bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Social Services
Authors: Dominelli Lena
Published: September 2017

Social services are provisions that respond to the needs of individuals, groups, or communities to improve social, emotional, and physical well‐being not supplied by carers who are kin. Social services are difficult to define, but constitute part of the welfare state that is the domain of social work and its practitioners – social workers and those who assist them in their tasks, social care workers, home helpers, and a range of others who work to provide services backed by society including the state, voluntary agencies, and commercial enterprises. They cover all client groups across the life course – children, families, older people, disabled people, mentally ill people, offenders of all ages, in diverse institutional settings or local communities.
Social Support
Authors: Lincoln Karen D.
Published: September 2017

Social support has repeatedly been linked to a host of diverse social, economic, and health outcomes, including mortality (Berkman & Syme 1994), depression (Wethington & Kessler 1986), a variety of physical health problems, including heart disease (Kristenson et al. 1998), rheumatoid arthritis (Krol et al. 1993), and educational attainment and success (Hagan et al. 1996).
Socialization, Gender
Authors: Rohlinger Deana A. , Latinsky Andrew
Published: September 2017

As children grow up they develop a sense of who they are, how they should relate to others, and the role they play in a larger society. The lessons children learn and the processes through which cultural norms are passed from one generation to the next are known broadly as socialization. Gender socialization highlights that there are roles, or cultural expectations and norms, associated with each sex category (“male” or “female”). Sociologists make distinctions between sex and gender. While sex is based on biological categories, gender is the result of cultural processes that construct different social roles for men and women. Gender socialization is the process through which boys and girls learn sex appropriate behavior, dress, personality characteristics, and demeanor.
Socioeconomic Status, Health, and Mortality
Authors: Rogers Richard G. , Onge Jarron M. Saint , Lawrence Elizabeth M.
Published: September 2017

The World Health Organization (1948) broadly defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well‐being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Health can be assessed in a number of ways, but generally includes subjective health, physical impairment, vitality, well‐being, acute conditions, and chronic disease. Health is a measure of the quality of life, whereas mortality defines the risk of death and can be used to measure length of life. Socioeconomic status (SES) exerts a profound influence on all dimensions of health and mortality. Individuals who are situated in elevated positions in the social hierarchy tend to experience superior levels of health and survival.
Solidarity
Authors: Coates Rodney
Published: September 2017

Solidarity, defined as the perceived or realized organization of individuals for group survival, interests, or purposes, may result from either external threats or internal needs. Solidarity, reflecting various dimensions and forms of organizing, may best be described in Durkheimian terms as ranging from organic to the inorganic. That is to say, we may describe solidarity that derives from some intrinsic characteristic of the participants or from extrinsic characteristics. When we speak of intrinsic characteristics, related to organic solidarity, we typically include such types as family, racial/ethnic groups, national and to some extent religious affiliation. Alternatively, inorganic solidarity, related to the more voluntary, associational characteristics of such organization, suggests greater volition on the part of its members. When we speak of inorganic solidarity we typically make reference to neighborhood associations, clubs, political organizations, and the like. Given the more transient nature of today's populations, religion and national identity may also fall into this latter category for obvious reasons associated with mobility and personal choice. Depending upon type, solidarity comes into being for multiple reasons. Social and political movements, community organizing, and social activism rely upon the ability of respective leaders to organize and solidify significant groups for the purposes of social action. The capacity of groups to solidify is directly associated with their capacity to organize about significant issues, events, visions, and/or threats. Thus the capacity to solidify is evidence of the capacity to survive, thrive, persist, and promote group interests, viability, and/or vitality.
Spatial Relationships
Authors: Hess Martin
Published: September 2017

Traditionally, the analysis of spatial relationships has been considered to be the domain of geography, whereas the academic discipline of sociology was concerned about the relationships between societies and social actors. Following a period of regional geography approaches in the first half of the twentieth century that had emphasized territorial differentiation as being at the core of human geography, this view has been subsequently contested. Rather than space being conceived of as a Kantian a priori for human existence and action (absolute space), the focus of many human geographers began to shift towards the analysis of spatial relationships between objects and events, thus introducing the concept of relative space.
Spatial Relationships
Authors: Hess Martin
Published: September 2017

This entry provides a brief account of how spatial relationships have been theorized in the social sciences. Space has often been conceived of as a physical arena in which social interaction takes place, a view that became increasingly challenged in human geography and cognate disciplines like sociology. Recent work therefore emphasizes the relational nature of space and place as constituted through social interactions rather than as a Kantian a priori of human existence. A relational understanding of space produces new spatial imaginaries that supersede the established concept of space within the history of modernity where space was seen as divided and territorialized, and society and space/place mapped onto each other. In a relational view, however, emphasis is placed on the multiplicity of sociospatial relations that continuously make and remake space and place.
Sport
Authors: Loy John W. , Coakley Jay
Published: September 2017

Sport is an embodied, structured, goal‐oriented, competitive, contest‐based, ludic, physical activity. Given the multitude of sport forms and the vast variety of specific sports, ranging from rural, primitive athletic folk games of old, to new urban, hi‐tech, extreme sports, this definition is unlikely to satisfy one and all. It does, however, (1) highlight the major social characteristics of modern sport; (2) suggest the specification of the embodied structural properties and social processes underlying the social development of modern sport; and (3) provide a set of common features for examining the magnitude and complexity of sport as a social phenomenon at different levels of analysis, including sport as a unique game occurrence, sport as a particular type of ludic activity, sport as an institutionalized game, sport as a social institution, and sport as a form of social involvement (Loy, 1968).
Sport and the City
Authors: Schimmel Kimberly S.
Published: September 2017

As even a casual observer may recognize, the phenomenon of contemporary sports bears little resemblance to that of the fairly recent past. At the turn of the twentieth century, sports were occasional and unregulated events played by members of local sports clubs. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, an individual's association with sport might have been limited to participant, spectator, or consumer of sport news mainly through radio or newspaper. However, as sports became meaningful to more than just the people who played them, the emergence of crowds at local sport club contests provided the opportunity for risk‐taking entrepreneurs to turn games into profit‐making ventures. In a relatively short time, traditional agrarian pastimes became today's urban commercial spectacles. Voluntary participation was replaced by binding contractual arrangements, and small hometown rivalries gave way to regional and international urban mega‐events produced for global television audiences.
Sports and Culture
Authors: Rowe David
Published: September 2017

For those sociologists who approach culture as the domain of prestigious aesthetic practices such as writing and painting, sport may be regarded as its antithesis: a bodily practice, of seemingly little cultural consequence, gazed on by passive spectators for the enrichment of the leisure and media industries. It is only in recent decades that sport has begun to be taken seriously as a sociological subject, analytical engagement with the realm of popular pleasure being increasingly indispensable to contemporary sociology. The increasing prominence of (especially electronically mediated) sport, a more open‐minded attitude within sociology to what has often been dismissed as “mass” or “low” culture, and the influence of interdisciplinary approaches (especially cultural and media studies) have created the foundation of a more open, dynamic cultural sociology of sport. As in other subdisciplines of sociology there is a range of theoretical, conceptual, and methodological approaches to sport and culture, the complexity of which is developing with both the intellectual apparatus and the phenomenon itself.
Sport Culture and Subcultures
Authors: Donnelly Peter
Published: September 2017

Research and theoretical approaches to sport culture and subcultures in the sociology of sport fall into three overlapping periods: (1) early interest in sport subcultures from an interactionist perspective; (2) a transition period during which more critical theoretical approaches to culture and subcultures and more rigorous methodological approaches emerged; and (3) a wholehearted embrace of “cultural studies” and the consequent fragmentation of approaches to sport culture and subcultures. These changes were accompanied by parallel theoretical and definitional concerns about the meaning of culture and subculture.
Sport and the Environment
Authors: Weiss Otmar
Published: September 2017

Everything outside the boundaries of the subsystem “sport” is considered to be its environment, and this can be influenced and altered by sport or, conversely, can itself influence sport. Examples of the latter are to be observed, for instance, in the effects on athletic performance of certain climatic qualities of the environment of Mexico City (tropical uplands) during the Olympic Summer Games in 1968, or of Lagos (humid tropical lowlands) during the Pan‐African Games in 1973.
Sport and Ethnicity
Authors: King C. Richard , Moraga Jorge E.
Published: September 2017

Ethnicity has proven fundamental to sport. It has long determined who has played, what participation and performance has meant, treatment by fans, media representations, and presentation of self.
Sport, Professional
Authors: McKay Jim
Published: September 2017

According to the ideal type suggested by Freidson (2001), sport does not exhibit all of the characteristics of a profession. Unlike archetypal high‐status professions (e.g., medicine) in which the practitioners rather than governments or markets exert significant control over their labor, professional athletes work in cartels and oligopolies where they must respond to the demands of owners, managers, coaches, sponsors, consumers, and the media. Thus it is more appropriate to say that like many institutions, sport exhibits particular
professionalizing tendencies
(e.g., specialization, relying strongly on expert knowledge). However, these professionalizing propensities can only be understood if they are located in a complex of five other interdependent and mutually reinforcing processes that have shaped modern sport from youth leagues to the international level: commercialization, commodification, bureaucratization, globalization, and governmentalization (Gruneau & Whitson 2001; Miller et al. 2001; Ingham 2005).
Sport as Spectacle
Authors: Andrews David L.
Published: September 2017

The spectacle, in the form of an imposing public display, is not simply a benign cultural form, because it can seldom be separated from “noncoercive strategies of power and persuasion” (Cary, 2005: 355). This is often overlooked when considering contemporaneous high‐profile sporting events staged for the entertainment of spectating publics (for instance, the NFL Super Bowl, Olympic Games, or FIFA World Cup). Despite their celebratory sporting veneer, these sport spectacles routinely communicate the values and ideologies of the dominant sociopolitical order. The sport spectacle has, of course, long been a vehicle for the expression and/or performance of dominant cultural practices and sensibilities, something attributed, at least partially, to the visceral intensity of competition‐based physical culture which possesses an almost unrivalled capacity to capture the interest and imagination of publics located within divergent historical and social contexts. Moreover, the very practice of bearing witness to (or spectating) particular displays of competitive physicality has played an important role in establishing the sociocultural import of some physical activities over others. Thus, the Olympic festivals of ancient Greece, the gladiatorial contests of ancient Rome, and even the folk football rituals of pre‐industrial Europe (such as the Florentinecalcio), were fully constituted as socially, culturally, and indeed politically significant practices through the presence and involvement of massed ranks of spectators, whose numbers dwarfed those of active participants.
Sportization
Authors: Maguire Joseph
Published: September 2017

The sportization process involved a shift towards the competitive, regularized, rationalized, and gendered bodily exertions of achievement sport that, in turn, connected to wider changes at the level of personality, body deportment, and social interaction. This process entailed regulating violence, developing formalized sets of rules and governing bodies, and shifting body habitus. Despite the existence of European rivals in the form of German and Swedish gymnastics, and although some older folk pastimes also survived, it was male achievement sport, emerging out of England, that was to affect people's body habitus on a global scale. Resistance to and reinterpretations of this body culture have been evident throughout the ongoing sportization process (Maguire 2012).
Sports Heroes and Celebrities
Authors: Jackson Steven
Published: September 2017

The terms hero and celebrity have increasingly become used interchangeably, but they are fundamentally different. According to Daniel Boorstin, “
The celebrity is a person who is known for his well‐knownness
… The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media. The hero is a big man [
sic
]; the celebrity is a big name” (1992: 57, 61). Thus, there are some clear distinctions between the two concepts and the challenge is to ascertain how and why they have become conflated. First, we must examine the meaning, significance and types of heroes and why sport remains such an important site for their identification and development. In turn, we need to understand how changes in wider society have tended to shift attention, status, and rewards from heroes to celebrities.
Sports Industry
Authors: Malcolm Dominic
Published: September 2017

Sport became an industry at the point at which events (matches, races, bouts) ceased to be oriented solely toward participants and became largely organized so that they could be consumed by spectators. In perhaps the earliest sociological analysis of this process, Gregory P. Stone (1955) argued that consequently “play” (unscripted, spontaneous) became overshadowed by “
dis
play” (prearranged, staged, spectacular); that is to say, in some respects industry or commercialism is the very antithesis of sport. This critique still lingers amongst those who might be termed “purists,” but it must now be recognized that whilst on the one hand sport has become an industry just like any other, on the other hand, and particularly in terms of the demand for sport, it has a number of distinctive or peculiar features.
State and Economy
Authors: Campbell John L.
Published: September 2017

The literature on the relationship between states and economies is vast. This entry focuses exclusively on states and economies in advanced capitalist societies. In this context, sociologists tend to follow Max Weber in viewing nation‐states as organizations consisting of administrative, legislative, judicial, and military apparatuses that govern a finite territory, ultimately through the use of force if necessary. They tend to view economies as systems of material production that are organized around market exchange and the pursuit of profit, and that are embedded in a variety of surrounding institutions, including political ones. Research in the area of state and economy has focused on several questions. How does the economy affect the state? How does the state affect the economy? How are state–economy relations organized? How are state–economy relations changing?
Statistics
Authors: Gillespie Wayne
Published: September 2017

Censuses are used to enumerate a population and its characteristics. Statistics are mathematical calculations derived from this information or data that are collected and recorded in a numeric or quantitative format. Quantitative methods such as these have been used to describe human populations for hundreds, even thousands, of years. Censuses, or the numbering of people, occurred throughout the ancient world. For example, the Romans conducted censuses in order to determine household income for political (i.e., voting) and taxation purposes. The Han dynasty census from 2
ce
China is the earliest, intact census surviving from ancient times; it shows that the population of this dynasty exceeded 57 million. Another notable census is the
Doomsday Book
, which was compiled in 1086 after the Norman invasion of England to determine the amount of wealth obtained from the conquest. Sometimes censuses are conducted on the dead as opposed to the living. In 1662, John Graunt reported the number of deaths in London over the preceding 30 years. He even analyzed mortality trends by gender, season, and location. Graunt eventually published the first “life tables,” used to compute life expectancy. In 1693, Edmund Halley refined Graunt's calculations to correctly compute life expectancy (Heyde & Seneta 2001). Censuses of human populations are still conducted throughout the modern world. The first census in the United States was taken in 1790, and censuses are done every 10 years in the US (US Census Bureau 2005).
Stereotyping and Stereotypes
Authors: Pickering Michael
Published: September 2017

Stereotyping is a way of representing and judging other people in fixed, unyielding terms. These revolve around an alleged characteristic of the category to which they are assigned. They are reduced to the stereotype that results from this, rather than being viewed as individuals with their own personal features and qualities. Instead of being considered and treated as particular and distinctive, they are represented simply through their category assignment and the essentialized and naturalized attribute this is made to carry. The force of the stereotype is strongest when it is commonly held to be irrevocable.
Strategic Decisions
Authors: Wilson David C.
Published: September 2017

Theoretical and empirical studies of decision‐making pervade organization theory. They have done so for over six decades. James March and Herbert Simon suggested in 1958 that managing organizations and decision‐making were virtually synonymous. From this broad perspective, decision‐making has maintained its centrality to the field of organization theory and is one of the most active areas of current management research, particularly in the field of strategic management. The dynamics of organizing brought with them the need for understanding decision‐making. As organizations grew and became more complex, decision‐making became a central activity. Managers, in particular, were expected to make choices amongst often uncertain alternatives and to choose wisely – benefiting the organization and its many stakeholders. Scholars were expected to uncover the characteristics of decision processes and to explain ways in which we might, ultimately, improve the ways in which decisions were made in organizations.
Stratification: Functional and Conflict Theories
Authors: De Graaf Paul M.
Published: September 2017

Every society can be characterized by a set of social positions that are related to the access to the scarce and desired goods in that society. Functional and conflict theories of stratification are formulated to provide an answer to the question how are positions distributed across members of a society.
Stratification and Inequality, Theories of
Authors: Grusky David B.
Published: September 2017

The term stratification system refers to the complex of institutions that generate inequalities in income, political power, social honor, and other valued goods. The main components of such systems are (1) the social processes that define certain types of goods as valuable and desirable, (2) the rules of allocation that distribute these goods across various roles or occupations in the division of labor (e.g., houseworker, doctor, prime minister), and (3) the mobility mechanisms that link individuals to these roles or occupations and thereby generate unequal control over valued goods. It follows that inequality is produced by two types of matching processes. The social roles in society are first matched to “reward packages” of unequal value, and individual members of society are then allocated to the roles so defined and rewarded. In all societies, there is a constant flux of incumbents as newcomers enter the labor force and replace dying, retiring, or out‐migrating workers, yet the positions themselves and the reward packages attached to them typically change only gradually. As Schumpeter (1953: 171) famously put it, the occupational structure can be seen as “a hotel … which is always occupied, but always by different persons.”
Stratification, Race/Ethnicity and
Authors: van Tubergen Frank
Published: September 2017

An important research field in the stratification literature is concerned with inequalities along the ascribed characteristics of race and ethnicity. The term race connotes biological differences among people (skin color, facial features) that are transmitted from generation to generation. As such, these biological differences are seen as permanent characteristics of people. However, the notion of race does not make much sense as a biological concept, because the physical characteristics that make people distinctive are trivial. Even though biological differences are superficial, they are important sociologically. For if people believe that others are biologically distinctive, they tend to respond to them as being different. Furthermore, skin color is transmitted from generation to generation by assortative marriage, a prime sociological phenomenon.
Stratification Systems: Openness
Authors: Bögenhold Dieter
Published: September 2017

The concept of stratification refers to the idea of vertical segmentation in a sense of having more or less resources. Degrees of stratification are always relational and they express degrees of social inequality. Open stratification systems exist when a society leaves channels for upward or downward mobility, where actors or families can change their position inter or intragenerationally. The classic idea in Marx's categorization was that access to means of production serves as the pivot point of all sociological and economic analysis. An early contrast to the dominant Marxist view was elaborated by Max Weber, who stressed the fact of differentiation. Bourdieu sees the social world in terms of a metaphor: Consider a multidimensional social sphere in which different groups of actors reflect, on the one hand, the sphere of social position and, on the other hand, the sphere of lifestyles. Other authors emphasize the growing relativity of the class concept due to increasing trends of mobility caused by education, urbanization, and changing demographic patterns, including the declining significance of the institution of the family, which leads more and more to a multicolored puzzle of conditions, lifestyles, attitudes, and behavior.
Stratification in Transition Economies
Authors: Róbert Péter
Published: September 2017

Although one could argue that all economies are in transition, permanently, from one state to another, this entry will focus on former socialist societies, which have undergone a post‐communist transition both in a political and a socioeconomic sense. Accordingly, economies that experienced a transition to democracy but not to a market economy (e.g., countries in South America) are not considered. Thus, this entry provides information on developments in social stratification in societies as a consequence of political
and
economic changes since the collapse of socialism at the end of the 1980s.
Strong Program
Authors: Eriksson Lena
Published: September 2017

The Strong Program is a programmatic statement that calls upon social scientists to examine the social content and underpinnings of scientific knowledge. It played an important part in the wider development of the field of sociology of scientific knowledge. The Strong Program originated from the so called Edinburgh school in the mid‐1970s and was most famously set out by David Bloor in his 1976 book,
Knowledge and Social Imagery
. Bloor was part of a group of sociologists and historians based in the University of Edinburgh who proposed that social scientists should treat and analyze scientific knowledge claims as they would any other type of knowledge claims: as knowledge constructed and located in a specific societal framework. The Strong Program was inspired by Wittgenstein's argument about rules, which states that to apply a rule, or a taxonomy, or a term, a judgment of similarity or difference is needed. The Edinburgh group introduced the concept of
finitism
to argue for why the content of scientific knowledge could not, and should not, be exempt from sociological analysis. No two cases or events are ever “the same,” or “not the same,” without a human decision about similarity or difference.
Subcultures, Deviant
Authors: Berard T. J.
Published: September 2017

Subcultures come in an incredible diversity of forms, associated with street gangs, organized crime families, prison inmates, drug addicts, football hooligans, surfers, religious cults, hippie communes, and punk rockers. On a grander societal scale, subcultures include working‐class and underclass subcultures, racial/ethnic subcultures, immigrant subcultures, regional subcultures, and youth subcultures. Although not all subcultures are deviant, the term subculture is often used to refer to the values and attitudes of deviant groups, and especially deviant groups of juveniles. Therefore, the study of deviant subcultures has traditionally been associated with the sociology of deviance and crime, criminology, and youth social work. But the study of deviant subcultures has expanded well beyond its traditional disciplinary boundaries.
Suicide
Authors: Stack Steven
Published: September 2017

Suicide is among the top ten leading causes of death. Over 30,000 Americans take their own lives each year: about 85 per day. Further, there are an estimated 250,000–600,000 suicide attempts each year. There are at least 5 million living Americans who have attempted suicide in the past. While Americans fear being murdered more than dying by their own hand, the suicide rate is currently double the murder rate.
Symbolic Interaction
Authors: Hall Peter M.
Published: September 2017

Symbolic interactionism (also known as interactionism) is a uniquely American theoretical perspective that draws its primary inspiration from pragmatism. It refers to humans’ distinctive use of language to create symbols, common meanings, for thinking and communication with others. Herbert Blumer (1969) coined the term to express his “reading” of George Herbert Mead's thought developed in the early 1900s and codified it in the elaboration of three premises: (1) humans act on the basis of the meanings which things have for them; (2) meanings arise in interaction between people; and (3) meanings are handed and modified through an interpretive process used by people in dealing with things encountered.
Saint‐Simon, Claude Henri (1760–1825)
Authors: Pickering Mary
Published: September 2017

Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint‐Simon, was an early nineteenth‐century reformer and thinker, who predicted that in the future society would be scientific and industrial in nature and should be reorganized to value productivity and work in support of the common welfare. He helped inspire sociology, socialism, technocratic approaches to social organization, and the idea of a united Europe.
Self‐Serving Bias
Authors: Corra Mamadi
Published: September 2017

The “self‐serving bias” refers to people's tendency to attribute positive outcomes or successes to internal or personal factors (such as effort or ability) and to attribute negative outcomes or failures to external or situational factors (such as task difficulty or luck). Variously labeled as “defensive,” “egocentric,” or “egotistic” attribution, the bias accounts for people's greater tendency to take credit for success than failure (e.g., having a perfect score on the SAT because of innate intelligence or hard work as opposed to having a low score on the test because of unfavorable test conditions; doing well in a boxing match because of exceptional strength and skills as opposed to doing poorly because of unfair rules). It is also evident in people's tendency to assess morally ambiguous situations in ways concordant with their interests; or in perceptions of fairness – arriving at judgments of what is fair or right that are biased in favor of self‐ interest.
Sweatshops
Authors: Smith David Norman
Published: September 2017

Sweatshops, which now spark global controversy, arose in the shadows of the emerging English factory system. Originally minor offshoots of the industrial revolution, they are now among the most ubiquitous features of global production.
Significant Symbol
Authors: Corra Mamadi
Published: September 2017

A “significant symbol” is anything with a shared meaning to a group of people or collectivity. It may be an object, gesture, sound, color, person, event, or any other thing; its distinctiveness lies in the fact that it means the same thing to most members of a group or collectivity. For most citizens of the United States, for example, the American Flag is a significant symbol signifying country; it has a shared meaning of peoplehood. To many people in the small West African country the Gambia (and to many in several, if not all, African countries), “kola nut” is a significant symbol because it represents union: the union of a husband and a wife; the union of a newly born child and a couple; and so on. The nut is a bitter brownish seed, about the size of a chestnut, produced by the tropical kola tree. Its extract (cola) contains caffeine and is used in beverages, as a masticatory, and for medicinal purposes. Because of its noted significance as a unifying symbol, the nut has a ubiquitous presence in wedding ceremonies, christenings, and the like, and its presence is expected in all such events. Likewise, among many African ethnic groups, the presence of an owl on a tree in front of a person's yard symbolizes evil and/or an impending danger. Experts similarly employ significant symbols when they use language that is unique to their areas of expertise (i.e., attorneys arguing the legal merits of a “class action suit”; sociologists debating the “Marxian” versus “Weberian” approach to the study of society).
Significant Symbol
Authors: Corra Mamadi
Published: September 2017

A “significant symbol” is anything with a shared meaning to a group of people or collectivity. It may be an object, gesture, sound, color, person, event, or any other thing; its distinctiveness lies in the fact that it means the same thing to members of a group or collectivity.
Sexism, Sexual Harassment, and Sexual Assault: Toward Conceptual Clarity
Authors: Firestone Juanita M. , Harris Richard J.
Published: September 2017

Within many hierarchical, bureaucratic systems, cohesion is very highly valued, and divulging negative information about fellow employees or about the organization in general is taboo. Interestingly, cohesion has been used to exclude rather than include individuals seen as “outsiders” or “troublemakers” (e.g., women, race/ethnic minority members). Both sexism and sexual harassment have been used to keep individuals in their place within many organizational models. In addition, sexual assault has been used as a technique of control by those with power over those with less power, especially in closed organizational systems. While each of these processes can be used independently, they are often used in combination to provide a potent system of organizational control. The definition of sexual harassment includes such a wide spectrum of behaviors, including legally defined harassment, sexist behaviors, and sexual assault, that these behaviors may overlap in real‐life situations. Thus, there is still a lack of conceptual distinction among them to enable individuals to sort through the various conceptualizations.
Stereotype Threat
Authors: Kleyman Kerry S. , Loskota Tierza , Kemmelmeier Markus
Published: September 2017

Stereotype threat describes a situation when members of a stigmatized group perform poorly on a task because they are concerned about confirming others’ negative stereotypes about them. A central characteristic of stereotype‐threat situations is that an individual believes that their own performance is not only reflective of their personal qualities, but that it will be viewed as indicative of the qualities of their entire group. Seeing one's own performance in this way can produce performance pressure, distraction, anxiety, and negative thinking – all leading to subsequent underperformance.
System justification theory
Authors: Kemmelmeier Markus
Published: September 2017

System justification theory was first proposed by social psychologists John Jost and Mahzarin Banaji (1994). Along with Jackman's (1994) paternalism theory, which emerged around the same time, system justification theory was inspired by the observation that in many cases status relations within unequal and oppressive societies are rather non‐conflictual. This notable absence of strife between unequal groups challenges traditional notions of group competition, which takes for granted an ongoing struggle over limited resources characterized by in‐group solidarity and out‐group rejection. Building on Marx, Gramsci, and Habermas, system justification proposed a social psychological account of false consciousness and hegemonial ideology, which serve to mute group conflict and justify existing inequality.
Social Bond
Authors: Chriss James J.
Published: September 2017

Following Parsons (1968), Habermas (1984) notes that sociology is the science primarily concerned with explaining human co‐operation. Explanations of the forms of human co‐operation have preoccupied philosophy, the humanities, and science since the time of the ancient Greeks. It was not until philosophy was able to separate itself from religious doctrine, beginning with Hobbes (the state) and Locke and Rousseau (the social contract), that a search was launched for the mechanisms that hold persons together or drive them apart (Eder, 2007). Building upon the thought of Vico, Mill, and Comte, by the late 1800s sociology was finally positioned to conceptualize and research human sociality, bringing to bear the latest statistical and methodological techniques.
Sexualities Across the Life Course
Authors: Carpenter Laura M.
Published: September 2017

The life‐course perspective is a powerful tool for studying sexual life. 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.
Sexual Geographies
Authors: Hunt Kalev
Published: September 2017

An interdisciplinary field of study which broadly encompasses the intersection of sexuality and space,
sexual geographies
is primarily the domain of those working in social and cultural geography. However, from its founding – and especially in the past decade – there has been work within the field originating from feminist geographers and those investigating urban, political, economic, and health geographies, along with contributions from other academics outside of the geography discipline, including, but not limited to, sociologists, cultural and social theorists, and media and communications researchers. Originally springing from studies in the 1970s and 1980s seeking to plot the locations and densities of (primarily gay male) enclaves of sexual minorities in North American urban cores, this emerging subdiscipline has expanded quickly from the study of gay (male) gentrification in inner cities to encompass the investigation of multiple sexualities within the context of a variety of spatial scales, ranging from the close proximity of the body to the vast span of transnational migration and international sex tourism. Indelibly shaped by the emergence of queer theory in the 1990s, sexual geographies today address how deviant, normative, dissident, and transitory sexualities are multiply co‐constitutive of the material, imagined, and virtual settings in which human experience transpires.
Sociology of American Indians
Authors: Nagel Joane
Published: September 2017

The sociology of American Indians draws on interdisciplinary research from history, law, and the social sciences to understand the internal organization of Native American communities, the place of Native individuals and communities in the United States, and points of comparison between Native Americans and Indigenous peoples around the world. The fields of American Indian and Indigenous studies are expanding areas of scholarship. Several decades ago all the sociologists who studied Native Americans easily would have fit in a small classroom. By 2012 such a gathering would require a large lecture hall. Major areas of sociological research on Native Americans focus on demography, comparative‐historical studies, social movements, economic development, and traditional ecological knowledge.
Taxes: Progressive, Proportional, and Regressive
Authors: Wernet Christine A.
Published: September 2017

The generation of government revenue and the redistribution of income among the population are two central reasons for taxation (Davies 1986). Governments have used taxation as a means to generate revenue for centuries, and some governments have been using taxation as a means of resource reallocation since at least the 1800s. The three main types of taxation, progressive, proportional and regressive taxes, are outlined.
Taylorism
Authors: Prechel Harland
Published: September 2017

Developed by Frederick Taylor in the 1880s, Taylorism is a form of scientific management that was implemented to increase control over the labor process. Taylor's system of scientific management emphasized the idea that economic success is caused by superior abilities and that those abilities can be learned.
Teamwork
Authors: West Michael A.
Published: September 2017

Teams are a particular form of work group. They are groups of people who share responsibility for producing products or delivering services. They share overall work objectives and ideally have the necessary authority, autonomy, and resources to achieve these objectives. Team members are dependent on each other to achieve the objectives and therefore have to work closely, interdependently, and supportively to achieve the team's goals. Members have distinct and clear roles. Effective teams have as few members as necessary to perform the task and are ideally no larger than six to eight members. And the team is recognized by others in the organization as a team. The team rather than the individual is increasingly considered the basic building block of organizations and team‐based working the modus operandi of organizations (West et al. 2003).
Terrorism
Authors: Kellner Douglas
Published: September 2017

Over the past two centuries, terrorism has been a highly contested and volatile topic. Those accused of terrorism are vilified as enemies of the state and social order, but many labeled “terrorists” insist that they are “freedom fighters,” strugglers for national liberation, or
mujaheddin
(holy warrior) or
fedayeen
(“prepared for martyrdom”), ready to die for righteous causes. Many decry terrorists' indiscriminate violence against civilians, while other critics like Chomsky (1988) and Herman (1982) document state use of violence and terror against its perceived enemies. Sociologically, terrorist groups recruit disaffected and alienated individuals often motivated by strong ideologies like nationalism, or religion, to commit terrorist acts. These in turn generate societal fear and exacerbate conflicts and hatred within the social fabric and can be used by the state to oppress groups labeled “terrorists.” In the twenty‐first century, governments throughout the world have attempted to define terrorism more precisely and to criminalize terrorism, while terrorist activities multiply. As weapons of destruction become more deadly and widespread, social divisions between haves and have‐nots multiply, and conflict rages throughout the world, terrorism will likely continue to be a major issue and problem of the present era.
Theology
Authors: Gabriel Karl
Published: September 2017

The modern conception of theology as both a faithful and rational or scientific way of talking about God dates from the Christian Middle Ages. Theology as a term is rooted in Greek philosophy, which consisted of three parts: the mythology of the gods, theology as a form of philosophy of nature, and political theology as a public cult. Christendom only reluctantly accepted the term. It is only from the twelfth century onwards that the term theology is commonly used for this science of Christian faith in contrast to the term philosophy. The late Middle Ages finds the term entirely accepted and it is even taken over by Martin Luther. In modern times it is especially used to distinguish between religious philosophy and religious studies on the one hand and Christian doctrine on the other.
Theory
Authors: Markovsky Barry
Published: September 2017

There are many different views in sociology about what theory is and what it should be. Many of these views are complementary, referring to different aspects of the process of theorizing, or to particular qualities that are more or less emphasized by different theorists. Other views about the nature of theories are so disparate as to actually contradict one another; yet, rightly or wrongly, they coexist peacefully across different streams of sociological work. One distinction that has gained some traction over the last decade is that betweensocial theoryandsociological theory. In practice the demarcation is often unclear, but social theory tends to lean more toward the philosophical and prescriptive, whereas sociological theory generally seeks empirical grounding through testable claims about social phenomena. The purpose here is not to critically evaluate sociology's various theoretical approaches, but rather to provide a short overview of some of the major strands of theoretical work from several different angles.
Thomas, William I. (1863–1947)
Authors: Stebbins Robert A.
Published: September 2017

W. I. Thomas was born in Virginia and raised in a Protestant, rural, religious milieu. In 1884 he received his bachelor's degree from the University of Tennessee, and after two years of study in Germany followed by teaching English and sociology at Oberlin College, he joined in 1895 the new faculty in sociology at the University of Chicago. He had been among that department's first group of graduate students (he worked under Albion Small), starting in1893 and receiving his doctorate in 1895. He remained at Chicago until 1918 when, for personal reasons, he retired. In 1923 Thomas returned to active teaching, now at the New School for Social Research, but his teaching was largely part‐time, for he preferred to mix teaching with research. Between 1930 and 1936 he went regularly to Sweden to work with the Social Science Institute at the University of Stockholm. He was appointed lecturer at Harvard University in 1936 and 1937, living in New Haven until his move to Berkeley, California, in 1939. He resided there as an independent researcher until his death in 1947.
Thomas, William I. (1863–1947)
Authors: Stebbins Robert A.
Published: September 2017

W.I. Thomas was born in Virginia and raised in a Protestant, rural, religious milieu. In 1884 he received his bachelor's degree from the University of Tennessee, and after two years of study in Germany, followed by teaching English and sociology at Oberlin College, he joined in 1895 the new faculty in sociology at the University of Chicago. He was among that department's first group of graduate students (he worked under Albion Small), starting in 1893 and receiving his doctorate in 1895. He remained at Chicago until 1918 when, for personal reasons, he retired. In 1923 Thomas returned to active teaching, now at the New School for Social Research, but his teaching was largely part‐time, for he preferred to mix teaching with research. Between 1930 and 1936 he went regularly to Sweden to work with the Social Science Institute at the University of Stockholm. He was appointed lecturer at Harvard University in 1936 and 1937, living in New Haven until his move to Berkeley, California, in 1939. He resided there as an independent researcher until his death in 1947.
Tradition
Authors: Tonkinson Robert
Published: September 2017

“Tradition” connotes a body of values, beliefs, rules, and behavior patterns that is transmitted generationally by practice and word of mouth and is integral to socialization processes. The content of tradition is shared by a given group and has informational and moral components that concern the nature of things, right and wrong behavior, and unanswerable questions about life and death. Strong connotations of fixity, stability, and continuity are inherent in the notion of “tradition,” as a benchmark or beacon guiding a society's body of daily behavior and providing justification for beliefs and practices. In relatively homogeneous small‐scale societies, where tradition is the only blueprint for acceptable behavior, it is typically unquestioned and, whatever its truth value, logicality, or consistency, may be regarded as sacred lore (Hunter & Whitten 1976).