorities of private or commercial broadcasting. A continuum of sorts exists between the model of public broadcasting introduced in the US, on one end, and that developed in countries such as the UK, Germany, Japan, and Australia, on the other. In the US this type of programming constitutes a small proportion of audience share in television and radio, and is perceived to be of marginal significance in public life. The reverse is the case in the UK, for example, where public service broadcasting – led by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) – is the predominant institutional arrangement wielding considerable influence. Public broadcasting systems around the world can be situated within the parameters of this continuum.
Public Opinion
Authors: de Boer Connie
Published: September 2017

The concept of public opinion is widely used in the social sciences: psychology, sociology, political, and communication science. Three distinct perspectives emerge from the many different definitions of the concept: individual, collective, and process.
Pragmatic Acculturation
Authors: Quah Stella R.
Published: September 2017

Pragmatic acculturation refers to “the cultural system of behavior and attitudes that allows and often encourages culture‐borrowing or the adoption of aspects of non‐native cultures for the purpose of satisfying specific needs” (Quah, 1989: 6, 2008). It refers to a person's or group's borrowing ways of thinking (ideas) and ways of doing things (procedures) from other cultures to solve specific problems. Pragmatic acculturation is usually but not exclusively found in ethnically plural societies and it is conceptually different from acculturation or assimilation, usually defined as “the process by which an outsider, immigrant, or subordinate group becomes indistinguishably integrated into the dominant host society” (Marshall, 1996: 20). In contrast to acculturation, the notion of “culture borrowing” in pragmatic acculturation is more than just a “movement of things among societies”; it encompasses patterns of behavior and attitudes. The concept of pragmatic acculturation in comparative sociological research contributes to an effective understanding of the permeability of cultural boundaries; of the effect of permeability on various aspects of social life; of the permanent or temporary transformation in belief systems; and of the way cultural beliefs and norms influence accounts of social life processes and events such as work productivity, governance styles, or disease incidence and prevalence across communities and countries (Quah, 2003, 2007).
Prosumers
Authors: Jurgenson Nathan
Published: September 2017

Alvin Toffler (1980) coined the term “prosumer” in his bookThe Third Wave. Prosumers consume what they produce and/or produce what they consume. Thus, prosumption involves both production and consumption rather than focusing on either one (production) or the other (consumption) (Ritzer & Jurgenson 2010). Toffler made the point that the prosumer is not a new phenomenon because, for example, those on pre‐industrial farms produced what they consumed. He states that it was the Industrial Revolution that divided the spheres of production and consumption.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839–1914)
Authors: Bakker Hans
Published: September 2017

Charles Sanders Peirce, a profound thinker and son of a famous Harvard mathematician, led a complicated life, and left behind many unpublished manuscripts that are only now appearing in a chronological edition. He is the founder of American Pragmatism, a way of thinking that holds that our beliefs are ultimately rules for action and that has relevance far beyond the United States (Eco 1999; Nöth 1995). Peirce (1931–5, 1958) emphasizes the way in which various kinds of signs mediate between the represented and the interpreted in order to create “habits” of social action (Menand 2001). While he never held a tenured appointment at a university and encountered considerable difficulty due, in part, to the Victorian standards of his day (Brent 1998), Peirce is now much better known than many faculty who had considerable prestige in post‐Civil War America. At one point he was so poor that he could not buy academic books. William James had to collect money from friends for his support. Yet for most of his life he earned his living as a scientific researcher for the US coastal survey.
Part 1 Crimes
Authors: Meier Robert F. , Sykes Elizabeth
Published: September 2017

Part I crimes is a series of eight crimes – murder and non‐negligent homicide, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, larceny‐theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson – about which police agencies report to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). They have been an important source of information about crime for more than three quarters of a century. They are also an important part of a larger crime reporting program called the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR).
Popular Culture Forms: Jazz
Authors: Franklin Adrian
Published: September 2017

Jazz is a musical style that developed from both African and European traditions emerging around the beginning of the twentieth century in African American communities, particularly in New Orleans. While there are now many styles, they all share some or many of the following musical qualities: syncopation, swing, improvisation, “blue notes,” call and response, sound innovation such as growls and stretched notes, and polyrhythmic structure.
Popular Culture Forms: Punk Music
Authors: Halnon Karen Bettez
Published: September 2017

“Punk,” a slang word for rotten or worthless, is the name for a rock music scene that has its roots in New York City in the mid‐1970s with bands such as the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads. Other early influences and proto‐punk bands included Wayne County, New York Dolls, MC5, The Velvet Underground, and Iggy Pop and the Stooges.
Quantitative Methods
Authors: Lamb Julie
Published: September 2017

Quantitative methods are those that involve numerical data resulting in statistical analysis. The quantitative approach relies on the stance that an overall view of society (or the gathering of social facts) is preferable to in‐depth information provided by a few individuals. In other words, data on social facts can be collected from a sample of individuals and applied to the societal level. This idea of generalization from a sample to the population of interest is of key importance in any quantitative method – data collected must be shown to be able to represent the population under study.
Race
Authors: Lemonik Arthur Mikaila Mariel
Published: September 2017

To sociologists, race is a system of stratification based on physical differences (“phenotypes”) that are seen as essential and permanent. These differences may be real or they may be imagined. Though individuals can and do come to identify in racial terms, race is most important as a system of categorization which is externally imposed. The fact that race is imposed externally is the major difference between it and the concept of ethnicity.
Race and the Criminal Justice System
Authors: Samuel Laurie
Published: September 2017

The criminal justice system is a system of social control designed to regulate the behavior of citizens. Through the creation and enforcement of the law, it defines what behavior is and is not acceptable. The criminal justice system is made up of several components, which include the police, courts, corrections, probation, and parole. Lawmakers guide the movements of these units and define those behaviors considered criminal. The process begins, however, with the police, who detect lawbreakers and arrest them. The process then moves to prosecution where arrestees are formally charged. Once a charge has been determined, arrestees may or may not go to court for a formal trial. In those cases where there is not a formal trial, offenders may admit guilt. Once guilt is established, the offender is either sentenced to a period of incarceration or may be given a sentence of probation, community service, or ordered to pay restitution to his or her victim(s). These less serious forms of punishment are usually reserved for first‐time non‐serious offenses and sometimes for juveniles. Though mechanisms exist for the structuring of discretion, the existence of discretion means that at each stage in the processing of individuals through the criminal justice system, the possibility for disparity in treatment exists. For example, decisions by the police on lawbreakers are sometimes based on personal biases and stereotypes. Researchers have long been interested in the factors that shape discretion. Race is a critical part of the discussion of factors that shape discretion as many of the decisions made by police, prosecutors, and judges are based on this factor.
Race and Schools
Authors: Pettigrew Thomas F.
Published: September 2017

Race and schools become a social issue when educational opportunities are differentially available to members of diverse racial groups within a society. Educational discrimination has a variety of effects that often lead to interracial conflict. Since education is a major means of social mobility, discrimination in this domain forces the less‐favored racial groups to occupy lower‐status jobs and receive less income. Such results form a vital component in a wider system of racial oppression, as in South Africa during apartheid and the state‐mandated segregation in the American South.
Racist Movements
Authors: Blee Kathleen M.
Published: September 2017

Racist movements are organized, collective efforts to create, preserve, or extend racial hierarchies of power and privilege. Such movements explicitly espouse the ideologies of white supremacism and/or anti‐Semitism (anti‐Judaism or hatred of Muslims or Arabs) that were consolidated in the western world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Manifestations of intergroup antagonism in earlier times, even conflicts that cross what later would be regarded as racial lines, generally are not considered racial movements because these are not based in modern ideas of race as an essential, biological, polarized, and unchanging attribute of social groups. Denoting as racist only social movements that take place in western societies is a common practice in sociological research, as most scholars regard white supremacism and anti‐Semitism as the legacy of ideologies by which European colonists sought to exonerate their brutal conquests and occupations. However, this restriction has been challenged by studies that use the concept racist (or racial) movements to describe subnational intergroup antagonisms in a number of non‐western societies, including China, India, Indonesia, and Russia.
Rape Culture
Authors: Williams Joyce E.
Published: September 2017

Rape culture is a concept of unknown origin and of uncertain definition; yet it has made its way into everyday vocabulary and is assumed to be commonly understood. The award‐winning documentary film
Rape Culture
made by Margaret Lazarus in 1975 takes credit for first defining the concept. The film's narration relies heavily on jargon such as “rapism” and “phallocentric society” and is more illustrative than definitive in dealing with rape as depicted in movies, music, and other forms of entertainment. Authors of the popular
Transforming a Rape Culture
define the phenomenon as “a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women … a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent” (Buchwald, Fletcher, and Roth, 1993: v). Herman (1984) characterized the United States as a rape culture because sex is typified in aggressive males and passive females. At the other end of the continuum of definitions are efforts to define a rape culture empirically such as are found in the work of Baron and Straus (1989) and Ellis (1989). Some empirical works on rape theorize its emanation from a subculture of violence, for example, societies with high homicide rates also tend to have high rape rates (Amir, 1971; Baron and Straus, 1989). Other researchers stress that an environment such as created by the military, male gangs, or fraternities produce rape‐prone subcultures (Boswell and Spade, 1996; Sanday, 1996; Nelson, 2002; Wolf, 2013). Clearly, rape is more common and acceptable in some environments than in others. However, the concept of rape culture inextricably links rape with the cultural fabric of the
whole
of society, recognizing that there are systems, institutions, and attitudes that encourage sexual assault and protect sexual predators.
Rational Choice Theories
Authors: Simpson Brent , Harrell Ashley
Published: September 2017

Rational choice theories explain social outcomes via the aggregated actions of
rational
or
purposive
actors. The actors are rational in the sense that, given a set of values, beliefs, and preferences, they calculate the relative costs and benefits of alternative actions; from these calculations, they choose the action that maximizes their expected utility. Rational choice models assume that the range of alternative actions available to actors is constrained and influenced by the environment or institutions within which the actors make decisions. They also assume that actors possess complete information about their values, preferences, and the various courses of action available to them. Actors collect, organize, and analyze this information prior to making a decision. Thus, rational choice theories are means‐end theories. That is, they describe the means (or rational calculus) through which actors go about obtaining their desired ends (or values).
Rational Choice Theory (and Economic Sociology)
Authors: Fararo Thomas J.
Published: September 2017

The tradition of sociological analysis includes two inter‐related major themes that relate to economics. One theme pertains to economy and society, with the emergent principle of embeddedness in the sense that economic transactions are embedded in an institutional environment and actors in economic roles are embedded in social networks. The other theme concerns the relationship between the theoretical approaches of the two disciplines, sociology and economics, with rational choice theory forming a boundary between them. Economic theorists have routinely treated human behavior as rational while sociological thinkers have thought of this as a limited and idealized assumption. Yet in recent decades, this boundary has become permeable. In a sense each discipline has invaded the other's territory. Rational choice theory with its formal approach has penetrated sociological theory while both institutional and social network forms of analysis have gained adherents in economics. This situation is reflected in the state of research in economic sociology. In what follows, these preliminary remarks will be elaborated in some detail.
Reception Studies
Authors: Livingstone Sonia
Published: September 2017

Reception studies derives primarily from the application of literary theories of textual interpretation to the everyday activities of mass media audiences. To understand the interpretive work actively undertaken by viewers or users of media, as part of the circuit of culture, reception studies integrate semiotic and sociological theories so as to situate the viewer between text and context. Thus, drawing on ideas from the interpretation of the literary texts of high culture, reception studies argues that popular culture and mass media texts must also be made sense of by their audiences. To do so, two forms of resources, or determinations, shape the meaning that results – first, the codes of the text, along with the conventions of its genre and the affordances of the technology; and second, the norms, values, and practices of the viewers’ domestic, community, and wider sociocultural contexts.
Redlining
Authors: Dwyer Rachel E.
Published: September 2017

Redlining is a form of discrimination in credit markets where banks and financial institutions identify entire neighborhoods as too “high risk” for financial investment in both residential and commercial property. Financial institutions “redline” neighborhoods for a number of reasons including the physical characteristics of the housing stock and undesirable location, but most important has been the presence of minority, especially black, residents. Racial redlining occurs not only because of the correlation of race with indicators of financial risk, but investors interpret the racial category itself to signal risk apart from the quality and prosperity of the neighborhood on other measures. In short, redlining is a critical form of community disinvestment that occurs when resources (e.g., home mortgages, insurance, home improvement loans, etc.) are made unavailable to residents (or made available on unfavorable terms) because of the high proportion of ethnic or racial minorities living in their neighborhood, regardless of objective socioeconomic characteristics.
Regulation Theory
Authors: Jessop Bob
Published: September 2017

Regulation theory is a distinctive paradigm in critical political economy. It originated in Europe and North America in the 1970s in response to the emerging crisis of the post‐war economy and it has since been applied to many other periods and contexts. Its name derives from its French originators, who describe it as
la théorie de régulation
or
l'approche en termes de régulation
. Similar ideas were also developed by other schools. The core concern of all such work is the contradictory and conflictual dynamics of contemporary capitalism considered in terms of its extra‐economic as well as economic dimensions. In highlighting the extra‐economic aspects of accumulation, regulation theorists draw on, and provide links to, other social sciences. Regulation theory was influential in economic, urban, and regional sociology in the 1980s and 1990s. This was partly because of its Marxist roots and partly because of its general heuristic power in organizing research on a wide range of sociological themes.
Replicability Analyses
Authors: Thompson Bruce
Published: September 2017

Researchers have traditionally but erroneously presumed that statistical significance tests evaluate the replicability of results (Thompson 1996, 2006). Butpvalues evaluate the probability of the sample, assuming the null hypothesis perfectly describes the population, andnotthe probability of the population. Therefore,pvalues do not bear upon questions of replicability. As Cohen (1994) noted, the statistical significance test “does not tell us what we want to know, and we so much want to know what we want to know that, out of desperation, we nevertheless believe that it does!”
Reputation
Authors: Fine Gary Alan
Published: September 2017

Reputation, as a social scientific concept, refers to the existence of a socially recognized persona: an organizing principle by which actions of a person (or group, organization, or collectivity) are linked into a common assessment. On one level a reputation constitutes a moral gestalt that is linked to a person – an organizing principle for person perception. However, reputations are more than this social psychological claim: they are collective representations, enacted in relationships. In this, the opinion that one individual might form of another often differs from a shared, established image. Reputations are embedded within social relations, and, as a consequence, reputation is connected to forms of communication, tied to a community.
Resource Mobilization Theory
Authors: Edwards Bob , Kane Melinda D.
Published: September 2017

The broader resource mobilization approach, though underutilized, remains relevant to analyzing the full spectrum of social movement challenges to hegemonic authority across the full range of social and political institutions. This entry sketches core features of the resource mobilization perspective by categorizing five resource types – material, human, social‐organizational, cultural and moral; mechanisms of resource access; and the exchange relationships through which movement actors acquire specific resources.
Revolutions, Sociology of
Authors: Lie John , Hoover Wilson Nicholas
Published: September 2017

What distinguishes revolution from riot or rebellion, collective action or collective violence, or
coups d'état
or just plain old regime change? Historical records are replete with instances of sudden, violent, extra‐constitutional, and consequential regime change. However, the modern concept of revolution is the product of the French Revolution of 1789–94. The events that came to be known as the Revolution denoted and dominated modern politics. Henceforth, revolution referred to a sudden, violent political change that leads to consequential extra‐political transformation. The French Revolution generated a new class of political actors – revolutionaries – and a new political ideology – the possibility and desirability of intentional, mass uprising to achieve sudden, extra‐constitutional political change. In the modern political imagination, revolution came to denote the possibility of a better – indeed, utopian – future through the seizure of state power and the construction of a new revolutionary order.
Riots
Authors: Myers Daniel J.
Published: September 2017

A riot is an unruly collective act of violence that is temporary, discontinuous from everyday routines, and results in damage to persons or property of either the participants or targets of the collective actor. Although most social scientists have an intuitive sense of what constitutes a riot, the edges of the definition are fuzzy and it can be difficult to determine whether or not some events are actually riots. For example, it is agreed that a riot is a collective act. That is, more than one individual must be involved and at least minimally coordinate action in order for a riot to occur. Two people acting together, however, would not constitute a riot, even though it is a collective act of violence. Thus, the lower limit for participation, damage, and duration to define a riot is difficult to establish and has led many sociologists to analyze events more ambiguously referred to as civil disorders or collective violence. For most, however, unless there are at least 30–50 people involved, the events last more than a few moments, and there is action that could result in property damage or injury requiring medical attention, a riot has not occurred.
Ritual
Authors: Smith Philip
Published: September 2017

Ritual involves conventionalized and stylized human actions. These are often organized with reference to overarching cultural codes, have a communicative intent, and generate powerful emotional responses among participants. Historically marginalized as a concern for anthropologists, since the cultural turn became institutionalized in social theory in the 1980s the concept of ritual has become more and more central to the sociological enterprise. The core debates revolve around the following themes: (1) whether priority should be given to analyzing rites (embodied actions, doing) or beliefs (cosmologies and symbols, thinking); (2) how a model conceived in functionalism can be adapted to include understandings of power and domination; (3) whether we should understand ritual in collectivistic or more microsociological ways.
Role Theory
Authors: Hindin Michelle J.
Published: September 2017

Role theory is designed to explain how individuals who occupy particular social positions are expected to behave and how they expect others to behave. Role theory is based on the observation that people behave predictably and that an individual's behavior is context‐specific, based on their social position and situation. Role theory is often described using the metaphor of the theater.
Relationalism
Authors: Tsekeris Charalambos , Koskinas Konstantinos
Published: September 2017

In epistemology, the relationalist mode of thinking often implies that “the scientific concepts no longer appear as imitations of thing‐like existences, but as symbols representing orders and functional links within reality” (Cassirer 1971: 3). In sociology, relationalism usually defines social human practices as ceaselessly reconstituted, reshaped, and reorganized by the ongoing flow of the very structure of their reciprocal relations, and not merely by their respective personalities or identities (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 224–35). This subsequently resolves old theoretical dualisms and dichotomies, in so far as “the relation between the social agent and the world is not that between a subject (or a consciousness) and an object, but a relation of ontological complicity – or mutual possession” (Bourdieu & Wacquant 1992: 20).
Remittances
Authors: Garip Filiz
Published: September 2017

Remittances are funds and goods sent by internal or international migrants to their origin families and communities. According to World Bank estimates, remittances to developing countries reached US$325 billion in 2010, constituting the largest source of external finance, and more than 10 percent of the gross domestic product, in many countries. Remittances relax budget constraints in receiving households and create investment opportunities in receiving communities. These flows also provide a potential pathway to reduce poverty and inequality in the most deprived regions of the world.
Sacks, Harvey (1935–1975)
Authors: Jacobsen Martin M.
Published: September 2017

Harvey Sacks was a sociologist who developed the methodological subdiscipline called conversation analysis. It conceptualized conversation as a means of social action rather than as an indicator of cognitive or psychological intent. Conversation analysis examines the surface structure and sequencing of linguistic exchanges as social acts rather than as indications of a speaker's intent, as is the case with speech act theory, pragmatics, or sociolinguistics. Sacks's focus on the surface structure of language use as an end in itself places him alongside such modern thinkers as Harold Garfinkel and Noam Chomsky.
Sacred
Authors: Hunt Stephen
Published: September 2017

The Latin word
sacer
, from which the term sacred is derived, denotes a distinction between what is and what is not pertaining to the gods. In not a dissimilar fashion, the Hebrew root of
k‐d‐sh
, which is usually translated as “Holy,” is based on the idea of separation of the consecrated and desecrated in relation to the divine. Whatever the specific expression of the sacred, however, there is a fairly universal cultural division where the sacred constitutes phenomena which are set apart, revered, and distinguished from all other phenomena that constitute the profane or the mundane. However, in Hinduism there has long existed the belief that the sacred and the unclean both belong to a single linguistic category. Thus, the Hindu notion of pollution suggests that the sacred and the non‐sacred need not be absolute opposites; they can be relative categories; what is clean in relation to one thing may be unclean in relation to another, and vice versa.
Satanism
Authors: Introvigne Massimo
Published: September 2017

While organized Satanism includes quite small groups, social scientists have studied Satanism mostly as the subject matter of juvenile deviance and social panics. Satanism may be defined as the adoration of the figure known in the Bible as the Devil or Satan. Its first incarnation was in the circle operating at the Versailles court of Louis XIV (1638–1715) around Catherine La Voisin (ca. 1640–80) and the defrocked Catholic priest Father Guibourg (1603–83), who invented the so called “Black Mass,” a parody of the Roman Catholic Mass. La Voisin was burned at the stake in 1680 and Guibourg died in jail in 1683. Small rings imitating what they had read of the group were subsequently discovered in France, Italy, and Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries.
School Choice
Authors: Davies Scott
Published: September 2017

School choice refers to the use of public funds that give parents more discretion in their children's education. It usually entails making available to parents a wider variety of educational options beyond a standard, local public school. Examples of choice initiatives include charter schools, home schooling, voucher programs, tax credits for private schools, and the formation of magnet schools. While many parents exercise a “hidden” form of school choice via their selection of residential location, choice programs stir most controversy when they entail privatization, that is, the redirecting of governing authority from a public body to parents and/or school staff.
School Discipline
Authors: Way Sandra
Published: September 2017

School discipline refers to a system of rules, monitoring, sanctions, and rewards implemented by school personnel with the intent of shaping student behavior. Commonly associated with teachers and principals imposing order in classrooms and corridors by exerting control and maintaining student compliance through supervision and punishment, school discipline also plays a role in educational and moral development. There is general agreement that discipline in school is necessary. The extent and nature of that discipline, however, is variable and, at times, controversial.
Schools, Magnet
Authors: Langenkamp Amy G.
Published: September 2017

Magnet schools are public schools defined by three principal characteristics: a distinctive curriculum or instructional approach, enrollment of students from outside the designated neighborhood attendance zones, and desegregation as their explicit purpose. Magnet schools have been used for desegregation since the mid‐1970s. However, the concept of magnet schools is based on district specialty schools which have been present since the 1900s. Currently, there are two major national studies of magnet schools.
Schools, Single‐Sex
Authors: Riordan Cornelius
Published: September 2017

Single‐sex schools refer to education at the elementary, secondary, or post‐secondary level in which males or females attend school exclusively with members of their own sex. Alternatively, males and females may attend all classes separately even though they may be housed in the same facilities, a phenomenon referred to as a dual academy. A related though different phenomenon is single‐sex classes, whereby schools that are otherwise coeducational provide separate classes for males and/or females in selected subjects.
Science, Ethnographic Studies of
Authors: Bauchspies Wenda K.
Published: September 2017

Ethnographies of science have their origins in the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) that emerged out of the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, and environmentalism of the 1960s. STS research illustrates that science and technology are a human achievement, composed of actors, social systems, and social processes. Or, in other words, science and technology are social constructions created in a sociocultural framework with social institutions, actors, and networks, social practices, material culture, and worldviews. STS scholars use ethnographies of science to contextualize science, to study the culture of science, to provide alternative perspectives of science, and to help science and its publics to design new research questions, programs, and policies.
Science and the Measurement of Risk
Authors: Haggett Claire
Published: September 2017

The measurement of risk is not a straightforward matter. Risk assessments made by scientists often differ from those of the lay public, and can ignore or invalidate their understandings. Sociological work has highlighted that public responses to risk are shaped by inter‐related social, experiential, and perceptual factors and have to be considered as part of the social context from which they arise. Lay people also have their own knowledge and expertise to draw upon when making assessments of the immanency and impact of any risk. It is not necessarily the case therefore that the public are being “irrational” in their decision‐making but that they use a different rationality to that of scientists. These differences can lead to conflicts over risks, and resistance from the public to the measurements, and subsequent recommendations, imposed upon them by scientific research. This entry outlines the way in which scientific measurement of risk is conducted, how this differs from public understanding of risks, and the significance of this disjuncture.
Science and Public Participation: the Democratization of Science
Authors: Forrester John , West Sarah
Published: September 2017

Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Fischer's
Citizens, Experts, and the Environment
(2000) said that wherever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government. But, nowadays, who can claim to be well informed enough about that thing which we call science to govern it except scientists themselves? In 1959, Sir Charles Snow put forward the thesis in the Rede Lecture that there was what amounted to an opposition between literary intellectualism at one end and proficiency in the physical sciences at the other. Snow dated his realization of this distinction to the 1930s. What we can say for certain is that there was a coming into common understanding that a reasonably well‐educated or cultured person could not be expected to be normally able to comprehend both the sciences and the arts. This state of affairs is not by any means all the scientific community's fault although science is guilty of creating, along with other forms of knowledge and understanding, elites.
Scientific Literacy and Public Understandings of Science
Authors: Douglas Conor M. W.
Published: September 2017

Scientific literacy, and more so the public understanding of science, have recently become areas of study in their own right within the sociology of science and science and technology studies (STS). This emergence is partly due to the increased focus on science as an inherently social activity, but more specifically it is due to the mounting challenges that the scientific community has faced in dealing with this fact. Science is not only a social activity in that it is governed by a set of norms and values (as Robert Merton's classic work in the 1950s posited, with the identification of the CUDOS norms of communism, universality, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism), but it is also a social activity in the respect that it plays an instrumental role in the construction of everyday life.