bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Social Movements in Latin America
Authors: Somuano Ventura Fernanda
Published: February 2012

As is the case with many concepts in social sciences, there are many definitions of social movements. However, consensus seems to be general on some of their characteristics. Social movements are informal networks or groups of people with common purposes, shared beliefs, and solidarity that mobilize around specific issues generally through different means of protest and direct action. For some authors, social movements represent collective challenges to elites, authorities, other groups, or cultural codes by people in sustained interactions with elites, opponents, and authorities. Some authors argue that social movements are an important vehicle for participation by ordinary people in public politics and are seen as the vanguard of a new society. Others state that social movements represent a threat to democratic politics and to social and political order.
State Building in Sub-Saharan Africa
Authors: Green Elliott
Published: February 2012

State-building in Africa has long been a concern of scholars and policymakers. The subject is particularly fascinating because of the large and quick shift from a continent largely populated by small states and acephalous societies in the precolonial era to one partitioned among European powers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then to one in which four dozen new sovereign countries were created upon independence. For decades the ongoing question in Africa has been how these new states could build themselves into modern nation-states. This issue became especially pertinent in the context of large-scale political and economic collapse from the 1970s onward and the resultant donor-driven structural adjustment and reform programs. The effects on state-building of both political and economic instability and the subsequent attempts at reform have been the subject of major debate, as has the relationship between the continent’s numerous civil wars and state formation. Africa is also a continent rich with numerous natural resources, such as oil and diamonds, many of which have had an effect on state-building together with continued supplies of foreign aid.
Biosociology
Authors: Hopcroft Rosemary
Published: February 2012

Biosociology is a subject that has emerged relatively recently in sociology—an emergence not without controversy. However, in the last ten years the number of publications in the area has increased dramatically, and an Evolution, Biology and Society Section of the American Sociological Association was created in 2004. The name “biosociology” covers a wide range of topics, from microsociological to macrosociological, with the unifying feature being an acknowledgement of the role of biology in human social life. Researchers in the area use a variety of sociological methodologies as well as research results and methodologies from an array of disciplines including anthropology, behavioral genetics, history, primatology, palaeoanthropology, biology, psychology, and neurology. The field focuses on how evolved human biology interacts with particular social environments to both produce and simultaneously to respond to social institutions and structures.
Citizenship
Authors: Nuhoḡlu Soysal Yasemin , Szakács-Behling Simona
Published: February 2012

Long a purview of legal and normative political theories, citizenship has made its way in noticeable strides into the discipline of sociology since the 1990s. It has become a focal point in the analysis of a variety of sociological questions, as well as in broader public and policy debates. The conceptual framework of citizenship in the work of T. H. Marshall (see Marshall 1950, cited under Historical Origins and Trajectories), whether endorsed or critically appraised, constitutes the starting point for much of the scholarship on citizenship. Inspired by Marshall, the scholarship shifted away from a purely legal understanding of citizenship to include concerns about social and economic inclusion, and later to questions of belonging and participation. Predominant conceptions of citizenship denote (a) membership in a polity (the nation-state), (b) a set of rights and duties that this membership carries with it, and (c) exercise of rights and obligations, and participation in the polity by members. National citizenship, the rights and duties it entails, and the identity it professes have come under significant duress as a result of the global hegemony of political and economic liberalism, particularly since the collapse of the polarized world system. Much of the work in the sociology of citizenship has developed in response to these global challenges. While a significant number of studies occupy themselves with the changing individual and collective relationship in the welfare state and in the broader context of human rights, others focus on questions of belonging and participation in a world where nation-state boundaries can no longer be taken for granted. More recently, attention has also been given to the growing global inequalities and populist reactions. These efforts produced a solid body of scholarship that addresses some of the key questions in sociology while engaging a multidisciplinary field, as reflected in the readings included here.
Comparative Historical Sociology
Authors: Prasad Monica
Published: February 2012

Comparative historical sociology is the branch of sociology that analyzes society-wide transformations, such as social revolutions, the rise of capitalism and the nation-state, democratization, and the birth and transformation of welfare states. At the end of the 19th century all of sociology’s European founders turned to historical explanation to understand the changes that capitalism had brought to their societies, from Marx’s attempt to explain history as the working out of class struggle, to Weber’s investigations into the comparative development of economy and society, to Durkheim’s investigations into the historical development of religion, law, and the division of labor. These early historical arguments were eclipsed, however, by the behavioral revolution and the explosion of statistical tools and techniques of the mid-20th century, which re-founded the discipline as the study of large numbers of individual actors or units. Only when revolutions and social change became increasingly pressing political concerns in the 1960s and 1970s did a large number of scholars once again turn to comparative historical sociology as the form of sociological explanation most appropriate to analyzing changes that occur infrequently or over very long periods, and that affect a society as a whole unit. While the classics of the discipline focus on European history, contemporary scholars are extending the approach to the rest of the world. Current areas of great interest include the question of why China did not experience an industrial revolution in the 18th century, the role of the state in economic development, and the transition to capitalism in eastern Europe. Some think that the study of rare events requires different methods from those common in the rest of sociology, and accordingly a lively methodological discussion is underway in the field. Because there has been great interest in the state as the source of much social transformation, the subfield overlaps considerably with macro political sociology; but comparative historical scholars are also interested in processes of social and economic change beyond the realm of the political.
Economic Sociology
Authors: Wherry Frederick , Occhiuto Nicholas
Published: February 2012

Economic sociology is the study of the relationship between society and the market. The field incorporates insights from economics, behavioral psychology, economic anthropology, and cultural anthropology. Structural and cultural approaches largely characterize the studies conducted in the field, with the former associated with networks, institutions, and social organization; the latter, rituals, symbols, cognitive frameworks, and narratives. Economic sociologists study how social networks and relationships affect economic actions, such as the provision of loans, the acquisition of a job, and the successful construction of deals. Empirical studies examine how prices are set, why some pricing schemes that do not seem rational are instead understandable and predictable, and how markets are incorporated into social life, and vice versa.
Gender
Authors: Baxter Janeen , Hoffmann Heidi
Published: February 2012

The term gender refers to the cultural and social characteristics attributed to men and women on the basis of perceived biological differences. In the 1970s, feminists focused on sex roles, particularly the socialization of men and women into distinct masculine and feminine roles and the apparent universality of patriarchy. More recent work has critiqued the idea of two distinct genders, calling into question the notion of gender dichotomies and focusing attention on gender as a constitutive element of all social relationships. Gender has been described as a social institution that structures the organization of other institutions, such as the labor market, families, and the state, as well as the social relations of everyday life. In addition, scholars have pointed to the ways in which gender is constructed by organizations and individual interactions. Gender not only differentiates men and women into unequal groups, it also structures unequal access to goods and resources, often crosscutting and intersecting with other forms of inequality, such as class, race, and ethnicity.
Immigration
Authors: Bloemraad Irene , Lin Edwin
Published: February 2012

The field of immigration research is broadly interested in understanding why people migrate across international borders, and what the consequences of migration are for the individuals involved, as well as the people and societies they enter and leave behind. In some countries, more than one in five residents were not born in the country where they live, while the economies of other countries are heavily dependent on the money that migrants send back. Migration thus affects a wide range of societies around the globe and can affect almost all aspects of human life. Sociologists consequently seek to explain population movements and state policies of migration control, debate theories of integration across a range of human activities, and consider the consequences of migration for development, national identities, and conceptions of membership in a world increasingly characterized by human relationships that span the borders of contemporary nation-states. Sociologists who work on migration do so in conversation with scholars drawn from many disciplines, including anthropology, demography, economics, ethnic studies, geography, history, legal studies, and political science. Given that the sociological field of migration studies is fundamentally interdisciplinary, any bibliography must be multidisciplinary, and it will invariably provide only a very small snapshot of the whole. The snapshot below, to remain manageable, is restricted to English-language publications, and it provides greater coverage of the US case than of other countries or regions of the world.
Life Course
Authors: Carr Deborah
Published: February 2012

Sociology of the life course is a sophisticated theoretical paradigm designed to understand human lives. Four key assumptions guide life course scholars’ theoretical and empirical work: (1) lives are embedded in and shaped by historical context; (2) individuals construct their own lives through their choices and actions, yet within the constraints of historical and social circumstance; (3) lives are intertwined through social relationships; and (4) the meaning and impact of a life transition is contingent on when it occurs. Life course scholars also rely on rigorous research methods and data sources—including national censuses, sample surveys, in-depth interviews, and historical records—to document human lives. Because a key question of life course research is “how does historical time and place shape lives?” researchers often compare data obtained at different points in time, from different birth cohorts (i.e., individuals born at different points in history), and from different national and cultural contexts. Researchers also rely heavily on longitudinal data, or data obtained from the same person at multiple points in time, so they can track individual-level continuity and change. Life course research is interdisciplinary, incorporating concepts from sociology, history, psychology, demography, gerontology, child development, and—in recent years—behavioral genetics. The specific foci of life course studies range from social psychological outcomes such as stress, self-esteem, occupational values, and cognitive complexity to family roles, marital and fertility patterns, educational and occupational attainment, retirement, and deviance. Although many life course scholars typically specialize in one developmental stage, such as childhood, adolescence, midlife, or older adulthood, most also consider ways that one life course stage influences subsequent experiences. Most life course research has focused on the U.S. context, yet in recent years the collection of longitudinal data—especially in the United Kingdom and western Europe—has fostered a flourishing of life course research in Europe.
Masculinity
Authors: Kimmel Michael , Bridges Tristan
Published: February 2012

Masculinities studies is a vibrant, interdisciplinary field of study broadly concerned with the social construction of what it means to “be a man.” Masculinities scholars study the social role and meanings of masculinities. A vast majority of scholarship dealing with gender inequality focuses on women and the ways that they are structurally and systematically subordinated to men and disadvantaged. Scholars of inequality note, however, that there are two sides to inequality: disadvantage and privilege. Masculinities scholars study the various ways that men are—as a group—privileged, as well as focusing on the costs of those privileges and the ways in which not all men are granted equal access to them. “Masculinity” refers to the behaviors, social roles, and relations of men within a given society as well as the meanings attributed to them. The term masculinity stresses gender, unlike male, which stresses biological sex. Thus studies of masculinities need not be confined to biological males. Masculinity studies is a feminist-inspired, interdisciplinary field that emerged in the last few decades of the 20th century as a topic of study. It deals with the diversity of identities, behaviors, and meanings that occupy the label masculine and does not assume that they are universal. Thus scholars of masculinity often refer to masculinities in the plural to highlight the diversity of meanings, roles, and behaviors consumed in the term. Despite the fact that gender is often experienced as intensely personal—an internal facet of our identity—masculinities are produced and reproduced through the course of our daily interactions as well as within the larger institutions of society. This bibliography provides resources and an introductory overview of historical studies of masculinity, theories of masculinity and gender inequality, the relationship between masculinity and sexuality, the literature dealing with diverse men’s movements, and a summary of findings within various social institutions (education, the family, the workplace, sport, and the media).
Medical Sociology
Authors: Cockerham William
Published: February 2012

Medical sociology, sometimes referred to as health sociology, is the study of the social causes and consequences of health and illness. Major areas of investigation include the social determinants of health and disease, the social behavior of patients and health care providers, the social functions of health organizations and institutions, the social patterns of the utilization of health services, the relationship of health care delivery systems to other social institutions, and social policies toward health. What makes medical sociology important is the critical role social factors play in determining or influencing the health of individuals, groups, and the larger society. Social conditions and situations not only promote and, in some cases, cause the possibility of illness and disability, but also enhance prospects of disease prevention and health maintenance. The earliest works in medical sociology were carried out by physicians in the United States, not sociologists who tended to ignore the field. This changed in the late 1940s when large amounts of federal funding became available to support joint research projects between sociologists and medical doctors. At its inception, work in medical sociology was oriented toward finding solutions relevant for clinical medicine. However, in 1950, Talcott Parsons, the leading theorist in sociology at that time, introduced his concept of the sick role that subsequently attracted other theoretical work and had an important role in the emergence of medical sociology as an academic field. Medical sociology has evolved to the point today that it investigates health and medical problems from an independent sociological perspective. Medical sociologists now comprise one of the largest and most active groups doing sociological work in North America and Europe, and the field has expanded to other regions as well. About one of every ten American sociologists is a medical sociologist.
Occupations and Professions
Authors: Albert Kyle , Weeden Kim
Published: February 2012

Sociologists have long been fascinated with occupations and professions, both as forms of social organization and as the locus for other social processes and dynamics. Social control and cohesion, differentiation and inequality, collective action, power and influence, and identity formation are just a few of the topics considered by sociologists studying occupations and professions. Four strands of literature compose the sociology of occupations and professions, broadly defined. One strand tackles the division of labor, with the goal of understanding how positions in the division of labor are differentiated from one another (e.g., professions from other occupations), and how those differences are maintained. A second examines occupational communities, and, in particular, the relationship between occupational membership and individual behavior. A third strand focuses on the social activity of work itself, including the labor process, employer control of work, alienation and job satisfaction, unionization and its recent discontents, and the rise and fall of skills. Another thread of scholarship considers how occupations become associated with rewards (e.g., pay, prestige, authority, etc.). The field of occupations and professions has diversified methodologically in recent years, opening up new modes of inquiry into some of these topics. Indeed, whereas case studies of particular occupations dominated the field in the latter half of the 20th century, major empirical research in the last decade have included ethnographies, comparative case studies, network analyses, and quantitative analyses of survey data. And, although the pace of theoretical innovation in the “professions” literature may have slowed in recent years, the field remains a vibrant arena for studies of globalization, technological change, corporate reorganization and changes in employment practices, and the emergence of “new” types of work (e.g., service work, emotional labor).
Religion
Authors: Evans John , DePalma Lindsay
Published: February 2012

The sociology of religion is a social science that examines how people are religious but does not advocate for a particular theological view, as the field of theology typically does. Religion was an obsession of the first sociologists, and it has been argued that American sociology was invented in reaction to religion. Since that time religion has remained central to the sociological canon as religion has remained a central component of society. Sociologists up until the last quarter of the 20th century assumed that religion was in the process of a slow death—a process called “secularization.” Sociologists now see secularization as occurring only in certain parts of social life, opening the door to the study of the religious influences on a range of social behaviors such as immigration, race relations, and politics. For example, some scholars have asked why immigrants are more religious than others. Other sociologists continue to study religion itself in congregations, or as systems of belief. For example, some sociologists have asked why American religion is increasingly individualistic. American sociologists of religion have remained focused on religion in America and have made limited forays into other parts of the world. There is a related sociology of religion tradition in Europe.
Social Problems
Authors: Best Joel
Published: February 2012

The term “social problem” is usually taken to refer to social conditions that disrupt or damage society—crime, racism, and the like. “Social Problems” is the title of an undergraduate course taught at many colleges; a typical course discusses what is known about a series of conditions considered social problems. In contrast, the sociology of social problems defines social problem differently and adopts a different analytic approach. This approach—sometimes called constructionist—defines social problem in terms of a process, rather than a type of condition. It focuses on how and why people come to understand that some conditions ought to be viewed as a social problem, that is, how they socially construct social problems. Typically, the social problems process begins with claimsmakers who make claims that some condition ought to be considered a problem, that this problem should be understood in particular ways, and that it needs to be addressed. Other people respond to those claims and rework them, so that the social problem is constructed and reconstructed by the media, the general public, policymakers, the social-problems workers who implement policy, and critics that assess the policy’s effectiveness. The process is complex: some claims produce a speedy reaction, while others have difficulty finding an audience. The constructionist approach began to guide researchers in the 1970s and has generated a substantial literature that continues to develop in new directions.
Sociology of Culture
Authors: Steensland Brian
Published: February 2012

Culture is the symbolic-expressive dimension of social life. In common usage, the term “culture” can mean the cultivation associated with “civilized” habits of mind, the creative products associated with the arts, or the entire way of life associated with a group. Among sociologists, “culture” just as often refers to the beliefs that people hold about reality, the norms that guide their behavior, the values that orient their moral commitments, or the symbols through which these beliefs, norms, and values are communicated. The sociological study of culture encompasses all these diverse meanings of “culture.” Amid this diversity, what unifies the sociology of culture are two core commitments: that the symbolic-expressive dimension of social life is worthy of examination, both for its own sake and because of its impact on other aspects of social life; and that culture can be studied using the methods and analytic tools of sociology. Within the discipline, the sociology of culture emerged as a bounded subfield during the 1980s. Prior to this period, sociological analyses of culture were found mainly in theoretical treatises and in empirical studies of religion, the arts, and the “sociology of knowledge.” Throughout, the sociological study of culture has been oriented by a common set of broad questions: What are the social origins of culture? What cultural patterns are found in various groups and institutions? And what influence does culture have on important aspects of society? Scholarship in the sociology of culture ranges from highly general conceptual arguments to closely observed empirical studies. The readings included here reflect this breadth.
Class
Authors: Manza Jeff
Published: February 2012

No concept is more widely used in sociology than that of “class.” Rooted in the writings of Marx and Engels, as well as Weber, Durkheim, Sorokin, and other classical social theorists, class has long been one of the key analytical concepts sociologists have deployed to explain a wide variety of outcomes. This wide usage does not, however, mean that “class” is always defined in consistent ways by sociologists, or that it is necessarily among the most important factors in accounting for any particular social phenomena. There are two features that all conceptualizations of class share. The first is that societies are organized unequally in a vertical fashion, with some people at the top possessing more power, income and wealth, and privileges than people at the bottom. These advantages (or disadvantages) are rooted (at least in part) in the economic relationships between individuals and households. Exactly how classes are defined and categorized, however, remains contested. Second, all class theories start from the proposition that the types of class relationships found in any society matter for other social processes. At the micro level, class location of individuals or households predicts such things as income and wealth, social and political attitudes, marriage, friendships and social networks, voting behavior, cultural consumption, and life chances. At the macro level, class power influences policy and political outcomes, as well as social movement organizations and capacities.
Power
Authors: Clegg Stewart
Published: February 2012

The concept of power is absolutely central to any understanding of society. Despite its ubiquity, power is arguably one of the most difficult concepts to make sense of within the social sciences. Nonetheless, power has been a core concept for as long as there has been speculation about the nature of social order. The ancient Greek philosophers of Athens pondered about it, usually in constitutional terms; Christian philosophers such as St. Augustine moralized about it, as Wolin 2004 discusses (see Classic Works); however, it was not until the epochal ideation of the Florentine Machiavelli, in the 16th century, and the Englishman, Hobbes, in 1651, that the foundations for an empirical analysis were established. Machiavelli, the Florentine diplomat and author who lived from 1469 to 1527, writing in his book The Prince (composed around 1513), had little time for noble and normative theories and was strongly empirical and nonnormative, reflecting on how power was and should be deployed in statecraft. Hobbes was more concerned with laying foundations for causal analysis. The Hobbesian view proved to be the most influential in mainstream social science, especially as the mid-20th-century Community Power Debate developed. Machiavelli’s work took on renewed interest, however, as the influence of Foucault’s work played out and emphasis shifted from causality to strategy.
Legal Matters and Education Law
Authors: Dayton John
Published: February 2012

Education law refers to the statutes, regulations, cases, and policies governing education and the resolution of disputes in educational institutions. These make up a vast body of laws regulating daily school operations and dispute resolution on issues from academic freedom to property tax challenges, student discipline to teacher contracts, and school lunch programs to tort liability. Schools are microcosms of the broader society, so nearly every legal issue in the broader society may also be found in schools. The citations included in this entry provide a useful overview of some of the most significant issues in education law and help the user to find further information on these and other issues of interest in education law.
Lifelong Learning
Authors: Linden Toby
Published: February 2012

The concept of lifelong learning is increasingly being used to frame education and training policy reforms in countries from both the developed and developing worlds. However, there are two different definitions of lifelong learning, with different policy implications: the first emphasizes that all types of learning, from the youngest ages to the oldest and of different types (formal, informal, and nonformal), need to be considered as part of lifelong learning. The alternative conception is learning that takes place after compulsory education, when an individual enters the labor market or goes into higher education (here, too, learning can be of a formal or informal nature). With the upsurge in interest in the concept, there are now a number of methodologies for measuring lifelong learning, as well as detailed country studies (including studies that use comparable approaches). Moreover, there are a number of synonyms for the concept, such as “lifelong education,” “recurrent education,” and “life-wide education.” Lifelong learning concepts are intended to profoundly reorient countries’ education and training systems in order to respond to changes in countries’ economies where knowledge generation, adaptation, and use play an increasingly large role. These changes in the nature of firms’ competitive advantage imply changing skills and competencies needed by workers. Moving towards a lifelong learning system is also seen as desirable because it will address equity concerns.
School Culture
Authors: Schuermann Patrick J. , Guthrie James W. , Hoy Colleen
Published: February 2012

Similar to change efforts in other sectors, organizational growth in education does not occur in an isolated environment. Rather, it occurs within institutions that have norms and values, assumptions and expectations. While often used interchangeably, several authors distinguish the constructs of “school climate” and “school culture” on the basis of organizational climate being the descriptive beliefs and perceptions individuals hold of the organization and culture being the shared values, beliefs, and expectations that develop from social interactions within the organization. School culture is “the way we do things around here”—those tangible and intangible norms and values shared by members of a school that help shape the behaviors of teachers and school leaders. This article provides a compilation of the major works that form the literature base on the topic of school culture, with an emphasis on works that discuss ways in which school leaders and teachers can utilize school culture in the service of achieving key educational goals.
Secondary to Postsecondary Transition Issues
Authors: Test David W. , Bethune Lauren K. , Diegelmann Karen M. , Holzberg Debra G. , Clark Kelly , Terrell Misty , Rusher Dana
Published: February 2012

Secondary transition was formally defined by the federal government in the 1990 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA 1990). In addition to defining transition, IDEA 1990 required the student Individual Education Program (IEP) to include a transition component by age sixteen and transition services for youth with disabilities be coordinated between the school and community service providers. Since 1990, IDEA was amended in 1997 and 2004. IDEA 2004 clarified that the purpose of a free, appropriate public education for a student with a disability was to “prepare them for further education, employment and independent living,” as well as defining transition services as “a coordinated set of activities for a child with a disability that (1) is designed to be within a results oriented process, that is focused on improving the academic and functional achievement of the child with a disability to facilitate the child’s movement from school to post-school activities, including postsecondary education, vocational education, integrated employment (including supported employment), continuing and adult education, adult services, independent living, or community participation; (2) is based on the individual child’s needs, taking into account the child’s strengths, preferences, and interests; and (3) includes instruction, related services, community experiences, the development of employment and other post-school adult living objectives, and if appropriate, acquisition of daily living skills and provision of a functional vocational evaluation” (IDEA; 34 CFR 300.43 (a)] [20 U.S.C. 1401(34)]). While IDEA 2004 provided a formal definition of secondary transition, Halpern 1992 (cited under History) informally defined it as “a period of floundering that occurs for at least the first several years after leaving school as adolescents attempt to assume a variety of adult roles in their communities” (p. 203). As a result, secondary transition is about helping students with disabilities prepare to successfully move from high school to adulthood.
Baroque Music
Authors: Carter Tim
Published: February 2012

“Baroque” is a style-period in music conventionally identified as the 17th century and the first half of the 18th, i.e., from Claudio Monteverdi (b. 1567–d. 1643) to J. S. Bach (b. 1685–d. 1750) and Handel (b. 1685–d. 1759). It is often divided into “early” (1600–1640), “middle” (1640–1690), and “high” (1690–1750) phases. These various chronological boundaries remain fuzzy, however, and also reflect the prejudices of German and Anglo-American scholarship that might not appeal to, say, French admirers of their musique classique from Jean-Baptiste Lully to Jean-Philippe Rameau, or Spanish devotees of the siglo de oro up to the death of Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1681). Given that many characteristics of early Baroque music can be traced to aesthetic attitudes and performance practices typical of the late Renaissance, it is common to take the beginnings of Baroque music back to 1580 or so. When the Baroque period ends is a much more problematic question, depending on where one situates the so-called Rococo and style galant (e.g., of Rameau or Georg Philipp Telemann), the Empfindsamer Stil (e.g., of C. P. E. Bach), or the pre-Classical style of, say, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi and Johann Adolf Hasse. Baroque music is often characterized by one or more of the following: harmonic (vertical) thinking, musical rhetoric and affective text expression, elaborate ornamentation, newly codified genres and forms, the emergence of functional tonality, and the rise of the virtuoso. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (in his Dictionnaire de musique, 1768), writing from the rather smug viewpoint of the French Enlightenment, claimed that “a baroque music is that in which the harmony is confused, charged with modulations and dissonances, the melody is harsh and little natural, the intonation difficult, and the movement constrained.” Modern scholars and performers would disagree, and the current entry, introducing the fundamental texts in the field and its subdivisions, seeks to make some sense of just what Baroque music might be. It does not include composer studies, which can be found separately in Oxford Bibliographies.
Solo Secular Vocal Music
Authors: Tunley David
Published: February 2012

Singing being the most natural and spontaneous form of music making, its universal cultivation knows no bounds in time or place. However, for practical purposes, the following references are mainly concerned with European-style solo secular vocal music from medieval times to the present day. Yet even within that time frame and geography it is not easy to define solo secular vocal music, often known as “art song,” a slightly broader term, as that repertory sometimes includes songs with a religious or spiritual text. The difficulty in finding a watertight definition of solo secular vocal music is that there is often an overlap with other forms and types. Folk songs, for example, have often been incorporated into classical repertory, but folk song is an enormous area in its own right and needs its own bibliographical resources. A similar overlap occurs with indigenous songs from various cultures, as do popular songs. Into the latter category are those by George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and others in the early years of the 20th century. However, most of the songs of these brilliant composers—even those whose compositions became classics of their kind—were originally written for musicals and as such are better treated as music for theater or cabaret rather than in the present category. Thus, with some exceptions, the sources listed below relate to solo songs not primarily composed for liturgical, religious, or theatrical purposes.
American Music Theory, 1955–2017
Authors: Forrest David , Neff Severine , Reef John
Published: February 2012

Since ancient Greece, the discipline of music theory has offered explanations for the nature of musical phenomena and the fundamental principles governing their use. As early as the Middle Ages, musicians utilized such explanations to analyze specific musical compositions. However, analysis as a subdiscipline of theory burgeoned only centuries later in 19th-century Europe. At that time, conservatory musicians, most often composers, taught theory as compositional craft—counterpoint, harmony, and form. In the mid-1950s, American composer-theorists began reformulating the conceptual basis of the 19th-century European tradition by proposing new explanatory models of musical structure influenced by the developments in contemporary science, philosophy, and linguistics. Their investigations resulted in their advocacy of a music-theoretical discipline centered at universities and composed of professional theorists or composer-theorists who had mastered an essential tripartite core of knowledge: Schenkerian theory and analysis, history of theory, and the pioneering subfields addressing post-tonal music, twelve-tone theory, and set theory. From the 1980s to the present, new paradigms and approaches including the topics of challenges from the New Musicology and music criticism, musical meaning (encompassing approaches from nonanalytic philosophy and semiotic approaches), phenomenological approaches, approaches from literary theory, popular music studies, non-Western approaches, multimedia studies, timbre, cognition, and social issues such as gender, queer, and disability studies, have further expanded the nature and scope of the discipline. Together these rich and varied fields of music-theoretical inquiry offer a scholarly literature unprecedented in Western musical thought.
Kinship
Authors: Parkin Robert
Published: February 2012

Kinship has traditionally been one of the key topics in social and cultural anthropology. There are two principal reasons for this: First, although not all human groups are constituted on the basis of kinship, all humans have kinship as individuals and are related to other individuals through it. Second, for the sorts of “tribal,” classless, economically unspecialized societies that anthropologists have mostly—though no longer exclusively—studied, kinship has appeared to be the main or even sole form of social organization. As a result, many theoretical approaches, especially the schools of functionalism and structuralism within social anthropology, have focused on how social groups are formed, how individuals are related to one another through kinship, and the mutual rights and duties they have as a result. Cultural anthropologists, by contrast, have chosen to focus more on the symbolic aspects of kinship, such as the meanings attached to being a particular sort of relative, as well as how symbols of and perspectives on personhood, the body, and gender inform kinship ideas and practices. In broad terms, this latter approach has predominated in America since around 1900 but has been reinvigorated periodically and become more influential in world anthropology, especially in the poststructuralist phase starting in the 1970s. The domain of kinship can be divided into descent (that is, relations between generations), marriage, and siblingship, though there are not nearly as many studies on the last category as there are on the first two. Early work (especially from the functionalist school) tended to see kinship as a matter of descent only, which produced the phrase “kinship and marriage”; later work, starting with structuralism, has tended to include marriage within the overarching rubric of kinship, adding to it the notion of affinal alliance. Among other things, this reflects the heavy concentration in functionalism on genealogical reckoning in analyzing kinship systems. Structuralism, by contrast, moved away from this in favor of a focus on kin categories rather than genealogical positions, and poststructuralism moved away from both genealogy and the notion of kinship systems to focus more on meaning, practice, and agency. Both earlier schools had an interest in kinship terminology, or the terms used for relatives and the different patterns they make when seen as whole systems, but whereas functionalism tended to view the terminology in terms of descent, structuralism connected it with marriage, especially affinal alliance involving marriage to various classes of cousins, from which came the terms, respective to the schools, of descent theory and alliance theory. There have also been numerous studies of the family, less influential theoretically than very recent studies of the new reproductive technologies and their implications for what we mean by kinship.
Linguistic Relativity
Authors: Li Peggy , Barner David
Published: February 2012

Linguistic relativity, sometimes called the Whorfian hypothesis, posits that properties of language affect the structure and content of thought and thus the way humans perceive reality. A distinction is often made between strong Whorfian views, according to which the categories of thought are determined by language, and weak views, which argue that language influences thought without entirely determining its structure. Each view presupposes that for language to affect thought, the two must in some way be separable. The modern investigation of linguistic relativity began with the contributions of Benjamin Lee Whorf and his mentor, Edward Sapir. Until recently, much experimental work has focused on determining whether any reliable Whorfian effects exist and whether effects truly reflect differences in thought caused by linguistic variation. Many such studies compare speakers of different languages or test subjects at different stages of language acquisition. Other studies explore how language affects cognition by testing prelinguistic infants or nonhuman animals and comparing these groups to children or adults. Significant progress has been made in several domains, including studies of color, number, objects, and space. In many areas, the status of findings is hotly debated.
Computational Linguistics
Authors: Dale Robert
Published: February 2012

Computational linguistics (CL) is an interdisciplinary mix of computer science and linguistics with additional insights drawn from areas such as psycholinguistics and the philosophy of language. Its primary concern is with the computational modeling of linguistic processes pursued as a theoretically oriented exercise whose purpose is either to provide models that help us gain insight into the nature of language and the human language processing mechanism or to support the development of software applications that do useful things with language (an area sometimes referred to as language technology). For some, the term “computational linguistics” is synonymous with natural language processing (NLP); however, from the perspective of the material provided here, NLP is more applications-oriented than CL. Although we provide some pointers to work that describes NLP applications, our primary focus here is on the theoretical underpinnings that CL provides to activities with a more practical focus. The first work in CL dates from the 1950s, when initial attempts were made to automatically translate Russian into English. Until the late 1980s most work in the field was concerned with what we might call symbolic systems, often involving large collections of handwritten rules to model some linguistic phenomenon. Since the late 1980s there has been a significant shift toward statistical methods, where rules and generalizations are learned from data rather than being produced manually; this has become possible only as a result of the combination of, on one hand, vast amounts of data becoming available, particularly via the World Wide Web, and, on the other hand, the immense increases in computer processing power required to execute many iterations over large data sets to derive information from them. In almost all subareas of CL one can generally divide the work pursued into the periods before and after this “statistical revolution.” The material here is organized around the conventional decomposition of linguistic study into phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Work that is primarily concerned with speech recognition and synthesis is not covered. Primarily concern is with work on the processing of English; again, much of the work in CL is applicable to other languages, but English holds a privileged position as the focus of most research.
Aphasia
Authors: Salis Christos , Obermeyer Jessica , Edwards Susan
Published: February 2012

Aphasia is a language disorder acquired subsequent to brain damage that affects production and understanding of spoken and written language in varying degrees and patterns associated with the size and site of the lesion (see Symptoms and Neurological Correlates). Written and online examples of aphasic speech are available (see Aphasic Language Data Sets). Brain damage is usually in the left cerebral cortex, with the left temporal and frontal lobes being especially vulnerable (see Symptoms and Neurological Correlates). Profiles of deficits vary in the extent that levels of language, phonology (see Phonemic and Phonetic Characteristics), lexis (see Nouns, Verbs, Closed-Class Words), and syntax (see Sentence Comprehension and Sentence Production) are involved, in varying degrees and patterns, although lexical access problems are found in most types of aphasia. These deficits give rise to problems in connected speech and conversation (see Discourse). Variations in the types of language deficit found in aphasia led to the notion of syndromes and the search for associations between types of language deficits and sites of lesion (see Historical Overviews). Two well-described syndromes are Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia. Broca’s aphasia is characterized by syntactic deficits in output but with relatively retained understanding of language. Most experimental research has been in this type of aphasia. In Wernicke’s aphasia, understanding is impaired and lexical semantics are compromised, whereas syntax is relatively intact. Aphasia is found in all languages (see Across Languages) and in children who have passed the early stages of language development and subsequently have impaired language following brain damage.