bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sexual Harassment
Authors: Zippel Kathrin
Published: September 2017

Sexual harassment refers to unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, or other forms of unwanted attention of a sexual nature, in a workplace or elsewhere. Legal definitions distinguish between quid pro quo sexual harassment, where putting up with these behaviors is a condition of work, and behaviors that create an intimidating, offensive, hostile environment for the victim. Its forms can be physical, verbal, gestural, visual, or graphic. Behaviors that can be perceived as sexual harassment include unwelcome (sexual) jokes, remarks with sexual connotations or about private lives, gossip, repeated requests to go out, and any form of unwanted touching or invasion of personal space, as well as sexual advances or assault.
Sexual Health
Authors: Lottes Ilsa
Published: September 2017

The concept of sexual health first appeared in publications in the 1960s, but in the late 1980s the use of the term increased dramatically in a wide range of disciplines. The meaning and application of sexual health to public health varies depending on sociocultural, political, and historical contexts. At the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, feminists, women's health advocates, and proponents of human rights presented a new approach to sexual health. This approach emphasized the need for women's empowerment, issues related to gender relations and inequality, justice for diverse sexualities, and the importance of adopting human rights/sexual rights frameworks in public policies and family planning programs. Other meanings and applications of sexual health are also described in this entry.
Shintoism
Authors: Nakano Tsuyoshi
Published: September 2017

Although there is no widely accepted definition of Shintoism even among Japanese scholars, the term could be defined tentatively as a Japanese traditional religious system based on so‐called “Shinto.” Shinto is generally believed to be indigenous to Japan. The term was coined by the combination of two words from Chinese –shin, originally from the Chinese character for “divine beings” or “gods” (shen), andto, originally from “way” (tao). Therefore, the literal meaning is “the way of the gods,” which corresponds to the native Japanese reading of the term,kami no michi, orkannagara no michi. The term Shinto (kami no michi) first appeared inNihon shoki(Chronicles of Japan compiled 720ce), together with the term “Buddha's law,”hotoke no minori. This was done in order to consciously designate traditional forms of worship of the emperor, which were inherited from ancestors, as these related to kami (god or gods; the same character asshin) and not to Buddhism. This indicates the large influence that rivalry with Buddhism had in the creation of the Shinto tradition from the outset.
Shopping Malls
Authors: Langman Lauren
Published: September 2017

The shopping mall is one of the most important social locations and symbols of contemporary consumer society and its cornucopia of goods. It is typically a “self‐contained” social environment with an assembly of stores and shops, carts and kiosks, and surely various eateries located in food courts. Shopping malls are the points of intersection between a vast globalized system where the production of highly advertised goods is distributed to individual consumers. They are sites of practices that mediate between the globalized factories and stores that sell the merchandise and individual interactions and identities that are today ever more dependent on the consumption of “branded” goods (Klein 1999).
Shopping Malls
Authors: Langman Lauren
Published: September 2017

Ever since people lived in permanent settlements, they came to markets, fairs, and bazaars to trade various foods, spices, adornments, and handicrafts – from rugs to pottery. With the rise of capitalism, itself based on a flourishing trade as markets expanded, a rising merchant class consumed more and more of the newly available goods. Consumption accelerated with capitalism, modernity, industrialization, and the mass production of consumer goods. One early moment in this transformation was seen in the arcades of Paris around 1822, when a more or less self‐contained collage of adjacent shops and stores erected glass roofs over its passageways, to protect shoppers from inclement weather. These arcades provided “phantasmagorias” of commodities for the growing and affluent urban classes.
Situationists
Authors: Toscano Alberto
Published: September 2017

The situationists were a collective of anti‐capitalist thinkers, active from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, who theorized the alienated character of modern consumer society and its revolutionary overcoming. Plagued throughout its history by splits and expulsions, the Situationist International (SI) was formed in 1957 from a number of tiny avant‐garde groups, including the Lettrist International and the Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. The SI published an eponymous journal from 1958 to 1969. Best known for its widespread cultural influence (from Baudrillard to punk rock) and role in the Paris events of May 1968, the SI counted among its ranks the Danish painter Asger Jorn, the Belgian writer Raoul Vaneigem, and the English art historian T. J. Clark. Its chief theorist was Guy Debord.
Small, Albion W. (1854–1926)
Authors: Williams Joyce E.
Published: September 2017

Albion W. Small is known more for discipline‐building in sociology than for contributions to sociological theory. He established the first department of sociology at the University of Chicago and served as its head from 1892 to 1924, and in that role influenced several generations of American sociologists. In 1895 he established the discipline's first professional journal, the
American Journal of Sociology
. He helped to found the American Sociological Society in 1905 and served two terms as its president. As with most of the first generation of sociologists in the US, Small's formal training was in philosophy and theology, but studies in Germany turned his attention to economics and interest theory. All of his work reflects an overarching concern with ethical interests. Small wrote and spoke about methodology, but not as we know it today. His own methodology was largely historical, economic, and political analysis. Nor did he clearly distinguish theory from methods. In his “Fifty Years of Sociology” (1916) under the subheading of theory, Small wrote about years of “wrangling about methods” along with the search for a single, theoretical explanation of society.
Smith, Adam (1723–1790)
Authors: Reisman D. A.
Published: September 2017

Adam Smith was born on June 5, 1723 in Kirkcaldy, a quiet fishing village north of Edinburgh. His father (whom he never knew) had been a Comptroller of Customs. He studied moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, where his teacher, Francis Hutcheson, was emphasizing “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” even in the shadow of John Knox and Scottish Puritanism. Smith then spent six years at Oxford as a Snell Scholar. A crisis of faith, possibly brought on by an exposure to the epistemological skepticism of David Hume, led him to abandon his plan to become a clergyman.
Social Capital and Education
Authors: Santana Rafael , Schneider Barbara
Published: September 2017

The concept of social capital has been widely used in educational research. However, researchers have yet to come to an agreement over what constitutes social capital and what its effects are on educational and other social outcomes. There are at least two distinct theories of social capital commonly used by educational researchers. The first, by James S. Coleman, conceptualizes social capital as the relational ties among individuals within a closed functional community (Coleman & Hoffer 1987; Coleman 1988, 1990). This perspective highlights the benefits of membership within a social system and emphasizes the functional form of social capital. The second, by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, also emphasizes the interconnectedness of individuals within a social system but additionally highlights members’ access to institutional resources as well as their consumptive behaviors that enable them to reproduce other forms of capital (Bourdieu 1986).
Social Change and Causal Analysis
Authors: Bernard Paul
Published: September 2017

Causal analysis means researching the processes through which causes produce their effects. This is particularly complex in the social sciences, which face challenges that do not affect the natural sciences (see Bernard with Boucher 2005). First,
social relations
are the real concern of the social sciences; variables can only indirectly represent these social relations through a characterization of the actors and objects involved in them (age, gender, or class categories, for instance, interacting in employment, family, or educational trajectories). Second, social relations are shaped in
historically
irreversible ways, at the microsocial level as well as at the meso level of institutions or at the macro level of societies. Finally, human actions depend on complex
intentions
; these largely have to be imputed when survey‐based, quantitative variables are used, while they are explored more directly through qualitative, open‐ended methods (see Bernard 1993 for a detailed discussion of how causal analysis can readily be used with both quantitative and qualitative types of data and methods).
Social Darwinism
Authors: Weiler Bernd
Published: September 2017

Social Darwinism, a highly controversial and protean term, refers to the application of concepts and ideas to the social world which are allegedly derived from Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Despite the fact that the so‐called founding fathers of sociology tried to establish the autonomy of their discipline, the often unconscious reliance upon biological concepts and the interpretation of the social order as the outcome of a natural process were pervasive traits of late nineteenth and early twentieth‐century social science. The term Social Darwinism first came into usage in the late 1870s and early 1880s and is, in its classic phase, commonly – and as some would immediately object wrongly – associated with such diverse theorists as Spencer and Bagehot in Great Britain, Sumner and Fiske in the US, Gumplowicz and Ratzenhofer in Austria, Lombroso, Ferri, and Niceforo in Italy, Broca, Topinard, and Lapouge in France, and Hellwald, Woltmann, Ploetz, and Ammon in Germany.
Social Embeddedness of Economic Action
Authors: Mingione Enzo , Ghezzi Simone
Published: September 2017

The concept of embeddedness expresses the notion that social actors exist within relational, institutional, and cultural contexts and cannot be seen as atomized decision‐makers maximizing their own utilities. Embeddedness is based on several assumptions about society: the actor is not an atomized individual; immediate utility cannot explain the full meaning of social relations; logics underlying the formation of institutions and their norms of behavior cannot be removed from the contexts of social interaction within which these institutions exist; convergent trends of transformation result in diverse processes of adaptation, which evolve from specific social, cultural, and cognitive configurations. The concept of embeddedness that followed from the work of Polanyi was revisited by Granovetter and has ever since been at the centre of the debates within the so‐called “new economic sociology.” At the core of this approach a number of important contributions illustrate the importance of social networks, social capital, the diversity of cultural and cognitive elements, and the social construction of markets. More recently, the concept of embeddedness, and in particular Polanyi's seminal idea of double movement, has been called for as an interpretative frame to explain societal transformation in the light of the recent economic crisis.
Social Exclusion
Authors: Silver Hilary
Published: September 2017

Social exclusion is a rupturing of the social bond. It is a process of declining participation, access, and solidarity. At the societal level, it reflects inadequate social cohesion or integration. At the individual level, it refers to the incapacity to participate in normatively expected social activities and to build meaningful social relations.
Social Movements, Nonviolent
Authors: Schock Kurt
Published: September 2017

Nonviolent social movements rely primarily or entirely on methods of nonviolent action to promote change. The focus here is on social movements that directly challenge authorities or hegemonic structures, and that do so – by choice or owing to limited options – only or primarily through methods of nonviolent action, such as protest demonstrations, marches, boycotts, strikes, occupations civil disobedience, and constructive programs. In the early twentieth century Mohandas Gandhi was instrumental in merging elements of “pragmatic” and “principled” strands of nonviolence and nonviolent resistance. Gandhi drew from and transcended these traditions by linking together mass‐based campaigns with nonviolent discipline and strategizing. Nonviolent social movements proliferated during the course of the twentieth century, propelling democratization and various issue‐related movements, such as the labor, women's, peace, and environmental movements. The crucial variable in determining the outcome of nonviolent struggle is not violent repression, as is commonly assumed, but rather the presence or absence of dependence relations that can be leveraged by challengers to undermine the opponent's power, and the creation of alternative relations that counter hegemonic cultural, economic, and political structures.
Social Movements, Repression of
Authors: Earl Jennifer
Published: September 2017

The repression of social movements refers to attempts by groups, individuals, or state actors (e.g., militaries, national police, and local police) to increase the costs associated with social movement participation or otherwise limit social movement activity. Commonly studied forms of repression include police action at public protest events, military suppression of protest events, arrests and/or imprisonment of activists, covert infiltration of social movements by government informants, restrictions on free speech and assembly, assaults on human rights, and political murder, among other tactics.
Social Movements, Strain and Breakdown Theories of
Authors: Buechler Steven M.
Published: September 2017

Strain and breakdown theories seek to explain outbreaks of collective action. When social institutions are stable, collective action is unlikely. When they undergo strain or breakdown, social controls and moral imperatives are weakened, increasing the likelihood of collective action such as fads, crazes, riots, rebellions, movements, and revolutions.
Social Network Theory
Authors: Eisenberg Anne F. , Houser Jeffrey
Published: September 2017

The idea of social networks is prevalent in everyday vernacular language, ranging from the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” where players identify how any one actor is linked to the actor Kevin Bacon through no more than six different people, to the way in which people “network” with one another as an avenue through which they gain social capital, to how we describe our computers’ ability to “talk” with other computers. The idea of social networks has an equally wide range of applications in sociology, from formal network theory to social network data analysis. The historical development of the sociological use of the idea of social networks originates with Durkheim and Simmel, and its breadth of use is reflected in contemporary theoretical and methodological developments and applications. In its different uses, from the vernacular to its historical development to its current developments, social network theory refers to the ways in which people are connected to one another and how these connections create and define human society on all levels: the individual, the group, and the institutional.
Social Problems, Concept and Perspectives
Authors: Groenemeyer Axel
Published: September 2017

“Social problems” have formed a specialized field within sociology, especially in the US, at least since the end of the nineteenth century. The European context has always been marked by the concept of the “social question,” which was one of the principal sources for the development of sociology as a scientific discipline apart from philosophy, history, political science, and political economy. Unlike US sociology, in the European tradition the concept of social problems was not disseminated in the sociological literature until the end of the 1960s, when it appeared first in books and articles about social work. While the concept today is institutionalized in special sections of sociological associations and in some journals and textbooks, and its use has been spread in public and political discourse, European sociology has always privileged the concept of the social question, with greater emphasis on macrosociological reasoning and theory building. As a consequence, most of the literature using social problems as a theoretical concept is of US origin (Ritzer 2004; for handbooks in German and French, see Albrecht et al. 1999; Dorvil & Mayer 2001).
Social Problems, Politics of
Authors: Groenemeyer Axel
Published: September 2017

Social problems are of social importance as public issues and claims for political action and public policy, and for their role in shaping social and political change. Traditionally, little attention has been paid to the state and political systems within the sociology of social problems but, viewed as a social conflict, it is a fundamental political issue.
Social Psychology
Authors: Eisenberg Anne F.
Published: September 2017

Social psychology is an approach to understanding human social relations that focuses on individuals and how their interactions impact social organizations and social institutions. Social psychological scholarship includes a wide range of theoretical perspectives, methodological tools, and substantive applications originating from diverse intellectual schools such as sociology, psychology, economics, education, and business. Contemporary social psychology is best understood by examining its range of theoretical perspectives, methodological tools, and substantive foci.
Social Worlds
Authors: Clarke Adele E.
Published: September 2017

The term social worlds is used in the social sciences in two main ways. One is as a generic reference to a specific situation or social context, and the second is explicit social worlds/arenas theory within the theoretical tradition of symbolic interactionism.
Socialization, Anticipatory
Authors: Shepherd Gordon
Published: September 2017

Anticipatory socialization refers to preparation for status changes and role transitions and, as such, is an important aspect of most forms of human socialization over the entire life course. While socialization in general may be defined as the social process in which groups transmit their culture and individuals simultaneously acquire self‐concepts and personality characteristics, anticipatory socialization directs particular attention to those situations where individuals are likely either to be induced to change or prepare themselves for change in conformity or opposition to a set of normative standards.
Socialization, Anticipatory
Authors: Shepherd Gordon
Published: September 2017

Anticipatory socialization refers to preparation for status changes and role transitions and, therefore, is an important aspect of most forms of human socialization over the entire life course. While socialization in general may be defined as the social process in which groups transmit their culture and individuals simultaneously acquire self‐concepts and personality characteristics, anticipatory socialization directs particular attention to those situations where individuals are likely either to be induced to change or prepare themselves for change in conformity or opposition to a set of normative standards.
Socialization, Primary
Authors: Wasson Leslie
Published: September 2017

Socialization is the process by which humans learn – ways of being and doing considered appropriate and expected in their social environments. We call it primary socialization when the individual is a newly added member of society and is therefore experiencing this process for the first time. Primary socialization has the social psychological characteristic of primacy, meaning that its position as first in the acquisition of social knowledge renders it a filter and a foundation for the subsequent information internalized by the fledgling social being. Primacy also makes early socialization remarkably resilient, in that it is much more difficult to change primary habits and beliefs than those learned later.
Sociocultural Relativism
Authors: Curra John
Published: September 2017

While the word “culture” was first used in 1877 by Edward Tylor to describe the totality of humans’ behavioral, material, intellectual, and spiritual products, it was Franz Boas who gave the term one of its most distinctive elaborations. Unlike some other anthropologists (e.g., Malinowski), Boas refused to devalue cultures regardless of how primitive they might appear to outsiders. For Boas, the principal task was to describe accurately and understand completely the cultures of the world, not to rank them from good to bad. Students of Boas, especially Benedict and Herskovits, carried on his legacy, especially his commitment to cultural relativity. They adopted cultural relativity as a principal way to generate respect and tolerance for human diversity, while defending indigenous peoples from threats to their collective and individual well‐being.
Sociolinguistics
Authors: Chambers J.K.
Published: September 2017

People adjust their vocabulary, sounds, and syntax depending upon who they are speaking to and the circumstances of the conversation. For instance, sales representatives talk about “automobiles” in the showroom but about “cars” with their neighbors, and they enunciate when reporting to their managers in ways that would seem stilted if they spoke that way to their friends after work. Such adjustments are linguistically subtle and socially meticulous and largely automatic. They are not taught or consciously learned, but are part of the innate linguistic competence of all normal people.
Sociological Imagination
Authors: Andrews Christopher
Published: September 2017

The term “sociological imagination” comes from a book with that title by American sociologist C. Wright Mills (2000 [1959]) and describes an understanding of one's own position and experiences as reflective of broader social and historical forces. According to Mills, the sociological imagination is more than just a theoretical concept or heuristic device: it is a “promise.” The promise of the sociological imagination is to allow individuals to understand their place in the broader social and historical context. As Mills says in the first sentence of
The Sociological Imagination
, people today increasingly feel that their private lives are a series of “traps” (p. 3). The promise of the sociological imagination is to understand the nature of these traps and to determine if they are in fact private in nature, or if, as Mills suggests, their actual origin lies with broader social and historical forces.
Sociology
Authors: Delanty Gerard
Published: September 2017

Sociology is a form of social inquiry that takes wide‐ranging forms. As is the case with many disciplines, it is contested and there is no generally accepted definition of what constitutes sociology. As a social science, sociology can be described as evidence‐based social inquiry into the social world and informed by conceptual frameworks and established methodological approaches. Sociology is the only science specifically devoted to the study of society in the broad sense of the term, meaning the social world and the open field of the social. Like many of the social and human sciences it does not have a clearly defined subject matter. Sociology is a versatile and resilient discipline that takes many forms. One of its enduring characteristics is that it brings to bear on the study of the social world a general perspective born of the recognition that the sum is greater than the parts.
Sociology in Medicine
Authors: Usher Carey L.
Published: September 2017

Sociology in medicine is a label distinguishing the work of the medical sociologist based upon the goals, setting, and disciplinary context of the work. Sociology in medicine is applied work that is motivated by the medical establishment rather than by sociological inquiry. The sociologist in medicine works within the medical system, typically with other health practitioners, using a foundation of sociological knowledge to study health and illness or medical issues. Sociology in medicine has been criticized for straying too far from the parent discipline. This distinguishing term was first published by Robert Straus in 1957.
Sociometry
Authors: Meeker Barbara F.
Published: September 2017

The word “sociometry” was coined by Jacob Levi Moreno (1889–1974). Moreno, one of the pioneers of psychotherapy, is also credited with developing psychotherapeutic techniques such as psychodrama and role playing. As he used it, sociometry was a way of uncovering the underlying emotional structure of a small group by asking group members which other members they would choose or reject as partners in specific roles such as roommate or fellow team member for a work project. Moreno believed that if group activities were set up according to these preferences, the task performance and morale of the group would be maximized and individual group members would experience satisfaction, empowerment, and personal growth. Jointly with Helen Hall Jennings (Moreno 1934), he applied his methods to the assignment of girls to residential cottages in the New York Training School for Girls, concluding that the predicted positive results did occur. Moreno also founded a journal named
Sociometry
to promote his research. This journal eventually became one of the official journals of the American Sociological Association where it has been for many years the primary outlet within sociology for social psychological research in general. Reflecting this more general interest, it changed its name and is now the
Social Psychology Quarterly
.
Solidarity, Mechanical and Organic
Authors: Hornsby Anne M.
Published: September 2017

French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) coined the terms mechanical and organic solidarity to describe two types of social organization, that is, ways in which individuals are connected to each other and how they identify with the groups and societies in which they live. Social solidarity is a state of unity or cohesion that exists when people are integrated by strong social bonds and shared beliefs and also are regulated by well‐developed guidelines for action (values and norms that suggest worthy goals and how people should attain them). In his first book,
The Division of Labor in Society
(1893), Durkheim argued that social solidarity takes different forms in different historical periods and varies in strength among groups in the same society. However, reflecting the popularity of social evolutionary thought in the late nineteenth century, Durkheim summarized all historical forms of solidarity into a traditional–modern dichotomy. Mechanical solidarity is a simple, pre‐industrial form of social cohesion and organic solidarity is a more complex form that evolves in modern societies.
Sombart, Werner (1863–1941)
Authors: Sica Alan
Published: September 2017

Werner Sombart was born in the small Protestant town of Ermsleben (Harz region) and died in Berlin, an event fully recorded in the
New York Times
with obituary and editorial (May 20 and 22, 1941). His father, Anton Ludwig Sombart, was from seventeenth‐century Huguenot stock and personified what Sombart's friend Max Weber would call in 1905 the Protestant ethic, and what Sombart himself named the bourgeois spirit. The elder Sombart was elected
Burgermeister
of Ermsleben in 1848, and became rich as an industrialist and estate owner through the sugar trade. Not satisfied simply to enjoy his wealth, he co‐founded the famous
Verein für Sozialpolitik
, an influential organization of concerned citizens that sponsored social research prescribing government policy, particularly pertaining to the liberation of agricultural workers from virtual serfdom on large estates. Bismarck invited him to become minister of agriculture, but he declined owing to poor eyesight.
Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis
Authors: Mouw Ted
Published: September 2017

The spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that the movement of jobs away from central city areas, combined with constraints on geographic mobility imposed by continued residential segregation, limits the employment prospects of inner‐city minorities. The basic story is straightforward: as jobs decentralize to the suburbs or beyond, black workers find it difficult to move to where the jobs are because of racial residential segregation, resulting in a “mismatch” between the jobs and black workers that raises unemployment and/or lowers wages. The spatial mismatch hypothesis has been widely discussed since it was first proposed in the late 1960s as an explanation for black–white differences in unemployment rates. At the same time, there are longstanding and unresolved debates in the literature regarding the magnitude of the effect that it has on racial differences in unemployment and wages.
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, Alternative
Authors: Crissey Honea Joy
Published: September 2017

Many sports can be considered alternatives to dominant sport forms, but the term alternative sport has generally been used in sociology to refer to a group of activities that meet a particular set of organizational criteria. Alternative sports initially existed outside of formal sports organizations and participants were primarily young people who, for one reason or another, did not fit into the world of traditional youth sports such as baseball and football. Though they differ greatly from one another, Robert Rinehart (2000) suggests that alternative sports can be loosely defined as: (1) participant controlled and directed, rather than organized through a governing body or other official organization; (2) individually focused, emphasizing personal achievements; (3) focused less on competition than traditional sports; and (4) generally possessing an insider requirement. That is, they are more likely than traditional sports to encompass their own subculture – one that stands in opposition to the dominant culture. In other words, skateboarders, for example, are not just people who happen to ride skateboards, but are “skaters,” expected to participate in a lifestyle associated with involvement in the sport.
Sports and Culture
Authors: Rowe David
Published: September 2017

For sociologists subscribing to a hierarchical model of culture, sports may be regarded as its antithesis: a bodily practice, of little cultural consequence, gazed on by passive spectators for the enrichment of the leisure and media industries. The neglect of sports as a sociological subject until relatively recently may be attributed to a common resistance within intellectual culture to engagement with the corporeal realm of popular pleasure. However, the increasing prominence of (especially electronically mediated) sports, 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 studies) has created space for a developed cultural sociology of sport. This shift by no means signals a theoretical, conceptual, and methodological consensus concerning sports and culture in the discipline, but, rather, a new willingness to explore their relationship within a sociological framework.
Sport and the State
Authors: Defrance Jacques
Published: September 2017

Since the end of the nineteenth century the dynamics of the sport–state relationship are best understood by taking into account (1) the dramatic growth of sport relative to other forms of physical activity (gymnastics, traditional games, etc.) and (2) socially significant changes in the operation and status of the state.
Sports Heroes and Celebrities
Authors: Jackson Steven
Published: September 2017

The terms hero and celebrity are increasingly being used interchangeably, but they are fundamentally different. There are some clear distinctions between the two concepts and the challenge is to ascertain how and why they have become conflated. This entry examines 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 toward a media saturated, consumer driven society have created a blurring of heroes and celebrities.
Status
Authors: Kantzara Vasiliki
Published: September 2017

The term “status” originates from Latin and denotes standing in society. Status refers to valued social positions that originate from legal‐political entitlements and command of economic resources, and is accompanied by a particular lifestyle. Status thus indicates the location of individuals and groups on the social hierarchy of honor and prestige. In addition, status groups may form communities to ensure their members' interest, and for this reason may ally or come into conflict with other groups. Some sociologists have attempted to measure socioeconomic status, taking education and profession into consideration, while others have explored aspects of status crystallization, coherence, or inconsistency. Currently, status is employed to explain an array of issues ranging from achievement in education to health condition. Issues pertaining to relations between different status groups that relate to citizenship rights claims, for instance, and may denote status threat responses, remain largely unexplored.
Status Attainment
Authors: Buchmann Claudia
Published: September 2017

Status attainment research begun by sociologists in the United States more than three decades ago laid the foundation for the study of the transmission of socioeconomic advantage from one generation to the next (also called intergenerational social mobility). Status attainment research seeks to understand how characteristics of an individual's family background (also called socioeconomic origins) relate to his or her educational attainment and occupational status in society. It developed a methodology – usually path analysis and multiple regression techniques with large survey data sets – to investigate the intergenerational transmission of status.
Stepfathering
Authors: Edwards Rosalind , Hadfield Lucy
Published: September 2017

Stepfamilies are becoming increasingly common in contemporary developed societies, with the vast majority (in heterosexual families) comprising a stepfather who has partnered and formed a (married or cohabiting) household with a biological mother and her resident children. The rise in stepfather households, however, occurs in an institutional context where legislation in many countries has shifted towards the view that bringing up children, and financial responsibility for them, primarily and unchangeably rests with biological parents. In contrast, and despite their prevalence, the institutional position of stepfathers is largely one of invisibility, or at least ambiguity, with few defined rights and responsibilities.
Stepmothering
Authors: Coleman Marilyn , Ganong Lawrence H.
Published: September 2017

Stepmothers are women who marry or cohabit with partners who have children from prior unions. This broad definition of stepmothers includes women from a variety of roles and who live in diverse family constellations – those who have children of their own as well as women that are childless or childfree, women in lesbian relationships, and it includes stepmothers who reside with their stepchildren all of the time, some of the time, or never. Women who live with their stepchildren are called
residential
stepmothers and those who do not live with their stepchildren, or who spend only part of each year living with their stepchildren, are called
nonresidential
stepmothers. Some women that fit the broad definition of stepmothers, such as women cohabiting with fathers whose children live elsewhere, and some lesbian partners, do not see themselves as stepmothers, and, in fact, are seldom included in studies of stepmothers. Given the diversity of stepmothers’ situations, it is unfortunate that the majority of studies have been limited to married stepmothers and most researchers have not distinguished between residential and nonresidential stepmothers.
Stereotyping and Stereotypes
Authors: Pickering Michael
Published: September 2017

Stereotyping involves the representation and evaluation of others in ways which ratify and endorse unequal social relations. It does so by making such representations appear fixed and unchanging as well as in stark contrast to the identities of those who engage in and perpetuate them. Stereotypes diminish the social standing of those targeted, reducing them to a particular attribute or disposition that either demeans them or confines them to achievement only in association with this attribute or disposition. This acts as a distancing mechanism, radically separating those stereotyped from those among whom the stereotypes circulate and are reproduced. Stereotyping always occurs within a two‐way, but one‐sided relationship and operates in favor of the existing status quo.
Strategic Essentialism
Authors: Wolff Kristina
Published: September 2017

The concept of strategic essentialism is a “strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (Fuss 1994: 99). It utilizes the idea of essence with a recognition of and critique of the essentialist nature of the essence itself. It is a means of using group identity as a basis of struggle while also debating issues related to group identity within the group.
Stratification, Gender and
Authors: Hakim Catherine
Published: September 2017

The documentation, interpretation, and explanation of structured social inequality has always been a central focus of sociology. Although social stratification lies at the heart of macrosociology, and is the subject of extensive theoretical and empirical analysis, the study of gender and stratification is comparatively recent, and developed in the 1970s onwards as a result of the second wave of the feminist movement in modern western societies (Crompton and Mann, 1986). The traditional sociological view was that the subordination and oppression of women could be adequately incorporated into class analysis. Feminist theory insisted that in modern societies the class structure, and the oppression of women within patriarchal systems (i.e., women's oppression by men), were separate but interacting social processes.
Stratification: Technology and Ideology
Authors: Kane Nazneen
Published: September 2017

Several theories of social stratification have emerged from the discipline of sociology. The ultimate focus of this body of knowledge has quite clearly been the production of a comprehensive understanding of inequality within and across human societies over time and place. Yet, few theories have constructed adequate working models of stratification that satisfy geographical and historical particularities.
Stratification in Transition Economies
Authors: Róbert Péter
Published: September 2017

This entry discusses the drivers of social stratification in the former communist “transition economies.” These societies are defined by their move from an autocratic/totalitarian political system to a parliamentary/multiparty democracy and from a planned to a market economy. Theoretically, this realignment involves social devices that affect social inequality. Practically, continuity and discontinuity with the communist past are important when considering political power groups, ideologies, and economic transformation. In the last 25 years, former communist countries have moved in various directions. The process has involved a maze of sometimes converging, sometimes diverging paths that have led to various forms of capitalism. The mechanisms affecting social stratification have included the rise of (or decline in) meritocracy, changes in access to economic and human capital resources, the growing role of social contacts and network capital, the expansion of the education system, and the growing variety of employment opportunities.
Stratified Reproduction
Authors: Agigian Amy
Published: September 2017

Stratified reproduction is a term originally coined by Shellee Colen in her classic 1986 study of West Indian nannies and their (female) employers in New York City, which found inequalities of race, class, gender, culture, and legal status played out on a social field that was both domestic and transnational. Colen elaborated the term in her later work to describe situations in which women perform physical and social reproductive labor structured by economic, political, and social forces and differentiated unequally across hierarchies of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and place in a global economy (Colen 1995). Many feminist social scientists since the 1980s have adopted stratified reproduction as a theoretical framework within which to examine a variety of issues relevant to the intersections of reproduction and stratification.
Stress, Stress Theories
Authors: Lackey Gerald F.
Published: September 2017

What differentiates the study of stress in sociology from similar work in fields like biology or medicine is the attention given by sociologists to the social distribution of mental health and well‐being. Sociological inquiry focuses on how the causes of stress, the resources for coping with stress, and the outcomes of stress vary across subgroups in the population. As distinct from a psychological or biological approach, the sociological study of stress focuses on how the social condition can determine a number of different stress outcomes. A significant step forward in this endeavor was made by Pearlin et al. (1981) when they formalized a sociological theory of the stress process.
Structural Strains, Successive Transition of
Authors: Hasegawa Koichi
Published: September 2017

The successive transition of structural strains refers to the mechanism and social process of the following vicious cycle: a policy or a countermeasure aimed at solving one problem gives birth to another serious problem, and the solution of that problem results in the creation of yet another more serious one and finally reaches a dead end. The first step in the wrong way leads into deep woods that are impossible to escape. In research into the social impacts of the Tohoku and Joetsu bullet train line construction project, Funabashi (1988) invented this concept and described this vicious cycle. The concept of structural strain, defined as deprivation caused by a structural factor neither personal nor accidental, came from Smelser's (1963) concept. This perspective reveals how the response to one risk factor can result in the creation of new risks, and that subsequent attempts to address the new risks produce yet further risks, until, finally, no remedy can be found. The concept explains rapid environmental degradation and other social problems.
Structuralism
Authors: Schneider Mark A.
Published: September 2017

Structuralism is a catchall term for a set of explanatory approaches or paradigms in the social sciences that emphasize the causal force of the relations among elements in a system or of emergent properties of their patterning. The character of the elements themselves (beyond what conditions their relations) is viewed as arbitrary and of no explanatory bearing. Various structural approaches have at times been popular in linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and sociology. In the latter two fields, distinct forms developed that can both be traced back to Émile Durkheim, while sociology has also produced strains of structuralism influenced by Georg Simmel. Arising from Durkheim and Simmel as well has been the programmatic contention that in structuralism alone will be found a basis for distinguishing sociology from other disciplines.
Structuration Theory
Authors: Stones Rob
Published: September 2017

“Structuration theory” is an approach used by the British sociologist Anthony Giddens in a series of publications in the 1970s and early 1980s in which he outlined a distinctive approach to the study of social relations. Giddens wanted the approach to both embrace and go beyond the more static notion of social “structure.” He also wanted the praxis and the dynamic qualities of agency to be included in the term. Thus both structure and agency are captured within the philosophy of structuration. Many commentators soon noted the striking similarity between Giddens's structuration theory and the work of Pierre Bourdieu in France. Bourdieu also wanted to go beyond the reification and objectivism of approaches that emphasized the pressures of the social milieu to the exclusion of individual and collective action. By creating a synthesis of the best from different traditions, Giddens was able to fashion a path between the deterministic tendencies of Marxism and positivism on the one hand and, on the other, the overly voluntaristic, free‐floating approaches of interpretive sociologies such as ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism. Bourdieu, working within the French postwar intellectual scene, devised a path between the overly objectivist and dehumanizing tendencies of structuralism and of Marxism and the idealistic and subjectivist tendencies of existentialism, which puts far too high a premium on the role of an individual's will power (see Bourdieu, 1977 [1972]).
Structure and Agency
Authors: Stones Rob
Published: September 2017

The concepts of structure and agency are central to sociological theory. Structures are typically seen as the more fixed and enduring aspects of the social landscape. As used by Durkheim and others working within a similar tradition,
structure
is a metaphor that denotes qualities of society that are akin to the skeleton of a body in the field of anatomy, or to the frame of a building in architecture. Durkheim's work was heavily influenced by his desire to establish a sphere of study for sociology that was distinct from both biology and psychology. To this end he insisted that there are structured ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that are general throughout a society and that act as external constraints over its members. This was to emphasize the role of society in the process of causation, as opposed to individual or group agency. Some writers taking issue with this position went to the other extreme. Weber, for example, emphasized the role of individuals and rejected the idea that terms such as “society” or “group” could refer to any reality other than that of individuals and their actions.