bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Kinsey, Alfred (1892–1956)
Authors: Plummer Ken
Published: September 2017

Alfred Kinsey was not by training a sociologist, but a biologist (specializing in the taxonomy of gall wasps) at Indiana University, Bloomington. Believing there was a need for a course about marriage and sexual behavior, in 1938 he was concerned to find little data on which to base such study. According to one small study at that time, some 96 percent of young Americans did not know the word masturbation and many thought it was a form of insanity. In general there was widespread ignorance, and he decided to conduct his own study of the sexual behavior of the American female and male during the 1930s to 1950s – most prominently asThe Sexual Behavior of the Human Male(1948) andThe Sexual Behavior of the Human Female(1953), and after his death, less well‐known studies such asSex Offenders(1965). Ultimately providing some 18,000 life stories of individuals (many of whom he interviewed himself), it was largely taxonomic – a “social book keeping” exercise showing who does what with whom, where, when, and how often. Using the interviews, he and his colleagues asked around 300 questions. When published, his work was a large statistical and scientific study, but curiously it became a national bestseller and played a prominent role in shaping US cultural life in the later part of the twentieth century (Reumann 2005).
Kinsey, Alfred (1892–1956)
Authors: Plummer Ken
Published: September 2017

Kinsey was a pioneer of early research into sexuality and, though a biologist, he provided some of the earliest statements about how sexuality was shaped by social forces. In this entry Kinsey's sociological contribution to the study of sexuality is suggested; and some key findings and ideas outlined (such as the six‐point homosexual continuum). Kinsey's work was controversial but it has had significant impact upon modern culture. Critical problems, including those suggested by feminists, are also raised.
Knowledge, Sociology of
Authors: McCarthy E. Doyle
Published: September 2017

The sociology of knowledge reflects and advances further a distinctly modern set of presuppositions about human knowledge: Knowledges develop out of particular sociohistorical circumstances and these circumstances inform what human beings know and their various ways of knowing. As a field of study it examines the social and group origin of ideas, arguing that the entire “ideational realm” (“knowledges,” ideas, ideologies, mentalities) develops within the context of a society's groups and institutions. But its theories also address broad sociological questions about the extent and limits of social and group influence through an examination of the social and cultural foundations of cognition and perception. Despite significant changes over time, classical and contemporary studies in the sociology of knowledge share a common theme: the social foundations of thought. Ideas, concepts, and belief systems share an intrinsic sociality explained by the contexts in which they emerge.
Kurauchi, Kazuta (1896–1988)
Authors: Kosaka Kenji
Published: September 2017

Kazuta Kurauchi was born in Okayama Prefecture in Japan. His father was the head teacher of Chinese classics at Kojokan, which was a local private school specializing in Chinese literature studies. From his early days, Kurauchi was greatly influenced by both Keiken Sakata, the famous scholar who owned and managed the school he attended, and his father.
Labor/Labor Power
Authors: Beamish Rob
Published: September 2017

While establishing their materialist position, Marx and Engels argued that one may distinguish humankind from other biological entities by consciousness, religion, or whatever else one chose, but humankind fundamentally distinguished itself from animals and other living organisms when it began to produce its means of life. Labor, they argued, is an eternal, naturally imposed condition of human life, common to all forms of society. Finally, Marx and Engels noted, while producing its means of life, humankind indirectly produces the material conditions for its ongoing existence.
Labor–Management Relations
Authors: von Otter Casten
Published: September 2017

The study of labor–management relations (LMR) refers to the rules and policies which govern and organize employment, how these are established and implemented, and how they affect the needs and interests of employees and employers. LMR has implications for the organization of work as well as economic policy. Focus gradually has broadened from the formation and operation of national and local institutions and collective bargaining to strategic human resource policies. Most recently a multi‐level agenda has formed, following new needs for regulation in world trade, in the extended European Union, and in former communist and newly industrialized countries.
Laboratory Studies and the World of the Scientific Lab
Authors: Kleinman Daniel Lee
Published: September 2017

The classic laboratory studies played a central role in defining the focus of research in the sociology of science and technology for a number of years. This entry summarizes the classic laboratory ethnographies in the sociology of science and discusses some more recent work as well.
Later‐Life Marriage
Authors: Kulik Liat
Published: September 2017

Late adulthood is usually characterized by several major events, including retirement from work, a decline in the health of spouses or other family members, and entry into the role of grandparent or sometimes even great‐grandparent. These changes may affect individuals, and have a unique impact on the spousal relations in late adulthood. Against this background, the following main aspects of later life marriage are emphasized here: marital quality, spousal caregiving, and the division of household tasks.
Lechner, Norbert (1939–2004)
Authors: Alfie Cohen Miriam
Published: September 2017

Born in Germany in 1939, Norbert Lechner was granted honorary citizenship by the Senate of the Republic of Chile in 2003. He earned a bachelor's degree in law and obtained a doctorate in political science from the University of Freiberg in 1969. He visited Chile as a doctoral student and came to live there. From 1974 he was a professor and researcher in the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Chile (FLACSO). He was its director from 1988 to 1994.
Legal Profession
Authors: Deflem Mathieu
Published: September 2017

The legal profession refers to all the occupational roles purposely oriented towards the administration and maintenance of the legal system. Encompassing lawyers, judges, counselors, and experts of legal education and scholarship, the legal profession has been the subject of considerable reflection in the sociology of law. This sociological interest parallels the enormous attention devoted to the legal profession in various strands of sociolegal studies, including also other social sciences besides sociology as well as legal scholarship, which in turn is the result of the successful monopolization of the execution of legal functions and the resulting social standing and closure of the legal profession. The fact that the legal profession is among the most researched aspects of the institution of law is thus a direct function of the professionalization of the legal role itself. Yet, although most scholarly research on the legal profession comes from within legal scholarship and from law‐and‐society perspectives that are firmly nestled in legal education, there also exists a distinctively sociological tradition that examines societal aspects of the legal profession from the viewpoint of a multitude of theoretical orientations.
Legitimacy
Authors: Troyer Lisa
Published: September 2017

Legitimacy is defined as a state of appropriateness ascribed to an actor, object, system, structure, process, or action resulting from its integration with institutionalized norms, values, and beliefs. It is a topic of longstanding interest across the spectrum of sociological phenomena and levels of analysis. Legitimacy is a multilevel concept, as implied by the term “actor,” which may refer to individuals, groups, organizations, nation‐states, and world systems. It appears as a core concept in diverse areas of sociological inquiry including (but not limited to) social psychology, stratification, deviance, collective action, organizations, political systems, law, and science.
Leisure
Authors: Scraton Sheila
Published: September 2017

Leisure is a notoriously difficult concept to define. The study of leisure has early origins stretching back to the 1920s and Veblen's
The Theory of the Leisure Class
(1925). However, it was in the 1960s and 1970s that the foundations of leisure studies as an academic area were laid. Early writers such as Dumazedier in
Towards a Society of Leisure
(1967) defined leisure as activity that is set apart from other obligations such as work and family and provides individuals with the opportunity for relaxation, the broadening of knowledge, and social participation. Dumazedier's definition highlights the notion that leisure involves pleasure and freedom of choice and that this sets it apart from paid work and everyday commitments. Leisure could be seen as
compensation
, a means of escape from the routines of daily labor, or as
residual time
, time left over when other commitments have taken place.
Leisure Class
Authors: Zick Varul Matthias
Published: September 2017

The concept of the leisure class was introduced by Thorstein Veblen in his
Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899). Leisure classes here consist of those people who, due to their social position, can afford to abstain from productive work and live on other people's labor. They confine themselves to non‐industrial occupations like “government, warfare, religious observances, and sports.” Their income is sourced from exploitation of industrial classes that are subdued by the leisure class's superior “pecuniary prowess.” In order to assert their position they have to be
visibly
idle. Their leisure practices do not only demonstrate momentary inactivity, but often display skills that serve as evidence of past abstention from work – higher learning and accomplishment in gentlemanly sports, for example, count as evidence for habitual non‐productivity. Positional claims are further asserted by wasteful “conspicuous consumption” of high‐status goods and by vicarious leisure of family members, guests, minions, and footmen. Conspicuous consumption of high‐priced goods is a form of “vicarious leisure” in which other people's labor time is taken up for the production of goods of ostensibly no practical use. Leisure class fashion, too, expresses contempt for productive activity (e.g., by deliberately limiting the movements of the wearer).
Liberalism
Authors: Gamble Andrew
Published: September 2017

Liberalism is the leading ideology of the modern era. The term first began to be used to denote the supporters of liberty and the opponents of arbitrary authority in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars. During the nineteenth century it came to signify adherence to the principles of individualism, liberty, limited government, progress, and equality. As such it has always been an extremely broad doctrine, espoused by thinkers as diverse as John Stuart Mill, Constant, Bentham, Tocqueville, Hobhouse, and Hayek. Many of its key ideas can be traced to earlier thinkers such as Locke, Kant, and the French and Scottish Enlightenments. At its core is a particular conception of society and human nature, based on beliefs in the moral primacy of the individual as the starting point for thinking about politics and society; the equal moral worth of every individual, regardless of class, nation, gender, or race; and the possibility of improving social conditions and reforming political institutions. Individuals are conceived as the bearers of rights which exist independently of government and for which government is brought into existence in order to protect. The legitimacy of any system of government depends therefore on how well it protects the liberty of its citizens.
Lifestyle
Authors: Katz‐Gerro Tally
Published: September 2017

Lifestyle involves the typical features of everyday life of an individual or a group. These features pertain to interests, opinions, behaviors, and behavioral orientations. For example, lifestyle relates to choice and allocation of leisure time; preferences in clothes and food; tastes in music, reading, art, and television programs; and choice of consumer goods and services.
Lifestyle Consumption
Authors: Binkley Sam
Published: September 2017

Lifestyles are symbolically embellished ways of living. Sociologically, they serve two important functions: they classify or categorize the practitioner within a broader social matrix, and in so doing offer practitioners a unique sense of self and identity. Thus, lifestyles combine material and symbolic processes: they are practical ways of providing for basic needs and requirements such as food, clothing, and shelter, but also aesthetic and symbolic expressions of one's sense of self and of one's membership among certain social groups. As such, lifestyles occur at the intersection of individual agency and social structure. They project a unity that is both subjectively meaningful to practitioners themselves, and objectively legible to those defining the social context in which they are performed. For these reasons, lifestyle has sustained as a key sociological concept, capable of bridging the divide between macro‐level concerns with large scale social structures and social groupings, and micro‐level concerns with the subjective dimensions of agency, meaning, and identity.
Local Residents' Movements
Authors: Hasegawa Koichi
Published: September 2017

Local residents’ movements expanded greatly in Japan after the mid‐1950s. Their names – such as “students’ movements” and “women's movements” – designate types of participants. The term “residents” indicates the local inclusiveness of the movement: anyone who lives in the area, if they are interested in a local issue, can participate. No other qualification is required. People of any age beyond high school, including senior citizens, male or female, people of any political affiliation or ideology, are welcome to participate. The boundary of the local area depends on the issues. In many cases it corresponds closely to a geographical area like a local school district, city, town, or village. But when pollution comes from a large‐scale project like the bullet train or an airport, the movement can even extend beyond prefectural boundaries.
Lombroso, Cesare (1835–1909)
Authors: Williams Frank P. , McShane Marilyn D.
Published: September 2017

Cesare Lombroso is considered one of the fathers of positivist criminology. His work on the traits and characteristics of offenders typifies the scientific analysis of the individual criminal in an attempt to determine the causes of crime. Although there is little support for his assumptions today, his work is valued not only as a precursor to criminal anthropology but also as an early demonstration of the use of scientific measures in theory building.
Luhmann, Niklas (1927–1998)
Authors: Rogowski Ralf
Published: September 2017

Niklas Luhmann saw it as his task to revolutionize the sociological theory of society. His theory of social systems claims nothing less than to offer sociology a new “universal theory for the discipline” (Luhmann 1995). One of the major concerns guiding his approximately 700 publications was to counter the trends, as he perceived them, of abandoning general sociological theory, confining sociological theory to exegeses of the classics, and dispersion of sociological research and thinking into subdisciplines. In countering these trends he devoted his energy to introducing a new general sociological theory that is able to provide an adequate understanding of the real challenges to modern society. He called his alternative approach autopoietic social systems theory. It borrows insights from general sciences, in particular general systems theory, epistemological constructivism, mathematical logic, and the theory of communication.
Lust Balance
Authors: Wouters Cas
Published: September 2017

The concept of the lust balance refers to the social organization and accompanying social codes (ideals and practices) regarding the relationship between the longing for sexual gratification and the longing for enduring relational intimacy. It thus draws attention to the balance between emotive charges in the desires for sex and love, and to changes in this lust balance. For although the two types of longing for sexual gratification and for an intimate relationship are clearly interconnected, these connections change in both the biographies of individuals and the histories of peoples. Nor is the interconnectedness unproblematic. Today, some people (mostly men) even view the two longings as contradictory. Moreover, the attempt to find a satisfying balance between the longing for sex and the longing for love may be complicated by many other longings; for instance, by the longing for children or by the longing to raise one's social power and rank. Therefore, the “balance” in the relationship between sex and love is a polymorphous and multidimensional tension balance. Yet it offers a wider theoretical framework that opens the possibility to integrate many different threads of long‐term developments, as is demonstrated by Wouters (2004), in a study pioneering lust balance as a central concept.
Lust Balance
Authors: Wouters Cas
Published: September 2017

Children become sexually mature at an age when their relational ideals and practices are already well developed, as is their whole pattern of self‐regulation. Thus, becoming sexually mature and the development of sexual impulses and longings find a bed – so to speak – in relational developments. How young girls and boys integrate sexuality into their personality and relational ideals can be recapitulated as the development of their lust balance. The concept of the lust balance refers to this development within a particular social organization and accompanying social codes (ideals and practices) regarding the relationship between the longing for sexual gratification and the longing for enduring relational intimacy. It thus draws attention to the balance between emotive charges in the desires for sex and love, and to changes in this lust balance. For, although the two types of longing are clearly interconnected, these connections change in both the biographies of individuals and the histories of peoples. Nor is the interconnectedness unproblematic. Moreover, the attempt to find a satisfying balance between the longing for sex and the longing for love may be complicated by many other longings; for instance by the longing for children or by the longing to raise one's social power and rank. Therefore, the lust balance concept draws attention to relationships between sex and love that are polymorphous and multidimensional, just like Norbert Elias's (2012) concepts of a power balance and a tension balance. Thus, it offers a wider theoretical framework that opens the possibility to integrate many different threads of long‐term developments as is demonstrated inSex and Manners: Female Emancipation in the West(Wouters, 2004), a pioneering study with the lust balance as a central concept. What follows next, leans on this study. Other studies into the connections and the tensions between sex and love are rare, and historical studies in this area are even harder to find. Studies of sexuality usually do not pay much attention, if any, to the kind of relationship in which it occurs, and, vice versa, studies of loving relationships usually do not take a systematic interest in sex.
Lundberg, George. A. (1895–1966)
Authors: Hammersley Martyn
Published: September 2017

George Andrew Lundberg studied sociology under M. C. Elmer, L. L. Bernard, and F. S. Chapin. His early work consisted of empirical investigations of a variety of topics; some titles include: “Sex Differences on Social Questions,” “The Newspaper and Public Opinion,” and “The Demographic and Economic Basis of Political Radicalism and Conservatism” (see Catton 1968). Later, Lundberg became renowned as the champion of a neo‐positivistic, quantitative approach to social science, against the older traditions of social philosophy and case study. In this respect, he formed part of an influential movement within US sociology in the 1920s and 1930s (see Hammersley 1989: Ch. 4).
Lundberg, George A. (1895–1966)
Authors: Hammersley Martyn
Published: September 2017

George Andrew Lundberg studied sociology under M.C. Elmer, L.L. Bernard, and F.S. Chapin. His early work consisted of empirical investigations into a wide variety of topics. Some titles include: “Sex Differences on Social Questions,” “The Newspaper and Public Opinion,” and “The Demographic and Economic Basis of Political Radicalism and Conservatism” (see Catton, 1968). Later, Lundberg became renowned as the champion of a neopositivistic, quantitative approach to social science, against the older traditions of social philosophy and case study. In this respect, he formed part of an influential movement within US sociology in the 1920s and 1930s (see Hammersley, 1989: chapter 4).
McDonaldization
Authors: Stillman Todd
Published: September 2017

McDonaldization is the process by which principles of the fast‐food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more spheres of US society and the rest of the world. Coined by the sociologist George Ritzer, the term invokes the famous fast‐food chain founded by Ray Kroc in 1955 as a metaphor for a widespread change in the delivery of goods and services toward more instrumentally efficient means of distribution. In a series of books and articles, Ritzer describes the competitive advantages of the McDonald's service system and catalogs the many ways in which it has shaped the expanding consumer marketplace.
Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766–1834)
Authors: Weeks John R.
Published: September 2017

Thomas Robert Malthus is unquestionably the most influential writer in history on the topic of population. This was generally unintentional on his part because he was trained in Jesus College at Cambridge University in England with the early ambition of becoming a clergyman, and he was ordained into the Church of England. After graduation from Cambridge he divided his time between his duties as curate in a small parish church in Albury, south of London near his family's home, and Cambridge, where he had been elected a fellow, and it was during this period that he wrote the first edition of the book that has immortalized him:
Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the future improvement of society; With remarks on the speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other writers
. Malthus (who went by Robert, which is why his first and middle names are usually provided) was by nature a shy man and he had a perceptible speech impediment (which limited the scope of his ambitions in the Church of England), and he published the book anonymously in 1798. However, the book's success forced him to acknowledge authorship, and he subsequently revised and expanded the book through several published editions.
Management Fashion
Authors: Carter Chris , Clegg Stewart
Published: September 2017

One of the striking features of the organizational world in the last 30 years has been the rise and fall of a dazzling array of management initiatives. Typically originating in the US, such ideas have spread across the industrialized world (Czarniawska & Sevon 1996). The raft of initiatives includes Total Quality Management (TQM), Business Process Re‐Engineering (BPR), Culture Change, the Learning Organization, Knowledge Management (KM), Shareholder Value (SHV), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Of course, at least since the advent of Taylorism there have been management initiatives that have been widely appropriated. A key difference between earlier diffusions and now is the emergence of a powerful actor‐network that actively packages and commodifies management initiatives as products based on a 3–5 year life cycle.
Management Improvisation
Authors: Cunha Miguel Pina E , Magni Massimo
Published: September 2017

Management improvisation is the conception of action as it unfolds in an organizational context, drawing on the available material, cognitive, affective, and social resources. Organizations cannot manage or control improvisation, but they support individuals in dealing with unexpected events that require improvised action: on the one hand organizations may create an environment which considers the departure from routine as a possible way to solve an emergent problem, thus helping to trigger improvisation. On the other hand, organizations may support individuals during the improvisation process, by defining structures, by creating an organizational context, and by training individuals to be better poised in improvising.
Marginalization, Outsiders
Authors: Dean Hartley
Published: September 2017

Marginalization is a metaphor that refers to processes by which individuals or groups are kept at or pushed beyond the edges of society. The term outsiders may be used to refer to those individuals or groups who are marginalized.
Marianne Weber on Social Change
Authors: Lengermann Patricia
Published: September 2017

Marianne Weber's work is being only slowly recovered and studied; her sociology in general and her analysis of social change in particular are informed by and respond to the ideas of Marx (Weber 1900), of her husband Max, of their mutual friend Georg Simmel, and of feminist activists and theorists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Ellen Key. Of these, her debate with Max is arguably the most important. Like him, she embraced a historical‐comparative methodology. But her feminism led her to reject his stance in value neutrality, to offer a radically different interpretation of the significance of Protestantism and capitalism, and to use a three‐part model of social change, in which ideas are only an equal player with materiality and human agency.
Martineau, Harriet (1802–1876)
Authors: Siemsen Cynthia
Published: September 2017

Harriet Martineau's 25 volumes of short novels illustrating the principles of political economy outsold the works of her contemporary, Charles Dickens; Martineau's travel chronicles of nineteenth‐century American society and its cultural beliefs are comparative historical accounts that have been likened to Tocqueville's
Democracy in America
; she authored sociology's first systematic treatment of methodology six decades before Durkheim's
Rules of the Sociological Method
; and Martineau translated and condensed Auguste Comte's
Cours de philosophie positive
, and introduced his attempt to establish a sociological science within the English‐speaking world. However, the story of sociology's emergence has been a history of men and their contributions to the formation of the discipline. Although Martineau achieved high intellectual success in applying scientific techniques borrowed from the natural sciences to theories of social observation, that status was limited to her lifetime alone (Harper 2001).
Marx, Karl (1818–1883)
Authors: Antonio Robert J.
Published: September 2017

Karl Marx's critique of economic inequality and appeals for social justice have inspired left‐wing political parties, labor movements, and insurgencies across the world. His ideas often have been fused with local political cultures and employed in diverse ways. Marx's participation in the communist movement, call for worldwide revolution, and totemic status in communist regimes have made him a very controversial thinker. In wealthy capitalist countries he has been more of an oppositional reference point than an inspirational figure. For much of the twentieth century, western sociologists viewed him as an ideologue, on the margin of their discipline. During the later 1960s and early 1970s, however, sociological interest in Marx increased, spurred by anti‐colonialist uprisings, student activism, and the New Left. In North American sociology, which previously had ignored or dismissed him, a new generation of theorists portrayed him as a founder of “conflict theory” or “critical sociology” and accorded him elevated status, along with Durkheim and Weber, as part of classical social theory's and sociology's founding troika. Later critics held that this canon was too narrow and Eurocentric and that the postmodern cultural shift and collapse of communism rendered Marx irrelevant. Others countered that globalization, deregulated capitalism, and increased economic inequality made him more relevant than ever. These divergent views aside, Marx's materialist perspective and concept of class have influenced much sociological work, including that claiming to disprove his theories. In the early twenty‐first century, Marxist sociologists worked in many parts of the world, and they even had their own section of the American Sociological Association. Moreover, sociologists with diverse orientations have employed concepts and questions originating from Marx in well‐established research and theory programs. Marx has had an enduring impact on sociology's development.
Marxism and Sociology
Authors: Steinmetz George
Published: September 2017

Marx's thinking is based on a depth‐realist ontology and a methodology emphasizing contradictions, unintended consequences, and overdetermined causalities. Marxists argue that capitalist societies are organized around social classes defined in terms of unequal powers over the means and results of production. Class relations are understood as relations ofexploitationas well as domination. Capitalism is seen as dynamic, expansionist, and volatile, plagued by periodic bouts of primitive accumulation, decommodification, and crisis. Critics argue that links between social class locations and political practices and subjectivities are weak or extremely variable. Many twentieth‐century Marxists agree that capitalism's futures may not be socialist at all. Critics since the 1960s have rejected Marx's sometimes totalizing claims to explain all aspects of culture, politics, and social life. Recent approaches reconstruct Marxism along the lines of rational choice theory or as a theory of cultural hegemony, social regulation, or world‐systems and empires.
Masculinities, Crime and
Authors: Messerschmidt James W.
Published: September 2017

Gender consistently has been advanced by sociologists as the strongest predictor of criminal involvement: it explains more variance in crime cross‐culturally than any other variable. As an explanatory variable, then, gender would seem to be critical. Yet early theoretical works in the sociology of crime were gender‐blind. That is, although acknowledging that the vast majority of those who commit crime are men and boys, the gendered content of their legitimate and illegitimate behavior was virtually ignored (Messerschmidt 1993).
Matriarchy
Authors: (Hans) Bakker J. I.
Published: September 2017

The term matriarchy has a commonsense meaning today. It refers to a situation where a female becomes an important figure in a nuclear or extended household. Thus, for example, Rose Kennedy was a matriarch of the Kennedy clan. That current meaning has deep roots. At one time many thinkers believed that women had always been secondary to men. Early ideas concerning what Carl Linnaeus called “
homo sapiens
” (wise man) were biased in favor of “men's history.” It was not clear to social scientists until the early twentieth century that male and female gender roles are social constructs and that biology is not always destiny. Comparative data on anthropologically indigenous, non‐industrial societies makes it clear that the division of tasks in the household can be quite varied, with men often doing household tasks. Moreover, many cultures recognize a “third gender” in which biological men are treated in every outward respect as women.
Matthew Effect
Authors: Gómez‐Morales Yuri Jack
Published: September 2017

When considering science as a social system, there is a continuous interplay between status and the class system that locates scientists at different positions within the opportunity structure of science. Social standing within science's opportunity structure is, then, a function of positive recognition by one's peers. All other extrinsic rewards, such as monetary income from science‐connected activities, advancement within the scientific hierarchy, and enhanced access to human and material scientific capital, derive from this basic form of recognition.
Mead, Margaret (1901–78)
Authors: Williams Joyce E.
Published: September 2017

Margaret Mead was one of a very few academics to become known to the general public. Her discipline was anthropology but her contributions to knowledge were as critical to sociology and to psychology as to her own discipline. She pioneered fieldwork on women and children in various cultures; advanced ethnographic techniques; applied the social sciences to understanding everyday events and problems; and increased public awareness of culture as learned patterns of thought and behavior. Mead was ahead of her time as an anthropologist and as a woman when in 1925, at the age of 23, she went alone on her first field trip to study adolescents in Samoa.
Media
Authors: Gorman Lyn
Published: September 2017

Discussions of media in a social context are generally concerned with mass media and, more recently, new media. Mass media are defined as communication systems by which centralized providers use industrialized technologies to reach large and geographically scattered audiences, distributing content broadly classified as information and entertainment. Media reaching mass populations emerged in the late nineteenth century – newspapers, magazines, the film industry – and expanded to include radio from the 1920s and television broadcasting from the 1950s. A range of “new media” developed from the 1980s, including video, cable and pay TV, CD‐ROMs, mobile/cellular phones, and the Internet. In twenty‐first‐century societies media are pervasive and integral to modern life. Even in less developed societies they are widespread, although disparities in access remain. Economic profitability is also seen as a defining feature of modern media, reflecting the importance of commercial considerations to media institutions.
Media and Consumer Culture
Authors: Kellner Douglas , Pierce Clayton
Published: September 2017

“Media and consumer culture” is the transdisciplinary category used by theorists and social researchers to describe and understand the mediated experience of individuals and groups within consumer capitalist societies who are influenced and informed by a variety of different media, such as film, television, radio, newspaper, magazines, advertising, Internet, and other information and communication technologies. Implicit in the category of “media and consumer culture” is the connection drawn between the imperatives of capitalist consumer society and the harnessing of the methods of mass communication and culture that bolster the production/consumption paradigm.
Media and the Public Sphere
Authors: Dahlgren Peter
Published: September 2017

Increasingly, discussions on issues of democracy and the media are framed within the concept of the public sphere. In schematic terms, a functioning public sphere is understood as a constellation of communicative spaces in society that permit the circulation of information, ideas, debates – ideally in an unfettered manner – and also the formation of political will, i.e., public opinion. In the normative vision of the public sphere, these spaces, in which the mass media and now, more recently, the newer interactive media figure prominently, serve to permit the development and expression of political views among citizens. These spaces also facilitate communicative links between citizens and the power holders of society. While in the modern world the institutions of the media are the institutional core of the public sphere, we must recall that it is the face‐to‐face interaction, the ongoing talk between citizens, where the public sphere comes alive, so to speak, and where we find the actual bedrock of democracy.
Media, Regulation of
Authors: McQuail Denis
Published: September 2017

Media regulation refers to all means by which media organizations are formally restrained or directed in their activities. In this context, the reference is primarily to external control by way of public policy, law, and regulation, although it also includes some forms of self‐regulation, especially when these are intended to meet public concerns. The term media refers to publicly available means of communication, in particular the mass media of print, film, television, and radio, however distributed. Media regulation may also apply to the distribution infrastructure, including cable, wireless, satellite, etc. New means of communication, especially the Internet, may be an object of regulation, especially where they are used as pubic means of communication. The emphasis in this entry is on the external regulation “in the public interest” and with attention to matters of organization and content rather than economic and technical matters. Internal regulation is only considered where it has public causes or consequences. However, new forms of interactive communication are blurring the distinction between public and private communication and the forms and purposes of regulation are changing. Media regulation has always responded to changes in communication technology and successive “regimes” of media regulation can be identified, largely matching the dominant technology of the time.
Medical School Socialization
Authors: Hafferty Frederic
Published: September 2017

The study of medical education as a process of professional socialization is at best a dormant and at worse a dying object of academic inquiry. What once helped to legitimate an emerging academic field (medical sociology) in the 1950s and 1960s has since fallen on hard conceptual and analytic times. Today, cutting edge work on socialization appears not in sociology journals (where many of the earlier studies were published), but in journals such as
Academy of Management Journal
,
Administrative Science Quarterly
, and the
Journal of Organizational Behavior
. Within sociology, current work on socialization appears in subfields such as political sociology, the sociology of family (including parenting, child, adolescent, and spousal roles), mass media, and organizational sociology. Even when we restrict our focus to the “medicine,” studies of training and socialization are more apt to highlight other professions (or “quasi‐professions”) such as nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, physical therapy, mortuary science, and athletic training.
Medical Sociology
Authors: Cockerham William C.
Published: September 2017

Medical sociology is a subdiscipline of sociology that studies the social causes and consequences of health and illness (Cockerham 2004). Major areas of investigation include the social aspects of health and disease, the social behavior of health care workers and the people who utilize their services, the social functions of health organizations and institutions, the social patterns of health services, the relationship of health care delivery systems to other social systems, and health policy. What makes medical sociology important is the significant role social factors play in determining the health of individuals, groups, and the larger society. Social conditions and situations not only cause illness, but they also help prevent it.
Meritocracy
Authors: Yair Gad
Published: September 2017

The term “meritocracy” has three interrelated meanings. First, it refers to the type of social order where rewards are distributed to individuals in accordance with criteria of personal merit. Put differently, it denotes the “rule of the talented,” a system of governance wherein the brightest and most conscientious individuals are accurately and efficiently assigned to occupy the most important positions, based on their talent and achievements. Second, the concept pertains to an elite social class, a definite group of people that enjoys high prestige because its select members proved to have merit based on their unique abilities and attainments (i.e., the aristocracy of merit as coined by Thomas Jefferson). Third, the term touches upon the criteria of allocation of positions, roles, prestige, power, and economic reward, whereby excellent individuals are over‐benefited in relation to others. These criteria are based on achieved rather than ascribed characteristics, and reflect the assumption that while achievements of merit are rare and difficult to attain, they are culturally valued.
Michels, Robert (1876–1936)
Authors: Rucht Dieter
Published: September 2017

Robert Michels is one of the founding fathers of modern political sociology. His writings focus on mass democracy, fascism, political leadership, political parties, and social movements. He has become famous for his widely cited “iron law of oligarchy,” which continues to be an important reference point for both social scientists and political activists.
Middleman Minorities
Authors: Min Pyong Gap
Published: September 2017

Before the1960s, social scientists usually used the dichotomous concepts of majority‐minority groups or dominant‐subordinate groups to discuss ethnic and race relations in the United States and other multi‐ethnic societies. However, they found they needed a new concept to refer to those minority groups that stood between these two poles in social status and economic role. Thus, they created the concept of middleman minorities to refer to these intermediate groups since the 1960s (Blalock 1967: 79–84; Eitzen 1971; Bonacich 1972; Bonacich & Modell 1980; Turner & Bonacich 1980; Zenner 1991; Min 1996).
Migration: Internal
Authors: Crowder Kyle , Hall Matthew
Published: September 2017

In general, internal migration refers to the movement of individuals or populations within a social system. More specifically, following the United Nations definition, internal migration is a permanent change in residence from one geographical unit to another within a particular country. For example, internal migration may involve a change in residence from a rural area to a city, from one city to another, or from one region of a country to another. From the perspective of the destination or receiving area, an individual making such a move is an in‐migrant, while that same individual is an out‐migrant from the sending area. Because internal migration has profound individual‐level and collective repercussions, research on the topic remains a popular endeavor for economists, geographers, and demographers, despite the absence of ideal data or definitional consensus.
Milgram, Stanley (Experiments)
Authors: Kemmelmeier Markus
Published: September 2017

Stanley Milgram was one of the most influential social psychologists of the twentieth century. Born in 1933 in New York, he obtained a BA from Queen's College, and went on to receive a PhD in psychology from Harvard. Subsequently, Milgram held faculty positions in psychology at Yale University and the City University of New York until his untimely death in 1984. Although Milgram never held a formal appointment in sociology, his work was centrally focused on the social psychological aspects of social structure.
Military Sociology
Authors: Smith Irving
Published: September 2017

Military sociology is an interdisciplinary subfield of sociology that employs sociological concepts, theories, and methods to analyze the internal organization, practices, and perceptions of the armed forces as well as the relationships between the military and other social institutions. Some of the topics generally covered in military sociology include small group process related to race/ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, leadership, policy, veterans, historical cases, United States and foreign military organization, international affairs, manpower models, the transition from conscription to all‐volunteer forces, the social legitimacy of military organization, the military as a form of industrial organization, and civil‐military relations.
Moralpolitik
(Confucian)
Authors: Kim SangJun
Published: September 2017

Moralpolitik
means politics based on moral‐ethical concerns. That politics and morals are closely related is a familiar idea. As Rousseau once stated, “those who want to treat politics and morals separately will never understand anything of either of them” (Rousseau 1980: 235). In this regard,
realpolitik
, which means politics excluding moral‐ethical concerns, signifies a rather exceptional mode of politics, mainly applicable to a certain aspect of international politics, and is a residual concept of
moralpolitik
, not vice versa.
Motherhood
Authors: Walzer Susan
Published: September 2017

Motherhood is the word that sociologists tend to use to refer to the social expectations, experiences, and structures associated with being a mother. The use of the term motherhood differentiates the biological fact of producing a baby (becoming a mother) and the practices involved in taking care of children (mothering) from the public and cultural norms linked to the creation and care of children. Motherhood, in other words, is a social institution – one that contributes to the reproduction of gender differentiation and hierarchy in family and work.
Multiracial Feminism
Authors: Berger Michele , Bettez Silvia
Published: September 2017

Women of color have always actively participated in women's issues. However, their experience with feminist work has often been overlooked and largely undocumented (Hurtado 1996). Multiracial feminism refers to the activist and scholarly work conducted by women of color and anti‐racist white allies to promote race, class, and gender equality. In comparison to the highly documented second‐wave white, middle‐class feminism, which centered on abolishing patriarchy and privileged patriarchy as an oppression over all others, women of color feminism resists separating oppression and insists on recognizing the intersectionality of race, class, and gender oppression.
Mumford, Lewis (1895–1990)
Authors: Luccarelli Mark
Published: September 2017

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) was a journalist and independent academic who developed incisive and broad studies of urbanization and technological development and their impact on modernity. He authored
The City in History
and several other important studies. Mumford advocated both urban planning and technological modernization, but only within a broader cultural, social, and environmental context supported by landscape restoration, conservation, and community and regional development. He thought that cities, and whole urban regions, should be cultural centers, places of art and landscape, and places of social justice. He was an advocate of public housing. A humanist with an abiding interest in sociology and geography, Mumford was a founder of urban studies as a field.
Macrosociology
Authors: Boatcă Manuela
Published: September 2017

As a subfield of sociological analysis and theory, macrosociology deals with large‐scale, long‐term social processes, phenomena, and structures, such as social change, stratification, or the capitalist world economy. Conceptually, macrosociology is a relational term to distinguish the broad level of sociological analysis from the one characterizing microsociology, which studies small‐scale units and individual relationships, like social roles, interaction, or identities. The tension between the objects of study of macrosociology as opposed to microsociology has routinely been construed as a choice between the analysis of either structure or agency, respectively. The alternating prominence of one approach over the other in the history of sociology as a discipline has made it difficult to settle the debate for either side. Nevertheless, several attempts at bridging the divide by means of a theoretical synthesis have been undertaken since the 1980s. The entry reviews macrosociological approaches from modernization theory, dependency perspectives, and world‐systems analysis to globalization theories, and argues that recent works bridging the divide between Marxist and Weberian approaches, as well as between sociology and anthropology, allow for a renewed possibility of theoretical synthesis in the form of a global – rather than universal – sociology.