ENA Dictionary of SociologyOxford University PressOxford University Press

A Dictionary of Sociology

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A

aberrant behaviour

Irregular behaviour that deviates from what is considered normal. In sociology, the use of the term implies that the behaviour in question is performed in secret and mainly for reasons of self-interest, as for example in the case of certain unusual sexual practices. This may be contrasted with ‘non-conforming behaviour’, which usually refers to public violations of social norms, often carried out specifically in order to promote social change. Thus the political or religious dissenter proclaims his or her deviance to as wide an audience as possible. The implications of this distinction for theories of deviance are discussed fully by
, in his essay on ‘Social Problems and Sociological Theory’ (, Contemporary Social Problems, 1971)
.

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ability

The power to perform a mental or physical task—either before or after training. Social psychologists usually distinguish ability from aptitude, the natural ability to acquire or learn a body of knowledge, sometimes measured by an aptitude test. Sociologists would probably distinguish ability and skill, the former being relatively specialized and task-specific, the latter referring to a wider set of learned techniques which could be applied to a number of cognate tasks.

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abolitionism

A term associated with protest on grounds of inhumanity and call for the abolition of: first, slavery (see, for example, the work of
, 1759–1833
); and, more recently, prisons and imprisonment. The latter stance developed within Scandinavian criminology (see
, The Politics of Abolition, 1974)
but has since been taken up within wider critical criminology. Abolitionists argue that prisons are ineffective, their justification untenable, and their violations of human rights widespread. The abolitionist stance rejects reformism on the grounds that this perpetuates and legitimizes the existing system. Abolitionism proposes new responses to crime, offending, and disputes—for example community-based alternatives to incarceration—and argues that the urge to punish and inflict pain must be challenged.

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abreaction, abreaction therapy

A term used by psychoanalysts to refer to the process of releasing repressed emotions by reliving in the imagination a previous negative experience. Sigmund Freud, in his early work, argued that the roots of hysterical symptoms lay in early experiences of psychological trauma. There are, within psychoanalysis, numerous therapeutic techniques which attempt to restore mental health by having the patient imaginatively relive actual traumatic experiences.

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absolute deprivation

See DEPRIVATION.

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absolute mobility

See MOBILITY, SOCIAL.

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absolute poverty

See POVERTY.

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absolutism, absolutist state

The term itself may be defined as a state-form typical of societies in the process of transition from feudalism to capitalism, wherein power is concentrated in the person of a monarch, who has at his or her disposal a centralized administrative apparatus. Viewed thus, the label has been applied to a wide variety of states, ranging from that of the sixteenth-century English Tudors to that of nineteenth-century Meiji Japan. This definition is, however, not uncontroversial: the label has also been applied to Tsarist Russia, where the transition was from feudalism to communism, and some would deny that Japan was ever a feudal society in anything other than the loosest sense.
There has also been great controversy about the role that such states played in the transition in question. Many historians have described this role in terms akin to that of the absolutist state having been a midwife of capitalism, an interpretation illustrated by the preference of some for the term ‘enlightened despotism’, rather than the (somewhat derogatory) alternative ‘absolutism’. (Others, however, have used this term in reference to the influence of Enlightenment rationalism on absolutism in Prussia, Austria, and so forth, rather than as a comment on the relationship of absolutism to capitalism.) By comparison, Marxists have (at least until relatively recently) tended to regard this role as closer to that of an abortionist, albeit an incompetent one. The problem that both parties to this dispute have had to address is the variability of the historical outcomes. Even within continental Europe, the rise of absolutist states appears, prima facie, to have been associated with both a rapid transition to capitalism in the West, and an intensification of feudal domination in the East.
For Max Weber (General Economic History, 1923) and non-Marxist scholars more generally, the explanation of the progressive role played by the absolutist or ‘rational state’ may be found in the immense contribution that these regimes made to the increasing predictability of action within their territorial boundaries, as they bureaucratized their own administrations, introduced elements of the rule of law, monopolized the legitimate use of force, and used this force to enforce their jurisdiction throughout society. Weber's response to the divergent outcomes of absolutism in Eastern and Western Europe was to portray what happened in the East as a delay rather than a regression, and to explain it as the result of the state's lack of allies in the wider society, which in turn reflected the more general economic and cultural backwardness of these societies.
The response of Marxists (such as Maurice Dobb, Eric Hobsbawm, and Perry Anderson) to this line of argument, has been to suggest that it owes more to the tendency amongst non-Marxists to accord a priori analytical privilege to the political realm, than it does to sound historical research. Given that the absolute monarchs and their most powerful supporters were always representatives of the feudal nobility, so Marxists have argued, it is the short-lived absolutisms of Western Europe (and especially of England and Holland) that require explanation, rather than the long-lasting ones of the East. The explanation that they provide revolves around the bold and controversial claim that the majority of continental states experienced a prolonged economic crisis during the sixteenth century, a crisis from which England and Holland were spared. The result was that in every society except those two, the feudal nobility was able to crush or constrain its capitalist rivals. For this reason, it was possible for the bourgeois classes of England and Holland to gain an early advantage over their potential competitors, an advantage which they enhanced still further by overturning their absolute monarchies in relatively short order. Putting to one side the many empirical objections that this thesis has encountered, it is important to note that it rests upon an analytical privileging of the economic realm that is arguably no more justified than the privileging of the political realm to which its proponents have rightly objected. Perhaps the most successful exception to both strictures is
's, French Absolutism: The Crucial Phase, 1620–1629 (1968)
.

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abstracted empiricism

A term coined by C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination (1959) and used to refer to the work of those sociologists who equate empiricism with science and make a fetish of quantitative research techniques. Whilst Mills accepts that there is a place for numerical data and statistical analysis in sociological reasoning, he insists that they are not sufficient for sociological analysis. Indeed, in the absence of the theoretical categories and comparative historical analyses that give such data their sociological meaning, he also insists that no conception of social structure is possible. This is because of the psychologism that he regards as intrinsic to all methodologies that restrict what is allowable as legitimate data to those which are produced by sociologists themselves by means of surveys and the like. A fascinating historical account of the origins of abstracted empiricism will be found in
, Sociology and Scientism: The American Quest for Objectivity, 1880–1949 (1987)
.

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accommodation

See ASSIMILATION.

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accounts

See VOCABULARIES OF MOTIVE.

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acculturation

See ASSIMILATION.

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accumulation

See CAPITAL ACCUMULATION.

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acephalous

A term used to describe the political system of societies without centralized state authority—such as, for example, traditional African lineage political systems (see
, Tribes without Rulers, 1958)
. Authority is wielded at the level of the clan, lineage, or lineage segment. For this reason these ‘headless’ societies are often referred to by the alternative term ‘segmented’.

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achieved status

See STATUS, ACHIEVED.

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achievement

The successful accomplishment of, or performance in, a socially defined task or goal. Talcott Parsons (in Social Theory and Modern Society, 1967) suggests that modern societies use indices of achievement—examination credentials or performance in role-based tasks—rather than ascriptive criteria to recruit, select, and evaluate individuals for particular roles. However, research demonstrates the continued influence of ascription in social stratification, notably according to such factors as race and sex. There is an interesting cross-disciplinary discussion of the concept and interpretation of achievement, its relationship to creativity and innovation, and its role in explaining economic growth in England and Japan since the seventeenth century, in
, Wellsprings of Achievement (1995)
. See also ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION; MERITOCRACY; STATUS, ACHIEVED.

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achievement motivation

Defined as the need to perform well or the striving for success, and evidenced by persistence and effort in the face of difficulties, achievement motivation is regarded as a central human motivation. Psychologist David McClelland (The Achieving Society, 1961) measured it by analysing respondents' narratives; rather more controversially he hypothesized that it was related to economic growth. Lack of achievement motivation was, for a period during the 1950s and 1960s, a fashionable explanation for lack of economic development in the Third World—notably among certain American modernization theorists. This thesis was much criticized by dependency theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank (Latin America: Underdevelopment or Revolution 1969). See also WORK ETHIC.

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act, action, social act

See ACTION THEORY; MEANING; PARSONS, TALCOTT; WEBER, MAX.

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action frame of reference

See ACTION THEORY.

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action research

A type of research in which the researcher is also a change agent, often used in local communities or by consultants working in companies, as part of the change process itself. The research subjects are invited to participate at various stages of a relatively fast-moving sequence of research–action–research–action. There is an iterative process of investigating a problem, using case-study methods, loosely defined; presenting the analysis, with one or more proposed solutions, to the subjects or group leaders; deciding which course of action to follow and implementing it; followed by further investigations to assess the outcomes, identifying unanticipated problems and possible solutions to them; followed by further action to refine and extend the new policies or activities. The process can be extended indefinitely, as the original focus of concern gradually moves to other related areas. The British community development programmes of the 1970s are an interesting example (see particularly the
Coventry CDP Final Report, 1975)
.

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action theory, action frame of reference

These terms are not interchangeable but are closely related and carry a number of implications about the way we regard sociology as a science. It is usual, for example, to juxtapose action to structure as alternative starting-points for sociological investigation. Action theories are those which see the major or only object for sociology as human action. This group includes Weberian sociology, phenomenological and hermeneutic sociology, symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, and structuration theory (all of which are dealt with under separate headings in this dictionary). These approaches concern themselves, not only with the nature of action, but also with meaning and interpretation. A defining quality of action is that, unlike behaviour, it carries a subjective meaning for the actor. Max Weber distinguished four types of action—traditional (customary), affective (emotional), value-oriented, and instrumental (rational means-end)—although, historically, much of sociological analysis has concentrated on the last two of these. Action theories, therefore, do not see sociology as a science like the natural sciences, dealing with external, independent objects; rather, sociology is scientific because it gives a rational, coherent account of peoples' actions, thoughts, and relationships.
The action frame of reference is associated with the name of Talcott Parsons, whose theory starts with a systematic analysis of action which sees the social actor as choosing between different means and ends, in an environment which limits choice both physically and socially. The most important social limitations on choice are norms and values. From this, Parsons builds up an elaborate model of the social system, such that his theory arguably loses its voluntaristic character: that is, the notion of the choosing actor disappears, in favour of a theory of structural determination in which norms and values play the determining role.
Apart from Parsons's theory, modern action theories in sociology have three different concerns. The first is the nature of rationality and rational action itself. This focus arises out of Weber's typology and poses questions about the possibility of causal explanations of action. (Are the reasons for doing something a cause in the same way that heating a piece of metal causes it to expand?) It also addresses the issue of whether there are any absolute criteria of rationality, or wether sociological explanations are always in some sense relative. Jon Elster's rational choice theory takes up some of these problems in a more substantive way. The second concern is the taken-for-granted rules and stock of knowledge that underlie action—a theme pursued notably by ethnomethodology and phenomenology. The third, addressed by symbolic interactionism, is the learning and negotiation of meaning that goes on between actors.
All action theories have something to say, implicitly or explicitly, about the rationality of the actor—if only that he or she behaves rationally. See also EXCHANGE THEORY.

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actionalism

A term generally associated with the name of French sociologist Alain Touraine, and not to be confused with the ‘action frame of reference’ (see ACTION THEORY) proposed by Talcott Parsons. Beginning in the 1960s, Touraine developed a radical new theoretical framework, most fully described in The Self-Production of Society (1973). In his own words, Touraine aims to ‘replace a sociology of society with a sociology of actors’. His purpose has been to overcome what he sees as a false division in sociology between objective and subjective, or system and action approaches. Actionalism places the social actor at the centre of theoretical attention, including theories of structural and historical phenomena. Actors are not simply the components of social systems, but the agents of those systems.
Touraine's analysis does not exclude groups and collectivities such as social classes. However, these are treated not as categories, but as dynamic sets of relationships between social actors. This perspective involves an explicit critique of structuralism and post-structuralism (in which the individual subject is ‘dead’), and of essentialism (which leaves history equally bereft of social actors).
The dynamic aspect of actionalism is what Touraine calls historicity (a term adapted from Jean-Paul Sartre); that is, the ability of society to act on itself, and the quality of history as a human activity. The sociologist is an agent of historicity—not a neutral observer—and has a stake in the conflicts of his or her society. This led Touraine to the method of ‘sociological interventionism’, in which sociologists study social change movements by participating in them directly. This actionalist sociology, Touraine believes, will be diverse and full of conflicts, but more legitimate because of its active engagement in social change processes.
In concrete terms, the actionalist approach attempts to explain how social values are shaped, and thus how social change is accomplished, by identifying the ‘historical subject’ (collective actor) in each historical epoch which carries the capacity for accomplishing revolutionary change by organizing itself into a social movement. In his earlier studies. Touraine argued that historical subjects attain the necessary self-awareness through the experience of work, so that the social movement expressing the historical subject of capitalism becomes organized labour. However, in later studies, he broadened his conception of ‘production’ and extended the theory to other social movements, including those organized by women, students, nuclear protesters, and nationalists.

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actor, social actor

See ACTION THEORY; AGENCY; SELF; SUBJECT.

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adaptation, modes of individual

See ANOMIE.

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adaptive culture

See CULTURE, ADAPTIVE AND MATERIAL.

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Addams, Jane

(1860–1935)
Addams was an American sociologist of central importance to the work of the Chicago School in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A powerful influence on many other women in sociology, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Emily Greene Balch, in 1889 she set up a social settlement in Chicago, Hull House, which was partly inspired by London's Toynbee Hall, but was more woman-influenced, more egalitarian, and less religious. She argued that one of the main problems for women was trying to manage the conflicting demands of family and society, and believed social settlements were one way to resolve the problem. Hull House was an important sociological centre for the University of Chicago, and also attracted other leading social theorists, Marxists, anarchists, and socialists of the time. A spokeswoman for women and working-class immigrants in particular, Addams was a cultural feminist who believed female values were inherently superior to those of men, and argued that a more productive and more peaceful society could be built by drawing on, and integrating, such values. Her commitment to pacifism made her a social pariah during the First World War, although in 1931 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. See
, Jane Addams; A Centennial Reader (1960)
, and
, ‘Women in Sociology: 1890–1930’, Journal of the History of Sociology (1978)
.

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addiction

See DRINKING AND ALCOHOLISM; DRUGS.

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additive overlapping clustering

See CLUSTER ANALYSIS.

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additive tree

See CLUSTER ANALYSIS.

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adelphic polyandry

See POLYANDRY.

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administrative theory, classical administrative theory

An early form of organization theory, pioneered mainly by Henri Fayol (1841–1925), which was concerned principally with achieving the ‘most rational’ organization for co-ordinating the various tasks specified within a complex division of labour (see his
Administration industrielle et générale, 1916)
. The translation of this book into English as General and Industrial Management (1949) implies that Fayol was concerned mainly with business management, although he himself makes it clear that his ideas about management were intended to apply to all formal organizations, including political and religious undertakings. Expressing the French ‘administration’ as ‘management’ has also led to the alternative designation of this approach as the ‘classical school of scientific management’. More recent exponents include Lyndall Urwick and Peter F. Drucker.
Fayol, who is acknowledged to be the earliest advocate of a theoretical analysis of managerial activities, identified the key functions of management as being those of forecasting and planning. The most rational and efficient organizations were, in his view, those which implemented a plan that facilitated ‘unity, continuity, flexibility, precision, command and control’. Universal principles of administration were then distilled from these objectives. These include the key elements of the scalar chain (authority and responsibility flowing in an unbroken line from the chief executive to the shop floor); unity of command (each person has only one supervisor with whom he or she communicates); a pyramid of prescribed control (first-line supervisors have a limited number of functions and subordinates, with second-line supervisors controlling a prescribed number of first-line supervisors, and so on up to the chief executive); unity of direction (people engaged in similar activities must pursue a common objective in line with the overall plan); specialization of tasks (allowing individuals to build up a specific expertise and so be more productive); and, finally, subordination of individual interests to the general interest of the organization. This list is not exhaustive, but illustrates the key proposition of administrative theory, which is that a functionally specific and hierarchical structure offers the most efficient means of securing organizational objectives (see
, Fayol on Administration, 1967)
.
Classical administrative theory, like its near-contemporary the scientific management approach, rests on the premisses that organizations are unproblematically rational and (effectively) closed systems. In other words, organizations are assumed to have unambiguous and unitary objectives, which the individuals within them pursue routinely, by obeying the rules and fulfilling their role expectations, according to the prescribed blueprint and structure. Moreover, in the attempt to maximize efficiency, it is only variables within that structure that need to be considered and manipulated. The interaction of the organization with its environment, together with the various factors which are external to the organization but nevertheless have consequences for its internal functioning, are systematically ignored. Clearly, both perspectives take a rather deterministic view of social action, since each assumes that individuals will maximize organizational efficiency, independently of their own welfare, and with no thought for the relationship between the collective goal and their own particular purposes. The Human Relations Movement in organizational analysis, an otherwise diverse group of writers and approaches, is united by its opposition to precisely this assumption. Despite such criticisms, the classical theory of administration has exerted considerable influence on the fields of business studies and public administration, and it still provides the basic concepts which many managers use in clarifying their objectives.

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adolescence

The term may be applied to the emotional and behavioural states supposedly associated with becoming adult; the phase in the life-cycle before the physical changes associated with puberty are socially recognized; or the transition in status from childhood to adulthood.
Typically, in modern industrial societies, young people are sexually mature well before society acknowledges them as adults in other respects; and, because of education and training, they remain dependent on parents and guardians. Consequently, adolescence has been seen as a time of peak emotional turbulence (see
, The Nature of Adolescence, 1980)
. Although few sociologists would dismiss the idea that physical change may of itself bring about behavioural change, or that young people do face a tension between sexual and social maturity, the value of the term adolescence is questionable. Comparisons with even the recent past show that children frequently had to become adults as soon as they could do useful work.
Anthropologists too describe numerous examples (especially in age-set societies) where the transition to adulthood is abrupt, marked by clear rites of passage, and relatively free from alleged adolescent problems. Surveys and other field studies in the industrialized West itself have cast doubt on the ideas that adolescence is typically any more stressful than any other stage in life or that the majority of teenagers are rebellious. The treatment of adolescence as a social problem may say more about the stereotypes of youth in the adult world and indicate a moral panic about youth culture (a critique along these lines will be found in
, Growing Up at the Margins, 1986)
. For an overview of the literature see
, The Adolescent in the Family (1991)
.

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Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund

(1903–69)
A leading member of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, who worked in America during the Second World War, returning to West Germany after the allied victory. He was a man of immense learning, and complex, often obscure and difficult ideas. His work covered aesthetic theory, literary and musical theory, general cultural criticism, social psychology, and philosophy. For the sociologist, his major work was (with numerous others) The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a (much criticized) empirical and theoretical investigation into the psychological roots of authoritarianism.
In the face of modern culture, he was concerned at the outset to avoid the subjectivism of existentialism and easy objectivism of positivism, but this modified as he became more pessimistic about the modern world. His aesthetic and cultural criticism and his philosophy became increasingly concerned with form rather than content: the form of a work of art, or of a system of ideas, offered the clearest demonstration of the limits and contradictions imposed upon us by society, as well as of the possibilities it offers. His own difficult style was allegedly an attempt to avoid what he saw as the false integration of modern industrial society. Perhaps his clearest statement of his view of modernity can be found in Minima Moralia (1951), a collection of aphorisms, which state that the notion of totality was once part of a liberating philosophy, but over the last century has been absorbed into a totalizing social system, a real or potentially totalitarian regime. Against this we must not seek knowledge, but emphasize paradox and ambiguity; temporarily, at least, truth might lie in the experience of the individual.
For examples of his cultural criticism see
Prisms (1955)
, and for his philosophy Negative Dialectics (1966). For a critique which characterizes his work as—among other things—a pretentious, obscure, sterile, and increasingly desperate borrowing of ideas uncritically from a succession of earlier failed Marxisms, see volume three of
's Main Currents of Marxism (1981)
. See also AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY; CRITICAL THEORY.

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advocacy research

One kind of descriptive policy research, carried out by people who are deeply concerned about certain social problems, such as poverty or rape. Their studies seek to measure social problems with a view to heightening public awareness of them and providing a catalyst to policy proposals and other action to ameliorate the problem in question. Occasionally, advocacy research studies bend their research methods in order to inflate the magnitude of the social problem described, and thereby enhance the case for public action to address the issue. See
's article: ‘Advocacy Research and Social Policy’, Crime and Justice (1997)
.

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affect, affective, affectivity

An affect is an emotion. In sociology the use of the term generally implies that an action is being or has been carried out for emotional gratification. For example, in their discussion of Class Awareness in the United States (1983), Mary R. Jackman and Robert W. Jackman discuss ‘affective class bonds’; namely, ‘the issue of whether subjective social class encompasses a feeling of emotional attachment’, rather than being merely a matter of nominal identification. ‘Affectivity versus affective neutrality’ is one of Talcott Parsons's so-called pattern variables, according to which different societies can be classified and analysed. See also AFFECTIVE INDIVIDUALISM.

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affective individualism

An alleged (though controversial) change in family life, said to have accompanied the demographic, industrial, and capitalist revolutions which occurred in eighteenth-century England, and since experienced widely in other modernized and modernizing countries. The term affective individualism is applied to this process, being the formation of marriage ties on the basis of personal attraction, guided by norms of romantic attachment.
A number of authorities (including
, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, 1977
) have argued that the eighteenth century saw a revolution in familial norms. Hitherto, families (even nuclear families) were deeply embedded in a wider network of community involvements (including close relationships with other kin), so that the family was not a major focus of emotional attachment and dependence for its members. Among other things, therefore, sex was instrumental (necessary to propagate children) rather than a source of pleasure; as indeed was marriage itself (which was undertaken for economic or political reasons, rather than feelings of romantic attraction). For reasons connected with industrialization (the precise causality varies between accounts), this form of family life gave way rapidly to the ‘closed domesticated nuclear form’, characterized by intimate emotional bonds, domestic privacy, a preoccupation with love and with the rearing of children for expressive rather than instrumental reasons. By extension, this process is alleged to have accompanied the spread of capitalism and industrialization throughout the globe, especially to the so-called traditional societies of the Third World.
The theory of affective individualism as an invention of modern societies has been strongly challenged—most notably by Alan Macfarlane (see
The Culture of Capitalism, 1987
)—mainly on the grounds that it posits as revolutionary a series of changes which were incremental and long pre-dated the processes of industrialization. See also FAMILY, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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affine, affinity

See KINSHIP.

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affirmative action

See POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION.

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affluent society

See EMBOURGEOISEMENT.

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affluent worker

See EMBOURGEOISEMENT.

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age-sets, age-grades

Broad age-bands which define the social status, permitted roles, and activities of those belonging to them. Transitions from one age-grade to the next are often major collectively organized social events with rites of passage marking the change of social status and role. The term can be applied in the modern industrial context, however it is more commonly used in reference to pre-industrial societies, which may superimpose an age-grade system of stratification (dividing members into youths, maidens, elders, and so forth) on the organizing tribal, lineage, or clan structure.

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age stratification

A system of inequalities linked to age. In Western societies, for example, both the old and the young are perceived and treated as relatively incompetent and excluded from much social life. See also AGEISM.

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ageing, sociology of

The physiological process of growing older has vital social and cultural dimensions which affect what is often seen as a purely biological inevitability. Age is a cultural category and its meaning and significance vary both historically and cross-culturally. The sociology of ageing did not feature in standard sociology textbooks until recently. Like sex or gender, age tended to be seen as a ‘natural’ division, or else as a ‘problem’ reserved for social policy. By contrast, considerable sociological attention has been paid to youth culture.
In Western capitalism, a wage-labour system means fixed retirement from external production, thus categorizing the aged as non-productive, and a burden. In research priorities, gerontology, with its medical model of ageing, has been influential. Sociological research in Britain has focused on the aged as isolates or in state institutions. Demographic changes—with increasing longevity, a declining birth-rate, and a greater proportion of the population over 65 in the West—have stimulated both a moral panic and new interest in the consumer and political potential of the elderly.
Stereotyping and an assumed homogeneity among the aged are to be challenged. Class, race, and gender, as well as culture, counter biological factors. For example, old age is not perceived as an impediment for males with supreme political power in either communist or capitalist states. In numerous articles on the social relations of old people, Ethel Shanas has criticized what has been termed the acquiescent functionalism of much writing on ageing and the family life of the elderly, a tradition which legitimates ageism by excluding the elderly from the labour-market and other significant social roles. By contrast, Shanas's own research seems to demonstrate that ageing is a process of deprivation, leading to what has been called ‘structured dependency’ (see
, Old People in Three Industrialised Societies, 1968
, and
, Family, Bureaucracy and the Elderly, 1977
).
There is growing research interest in this field, not only in the experience and ethnography of the aged, but also in the specific constructions of ‘old age’ across cultures and through time (see, for example,
's Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association, ‘On the Significance of Age in Sociology’, American Sociological Review, 1987)
.

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ageism

Discrimination, or the holding of irrational and prejudicial views about individuals or groups, based on their age. It involves stereotypical assumptions about a person's or group's physical or mental capacities and is often associated with derogatory language. Most commonly these are applied to the elderly. Organizations such as the Grey Panthers have emerged in the United States to combat discrimination against the elderly and to fight for their rights.

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agency

The term agency is usually juxtaposed to structure and is often no more than a synonym for action, emphasizing implicitly the undetermined nature of human action, as opposed to the alleged determinism of structural theories. If it has a wider meaning, it is to draw attention to the psychological and social psychological make-up of the actor, and to imply the capacity for willed (voluntary) action.
Sociological theories are often characterized according to the relative emphasis they place on agency or structure—and in terms, therefore, of an agency versus structure debate. Some recent theorists have intervened in the debate in a conscious attempt to transcend this dualism. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is a good example. Bourdieu is best known in the English-speaking world for his concepts of cultural capital and habitus, although his numerous books and articles also contain a full-blown theory of social order. The latter centres on the reproduction of contemporary culture—which favours the interests of those in power—via the differential distribution of knowledge through educational institutions. Especially in his later work, Bourdieu calls for a constructivist (see social constructionism) approach to sociology, transcending both essentialism and all ideas of the taken for granted in everyday life. His insistence that the objective and subjective aspects of social life are inescapably bound together leads him to challenge the dualism of macro versus micro and structure versus agency, in texts such as Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977), Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (1977), Distinction (1984), Homo Academicus (1988), In Other Words (1990), The Logic of Practice (1990), and The Craft of Sociology (1991). It is not clear that these diverse texts form a systematic sociological project, far less solve the dualism of structure versus agency, but an argument to that effect has been constructed by (among others)
, ‘Rethinking Classical Theory: The Sociological Vision of Pierre Bourdieu’, Theory and Society (1985)
.
Similarly, the American sociologist Jeffrey Alexander argues for a multidimensional sociology, bringing together the metaphysical and empirical, individual volition and collective domination, and normative and instrumental action, notably in his four-volume Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1984). He also argues that Talcott Parsons came closer to achieving this synthesis than did any other sociological theorist. See also ACTION THEORY; STRUCTURATION.

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aggregate (collectivity).

Large collections of people may act as groups, with some degree of common purpose, but they may also act as non-organized collectivities, or aggregates. For example, an audience or crowd may be said to be an aggregate, in so far as its members lack any organization or persisting pattern of social relationships. The term is also used more broadly in reference to research or analysis that deals only with aggregate data, which consist of statistics produced for broad groups or categories (for example certain types of persons, households, or companies), and in which the characteristics of individual respondents (persons, households, or companies) are no longer identifiable. See also COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOUR; MICRODATA.

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aggregate data

See AGGREGATE (COLLECTIVITY).

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aggression

Acts of hostility, injury, violence, or extreme self-assertion. There are several competing theories as to why people may become aggressive. Many of these are biological or instinctual in tenor. Thus, for example, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that people were by nature violent—and avoided a ‘war of all against all’ only by considerable ingenuity and effort. Many schools of psychology share this assumption, and argue that aggression is obviated by exhaustive processes of education or socialization, combined with a generous measure of social control. That is, socialization itself is not sufficient, and people must be continually rewarded for their civilized behaviour and punished for unacceptably aggressive conduct.
However, most sociological theories of aggression root it not in the biological substructure or psychological superstructure of the individual, but in his or her relationship to the social environment. Probably the most popular of these is the so-called frustration-aggression hypothesis or theory, which states that aggressive behaviour results when purposeful activity is interrupted (see the classic statement in
, Frustration and Aggression, 1939
). Thus, for example, children may attack other children who take their toys from them. This theory has, however, been criticized for its inability to explain the circumstances under which frustration leads to outcomes other than aggression. (Some children may simply sulk quietly under these circumstances.) The frustration-aggression thesis has also been identified with the earlier work of Sigmund Freud, who argued that frustration—the blocking of pleasure-seeking or pain-avoiding activities—always leads to aggression, either towards the perceived source of interference, or (if inhibited) displaced on to another object. (Freud later postulated that aggression was the product of the death instinct—Thanatos.)
A third group of theories—learning theories—view violence as the result of successful socialization and social control. That is, aggressive behaviour in general and violent behaviour in particular occur where they are expected, even in the absence of frustration. For example, members of a subculture may learn to behave in accordance with norms of violence which have been presented to them as socially desirable, as in cases where the use of force (such as fist-fighting) is associated with masculinity. Similarly, soldiers at the front and teenagers in a gang may feel violence is acceptable and the done thing, because they have been brought up to believe this to be the case, expect to win approval and prestige if they fight well, and wish to avoid censure should they ‘chicken out’. See also DIFFERENTIAL ASSOCIATION.

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Aggression–Approval Proposition

See SUCCESS PROPOSITION.

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agnate, agnation

In Roman law, agnati were a group of males and females who were related through a common ancestor, and thus came under a single family authority. The modern use in social anthropology relates to patrilineal (or male) descent, but the element of male authority has been lost. An agnate is thus a blood relative in the patrilineal (or male) line. Agnation refers to a kinship system in which relationship is traced exclusively through the male line. In current anthropological usage the term patrilineal is preferred.

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agrarian capitalism

See CAPITALISM.

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agrarianism, agrarian societies

Agrarian societies are those which combine horticulture and animal husbandry in systems of farming. Agrarianism also refers to the romanticization of the rural farm as the ideal place for family life.

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agreement, method of

See MILL, JOHN STUART.

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agribusiness

A large-scale capitalist farming and food-processing organization and enterprise (producing fertilizers, pesticides, or machinery) which shares many characteristics of other advanced industries. These include, for example, the use of advanced science and technology, techniques of mass production, and extensive vertical and horizontal integration of processes and corporations. Thus, for example, one might find a frozen-food corporation, having long-term contracts with an array of large farms using computers to plan production of highly specialized produce to order, and being supplied with inorganic fertilizers and other materials by a company also owned by the food corporation. The effects of agribusiness in the United States are discussed in
, Radical Agriculture (1976)
and
, How the Other Half Dies (1976)
. See also RURAL SOCIOLOGY.

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agriculture, sociology of

See RURAL SOCIOLOGY.

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AIDS, sociological studies of

The Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) is a complex of symptoms and ultimately deadly infections caused by the Human Immuno-deficiency Viruses (HIV). An initial period of high infectivity is followed after some three months by the appearance of HIV antibodies, which signal a reaction to the HIV infection, and on which the main tests for the condition are based. Following what are often years of symptom-free living, the body finally succumbs to normally rare and unusual diseases, especially PCP (Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia) and KS (Karposi's Sarcoma). The main vehicles of transmission are the bodily fluids, especially blood (blood transfusion, intravenous drug use, and vertical transmission from mother to child) and semen, chiefly by means of penetrative sexual intercourse (homosexual or heterosexual). The World Health Organization distinguishes three zones and patterns of infection: Asia, which is now the principal growth area of infection; the African continent (site of the initial discovery, and where transmission is primarily heterosexual in form); and industrialized Western nations (where an epidemic started in the 1980s, with infection primarily transmitted by homosexual intercourse, and intravenous drug needle-sharing). In 1996 it was estimated that 30 million people were infected by HIV and 10 million living with AIDS.
Sociology has contributed in various ways to the understanding and control of AIDS/HIV infection. Studies of sexual networks of transmission were crucial for identifying the virus in 1982. Sociology has also informed national and large-scale studies of sexual and drug-taking behaviour, both KABP (Knowledge, Attitudes, Behaviour and Practices), and the more innovative and qualitative research that is necessary to monitor the prevalence and incidence of high-risk behaviour and risk-taking activity. Theories of risk-taking have also developed from early reliance on the Health Belief Model to contextual and strategic aspects and the study of collective and community response.
Because the activities implicated in the transmission of AIDS are in many societies either illegal or tend to involve already marginalized groups, sociological studies of gender, deviance, and sexual identity have been used to focus research studies. Techniques have been devised to identify and sample hard-to-reach and ‘hidden populations’, such as intravenous drug-users and non-gay-identified men who have sex with men, by extending existing sociological and anthropological methodologies. Methods such as sexual diaries have been employed to elicit intrusive information as non-reactively as possible.
The main resources for the study of sociological features of AIDS include the annual Social Aspects of Aids conference and volume, and the biennial WHO/UNAIDS publication edited by
, Aids in the World
.

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alcoholism

See DRINKING AND ALCOHOLISM.

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algorithm

Initially a word with equivalent meaning to formula, but under the influence of computing now regarded as a step-by-step procedure to solve a problem, usually supported by a mathematical proof. In sociology, the term is generally used more loosely than this, to describe the steps which must be followed to construct a new variable from a set of other variables. A good example would be the algorithm used by Erik Olin Wright to arrive at his social class variable, by combining particular combinations of ownership and decision-making responsibilities, said to characterize the various class locations (see his
Classes, 1985
).

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alienation

In the most general terms, this concept describes the estrangement of individuals from one another, or from a specific situation or process. It is central to the writings of Karl Marx and normally associated with Marxist sociology. There are philosophical, sociological, and psychological dimensions to the argument. (These are most usefully expounded in J. Torrance's Estrangement, Alienation and Exploitation, 1977.)
The philosophical discussion falls largely outside the domain of sociology (though Marxists might argue that these sorts of disciplinary distinctions are inappropriate). It is sometimes claimed that the three major influences on Marx's writings were German idealist philosophy (Hegel and Feuerbach), British political economy (Owen, Ricardo, Smith), and French utopian socialism (Saint-Simon, Proudhon, and Fourier). Alienation as a philosophical concept is the most obvious legacy of the first of these. Hegel provided Marx with the philosophical means to overcome the Kantian dualism of is and ought, since for Hegel, the actual was always striving to become the ideal. The passage of the self-creating, self-knowing idea through history, its alienation through externalization and objectification and its reappropriation through knowledge, provided Marx with his revolutionary imperative. Turning Hegel on his head and rooting his own ideas in a materialist vision, Marx argued that humanity is lost in the unfolding historical epochs, but at the same time created and found again with the advent of communism, which represents the complete return of individuals to themselves as social beings.
This philosophical and teleological conception of alienation permeates Marx's writings. However, sociological discussion of the term relates more to his argument that estrangement is a consequence of social structures which oppress people, denying them their essential humanity. Alienation is an objective condition inherent in the social and economic arrangements of capitalism. In this sense it is the centrality of alienated labour that most clearly describes the concept. Labour-power defines humanity—the ‘species being’—wherein the satisfaction of needs develops the powers and potential of human beings. However, all forms of production result in ‘objectification’, by which people manufacture goods which embody their creative talents yet come to stand apart from their creators. Alienation is the distorted form that humanity's objectification of its species-being takes under capitalism. Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to the employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others and in so doing generate alienated labour. Marx attributes four characteristics to such labour: alienation of the worker from his or her ‘species essence’ as a human being rather than an animal; alienation between workers, since capitalism reduces labour to a commodity to be traded on the market, rather than a social relationship; alienation of the worker from the product, since this is appropriated by the capitalist class, and so escapes the worker's control; and, finally, alienation from the act of production itself, such that work comes to be a meaningless activity, offering little or no intrinsic satisfactions. The last of these generates the psychological discussion about alienation as a subjectively identifiable state of mind, involving feelings of powerlessness, isolation, and discontent at work—especially when this takes place within the context of large, impersonal, bureaucratic social organizations.
It is impossible to extricate Marx's ideas about alienation from his wider sociological discussion of the division of labour, the evolution of private property relations, and the emergence of conflicting classes. In the Marxian terminology, alienation is an objectively verifiable state of affairs, inherent in the specific social relations of capitalist production. However, subsequent researchers have tended to neglect these structural considerations, and attempted instead to operationalize the concept in terms of a range of specifically cognitive and attitudinal characteristics. The ‘psychological state’ of alienation was said by
(‘On the Meaning of Alienation’, American Sociological Review, 1959)
to comprise the dimensions of powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, normlessness, and self-estrangement. In a famous study of factory workers, Robert Blauner attempted to link these dimensions of subjective alienation to particular types of work situation, arguing that the technologies associated with craft, machine, assembly-line, and continuous-process production show a curvilinear association with alienation. That is, ‘in the early period, dominated by craft industry, alienation is at its lowest level and the worker's freedom at a maximum. Freedom declines and the curve of alienation … rises sharply in the period of machine industry. The alienation curve continues upward to its highest point in the assembly-line technologies of the twentieth century … in this extreme situation, a depersonalised worker, estranged from himself and larger collectives, goes through the motions of work in the regimented milieu of the conveyer belt for the sole purpose of earning his bread … But with automated industry there is a countertrend … automation increases the worker's control over his work process and checks the further division of labour and growth of large factories’ (Alienation and Freedom, 1964). At this juncture, the discussion of alienation merely becomes part of a larger debate about the subjective experience of work generally, and job satisfaction in particular.
Many of the doctrines allied to employee self-management, as in Yugoslavia during the post-war period, are linked explicitly to the task of overcoming alienation by means of collective ownership and control. Profit-sharing and employee share-ownership schemes all owe some debt to the concept of alienated labour. Paradoxically, the ownership characteristics of state socialist societies increased the sense of alienation and powerlessness, since in that property vacuum the fact that no one seemed to own state property was more demoralizing than the active ownership of the free-market variety that so troubled Marx. See also WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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alliance theory

Generally associated with the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the theory argues that in kinship systems, inheritance and the continuation of the vertical line (descent) is less important than the horizontal links (alliances) and relationships of reciprocity and exchange which are brought about by marriage between different groups.

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Allport, Gordon W.

(1897–1967)
A leading American social psychologist who became head of the Harvard Department of Psychology in 1938. His most significant contributions include a theory of personality, which highlighted the self and the proprium, the latter defined as ‘all the regions of our life that we regard as peculiarly ours’ (see
Becoming, 1955
); studies of the importance of prejudice as a historical and cultural, as well as a psychological, phenomenon; an emphasis on the importance of personal documents in social science (such as his collection of Letters from Jenny, 1965); and his championing of the ideographic method.

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altercasting

A concept introduced by
(Sociometry, 1963)
and used within role theory and dramaturgical sociology to describe the process of casting of the other (alter) into a particular role. It highlights the fact that the way in which one acts towards others has a definite pattern and may constrain what the other can do.

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alternative movement

See SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.

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alternative technology

See APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGIES.

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Althusser, Louis

(1918–90)
One of the most original and influential of twentieth-century Marxist social philosophers, Louis Althusser provoked a spectacular, but deeply controversial renewal of Marxist scholarship across a whole range of humanities and social science disciplines. His most important work, and the height of his influence, spanned the decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Viewed in political terms, his project was to provide an analysis and critique of the Stalinist distortion of Marxism. But Althusser differed sharply from many contemporary Marxist critics of Stalinism in refusing to employ the rhetoric (as he saw it) of merely humanist moral condemnation. Instead, a ‘rigorously scientific’ analysis of the causes and consequences of Stalinism was seen to be a necessity, if political opposition to it was to be effective.
The quest for a scientific approach to the understanding of history took Althusser in two directions: first, to a rereading of the classic texts of the Marxian tradition; and, second, to a philosophical consideration of the nature of science, and how to distinguish it from other forms of knowledge or discourse (ideology). Althusser's view of science was an ambitious attempt to recognize science as a social practice in which knowledge is produced, and so as a part of the history of those societies within which it is conducted. At the same time, Althusser retained from the materialist tradition of Marxism the insistence that the real world exists prior to, and independently of, our historically and socially produced knowledge of it. Ideology also alludes to this independently existing reality, but does so, according to Althusser, in a way quite different from science. In ideology, individual ‘subjects’ are provided with a way of recognizing themselves and their relation to the society in which they are situated. This mode of recognition—or misrecognition—serves primarily to orient practical conduct. In the case of the dominant ideology, it does so in ways which tend to reproduce and preserve the prevailing system of social domination.
Althusser's view of science was put to work in his rereading of the classic Marxian texts. The most famously controversial outcome of this process was the proclaimed ‘epistemological break’ between the earlier (pre-1845) and mature writings of Marx. The philosophical humanism of the early Marx, according to which history was to be understood as a process of progressive human self-realization, was rejected as a pre-scientific ‘theoretical ideology’. Only after Marx's ‘settling of accounts’ with his earlier philosophical position did the beginnings of a new and scientific approach to the understanding of human history emerge in his writings. This new approach—historical materialism—did not arise fully formed, and Althusser and his associates employed a method of ‘symptomatic reading’ to recover the basic structure of concepts (‘problematic’) definitive of Marx's science of history. During the 1960s Althusser and his close colleagues produced a series of texts (For Marx, Reading Capital, and Lenin and Philosophy were probably the most influential) in which rigorous definitions and applications of these concepts were attempted. In part, this was a matter of reworking already well-established Marxian concepts: the ideas of forces and relations of production, the typology of modes of production, the concepts of ideology, the state, and social formation (all of which are treated separately in this dictionary).
But, amidst this reworking of established concepts, Althusser was addressing long-standing lacunae and failings in Marxist theory. First, there is the question of economic determinism (or ‘economism’). Drawing on indications in texts by Marx and Engels themselves, together with currently influential structuralist ideas, Althusser advanced a view of social wholes as ‘decentered structures in dominance’. Societies are ordered combinations of economic, ideological, and political practices, none of which is reducible to any of the others, and each of which has its own specific weight in the shaping of the whole (‘structural causality’).
The view of history as a linear sequence of epochs or stages (the succession of modes of production) through which humankind passes en route to communist self-realization had become identified with Marxist orthodoxy. Althusser rejected this as a historicist ideology, and claimed to uncover an anti-historicist view of history as a ‘process without a subject’ in Marx's later writings. For Althusser, the major historical transitions are always contingent, always exceptional outcomes of the over-determination or ‘condensation’ of a multiplicity of contradictions affecting a social order. Accordingly, the quasi-religious certainty that ‘history is on our side’ should have no place in a Marxist understanding of history.
But Althusser's most controversial position was his stand against ‘theoretical humanism’: his view of the relation between subjects and society. Not only is the view of history as a process of human self-realization to be rejected, but so also is any notion of autonomous individual agency, as the source or basis of social life. Individuals are ‘bearers’ of social relations, their sense of self an outcome of the social process of ‘interpellation’ (or ‘hailing’), which is itself the modus operandi of the dominant ideology. Althusser's apparent denial of individual autonomy outraged humanist Marxists and non-Marxist social theorists alike; but, paradoxically, still more extreme anti-humanist views than Althusser's own have come to be very influential in post-structuralist cultural theory.
So influential were the ideas of the Althusserians in fields as diverse as literary and film criticism, political sociology, anthropology, feminist social theory, epistemology, cultural studies, and sociology of development that, for a moment, it appeared that a new orthodoxy was in the making. But already Althusser was busily changing the rules. From 1967 onwards came a spate of self-critical writings, many bearing the imprint of the radical student movement of the time. Now Althusser appeared to retract his earlier commitment to a theory of the nature of science, viewing philosophy rather as a practice of mediating between science and politics. Along with this went a deepening of his scepticism concerning the scientific status even of much in the mature writings of Marx himself. This story is told in full in
, The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism (1984)
.
As his autobiography reveals, Althusser had always been psychologically unstable. A period of deep depression in 1980 resulted in his killing his wife Hélène, and he spent the final decade of his life in obscurity, most of it in a Paris mental hospital.

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altruism

Behaviour which takes account of the interests of others, usually treated as in opposition to egoism, selfishness, and individualism. There are extensive theoretical and empirical research literatures in social psychology, economics, political behaviour, and sociobiology (as well as sociology) on altruism, its sources and consequences, and on whether altruistic behaviour is ultimately reducible to and explained by egoistic motives. Research on altruism is also relevant to exchange theory and rational choice theory, public policy-making, and the voluntary sector. Studies have focused on blood donation; acts of bravery in wars and other conflicts; spontaneous acts of helping strangers in public situations compared to help offered to family and friends; the willingness of citizens to tax themselves for the benefit of others; participation in voluntary non-profit organizations; and giving money to charities.
Research seems to confirm that altruism is part of human nature. People do have regard to the interests and needs of others, make sacrifices for their children and even non-kin, and contribute to public goods. Some research suggests there is a hereditary component in altruism. Other social animals display altruistic behaviour, for example birds give predator alarms. Sociobiologists have identified selection processes that lead to the establishment and perpetuation of ‘altruistic’ genes in populations. In addition, socialization in the family and community encourages people to adhere to public-spirited values and engage in helping behaviour. People who do voluntary work generally give altruistic reasons for becoming involved in such activities (such as a desire to help others). But self-oriented reasons are often simultaneously present, such as the desire to gain work experience, enjoyment of social contacts, and an interest in the particular activity in question. For some people, involvement in charity work confers the prestige, power in the community, and self-fulfilment that others obtain from employment. Similarly, studies of corporate philanthropy conclude that charitable donations are good for business, with enlightened self-interest rather than altruism being the driving factor in firms' public activities. In many cultures, gift-giving is used to enhance prestige, or even defines a person's social status.
Economists are concerned with the ‘free rider’ problem in the provision or use of public goods, such as the problem of the person who benefits from public TV but does not contribute his or her share of the costs through taxes, or the country that regularly exceeds its allocated fishing quota and so depletes fish stocks for all other countries fishing in the same seas. Sociologists are concerned rather with the development of trust and co-operation in relationships, and the impact of social norms and group identity on decision-making in social dilemmas. These issues are often studied through decision-making in the Prisoner's Dilemma game, with variable results from short-term studies.
Research based on simulations with the Prisoner's Dilemma game has shown that, in the long run, altruism and selfishness are not always or necessarily mutually exclusive choices. In his Evolution of Cooperation (1984) R. Axelrod showed how co-operation can evolve in a society of completely self-interested individuals, in effect that altruism and individualism are not necessarily in conflict in human society where public goods are of benefit to all, including people who do not use them directly. Axelrod carried out a series of computer simulations to assess the effectiveness of various strategies in the Prisoner's Dilemma game, an issue which is usually studied with laboratory experiments of short duration. Strategies were submitted to the tournament by sixty-two players in six countries from the fields of psychology, economics, political science, mathematics, and sociology. Contrary to expectation, one of the simplest strategies, named TIT FOR TAT, emerged repeatedly as the winner, owing to a combination of being nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear. By using computer simulations of the competing strategies, the game could be run for a much longer time and with a larger number of diverse players than in laboratory experiments, thus approximating to evolution in the long term. For a useful overview of relevant literature see
, ‘Altruism’, Annual Review of Sociology (1990)
. See also GIFT RELATIONSHIP; SUICIDE.

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altruistic suicide

See SUICIDE.

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ambivalence

The coexistence, in one person, of opposing emotions or attitudes. Sigmund Freud often refers to the individual oscillating between love and hate for the same object or person. In sociology, the dual consciousness thesis posits a subordinate class which holds apparently inconsistent beliefs or values, resulting in an ambivalent attitude to some of the central institutions in society.

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amnesia, retrograde

See RETROGRADE AMNESIA.

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amoral familism

Social action persistently oriented to the economic interests of the nuclear family. In a controversial account of poverty in a village in southern Italy (The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, 1958), Edward C. Banfield argued that the backwardness of the community was to be explained ‘largely but not entirely’ by ‘the inability of the villagers to act together for their common good or, indeed, for any end transcending the immediate, material interest of the nuclear family’. This was attributed to the ethos of ‘amoral familism’ which had been produced by the combination of a high death-rate, certain land-tenure conditions, and the absence of the institution of the extended family. Banfield's thesis provoked considerable debate about the nature of ‘familism’ and the role of culture generally in preventing or facilitating economic development (see DEVELOPMENT, SOCIOLOGY OF).

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amplification of deviance

See DEVIANCE AMPLIFICATION.

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analysis of variance

See CAUSAL MODELLING, VARIATION (STATISTICAL).

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analytic induction

A logic of qualitative research which employs a systematic and exhaustive examination of a limited number of cases in order to provide generalizations. Donald Cressey, who employs the logic in his book Other People's Money (1953), suggests the stages of analytic induction are: defining the field; hypothesizing an explanation; studying one case to see if it fits the facts; modifying the hypothesis or the definitions in the light of this; and reviewing further cases. According to Cressey, ‘this procedure of examining cases, re-defining the phenomenon and reformulating the hypothesis is continued until a universal relationship is established’. See also GROUNDED THEORY; INDUCTION; SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM.

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analytical Marxism

A term sometimes applied to the writings of sociologists and social theorists such as Erik Olin Wright, Jon Elster, and John Roemer, who attempted during the 1980s and 1990s to revitalize European and North American Marxist sociology by combining the methodological tenets of Marxism with a variety of alternative approaches. For example, individual members of this loosely defined group have, to varying degrees and at different times, adopted the positivist covering law account of causal explanation (see CAUSE)—Wright's work is sometimes referred to rather disdainfully as ‘multiple-regression Marxism’—methodological individualism, and rational choice theory. The group's commitment to abandoning some of the philosophically untenable positions of earlier Marxisms is neatly captured in their self-description as ‘No Bullshit Marxists’. Critics claim that, when the objectionable principles of Marxism (such as its historicism and economic determinism) are jettisoned, nothing that is distinctively Marxist remains (since all that seems to hold the members together is a commitment to clarity). For a sympathetic overview see
, Analytical Marxism (1994)
. See also NEW STRUCTURALISM.

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anarchism

An array of philosophical and political positions arguing that human societies function best without government or authority, and which suggest that the natural state of people is one of living together harmoniously and freely, without such intervention. Anarchy is said not to lead to chaos but to ‘spontaneous order’. The philosophy takes many forms and covers the whole political spectrum from extreme right to extreme left, the former seeking to diminish the influence of the state in order that free-market principles might prevail, the latter arguing that the state will wither away under true communism. Proponents of voluntary associations and mutual aid fall somewhere between. Good overviews of the theory of anarchism can be found in texts of that name by David Miller (1984) and Alan Ritter (1980).
In modern times, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's romantic claim that we are born free but then everywhere found in chains is one of the first statements of anarchism, whilst the first person to evolve a systematic theory of anarchism was the English rationalist William Godwin. During the nineteenth century, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (influenced in part by Godwin) developed a theory of anarchism that provided much of the basis for French syndicalism, arguing for the ideal of an ordered society of small units, functioning without central government, and organized instead on the federal principle of ‘mutualism’—or equitable exchange between self-governing associations of producers. Proudhon's disciple Mikhail Bakunin, in dispute with Karl Marx, favoured the destruction of state power and advocated violence to achieve this end. He too insists that the reconstruction of society has to be achieved from the bottom upwards by free associations or federations of workers. Like Proudhon, Bakunin maintained that all political parties were ‘varieties of absolutism’, and so was opposed to organized political action by a revolutionary vanguard on behalf of the proletariat. The extent to which anarchism challenges other political philosophies on the right and left alike is evident in Peter Kropotkin's observation that ‘Throughout the history of our civilisation, two traditions, two opposed tendencies have been in conflict: the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist tradition, the authoritarian and the libertarian tradition’ (Modern Science and Anarchism, 1912). Kropotkin, a Russian aristocrat, was himself an advocate of a ‘communist anarchism’ which was opposed to centralized mass production, and favoured instead an ideal of small communities in which industry and agriculture would be combined, and an education allowing each individual to develop to his or her full potential would be integral to the production process. Like most anarchists he tends to idealize primitive communities in his writings.
Anarchist influences are often evident in contemporary discussions of communes and communalism, ‘direct action’, workers' control, decentralization, and federalism. Anarchist philosophy and practice has also played a role (usually a minor one) in the trade-union movement, the Spanish Civil War, the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, the events of May 1968 in France, in Gandhian techniques of non-violent protest, and in much latter-day terrorism.
An interesting link with social ecology is made in the writings of the Canadian anarchist Murray Bookchin. After thirty years of political activism, beginning with the Spanish Civil War, Bookchin emerged in the 1960s as a distinctive voice within the radical ecological movement. His theories, usually described as part of the communitarian anarchist tradition, have been developed in twenty or so books, including Post Scarcity Anarchism (1971), Towards an Ecological Society (1980), The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1984), The Modern Crisis (2nd edn., 1987) and The Philosophy of Social Ecology (1990). Bookchin has also directed the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont, and been influential in the world-wide Green movement. His originality lies in his sweeping unification of radical politics with history, philosophy, and ecology.
Sociologists have largely ignored or been critical of anarchist philosophy, yet it harbours a whole tradition of social organization, and a systematic theory of how societies work. Although rarely acknowledged as such many of the writings of Michel Foucault, and even the theories of post-structuralism and post-modernism, might be seen as latter-day heir apparent to anarchist thought. Likewise, the work of many symbolic interactionists is largely compatible with the anarchist vision, since it harbours a view of society as spontaneous order.

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anarchy, epistemological

See METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM.

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ancestry

See DESCENT GROUPS.

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androgyny

An androgynous individual is one who unites the characteristics of both sexes. Androgyny has been of interest to some sociologists who study gender because it makes problematic the taken-for-granted assumptions of what it is to be a man or a woman. Examples include Harold Garfinkel's case-study of ‘Agnes’ or Michel Foucault's historical dossier on Herculine Barbine. More commonly it provides the subject-matter of much science fiction (see e.g.
's Woman at the Edge of Time
). Some feminists advocate cultural or psychological (rather than physical) androgyny as an alternative to patriarchy.

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animatism

The explanation, proffered by some early anthropologists, of primitive religion as resulting from a sense of wonder at unusual natural objects (for example volcanoes) or the unusual behaviour of such objects (exceptional waterfalls and the like). It was argued that technologically simple peoples imbued these phenomena with spiritual forces. Critics of this thesis included Émile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. See also TOTEMISM.

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animism

See TOTEMISM.

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Annales School

An influential school of French historians, formed around the journal Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, which was founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch at the University of Strasburg in 1929. The Annales School attempted to develop a ‘total history’ as a critique of existing historical methodology which offered merely a chronology of events. They turned attention away from political history towards a macro-historical analysis of societies over long time-periods. The Annales School, which included Maurice Halbwachs, André Siegfried, Fernand Braudel, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and Georges Duby, had the following characteristics: it was interdisciplinary; it was concerned to study very long historical periods (la longue durée) and social structure; some members of the School employed quantitative methods; they examined the interaction between geographical environment, material culture, and society.
The work of the original members is represented, for example, by Bloch who attempted a total analysis of medieval society in his Feudal Society (1961). In the post-war period two works in particular have been very influential in the social sciences, namely Braudel's study of the Mediterranean (The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 1949) and Le Roy Ladurie's analysis of fourteenth-century village life (Montaillou, 1975). The School has influenced historical sociology, especially the world-system theory of Immanuel Wallerstein (see, for example, his two-volume study of
The Modern World-System, 1974 and 1980
). Critics have argued that the Annales School neglected political processes. Nor is it clear how the Annales approach was fundamentally different in scope and interdisciplinarity from, for example, historical materialism, the historical sociology of Max Weber in his The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilisations (1924), or the figurational sociology of Norbert Elias in The Court Society (1969)—although it tends to be less abstract than all of these.

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anomic suicide

See ANOMIE.

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anomie, anomy

An absence, breakdown, confusion, or conflict in the norms of a society. The term anomia is scattered throughout classical Greek writings, where it may be linked to the adjective anomos, meaning ‘without law’. It has since assumed a wider and often negative connotation of breakdown and catastrophe. In sociology the term is most frequently identified with the work of Émile Durkheim and Robert Merton.
In Durkheim's writings the concept appears prominently in The Division of Labour in Society and Suicide. In the former, anomie emerges through society's transition from mechanical to organic solidarity. Normally, increasing division of labour brings about social integration by organic solidarity, but where economic change is too fast for the growth of moral regulation to keep pace with increasing differentiation and specialization then an abnormal or anomic pathological division of labour occurs. The argument is further developed in his discussion of suicide—where anomie is one of the four causes of suicide identified in Durkheim's classic study. Anomic suicide occurs increasingly in organic societies, notably at times of economic depression or boom, when there is a lessening of economic (and possibly normative) regulation. In such periods, people are less closely locked into the order of society, so their basic desires may become limitless and confused. At this point, anomie becomes almost a psychological state of disorder and meaninglessness, rather than the structural characteristic of society and social order that Durkheim originally intended. (Arguably, however, since Durkheim's underlying model of human desire as differing from animal instinct is that the former contains no mechanism of self-limitation, and hence can only be limited by social regulation, this is consistent with saying that the psychological state is a correlate of the structural characteristic, and conceptually distinct from it.) The concept is often contrasted with Marx's idea of alienation.
Robert Merton's work shifts the meaning somewhat. Merton wanted to produce a sociological account of deviance: of how social structures and cultural values exert definite pressures to conform, yet create disjunctions and contradictions which make deviance a necessary outcome. In his classic essay on
‘Social Structure and Anomie’ (in Social Theory and Social Structure, 1957)
, he discusses the American Dream of ‘log cabin to White House’, the truly open society where enormous upward social mobility and financial rewards are possible, and distinguishes these cultural goals of economic success from the legitimate structural means (educational attainment and hard work) by which they might be achieved. According to Merton, the American value-system creates almost universal striving for success, and specifies a range of normatively approved means of securing this goal, but the structure of economic resources in that society enables only certain privileged groups and classes to succeed. This creates feelings of relative deprivation among many disprivileged individuals, who then turn to various forms of individual deviance, where these seem to offer alternative means to the same desired ends. In other words anomie occurs as the disjunction of means and goals. The true conformist will be the person who has access to both the legitimate means and the approved goals. However, in a celebrated typology of modes of individual adaptations to anomie, Merton also discusses innovation (keeping goals, but rejecting legitimate means, as in theft); retreatism (rejecting or withdrawing from goals and means, as in drug use); ritualism (keeping to legitimate means becomes a goal in itself, as in the case of a slavish bureaucrat); and, finally, rebellion (rejecting both means and goals, and substituting new ones, as in political radicalism)
Merton's theory has been much criticized for assuming too much conformity and consensus, an overly-integrated view of society, and an over-socialized view of people. Nevertheless, it has been very influential, especially in subsequent theories of delinquency. For example, in Albert Cohen's theory of status frustration (Delinquent Boys, 1956) and R. Cloward and L. Ohlin's theory of differential opportunity structures (Delinquency and Opportunity, 1961), delinquency is seen as the outcome of a situation of strain or anomie in the social structure. The concept of anomie has also been applied to a range of other areas, discussed critically in the volume edited by
, Anomie and Deviant Behaviour (1964)
, and more recently in
, Anomie: History and Meanings (1987)
. See also SUBCULTURE.

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anomie, epistemological

See METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM.

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anthropology

See SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY.

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anthropomorphism

Attribution of human characteristics to that which is not human. The most commonly cited sociological illustration of this phenomenon is the tendency, often found in early functionalist sociology, to push the organic (or biological) analogy too far—to the point at which societies are reified and given the characteristics of self-conscious human actors.

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anticipatory socialization

In contrast to more formal training, anticipatory socialization involves the informal adoption of norms or behaviour appropriate to a status not yet achieved by the individuals concerned, so providing them with experience of a role they have yet to assume. For example, children may anticipate parenthood by observing their parents as role models, and the careerist may anticipate promotion by emulating the occupational behaviour of his or her superiors.

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anti-naturalism

See NATURALISM.

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antinomianism

The belief that one's religious commitments or faith exempt one from the legal or moral codes of the wider society (hence ‘anti-norms’). Antinomianism has been a characteristic of particular sects throughout the history of Christianity. Most notably, certain radical Protestant sectarians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries extended the Calvinist doctrine of predestination in this way, arguing that those who possessed an inner certainty of their own election were no longer capable of sin and therefore freed from the restrictions of conventional conduct. More recent examples include the Oneida Community, in the nineteenth century, and the Children of God in the present day. Antinomianism is usually associated with unorthodox sexual or marital practices, such as plural marriage (the Oneida Community) or sexual activity outside marriage (the Children of God), the latter being justified on the grounds that it brings others to salvation.

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anti-psychiatry

A term coined in the 1960s for writers who are highly critical of the ideas and practice of psychiatry. Precisely who is included within this group (which is always theoretically and politically heterogeneous) tends to vary. Frequently mentioned are the radical libertarian Thomas Szasz, the more left-wing, existentialist-inclined R. D. Laing and his colleague David Cooper, the Italian mental health reformer Franco Basaglia (all psychiatrists), and two sociologists—the symbolic interactionist Erving Goffman and labelling theorist Thomas Scheff. Sometimes Michel Foucault is also cited in this context. All of these writers, from their divergent stances, view madness and mental illness as social constructs, and emphasize the way in which psychiatry functions as an agency of social control, constraining and coercing individuals, especially in institutional contexts.
The work of Szasz is typical. In The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) he forcefully denounces the application of the language of illness to human thought and conduct, regarding it as mystifying processes of social control. Rather, mental illnesses (except for organic disorders) are ‘problems in living’, to be analysed in terms of social rules and role-playing. Numerous subsequent books reaffirm his message, calling for private, contractual psychiatry to replace state coercion.
In the United States and United Kingdom, acceptance of policies of community care largely predated 1960s anti-psychiatry. In Italy, anti-psychiatry was an important influence on the reforming programme that culminated in the radical legislation of 1978, which introduced community care on a national basis.

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anti-urbanism

An intellectual current and strand of social science writing which is critical of the city as a social form. Negative attitudes to urbanization—and the ‘pastoral myth’ of the countryside—predate the industrial revolution. However, as Robert Nisbet has observed, ‘revulsion for the city, fear of it as a force in culture, and forebodings with respect to the psychological conditions surrounding it’ date from the nineteenth century. While some radicals (notably Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) saw aspects of urbanization as socially progressive, for liberals and conservatives it posed problems of social control. Classical sociology reflected these concerns. According to Nisbet, ‘the city … form[ed] the context of most sociological propositions relating to disorganisation, alienation, and mental isolation—all stigmata of loss of community and membership’ (The Sociological Tradition, 1966).
The presumed breakdown of traditional communities in urban societies was a powerful theme in the work of Auguste Comte, Frédéric Le Play, and Émile Durkheim. More specifically, anti-urbanism affected the development of rural and urban sociology: Ferdinand Tönnies's suggestion that cities were prime locations for Gesellschaftlich (instrumental and associational) social relations was developed by Georg Simmel (The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903), whose work strongly influenced the Chicago urban sociologists.
Contemporary sociology largely rejects anti-urbanism. It is now generally recognized that the growth of cities, and the varied forms of social association occurring within them, are both consequences of the emergence of modern industrial societies. The city, in other words, is ‘a mirror of … history, class structure and culture’
(, Clichés of Urban Doom, 1989)
. See also COMMUNITY STUDIES.

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apartheid

See SEGREGATION.

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applied sociology

See POLICY RESEARCH.

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appropriate technologies

Because of the permanent over-supply of labour in contemporary developing societies, some sociologists (and economists) have argued that the labour-saving (often capital-intensive) techniques of production which are associated with technological innovation and development in the West, are inapplicable in most Third World contexts. Rather, the labour surplus suggests a bias in favour of labour-intensive and capital-saving techniques, exemplified in ‘appropriate’ (sometimes called ‘alternative’ or ‘intermediate’) technologies. The example of China is often cited in this context, since the particular combination of the factors of production in that country has encouraged Chinese governments to build roads using large numbers of people armed with shovels, rather than fewer people equipped with (expensive) bulldozers. All manner of goods and services can be produced by labour-intensive technologies, which offer full employment, self-sufficiency, and (possibly indirectly) greater equality. However, because capital-intensive methods of production promise higher net output and therefore higher rates of growth, they are often favoured despite yielding a lower volume of present employment. See also TECHNOLOGY.

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aptitude

See ABILITY.

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Ardrey, Robert

(1908–80)
Though best known for a series of best-selling books on human and animal nature, Ardrey's early career was as a novelist and playwright. In the 1950s he became deeply interested in R. A. Dart's discoveries of fossil hominids in Kenya, and their possible implications for our view of human nature. In a series of books (African Genesis, 1961, The Territorial Imperative, 1966, and The Social Contract, 1970) Ardrey combined his view of humans as descended from ‘a race of terrestrial, flesh-eating, killer apes’, with generalizations on territoriality, dominance, aggression and so on in non-human animals, to draw conclusions about the instinctual basis of nature. On his own account, the egalitarian and socialist assumptions of his youth were refuted by this ‘revolution in natural science’. The popular reception of Ardrey's work was undoubtedly connected with its politically conservative response to the challenges and conflicts of the 1960s, and it remains an exemplar of the biological reductionism to which many sociologists object.

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aristocracy

See UPPER CLASS.

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aristocracy of labour

See LABOUR ARISTOCRACY.

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arithmetic mean

See CENTRAL TENDENCY (MEASURES OF).

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arms control

See DISARMAMENT.

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Aron, Raymond

(1905–83)
A controversial French sociologist, Aron was professor of sociology at the Sorbonne from 1955 to 1968, and for some years a prominent member of the Mont Pelerin Society (although he later resigned). He was instrumental in introducing German sociology (especially Tönnies, Simmel, and Weber) to French social science via his German Sociology (1935). He also wrote an influential introduction to sociological theory (Main Currents in Sociological Thought, 1960 and 1962) in which he gave a special emphasis to the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. Aron disagreed profoundly with Marxism as a social science, and it was partly on these grounds that he was often a target of criticism, because in post-war French social philosophy Marxism was the dominant paradigm. Aron, by contrast, was more impressed by the work of Max Weber, an influence which is evident in publications such as Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society (1956). He played an important part in the debate which followed the student protests of 1968 (see
The Elusive Revolution, 1968
), and also wrote more generally about the nature of power, political élites, and political organization. He had a specific interest in the work of Vilfredo Pareto in his approach to élites.
Aron's work is distinctive because of the attention which he gave to international relations and war—topics which are frequently neglected by sociologists. This interest is reflected in Peace and War (1962) and Clausewitz (1985).

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artefacts, statistical and methodological

A statistical artefact is an inference that results from bias in the collection or manipulation of data. The implication is that the findings do not reflect the real world but are, rather, an unintended consequence of measurement error. When the findings from a particular study are deemed to be—at least in part—a result of the particular research technique employed (see RESEARCH DESIGN), rather than an accurate representation of the world, they are sometimes said to be a methodological artefact.

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asceticism, this-worldly

See PROTESTANT ETHIC THESIS.

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ascribed status

See ASCRIPTION; STATUS, ACHIEVED.

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ascription

In allocating roles and statuses, or imputing allegedly natural behaviours, cultures make varying use of kinship, age, sex, and ethnicity. Such ascribed characteristics cannot be changed by individual effort, although social movements and states attempt periodically to challenge the disadvantages and stereotypes arising from nepotism, ageism, sexism, and racism. See also PARSONS, TALCOTT; STATUS, ACHIEVED.

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Asiatic mode of production

Of all Karl Marx's conceptions of the modes of production which he considered to have provided the base for the various forms of society known to human history, this was perhaps the least developed, and is certainly the one that has given rise to the most controversy.
Marx seems to have introduced the concept mainly in deference to the early nineteenth-century view that Asia was the source of all ‘Aryan’ peoples, whose history is what his materialist conception of history was originally concerned with. He later outlined a wider conception of primitive communism, mainly under the influence of Lewis Henry Morgan's theory of the development of the human race as a whole. Sometimes the term ‘Asiatic society’ was used to refer to all non-Western social forms that were neither primitive-communist nor slave-based, whilst at others it (or its more common synonym oriental despotism) was said to be applicable only to the cases of Japan and China. Underlying this referential variation was a conceptual variation. Sometimes, especially in their earlier work (and, aberrantly, in Capital, 1867), Marx and Engels stressed the dominant role that the state played in such societies because of either its monopoly of land ownership, its control over irrigation systems, or its sheer political and military power. At other times—and this is what allowed them to broaden the range of societies to which the term was applied in most of their later work—they suggested that it was the communal nature of landholding that isolated the inhabitants of different villages from one another and so made them prey to state domination.
The subsequent status of the concept among Marxists and non-Marxists alike has varied with changes in the political climate. Between the two world wars, the idea was disavowed by Soviet-influenced Marxists, who probably saw it as an obstacle to the Soviet Union's political ambitions in and for the Far East. In the Cold War climate of the 1950s, Karl Wittfogel disinterred the concept in his Oriental Despotism (1957), suggesting that the real reason for its unpopularity in the Soviet Union was the uncomfortable similarity between it and the reality of Stalin's Russia.
During the 1960s the concept excited some interest on the part of Western Marxists, who hoped that it might provide them with a means of avoiding a Eurocentric conception of social development. In the 1970s, however, such hopes were exposed to a barrage of criticisms, which largely explain the concept's current eclipse, and which in one way or another appear to have owed something to the rise of structuralist Marxism. For example, Perry Anderson subjected the concept to a widely accepted empirical critique in his Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974), while Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst made it the object of a (rather more controversial) theoretical critique in their Precapitalist Modes of Production (1975). Finally, Edward Said delivered what appears to have been the coup de grâce, by arguing that, in formulating the concept, Marx and Engels were the unwitting bearers of a noxious discourse that he termed ‘orientalism’ (see his 1979 book of the same name).

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assimilation

A term synonymous with acculturation, used to describe the process by which an outsider, immigrant, or subordinate group becomes indistinguishably integrated into the dominant host society. In early American studies of race relations by such as Robert Park, the term was contrasted with accommodation (whereby the subordinate group simply conformed to the expectations of the dominant group), competition (in which it set up its own values in opposition to the mainstream), and extermination and exclusion (which saw no room for interaction between subordinate and dominant groups). Assimilation implied that the subordinate group actually came to accept and internalize the values and culture of the dominant group. This view of the process developed in part out of American concerns about the growing number of immigrants to that society, and has been criticized for exaggerating the importance of the values of the dominant group, and for neglecting the ability of new or subordinate groups both to affect the values of the dominant group (and thereby create a melting-pot culture) or else to live alongside it while adhering to its own values (in a multicultural society).

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association

See ASSOCIATION COEFFICIENTS; PLURALISM; VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATIONS.

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association coefficients

Association coefficients consist of a number used to indicate the degree to which two variables or attributes are related. Two basic types are covariation measures and dis/similarity measures. Covariation measures (such as the Pearsonian product-moment correlation, r) are based upon the product (multiplication) of the data values, and indicate the extent to which the variables are associated (0 = none and 1 = perfect), and the direction in which the variables vary with each other (positive, where one variable increases with another, or negative where one variable decreases as the other increases). Association measures should be chosen by reference to the level of measurement of the variables involved, and most measures of association retain the same value if the data values are legitimately transformed in accord with that level; thus, Kendall's rank-order correlation, s, retains the same value if the data are given new values but in the same order as the original ones. Dis/similarity measures cover both similarity (or proximity) measures, where a high value means considerable likeness between the variables, and dissimilarity measures where a high value denotes considerable difference. Most association measures have the form basic value/norming factor, as in u^2 = v^2/N. The basic value represents the property of interest, and the norming factor is defined as the maximum value which the basic value can assume, thus ensuring the overall measure achieves a maximum of 1. The zero value normally represents either statistical independence (as in q, v^2, u, and s) or absence of any common property (as in dis/similarity measures).
Statistical associations and measures of correlation are not in themselves evidence of causal relationships, which must be identified by theoretical reasoning and models. In practice, statistical associations are often treated as equivalent to establishing causal links, with textbooks thus warning against spurious correlations. Arguably, statistical measures become less important in the research process as our knowledge of causal mechanisms becomes more complete, although they remain useful for assigning quantitative values to a model of a causal process.

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associational democracy

See PLURALISM.

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Aston School (of organization theory)

See ORGANIZATION THEORY.

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asymmetric society

A term devised by the American sociologist James S. Coleman, who argues (in The Asymmetric Society, 1982) that the growth of corporate actors in advanced capitalism (in the form of business, trades union, and government organizations) has generated an increasing asymmetry between individuals and corporate organizations, with power gradually moving from the former to the latter.

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asymmetrical causal processes

An irreversible or one-way causation process. Once A has been set in motion and caused B, the new situation becomes permanent, and cannot be reversed by eliminating or reducing A after the event. Asymmetrical causal processes are more common in the social world than in the physical world, invalidate many of the assumptions underlying statistical inference and social statistics, and pose special problems in policy research. See
, Making it Count (1985)
.

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asymmetry hypothesis

The argument that, because the household remains the unit of class composition in modern industrial societies, a married (or partnered) woman's class characteristics are determined mainly by the occupational position of her husband.
The hypothesis is clearly formulated in Talcott Parsons's early papers on family and kinship in the USA (see, for example, his
‘The Kinship System of the Contemporary United States’, American Anthropologist, 1943
). Parsons argued that, because the family is a unit of diffuse solidarity, the smooth functioning of the social system required its members to share a common status in the stratification order. Moreover, in contemporary industrial societies, it was in fact the occupational position of the husband that determined the social standing of the family as a whole. This conviction—which was said to be shared by both marital partners—eliminated intrafamilial status inconsistencies and in this way reduced the possibility of status conflict. Consequently, as Parsons puts it, ‘there is a typically asymmetrical relation of the marriage pair to the occupational structure’, whereby the status-conferring role is confined to that of the husband.
With the emergence of feminist perspectives in sociology the hypothesis has since been subject to a great deal of empirical scrutiny. Class analysts have been particularly involved, because the argument for asymmetry implies that it is the conjugal family that continues to shape class fate, class formation, and class action, irrespective of the increasing involvement of women in paid employment. The evidence itself is mixed. The findings for advanced capitalist societies tend to support the view that a married woman's class socio-political characteristics (for example her class identification and voting behaviour) are still best understood in terms of the class position (occupational role) of her husband—even when she herself is formally employed in an occupation having class characteristics different from those of her partner. However, those for the post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe seem to refute the hypothesis, suggesting that the processes of socio-political class formation may be different under the different regime types (see
, ‘Class Gender, and the Asymmetry Hypothesis’, European Sociological Review, 1995
).

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atomism

A philosophical position which views the world as composed of discrete atomistic elements, and reduces knowledge to observation of the smallest indivisible elements, such as human beings—but not social structures and social institutions. In strict atomism, the basic elements do not have causal powers: the relations between them are external and contingent. However an atomistic view of society may be combined with a voluntaristic explanation of social phenomena.

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attitudes, attitude research

Variously defined as an orientation towards a person, situation, institution, or social process, that is held to be indicative of an underlying value or belief; or among those who insist that attitudes can only be inferred from observed behaviour, as a tendency to act in a certain (more or less consistent) way towards persons and situations. Milton Rokeach's much-quoted definition (Beliefs, Attitudes and Values, 1976) embraces both tendencies and describes an attitude as ‘a relatively enduring organization of beliefs around an object or situation predisposing one to respond in some preferential manner’.
Social psychologists and sociologists have invested a great deal of effort in the measurement of attitudes, opinions, and views on society at large; on relationships and events within it; and on the identification and measurement of underlying values, which are less volatile, more deeply held ‘prejudices’. Attitudes are studied both as a substitute for measuring behaviour directly and because they are (sometimes) assumed to predict behaviour. Some social scientists treat them as important variables in their own right, key features of the individual, as reflected for example in the so-called authoritarian personality.
The sheer volume of attitudinal research is not difficult to explain. Consider, for example, the phenomenon of race discrimination. It is not easy to observe instances of discrimination, and isolated incidents, while illustrative, may not be representative. The alternative in surveys is to ask people to report their behaviour, but this runs into difficulties with situations that have never arisen, or are purely hypothetical. The other approach is then to collect attitudinal data on people's predispositions and stated values, the advantage being that the questions seem to be appropriate for everyone.
In reality, however, many people do not have well-developed or even superficial opinions on topics that may interest the sociologist. Some would argue that the idea of attitudes is closely tied to the culture of Western industrial society, in which citizens are regularly invited to express their views on public issues, both directly and through the ballot box. What is certain is that attitude scales developed in Western societies do not function in the same way in other cultures. Even the standard simple job satisfaction question attracts a different pattern of response as soon as it is used beyond the confines of Western industrial societies—in Japan for example. There is some debate about the ethnocentricism and broader cross-cultural validity of many attitude scales that have been developed over the past eight decades.
At the simplest level, attitude questions invite people to agree or disagree, approve or disapprove, say Yes or No to something. More sophisticated techniques for measuring attitudes (treated under separate headings in this dictionary) include the well-established and easy to use Likert scale, the Thurstone scale, Osgood's semantic differential scale, the Bogardus social distance scale (in which attitudes are equated with hypothetical behaviour), and Guttman scales. A huge variety of personality tests, attitude and aptitude scales have been developed in the United States and Europe for commercial use by employers and recruitment agencies, as part of the staff selection process. Attitude scales of various types are sometimes used in opinion polls, occasionally in simplified form. Attitude research shades into studies of reported behaviour, sociometric scales, the sociology of knowledge, research on motivations, preferences, aims and objectives, which are also causally linked to behaviour, and the whole range of social psychological research.
One of the longest-running disputes in social-scientific research concerns the relationship between attitudes and action. What are the behavioural implications of holding particular attitudes? This debate, which has taken place mostly among social psychologists, has culminated (after some six decades of research) in ‘general agreement that attitude, no matter how assessed, is only one of the factors that influence behaviour’ (see
, Understanding Attitudes and Predicting Social Behavior, 1980
). However, this is as far as the consensus goes, since there is then widespread disagreement, both about where attitudes stand in this list of factors, and how they relate to the many other variables in the equation. After exhaustively reviewing the literature, Richard Eiser (Social Psychology: Attitudes, Cognition and Social Behaviour, 1986) was able to conclude only that ‘attitudes, in short, have behavioural implications’, and that ‘the question of which specific behaviours are implied by a particular attitude, however, will depend on circumstances, and is therefore an empirical one’.
For a useful summary of the major contributions to this debate, together with a discussion of other salient issues in attitude research, see
, Attitudes and Decisions (1988)
. See also EQUAL APPEARING INTERVALS; PROTESTANT ETHIC THESIS.

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attitudinal consistency

See COGNITIVE CONSISTENCY.

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attribution theory

Attribution theory deals with the rules that most people use when they attempt to infer the causes of behaviour they observe. In general, people tend to attribute their own behaviour to the situation or circumstances (social environment) in which they find themselves, while they attribute other people's behaviour to personality factors. An excellent sociological discussion of this phenomenon, as it emerges in the context of beliefs about the causes of poverty and wealth, will be found in James R. Kluegel and Eliot R. Smith's Beliefs about Inequality: Americans' Views of What is and What Ought to Be (1986).

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authenticity

A concept common in existentialist philosophy, involving the idea of a life led in and through the recognition of our human condition (most importantly that we will die), and our total responsibility for our choices and actions (as opposed, for example, to the claim that society makes us what we are). See also EXISTENTIAL SOCIOLOGY.

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authoritarian, authoritarianism

See AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY.

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authoritarian personality

A term coined by Theodor Adorno and his associates through a book of the same name first published in 1950, to describe a personality type characterized by (among other things) extreme conformity, submissiveness to authority, rigidity, and arrogance towards those considered inferior.
Adorno was a member of the Frankfurt School who fled the Third Reich, first to Britain and then to the United States, where he conducted extensive empirical research on the anti-semitic, ethnocentric, and fascist personalities. In attempting to explain why some people are more susceptible to fascism and authoritarian belief-systems than are others, Adorno devised several Likert attitude scales which revealed a clustering of traits which he termed authoritarianism. Several scales were constructed (ethnocentric, anti-semitic, fascist) and part of the interest in the study came from examining these scales. During interviews with more than 2,000 respondents, a close association was found between such factors as ethnocentrism, rigid adherence to conventional values, a submissive attitude towards the moral authority of the in-group, a readiness to punish, opposition to the imaginative and tender-minded, belief in fatalistic theories, and an unwillingness to tolerate ambiguity. These authoritarian attitude clusters were subsequently linked, using Freudian theory, to family patterns. Intensive interviewing and the use of Thematic Apperception Tests identified the authoritarian personality with a family pattern of rigidity, discipline, external rules, and fearful subservience to the demands of parents.
The Authoritarian Personality is a classic study of prejudice, defence mechanisms, and scapegoating. The term itself has entered everyday language, even though the original research has attracted considerable criticism. Among other weaknesses, critics have suggested that the Adorno study measures only an authoritarianism of the right, and fails to consider the wider ‘closed mind’ of both left and right alike; that it tends, like all theories of scapegoating, to reduce complex historical processes to psychological needs; and is based on flawed scales and samples. For a detailed exposition and critique see
, The Origins of Scientific Sociology (1962)
. See also CRITICAL THEORY.

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authoritarian populism

See POPULISM.

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authoritative power

See ORGANIZATIONAL REACH.

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authority

See CHARISMA; DOMINATION; LEGITIMACY; POWER.

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autobiography

See LIFE-HISTORY.

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autocracy

A regime in which power is concentrated in the person of a single individual—as, for example, in the case of ‘the Stalinist autocracy’. The term is thus loosely applied, and will be found in discussions of a variety of state structures and political regimes, including in particular totalitarian, fascist, real socialist and monarchical examples. See also STALINISM.

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automation

In theory, a workerless system of manufacture; in practice, a series of individual computer-controlled or robotic machine tools, with electro-mechanical link operations replacing transfer by hand. Research on the modern labour process suggests that automation displaces, rather than replaces, human labour and skill—to maintenance, planning, distribution, and ancillary work.

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autonomy

In psychology, the maintenance of the integrity of the self, said to be lacking where (for example) the individual is excessively conformist or suffers from a behavioural disorder such as hysteria or multiple personality. In Kantian philosophy it refers to the doctrine that the human will carries within itself its own guiding principle. Political scientists use the term in reference to the right or power of self-government (for example an ‘autonomous state’). In sociology, it is usually applied in contexts where the writer has in mind a rational, self-determining social actor, who is not subject to some form of determinism but expresses his or her own goals and interests.
Research suggests that lack of autonomy at work is related to mortality and morbidity. For example, the ‘Whitehall Studies’ of British civil servants show that illness is grade-related—that is, people working in senior administrative jobs enjoy lower rates of sickness absence, lower susceptibility to ill-health, and lower risks of death from a wide variety of pathological conditions, than do those employed in routine clerical grades—and that ‘less sense of control over one's work, lower use of skills and less variety on the job’ are crucial to the explanation of these relationships (see
, ‘Social Differentials in Health within and between Populations’, Daedalus, 1994
). Similarly, the major cross-national comparative analysis of the relationships between social structure and personality undertaken by Melvin Kohn and his colleagues concludes that (among other things) the associations between social stratification, values, and orientations can be explained ‘largely in terms of the close relationship between social stratification and conditions of work that facilitate or restrict the exercise of occupational self-direction’, so that occupational self-direction (by which is meant ‘autonomy in the work-place’) forms the ‘crucial explanatory link between social structure and personality’ (see, for example,
, Social Structure and Self-Direction, 1990
).

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average, averaging

See CENTRAL TENDENCY (MEASURES OF).

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aversion therapy

A therapy based on classical conditioning, in which a maladaptive behaviour (such as drinking alcohol or smoking) is associated with an unpleasant event (for example an electric shock). It is now generally regarded as outmoded by other forms of therapy more acceptable to contemporary social values. See also BEHAVIOURISM.

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avoidance relationships

A generic term applied to certain potentially difficult or stressful affinal (‘by marriage’) secondary relationships in extended families. In Western societies the archetypical instance is mother-in-law avoidance. These relationships are, to a differing degree in different societies, subject to strain—either because of the potential for (threatening) sexual relations or because of lack of a specified role content for incumbents. Typically, strain is avoided by physical avoidance; by codifying the relationship so that it is subject to minute regulation of correct behaviour and precise requirements; or by ‘personalization’, whereby the parties involved are expected to create a working relationship, merely on the basis of their own goodwill and personalities. The custom takes many forms. Among the African Galla, for example, a man must not mention the name of his mother-in-law, drink from a cup she has used, or eat food prepared by her, although he can address her directly.
Where this custom of maintaining a respectful distance between certain relatives occurs, there is also frequently associated with it a directly contrary relation of familiarity, usually called a ‘joking relationship’. Thus, a man might have an avoidance relationship with his wife's parents, but a joking relationship with her brothers and sisters.

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awareness context

A concept developed by
in Awareness of Dying (1965)
, to facilitate analysis of ‘the total combination of what each interactant in a situation knows about the identity of the other and his own identity in the eyes of the other’, and in this way to aid understanding of the social organization of knowledge and awareness.

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axiom, axiomatic

An axiom is an assumption, postulate, universally received principle, or self-evident truth. Most sociological theories rest on one or more undemonstrated axioms, for example, that all human action is rational, or—as in the case of Marxism—that the class struggle is the motor of history. Some sociologists refer to such axiomatic beliefs as ‘domain assumptions’ or ‘metatheoretical beliefs’. Thus, for example, in Metatheorizing in Sociology (1991), the American sociologist George Ritzer offers an explanation and defence of metatheorizing, which Ritzer defines as the investigation and analysis of theories. The book takes social theories themselves as the object of study, classifying and comparing them, and it includes a history of sociology using a meta-theoretical approach to trace the rise and demise of sociological paradigms.

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B

Bachelard, Gaston

(1894–1962)
A founding figure in the historically oriented French tradition in philosophy of science, Bachelard was also concerned with the characteristics of creative thought in the arts. Like Thomas Kuhn, Bachelard argued against a pervasive view of science as continuously cumulative knowledge. On the contrary, science passes through sharp ruptures or breaks in its history, each new practice of science requiring the abandonment of previous epistemologies. In general, the advance of science is a struggle against the ‘epistemological obstacles’ constituted by extra-scientific ideologies—which include philosophical (mis)representations of science themselves. Bachelard's work was important in shaping the ideas of many French intellectuals of a younger generation, most notably Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault. See also PARADIGM.

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backward-sloping supply curve for labour

The preference for increased leisure over increased remuneration. Thus, when wage incentives are offered to improve productivity, labourers respond by working shorter hours to earn the same money rather than harder or longer to earn more money.
Max Weber discussed this phenomenon in General Economic History (1923), citing it as an example of ‘economic traditionalism’, and arguing that ‘at the beginning of all ethics and the economic relations which result, is traditionalism, the sanctity of tradition, the exclusive reliance upon such trade and industry as have come down from the fathers. This traditionalism survives far down into the present; only a human lifetime in the past it was futile to double the wages of an agricultural labourer in Silesia who mowed a tract of land on a contract, in the hope of inducing him to increase his exertions. He would simply have reduced by half the work expended because with this half he would have been able to earn … as much as before’.
Early European colonial entrepreneurs were dismayed when native workers appeared unresponsive to wage incentives. This behaviour was widely interpreted as evidence of innate laziness, to be remedied by keeping wage rates down, so preventing idleness and forcing the worker into virtue. Sociological research in developing countries has established that a variety of alternative explanations can be offered for the phenomenon. For example, it may be a consequence of perceived opportunities for saving, investment, and social mobility; the nature of familial obligations regarding the distribution of rewards; or resentment against new patterns of authority. In other words, the context provided by local social and political institutions needs to be considered, since this can serve to make the backward-sloping supply curve as consistent with the maximization of individual welfare as is a positively sloped curve in other contexts (see
, ‘Interpretation of Backward-Sloping Labour Supply Curves in Africa’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 1976
). See also ECONOMIC MAN.

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balance theory

Balance theory describes the affective (positive or negative) links between points (individuals or groups) in a network, by examining the compound effects in each constituent triad, which is balanced if the product of its links is positive, and unbalanced otherwise. The balance theorem proves that if all triads are balanced the system is polarized into two hostile groups.

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Balch, Emily Greene

(1867–1961)
Balch was an American sociologist who pioneered the concept of role and the use of statistical techniques in sociology. She carried out important comparative analyses of immigrant life in both Europe and America, and forged links between feminism, pacifism, and peaceful arbitration. In 1892 she co-founded a social settlement in Boston—Dennison House—with Vida Scudder and Helena Dudley. Balch was active in numerous women's trade-union activities, and from the start Dennison House became a centre for women workers. Her commitment to world peace during the First World War created much furore and subsequent ostracism, although her work in this field was finally given recognition in 1946, when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Balch combined both statistical data and sociological theory in her important study Public Assistance of the Poor in France, at a time when few other sociologists were doing so. However, her best-known volume is Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (1910), which pre-dated and in some ways complemented the much-praised and more widely recognized work of the Chicago sociologists W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–20).

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banks, data

See DATA ARCHIVE.

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banks, development

See DEVELOPMENT BANKS.

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bar chart

A graphic means of displaying a frequency distribution of nominal, ordinal, or grouped continuous data. Blocks proportional in width to the size of the categories are raised along the horizontal axis. The height of each block is then adjusted so that its area is proportional to the relative frequency of its category. The diagram thus appears as a series of bars of varying height, as in the hypothetical example in Figure 1, which shows the number of births in a county hospital for each day of the week. Conventionally, the frequency is shown at the top of each bar, and only values which actually occur are represented. (For example, if there had been no births on Monday, no space would have been left for that day.)

FIGURE 1: A bar chart showing frequency of births by day of week

Other graphic methods of displaying data include the histogram and frequency polygon. The former is a graph showing interval-level or ratio-level data, consisting of contiguous lines or bars of a height corresponding to the number of observations in the interval, and should only be used to display variables when there is an underlying order to the values. Conventionally, intervals that have no observations are included in the histogram, although no lines or bars are printed. Figure 2 is a hypothetical example showing the monthly spending of a group of teenagers attending a summer camp. (The numbers below the bars indicate the middle value or mid-point of each interval.) A variation on this technique is the ‘frequency polygon’, in which the bars are replaced by dots placed above the mid-point of each class interval, and the dots then joined by straight lines.
These and other visual means of presenting data (such as the pie-chart) are normally found where researchers wish to convey the basic information contained in a frequency distribution at a glance or in a simplified form. For this reason they are widely used in media such as magazines and newspapers. See also MEASUREMENT.

FIGURE 2: A histogram of monthly expenditure

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Barnard, Chester I.

(1886–1961)
An American industrialist and administrator who was interested in the comparative study of organizations and penned classic and influential studies of their workings (see
The Function of the Executive, 1938, and Organization and Management, 1948
). Barnard argued that organizations are inherently co-operative systems—in sharp contrast to previous approaches, which stressed their hierarchical, rule-bound, and authoritarian nature.

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base

A term imported into Marxist discourse on the authority of Karl Marx's reference to a ‘real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness’, which appears in the statement of the ‘guiding thread’ for his studies contained within his Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).
Since the 1960s, most of the discussion of the term has revolved around two questions: namely, ‘What is the composition of this base?’ and ‘What is its relation to the superstructure?’ Marx himself wrote that the base comprised ‘relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society’. What has been at issue is the meaning of ‘correspond’ and the composition of the ‘relations of production’.
Earlier generations of Marxists tended to understand correspond as meaning determine, and to regard the composition of the relations of production as purely economic in the commonsense meaning of the term; that is, material production itself. By contrast, their more recent successors have not only softened the sense of determination implied by ‘correspond’, but have also reversed the direction of any determining current so that it flows from the relations to the forces of production (see, for example, the writings of Louis Althusser). Furthermore, they have pushed the question about the nature of the relations one step back, by asking whether it is correct to suppose that economic relations in the commonsense meaning can ever be understood as purely matters of material production, when they necessarily also involve (at a minimum) both managerial power relations and ideological relations (see, for example,
, The Politics of Production, 1985
).
As regards the relation of the base to the superstructure, here too, earlier generations were prone to assume that the former more or less unproblematically determined the latter. Again, by contrast (and this time taking their cue from some clarificatory comments made by Marx and Engels themselves), their successors have tended to emphasize what has been termed the relative autonomy of the various aspects of the superstructure, and their capacity to react back on the base—while nevertheless still maintaining that, in Althusser's words, ‘the economic is determinant in the last instancey’. Examples here would include
, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977)
and
, The Capitalist State (1982)
. Needless to say, this terminology has prompted endless and acrimonious debate (mostly between Marxists and their critics but also, to a lesser extent, within Marxism itself), about how—precisely—these propositions ought to be interpreted. In other words, how much autonomy is implied by the term ‘relative’, and what (or when) is ‘the last instance’?
In a controversial defence of Karl Marx 's Theory of History (1978), the philosopher G. A. Cohen has argued that base and superstructure refer to explanans and explanandum in what was, at least in Marx's hands, a functional explanation. Although opinions vary, it is at least arguable that this puts an end to the debate about the explanatory priority of forces and relations of production, and accommodates arguments for the relative autonomy of superstructures—at least in so far as deciding what Marx meant is concerned. See also IDEOLOGY; MODE OF PRODUCTION; SOCIAL FORMATION.

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behaviour

See BEHAVIOURISM; SOCIAL BEHAVIOURISM.

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behaviour, political

See POLITICAL BEHAVIOUR.

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behaviour therapy

A form of psychotherapy, originally resting upon behaviourist principles, and using the techniques of classical and instrumental conditioning. The therapist tries to change the conditions that maintain the maladaptive behaviour. Recently, however, behaviour therapists have paid increasing attention to thoughts and thought processes.

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behavioural conformity

The tendency to make one's actions comply with prevailing norms, irrespective of one's personal beliefs; distinct, therefore, from the authentic conformist who endorses norms and behaviour alike. Some sociologists have argued that the conforming personality is a distinct type. Because such people want to be liked, and to be accepted by others whom they deem important, they reflect the attitudes and behaviour of these peers—so that if these people are (say) anti-semitic, then the conformist will also voice opinions and participate in discriminatory activities against Jews. However, because conformists need to be liked rather than want to hate, they tend not to generalize their attitudes and behaviour to cognate outgroups. (Thus, in this example, antipathy to Jews would not be extended to other ethnic minority groups.)

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behaviourism

An approach which can be found in philosophy, but more especially psychology, which denies (with greater or lesser insistence) that consciousness has any relevance to the understanding of human behaviour. Behaviour is seen in terms of an identifiable and measurable response to external or internal, recognizable, and measurable stimuli. The response can be modified by reward or various forms of discouragement—a process known as conditioning. Behaviourism is thus both a theoretical orientation, of enormous influence in academic psychology, and a practical technique used to alter what is perceived as undesirable conduct.
As a theory, behaviourism blossomed at the beginning of the twentieth century, as a reaction against the then dominant introspectionism. While introspectionism concentrated on the study of consciousness, in this case via self-examination, behaviourism rejected the idea that states of consciousness could be apprehended. In the first behaviourist manifesto (Behaviourism, 1913), John B. Watson argued that introspection was unreliable because self-reports may be vague and subjective, and the data thus obtained cannot be independently verified. Behaviourists, basing their arguments on the philosophical foundations of logical positivism, then proposed that all that can truly be known is what is observed through the senses. They staunchly maintained that observable behaviour is the only legitimate subject-matter for psychology. Observation is best achieved, according to behaviourist tenets, via the conduct of controlled experiments. In practice, such experiments often use animals, under the assumption that the characteristics of animal behaviour can fruitfully be generalized to humans (see, for example,
's The Psychological Care of Infant and Child, 1938
).
The behaviourist project in the academy can be illustrated by the influential work of the Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1904, for his work on the process of digestion in dogs. Pavlov conducted a number of experiments on dogs, which purported to show that reflexes could be learned, or (in the behaviourist terminology) conditioned. In Pavlov's experiments, the animals were exposed to the sight or smell of food, thus eliciting salivation. They were then exposed to the ringing of a bell at the same time as the food was produced. This stimulated further salivation. Finally, the dogs were exposed only to the ringing of the bell, which produced salivation even though no food was present. Pavlov and other behaviourists have taken this and similar experiments as proof of the idea that reflexes can be conditioned through environmental stimuli. Their conclusion is, then, that both animal and human behaviour works according to a stimulus–response model. Subsequent behaviourists, such as B. F. Skinner in the United States and Hans Eysenck in Britain, have elaborated on these premisses in their own work (see
's About Behaviourism, 1973
, or any one of Eysenck's numerous books and articles about mental illness—or ‘abnormal behaviour’ as he prefers to call such conditions). Skinner also outlined his own behaviourist social utopia, in Walden Two (1948), a novel which paints a picture of a society controlled by operant techniques.
As a direct application of behaviourist theories, aversion therapy, desensitization, and operant conditioning are among the behaviourist techniques used within the health, mental health, and prison services. Aversion therapy involves the use of a noxious physical stimulation or punishment to reduce the frequency of unwanted behaviour. Electric shocks and injections of apomorphine have been used in attempts to make patients averse to certain anti-social behaviours. Desensitization, used particularly in the treatment of phobias, is a psychological therapy in which the practitioner steers the patient through an ‘anxiety hierarchy’, with the intention of allowing the patient to become less sensitive to the feared object or event. Operant conditioning involves the systematic manipulation of the consequences of a behaviour through rewards and punishments so as to modify the subsequent behaviour. At present there is extensive and intensive controversy about both the effectiveness and the ethics of all these techniques.
Behaviourism represents an extreme environmentalist position as regards the question of what guides human actions. According to behaviourists, all behaviour is learned through association and conditioning of one kind or another, and this same behaviour can therefore be unlearned or altered by external (environmental) manipulations. As might be expected, the theory has been regarded with suspicion or rejected outright by sociologists, mainly for two reasons: it is primarily individualistic in its approach; and it is very difficult to carry out a sociological study without taking some account of how people think about the social world. For example, a frequent criticism of behaviourism voiced by George Herbert Mead was that it can account only for what people are doing, not what they are thinking or feeling. It therefore ignores the many aspects of human conduct which may not be readily amenable to observation. For a long time, however, behaviourism dominated theoretical and clinical psychology, especially under the influence of Skinner, although cognitive psychology now seems to be replacing it as the central orthodoxy.
Elements of behaviourism do nevertheless appear in sociology: George Homans's exchange theory borrows from some of Skinner's work, and more often there are generalized behavioural assumptions implicit in theories of socialization. For example,
's own Mind, Self and Society (1934)
is about consciousness, yet Mead often calls himself a social behaviourist, and symbolic interactionism can indeed be seen as propounding the view that society, as a structure of social roles, conditions people into acceptable social behaviour. It must be emphasized, however, that this is a very loose usage of the term, and a very general form of behaviourism. See also NEO-POSITIVISM.

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Benedict, Ruth Fulton

(1887–1948)
A student of Franz Boas at Columbia University, Benedict conducted her first fieldwork in the early 1920s, developing a strong interest in comparative studies. She was subsequently influenced by psychological theory and is closely associated with the so-called Culture and Personality School of American anthropology. Her best-known works are probably Patterns of Culture (1934) and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946).

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benefits, welfare

See SELECTIVE VERSUS UNIVERSAL BENEFITS; WELFARE.

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Benini coefficient

A derivative of the chi-square statistic which provides a surface description of mobility patterns in a social mobility table. The coefficient describes immobility and mobility (association and dissociation) between origin and destination classes, relative to the limits imposed by the (changing) size of the classes over time, and so provides a summary descriptive measure of mobility between generations that adjusts for changes in the occupational structure. It takes a value in the range plus one (mobility greater than that expected from marginal effects alone) to minus one (mobility less than that expected from marginal effects alone). Values of zero represent an almost random pattern of mobility.
The Benini statistic is one of a number of measures of association in mobility tables which attempt to make a gross distinction between mobility brought about by changes in the occupational structure and mobility due to other factors (further examples include the index of association, disparity ratios, and odds ratios). These statistics all lack the advantage of the newer techniques of loglinear modelling; namely, that the latter permit one to test alternative models of mobility, in order to examine their respective criteria of fit.

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Benjamin, Walter

(1892–1940)
A literary critic associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1930s, taken up by sociologists of literature in the 1970s, mainly because of his analysis of the material aspects of literary production (see
, Walter Benjamin, 1982
).

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Bentham, Jeremy

(1748–1832)
Often regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism, Bentham is best known for his texts on legal philosophy, and his programmes of social (especially penal) reform. He was a leading figure of classical criminology, which attempted to make the legal system more rational, and devised the panopticon—a design for the organization and architecture of prisons which facilitated maximum surveillance and control of inmates.

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Bernstein, Eduard

(1850–1932)
As the leading revisionist thinker of the German Social Democratic Party, Bernstein sought to cleanse the party's ideology of what he regarded as its anachronistic Marxist assumptions and ideas. At the philosophical level and on the basis of a newly assertive neo-Kantianism, he rejected the positivism and evolutionism, as well as the residual Hegelianism that he detected in orthodox Marxism. Consequently, at the political level he challenged the immiseration and proletarianization theses as applied to capitalist societies, as well as the amorality, fatalism, and pessimism that underpinned them. For Bernstein, then, socialism represented not just a distant goal, but also an ethical ideal that possessed far more than mere inspirational significance in the present. In sum, despite his often misread statement ‘the movement is everything, the goal nothing’, Bernstein came to stand for a socialist gradualism that should be distinguished from mere reformism (see
's book about ‘Bernstein's challenge to Marx’, The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism, 1952
). See also KAUTSKY, KARL.

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beta weights

See REGRESSION.

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bias

See INTERVIEW BIAS; INTERVIEWER BIAS; NON-RESPONSE; OBJECTIVE; OBSERVER BIAS; PREJUDICE; SAMPLE SELECTION BIAS; SAMPLING ERROR.

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bilateral descent

See DESCENT GROUPS.

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bimodal distribution

See CENTRAL TENDENCY (MEASURES OF).

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binomial distribution

A probability distribution for the occurrence of a specific event which either occurs or not—such as winning a race. The binomial distribution is symmetrical (like the normal distribution), in certain cases, but is otherwise skewed. See also DISTRIBUTION (STATISTICAL OR FREQUENCY).

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biography

See LIFE-HISTORY; PERSONAL DOCUMENTS.

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biological analogy

See ORGANIC (OR BIOLOGICAL) ANALOGY.

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biological reductionism, biologism

A theoretical approach which explains social or cultural phenomena in biological terms. Twentieth-century incarnations of biological reductionism have relied to varying degrees on Darwin's theory of evolution and principles of natural selection. Within the human sciences, there have been attempts to explain observed differences in group behaviour—such as performance on intelligence tests, rates of mental illness, intergenerational poverty, male dominance or patriarchy, and propensity for crime—as being biologically determined, by claiming that groups have different biological capacities or evolutionary trajectories. The theories of Social Darwinism, eugenics, and sociobiology incorporate biological reductionism. See also Ardrey, Robert.

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bio-medical model

See MEDICAL MODEL.

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Bion, Wilfred

(1897–1979)
One of the better-known Kleinian psychoanalysts (see KLEIN, MELANIE) for whom psychoanalysis dealt less with defences against feeling than with defences against thought. From a sociological point of view his most important work was on group processes, in particular the unconscious alliances that groups form, in order to resist accomplishing their task. He calls these alliances ‘basic assumption groups’: dependency (waiting for the leader to do everything); flight-fight (finding an external enemy or scapegoat to distract attention); or pairing (where two members form a relationship which seems to offer a solution to the group's problems). See especially his
Experiences in Groups (1961)
.

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bio-psycho-social model

See MEDICAL MODEL.

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biotic competition

See URBAN ECOLOGY.

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bipartite, bipartisan

Affecting two parties (‘bipartite agreement’) or divided into two parts. The term is mostly employed in reference to formal economic and political negotiations and arrangements. For example, a number of social scientists have pointed to bipartisanship as a factor explaining the lack of success of third parties (such as the Socialist and People's Parties) in the United States, citing the difficulties of mounting a new political party within an established two-party system. In this case, the more conservative parties found it relatively easy to incorporate, as their own, parts of the platforms of the more reformoriented third parties, thus undermining their appeal to the electorate. (See, for example,
's Why is there no Socialism in the United States?, 1906
.)

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birth cohort

See COHORT.

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birth-rate

A measure designed to provide information on the comparative fertility of different populations, most commonly used in demographic analysis. A number of different calculations of varying sophistication may be used. The most well-known—the ‘crude birth-rate’—is simply the number of live births in a year per 1,000 population (using mid-year estimates). This measure takes no account of the age-structure of populations, which affects the numbers of women who are capable of giving birth in any year (the ‘population at risk’), and does not therefore yield particularly accurate comparisons. Multiplying the crude birth-rate by Area Comparability Factors produces rates adjusted for age and sex differences, allowing comparisons to be made between geographical areas, or across social groups within a society. The ‘general fertility rate’ is the birth-rate per thousand women of child-bearing age, calculated as the number of live births divided by the female population aged 15–44 years, times 1,000. These more sophisticated birth-rates take account of factors such as age-structure, but the more sophisticated the measure, the more data about the population are required for its calculation.

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bivariate analysis

See MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS.

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bivariate linear regression

See REGRESSION.

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black economy

That portion of employment within the market economy that is not fully covered by official statistics, due to some degree of under-reporting which is assumed to be connected with tax evasion. Unfortunately, economic statistics are imperfect, so that gaps and inconsistencies are due more often to data-quality problems than to unreported black economy activity. Guesstimates of the size of the black economy are inflated by the substantial amounts of non-market work and marginal work in the informal economy.

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Black Report

An influential Report of the Working Group on Inequalities in Health (under the chairmanship of Sir Douglas Black) submitted to the British Government in 1980. The Report synthesized much evidence, hitherto available mainly in academic journals and in a fragmented form, which suggested that Britain's health service was failing to reduce social (particularly class) inequalities in health.
For example, the Report argued that working-class men and women are significantly more likely than are those in the managerial or professional classes to die early, and that children born into working-class homes are exposed to higher risks of early mortality, illness, and injury than are those coming from middle-class backgrounds. More controversially, it suggested that although many absolute improvements in the various rates had been achieved over time, some class differentials in health outcomes had actually increased over the period of thirty years or so since the National Health Service was first established. It argued that this was due, not so much to the flawed workings of the health-care system itself, or to restricted access to health-care facilities, as to social inequalities such as those to be found in housing and working conditions, in the distribution of incomes, and in opportunities for educational advancement. The authors of the Report concluded that health standards could only be improved and equalized by major initiatives in community health, preventive medicine, and primary care, and (more importantly) by radical shifts in social policy in order to improve the standard of living of the working classes.
Notoriously, the Conservative administration which received the Report made strenuous efforts to suppress it, although these simply created intense media interest. When the findings were finally published (see
, Inequalities in Health, 1982)
they became the focus for a protracted debate among epidemiologists, sociologists, and public health experts. On the one hand, the Report stimulated further research into class and other persisting social inequalities in health, including comparative studies which examined Britain in relation to industrialized societies elsewhere. On the other, critics suggested that the Report's tendency to focus upon mortality (death) rates overlooked the complexities of the relationship between these and morbidity (sickness) rates, in particular the possibility that inequalities in death-rates may have only a weak relationship to inequalities in health. (For example, mental illness rarely results in death, but has a significant although complex relationship to social class.)
Whatever the weaknesses of the Report, it was important in promoting interest in the sociology of health and illness, and provides a good illustration of the way in which sociologists can inform social policy by means of policy research. In the longer term, its greatest sociological significance may lie in the fact that it acted as a catalyst for a vigorous discussion of the methodological problems involved in epidemiological work, including those associated with the use of the Registrar-General's (that is the British Government's official) occupational classification as a measure of social class (some commentators argued that the Report actually underestimated class differentials in health because of the class heterogeneity of some of the Registrar-General's categories); the implications of social mobility for health (is poor health more common among the working classes and the poor because sick people are likely to be steadily downwardly mobile?); and the difficulties of interpreting complex causal interactions between differences in life-style (smoking, diet, leisure activities, and the like) and effects attributable to social class as such.
A useful discussion of some of the issues that have emerged as a result of the debate prompted by Black will be found in
, ‘Explaining Health Inequalities: Beyond Black and Barker’, European Sociological Review (1995)
. As a measure of how much more sophisticated that debate has now become, the original Report can usefully be compared with recent studies such as that by
, ‘Measuring Inequalities in Health’ (Sociology of Health and Illness, 1996)
, which examines trends in mortality in Britain in terms both of the conventional Registrar-General's class categories and the newer and more robust Goldthorpe class scheme.

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blank-slate or blank-paper hypothesis

See TABULA RASA.

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Bloch, Marc

(1886–1944)
A distinguished French medieval historian, co-founder of the prominent Annales School, and therefore important influence on the historical sociology of such work as the world-systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein. Bloch was an enthusiast of ‘totalizing’ approaches which emphasized the underlying movements in whole societies rather than either the activities of particular individuals or the chronology of specific events. His major works were French Rural History: An Essay on its Basic Characteristics (1931) and Feudal Society (1939–40). His comparative (and as he saw it scientific) approach to history, and his enthusiasm for the use of as wide a variety of data-sources as possible, is evident in his text on The Historian's Craft (1949). See also FEUDALISM.

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blockbusting

Defined by
(Blockbusting in Baltimore, 1994)
as ‘the intentional action of a real estate speculator to place an African American resident in a house on a previously all-white block for the express purpose of panicking whites into selling for the profit to be gained by buying low and selling high’. Blockbusting occurs when there is racial prejudice on the part of White residents, underpinned by an institutionalized dual housing market, whereby lenders and realtors are involved in ‘a silent conspiracy on race and residency’ in order to maintain racially exclusive neighbourhoods. For reasons of self-interested short-term economic gain, realtors sometimes violate this unwritten agreement, and offer African Americans housing opportunities in hitherto exclusively White areas. The argument is reminiscent of Rex and Moore's much earlier account of housing classes, and by implicitly reviving the perspective of urban managerialism, it provides a corrective to those in sociology and policy-making who view urban processes in entirely cultural or structural terms.

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blue-collar work

See MANUAL VERSUS NON-MANUAL DISTINCTION.

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Blumer, Herbert

(1900–86)
Blumer studied at the University of Chicago and taught George Herbert Mead's classes after the latter's death in the early 1930s. In 1937, for an overview article on the nature of social psychology in Man and Society (edited by W. Schmidt), he coined the term symbolic interactionism—hence literally becoming the founder of this tradition. Later, when he held the first Chair of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, he influenced several generations of interactionist sociologists as well as encouraging diversity in one of North America's leading sociology departments. He held many important offices, including the presidency of both the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
His abiding concern was that sociology should become the down-to-earth study of group life. He outlined this position in his major book Symbolic Interactionism (1969). Blumer disliked the tendency for sociologists to analyse phenomena that they had not witnessed first-hand, and had a particular abhorrence of grand, especially abstract theory. Instead, he advocated a methodology that would explore and inspect the rich variety of social experience, as it was lived; would build up ‘sensitizing concepts’ from experience; that would produce theories directly grounded in empirical data; and would determine the relevance of such theories by a continual return to the evidence. Substantively, he was interested in the mass media, fashion, collective behaviour, industrial relations, race relations, and life-history research. His work is appraised in an edition of the journal
Symbolic Interaction (1988)
published shortly after his death.

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Boas, Franz

(1858–1942)
A German-born anthropologist who founded modern cultural anthropology (see SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY) in the United States. He and his students came to dominate American anthropology for the first three decades of the twentieth century. Boas revolutionized fieldwork methodology, relying on analysis of local texts, linguistics, and training local representative researchers to document their own culture. His Primitive Art (1927) greatly influenced later approaches to examining the material culture of peoples.
Using these methods Boas provided an enormous amount of ethnographic data on native American cultures of the Pacific Northwest. He gave priority to empirical ethnographic investigation over any search for scientific laws of cause and effect in culture. Boas was a cultural relativist, arguing that culture should be understood in terms of its own framework of meaning, rather than being judged by outside investigators according to the values of their own culture. He exposed and undermined the grandiose pretensions of evolutionary theory as espoused by Edward Tylor and James Frazer. Instead, Boas insisted on study of cultures as wholes, as systems of many interrelated parts. His later interest in psychology served as a precursor to the culture and personality approach. His other principal works include Race, Language and Culture (1940), and The Mind of Primitive Man (1911).

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body, sociology of

Influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault, which assert sociology's neglect of the body, sociologists who practise this relatively new specialism analyse humans as embodied persons—not just as actors with values and attitudes. They explore the varied cultural meanings attached to bodies, and the way they are controlled, regulated, and reproduced, paying especial attention to illness, disease, and sexuality. A good introduction to the field is Bryan S. Turner's The Body and Society (1996). The study of the body has developed into a very broad strand in modern sociological research. It includes such diverse themes as sex therapy, contemporary dance, the body-building industry, the management of children, use of food, and images of lesbians and gays. These apparently esoteric themes are usually connected to central issues of social theory, such as those of control, order, and ideology. Sociologists of the body have also made an increasing contribution to the study of illness and to medical sociology. The scope of this increasingly popular specialism is illustrated in the range of topics addressed in
, Body Matters (1993)
. See also EMOTION, SOCIOLOGY OF; FOOD, SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF; GENDER; NATURE VERSUS NURTURE DEBATE.

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body language

A term used in social psychology to refer to the gestures, facial expressions, and bodily postures adopted by people in social interaction. Just as oral and written language expresses our ideas, thoughts, and emotions, so our bodies are said to express a series of unspoken (some say unconsciously articulated) messages, by means of posture and such like. The alternative term ‘kinesics’ is sometimes used in psychology, to refer both to the body movements which convey information in the absence of speech, and the study of such movements. See also NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION.

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Bogardus social distance scale

A scaling technique for measuring social distance, pioneered by Emory S. Bogardus in the 1930s, usually applied to the study of ethnic relations, social classes, and social values generally. The scale attempts to measure respondents' degree of warmth, intimacy, indifference, or hostility to particular social relationships, by having them indicate agreement or disagreement with a series of statements about particular (say) religious groups. For example, would these groups be acceptable as visitors to the country, fellow citizens, neighbours, personal friends, and close kin by marriage? Characteristically, the scales make the assumption that the attributes measured can be ordered as a continuum of social distance (in the above example this ranges from exclusion from the country to close kinship by marriage). Other examples of social distance scaling techniques include sociometric measurement, and occupational prestige scales, which require respondents to judge the social standing of a selection of occupations.

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bonded labour

See PATRON-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP.

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bonding

A term referring to the mutual identification of mother and child and the circumstances in which this develops. Sometimes it is used to describe the formation of other close relationships.

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Boolean algebra

See COMPARATIVE SOCIOLOGY; QUALITATIVE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS.

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Booth, Charles

(1840–1916)
A Victorian businessman and social reformer who produced the first major empirical survey of the Life and Labour of the People of London, in seventeen volumes, between 1891 and 1903. Using a subsistence definition of poverty he found (contrary to his expectations) that nearly 31 per cent of those surveyed were in poverty. His work was the first major survey in British sociology and has influenced all subsequent debates on poverty.

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boundary debate

See CONTRADICTORY CLASS LOCATION.

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boundary maintenance

The ways in which societies (or social systems) maintain distinctions between themselves and others. Many have suggested that, by studying the ways in which a society attempts to define its inherently ambiguous—and hence potentially dangerous—peripheral areas, it is possible to obtain a better understanding of what constitutes its key cultural values.

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bounded rationality

According to the rational exchange postulates associated with the organizational theory of Herbert A. Simon (see
Models of Bounded Rationality, 1982
), there are cognitive limits to the ability of people to pursue wholly rational purposeful behaviour. Rather than seek the optimal solution, actors satisfice; that is, they accept a solution which is ‘good enough’, within a so-called zone of indifference.

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bourgeoisie

Originally a sixteenth-century French term referring to the body of urban freemen, which gradually became interchangeable with the term capitalist class, especially amongst Marxists. Current usage refers to the owners of the means of production in capitalist societies—although, because of the decomposition of capital, the term now has doctrinaire connotations and appears slightly dated.
Among non-Marxists, the applicability of the term in more advanced capitalist countries has been regularly questioned, especially since the 1930s. For example, Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means (The Modern Corporation and Private Property, 1932) argued that because of the separation between ownership and control which became apparent in larger American corporations during the 1930s, economic power was beginning to pass from the owner-entrepreneurs (capitalists) to the managers. Similar and again highly influential arguments appeared in the 1950s (see, for example, Daniel Bell's article on the decline of family capitalism which is reprinted in his The End of Ideology, 1960), and again in the 1960s, when in his book The New Industrial State (1967) John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term ‘technostructure’ to refer to the institutional rather than personal nature of power in modern economies. According to Galbraith, the rise of the modern corporation has replaced the entrepreneur, as an identifiable individual and as a directing force in the enterprise, by a collective ‘guiding intelligence’ embracing all those functionaries located between the levels of senior management and junior staff (the technocracy), who contribute to group decision-making for and on behalf of the organization which they form.
More recently, this change in analytical focus has gained still greater momentum with the development of the subdiscipline of business history, and in particular the appearance of Alfred D. Chandler's studies of organizational change in large American companies (see, for example, his
The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, 1977
). The summation of this whole line of argument probably came with the publication of Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), with its claim that the new centrality of knowledge in the production process had changed not only the distribution of economic power, but also its very nature.
Concerning the issue of ownership more specifically, scholars (and of course some politicians) have claimed that the ever-wider dispersion of shares and the accompanying increase in the proportion of shares owned by pension funds and other financial intermediaries, have both transformed and made more democratic the structure of ownership in advanced capitalist societies (see, for example,
's The Unseen Revolution, 1976
).
The response of Marxists, and those that agree with them on this issue, has been twofold. On the one hand, it has been argued that empirical studies demonstrate that the powers of individual owners have not declined much, and certainly not as radically as has been claimed. On the contrary, according to these researchers, the more widespread share ownership only means that it is now often possible to have a very significant impact on the manner in which the still very considerable powers of boards of directors are exercised (for example with regard to investment decisions), whilst owning only a single-figure percentage of the shares. Moreover, as has been argued more recently by those interested in ownership networks, because of the power that comes with the ownership of relatively small parcels of shares, and especially if these shares are in large, market-dominating companies, it is possible that their owners may come to exercise power far beyond the confines of their base company, either through that company's holdings, or as owners on their own account. (See, for example, the article by
in , Structures of Capital, 1990
, or J. Scott's Who Rules Britain?, 1990.)
The second thrust of the Marxist response to arguments about ownership and control has been more theoretical, and comprises a claim that the issue of personal versus institutional ownership only presents problems because of a residual humanism in much Marxist thinking, a tendency which requires one to give theoretical priority to the identification of the concrete bearers of property relations (that is, specific individuals), rather than (following Marx's sixth thesis on Feuerbach) to the identification of the social relations of possession, control, and title that constitute these bearers themselves. If the latter are given theoretical priority, then because the bearers so constituted may be either humans or institutions one may talk of the existence of something called a capitalist class, if not necessarily of a clearly defined body of people recognizable as a bourgeoisie, regardless of the concrete nature of, or relations between, its bearers (see, for example,
, Social Theory after Postmodernism, 1990
). See also MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION; MIDDLE CLASS.

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bourgeoisie, petite

See PETITE BOURGEOISIE.

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Bowlby, John E.

(1907–90)
A British psychoanalyst famous for his work on the early separation of an infant from his or her mother, positing a biological attachment need to explain both the infant's immediate responses, and later adult behaviour. His work, whilst controversial amongst feminists, was influential in changing practices in nurseries and children's wards in hospitals. The most succinct summary is in A Secure Base (1988).

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bracketing

See PHENOMENOLOGY.

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Braudel, Fernand

(1902–85)
A leading member of the Annales School of French history, best known for his magnum opus The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), although his Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800 (1967) is more accessible to sociologists.
Braudel's monumental studies of nascent capitalism are replete with typologies of economies and cultures. However, the organizing principle of his work was a distinction between different levels of historical time within which change takes place at different speeds, most notably the threefold distinction between histoire événementielle, histoire conjoncturelle, and histoire structurale. ‘History’, he claimed, ‘exists at different levels … On the surface the history of events works itself out in the short term; it is a sort of micro-history. Halfway down, a history of conjunctures follows a broader, slower rhythm. So far that has above all been studied in its developments on the material plane, in economic cycles and intercycles … And over and above the “recitatif” of the conjuncture, structural history, or the history of the longue durée, inquires into whole centuries at a time … It functions along the border between the moving and the immobile, and because of the long-standing stability of its values, in appears unchanging when compared with all the histories which flow and work themselves out more swiftly, and which in the final analysis gravitate around it’ (On History, 1980). The last of these generates a ‘geohistory’ of the environment for which Braudel is best known, a history of material life, consisting of ‘repeated actions, empirical processes, old methods and solutions handed down from time immemorial, like money or the separation of town from country’.
Although Braudel was a major influence on world-systems theory, his work has been criticized by some for its imprecision as regards causality, and by others for its implicit historical materialism.

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bride-price, bride-wealth

The money or goods given by the kin of the groom to the kin of the bride on marriage. Although it is sometimes seen as compensatory payment to the natal family for the upbringing of the daughter, it varies in form and meaning across cultures. In some, the ‘bride-price’ may become the property of the bride, and is treated as an insurance against divorce.

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broken windows thesis

A thesis which links disorderly behaviour to fear of crime, the potential for serious crime, and to urban decay in American cities. It is often cited as an example of communitarian ideas informing public policy.
In the March1982 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, political scientist James Wilson and criminologist George Kelling published an article under the title ‘Broken Windows’, in which they argued that policing in neighbourhoods should be based on a clear understanding of the connection between order-maintenance and crime prevention. In their view the best way to fight crime was to fight the disorder that precedes it. They used the image of broken windows to explain how neighbourhoods might decay into disorder and crime if no one attends to their maintenance: a broken factory window suggests to passers-by that no one is in charge or cares; in time a few more windows are broken by rock-throwing youths; passers-by begin to think that no one cares about the whole street; soon, only the young and criminals are prepared to use the street; which then attracts prostitution, drug-dealing, and such like; until, in due course, someone is murdered. In this way, small disorders lead to larger disorders, and eventually to serious crimes.
This analysis implies that if disorderly behaviours in public places (including all forms of petty vandalism, begging, vagrancy, and so forth) are controlled then a significant drop in serious crime will follow. Wilson and Kelling therefore argue in favour of ‘community policing’ in neighbourhoods. This means many more officers involved in foot-patrol (in Britain the philosophy of ‘bobbies on the beat’) and fewer involved in riding around in police cars merely following up 911 (in Britain 999) calls. In this way law enforcement comes to be seen as a technique for crime prevention rather than as a vehicle for reacting to crime.
These ideas on how to tackle the crime problem in urban America have been taken up with some success, notably by the New York Transit Authority (for whom Kelling acted as a consultant), who adopted a policy of ‘zero tolerance’ towards graffiti on trains, urinating in public, intimidation of commuters, and such like, and dramatically reduced the incidence of serious crime in New York City subways. Similar initiatives have also achieved notable successes in reducing crime-rates and urban decay in many other American cities. Typically these involve some mixture of Neighbourhood Watch programmes, zero tolerance of minor public disorders, a shift towards ‘community-oriented’ (preventive) and away from ‘incident-oriented’ (reactive) policing, police involvement in local youth projects, decentralization of authority to individual police officers, and community involvement in setting priorities for and collaborating with prosecutors, police, probation officers, and other criminal justice officials (see
, Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in our Communities, 1996
).
Supporters of these strategies argue that they offer an imaginative solution to the competing demands of liberty and community in advanced societies; are a necessary corrective to the drift in public policy towards maximizing individual rights and away from enforcing communal obligations; and provide an effective means of reclaiming public spaces without sacrificing essential freedoms. Critics worry about the possible threat they pose to tolerance of cultural pluralism and the legitimacy they may accord to vigilantism among citizens determined (as they see it) to ‘restore order’ in their communities. See also CRIMINOLOGY.

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Buddhism

A salvation religion, founded in north India in the fifth century BCE (the exact dates are the subject of scholarly controversy) by Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha (meaning Enlightened One). Buddhists may be defined as those who revere the so-called Three Jewels: the Buddha himself; the Dharma or doctrine taught by him; and the Monastic Community—those monks and nuns who renounce the married household to live out the doctrine in full. Buddhism as taught by the Buddha was a universalist humanism not unconnected with the emergence of urban culture in north India. According to it, anyone (male or female, high-born or low) can escape from the endless cycle of rebirths by following the practice of morality, meditation, and insight.
Today, two main types of Buddhism survive, the Theravada and the Mahayana. The former is found in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka; the latter in Nepal, Tibet, China, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Missionaries and immigrants have carried both throughout the world in modern times. Theravada Buddhism is the more conservative form: it has few and simple rituals and focuses on the worship of the Buddha itself. Mahayana Buddhism is a slightly later development, having more elaborate ritual, a baroque pantheon of saints (bodhisattvas), more numerous scriptures, and (sometimes) a married clergy. Mahayana Buddhists believe that their form of Buddhism offers an easier route to salvation than that provided by Theravada Buddhism.
Although Buddhism is a form of religious individualism, it has always accepted spiritual hierarchies, the most dramatic of which was the Mahayana theocratic state, under the Dalai Lama, which ruled Tibet for many centuries. In the modern world, new forms of Buddhism have arisen which combine it with nationalism, socialism, rationalism, and even social welfare activities.

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bureaucracy

A body of administrative officials, and the procedures and tasks involved in a particular system of administration, for example a state or formal organization. Max Weber did not invent the concept of bureaucracy (the term was coined in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century) but he is generally recognized as having made the most original contribution to the study of the phenomenon. Almost alone, among early contributors, his treatment is not pejorative.
Although the concept is usually understood as one of Weber's ideal types concerned with rational and efficient organization, comprising specific attributes for both positions and personnel, it is much more than this. Its full value can only be gleaned by seeing bureaucracy not just as an outcome of the broader process of rationalization but also in terms of Weber's work on democracy and domination. Domination, or the legitimate and institutionalized exercise of power, requires some kind of administration, and therefore a role for the functionary interposed between leader and electorate within a democratic system. The type of organization which emerges depends on the nature of the legitimation elaborated when the powerful justify that power to their subordinates. Bureaucracy develops when that legitimation is of the rational-legal variety, emphasizing the impersonal exercise of power, according to rational rules.
The characteristics of bureaucracy are a hierarchy of offices and the channelling of communication through hierarchical levels; files and secrecy; clearly defined spheres of authority determined by general rules and governed by regulations; and the administrative separation of official activities from private affairs. Bureaucratic officials, according to Weber, are appointed from above (rather than elected); enjoy life-long tenure and high status; have a fixed salary and retirement pension; and a vocation and sense of loyalty to their career and office.
Bureaucracy has a purely technical superiority over all other forms of domination, although this does not necessarily imply greatest efficiency in goal attainment, since rationality and efficiency must always be measured in relation to a clearly stated objective. Above all else, bureaucracy is tied to the capitalist market economy, which demands the unambiguous and continuous discharge of public and private administration. Bureaucracy implies rationality, and this in turn implies calculability, which minimizes uncertainty in risk-taking activities. Such calculability also involves mass democracy, a levelling process by which all become formally equal before the law, so that arbitrary treatment diminishes.
Weber's pessimistic view of the rationalization process is evident in his concern about the indestructibility of fully established bureaucratic structures. Once in place, the rulers cannot dispense with the trained personnel, as the example of post-communist Eastern Europe illustrates clearly. The professional bureaucrats are also chained to their activity and thus seek its perpetuation. Finally, politicians (elected or otherwise) are increasingly in the position of a dilettante with respect to the expert bureaucrat, who wields administrative secrecy as a weapon against public scrutiny and oversight. Bureaucratic knowledge is thus power, not only in the sense of expert knowledge, but also as concealed knowledge which enables officials to hide behind routines and procedures. Not surprisingly, the term has since come to be used in reference to every situation in which officials wield excessive power, or the organizational structure itself malfunctions. Bureaucracies can cease to be efficient, in terms of the purposes for which they are intended, when personnel proliferate beyond what is needed for the task in hand; when responsibilities are shunned and passed around the system; when rules, formalities, and files proliferate, again beyond what is necessary; and officials stick rigidly to the letter of the regulations without regard for the purpose they are supposed to serve (in other words slavish adherence to the bureaucratic means becomes an end in itself).
Bureaucracy tends to breed experts with educational credentials who, Weber was concerned, could emerge as a self-recruiting caste. In a Marxian aside, Weber argues that capitalism and socialism can be subsumed under the broader process of bureaucratization; namely, the separation from the means of production, destruction, research, and administration of the worker, soldier, academic, and administrator respectively.
Stanislav Andreski (Max Weber's Insights and Errors, 1984) has argued that there are in fact now four distinct meanings which can be attached to the term. ‘Bureaucracy’ can refer to the set of people who perform the administrative functions in the manner described by Weber; the network of relationships in which they are enmeshed; the amount of power they wield as a body; and the various kinds of malfunctioning of the administrative machine. All four are evident in the contemporary sociological literature. Andreski himself argues that the term ought to be reserved for the third of the aforementioned meanings: that is, ‘the condition when the power of the administrators is greater than that of any other group of leaders or holders of authority’. Weber himself did not live to see a complete bureaucracy in this sense—the first example being the depersonalized government of the Soviet Union after the death of Stalin. However, the Chinese Empire offers a pre-industrial approximation, since no other class could challenge the mandarins, although their power was subject to and limited by the prerogative of the emperor and his relatives (an unstable form of political domination which Weber refers to as patrimonialism).
Without a doubt Weber's writings on the nature of bureaucracy not only became a fruitful source of what emerged as organization theory but also contributed to the study of the conditions for the democratic exercise of power in an increasingly complex world. Though conceptually untidy, and in places empirically questionable, his studies of bureaucracy are unrivalled as a survey of the development and functioning of administrative machines. While most of the other early sociologists foresaw progressive movements towards democracy and liberty, Weber could see only increasing bureaucratization, and in that sense his analysis has stood the test of time. However, his treatment is scattered, and by no means an easy introduction to the subject. The best starting-point for the student of sociology is still Martin Albrow's Bureaucracy (1970).

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bureaucratic orientation to work

See WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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bureaucratic socialism

See COMMUNISM.

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Burgess, Ernest W.

(1886–1966)
Born in Canada, Burgess taught at Chicago University from 1916 until his retirement in 1952. He was a major influence on the development of the Chicago School, stressing the value of empirical research, and pioneering the study of the city (with Robert Park), delinquency (with Clifford Shaw), and family life. Many of his most influential writings will be found in The Basic Writings of Ernest W. Burgess (1974) edited by Donald J. Bogue. See also CONCENTRIC ZONE THEORY.

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business cycle

Recurring economic cycles, involving a period of above-average growth (expansionist phase), followed by one of lower than average growth (recession), then one of negative growth (depression). Modern economists generally assume that the ‘normal’, ‘classic’, or ‘Juglar’ cycle lasts approximately five years, but there is no consensus as to its causes, indeed there are some who have argued that the fluctuations themselves are random rather than uniform in character. The Russian-born American development economist Simon Kuznets also identified a longer economic cycle (‘Kuznets cycle’) lasting some fifteen to twenty years. So-called Kondratieff cycles (named after the Russian economist who developed the idea in the 1920s) consist of ‘long wave’ cycles of boom and recession averaging half a century or so, fuelled by major technological and industrial advances, such as the advent of steam power. These cycles are often linked to developments in the world-system (see, for example,
, ‘World-Systems Analysis’, Annual Review of Sociology, 1995
).

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Business Improvement Districts (BIDs)

A strategy for mobilizing private funding in order to improve the environment of city centres. By 1997 over 1,000 Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) or Zones had been created in the USA and Canada (31 in New York alone).
In the wake of the urban riots in America during the 1960s, major business companies rallied behind the National Urban Coalition, and began to support neighbourhood improvement initiatives by investing in development schemes in cities where they had plants or offices. The Ford Motor Company, for example, was heavily involved in renovating downtown Detroit. However, by 1980 it became clear that this voluntary effort was too erratic, sometimes unfair in its consequences, and insufficient to halt inner-city decay and the decline of confidence in city centres. BIDs are an attempt to reverse these trends. Property owners in a run-down area are balloted in the attempt to secure their agreement for the levy of a mandatory tax (typically an additional 5 per cent) for the improvement of the urban environment (refurbishment of public amenities, installation of security cameras, and so forth). The tax is collected by the local authority, but handed over to a board run by the private sector, which spends the money on urban renewal projects. The idea was pioneered in the development of the Nicollette Mall in Minneapolis in 1970.
Most BIDs are limited to a five-year time-span, which means that positive achievements often have to be demonstrated quickly, especially in relation to those problems which are of greatest concern to the business community. Typically, BIDs are concerned with the development of ‘clean, safe and friendly streets’ (many devote up to 80 per cent of expenditure on this item), and so concentrate on filling vacant lots, improving traffic management, and enhancing the physical environment. Some do tackle social issues, such as begging and homelessness, and many go on to promote particular areas by organizing festivals and other cultural events. Although results to date in the USA have been impressive, this form of city-centre partnership between the public and private sectors has proved hard to export, and even the Canadian initiatives suffered problems when government support was withdrawn. In Britain, a number of possible variants on the BIDs strategy are being researched and discussed in policy circles, all based on the same basic idea: of a partnership between private sector interests, a local authority, and (possibly) other public sector agencies; focused on the commercial enhancement of the city centre; and dependent on significant and sustained private sector contributions (although a range of funding options, only one of which is the tax levy, are being explored).
BIDs vary widely in their programmes and resources, but some of the largest (Grand Central, New York, at $9.3 million; Philadelphia, $6.4 million; Baltimore, $1.7 million; Buffalo and Seattle, $1.4 million each) confirm that substantial sums of money are involved in developing this model of urban renewal. Enthusiasts argue that BIDs should be judged by their results, and claim that these typically will include a cleaner, friendlier, and safer urban space, a reduction in crime, and reinvigoration of the economic life of hitherto depressed areas. Sceptics point to higher property values and argue that BIDs may result in a form of gentrification which merely dispossesses and displaces the inner-city poor. See also CONCENTRIC ZONE THEORY; URBAN SOCIOLOGY.

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C

canonical analysis

See MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS.

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CAPI (Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing)

See SURVEY, SOCIAL SURVEY.

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capital

According to modern economics, one of four factors of production—the others being land, labour, and enterprise. That capital is not, first and foremost, a sum of money, was the great discovery of early political economy, which stressed that expansion of the wealth of a society lay in expansion of its productive powers. Capital consists of tools, machinery, plant, and any other humanly made material or equipment which, not being used for immediate consumption, contributes to or enhances productive work. Since Adam Smith it has also been customary to distinguish between circulating capital and fixed capital. The former is used to purchase commodities, chiefly raw materials and labour effort, and sell them again as a product at a profit. The latter, for example machines and tools, yields a profit without circulating further.
According to Karl Marx, capital accumulation supplies the dynamic specific to the capitalist mode of production, or modern capitalist system. It depends on the exploitation of workers through the extraction of surplus value (see LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE). In Capital (1867), Marx offers a critique of political economy, arguing that, although this process appears to be a relation between things (commodities), it is in fact a relation between human beings. Furthermore, there is a logic to the accumulation process which will result in the concentration of capital in a few hands, simultaneously with proletarianization and immiseration of the bulk of the labour-force.
Mainstream economists and sociologists continue to regard capital formation and accumulation as necessary to any form of industrialization. Moreover, because the development of capitalism has proceeded somewhat differently from Marx's expectation, it has become necessary, even for Marxists, to distinguish between various capital functions—in particular between capital ownership and managerial control. A related notion is that of different capital fractions, for example finance capital as against industrial capital. See also CORPORATION; CULTURAL CAPITAL; LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE; MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION.

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capital, cultural

See CULTURAL CAPITAL.

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capital, decomposition of

See DECOMPOSITION OF CAPITAL.

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capital accumulation

Within Marxism, this is the central dynamic of capitalist development and refers to the process whereby capital is expanded through the production, appropriation, and realization of surplus value. It cannot be understood apart from capitalist relations of production. In conventional economics, it is also an important component of economic growth, but refers to a country's net investment in fixed assets: that is, equipment, machinery, inventories, buildings, social overhead capital, and overseas assets.

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capital-intensive production

This refers to techniques of production, and represents the proportion of capital (machinery, equipment, inventories) relative to labour, measured by the capital–labour ratio. The term is frequently used in the development literature to characterize the nature of the industrialization process and to examine its consequences for growth in employment vis-à-vis output.

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capitalism

A system of wage-labour and commodity production for sale, exchange, and profit, rather than for the immediate need of the producers. Plentiful examples of capitalism in the pre-modern era exist but, typically, capitalist exchanges were restrained by political and religious control. What has impressed students of modernity is the huge and largely unregulated dominance of capitalist enterprise (with its related monetary and market networks) across political and cultural frontiers. Capitalism provided the principal, but not the only means of industrialization, and should not be confused with it.
The list of defining attributes of capitalism still derives largely from the pioneering writings of Karl Marx and Max Weber. Marx took the production relations of capitalism as its most essential feature. Following Adam Smith he distinguished the intrinsic use of commodities from their exchange value in the market. Capital is created by purchasing commodities (raw material, machinery, labour) and combining them into a new commodity with an exchange value higher than the sum of the original purchase. This is made possible by the use of labour-power which, under capitalism, has itself become a commodity. According to Marx, labour-power is used exploitatively: its exchange value, as reflected in the wage, is less than the value it produces for the capitalist. The difference, so-called surplus value, is retained by the capitalist and added to the stock of capital. The cycle recurs ad infinitum and is the basis of class conflict. But Marx's identification of capitalism with exploitation relies on the thesis that labour is the source of all value—and therefore profit. This is contested in mainstream economics and even by many Marxists.
Weber also recognized the importance of wage labour but considered market exchange as the defining characteristic of capitalism. Thus, in the modern West, capitalism typically means calculating rationality, accumulation of wealth through deferred gratification, and the separation of economic and social relations. The other institutions necessary to capitalism include: private property, formally free labour, a network of markets for raw materials, labour produce, and an extensive monetary system. Weber's critics argue that, unlike Marx, he fails to specify the underlying mechanisms which weld these institutional features into a functioning whole.
The concept of capitalism now has little analytic value by itself because of the extremely wide expanse of historical time over which it might be applied. The insight to be gained from describing both mid-Victorian and late twentieth-century Britain as capitalist is limited. The same applies to its wide geographical and cultural scope, since it is not self-evidently helpful to explain the momentum of contemporary societies as different as Japan, Sweden, and Australia, simply in terms of their possession of a capitalist system of production. More precision can be gained by specifying types of capitalism according to either qualitative or quantitative factors.
The aim of qualitative classification is to show that capital can be accumulated by several different methods. Thus mercantile capitalism is a system of trading for profit, typically in commodities produced by non-capitalist production methods. Agrarian capitalism is exemplified by the activities of the British landowning gentry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The agrarian revolution they oversaw transformed a system of production for subsistence into the production of cash crops for the market, the surplus being made possible by reformed and mechanized cultivation. Industrial capitalism is capitalism's classic or stereotypical form. It entails manufacture by means of a factory system with an intricate division of labour within and between work processes; the creation of designated workplaces and factories; de-skilling of traditional handicraft skills; and the routinization of work tasks. Financial or pecuniary capitalism subordinates the capitalist productive process to the circulation of money and monetary assets and hence to the accumulation of money profits as such. It presupposes a highly developed banking system, an equity market, and corporate holdings of wealth through share ownership. As Thorstein Veblen pointed out, whole industrial complexes as well as buildings and land, become the subject of speculative profit and loss. State capitalism occurs where some element of government-created or government-led enterprise has been necessary to initiate both industrialism and capitalism. Even in nominally communist economies, or in the developing world, state enterprise finds itself beholden to the pressures of international trade and finance, or the managerial constraints of capitalist production methods.
Quantitative classification aims to reflect the extensive variation in the scale of capital accumulation and in the concentration of the economic power of capital. Petty accumulation is a network of individual producers or artisans, typically found at the outset of capitalist history, but far from uncommon in the modern (especially the developing) world. Formally, it means that the owner of capital is also the worker, and the system is nominally classless. Entrepreneurial capitalism exists when capital accumulation makes possible a division between owners and employees. The entrepreneurial business class typical of this phase consists, in theory, of individuals who wholly or substantially own and also control (manage) their undertakings. Corporate or monopoly capitalism is the outgrowth of shareholding, limited individual liability, and the concentration of capital into large impersonally owned monopolistic or oligopolistic holdings through banks and finance houses. It is identified with the growth of corporations and a division of labour, supposedly through shareholding, between owners and managers.
Despite the long history of capitalism, it is often claimed that commodity production and unregulated exchange are inimical to social order, most notoriously in Marx's (unfulfilled) prediction that the antagonistic class relations of capitalism would eventuate in its political overthrow through violent revolution. But conservative critics, too, have argued that the calculating behaviour encouraged by the capitalist marketplace would cause disorder through the devaluation of moral traditions. Despite these views, instability would seem not to be a defining characteristic of capitalist systems, and the reason would seem to lie in the specifics of the wide range of cultures in which nominally capitalist production relations have been embedded.
Tom Bottomore's Theories of Modern Capitalism (1985) is a good introductory overview of this vast topic. For a provocative and detailed analysis of the contemporary international financial scene see
, Casino Capitalism (1986)
. Strange's observations suggest that many sociological models of capitalist exchanges may in fact be rather selective, referring mainly to entrepreneurial or corporate industrial capitalism, and ignoring the vast speculative activity associated with modern money and commodity markets. See also ENTREPRENEUR; LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE.

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capitalism, disorganized

See DISORGANIZED CAPITALISM.

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capitalism, spirit of

See PROTESTANT ETHIC THESIS.

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capitalism, state

See STATE CAPITALISM.

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capitalist, capitalist class

See BOURGEOISIE.

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carceral organization

See INCARCERATION.

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career

A patterned sequence of occupational roles through which individuals move over the course of a working life, implying increased prestige and other rewards, although not excluding downward occupational and social mobility.
The sociological concept of career began its life in the study of occupations conducted by sociologists such as Oswald Hall and Everett Hughes at Chicago in the 1940s, but was further refined by sociologists within the tradition of symbolic interactionism, and made applicable to areas outside of the simply occupational—suggesting, for example, that there are deviance careers. Thus, Howard Becker in Outsiders (1963) applied the concept to the stages of ‘becoming a marijuana smoker’, whereby smokers learned the technique, learned to perceive the effects, and finally learned to enjoy the experience. Similarly, Erving Goffman in Asylums (1961) discussed the ‘moral career’ of the mental patient, again in three phases: pre-patient, patient, and post-patient. Goffman's work, however, was much more concerned with the shifts in subjective images of the sense of self experienced by patients: how, for example, they were stripped of an earlier sense of identity when others (‘the circuit of agents’) started to define them as mad; how this self became mortified on arrival in a mental hospital; and how patients became charged with building a new imagery of the self and a new identity. Both these studies are also classic instances of labelling theory.
In studies of careers the aim is to uncover the recurrent or typical contingencies and problems awaiting someone who continues in a course of action. There is a contrast to be drawn between the objective career line, in which the recurrent problems of adjustment facing someone on a particular path of change can be predicted (for example, the stages involved in becoming a student, a doctor, or a member of a religious sect); and the subjective career or interpretive acts taken by people as they move through certain changes. Goffman highlighted this contrast in Asylums, insisting that the value of the career concept is its very two-sidedness where ‘one side is linked to internal matters held dearly and closely, such as image of self and felt identity; [and] the other side concerns official position, jural relations and style of life, and is part of a publicly accessible institutional complex’.

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career mobility

See MOBILITY, SOCIAL.

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cargo cult

See MILLENARIANISM.

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cartel

See MONOPOLY.

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case

Any single unit selected for observation or analysis by a researcher. For example, in a study of the division of household tasks among eighty couples, each couple would constitute a separate case. Similarly, in a sample survey, individual respondents or interviewees are cases. Cross-national comparative analysis might feature nations as cases. In contingency tables, the total number of cases is conventionally indicated by a lower-case letter n, as in ‘n = 1,350’.

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case-history

A sociological method analogous to medical case-histories, tracing the career of a phenomenon through one example or many, which enables comparative and longitudinal analysis. The extended history of a selected case may be one of a number in a case-study research project, providing an enormously detailed and substantiated account, with reference to some specific characteristic or experience. The most common type is the life-history of an individual which, despite its title, is necessarily selective, giving a post hoc account of the antecedents, causes, consequences, contextual factors, perceptions, and attitudes associated with some key feature of the person or their experience—such as the fact of their being an immigrant, criminal, or charismatic leader. By their nature, such case-histories give greater emphasis to personal characteristics than to structural factors, and to specific processes rather than general patterns. Case-histories sometimes take as their unit of study a group, organization, or community, and are thus closely allied to the case-study. A single case-history is often used to generate hypotheses for further study. Case-histories are also used extensively in psychiatry and social work, and in criminology and clinical psychology, employing the skills and methods of the respective disciplines.

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case-study, case-study method

A research design that takes as its subject a single case or a few selected examples of a social entity—such as communities, social groups, employers, events, life-histories, families, work teams, roles, or relationships—and employs a variety of methods to study them. The criteria which inform the selection of the case or cases for a study are a crucial part of the research design and its theoretical rigour. Case-studies include descriptive reports on typical, illustrative, or deviant examples; descriptions of good practice in policy research; evaluations of policies after implementation in an organization; studies that focus on extreme or strategic cases; the rigorous test of a well-defined hypothesis through the use of carefully selected contrasting cases; and studies of natural experiments. The methods used to assemble information are determined in part by ease of access and whether the study is accepted by the subjects. Participant and non-participant observation, unstructured interviews with key informants, analysis of documentary evidence (including personal documents) and information in administrative records, content analysis of key documents issued by the study subject, analysis of significant events occurring within the research period, and sample surveys have all been used to varying degrees in case-study research. There are no standard formats for reporting the methods used, the data collected, and the results from case-studies, but quantitative analysis is less common than in survey reports. See also CASE-HISTORY; COMMUNITY STUDIES.

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casework

The earliest and possibly most widely discussed method of social work, pioneered originally by Octavia Hill in the London Charity Organization Society (1869), but given its first systematic statement by
in her book Social Diagnosis (1917)
. Whilst an emphasis is placed upon meeting the needs and solving the problems of the individual person, and there is a broad affinity to psychoanalysis, casework harbours a range of different theoretical traditions. It is one of the major methods of social work—the others being group work and community work. The former involves the social worker in the activities and situation of a small group of clients facing common or similar difficulties; the latter places the social worker in a neighbourhood area, to act as a resource for, and mobilizer of, local activists.

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cash crop, cash-crop production

A cash crop is a horticultural product that is grown exclusively for sale on a money market, rather than for subsistence or barter. Cash-crop production may entail monoculture (the production of a single crop for the market), with the result that farmers are dependent on the success of this crop to generate sufficient income to cover their subsistence needs.

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cash nexus

The reduction (under capitalism) of all human relationships, but especially relations of production, to monetary exchange. The term occurs most frequently in the writings of Karl Marx and is still used primarily by Marxists. See also CAPITAL.

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caste

An institution of considerable internal complexity, which has been oversimplified by those seeking an ideal type of rigid hierarchical social stratification, based on extreme closure criteria. In Max Weber's writings it was synonymous with ethnic status stratification and constituted one end of the continuum which contrasted status honour stratification with commercial classes and the market. Possibly the clearest definition is that proffered by André Béteille, who describes a caste as ‘a small and named group of persons characterized by endogamy, hereditary membership and a specific style of life which sometimes includes the pursuit by tradition of a particular occupation and is usually associated with a more or less distinct ritual status in a hierarchical system, based on concepts of purity and pollution’ (Caste, Class and Power, 1965).
Caste orders the lives of Indian Hindus and has as its basis the fivefold varna division embracing Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, Shudra, and Untouchable. Within each varna there exist myriad jati, which are small endogamous groups, tied to a defining occupation, based in a village or group of villages, and which provide for the element of mobility within a system where otherwise birth determines social rank.
The varna system provides the system of values, the jati its functional organization and practice. Jatis may seek promotion within the caste hierarchy by adopting the practices of higher varna, which can result in promotion within their varna but not between varna, a process known as sanskritization. It is believed that mobility between varna can only be achieved through rebirth, where the successful practice of the caste code or dharma earns for the individual an increased karma and therefore higher status at rebirth.
The major dividing-line between and within the castes centres around the rules of pollution. These affect commensality (sharing and preparing of food), intermarriage, and any form of social intercourse. Since pollution of food is most likely, the higher varna tend towards vegetarianism, and are also teetotal. For this reason too, meat consumption is gradated, with distinctions being made between mutton, pork, and beef. Spatial segregation is a natural consequence of the jati system, and the segmentation inherent in the system and its attendant rules are overseen by a caste court. The caste system has been able to assimilate non-caste, non-Hindu outsiders very successfully.
Since independence in 1947, the Indian state has attempted to break down caste divisions, although in practice caste retains an important role in the social structure. Some sociologists have attempted (controversially) to extend the term beyond the Indian situation, and to apply it to the analysis of the South African system of apartheid, and even to the system of racial segregation in some parts of the United States during the twentieth century. See also CASTE SCHOOL OF RACE RELATIONS; HINDUISM.

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Caste School of Race Relations

The label sometimes attached to those authors who applied the term caste to the separation between Whites and Blacks in the United States. The most notable publications in this mould are
's ‘American Caste and Class’ (American Journal of Sociology, 1936)
,
's An American Dilemma (1944)
, and
's Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937)
.
This interpretation of American race relations provoked a furious (though fairly short-lived) controversy. Myrdal defended his analysis by claiming that ‘the scientifically important difference between the terms “caste” and “class”… is … a relatively large difference in freedom of movement between groups’. He also disputed whether (as critics of the School tended to claim) the Hindu caste system was characterized by less fluidity and less conflict than relations between Whites and Blacks in the United States.
The most sustained criticism of the school is Oliver C. Cox's Caste, Class and Race (1948), in which the author points to a fundamental difference between the Indian and American situations, in that caste divisions in the former are a coherent system based on the principle of inequality, whereas the ‘colour bar’ in America actually contradicted the egalitariany principles of the system within which it occurred.

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categoric variable

See VARIABLE.

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category

A key aspect of the measurement process involves placing observations of measurements into groups or categories on the basis of unequivocally shared features. Hence a category is a homogeneous grouping of data. For example, the variable ‘sex’ would have two categories, male and female; the variable ‘social class’ might have three categories, upper, middle, and working. In the former case the rule for assigning cases or observations to the appropriate category is relatively simple. In the latter, the rules would be more complex, and dependent upon the class theory being used. See also CODING; RULES OF CORRESPONDENCE.

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catharsis

Literally ‘cleansing’ or ‘purging’, psychodynamically the term refers to a release of emotions that reduces underlying tensions and anxieties. Sigmund Freud initially suggested that catharsis could be accomplished through the simple re-enactment of the distressing early experiences that occasioned subsequent pathology. Later he argued that active processes of repression inhibited cathartic re-enactments. See also PSYCHOANALYSIS.

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cathexis

A charge of psychic energy. The term is particularly associated with Sigmund Freud, who used it to refer to the investment of libidinal (sexual) energy in ideas, persons, or things. These ‘object-cathexes’ of the id were counterposed by anti-cathexes—forces employed by the ego in the process of repression. See also PSYCHOANALYSIS.

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CATI (Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing)

See SURVEY, SOCIAL SURVEY.

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causal modelling

A causal model is an abstract quantitative representation of real-world dynamics. Hence, a causal model attempts to describe the causal and other relationships, among a set of variables. The best-known form of causal modelling is path analysis, which was originally developed in genetics, but was adopted as a technique in the 1960s by American sociologists such as Otis Dudley Duncan. Most causal modelling is associated with survey research (see the classic text by
, Causal Inferences in Nonexperimental Research, 1964
).
Essentially, causal models are based on structural equations of the form z = b_1x + b_2y, and are analysed using regression techniques. However, a simpler way to understand the principle of causal models is to think of them as hypotheses about the presence, sign, and direction of influence for the relations of all pairs of variables in a set. Usually these relations are mapped in diagrams or flow graphs as in the simple example shown below.

Even when there are only three variables under examination many different models of their relationship are possible. Thus, investigating all the different possible models is an important step in the analysis of data, and in linking sociological theory to empirical research.
Causal models incorporate the idea of multiple causality, that is, there can be more than one cause for any particular effect. For example, how a person votes may be related to social class, age, sex, ethnicity, and so on. Moreover, some of the independent or explanatory variables could be related to one another. For example, ethnicity and class may be related, so that the effect of ethnicity on vote is both direct and indirect (through class)—as shown in Figure 3. This example also serves to show the importance of thinking about such models before data are collected. Theorizing in this way tells us what data we need to collect to test our model. However, we are interested not only in what affects voting, but also how different variables affect it. For example, does sex have a positive or negative effect on vote? Put this way the question seems a strange one, but if (say) we were to ask whether being female makes it more or less likely that a person votes Republican, this would involve assigning a positive dimension to the relationship if the former were true and a negative dimension if the latter were the case. We could equally ask questions such as whether age or class or sex was more important in its effect on voting. Causal analysis would also be able to show the combined impact of age, class, and sex on vote. That is, we could say how much of the variance in vote is accounted for by the other three variables.

FIGURE 3: Diagram showing hypothetical direct and indirect (through class) effects of ethnicity on voting behaviour

At best causal models usually account for only a proportion (usually no more than 20 or 30 per cent) of the variance in a dependent variable. For this reason causal models include a residual or error term to account for the variance left unexplained. There are, after all, many other social characteristics which affect how people vote, apart from those of age, sex, and class. It is also important to note that the causal model assumes a hierarchy—age, sex, and class cause vote, but vote does not cause age, sex, and class. Finally, it should be noted that causal models do not prove that one variable is caused by the effect of others. All the model can do is to indicate whether it is compatible with the data; and, if so, what the strengths of the causal effects are, given the model being used.
Herbert Asher's Causal Modelling (2nd edn., 1990) gives a short—but highly technical—introduction to the logic and tools of causal models. See also MULTI-LEVEL MODELS; MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS.

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cause, causal explanation

In non-specialist contexts, to ask for the cause of some particular happening is to ask what made it happen, or brought it about. To give a causal explanation is to answer such questions, usually by specifying some prior event, condition, or state of affairs without which the problematic event would not have occurred. In more specialist, scientific or philosophical contexts, the concepts of cause and causal explanation have been the focus of sustained attempts to achieve analytical rigour. Medieval European thought on this topic was dominated by Aristotle's doctrine of the ‘four causes’. These were efficient cause (roughly corresponding to the commonsense view just outlined); material cause (the nature or composition of a being); formal cause (its form or structure); and, fourthly, final cause (its goal or purpose).
Advocates of the scientific revolution which took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were prone to anti-Aristotelian polemics. In the increasingly successful mechanical view of nature there was no place for explanations in terms of goals or purposes, except in the domain of human intentional activity. Indeed, some radical advocates of mechanical explanation (for example Thomas Hobbes) extended its scope even to this latter domain. Empiricists, in particular, were hostile to all attempts at explanation in terms of supposed entities or properties not accessible to observational or experimental determination. The search for not only final but also material and formal cause, as these were commonly understood, should be abandoned in favour of a programme of explanation in terms of efficient causality.
Empiricism became the dominant philosophical representation of scientific method, and it has been particularly influential in shaping popular views of the nature of science. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume is generally credited with the empiricist view of efficient causality as a regular association, or ‘constant conjunction’ of phenomena in our experience. If events of one type (B) are regularly preceded by events of another type (A), then we may identify A as the cause of B. But this drastic narrowing-down of causal explanation to what could be established by the evidence of the senses only served to underline the gap between scientific claims and their basis in evidence. Hume famously posed the intractable problem of induction; namely, how do we know that regularities in our experience so far will be continued into the future? Or, more generally, how can we make justifiable inferences from our finite evidence to the universal claims embodied in causal laws? Hume appeared content to acknowledge that no such rational justification could be found, but empiricist philosophy since Hume has been littered with failed attempts to solve this problem. It should be noted that, in the absence of a solution to the problem of induction, empiricist philosophy can give no rational justification for counterfactuals, scientific prediction, or for the application of scientific knowledge in new technologies.
But there are other difficulties faced by the empiricist view of causality, now commonly referred to as the ‘covering law’ account (that is, the event to be explained is shown to be ‘covered’ by a law linking events of that type with events of some other type). The most obvious of these is that events may be regularly associated with one another without one being the cause of the other (in the sense of bringing it about, or making it happen). The association may be coincidental; or, more likely, there may be some more complicated causal connection between them (such as that both are effects of some so-far undetected common cause). A related problem is that even where the evidence suggests a direct causal relation between two phenomena, it may not be possible to establish which is the cause, and which is the effect.
Another problem for the empiricist view of causality is that constant conjunctions in the flow of our experience of nature are actually quite unusual. For example, seeds commonly germinate as temperature rises in the spring. However, they do not always do so. Empiricist philosophers respond to this kind of problem by making the account more complicated; several conditions (such as sufficient moisture, changes in day-length, past exposure of the seed to sub-zero temperature, and so forth) may have to be specified in order that the constant conjunction may be stated as a universal law. Which of these conditions we call the cause will depend on the context of the inquiry, as will those which may be regarded as given, or background conditions. It should be noted, however, that the process of drawing up this list of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions will involve experimental methods which are not applicable in many fields of inquiry, including (many would argue) large parts of social science. Here, scientists working under the influence of empiricist philosophy have devised substitutes for experimentation, usually involving analysis of statistical relationships.
Yet another difficulty with the empiricist view of causality is that it does not adequately represent a large and important part of what scientists take themselves to be doing when they search for explanations. For example, observed regularities governing the germination of seeds may be only the starting-point for a scientific investigation of what makes seeds germinate. This investigation, for example, would take us into the internal structure of the seed, its tissues and cellular structure, the genetic mechanisms which regulate the secretion of growth-hormones, and the biochemistry of their action on cell-nuclei. Most of the great conceptual innovations of modern science—gravitation, atomic theory, natural selection, quantum mechanics, and so on—have consisted in postulating underlying mechanisms which explain observable regularities. Contrary to empiricist rhetoric, therefore, material and formal causes continue to play a major role in science. Most modern anti-empiricist philosophers agree on this state of affairs—although realists and conventionalists disagree about how to interpret the situation. The former tend to respect the achievements of science but try to develop more appropriate accounts of the rationality of causal explanation than those offered by the empiricists. Conventionalists tend to see the gap between the evidential basis on the one hand, and the bold and speculative claims of science on the other, as grounds for a more sceptical view of scientific knowledge-claims, seeing these as socio-culturally relative, or as shaped by vested interests.
In the human sciences, the philosophical influence of empiricism has been very strong, especially in Britain and the United States. In the absence of any general utility of experimental method, the search for causal explanation has tended to take the form of statistical analysis of large-scale data-sets. Though methods of data collection and analysis have become extremely sophisticated, it is arguable that the concepts of causality commonly involved still suffer from the general limitations of the empiricist covering law model. However, such methods are also criticized in some quarters, as inappropriate to the distinctive subject-matter of the social sciences. Human social action is purposive and symbolically meaningful. This is the one residual domain in which Aristotelian final causes have not been (and, these critiques argue, should not be) driven out by the advance of modern scientific method. Various traditions of interpretive sociology and anthropology, which are rooted historically in German neo-Kantianism, take this view. In its more extreme forms, interpretivism denies the applicability of causal explanation and so of quantitative methods in the social sciences, favouring instead so-called qualitative methods aimed at interpretive understanding of social communication. See also CAUSAL MODELLING; CONVENTIONALISM; DEPENDENT VARIABLE; INDEPENDENT VARIABLE; INTERPRETATION; REALISM; SEQUENCE ANALYSIS.

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cell, cell entry

See CONTINGENCY TABLE.

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census

A complete and individual enumeration of all cases of the type specified within defined boundaries at a single point in time; a 100 per cent count of some social entity or type of event. In contrast to a survey, in which only part of a population is included, a census yields cross-sectional data, ranging from a simple head-count to more sophisticated information, on every member (in theory at least) of a population.
In order to achieve such complete coverage, national censuses usually require compulsion, an obligation to participate and co-operate in providing the information required, and are therefore the preserve of national governments. National censuses have been undertaken only relatively recently (the first British Census took place in 1801).
Most countries carry out a population and housing census every ten years with compulsory participation to ensure total coverage and a complete head-count. Population data in inter-censal years must then be inferred from inter-censal projections or from sample surveys. Some countries also have other national censuses, for example of employment or business activities, or industrial output. Censuses may be carried out annually, or at periodic intervals, instead of every ten years—although there are obvious constraints of logistics and finance. In recent years, therefore, there have been experiments in applying sampling techniques to national censuses. What this usually means is that the 100 per cent count is limited to identifying all relevant cases, combined with a questionnaire survey of a specified proportion of all cases, ranging from 10 per cent to 50 per cent—in effect a census followed immediately by a sample survey. Other bodies that attempt censuses—for example of all members of an association—may achieve high levels of co-operation, but are unlikely to achieve complete coverage due to the absence of any compulsion to participate, resulting in some degree of non-response.

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census follow-up survey

In some countries, additional sample surveys are carried out immediately after a 100 per cent census of the population, and using the census returns as the sampling frame to identify a random sample of the total (adult) population or else sub-groups within it (such as all persons with higher education qualifications). Response to follow-up surveys is usually voluntary whereas most countries ensure that participation in the population census is compulsory. Follow-up surveys may be postal surveys, if large samples are involved, or personal interview surveys, if they focus on smaller sub-groups. Follow-up surveys provide substantive additional information to that collected in the census, unlike post-enumeration surveys. See
, Secondary Analysis in Social Research (1982)
.

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census quality check

See POST-ENUMERATION SURVEY.

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central business district (CBD)

See CONCENTRIC ZONE THEORY.

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central life interest

The motivations which lead workers, most of whom are seen as alienated, to seek either extrinsic or intrinsic satisfaction from their jobs. Used mainly by American sociologist Robert Dubin and his students in the study of the world-views of industrial workers. See also WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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central organizing trait

Any characteristic which has a strong effect on the way that one judges a person. Thus, for example, one's evaluation of the other may be greatly influenced by the fact that she or he is a member of a particular ethnic group or has a particular occupation.

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central tendency (measures of)

A statistical term applied to the central value in a frequency distribution—commonly referred to as the average. Depending on the level of measurement of the variable (nominal, ordinal, interval, or ratio), and the shape of the distribution (normal or otherwise), various measures of central tendency may be calculated. The mean is the most well-known, and is obtained by adding together all the individual values in a set of measurements, then dividing the sum by the total number of cases in the set—to give the average age, height, temperature, or whatever. However, if a particular distribution is highly skewed (that is, if there are several numbers of extreme value at one or other end of the series), then it may make more sense to calculate the median. The median is literally the middle value in a series of numbers, and may be used in place of the mean when, for example, average income is calculated, since the distribution of income is generally highly skewed. The third measure of central tendency, the mode, is used to describe the most frequently occurring category of a non-numeric variable (for example voting intention). It is less frequently employed than the mean or median.
Any elementary statistical textbook will supply formulae for the calculation of measures of central tendency. The following examples may help to illustrate the principles outlined above. If, for example, a poll of voters in a small town suggests that 40 per cent will vote Republican, 35 per cent will vote Democrat, while 25 per cent will not vote at all, then we may say that the typical voter among these townspeople is a Republican. This is the category which has the largest representation—the mode. (A distribution with two modal categories is termed bimodal.) By comparison, the median value in a series is the middle case; or, more precisely, the point which neither exceeds nor is exceeded by more than 50 per cent of the total observations. For example, a number of students might be tested in an examination and receive the following grades: Joan—B, Bill—C, James—D, Brett—F, Joyce—F. In this distribution, the middle case is James, since he has two students ranking above and two below him. The median mark is therefore D. The mean is the measurement of central tendency most people have in mind when they talk about ‘the average’. For example, we may record the number of times a particular university professor at his or her desk is interrupted by telephone calls each day for a week, and obtain the following data: Monday = 4, Tuesday = 6, Wednesday = 4, Thursday = 4, Friday = 2, Saturday = 4. The average number of interruptions per day is therefore 24 (total number of scores in the set) divided by 6 (the number of cases)—giving a mean of 4 calls each day. See also SKEWNESS.

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centre–periphery model

The centre–periphery (or core–periphery) model is a spatial metaphor which describes and attempts to explain the structural relationship between the advanced or metropolitan ‘centre’ and a less developed ‘periphery’, either within a particular country, or (more commonly) as applied to the relationship between capitalist and developing societies. The former usage is common in political geography, political sociology, and studies of labour-markets.
In sociology, however, centre–periphery models are most likely to be encountered in studies of economic underdevelopment and dependency and tend to draw on the Marxist tradition of analysis. The use of the centre–periphery model in this context assumes that the world system of production and distribution is the unit of analysis. It also assumes that underdevelopment is not a simple descriptive term that refers to a backward, traditional economy, but rather a concept rooted in a general theory of imperialism.
According to the centre–periphery model, underdevelopment is not the result of tradition, but is produced as part of the process necessary for the development of capitalism in the central capitalist countries—and its continued reproduction on a world scale. The theory assumes a central core of capitalist countries, in which the economy is determined by market forces, there is a high organic composition of capital, and wage-levels are relatively high. In the peripheral countries, on the other hand, there is a low organic composition of capital and wage-levels do not meet the cost of reproduction of labour. Indeed, the cost of reproduction of the labour-force may be subsidized by non-capitalist economies, particularly rural subsistence production. Likewise, in peripheral economies, production and distribution may be determined largely by non-market forces such as kinship or patron-client relations.
The centre–periphery model thus suggests that the global economy is characterized by a structured relationship between economic centres which, by using military, political, and trade power, extract an economic surplus from the subordinate peripheral countries. One major factor in this is the inequality between wage-levels between core and periphery, which make it profitable for capitalist enterprises to locate part or all of their production in underdeveloped regions. The extraction of profit depends on that part of the cost of the reproduction of the labour-force that is not met by wages being met in the non-capitalist sector. Thus, according to proponents of the core–periphery model, the appearance that capitalism is developing traditional and backward societies by locating enterprises in underdeveloped regions masks the structural relationship by which capital develops and prospers at the expense (or progressive underdevelopment) of non-capitalist economies.
The centre–periphery model has led to two main debates. The first concerns the elaboration of a theory of modes of production, which attempts to conceptualize different economic forms in terms of the relationship between production and distribution in each mode. The other tries to tease out the exact links between particular areas of the centre and periphery through examining the articulation of different modes of production. Both debates may often appear to be excessively theoretical—or at least of little practical significance. The centre-periphery model is also implicated in various types of world-system theories (see, for example,
, Dependent Accumulation, 1978
, and
, Unequal Development, 1976
). See also ECONOMIC DUALISM; NEO-COLONIALISM.

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chain employment

See MIGRATION, SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF.

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chain migration

See MIGRATION, SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF.

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change, social change

One of the central problems of sociology. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the first attempts at sociological analysis were prompted by the need to explain two great waves of change that were sweeping across Europe: namely, industrialization, and the expansion of democracy and human rights in the wake of the American and French Revolutions. Auguste Comte, in his theory of social dynamics, proposed that societies progressed through a series of predictable stages based on the development of human knowledge. Herbert Spencer offered a theory of change that was evolutionary, based on population growth and structural differentiation. Karl Marx contended that the most significant social changes were revolutionary in nature, and were brought about by the struggle for supremacy between economic classes. The general tendency of nineteenth-century theories of social change was towards historicism and utopianism.
This century, theories of social change have proliferated and become more complex, without ever wholly transcending these early formulations. In the modern world we are aware that society is never static, and that social, political, and cultural changes occur constantly. Change can be initiated by governments, through legislative or executive action (for example, legislating for equal pay or declaring a war); by citizens organized in social movements (for example trade unionism, feminism); by diffusion from one culture to another (as in military conquest, migration, colonialism); or by the intended or unintended consequences of technology. Some of the most dramatic social changes in modern times have been initiated by such inventions as the motor car, antibiotics, television, and computers. Change can also come through the impact of environmental factors such as drought, famine, and international shifts in economic or political advantage.
Sociologists have explored the question of change largely by the close analysis of particular change processes, and by refining definitions. Social change theories now encompass a very broad range of phenomena, including short-term and long-term, large-scale and small-scale changes, from the level of global society to the level of the family. Dramatic structural and economic changes such as occurred in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s are only one part of the field. Sociologists are also interested in changes that affect norms, values, behaviour, cultural meanings, and social relationships.
One legacy of Saint-Simon and Comte, as refracted through the work of Émile Durkheim, is the theory of functionalism associated with the names of Talcott Parsons and Wilbert E. Moore. If society is viewed as a complex and interconnected pattern of functions, change can be explained as an epiphenomenon of the constant search for equilibrium. For example, mass unemployment may generate a welfare system, or racial conflict may generate legislative action. The ramifications of any particular social change are endless and unpredictable, but all can be understood as social adjustments to some failure or ‘dysfunction’ within the social organism.
A systematic functionalist attempt to specify the structural determinants of change can be found in the work of the American sociologist Neil J. Smelser. In an empirical study of Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959), he analysed the interrelationship between the growth and organization of the cotton industry and the structure of the family, during the industrialization process in nineteenth-century England. In this early work, a model is proposed to explain the differentiation of social systems, based on an analysis of the way in which these two particular systems responded to forces for change. In his subsequent writings, for example Theory of Collective Behaviour (1963), Smelser both refined this model and applied it to a variety of types of collective action. He conceptualizes social change as a ‘value-added’ process, in which a number of conditions or stages are sequentially combined, before eventually producing a particular social change. This approach minimalizes, but does not wholly ignore, the more proximate causes of social change. A good summary can be found in the essay
‘Toward a General Theory of Social Change’ (in his Essays in Sociological Explanation, 1968)
. More recently, his theory of social change has been applied in a study of working-class education in England, in Social Paralysis and Social Change (1991).
Herbert Spencer's evolutionary view of change has its modern descendant in the discipline of sociobiology. Researchers like Edward O. Wilson have presented a view of society that stresses adaptation, but locates the process far more deeply in our genetic inheritance. Sociobiologists argue that we humans are—individually and socially—products of millions of years of adaptive survival strategies. A society can change in positive (adaptive) or negative (non-adaptive) ways, and these choices will seal its fate: thus welfare, or affirmative action, or deficit spending might be good for some, but bad for all. Social survival is the key to the consequences, if not to the purposes, of social change.
The functionalist, evolutionary, and sociobiological conceptions of social change all have conservative implications, in so far as they stress the needs of society, and the protection of a stable status quo above the desires of individuals.
The Marxist and conflict theory traditions have developed along different lines, although they share important underlying assumptions with functionalism. The Marxist theory of change is more pro-active, focusing on the ability of human beings to influence their own fates through political action. Conflict theories in general—not necessarily Marxist—explain social change as the outcome of a struggle for advantage between classes, races, or other groups, rather than a search for consensus. Daniel Bell's Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) gives an interesting turn to the conflict perspective by suggesting that change in the modern world arises out of the tension between three ‘realms’ of social reality which operate on different principles and move towards different goals: the techno-economic structure (science, industry, and the economy); the political system; and culture. Nineteenth-century theorists saw change as a total, homogeneous process, where every aspect of society would change together. We now know that, as Bell's model suggests, change is often uneven and partial.
Cultural lag is a commonly observed phenomenon, where the development of culture falls out of step with developments in technology, politics, or economics.
The problems presented by the empirical study of social change are formidable. Historical data are invariably incomplete or biased, and long-term studies of ongoing change are expensive and difficult. Official statistics, repeated surveys (like the Harris or Gallup Polls), and panel studies are among the tools the student of social change must use.
The nineteenth-century equation of change with progress is no longer widely accepted. Change may be regressive, or destructive, or confused by cultural lag. Ulrich Beck's account of the emergence of ‘reflexive modernization’ states that advanced industrial societies are increasingly characterized by ‘manufactured uncertainty’ or risk. It remains an open question to what extent sociologists can explain or predict social change, and therefore to what extent societies can ever reliably initiate or control change in directions deemed socially desirable, or in any direction at all.

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charisma

In his famous typology of forms of authority (or ‘non-coercive compliance’), Max Weber distinguishes the traditional, charismatic, and rational-legal types. The first of these depends on the leader delivering a traditional message or holding a traditionally sanctioned office. By contrast, charismatic authority disrupts tradition, and rests only on support for the person of the leader. Weber defines charisma as ‘a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as leader’ (Economy and Society, 1922). The concept has been widely used in both religious and political sociology (case-studies are reported in the essay on
‘Charismatic Leadership’ reproduced in , Scholarship and Partisanship, 1971)
. Archetypical charismatic figures include Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler. In Weber's view, most previous societies were characterized by traditional authority structures, periodically punctured by outbursts of charisma. Although the concept is intended to highlight certain aspects of the relationship between leader and followers, it does tend to point also to an irrational element in the behaviour of the latter, and on that basis has been subject to some criticism (see
, Max Weber, 1960
).
Charisma is therefore unusual (outside of the routine and everyday), spontaneous (by contrast with established social forms), and creative of new movements and new structures. Weber saw the charismatic demagogue as the main counterweight to bureaucratic rigidity in mass democracies. Being a source of instability and innovation charisma is a force for social change. Although vested in actual persons, charismatic leadership conveys to beholders qualities of the sacred, and followers respond by recognizing that it is their duty to serve the leader. Charisma is alien to the established institutions of society. As Weber puts it, ‘from a substantive point of view, every charismatic authority would have to subscribe to the proposition, “It is written … but I say unto you …”’.
Charismatic phenomena are temporary and unstable. In the short term, the leader may change his or her mind, possibly in response to being ‘moved by the Spirit’. In the longer term he or she will die. For that reason, charismatic authority is often ‘routinized’ during the lifetime of the new leader, so that he or she will be succeeded either by a bureaucracy vested with rational-legal authority or by a return to the institutionalized structures of tradition to which the charismatic impetus has now been incorporated.

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chattel slavery

See SLAVERY.

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Chicago sociology, Chicago School

A tradition of sociology associated with the University of Chicago for the first four decades of the twentieth century and one which dominated North American sociology throughout this period. It was the first department of sociology to be established (in 1892 by Albion Small), and with it came the first main sociological journal, the
American Journal of Sociology (in 1895)
; the establishing of the American Sociological Association (1905); the first major student text, Robert Park and Ernest Burgess's Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921); a large graduate school; and an important series of research monographs. Much of this is catalogued in the many histories that have been written about the
‘Chicago School’. (The best of these include , Chicago Sociology, 1967
, and
, The Chicago School of Sociology, 1984
.)
The tradition was heavily informed by philosophical pragmatism, the direct observation of experience, and the analysis of urban social processes. It is most frequently identified with these three themes.
First, and most commonly, Chicago sociology was firmly committed to direct fieldwork and empirical study, in contrast to some of the more abstract, systematizing, and theoretical tendencies of many of the earlier North American sociologists, especially the Social Darwinians, Robert Park, the influential chair, told his students to ‘go and sit in the lounges of the luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and on the slum shakedowns; sit in the Orchestra Hall and in the Star and Garter Burlesque. In short, go get the seat of your pants dirty in real research’. Such a directive led not only to a large number of now classic empirical studies of sociology—Frederic Thrasher's The Gang (1927), Clifford Shaw's The jack Roller (1930), Nels Anderson's The Hobo (1923) or Harvey Zorbaugh's The Gold Coast and the Slum (1929) are typical examples—but also to considerable experimentation in research methods. Of particular note was the development of participant observation and the case-study method.
However, it is a mistake to see Chicago as simply the home of qualitative methods, since it also pioneered the use of social surveys and community-based statistical research, the quantitative mapping of social areas, and the creation of a local community fact-book. In short, a strong tradition of quantitative method was also developed at Chicago, linked especially to William Ogburn. Nor was Chicago sociology atheoretical, Everett C. Hughes, a leading member of the Chicago School and pioneer of the sociology of occupations and professions in the 1940s, was instrumental in introducing explicit theory into the later Chicago sociology. Hughes himself wrote several classic articles investigating the subjective consequences of work for the individual and the strategies for pursuing status and earnings in workplaces (see
Men and their Work, 1958
, jointly authored with Helen McGill Hughes).
A second core theme of sociology at Chicago was its concern with the study of the city. It was here—in one of the fastest-growing cities in North America at the turn of the century, with all its attendant problems of immigration, delinquency, crime, and social problems—that the sociological study of the city came into its own. Much of urban sociology has its roots in this tradition, both descriptively through a mapping of the areas of the city (into a series of zones arranged in a concentric circle from an inner city zone to an outer commuter belt), and theoretically in terms of attempting to explain the dynamics of city growth and change.
A third theme to emerge from Chicago was a distinctive form of social psychology, derived in part from the allied department of philosophy, and especially the work of George Herbert Mead. This was a tradition which focused upon the creation and organization of the self, and which later came to be identified through the writing of Herbert Blumer as symbolic interactionism. See also FORMALISM; FRAZIER, EDWARD FRANKLIN; SEQUENCE ANALYSIS; URBAN ECOLOGY.

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child abuse

In its most general sense, child abuse refers to the maltreatment or injury of a child by an adult or adults. Such abuse can be physical, emotional, sexual, or a combination of all three. It might be perpetrated by one person or by several, within a family or outside it, and in public or in private. Child abuse is widely acknowledged as causing (often) severe emotional and psychological damage to victims, damage which, because of widespread imposition of secrecy by abusers, sometimes does not become manifest for many years. In this broad sense it points to an abuse of power between different age-groups. Historical evidence shows clearly that child abuse of all kinds has existed for centuries, although how it has been defined varies enormously. What was regarded as firm discipline fifty years ago is today considered abusive.
It is useful to differentiate physical abuse of children—child abuse or ‘baby battering’—from child sexual abuse. Baby battering became an issue of widespread concern and the basis for a moral panic in the 1960s, as discussed in particular by R. and C. Kempe in the USA (see their
Child Abuse, 1983
), who saw it as indicative of ‘dysfunctional’ families. Later investigations found that baby battering, as well as physical violence within families generally, correlated strongly with families living in poverty, although some contend that middle-class family violence is simply kept more hidden and secretive. The deaths in Britain of infants Maria Colwell in 1973 and Jasmine Beckford in 1984 created public outcry and raised controversial issues about what constituted appropriate interventions in families by social workers (see SOCIAL WORK).
In contrast with baby battering, which is apparently class-related, the evidence pertaining to child sexual abuse suggests that it occurs within all social classes. Most victims are girls, though boys are also abused. The majority of abusers are men, although there is evidence that a very small proportion of women also abuse children sexually. Collecting reliable data for child sexual abuse is notoriously difficult, particularly as most experts agree that the mojority of cases are never reported. Estimates range from 10 per cent to 90 per cent of all children having experienced some form of sexual abuse. One problem for researchers is that there is no single legal category of ‘sexual abuse’; it includes rape, buggery, unlawful intercourse with a minor, and incest (defined narrowly as the father having full sexual intercourse with a child). Much debate has focused on what exactly does constitute sexual abuse, and whether or not children can be trusted to tell the truth, particularly in court situations.
These issues came to the fore in a crisis in Cleveland (UK) in 1987, when over 200 children were reported by a paediatrician to have been sexually abused, but the local police, unwilling to accept such a possibility, refused to act on the doctors' evidence. Although it was later decided that some children had been wrongly diagnosed, evidence upheld the view that the majority of children had indeed been abused. At the time, however, it was the paediatrician and social workers, rather than the abusers, who were criticized. The episode resulted in widespread public debate about the role of the family in child-rearing, the nature of privacy and power relations in families, and balance between children's rights as against those of parents. Less discussed, but no less relevant, were issues relating to children as parents' property, male violence, and the erotic nature of some power relations (see
, Unofficial Secrets—Child Sexual Abuse: The Cleveland Case, 1988
).
There are three main models of child sexual abuse. The psychological model, which is concerned primarily with male offenders, sees the perpetrators as suffering from personality disorder. This model disregards the victims and the social context in which abuse occurs. The family systems model, by contrast, treats the family as a single entity, rather than focusing on the individuals within it, or the histories of particular family members. Families where abuse occurs are seen as ‘dysfunctional’. This view presupposes such a thing as a ‘normal’ family and implicitly labels families that do not appear to be normal as pathological or deviant. The feminist model regards sexual abuse as an aspect of a wider power system of male dominance over women and children, an integral part of which is male violence. Such a model recognizes inequality in general, particularly the abuse of power between age-groups, and presupposes different forms of intervention, but it does not offer any obvious solution for the minority of women who abuse children.
Good accounts of child abuse, which situate the phenomenon in its wider socio-political context, will be found in
, The Politics of Child Abuse (1985)
and
, The Family in Question (2nd edn., 1993) and The Child in Question (1997)
.

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Childe, Vere Gordon

(1892–1957)
Born in Australia, Childe became professor successively in the Universities of Edinburgh and London, and was a leading figure in mid-twentieth-century archaeology. Known for his Marxist emphasis on the importance of the economy, Childe nevertheless also stressed the importance of society and culture, rather than artefacts. He was a great popularizer of archaeology, particularly through his well-written comparative accounts of human prehistory, such as Man Makes Himself (1956).

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childhood

The term ‘child’ can be used to mean either an offspring or someone who has not reached full economic and jural status as an adult in a society. Individuals in the latter state are passing through an age-related period known as childhood.
Childhoods vary between cultures and historical periods. The French historian, Phillipe Ariès (Centuries of Childhood, 1962), was the first to point out that modern Western childhood is unique in the way it ‘quarantines’ children from the world of adults, so that childhood is associated with play and education, rather than work and economic responsibility. Other writers have pointed out that childhood is constructed on the inabilities of children as political, intellectual, sexual, or economic beings, despite empirical evidence to the contrary. This construction implies that children must be protected (primarily by women) in the family, which serves the needs of capitalist states for the reproduction and socialization of the labour-force, at minimum cost to the state. The child also provides state agencies with the excuse to intervene in irregular families, and to change or dismember them, if they do not comply with certain norms.
Studies in the sociology of childhood indicate that the term is a powerful symbol in the construction of modern, Western society. The term is highly ambiguous, which helps its symbolic functioning. On the one hand, children are the cherished and valued possessions of the parents; on the other, they are a cost and burden on society (and particularly on women). In the 1980s, through the ‘discovery’ of child abuse and also the development of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a new approach—stressing the rights, strengths and capabilities of children—has arisen in sociology, to challenge the prevailing image of childhood.
For different reasons, childhood has been a major topic of analysis in psychoanalysis, linguistics, the sociology of education, and in the study of primary socialization and gender differentiation. For an overview of the field see
, Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood (1990)
.

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chiliasm

The doctrine or belief that Christ will reign on earth for 1,000 years. There are numerous examples of chiliast cultic and sectarian movements in the history of the Christian Church. For example, in the medieval period, the Taborites (led by the Bohemian priest Martin Huska) preached the imminent advent of Christ, to be preceded by a period of catastrophe, followed by a New Age of His rule on earth (see
, ‘Chiliasm and the Hussite Revolution’, Church History, 1957
). Chiliasm is therefore a specific form of millenarianism and shares many of the same characteristics. Thus, in anticipation of the Second Coming, chiliast communities tend to secede from the larger social order, not only spiritually but also physically, often living (as did the Taborites for a time) in a state of collective emancipation—recognizing no traditional authorities, norms, or legal restraints; shunning family and home; and turning over material possessions to common funds.

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chi-square

See SIGNIFICANCE TESTS.

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Christianity

A world religion which regards Jesus Christ as its founder, Christianity was originally a social movement in Judaism, emerging in Jerusalem during the Roman occupation. With the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Christianity became increasingly a religion of Gentiles, partly as a consequence of the preaching of the apostle Paul, who established Gentile churches.
In Rome, these Christian groups became the targets of political repression, especially under Nero. This persecution resulted in the new institutions of martyrdom and sainthood. Although Christianity spread among the lower classes, it eventually won favour among the powerful, and in 313 CE Constantine established it as the religion of the Roman Empire. Karl Kautsky's argument (Foundations of Christianity: A Study of Christian Origins, 1908) that early Christianity was a proletarian religion requires qualification.
By the eleventh century, there was a clear divide between Western and Eastern Orthodoxy. The bishop of Rome was transformed into the Pope with authority over Western Christendom. The Roman Catholic Church had a major impact on Western culture, especially through the educational function of monasteries. There was a profound split in the Church as a consequence of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Christianity is founded on the belief in an omnipotent and just God who is responsible for all Creation. Although humanity has sinned, and therefore fallen from grace, salvation from punishment has been made possible by God's mercy in sending a saviour—Jesus Christ—to atone for these sins. Christians therefore believe that faith in Christ as the Son of God ensures everlasting salvation. However, contemporary Christianity is an extradordinarily diverse belief system, embodying various doctrines emphasizing not only faith but also all manner of good works. A fascinating account of the historical emergence of the doctrines and organization of the Christian church is given in Elaine Pagels's book, The Gnostic Gospels (1979).
Much of the sociology of religion has been concerned with the social consequences of specifically Christian beliefs. Max Weber's protestant ethic thesis is one of the best-known examples. There has also been much debate about the impact of Christianity on Western civilization generally, for example in promoting democracy or scientific innovation, and about the contemporary secularization of the Christian religion. See also CHILIASM; CHURCH; RELIGION, SOCIOLOGY OF; SECT.

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chromosomes

The nuclei of the body-cells of humans and other complex animals and plants contain a number (fixed for each species—twenty-three in the human case) of pairs of thread-like structures. These carry the genes, the basic units of material inheritance, arranged in a linear sequence. When cells divide to form egg and sperm, chromosomes pair up and then divide in ways which randomly allocate genetic material to the resulting gametes. This process accounts for the inherited diversity among the individual progeny of sexual reproduction.

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church

A church is a large, bureaucratic, and hierarchical religious organization, which typically recruits from the upper and middle classes. It has a priesthood, sacraments, and formal liturgy. Lay participation, especially in worship, is not necessarily encouraged. These definitional characteristics confine the use of the concept largely to a Christian context. The church is accommodated to existing social arrangements and regards the state as a necessary aspect of political control over society. Individuals are born into the church and become permanent members through infant baptism. The church as an ideal-type is contrasted with the sect. See also CULT; DENOMINATION.

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circulating capital

See CAPITAL.

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circulation mobility

See MOBILITY, SOCIAL.

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circulation of élites

See ÉLITE THEORY.

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citizenship

In political and legal theory, citizenship refers to the rights and duties of the member of a nation-state or city. In some historical contexts, a citizen was any member of a city; that is, an urban collectivity which was relatively immune from the demands of a monarch or state. In classical Greece, citizenship was limited to free men, who had a right to participate in political debate because they contributed, often through military service, to the direct support of the city-state. It is argued by historians that citizenship has thus expanded with democratization to include a wider definition of the citizen regardless of sex, age, or ethnicity. The concept was revived in the context of the modern state, notably during the French and American Revolutions, and gradually identified more with rights than obligations. In modern times citizenship refers conventionally to the various organizations which institutionalize these rights in the welfare state.
In sociology, recent theories of citizenship have drawn their inspiration from T. H. Marshall, who defined citizenship as a status which is enjoyed by a person who is a full member of a community. Citizenship has three components: civil, political, and social. Civil rights are necessary for individual freedoms and are institutionalized in the law courts. Political citizenship guarantees the right to participate in the exercise of political power in the community, either by voting, or by holding political office. Social citizenship is the right to participate in an appropriate standard of living; this right is embodied in the welfare and educational systems of modern societies. The important feature of Marshall's theory was his view that there was a permanent tension or contradiction between the principles of citizenship and the operation of the capitalist market. Capitalism inevitably involves inequalities between social classes, while citizenship involves some redistribution of resources, because of rights which are shared equally by all.
Marshall's theory has given rise to much dispute. Critics argue that it is a description of the English experience only, and it is not a comparative analysis of citizenship; that it has an evolutionary and teleological view of the inevitable expansion of citizenship, and does not examine social processes which undermine citizenship; it does not address gender differences in the experience of citizenship; it fails to address other types of citizenship, such as economic citizenship; and it is not clear about the causes of the expansion of citizenship. Some sociologists believe that Marshall's argument can be rescued from these criticisms if the original theory is modified. The continuing debate is reflected in the papers collected in
, Citizenship Today: The Contemporary Relevance of T. H. Marshall (1996)
.
There are very different traditions of citizenship in different societies. Active citizenship, which is based on the achievement of rights through social struggle, is very different from passive citizenship which is handed down from above by the state (see
, Nation-Building and Citizenship, 1964
). There are also very different theoretical approaches to understanding the structure of the public and private realm in conceptions of citizenship. For some sociologists, such as Talcott Parsons, the growth of citizenship is a measure of the modernization of society because it is based on values of universalism and achievement. These different theoretical traditions are primarily the product of two opposed views of citizenship: it is either viewed as an aspect of bourgeois liberalism, in which case it involves a conservative view of social participation, or it is treated as a feature of radical democratic politics; it is either dismissed as a mere reform of capitalism, or it is regarded as a fundamental plank of democracy. Recently, sociologists have gone beyond these traditional theories of democracy, liberalism, and civil society, to ask questions about the changing relationships between individuals, communities, and states, in a world in which the nation-state is increasingly subject to influences from supranational institutions. Will globalization replace state citizenship with a truly universal conception of human rights? (Speculative answers to this and related questions will be found in
, Citizenship and Social Theory, 1993.)

's Citizenship (1988)
is an excellent discussion of the (now extensive) literature surrounding the concept.See also INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY.

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city, sociology of the

See URBAN SOCIOLOGY.

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civic nationalism

See NATIONALISM.

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civil disobedience

Narrowly understood, the refusal by all or part of a community to pay taxes or obey the laws and regulations of the state, as an attempt at changing government policy by non-violent means. The Gandhian protests against British Rule in India are one obvious example. More recently, substantial numbers of British voters refused to pay a community charge (or so-called poll tax) to fund the spending of local government, and successfully forced a change in the basis of raising this revenue. More generally, however, civil disobedience shades into other (sometimes violent) forms of collective protest (such as riots), so that the precise boundaries of the phenomenon can be difficult to identify. What are intended to be peaceful protests against particular taxes may (for whatever reason) turn into violent episodes; indeed, it is often in the state's interest to label such activity in precisely this way, in order to discredit the participants. See also PASSIVE RESISTANCE.

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civil liberties

See CIVIL RIGHTS.

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civil religion, civil religion thesis

In the 1960s a number of sociologists (including Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, and Robert Bellah) distinguished civil religion from institutional (church-based) religion, arguing that societies such as modern America were attaching sacred qualities to certain of their institutional arrangements and historical events. Thus, in the case of the United States, the extensive immigration from Europe was analogous to the Jewish Exodus, and the Civil War a rebirth through bloodshed and an expiation of old sins. The theme of American civil religion was therefore one of Americans as the new Chosen People (see, for example,
's ‘Civil Religion in America’, in , Religion in America, 1968
). Similarly, in a famous (and much criticized) article on the monarchy in Britain, Edward Shils and Michael Young identified what they argued were religious aspects of the apparently secular rituals surrounding the coronation (
‘The Meaning of the Coronation’, Sociological Review, 1953
). The basic idea behind these and other variants of the ‘civil religion thesis’ is that in advanced industrial societies, which are increasingly secular in terms of institutional religions, civic religions (such as the celebration of the state or civil society) now serve the same functions of prescribing the overall values of society, providing social cohesion, and facilitating emotional expression. In other words, civil religions offer a ‘functional equivalent’ or ‘functional alternative’ to institutional religions, since they meet the same needs within the social system. Both arguments (about civil religion in particular and functional alternatives in general) were subject to the charges of evolutionism, teleology, tautology, and empirical untestability laid against normative functionalism as a whole. See also SECULARIZATION.

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civil rights

Rights which are recognized as belonging to all individuals in a society, which can be upheld by appeal to the law, and are not subject to arbitrary denial either by individuals or the state. They are usually defended in terms of the protection of the individual from the state, and subject to clear limits, themselves identified in relation to the rights of others or else the common good.
Although the idea of rights being embodied for citizens in legal doctrines was hardly new, it took on a new meaning in the twentieth century, as a result of the Civil Rights Movement. The distinctively modern form of civil rights is often dated from the American Civil War, after slaves gained the right to be free. It is embodied in the Civil Rights Legislation of the late twentieth century—such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the United States. The history of this legislation is discussed in
, Equality by Statute (1978)
. See also CITIZENSHIP; CIVIL SOCIETY.

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civil society

There are several competing definitions of what this concept involves. However, its key attributes are that it refers to public life rather than private or household-based activities; it is juxtaposed to the family and the state; and it exists within the framework of the rule of law. Most authorities seem to have in mind the realm of public participation in voluntary associations, the mass media, professional associations, trade unions, and the like.
Interposed between the individual (or family) and the state for some thinkers (such as Hegel), it was a temporary phenomenon, to be transcended when particular and common interests combined. For others it was the realm of the particular counterpoised to the state, whereas for Antonio Gramsci it was the bastion of class hegemony, and ultimately (though not unequivocally) supportive of the state. More recent usage has drawn on the experience of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, and the apparent atrophy or non-existence of the meso level of social relations, the sphere of social self-organization, and of that level in the articulation of interests that is to be found between the private realm of the domestic and the totalizing state.
Civil society is always seen as dynamic and embraces the notion of social movements. It can also be seen as the dynamic side of citizenship, which, combining as it does achieved rights and obligations, finds them practised, scrutinized, revamped, and redefined at the level of civil society. Thus, freedom of speech as an essential civil right depends on the culture and organization of publishers, journalists, and the reading public at large, both for the manner in which it is legitimized and for its scope and intensity. An excellent edited collection on this topic is
, The State and Civil Society (1984)
.

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civilizing process

See ELIAS, NORBERT.

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clan

A clan is a unilineal kin group which is usually exogamous, claiming descent from a common ancestor, and is often represented by a totem. Clans are of either matrilineal (matriclan) or patrilineal (patriclan) descent, recruiting the children of either male or female members accordingly. A clan is usually segmented into lineages, which are the branches of descent from a common ancestor. Classic works on clans include
, Zuni Kin and Clan (1917)
,
, We, the Tikopia (1936)
, and
, The Nuer (1940)
. See also PHRATRY.

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class, social class

See BOURGEOISIE; CLASS AWARENESS; CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS; CLASS IMAGERY; CLASS INTEREST; CLASS POSITION; CONTRADICTORY CLASS LOCATION; FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS; MARX, KARL; MIDDLE CLASS; PETITE BOURGEOISIE; PROLETARIAT; UNDERCLASS; WORKING CLASS.

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class, housing

See HOUSING CLASS.

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class awareness

A term—broadly synonymous with ‘class identification’—referring to the subjective definition and interpretation of social class in the public consciousness. Sociological investigations of class awareness therefore examine the class labels (if any) that are commonly used in popular discourse; the extent to which people personally identify with these labels; which factors determine identification with particular classes; and the implications of class identities for broader political orientations and social behaviour generally. The term has a much wider currency in the United States than in Britain or Europe, mainly because it carries less of the ideological baggage associated with the Marxist notion of class consciousness, although there are obvious overlaps between the two concepts and indeed in the relevant sociological literatures. For example, and rather confusedly, Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Weber Cannon (The American Perception of Class, 1987) argue that lack of an organized working-class movement in the United States does not mean that American workers lack class consciousness—by which the authors mean class images and identities that affect other perceptions of society (in other words class awareness). It is doubtful whether this minimal conception of class consciousness would be accepted by Marxists or other class analysts. A more typical (and probably the best) treatment of the American material is Mary R. Jackman and Robert W. Jackman's Class Awareness in the United States (1983). See also CLASS IMAGERY.

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class consciousness

In the transition from a ‘class in itself’ (a category of people having a common relation to the means of production) to a ‘class for itself’ (a stratum organized in active pursuit of its own interests) the emphasis in Marxist analysis has been on the development of revolutionary class consciousness among the workers. As a rule, constituting this class in itself involves a set of environmental variables (concentration in factories, communication, mechanization), a distinctive way of life and distinctive cultural activities, all of which bring the working class into conflict with other classes as a ‘class against capital’. However, it is only when these objective features generate a consciousness of common interests rooted in the process of production and lead to practical action through political representation, that it is possible to speak of class consciousness in the Marxian sense. Marx severally identified the connections between these two analytically distinct stages, but the easy bipolarity of proletariat versus bourgeoisie found in The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) is often replaced in his other writings by a complex interrelation between ideology, culture, and political representations (as is found, for example, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852). Here, ‘class fractions’ tied to particular property forms are engaged in myriad political contests, using a varied symbolic universe and competing discourses, all under the auspices of a multi-faceted state.
However many the hints about the historical contingency of class consciousness that one can find in Marx, his emphasis is still upon the inevitability of real interests being pursued, even if sometimes the means come accidentally to hand—as with the Paris Commune. Here too, Marx saw only ‘delusive prejudice’ rather than real interest separating peasant from proletarian, and predicted that rural producers had as a class fraction entered their period of decay. This complex interplay between the apparent ineluctability of class and its problematic articulation are captured in E. P. Thompson's now famous aphorism that ‘if the experience appears as determined, class consciousness does not’.
Most conceptions of proletarian class consciousness depict its development as an explosion of mass consciousness—culminating in some sort of latter-day equivalent of the storming of the Winter Palace. However, in an interesting attempt to introduce rational choice theory (see EXCHANGE THEORY) into Marxist analysis,
(‘Marxism, Functionalism and Game theory’, Theory and Society, 1982
) has argued that a class-conscious class is one which has solved the free-rider problem. That is, class consciousness is the ability of class organizations to pursue class objectives by controlling sectional struggles, and is therefore an attribute of organizations rather than individuals: it is the capacity of a class to behave as a collective actor. From this point of view, what is at issue is the capacity of class organizations (such as trade unions) to mobilize members behind centrally organized initiatives on behalf of class rather than particular interests; and, once mobilized, to hold in check groups who would ‘free ride’ or pursue sectional gains at the collective expense. Almost paradoxically, therefore, class consciousness implies the absence of industrial militancy and spontaneous mass action, since class objectives are pursued by a highly centralized labour organization.
In contemporary usage (and especially in American sociology), there is often a failure to distinguish sufficiently between class consciousness as envisaged by Marx and Engels, and the less problematic concepts of class identification or class awareness. See also CLASS INTEREST; COLLECTIVE ACTION.

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class culture

During the 1980s, a number of (mainly American) sociologists and social historians developed the argument that the tradition of studying class consciousness via survey methods inevitably abstracted this phenomenon from social action and the context of class practices, with the result that the continuing salience of social class in American life was systematically underestimated. Using historical, ethnographic, and participant observation techniques, these critics attempted to identify and ground class consciousness in everyday cultural practices, shop-floor collective action, and local forms of social organization. Michael Burawoy's celebrated study of Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (1979) is an early example of this genre, which had much in common with the understanding of class to be found in the work of the English historian E. P. Thompson, who viewed class consciousness and class formation as cultural expressions embodied in the development of neighbourhood solidarism, mutual aid societies, social clubs, class-specific forms of leisure, and so forth (see
The Making of the English Working Class, 1968
). For an overview of this diverse and expanding literature see
, ‘From Class Consciousness to Culture, Action, and Social Organization’, Annual Review of Sociology (1995)
.

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class dealignment

See CONSUMPTION SECTORS; VOTING BEHAVIOUR.

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class imagery

The commonsense or everyday beliefs about social class that are held by ordinary members of society—particularly in respect of the number, size, and characteristics of the various classes in their society.
Studies of social stratification often distinguish objective and subjective structure, the former pertaining to relationships of power or privilege, the latter being the domain of class imagery. The term itself dates from 1957 and gained British currency through David Lockwood's influential work on working-class images of society (see
, Working-Class Images of Society, 1975
).
Two accounts of subjective stratification exist. One is Marxist, in which consciousness or awareness of the class structure is postulated as arising from class conflict and experience of social inequality, and any departure from a conception based on class interest is deemed to be false consciousness. Reputationalist studies, on the other hand, based on community studies of class and occupational prestige, have also detected different perceptions of the class structure, noting that people differ in the extent to which their image is dichotomous (‘us’ versus ‘them’) or multiple and finely graded. Different bases for these images or models (such as power and money) have been described by a number of sociologists—but, in most cases, systematic class images are difficult to identify empirically. The most recent studies of class imagery and connotations suggest that there exists a more fluid, complex, and open stock of such class and occupational images and meanings than is usually assumed, and that individuals use different imagery and conceptions for different purposes and strategies (see, for example,
, ‘Class Imagery in a National Sample of Women and Men’, British Journal of Sociology, 1984
).

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class interest

The basic concept of class interest derives from Karl Marx's theory of social class. Marx argued that the social relations which define class generate inherently opposing interests. Hence, for example, the interests of the bourgeoisie are different from and antagonistic towards those of the proletariat. It is in the interests of the bourgeois class to exploit the proletariat and in the interests of the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie. Note that this definition of interest is in-built to the definition of class: classes have objective interests. As the American Marxist Erik Olin Wright puts it, ‘class structure is … a terrain of social relations that determine objective material interests of actors, and class struggle is understood as the forms of social practices which attempt to realize those interests [and] class consciousness can be understood as the subjective processes that shape intentional choices with respect to those interests and struggles’ (see his
Classes, 1985
). Here it is possible to see the role assigned to the concept of class interests within a Marxist theory of class action.
However, there are many problems with this concept. In particular, it is more satisfactory to examine how far objective conditions actually exist, which are sufficiently similar for there to be the possibility of common interests emerging. What form those interests might take also becomes an empirical question. Hence, for example, David Lockwood has noted how workers form attachments to (rather than antagonisms towards) the existing form of capitalist society, through the activities of trade unions. John H. Goldthorpe, on the other hand, argues that whether or not individuals become conscious of possessing a class identity, and seek to pursue common class interests with others similarly placed, will depend in part upon the nature and degree of ‘demographic class formation’; that is, ‘the empirical question … of how far classes have in fact formed … in the sense of specific social collectivities … that are identifiable through the degree of continuity with which, in consequence of patterns of class mobility and immobility, their members are associated with particular sets of positions over time’ (see
Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, 1980
). But neither Goldthorpe nor Lockwood assumes that there are objective class interests. Rather, each argues that the interests pursued by a class or its representatives are contingent upon a complex pattern of historical and political circumstances, and emerge out of social action rather than being an inherent condition of such action. In particular, people have to assume social identities as members of a class, before it becomes possible for sociologists to identify its interests.

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class position

In a study of class consciousness among clerical workers (The Blackcoated Worker, 1958; 2nd edn., 1989), the British sociologist David Lockwood introduced an influential theory of ‘class position’, which distinguished the three component factors of market situation (‘the economic position narrowly conceived, consisting of source and size of income, degree of job-security, and opportunity for upward occupational mobility’); work situation (‘the set of social relationships in which the individual is involved at work by virtue of his position in the division of labour’); and, finally, status situation (‘the position of the individual in the hierarchy of prestige in the society at large’). It was the particular combination of experiences originating in these three spheres which, according to Lockwood, constituted the principal determinants of class consciousness among clerks. See also GOLDTHORPE CLASS SCHEME.

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classical conditioning

See CONDITIONING.

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classical criminology, classicism

See CRIMINOLOGY, CLASSICAL.

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classical economic theory

See LAISSEZ-FAIRE ECONOMICS; MALTHUS, THOMAS; MILL, JOHN STUART; SMITH, ADAM.

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classical school of scientific management

See ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY.

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classification

See TAXONOMY.

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classification (clustering)

See CLUSTER ANALYSIS.

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classroom interaction, classroom behaviour

Describes the form and content of behaviour or social interaction in the classroom. In particular, research on gender, class, and ‘race’ in education has examined the relationship between teacher and students in the classroom. A variety of methods have been used to investigate the amount and type of ‘teacher-time’ received by different groups of students. Much of the research has then sought to relate this to different educational experiences and outcomes among particular groups. For example, some studies showed that boys received a disproportionate amount of the teachers' time, sat in different places in the classroom, and were more highly regarded by teachers, which may go some way towards explaining the educational differential between men and women. More recently, focus has shifted to examining the role of the school as a whole on student experiences as well as behaviour outside the classroom, such as bullying and racial and sexual harassment. See also EDUCATION, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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clergy

A generic term used for ordained religious leaders, deriving from ‘clericus’, a clerk in Holy Orders (bishop, priest, or deacon). In the Christian tradition, ordination creates a status, but not necessarily a role or occupation. However, in recent times it has become professional, though showing discrepancy between (high) prestige and (low) income, compared to other occupations.

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clientelism, client–patron relationship

See PATRON-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP.

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clinical depression

See DEPRESSION.

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clinical sociology

A term, analogous to clinical psychology, introduced in 1931 by Chicago sociologist Louis Wirth, for the work of sociologists employed in clinical settings alongside social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists. Clinical sociology involves the use of sociological knowledge to aid diagnosis, treatment, teaching, and research. However, the practice of employing clinical sociologists is not widespread.

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cliometrics

A term formed by compounding the muse of history and the concept of measurement, devised by its practitioners to describe the ‘new quantitative economic history’ which developed in the United States during the late 1950s, and rapidly became controversial in the American and European historical community. Cliometricians applied sophisticated statistical techniques (such as regression analysis) to historical data, and (to cite the example of two of the most prominent studies) attempted to calculate the profitability of slavery in the period before the American Civil War, and to quantify the contribution of the American railroads to economic growth (see
, Time on the Cross, 1974
, and
's Railroads and American Economic Growth, 1964
).
Cliometric work was controversial, not only because of the usual distrust of (usually reconstructed) numerical data and the (occasionally questionable) use of advanced statistical techniques, but also because the most prominent studies framed their hypotheses in the novel form of explicit counterfactuals. That is, for example, they asked the question ‘What would have happened if the railroads had not been built?’ Most also rested on what were deemed to be the rather narrow behaviourist assumptions of neo-classical economics.
With hindsight, it is easy to see that the new quantitative history was not in fact all that novel, since many of the leading economists and economic historians of the early twentieth century made liberal use of quantitative historical data and neo-classical theory respectively. The use of large-scale data-sets, further encouraged by developments in computer technology, is now established practice in modern history. In contemporary usage, the term cliometrics is still commonly applied to systematic attempts to apply social science theory and statistical analyses to historical data, but it no longer describes a sharply defined school. Cliometric analyses are now found across a wide range of substantive historical subject areas.

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closed groups and open groups

These terms are sometimes applied to social groups or organizations which have (respectively) fairly impermeable boundaries, and therefore little interaction with outsiders, or permeable boundaries with few barriers to relations with outsiders. Thus, there can be open and closed religious sects, clubs, committees, military élites, and so forth.

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closed response

Fixed choice answers to an interview question, which may be read out, or shown to respondents on a card, for them to choose the reply closest to their views or situation.

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closed shop

A system of trade-union job control in which getting and holding employment is contingent on being a member of the union either before entry or on engagement. Pre-entry shops require union membership before a worker can be hired; post-entry and agency shops require workers to become members after taking up employment. Now illegal as such in the United States, Britain, and some European societies (on the grounds that compulsory membership is an infringement of civil rights), closed shops are nevertheless not without advantages to employers as a device for informal management of labour relations. Consequently, there are several forms of union-management agreement (UMA) which constitute a closed shop in all but name.

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closed society

See OPEN SOCIETIES AND CLOSED SOCIETIES.

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closure, social closure

Identified in the writings of Max Weber, and more recently resurrected by the British sociologist Frank Parkin, the concept emerged as an alternative to Marxist theories of inequality and of how the latter is generated, maintained, and transformed (see
's Marxism and Class Theory, 1979
). Weber saw closure as being one of the means by which commercial and property classes moved along the continuum of legitimating and reproducing their life-chances in the direction of social class and status group. Later exponents of this view saw closure as the basis of all inequality, be it that of material reward, status honour including ethnicity, caste, and even the nomenklatura system of communist regimes.
Closure functions through the twin mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion and can be founded upon individualistic or collective criteria. It is based on the power of one group to deny access to reward, or positive life-chances, to another group on the basis of criteria which the former seek to justify. The selection of these criteria of exclusion and inclusion—be they educational credentials, party membership, skin colour, religious identity, property, social origins, manners and style of life, or region—and their imposition, contribute to explaining the boundaries of inequality and the strategies of usurpation on the part of the excluded, as much as the patterns of domination and the legitimizing ideologies for inequality. Processes of social closure involve marginalization (or exclusion), on the one hand, and incorporation (inclusion) on the other.
Since closure is about mobilizing power to exclude others from privileges or rewards, students of the process tend to assume that power is itself an attribute of closure, and rarely investigate the sources of that power. Thus, an educational élite is assumed to have the power to exclude those without the relevant credentials, if their exclusionary strategies hold. Often, however, there are competing modes of closure which conflict with each other. Furthermore, élites defined by one criterion (say, education) may not always seek the obvious (in this case educational) means to achieve closure—attempting to exclude people, instead, on other grounds (such as those of gender or ethnicity). One other problem with closure theories stems from the uneven distribution of reward within a group practising closure, as for example in the case of the communist nomenklatura, where rewards to those in the lower reaches were questionable to say the least. The best overall assessment of closure theory is Raymond Murphy's Social Closure: The Theory of Monopolization and Exclusion (1988).

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cluster analysis

A form of multivariate analysis, of which the purpose is to divide a set of objects (such as variables or individuals), characterized by a number of attributes, into a set of clusters or classes, in such a way that the objects in a class are maximally similar to each other and maximally different to the other objects, with reference to a selected list of descriptive indicators and characteristics which form the basis of the analysis. In biology the technique is known as numerical taxonomy.
Cluster analysis was among the multivariate statistical techniques developed by
(Social Area Analysis, 1955)
for analysing census data. It is applied to census small-area statistics and social indicators in social area analysis to create area typologies, either focusing on particular urban or metropolitan areas, or covering the country as a whole. Cluster analysis found a wide range of applications in other areas, including developmental work with opinion statements or questions from which an attitude scale will be formed; exploratory work to identify underlying patterns in large data-sets; analytical work to measure significant similarities and differences between individuals, social groups, companies, or other types of organization, nation-states, types of event, and so forth; and the development of classifications and typologies.
Different ways of defining similarity and difference give rise to distinct methods of clustering. Alternative ways of determining how well the solution fits the data will generally give rise to somewhat disparate results. Most classification procedures begin with a table of association of dis/similarity coefficients between each pair of objects and then proceed in one of two ways—bottom up (where the objects are successively merged into larger clusters) or top down (where the entire set of objects is divided into increasingly small clusters). These yield as a solution a hierarchical clustering scheme (HCS), which is represented by a dendogram, or tree. An HCS is also often represented as a set of contours within a multi-dimensional scaling solution of the same data. The most common clustering method is stepwise hierarchical clustering with output displayed in a dendogram figure, which clearly identifies any outlier cases that remain separate from other cases until the final stage of the clustering process when all cases are combined in a single group, with three or more intermediate levels of aggregation.
Recent developments in this field include additive overlapping clustering (where each cluster has a measure of its importance), additive trees (where the length of the path between points represents the data dissimilarity), and rectangular clustering (where both the individuals and the variables of the data are clustered jointly).

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code, codes

See CODING; ELABORATED AND RESTRICTED SPEECH CODES.

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co-determination

A translation of the German term mitbestimmung which refers to the form of workers' participation in management practised in Germany since 1951. Under the terms of the law passed in that year, employees have a right to participate not just in the management of the workplace but also in that of the company as a whole, through elected board representatives. With the notable exception of Britain, this model has inspired similar schemes throughout much of the rest of Europe. See also INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY.

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coding

The transformation of observations into categories and classifications, assigning a number or symbol to each item of information or section of a statement, to enable quantitative analysis to be carried out subsequently. While coding is an important part of many types of research, it is most commonly thought of as an essential element within survey research. Coding is also an important aspect of measurement, for in the act of coding we are making a measurement.
To demonstrate these points we may consider the example of a questionnaire administered to an individual (or ‘informant’ or ‘respondent’) in a social survey. In most social surveys the majority of questions are closed, that is, the range of permissible answers is predetermined. For example, suppose there was a question in a survey on voting behaviour which asked, ‘If there were an election tomorrow, which political party would you vote for?’ Usually, the range of permissible answers would be printed on the questionnaire under the question, in the following manner:

Q. 15 If there was an election tomorrow, which political party would you vote for?

Republican

1

Democrat

2

Other

3

Would not vote

4

Don't know

5

If the respondent replied ‘Republican’ to the question, the interviewer would circle the number 1 next to ‘Republican’. In so doing, the question is coded: for this question, all those answering Republican are given the value of 1. Their responses have thus been measured and will eventually be entered into a data-set.
However, some questions are open; that is, the range of answers is not predefined, because they cannot so easily be predicted. For example, the question on voting behaviour might be followed by one which asked ‘Why would you vote for the (Republican) Party?’ A space is left below the question for the interviewer to write down the respondent's answer verbatim. The researcher must then analyse a sample of the answers given in order to establish a coding frame. This frame will serve as a means for distinguishing different types of answer. Imagine that the following frame is devised:

Category

Code

Likes particular policies of party

1

Likes ideals of party

2

Always votes for the party

3

Dislikes policies of other party

4

Likes party leaders

5

Wants a change of government

6

Other reasons

7

This frame is then given to an experienced coder, along with the frames for all other open questions. The coder reads each respondent's answer to the question and has to decide to which one of the code-frame categories each answer most closely approximates. For example, if the respondent had said ‘Because I believe in cutting taxes and controlling welfare spending’, the coder would circle 1, since the respondent is answering in terms of Republican party policy. Hence coding is the first step in processing data.
Much of the coding work in sample surveys is done by the interviewer, but some has to be done after the interview by trained coders, during so-called office coding. When a questionnaire has been completely coded the numeric codes are entered into a computer for eventual analysis. Every act of coding—whether by interviewer or office coder—is a measurement, that is, the assignment of a numeral for an answer, according to some rule. The rules are provided by the pre-coded question (to which only one answer is possible), or by the coding frame for open questions, where the coder selects the appropriate code for the answer. This can, of course, then lead to measurement error. The interviewer might circle the wrong answer or the coder might ascribe the wrong code. For this reason, editors are employed to check the work of interviewers and coders, and computer edit-checks are used to search for inconsistencies in the data (for example, out-of-range codes, double-coding, and so forth). These methods serve as a check on the reliability and validity of the data.
Coding is essential for the analysis of responses to surveys and most questionnaires provide space for the codes connected with each reply. However, coding can be applied to other types of information, such as depth interviews or observed interactions, and it is an important aspect of conversation analysis. When qualitative coding is applied to the substantive content of communications, such as newspapers or political speeches, it is called content analysis. See also ERROR (SAMPLING AND NON-SAMPLING).

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coding frame

See CODING.

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coefficient

See ASSOCIATION COEFFICIENTS.

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coercion

See POWER.

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coercive power

See COMPLIANCE.

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cognate, cognatic

Having a common ancestor who can be traced back bilaterally through either the male or female line; that is, descent is not unilineal. See also DESCENT GROUPS.

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cognition, cognitive

The process of knowing (thinking), sometimes distinguished from affect (emotion) and conation or volition (striving), in a triad of mental processes. Cognitive psychology, which focuses on the use and handling of information (often employing computer models), is now the dominant approach within academic psychology, and has replaced and transformed older behaviourist approaches.

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cognitive consistency

The experience of holding thoughts, attitudes, or of acting in ways which are not mutually contradictory. The cognitive consistency versus inconsistency polarity, along with consonance versus dissonance and balance versus imbalance, has been employed widely by social psychologists in the analysis of attitude change. Theorists assume a desire for cognitive consistency, arguing that cognitive inconsistencies—a mis-match between cognitions—are uncomfortable, and can motivate attitude change. However, the consequence may also be denial and rationalization. See also COGNITIVE DISSONANCE.

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cognitive dissonance

A major cognitive theory propounded by
in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957)
. The theory addresses competing, contradictory, or opposing elements of cognition and behaviour: for example, why do people continue smoking, when they know that smoking damages health? Festinger suggests that individuals do not believe so much out of logic as out of psychological need—a kind of psycho-logic. He argues that, striving for harmony and balance, there is a drive towards consonance amongst cognitions. Dissonance reduction may happen either through a change in a person's behaviour or a shift in attitude; thus, in the example cited above, either they stop smoking, or else modify their knowledge, for example to the belief that ‘most people who smoke don't die young and so aren't really at risk’. The theory is almost tautological in postulating some inner need for consistency, and has been criticized for ambiguity, but it has been enormously influential. See also COGNITIVE THEORY.

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cognitive psychology

See COGNITION; COGNITIVE THEORY; PIAGET, JEAN.

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cognitive sociology

A version of ethnomethodology which examines the problematic nature of ‘meaning’ in everyday life, and seeks to integrate ethnomethodology with linguistics (deep structures), on the one hand, and traditional sociology (normative or surface rules) on the other. The major proponent is the American sociologist Aaron V. Cicourel, who has studied many apparently diverse phenomena—including crime, deafness, education, and research methods—in an attempt to identify the underlying social organization and ‘negotiated order’ of everyday life.

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cognitive theory

A major cluster of theories in social psychology, which focus upon the links between mental processes (such as perception, memory, attitudes, or decision-making), and social behaviour. At a general level such theories are opposed to behaviourism, and suggest that human beings are active in selecting stimuli, constructing meanings, and making sense of their worlds. There are many branches of cognitive theory, including Fritz Heider's cognitive balance theory, Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory, George Kelly's personal construct theory, and attribution theory (see
, Cognitive Social Psychology, 1980
).

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cohabitation

An arrangement whereby couples who are not legally married live together as husband and wife. Frequent in previous eras, cohabitation has increased markedly in the United States and Britain since the 1960s. It is now common before marriage and is sometimes an alternative to marriage.

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cohort, cohort analysis

The term cohort originally referred to a Roman military unit, but it is now used to identify any group of people with a time-specific common experience, such as graduating from school in the same year, or cohorts defined by time of marriage or widowhood. Cohort analysis refers to any study in which there are measures of some characteristics of one or more cohorts at regular intervals after the defining event.
Cohort analysis as a method of research was developed by demographers and applied primarily to the study of fertility. The most common type of cohort analysis uses age-groups (birth cohorts), for example five- or ten-year age-bands, to study mortality rates. The individuals within the bands move through the ageing process together as a cohort, and often become identified as a distinct group, such as the ‘Baby-Boomers’ or ‘Ageing-Hippies’. This approach is especially common in secondary analysis, as age is a commonly recorded item of information in population census data-sets, and in data from registers and administrative records. Cohort analysis can also be applied to repeated cross-sectional survey data-sets, where samples are large enough to distinguish a number of cohorts defined by (for example) age, or year of first childbirth. Proxy cohort data or analysis is achieved by tracking the characteristics of ten-year age-groups through successive decennial population censuses or equivalent large data-sets.
The critical problem of cohort analysis is to differentiate age, cohort, and period effects. Age effects are associated with growing older; cohort effects are common to people born at the same time; period effects are due to the shared experience of particular historical events—for example the Second World War. Unfortunately there is no simple way of disentangling these. This is important substantively: because the effects are confounded, different interpretations of change are usually possible (for example, observed cultural, political, or social changes may be due to cohort effects or ageing), and conclusions have to be correspondingly tentative. When informed by sound theory, however, cohort analysis is a powerful analytic technique (see
, ‘Career Opportunities in the Federal Republic of Germany: A Dynamic Approach to Study Life Course, Cohort and Period Effects’, European Sociological Review, 1986
).

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cohort rates

See FERTILITY.

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Coleman, James S.

(1926–95)
A much honoured American sociologist, prolific author and co-author of numerous monographs and scholarly papers (some 28 books and more than 300 articles), who was for much of his professional life associated with the University of Chicago. He served as President of the American Sociological Association in 1991–2.
Coleman was unusual among sociologists of his generation, especially in America, in that he was equally at home conducting empirical research and constructing formal theory. His range of interests was truly remarkable. Major themes in his work include the following: the social organization of education, adolescence, and youth (The Adolescent Society, 1961, Youth: Transition to Adulthood, 1973, Becoming Adult in a Changing Society, 1985); the role of families, communities, and religious institutions in education, and the idea of social capital (Equality of Educational Opportunity—the so-called Coleman Report—1966, High School Achievement, 1982, Public and Private High Schools, 1987); the social theory of simulation games, collective decision-making, and collective action (on which he wrote several influential articles); mathematical sociology, in particular stochastic processes, models of purposive action, and market models (Introduction to Mathematical Sociology, 1964, The Mathematics of Collective Action, 1973); and theories of rational action (Foundations of Social Theory, 1990). In addition, he was a co-author of Union Democracy (1956), a classic of political sociology; a leading exponent of applied sociology committed to policy research in the social sciences; and wrote monographs on (among other things) Community Conflict (1957) and Medical Innovation (1966) which he described as being more or less ‘single-shot activities’ rather than recurring themes in his work.
Coleman's lasting contributions to sociology will be many and varied—although his most recent theoretical work has yet to attain its full impact.
His research on adolescence demonstrated the importance of informal social systems (peer-group subcultures and rewards) among the young, especially where these were at odds with the values and rewards institutionalized by educationalists within schools. (Some students worked hard to gain prestige among their classmates by actively avoiding high grades for their work.) The Coleman Report and associated investigations into educational achievement demonstrated the importance of non-school factors for children's cognitive development. The Report concluded that family and other influences outside school explain most of the apparent school effects in attainment. Both bodies of work were controversial and questioned at the time—although both have stood the test of time and their major conclusions are now widely accepted.
Coleman's excursion into simulation games and learning behaviour led to the establishment of what became known as the Academic Games Programme (or Hopkins Games Project), a diverse set of research activities which sought to analyse the role of games in the socialization process, especially in schools. Although much of this work concentrated on the potential of games for understanding different aspects of the learning process, Coleman was also led by his findings to the construction of formal sociological theory, in much the same way as a physical scientist might use the experimental method for the same purpose. Games were devised which simulated (for example) a national presidential campaign—and the results were then used to inform Coleman's writings about collective decision-making in the legislative process.
In the field of public policy, his most important work probably lay in his clarification and analysis of the concept of equality of opportunity, and its implications for schooling. His work on youth and adolescence was also an important early illustration of the power of sociology as a basis for policy-making. Here, as elsewhere in his work, Coleman often challenged conventional wisdoms and generated not only academic controversy but also fierce public debate.
It is probably too soon to judge the lasting influence of his magnum opus on The Foundations of Social Theory. Many admirers have already hailed the work as a ‘foundation effort’ within sociology, to be placed on a par with earlier attempts by Durkheim and Parsons, who also sought to provide a unifying theoretical and methodological basis for the discipline. Others question whether rational-choice theory—the broad umbrella under which Coleman constructed his models and explanations—can provide a satisfactory solution to the long-standing sociological concern of solving the problem of social order by explaining how individually rational actions systematically generate regularities in macro-level outcomes.
There is an excellent Festschrift offering a wide-ranging assessment of Coleman's contributions to sociology—Jon Clark (ed.), James S. Coleman—and which is made especially interesting by the fact that it contains several pieces by Coleman himself, reflecting on the significance of his work, penned shortly before his death.

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Coleman Report

An influential and controversial study, published by the US Government in 1966, under the title Equality of Educational Opportunity. The co-authored report was based on an extensive survey of educational opportunity (the national sample included almost 650,000 students and teachers in more than 3,000 schools), was mandated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and was directed by the sociologist James Coleman. It was a landmark in policy research, being one of the first social scientific studies specifically commissioned by Congress in order to inform government policy, following those done on the military during the Second World War. The research design adopted for the investigation changed the whole direction of policy research in education and was widely imitated by later researchers. The results shaped school desegregation policy for many years following publication of the Report.
The study began with the controversial and innovative premiss that equality of opportunity should be assessed by equality of outcome rather than equality of input. The researchers therefore collected data, not only on the educational resources available to different groups of children, but also on students' achievements (as measured by, for example, test scores). For the first time it was possible to provide an informed answer to the question of how much, and in what ways, schools were able to overcome the inequalities (notably those associated with race) with which children came to school. Coleman himself later argued that the most important research findings of the study were twofold. First, it showed that variations in school quality (as indexed by the usual measures such as per pupil expenditure, size of school library, and so on) showed little association with levels of educational attainment, when students of comparable social backgrounds were compared across schools. (Differences in students' family backgrounds, by comparison, showed a substantial association with achievement.) Second, a student's educational attainment was not only related to his or her own family background, but also (less strongly) to the backgrounds of the other students in the school. These findings had clear implications for social engineering: opportunities could best be equalized via strategies of desegregation of schools (for example by busing). They challenged a major plank of Lyndon Johnson's vision for the Great Society; namely, that increased spending on education could rectify social deficits.
The report was a focus of controversy both among academic researchers and in the political arena for many years. It was widely misinterpreted as an argument that ‘schools don't matter, only families matter’. Ironically, some of Coleman's subsequent work was designed to identify those characteristics of schools which did matter, so that the impact of school relative to that of family could be increased. For example, later research (reported in High School Achievement, 1982, and The Impact of Communities, 1987) suggested that, after controlling for background and other effects, pupils in private Catholic schools did better than others, because of the higher academic demands and disciplinary standards set in these schools, and because of the kinds of families and communities to which the children belonged. This second set of factors was discussed by Coleman under the heading of social capital.
Remarkably, considering both the constraints of time under which he and his colleagues worked and the limited agenda set by the government bureaucrats who monitored the study, all but one of the major findings generated by Coleman withstood subsequent examination by an army of social scientists. (For example, a group of eminent social scientists and social statisticians formed the Harvard University Faculty Seminar on the Coleman Report, and met regularly for a whole year, for the sole purpose of verifying the original findings by reanalysing the data.) Subsequent reanalysis showed that a coding error had produced greater evidence of peer effects in schools than was actually the case, a particularly unfortunate mistake, since this finding was often cited as evidence to support policies of forced integration and busing as the most effective way of ending racial segregation and raising Black educational achievement.
There is an excellent summary and appraisal of the Coleman Report, together with an account of research that followed in its wake, in the article on
‘Coleman's Contributions to Education’, in , James S. Coleman (1996)
.

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collective action

Action taken by a group (either directly or on its behalf through an organization) in pursuit of members' perceived shared interests. It seems logical to expect that people who have an interest in common will act on it—for example that pensioners will act for higher pensions, or miners for greater underground safety. Experience shows that this is not always the case, and that many people who stand to benefit from a given collective action will refuse to join in. This seems to run against the assumption of rationality in human behaviour, and presents a particular problem for students of politics and social movements.
In 1965 Mancur Olson offered an explanation in The Logic of Collective Action. Olson argued that rational self-interest often leads to inaction, in so far as individuals will benefit from concessions made to the whole group, whether they themselves have been active or not. If pensions are raised after a campaign by senior citizens, all pensioners will gain, including those who did nothing. Olson called this the free-rider problem, and it is important because it undermines the ability of interest groups and social movements to mobilize large numbers of citizens. If those citizens are poor, the costs of participation are relatively higher for them, and they are even more likely to remain passive. The only answer to the free-rider problem is for the movement to offer extra incentives to participate, beyond the goals themselves. These incentives may take the form of recognition, prestige, or the psychological rewards of participation itself.
The nature of rational choice has been a conundrum for sociology since Max Weber's classical writings on the problem. One attempt to model the process is shown in rational calculus or game theory which tries to show how, in concrete social situations, actors will try to maximize their rewards and minimize their costs. However, few people are so careful, controlled, and well-informed that their actions will fit the rational-choice model (see EXCHANGE THEORY). Acts of bravery and commitment lie outside its explanatory power, as do acts based on ignorance or impulse. Large areas of collective action clearly require explanations of a more complex type. A good overview of the field is given in Russell Hardin's Collective Action (1982). See also CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS; CLASS INTEREST; REBELLION; STRIKE.

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collective and distributive power

In his essay on
‘The Distribution of Power in American Society’ (in Structure and Process in Modern Societies, 1960
), Talcott Parsons distinguishes the distributive aspects of power (‘power by A over B’), from its collective aspects (‘the power of A and B together’). The former are to the fore where the relationship between A and B is a zero-sum game; that is, when there is a fixed amount of power to be distributed among participants, and for one member to gain power another must lose; the latter emerge where individuals in co-operation can enhance their joint power over a third party.

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collective bargaining

A system for the fixing of earnings and conditions of employment, in which the processes of price (or wage) competition in the labour-market between individual workers and individual employers is replaced, either in whole or in part, by rule-fixing. These rules are of two kinds: procedural, regulating the forms and institutions under which collective negotiations are to be conducted; and substantive, regulating the actual content of particular agreements. Typically, collective bargaining occurs between trade unions and an employer, or organization of employers. However, during the twentieth century, governments and the law in industrial societies have increasingly become parties to both the procedural and the substantive aspects. Bargaining may therefore take place at the workplace, company, regional, or industry levels. Britain is unusual in having no legal compulsion on employers to bargain in this way and collective agreements are rarely directly enforceable in the courts.

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collective behaviour

Potentially a very wide-ranging field of study which deals with the ways in which collective behaviours emerge as responses to problematic circumstances and situations. At one extreme this can mean the study of co-ordinated and organized social movements; at the other, it refers to the seemingly spontaneous eruption of common behavioural patterns, as for example in episodes of mass hysteria. Between these are responses to natural disasters, riots, lynchings, crazes, fads, fashions, rumours, booms, panics, and even rebellions or revolutions. Many of these phenomena are dealt with under separate headings in this dictionary. Collective behaviour, then, is perhaps a term that covers too wide a field, since, in one sense, it could be seen as coterminous with the whole of sociology.
Perhaps the earliest formulations of collective behaviour are to be found in crowd psychology. Gustave Le Bon, in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), argued that the crowd was a reality sui generis, since ‘it forms a single being, and is subjected to the law of the mental unity of crowds’. He suggested that all individual responses were lost in crowds, and that a ‘collective mind’ emerged which made people ‘feel, think and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would’. Crowds emerged through the existence of anonymity (which allowed a decline in personal responsibility); in contagion (ideas moving rapidly through a group); and through a suggestibility whereby the unconscious aspects of the personality come to the fore.
Many subsequent studies of crowds, riots, mobs, and similar such collective disturbances—including, for example, contributions by Gabriel Tarde and Sigmund Freud—do little more than elaborate Le Bon's contagion hypothesis. Freud starts from Le Bon's description of the crowd mentality—whereby crowds are seen as impulsive, changeable, and irritable; incapable of sustained attention, criticism, or perseverance; and governed by a sense of omnipotence, exaggerated feelings, magical formulas, and illusions—and explains group participation in terms of the psychoanalytic theories of the instinct-object relationships in the individual and of the primal horde. As he puts it, ‘The uncanny and coercive characteristics of group formation, which are shown in the phenomena of suggestion that accompany them, may … be traced back to the fact of their origin from the primal horde. The leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father; the group still wishes to be governed by unrestricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority … it has a thirst for obedience. The primal father is the group ideal, which governs the ego in the place of the ego ideal’ (‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’). According to Freud, these features together with the loss of consciousness, dominance of the mind by emotions, and the impulsiveness of crowds, ‘correspond to a state of regression to a primitive mental activity’.
A more sociological approach to collective behaviour is evident in Neil Smelser's ‘value-added schema’ (see
Theory of Collective Behaviour, 1963
), which suggests that the determinants of collective behaviour are given by the following sequence of events and elements: structural conduciveness (conditions of permissiveness under which collective behaviour is seen as legitimate); structural strain (such as economic deprivation); growth and spread of a generalized belief (for example a mass hysteria, delusion, or creation of a folk devil); precipitating factors (specific events—such as a fight set against the background of an explosive race situation—which confirms the earlier generalized belief); mobilization of the participants for action (via effective leadership, in a social movement, or a single dramatic event such as a rumour of a panic sell by a leading holder of shares in a company); and the operation of social control (which refers to the counter forces set up by the wider society to prevent and inhibit the previous determinants). According to Smelser, the last of these is of particular importance, since ‘once an episode of collective behaviour has appeared, its duration and severity are determined by the response of the agencies of social control’.
Smelser's sixth determinant attaches the same importance to social control as do transactional (notably labelling) theories of deviance. Within the interactionist tradition more generally, special attention has been paid to social typing, and to the way in which role models are created and diffused in the wider society (see, for example,
, Collective Behaviour, 1957
). This volume also includes some of the earliest sociological work on fads and fashions. More recently, the study of the specific conditions under which organized collective actions (such as strikes) take place has been greatly influenced by rational choice theory, following the classic analysis by
(The Logic of Collective Action, 1965)
. See also EXCHANGE THEORY; SUBCULTURE.

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collective conscience

Defined by Émile Durkheim as ‘the body of beliefs and sentiments common to the average of members of a society’, it comprised a form and content which varied according to whether society was characterized by mechanical or organic solidarity. In the former, the collective conscience was extensive and strong, ranging far and wide into people's lives, controlling them in detail through various religious or other traditional means of sanction. It emphasized the primacy of society over the individual and his or her dignity. However, with the coming of the Enlightenment the collective conscience waned, becoming less extensive, weaker in its grip on the individual, secular, and sanctioned through the imposition of general rule rather than specific codes. The growth of individualism, albeit moral individualism in Durkheim's view, undermined the collective conscience. In the transition to organic solidarity this could be observed in the replacement of repressive by restitutive systems of law. Whereas the former punished for the violation of solidarity itself, the latter sought simply to maintain the normal contact and social intercourse in society. Durkheim's argument is that a society-wide collective conscience can only hold a segmental society together; a more differentiated society must be held together by a more differentiated moral consciousness, whose foci (at least in his view) would be occupational groups and the specialized norms issuing from them. The collective conscience becomes a diffuse, abstract ‘cult of the individual’ which, as a civil religion, supplies ultimate principles and justifications, but cannot bear the whole weight of social cohesion. See also ANOMIE; DIVISION OF LABOUR; DYNAMIC DENSITY.

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collective consumption

This concept was central to neo-Marxist urban social theories developed in the late 1960s and 1970s. Manuel Castells and others argued that advanced capitalism required increasing state involvement in the so-called means of collective consumption. To reproduce an adequate labour-force, provision of individual means of consumption (commodities such as food and clothing) was no longer enough; services such as education and mass transportation were also needed. Unlike individual commodities, the latter were consumed collectively, being services used by many people rather than goods consumed individually. Particular features of collective consumption, notably the state's role in its provision and the opportunities it appeared to offer for political mobilization of consumers, underlay the significance of the concept for these urban social theories.
Subsequently, however, the distinction between collective and individual consumption was much disputed. It is difficult, for example, to see just how services such as education are consumed ‘collectively’—although they may be collectively provided. As used in practice, therefore, the term collective consumption now has no very precise meaning, although it normally refers to services (rather than goods) which are directly provided by state agencies instead of by the market; or, at least, to services provided with considerable state involvement, for example through subsidies or regulation. (In that sense, of course, it is a misnomer—since it does indeed indicate collective provision of services which are then consumed individually.) Later writers have developed more complex classifications of the social organization of consumption, and used these to analyse the nature of urban politics and the role of so-called consumption sector cleavages in social stratification and in determining political attitudes. For an overview see
, Social Theory and the Urban Question (1986)
. See also URBAN SOCIOLOGY.

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collective good

See PUBLIC GOOD.

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collective labour

Karl Marx's utopian conception of how production would be organized under communism. In his writings on alienated labour, Marx identified the alienation of human beings from each other as a direct consequence of their alienation from their very being. The transcendence of alienation would involve the creation of ‘free and associated labour’ as part of the broader emancipation of labour; that is, doing away with state parasites and those who do not work at all, or who work to enslave others. Collective labour would be a part of the wider co-operative production, abolishing the anarchy of capitalist production, and involving the administration of things rather than the management of people. Individuals would no longer treat each other as competitors for jobs, advantage, and scarce resources, but would in the realm of ‘use value’ produce collectively for their common genuine needs.

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collective representations

Simply put, these refer to the ideas, beliefs, and values elaborated by a collectivity, and which are not reducible to individual constituents. They are central to Émile Durkheim's search for the sources of social solidarity. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), these representations are seen as being created through the intense interaction of religious rituals, and being richer than individual activities they come to be autonomous of the group from which they emerged. Collective representations help to order and make sense of the world, but they also express, symbolize and interpret social relationships. The concept supersedes Durkheim's earlier notion of ‘collective conscience’, since collective representations come to inhibit and stimulate social action. Their force or authority comes from their being within all of us and yet external to the individual. Durkheim explained great value transformations (such as the propagation of Enlightenment values in the French revolution) by reference to the power of this ‘coming together’ (or dynamic density), whereby the religious world is rooted in collective life, leaving the profane to the individual. Assembly of an intense kind generates collective representations, which then survive the disintegration of this higher collective life as sacred and therefore morally coercive beliefs, values, and symbols.

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collectivism

A term with a general and a variety of specific applications. In the most common usage it refers to any political or socio-economic theory or practice which encourages communal or state ownership and control of the means of production and distribution. Particular applications vary greatly since there are numerous examples of collectivist organizations.
Farmers organized into collectives were, until recently, a significant social group in the former USSR. These farms controlled the labour inputs of members, fixed rates of remuneration, and determined the content of agricultural production. Many were the result of a violent forced collectivization of peasant and family-owned farms during the Stalinist period. Agricultural collectives in China have had a more varied history. One of the most popular schemes was a ‘responsibility system’ introduced in the 1980s, whereby individual peasant households signed a contract by which the land still belonged technically to the collective, but was assigned to individual households for their own use. These contracts specified obligations on either side, for example with respect to the provision of tools and equipment, payment of taxes, and meeting of production quotas. A particularly interesting form of collective—the workers' self-management of the economy—emerged in Tito's Yugoslavia. However, sociological research confirmed that the theoretically democratic distribution of influence within the enterprise was not matched by the real power of Workers' Councils, which tended in practice to be largely symbolic.
The collectivist critique of liberal and other theories of individualism argues that market relationships are competitive, tend also therefore to be divisive, and undermine those communal bonds which are necessary between individuals if they are to cope with misfortunes to which all are in principle vulnerable. For example, social welfare theorists argue that unrestrained free exchange causes welfare problems, as evidenced by the housing market which fails to provide shelter to those in demonstrable need. One of the most celebrated collectivist defences of the welfare state was made by Richard Titmuss (see
The Gift Relationship, 1970
), who argued that welfare systems should be defended by reference to arguments about altruism. His argument was that people should receive welfare as a gift from strangers, an expression of social solidarity, rather than as an entitlement or right derived from a complex network of reciprocal relationships. Thus, in the case of blood donations, Titmuss maintained that if this ‘most sacred’ of commodities were to be commercialized then the moral bonds between individuals would become wholly contaminated by calculations of self-interest and market price. As he puts it, ‘In not asking for or expecting any payment of money those donors signified their belief in the willingness of men to act altruistically in the future, and to combine together to make a gift freely should they have need for it. By expressing confidence in the behaviour of future unknown strangers they were thus denying the Hobbesian thesis that men are devoid of any instinctive moral sense’. This communitarian view of welfare as an expression of the common values that bind otherwise disparate individuals together may be contrasted with the more individualistic conception of welfare derived from the theory of citizenship. The latter implies that claims to welfare resources are simply an extension of the legal and political rights that are characteristic of liberal democracies and, therefore, that collective welfare is quite consistent with the theory of liberal pluralism. Welfare states are simply adjuncts to markets; that is, rational deprivation-alleviating institutions and policies, resting on the individualistic principles of reciprocal obligations and exchange. Communitarianism, by contrast, embodies a vision of a social order that fosters intimate communal bonds.
During the early 1990s, the term ‘communitarianism’ was appropriated by a small group of mainly American social scientists, linked by a common hostility to the philosophies of liberalism and libertarianism. The sociologist Amitai Etzioni was one of the prominent founders of this movement (see his
The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society, 1996
). Etzioni argues that the advanced industrial societies of the capitalist West suffer from ‘rampant moral confusion and social anarchy’ because individuals have been given too much freedom and not enough responsibilities. Etzioni and other communitarians are in favour of more obligations and fewer rights. They tend to shun economic explanations of social problems, preferring instead to blame everything from crime to excessive consumerism on the moral decline of the family, much of which can be traced to the increasing employment of women outside the home. Etzioni claims this has created a ‘parenting deficit’ which prevents ‘effective personality formation’ in infants, increasing reliance on child-care facilities that often amount to little more than ‘kennels for kids’, and in due course producing a generation of young people who lack the moral fibre to resist crime, drugs, and early sex.
Communitarians deny that they are advocating a return to the 1950s-style division of labour (formal employment for men, back into the home for women), and proffer instead a range of ‘pro-family practices and policies’, such as Etzioni's ideas for ‘peer marriage’ (a two-parent family, in which each partner has the same rights to extended ‘family leave’ after the birth of children, underwritten by a hardening of the laws against divorce). More broadly, communitarians favour a social order in which ‘the community’ identifies the common good, and persuades its members to act towards it. In this way arguments in favour of (say) safer driving will succeed because they have moral force.
Communitarians claim to have influenced the development of social policy in America (Etzioni has been a policy adviser to the Clinton administrations) and Britain (where communitarian ideas are said to have found favour with New Labour). Community policing, for example, is a policy consistent with communitarian ideals. Critics have suggested that communitarian arguments are both vague and naïve. Who will pay for extended parental leave-of-absence from employment? What if ‘the community’ endorses values such as homophobia or racialism? What happens to dissenters, who refuse to conform to the ideals of the two-parent family and marriage for life, and are not persuaded by mere exhortation alone? Communitarian social policies are also said to be authoritarian in effect if not intention. See also BROKEN WINDOWS THESIS; COMMUNE; GIFT RELATIONSHIP.

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collectivist organizations

See COLLECTIVISM.

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colonialism

The establishment by more developed countries of formal political authority over areas of Asia, Africa, Australasia, and Latin America. It is distinct from spheres of influence, indirect forms of control, semi-colonialism, and neo-colonialism.
Colonialism was practised by Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, and the Netherlands in the Americas from the fifteenth century onwards, and extended to virtually all of Asia and Africa during the nineteenth century. It was usually (but not necessarily) accompanied by the settling of White populations in these territories, the exploitation of local economic resources for metropolitan use, and sometimes both together. The term is often used as a synonym for imperialism although the latter covers other informal mechanisms of control.
In addition to debates about the causes, benefits, and impact of imperialism, discussion of colonialism has covered a wide range of issues including: the different mechanisms of colonial control and the contrast between the assimilationist policies of France and Portugal and the more segregated policies of Britain; the social and economic impact on colonized countries, resulting from the destruction of old social, economic, and political systems and the development of new ones; the nineteenth-century discourse of domination around the idea of the ‘civilizing mission’ and the related rise of racism; the issue of why colonialism ended in the post-1945 period, involving a consideration of the relative weights of international pressure from both the United States and USSR, the rise of nationalist movements demanding independence in colonies, and the exhaustion of the European colonial powers after the Second World War.

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colonialism, internal

See INTERNAL COLONIALISM.

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command economy

Not to be confused with its associated feature the planned economy, the paradigm case is the neo-Stalinist, centrally directed, state-owned economy of the Soviet Union. A continuum can be elaborated, within which communist economic systems can be located in terms of whether they seek to centralize all or some of the decisions relating to macroeconomic policy, enterprise-level activity, and household behaviour concerning employment and consumption. The type of economy which existed in post-revolutionary Russia faced with civil war between 1918 and 1921—namely war communism—centralizes all of the above spheres of decision-making. The command economy centralizes the first two dimensions but leaves some scope for local-level decisions as regards the third. So-called market socialism decentralizes all three—although state ownership remains. Many of the pathologies attributed to planned (or ‘administered’, ‘managed’, or ‘non-market’) economies are in fact evident only in the specifically command version. See also STALINISM.

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commodification, commoditization

Within Marxist theory this refers to the production of commodities for exchange (via the market) as opposed to direct use by the producer. It signals the conversion of use-values into exchange-values and heralds a change in production relations. In conventional terms it can be described as the process whereby goods and services which were formerly used for subsistence purposes are bought and sold in the market. These terms are widely used in Third World studies, for example, when subsistence peasants begin to sell their produce for cash. See also COMMODITY FETISHISM.

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commodity chains, commodity chain analysis

The network of economic links which integrate transnational labour processes and corporations involved in global sourcing and global marketing of products. Commodity chain analysis—sometimes also known as the ‘global commodity chains’ (GCC) approach—is a development of the world-system perspective. It challenges the assumption that capitalism is an incremental process contained within nation-states by tracking the organizational, geographical, and cultural dimensions of world-wide chains for the manufacture and distribution of goods such as clothing, automobiles, food, and drugs. A distinction is sometimes made between producer-driven (transnational corporation) and buyer-driven (retailer/trading company) commodity chains. For a summary statement and series of case-studies see
, Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (1994)
. See also GLOBALIZATION.

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commodity fetishism

An idea elaborated by Karl Marx early in the first volume of Capital. He makes a distinction between use-value and exchange-value: the former is a judgement about the usefulness of an object; the latter is what that same object will fetch in exchange on the market. Money provides the medium of exchange, and brings unequal, different objects into relations of equality with each other—one meal in a restaurant, for example, might equal four paperback books. Exchange-values depend upon the ratio of the labour times currently needed to produce the objects. This in turn refers us to the social division of labour and the complex relationships of interdependence that exist in capitalist society. These complex relationships, however, are not obvious to those participating in market exchanges who see only the resulting relationships (of price) between commodities. They therefore (mistakenly but adequately for their purposes) view these relationships as autonomous, and as governing rather than dependent on the social division of labour, and the relations it establishes between different producers. When generalized, this delusion is the commodity fetishism which Marx criticized in bourgeois economists who took economic value to be an intrinsic property of commodities, like their use-value.
The commodity is a fetish, in the sense that it is endowed with the powers of human beings, so it seems that what happens to us depends upon the state and movement of the market. György Lukács extends the theory into the notion of reification: all human relationships and experience come to be perceived as commodities and we treat them as things. Commodity fetishism is one aspect of the analysis of ideology in capitalist societies: the real underlying relationships are hidden from our perception and we build our understanding of the world only on appearances.

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commonsense knowledge

This refers, unsurprisingly, to routine knowledge we have of our everyday world and activities. Different sociological approaches adopt different attitudes to commonsense knowledge. The concept is central to Alfred Schutz's phenomenological sociology, where it refers to organized ‘typified’ stocks of taken-for-granted knowledge, upon which our activities are based, and which, in the ‘natural attitude’, we do not question. This idea forms the basis of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's general theory of society (The Social Construction of Reality, 1967). For ethnomethodologists, commonsense (or, as it is frequently termed, ‘tacit’) knowledge is a constant achievement, in which people draw on implicit rules of ‘how to carry on’, which produce a sense of organization and coherence. Anthony Giddens builds this idea into his theory of structuration (The Constitution of Society, 1984). For symbolic interactionists and other interpretive sociologists, there is a less rigorous analysis of commonsense knowledge, but the central aim of sociology is seen as explicating and elaborating on people's conceptions of the social world, and sociological analysis must always be rooted in these conceptions.
However, some sociologists regard commonsense knowledge as different from, if not opposed to, sociological understanding. For Émile Durkheim, sociology must break free of commonsense perceptions (prejudices), before we can produce scientific knowledge of the social world. For Marxists, much commonsense knowledge is ideological, or at least very limited in its understanding of the world. These approaches tend to emphasize the scientific nature of sociology and, in the case of Marxists, the importance of the revolutionary party to organize and guide the working class.

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communal production systems

A term sometimes applied to the broad range of exchanges between formal production and the household production system, in which those who carry the costs expect symbolic, intangible returns for their efforts. These include baby-sitting circles and car pools (which verge on the formal, since they sometimes operate on quasi-money exchanges, and break down if equal values are not exchanged over a given period of time), housing improvement co-operatives, and making meals for a sick neighbour (a form of exchange which is similar to that within the household).

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commune

Refers to either a group of people sharing life and work, a utopian community in which members attempt to found a new social order, based on a vision of an ideal society; or to a territorial administrative unit, originally used in the French Revolution to refer to a subdivision of a canton, introduced in 1792. The latter usage was adopted by the Jacobin regime of 1793–4, extended to other insurrectionist bodies such as the Paris Commune of 1871, and to several other countries including Italy. In the post-war period it has also referred to Chinese units of territorial administration and Israeli kibbutzim.
However, sociological interest in communes focuses mainly on the commune in the first sense; namely, the attempt to create new, shared, egalitarian living and working relationships. Among the questions posed by these experiments is whether behavioural patterns and power relations (such as those based on gender) are significantly transformed in a more socially egalitarian context. Andrew Rigby (Alternative Realities, 1973) has offered a useful six-fold typology of communes: self-actualizing communes offer members the opportunity to create a new social order by realizing their full potential as individuals within the context of the communal group; communes for mutual support attempt to promote a sense of solidarity that members feel they have been unable to discover in the world at large; activist communes provide an urban base from which members can venture forth to involve themselves in social and political activity in the outside world; practical communes define their purpose at least partly in terms of the economic and other material advantages they offer to members; therapeutic communes, as the name implies, offer some form of care and attention to those who are considered to have particular needs; and religious communes are defined by their members primarily in religious terms. These categories are, of course, not mutually exclusive.

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communication

The process of establishing meaning, found in all social situations, and hence a very wide-ranging concern of social scientists generally. Conventionally studied by social psychologists, semiologists, students of mass media, and linguists, communication studies has increasingly become established as a field of inquiry in its own right (for example in Communications Departments), and is often allied to cultural studies.
Communication occurs through at least five modes. Intrapersonal communication concerns internal conversations with one's self. Interpersonal communication concerns face-to-face interaction, such as that analysed by Erving Goffman, and often studies paralanguages such as body movements (see BODY LANGUAGE) and spatial arrangements. Group communication involves the study of group dynamics, whilst mass communication involves messages sent from mass sources in mass ways to mass audiences, often to make mass money. A fifth and growing form of communication has been called extrapersonal communication and concerns communicating with non-humans: this could mean ‘talking to the animals’, but most frequently it refers to the way we communicate with machines, computers, and high technology (for example through video games or bank-teller machines).
Communications research often works from a simple model which asks ‘who says what in which channel to whom and with what effects?’ The resulting description of the ‘communication structure’ that exists in every (simple or complex) social system is sometimes criticized for depicting too linear a flow since feedback loops can occur at all stages of communication. Nevertheless, the central components usually involve senders (producers), messages (codes), and receivers (audiences). A distinction must also be made between the formal and actual structures of communication. The former is defined by publicly recognized social roles (such as the hierarchy of offices in a bureaucratic organization) whereas the latter refers to the structure of interaction as it actually occurs (which may include various forms of informal communication through unofficial channels).
The structure and effectiveness of communication can have substantial consequences for the functioning of social systems. This is well illustrated in the study of formal organizations, notably for example in research influenced by contingency theory, which often placed systems of communication at the heart of the analysis. See also CONTENT ANALYSIS; CRITICAL THEORY; CYBERSOCIETY; INTERNET; LANGUAGE.

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communication, non-verbal

See NON-VERBAL COMMUNICATION.

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communication structure

See COMMUNICATION.

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communism

A political doctrine, originating in the French Revolution, according to which human society can be organized on the basis of the common ownership of economic resources by the direct producers or workers. The theory of communism was developed systematically by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1840s, who asserted that human society underwent development through a series of historical stages or modes of production, and that out of the development of capitalism and the organized activity of the working class would emerge a communist society or workers' state as the culmination of history. Marx gave only the most general indication as to what constituted a communist society, and later writers modified his vision by allotting a central place to the state in the organizing of such societies, and by arguing for a prolonged transition period of socialism prior to the attainment of full communism. For that reason, the USSR, People's Republic of China, and more recently established communist regimes such as those in Cuba and Vietnam are often described as ‘state socialist’. This usage indicates that they are judged to have realized part of the socialist programme by abolishing private property and establishing state control over the economy; however, they are not considered truly socialist (or communist), because they have not established political democracy. (Rather unhelpfully, however, they are sometimes also referred to as state capitalism. What both terms point to is the recognition that these societies fall far short of Marx's utopian communist ideal—and usually involve a heavily centralized and undemocratic political apparatus in which the state bureaucratic élite acts as a surrogate capitalist class. Thus, and to add further to the terminological confusion, they are sometimes also known as ‘bureaucratic socialist’ or ‘state monopoly capitalist’ societies.) One of the best histories of the communist movement and communist societies is
's The Communist Movement: From Comintern to Cominform (1975)
.
Theories within Marxism as to why communism was not achieved after socialist revolutions pointed to such elements as the pressure of external capitalist states, the relative backwardness of the societies in which the revolutions occurred, and the emergence of a bureaucratic stratum or class that arrested and diverted the transition process in its own interests. Non-Marxists have applied the term communism to any society ruled by a communist party and to any parties aspiring to create such a society. Communist societies were seen by most sociologists as being distinct from capitalist states in important political and ideological respects, involving as they did the concentration of decision-making in a small and secretive leadership; state domination of the economy; the limitation of all independent political and social activity; and a higher reliance on coercion than was present in liberal democracies. However, the extent to which the economic bases of the two types of system were in practice distinct was always a hotly debated issue, with some writers arguing that the technological imperatives of advanced industrialism yielded great similarities at the level of the productive unit and its organization.
While critics applied the concept totalitarian to these societies, more sympathetic analysts identified possibilities for independent political activity within them, and stressed their continued evolution up to the point of the dissolution of the USSR and its satellites in Eastern Europe during the late 1980s. See also REAL SOCIALISM.

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communist anarchism

See ANARCHISM.

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communitarian, communitarianism

See COLLECTIVISM.

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community

The concept of community concerns a particularly constituted set of social relationships based on something which the participants have in common—usually a common sense of identity. It is, to paraphrase Talcott Parsons, frequently used to denote a wide-ranging relationship of solidarity over a rather undefined area of life and interests. According to Robert Nisbet (The Sociological Tradition, 1966), it was the most fundamental and far-reaching of the core ideas incorporated in the discipline's foundations, principally because concern with loss of community was central to nineteenth-century sociology. The sociological content of community has, however, remained a matter for endless dispute.
These disputes flow from what Nisbet describes as the rediscovered symbolism of community in nineteenth-century thought, which identified this form of social association with the Good Society, and with all forms of relationship which are characterized by a high degree of personal intimacy, emotional depth, moral commitment, social cohesion, and continuity in time. It was feared that these were precisely the features which were disappearing in the transition from a rural-based to an urban-industrial society. This alleged loss of community was central to the work of Ferdinand Tönnies, who has been described as the founder of the theory of community. In the book
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (‘Community and Society’)
Tönnies presented ideal-typical pictures of these forms of social association, contrasting the solidaristic nature of social relations in the former, with the large-scale and impersonal relations thought to characterize industrializing societies.
One difficulty for the sociology of community ensuing from these intellectual origins is that it has frequently been used to identify and at the same time endorse a particular form of social association. A second is that there is no clear and widely accepted definition of just what characteristic features of social interaction constitute the solidaristic relations typical of so-called communities. These value-laden but imprecise circumstances go a long way to explaining a third difficulty—the empirical identification of communities. The term has been used in the sociological literature to refer directly to types of population settlements (such as villages or physically bounded urban neighbourhoods); to supposedly ideal-typical ways of life in such places; and to social networks whose members share some common characteristic apart from or in addition to a common location (such as ethnicity or occupation). Frequently the term is used in ways which contain all these elements—as, for example, in ‘traditional inner-city working-class communities’. At one time the problems of defining the concept of community provided the basis for a thriving sociological industry. In a classic contribution to this debate, George A. Hillery analysed no fewer than ninety-four definitions of the concept, although his conclusions were hardly enlightening since he was able only to extract from these a classification which distinguished sixteen different and characteristic elements. These included geographical area, self-sufficiency, kinship, consciousness of kind, common life-styles, and various intensive types of social interaction. Somewhat despairingly, perhaps, Hillery concluded from his review that ‘There is one element, however, which can be found in all of the concepts … all of the definitions deal with people. Beyond this common basis, there is no agreement’ (
‘Definitions of Community: Areas of Agreement’, Rural Sociology, 1955
). See also ANTI-URBANISM; COMMUNITY POWER; COMMUNITY STUDIES.

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community, moral

See MORAL COMMUNITY.

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community care

An imprecise and much abused concept embracing a diverse set of policies for dependent persons—particularly those chronically dependent by virtue of age, mental illness, or mental or physical handicap—which involve, in some way or another, looking after them in the community. In its most general sense, the community is here merely negatively defined as ‘not the institution’; that is, not the large-scale, long-stay institution, such as the asylum or workhouse. Inherent in the concept is, therefore, a contrast between old institutional policies that encouraged the separation of people from the community (ordinary everyday life), and new policies according to which individuals are cared for and integrated into community life as far as possible. This basic opposition is associated with contrasting stereotypes: the vast, impersonal, isolated, impoverishing, harsh, and bureaucratic institution, on the one hand, and on the other the friendly, supportive, enriching, and caring (with its connotations of love) community. It is this contrasting imagery that gives the notion of community care such strong symbolic power, accounts for the ready acceptance of policies put forward in its name, and (regrettably) distracts attention from any precise examination of the care, if any, that is provided.
The actual character of community-care provisions varies enormously and changes over time. Only detailed knowledge of service arrangements and policies allows us to determine their exact nature. In its early usage in the 1930s, community care referred to the boarding out (fostering) of those identified as mentally subnormal. Here and elsewhere the model was of publicly funded and administered alternatives to institutional care. After the Second World War, when community care became a very widely accepted policy objective, it still referred to publicly provided services, including ‘half-way’ houses and small residential units for the chronically dependent, or units in general hospitals for those with acute problems. Not surprisingly, the main obstacle to policy implementation was the capital investment required, in a context of low capital expenditure on state welfare services; studies showed that in Britain the implementation of community-care policies was slow.
In the United States community care spread more rapidly. Although some new state-funded services were established, such as Community Mental Health Centres (which in practice primarily dealt with acute problems), many people with chronic problems were discharged into private facilities such as nursing homes and boarding houses. The introduction of community care consequently went hand in hand with the privatization of care—a trend exacerbated in the 1970s by the cutbacks in federal support for facilities like CMHCs.
A similar pattern emerged in Britain from the mid-1970s, prompted by the state's fiscal crisis, and compounded by public expenditure cuts. Community care increasingly meant private care, whether provided by commercial or charitable groups, or family and friends—a transformation which ensured that public expenditure pressures accelerated rather than curtailed policy implementation. It also ensured that, with the run-down in public services, many individuals faced neglect and marginalization (rather than enjoying care and support) in the community, or else experienced a process of ‘trans-institutionalization’, discharged from one (large-scale) institution only to end up in another—albeit smaller. The marked failures of community care in Europe and the United States, as well as its somewhat limited successes, are now well documented.

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community control

A concept used widely but frequently rather loosely. In social work, probation work, or psychiatry, the term may be used as part of the vocabulary of practice to refer to some form of community care, therapy, or treatment (often forming part of a process of decarceration), or with reference to schemes such as Intermediate Treatment, Community Service Orders, or home-detention monitored by electronic tagging. In criminology and social control theory it may be used in a broader sense, to draw attention to the ways in which control systems become part of the fabric of the community, such that communities and individuals come to be controlled and to control themselves through mechanisms of surveillance, regulation, and reporting of rule-breaking. This scenario is best drawn by
in his essay, ‘The Punitive City: Notes on the Dispersal of Social Control’, Contemporary Crises (1979)
. Cohen's essay, and the writing of others on the exercise of social control through community agencies, is heavily influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, notably his volume Discipline and Punish (1977).
Critics have suggested that use of both terms—community and control—is too broad and vague, prone to romanticism, and often employed for purposes of polemic. However, the idea of community control seems usefully suggestive to many writers, and is increasingly fashionable among those involved in making social and government policy. See also SOCIAL CONTROL.

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community power

Max Weber defined power as ‘the chance of … men to realise their own will in a communal action even against the resistance of others who are participating in the action’. This definition is disputed and a major contribution to competing theories of power comes from the community power debate—arguments about how and by whom power is exerted in local democratic polities.
One view is that local power is exercised by an élite—such as local officials, politicians, and leading business interests—and is manifest in its public and private decision-making on public policies (see
's classic Community Power Structure, 1953
). However, some political scientists reject this ‘stratification theory’ of power, and deny that an upper-class élite rules, in its own interests, through subordinate officially recognized political and civic leaders. Robert Dahl's study of New Haven (Who Governs), 1961) concludes that the advent of representative democracy shifted power from an élite to various organized interest groups—from oligarchy to pluralism. Differently constituted groups rule depending on the issue in question.
Common to both these approaches is the Weberian action-oriented definition of power: A's power over B amounts to A's ability to compel B to take certain actions. Therefore, in studying community power, we examine decision-making and who influences its outcome. In a much-cited discussion (Power: A Radical View, 1974), Steven Lukes describes this as a one-dimensional view, an approach which Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz (Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice, 1970) deem inadequate. A second dimension to power—so-called ‘non-decisionmaking’—involves the ‘mobilization of bias’, or manipulation of the political agenda by powerful groups, taking decisions which prevent issues from emerging and becoming subject to formal political decision-making.
Lukes also proposes a third dimension to power, ignored by all of the above-mentioned approaches because they are narrowly behavioural, assuming that power must involve decision-making. However, power can also be exercised by preventing people from having grievances in the first place, or as Lukes puts it ‘by shaping their perceptions, cognitions and preferences in such a way that they accept their role in the existing order of things’. Thus, certain issues never arise, so neither do decisions to include or exclude them from the political agenda. Lukes also argues that competing concepts of power reflect differing moral and political values concerning the conception of interests. Power is therefore an ‘essentially contested concept’—subject to irresolvable dispute between theorists with differing values. His radical view denies that interests are simply consciously expressed wants, for these may be shaped by a social system which serves the powerful by suppressing people's recognition of their real interests. (Note the parallel here with the Marxist notion of false consciousness.)
But how can social scientists identify putatively real interests which are unrecognized by those to whom they are attributed? Lukes reanalyses a ‘two-dimensional’ study of community responses to air pollution which, he argues, indicates that real interests can sometimes be identified empirically where counterfactual instances arise, that is, where the processes and structures that deny the expression of real interests are (for whatever reason) temporarily rendered ineffective (a phenomenon illustrated in J. Gaventa's Power and Powerlessness, 1980). His analysis, which has been extensively criticized, transcends the initial confines of the community power debate and addresses the nature of social power generally.
For a summary of the substantive findings of the major studies of community power, together with a report of a sophisticated case-study of local political struggles in a London Borough, see
, Urban Politics (1979)
. See also COMMUNITY STUDIES; NATURAL EXPERIMENT.

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community safety

A concept which is sometimes used interchangeably with that of ‘crime prevention’ in criminological debates. The argument that the community can be both the cause (as, for instance, in some of the writings of the Chicago School) and the solution of the crime problem is not new. Ironically, at a time when critiques of post-industrial or mass society are mourning the loss of ‘traditional communities’, the idea that tackling criminal victimization is the responsibility of a broad base within the community has regained prominence in criminal justice policies and practices. Communities have been given a role in local crime prevention through the emphasis on physical measures to reverse the broken window syndrome. Members of the community are encouraged to take a share in deviance control by co-operating with the police and fulfilling their moral obligations as active citizens. However, critics of this philosophy have argued that the idea of citizen involvement in community safety programmes presumes both that we can identify and agree upon who the citizens are that make up a community, and what the crime concerns are for such citizens. In reality, some ethnic, gender, and age-groups are less visible, and (it is argued) their needs are therefore taken less seriously than are those of others in the ‘community’.

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community studies

The ambiguities of the term community make any wholly coherent sociological definition of communities, and hence the scope and limits for their empirical study, impossible to achieve. In practice, most self-proclaimed community studies have been concerned with examining patterns of social interaction in relatively geographically confined locations, such as villages and urban neighbourhoods. The impact of externally generated change has often been a key concern of these studies. Some sociologists use community studies as a means of exploring, at a manageable local level, wider social processes and structures—such as class or power structures. Others focus on the impact of the spatial proximity of people in a given locality on patterns of social interaction. A wide range of methods has been used, but participant observation, the use of key informants, and social anthropological techniques have been prominent. The best introduction to this diverse literature is still Colin Bell and Howard Newby's Community Studies (1972).
The links between community studies, on the one hand, and rural and urban sociology, on the other, have (unsurprisingly) been particularly close. For example, concepts of community were incorporated in Robert Redfield's folk–urban continuum, and in the urban ecology of the Chicago School; while, conversely, many of the classic community studies were inspired by such theoretical perspectives. However, much scepticism has been expressed concerning the alleged typicality of those community studies which claimed to provide case-studies of wider social processes. These problems led one critic to describe them (rather unfairly) as ‘the poor sociologist's substitute for the novel’.
Various attempts have been made to rethink the content and purpose of community studies by abandoning the normative overtones which the concept of community has so frequently carried. (Although the philosopher Raymond Plant has also argued that the concept is ‘essentially contested’ and therefore necessarily comprises both a descriptive and an evaluative dimension.) In an article entitled
‘The Myth of Community Studies’ (British Journal of Sociology, 20, 1969)
Margaret Stacey proposed abandoning the concept altogether, and reformulating the terrain conventionally occupied by community studies as the examination of locally based and interrelated sets of social institutions, or local social systems. These social systems are not however conceived in isolation from more widely operative social structures and processes.
Stacey's paper appeared at a time when urban sociology in particular was turning sharply away from what appeared to be the abstracted micro-sociology of community studies to consider how macro-social processes shaped the sorts of locations which had been the targets of many such studies. Its impact was therefore limited. However there was a later revival of interest in ‘locality studies’ (as they were now termed) among urban sociologists. The reasons for this are complex but they stem in large part from geographical work which emphasizes the significance of locally varying social, economic, and political structures in the explanation of changing patterns of industrial location. There is also now some more general sociological concern with the spatial aspects of social organization, notably in Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration, which incorporates the concept of ‘locale’—defined as the ‘physical settings associated with the “typical interactions” composing … collectivities as social systems’. Among such locales are those which contain—in more or less complex forms—the types of local social system referred to by Stacey. See also COMMUNITY POWER.

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community survey

A term employed by social epidemiologists for studies designed to measure health independently of service-use, by screening individuals living in their homes in the community, using special health measures (screening instruments). Such surveys usually exclude those living in large-scale institutions, such as prisons or hospitals, and the homeless.

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compadrazgo

Compadrazgo is best described as a system of fictive kinship, with its origins in the medieval Catholic church in Europe. It can be loosely translated as ‘godparenthood’. Through baptism of a child into the Christian church, compadrazgo sets up a relationship between the child's biological mother and father and (possibly unrelated) persons who become spiritual parents. The latter sponsor the child's acceptance into the Church and, theoretically at least, are responsible for his or her religious education. The biological and spiritual parents refer to each other as ‘co-parents’ and this relationship is normally accompanied by a degree of behavioural and linguistic formality. In the symbolic sense, compadrazgo often signifies that simply being born does not entitle a child to community membership, and that biological parents must be supplemented by social parents in order to give the child a social existence. In this sense baptism can be described as a rite of passage.
Although some Protestant churches use godparents for baptism, and the practice is widespread among Roman Catholics world-wide, it is in the Catholic cultures of the Mediterranean and in Latin America that compadrazgo can be said to be an institution with economic and political significance.
Co-parents with political and economic resources are sought by the biological parents of a child in order to ensure political protection and economic support for the whole family, or perhaps financial support for the child, for example in the form of help with school fees. Persons of political and economic standing in the community often have a large number of godchildren, which not only demonstrates their high status, but also entails that they can count on the labour services and political support of numerous co-parents. The unequal reciprocal system thus established is the basis of many of the widespread patron and client relationship systems in these areas, although it should be emphasized that patron-client relationships are not limited to compadrazgo. The strength of compadrazgo (as an alternative to kinship or the state) as an organizing principle can be seen in the role it plays in the Mafia.
In Latin America, godparenthood is not always limited to baptism, but may be a term used to attract a patron for a variety of supports. Thus, a wealthy acquaintance may be asked to be the godparent of a marriage by paying for the celebrations, or a benefactor of a public building may also be named its godparent. The term may be used to denote the employer of a young maid, particularly if the terms of employment utilize benefits such as the employer paying for the girl's schooling. It is also loosely applied to a number of benevolent though unequal power relationships in which the client feels able to ask for favours.

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comparative sociology, comparative method

All sociology is implicitly comparative, since social phenomena are invariably held in some way to be typical, representative, or unique, all of which implies appropriate comparison. Émile Durkheim was therefore correct to insist that ‘comparative sociology is not a particular branch of sociology; it is sociology itself, in so far as it ceases to be purely descriptive and aspires to account for facts’ (The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895). Consequently, there is no one comparative method, since all research techniques can be used to facilitate comparison.
Where a sociological analysis is explicitly held to be comparative, this usually involves the study of particular social processes across nation-states, or across different types of society (such as capitalist and state socialist). Much of what is normally referred to as comparative sociology is perhaps more accurately described as cross-national research. In his Presidential Address of 1987 to the American Sociological Association, Melvin L. Kohn delivered a manifesto for this form of research (
‘Cross-National Research as an Analytical Strategy’, American Sociological Review, 1987
).
Two general orientations to this type of comparative analysis are evident in the literature. First, there are those studies which seek similarity, usually starting from some well-defined a priori general theory which is then tested in different social (and possibly historical) contexts. Much functionalist inspired research, for example almost the whole corpus of modernization theory, takes this form. Similarly, structuralists in both sociology and anthropology have attempted to identify the models and general processes that underlie the apparently different orderings of experience in different societies, as for example in the work of structural Marxists. The danger of this approach is that context is ignored in the search for illustrations of allegedly universal propositions.
At the other extreme are studies which search for variance. These emphasize the specific historicity of societies, reject the search for general theories or laws, and use comparative research to shed light on the differences between cultures in order to understand better the specific arrangements that are found within each. Max Weber's comparative sociology offers a good example. Correspondingly, the problem here is that sociological explanation may be sacrificed on the altar of context, so that one arrives at the conclusion that cross-cultural or cross-national differences in particular social phenomena are entirely the result of historical contingency. The division of labour, crime-rates, organization of religion (or whatever) are different in Britain and Germany because Britain is Britain and not Germany. The units of analysis (in this case nation-states) are simply so many case studies to be interpreted.
In a stimulating analysis of this dilemma, A. Przeworski and H. Teune (The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry, 1970) have argued that the objective of comparative sociological research should be one of replacing the names of nations with the names of variables. That is, the explanans of particular dependent variables which differ cross-nationally should be rooted not simply in the different histories of the societies involved, but in specific national characteristics (such as degree of income inequality or type of political regime) that can be subsumed under variable names about which the sociologist can meaningfully generalize.
Much comparative research relies on multivariate statistical techniques in order to answer questions about (for example) cross-national variation in levels of class awareness. In The Comparative Method (1987), Charles Ragin advocates an alternative (or, as he sees it, complementary) logic of qualitative comparative method, based on a technique of data reduction that uses Boolean algebra to simplify complex data structures in a systematic and holistic manner. This approach is case-oriented, rather than variable-oriented, and historical rather than abstractly causal. Boolean logic is inductive, and uses binary variables in a so-called ‘truth table’ which cross-classifies types of social situations against historical outcomes, in the attempt to identify patterns of multiple conjunctural causation (preferably by exhaustive consideration of all possible combinations of present and absent social conditions).
The logical and methodological problems of comparative research are best discussed in the context of substantive comparative analyses. Exemplary texts include
, Comparative Methodology (1990)
and
, Issues and Alternatives in Comparative Social Research (1991)
. See also CAUSE; COUNTERFACTUAL; HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY; MILL, JOHN STUART; QUALITATIVE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS.

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compensatory education

Programmes for targeting special resources and schooling at so-called problem groups, in the belief that carefully designed curricula (for example in language skills) will overcome the supposed cognitive and motivational deficit experienced by children from deprived backgrounds. Frequently linked with human capital theory, the assumption of such education is that under-achievement is an individual problem, and that schools can in some way compensate for structured social inequality.

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competition, ecological

See ECOLOGICAL COMPETITION.

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competition, economic and social

See ASSIMILATION; CONCENTRIC ZONE THEORY; HOUSING CLASS; LABOUR-MARKET; MARKET.

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complementarity hypothesis

The literature on small-group formation contains two major hypotheses about the determinants of attraction between individuals. The first of these—the similarity thesis—suggests that people are drawn together because of similarities in their personal characteristics (attitudes, ages, interests and so forth). Theodore M. Newcomb's study of friendship formation at college (The Acquaintance Process, 1961) supports this view. The second hypothesis maintains that interpersonal attraction takes place on the grounds of complementarity of characteristics between individuals. For example, Robert Francis Winch's investigation of married couples (Mate-Selection: A Study of Complementary Needs, 1958) suggested that ‘social needs’ (such as deference, aggressiveness, and exhibitionism) should be complementary rather than similar, if marriages were to work. If one partner was low in a particular attribute then the other should be high. Furthermore, certain combinations of attributes were favoured, such as high deference and high dominance. Later modifications of this thesis took into account additional variables (such as mutual gratification of social needs and the social context of relationships).

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complex sampling

See SAMPLING.

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compliance, types of compliance

The organizational sociologist Amitai Etzioni distinguished three means by which organizations (see ORGANIZATION THEORY) could secure compliance from their members—essentially three types of power by which organizations could be classified. Coercive power, based on physical means, rests on the real or potential use of physical force to enforce compliance with orders. Remunerative or utilitarian power rests on the material means provided by money or some other reward which the members desire and the organization controls. Finally, normative or identitive power uses symbolic means to secure loyalty, by manipulating symbols such as prestige or affections. Typically, prison regimes employ the first of these means, business organizations the second, and collegiate organizations the third.
Etzioni also argued that three kinds of involvement by members could be identified in organizations—alienative, calculative, and moral—covering the range from negative to positive feelings among participants. These do not correspond to the types of compliance on a one-to-one basis; rather, when cross-classified against the latter, they yield a nine-fold typology of compliance relationships, embracing six cells in which the dominant power system does not correspond to the involvement of the members, thus inducing strain towards congruence in one or other dimension. Thus, for example, universities, which are organized around symbolic power, do not function effectively when calculative involvement becomes the norm among teaching staff (See
's A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organisations, 1961
).

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componential analysis

A technique used to describe the bases and contrasts by which the constituent terms differ in a language and/or culture. Thus, in kinship analysis, son, daughter, and cousin are all in the same generation, and whilst son and daughter share the same component of children of a parent, they differ in the male/female component.

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comprador

A Portuguese term, literally ‘buyer’, used to denote the main indigenous agent in trading-houses on the China coast. By extension, ‘comprador bourgeoisie’ is a term used for a social class deemed to be compliant with foreign interests, and uninterested in developing the national economy. It is usually contrasted with the class of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ which is considered to have this potential.

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comprador bourgeoisie

See COMPRADOR.

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computer packages

Quantitative sociologists now have access to a huge variety of statistical packages for managing and analysing large-scale data-sets. The most widely used of these is probably SPSS (the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). However, newer and more user-friendly packages (such as Minitab) are becoming increasingly popular, as are more powerful packages which perform specialized tasks such as complex loglinear analyses. Examples of the latter include the interactive program GLIM (Generalized Linear Modelling), which will also fit a variety of regression models, and the large variety of programs for multi-dimensional scaling (MINISSA, INDSCAL, M-D-SCAL, and so forth). Many methods texts now include detailed information about the authors, sources, and capabilities of competing packages.

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Comte, Auguste

(1798–1857)
A French social theorist who coined the term ‘sociology’. After studying the natural sciences at the École Polytechnique in Paris, Comte became Henri Saint-Simon's secretary in 1817. In the course of what proved to be a somewhat fraught relationship (it ended acrimoniously in 1824 after a dispute over authorship credits), Comte was able to begin the development of what he described as his ‘positivist philosophy’. Many of those who have invoked Comte's name but not read his work have been misled by his use of this term. Although Comte took the natural sciences as his model, he intended the term to suggest that his approach was a positive rather than a negative one, and not (as is more commonly supposed) that he embraced any sort of empiricism.
For Comte, his Enlightenment predecessors had been too critical of the social conditions they confronted, and as a result they had failed to appreciate not simply the beneficent nature of certain institutions but also and more importantly the interrelated nature of all of them. On this basis, he came to define the object of his interest as the social whole, and to label the science of this new object initially ‘social physics’ and latterly sociology.
Between 1820 and 1826 Comte produced his first essays in this new discipline. He grounded his writings in a set of metaphysical and methodological protocols that, because of their antiscepticism as well as their appreciation of the necessity of theory, seem closer to what would be termed today scientific realism rather than empiricism. (See, for example, the collection entitled
The Crisis of Industrial Civilisation
, edited and translated by Raymond Fletcher.) In these essays, he sought to explain the instability of the Europe in which he lived as the product of an interrupted and therefore incomplete transition between social structures of a ‘theological’ or ‘military’ type, and those of a ‘scientific-industrial’ type. He referred to this transitional phase of social development as the ‘metaphysical stage’, and specified its overcoming as the purpose of sociology, which as the synthetic and therefore the most difficult of the sciences he dubbed ‘the queen of the sciences’. This ‘Law of the Three Stages’ inspired numerous attempts at evolutionary sociology in the nineteenth century. In his subsequent six-volume Course in Positivist Philosophy (1830–42) he identified the specific objects of sociological inquiry as economic life, ruling ideas, forms of individuality, family structure, the division of labour, language, and religion. He organized his discussion of these topics in terms of a highly influential distinction between ‘social statics’ (the requirements for social order) and ‘social dynamics’ (the determinants of social change).
Because of what we must assume were deep and unresolved psychological problems, as well as what appears to have been a rather tragic love-life, little of what Comte wrote thereafter has proved to be of much interest to subsequent generations of sociologists. However, this judgement may yet be revised, since at the core of his later interests were the emotions, the sociological study of which has recently attracted much attention in the United States. This said, the immediate result of this interest was Comte's formation of what would be termed today a love cult, and his declaration that he was the Pope. See also POSITIVISM.

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concentric zone theory

A diagram of the ecological structure which, in the words of its author, ‘represents an ideal construction of the tendencies of any … city to expand radially from its central business district’
(, The City, 1925)
. The theory posits concentric zones round the central area, defined by their residential composition, moving from the very poor and socially deviant, in the inner zone of transition, to a peripheral suburban commuter ring.
Burgess himself argued that this structure is the result of competition between users for land—a process analogous to the ecological competition between biological species for territory. In human societies, these ‘biotic’ processes are overlaid by cultural processes, which limit the conflict and social disorganization resulting from unfettered territorial competition. Control is exercised through the division of the population into distinctive groups, defined by common ethnic identity, occupational status, or economic position. Within each zone, groups occupy particular natural areas, so forming an ‘urban mosaic’ of local communities. Social and economic mobility cause changes in the pattern of territorial occupation, via the ecological processes of invasion, domination, and succession.
This model is an ideal type. However, geographers and economists subsequently proposed more complex diagrams of urban structure and typologies of the natural areas, aided by the advent of large data-sets and computer technology. This social area analysis largely ignores the wider issues of social process and structure which concerned Burgess and his colleagues in their distinctive contribution to the development of urban sociology. See also CHICAGO SOCIOLOGY; HOUSING CLASS; INVASION–SUCCESSION MODEL; URBAN ECOLOGY.

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concepts

The terminological means by which social scientists seek to analyse social phenomena, to classify the objects of the observed world, impart meaning through explanation to these phenomena, and formulate higher-level propositions on the basis of these observations. Concepts have themselves been categorized in many ways, for example one distinction is between those which describe directly observable phenomena, and those which signify inferred phenomena. The malleability of concepts is attested to by the fact that there is controversy over their definition and indeed there exists a class of such concepts termed ‘essentially contested concepts’. Many concepts in the social sciences are both descriptive and evaluative and many carry emotional or theoretically loaded overtones. Such terms as exploitation, alienation, discrimination, and even social class bring with them a heavy baggage of values (see
, Methodology of Sociological Research, 1977
).

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concomitant variation, method of

See MILL, JOHN STUART.

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concrete operations stage

See PIAGET, JEAN.

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conditioned or conditional response

See CONDITIONING.

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conditioned or conditional stimulus

See CONDITIONING.

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conditioning

A term employed by behaviourist psychologists within the framework of stimulus-response (S–R) models of learning. It refers to the process whereby new stimulus-response connections are established.
Behaviourists conventionally distinguish two types of conditioning. In classical or Type-S conditioning, first identified by Ivan Pavlov in his famous experiments with dogs, a new stimulus is linked to an already existing response. The new S–R connection is established by contiguously pairing the new, formerly neutral, stimulus with an old one which already provokes the response. In Pavlov's experiments, the old, unconditioned (or unconditional) response (UCS) of food in the mouth provokes a reflex unconditioned (unconditional) response (UCR). When this stimulus is repeatedly paired with a new one (the sound of a bell) this new stimulus will, in time, produce salivation. A new connection is, therefore, established between a conditioned (conditional) stimulus (CS), the sound of the bell, and a conditioned response (CR), salivation. In this process, the pairing of food with the sound of the bell serves to strengthen or reinforce the new S–R connection—that is, to make the occurrence of the response of salivation to the sound of the bell more likely. Frequent repetition of the new stimulus without reinforcement (food) leads to extinction of the conditioned response.
In operant, instrumental, or Type-R conditioning, a new response is established to a formerly neutral stimulus. This response is encouraged by the introduction of some reinforcement of that response whenever it occurs. The approach is commonly associated with the American psychologists E. L. Thorndike (Animal Intelligence, 1911) and B. F. Skinner (The Behaviour of Organisms, 1938). In Skinner's well-known experiments with rats in cages, the pressing of a bar is reinforced by giving a pellet of food (the reinforcing stimulus) whenever the bar is pressed. Reinforcement utilizing pleasure is termed positive reinforcement. Where the reinforcement takes the form of avoiding something that is unpleasant (an electric shock, a disagreeable taste) it is termed negative reinforcement. Where a reinforcer derives its value through learning it is termed a secondary reinforcer. For example, if a rat learns to obtain tokens to secure food, the tokens may be used as secondary reinforcers in conditioning some new response. Operant conditioning has also been used as a basis of therapy for humans. Subjects learn that certain patterns of behaviour have desirable consequences, that is they are rewarded, and this increases the likelihood of the behaviour occurring in the future.
Much of the debate amongst learning theorists has concerned the interpretation of the empirical observations made in studies of conditioning. Early behaviourists developed analyses of conditioning that suggested it was a simple, unconscious, and automatic process. However, a number of experiments provided convincing evidence that cognitive processes were involved in establishing the stimulus-response connections observed in conditioning studies. In academic psychology from the 1960s onwards, the increasing emphasis on cognition and information processing has shifted attention away from studies of conditioning in animals and humans, and from conceptualizing learning in terms of stimulus-response models.

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Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de

(1743–94)
A leading contributor to the Encyclopedia (1751–65), and first supporter then victim of the French Revolution, Condorcet is chiefly remembered for his theory of human progress. This was presented in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of Progress of the Human Mind, written while in hiding. He distinguished a series of ten progressive epochs or phases in human history, and like many of his contemporaries, emphasized the indefinitely progressive potentiality of the growth of science and mathematics. His radical social and political ideas were one of the main targets of criticism in Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, in which the latter argued that all such well-meant projects must founder on the disproportion between population growth and natural limits to the supply of food.

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confidence intervals, confidence limits

The spread of values around the mean for a sample survey variable which, using the conventional 95 per cent confidence level, equate to the mean plus or minus two standard deviations, or standard errors of the mean. See also CENTRAL TENDENCY (MEASURES OF); VARIATION (STATISTICAL).

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conflict, social conflict

See COMPETITION, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL; CONFLICT THEORY; CONSENSUS; INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT; MILITARY AND MILITARISM; POWER.

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conflict, industrial

See INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT.

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conflict theory

Although conflict has always been central to sociological theory and analysis, conflict theory is the label generally attached to the sociological writings of opponents to the dominance of structural functionalism, in the two decades after the Second World War. Its proponents drew on Max Weber and (to a lesser extent) Karl Marx to construct their arguments, giving differing emphases to economic conflict (Marx) and conflict about power (Weber). Conflict theorists emphasized the importance of interests over norms and values, and the ways in which the pursuit of interests generated various types of conflict as normal aspects of social life, rather than abnormal or dysfunctional occurrences. For example, in Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (1959)—a standard work of conflict theory—Ralf Dahrendorf, although critical of Marxist notions of class, argued that classes in the advanced ‘post-capitalist’ societies of Britain, Germany, and the United States were derived ‘from positions in associations co-ordinated by authority’, and that these societies were therefore characterized by disputes about ‘participation in or exclusion from the exercise of authority’.
The claims of conflict theory against functionalism were comparatively modest compared with later criticisms. For example, Dahrendorf argued that structural functionalism was not so much wrong as partial: that power or authority within a social system was not simply integrative, something which emerges from the system in order to keep it together, but also divisive, something which has to be imposed over conflicting interests. At the same time he argued, again against Marx, that social conflict was multi-faceted and does not congeal around one central issue.
Conflict theorists did not claim to present any general theory of society but emphasized coercion rather than consensus as the cause of social order. John Rex, in Key Problems of Sociological Theory (1961), offered a version of conflict theory owing rather more to Marx. But the most effective contribution from this period is David Lockwood's paper on social integration and system integration (in
, Explorations in Social Change, 1964)
. Lockwood argues that we can distinguish between system integration, which refers to relationships between different parts of the social system, the economy, and political system; and social integration, which refers to norms and values. Structural functionalism tends to run both together and gives priority to social integration: if that persists then the assumption is that system integration is also present. Lockwood points out that social integration can exist without system integration. An economic crisis, for example, can indicate the existence of system conflict, but does not automatically lead to a breakdown in social integration. Lewis Coser's The Functions of Social Conflict (1956) attempts to incorporate the analysis of social conflict into structural-functionalism, seeing it as a process of tension management, or as part of a process of reintegration in response to social change. Randall Collins's version of conflict theory is distinguished by the fact that it is rooted in the micro-level concerns of individual actors, indeed he claims his theoretical roots lie in phenomenology. Increasingly, during the 1980s, he turned to outlining a microsociological theory highlighting the role of ‘interaction ritual chains’ as the basic unit in the ordering of societies (compare his Conflict Sociology, 1975 and Theoretical Sociology, 1988).
With the emergence of Marxism as a major force in social theory during the 1960s, this debate faded away, and conflict theory merged into the more general Marxist and Weberian tendencies in social theory. In modern sociology, the conflict tradition is represented (in very different ways) by such developments as Anthony Giddens's structuration theory, and by rational-choice theory (see EXCHANGE THEORY).

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conforming personality

See BEHAVIOURAL CONFORMITY.

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conformity

The social psychological study of conformity examines the pressures on individuals to conform to the expectations of a group, society, organization, or leader. The classic experiments were conducted by Solomon E. Asch, an American gestalt psychologist who undertook a series of small-group studies on the social pressures to conform. His subjects were asked to answer a basic puzzle (for example on the length of a line) when others provided a manifestly incorrect answer. Many subjects felt under pressure to give the same incorrect answer; however, the majority resisted pressures to conform, and even those who acquiesced offered reasonable explanations for doing so, despite subsequently expressed doubts about their behaviour (see his
Social Psychology, 1952
). Asch argues that the results confirm his view of human nature, which is of human beings as creative and rational organisms, in contrast to the tradition that views them as passive and responding only to environmental pressures. The concept of conformity was also used by Robert Merton in Social Theory and Social Structure (1968) to refer to acceptance of cultural goals and the legitimate or approved means of achieving them. See also BEHAVIOURAL CONFORMITY.

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Confucianism

A philosophy for living that contains elements of religious practice, founded by Confucius in the sixth to fifth centuries BCE. Its influence in China was paramount, but it has also been significant in Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, as a source of learning and an ethical code.
Confucius (551–479 BCE) taught the necessary actions for harmony and order during a time of political violence and social disorder. During the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220CE) his teachings (compiled by his disciples in the Analects) became state orthodoxy in China and remained so until 1911. Confucianism taught that nobility was not to be attained through inheritance but by following the correct rituals and acts of filial piety, reciprocity, and righteousness. In particular, juniors (such as subjects or sons) should show loyalty to seniors (rulers, fathers), while seniors should show benevolence to juniors. This idea was extended by Mencius (c. 371–289BCE), the ‘second sage of Confucianism’, to suggest that humans were essentially good (the idea of original virtue), and that it was appropriate for subjects to rebel against unjust rulers. Significantly, the latter idea was never introduced into Japan, where loyalty to the Emperor was made paramount.
Although today practised actively as a religion only in South Korea, the influence of Confucianism on the ethical, legal, political, and educational systems of the above-named countries remains considerable. Robert Bellah (Tokugawa Religion, 1957) has argued that Confucianism may have had a similar role in the development of modern Japan as did the protestant ethic in Northern Europe (an interpretation which is at odds with that of Max Weber in The Religion of China, 1916). Others have argued that Confucianism's emphasis on harmony, respect for authority, loyalty, benevolence, meritocracy, literacy, and scholarship, lies behind the recent economic growth of Japan and the newly industrializing countries (NICs) of East Asia.

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conjugal role

See ROLE, CONJUGAL.

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conjuncture

A term used by so-called structural Marxists to refer to the concrete state of political-economic and especially class relations, in a specific society, at a particular point in time (as in ‘specific historical conjuncture’).

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connotative versus denotative meaning

Connotative meaning refers to the associations, overtones, and feel which a concept has, rather than what it refers to explicitly (or denotes, hence denotative meaning). Two words with the same reference or definition may have different connotations. Connotative meaning is often researched using the semantic differential, based in part on the phenomenon of synaesthesia, where experience in one sense modality is perceived with (or replaces) another modality: for example, where a sound is perceived as a colour or emotion, as in blue or sad music. See also DISCOURSE.

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connubium

A system of marital exchanges, for example between two bands or tribes, by which the men of one group must marry the women of the other (and vice versa). There are several interpretations of these arrangements, for example relating them to the incest taboo, the formation of political alliances, and attempts to define the symbolic boundaries of groups.

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consanguinity

A consanguine relationship is a kin relationship based on descent from a common (male or female) ancestor, who may not necessarily be a blood relation. Social anthropologists point out that fictive relationships can be just as important as actual biological ties when tracing consanguinity (as is often the case with clans). A. R. Radcliffe-Brown argued that kinship is a better term than consanguinity, because it does not imply a blood relationship.

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consciousness, class

See CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS.

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consciousness, false

See FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS.

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consciousness, social

See IMAGES OF SOCIETY.

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consensual union

A form of cohabitation by a man and a woman who live together as married but whose relationship is not formally ratified by the dominant laws and religion of the country. The offspring of a consensual union are illegitimate in law. In some parts of the Third World, customary marriages are not recognized by the state, and are defined as consensual unions in official statistics. See also MARRIAGE.

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consensus, social consensus

The term consensus refers to a commonly agreed position, conclusion, or set of values, and is normally used with reference either to group dynamics or to broad agreement in public opinion. Additionally, however, it has come to be associated with the particular form of normative functionalism most fully developed in the writings of Talcott Parsons (see, for example,
The Social System, 1951
).
In so far as sociological theory is concerned with the problem of social order, it is possible to identify two broadly differing approaches in the history of the discipline, one of which emphasizes conflict and coercion while the other assumes a degree of social consensus in the form of agreement over values and norms. Whilst value consensus is seen as the basis of social order, the true explanatory focus is the process of socialization through the vehicle of the family, an activity upon which normative functionalists placed great emphasis.
It was commonplace, during the 1960s, to speak of the debate between the consensus and conflict schools. Enthusiasts of the former approach tended to be critical of any kind of social determinism and to argue instead that social theory must accommodate intention and choice at the level of individual action. Society should therefore be seen as the expression of a system of values and norms which have been developed and institutionalized over time by its members. Thus, in Parsons's own writings, ‘integration’ is cited as one of four key requirements for the functioning of society. Conflict theory was the inevitable counterpart to the consensus view of social order and was developed in opposition to Parsonsian functionalism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This approach rejects the assumption of shared norms and values as the basis for social order, and points instead to the balance of power between conflicting interests, both political and economic. With hindsight it is clear that, on many issues, the two groups of protagonists were simply talking past each other.

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consensus theory

See CONSENSUS; FUNCTION.

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conservatism

An everyday notion meaning to ‘preserve’ or ‘keep intact’ which has, at least in Europe and the United States since the nineteenth century, come to be associated with a set of political principles. The major problem in defining the concept is that many conservatives themselves deny conservatism is an abstract theory or ideology; rather, they defend their judgements on the grounds of tradition, historical experience, and gradualism. Typically, conservatives eschew comprehensive visions of the good society, and favour instead the (as they see it) pragmatism of piecemeal social reform.
That said, modern conservatism tends to draw on two somewhat contradictory intellectual strands, namely the organic conservatism of the Middle Ages and the libertarian conservatism of writers such as Edmund Burke. The former harks back to the medieval ideal of the close-knit local community, a stable social hierarchy with rank ascribed at birth rather than achieved (see ASCRIPTION), dominated by aristocratic paternalism towards the poor, and a network of reciprocal rights and obligations linking benevolent master and deferential servant (see DEFERENCE). By comparison, Burke (an eighteenth-century English political theorist) favoured laissez-faire economics, unregulated capitalism, and minimal state intervention in economic affairs. Whereas organic conservatism emphasizes ‘one nation’, libertarians endorse the individualism of autonomous individuals following their own self-interest, usually on the grounds of individual freedom, social justice, and (long-term) collective welfare.
These strands have proved difficult to reconcile in the long term. (Burke himself also wrote a passionate defence of the organic political and social traditions of eighteenth-century Britain, denouncing the French Revolution, and thus setting the trend in this respect.) Modern conservatives have grappled to balance the two and offered a full range of hybrids. An excellent account of the difficulties inherent in this exercise, illustrated by reference to the history of political conservatism and the Conservative Party in Britain, is Robert Eccleshall's essay on this subject in his Political Ideologies (1984).

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Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area

See METROPOLITAN STATISTICAL AREA.

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conspicuous consumption

See LEISURE CLASS.

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conspicuous leisure

See LEISURE CLASS.

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constant conjunction

See CAUSE.

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constellation of interests

See DECOMPOSITION OF CAPITAL.

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constructionism, constructivism

See SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM.

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consumer society

A term sometimes applied to modern Western societies, which suggests that they are increasingly organized around consumption (of goods and leisure), rather than the production of materials and services. The usual list of late twentieth-century sociological suspects have been implicated in this development: increasing affluence, embourgeoisement, the emergence of a mass popular culture, growing privatism, demise of social class, appearance of consumption sectors and cleavages, growing individualism, and so forth. As will be clear from a reading of those entries in this dictionary to which the reader has just been referred, most of these trends are highly questionable, and it is in any case not clear whether, were they to be realized, the new consumer society would display those features of egalitarianism that some of its proponents have envisaged. Consumerism may simply underline the distinction between rich and poor—as, for example, in the phenomenon of conspicuous consumption. See also CONSUMPTION, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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consumption, sociology of

An as yet ill-defined and extremely diverse field of sociology that developed rapidly during the 1980s. Its substantive focus is the material culture (especially the mass culture) of advanced capitalist societies. The essays collected together in
, The Sociology of Consumption (1988)
or
, Consumption Matters (1996)
are a good illustration of the diversity of the field.
Proponents of the sociology of consumption tend to argue that it provides an alternative focus for much of the work carried out in the tradition of urban sociology, a new approach to the analysis of social inequality and political alignments, and (sometimes) the basis for a wholesale revolution in sociological thinking. Their general complaint is that sociology has been dominated by the nineteenth-century concerns of the classical theorists—alienation, bureaucracy, social class, the division of labour, and other characteristics of early industrial capitalism—all of which emphasize production as the source of social meaning and the basis of social order or conflict. By contrast, if one takes seriously the late capitalist phenomenon of mass consumption, then (to quote the critique by H. F. Moorhouse) ‘it should no longer be possible for analysts to operate with a notion of an alienation based on paid labour pervading all contemporary life, nor should it be possible to privilege the factory, office, shop or mine as the crucial site of human experience and self understanding, though this is continually done in a lot of sociological and most Marxist theorizing’ (see
‘American Automobiles and Workers’ Dreams', Sociological Review, 1983
). In short, sociologists have produced too many studies of what it is like to work for Ford, and too few of what it means to own, drive, or customize a Ford.
This self-conscious attempt to challenge some of the basic assumptions of sociology has encouraged studies of topics as diverse as those of leisure, fashion, niche marketing, tourism, and the heritage industry. Many of these are less original than is claimed, since they tend to echo themes such as commodity fetishism, materialism, structural differentiation, inequality, privatism, and individualism, all of which were familiar to the classical theorists themselves. The interpretation of the symbolic significance of cultural artefacts (such as automobiles) does tend, however, to draw heavily on more recent structuralist and post-structuralist writings by authors such as Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Jean Baudrillard. There are substantial overlaps here with the more diffuse and increasingly fashionable concerns addressed by students of cultural studies (see, for example,
, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, 1996
).
In so far as the very diverse literature has a central unifying theme then this is provided by the common contention that consumption shapes social relations and social meanings in no less authentic a manner than does production; or, as Daniel Miller puts it, the sociology of consumption ‘translates the object from … being a symbol of estrangement and price value to being an artefact invested with particular inseparable connotations’ (Material Culture and Mass Consumption, 1987).
Discussion in Britain—and to a lesser extent some other European countries—has tended to focus on the particular claim that there is a major and novel consumption cleavage in advanced capitalist societies, between a majority of people who provide for their consumption requirements through the market, and a minority who remain reliant on (increasingly inadequate) state provision. This cleavage is argued to be as important (possibly more so) as earlier divisions such as social class, and is said to influence political attitudes, material life-chances, and cultural identities in parallel fashion. Critics have replied by insisting that the individual's position in the realm of consumption is still importantly influenced by his or her position in the labour-market—and is therefore reducible to the more traditional cleavages associated with production. This, in turn, has provoked the counterclaim that state intervention in provisions such as housing, education, health, and transport introduces a dimension of inequality not directly affected by relations of production. However, it can be argued that even if this were the case, dependence on state provision is itself a factor of weakness in the labour-market. Critics have also argued that the realm of consumption, once divorced from relations of production, does not of itself generate social inequality. The counter-claim would seem to be strongest in relation to housing, where the growth of owner-occupation and the long-term rise in the value of property has encouraged realization of substantial amounts of capital, mainly through the sale of houses inherited from an older generation. This is not, however, an argument which can be generalized to other areas of consumption. See also EMBOURGEOISEMENT; INFORMAL ECONOMY; LEISURE CLASS; POPULAR CULTURE.

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consumption sectors, consumption cleavages

Social divisions created by the way in which material goods and services—especially major items such as housing, health, and education—are consumed in advanced capitalist societies.
For the most part sociologists have ignored the possible significance of patterns of consumption in determining social stratification—although Max Weber observed that status groups are ‘stratified according to the principles of their consumption of goods’ and Thorstein Veblen analysed the conspicuous consumption of the so-called leisure class. However, debates about housing classes and collective consumption during the 1960s and 1970s led some sociologists to claim that consumption-based, rather than production-based, cleavages are of increasing significance. In Britain this claim has been reinforced by psephological studies which claim to show that, during the 1980s, the public/private housing-tenure divide became more important than social class in determining voting behaviour (the so-called dealignment thesis).
According to a leading theorist of consumption cleavages, ‘a sociological analysis of the different patterns of consumption—state provision in kind, state provision in cash, self-provisioning, and marketed or privatized provisioning—is … central to an understanding of certain key features of contemporary social organization’
(, Social Theory and the Urban Question, 1986)
. In practice, discussion has concentrated on private (market) and socialized (state) provision, since (according to Saunders) the main consumption-based division in contemporary capitalist societies is between those who satisfy their needs through personal ownership and those who remain reliant on socialized state provision. Moreover, given the choice, those who can afford to do so choose privatized and market-based, in preference to socialized, consumption—for example of housing, health care, and education. This undermines political support for welfare regimes (and parties which promote them) and has negative effects on the quality of what welfare institutions provide for those who remain dependent on them. This creates a major social division between a ‘marginalised and stigmatised minority … cast adrift on the water-logged raft of what remains of the welfare state’, and a privatized majority, with increasing freedom to choose among better-quality market-based consumption possibilities.
There are many criticisms of this theory of sectional cleavages. Increasingly, sociologists accept the need for a closer analysis of the relationship between differing modes of consumption and possible social divisions these create, but many reject Saunders 's (possibly normatively derived) conclusions about the merits and demerits of privatized and socialized provision respectively. A majority would probably question whether consumption cleavages rather than (say) social class determines life-chances, social identity, and political alignments. There is some evidence that consumption cleavages are class-dependent rather than independent determinants of social processes. Some critics have argued that the theory is ethnocentric (being mainly concerned with the situation in Britain); others argue that the distinction between socialized and market-based consumption is unrealistic, since the public sector frequently supports apparently privatized consumption. Empirical studies have also shown that attitudes to welfarism vary according to the particular social service under discussion and that the major determinant of voting behaviour (at least in Britain) is still social class. The debate about these findings has led to some further refinements of the original theory which, together with developments elsewhere in sociology, has contributed to a growing volume of literature on the sociology of consumption.

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contagion

See COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOUR.

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content analysis

Content analysis reduces freely occurring text to a much smaller summary or representation of its meaning. Bernard Berelson (Content Analysis in Communication Research, 1952) defines it as ‘a research technique for the objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication’, though this is an overly narrow description. The technique was largely developed in the 1940s for propaganda and communication studies (
‘Who says what to whom and with what effect?’, as puts it in his essay on ‘Describing the Contents of Communication’, in Lasswell et al. (eds.), Propaganda, Communication and Public Opinion, 1946
), and has increasingly made use of linguistics and information science.
In its simplest form, content analysis consists of word counts (for example to create a concordance, establish profiles of topics, or indicate authorship style), but grammatical and semantic improvements have increasingly been sought. These include attempts to ‘lemmatize’, or count variants and inflections under a root word (such that ‘am’, ‘are’, ‘is’, ‘will’, ‘was’, ‘were’, and ‘been’ are seen as variants of ‘be’), and to ‘disambiguate’, or distinguish between different meanings of a word spelt the same (such as ‘a bit of a hole’, ‘a 16-bit machine’, ‘he bit it off’). More ambitiously, content analysis seeks to identify general semantic concepts (such as ‘achievement’ or ‘religion’), stylistic characteristics (including understatement or overstatement), and themes (for example ‘religion as a conservative force’), and this normally requires complex interaction of human knowledge and fast, efficient computing power, typified by a system such as the Harvard General Inquirer. Content analysis has concerns and techniques in common with artificial intelligence although it has to be able to cope with more general and open-ended materials. See also CODING.

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contest and sponsored mobility

Alternative patterns of intergenerational social ascent through schooling. Under contest mobility individuals have, within a basic framework of rules, a wide range of strategies or routes they can pursue in order to attain credentials associated with high status. Under sponsored mobility the alternatives are minimal and typically controlled by an élite. The former is seen as more egalitarian, since it implies open competition, with selection delayed as long as possible. Under the latter, recruits are chosen early for the ‘fast track’ by the élite or their representatives, and exclusion is practised against the rest. Ralph H. Turner, who proposed the distinction in the early 1960s, made the controversial claim that, in the United States, contest mobility is the more predominant, compared with the stronger emphasis on sponsorship in Britain and other European societies. See also CLOSURE.

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contextual models

See MULTI-LEVEL MODELS.

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contingency table

Contingency tables, often referred to as cross-classifications or cross-tabulations, are tables of counts which describe and analyse the relationship between two or more variables in a data-set. They contain row variables across the horizontal axis and column variables down the vertical. Cell entries give the number of cases (persons, households, or other unit of analysis) that occur in each cell. The cells themselves are formed by combining one category from each of the row and column variables. Marginal totals (or marginals) give the total number of cases found in each category of the variables—in other words they are the row and column totals. Normally, cell entries are expressed as either row or column percentages (depending on the point the analyst wishes to make), with the total numbers of cases shown in the marginals. These elements are shown in tabular form below.

COLUMN VARIABLE

The above is a template for a typical 2 × 2 cross-tabulation. However, contingency tables can take more complex forms, with three or more variables and several categories of each. In such complex presentations, it is often difficult both to determine the nature of the causal relationships to be found among the variables, and then to demonstrate these to the reader. For example, it may be hard to eliminate spurious correlations, or to establish three-way interaction effects, that is, those cases where two variables are associated, but the strength or direction of the association varies across different categories of the variables. For these reasons the analysis of complex contingency tables is nowadays normally undertaken using the mathematical techniques of loglinear analysis. See also MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS; TABULAR PRESENTATION.

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contingency theory

A strand of organization theory (sometimes also known as the ‘rational systems perspective’), the leading practitioners of which were Tom Burns, Joan Woodward, Paul Lawrence, and Jay Lorsch, an otherwise theoretically eclectic group who were nevertheless united in their belief that no single organizational structure was inherently more efficient than all others. Rather, since organizations differed in the tasks they performed and environments they faced, the appropriate organizational structure was in each case a function of such factors as technology, market, and the predictability of tasks.
In The Management of Innovation (1961), Burns and his co-author G. Stalker examined the impact of technical innovation on electronics companies, and attributed the differential adaptability of firms to the prevailing system of management. They devised an influential typology of ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ (or ‘organismic’) systems of management. In mechanical management systems, decision-making takes place within a tightly controlled and familiar normative framework, in which: individual employees are responsible for well-defined tasks; functions are precisely defined; control, authority, and communication are hierarchical; interaction between members is typically vertical (between subordinate and superior); there is an insistence on loyalty to and obedience of superiors; and a greater importance is attached to internal (local) than to general (cosmopolitan) experience and skills. Organic management systems display characteristics which are the obverse of these: continual adjustment and redefinition of tasks through interaction with others; network structures of control, authority, and communication; a lateral rather than vertical direction of communication through the organization, involving frequent communications between people of different rank, with communications taking the form of consultations rather than command; and so forth. Burns and Stalker argued that the former structure was only suited to ‘a concern for which technical and market conditions approximated very closely to stability’. Changing market and technological conditions, which create unforeseen problems and tasks which cannot therefore be described functionally or distributed automatically throughout a clearly demarcated structure, required an organic system of management.
Similarly, Lawrence and Lorsch (Organization and Environment, 1967) found, in a study of ten firms in three different industrial environments (plastics, food, containers) in the United States, that the degree of uncertainty in the three ‘task sub-environments’ of the firms (market, techno-economic, and scientific) was strongly related to their internal organizational arrangement. The greater the uncertainty, the greater the need to differentiate the sales, production, and research and development departments within the firm. However, the greater the degree of internal differentiation, the greater the need for appropriate mechanisms for integrating and resolving conflicts between the various segments.
Like Woodward and Burns, the premiss of Lawrence and Lorsch's work is that there is no ‘one best way’ to organize a given technical process, an explicit challenge to the assumption made by the scientific management approach that science can always identify the quickest and best way to perform work-tasks. This insight was a major advance on those organizational theories (such as the scientific management approach) which assumed that organizations operate unproblematically as more or less closed systems.

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continuous variable

See VARIABLE.

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contract labour

Contract labour normally refers to workers who are hired for a specific task and a finite period. In Third World countries the term sometimes refers to a system whereby workers are hired by an intermediary—the labour contractor—who supplies them to the employer for a fee. Such workers are often bound to the contractor by a variety of mechanisms and their freedom of movement may thus be restricted.

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contractarianism

A mode of reasoning which purports to deduce moral principles from the rational choices of abstract individuals (‘rational contractors’) deliberating under conditions of ignorance and uncertainty. The most prominent contemporary example will be found in John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1972). See also JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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contra-culture

See COUNTER-CULTURE; SUBCULTURE.

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contradiction

Originally a logical term which was taken up by G. W. F. Hegel in order to explain the nature of the dialectical movement in the history of thought, whereby a thesis necessarily begets its antithesis (opposite), and results in a synthesis that contains and advances upon the initially antagonistic (contradictory) ideas. As his own work developed, Karl Marx provided himself with the means to move on from this metaphorical mode of conceptualizing social development, with its evolutionary connotations. However, he appears not to have demurred when Friedrich Engels later made it central to his ‘dialectical materialism’. Its usage therein represents the principal justification for the term's subsequent canonical status within Marxist discourses of an orthodox kind.
The concept is now widely (and more loosely) used in sociological theory generally. For example, in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1979), the American sociologist Daniel Bell identified a growing contradiction in advanced Western societies, rooted in a disjunction between the social structure (the economy, technology, occupational system) and the culture (the symbolic expression of meanings), each of which is governed by a different ‘axial principle’. The former calls for functional rationality, efficiency, self-control, deferred gratification, and dedication to a career, whereas the latter fosters attitudes of conspicuous display, prodigality, and hedonism.

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contradictory class location

During the 1970s class analysis (particularly of a Marxist kind) was preoccupied with the problem of assigning class positions to those ‘intermediate’ roles (such as manager, supervisor, or salaried professional) which seemed to be neither unambiguously of the bourgeoisie nor of the proletariat, and so generated a series of ‘boundary problems’ in the generation of class taxonomies. The resulting literature (the so-called boundary debate), which featured extensive contributions from the likes of Nicos Poulantzas, Guglielmo Carchedi, and John and Barbara Ehrenreich, is cogently summarized in Nicholas Abercrombie and John Urry's Capital, Labour, and the Middle Classes (1983). By far the most sustained attempt to solve these boundary issues was Erik Olin Wright's theory of ‘contradictory class locations’.
Wright, an American Marxist, argued that in each mode of production certain basic social classes are defined by being completely polarized within the relevant social relations of production. Under capitalism, for example, the working class is wholly dispossessed of the means of production, must sell its labour-power to the bourgeoisie, and so is both exploited and dominated by it. However, in the absence of wholesale polarization, contradictory locations within a mode of production also arise. Managers have contradictory interests as a class: like workers, they are exploited by capitalists (who make a profit from managerial work), yet like capitalists themselves they dominate and control workers. Moreover, concrete social formations rarely comprise a single mode of production, so that capitalist societies, for example, typically contain certain non-capitalist forms of production relations. Most obviously, they inherit the legacy of simple commodity production, in which direct producers own and control their own productive means—the petite bourgeoisie or own-account workers more common to feudal societies. Certain class relations interpenetrate both modes of production and so constitute contradictory relations between them. Small employers, for example, are simultaneously petit bourgeois and capitalist, in that they are self-employed direct producers, but also employers and therefore exploiters of labour-power. Similarly, an extensive group of so-called ‘semi-autonomous employees’ (such as salaried professionals) do not own productive means, but still exercise considerable control over their activities within production: they are, therefore, in a contradictory class location defined by elements of both proletarian and petit bourgeois existence.
As a Marxist, Wright's principal aim was to identify which among these contradictory class locations offered the most likely allies for the working class, in its struggle against capitalist exploitation and domination. His theory has been refined during the course both of several lengthy theoretical exegeses, and a major empirical programme of class analysis, involving research teams in countries throughout the world (see
's Class, Crisis and the State, 1978
;
Class Structure and Income Determination, 1979
; and
Classes, 1985
).
Wright's reformulation of the concept of class has been controversial, both within Marxism and without, and has been criticized as static, mechanical, deterministic, and (in common with the arguments of most other structuralists) devoid of human agency. However, it has also generated enthusiastic support, notably among those who see in it a corrective to the excessive individualism of the alternative status attainment tradition of class analysis in the United States. Wright's The Debate on Classes (1989) gives a good overview of the arguments and the enormous secondary literature generated by his project. See also MIDDLE CLASS.

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control (experimental)

Experimental research designs require that all cases are randomly allocated to either the experimental group which receives the treatment being tested, or to a control group which receives no treatment or an ineffective (placebo) treatment, and hence provides baseline information on spontaneous developments against which the effects of the experimental treatment can be measured.

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control group

A group used for comparison with another, either because it represents the most common or typical case, or because it illustrates the absence of some phenomenon being studied. Human beings are not inert, lifeless matter, and hence cannot be studied simply by carrying out before-and-after studies around some experimental stimulus applied to them. Many other developments and changes will be occurring spontaneously at the same time, as people go about their lives, and it is difficult to disentangle the effects of one particular stimulus from all the others affecting people, as individuals or as groups, at the same time. The solution is to identify a group, or social aggregate, that serves as a control group in providing information on characteristics or changes in a baseline situation that is as close to ‘ordinary’ as possible, or illustrates social behaviour in the absence of the key factor of interest. Control groups can be created at the sampling stage, through statistical manipulation of the data-set, or during analysis. The most rigorous type is experimental controls, obtained by random allocation of cases. See also CONTROL (EXPERIMENTAL).

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control, social

See SOCIAL CONTROL.

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control systems (managerial)

See TRUST AND DISTRUST.

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conurbation

A term coined by Patrick Geddes in 1915 to describe large-scale city regions such as Greater London, New York/Boston, or the Ruhr. It is not a statistically based concept, but normally refers to one city or a conglomerate of very large cities surrounded by extensive suburbs, which form a continuous urban and industrial built-up environment. In most cases, transportation systems develop to link all districts within the conurbation, so as to create a single urban labour-market or travel-to-work area. Alternative terms are urban agglomeration and, in the United States, metropolitan area.

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conventionalism

Conventionalism is the view that the adoption by the relevant scientific community of one theory rather than its rival(s) is a matter of mere convention.
It is now widely accepted in the philosophy of science that even the best-established scientific laws and theories are not fully confirmed by the factual evidence upon which they are based. In part, this is because such laws and theories are usually universal in scope, and so make claims which of necessity go beyond any finite set of evidence for them. Also, the evidence is itself conceptualized and described in terms which are informed by theory. If this is so, choice between rival theories is never determined by the facts and logic alone.
Against conventionalism, it is possible to argue that, in the absence of conclusive proof of a logical or factual kind, there may still be good reasons for accepting one theory as more plausible, better supported by the evidence, and so on, than any available alternative.

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convergence thesis

See INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY.

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conversation analysis

A research method that takes conversations in real-life settings as the object of study, and as a window on to the roles, social relationships, and power relations of participants.
Derived largely from ethnomethodology and sociolinguistics, it starts from the premiss that conversations are one of the central activities of social life, and that through them much social life is organized. Conversation analysis therefore sets out to record patterns of conversation in order to detect underlying rules that enable communication to proceed in a largely orderly fashion. It focuses on the structure, cadences, and other characteristics of verbal interactions, usually in dyads or very small groups. The subject-matter of the discussion is noted, but can be unimportant, and is not itself the main focus of analysis (as in content analysis). Research findings have proved useful in elucidating many hidden aspects of human interaction which have wider interest in understanding real-life as well as research interviews.
The method normally involves making tape-recordings or video recordings of conversations, which are then subjected to detailed analysis—for example, noting the number of times one person interrupts another, how conversations are initiated, how turns to talk are allocated, and counting the duration of pauses, silences, and speech in seconds. For an excellent short introduction to the leading practitioners (such as Emmanuel A. Shegloff and Harvey Sachs) and principal themes, see

's essay on the several dimensions of empirical research in contemporary ethnomethodology, in
, Social Theory Today (1987)
.

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conversionism

In religious terms, this refers to sudden and dramatic experience of God, which brings about a profound change in a person's religious status. For example, in Protestant, evangelical Christianity, there is an emphasis on personal and emotional experience of God, and thus on the importance of a conversion. In sociological terms, conversion refers to the process by which a person achieves membership of a religious group; it is common to contrast the achievement of Christian membership of a sect by a conversion experience, and of a church by training and ritual. In some branches of Judaism conversion is achieved by circumcision. Sociologists argue that in fact individual conversion is normally preceded by a period of preparation or socialization.
The term can also be used in a more general sense to mean the acquisition of a new role or ideology. This general sense would embrace, for example, the idea of conversion to socialism. See also RELIGIOUS REVIVAL.

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Cooley, Charles Horton

(1864–1929)
Cooley was one of the first generation of American sociologists, but an eccentric who differed from most of his peers. Whereas the majority of the pioneers were Social Darwinians, Cooley was a less mechanical evolutionist: most were reformists, often inspired by religion, while Cooley was more artistic and romantic; and most were aiming to make sociology a rigorously objective (positivist) science, but Cooley was an idealist, more concerned with introspection and imagination—one of the earliest of humanistic sociologists.
Cooley sought to abolish the dualisms of society/individual and body/mind, emphasizing instead their interconnections, and conceptualizing them as functional and organic wholes. The root problem of social science was the mutual interrelationship between the individual and social order. In his view, the concepts of the ‘individual’ and of ‘society’ could be defined only in relationship to each other, since human life was essentially a matter of social intercourse—of society shaping the individual and individuals shaping society. However, his critics did not see him as being successful in this enterprise, ultimately siding too much with the individual and idealism.
Cooley launched his career ‘in defiance of categories’, refusing to label himself a sociologist, and seeking instead to merge history, philosophy, and social psychology. Two of his concepts have, nevertheless, captured the sociological imagination. The first is the looking-glass self: the way in which the individual's sense of self is ‘mirrored’ and reflected through others. This was an idea later to be greatly expanded by William James and George Herbert Mead in their attempts to build a general theory of the self. The second of Cooley's lasting concepts is that of the ‘primary group’, characterized by close, intimate, face-to-face interaction, which Cooley contrasted with the larger and more disparate ‘nucleated group’ (subsequently referred to more commonly as the ‘secondary group’), whose members were rarely if ever all in direct contact. (Families or friendship circles are typical primary groups; trade unions and political parties are characteristically secondary groups.)
Cooley was both a student and professor at the University of Michigan. His major works are Human Nature and the Social Order (1902), Social Organisation (1909), and Social Process (1918). See also SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM.

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Coolidge, Mary Elizabeth Burroughs Roberts Smith

(1860–1945)
Coolidge was the first American full-time professor of sociology. A statistician of women's poverty, she was also an authority on feminism, social welfare, Victorian sexuality, Chinese immigration to the United States, and Native Americans. Her major study Chinese Immigration (1909) was highly regarded in both America and China. This combined an analysis of both law and history to document race relations between this exploited minority group and the wider White community. A further study of a minority people, The Rain Makers: Indians of Arizona and New Mexico (1929), provided important photographic and other documentation of a group much neglected and oppressed at the time. In 1912 she published a systematic and comprehensive, but also controversial, study of gender—Why Women are So. In this she argues that women are socially constructed as a distinct group, and that their life-chances are seriously curtailed and constrained by dress, language, and the marketplace—all factors which were subsequently addressed by second-wave feminism. Coolidge was an active leader of the San Francisco women's struggle for the vote, and believed that sociology could and should play an active part in documenting social problems and inequalities, which could then inform and encourage reform and improvement. Passionately concerned with women's poverty, she carried out many analyses of old age, poverty, catastrophic disasters, and the workings of the criminal courts.

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co-operative

An alternative form of organization to the capitalist system, found in some decentralized forms of socialism, but also sustainable on a successful basis within capitalism itself. There are two kinds: producer (or worker) co-operatives, which constitute a form of worker self-management; and consumer co-operatives, in which customers share in the profits in relation to purchases. The co-operative movement grew out of ideas formulated in the early nineteenth century by Robert Owen in Britain and Charles Fourier in France, and has spread throughout the world, with particular success in the United States. Co-operatives include farming co-operatives (for marketing, processing, and purchasing); retailer-owned wholesale co-operatives; mutual insurance companies; credit and banking co-operatives; consumer goods shops; and group health and medical schemes. Historically, co-operatives tend to have experienced difficulty in raising funds for long-term investment; ensuring that an adequate proportion of the profit is reinvested rather than distributed among the membership; and reconciling their democratic ideals with management expertise and élitism.

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co-optation

A term devised by Philip Selznick (see
TVA and the Grass Roots 1949
), to refer to a political process found especially in formally democratic or committee-governed organizations and systems, as a way of managing opposition and so preserving stability and the organization. Non-elected outsiders are ‘co-opted’ by being given formal or informal power on the grounds of their élite status, specialist knowledge, or potential ability to threaten essential commitments or goals.

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core-periphery model

See CENTRE–PERIPHERY MODEL.

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corporate capitalism

See CAPITALISM.

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corporate crime

Frequently (and unhelpfully) used interchangeably with the term white-collar crime, corporate crime should be seen as distinct, being committed on behalf of the corporation, not against it (though competing businesses may be the victims). The term does not necessarily mean that criminal law is violated, the insight offered being the ways in which corporate businesses can cause major social, financial, and physical harm, yet face few or no legal sanctions. Such crime can be intentional or the result of indifference or inefficiency. Examples include price-fixing cartels, long-term fraud, industrial accidents, and pollution.

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corporate groups

See CORPORATE SOCIETY.

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corporate society, corporatism

These terms refer to a type of society in which various large-scale corporate organizations with powerful vested interests are involved in the economic, social and political decision-making process. Examples of groups of people acting jointly in their interest include business groups, the professions, trade unions, and pressure groups. Sociologists have usually concentrated their attention on economic corporations, especially large multinational corporations which have grown over the course of the twentieth century, and on the extent to which they enjoy control over the economy or are themselves controlled by democratic processes.
The evidence suggests that business corporations have considerable power in the market, but they may also be constrained by competition in the market, and by the state. Corporate groups are interdependent. In the 1970s, it was argued that a corporatist relationship existed between employers associations and trade unions, who, along with the state, were jointly involved in economic decision-making. Corporatism was especially evident in West Germany, the Scandinavian countries, and to a lesser extent Britain. Corporate groups were said to enjoy a say in making national policy decisions in return for controlling their members. In relation to the trade unions, there has been much debate as to whether corporatism was a form of working-class incorporation, or an expression of worker power. In the harsher economic climate of the 1980s, however, corporatism all but disappeared, especially in Britain, when trade unions were almost entirely excluded from the policy process. The various interpretations of corporatism are spelled out fully in Order and Conflict in Contemporary Capitalism (1984), edited by John H. Goldthorpe, a collection of essays which is based on a series of excellent comparative studies of political and industrial conflict in advanced capitalist societies during the post-1945 era.
It should be noted that theories of corporatism are sometimes called ‘neocorporatist theory’, to distinguish them from the normative theory of the corporate state espoused in the early twentieth century by the Roman Catholic Church, Italian Fascist Party, and others.

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corporation

The legal form of organization for both capitalist and public enterprise, in which control apparently or actually passes to a managerial élite, appointed on the basis of presumed or credentialed expertise. Large corporations in the private sector are the outcome of joint-stock (share) ownership and blocks of impersonally owned and controlled finance capital. In the public sector they typically result from state nationalization and ownership of assets. The best sociological study of the behaviour of corporate employees is still Rosabeth Moss Kanter's Men and Women of the Corporation (1977). See also CAPITALISM; MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION.

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corporatism

See CORPORATE SOCIETY.

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correlation

If a change in the amount of one variable is accompanied by a comparable change in the amount of another variable, and the latter change does not occur in the absence of the former change, then the variables are said to be correlated. This is sometimes called the method of concomitant variation, after the terminology devised by John Stuart Mill, who spelled out many of the basic designs of logical proof in the nineteenth century (see
A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Deductive, 1843
). Correlations may be linear (where there is a constant ratio between the rates of change in each of the variables) or curvilinear (where the rate of change of one variable is at an increasing or decreasing ratio to the rate of change in the other variable). They may be positive (increase in one variable is associated with increase in the other) or negative (increase in one variable is associated with decrease in the other). Negative correlations are sometimes termed inverse correlations; positive correlations are occasionally referred to as direct correlations. When two (or more) variables are correlated, but there is no causal link between them, then the correlation is said to be spurious: both may be affected by a third (antecedent) variable. See also ASSOCIATION COEFFICIENTS; CAUSAL MODELLING; CURVILINEAR RELATIONSHIP; MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS.

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correlation, spurious

See SPURIOUS CORRELATION.

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cost-benefit analysis

A method of setting out the factors which need to be taken into account in making choices about major investments in public-sector projects. The objective is to assign monetary values to and weight all costs and all benefits, social and economic, so that one can see clearly whether the benefits exceed the costs of a venture. The method is normally applied to major public projects such as a new dam, airport, urban motorway, university, or a scheme for the unemployed, but the approach could in principle be applied to other private-sector investments or personal choices, as an aid to decision-making. The appraisal differs from commercial project appraisal because costs and benefits to all members of society are included—not only the monetary expenditures and receipts of the investor—so that, for example, environmental costs and the costs of social severance are included with other diffuse social costs and benefits.
The main difficulty with cost-benefit analysis is how to assign monetary values to social costs and benefits, especially when these affect different social groups, users and non-users of the proposed facility. The objection most often raised is that it gives a spurious air of economic rationality and objectivity to decisions that are necessarily social and political in nature.

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counter-culture

Where subcultures specifically stand in direct opposition to the dominant culture of the society in which they are located, rejecting its most important values and norms and endorsing their opposites, they are sometimes termed ‘contra-cultures’ or ‘counter-cultures’. The term was popularly applied to the student and hippy cultures identified with the youth conflicts around 1968, but it can have a wider usage.

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counterfactual, counterfactual conditional

A proposition which states what would have followed had the actual sequence of events or circumstances been different. Thus, to claim that the Battle of Alamein altered the outcome of the Second World War is to imply the counterfactual that, had victory in the desert actually gone to the defeated German forces, then the Allies would have lost the War.
Counterfactual reasoning is clearly inherent in causal explanation: the identification of a cause implies that, ceteris paribus, in its absence things would have happened differently. It is frequently claimed that any meaningful and falsifilable sociological proposition will necessarily have a corresponding counterfactual. In practice, however, it may be difficult to assess the plausibility of the counterfactual (or ‘conditional’) claim—which can be supported only indirectly by comparative analysis of similar or parallel circumstances elsewhere which (for some identifiable reason) yielded different outcomes.
Many sociological claims (for example those relating to the allegedly functional consequences of certain social institutions) are notoriously without counterfactuals. If the argument is put that the state in capitalist society serves the long-term interests of capital, then it is difficult to see how this statement can be subject to falsification, unless one can specify both what the precise interests of capital are and what would count as evidence of the state acting against these interests. Understandably, therefore, proponents of the more grandiose sociological theories attach little (some would say far too little) importance to the possibilities of formulating counterfactual propositions. See also CLIOMETRICS; COMMUNITY POWER.

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counter-movement

An organized response to a social movement, with the purpose of blocking the movement's activities, resisting change, and presenting alternative points of view. Counter-movements may be spontaneous expressions of public feeling, or fronts for interest groups. Feminism, for example, has given rise to several counter-movements in the United States, including Pro-Life (antiabortion), and the successful anti-ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) movement. Other examples of counter-movements include those against fascism and racism in Britain, and conservative movements against the dismantling of communism in the former USSR.

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countervailing power

A term first used by American economist John Kenneth Galbraith in American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (1952) to describe one aspect of the power system in a mature capitalist democracy. In the theory of pluralism, powerful groups and interests maintain a rough balance, none being strong enough to dominate all the others. In mixed economies, Galbraith proposed that a similar balance of powers had superseded laissez-faire capitalism and pure market competition. Trade unions, consumer organizations, trade associations and government regulation formed a system of countervailing power against the monopolistic powers of big business (see MONOPOLY).

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coup d'état

A violent and immediate seizure of state power, usually by armed forces, and with the implication of being undemocratic and unconstitutional. Successful examples occurred in Greece in 1967, Chile in 1973, and in Turkey in 1980. An unsuccessful attempt was made at a coup d'état in Russia in 1990. The best overview will be found in Edward Luttwak's Coup d'état (1968).

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cousins

See CROSS-COUSIN; PARALLEL COUSIN.

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covariation

See ASSOCIATION COEFFICIENTS.

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covering law account of causality

See CAUSE.

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covert observation

Participant observation carried out without the explicit awareness and agreement of the social unit being studied. This entails finding some self-explanatory role within the research setting in order to mask the researcher's true purpose. It may be used because research access to the social unit would normally be denied, or to ensure that the researcher's presence does not affect the behaviour of those being observed. Examples include Laud Humphries's covert observations of homosexual encounters (Tearoom Trade, 1970), and Leon Festinger and his colleagues, who observed a religious cult by pretending to become adherents to its beliefs (When Prophecy Fails, 1956). The method raises serious ethical problems. Martin Bulmer's Social Research Ethics (1982) examines the merits and dilemmas of covert participant observation, as illustrated by a variety of well-known American and British studies. See also RESEARCH ETHICS.

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credential inflation

See DIPLOMA DISEASE.

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credentialism

A process of social selection in which class advantage and social status are linked to the possession of academic qualifications. Credentialism expresses the ideology that qualifications reflect either the expertise or attributes necessary for social ascent or the occupancy of élite roles. It is said that an unintended consequence of credentialism, especially in developing societies, is credential inflation or so-called diploma disease. For a case-study of the United States see
, The Credential Society (1979)
. See also MERITOCRACY.

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crime

A crime is held to be an offence which goes beyond the personal and into the public sphere, breaking prohibitory rules or laws, to which legitimate punishments or sanctions are attached, and which requires the intervention of a public authority (the state or a local body). Ideally, the latter administers a formal system for dealing with crime, and employs representative officers (for example a police-force) to act on its behalf. In terms of law and jurisprudence, being guilty of the committing of a criminal act usually involves evil intent or conscious recklessness, although there are some exceptions in law. Where such conscious intent can be shown to be missing (as, for example, in the cases of children or the insane) then the offence is not a crime and will not attract the usual punishment (although some form of detention or therapeutic treatment may follow).
For crime to be known as such it must come to the notice of, and be processed through, an administrative system or enforcement agency. It must be reported and recorded by the police (or other investigator); it may then become part of the criminal statistics; may or may not be investigated; and may or may not result in a court case. Thus, recorded crime-rates are socially constructed, and also leave out hidden crime. The latter can include, for example, unreported instances of domestic violence, of attacks on ethnic minorities, indecent assault, and rape. Self-report studies of those involved in delinquency and criminality have confirmed that a large proportion of such behaviour is not officially recorded. A more recent wave of studies of victims of crime has also supported the view that the hidden crime figure is very large. One could also include here various forms of economic crime, from workplace theft to large-scale fraud, industrial pollution, and contravention of health and safety legislation, all of which may not be officially recorded as crime but, according to some criminologists, contribute significantly to the hidden crime that affects society. What some have termed victimless crimes or crimes without victims (for example those involving drugs, prostitution, and illegal gambling) may break laws but go unreported because those involved enter into a form of agreement and support the transaction (see
, Crimes Without Victims, 1965
).
A legal definition of crime may therefore not be sufficient. What a society defines as crime is socially constructed and highly relative. Its definition and accepted aetiology (or cause) can be influenced by ideas of morality (in relation to responsibility), and by religious faith (the sinful nature of crime), as well as competing scientific claims as to its origins.
The perpetration of crime can be an individual act or be talked of in organizational terms (see
, The Organization of Crime, 1975
). The concept can also be loosely applied to actions which offend against a set of principles but which do not necessarily involve the breaking of a law—such as, for example, crimes of the powerful and crimes of the state. States can, of course, use the category crime and the criminal law for their own political purposes: exceptions to and expansions of the law can quickly be introduced in times of national emergency or in the interests of the state. The example of Nazi Germany provides a clear illustration of this process. Some anthropological and sociological studies would suggest that adopting a definition of crime derived from law, legitimated by the state, and administered by a bureaucracy, is ethnocentric and narrow, and that a wider consideration of the breaking of norms and the exercise of social control in simpler societies without formal law is illuminating. See also BROKEN WINDOWS THESIS; CORPORATE CRIME; INDEX CRIME; WHITE-COLLAR CRIME.

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crime, corporate

See CORPORATE CRIME.

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crime, hate

See HATE CRIMES.

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crime, organized

See ORGANIZED CRIME.

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crime, political

See POLITICAL CRIME.

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crime, social

See SOCIAL CRIME.

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crime, victimless

See VICTIMLESS CRIME.

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crime, white-collar

See WHITE-COLLAR CRIME.

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crime prevention

See COMMUNITY SAFETY.

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crime-rate

A measure of change in recorded crime, over a given period of time, based upon official statistics for offences or offender rates. It enables comparison of variations across offences or areas, and can be produced for selected offences (such as car theft), or as a general measure. Recorded rates are open to criticism as unreliable, reflecting personal and institutional biases, changes in law and police practice, and distortion caused by moral panics about (for example) mugging) (see
, Policing the Crisis, 1978
). See also CRIMINAL STATISTICS; INDEX CRIME.

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crimes of the state

See POLITICAL CRIME.

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criminal statistics

Once held to reflect accurately the incidence of crime in society, first produced in France in 1827 and regularly for England and Wales since 1837, such statistics—like all official statistics—are now interpreted with caution. Criminal statistics are based on notifiable (triable by jury) recorded offences, and can be drawn from aggregate data recorded by official agencies such as the police and courts, but also from criminological research studies. Limitations have been confirmed by the national British Crime Surveys (1982, 1984, 1988) which have produced data on typically unreported and hidden crime such as vandalism. Even victim surveys can have difficulty eliciting data about some crimes—such as rape and sexual attack. Localized surveys suggest that both routinely compiled criminal statistics and national survey data seriously under-record crime generally and crimes such as rape in particular.
Most sociologists recognize that the criminal statistics are the product of a complex process. Society must first define a behaviour as criminal, but the definition of a criminal act can change over time, and between jurisdictions. To enter the statistics a crime must be reported and recorded, but the public do not report all offences, while changes in police procedure, or simple human error, can mean no record is made. The outcome of a court case, and hence the statistical recording of a conviction or otherwise, also depends upon a complex mix of ingredients. Some would argue, therefore, that criminal statistics are less a picture of the incidence of crime than an indicator of what the authorities regard as the most important offences, what the police actually find it manageable to police, and what kind of offence the court system tends to process with convictions resulting. Nevertheless, after a period of criticism and distrust, use of criminal statistics has been regaining broad acceptance. See also CRIME-RATE; ETHNOSTATISTICS.

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criminology

Most literally, the study of crime, its perpetrators, and its causes; and, relatedly, an interest in its prevention, and in the deterrence, treatment, and punishment of offenders (see
, Criminology, 2nd edn., 1992
).
Approaches and theoretical traditions are diverse. Thus, criminology as the study of crime will be interested in the distribution of crime, and in the techniques and organization of crime. Criminology as the study of criminals might seek explanations for criminal behaviour in biology, psychology, or in the political economy of society. The related sociology of law may be interested in the processes of making and breaking laws and in issues such as proportionality—making the punishment fit the crime. During the 1960s and early 1970s, a sociology of deviance developed as a source of sociological opposition to the law-enforcement and establishment-orientation or traditional criminology, and as an epistemological critique of unquestioned assumptions about what constitutes crime or deviance. In the 1970s and 1980s external and internal influences on criminology encouraged the development of critical criminology and feminist criminology (see CRIMINOLOGY, CRITICAL and CRIMINOLOGY, FEMINIST). The latter drew attention to the near invisibility of women in criminological work and gave significant impetus to rectifying the past neglect of victims of crime. Generally speaking, the politics of these new positions has been identified with supporting and asserting the rights of minority groups.
Sometimes seen as a sub-field of sociology, sometimes as a discipline in itself, criminology is clearly a mixed but dynamic enterprise, drawing on (among others) sociology, economics, history, psychology, and anthropology. It can be criticized for its inability to produce an overall explanatory theory; nevertheless, the subject continues to develop. Some commentators have suggested that its principal concern ought to be the study of the production and disruption of order—in other words control rather than crime—while critics have invoked a postmodern vision of the death of criminology. Yet others argue that such announcements are premature, and are promoting new directions in crime prevention, and critical and realist criminology (see CRIMINOLOGY, REALIST).
, Criminological Controversies (1996
), provides an excellent introduction to the theoretical and empirical issues that dominate the field. See also BROKEN WINDOWS THESIS; CRIMINAL STATISTICS; CRIMINOLOGY; LABELLING; CRIMINOLOGY, POSITIVIST.

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criminology, classical

Originating in eighteenth-century philosophy, classicism views both criminality and the administration of criminal justice as premised upon principles of rationality, choice, responsibility, and the deterrent power of punishment. It is usually associated with the work of Cesare Beccaria (1738–94; for example, see his
Dei delitti e delle pene, 1764
) and conventionally interpreted as the advocacy of a humane alternative to the arbitrary and unjustly severe sentencing and punishment of offenders. Underpinning this rationalist approach was an attempt to achieve administrative uniformity; a scale of punishments proportionate to the objective harm caused by the offence; and a belief in the aim of punishment as deterrence not retribution. A social contract is held to be agreed between the individual and society—and deemed to be a rational agreement in everyone's interest. To break the contract, and in so doing the laws of society, demonstrates free will and choice; but it is also a failure to meet one's social responsibilities, which must be met by appropriate punishment on behalf of society, in order to deter others.
Orthodox classicism was criticized for not taking account of circumstances, either of the offender, or in which the offence itself was committed. Critics maintained that, for this reason, punishment that is unvarying, or laid down according to a fixed scale, will be unjust. In this way other considerations are raised, for example the issue of causation (whether environmental or biological), and classicist free-will rationality comes eventually to be replaced by nineteenth-century positivist criminology (see CRIMINOLOGY, POSITIVIST) as a dominant perspective. However, the classical perspective has been adapted over time, and a contemporary neo-classical form remains influential in some areas—for example in debates about responsibility for crime. The best recent appraisal of the tradition is Bob Roshier's Controlling Crime: The Classical Perspective in Criminology (1989).

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criminology, critical

Also termed radical criminology, this perspective emerged in the early 1970s, as an explicitly politicized body of work. Drawing on varieties of Marxism (and in some cases anarchism), it adopted a conflict perspective and placed emphasis upon the oppressive power of the state, its control over the definition and prosecution of crime, and the exploitation of the powerless by capital. Crime was viewed and explained as a product of the social and historical processes related to capitalism itself. The standard treatment is given in
, The New Criminology (1973)
. Critical of both the behaviourism of positivist criminology (see CRIMINOLOGY, POSITIVIST) and the apolitical and narrow vision of labelling theory, it was in its turn criticized for being too polemical, neglecting gender and race issues, romanticizing the criminal as someone engaged in political resistance to capital and the state, and concentrating on control and neglecting crime and its victims.
As it developed in the 1970s and 1980s, critical criminology rediscovered its own (lengthy) radical history, hitherto obscured by ‘bourgeois’ criminology (see, for example,
, Punishment and Social Structure, 1939
). It has allied itself with cultural studies in work around race, racism, and the state, and studies of youth subcultures. It has also strengthened its commitment to the abolition of prisons and greater accountability of the police, with a series of studies of institutions of the criminal justice system, including, for example, prison regimes, deaths in police custody, sexism and racism in the criminal justice process. Despite this, the approach is dismissed by some as Left Idealism, particularly by those involved in the development of realist criminology (see CRIMINOLOGY, REALIST).

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criminology, environmental

Traditionally, the study of ‘crime and place’; that is, the spatial patterning of crime and victimization (see VICTIMOLOGY). Environmental criminology is related therefore to the work of the Chicago School on urban ecology, and to such developments in crime prevention as the notions of ‘defensible space’, ‘target hardening’, and, most recently, zero tolerance (see BROKEN WINDOWS THESIS). However, with the emergence of theories of late-modernity and the risk society, ‘green’ (environmental) issues have become more prominent—a context in which the notions of environmental crime and criminology tend more often to refer to crimes against the natural environment, animal life, and human communities (for example the dumping of toxic waste). This emerging area of sociological research also raises questions of human rights and issues related to ecopopulism.

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criminology, feminist

A self-conscious corrective to mainstream criminology and deviance theories (of various kinds), and one with the triple goals of critique, research, and reformulation of the field of inquiry. It emerged during the 1970s, partly as an outgrowth of both the women's movement and feminism, but also as a response to the so-called new deviance theory and critical criminology (see CRIMINOLOGY, CRITICAL), which, whilst aiming to be radical and innovative, had continued to ignore women. In Britain the first major publication of feminist criminology was Carol Smart's Women, Crime and Criminology (1976), which critically reviewed the field to that time. In the United States there was a more controversial start, with several studies suggesting that the crime-rate amongst women was increasing, alongside the development of the new feminist consciousness (see, for example,
's Sisters in Crime, 1975
, or the somewhat less controversial
, Women and Crime, 1975
).
Research and theory now covers a wide range of areas. The initial critiques examined the neglect of the study of women in the fields of crime and control, and also reviewed the few studies which did exist, in order to reveal their patriarchal and sexist foundations (studies, for example, such as O. Pollak's The Criminality of Women). From this start, attempts were made to see if women could be incorporated into the mainstream of deviance theory, for example by asking whether anomie theory or subcultural theory could make sense of gangs comprised entirely of girls.
Feminist criminology brought with it not just a revitalized interest in established areas of research, such as female offenders, differential court responses to women offenders, and women's prisons (all traditionally areas of male inquiry); it also helped to develop a number of newer areas of study. For example, it looked at the way in which women's deviance was more often prone to both sexualization and medicalization, and investigated new areas of control (such as the regulation of women's bodies, their reproductive cycles, their private and personal lives, and their sexuality). Thus, in one key feminist analysis, the thesis was propounded by Susan Brownmiller and others that fear of rape was a central mechanism in the control of women's lives (Against her Will, 1975).
The most general contribution of feminist criminology has been to open up the topic of gender relations for criminological study. Since crime is overwhelmingly committed by men, the fundamental question that it poses concerns the links between gender relations and crime: namely, what is it about gender that creates the tendency for crime to be a predominantly male phenomenon?

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criminology, positivist

Distinguishable from the positivism of social and psychological theory in its commitment to the practical application of its theory and research, it claims scientific status for its quantification-oriented methodology and is characterized by a search for the determining causes of crime and misbehaviour which are held to be discoverable in the physical, genetic, psychological, or moral make-up of those pre-disposed to such acts. Hypothesis-testing, empirical investigation, classification, and categorization are its hallmarks. This perspective rejects the view, proffered within classical criminology (see CRIMINOLOGY, CLASSICAL), of the criminal as a rational actor, exercising free will.
Early key figures were the Italian criminologists Enrico Ferri (The Positive School of Criminology, 1901), Raffaele Garofalo (1852–1934), and Cesare Lombroso (L'uomo delinquente, 1876). The last of these proposed that criminals exhibited certain physical stigmata, which also identified them as ‘throwbacks’ to some early primitive humanity or animal state, a proposition he later expanded. This may be termed biological positivism, and as a strand of criminology it has remained strong, represented (for example) in work by Eleanor (Gluecks) and Sheldon Gluecks in the 1950s linking propensity to commit crime to body size and shape; the XYY chromosome theory, popular in the 1960s, where the presence of an additional chromosome is held to determine criminality; or the work of Hans Eysenck, who has argued that ‘criminality is obviously a continuous trait of the same kind as intelligence, or height, or weight’.
Critics argue that the approach is value-loaded rather than objective, dealing with social constructs rather than scientific facts, and tied to a behaviourist view of humanity which overlooks the importance of beliefs, values, and purpose.

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criminology, realist

Sometimes also termed ‘Left Realism’, realist criminology emerged in the mid-1980s, in the work of Jock Young and others in Britain (see, for example, the special issue of
Contemporary Crises, 1988
). Its proponents emphasize social causes of crime, and interaction between agencies of social control (such as the police and courts), the offender, the victim, and the public. They consider the choices facing individuals in restricting circumstances, and draw strongly upon theories of relative deprivation and subcultures.

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critical theory

In sociology, critical theory is most closely associated with the Frankfurt School of Social Research, although its origins can be traced back through Hegelianism and Western Marxism generally. The term now describes a very diverse strand of Marxism which, over the past fifty years or so, has drawn on a wide range of other influences including psychoanalysis and systems theory.
The central principles of critical theory can perhaps be defined most clearly in contrast to some of the principles of twentieth-century positivism—indeed its proponents sometimes referred to it as negative philosophy. As opposed to the idea that knowledge comes from our sense-experience, critical theory is a form of rationalism; that is, critical theorists maintain that the source of our knowledge and the source of our common humanity is the fact that we are all rational beings. Hegel stated that the ‘real is rational’. Critical theory may be seen as stating that the real ought to be rational. Rationality, in this context, refers not to formal logic, but to a dialectical process of thought, in which the whole is greater than the parts, and contradictions continually appear and disappear into new syntheses. For Hegel, history was moving relentlessly towards a rational conclusion; the Marxist appropriation of Hegel gradually eliminated the idea of inevitability and linked the process to human praxis. The most complete statement of this view can be found in the work of György Lukács.
Critical theory usually involves the projection of some possible utopian state into the future, although (particularly in the work of the Frankfurt School) it sometimes seems that the utopian state was in the past. From the idea of rationality it is possible to deduce the basic form of a rational society. By virtue of being human we all possess the quality or potentiality of rational thought. A rational society, therefore, is one in which we all participate in order to create and transform our environment. This provides us with a standard by which we can criticize societies that exist in the present: a society which excludes groups from economic and political participation, or which systematically renders groups powerless, is an irrational society. In the work of Jürgen Habermas, the major modern representative of the school, a rather different model can be found. Habermas works not from our possession of rational faculties but from the fact that we all use language. His utopia is an ‘ideal speech situation’ in which all have equal access to information and public debate. In terms of theoretical argument, critical theory works dialectically, not juxtaposing one set of truth claims to another, but by searching out the internal contradictions and the gaps in a system of thought, and pushing these contradictions to the point where something different emerges. This is sometimes referred to as an internal critique.
The Frankfurt School for Social Research was founded in 1923 as a centre for socialist research. Its leading figures emigrated to America with the rise of Hitler and several remained there after the War. The central figures were Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. A number of other famous names were associated with it, including Leo Lowenthal, Karl Wittfogel, and Erich Fromm. From the beginning, the school was critical of orthodox Marxism, offering an analysis of ideology and politics and abandoning traditional forms of economic explanation. For the classic critical theory of the founders of the Frankfurt School, the main targets were so-called instrumental reason, and the particular totalitarian form of domination that they saw developing in modern industrial society. Instrumental reason sees the world, including other people, in terms of how we can exploit it; involves the separation of fact and value; and the relegation of values to an unimportant role in knowledge and life. This way of thinking is typical of industrial society and (according to critical theorists) is intimately linked to structures of domination.
Frankfurt critical theory has the reputation of being pessimistic. The argument is that capitalism has managed to overcome many of its contradictions and the working class has been incorporated into the system. Marcuse saw other minority groups on the fringe of the system—ethnic groups or perhaps even students—as providing possible foci for opposition, but Adorno seemed to see few signs of hope beyond avant-garde culture, which at least forced people to think. Some of the group's most famous work—such as
The Authoritarian Personality (, 1950)
and
's Eros and Civilisation (1955)
—drew on psychoanalysis to provide a theory of ideology that explains not only how people come to be dominated but also how they come to need to be dominated.
Habermas's work is of a rather different quality, much closer to the systematic theory of Talcott Parsons, but it still maintains a critical dimension. Habermas differs from the first generation of critical theorists in his desire to construct a systematic social theory and his willingness to grant instrumental thought a legitimate place in his scheme. He allows an authentic place for instrumental reason, and uses psychoanalysis as a model for an ‘emancipatory science’, a science which not only produces knowledge, but also enables us to become aware of and to change ourselves, and thus to remove inequalities and distortions in communication. In Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), he distinguishes three so-called cognitive interests that human beings share: a technical interest, in knowing and controlling our environment, which gives rise to the empirical (primarily the natural) sciences; a practical interest, in being able to understand each other and work together, which gives rise to the hermeneutic sciences; and an emancipatory interest, which involves our desire to rid ourselves of distortions in understanding and communication, and gives rise to the critical sciences such as psychoanalysis.
Behind this is a fairly radical revision of the orthodox Marxist view of the nature of human existence. Habermas regards work as important but sees it only as generating the first of these cognitive interests. We are also, importantly, symbol-using animals: this generates the other two. For Habermas, this means that we cannot maintain any form of economic-determinist argument, except perhaps for the historically limited period of early capitalism.
Drawing on a wide variety of disciplines he develops a broad evolutionary theory of history. Evolutionary stages are seen in terms of increasing levels of universality, each level setting new problems and offering new possibilities, and each type of society governed by a particular institutional complex. For example, tribal society is dominated by kinship institutions, and late capitalism by state institutions. His analysis of capitalism identifies a number of crises through which the system moves. In early capitalism, which he analyses in terms similar to that of Marx, economic crises present the main problem. Political intervention to deal with economic problems produces what he calls a rationality crisis, based on the impossibility of constructing a stable social order on an unstable market economy, and this in turn can lead to a legitimation crisis in which the state loses legitimacy because it cannot reconcile the conflicting demands made upon it by the requirement to plan the economic system. If, however, the state is successful in reconciling the different interests, the work ethic and competitive drive are weakened, leading to a motivation crisis which also threatens social integration.
Habermas's ideal is not based on the notion of a rational society, as is that of traditional critical theory, but on the concept of the ideal speech situation. The fact that we are all symbol-using animals living and working together indicates an ideal in which communication is free and not distorted by social inequalities, external oppression, or internal repression. Many of these ideas are spelled out in Legitimation Crisis (1973) and Communication and the Evolution of Society (1976).
The best introduction to critical theory is David Held's (1980) book of that name. The history of the Frankfurt School is meticulously documented in Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination (1973) and, more recently, Rolf Wiggeraus's The Frankfurt School (1995). Some fairly telling criticisms—especially of the work of those writers at the centre of this tradition (Horkheimer, Marcuse, Adorno, and Habermas)—are spelled out in
's article on ‘Critical Theory’ (in , Social Theory Today, 1987)
. The most notable of these accuses critical theory of ‘philosophico-historical reductionism’: a chronic tendency to retreat from ‘the embrace of the empirical social sciences’ and into ‘the exclusive domain of philosophy’.

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cross-class family

See ASYMMETRY HYPOTHESIS; MOBILITY, SOCIAL.

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cross-cousin

In kinship theory, cross-cousin is a term used to describe first cousins whose related parents are of the opposite sex. In other words the mother of one is the sister of the father of the other. Societies vary as to whether they forbid or prefer marriages between cross-cousins. The term was introduced by Edward Tylor, but used extensively by Claude Lévi-Strauss to examine the ‘elementary structures of kinship’, by which he meant the rules that govern preferences and proscriptions about marriage between parallel cousins and cross-cousins.

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cross-sectional analysis, cross-sectional data

Statistical analysis which provides information on the characteristics of, and statistical relationships between, individual units of study at a specified moment in time (the moment of data collection). Sometimes referred to as a ‘snapshot’ approach, cross-sectional analysis cannot therefore provide information on change or processes over time, for which purpose a longitudinal study design is required. However, for logistical reasons, the bulk of social survey data to date has been collected in a form suitable only for cross-sectional analysis. See also PANEL STUDY.

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cross-tabulation, cross-classification

See CONTINGENCY TABLE.

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crowding

A collective or public good is said to suffer from crowding if the ratio of individual benefit to total cost declines as the number of people who use or enjoy the good increases; in short, the more who enjoy it, the less each enjoys it. A good example is highways, a public good which become less attractive as more people use them, until the point at which people reckon it is not worth their while attempting to travel by car.

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crowds

Of concern to some of the early social psychologists, such as Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde (who suggested the origins of crowds in both herd instincts and mass imitation), sociological research on crowds is now part of the study of collective behaviour. Crowds usually involve large numbers of people, in close proximity, with a common concern. They may be focused and instrumental, having a clear goal, such as attending a rally; or they may be expressive, where the group aims to produce its own emotional or expressive satisfaction, as for example in the case of a dancing crowd at a carnival. This line is not always easy to draw, as can be seen in the case of riots: some have argued that riots are expressive and purely emotional, an outburst of senseless rage and destruction; others have suggested riots are instrumental, being either a political statement, or a criminal act of theft and destruction. These distinctions are not always clear. Others, no less ambiguous, concern the differences between focused crowds (having a specific object or goal), and diffuse crowds (uncertain, suggestible, and in which milling and rumour is common). An important series of such clarifications may be found in Ralph H. Turner and Lewis M. Killian's Collective Behaviour (1957). See also EMERGENT NORMS.

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crude birth-rate

See BIRTH-RATE.

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crude death-rate

See MORTALITY RATE.

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crude divorce-rate

See DIVORCE RATE.

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crystallization, status

See STATUS CRYSTALLIZATION.

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cult

In the anthropological meaning, a cult is a set of practices and beliefs of a group, in relation to a local god. In sociology, it is a small group of religious activists, whose beliefs are typically syncretic, esoteric, and individualistic. Although it is related to the concept of a sect, the cult is not in Western society associated with mainstream Christianity. As a scientific term, it is often difficult to dissociate the idea of a cult from its commonsense pejorative significance, and it does not have a precise scientific meaning. Cultic practices appear to satisfy the needs of alienated sections of urban, middle-class youth. Cultic membership among young people is typically transitory, spasmodic, and irregular. Research suggests that young people often have multiple cult memberships. In Western societies, cults have proliferated in the post-war period, and are often associated with the counter-culture. See also NEW RELIGIONS; SECULARIZATION.

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cultural anthropology

See SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY.

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cultural assimilation

See ASSIMILATION.

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cultural capital

(in ‘Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction’, 1973)
argues that middle-class parents endow their children with a cultural capital of various linguistic and cultural competences. Schools require these competences (whose content is controlled by the rich) for educational success, yet fail to teach them to working-class children. Thus, school assessment which looks neutral actually legitimates economic inequality, by transforming socio-cultural competences into hierarchies of attainment which appear to be the outcome of inequalities of natural ability.

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cultural diffusion

See DIFFUSION.

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cultural integration

See ASSIMILATION.

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cultural lag

A concept and theory developed by William F. Ogburn as part of a wider theory of technological evolutionism. It suggests that there is a gap between the technical development of a society and its moral and legal institutions. The failure of the latter to keep pace with the former is said, in certain societies, to explain (at least some) social conflict and problems.

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cultural materialism

A macro-theory in anthropology which holds that most aspects of human culture can be explained in material terms. Its most systematic formulation will be found in the two closing chapters of Marvin Harris's exhaustive survey of the development of anthropological theories of culture (The Rise of Anthropological Theory, 1968). Harris, an American anthropologist, claimed that his purpose in writing the book was ‘to reassert the methodological priority of the search for the laws of history in the science of man’, specifically to prove that ‘the analogue of the Darwinian strategy in the realm of socio-cultural phenomena is the principle of techno-environmental and techno-economic determinism’. This holds that similar technologies applied to similar environments tend to produce similar arrangements for the production and distribution of goods, which in turn tend to support similar sorts of social groupings, who organize and explain their activities in terms of similar systems of beliefs and values. In this fashion, the principle assigns research priority to the study of the material conditions of socio-cultural life, in much the same way (according to Harris) as the principle of natural selection accords priority to the study of differential reproductive success. He claims that this makes the former a ‘statement of a basic research strategy’ rather than a specific ‘law of society’. Critics have observed that, despite Harris's attempts to avoid historicism and to exclude any reference to the Hegelian dialectic, his materialist approach to the study of culture shares the same characteristics as the materialism of Marx and Engels; namely, that as a concrete research strategy it soon falls foul of empirical findings that falsify its basic premiss, and as a pseudo-law of history it must be framed at such an abstract level that it claims everything but says nothing.

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cultural pluralism

See MULTI-CULTURAL SOCIETY.

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cultural relativism

Cultural relativists assert that concepts are socially constructed and vary cross-culturally. These concepts may include such fundamental notions as what is considered true, morally correct, and what constitutes knowledge or even reality itself. In
‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ (American Philosophical Quarterly, 1964),
argues that our sense of reality is a social construction, based upon the prevailing discourse of a society. Thus, cultural relativists reject the rationalist and universal premisses of grand theories such as functionalism, Marxism, or Freudian psychoanalysis.
Cultural relativism draws upon the tradition of linguistic philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Willard Quine, Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir. These writers have contended that if language constructs the world, then reality is not independently existing, but is shaped by cultural and linguistic categories. Two cultures can thus be incommensurable since their world-views are based on quite different languages and premisses. Paul Feyerabend (in Against Method, 1975) says that there are cultures so different from the West that they are incomprehensible to outsiders, who therefore cannot translate them into their own terms.
This has major implications for the study of non-Western societies. If importing a Western rationalist approach is ethnocentric, then we must understand cultural patterns in their own terms, adopting an insider's view of the culture. Ethnography thus becomes a process of uncovering the meanings by which people construct reality and translating this knowledge into the discourse of the field-worker's own society. See also INTERPRETATION; SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS.

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cultural studies

A developing area of academic interest, sometimes taught as a distinctive university or college qualification, which lies at the interface between the social sciences (notably sociology) and humanities (most obviously literature). It is principally concerned with the nature of mass culture and the workings of culture industries. Among other things, therefore, it embraces the study of popular culture, communication, consumer society, the mass media, leisure, post-modernism, and aspects of literary and sociological theory which address the construction of identity and ideology. Typical of those whose writings are considered central to the field (although they themselves might deny the applicability of this label to their work) would be Jürgen Habermas, Stuart Hall, Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-François Lyotard.
As a field of interest, cultural studies seems to lack a distinctive or coherent disciplinary core, and over the years it has borrowed both its substantive topics and theoretical orientations increasingly freely from other areas of scholarship. Recently, some critics have claimed that it now exerts a pernicious influence on teaching and research in sociology, political science, and social history, by encouraging practitioners of these subjects both to abandon systematic empirical work in favour of what, at least in extreme cases, is largely ‘data-free’ social science (that is, unsubstantiated speculation intermittently illustrated by only casual empirical observation), and to underestimate the importance of social structure in everyday life. However, proponents argue that cultural studies has revitalized sociology: first, by exposing its obsession with moribund concepts related to the world of production, and deriving from its nineteenth-century origins; and, second, by alerting researchers to the real concerns of ordinary people in the advanced societies of the late twentieth century.
It is clear that British (and to a lesser extent American) sociology took a pronounced ‘cultural turn’ in the early 1990s. However, it remains to be seen whether this reflects a lasting move towards greater individualism in advanced societies, or is merely part of a larger (but temporary) end-of-century mood of introspection in Western civilizations. A good overview of some of the key issues and debates in this arena will be found in The Polity Reader in Cultural Theory (1993). See also CONSUMPTION, SOCIOLOGY OF; KNOWLEDGE, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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cultural theory

This term has been applied to diverse attempts to conceptualize and understand the dynamics of culture. Historically these have involved arguments about the relationship between culture and nature, culture and society (including material social processes), the split between high and low culture, and the interplay between cultural tradition and cultural difference and diversity. Cultural theory has also been marked by an engagement with concepts which have often been taken to cover some of the same ground signified by the notion of culture itself. Prominent here have been the concepts of ideology and consciousness (particularly its collective forms).
The works of Raymond Williams (The Long Revolution, 1961) and E. P. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class, 1963) have been particularly influential in the development of post-war British cultural theory. Williams's emphasis on culture as a ‘whole way of life’ and Thompson's emphasis on culture as the way in which groups ‘handle’ the raw material of social and material existence opened up new ways of thinking about culture—in particular uncoupling the concept from a narrow literary and aesthetic reference. Both Williams and Thompson studied the lived dimension of culture and the active and collective process of fashioning meaningful ways of life.
The so-called culturalist reading of the term developed by both Thompson and Williams was subsequently challenged by other more obviously structuralist interpretations. These emphasized the external symbolic structures of culture, as embodied in cultural languages and codes, rather than its lived forms. In this formulation culture could be read as a signifying system through which the social world was mapped. The structuralist version of cultural theory was also strongly informed by Louis Althusser's version of Marxism. Althusser offered a reworking of Marxist theories of ideology which gave greater scope to the efficacy of the ideological realm. In particular he emphasized the relative autonomy of the ideological or cultural domain whilst holding on to the principle of the ultimately determining character of economic relations and processes.
The concern to recognize the efficacy of cultural practices in Althusser's writings was further developed within cultural theory by the appropriation of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci's work opened up new ways of conceptualizing the role of culture and cultural practices in class formations and class alliances and, in particular, gave great weight to the role of culture in securing forms of political and moral leadership and authority (hegemony). The influence of Gramsci's ideas was particularly important in helping cultural theory move beyond the impasse created by the tensions between competing culturalist and structuralist perspectives in the 1970s (see, for example,
, Policing the Crisis, 1978
).
As Gramsci's importance has waned within cultural theory, so that of Michel Foucault has increased. A central thrust of Foucault's influence has been to shape a more discursive understanding of cultural languages and of the interconnection between power and representation (see
, Hard Looks, 1996
). Foucault's influence has also been obvious in arguments about the historically specific character of culture and its development as both an object and instrument of government (see
, Cultural Studies, 1992
).
The interplay between race, ethnicity, and culture has also emerged as a central concern of contemporary cultural theory. This has often been via a critique of the forms of ethnicity assumed within the tradition of British cultural theory associated with Williams and Thompson—or what Paul Gilroy has termed the morbid fascination with Englishness (see his
Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, 1987
). It has also challenged the incipient nationalism of conceptions of culture which link it to particular bounded national territories. In place of this, writers such as Gilroy have emphasized instead the transnational movement and mixing of cultures. Cilroy's notion of the ‘Black Atlantic’ represents an attempt to envisage cultural processes outside the restrictions imposed by nationally delimited conceptions of culture. In this sense, it has much in common with Edward Said's work on orientalism, which examines not only the internal dynamics but also the external determinants of cultures. In Said's Orientalism (1978), Western conceptions of culture and civilization are depicted as having been formed against a process of naming and symbolically subordinating the Oriental.
Feminist arguments have also exerted an important influence on recent cultural theory. Looming large here has been the interplay between feminism and psychoanalysis. This has led to much discussion about the ways in which gender identities are formed within cultural languages and through cultural practices. Recent work on memory, fantasy, and gender performance has been especially suggestive (see
, The Women in Question, 1993
; and
, Bodies that Matter, 1993
). See also CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS; FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS.

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cultural transmission theory

See SUBCULTURE.

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culture

When social scientists use the term culture they tend to be talking about a less restrictive concept than that implied in everyday speech. In social science, culture is all that in human society which is socially rather than biologically transmitted, whereas the commonsense usage tends to point only to the arts. Culture is thus a general term for the symbolic and learned aspects of human society, although some animal behaviourists now assert that certain primates have at least the capacity for culture.
Social anthropological ideas of culture are based to a great extent on the definition given by Edward Tylor in 1871, in which he referred to a learned complex of knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, and custom. This definition implies that culture and civilization are one and the same. But this equation, although possible in English and French usage, runs counter to the German distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation, the former referring to symbols and values, while the latter deals with the organization of society. Archaeological usage, though acknowledging the wholeness of human societies, makes a distinction between material culture (or artefacts) and practices and beliefs, the non-material or adaptive culture (see CULTURE, ADAPTIVE AND MATERIAL) transmitted by teaching and tradition. Only material culture is accessible to archaeology, whereas adaptive culture is the subject of history, sociology, and anthropology.
For nineteenth-century anthropologists, such as Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan, culture was a conscious creation of human rationality. Civilization and culture, in this conception, showed a progressive tendency towards what were regarded as higher moral values, and this enabled the Victorian mind to construct a hierarchy of cultures or civilizations which provided a rationale for colonial activities by apparently higher-order Western civilizations.
Modern ideas of culture arose through the work of field anthropologists such as Franz Boas, around the turn of the century, and tend towards relativism. The intention is to describe, compare, and contrast cultures, rather than ranking them, although Boas and some later North American anthropologists have also been interested in the processes by which cultural traits may be borrowed or otherwise transmitted between societies. This has led to the development of the idea of culture areas, and a comparative ethnography of North America, both of which are largely absent in British social anthropology. For the latter, culture is generally taken to mean a collection of ideas and symbols that is generally distinguished in the discipline from social structure, and this distinction is also central to European and North American sociological usages of the term.
In America, it is sometimes argued that the concept of culture can provide ways of explaining and understanding human behaviour, belief systems, values, and ideologies, as well as particular culturally specific personality types. One exponent of the latter theory was Ruth Benedict (see, for example,
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, 1944
).
In cultural anthropology, analysis of culture may proceed at three levels: learned patterns of behaviour; aspects of culture that act below conscious levels (such as the deep level of grammar and syntax in language, of which a native language speaker is seldom aware); and patterns of thought and perception, which are also culturally determined. See also CONSUMPTION, SOCIOLOGY OF; CULTURE AND PERSONALITY SCHOOL; CULTURAL RELATIVISM; CULTURAL STUDIES; CULTURAL THEORY; EVOLUTIONARY UNIVERSALS; PARSONS, TALCOTT; POPULAR CULTURE.

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culture, adaptive and material

Adaptive culture is a term mostly used in American cultural anthropology, in reference to the realm of ideas, beliefs, values, and customs, as contrasted to the material culture of manufactured objects (buildings, consumer goods, and such like).

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culture, organizational

See ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE.

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culture, political

See POLITICAL CULTURE.

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culture, popular

See POPULAR CULTURE.

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Culture and Personality School

A development in the study of socialization that arose principally in the United States in the 1930s. The theory combined elements of psychology, anthropology, and sociology, but principally involved the application of psychoanalytic principles to ethnographic material. Drawing on Freudian theory (see
's Civilization and its Discontents, 1930
), it emphasized the cultural moulding of the personality and focused on the development of the individual. Culture-and-personality theorists argued that personality types were created in socialization, and they placed particular emphasis on child-rearing practices such as feeding, weaning, and toilet training. The perspective is best demonstrated in the work of anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson, Ruth Benedict, Geoffrey Gorer, and Margaret Mead. Mead, in particular, has become associated with the main tenet of the School: that different cultures (or societies) produce different personality types as a result of different socialization practices. Her controversial findings—notably that sex roles were culturally rather than biologically determined—influenced a generation of American sociologists to reexamine their cultural assumptions about the roles of men and women in society.
Numerous other studies offer variations on this theme. In The Psychological Frontiers of Society (1945), Abram Kardiner looked at the way in which personality types are present in cultural patterns. Kardiner and his colleagues argued that religion and politics are screens on to which the basic personality-orientation of a society is projected. In
‘Anthropology and the Abnormal’ (Journal of General Psychology, 1934)
, Ruth Benedict examined social deviance, and drew attention to the fact that a highly valued personality type in one society may be considered deviant in another. She argued that different societies have different means for dealing with whatever behaviour is considered abnormal—and that this changes over time.
The Culture and Personality School was particularly important in the wartime National Character Studies, undertaken in an attempt to understand the character (and hence the strategies) of the Axis Powers, one result of which was Benedict's classic account of the Japanese, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). Mead's parallel account of the United States was published as And Keep Your Powder Dry (1942). After 1950 greater emphasis was placed on the use of statistics in demonstrating connections between child-rearing practices, personality, and culture. Thus, in Child Training and Personality (1953), John Whiting and Irving Child used a large cross-cultural sample to show the alleged connection between experiences of early childhood and systems of curing illness.
In the post-war period, the School came increasingly to be criticized for exaggerating the congruence of personality types within any given society; for ignoring the significance of relationships that exist between cultures; and, most seriously, for reifying culture rather than viewing it as a social construction. It also proved difficult to demonstrate the connections between early child-rearing practices and later adult personality traits. Culture-and-personality studies have little currency in contemporary anthropology and sociology, even in the United States, to which their influence has mostly been confined. The influence of the School has not, however, entirely disappeared.

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culture area

See CULTURE.

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culture of poverty

See FATALISM; LEWIS, OSCAR; POVERTY.

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culture shock

A term coined in the 1960s to refer to an occupational disease suffered by those suddenly immersed in a culture very different to their own. The term generally implies a negative reaction (physical, cognitive, and psychological) to moving within or between societies, but some authors have suggested it may have benefits for the individual concerned. Those who become partially, or fully, immersed in a new culture may suffer return culture shock when re-entering their own society.

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curriculum

The curriculum comprises the subjects and courses taught in any educational institution. It is a formal statement, by the institution, of what is to be learned. In British schools, following the 1988 Education Reform Act, the curriculum is determined nationally and consists of a number of core subjects that must be studied by all school students. (see
, Sociology of the Curriculum, 1991
.) See also HIDDEN CURRICULUM.

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curriculum, hidden

See HIDDEN CURRICULUM.

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curvilinear relationship

A relationship between two or more variables which is depicted graphically by anything other than a straight line. For example an accelerating rate of increase in deaths with age is represented by a steepening curve. Curvilinear relationships are very variable, and more complex and less easily identified than simple linear relationships. See also CORRELATION.

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customs

Customs are established ways of thinking and acting in societies. They have been studied at various levels. Ethnographic accounts detail the routine minutiae of daily life. At a greater level of complexity the rules implicit in these routines can be analysed and cultural patterns discerned in repetitive acts. Finally, custom can be taken to mean the distinctive nature of a whole culture, or of a culture area (a geographical area in which the inhabitants share a common culture—which may embrace a number of subcultures).

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cybernetic hierarchy

See PARSONS, TALCOTT; SOCIAL SYSTEM.

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cybernetics

The study of communication among machines, animals, and men, particularly the role of feedback information in the process of control. In the social sciences, the theory links social control closely to the nature and function of communication, and has been deployed most widely in the study of formal organizations. See also PARSONS, TALCOTT; SOCIAL SYSTEM.

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cybersociety

The mesh (‘space’ or ‘virtual reality’) of electronically based communications created by the world-wide network of computer users. Although it is conventional to distinguish between ‘information technology’ (the term applied to any computer-based application or process, such as is found in the case of office automation), on the one hand, and ‘telecommunications technology’ (for example fax machines or video conferencing), on the other, the multi-media integration of almost all technologies of communication via computers has effectively made this distinction redundant. The newer terminology of cyberspace refers to both developments.
Computer-mediated social interaction has become increasingly prominent in the organization of everyday life in the late twentieth century. Electronic mail and the creation of the Internet have made possible such things as on-line shopping, Web-based ‘chat-rooms’, and personalized video pornography in the home. The implications of this explosion in communications for work, leisure, and politics are a matter of controversy among sociologists (see, for example,
, CyberSociety, 1994
).
Curiously, one of the most thought-provoking statements about the possible sociological characteristics of a thoroughgoing cybersociety is the novel The Naked Sun, written by the prolific science-fiction author Isaac Asimov and first published (in 1956) while computer-development was still in its infancy. The story features a distant world in which people ‘view’ each other remotely via ‘trimensional images’ and are only exceptionally involved in direct face-to-face physical contact. It also contains a good deal of speculation about the role of sociologists in this and other no less abnormal societies (in Asimov's novel, people on Earth, by contrast, live underground in vast over-populated caves of steel, and are terrified of open spaces and contact with fresh air), and includes the immortal line, spoken in response to the need to send an Earthly representative to other planets in order to save the human species, that the ruling authorities ‘had better send a sociologist’.

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cycle of deprivation

A theory popularized in the 1970s to explain the persistence of poverty and other forms of socio-economic disadvantage through generations. The theory postulates that ‘family pathology’ is the principal mechanism for transmitting social deprivation intergenerationally, and that this explains the persistence of bad housing, low education attainment, and unemployment in poorer households and communities. In essence the argument is that deprivation and welfare dependency are, if not quite the fault of the poor, then certainly without serious structural origins—an interpretation that has much in common with the earlier culture of poverty (see FATALISM) thesis, though placing less emphasis on individual and community pathologies. Extensive empirical research has largely undermined the credibility of the thesis (see
, Cycles of Disadvantage, 1976
).

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cyclical change

See BUSINESS CYCLE.

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cyclical unemployment

See UNEMPLOYMENT.

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D

dangerous classes

A term taken from the title of the book (The Dangerous Classes of New York) published in 1872 by the American social reformer Charles Loring Brace. His ‘dangerous classes’ included the vagabonds, waifs, predatory criminals, vagrants, and prostitutes that emerged out of the poor underclass in late nineteenth-century New York city. Sociologists and criminologists have sometimes argued that contemporary policing policies (for example in relation to drugs control) are still informed by this concept, and contain a hidden agenda which aims either to identify ‘public enemies’ who can be blamed for various economic and social problems, or to suppress members of today's ‘dangerous classes’ (immigrants, youths, various minority groups) in the interests of public order and security (see, for example,
, The Return of the Dangerous Classes, 1994
).

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Darwinism, Social Darwinism

Darwinism is the belief in the theory of evolution by means of natural selection, developed separately by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, and subsequently popularized in Darwin's two great works on evolution: the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) and the Descent of Man (1871). The original version of the theory proposed that, since population numbers remained stable whilst reproduction occurred at a higher than replacement rate, there must be some systematic selective mechanism involved in the process, by which certain individuals perished, while others survived. The mechanism advanced was that of ‘natural selection’, whereby those individuals better suited to their environment survived, whilst others who were less well adapted died. Over time this process would result in species formation. It was not until thirty or so years later that the actual mechanism of heredity—the individual gene—was widely recognized and incorporated into existing theory to inaugurate modern neo-Darwinism.
At the time of its writing, Darwin and Wallace's theory formed just one thread in an existing discourse about evolution more generally, which included the social evolutionism of Herbert Spencer. Many writers on society, influenced by Spencer, eagerly absorbed Darwin's ‘scientific’ theory into their own writings, and it was Spencer himself who coined the phrase (commonly attributed to Darwin) ‘the survival of the fittest’, to explain the historical development of societies. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, in the United States and Britain, there arose a movement based upon the incorporation of notions of survival of the fittest into social theory. The most well-known manifestation of this Social Darwinist movement was eugenics. In its most extreme manifestation, members of the Eugenic Society wrote pamphlets variously advocating the compulsory sterilization or incarceration of large subgroups of the population and selective breeding among the rest, in order to improve the genetic quality of the population as a whole. More recently, Darwinian theory has been a focus of controversy, for certain scientists are now convinced that the slow process of natural selection as Darwin proposed it is insufficient to account for species formation, which (they claim) must arise from some process that operates more rapidly. It is still the case, however, that the vast majority of practising biologists and genetic scientists remain committed neo-Darwinists. See also GUMPLOWICZ, LUDWIG; MILITARY AND MILITARISM.

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data

Plural of datum, a fact or statistic. Hence data are records of observations. These might take a number of forms: for example, scores in IQ tests, interview records, fieldwork diaries, or taped interviews. All of these provide data, that is, observations from which inferences may be drawn, via analysis.

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data archive, data-bank

A storage and retrieval facility or service for social scientific data. Data archiving has grown in parallel with the development of secondary analysis as a recognized field of social research. The International Federation of Data Organizations for the Social Sciences (IFDO) was founded as recently as 1977 by four North American and seven European data archives. These archives act as lending libraries for machine-readable information collected by academics and government agencies. In the vast majority of cases, the information in question is derived from social surveys (most data archives are in fact survey archives), although there are now archives which store the taped interviews obtained by oral historians and others. Survey archives are often depositories for official statistics, including censuses, as well as non-official data-sets such as opinion polls and academic surveys. In Britain, for example, the Economic and Social Research Council established such an archive (the UK Data Archive) at the University of Essex in the late 1960s. Similar archives exist at many universities in America and Europe. (A representative sample of archives are listed in
, Secondary Analysis in Social Research, 1982.
)
All data archives have three primary functions: the collection, storage, and preservation of data (usually in the form of magnetic tapes); the dissemination of data within the national social science community and across international boundaries; and the development of facilities and techniques of analysis to encourage the widest and most intensive possible use of data. Different archives attach different degrees of importance to these objectives: some operate a broad acquisition policy whereas others are more selective; some make access to the data-sets easy by publishing detailed catalogues of holdings; others specialize in secondary analysis conducted by in-house researchers.
The major advantage of data archives is that they constitute a rich source of inexpensive and publicly available information. However, unless the data-sets held by the archive are fully documented (with complete and detailed codebooks, for example), then the researcher engaged in secondary analysis may be unaware of important limitations on how the original information was collected and how it may legitimately be used.

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Davis-Moore thesis

See FUNCTIONAL THEORY OF STRATIFICATION.

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de Beauvoir, Simone

(1908–86)
A Parisian-born philosopher and novelist who graduated from the élite École Normale Supérieure. She is most celebrated for her two-volume The Second Sex (1949) which has been grossly translated and truncated in its English-language version. This was a wide ranging analysis of the subordination of women, examining biological, historical, and ethnographic aspects. ‘Woman is made not born’, she argued. Literature and belief systems revealed that women were always seen as the ‘other’ to man as subject. Women, she concluded, are seen as nature while man is seen as culture. Such claims rest sometimes on Eurocentric ideological assumptions disguised as universals. Many descriptions of women's existence were in effect vivid details from de Beauvoir's first-hand experience and observations of mid-century Paris and gave authenticity to her text. The book inspired thousands of women readers. She answered a post-war unease, when the question of women's subordination had disappeared. Since the more recent growth of feminist perspectives in many specialisms, there have been few such multi-disciplined studies.
De Beauvoir also wrote novels, her earliest being She Came to Stay (1943). The Mandarins (1954) received the Prix Goncourt. An existentialist philosopher, she explored moral and political dilemmas in essays and plays. There were also autobiographical volumes; for example Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), The Prime of Life (1960), and accounts of both her mother's death (A Very Easy Death, 1964) and that of her long-term companion Jean-Paul Sartre (Adieux, 1981).

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de facto segregation

See SEGREGATION.

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de jure segregation

See SEGREGATION.

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dealignment, dealignment thesis

See CONSUMPTION SECTORS.

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death-rate

See MORTALITY RATE.

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debt bondage

See PATRON-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP.

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decarceration

The process of removing people from institutions such as prisons or mental hospitals—the opposite of incarceration. In the middle of the twentieth century, this became a central feature in the reorganization of social control, and is closely allied to programmes of community care and community control. The reasons for this change are discussed in Andrew Scull's controversial book Decarceration (1984). Another linked concept is transcarceration, in which people are moved sideways from one kind of institution to another.

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decentred self

See ALTHUSSER, LOUIS; DESCARTES, RENÉ; STRUCTURALISM.

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decile range

See VARIATION (STATISTICAL).

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decision-making

See COMMUNITY POWER; CONTINGENCY THEORY; COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS; GAME THEORY; ORGANIZATION THEORY; POLITICAL PARTIES; POWER; SATISFICING.

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decomposition of capital

The process by which, in advanced Western capitalist societies, ownership of the means of production has come historically to be dispersed throughout a greater proportion of the population. In the classic statement of this thesis
('s Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, 1959)
, there is an increasing separation of ownership and control. Subsequent sociological studies investigated, and debated, the empirical relationship between the two.
A number of interpretations have been offered. At one extreme, John Kenneth Galbraith (The New Industrial State, 1967) argues that, as a consequence of growth in the scale of production, corporations become increasingly capitalized, to the point at which only the wealthiest of individuals can own anything other than a minimal stake in the ownership of the large corporation. The number of individuals holding shares therefore increases such that no individual, or even group of individuals, can have a controlling interest. This long-term process of dispersal creates a power vacuum which can only be filled by a professional salaried management. At the other extreme, Sam Aaronovitch (The Ruling Class, 1961) maintains that the characteristic form of advanced capitalism is a fusion of monopoly capital in banking and manufacturing into ‘finance capital’, or capital not restricted to one sphere of industry. Banks, insurance companies, pension funds, investment trusts, manufacturing, and other commercial corporations all own shares in each other. These cross-shareholdings are reinforced by a complex web of interlocking directorships—and sometimes by kinship and friendship ties—which restricts ‘effective ownership’ to a financial oligarchy, comprising only a few hundred or few thousand individuals, organized into financial groups or knots of financial power.
Considerable research effort has been expended in the attempt to specify the size and shape of these knots. How much, and which parts, of a corporation need to be organized into a co-ordinated financial grouping before strategic control of a particular corporation can be secured? The most convincing answer to these questions will be found in the works of John Scott (see especially
Corporations, Classes and Capitalism, 2nd edn., 1985, and Capitalist Property and Financial Power, 1986
). These studies identify empirically the varied modes of corporate control, including that of the ‘constellation of interests’. This is found in enterprises where financial intermediaries are the dominant shareholders, but none is able, individually, to exercise minority control. Where the largest twenty voting shareholders collectively hold sufficient shares for minority control, these comprise a diverse ‘constellation of capitalist interests’, and no stable coalition can exercise full powers of minority control. In this situation, the members of the Board of Directors can ‘achieve some degree of autonomy from any particular interest’. Scott's work demonstrates that the dynamics of this situation alone reveal the relationship between ownership and control to be much more complex than either of the earlier interpretations would suggest. See also BOURGEOISIE; INTERLOCKING DIRECTORATE.

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decomposition of labour

The process of differentiation within the working class, such that it is no longer a homogeneous group, but is instead stratified internally by skill level. An early statement of the thesis will be found in Ralf Dahrendorf (Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, 1959), although this has now been superseded by debates about the contemporary labour-market segmentation, and the extent to which the industrial proletariat of capitalist societies has always been internally divided (notably the so-called labour aristocracy debate).

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deconstruction

See POST-STRUCTURALISM.

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deduction, deductive

The use of logical rules to arrive at a set of premisses from which certain conclusions must follow. Deduction begins with theory, moves to hypotheses derived from the theory, and then tests hypotheses via prediction and observations. This approach to testing and theory is often referred to as the hypothetico-deductive method, and since it emphasizes hypotheses, prediction, and testing, is sometimes held to be the method par excellence of science. See also INDUCTION.

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defence mechanisms

Unconscious psychological mechanisms, delineated by Sigmund Freud, that the ego uses to defend the individual from unacceptable instinctual impulses which must be hidden from consciousness. Best-known are repression and projection; others include regression, reaction formation, introjection, and displacement. Although widely criticized, these concepts have been incorporated into everyday psychological understandings. See also PSYCHOANALYSIS.

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deference

Part of the Weberian armoury of concepts dealing with legitimacy, deference has been defined by Howard Newby (The Deferential Worker, 1977) as ‘the form of social interaction which occurs in situations involving the exercise of traditional authority’. Submissive behaviour—but not necessarily, according to Newby, a normative endorsement of the status quo—is required on the part of the subordinate actor or group. A deferential performance need not imply deferential attitudes—merely a conforming to expectations within an unequal power relationship.
As with all concepts of legitimacy, deference requires reference both to those claiming as much as to those ascribing legitimacy to an order, and this in turn led Newby to coin the phrase ‘the deferential dialectic’ to describe the manner in which the superior ‘defined, evaluated and managed the relationship from above’, as much as it was being ‘interpreted, appraised and manipulated from below’. The face-to-face nature of the deferential relationship, and the overt inequality apparent at every turn, suggest that the traditional order within which this relationship is played out is grounded in the most morally powerful of values. Property ownership, with its hereditary overtones as in the case of family farms and the tied cottage, rural religiosity, and respect for natural forces, may all combine in a constellation of such values. The erosion of deferential behaviour amongst industrial workers has been caused by the disappearance of those same conditions for the exercise of such relationships and the collapse of the economic and moral basis to the order that maintained them. See also IMAGES OF SOCIETY.

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deferred gratification

The ideological principle which encourages individuals and groups to postpone immediate consumption or pleasure in order to work, train, invest, or gain in some other way an enhanced return at a future date. Deferred gratification is an essential principle behind capital accumulation and implicit in any system of industrialization.

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definition, operational

See OPERATIONAL DEFINITION.

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definition of the situation

A concept first developed by William Isaac Thomas and Florian Znaniecki in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918–20). There are two sides to a situation: one is objective, while the other is subjective, where an individual ‘has to take social meanings into account and interpret his experience not exclusively in terms of his own needs and wishes but also in terms of the traditions, customs, beliefs, and aspirations of his social milieu’. Most significantly the concept was used to formulate an early version of the self-fulfilling prophecy.

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degradation ceremony

Introduced by Harold Garfinkel in his article on
‘Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies’ (American Journal of Sociology, 1956)
, the term degradation ceremony (or ‘status degradation ceremony’) refers to communicative work directed towards transforming an individual's total identity into an identity lower in the relevant group's scheme of social types. Garfinkel argued that the structural conditions of moral indignation and shame—and hence the conditions of status degradation—are universal to all societies. Law courts are one example where degradation ceremonies are carried out publicly by professional degraders (lawyers and judges) as an occupational routine. Public denunciations undertaken in other social settings may be just as effective. The term highlights the importance of societal reaction in the defining of deviance in everyday life. See also LABELLING; STATUS; STIGMA; SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM.

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degradation-of-work thesis

The proposition that skilled work has declined in importance with the rise of capitalist industrialization—most notably during the twentieth century and following the rise of the scientific management movement. The most notable proponents of this thesis have been neo-Marxists such as Georges Friedmann and Harry Braverman. The latter argues that private capitalists pursue increased control over their workforces, both as a means of increasing labour productivity by extracting greater profits, and for the political purpose of subduing the working class. The principal means for securing this control is said to be the separation of conception and execution, that is, appropriation of all planning and design knowledge by managers, with the workers being delegated only the responsibility for operating pre-programmed machinery and performing routinized and de-skilled tasks. This process was characterized as the ‘degradation of work’ because it stripped formerly skilled employees (for example craft-workers and clerical workers) both of their skills and their self-respect. The thesis formed the core of the so-called labour process debate that preoccupied neo-Marxist sociologists of work during the 1980s. See also PROLETARIANIZATION.

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deindustrialization

The diminishing proportion of either national production or the labour-force of the richest Western nations engaged in the primary and secondary industrial sectors. The extent of, and reasons for, deindustrialization are a matter of controversy. Though some such trend is evident in all the major Western economies, in only a few (notably Britain) has it coincided with falling investment, and an absolute decline in manufacturing capacity.

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deism

See THEISM.

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delinquency

Literally misdeed, guilt, or neglect of duty, and hence in this sense not strictly defined by law. However, particularly when referred to as juvenile delinquency, the term is often used to embrace a broad range of behaviour, from that found offensive to respectable values (noisy teenage gatherings, truancy) to petty and occasionally more serious crime (such as shop-lifting, breaking and entering, and car theft).
Typically, the delinquent has been seen as an urban male, usually working class, aged between 12 and 20, associated with a variety of anti-social behaviours, membership of a gang, and having a history of trouble with the authorities and of recidivism. A high proportion of serious (indictable) offences are committed by people in this age-group, and so, on the one hand, the ‘problem’ of delinquency is one that always seems clearly demonstrable and inviting obvious explanations. Yet, on the other, the sociological literature and range of explanatory approaches is wide—drawing, for example, on the diverse theories of anomie, the Chicago School, the gang, delinquent drift, deviance amplification, differential association, differential opportunity, moral panics, and subcultures (all of which are treated under separate entries elsewhere in this dictionary). Psychology and psychiatry also offer various approaches: influences here include parental or maternal deprivation, and measures of intelligence and personality (for all of which again see separate entries). It is often held that the problem is new or getting worse, but late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and American society saw similar waves of delinquency. (A good account of these is given in
, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears, 1983
.) In the past, studies of delinquent youth largely neglected questions of race and gender, an omission which is only slowly being addressed.

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delinquent drift

David Matza, in his book Delinquency and Drift (1964), argued that delinquency did not emerge as a result of strongly deterministic forces, but rather through a gentle weakening of the moral ties of society, which allowed some young people to drift into delinquency. See also VOCABULARIES OF MOTIVE.

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demobilization

See MOBILIZATION.

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democracy

So many political systems and ideologies claim the virtue of democracy that the word has become virtually meaningless in its everyday use; the label is used to legitimize almost every kind of political power arrangement.
The origins of democracy as an idea and a practice go back to the city-states of Greece in the fifth century BCE. At that time, it meant simply ‘rule of the citizens’ (the demos), and was designed to allow all citizens to have a voice in decisions that would affect all. This right was exercised at mass meetings, and approximated to what we would today call direct democracy. It is important to remember three things about this ancient Greek democracy: first, that it excluded women and a large class of slaves; second, that the demos acted as a collective or social body, rather than as isolated individuals; and, third, that this kind of collective decision-making could work only as long as the citizen body remained relatively small and homogeneous. Kirkpatrick Sale in Human Scale (1980), building on the empirical work of Robert Dahl, has suggested that true democracy is difficult in groups larger than 10,000, and impossible in populations above 50,000: most West Europeans and Americans live in towns and cities larger than this. In fact the classic age of Greek democracy lasted only for about 200 years, in city-states of a few thousand privileged citizens, and was destroyed by invasion and war. Its long-term durability in the face of population growth was never tested.
Contemporary democracies are all very different from the ancient Greek model. The pattern that emerged in England in the seventeenth century and slowly became the model for the world was one of representative democracy. Here, citizens elect politicians who promise to represent the interests of those citizens in debates and decisions, which typically take place in some central national forum such as a parliament or congress. Thus, ideally, the parliament becomes a miniature demos.
In practice, politicians in a democracy usually belong to parties which propose general policies or programmes, rather than responding to citizens on an issue-by-issue basis. Parties thus become independent centres of power. The experience of the twentieth century seems to show that citizens' views are best represented by the proliferation of many small parties—as in Italy or Israel; but government can be carried on more efficiently where there are only two, or at most three parties—as in Britain or the United States. This is one of the many paradoxes of democracy which have engaged the attention of sociologists and political scientists.
Although there are many one-party systems in the world which claim to be democratic on the basis that they represent the collective will of the people, it is widely agreed that real inter-party competition and real representation of different interests is a necessary condition of democracy. Other necessary conditions include: free and fair elections, a genuine choice between candidates and polities, real parliamentary power, the separation of powers, civil rights for all citizens, and the rule of law. There is room for unlimited disagreement about the exact meaning of any and all of these conditions, which is why democracy continues to be the focus of intense public and academic debate. Researchers have explored the nature of the state as a sociological entity, political socialization, voting behaviour and political participation, the relationships between democracy and economic systems, and the manipulation of public opinion.
But the main thrust of research has been to investigate the reality of democracy itself—how widely power is distributed, and what role ordinary citizens play. In 1956 Robert A. Dahl published A Preface to Democratic Theory in which he argued that the modern industrial states were not democracies so much as polyarchies—shifting coalitions of powerful interest groups. This sparked off two decades of intense research and analysis. In the same year, C. Wright Mills produced The Power Elite which took the critique of democracy much further by claiming that, in the United States, democratic political practices had been obliterated by a power élite consisting of the institutional leaders of big business, the military, and what Mills called ‘the political directorate’ (the executive branch of government). Citizens had become docile and powerless in this mass society.
The counterpart of élite and class-rule theories of democracy has been the conservative tradition which, from Plato to Burke, has been suspicious of democracy as a dangerous and inefficient system which could easily lead to mob rule. The origins of popular democracy in the French Revolution of 1789 gave force to this view.
In the modern democracies there is little consensus about just how strong the voice of the people can or should be in a constitutional democracy. Politicians routinely ignore massive public opinion majorities—for example the majority for capital punishment or a balanced budget in the United States, or the majority against full integration into Europe, or against health privatization in Britain. Democracy mixes uneasily with traditional paternalism, international corporate capitalism, and welfare statism. Indeed, the complexity of political and economic decision-making today presents a formidable barrier to real public participation. In the future, new electronic techniques for supplying information and testing public opinion may bring democracy a little closer to its participatory origins.
Useful introductions to the voluminous literature surrounding these issues are Jack Lively's Democracy (1975) and the collection edited by
, Democratic Theory and Practice (1983)
. See also BUREAUCRACY; INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY.

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democracy, industrial

See INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY.

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democracy, participatory

See PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY.

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democratic socialism

See STATE CAPITALISM.

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demographic transition

The pattern of transition, observed in many areas of the developed world, between two demographic regimes: the first, termed traditional, in which levels of fertility and mortality are high; and the second or modern regime in which levels of fertility and mortality are low. According to demographic transition theory, developed from the observation of this pattern in Europe and associated with the name of Frank W. Notestein, mortality should decline first, leading to a period of fairly rapid population growth (as occurred in Great Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century for example), followed by a subsequent decline in fertility to similarly low levels (see, for example,
‘Population—the Long View’, in , Food for the World, 1945
). Much effort has been devoted to debating whether the demographic transition will follow a similar pattern in developing countries, and the implications of the question of whether the growth of population at intermediate stages of the transition acted as a stimulus to the Industrial Revolution, or was merely a consequence of economic development and modernization.

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demography

The study of human populations, their growth and decline, due to changing patterns of migration, fertility and mortality, and characteristics such as the sex-ratio, dependency ratio, and age-structure. The subject is sometimes divided for further elucidation into ‘formal demography’, meaning the formal statistical analysis of population parameters and dynamics, and ‘population studies’, the wider investigation of the causes and consequences of population structures and change. It is in the latter area that many demographers have interests which overlap with those of sociologists, and in much sociological investigation demographic analysis forms an important component in the description and understanding of human societies.
The methodology consists of analysis of databases of official statistics from births, deaths, and marriage registration, and from population censuses. Demographers seek ultimately to produce population projections, that is, forecasts not only of the size of the population over coming decades, but also its changing age-structure, which can be important for social policy and labour-market policy. For example, if the dependent population (children under school-leaving age and people over retirement age) is growing relative to the population of working age which has to support it financially, there may be major implications for taxation, social insurance, and fiscal policy. If the population of working age is declining in absolute numbers, there may be a case for government policy to encourage a larger percentage (of women especially) to enter employment. Thus demographic statistics and analyses provide the essential underpinning for many other types of study. For this reason population censuses were the very first type of systematic social enquiry to be developed.
Analyses of vital statistics do, however, have their limitations. In particular, they cannot supply information on the motivations, value-systems, or aims and preferences underlying changes in the birth-rate, which is a key factor in population growth. In recent years, there have been concerted efforts to develop and carry out interview surveys on fertility orientations and behaviour. These cover issues such as the preferred number of children in a family, the effects of household income and women's employment on their fertility, attitudes to contraception and its use—all factors affecting the timing and spacing of births. The World Fertility Survey in the 1970s established standards of data collection and analysis for an important addition to the demographer's repertoire of data sources and research analyses. See also HISTORICAL DEMOGRAPHY; SOCIAL DEMOGRAPHY.

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demography, historical

See HISTORICAL DEMOGRAPHY.

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demography, social

See SOCIAL DEMOGRAPHY.

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demonstration experiment

A type of policy research based loosely on the experimental research design. New policies or procedures are introduced in one location, such as a factory or school, and the resulting effects compared with other similar locations where the changes have not been introduced, usually with a view to demonstrating the benefits of the changes thus tested. See also CONTROL (EXPERIMENTAL).

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denomination, denominationalization

A denomination is a religious organization which, in the church–sect typology, stands mid-way between the church type and the sect type. It is a voluntary association with a formal bureaucracy. There is a trained ministry and lay participation is restricted to particular limited activities. It is tolerant about belief and practice, and expulsion of members who deviate from orthodoxy is rare. Individual commitment is not intense, and recruitment is through socialization. Denominationalization refers to the historical process by which certain sects (such as the Methodists) acquired the characteristics of a denomination without necessarily becoming a church.

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denotative meaning

See CONNOTATIVE VERSUS DENOTATIVE MEANING.

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density

The degree of aggregation, concentration, or crowding within a defined geographical or social space, measured in different ways. The population density of an area is measured by the number of persons usually resident in the area or, sometimes, by the number of persons working in an area (the day-time population density). Trade-union membership density is the percentage of all workers at a particular workplace, or in a company, who are union members.

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dependence, dependency

The state of being connected to and subordinate to someone or something. The opposite of self-reliance, this term may be encountered in a variety of sociological contexts. In the study of economic growth and the sociology of development, it describes a situation in which the less developed countries (LDCs) literally depend on inputs from the advanced industrial states, in order to achieve growth. This can take the form of financial and technical aid, expertise, or military support. Dependency is judged by so-called dependency theorists and others to be a limiting condition which is detrimental to the long-term economic and political interests of Third World states. In a medical context, the term is synonymous with addiction, the most common forms of dependency being associated with drug addiction and alcoholism (see DRINKING AND ALCOHOLISM). Individuals are sometimes described as being emotionally dependent, financially dependent, or politically dependent on others. Much research has also been done on the social consequences for relationships between the sexes of the financial dependence of many married women on their husbands (especially if the former are not involved in paid employment). See also COMPADRAZGO; PATRON-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP; DEPENDENT VARIABLE.

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dependency ratio

A simple indicator of the age composition of the population which typically varies in the range 0.5 to 1.00. Early definitions of the dependency ratio refer to the total number of young dependants divided by the total number of persons of productive age. More recently, due to the economic burden of ageing populations, the dependency ratio is defined as the total number of young and old dependants divided by the population of working age—for example persons aged under 15 and 65 and over divided by persons aged 15–64, or persons aged under 20 and 60 and over divided by persons aged 20–59 years. In both definitions, the two parts of the population are identified purely by age, rather than with reference to numbers actually working and not working. As national data sources improve in quality and frequency, this third—more precise—definition becomes a possibility, and is used in some studies. The dependency ratio is used by demographers to monitor trends over time in the age structure and relate them to the fertility rate, the mortality rate, and other demographic, social, and economic indicators.

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dependency theory

A set of theories which maintained that the failure of Third World states to achieve adequate and sustainable levels of development resulted from their dependence on the advanced capitalist world.
Dependency theories developed in opposition to the optimistic claims of modernization theory which saw the less developed countries being able to catch up with the West. They stressed that Western societies had an interest in maintaining their advantaged position in relation to the LDCs and had the financial and technical wherewithal to do so. A variety of different accounts of the relationship between the advanced and less developed states evolved within the broad framework of dependency theory, ranging from the stagnationism and ‘surplus drain’ theory of Andre Gunder Frank (which predicted erroneously that the Third World would be unable to achieve significant levels of industrialization), to the more cautious pessimism of those who envisaged a measure of growth based on ‘associated dependent’ relations with the West.
The major contribution to dependency theory was undoubtedly that of Frank, a German economist of development who devised and popularized the phrase ‘the development of underdevelopment’, describing what he saw as the deformed and dependent economies of the peripheral states—in his terminology the ‘satellites’ of the more advanced ‘metropolises’. In Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1969), he argued that the Third World was doomed to stagnation because the surplus it produced was appropriated by the advanced capitalist countries, through agencies such as transnational corporations. Frank himself insisted that growth could only be achieved by severing ties with capitalism and pursuing autocentric socialist development strategies.
Dependency theory was flawed by an overemphasis on economic factors and in some versions a necessitarian logic based on the idea of a ‘surplus drain’ (extraction and appropriation of profits) from the LDCs to the rich and powerful nations. None the less, it had the merit of drawing attention to the international dimension of development, and brought the power relations between states under scrutiny. The emergence of the newly industrializing countries (NICs) as a group of successful late developers challenged the validity of the core assumptions of dependency theory, demonstrating that successful late industrialization was possible under certain circumstances, and suggesting the need for a more sophisticated and disaggregated approach to Third World development. See also DEVELOPMENT, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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dependent population

See DEMOGRAPHY.

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dependent variable

Within a particular study, analysis, or model, a dependent variable is the social element whose characteristics or variations are to be explained by reference to the influence of other, prior, so-called independent variables. For example, a person's income (dependent variable) may vary according to age and social class (independent variables). The value of dependent variables can often be predicted using some form of causal modelling. Whether a variable is treated as dependent or independent is determined by the theoretical framework and focus of a study.

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depression, clinical depression

Mental states characterized by feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and loss of interest, experienced by most individuals. They are deemed clinical (that is a mental illness) if they are persistent, severe, and out of proportion to any identifiable precipitant. The term depression entered psychiatric classification primarily as a symptom of melancholia (the predecessor to depression) and has only featured as a diagnostic label since the end of the nineteenth century (initially in the term manic depression).
The precise differentiation of types of depression varies. In the post-war period it has been common to distinguish reactive and endogenous depression. With reactive depression—a neurosis—there is an identifiable precipitant, but the response is exaggerated. With endogenous depression—a psychosis—there is not; instead the illness appears to arise from within. However, the DSM-III, under the heading of ‘Affective Disorders’, distinguishes bi-polar (manic depression) and unipolar disorders (depression).
The various types of depression are now the most frequently diagnosed mental illnesses, and are more common in women than men (with a usual ratio of two to one). There are undoubtedly biochemical changes associated with depressive states (though work on the biochemistry of depression has not been very successful) and the most widely used treatments are physical—drugs or ECT (electro-convulsive therapy). However, the case for the importance of social factors in the aetiology of depression is strong. George Brown and Tirril Harris's study of the Social Origins of Depression (1978) demonstrated very clearly that adverse life-events and other stress-inducing occurrences, when combined with situationally generated vulnerability, increased the chances of clinical depression (both reactive and endogenous).

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depression, neurotic

See NEUROTIC DEPRESSION.

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deprivation

Literally the taking away of something or the state of being dispossessed, the term is loosely used for the condition of not having something, whether or not it was previously possessed, with the implication that the person in question could reasonably expect to have it. Of what precisely the individual is deprived varies, but basic welfare needs for food, housing, education, and emotional care (see, for example, the concept of MATERNAL DEPRIVATION) receive much of the attention.
Like the narrower notion of poverty, deprivation can be viewed in absolute or relative terms. Absolute deprivation refers to the loss or absence of the means to satisfy the basic needs for survival—food, clothing, and shelter. The term relative deprivation refers to deprivations experienced when individuals compare themselves with others: that is, individuals who lack something compare themselves with those who have it, and in so doing feel a sense of deprivation. Consequently, relative deprivation not only involves comparison, it is also usually defined in subjective terms. The concept is intimately linked with that of a comparative reference group—the group with whom the individual or set of individuals compare themselves—the selection of reference group being crucial to the degree of relative deprivation.
The concept of relative deprivation was introduced by Samuel Stouffer and his co-workers in their classic social psychological study The American Soldier (1949); it was also used by Robert K. Merton in his standard text Social Theory and Social Structure (1949), and was widely used by sociologists in the 1950s and 1960s. Not surprisingly it was invoked in discussions of poverty and in the arguments about the need for relative definitions of poverty. It was also employed by W. G. Runciman in his important study Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (1966). This focused on institutionalized inequalities and people's awareness of them, and on the question of which inequalities ought to be perceived and resented, by standards of social justice. More recently, the link between social inequalities and the experience of relative deprivation has been put forward as the explanatory mechanism that accounts for international differences in life-expectancy, the argument being that high levels of inequality lead via relative deprivation to lowered life-expectancy.
Sociological debates have tended to focus on subjectively experienced relative deprivation. In the field of social policy, however, externally assessed material and cultural deprivations have been the focus. One important issue has been the extent to which deprivation is transmitted from one generation to the next. In this context the idea of a cycle of deprivation has been employed to refer to the intergenerational transmission of deprivation, primarily through family behaviours, values, and practices. This idea suggests the importance of personal and familial pathology—as opposed to structural inequalities—in accounting for deprivation, and has led to considerable debate and criticism (see
, Cycles of Disadvantage, 1976
, and
, Dynamics of Deprivation, 1987
). The term multiple deprivation is used where deprivations extend across a wide range of social needs. For a useful review of the extensive literature see
, ‘Relative Deprivation and Social Movements: A Critical Look at Twenty Years of Theory and Research’, Sociological Quarterly (1982)
.

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deprivation, maternal

See MATERNAL DEPRIVATION.

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Deprivation-Satiation Proposition

See SUCCESS PROPOSITION.

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derivations

See ÉLITE THEORY.

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Descartes, René

(1596–1650) Together with Immanuel Kant and David Hume, the French philosopher René Descartes is one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. Descartes also made significant contributions to mathematics and the science of mechanics. He is best known for his Discourse on Method and Meditations, two texts in which he employed his method of systematic doubt so as to arrive at some indubitable foundation from which certain knowledge could be deduced. Famously, Descartes discovered he could doubt virtually everything, save that in doubting, and so thinking, he must at least exist. However, the existence thus asserted was not his bodily existence, but rather the existence of the self as a ‘thinking thing’. Descartes required proof of the existence of God, to restore his confidence in the existence of material bodies, defined by their spatial existence. This metaphysical view of the world as composed of extended material bodies, on the one hand, and souls or minds defined by thought, on the other, is known as dualism. Descartes himself, and successive dualist philosophers of mind, have experienced great difficulty in accounting coherently for the special connection between mind and body which constitutes the human person.
The influence of body–mind dualism is pervasive throughout the contemporary social sciences (for example, in Max Weber's distinction between behaviour and meaningful action). The increasingly problematic failure of sociology to deal adequately with either human embodiment or ecological issues is one legacy of this. Psychoanalysis and recent structuralist approaches in social science, which affect to ‘de-centre’ the human subject, often start out by explicitly rejecting Descartes's assumption of the ‘transparency’ of the self to reflection. Finally, Descartes is now frequently criticized as advocating a view of animals as non-conscious complex machines, thus allegedly excluding animals from direct moral concern, and sustaining an untenable gulf between human and animal nature. The adjective used to refer to Descartes is ‘Cartesian’. See also METAPHYSICS.

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descent, descent theory

See KINSHIP.

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descent, parallel

See PARALLEL DESCENT.

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descent groups

These are kin groups who are lineal descendants of a common ancestor. Unilineal descent is either matrilineal (if traced through the mother) or patrilineal (traced through the father's line). Bilateral descent can be traced through either line. Although the local discourse of descent often stresses its biological foundations, this should be seen as culturally constructed, since fictitious biological relationships are sometimes created. See also CLAN; KINSHIP; PARALLEL DESCENT.

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deschooling

A movement associated with the writings of Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society, 1971) and Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970), although critiques of the role of the educational system in the development process had been presented earlier, by René Dumont (False Start in Africa, 1962) among others. The movement was influential during the 1970s, especially in the United States, although Illich and Freire both wrote from a Latin American perspective. The central ideas are that education and learning permeate all life-experiences and social relationships, and are not the monopoly of the formal educational system; that in the Third World it is essential for the curriculum to build on pupils' own experiences and provide relevant knowledge and skills; and that conventional educational systems serve in practice to demean and exclude many social groups (for example the poor) and to create institutional dependence. Wider political arguments are developed from this position. See also EDUCATION, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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descriptive statistics

See INFERENTIAL STATISTICS.

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de-sensitization

See BEHAVIOURISM.

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desert

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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desire

Desire refers to the psychological aspects of sexuality, particularly fantasies, operating both consciously and unconsciously. It is distinct from both the biological aspects of sexuality—the body and its sensations, its ability to reproduce, and sexual acts—and the social and political aspects, including sexual identity and sexual relationships.
Although we experience pleasure and pain through our bodies, arguably much of this is in fact a result of the psychological aspects of fantasy and desire. Psychoanalytic theory has explored these issues in particular, and in recent years the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan challenged Sigmund Freud's theory of biological ‘drives’, arguing instead that sexuality and desire are primarily sites for the production—and transgression—of meaning, and that desire is a result of cultural meanings and representations as much as any physiological expression. In particular, he sees desire as a metonym; that is, a word used in a transferred sense—‘metonymy’ being a figure of speech, and an important concept in semiology, in which the name of one thing is substituted for another to which it is related, for example an effect for a cause, or as in the substitution of ‘the bottle’ for ‘drink’. See also NEED.

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de-skilling

A term which summarizes the central ideas of Harry Braverman's Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974). His thesis was that capitalist forms of production reduce the cost of labour by breaking down complex work processes into smaller, simpler, and unskilled tasks. This continuous fragmentation process replaces the skilled craft worker by unskilled labour requiring little training, so that jobs in the secondary sector of the labour-market are substituted for jobs in the primary sector. In consequence, wages and employment conditions are pushed down to the lower levels typical of the secondary sector; unemployment and insecure employment become widespread; and people in the de-skilled jobs become alienated from their work.
The thesis has attracted a lot of interest among academic social scientists, especially in Britain, and it has provided the framework for case-study research on work organization and change within workplaces, particularly in the declining manufacturing sector (see
, The Nature of Work: An Introduction to Debates on the Labour Process, 1983
, for an overview). Studies based on nationally representative statistics on the workforce tend not to substantiate Braverman's conclusion about the direction of change in the occupational structure and the consequences of a shift away from manufacturing to service-sector industries: while certain skilled occupations are disappearing, others experience skills upgrading, and newer occupations, such as computer programming and systems analysis, expand rapidly. See also DEGRADATION OF WORK THESIS; INDUSTRIAL SECTOR; LABOUR PROCESS; PROLETARIANIZATION; SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT; SKILL.

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desocialization

The process by which earlier socialization is undone. It is most commonly associated with the study of thought reform and brain-washing, and is also found in the work of Erving Goffman as a process of ‘mortification’ when inmates enter a total institution, being stripped of an earlier self and acquiring a new one.

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despotism

See ABSOLUTISM.

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determinism

See BIOLOGICAL REDUCTIONISM; CULTURE AND PERSONALITY SCHOOL; ECONOMIC DETERMINISM; HISTORICISM; LABELLING; SOCIAL AREA ANALYSIS; SOCIOBIOLOGY; TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM.

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deterrence

In criminology or the sociology of the military, deterrent and preventive measures can overlap, since both aim to discourage certain acts or place restrictions on the rational choices of others. The threat of imprisonment or of nuclear escalation are held to be deterrents and hence preventive of crime or nuclear war. In relation to crime, the threat of arrest, trial, conviction, and punishment is viewed as a general deterrent. Deterrence, as a general objective, is also invoked to justify punishment. Imprisonment is assumed to be a powerful deterrent but its effectiveness in persuading potential offenders to avoid crime is disputed. However, prison also seeks to reform, and may be said to deter crime if an individual commits no further crime after release. Nevertheless, in most modern penal systems, recidivism is high.

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development, sociology of

The application of social theory and analysis to societies (usually in the Third World) which are undergoing a late transition to capitalist industrialization. It has been particularly concerned with analysing the social effects of development on class relations and on social groups such as the peasantry and the urban poor.
Development studies emerged as a distinct area of research in the post-war period, and was associated with the growing concern for the political and economic development of the post-colonial world. The first sociological account of development was modernization theory, which held that the less developed countries would eventually catch up with the industrialized world, providing they emulated the economic and social systems of Western capitalism. Based largely on the theoretical premisses of structural functionalism, modernization theory conceptualized development as a staged transition from tradition to modernity, to be brought about at the economic level by the operations of the market and foreign investment; at the social level by the adoption of appropriate western institutions, values, and behaviours; and at the political level by the implementation of parliamentary democracy. A product of the Cold War, and motivated by the concern to challenge socialist ideas in the post-colonial world, modernization theory was criticized for its optimism, over-simplification, and ethnocentrism. It was displaced in the late 1960s as the most popular sociological analysis of development by the dependency approach. This was in turn charged with over-simplification and with merely inverting the assumptions of the previous orthodoxy.
Criticism of these approaches has left the sociology of development as a fragmented field in which various competing and more modest theories jostle for supremacy. In recent years there has been a growing awareness that the nation-state cannot be analysed in isolation from the international context. The field also has significant and growing overlaps with the sociological debates about globalization and the environment (see, for example,
's Popular Development, 1996
). There has also been a renewed analytic emphasis on the interdependency and integration among nations, not just in terms of economic processes, but also at the level of culture and ideology. For example, in The Westernization of the World (1996), Serge Latouche argues that the concept of ‘Third World development’ is rooted in specifically Western ideas of technical progress and the accumulation of capital. This leads to development policies which destroy the cultures of non-Western populations. In particular, Latouche maintains that the drive towards global uniformity in cultures, life-styles, and ‘mentalities’ has been responsible for endemic civil wars, ecological disasters, and the widespread national debt throughout the Third World. David E. Apter's Rethinking Development (1987) gives a good overview of the more established literature. See also CENTRE–PERIPHERY MODEL.

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development, uneven

See UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT.

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development banks

Financial institutions established by states and private interests, for the particular purpose of promoting economic growth, often having preferential interest-rates and terms of repayment. Examples include the Inter-American Development Bank, International Development Agency, and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

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deviance

Commonsensically, deviance has been seen as an attribute, as something inherent in a certain kind of behaviour or person: the delinquent, the homosexual, the mentally ill, and so forth. Indeed, this was a position which had a certain credence in the earlier writings of the social pathology theorists, and which is still important in some clinical and criminological research. For sociologists, however, deviance is best viewed, not as a type of person, but rather as a formal property of social situations and social systems. There is no fixed agreement on the substance of deviance—even murder or incest are accepted at times—but there are two interrelated properties which help characterize the phenomenon.
The first refers to deviance as a pattern of norm violation, and a range of norms are then specified such that religious norms give rise to heretics, legal norms to criminals, health norms to the sick, cultural norms to the eccentric, and so forth. Since norms emerge in most social situations, such a definition is very wide-ranging, and enters every sphere of social life. For example, there can be class deviance, where the normative expectations of class behaviour are violated; or situational deviance, where the norms emerging between a group of friends are transgressed.
A second property highlights deviance as a stigma construct, a label bestowed upon certain classes of behaviour at certain times, which then become devalued, discredited, and often excluded. This characteristic can also be seen as very wide-ranging: people may make friends deviant simply because they belch or talk too much; whilst terrorists may become political martyrs in the eyes of those who share their particular values. The study of deviance here is concerned primarily with the construction, application, and impact of stigma labels.
Within either tradition—norm violation or stigma construct—deviance is a shifting, ambiguous, and volatile concept. Precisely who or what is deviant depends upon a firm understanding of the norms and labelling process in particular social contexts. Despite these inherent difficulties with the term an enormous sociological literature has been generated by research on deviance.
The work of Émile Durkheim is generally considered the most fruitful starting-point for the contemporary analysis of deviance. In his work, two major and somewhat antagonistic issues emerge, both of which signpost subsequent trends. One is his focus on anomie: a state of normlessness and breakdown which emerges most conspicuously at times of rapid social change. Anomie indicates a strain, a breakdown, within a social order or social structure. This concept shifts the focus away from the deviant as a type of person to the suggestion that deviance is a feature of certain kinds of social structure. It is an idea followed through in a host of subsequent writings; in theories of delinquency as a consequence of strains within the social order (as in the work of Robert Merton and anomie theory); as a consequence of the breakdown of parts of the city (see, for example, the concept of the ZONE OF TRANSITION); and in the idea of subcultures.
Durkheim's second concern is his focus upon the functions of deviance. In The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) he suggests that ‘crime is normal because a society exempt from it is utterly impossible’. Deviance is bound up with the very conditions for a society; far from deviance being abnormal or pathological in itself, every society needs deviance. This seemingly paradoxical claim about the normality of deviance is propounded by Durkheim on several grounds. First there is a broad statistical argument; empirically, all known societies do have their deviance, and the rate of deviance often remains relatively stable over periods of time (though Durkheim certainly agrees that there can be abnormally high rates which need to be checked). But why is deviance universal? In line with Durkheim's more general functional analysis he suggests that deviance fulfils a number of important functions. Citing Socrates, he argues that one of these functions is to bring about change: today's deviants are signs of tomorrow's world. This is not true of all deviance—some is apologetic and fits readily into the existing social order. But deviance that is radical, challenging, and threatening is often so precisely because it suggests a different vision of the social world, one that may increasingly come to be: the reforming Christian sects of the sixteenth century, for example, quickly became the established Churches of subsequent eras. But in contrast to the function of facilitating change there is also a major function of solidarity and cohesion secured by deviance: people unite against a common enemy.
Durkheim's work has been very influential but there have been many other sociological traditions within which the issue of deviance has also been addressed in some depth. Members of the so-called Chicago School examined deviance as part of a normal learning process of cultural transmission, most fruitfully in the later work of Edwin Sutherland, and in terms of the general theory of differential association. Those within the symbolic interactionist tradition were particularly concerned with the processes through which deviance was socially constructed. Ultimately this interest gave rise to labelling theory and social constructionism. Other strands of thought have seen deviance as a form of social conflict, and there have been attempts recently to link it to Marxism and the sociology of law, feminist criminology, and Michel Foucault and discourse theory.
Throughout the late 1960s and much of the 1970s, deviance theory was one of the most fertile and controversial fields of sociology, but by the 1980s debate had become largely institutionalized and interest somewhat diminished. In the opinion of some observers the rather boisterous specialism gradually matured. Alternatively, in the view of many of the self-proclaimed radicals within the field, the sociology of deviance simply became yet another sociological orthodoxy. However one judges this process the story itself is well documented in
, Images of Deviance and Social Control: A Sociological History (1985)
. See also CAREER; CRIME; DEVIANCE AMPLIFICATION; DEVIANCE DISAVOWAL; SOCIAL CAPITAL.

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deviance amplification

Introduced by Leslie Wilkins in his book Social Deviance (1967), the concept suggests that a small initial deviation may spiral into ever-increasing significance through processes of labelling and over-reacting. It was initially linked to cybernetics and feedback loops, but was used most extensively within the labelling theory of deviance. However, by far the most systematic defence and application of the theory will be found in Jason Ditton's Controlology (1979), a critique of ‘half-hearted’ labelling theories which attempts ‘to extend Wilkins's model to the point at which control may be seen to be operating independently of crime (rather than within a mutually causal framework) on the basis that such liberation will constitute an adequate propositional basis for a fully-fledged labelling theory’.

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deviance career

See CAREER.

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deviance disavowal

A refusal, on the part of those who have been labelled deviant, to accept this characterization. The concept was originally developed with reference to so-called social deviants, such as the physically handicapped, who had a strong interest in attempting to minimize the stigma of deviance in order either to appear normal or to normalize their interactions and relationships with the able-bodied. It is now used more widely, notably within the labelling perspective, to apply to all forms of deviant behaviour.

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deviant subculture

See SUBCULTURE.

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Dewey, John

(1859–1952) Over a long life spanning nearly a century, Dewey was one of America's leading philosophers, responsible for developing and refining philosophical pragmatism. Rejecting much of classical European and essentialist philosophy, Dewey stressed the importance of linking theories to active participation in the world, and to practical problem-solving (instrumentalism). His work exemplifies the North American approach to problem-solving and it has been especially influential in progressive theories of education. For example, in Democracy and Education (1916) Dewey stressed the importance of child-centred learning, where the experiences of the child are seen as valuable in establishing problems, and where thoughtful continuity of such experiences allows the child to exert increasing control over his or her life.

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diachrony

See SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE; STRUCTURALISM.

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dialectic, dialectical materialism

See ENGELS, FRIEDRICH; GURVITCH, GEORGES; HEGEL, G. W. F.; HISTORICAL MATERIALISM; MARX, KARL; MATERIALISM.

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diaspora, diaspora studies

A diaspora is a dispersion of people throughout the world. The term was first applied collectively to the Jews scattered after the Babylonian captivity, and in the modern period to Jews living outside of Palestine and latterly Israel, but has now been extended to include the situation of any widely spread migrant group.
During the late 1980s and 1990s, diaspora studies of transnational experiences and communities developed as a self-conscious critique of earlier sociological approaches to international migration, this shift in terminology reflecting the more general turn towards globalization as a theme in macrosociology (although post-modernism and post-structuralism are also evident influences). Proponents argue that improvements in transport (such as cheap air fares) and communications (electronic mail, satellite television, the Internet) have made it possible for diaspora communities, scattered across the globe, to sustain their own distinctive identities, life-styles, and economic ties. The rigid territorial nationalism that defines modern nation-states has in this way been replaced by a series of shifting and contested boundaries. Diaspora studies has spawned many new terms (‘imagined communities’, ‘global ethnospaces’, ‘preimmigration crucibles’) which describe these transnational influences, and the networks and communities under study, to substitute for the conventional terminology of immigration and assimilation. Typical studies would include Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993) and Nancy Abelmann and John Lie's Blue Dreams: Korean Americans and the Los Angeles Riots (1995).
Enthusiasts argue that the new diaspora studies detail the complexity, diversity, and fluidity of migrant identities and experiences in a more realistic way than did the older mechanistic theories and models of international migration (which, it is claimed, emphasized unidirectional flows and influences, uprooting of migrants from their societies and cultures of origin, and assimilation via the melting pot into the new host culture). Critics point to the creation of pointless neologisms, abstruse theoretical terminology, apparent disregard for numbers and generalizations, and a tendency to ignore earlier sociological studies of migration (especially where these document complex structures of opportunity and migrant networks in ways which prefigure the new diaspora studies themselves). It is also said that the new diaspora studies unwarrantably overlook structural economic and political influences upon migration. Certainly, many are focused principally upon personal narratives of migrants, and document mainly the popular culture of the diaspora community.

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diaspora identities

See IDENTITY.

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dichotomy

Any variable which has only two categories. In theory these categories are meant to be mutually exclusive. The variable ‘sex’, with its two categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’, is a good example. There are numerous well-known examples of dichotomies in sociology: Tönnies's Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Durkheim's mechanical and organic solidarity, and so on. A variable with more than two categories is called a polytomy. Sometimes, in order to simplify analysis, polytomous variables are collapsed—the number of categories is reduced by merging adjacent codes—to a dichotomy.

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dictatorship of the proletariat

See LENIN.

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difference

Although increasingly employed with reference to ethnic, class, and age divisions within social groups, the term ‘difference’ was initially used by ‘second wave’ feminist writers, who defined the term politically, seeing it as a polarity both between women and men and among women themselves. Kate Millett and Shulamith Firestone viewed women's differences from men as a principal manifestation of women's oppression by men. Others see the term as referring more to the fact that women have a different experience of work, love, and family, indeed a different psychology, from that of men. It is also used in the negative sense of social exclusion and subordination, although radical feminists such as Mary Daly see it as a positive phenomenon, difference as a cause to embrace and celebrate. Black feminists such as Audre Lorde have attacked the misleading universalism of feminism and stressed the deep differences existing between women at all levels, especially with regard to access to scarce resources and power, as a result of ethnic differences and divisions based on class and sexual orientation. In recent years there has been a growing multiplicity of women celebrating differences, but some argue this results in a loss of homogeneity in the women's movement, while others point out that the politically neutral notion of difference to a great extent disguises social inequality—both between women and men, and among women themselves.

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difference principle

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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differential association

A theory of crime and delinquency pioneered by Edwin Sutherland in the 1930s, as a response to the dominant multi-factorial approaches to crime causation, associated particularly with the work of Eleanor (Glueck) and Sheldon Glueck. In contrast to their account, which identified long lists of factors which might contribute to crime causation, Sutherland aimed to build an integrated and sociological theory which stressed that crime was basically a learned phenomenon. The theory was elaborated and refined in various editions of Sutherland's highly influential textbook Principles of Criminology (later co-authored with Donald Cressey), and came to be presented in nine propositions, the most central of which argued that ‘a person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favourable to violation of law over definitions unfavourable to violation of law’. Criminal behaviour was learned by individuals being in contact with situations where criminality was defined favourably. Arguably, therefore, the theory is as much one of differential definitions as differential association.
The theory was highly influential in deviance and delinquency research, making the explanation of crime largely a matter of ordinary learning processes, rather than biological predisposition. Although it was frequently attacked for being too general and failing to deal adequately with individualistic crimes like embezzlement, the proponents of the theory responded by making it ever more refined and testable, as well as applying it to a wider range of individual deviant phenomena, often using the vocabulary of motives argument to clarify the social nature of even solitary crimes.

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differential opportunity structure

A theory of delinquency developed by Richard A. Cloward and Lloyd B. Ohlin. In their book Delinquency and Opportunity (1960), they attempt to link the Mertonian theory of anomie to the Chicago School tradition of cultural transmission and differential association, in order to produce a general theory of delinquent subcultures linked to differential opportunities for crime. See also OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURE.

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differentiation, social or structural

See STRUCTURAL DIFFERENTIATION.

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diffuse crowd

See CROWDS.

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diffused power

See ORGANIZATIONAL REACH.

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diffusion, diffusionism

Diffusion refers to the spread of cultural attributes from one culture to another through contact between different cultural groups. Diffusion theory developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in opposition to evolutionary theory, both being concerned with the origins of human culture. Diffusionists such as Robert Lowie (The History of Ethnological Theory, 1937) saw cultures as patchworks of borrowed traits, the superior traits moving out from the centre, like the ripples from a stone thrown into a pond. The movement of these cultural traits could be reconstructed by assuming that the traits most widely distributed are the oldest.
Some diffusionists sought to prove that all human culture originated in one place and spread out from there by diffusion. The similarities between Mayan temples and Egyptian pyramids led anthropologists like W. Perry (1887–1949) and Elliot Smith (1871–1937) to argue that Egypt was the fount of human culture (see, for example,
, The Growth of Civilization, 1926
).
Anthropology has largely moved away from this debate, seeing most cultural traits in disparate areas as having developed independently, and criticizing the diffusionists for extracting cultural artefacts from their context. For example, although the Mayan temples and Egyptian pyramids share a similarity of form, they have completely different religious functions. Some of the original interests of the diffusionists have continued to be pursued by the American historical school of anthropology. See also GALTON'S PROBLEM.

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Dilthey, Wilhelm

(1833–1911) A German philosopher, one of the great precursors of the interpretative tradition in sociology, Dilthey's central preoccupation was with the creation of an adequate philosophical foundation for knowledge in the human or historical sciences. For him, the world of human history and culture consisted of ‘expressions’ of human life-experience (Erlebnis) which were to be apprehended and understood in ways quite different from and irreducible to the methods of the natural sciences. His early conviction that psychology could play the part of a foundational science for the human sciences was eventually displaced in favour of a hermeneutic approach (see INTERPRETATION) to institutions, religions, buildings, and so on, as so many ‘objectifications’ of life-experience. See also GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN AND NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN; IDEOGRAPHIC VERSUS NOMOTHETIC APPROACHES.

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diploma disease

A term developed by Ronald Dore as part of a critique of the excessive reliance on the selection process in formal educational institutions (and hence on educational qualifications) as evidence of ability, training, and merit for entry to particular occupations, careers, or internal labour-markets. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as credential inflation. As an unintended consequence of the belief that educational certificates are the key to obtaining the best-paid and most secure jobs, individuals may come to strive for constantly higher credentials in order to procure jobs which previously did not demand these, and for which their education does not in any case prepare them. Education thereby becomes merely a ritualistic process of accumulating qualifications. See also MERITOCRACY.

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direct (causal) effect

See CAUSAL MODELLING.

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direct correlation

See CORRELATION.

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direct democracy

See PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY.

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disability

Loss or lack of functioning, either physical or mental, such as blindness, paralysis, or mental subnormality—which, unlike illness, is usually permanent. Disabilities are usually stigmatizing. Moreover, disabled persons often need extra financial and personal support (which is too often inadequate to sustain their rights), and are a key group in social security and welfare programmes.

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disarmament

The process or policy of reducing levels of armaments, especially in the nuclear age, with the implication that possession of arms itself stimulates conflict. It is distinct from arms control—the negotiation of limits on armaments by participant states. Variants of the policy include unilateral and multilateral, partial and complete, nuclear and conventional disarmament.

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disasters, sociological aspects of

Natural disasters—volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves—disrupt all or part of societies, provoking refugees, collapse of production and distribution systems, and intensified competition for resources. Man-made disasters (notably war) involve social causes as well as these consequences—with the implication that they are avoidable. So-called disaster research examines the social and psychological impact of these occurrences among those involved.
Some sociologists (most notably Robert Merton) have argued that disaster-sites offer important opportunities for sociological research and the construction of social theory, since the resulting conditions of collective stress compress social processes into an uncommonly brief time-span; make usually private behaviour public and therefore more amenable to study; and generally highlight aspects of social systems and processes that are normally obscured by the routine of everyday life. Research has established that disasters have typical phases (such as the warning, threat, impact, inventory, rescue, remedy, and recovery phases); that certain types of collective behaviour tend to be associated with each phase; and that the precise form taken by each phase is affected by the characteristics of previous stages. (Thus, for example, the scale of the remedy operation is in part a function of the degree of identification with the victims.) A good comprehensive account of this iterature is G. W. Baker and D. W. Chapman's Man and Society in Disaster (1962), and a typical case-study is Kai Erikson's Everything in its Path (1976), which investigates the individual trauma (state of shock) and collective trauma (loss of communality) that followed a flood in previously tightly knit mountain communities in West Virginia.

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discourse, discourse analysis

The study of language, its structure, functions, and patterns in use. For Ferdinand de Saussure, language in use (or parole) could not serve as the object of study for linguistics, since as compared to langue (the underlying system of rules), it was individualized, contingent, and therefore intangible. Eventually, however, some of Saussure's successors in linguistics as well as in the wider structuralist tradition did turn their attention to parole, in the hope of discovering, behind it, additional structures to those of langue; structures which, in other words, would facilitate the completion of the analysis of meaning, and so allow semantics to take account of the connotative (secondary or implied) as well as the denotative (intended or explicitly signified) dimension of language.
In the event, the reversal of the privilege accorded by Saussure to the denotative over the connotative became one of the distinguishing characteristics of post-structuralism, and it is the sense given to the term discourse within this body of thought (rather than within linguistics) that has come to exercise a powerful influence in sociology. For this reason, then, discourse analysis in sociology has been more concerned to uncover the large patterning of thought that structures whole texts, rather than the finer patterning that structures sentences, and which concerns linguists.
As Roland Barthes pointed out in the conclusion to his Mythologies (1957), what one is confronted with in parole is a chain of ‘signifiers’ rather than one of ‘signs’. What is more, these signifiers often appear to mean more than is suggested by dictionary definitions. Barthes's suggestion was that, in order to discover what this might be, one has to be able to reconstruct the additional sets of underlying relations that determine the actual use of signifiers in particular contexts. Barthes himself termed these additional sets of relations ‘myths’—a term he and others later rejected because of its negative and economic-reductionist connotations.
It was Michel Foucault who eventually provided a conception of the additional structures that determine language use (and, indeed, although this is far less often acknowledged, of the sociological constraints upon them), which sits happily alongside the positive and non-reductionist conception of the ideological realm that commands wide support today. According to Foucault in his methodological text The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), these additional structures are made possible by historically produced, loosely structured combinations of concerns, concepts, themes, and types of statement, which he terms ‘discursive formations’. Although such formations are far more loosely structured than the discourses they make possible, they are sufficiently determining to allow the differentiation of connotative structures from one another, for example, of sociology from racism and from the law.
What gives these formations their structuring quality are the particular conditions which made and still make them possible. These ‘rules of formation of a discursive formation’ include, so far as the objects they allow to be addressed are concerned, each of the following: the social or institutional contexts wherein they emerge, most often as the loci or sources of concern of some kind; the social identities of those who have or gain authority to pronounce on such problems and their causes; and the ‘grids of specification’, the intellectual templates so to speak, which are used to separate off the particular objects of concern from the many others with which each is intertwined in reality.
In order to indicate that the discourses produced in such ways add meaning to langue, Foucault describes their joint product not as a sentence, but as ‘statement’. He then defines this as a series of signs which, first, assumes the particular subject position given by the relevant discursive formation; second, projects a certain dynamic on to the set of signifiers that constitute it; and, finally, possesses a definite materialism by virtue of being recognizably different from other statements. A discourse is thus ‘a group of statements insofar as they are made possible by the same discursive formation’.
Despite the formidable nature of the intellectual underpinning made necessary by the counter-intuitive nature of nonrepresentationalist conceptions of social phenomena, and (ironically) its own somewhat opaque language (some idea of which can be gained from the terminology introduced in this entry), discourse analysis is not a horrendously difficult exercise, as Jonathan Potter and Margaret Wetherell make clear in the excellent discussion of its methodology contained in their Discourse and Social Psychology (1987). For an example of an empirical study see
's Discourses of Counselling (1997
), a study of the conversations between HIV counsellors and their clients, which draws on the sociological traditions of interactionism, conversation analysis, and ethnomethodology. See also CONNOTATIVE VERSUS DENOTATIVE MEANING; SEMIOLOGY.

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discretionary income

See INCOME DISTRIBUTION.

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discriminant analysis

See MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS.

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discrimination

This concept—which in common usage means simply ‘treating unfairly’—occurs most commonly in sociology in the context of theories of ethnic and race relations. Early sociologists (such as William G. Sumner and Franklin H. Giddings) viewed discrimination as an expression of ethnocentricism—in other words a cultural phenomenon of ‘dislike of the unlike’. This interpretation is consistent with studies of stereotyping which show how relations between ethnic and racial groups are affected by the socially derived beliefs each holds about the other. However, most sociological analyses of discrimination concentrate on patterns of dominance and oppression, viewed as expressions of a struggle for power and privilege.
There is considerable disagreement about the structural sources of these inter-ethnic and inter-racial struggles. Marxists argue that capitalist societies create racialism to assist exploitation (see, for example,
, ‘Notes Towards an Economic Theory of Racism’, Race, 1973
). A derivative of this approach is the argument that discrimination is often the result of internal colonialism (as illustrated in
's article on ‘internal Colonialism and the Ghetto Revolt’, Social Problems, 1969
). Theories of segmented or split labour-markets (such as that proposed by
, ‘A Theory of Ethnic Antagonism: The Split Labour Market’, American Sociological Review, 1972
; see also LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION) offer another interpretation of discrimination, suggesting that capitalists benefit by forcing a distinction between cheap insecure labour and higher-paid secure labour, and that it is often convenient to draw from different ethnic or racial groups in constructing these categories. Finally, there are those who have argued that discrimination results from tendencies towards authoritarianism (however caused) among the poorer sections of any population (as, for example, in
's ‘Racial Tolerance as a Function of Group Position’, American Sociological Review, 1981)
.
In recent years, the concept of discrimination has also been applied widely in the study of relationships between the sexes, where parallel sorts of arguments have often been deployed. Thus, research suggests that women are more likely to be located in the secondary sector of split labour markets, and (according to some) may even form an industrial reserve army. Rather more specialist studies have also looked at discrimination against the elderly (ageism) and those with disabilities. See also PREJUDICE; SEXISM.

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discrimination, institutionalized

See INSTITUTIONALIZED DISCRIMINATION.

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discrimination, positive

See POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION.

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discursive formation

See DISCOURSE.

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disease

See HEALTH AND ILLNESS, SOCIOLOGY OF; MEDICINE, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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disequilibrium

See EQUILIBRIUM.

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disguised wage-workers

A workforce that is apparently independent or self-employed, but which is in fact contracted on a piecework or commission basis, by capitalist firms. Examples include outworkers, commission salespersons, and share-cropping peasants. Some Marxists argue that surplus value is expropriated from such workers despite the fact that they are not formally employed as wage-workers.

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disjointed incrementalism

See SATISFICING.

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disorganized capitalism

A term used by political sociologists such as John Urry, Scott Lash, and Claus Offe to describe the fragmentation of socio-economic groups in the economy, state, and civil society of advanced capitalism (see, for example,
, The End of Organised Capitalism, 1987
). The organized interaction of capital (into corporations) and labour (into trade unions) has allegedly broken down—principally as a result of economic restructuring and recession. It is argued that changes in the occupational structure, the demise of full employment, growing divisions between the employed and unemployed, the growth of the service industries and the increasing size of the informal sector have had profound implications for the political process in liberal democracies. Interrelated problems in the state include the failure of corporatist organizations to fulfil their objectives, difficulties of managing both political demands and distributional conflicts, and class dealignment. As a consequence, liberal-democratic assumptions about political participation and representation are undermined. Finally, economic and political disorganization has implications for the nature of civil society, notably by encouraging the growth of a post-modern culture, which is linked to fragmented specific interest groups other than social classes.

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dispersion, measures of

See VARIATION (STATISTICAL).

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displacement

A process whereby strong negative or positive emotions directed towards an object or person are, because they are for some reason blocked, redirected on to another object or person. See also DEFENCE MECHANISMS; PSYCHOANALYSIS.

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disposable income

See INCOME DISTRIBUTION.

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dissimilarity, index of

A statistic used to measure the overall difference between two percentage distributions. It is calculated by summing the differences between the numbers in each pair of corresponding values and dividing by 2. The result lies in the range 0 to 100; is always positive; and indicates the proportion of cases that would need to be reallocated in order to make the two distributions the same. Dissimilarity indices are often reported in studies of racial and occupational segregation. In studies of social mobility they can be used to summarize the difference between pairs of marginal distributions (across nations, across the sexes, comparing class of origin and class of destination within one country, and so on). For examples see
, Against the Odds? (1997
).

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dissimilarity, measures of

See ASSOCIATION COEFFICIENTS.

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dissonance

See COGNITIVE DISSONANCE.

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distribution (statistical or frequency)

A series of figures presenting all observed values (as raw numbers or proportion of cases) for a variable in a quantitative data-set—enabling a quick visual appreciation of the distribution of the data. The frequency distribution may be further illustrated by use of graphics such as a pie-chart or histogram.
A frequency or statistical distribution using observed data should not be confused with mathematical probability distributions, which are hypothetical distributions, the form of which is determined by algebraic formulae. The correspondence between an observed frequency distribution and various hypothetical mathematical distributions will often determine the type of statistical analysis performed on particular data.
Frequency distributions from a survey data-set are usually the first output from the clean and edited data-set, showing the response totals for each possible reply to each question in the questionnaire. Empirically observed distributions can be analysed using measures of dispersion and other statistical tools developed from the three main forms of probability distribution: binomial, Poisson, and normal (Gaussian).

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distributive justice

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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distributive power

See COLLECTIVE AND DISTRIBUTIVE POWER.

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divination

Divination is an act which tries to foretell the future or discover the origin of a situation—usually of a calamity or illness. It does this through the consultation of an oracle or deity by a religious specialist, the diviner.

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division of labour

One of the oldest concepts in the social sciences. It denotes any stable organization, co-ordinating individuals, or groups carrying out different, but integrated activities. Its first and most celebrated use was in classical political economy, the precursor to modern economics. According to Adam Smith, division of productive labour greatly increases the wealth-creating capacity of a society. Unrestrained by government or administrative rules, the free market encourages producers to specialize in activities where they have a natural advantage. By specializing they benefit from greater dexterity, more efficient use of materials and time, and from mechanization. Simultaneously, the hidden hand of competition penalizes insufficiently specialized (by implication inefficient) producers, and encourages the prudent (rational) exchange of goods and services.
However, there can be different principles of specialization. Economics emphasizes specialization according to productivity, or quantity produced in relation to the costs of production. Organization theory, however, has long recognized that in practice conflicting criteria govern the division even of productive tasks. Considerations of the mental health of the worker (psychological efficiency) or the management of industrial unrest (social efficiency) actually limit the over-detailed specialization of tasks. Outside of productive organization, specialization may well be according to some qualitative criterion, whereby scale and quantitative productivity are relatively discounted (for example in medicine or education). Socio-geographers have also explored the spatial division of activity and power between different regions and localities.
Co-ordination is itself a troublesome concept. The early political economists assumed that a single factor (market competition between prudent individuals) was enough to bring differentiated activities together so as to maximize public well-being. Yet they also recognized that a division of labour could take place on a number of levels, between different sectors of the economy, between occupations, or between individual tasks. To this, classical sociology added the notion that modern societies as a whole are characterized by an extensive social division of labour, involving the specialization and interdependence of whole institutions and social processes. The extension of market competition, which is by definition divisive, is inadequate to explain the co-ordination of modern societies.
Despite their many differences in outlook, the common theme of sociology's founders was that the division of labour is held together by power relations, ideology, and moral regulation. Karl Marx, for example, argued that market processes express an underlying division of class power that is a property of the whole socio-economic complex and encompasses individual motives and actions. Class seriously distorts the division of labour as it might occur naturally between isolated and roughly equal individual producers. Antagonistic relations of production originated in the first place from the division of labour, because of arbitrary inequalities of advantage in exchange, and the ensuing dependence of the weaker on the stronger. In turn, the subsequent form of the division of labour in any particular era reflects the struggle over the distribution of the surplus product, between the owners and non-owners of the means of production.
For Émile Durkheim, the principal interest of the division of labour is its moral consequences, that is, its effect on the underlying solidarity of the society, which should restrain individual egoism, ruthlessness, and licence. Although historians and anthropologists have subsequently questioned the idea that premodern societies lacked a division of labour, Durkheim argued that traditional societies are integrated by so-called mechanical solidarity, in which emphasis is placed on the values and cognitive symbols common to the clan or tribe. Individuals and institutions are thus relatively undifferentiated. Modern societies, he claimed, require the development of organic solidarity, in which beliefs and values emphasize individuality, encourage specialist talents in individuals, and the differentiation of activities in institutions. But although the economic division of labour may have initiated such a way of life, by itself the unregulated market loosens restraints on individual desires, undermines the establishment of social trust, and produces abnormal forms of the division of labour. This is the source of his celebrated concept of anomie, and of the forced division of labour associated with class and political conflict. Full organic solidarity will require appropriate education; legal restraint on inheritance and other unjust contracts; and intermediary institutions to integrate individuals into occupational and industrial life.
With the possible exceptions of Friedrich Engels and Thorstein Veblen, the division of labour by sex or gender received only scant attention from the so-called founding fathers of sociology. Yet patriarchy is arguably the oldest example of a forced or exploitative division of social activities. Most societies operate a broad division of labour between men and women, in terms of their social, religious, and political functions, and specifically in relation to the work they perform. In the context of paid employment this is called occupational segregation; it is typically far more pronounced than segregation on the basis of race or religion in the labour-market. A distinction is usually drawn between vertical and horizontal occupational segregation. Horizontal segregation arises when men and women do different types of work: in industrial societies jobs involving heavy manual labour are usually done by men, and women are concentrated in social welfare services. Vertical segregation arises when men have a near monopoly of the higher status occupations that offer greater authority and better rewards, while women are concentrated in the lower-status jobs. (It is never the other way round.) Even in societies where horizontal occupational segregation is eroded by policies emphasizing social equality, a high degree of vertical occupational segregation persists.
Recent feminist analysis has drawn on both power and moral types of explanation in order to explore invidious distinctions almost universally made between men's and women's social labour and social position, and the form the division of labour by gender has taken in industrial societies. Power inequality is evident in the way the system of industrial production for many years existed alongside, and arguably relied upon, the domestication of women and their unpaid household labour. Persistent inequalities of reward, and the segmentation of labour-markets into areas of men's and women's work, are only slowly diminishing. Moral control is at work in the ideologies of the family, myths of romantic love, the duties of motherhood, and supposedly natural differences between the sexes which the socialization of boys and girls still encourages. Thus, despite modern doctrines of natural rights, women have often (until recently at least) been excluded from the legal and political guarantees which Durkheim considered to be essential if the division of labour was to be accompanied by organic solidarity. See also DEPRIVATION; DISCRIMINATION; DOMESTIC DIVISION OF LABOUR; LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION; SOCIAL ORDER.

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division of labour, domestic

See DOMESTIC DIVISION OF LABOUR.

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division of labour, international

See INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF LABOUR.

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division of labour, sexual

See SEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOUR.

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divorce

The formal legal dissolution of a legally constituted marriage. The conditions necessary to terminate a marriage in divorce vary widely from culture to culture and over time. In certain societies the rights of men and women in this respect are still highly unequal, but there appears to be a move in Western societies towards an acceptance of the idea of irretrievable breakdown of a marriage as suitable grounds for divorce. One of the most significant trends in the wake of this liberalization of divorce laws has been the increasing propensity for divorce proceedings to be initiated by women. In addition, it should be noted that definitions of what constitute marriage and divorce also vary widely, and that in Western societies divorce is increasingly preceded by extended periods of separation between partners, which renders the legal procedure increasingly less relevant.
In the United States and Britain over the past two decades, concern over rising divorce-rates has frequently reached the status of a moral panic, and it is often stated that, given the continuation of current rates, over one in three marriages contracted will end in divorce. However, these calculations must be considered in the light of high rates of remarriage among divorcees, and an increasing propensity to establish common-law rather than formalized legal unions among those groups most at risk of divorce (for example the young). Of course, the statistics say nothing of the social difficulties and personal suffering faced by many people experiencing the effects of divorce, including the children of broken marriages. Another well-publicized statistic indicates that one in five children in Britain, by the age of 16, will have experienced the divorce or separation of their parents, given current rates. In Social Origins of Depression (1978), George Brown and Tirril Harris identified divorce of parents as one of the more stressful life-events likely to have been experienced by women suffering from neurotic depressive conditions. The deleterious effects on divorcing individuals of legal wrangling over children and housing is also well documented.
The basic statistics, and some of their social policy implications, are discussed in
, Family Obligations and Social Change (1989)
. See also FAMILY, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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divorce-rate

A measure designed to provide information on the comparative propensity to divorce in different populations. The crude divorce-rate for a particular year is calculated by dividing the number of divorces occurring within a population over the year, by the average or mid-year population for that year, expressed times 1,000. However, as in the case of the crude birth-rate, this measure takes no account of the age-structure of populations, and therefore of the population at risk. A more refined measure divides the number of divorces by the number of marriages in a given year (times 1,000).
The divorce-rate is sometimes used as an indicator of social stress in a society. However, in countries where separation characteristically precedes formal legal divorce, divorce-rates are increasingly less relevant as a measure of the actual experience of individuals in a population. See also MARRIAGE.

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documentary research

See LIFE-HISTORY; PERSONAL DOCUMENTS.

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domain assumptions

See AXIOM.

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domestic colonialism

See INTERNAL (OR DOMESTIC) COLONIALISM.

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domestic division of labour

The division of tasks, roles and duties, within the household. With the increased entry of married women into formal employment, sociologists began to look more closely at the processes that linked home and workplace, including the question of whether or not women's increased involvement in paid labour led to a renegotiation of the ‘traditional’ domestic roles and organization of domestic labour. A huge empirical and theoretical literature was then generated in a relatively short time.
Early studies cast doubts on the optimistic view (advanced, for example, by Michael Young and Peter Wilmott in The Symmetrical Family, 1973) that, especially among the middle classes, husband and wife were increasingly sharing in the complementary (hitherto largely segregated) tasks of earning a wage and running a household. Thus, Robert O. Blood and Donald M. Wolfe (Husbands and Wives, 1960) found that, among a large sample of families in Detroit, the sex segregation of domestic tasks was largely unchanged: men performed outdoor tasks requiring ‘mechanical aptitude’ while women did housework. Similar findings are reported in Ann Oakley's The Sociology of Housework (1974) and Stephen Edgell's Middle Class Couples (1980). Research by Rhona and Robert N. Rapoport on dual-career marriages drew attention to the role conflict confronting the women, a conflict which frequently resulted in them shouldering a ‘double burden’ of accepting primary responsibility for traditional domestic labour, but also holding down a paid job.
More recent studies have documented in great detail the extent to which the traditional allocation of domestic tasks to women remains largely unaltered. An excellent summary of the findings from this explosion of research is Lydia Morris's The Workings of the Household (1990). Reviewing the results to date, she concludes that the American and British studies produce parallel findings, the most important of which are as follows: women, including employed women, continue to bear the main burden of domestic work; men's (slightly) increased participation in domestic labour does not offset women's increased employment; women in part-time employment fare worst, possibly because of a life-cycle effect, which creates extra work associated with caring for young children; men tend nevertheless to be more involved with domestic tasks at this stage of the life-cycle than at other stages; there is relative stability in the level of housework time expended by men whether the wife works or not. Differences in emphasis and on points of detail across these studies are interesting, but insignificant when set against the central and often confirmed finding echoed by Sarah F. Berk, to the effect that ‘husband's employment activities and the individual characteristics that establish husbands in the occupational sphere are the most critical determinants of total household market time … [whilst] … few married men engage in significant amounts of household labour and child care’ (The Gender Factory, 1985). See also CONJUGAL ROLE; HOUSEHOLD ALLOCATIVE SYSTEM; SEX ROLES; SEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOUR.

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domestic labour

A concept developed within feminist theory to analyse the significance of the unpaid work performed by women in the home. Within Marxist feminism, domestic labour is sometimes referred to as ‘reproductive labour’, after Friedrich Engels's distinction between productive (value-creating) work and work aimed at re-creating the worker or the capacity to work. Most definitions of domestic labour equate it with housework but some include ‘emotional work’ such as tension management and caring. Considerable debate took place in the 1970s as to whether this labour should be considered productive or unproductive in the classic Marxian sense, and whether it should be seen to benefit men or capitalism, or indeed both. Despite disagreement as to how precisely to conceptualize such labour, and about its substantive significance, it is widely recognized as providing an important basis for inequality between the sexes, entailing some degree of exploitation of women by men, and constituting a significant if hidden subsidy to the economy. See also HOMEWORK; PATRIARCHY.

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domestic violence

Specifically male violence (physical or psychological) against women, the term was popularized by feminists in the 1970s, some of whom established refuges for battered women, and who argued that domestic violence is a reflection of gender inequalities in power and of women's oppression. More broadly, the term encompasses any violence within the family, although violence against children is usually described specifically as child abuse. Typically, the police have been reluctant to intervene in incidents involving domestic violence, preferring to regard the family as a private realm.

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dominant culture

Whereas traditional societies can be characterized by a high consistency of cultural traits and customs, modern societies are often a conglomeration of different, often competing, cultures and subcultures. In such a situation of diversity, a dominant culture is one that is able, through economic or political power, to impose its values, language, and ways of behaving on a subordinate culture or cultures. This may be achieved through legal or political suppression of other sets of values and patterns of behaviour, or by monopolizing the media of communication.

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dominant ideology thesis

Proponents of the thesis identify ideology, a term used (in this context) synonymously with concepts such as shared belief systems, ultimate values, and common culture, as the mainstay of social order in advanced capitalist societies. The argument assumes that, in class-stratified societies, the ruling class controls the production of ideas as well as material production. It propagates a set of coherent beliefs which dominate subordinate meaning systems and, as a consequence, shapes working-class consciousness in the interests of the status quo. The dominant class effectively diffuses a false consciousness among the masses who are thus rendered incapable of defending their own class interests. In other words, a dominant ideology functions to incorporate the working class into capitalist society, thereby maintaining social cohesion.
While Talcott Parsons and other normative functionalists have long been associated with cultural accounts of social integration, it has been noted that neo-Marxists such as Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, and Jürgen Habermas also relied on theories of a dominant ideology in their writings on capitalist societies. Moreover, with the possible exception of Gramsci, they give a functionalist account of the role of such an ideology in their explanations of social stability. Neo-Marxists, it has been argued, have come increasingly to depend on the concept of ideology to explain the lack of revolutionary working-class consciousness in advanced capitalist societies: the absence of revolutionary struggle is explained primarily by the ideological incorporation of the working class. Functionalist and Marxist explanations of how societies cohere have thus become rather similar over the course of the twentieth century—a somewhat ironic development since neither Durkheim nor Marx neglected the role of economic and political coercion in their own accounts of social stability and instability.
Numerous theoretical and empirical problems have been identified with the dominant ideology thesis. Rarely has a dominant ideology been clearly identified and its principal characteristics properly defined. The thesis suggests that an overarching ideology dictates the way in which the subordinate classes view society, yet its proponents have consistently failed to explain the processes by which the ruling class imposes such an ideology on the masses. Instead, they proffer a somewhat derisory picture of a falsely conscious working class, easily lulled into accepting an unequal distribution of material resources and political power. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that such a vague and imprecise thesis has been almost impossible to operationalize and substantiate empirically.
Many sociologists question the importance which has been attached to the role of a dominant ideology in recent accounts of social order. For example, Nicholas Abercrombie and his colleagues (The Dominant Ideology Thesis, 1980) maintain that dominant ideologies are rarely transmitted effectively throughout social structures, and that their principal effects are on superordinate rather than subordinate classes. In feudal and early capitalist societies such ideologies functioned to maintain the control of the dominant class over wealth—but at the level of the élites themselves. Both the feudal manor and capitalist family firm depended on the conservation and accumulation of property. Private possession of land and capital required a stable marriage system, with unambiguous rules about inheritance, legitimacy, and remarriage. The dominant ideology was a complex of legal, moral, and religious values which had the required effect of preserving wealth. Among feudal ruling classes, for example, Catholicism and the system of honour provided ideological guarantees that children would remain loyal to family holdings. By comparison the peasantry (and in early capitalism the factory workforce) were co-opted by the sheer exigencies of labouring to live—the ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’. Even in late capitalism the ‘iron cage’ of everyday life offers a better explanation of working-class quiescence than does ideological incorporation. Moral pluralism and a great diversity of political, social, and cultural deviance can readily be tolerated because the compliance of subordinate strata is secured by economic constraint, political coercion, and the bureaucratic mechanisms of school, family, workplace, and prison. The persistence of conflict in capitalist societies also suggests that a dominant ideology is not functionally all-embracing.
In short, the consequences of a dominant ideology for social order have almost certainly been overstated, and the sources of social cohesion are to be found also in economic compulsion and interdependence, legal and political coercion, the constraints of everyday routine, and (perhaps) fatalism. See also DOMINANT CULTURE; DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS.

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dominant value system

See DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS.

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domination

Rule by coercion or noncoercive compliance. Individuals or groups may exercise power over others—domination—either by brute force or because that power is accepted as legitimate by those who are subject to it. Max Weber identified three pure types of ‘legitimate domination’, which today would probably be thought of as types of authority, classified according to the grounds on which their claims to legitimacy were based. These types are: rational-legal (legitimacy claimed from a generally agreed set of rules and procedures); traditional (legitimacy based on continuity over time); and charismatic (legitimacy based on the extraordinary personal qualities of the leader). See also BUREAUCRACY; CHARISMA; LEGITIMACY.

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doubling-time

The time it takes for a population of a given size to double its size—which is nowadays measured in decades rather than centuries.

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dramaturgy, dramaturgical perspective

A theoretical position, often allied to symbolic interactionism, role theory, and the work of Erving Goffman, which uses the stage and the theatre as its key organizing metaphor. The idea that ‘all the world is a stage and all the people players’ is hardly new, having a long lineage which includes Greek theatre, Shakespeare, and Machiavelli. In modern sociology, the idea was most fully explored by Goffman, whose study of the micro order of interaction highlighted the ways in which people are engaged in impression management. But although he is the most central contributor to this field there have been others: either developing particular aspects of the theory, as for example the application of the concept of ‘script’ to sexuality, in the work of John Gagnon and William Simon (Sexual Conduct, 1973); applying it to particular research problems, such as the study of soccer hooligans reported in
, The Rules of Disorder, 1978
; or in political symbolism, as exemplified in
's ‘The Presidency and Impression Management’, Studies in Symbolic Interaction (1979)
.

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dream work

See PSYCHOANALYSIS.

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drinking and alcoholism

A depressant intoxicant, the drinking of alcohol is a popular practice in the leisure time of most cultures; it is also held in regard as a key part of many religious and secular ceremonies and rituals. However, some cultures forbid alcohol use for reasons of religion (for example Muslims), whilst some countries (such as Finland) have sought to impose tight regulations on its availability for social reasons. The best known failure of total prohibition is the United States in the 1920s. In the United Kingdom, licensing laws dating from the First World War regulate alcohol availability. Since the Second World War, spending on alcohol has risen in most advanced industrial societies, as part of the rising proportion of household finances available for leisure pursuits. Drinking in the home has increased, though drink remains associated with either sophistication and escape or masculine values and camaraderie. Public houses and bars retain a sense of being masculine territory. Alcohol is a disinhibitor and can impair judgement; in moderation, the former effect is socially valued, but the latter carries implications for health by increasing the possibility of accidents, unsafe sex, and such like. Drinking carries various symbolic meanings, for example ‘round-buying’ and other rituals involve reciprocity, inclusion, and exclusion. The perspectives of symbolic interactionists, anthropologists, and subcultural theory are particularly illuminating here.
Alcoholism was coined as a term to denote a special medically diagnosable condition of serious dependence upon or addiction to alcohol. Dating from the mid-nineteenth century, acceptance of the term is the cornerstone of the self-help philosophy of groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, founded in the United States in the 1930s. Alcoholism has been described in terms of a disease, a genetic disorder, a psychological problem, and as the product of the dysfunctional family. Undoubtedly, drink and its heavy consumption are related to the incidence of petty and serious crime (especially violence and motor accidents), health problems, and workplace injuries. However, the term alcoholism has been justifiably criticized in recent years: the World Health Organization and others would no longer accept its description as a disease, and a broader set of perspectives, including social and cultural theory, now generally inform work on alcohol dependence.

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drives, innate and acquired

Energizing forces directed towards a particular goal or objective. Drives may be viewed as innate (physiological) or acquired (learned). In the former case the term is sometimes used as an alternative to instinct—though drive suggests less pre-patterning of behaviour. It is arguably a better translation of Sigmund Freud's trieb than is instinct. See also NEED.

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drugs, drug addiction

These terms generally refer to illegal drugs, although the social significance of alcohol, tobacco, and tranquillizers should be noted (for example regarding health). The diverse origins of illegal drugs include natural plants and manufactured synthetics. Research shows that patterns of use, behaviour, and subjective experience will be influenced by particular properties of drugs but also by social factors, such as culture and expectations (see, for example. Institute for the Study of Drug Dependence, London,
Drug Abuse Briefing, 1991
). Most commonly used is cannabis, but greatest social concern is aroused by heroin, and more recently crack/cocaine, LSD, amphetamine, and Ecstasy. Prohibitions on drug use are relatively recent; use of opiates as remedies and intoxicants was common during the nineteenth century (see
, Opium and the People, 1987
).
The concept of addiction is unhelpful: it suggests a dependency with grave consequences for the individual and society. Not all drug-users develop dependency nor do such consequences inevitably follow; the term ‘problem drug-user’ is therefore increasingly favoured. Regarding crime, the dominant thesis is that regular drug use, coupled with the illegality of supply, forces users to commit crime to pay for drugs; however, whether drug use leads to involvement in crime, or involvement in delinquent life-styles introduces a person to drug use, is debated. HIV transmission via shared syringes has encouraged the aim of minimizing harm associated with use, challenging the traditional pursuit of abstinence. Calls for decriminalization are regularly made, but legislative change seems unlikely, at least in the short term.

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DSM-III

The abbreviation for the third, 1980 edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, further revised in 1985 (DSM-IIIR). The original DSM appeared in 1952, with a second edition in 1968. The DSM-III introduced specific criteria for each disorder in order to facilitate diagnostic precision.

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Du Bois, W. E. B.

(1868–1963) A Black American intellectual and activist, also in part a sociologist in everything but official recognition, whose work (though largely ignored by modern sociologists) prefigures some of the classic themes of early American sociology.
Du Bois studied at the Universities of Harvard and Berlin
( was an admirer), contributed to the American Journal of Sociology
, chaired the Department of Sociology at Atlanta University, and published the first systematic sociological studies of African American communities. His The Philadelphia Negro is a comprehensive report on what nowadays would be called the Black urban underclass. It pre-dates W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant by more than twenty years and could serve equally well as the locus classicus of American urban ethnography. In a famous article published in Atlantic Monthly in 1897 (and reprinted in his Souls of Black Folk, 1899/1903), Du Bois formulated a theory of dual consciousness which shows the influence of William James's ideas about the self (James taught Du Bois at Harvard), noting that ‘it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One feels this twoness—an American, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength keeps it from being torn asunder.’
Du Bois was a co-founder of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) and a major figure in the renaissance of Harlem as a cultural centre in the 1920s. He was, however, much criticized for his support for African American participation in the First World War. His contribution to the development of sociology is described in the first part of the biography by
, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (1993)
.

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dual-career marriage

Marriages in which both partners pursue occupational careers. Such marriages are still relatively rare, and findings about dual-career marriages may not generalize to dual-earner families (where both partners are formally employed but only one—usually the male—pursues a career), which are now the norm. However, empirical studies suggest that both career women and those with less rewarding jobs appear to work a double shift, combining home and work responsibilities. See also DOMESTIC DIVISION OF LABOUR.

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dual consciousness

A term used to describe the world-view of people who simultaneously hold two apparently inconsistent sets of beliefs. This is usually ascribed to the fact that people receive a set of beliefs through general socialization into a dominant culture but have another set of beliefs based on their own practical experiences of life. It is often said that the working class is most prone to dual consciousness because the everyday experience of workingclass life runs counter to many received beliefs about society. Thus, for example, it is possible for workers to agree that strikes are usually caused by malcontents, extremists, and agitators (received beliefs), but to relate their own experiences of strikes to genuine grievances (practical experience). In Frank Parkin's Class Inequality and Political Order (1972) the terms ‘dominant value system’ and ‘subordinate value system’ serve to make this same distinction. The former refers to the fact that ‘the social and political definitions of those in dominant positions tend to become objectified and enshrined in the macro institutional orders, so providing the moral framework of the entire social system’. The generating milieu of the latter is the local working-class community. Parkin describes the subordinate value system as ‘essentially accommodative; that is to say its representation of the class structure and inequality emphasizes various modes of adaptation, rather than full endorsement of, or opposition to, the status quo’. See also DOMINANT IDEOLOGY THESIS.

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dual-earner families, dual-earner marriages

See DUAL-CAREER MARRIAGES.

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dual economy

See ECONOMIC DUALISM; INTERNAL COLONIALISM; LABOUR-MARKET; LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION.

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dual labour-market

See LABOUR-MARKET; LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION.

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dualism

Any theory that identifies an irreducible distinction between two classes of thing. Those of most interest to sociologists are ethical dualism, which states an irreducible difference between statements of fact and value-judgements; explanatory dualism, which holds that while natural events have causes, human actions can only be explained by reference to motives or reasons; the doctrine that mind and matter exist as independent entities; and the idea of the religious and the secular being parallel and independent spheres of life, governed by different laws. See also DESCARTES, RENÉ.

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dualism, economic

See ECONOMIC DUALISM.

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duopoly

See OLIGOPOLY.

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dummy variables

In quantitative data analysis, researchers are sometimes interested in the implications of non-interval level variables for a dependent variable, as for example in the case of the relationship between sex and income. Although regression analyses normally require data scaled at the interval-level, it is possible to include non-interval variables in a multiple regression by creating appropriate so-called dummy variables. In the example just cited, this would involve coding men as 1 and women as 0; or, where the independent variable comprises more than two (let us say n) categories, creating a dummy variable comprising n - 1 dummy variables. Thus, if the independent variable ‘social class’ contains the four categories ‘upper’, ‘middle’, ‘working’, and ‘none’, then in order to include these in a multiple regression analysis three dummy variables would have to be created: v1 ‘upper’ (coded 1) or ‘not upper’ (coded 0); v2 ‘middle’ (coded 1) or ‘not middle’ (coded 0); v3 ‘working’ (coded 1) or ‘not working’ (coded 0). The fourth category is represented by these three dummy variables since it can be described by the combination 000. Each category in the social class variable now has a unique combination of zeros or ones by means of which its presence or absence can be indicated. In a regression analysis involving dummy variables the resulting regression coefficients are then treated as if they were based on variables measured at the interval level. See also MEASUREMENT.

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Durkheim, Émile

(1858–1917) The most famous French sociologist, long acknowledged as the founding figure of functionalism, but more recently hailed by leading authorities on structuralism, sociolinguistics (see CONVERSATION ANALYSIS), and post-modernism, all of whom have found in Durkheim's writings ideas and sentiments which are easy to incorporate.
Born of Jewish parents (his father was a rabbi), Durkheim was educated at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied philosophy. After teaching this subject in provincial lycées for five years he obtained a post as a lecturer in social science and education at the University of Bordeaux in 1887. Ten years later he helped found L'Année sociologique, soon to become the most prestigious sociological journal in France, and a focus for an influential Durkheimian school of thought. Durkheim published regularly in the journal until his relatively early death at the age of 59 from a stroke.
Despite a brilliant career as a teacher and researcher, and the publication of a series of controversial monographs which sketched out the methods and subject-matter of the new science of sociology, it was a full fifteen years before Durkheim was eventually called to a Chair in Paris. Some have suggested that, in this, he was a victim of the anti-semitism of French intellectual life. However, it is also true that his single-minded championing of sociology as the most important social science gained him many enemies in the educational establishment, and his career is littered with bitter controversies involving those who rejected his vision of sociology.
Most of his major monographs were translated into English after his death and are, remarkably, still in print even in translation. The impelling logic of The Division of Labour in Society (1893), his controversial doctoral thesis defended after his stint in lycée teaching, was swiftly followed by The Rules of Sociological Method (1895). Durkheim here stressed that sociology as a science would be characterized by observation (rather than abstract theory), the study of social (rather than psychological) facts, and provide both functional and causal explanations. His principles were applied in the complex and multi-dimensional argument of Suicide (1897), in which he seeks to demonstrate that this apparently most personal of acts is ultimately determined by society, and that the suicide-rate is therefore a ‘social fact’. He deploys an aetiological explanation in which the effects (suicides) are evidence of the underlying social currents. His lifelong interest in morality and moral authority (evident, for example, in the depiction of mechanical and organic solidarity in his doctoral thesis) culminated almost inevitably in writings on religion. The conclusion that ‘collective’ individuals worship society, stated most forcefully in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), is an apt epitaph for his work. Other major texts on socialism, morality, and education were published posthumously.
Throughout these publications one is struck by the breadth of vision displayed by Durkheim in his remorseless search for the social and moral bases of the emerging industrial society. He continues to be reappraised by commentators from both the left and right of the political spectrum. His label as a conservative thinker has long ago been discarded—rightly so, in the light of his contributions to the theory of equality of opportunity, evident for example in his writings on education.
In a definitive biography, Steven Lukes (Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work, 1973) conveniently identifies the key concepts, dichotomies, and arguments which identify the Durkheimian heritage. Collective conscience, collective representations, and social facts were concepts which argued for the distinctiveness of sociology against other social sciences (notably psychology). These concepts were suited to the object of sociological explanation—namely, collective phenomena not reducible to the individual actor or psyche. Furthermore, the central problem for sociology was to explicate the relationship between the individual and society, recognizing that these analytical levels were distinct. The association created by individuals has its own characteristics, its own ‘facticity’, which can only be explained by social facts located at that level. His strong opposition to methodological individualism pushed him in the direction of a holism which occasionally appeared to reify society itself (a charge also levelled against subsequent functionalists who looked at society in a similarly holistic way). Other dichotomies flowed from this key coupling of individual and society. For example, in the distinction between the sacred and the profane, the former was created by the collectivity while the latter expressed the private and individual life. The former was moral whereas the latter was sensual.
Durkheim saw his task as the creation of a science of sociology, with its own subject-matter, methodology, and explanatory models. In this he continued the work of Comte and Saint-Simon. Likewise, his concern for what might be termed social engineering derived from his belief that sociology could and should intervene scientifically, when social development did not produce order sui generis. He read and absorbed the work of his near contemporaries, including Karl Marx, and this perhaps explains why his thought has variously been depicted as idealist, realist, positivist and evolutionist. In truth his intellectual and personal concerns refracted these views into a mélange of concepts peculiarly his own. Lukes's biography gives an appreciative assessment. By comparison, Raymond Aron systematically treats all of Durkheim's major works to a thoughtful but fairly savage criticism, in his Main Currents in Sociological Thought, ii (1967). See also ANOMIE; DIVISION OF LABOUR; DYNAMIC DENSITY; FATALISM; INFLATION; LAW, SOCIOLOGY OF; MORAL COMMUNITY; ORGANIC (OR BIOLOGICAL) ANALOGY; RELIGION, SOCIOLOGY OF; RITUAL; SOCIAL ORDER; SOCIAL SOLIDARITY; SUICIDE; TAXONOMY.

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dyad

The dyad, a group of two members, is the smallest possible social group: if one person opts out the group ceases to exist. Two people can form an intimacy not found in larger groups, but the dyad also involves other basic elements of social exchange, such as rivalry, reciprocity, and power. See also TRIAD.

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dynamic density

In Émile Durkheim's writings on the emergence of organic solidarity from mechanical solidarity, he identified certain conditions for the transition to the former: volume (or population growth), the concentration of people, and finally the increase in the intensity of communication which would emerge out of these two factors. Increased intensity of communication served to break down the segmented structures of society, overcome the opaque nature of social milieux, and in due course develop social differentiation. Durkheim places enormous store on dynamic density—observability, contiguity, and constant social contact—as the pre-condition for and guarantor of social and moral consensus. Moral or dynamic density, by fostering interaction, not only creates the division of labour, but is the condition for its continued existence. Employer, employee, state, and society must all be in proximate contact, so as to be aware of each other's interdependence, and also to create the moral regulation that acts as the social glue for social integration.

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dysfunction, dysfunctional

Terms used to deal with tensions in the social system. Something is dysfunctional if it inhibits or disrupts the working of the system as a whole or another part of the system; for example, if teenage anomie disrupts the labour-market or education system, then it may be said to be dysfunctional for the society. See also FUNCTION.

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E

ecological competition

A term derived from the biological sciences to denote the process of interaction between social groups, each seeking to gain access to a limited supply of the necessities of life, such as living space. See also CONCENTRIC ZONE THEORY; ECOLOGY; HUMAN ECOLOGY; URBAN ECOLOGY.

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ecological fallacy

The spurious inference of individual characteristics from group-level characteristics. The classic presentation is by
in ‘Ecological Correlations and the Behaviour of Individuals’ (American Sociological Review, 1950)
, which demonstrates the inconsistencies between correlations at differing levels of aggregation. For example, a strong association between unemployment rates and crime-rates may be observed in data for police districts, but the statistical association will be much weaker and may not occur at all in data for particular component smaller neighbourhoods, or in survey microdata. More generally, a strong association between two factors in aggregate data cannot be taken as evidence of a causal link at the individual level. One of the most famous examples of ecological reasoning is Émile Durkheim's Suicide (see
, ‘Durkheim's Suicide:Further Thoughts on a Methodological Classic’, in , Émile Durkheim, 1965)
.

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ecological invasion

A term referring to the process by which social groups or activities which are better adapted to a given environment than are its existing inhabitants or activities enter and eventually dominate it. See also CONCENTRIC ZONE THEORY; ECOLOGY; HUMAN ECOLOGY; URBAN ECOLOGY.

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ecological succession

A term used in urban ecology, denoting the replacement of one dominant group or activity by another, following an invasion of the territory of the latter by the former. See also CONCENTRIC ZONE THEORY; ECOLOGY; HUMAN ECOLOGY.

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ecology

Ecology is the scientific study of the interactions that determine the territorial distribution and abundance of organisms. The term was first used scientifically in 1869 by the German biologist Haekel in a study of plant ecology. Darwin's theory of the evolution of species inspired the development of ecology. According to Darwin, evolution is driven by reproduction and inheritance on the one hand, and by natural selection on the other. Natural selection eliminates species least able to survive the struggle for existence because they fail to adapt to changing environments. An important aspect of the latter—alongside factors such as climate and topography—is the presence of other species competing for limited territory or other resources. However, unfettered competition is normally limited, as species are also interdependent, related to each other symbiotically in a ‘web of life’, the result of successful adaptation to each other and to the natural environment (although certain species are dominant). This equilibrium is temporarily upset when newly dominant species emerge. The concepts of invasion, domination, and succession have been used to analyse the stages of this process.
Ecological perspectives have had considerable influence well beyond the biological sciences, for example in medical epidemiology, the psychology of architecture and design, and human geography. Late-twentieth-century concern about the impact of human activities on the environment has resulted in new social and political ecology movements and the growing salience of so-called green issues generally—all of these being topics for sociological research. However, the main influence of ecological concepts on sociological theory occurred between the 1920s and the 1940s in the United States, initially through the development of urban ecology by Chicago sociologists. The ecological perspective was subsequently applied more widely and the terms human or social ecology have often been used in this context. Some human ecologists were critical of the emphasis placed by the early Chicago sociologists on competition between human groups for territorial advantage (based on a rather unidimensional view of Darwinian natural selection) and suggested a broader remit for study, namely, the form and development of different types of human community (not necessarily spatially bounded), with particular reference to the ways in which they adapt to their environments through co-operative and competitive social relationships.
The relationship between ecological theories and sociology has been limited, and is stronger in North America than in Europe, still influencing, for example, some American urban and rural sociology. Indeed, it has been claimed that the ecological perspective transcends any individual social science, as it deals with processes which underlie all these disciplines. Recent sociological theory is scarcely influenced by its particular use of the biological analogy, although the concern with adaption, interdependence, and equilibrium also characterizes structural-functional sociology.See also DARWINISM; ECOLOGICAL COMPETITION; ECOLOGICAL INVASION; ECOLOGICAL SUCCESSION; INVASION-SUCCESSION MODEL; NATURAL AREA.

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ecology, human

See HUMAN ECOLOGY.

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ecology, urban

See URBAN ECOLOGY.

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econometrics

Economic analysis using a combination of empirical data, techniques of statistical estimation, and (usually) some form of multivariate analysis, such as regression analysis, applied to economic theory. Econometric models of the economy are used in forecasting and policy analysis.

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economic activity

See EMPLOYMENT.

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economic determinism

A philosophical and theoretical position most commonly associated with the Marxist assertion that social phenomena have their roots in the relations of production.
According to Karl Marx the relations of production constitute the base upon which a legal and political superstructure rests. They also structure social relations between classes, producing corresponding forms of social consciousness. Thus, as Marx puts it, ‘the mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general’ (
‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859
). This and similar propositions have been the source of much debate about the nature and degree of economic determinism. At one extreme, it might be argued that all social, political and cultural life can be ‘read off’ from the relations of production, and that the social consciousness of the individual is determined by his or her position in the economic structure. Such a view challenges the notion of free will and individual autonomy, and has been criticized accordingly. Alternatively, the relations of production could be seen merely as a constraining factor in the development of the superstructure, defining no more than the broad parameters to which the superstructure and individual consciousness will loosely correspond.
These points were elaborated by Friedrich Engels after Marx's death, such that economic relations were denied any automatic determining effect, but seen rather as exerting a ‘decisive influence’. Engels's phraseology has been the focus of much debate within Marxism and the source of much criticism by non-Marxists. At the heart of the criticism is the desire to assert the power of ideas and the potential of autonomous individuals to effect social change. See also ALTHUSSER, LOUIS.

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economic development

See ECONOMIC GROWTH.

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economic dualism

A way of conceptualizing the existence of two (sometimes more) separate but symbiotic sets of economic processes or markets within the same political or national social framework. In Third World societies, for example, a dual economy is formed by the coexistence of peasant subsistence agriculture and cash production of basic commodities or industrial goods for the international market. An analogous division exists in highly industrialized economies between the corporate core and peripheral firms and labour-markets. See also LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION.

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economic growth

The growth of national income, or the output of goods and services per head of population, with output conventionally measured by the Gross National Product (GNP). The alternative term economic development is often used in relation to Third World societies. Economic growth does not necessarily lead to growth in consumption and improved distribution of wealth and public welfare; it depends on how the increased output is used, and by whom.
Economists have devoted much effort to producing theories of economic growth which might guide policy-making in developing countries and in industrial societies. Theories place varying degrees of emphasis on capital investment, the economic infrastructure, manpower planning and education, and the relative roles of government and the private sector. See also ENTREPRENEUR; SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT.

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economic life, sociology of

The fundamental problem in economics is to explain how the limited productive resources and effort of a society are allocated among the wide range of alternative uses to which they might be put. Conventional economic theory seeks to address this issue by adopting a position of methodological individualism. It also makes a number of abstract assumptions for purposes of analysis. First, relationships of competition exist between the producers of a commodity, between its consumers, and between producers and consumers collectively, the whole constituting a set of market relationships. Second, both competition and economic co-operation are outcomes of the rational pursuit of economic advantage by individuals and groups. This is the paradigmatic example of a rational choice exchange theory. Third, the propositions of the theory do not simply describe the institutions and motivations of so-called market societies alone; they formalize what is an inevitable and natural set of determining influences in any society, as soon as the issue of scarce resources (means) and competing possible uses (ends) arises.
The sociology of economic life can also be said to be concerned with resource allocation; and, like economics, it can trace its origins to classical political economy. However, early sociology was very often a critique of the tendencies towards individualism and abstraction within political economy, on which economics subsequently built. For example, Karl Marx was among the first to claim that resource allocation through unregulated market competition is fundamentally anarchic rather than orderly, and reproduces already existing inequalities of class power and privilege. In modern times, a similar view has been taken of market discrimination in relation to race and gender. Such arguments mean that the investigator is obliged to approach society with a degree of methodological holism which is unacceptable to many economists.
Another influential controversy is the link between economics and various versions of liberal political theory in which state regulation of economic and social policy is rejected as an infringement of individual liberty. It is claimed that welfare is more likely to be maximized by encouraging free enterprise and unrestricted market competition. This view is associated with neo-classical economics which argues that the fundamental momentum of a competitive economy is towards optimum distribution of resources and equalization of the incomes of factors of production. It is a serious mistake, however, to assume that intellectual criticism of this orthodoxy in economic theory amounts in itself either to an attack on liberal political values or (a criticism often levelled at sociological thought) inevitably implies an underlying socialistic bias. On the contrary, many of the sociological critics of competitive market theories have themselves subscribed to the broader values of liberalism and individualism, yet at the same time have argued either that neoclassical theory is intellectually inadequate or that political reliance on supposed laws of the marketplace will have unintended consequences which place liberal values in jeopardy. Examples include Max Weber on bureaucracy and Émile Durkheim on anomie. Moreover, a similar controversy has existed within modern economics itself, especially since the revolution in economic theory initiated by John Maynard Keynes and his followers. Keynesian economics claimed that the equilibrium of a whole economy may occur at a point where aggregate resources are less than optimally utilized—even though individual markets are in equilibrium.
Sociology has shared with economic history (and with the so-called institutional heresy within economics itself) an interest in the origin and variability of actual markets and other economic institutions. Markets and banking, for example, both presuppose a relatively stable currency, codified and effective law, and normative standards of conduct. A degree of moral order, together with interpersonal trust, is a necessary pre-condition for sound money, dependable contracts, and economic transactions in general. The need to account for the non-contractual preconditions of contractual exchanges was acknowledged by early political economists, but with the increasing formalization and abstraction of market theory was overlooked, and only taken up later by sociologists from Durkheim onwards. Market institutions also presuppose the presence in individuals and groups of the appropriate economic motivations. But, far from being a universal human motive, the calculative and sustained pursuit of economic advantage and profit, so essential to the idea of the competitive economy, may have flourished only under the rather unusual, possibly unique, religious and moral conditions found at the onset of the modern age. Sociologists tend therefore to be highly critical of the suggestion that the supposed laws of the market are universally valid, rather than (at best) merely descriptive of a particular historical situation and type of society, namely modern capitalism and industrialization.
Because the causal factors advanced by conventional economics may themselves stand in need of causal explanation, some sociologists have gone so far as to claim that economic theory cannot stand alone, or even that a separate discipline of economics is unnecessary. Such sociological imperialism risks self-contradiction. On one hand, sociologists commonly compare societies in terms of their economic institutions; on the other, the meaning and nature of economic activities is held to be wholly relative to individual cases. The (mainly Marxist) attempt to solve this problem by equating economic activity with productive activity overlooks the fact that, in all societies, many undoubtedly productive activities, notably domestic and reproductive tasks performed by women, are considered to be of little economic value. Economists can thus argue that their treatment of scarcity and resource allocation as a universal and self-contained societal problem is indeed valid.
Sociologists are arguably better placed to address the interconnections between the economy, the political system, social structures, ideological systems, and culture. Examples might include the linkages between the international division of labour, inter-state relations, and multinational firms; the relationship between patriarchy, as a set of social institutions, and the economy; or the classic example of the thesis about a direct link between the protestant ethic and the rise of capitalism in Western Europe. Sociologists have contributed a substantial body of theoretical and empirical work on particular features of the economy and labour-market, particularly at the micro-level, including the study of power relations in the labour-market as a whole and in the workplace; industrial conflict and its resolution; explaining the development and impact of pressure groups, trade unions, and other associations, and analysis of their role in industrial relations; studies of social movements such as demands for desegregation and equality of opportunity in education, training, and the workforce; studies of management, entrepreneurs, firms, and corporate behaviour; analysis of social and technical innovation processes and the diffusion of knowledge and technical innovations; studies of work organization and social processes in the workplace, and their effects on productivity or job satisfaction, including theses about de-skilling and socio-technical systems; research on social and economic relationships within households, and the implications of household work strategies and family financial management systems on workforce participation and attitudes to pay; issues of preferences and tastes, work orientations, and value systems which affect labour-market behaviour and consumer behaviour; the wider objectives of management that make satisficing strategies more common than profit-maximizing ones; and the nature of work outside the market economy, including domestic work and work in the informal economy. Finally, sociologists' strengths in empirical research mean they are usually better placed than economists to collect data and conduct studies to test theories and arguments about economic activity developed by economists, particularly in relation to decision-making processes, both implicit and explicit.
An early, but still useful, attempt to map the contours of this major area of sociology is Neil Smelser's The Sociology of Economic Life (2nd edn., 1976). For a more recent selection of representative articles see
, The Sociology of Economic Life (1992)
.

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economic man

A term used in classical economic theory (see LAISSEZ-FAIRE ECONOMICS), denoting the individual's rational deployment of labour or resources in the marketplace, in systematic pursuit of his or her own self-interest. The term is intended to apply to both men and women but could be argued to reflect an implicit assumption of the primacy of male activity in the market. See also EXCHANGE THEORY; POLITICAL ECONOMY.

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economic traditionalism

See BACKWARD-SLOPING SUPPLY CURVE FOR LABOUR.

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economics

See ECONOMIC GROWTH; ECONOMIC LIFE, SOCIOLOGY OF; EMPLOYMENT; EXCHANGE THEORY; GIFT RELATIONSHIP; HUMAN CAPITAL THEORY; INFLATION; INFORMAL ECONOMY; KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS; LABOUR-MARKET; LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION; LAISSEZ-FAIRE ECONOMICS; MALTHUS, THOMAS; MILL, JOHN STUART; MONETARISM; NEO-CLASSICAL ECONOMICS; PARETO PRINCIPLE; POLITICAL ECONOMY; SMITH, ADAM; SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT; UTILITARIANISM; UTILITY.

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economism

A Marxist term, originally used to denote a trade-union-based political strategy, but nowadays more commonly used to characterize an economically reductionist argument. See also ECONOMIC DETERMINISM; MODE OF PRODUCTION; REDUCTIONISM.

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economy, black

See BLACK ECONOMY.

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economy, command

See COMMAND ECONOMY.

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economy, informal

See INFORMAL ECONOMY.

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economy, mixed

See MIXED ECONOMY.

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economy, positional

See POSITIONAL ECONOMY.

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economy, subsistence

See SUBSISTENCE ECONOMY.

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ecopopulism

The term sometimes applied to the contemporary environmental justice movement, or development during the 1980s (notably in the United States) of thousands of community groups who developed a national co-ordinating infrastructure, in order to protest against inappropriate dumping of hazardous wastes, use of pesticides, and other environmentally damaging toxic substances. Opponents sometimes use the alternative epithet BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything).

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editing, edit checks

See CODING.

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educability

A term sometimes used in the sociology of education in an attempt to avoid begging the vexed nature versus nurture controversy surrounding intelligence. It is intended simply to refer to observed variations, among school pupils, in their capacity to accomplish teacher-imposed intellectual tasks.

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education, sociology of

Education is a philosophical as well as a sociological concept, denoting ideologies, curricula, and pedagogical techniques of the inculcation and management of knowledge and the social reproduction of personalities and cultures. In practice, the sociology of education is mostly concerned with schooling, and especially the mass schooling systems of modern industrial societies, including the expansion of higher, further, adult, and continuing education. School organization and pedagogy has drawn upon at least four competing educational philosophies: élitist or Platonic; open or encyclopaedic; vocational; and civic (as exemplified by American pragmatist education for democracy and the polytechnic school systems of Marxist state socialism). Sociologists argue that the power structure and needs of individual societies determine which of these is emphasized.
Systematic sociology of education can be traced to Émile Durkheim's pioneering studies of moral education as a basis for organic solidarity and Max Weber's analysis of the Chinese literati as an apparatus of political control. But the first major expansion of the subject after the Second World War was associated with technological functionalism in America, egalitarian reform of opportunity in Europe, and human-capital theory in economics. These all asserted a causal linkage between amounts of schooling and the economic advancement of both individuals and societies. They also implied that, with industrialization, the need for technologically educated labour progressively undermines class and other ascriptive systems of stratification, and that educational credentialism promotes social mobility. However, statistical and field research in numerous societies uncovered a persistent link between social class origins and achievement, and suggested that only limited social mobility occurred through schooling. As a result, intense controversy developed over the determinants of the educability of groups disadvantaged by class and ethnic background. Sociological studies pointed to a wide range of material, cultural, and cognitive factors likely to depress intellectual development. Other work showed how patterns of schooling reflected, rather than challenged, class stratification and racial and sexual discrimination.
That school learning is an unmitigated good was even more profoundly challenged with the general collapse of functionalism from the late 1960s onwards. Neo-Marxists argued that school education simply produced a docile labour-force essential to late-capitalist class relations. Advocates of deschooling argued that, for the world's poor, schools merely created institutional dependence on professional educators. In particular, the deschoolers drew on a growing research literature revealing numerous counter-productive effects of human-capital-inspired development programmes for the Third World. An analogous challenge, combining research and ideology, was mounted against human-capital compensatory programmes for the urban poor of the industrialized West. Phenomenological and interactionist (see SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM) perspectives emphasized several important dimensions of knowledge management through schooling: in school classroom interaction; by the professionalizing of the teaching process; through the bureaucratization of school organization; and, at the cultural level, where the links between the sociology of education and the sociology of knowledge are more immediately visible.
The extent to which education can in principle operate as a means of social engineering—for example in pursuit of greater equality in society—is contested in the work of the American sociologist Christopher Jencks. This investigates the determinants of economic success; that is, the relative effects of family background, cognitive skills, length and type of schooling, race, and personality on subsequent occupational status and earnings. In two acclaimed though controversial (co-authored) texts, Jencks and his colleagues argued that people from similar family backgrounds and with similar test scores were scattered across almost as wide a range of occupational destinations and incomes as those with disparate origins and social characteristics, thus suggesting that attempts to equalize outcomes through education were likely to prove ineffective. Direct intervention in the market processes distributing incomes was necessary for successful social engineering (see
Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effects of Family and Schooling in America, 1972, and Who Gets Ahead? Determinants of Economic Success in America, 1979)
.
This is a consistently popular area of the discipline, from the point of view of both research and teaching, so the literature is correspondingly large. Good general texts include
, A Sociology of Educating (2nd edn., 1986)
and
, Social Analysis of Education: After the New Sociology (1987)
. For a highly original case-study see
, Were They Pushed or Did They Jump? Individual Decision Mechanisms in Education (1987
). See also CLASSROOM INTERACTION; COLEMAN REPORT; COMPENSATORY EDUCATION; CONTEST AND SPONSORED MOBILITY; CULTURAL CAPITAL; CURRICULUM; DEWEY, JOHN; DIPLOMA DISEASE; HIDDEN CURRICULUM; PEDAGOGY; SCHOOL CLASS; SOCIALISM; TRACKING.

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effect statistical

See CAUSAL MODELLING.

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efficiency

There are conflicting notions of efficiency in everyday work-life. Technical efficiency is relatively straightforward, and describes the relation of various energy inputs into equipment, in relation to output (though it may be difficult or meaningless to measure the latter). But there is no necessary reason why a technical optimum should coincide with maximum economic efficiency. Perfectly functioning equipment may well be closed down for financial reasons. The efficient use of human beings often crosscuts both, whether one is dealing with optimum use of physiological effort; psychological well-being (such as avoidance of stress) which may be vital to long-run as opposed to short-run task performance; or organizational and social efficiency, such as avoiding waste of human capital through unemployment or structural dislocation. Quite apart from these conflicting meanings, the notion of efficiency also raises questions of underlying and perhaps irreconcilable values about what ultimately contributes to individual and social welfare.

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effort bargaining

A term first used by
(‘The Effort Bargain’, Industrial and Labour Relations Review, 1957)
, popularized by W. Baldamus (Efficiency and Effort, 1961), in relation to the competing rationalities behind employment which emerged from studies of incentive payment systems. The latter assume that workers seek to maximize money income and thus share in the managerial definition of rational action. Field studies in industrial sociology and psychology revealed that workers typically restrict output (that is, produce less than the technically possible level for maximum short-run earnings), because they do not expect any dramatic change in their average earnings level. Synthesizing the results of such work, Baldamus argued that because workers do not expect long-run fluctuations in their overall income, it is rational for them to minimize the wage disparity between the amount of effort required by a particular task and the average rate of pay. Different social classes in fact will entertain conflicting values regarding the notion of a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. Incentive schemes may even encourage workers to conceal the level of actual effort from work-study engineers and management. Today it is recognized that effort bargaining has important implications for the conduct of labour relations, since wage-effort comparisons between groups was endemic to collective bargaining itself, as well as attempts by modern governments to run incomes policies.

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egalitarianism

A doctrine which sees equality of condition, outcome, reward, and privilege as a desirable goal of social organization. The bases for such beliefs have been religious and secular, and have ranged from crude slogans such as ‘we all have the same stomachs, and only one of those’, to more sophisticated Marxian statements about societies moving from the organizing principle of ‘from each according to their abilities to each according to their work’ (socialism) to ‘from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs’ (communism). But even this form of equality demands unequal treatment. Positive discrimination may have as its goal either the preparation of a ‘level playing-field’ or the facilitation of an endless series of draws with no winners or losers. Given the multi-dimensional nature of inequality and its seemingly ineluctable nature some socialist writers have sought to find equality in the unequal but inconsistent distribution of several facets of inequality. Prestige, income, education, and any other goods could be so arranged that their various levels of distribution balanced out, thus minimizing any sense of relative deprivation. In practice, however, this has involved the allocation of unacceptable levels of power to the state, the agency that is invariably charged with manipulating these social scales.See also JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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ego

See PSYCHOANALYSIS.

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egocentrism

A stage in the development of thought or morality which is entirely self-focused. The concept is widely deployed in the writings of social psychologists such as Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg.

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egoism

See INDIVIDUALISM; SUICIDE.

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egoistic suicide

See SUICIDE.

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eigenvalue

See FACTOR ANALYSIS.

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elaborated and restricted speech codes

A distinction formulated by Basil Bernstein, a leading figure in the sociology of education, which contrasts the so-called formal language of middle-class children with the public language of the working class (see his
Class, Codes and Control, 1971–7)
. These linguistic codes were said to be correlated with class differences in family organization, power, and control. The elaborated code of the middle class is institutionalized in schools. This results in ‘culturally induced backwardness’ among working-class children. Bernstein's research projects at the London University Institute of Education appeared to confirm these ideas, but the results of replication by others in Britain and the United States have been more ambivalent. His use of terms like class and code has also been criticized, albeit sometimes unfairly, for their ambiguity and implicit disdain for working-class life.
Bernstein was one of the first sociologists to place the problem of knowledge at the centre of the study of educational process. This was taken up by the ‘new’ sociology of education of the early 1970s. His work is usually discussed in two phases, though it is underlain throughout by concerns which reflect the influence of Émile Durkheim, in particular social symbols, classification, and cognitive processes. The earlier studies of social class and linguistic codes did much to initiate a sociology of language. His later works deal with the classification and framing of educational knowledge. Classification refers to the variability of boundaries in curriculum content (for example between school subjects); framing addresses the relative openness of teacher-pupil relationships. These concerns led Bernstein to a critique of progressive classroom pedagogies because of their invisible link to middle-class rather than working-class child-rearing styles.

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elective affinity

A term used by Max Weber to describe the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism (in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905). It refers to the resonance or coherence between aspects of the teachings of Protestantism and of the capitalist enterprise, notably the ethos of the latter. The relationship was unconscious so far as the actors involved were concerned. The concept has remained firmly tied to Weber's work although it has been used loosely by other sociologists, often in situations where it seems likely that there is an association between certain variables, but it is not yet clear what form this connection might take. A more modern way of describing the situation to which the concept applies might be in terms of the connections between beliefs, actions, and the unintended consequences of action. (see
, ‘Max Weber's Elective Affinities’, American Journal of Sociology, 1978
.) See also PROTESTANT ETHIC THESIS; UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES.

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Elias, Norbert

(1897–1990)
Of German Jewish origin, Elias fled from National Socialism in 1933, becoming a lecturer in sociology at the University of Leicester in England in 1954. He retired in 1962, and was Professor of Sociology at the University of Ghana from 1962 to 1964. His work was relatively neglected in his life-time, and he did not create a school of sociology, although there is now a considerable following in Amsterdam, where Elias spent the last years of his life. He was awarded the Theodor W. Adorno Prize in 1977, and the Amalfi Prize for sociology in 1988, for his study The Society of Individuals. From 1979 to 1984, he was a Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld. His major work, The Civilising Process, which was published in 1939 in German, was long neglected until its translation into English in 1978 and 1982.
Two key principles dominated his sociology. First, he was concerned to understand the process of civilization, which he defined as a process whereby external restraints on behaviour are replaced by internal, moral regulation. Second, he criticized functionalism and structuralism for their tendency to reify social processes, and argued instead for figurational or processual sociology; that is, a conceptualization of the constant and endless processual flux of all social relationships. Hence he wrote about ‘civilizing processes’ rather than ‘civilization’. His work has been criticized on two principal counts. First, it is not clear what is the cause or mechanism which produces these civilizing processes. Second, it is objected that his theory is not supported by empirical evidence, since modern societies are very uncivilized in terms of everyday violence and brutality.
Among his numerous other publications are What is Sociology? (1970), The Court Society (1969), The Loneliness of the Dying (1982), Involvement and Detachment (1987), and An Essay on Time (1984).

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élite, élite theory

It was the work of two nineteenth-century Italians—Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca—that turned the rather commonplace observation that for much of recorded human history the few have ruled the many into an important contribution to modern political sociology. For Mosca, whose Elementi di scienza politica of 1896 (translated as The Ruling Class in 1939) was the first statement of the theory, the distinguishing mark of the rulers and therefore the explanation for their political dominance over the ruled lay in the rulers' superior organization. But the dominance so achieved would last only so long as it was exercised in a manner consonant with the values (‘the political formula’) of the society concerned. If it was not so exercised, the élite involved would be replaced sooner or later by another, one that was prepared to rule in accordance with the prevailing values.
Although he is usually considered to have derived the idea from Mosca, it was Pareto who, by naming the ruling few ‘the élite’, gained much of the credit for the theory's creation. However, Pareto went on to develop the idea, as part of a complex sociology of his own making. According to this sociology, social action is determined by one or other of six basic ‘sentiments’ or ‘residues’, which are typically rationalized by more intellectual sets of ideas (for example, democracy, nationalism, and liberty), which he terms ‘derivations’. Amongst the residues two were far more important than the others: the ‘residue of the persistence of aggregates’, which stimulated courage and strength; and the ‘residue of combinations’, which stimulated cunning and compromise. Borrowing from Machiavelli, Pareto termed those rulers moved by the first of these residues ‘lions’ and those moved by the second ‘foxes’, and then used this distinction to formulate his theory of the ‘circulation of élites’. According to this theory, every society is founded in violence and therefore by lions, but as it settles down the need for their courage and strength declines. Eventually, this need is replaced by an even more compelling one for the subtler skills of the foxes, who then become the rulers. The rule of the foxes remains in place until the society's identity and sense of direction become so unclear that a need for more leonine qualities once again arises.
Despite the formalistic, ahistorical, and manifestly psychologistic nature of these ideas, they have been periodically revived since Mosca and Pareto's time by those seeking ways of filling gaps in other theories of the distribution of power— hence, for example, C. Wright Mills's use of them in The Power Elite (1956) to overcome the economic reductionism of Marxism. Hence also their use by the ‘democratic élitists’ (see
, The Theory of Democratic Elitism, 1967
) of the 1960s to overcome the too indeterminate nature of pluralist theories.
For a review of both the extensive literature on élite theory, and the substantive material deriving from studies of bureaucracy, business, the military, and community power, see
, Political Elites (1969
). See also MICHELS, ROBERT; POWER ÉLITE.

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élite, power

See POWER ÉLITE.

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embourgeoisement, embourgeoisement thesis

Embourgeoisement is the process by which bourgeois aspirations, and a bourgeois standard and style of life, become institutionalized among the working class. The phenomenon is said to undermine working-class consciousness and so frustrate the historical mission of the proletariat as an agency of revolutionary social change.
The concept itself has Marxian origins. In the late 1880s, Friedrich Engels attempted to explain the failure of the British working class to exploit the franchise of 1867 in terms of the workers' ‘craving for respectability’, and enjoyment of a standard of living sufficient to encourage bourgeois values, life-styles, and political ideals. Orthodox Marxists since have often deployed this argument as an explanation for working-class quiescence under capitalism.
However, the proposition attained a much wider credibility when it was taken up by (mainly North American) liberals such as S. M. Lipset and Clark Kerr, during the two decades following the Second World War. Proponents formulated the thesis of embourgeoisement in a variety of ways and identified a range of disparate causal mechanisms behind the process itself. In its most general formulation, however, the thesis claimed that the sectoral transformation in the structure of employment—the move from manufacturing to services, and from unskilled labouring to the new knowledge-based occupations—created high levels of class mobility, and led to a shrinkage of the working class, considered as a proportion of the economically active population. Advanced Western societies were therefore literally becoming more middle class, in the demographic sense at least, if none other.
Additionally, however, tendencies intrinsic to production (notably automation) were granting manual workers greater control over their work and undermining their sense of workplace alienation. Urban renewal after the war led to the dissolution of long-established, tightly knit, often occupationally homogeneous working-class communities in the inner cities, as workers spilled out into the less dense, more heterogeneous suburbs of the new commuting areas. Official statistics of this period purported also to show a ‘homogenization’ of incomes and living standards, both because of the high-wage and full-employment-based expansion in Western economies, and the redistributive social policies pursued by welfare-minded social democratic states. This was the era of ‘high mass consumption’ and the ‘affluent society’ : ownership of consumer durables became widespread and even manual workers could realistically aspire to car-ownership and purchasing their own home. A mass-market of ‘middle-income’ consumers was created.
These objective changes allegedly prompted, in turn, the homogenization of life-styles and social values. Increased income facilitated working-class participation in middle-class styles of dress, leisure practices, and styles of décor. Finally, the increase in incomes and integration of rank-and-file workers into their employing organizations as skilled operatives together changed the workers' attitudes and values, fostering a new identification with the objectives of the capitalist enterprise, a weakening of the traditional loyalties to workmates, trade union, and class, and the growth of a typically middle-class concern with status. Workers became family-minded and home-centred rather than neighbourhood-centred and collectivist. Conservative values came to dominate their world-views: manual workers now sought security and respectability, and by individualistic rather than solidaristic means. Ultimately, this translated into voting behaviour, as the old class-based parties of the Left were abandoned in favour of the bourgeois or petitbourgeois parties of the political Right.
The clearest statement of this thesis is Ferdynand Zweig's The Worker in an Affluent Society (1961), which has the additional virtue of being empirically grounded, since Zweig conducted interviews with workers in five British firms. Most other proponents of embourgeoisement argued principally on the basis of speculation and anecdote.
The thesis prompted a number of important sociological studies in the 1960s. These were generally more rigorous than the original statements and greatly undermined the credibility of the argument. The most notable of the critical treatments were probably the so-called Affluent Worker Studies in Britain, carried out by John H. Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer, and Jennifer Platt (see especially
The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure, 1969
);
's study of a Working-Class Suburb (1960
) in the United States; and, for France,
's Affluence and the French Worker in the Fourth Republic (1967
). These and a host of similar studies showed convincingly that the working classes of the advanced West were not as wealthy as their middle-class peers, retained important aspects of their proletarian identities, and still had distinctive social values, political ideals, and styles of life.
Although theories of embourgeoisement were widely held to be discredited during the 1970s, they made a curious return in the midst of the recessionary 1980s, when commentators of both the extreme Right and Left argued that working-class support for the policies of right-wing governments across Europe and North America provided testimony to a new consensus around middle-class norms, values, and life-styles.See also CONSUMPTION, SOCIOLOGY OF; INCORPORATION; LABOUR ARISTOCRACY; PRIVATISM; SUBURBANISM.

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emergence, emergent properties

Emergence is the process by means of which a number of divergent elements are synthesized and organized into a new form. As a concept it has been particularly prominent in evolutionary theory. However, it is also widely deployed in symbolic interactionism, which also aims to capture the processual and adaptive nature of social life. In the writings of both George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer the interaction of body, mind, self, and society constantly leads to emergence. From this point of view, society itself is an emergent, as are all social objects.

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emergent norms

Standards of behaviour that are gradually established by people who have come together into a group. Thus, for example, the ‘emergent norm theory of crowds’ suggests that, although crowds consist of individuals with different attitudes, motives (see VOCABULARIES OF MOTIVE), and values, the ambiguity of the crowd situation encourages the development of a group norm (for that particular circumstance) which creates an illusion of unanimity of purpose and uniformity of behaviour.

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emic and etic analysis

A distinction borrowed by anthropologists from linguistics. Emicists concentrate on describing the indigenous values of a particular society while eticists apply broader theoretical models across a number of societies. The emic approach became popular in the late 1960s as part of the movement towards cultural relativism. In practice, anthropological research has always entailed a mixture of emic and etic approaches.

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emigration

See MIGRATION, SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF.

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emotion, sociology of

Although a concern with emotion is present in much early sociology (for example in the work of C. H. Cooley), the sociological study of emotions emerged as a distinctive subfield within the discipline only during the 1970s, in part at least as a self-conscious response to a sociology that (in the eyes of some) had become overly concerned with the cognitive and rational. It examines such emotions as shame and pride, love and hate, awe and wonder, boredom and melancholy, and asks questions about how these are culturally patterned, experienced, acquired, transformed, managed in daily life, and legitimated through accounts. At its most general, then, the specialism examines the links between feelings, on the one hand, and cultures, structures, and interactions (see ACTION THEORY) on the other.
Three models of analysis are common. The first (or organismic) suggests that feelings happen within the person, are experienced bodily, and then interpreted. The second or constructionist position maintains that feelings are socially constructed, and that they do not apply to internal states but are in fact cultural meanings given to sensations, since the same sensation may be given very different meanings. (Pain, love, and anger, for example, are not universals, but are given different meanings in different cultures, and are often experienced differently.) The final position is that of the interactionist who interprets feelings as an emergent property of the interaction between environment and body.
Two pioneering works in this field illustrate the sorts of research that will be found here. Arlie Hochschild's The Managed Heart (1983) is a study of airline stewardesses in the United States, which highlights the ways in which those who practise this particular occupation sell emotions (it is emotional labour), and are guided by feeling rules. Thomas Scheff suggests that ‘shame is the primary social emotion’, and in his work examines both the ubiquity of this emotion, and the ‘spiral of shame and rage’ often generated by it in social interaction (see especially
Microsociology 1990
). The current terrain and topics of interest are clearly mapped in
, Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions (1990)
.

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emotional labour

For Arlie Hochschild (The Managed Heart, 1983), this is the work done with feelings, as part of paid employment. People in many of the personal service occupations—such as airline stewardesses, waitresses, bartenders, and such like—are paid to ‘sell their emotions’. Emotions here can become a commodity. Arguably, more and more work in the Western world is of this type, particularly in those occupations dominated by women. See also EMOTION, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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emotional work

Emotional management done in one's private life. Although performed in the private rather than the public sphere, and for a variety of reasons other than because it forms part of the contractual obligations governing a particular occupation, nevertheless it has close parallels with emotional labour.

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empathy

The ability to identify with and understand others, particularly on an emotional level. In sociology, Max Weber's concept of verstehen (understanding) is often, mistakenly, regarded as implying empathy with the object of study. It is often argued that empathy provides a useful source of hypotheses—but little more. William Outhwaite's Understanding Social Life: The Method Called Verstehen (1975) is still the best commentary. See also MEANING.

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empirical

As applied to statements, particular research projects, or even to general approaches to research, the term ‘empirical’ implies a close relationship to sensory experience, observation, or experiment. Sometimes the term is contrasted with abstract or theoretical, sometimes with dogmatic, or sometimes with scholarly. In its derogatory uses, lack of attention to matters of principle or theory is implied. As a term of approval, for example from the stand-point of empiricism, the term implies practical relevance, or testability, as against bookish scholasticism or groundless speculation.

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empiricism

In sociology, the term empiricism is often used, loosely, to describe an orientation to research which emphasizes the collection of facts and observations, at the expense of conceptual reflection and theoretical enquiry. More rigorously, empiricism is the name given to a philosophical tradition which, in its modern form, developed in the context of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Though by no means all of the early empiricists were advocates of the new science, empiricism subsequently developed in close symbiotic association with modern science. In sociology, empiricism has been widely adopted as a philosophical approach by those who advocate methodological naturalism: the development of sociology as a scientific discipline.
In its early forms (in the work of John Locke, David Hume, and others) empiricism was primarily an epistemology: a theory of the nature, scope, and limits of human knowledge. As such, it included a theory of the mind and its workings which has subsequently been displaced by the development of cognitive psychology. What remains of empiricism as a philosophical theory is primarily the thesis that substantive human knowledge is limited to what may be tested (confirmed or validated) by empirical observation. What may be known a priori, or independently of all experience, is restricted to analytical statements—for example, statements that offer definitions of technical concepts, or, as Hume put it, which state ‘relations of ideas’. Empiricism defended the privileged status of science as the only form of human enquiry in which knowledge-claims were based upon, or were permanently open to, testing in terms of empirical observation and experiment. Theology and speculative metaphysics, by contrast, made bogus claims to knowledge on the basis of faith, intuition, or ‘pure’ reason.
Though empiricists are keen to demonstrate their opposition to metaphysics, it may be argued that empiricism itself carries an implicit metaphysics: namely, that the ultimate (knowable) realities are the fleeting sensory impressions (or ‘sense-data’) against which all genuine knowledge-claims are to be tested. The most radical forms of empiricism, then, are liable to be sceptical about the knowability not only of the objects of scientific knowledge, but also the things and beings of common-sense experience. Thus, the distinctive twentieth-century form of empiricism, the logical empiricism or positivism of the Vienna Circle, followed upon the deep uncertainties of the turn-of-the-century revolution in physical science. In general, empiricists have raised the standard of empirical testability as a means of defending science, and combating the claims of, first metaphysics and theology, and more recently pseudo-sciences such as Marxism and psychoanalysis. Their difficulty has been to do so in a way which does not rule out all, or most, genuine science by the same criterion.

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empiricism, abstracted

See ABSTRACTED EMPIRICISM.

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empiricism, logical

See VERIFICATION; VIENNA CIRCLE.

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employer strategies

This term refers to patterns of employers' decision-making regarding work organization within firms (for example forms of control over labour, job structures, and payment systems). Originally developed within Marxism to refer to employers' responses to capital-labour conflicts, it is currently used in the labour process and labour-market segmentation literatures to stress the agency (or intervention) of employers in a supposedly impersonal labour-market, and the variety in their forms of decision-making.

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employment

The supply of labour by persons of either sex for the production and processing of all primary products (such as the characteristic products of agriculture, forestry, and fishing); the processing of primary commodities to produce such goods as flour, cheese, wine, cloth, or furniture, whether for the market, for barter, or for own consumption; and for the production of all other goods and services for the market. This broad definition ensures that the concept is applicable to statistics on market economies, command economies, mixed economies, and subsistence economies. It covers the production of goods and services normally intended for sale on the market, goods and services supplied by government agencies and the nonprofit sector, and certain types of production for own consumption (non-market production). In Western industrial societies, a much narrower definition is conventionally applied in official statistics—namely work for pay, profit, or family gain, within a specified reference-week—thus limiting the concept to work in the market economy, which is reflected in national economic accounts and gross national product. Employment can also be defined with reference to a person's usual activities rather than their current activities.
Sociologists frequently ignore these precise, and essentially economic definitions of employment (often termed economic activity by economists), in favour of the much more general notion of work, which has a different, wider meaning. Many disagreements and debates have their origin in a failure to distinguish clearly between work and employment. To make matters worse, work is regularly used as a synonym for paid employment or market work in everyday discourse, and in social science reports. Hence, for example, work-rates are synonymous with labour-force participation rates and economic activity rates in scientific (especially economic) papers. See also BLACK ECONOMY; HOUSEHOLD WORK STRATEGY; LABOUR-MARKET; LABOUR RELATIONS; OCCUPATIONAL SEGREGATION; WAGE-LABOUR.

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employment, flexible

See FLEXIBLE EMPLOYMENT.

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employment status

The legal status and classification of someone in employment as either an employee or working on their own account (self-employed). In practice, most classifications of employment status in official statistics expand this simple two-fold distinction into a fuller typology which identifies large employers, small employers, the self-employed without any employees, unpaid family workers contributing labour to a family farm or business, partners in a legally defined partnership, apprentices and supervisors, as well as ordinary employees.
The sociological distinction between capitalists or entrepreneurs and employees selling their wage-labour is clouded in most classifications of employment status, as employers are classified by their specific legal status, as employees of their own incorporated companies; however, some countries ignore the legal status in favour of the social reality. Practice varies because this concept is not wholly defined by the economic framework that dominates labour-market statistics.

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enclave

A term used in under-development and dependency theories to refer to parts of a Third World economy which are based on production for export and are controlled and managed by foreign capital. The enclave is thought to have few linkages with the national economy and thus to have little impact on internal growth.

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enculturation

A term from American cultural anthropology that is virtually synonymous with socialization. It refers to the idea that, to be a full member of any culture or subculture, individuals have constantly to learn and use, both formally and informally, the patterns of cultural behaviour prescribed by that culture.

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end-of-ideology thesis

Although not originated by the American sociologist Daniel Bell, this very controversial thesis is commonly identified with him, thanks to the publication in 1960 of a book of his essays entitled The End of Ideology. The central thrust of the thesis is suggested by the subtitle of this book:
‘On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties’.
's argument is that the great political ideologies of the nineteenth century, liberalism and socialism especially, each of which he conceives of as ‘a set of beliefs, infused with passion, and seek[ing] to transform the whole of a way of life’, finally lost their ability to mobilize the people of the advanced industrial societies in the 1950s. This, he suggests, happened for two main reasons. First, because of the failure of these ideologies to prevent war, economic depression, and political oppression. And second, because of the modifications to capitalism brought about by the changes summarized by the term welfare state. Although Bell acknowledged the continuing and indeed increased importance of ideology in ‘the rising states of Asia and Africa’, his conclusion was that in the industrialized West, social improvement would and could only come through what he was later to term ‘“piecemeal” change in a social-democratic direction’.

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endogamy

The preferred or prescribed practice of marrying within the defined kin-group, be it clan, lineage, village, or social class. The opposite principle is exogamy: the preferred or prescribed practice of marriage outside the kin group, the boundaries of which are often defined by the incest taboo. The latter principle is most clearly expressed in the Arapesh saying, recorded by Margaret Mead, which states: ‘Your own mother, your own sister, your own pigs, your own yams you have piled up, you may not eat. |Other people's mothers, other people's sisters other people's pigs, other people's yams that they have piled up, you may eat.’

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endogenous depression

See DEPRESSION.

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endogenous variables

See STRUCTURAL EQUATIONS.

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Engels, Friedrich

(1820–95)
A nineteenth-century philosopher, socialist, manufacturer, and co-founder of Marxism. The best introduction to his life and work is Terrell Carver's Engels (1981).
Born into a family of well-to-do mill-owners in Rhineland, Engels very soon took up a critical stance against the conservatism of his background, and went on to establish the intellectual partnership with Karl Marx for which he is most well-known. So close was the cooperation between them that it is often difficult to be sure what should be attributed to either partner. Their early influences in the radical Young Hegelian circle, and conversion to socialism and communism in the early 1840s, ran in close parallel. It seems to have been
's ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’ (1844)
which set Marx off on his life-long researches into that subject. The culmination of this research was Marx's Capital. Only one volume of this was published in Marx's lifetime, and it was Engels's contribution, after Marx's death, to prepare for publication the drafts of the remaining two volumes.
Following their (relatively minor) involvement in the unsuccessful uprisings of 1848, both Marx and Engels went into exile in England. Until 1869 Engels was preoccupied with the family business in Manchester, but he was at least able to offer Marx's family desperately needed financial support, while Marx continued with his studies. From the 1870s onwards Engels was able to give more time to intellectual and political work. His advice was much sought by the leaders of the international working-class movement, and he was particularly closely involved with the development of the German socialist movement from 1875 onwards. The books and pamphlets in which he expounded his and Marx's approach to history, politics, and philosophy were extremely widely read, and were more influential even than Marx's own work in forming the image of Marxism as a systematic world-view held by successive generations of socialist and communist militants.
However, Engels's contribution went well beyond merely popularizing the work of his mentor. His Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) remains a classic work of social and economic investigation. It is particularly noteworthy for its pioneering exposition of the links between poverty, environmental degradation, and ill-health, consequent upon modern industrialism. Engels's late work also contained much originality. His Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) extended the range of historical materialism to engage with current work in anthropology. This work was especially significant in its attempt to explain the history of women's subordination ‘materialistically’ in terms of the institutions of private property and monogamy. Despite its flaws, this work is still considered worthy of serious attention by many contemporary feminists. Engels's later years were also much taken up with following developments in the natural sciences and engaging with the political and philosophical implications of those developments. Dialectical materialism was the term invented by Engels to encapsulate his attempt to sustain a form of materialism which was sufficiently open and flexible to address these new developments. Ironically, Engels's ideas were subsequently converted into a dogmatic ideology by the leadership of the Soviet state. See also EMBOURGEOISEMENT; MATRIARCHY.

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Enlightenment, The

The period of European thought which is equated with an emphasis on reason, experience, scepticism of religious and traditional authority, and a gradual emergence of the ideals of secular, liberal, and democratic societies. Often dated from the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica in 1686 and John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises on Government three years later, some argue it began earlier, in the seventeenth century, with the works of Bacon and Hobbes in England, and in France, with Descartes's emphasis on unaided reason. It is the eighteenth century, however, which is generally seen as the heyday of the Enlightenment, especially in France, with the Encyclopédie and anti-clerical encyclopédistes such as Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. David Hume, a Scottish philosopher, aimed to bring the experimental method into the study of the human mind, and believed natural science, culminating in Newtonian mechanics, could find a few basic principles which would make it possible to discern order in the apparent chaos of natural systems. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, outlined his optimistic ideas about free markets in the economy and the benefits of a division of labour. The German physicist and philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that knowledge of space and time is subjective, and distinguished between things as they are in themselves and things as they appear to us, thus separating out experience and thought.
There were many strands to the Enlightenment, running through literature and the arts, science, religion, and philosophy, Overall, however, it is equated with a materialist view of humanity, an optimism about the possibility of rational and scientific knowledge, progress through education, and a utilitarian approach to ethics and society. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer have argued in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972) that there is a hidden logic of domination and oppression behind Enlightenment rationality. The desire to control nature, which was at the core of the Enlightenment, also entailed the domination of human beings. The legacy of the Enlightenment, if thoroughly analysed and understood, can be seen as the triumph of an instrumental rationality that led to the development of a bureaucratic rationality from which some argue there is no escape. See also EMPIRICISM; EPISTEMOLOGY; PROGRESS; SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT.

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enterprise society, enterprise culture

A label commonly applied to those countries in which the state makes a conscious attempt to promote the qualities of self-reliance, innovation, and individual achievement. During the 1980s, for example, governments in Britain and the United States implemented a series of economic and social reforms, including the deregulation of industry and privatization of public utilities, in order to revitalize the (as they saw it) moribund organizational culture of late twentieth-century corporate society. These policies were intended to promote economic competition, reduce the influence of the state in economic life, constrain public expenditure, and encourage individuals to take responsibility for their own welfare, mainly by promoting the adoption of market principles wherever possible. It is doubtful if this programme has had any long-term effect on entrepreneurship or the work ethic, although it contributed in some countries to a retrenchment of the welfare state.

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entitlement

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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entrepreneur, entrepreneurship

There are at least four distinct meanings given to this term, which overlap only in part. At a basic level, an entrepreneur is a person who owns and runs a business—not necessarily a new, small, growing, or successful business. Economists define the entrepreneur as a person who risks capital and other resources in the hope of substantial financial gain, or as someone who specializes in taking judgemental decisions about the use and coordination of scarce resources. The emphasis is on calculated risk-taking. Sociologists define the entrepreneur as a creative innovator in the business sphere, in contrast to the conventional business-owner, capitalist, or professional manager, who conforms more often to established procedures and objectives. This conception originated with Joseph Schumpeter, who defined entrepreneurs as individuals who develop and implement new combinations of the means of production, a function which he described as fundamental to economic development in his book The Theory of Economic Development (1934). Finally, the term is sometimes used more loosely to refer to the owner or creator of a new, small, growing, and successful business, or even to any person who sets up a small business, or changes from an employee job to being self-employed, even though neither need involve any significant degree of innovation or capital investment.
The 1980s saw the development of the concept of intrapreneurs; that is, people working alone or in teams who remained employees within the organization or firm for which they worked, but took responsibility for some innovation, costly exercise or risky development, or even for a routine subset of activities, in the expectation of additional personal financial reward for successful ventures and profitable operations. At the extreme, intrapreneurs shade into employees whose earnings depend heavily on bonus and commission payments, or other incentive payments—such as sales personnel.
Theories about entrepreneurial behaviour concern the relative importance of personality traits, social marginality, the ‘artisan’ or ‘craftsman’ orientation to work, sources of risk capital, the economic environment, and institutions. Theories of economic growth do not always attach importance to entrepreneurs. Sociological interest in entrepreneurship has declined steadily with the emergence of monopoly capitalism and the rise of the modern business corporation. However, the American economic sociologist Ronald S. Burt has conducted a number of analyses of envy and entrepreneurial opportunities in competitive environments, notably via the application of concepts derived from network analysis (see
Corporate Profits and Cooptation, 1983, and Social Contagion and Innovation, 1988
).

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entrepreneurial capitalism

See CAPITALISM.

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environment

Literally ‘that which environs or surrounds’, the term is used in various ways in academic discourse. In biology and psychology, environment is frequently juxtaposed to heredity, in an exhaustive division of the causes that shape the character of living things. Heredity refers to what is genetically transmitted, environment to what is given externally. Much of the debate has focused on their relative importance, and environment itself is usually given little substantive content. In other usages the environment is simply the (delimited) social context in which the individual (or any living organism) is located, and the emphasis is on issues of adaptation and adjustment to this environment, as in Jean Piaget's work on cognitive development.
The natural environment, for all its potential significance to sociology as the territory in which human action occurs and as itself modified by human agency, is rarely construed in social terms; until recently it featured little in sociological thinking beyond references to the heredity versus environment debate. Significantly, the current social and political attention given to the environment concentrates on the physical world—on towns, houses, the countryside, and natural resources such as air and water—albeit an environment recognized to be not just a matter of nature but also of human intervention. In this interpretation the term contrasts with concepts like community, society, and social group that highlight social relations rather than physical and material conditions. However, it is precisely the focus on the specificities and impact of the material world and on the way it is socially constructed that produces the potential of an environmental sociology.
Since the 1980s, the sociology of the environment has emerged as an identifiable specialism within the discipline, although it is still rather loosely defined. Among the topics likely to be encountered in any of the standard texts now available will be the following: the role of industrialism in generating environmental degradation; the structural and social origins of environmental movements (see SOCIAL MOVEMENTS); the content and influence of Green politics and parties; the environmental implications of urbanization and globalization; the problems of securing sustainable development; and wider theoretical issues such the possible conflict between a non-exploitative approach to nature and the continued commitment to Enlightenment values such as those of democracy, human rights, and the pursuit of progress. (See, for example,
, Ecological Thought, 1995
, and
, Social Theory and the Environment, 1996
). Several strands of this literature deal with the built environment and lead into discussions of culture (especially popular culture). For example, in his study of the links between environmental and social change, as these are evident in the use of commercial space, Mark Gottdiener (The Theming of America, 1996) depicts ‘themed spaces’ (everything from Graceland and Disneyworld to local shopping malls) as a barrage of familiar and comforting symbols that are intended to make consumers feel good, and to part them systematically from their money in the interests of sustaining economic growth.

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environmental criminology

See CRIMINOLOGY, ENVIRONMENTAL.

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environmental sociology

See ENVIRONMENT.

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epidemiology

The analysis of the incidence and spread of disease within populations, with the aim of establishing causality. The modern science of epidemiology is often said to have originated with John Snow's identification of a particular source of drinking water as the cause of the 1849 cholera epidemic in London. More recently, linkages between smoking and lung cancer, between heart disease and certain fats, and between the contraceptive pill and breast cancer, have all been established through epidemiological research.

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epistemological anarchy

See METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM.

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epistemological anomie

See METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM.

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epistemological pluralism

See METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM.

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epistemology

The philosophical theory of knowledge—of how we know what we know. Epistemology is generally characterized by a division between two competing schools of thought: rationalism and empiricism. Both traditions of thought received their most systematic philosophical expressions in the context of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Both approaches were concerned with finding secure foundations for knowledge, and clearly distinguishing such well-grounded knowledge from mere prejudice, belief, or opinion. The model of certainty which impressed the rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza) was that to be found in the formal demonstrations of logic and mathematics. They sought to reconstruct critically the total of human knowledge by the employment of such ‘pure’ reasoning from indubitable axioms or foundations (hence Descartes's ‘I think therefore I am’). The empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume) took direct acquaintance with the ‘impressions’ of sense-experience as their bedrock of infallible knowledge. Disputes between rationalists and empiricists centred especially on the possibility of innate knowledge, of knowledge acquired a priori, or independently of experience. Empiricists vigorously denied this, advocating their view of the human mind as a blank sheet or tabula rasa, until marked by the impressions of sensory experience.
The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant is widely held to have achieved a transcendence of this conflict of ideas, insisting that a framework of basic organizing concepts (space, time, causality, and others) could not be acquired by experience alone, yet was necessary for us to be able to interpret the world of experience at all. These concepts were therefore prior to experience, but nevertheless (a nod in the direction of the empiricists) they could only be used to make objective judgements within the bounds of possible experience.
It is arguable that all theoretical and empirical approaches in sociology presuppose (explicitly or implicitly) some epistemological position or other. Largescale quantitative research is often (though wrongly) characterized in terms of empiricist or positivist epistemology, whilst the main opposition to positivism has derived (directly or indirectly) from the Kantian tradition. Whereas Kant thought the basic conceptual structure (the ‘categories’ and ‘forms of intuition’) underlying objective judgements about the world were necessary and therefore universal, many of Kant's successors in the human sciences have historically or socio-culturally relativized his position. Accordingly, it is common for sociological anti-positivists to argue that some conceptual or theoretical framework must be presupposed in any empirical research or factual judgement, but that there are several competing conceptual frameworks, and no neutral standpoint can be found from which to adjudicate between them. Arguments such as this lead to epistemological relativism, conventionalism, or agnosticism. Another argument, deriving from nineteenth-century neo-Kantianism, emphasizes the qualitatively different form of understanding involved in intersubjective communication and the interpretation of meaning (compared with the objective understanding we have of the material world). This form of understanding has its own conceptual and methodological conditions of possibility which may be philosophically analysed, as in phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophies of social science. Critical (or transcendental) realists (such as Roy Bhaskar) also draw upon Kant's method of argument, and recognize the necessity of prior conceptual organization for all empirical knowledge. They nevertheless insist upon the knowability of realities which exist and act independently of our knowledge of them. This philosophical tradition is claimed by its adherents to offer a defence of naturalism, whilst at the same time accepting the main arguments of the Kantians against positivism and empiricism.
Some post-structuralists, impatient with the apparently interminable disputes among rival epistemologies, have sought to avoid epistemology entirely. The main argument for doing so begins with a premiss which is common ground to most non-positivist philosophers of social science. This is that we have no direct or unmediated access to the realities about which our theories claim to provide knowledge. Some form of conceptual or linguistic ordering is necessary for even the most basic reports of our experiences or observations. We cannot step outside of language or discourse so as to check whether our discourse does, after all, correspond to reality. The conclusion which is then drawn from this axiom is that the classical epistemological question as to the adequacy of our discourse to the reality it purports to represent is in principle unanswerable and therefore misconceived. These post-structuralists are then led to deny the knowability of any reality beyond, or independent of, discourse, thence into an oscillation between epistemological agnosticism and metaphysical idealism. Of course, it does not at all follow from the widely accepted claim that language (or ‘discourse’) is necessary to our knowledge of the world, that we cannot then know the world. This would be as if someone were to say that, because we have no way of telling what colour things are other than by looking at them, we cannot know what colour they (really) are! So far, attempts to avoid epistemology appear to have yielded only yet more terminologically impenetrable epistemologies.

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equal appearing intervals

This is often referred to, after its principal author L. L. Thurstone, as the Thurstone technique of attitude measurement. On the assumption that any attitude involves a continuum ranging from the strongest possible appreciation of a value at one extreme to the strongest possible depreciation of that value at the other, Thurstone devised a scaling procedure which attempted to divide any given attitude into a number of equal appearing intervals, and so give respondents a scale-value according to their responses to the statements in a particular attitude or value-set.
Scaling attitudes in this way involves a number of steps. In the first, a group of judges sort a number of attitude statements into categories, according to the relative positions of these statements along an attitude continuum which has already been divided into categories having positions equidistant from those immediately above and below them. The allocation of statements to categories by the judges is then used to construct a scale, securing an individual scale-value for each item, assigning it the median position given by the judges as a whole. If a large number of statements has been used at the outset, then it is necessary to select from these in such a way as to exclude all ambiguous items, and to represent the full range of the attitude in question. Finally, respondents are invited to accept or reject the items in the scale, each respondent being given a score equal to the average of all the statements he or she accepts. The technique has also been used to construct cognitive and behavioural scales.
There are numerous well-documented dangers to be guarded against in using the technique. The criteria for eliminating the irrelevant items are various and contentious. The scale is intended to provide interval measurement of the attitudes of the respondents, but this presupposes that the items in the scale are measured at the interval level (‘equal appearing’), a questionable assumption given the way in which the final scale-value of each item is derived. Because the scale-values depend on the judges, it is important that as large a number as possible of well-informed judges are used, and that they are not systematically biased with regard to the attitudes being measured.

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equality, social equality

See DEMOCRACY; EGALITARIANISM; JUSTICE, SOCIAL; SOCIALISM.

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equality of opportunity

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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equilibrium, social equilibrium

In normative functionalist theory generally, and the work of Talcott Parsons in particular, the commonplace concept of equilibrium (a state of balance in which opposing forces or tendencies neutralize each other) is given a more specific meaning. It applies, in particular, to what Parsons calls a ‘boundary-maintaining system’; that is, a social system which ‘maintains certain constancies of pattern’, relative to its environment. Two types of constancy are identified—static (unchanging), and moving, the latter of which Parsons describes as ‘an orderly process of social change’ (see
The Social System, 1951
). The tendency of social systems towards equilibrium is built into the premisses of (and later the very definitions of a society proffered by) Parsonsian theory. The use of the terms ‘moving equilibrium’ and ‘disequilibrium’ (rather than the more prosaic change and conflict) speaks volumes about the conservatism of this form of sociological theory. See also CHANGE, SOCIAL; CONSENSUS; SOCIAL INTEGRATION AND SYSTEM INTEGRATION.

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equity theory

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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error (sampling and non-sampling)

There are many sources of inaccuracy, or error, in a survey. Sampling error consists of bias in sample selection procedures, plus random sampling error. Non-response bias can be measured and analysed after interviewing is completed. There is scope for less visible and less measurable error in the interviewing process itself, and in the subsequent coding and classification of replies. Interviewer bias affects some interviews, and interviewers do occasionally make mistakes, such as overlooking a whole section of a questionnaire. Coding errors arise when data are prepared for analysis. They consist of simple mispunches, from striking the wrong key to code a reply, and misclassification, as when a job description is not read or understood correctly, and is allocated to the wrong occupation code. Edit and consistency checks after data preparation will identify some but not all coding errors. Surveys require rigorous attention to detail at every stage in the process to reduce error to the minimum. Even small inaccuracies at each stage can mount up to an appreciable amount of total error in the end.

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eschatological

Beliefs about the ‘last things’ and a religious end (and judgement) to the world. They form a significant part of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and tend to be stressed most strongly by fundamentalist and sectarian—especially Adventist—movements. The term is also applied analogically to political and catastrophe-linked movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. See also MILLENARIANISM.

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essentialism

A philosophical term which has been used in a variety of ways. According to Karl Popper (Conjectures and Refutations, 1969), essentialists make the twin claims that it is possible to establish definitively the truth of a scientific theory, and that scientists can arrive at complete explanations by discovering the essence or reality that lies behind the appearance of a phenomenon. However, the term is also applied to the theory of descriptions which states that definitions are descriptions of the essential properties of things, and that one can evaluate attempts at definitions in terms of the falsity or truth of the descriptions given by them. From this point of view, science requires the discovery of such essences, and thus of correct definitions. The contemporary usage of the term is largely pejorative, since most philosophers of science accept that descriptions and knowledge are provisional, and that facts (like truth and reality) are always conceptualized in terms which are informed by theory. See also CONVENTIONALISM; RELATIVISM.

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essentially contested concepts

See COMMUNITY POWER; COMMUNITY STUDIES.

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estate

A social stratum to which are attached specific rights and duties sustained by the force of legal sanction. The most obvious examples are the peasants, serfs, burghers, clergy, and nobility of the post-feudal states of continental Europe. For example, early-modern France distinguished the nobles, clergy, and the ‘Third Estate’ until the late eighteenth century. The term is often (though controversially) applied to the system of stratification in feudal Europe, since feudal strata were characterized more by personal bonds of vassalage, rather than shared political rights and obligations. It should be noted, for example, that the distinguished historian of feudalism Marc Bloch refers to the strata of the feudal order as ‘classes’.
Estate systems of stratification are rigid in their prescription of economic duties, political rights, and social convention, although typically they are not closed to social mobility. Unlike in caste systems, the estate does not necessarily renew itself from within: the clergy in pre-revolutionary France, for example, was an ‘open estate’.
Sociological usage of the term dates back to Ferdinand Tönnies's distinction between estates and classes (or ‘communal’ and ‘societal’ collectivities). In Economy and Society (1922) Max Weber cites the estates of medieval Europe as paradigmatic examples of status groups. In the same vein, T. H. Marshall defined an estate as ‘a group of people having the same status, in the sense in which that word is used by lawyers. A status in this sense is a position to which is attached a bundle of rights and duties, privileges and obligations, legal capacities or incapacities, which are publicly recognized and which can be defined and enforced by public authority and in many cases by courts of law’ (
‘The Nature and Determinants of Social Status’, in Class, Citizenship, and Social Development, 1964
). However, like most of the other main sociological concepts for studying systems of stratification, that of estate is a matter of some dispute.

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estimation

See STATISTICAL INFERENCE.

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ethical dualism

See DUALISM.

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ethics

Ethics is often defined as the concern with what ought to be, whereas science (including social science) is concerned with describing reality as it actually exists. This distinction has given rise to the notion that social science should be value free or value neutral. In practice, however, both the means and goals of social science investigation are intrinsically bound up with ethical considerations.
There is no clear consensus on a complete set of ethical rules to be followed when conducting research involving human subjects—although there are some generally agreed professional guide-lines. One of the basic tenets is that subjects should normally have their privacy protected through the practice of informed consent. This would rule out any observation of private behaviour without the explicit and fully informed permission of the person to be observed. Furthermore, subjects should not be exposed to unnecessary stress, or manipulation, or personal risk. The researcher is also responsible for preserving the confidentiality of any information that could identify subjects. The protection of data, so that anonymity is assured, is an increasing concern and is now subject to certain legal requirements. Ethical principles guide not only the conduct, but also the presentation of research, and there are ethical implications concerning how the results might be used. Sociologists may never face the dilemma of Oppenheimer developing the atomic bomb, but as Robert Friedrichs wrote in A Sociology of Sociology (1970), ‘knowledge of man is not neutral in its import; it grants power over man as well.’ See also RESEARCH ETHICS.

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ethnic nationalism

See NATIONALISM.

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ethnicity, ethnic group

Ethnicity defines individuals who consider themselves, or are considered by others, to share common characteristics which differentiate them from the other collectivities in a society, within which they develop distinct cultural behaviour.
The term was coined in contradistinction to race, since although members of an ethnic group may be identifiable in terms of racial attributes, they may also share other cultural characteristics such as religion, occupation, language, or politics. Ethnic groups should also be distinguished from social classes, since membership generally cross-cuts the socio-economic stratification within society, encompassing individuals who share (or are perceived to share) common characteristics that supersede class. The Jews in the United States thus constitute a typical ethnic group, since they include individuals of different racial origins (from East Europe to North Africa), social classes, mother-tongues, political beliefs, and religious commitment (from orthodox to atheist), yet still consider themselves to share a common Jewish identity that distinguishes them from, while not necessarily placing them in opposition to, wider American society.
Ethnic groups are therefore fluid in composition and subject to changes in definition. New ethnic groups are constantly being formed as populations move between countries. Indians in Britain, for example, constitute an ethnic group—although as individuals in India they would be seen to be members of quite different groups in terms of caste and language. The concept of ethnicity is particularly important when it forms the basis for social discrimination (as, for example, in the case of Jews in Nazi Germany) or for independence movements (as in the Soviet Union).
The relevant literature is voluminous. John Rex and David Mason's Theories of Race and Ethnic Relations (1986) demonstrates the range and diversity of current approaches in the field. Michael Banton's Racial and Ethnic Competition (1983) is an excellent summary of the American and British substantive literature. For America see
, Ethnic Dilemmas, 1964–1982 (1983)
.
's The Ethnic Revival (1981)
demonstrates the importance of the concept to a sociological understanding of conflict and change in the modern world. Frank Bean and Marta Tienda's The Hispanic Population in the United States (1990) uses quantitative data in a case-study of ethnicity in modern America. Ira Katznelson's history of the urban politics of Northern Manhattan (City Trenches, 1981) is a case-study of the interaction of ethnicity and class. See also CULTURE; NATIONALISM.

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ethnocentricism

Sometimes described as the cardinal sin of the comparative method, this is the practice of studying and making judgements about other societies in terms of one's own cultural assumptions or bias. Ethnocentricism often suggests that the way something is done in other societies is inferior to the way it is done in one's own society. It is only by escaping the preconception that there is one correct way of organizing things that sociologists can begin to analyse the practices of other cultures in the context in which they are performed. Avoidance of ethnocentricism quickly became one of the main tenets of social anthropology and comparative sociology after the turn of the century. However, pushed to extremes, this principle can make comparative analyses so relativistic that it becomes impossible to apply any universal cognitive or evaluative criteria—such as, for example, criteria of rationality or universal moral standards. See also OBSERVER BIAS.

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ethnography

A term usually applied to the acts both of observing directly the behaviour of a social group and producing a written description thereof. Sometimes also referred to as fieldwork, the term is most commonly linked with the research techniques of social anthropology, although sociologists involved in a community study would certainly do fieldwork, as might those doing almost any form of case-study. The principal technique of ethnographic research is participant observation. A classic example is William Foote Whyte's study of the social structure of an Italian slum district in an American city (Street Corner Society, 1943). Subsequently, Whyte also wrote a fine piece of descriptive methodology, reflecting on his ethnographic work (Learning from the Field: A Guide from Experience, 1984).

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ethnomedicine

‘Folk’ ideas and practices concerning the care and treatment of illness available within particular (usually non-Western) cultures—that is, outside the framework of professionalized, regulated scientific medicine. They commonly involve empirically based natural remedies, frequently from plants, and healing rituals with a supernatural element. Often deemed unscientific, such methods of healing are increasingly shown to have some value.

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ethnomethodology

A sociological approach which emerged out of the breakdown of the so-called orthodox consensus in the mid-1960s. The label was coined by the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel, who laid the foundations of ethnomethodology as a theory, and as a self-conscious critique of all conventional sociology. Explaining the origins of the term, he suggests that ‘“ethno” seemed to refer, somehow or other, to the availability to a member of common-sense knowledge of his society as common-sense knowledge of the “whatever”. If it were “ethno-botany”, then it had to do somehow or other with his knowledge of and his grasp of what were for members adequate methods for dealing with botanical matters … and the notion of “ethnomethodology” was taken in this sense’
(‘The Origins of the Term “Ethnomethodology”’, in ), Proceedings of the Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology, 1968)
. This interest led Garfinkel to analyse, in great detail, the methods used by people in everyday life to account for (or make sense of) their activities—both to themselves and others. These unconventional (some might say esoteric) researches are reported in Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), where Garfinkel gives the most concise definition of his studies, as being ‘directed to the tasks of learning how members’ actual, ordinary activities consist of methods to make practical actions, practical circumstances, commonsense knowledge of social structures, and practical sociological reasoning analysable'.
For a decade or more after the publication of Garfinkel's text, ethnomethodology was the subject of fierce and often bitter debate within sociology departments. It has now settled into an accepted but minority preoccupation, although some of its insights have been taken into the centre of sociological theory, particularly through the work of Anthony Giddens.
Ethnomethodology draws on a varied philosophical background: phenomenology on the one hand and Wittgenstein and linguistic philosophy on the other. Together with much post-structuralist and post-modernist work, it is a sociological representative of what has become known as the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, an increasing preoccupation in twentieth-century philosophy with the nature of language and language use. Social life, and the apparently stable phenomena and relationships in which it exists, are seen by ethnomethodologists as a constant achievement through the use of language. It is something that together we create and recreate continuously. This is indeed the rationale behind the name: ‘ology’ (the study of) ‘ethno’ (people's) ‘method’ (methods) of creating social order. The emphasis is on doing things: we ‘do’ friendship, being a sociologist, walking along the street, and everything else. At one time it was common to distinguish linguistic from situational ethnomethodology, but this is no more than a difference in emphasis, the basis for both tendencies resting firmly in the use of language.
There are two central ideas in ethnomethodology: indexicality and reflexivity. The first is the insight that there is no such thing as a clear, extensive definition of any word or concept in a language, since meaning comes from reference to other words and to the context in which the words are spoken. It is always possible to ask ‘What do you mean?’ about a statement, and then go on indefinitely, asking the same question to whatever answer is given. There is no final answer. Much of Garfinkel's early work consisted of sending his students out on exercises which establish the fact that we create and maintain a sense of meaning and existence in social life which is not actually there. One such exercise was to ask ‘What do you mean?’ relentlessly during conversations. The result is that people become distressed and angry when the taken-for-granted rules we use for establishing meaning are undermined. They lose their sense of social reality.
Reflexivity refers to the fact that our sense of order is a result of conversational processes: it is created in talk. Yet we usually think of ourselves as describing the order already existing around us. For ethnomethodologists, to describe a situation is at the same time to create it.
Both ideas formed part of a radical critique of all conventional sociology—which explains the bitterness of some of the arguments that ensued. According to ethnomethodologists, conventional sociologists are constructing a sense of social order in the same way as a layperson: namely, meanings are regarded as substantive and unproblematic. Consequently they are taken for granted. By contrast, ethnomethodologists argue that the proper task of sociology is to sort out the interpretive rules by means of which we establish our sense of order, rather than engage in reflexively establishing that sense. In this way, conventional sociology becomes an object of study for ethnomethodology, in the same way as any other human social activity is an object of study. Thus, Garfinkel's book contains both an essay on coding answers to sociological interviews and an essay on trans-sexuality, the activities sharing an equal status as ways of producing social reality.
The example of so-called glossing illustrates the sort of interpretive procedure in which ethnomethodology is interested. In everyday life glossing means avoiding the issue. For ethnomethodologists, all talk is glossing, since the issue cannot be directly stated. In glossing, we employ a range of taken-for-granted rules, such as the ‘etcetera rule’, which adds to every other rule a clause which says ‘except in reasonable circumstances’. Harvey Sachs, who specialized in conversation analysis, stated numerous similar rules, including the one which states that, generally, only one person speaks at a time, and that if this rule is broken it is only for a very short period.
A common criticism of ethnomethodology is that it does not tell us anything very important. By definition, the big political and social issues of the day are beyond its scope, since the concern is with how we constitute this world, rather than what we constitute it as being. It is argued that the rules it draws out are also comparatively low level and merely tell us what we already know. The most damning criticism by a conventional sociologist is still
's ‘A Revolution in Sociology?’ (Sociology, 1973)
, although the most vitriolic critiques are probably James S. Coleman's review of Garfinkel's book in the American Sociological Review (1968), and Lewis A. Coser's celebrated presidential address to the American Sociological Association in 1975 (Two Methods in Search of a Substance', American Sociological Review).
Although ethnomethodological work continues, it is neither as prominent, nor as controversial as hitherto. On the other hand, a modified version of some of its insights is now almost taken-for-granted: there is, for example, a much wider recognition among sociologists of the problematic nature of meaning and of the way in which our talk does contribute to the creation of our social reality. Meanwhile, ethnomethodology has become a relatively prosperous alternative discipline, with its own conferences, journals, and centres of excellence. (An excellent overview of contemporary work is
's essay on ‘Ethnomethodology’ in , Social Theory Today, 1987.)

Among ethnomethodologists Aaron Cicourel has been most concerned with establishing a relationship with conventional sociology (see
Cognitive Sociology, 1973
). The most systematic attempt to integrate ethnomethodological insights into sociology can be found in the work of Anthony Giddens, particularly in New Rules of Sociological Method (1976), and The Constitution of Society (1984). He stops short of seeing social reality and societies as constructions of talk, but recognizes that taken-for-granted rules of talk and action are fundamental to social order, and employs a notion of rule similar to that of ethnomethodology as a way of understanding both social action and social structure and bringing the two together. See also COGNITIVE SOCIOLOGY; COMMONSENSE KNOWLEDGE; ETHNOSTATISTICS.

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ethnostatistics

Ethnostatistics studies the social organization and production of statistics, seeing them not as resources (towards an explanation of a particular social phenomenon), but as topics of investigation in their own right. In an early paper
(‘A Note on Official Statistics’, Social Problems, 1962),
argued that criminal statistics should not be taken as objective indicators of the crime-rate, but instead should be examined as displays of social organization—of the work of statistics-keeping agencies. Similarly, Jack Douglas in The Social Meanings of Suicide (1967) suggested the same treatment should be accorded Émile Durkheim's suicide statistics, by treating them as the problem to be explained rather than as an objective or true measure of the suicide rate. There is a clear connection between this tradition and the ethnomethodological critique of sociology as a ‘folk discipline’ which takes commonsense meanings for granted. Recently, the domain of ethnostatistical work has been considerably expanded: thus, in his book Ethnostatistics (1988), Robert Gephart defines the enterprise as ‘the study of the construction, interpretation, and the display of statistics in quantitative social research’.

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ethology

Pioneered by Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, ethology applies evolutionary theory to early animal and childhood human behaviour, in order to examine its instinctive and adaptive nature. Its roots go back to Charles Darwin's Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Lorenz is usually credited with its discovery in the early 1930s. He is best-known for his studies of ‘imprinting’ and the instinctive basis of animal and human behaviour. His work had more impact on psychologists (as in John Bowlby's research on attachment and loss) than on sociologists: the latter usually argue that studies of animal behaviour are of little relevance in understanding human society.
Ethology became immensely popular during the 1960s in popular books such as Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape (1967). In this and his subsequent work, Morris sought to demonstrate the similarity, and hence the evolutionary significance, of certain aspects of human and animal behaviour. Critics have pointed to the reductionist assumptions behind much of the popular ethology of the 1950s and 1960s, which is regarded as one of the precursors of sociobiology.

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eufunction, eufunctional

A eufunctional activity (from the Greek eu meaning ‘well’) is one which contributes to the maintenance or survival of another social activity or of the social system as a whole. The term is now largely obsolete, having been replaced by the simple reference to an activity being functional or having a particular function, the implication being that the objective consequence of the activity in question for the wider social system is indeed positive, in the sense of contributing to the maintenance of social order and stability. The contrast, in the cases of both the older and modern terminology, is with the concept of dysfunction—a term applied in functionalist sociology to activities which are deemed to contribute to the disturbance of existing social patterns and structures. The distinction between functions (or eufunctions) and dysfunctions should not be confused with that between manifest and latent functions: it is possible, at least in principle, to distinguish manifest and latent functions and manifest and latent dysfunctions.

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eugenics

From the Greek eu (well) and gens (to produce), eugenics refers to the manipulation of the processes of evolutionary selection, in order to improve a particular genetic stock or population. This may be achieved either through ‘negative’ eugenics (for example the provision of screening facilities to pregnant mothers, in order to detect and prevent the inheritance of deleterious recessive genetic conditions), or through ‘positive’ eugenics (in which certain groups may be selected for, or prevented from, reproducing). The latter is generally considered ethically unacceptable; the former is an area of ethical controversy. The Eugenic Society achieved notoriety in the early years of this century for advocating various forms of positive eugenics in order to improve the genetic quality of the national populations in Britain and the United States. See also DARWINISM; GENE.

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evaluation research

A type of policy research devoted to assessing the consequences, intended and unintended, of a new policy programme or of an existing set of policies and practices, including measurement of the extent to which stated goals and objectives are being met, and measurement of displacement and substitution effects. Evaluation research became a self-identified field during the 1960s, and has common roots with the War on Poverty. (It was obviously useful to know the impact of the various social programmes to combat discrimination, deprivation, and other perceived social ills.) Because evaluation research tends to be applied, interdisciplinary, and methodologically opportunistic, practitioners tend to publish via specialized outlets such as the journals Evaluation Review (formerly Evaluation Quarterly) and New Directions in Program Evaluation.

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evaluative theory

See NORMATIVE THEORY.

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evangelical

This term is derived from the Greek word euaggelion meaning ‘Gospel’ or good news (of the salvation of human beings from sin). In sociological terms, it refers to those movements in Protestantism which are concerned with religious revival through an emphasis on the Bible, preaching, personal conversion, and salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. See also RELIGIOUS REVIVAL.

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Evans-Pritchard, Sir Edward Evan

(1902–73)
A leading British social anthropologist who undertook ethnographic studies of a number of African societies. He viewed social anthropology as a humanistic rather than a scientific study of society—perhaps, it is thought, because his first degree was in history. Because of this belief he distanced himself from A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (whom he succeeded as Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford between 1945 and 1970) and other functionalists who sought to generate laws or theories about societies in general. By introducing a historical element to his work, Evans-Pritchard showed how societies change and manage change over time, which represented a major advance on the static analyses of functionalism. At the same time, however, he was concerned to describe societies holistically, and in this sense can be seen as a follower of Émile Durkheim.
Perhaps most importantly, however, Evans-Pritchard played a major role in shifting the focus of anthropology from the study of the function of rituals in society to an examination of the meaning ascribed to rituals by members of that society. He saw one of the main tasks of anthropology to be the translation of one culture into terms understandable to members of another culture. This he achieved most memorably in the two early monographs which made his reputation and are still popular today—Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) and The Nuer (1940).
If Evans-Pritchard was less concerned to be scientific than was Radcliffe-Brown, his work was nevertheless more theoretical than that of Bronislaw Malinowski, from whom he learned his enthusiasm for intensive fieldwork methods. The volume he edited with Meyer Fortes (African Political Systems, 1940) revolutionized political anthropology, and many of Evans-Pritchard's later writings (such as Essays in Social Anthropology, 1964) were about the relationship between anthropology and other social sciences, including sociology. They constitute important contributions to the sociology of knowledge, and offer provocative statements of the problems of subjectivity in social research, and of the need for comparative analysis. The sociological significance of his writings, especially for theories of language, rational action, and religion, is clearly explained in Mary Douglas's commentary on his life and work (Evans-Pritchard, 1980). See also MAGIC, WITCHCRAFT, AND SORCERY.

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event-history analysis

A form of longitudinal study in which the unit of enquiry is not the individual or social group but the socially significant event, for example, change of occupation, spell of unemployment, change of marital status, or other significant life-event. Arguably, the technique is of long standing, having an obvious precursor in the life-history method of the Chicago School. However, a number of recent conceptual and methodological advances have created great interest in the approach, and there is now an extensive literature (especially on life-history and work-history analyses).
Conceptual advances include the concept of life-course analysis, which focuses attention on the overlaps between an individual's experiences and those coincident in historical time, for example changes in government policy, the experiences of other family members, or status of significant other individuals (see
, Transitions: The Family and the Life Course in Historical Perspective, 1978
).
At the level of research techniques, advances in dealing with problems of attrition and recall have extended the reliability of panel data, and the development of a number of statistical techniques and packages for handling recurrent binary events have made the analysis of events (and their associated ‘time windows’) both more sophisticated and easier to present (see
, Analysis of Panel Data, 1986
). The Cox proportional hazard model is a good example of one such technique.
The papers collected in
, Life and Work History Analyses (1991)
give a good idea of the issues and recent developments in the field. One of the leading exponents of this form of analysis, Hans-Peter Blossfeld, has also produced two (co-authored) texts—Event-History Analysis (1989) and Techniques of Event-History Modelling (1995)—which give an excellent account of the explanatory potential of event-history techniques for causal modelling of longitudinal data. See also SEQUENCE ANALYSIS.

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everyday life, sociologies of

The branches of sociology that investigate the organization and meaning of everyday life, usually (but not exclusively) identified with microsociology and with qualitative research into everyday experiences as diverse as pedestrian behaviour, sleep, telephones, work experiences, talk, and time. Jack Douglas's Understanding Everyday Life (1970) is an early statement of the field; Patricia
, ‘Everyday Life Sociology’ (Annual Review of Sociology, 1987)
offers a less partisan and more recent overview.
Everyday life sociologies cover a broad theoretical range. In Andrew Weigert's Sociology of Everyday Life (1981), for example, he suggests four perspectives with this particular emphasis: Erving Goffman's dramaturgical work, which provides a theatrical metaphor for analysing how people present themselves in everyday life; Harold Garfinkel's ethnomethodology, focusing on the procedures through which people assemble their everyday lives; the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz, Thomas Luckmann, and others, which offers a philosophical foundation for the analysis and constitution of everyday consciousness; and Henri Lefebvre's critical theory, which examines the allegedly repressive contradictions of everyday living under capitalism. Only the last of these does not adopt a microsociological frame of reference.

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evolutionary universals

In his later writings, Talcott Parsons tied his functionalist theory (notably the four so-called ‘systems problems’) to an evolutionary perspective, exemplified in his twin volumes on Societies (1966) and The System of Modern Societies (1971). He argued that, like biological organisms, societies progress through their ‘capacity for generalized adaptation’ to their environment. This is achieved mainly through processes of structural differentiation; that is, the development of specialized institutions to perform the social functions necessary to meet increasingly specialized needs. However, this increasing complexity then requires new modes of integration, in order to co-ordinate the new and more specialized elements. This is achieved via the principle of the ‘cybernetic hierarchy’ —increased information exchange or the growth of knowledge. (In this way culture comes to be the dominant influence on the social system in Parsons's work.)
Evolution is then from traditional to modern societies, and progress can be charted via the development (structural differentiation) of evolutionary universals such as bureaucratic organization, money and market complexes, stratification, and the emergence of generalized universalistic norms. Each of these enables a society to adapt more efficiently to its environment (see
‘Evolutionary Universals in Society’, American Sociological Review, 1964
). Critics have argued that, at this level of abstraction, Parsonsian theory is simply a vast taxonomy, is therefore untestable, and says little more than the obvious.

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evolutionism, evolutionary theory

In the nineteenth century, evolutionism was a current of thought based on a biological analogy, but distinguished from Darwinian theory by its deterministic nature. Darwin's general theory of evolution claims that natural species evolve through variation and natural selection, a process that is not necessarily progressive. However, in the evolutionary theory espoused by Victorian social scientists, human societies were bound to improve, change was progressive, and led to further civilization and moral improvement of human society. Such theories were central to the nineteenth-century approach to society and political life. They underpinned colonialism and are still deeply entrenched in Western thought.
's essay on ‘Theories of Progress, Development, Evolution’ (in , A History of Sociological Analysis, 1979)
gives a good history and overview.
Although evolutionary theory in sociology is attributed to Herbert Spencer, it is clear that it was taken for granted by writers as diverse as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Émile Durkheim, and V. Gordon Childe. The fact that it can be traced in the work of both radical and conservative theorists is indicative of the profound cultural importance of evolutionism for Western thought. See also CHANGE, SOCIAL; DARWINISM; EVOLUTIONARY UNIVERSALS; FRAZER, SIR JAMES GEORGE; MATRIARCHY; MORGAN, LEWIS HENRY; PARSONS, TALCOTT; PROGRESS; SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY.

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exchange

See EXCHANGE THEORY; GIFT RELATIONSHIP.

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exchange mobility

See MOBILITY, SOCIAL.

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exchange theory

Exchange theories view social order as the unplanned outcome of acts of exchange between members of society. There are two major variants. Rational-choice (or, as it is sometimes known, rational-action) theory locates the source of order in the personal advantage individuals gain through co-operative exchange. Anthropological-exchange theory claims that both order and the pursuit of individual advantage are effects of the underlying ritual and symbolic nature of the thing exchanged. In both versions social conflict (or disorder) is simply the consequence of the breakdown of the exchange process.
Rational-choice theory can be traced as far back as classical political economy of the eighteenth century, the most familiar example being Adam Smith's theory of the division of labour, expounded at the start of The Wealth of Nations (1776). According to Smith, the hidden hand of the free market leads prudent self-interested individuals to promote the public welfare, even though that was never their intention. The modern discipline of economics, which grew out of political economy, has developed a highly abstract and increasingly mathematically formulated version of rational-exchange theory, according to which prices and the allocation of scarce resources can be explained by rational maximization of utility by economic actors in relation to money outlay. The apparent success of this sophisticated and relatively unified body of theory inevitably led to the suggestion that the same method might be applied to the wider subject-matter of sociology. In the United States especially the term ‘exchange theory’ almost exclusively denotes these attempts to explain social life by rational-choice methods. Examples include the controversial writings of George Homans and Peter Blau, and those of the economist Gary Becker, all of whom in various ways have tried to apply the idea of calculative individual action to those very theatres of social life where, on first sight, it would seem most inappropriate. These include the family, loving relationships, and sentiments of collective altruism and obligation.
One of the most sophisticated treatments is that by Peter Blau (see especially
Exchange and Power in Social Life, 1964
). Blau offers a ‘structural’ version of exchange theory, which goes beyond the psychological reductionism of writers such as George Homans by arguing that ‘reciprocal exchange of extrinsic benefits’ between actors may be absent or incomplete—as, for example, where power relations are wielded. This renders exchange theory—at least for those who accept that much of social behaviour is guided by exchange—sociologically more plausible (see
, Social Exchange Theory—The Two Traditions, 1974
).
More recent contributions have moved away from exchange theories and attempted to link rational choice to other more obviously sociological theoretical traditions, for example to the action frame of reference in order to yield specified propositional models for empirical testing (see
, Foundations of Social Theory, 1990
), and to network analysis and organization theory in the work of Karen Cook (many of whose publications are cited in her edited collection on Social Exchange Theory, 1987). Rational-choice concepts have also been pursued enthusiastically in political science, where writers such as Anthony Downs and Mancur Olson have explored the calculative considerations behind political commitment, voting behaviour, protest movements, and both voluntary and coerced collective organization. Jon Elster, John Roemer, and others have attempted to reformulate Marxist class theory along rational-choice lines (see especially the former's
Making Sense of Marx, 1985
). Elster himself defines rational action theory as ‘first and foremost normative. It tells us what we ought to do in order to achieve our aims as well as possible. It does not, in the standard version, tell us what our aims ought to be… From the normative account, we can derive an explanatory theory by assuming that people are rational in the normatively appropriate sense’. Its central explananda are actions. These actions should be the best way of optimizing an individual's desires, given his or her beliefs, and these desires and beliefs must themselves be rational (or at least internally consistent). In forming their beliefs, people must collect the right amount of evidence, a decision that itself must be subject to the canons of rationality. In other words, ‘rational action involves three optimizing operations: finding the best action, for given beliefs and desires; forming the best-grounded belief, for given evidence; and collecting the right amount of evidence, for given desires and prior beliefs’ (see
Solomonic Judgements: Studies in the Limitations of Rationality, 1989
).
Stated in these rather limited terms, and especially since Elster is careful to specify the limits and failures of rationality in the explanation of action (for example, where action is non-instrumental, grounded instead perhaps in social norms or the preference for social justice), it is hard to see how sociologists might object to the rational-choice programme of research. However, many have remained generally sceptical of attempts to apply rational-choice theory in sociology (notably its exchange-based form), for at least three reasons. First, the success of economic theory depends on there being a definite currency in the market exchange, available to both the individual and the theorist, which can be used as an independent measure of the relation between action and advantage. Happiness, social acceptance, prestige, and influence have been offered as functionally equivalent non-economic currencies in sociology. But these individual goals are also frequently in competition with each other and the explanation of social order calls for an understanding of how such fundamental values are prioritized. Further, this understanding must avoid circularity. Different orderings of values cannot be explained by the advantage (or value) they might have to the actor. Secondly, the theory is invulnerable to refutation, since particular actions of individuals are treated by rational-choice theorists as both the object of explanation and as proof of the theory: whatever action occurs, even if it has unpleasant consequences for the individual, by definition yields a greater advantage than if the action did not occur. (In other words the theory veers towards tautology.) Finally, a venerable tradition in sociology regards the occurrence of exchange between individuals as an effect rather than a cause of social order, because stable relationships of exchange depend on a pre-existing minimum of trust and law enforcement. (For an excellent overview of the relevant issues here see
, ‘Exchange Theory’, in , A History of Sociological Analysis, 1979)
.
Anthropological exchange theory has grown out of the fact that market institutions in non-industrialized societies are typically more rudimentary than those found in modern economies. Exchange does exist, but it contains an important element of obligation, whereas market transactions are by definition based on choice. The comparison of the two has led to the thesis that orderly collective life is a pre-condition, not a consequence, of self-interested choice. This draws on Durkheim's claim that not everything in the contract is contractual, that is, rational (business) exchange cannot itself be the source of settled, morally regulated social order, but instead presupposes it. Social sentiments must be embodied in symbols (or collective representations) of society's obligatory rules and commands which define the scope remaining for the pursuit of individual interest.
Numerous field studies of non-industrial communities have identified two principal forms of obligatory exchange: reciprocal gift exchange and redistributive political exchange. Emile Durkheim's nephew, Marcel Mauss (The Gift, 1925), was one of the first to examine gift-giving ceremonies, among tribal and archaic societies, which embody what has since come to be known as the norm of reciprocity. The ceremonies included the celebrated kula of the Trobriand Islanders and the potlatch among American Indians. In these and many other cases, purely utilitarian exchange was secondary to the prestations (or obligatory gift-giving) incumbent on whole clans, tribes, or families, and which could include courtesies, entertainments, ritual, military assistance, women, children, dances, and feasts. The gifts and payments were never separated from those making and receiving them: the communion and alliance they establish are indissoluble and thereby the exchanges contain an important instrumental element. They symbolize the compulsion to make an equivalent or value-added return for gifts and assistance received and to give them when demanded. Out of and alongside this grows a social economy of bartering and economic exchange. Mauss's work gave rise to extensive field research and theorizing in anthropology which has revealed the complexities behind ceremonial exchange. This includes Bronislaw Malinowski's famous ethnography of the kula and also more recent fieldwork by Helen Codere on the potlatch. In France a whole school of so-called structural anthropology has been built around the relation between symbols, ritual, and social structure. A familiar example is Claude Lévi-Strauss's binary analysis of how the exchange of brides in Aboriginal society expresses and symbolizes pre-existing rules of classification and kinship organization. (The anthropological literature is reviewed and usefully set in context by
, The Rise of Anthropological Theory, 1968
.)
Redistributive exchange requires a political administrative centre exacting taxes and duties which are then reallocated. This is also the principle behind the modern welfare state, but it was widely prevalent in pre-industrial societies, albeit rarely with such ameliorating aims. Political redistribution was often a precursor or alternative to the allocation of goods and resources by the market, but has, since the time of Adam Smith, been the object of scorn by liberal advocates of enlightened self-interest, unregulated market exchange, and a free society.
In a recent review of the extensive and rapidly expanding literature surrounding rational action theories, not only in sociology and anthropology but also in philosophy and other social sciences, John Goldthorpe has provided a useful typology of the many available varieties (see his
‘Rational Action Theory for Sociology’, British Journal of Sociology, 1997
). These are distinguished according to three criteria: namely, whether they have strong or weak rationality requirements; focus on procedural rather than situational rationality; and claim to provide a general rather than a special theory of action.
Strong rationality theories extend to actors' goals, as well as to their beliefs and the action they take towards their goals on the basis of these beliefs, and are exemplified in the version of rational action theory imposed by the requirements of consistency and transitivity in preferences found in mainstream economics: if a person prefers option 1 to option 2, and option 2 to option 3, then he or she must also prefer option 1 to option 3. The requirement of only weak rationality is well-illustrated in Herbert Simon's theory of bounded rationality, which proposes that actors will satisfice (opt for a course of action that is ‘good enough’), either because they lack complete information or because of the sheer complexity of the situations that they face (which makes the persistent maximization of utility empirically impossible).
Goldthorpe's second distinction concerns the extent to which emphasis is given to rationality in action as being procedurally rather than situationally determined. The logic of the market can be seen as constraining actors to an extreme degree—leading to the (largely reactive) ideal-typical economic man. By contrast, some social psychologists have attempted to provide psychological foundations for the idea of a subjectively rational action which follows from the actor's definition of the situation, emphasizing for example the way in which action is framed.
Finally, Goldthorpe argues that there is a wide variation among rational action theories, in the extent to which they aim to provide a general rather than a special theory of action. Economics treats itself largely as a separate science, which studies action directed towards the pursuit of wealth, or satisfaction of material wants, normally within systems of exchange based on money and markets. In turn, therefore, rational action theory becomes a special theory applicable only to this domain of life. However, other social scientists (and even some economists) have argued that versions of rational action theory can serve as the basis for a general theory of action, and are as applicable to (say) the explanation of the domestic division of labour or suicide rates as they are to economic transactions narrowly defined. Becker's work (see especially
The Economic Approach to Human Behavior, 1976
) illustrates this tendency towards what some have called ‘economic imperialism’, the attempt to apply rational action theory to all social action, which is viewed simply from the standpoint of individuals maximizing their utility from a stable set of preferences and accumulating maximum gains from the ‘markets’ (monetary or otherwise) in which they are involved.
Goldthorpe himself argues that sociology is best served by a version of the theory which refers to action that can be treated as subjectively rational and so has rationality requirements of an intermediate kind; recognizes that there is a need to delimit what can count as such action and so focuses attention primarily on situational understanding; and is therefore a special rather than a general theory. However, although he accepts that certain modes of action fall outside the scope of such theory, he is convinced that the rational action approach offers greater promise than do any other available alternatives (for example those which emphasize the importance of cultural traditions, values and norms), both from the point of view of explaining how individual action generates social regularities through the micro-to-macro link, and (where its explanatory power fails) promoting further research of a progressive kind—rather than merely defensive ad hoc explanations. See also STRUCTURALISM.

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exchange value

See CAPITALISM; COMMODIFICATION.

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exclusion, social exclusion

A process by which individuals or households experience deprivation, either of resources (such as income), or of social links to the wider community or society. During the 1980s, the language of social exclusion came increasingly to be used alongside (and sometimes to replace) that of poverty, especially in discussions of social policy in Europe. It is not immediately obvious what is gained by this shift in terminology, since the former concept is no less controversial than the latter, and is commonly used to refer to the same cluster of social problems associated with (for example) unemployment, low income, poor housing, deficient health, or social isolation.
At least three broad and overlapping usages have emerged in this context. The first of these defines social exclusion in relation to social rights and to the barriers or processes by which people are prevented from exercising these. This understanding of the term leads researchers readily into discussions of civil society and to modern notions of citizenship. A second strand in the literature reveals a broadly Durkheimian frame of reference. Here, authors conceptualize social exclusion as a state of social or normative isolation from the wider society, and refer this to related notions such as those of anomie and so to problems of social integration. Finally, the term has been applied to situations of extreme marginalization, especially in the setting of multi-cultural societies. See also CLOSURE.

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existential sociology

A mainly American (especially West Coast) school of sociology, which has emerged as a rejection of most orthodox scientific versions of sociology, claiming as its roots the European existential philosophies of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as the phenomenology of Husserl and Schutz. The claim is usually made that the grand laws of the Enlightenment may become new tyrannies, and need to be challenged by looking at life as it is lived, with all its angst and even terror. In some of the writings of its proponents, the world is without meaning, and the sociologist is charged with the study of the processes by which people make sense of their lives and milieu. In this, it has some similarities with the philosophies of Max Weber and (more obviously perhaps) symbolic interactionism, a claim made by Edward Tiryakian in his book Sociologism and Existentialism (1962).
The most recent proponents of this sociology stress intimate familiarity with the experiences of everyday life. Two books published in 1970 identified the new sociology. Jack Douglas's collection of readings on Understanding Everyday Life distinguished the traditional sociologies from a range of newer ones, while Stanford M. Lyman and Marvin B. Scott's A Sociology of the Absurd provided essays on such topics as time, space, and accounts, which highlighted the new approach and its areas of inquiry. More recent works such as Jack Douglas and J. Johnson's Existential Sociology (1977) and J. Kortaba and A. Fontana's The Existential Self in Society (1984) take this position further.
Existential sociology claims to study human beings in their natural settings and in all their complexities, most importantly incorporating their brute bodies and feelings into the picture, two areas that are often neglected elsewhere in sociology. It looks, for example, at chronic pain.
To date very few sociologists have followed in this tradition, and it has many critics who accuse it of creating yet another schism, of avoiding the central concerns of classical sociology, and of vulgarizing the tradition of existential philosophy developed in Europe. See also EXISTENTIALISM.

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existentialism

A loose philosphical label applied to the work of, amongst others, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietszche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. It refers to the systematic investigation of the nature of human existence, giving priority to immediate experiences of aloneness, death, and moral responsibility. See also EXISTENTIAL SOCIOLOGY.

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exogamy

See ENDOGAMY.

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exogenous variables

See STRUCTURAL EQUATIONS.

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experiment, experimental design, experimental method

See CONTROL (EXPERIMENTAL); CONTROL GROUP; EXPERIMENTER EFFECTS; FIELD EXPERIMENT; NATURAL EXPERIMENT.

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experimental control

See CONTROL (EXPERIMENTAL).

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experimenter effects

A term used in psychology to highlight the ways in which an experimenter or researcher may influence the outcome of an experiment through his or her presence. The most celebrated instance in sociology is probably that of the so-called Hawthorne experiments conducted by Elton Mayo and his colleagues.

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explanandum and explanans (explicandum and explicans)

That which needs to be explained (explanandum) and that which contains the explanation (explanans)—either as a cause, antecedent event, or necessary condition.

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explanation

See CAUSAL MODELLING; CAUSE; INTERPRETATION; MEANING; REALISM.

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explanatory dualism

See DUALISM.

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explanatory reduction

See REDUCTIONISM.

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exploitation

The use for unacceptable purposes of an economic resource, be it land, labour, or market position. Thus, a monopolist could use control of the market to charge consumers excessive prices, or an owner could utilize land in such a way as to damage the natural resources. In orthodox economics the term has virtually no place. In Marxism exploitation is central, and is defined in terms of the labour theory of value, to denote the extraction of surplus value, or the difference between the value of what a worker receives in wages and that which is produced and appropriated by the capitalist. See also FEUDALISM; PATRON-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP.

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exponential growth

The exponential family of curves (Y = ex) describes growth at an increasing (geometrical) ratio (as in the example of compound interest rates). Thomas Malthus (Essay on the Principle of Population, 1789) pointed out that if food resources increase in linear (arithmetical) ratio, and population increases exponentially, extinction is inevitable. A more descriptive model for growth is logistic. See also LOGISTIC GROWTH.

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expressive crowd

See CROWDS.

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expressive ties and instrumental ties

A distinction sometimes employed to characterize social relationships considered to be an end in themselves as against those which are goal-oriented. Thus, for example, expressive ties involve a commitment to the other person, arising perhaps out of kinship or feelings of love, whereas instrumental ties involve co-operation merely in order to achieve some limited and immediate goal (such as the relationship between doctor and patient).

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extended family

See FAMILY, EXTENDED.

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extensive power

See ORGANIZATIONAL REACH.

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external labour-market

See LABOUR-MARKET; LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION.

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externality, externalities

In economic theory it is generally recognized that some of the costs and benefits of economic activities (production, exchange, and the like) are not reflected in market prices. So, for example, air pollution caused by the activity of a company may be experienced as a cost by local residents or by society as a whole, but since clean air does not figure in the costs of production as calculated by the company, the latter has no incentive to reduce its polluting activity. Such costs and benefits which are not expressed in market prices are termed ‘externalities’. Policy problems implicit in social and environmental externalities in market economies are conventionally addressed by economists in the form of strategies for assigning market values to non-market variables and so ‘internalizing’ them, for example through taxation of pollution or scarce-resource use. Recent developments in environmental economics tend to exhibit the limitations of the concept of externality in the face of the systemic character of environmental-economic interactions (see, for example,
Economics, Natural-Resource Scarcity and Development, 1989
).

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externalization

A concept used by phenomenological and some Marxist sociologists to describe how human beings imprint their ideas and projects on the outside world. For example Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in The Social Construction of Reality (1966), view social processes as a dialectic of externalization and internalization.

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extrinsic satisfaction

See WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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extroversion and introversion

A polarity in descriptions of personality, which has a long history, although the terms themselves only became popular in the nineteenth century. Extroversion (literally turning outwards) is typified by outgoing, sociable, impulsive behaviour; introversion (turning inwards) by reflective, withdrawn, responsible behaviour. The psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung linked extroversion with hysterical tendencies, introversion with depression and anxiety, the contrast underpinning his differentiation of personality types. Hans J. Eysenck, employing psychometric techniques and factor analysis, identified two major dimensions of personality and labelled the poles of one dimension extroversion and introversion. Individuals are located at points along the dimensions, the two axes enabling the full mapping of personality differences, and identification of personality types.

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Eysenck, Hans Jurgen

(1916–97)
One of the world's leading but also most controversial psychologists. Eysenck was born in Berlin, but fled to France and then England to escape the rise of the Nazis, and spent most of his working life at the University of London. He was made Professor of Psychology in 1955, and directed the successful Psychology Department of the Institute of Psychiatry, at the Maudsley Hospital in London. He wrote numerous articles and some fifty books, including several best-sellers (Know Your Own IQ, Uses and Abuses of Psychology, Fact and Fiction in Psychology), many of which involved him in fierce disputes, not only with fellow psychologists, but also with an array of other social scientists.
His major contribution to the development of psychology probably lay in his championing of rigorous experimental and psychometric tests for research into the human personality. His monographs often deal with such traits as extroversion and introversion, political attitudes, and abnormal behaviour including mental illness (see, for example,
Scientific Study of Personality, 1952; Psychology of Politics, 1954
;
Dynamics of Anxiety and Hysteria, 1957
). Eysenck was a leading exponent of behaviourism although he also proposed that genetic factors play a substantial part in determining the psychological differences between people. Controversially, he was an early supporter of the thesis that there was a unitary intelligence which could be measured by IQ tests, and concluded that because research showed the average measured intelligence of Blacks was significantly lower than that of Whites the difference must therefore be genetic (although his later work gives greater emphasis to environmental factors, and accepts that the differences between ethnic groups might be changed). He also argued for the importance of genetic factors in explaining criminality. In the 1970s he conducted a series of studies which suggested that the relationship between smoking and cancer was due to personality differences, rather than carcinogens in tobacco, because people who had emotional problems were more likely both to smoke and to succumb to cancer. This work came under heavy criticism when it emerged that the research had received support from funds provided by American tobacco companies. In The Natural History of Creativity (1995), he argued that creativity stems from the psychopathological characteristics of creative persons and geniuses, rooted in their DNA structures.
Ironically, although Eysenck himself was often accused of manipulating data to produce results favourable to his own theories, he was also an outspoken critic of psychological studies which made claims that could not be supported by empirical evidence. For example, he published critiques of both parapsychology and psychoanalysis, including the results from an experiment which seemed to show that distressed people who were given psychotherapy recovered no more quickly than did those who did not receive any such treatment. In his autobiography (Rebel with a Cause, reprinted in 1997), Eysenck describes his career—not inappropriately—as a series of opposition stands, usually against the establishment (including Freudians and those who advocate the use of projective tests) and in favour of rebel minorities (notably proponents of behaviour therapy and genetic studies).

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F

Fabianism

Fabianism describes a broad central tendency in English collectivist thinking about social policy which is essentially non-revolutionary, pragmatic, rational, with a belief in government intervention and the perfectibility of the welfare state; it is strongly associated with the English tradition of empirical research. The Fabian Society, founded in 1884 by (among others) Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw, took its name from a Roman general whose motto was ‘slow but sure’. Avoiding both revolutionary Marxism and Owenite utopianism, the early Fabians embraced a programme of ‘municipal socialism’ and state control of the conditions of labour, to be achieved by the Labour Party with trade-union backing. Political influence was mainly exerted indirectly through marshalling facts in policy-related publications and journalism. Nevertheless, in 1945 over half the members of parliament for the Labour Party were Fabians. Although always concerned with socialist ideals of equality, freedom, and fellowship, Fabian writings have ranged from Richard H. Tawney's egalitarianism, in the 1920s, to the revisionism of Anthony Crosland in the 1950s. Fabianism, when wrongly bracketed with social administration, is sometimes criticized as untheoretical, nationalistic, incremental, bureaucratic, and élitist, being addressed mainly to British politicians and civil servants rather than wider issues, grass-roots politics, and the common people. However this criticism seriously underrates the historical influence and continuing strength of the left-wing empirical tradition in the Fabian Society. See also COLLECTIVISM; SOCIALISM.

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face-to-face interaction

The process in which co-present individuals influence each other's actions; or, as it is defined by Erving Goffman (in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959), ‘the reciprocal influence of individuals upon one another's actions when in one another's immediate physical presence’.

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fact

There is no generalized opposition between the everyday and sociological uses of the term fact. Both suggest that any statement which is true can be described as a fact. For example, it is a fact that British law prohibits murder, that Russia possesses nuclear weapons, and that wealth in America is distributed unequally. However, there is a considerable social science literature on the relationship between facts and theories, or interpretations based on facts. It is for this reason that social science generalizations are often contested. Most sociologists would also accept that many of the most interesting social facts are theory impregnated; that is, they imply certain assumptions about what is significant in society, and how best to conceptualize this. Facts are also considered to be provisional–considered true until shown otherwise. The boundary between fact and assertion is also hard to draw–although many would argue that falsifiability provides a useful criterion for the social sciences.

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fact, social

See SOCIAL FACT.

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factor analysis

A family of statistical techniques for exploring data, generally used to simplify the procedures of analysis, mainly by examining the internal structure of a set of variables in order to identify any underlying constructs. The most common version is so-called principal component factor analysis.
In survey data, it is often the case that attitudinal, cognitive, or evaluative characteristics go together. For example, respondents who are in favour of capital punishment may also be opposed to equality of opportunity for racial minorities, opposed to abortion, and may favour the outlawing of trade unions and the right to strike, so that these items are all intercorrelated. Similarly, we might expect that those who endorse these (in the British context) right-wing political values may also support right-wing economic values, such as the privatization of all state-owned utilities, reduction of welfare state benefits, and suspending of minimum-wage legislation. Where these characteristics do go together, they are said either to be a factor, or to load on to an underlying factor–in this case with what one might call the factor ‘authoritarian conservatism’.
Factor analysis techniques are available in a variety of statistical packages and can be used for a number of different purposes. For example, one common use is to assess the ‘factorial validity’ of the various questions comprising a scale, by establishing whether or not the items are measuring the same concept or variable. Confronted by data from a battery of questions all asking about different aspects of (say) satisfaction with the government, it may be that individual items dealing with particular economic, political, and social policies, the government's degree of trustworthiness, and the respondent's satisfaction with the President are not related, which suggests that these different aspects are seen as conceptually distinct by interviewees. Similarly, for any given set of variables, factor analysis can determine the extent to which these can be reduced to a smaller set in order to simplify the analysis, without losing any of the underlying concepts or variables being measured. Alternatively, researchers may ask respondents to describe the characteristics of a social attribute or person (such as ‘class consciousness’ or ‘mugger’), and factor-analyse the adjectives applied to see how the various characteristics are grouped.
All these uses are ‘exploratory’, in the sense that they attempt to determine which variables are related to which, without in any sense testing or fitting a particular model. Consequently, as is often the case in this kind of analysis, researchers may have difficulty interpreting the underlying factors on to which the different groups of variables load. Some marvellously imaginative labels have been devised by sociologists who have detected apparent underlying factors but have no clear idea of what these higher-order abstractions might be. Less frequently, however, a ‘confirmatory’ factor analysis is undertaken. Here, the researcher anticipates that a number of items measuring (say) ‘job satisfaction’ all form one factor, and this proposition is then tested by comparing the actual results with a solution in which the factor loading is perfect.
Alternative criteria exist for determining the best method for doing the analysis, the number of factors to be retained, and the extent to which the computer should ‘rotate’ factors to make them easier to interpret. An ‘orthogonal rotation’ yields factors which are unrelated to each other whereas an ‘oblique’ rotation allows the factors themselves to be correlated; and, as might be expected, there is some controversy about which procedure is the more plausible in any analysis. Although there are conventions about the extent to which variables should correlate before any are omitted from a factor, and the amount of variance (see VARIATION) to be explained by a factor before it may be ignored as insignificant, these too are matters of some debate. The general rule of thumb is that there should be at least three variables per factor, for meaningful interpretation, and that factors with an ‘eigenvalue’ of less than one should be discarded. (The latter quantity corresponds to the percentage of variance, on average, explained by the equivalent number of variables in the data, and is thus a standardized measure which allows researchers to eliminate those factors that account for less of the variance than the average variable.) However, even when a factor has an eigenvalue greater than 1, there is little to be gained by retaining it unless it can be interpreted and is substantively meaningful. At that point, statistical analysis ceases, and sociological theory and imagination take over. Moreover, the correlation matrix which is produced for the variables in any set and which yields the data from which factors are extracted, requires for its calculation variables which have been measured at the interval level and have a normal distribution. The use of the technique is therefore often accompanied by disputes as to whether or not these conditions have been met. For a useful introduction by a sociologist see
, ‘Factor Analysis’, in , Encyclopedia of Sociology (1992
). See also MEASUREMENT; PERSONALITY; SCREE TEST.

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factory system

A system of manufacturing involving the concentration of materials, fixed capital, and a labour-force, in one or more workplaces or plants. The reasons why factory production developed and largely displaced scattered domestic manufacture are a matter of debate in economic and social history. As a productive system it possesses three main types of efficiency gains for the owner or controller: economic, by allowing advantages of scale, while reducing the costs of distribution of raw materials and finished product; technical, by making possible the deskilling of craft labour, and the use of machines; and managerial, by increasing the scope for disciplined control of the effort bargain. See also CAPITALISM.

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falangism

Literally ‘phalanxism’, a right-wing Spanish movement that developed in the early 1930s under the leadership of José Primo de Rivera, and sought to reproduce German and Italian fascism in Spain. Opposed to the Republican regime, it supported Franco's Nationalist coup of 1936, but became only a minor element in his regime.

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fallacy of composition

The (mistaken) assumption that, if an action is in the collective interest of a group, and if members of that group are rational, then the group must be (in the same sense) collectively rational–and will therefore act in its interest, just as each of its individual rational members would do. The fallacy has been demonstrated by game theorists and theorists of public goods.

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fallacy of misplaced concreteness

See REIFICATION.

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false consciousness

A Marxist concept, referring to thinking that confirms human servitude, rather than emancipating the species essence. It refers to the purpose served by thought in the collective life of humanity. False consciousness hinders the universal class of the proletariat in its liberating and developmental role (see
, Main Currents of Marxism. 1978
).
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Karl Marx writes of ‘the phrases and fantasies of the parties and their real organization and real interests, between their conception of themselves and what they really are’, which appears to suggest the commonsense (and mistaken) interpretation of false consciousness, as a wrong self-perception of interests and identity. However, these superstructures of illusion inhibit class (emancipating) action, by obscuring both the role of reason and its object in the historical process.
Within the class process, Marx's description of the manner in which the ruling ideas of an ascendant class come to exert hegemony on a broader class basis than that exercised by the previous ruling class, has led to further misunderstanding of what is meant by false consciousness. These ruling ideas are progressively more emancipating although still expressing a class interest. They are subversive of the ruling class itself in that their liberating thrust cannot ultimately be turned into a force for consolidating class power. False consciousness is also often mistakenly associated with consumerism and economic instrumentalism (see WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF).
In the writings of György Lukács there exists the distinction between class opportunism, where the struggle is with effects and not with causes of class situation (with the parts and not the whole, the symptoms and not the thing itself), actual consciousness, and real class consciousness. The last of these allegedly becomes obvious in periods of crisis, when the reified forms which fetter the proletariat and its reified consciousness are overcome, through objective necessity and the emergence of the ‘class for itself. Lukács in particular identified the workers’ councils as the signifier of the class consciousness which was overcoming bourgeois consciousness.
David Lockwood (Solidarity and Schism, 1992) examines the Marxist problem of ‘end-shift’, or the relation between class position, actual consciousness, class action, and potential consciousness. Eschewing discussions of revolutionary practice, and elaborating the relationship between immediate and fundamental interests, Lockwood criticizes the attribution by Marxists of standards of rationality which are a necessary prerequisite for the proletariat to overcome false consciousness. This not only overlooks such factors as the status order but also relegates nonrational action to the utilitarian depository of ignorance or error. See also COMMODITY FETISHISM.

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falsification, falsificationism

To falsify a knowledge-claim is to provide evidence that it is false. Since the time of David Hume, empiricist philosophy of science has struggled with the problem of induction: namely, how is it possible to justify inference, from a finite set of instances, to the truth of a universal law whose scope is potentially infinite? In the absence of a convincing answer to this question, our everyday and scientific belief in a regular, ordered, and predictable universe must seem to be a physiologically indispensable, but still irrational, habit of mind.
The original approach to this problem pioneered by Karl Popper involved a reasoned rejection of the question itself. Popper accepted that the problem of induction was insoluble, but it did not follow that science was irrational, or that it could not progress. Instead of seeing discovery of the truth as the aim of science, we should, rather, see scientific activity as a systematic attempt to ‘falsify’–or refute–bold and imaginative conjectures about the nature of the world.
Popper's formulation of this principle is widely acknowledged as one of the most original contributions to the modern philosophy of science. His work is often assimilated to the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle, but Popper was in fact (correctly) viewed by the latter as ‘the official opposition’. Certainly, Popper shared with the Vienna Circle a concern with what differentiated science from other approaches to knowledge and belief, and with passionate advocacy of scientific method. However, he differed from them in several important respects. First, he did not equate testability or scientificity with ‘meaningfulness’. For him, metaphysics, religion, myth, and other forms of discourse which fell on the ‘wrong’ side of the science/non-science division were still meaningful, and might even be true. Such systems of thought in any case formed the indispensable prehistory of properly scientific modes of enquiry. Furthermore, Popper did not follow the logical positivists in their search for indubitable ‘basic statements’ which reported sense-experience, and were crucial to verification.
Popper rejected the most characteristic doctrine of empiricism, in arguing (following Kant) that all descriptions of experiences involve selection and interpretation in terms of some prior conceptual framework, or theory. The model of scientific advance as an inductive process of generalization from particular experiences must therefore be rejected. Popper's alternative model is eloquently captured in the title of one of his books–Conjectures and Refutations (1963). Scientific theories are invented, by a process which cannot be captured by any logical scheme. Once invented, their scientific status is established by their fruitfulness in allowing the deduction of hypotheses which are ‘empirically contentful’. By this, Popper means that they should be highly improbable (in the sense that they rule out as impossible many happenings which might otherwise seem possible), and at the same time be clear and unambiguous in specifying what they rule out. In Popper's version, the empirical testing of a theory is not a matter of finding evidence to support or confirm it, but rather a matter of systematically attempting to show it to be false–a logic of refutation or falsification. In this way Popper avoids the problem of induction which had bedevilled the attempt to justify science in terms of the idea of empirical verification. Popper's position is based on recognition of a very simple asymmetry between the logic of verification and that of falsification in relation to the law-like generalizations of science: universal claims always go beyond what is strictly justified by the (finite) body of evidence for them, but may be decisively refuted by a single counter-instance.
But the situation is more complex than this. Most especially, although the logic of falsification may be simple, its methodology is not. An observation which appears to challenge an established theory may itself be challenged as fraudulent, methodologically suspect, and so on, and will always leave advocates of the theory a range of choices to modify their theory, short of wholesale abandonment. Popper is fully aware of this, and is inclined to present falsificationism as a normative injunction, rather than as a description of the actual practice of scientists. Nevertheless, choice between rival theories is never an arbitrary matter. Although all scientific knowledge must be considered provisional (there is no conclusive proof or disproof), scientists properly prefer, among rival theories which are so far unfalsified and account for the known facts, that theory which has most empirical content.
Popper's colleague, Imre Lakatos, developed a still more complex form of falsificationism in response to the historically based conventionalist arguments of Thomas S. Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and others (see
‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’, in . Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, 1970
).

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family, conjugal

The conjugal family refers to a family system of spouses and their dependent children. In such systems, because the social emphasis is placed primarily on the marital relationship, families are relatively independent of the wider kinship network. Consequently, divorce-rates tend to be high. In this context, the term has come increasingly to be applied also to partners who are in a long-term relationship, but who are not actually married. See also FAMILY, EXTENDED.

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family, extended

This term refers to a family system in which several generations live in one household. Nostalgia for the extended family is based largely on myth, as in Western, non-agrarian societies such households are rare. Conversely, even in conjugal families, wider kinship obligations can be strong. See also FAMILY, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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family, nuclear

The term nuclear family is used to refer to a unit consisting of spouses and their dependent children. Early accounts of the family emphasized the biological imperative underpinning the nuclear family. Anthropological studies reinforce the ‘naturalness’ of the nuclear family and George P. Murdock asserts that it is a ‘universal human grouping’ (Social Structure, 1949). Murdock attributes this to the nuclear family's utility in performing tasks necessary to the survival of the species and to social continuity: namely, the regulation of sexual relationships, reproduction, the socialization of children, and economic co-operation between the sexes. Sociologists emphasize that biology is not sufficient for understanding family forms and insist that it is also necessary to examine how the nuclear family is shaped by ideological, political, and economic processes.
The structural-functionalist interpretation of the family (see
, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, 1955
) is still important because so much subsequent family sociology is a reaction against functionalism. However, the argument that the isolated nuclear family developed in response to the needs of a mature industrial economy is now widely rejected, because of evidence of historical and cross-cultural variation. Parsons argues that the nuclear family fits industrial needs because, on the one hand, it allows families to be mobile and economically independent of the wider kin group; and, on the other hand, it ensures that in an individualistic and impersonal world, adults and children have a stable, if limited, set of affective relationships. William Goode (The Family, 1964) also emphasizes that a nuclear family serves industrial society well in providing what Christopher Lasch calls a Haven in a Heartless World (1977). However, Goode also warns that family forms and functions change, as a result of individual desires and initiatives.
The ‘family as a haven’ thesis raises the question of haven for whom? By treating the family as a unified entity, the realities of power are ignored. Husband, wife, parents, and children all have different interests and differential power. Michael Young and Peter Willmott claimed, in The Symmetrical Family (1973), that the nuclear family is becoming more egalitarian, with more flexible sex-role division. However, this optimistic view has been rejected by many feminist authors, who argue that the family is a repressive institution, especially for women. What is clear is that, with rising divorce-rates and the ageing of the population, the nuclear family is no longer the norm in either Britain or America. An adult will usually experience nuclear families twice: once as a child in his or her family of origin; and, after a period of independence, as a parent in his or her family of marriage (see
, The Family and Industrial Society, 1983
) Nuclear families are therefore increasingly associated only with certain stages in the life-course and are less durable than in the past. They may also have a different role structure now that the majority of married women and mothers are in paid employment. Nevertheless, the nuclear family seems a remarkably resilient institution, surviving various social upheavals and adapting to social change. See also AFFECTIVE INDIVIDUALISM; FAMILY, SOCIOLOGY OF; MARRIAGE; ROLE, CONJUGAL.

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family, sociology of

The family is an intimate domestic group made up of people related to one another by bonds of blood, sexual mating, or legal ties. It has been a very resilient social unit that has survived and adapted through time. Yet, on both sides of the Atlantic, there have been loud claims that families are in decline, and there have even been those who welcome the so-called demise of the family, because it is viewed as an oppressive and bankrupt institution. Nevertheless, family sociology continues to thrive, and is producing a wide range of research that is demythologizing our beliefs about family systems of the past; and expanding our understanding of the diversity of family life, not only between individual nations, but also between various classes, ethnic groups, and regions. More studies are crossing discipline boundaries, looking at the interrelationship of family life and work, and how micro-family relationships are affected by macro-social and economic changes. Family sociology is also incorporating the life-cycle perspective, exploring how families differ at various stages, from early marriage through to old age. Finally, there is an increasing amount of research concerning different family forms, such as lone-parent and reconstituted families; and, inevitably, family sociology has become closely entwined with practical policy concerns.
In recent years there has been a radical reappraisal of the state of the contemporary family and of the desirability of its survival. One strand of this criticism has been to view the family as a bolster for capitalist society (see
, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life, 1976
). A second is the view that the conjugal family oppresses and represses individuality (as argued by, for example,
, The Politics of the Family, 1971
). A third line of criticism can be found in the work of feminist authors, ranging from writers like Jessie Bernard and Ann Oakley, who tend to focus on the nature and consequences of current sex-role divisions in the contemporary family, through to the more radical critique of Michelle Barrett and Mary Mclntosh (The Anti-Social Family, 1982), who regard the family as not only oppressive to women but also an anti-social institution.
Historical studies of families have laid to rest some of the myths about family life of the past. For example, it is a mistake to presume that the nuclear family emerged in response to industrialization, replacing a pre-existing extended family system. Research has indicated that, throughout most of Western Europe, the nuclear family type preceded the early formation of capitalism. Moreover, the romantic image of a close and stable family unit in bygone ages proves unfounded, and studies such as Philippe Aries's Centuries of Childhood (1962) make it quite apparent that the emphasis on intimacy in modern family life is relatively new.
Although there is clearly some continuity of family form over time it is wrong to downplay the diversity of family life. Different ethnic and religious groups hold quite different values and beliefs, and these differences affect not only gender-role conceptions, the internal family division of labour and child-rearing, but also attitudes to work and other social institutions. Similar differences emerge for families of different class backgrounds. Working-class families have been associated with more segregated conjugal roles, although even working-class marriages are now claimed to be symmetrical (see
, The Symmetrical Family, 1973
). Child-raising orientations also vary by social class, with studies by John (Newson) and Elizabeth Newson in England and by Melvin Kohn in America showing that the middle classes tend to emphasize autonomy and the working-class value obedience, in their respective off-spring. Kohn attributes this difference in orientation to the father's occupation, making it clear that family relationships and work roles interconnect.
Families and work have often been conceptualized as separate spheres, with women being linked to the home and men to the workplace. This separation was unfortunately perpetuated by the sociology of the family being conducted as a separate enterprise from the sociology of work and occupations. Clearly, however, the divide makes no sense, and the increased participation of married women in the workplace has highlighted the importance of work and family transactions. Early work by Rhona (Rapoport) and Robert N. Rapoport on dual-career families has expanded into studies exploring the benefits and strains of families with dual-earners. There are, however, many questions still to be answered concerning the interaction of family and work. For example, how do families affect transitions in and out of the labour-market? How do workplace policies and events affect family life? And how do work-family arrangements differ through the life-cycle?
Research concerned with the life-cycle of families parallels the growing interest in individual life-course analysis. A key concept is family time, which addresses the timing and sequence of transitions such as marriage and parenthood, and how such timings are precipitated both by individual family members and by society at large. The timings of earlier events (such as age of first marriage) are shown to have a great impact on later outcomes (such as divorce). Family transitions also have economic consequences. For example, research in the United States has revealed how women and children face a high risk of poverty following divorce.
The proportion of single-parent families has risen dramatically during the second half of the twentieth century. Social research can play an important role in revealing how society can aid single-parent families to adjust and survive—and not just in financial terms. Many children will at some stage live in a single-parent household and it is damaging to view such families as pathological or deviant. Reconstituted families are also coming under scrutiny and, as yet, many important questions remain unanswered. For example, to what degree does a remarriage terminate the existing child-grandparent relationship, and how does this affect the transfer of equity, inheritance, and family culture across the generations?
Inevitably, in family sociology, the line between social research and policy tends to be blurred. There is a long tradition of excellent family studies that combine both theory and practical concerns (see, for example,
, The Family Life of Old People, 1957
, or
, Family Obligations and Social Change, 1989
). The questions facing family sociologists of the future will undoubtedly be different, as changing circumstances bring new problems to light. However, one thing is clear: regardless of changes in its size, shape, membership, or form, if past experience is any guide then families are here to stay. See also AFFECTIVE INDIVIDUALISM; HOUSEHOLD ALLOCATIVE SYSTEM; HOUSEHOLD WORK STRATEGY.

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family, stem

Through field studies of family organization, Frédéric Le Play (1806–82) claimed to have distinguished four fundamental family types: namely, patriarchal, unstable, particularist and stem. The stem family was described as a more flexible modification of the patriarchal type. It was said to be typical of Central Europe, Spain, and Scandinavia; was the ideal for stability and prosperity; and consisted of six or seven members, typically free labourers or farm tenants, with clear intergenerational inheritance of either tenancy or smallholding.

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family, symmetrical

A family form identified by Peter Willmott and Michael Young in the early 1970s and said to be increasingly common, in which the domestic division of labour is less marked, and the home more central to social life and social identities. However, feminist scholarship of the same period highlighted continued inequalities of the domestic division of labour, and the thesis has found little empirical support. See also ROLE, CONJUGAL.

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family systems theory

The application of general systems theorizing to the family. Family systems theory emphasizes the interrelatedness of family members, the difficulty of understanding one family member in isolation from the others, and non-linear causation. It provides the analytical foundation of some, though by no means all, family therapy.

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family therapy

A form of treatment favoured by some social workers and psychotherapists. It shifts attention away from the individual's problems to the family viewed as an interdependent system. Treatment involves analysing and interpreting the observed intra-familial dynamics. Feminists argue it ignores inequalities in power between the sexes, so contributing to tendencies to blame, devalue, and subordinate women.

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family wage

This was an objective adopted by male trade unionists at the turn of the nineteenth century in their fight for improved wages. It is based on the argument that a wage should be sufficient to maintain a wife and children. There was considerable female support for this view–although nowadays it is often cited as a factor in explanations of women's disadvantaged position in the labour-market.

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fascism

Originally, the term denoted only the Italian political party founded by Benito Mussolini in the aftermath of World War I, and the state that was created during the 1920s following the party's seizure of power, although in ordinary usage it has since become a generic term used to refer to almost any authoritarian right-wing ideology, political party, or state. It nevertheless retains a certain precision within political sociology. In the latter context, it has come to refer to parties, ideologies, or states that either advocate or embody a typically terroristic domination of a fused state apparatus, within which there is no separation of powers or rule of law, by a single party infused with a frequently racist and always nationalist petit bourgeois ideology. On this basis, the German Nazi (National Socialist) Party founded by Adolf Hitler, the ideology he elaborated, and state that he created after his seizure of power, have become the archetypes of fascism in place of their Italian equivalents. Naturally, there were many variations on the fascist themes current in inter-war Europe, and these are concisely discussed in
, Varieties of Fascism, 1964
.
Striking as this broadening of reference and change of archetype has been, it has not aroused much controversy, at least in sociological circles. Certainly, it has not provoked nearly as much controversy as that which has raged around the causes and significance of fascism in general, and of its temporary German and Italian successes in particular. It is true that almost all those who have sought to explain the rise of fascism in the inter-war years have regarded it as the product of a crisis associated with some type of transitional process. But what they have signally failed to agree about is the nature of the crises and transitions involved.
For the majority of Weberian sociologists and liberal scholars (such as Ralf Dahrendorf and Reinhard Bendix, addressing the case of Germany, or A. W. Salamone and Frederico Chabod that of Italy) the pertinent transitional process was that which was occurring–or, better, failing to occur–at the level of values. (The general process that is involved here is often referred to as one of modernization.) More concretely, since the chief bearers of the liberal-democratic values that are considered to be appropriate to modern societies were the bourgeoisie and their middle-class allies, such scholars have focused their attention on the failure of these groups to establish their social dominance or keep faith with their values.
Within such an analytical framework it is not surprising that what are typically identified as the ‘fatal crises’ turn out to be essentially political in nature. Thus, in the case of both societies, emphasis is given to the ways in which the legitimacy of what were newly established liberal-democratic regimes was undermined. Among the most important factors cited in this regard are: tensions arising from what were termed in Italy ‘lost territories’; the heavy financial burdens imposed by war reparations (Germany) and the repayment of war loans (Italy); the shared experience of a hyper-inflation which wiped out the savings of the middle classes; the uncertainty and instability that in both cases resulted from the political fragmentation caused by the existence of electoral systems based on proportional representation; and, finally, miscalculations on the part of the bourgeois parties as to the seriousness of the fascist threat.
By contrast, Marxist-inclined writers have traditionally identified the pertinent transition process as an economic one, and have focused instead on the difficulties encountered by both Italy and Germany in making the transition between the competitive and monopoly stages of capitalist development. More recently, they have also stressed the contribution made to these difficulties by the belated passing of absolutism, as for example in the work of Barrington Moore (see his
The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 1966
).
By far the most sophisticated Marxist analysis is that to be found scattered through the pages of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks (1929—35)–although, because of the conditions under which Gramsci wrote, his account is not worked out in great empirical detail and is sometimes rather too elusive for contemporary readers. Guided by the particular interpretation of the relative autonomy of politics and ideology that he brought to Marxism with his concept of hegemony, Gramsci formulated a whole series of middle-range concepts (‘passive revolution’, ‘catastrophic equilibrium’, ‘fordism’, and ‘Caesarism’) which he uses to chart and explain the interaction of economic, political and ideological factors in the aetiology of Italian fascism. In the 1970s several structuralist Marxists sought with mixed success both to develop Gramsci's ideas, and to apply them to the German and other cases. Nicos Poulantzas was by far the most ambitious and prominent of these (see his
Fascism and Dictatorship, 1970
).
Many historians as well as sociologists continue to be attracted to the study of fascism, because of its horrific dramatic interest, its implications for the development of civilization, its suitability for comparative study, and feared recurrence. It provides an almost unrivalled opportunity for sociologists and others to investigate some of the most profound and disturbing aspects of the modern world.

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fatalism

A system of beliefs which holds that everything has its appointed outcome, that this cannot be avoided by effort or foreknowledge, and must merely be accepted as an unavoidable fact of life. The phenomenon has been somewhat neglected by sociologists, although fatalism is often identified as a characteristic of poverty, chronic illness, and unemployment. Thus, for example, Oscar Lewis maintains that it is a central characteristic of the ‘culture of poverty’ (see
The Children of Sanchez, 1961
). Similarly, in her discussion of ‘the passive worker thesis’ (the idea that women are generally more stable, passive, and fundamentally exploitable workers than men), Kate Purcell argues that women's behaviour at work is informed by ‘a fatalistic approach to life’, fostered by gender socialization and women's biology, and reinforced particularly by women manual workers' work and class circumstances
(‘Female Manual Workers, Fatalism and the Reinforcement of Inequalities’, in , Rethinking Social Inequality, 1982)
.
In his study of Suicide (1897), Émile Durkheim defines fatalistic suicide (as in the case of suicides committed by slaves) in terms of excessive regulation of the wants of individuals, a situation in which the future is ‘pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline’. Hope is diminished to the extent that even life itself becomes a matter of indifference. In an extension of the Durkheimian discussion, David Lockwood (Solidarity and Schism, 1992) suggests that fatalism is a matter of degree, and can result from either ‘physical or moral despotism’; that is, from force of circumstances such as the condition of slavery, or the constraints imposed by a system of explicitly fatalistic beliefs such as those embraced by the Hindu doctrine of karma–samsara–moksha. Fatalism grounded in a specifically fatalistic ideology (such as Hindu soteriology) engenders an ethical commitment. By comparison the existential fatalism induced by slavery is grounded primarily in ritual rather than beliefs, and the subordinate strata do not approve of their condition but judge it merely to be unalterable. In both cases, however, ‘what is especially conducive to a fatalistic attitude is not so much the degree of oppressive discipline involved, but rather the fact that social constraint is experienced as an external, inevitable and impersonal condition’.

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fatherhood

An apparently commonsense concept, but one which is too often used loosely by sociologists, since it could mean: a man through whom ties of filiation (‘being the child of’) are traced; a man through whom property rights are traced; a man whose acknowledged (not necessarily genetic) relationship to the child establishes its full social membership within the society; a man whose acknowledged relationship to the child establishes its social group membership within a society; or any combination of these. Different societies, with different systems of descent and transmission of rights, employ the term differently.

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Featherman-Jones-Hauser hypothesis

This states that there exists a cross-national similarity of social mobility rates at the level of underlying ‘relative mobility chances’, such that in all societies having a nuclear family system and market economy, the mobility pattern will be ‘basically the same’ (see
, ‘Assumptions of Social Mobility Research in the US: The Case of Occupational Status’, Social Science Research, 1975
). The argument has since been much disputed (see
, The Constant Flux, 1992
).
The manner in which the thesis is formulated raises two problems for the researcher who attempts to subject it to empirical testing. The first is the gap between the loose verbal formulation of the argument and the strict ‘common social fluidity model’ against which it is conventionally tested. The former refers to a basic similarity whereas the latter postulates identical intergenerational social mobility chances across nations. The second problem is to determine whether or not the thesis is intended to apply to societies without a market economy–such as, for example, the former communist states of Central and Eastern Europe.
The latter issue is the more easily resolved. Featherman and his colleagues themselves raise the possibility that their arguments also apply in non-capitalist countries. In any case, it is certainly possible to extend the hypothesis in this way, and subsequent researchers have routinely included data for communist (and formerly communist) countries in their investigations.
However, the terminological inexactitude of the hypothesis itself continues to cause difficulties, so that debate about its empirical standing remains lively and unresolved. On the one hand, there are those such as Erikson and Goldthorpe who argue that the weaker (verbal) formulation is essentially sound, and that the key features of cross-nationally common fluidity patterns can be represented in a so-called ‘core model’. Although their data for fifteen countries show some cross- national variations in relative rates that are not captured by this model, these are relatively minor. On the other hand, Harry Ganzeboom, Ruud Luijkx, and Donald Treiman have argued that analysis of 149 intergenerational class mobility tables from 35 countries ‘suggests that the hypothesis of common social fluidity is simply incorrect’. Their results seem to show that ‘the between-country variance accounts for about one third of the total variance in the mobility parameters, indicating that there are significant between-country differences’
(‘Intergenerational Class Mobility in Comparative Perspective’, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 1989)
.
It is difficult to arbitrate between these and other similarly competing accounts, not only because they tend to adopt different criteria as to what constitutes mobility regimes that are ‘basically the same’, but also because they have invariably been arrived at from an analysis of alternative data-sets, coded to class schemes (including Goldthorpe class schemes) of varying complexity and reliability, and conducted on the basis of competing statistical tools. It does seem to be generally agreed, however, that the cross-nationally common element in relative mobility chances heavily predominates over the cross-nationally variable one.

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fecundity

The biological capacity for reproduction of individuals or populations. In demography, fecundity (as the potential for childbearing) is contrasted with fertility, or actual childbearing. The infecund are those who cannot have children though they may have been fertile and/or fecund in the past.

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federalism

A political system and philosophy which, within a particular nation-state, recognizes a central government for the whole country and autonomous regional governments for constituent states or provinces. The powers and functions of government are divided between the two levels. Federal systems must embody a means of resolving conflict between the centre and regions or between any two regions. Regional authorities are given specific duties and protected by rights from encroachment by the centre. Both levels of government have the right to legislate for tax. Switzerland and the United States are contemporary examples of federal political systems. The term is sometimes also applied to commercial and other organizations, as for example in the case of federal (as against centralized) labour movements, but its main application is with regard to systems of government.

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feedback

See CYBERNETICS; EQUILIBRIUM.

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feeling rules

A concept developed by Arlie Hochschild (The Managed Heart, 1983) to draw attention to the existence of ‘rules about what feeling is or is not appropriate to a given social setting’. See also EMOTION, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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femininity

A summary term, contrasted with masculinity, for the distinctive ways of acting and feeling on the part of women. Precisely what characteristics are listed varies, though passivity, dependence, and weakness are usually mentioned. Sociologists point to the social origins of femininity and female subjectivity, and stress their ideological role, but discussions of femininity often lapse into essentialism.

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feminism, feminist

A social movement, having its origins in eighteenth-century England, which seeks to achieve equality between the sexes by extension of rights for women. In the 1890s the term referred specifically to the women and men who campaigned for votes for women and women's access to education and the professions. After the achievement of the vote (1920 in the United States and 1928 in Britain), an enduring tension within feminism became more evident, between the objective of equal rights with men in the public sphere and the recognition of women's difference from men with the objective of enhancing their position in the private sphere of the family. The ‘second wave’ of feminism from 1969 onwards has many different strands, but there appears to be some common core and there have been movements on behalf of women in almost every country and on a world scale through the United Nations decade for women, 1975–85.
‘Second wave’ feminism has had a significant impact on sociology. Many more women are gaining recognition for their academic work. There have been feminist critiques of the male-centred nature of much sociological theory–such as theories of crime that make no use of the fact that most criminals are male. There has been an enormous growth in research on women's lives. Perhaps most importantly, there have developed theories about the inequality of the sexes, using such concepts as gender, patriarchy, and sex roles. (For a general discussion of the implications of feminist theory for sociology see
, Feminism and Sociological Theory, 1989
.)
The feminist critique of (‘malestream’) sociology is well illustrated in the work of American sociologists like Jessie Bernard and Alice Rossi. The dissection of gender relations is a common strand in many of Bernard's books and articles, first from an occupational perspective in Academic Women (1964), then an interpersonal one in Future of Marriage (1972), and most recently a global perspective in The Female World (1987). Rossi has challenged sociologists to take seriously the biological component of human behaviour, and has criticized conventional interpretations of the position of women in families and politics and employment, notably in volumes such as Academic Women on the Move (1973), Gender and the Life-Course (1985), and Feminists in Politics (1982). Similarly, in Britain, Ann Oakley popularized feminist scholarship in the 1970s, via empirical research on housework (The Sociology of Housework, 1974) and on childbearing (From Here to Maternity, 1979). See also CRIMINOLOGY, FEMINIST; CULTURAL THEORY; METHODOLOGY, FEMINIST; MOTHERHOOD.

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feminist criminology

See CRIMINOLOGY, FEMINIST.

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feminist methodology

See METHODOLOGY, FEMINIST.

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Ferguson, Adam

(1724–1816)
Though less revered as a philosopher than his fellow luminary of the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume, Ferguson has a better claim to be considered among the founders of modern sociology. His critique of the ‘self-interest’ view of human nature followed Hume's lead, but Ferguson took his view of humans as inescapably social in nature forward into a critical analysis of the new commercial civilization then displacing the older clan-based society of the Scottish Highlands. His views on the effects of the division of labour were significant precursors of later work on this topic by Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim, and the concepts of self-estrangement and alienation are also prefigured in Ferguson's writings. See also INTERESTS.

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fertility, fertility rate

The actual level of childbearing of an individual or population. There are different ways of measuring the fertility of a population. The simplest measure, the crude birth-rate, relates the number of live births in a given year to the total population size in that year. More complex measures relate the year's births to more restricted populations, usually childbearing women, to yield a better index of underlying fertility. The denominator may be all women of childbearing years (commonly set at 15 to 44) or women in more specific age-bands (age-specific fertility rates). Fertility rates may be combined with mortality rates to generate an overall reproduction rate.
Measures relating fertility to population (whether total or specific) in a given year are termed period rates. Arguably of more value in detecting fertility trends are so-called cohort rates. These measure the births to women grouped according to year of birth (birth cohorts) or age at marriage (marriage cohorts). Cohort fertility rates can reveal variations in the timing of childbearing between different cohorts and indicate whether changes in period measures are due to changes in the spacing of births or to changes in overall family size (though final figures can only be obtained after a lengthy period).
Historically there has been a long-term decline in levels of fertility in industrial societies, a decline that is associated with economic development and restructuring, reductions in child mortality, changes in welfare provision and the economic and social value of children, and the changing social position of women.

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fetishism of commodities

See COMMODITY FETISHISM.

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feudalism

Some historians have argued that feudalism is a technical term that can only be applied to Western European institutions of the Middle Ages. Others (including most sociologists) have conceptualized the phenomenon in a more abstract way, as a general method of political organization, and one which can therefore be identified in other times and places (such as Tokugawa Japan).
The term originated in seventeenth-century England as a way of talking about a mode of landholding that was then rapidly disappearing. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was widely taken up by legal scholars and in this way entered the vocabularies of the founders of sociology. Although the founders typically used the term to refer to the type of society from whence capitalism had emerged in Western Europe, none of them explicitly formulated a fully developed concept of feudalism. However, as will become apparent below, highly influential embryos of such a concept may be derived without much difficulty from the historical writings of both Karl Marx and Max Weber.
There have been and there remain disputes about how the concept of feudalism should be formulated. All of the specifically sociological conceptualizations are nomothetic (generalizing) in character. The best-known ideographic (individualizing) formulation is that arrived at by the French historian Marc Bloch in his Feudal Society (1961). Bloch's account deserves some attention, not only because it has been highly influential in itself, but also because the contrast between it and the various sociological alternatives illustrates some of the central disputes about concept formation in the social sciences.
Bloch's methodological premiss is that each society is unique and has to be understood in its own terms. (He only grudgingly admits, mentioning Japan specifically, that something like feudalism may have existed outside of the West European context.) His work is also profoundly empiricist and humanist in Louis Althusser's senses of these terms. The consequences of these premisses are apparent in his formulation of the core relation of feudalism–vassalage. In the course of a highly detailed study of France during the Middle Ages, he defines vassalage as ‘the warrior ideal’, or a contract of mutual benefit freely entered into ‘by two living men confronting each other’. From this relationship all the other characteristics of feudal societies follow: hereditary succession; enfeoffment (the granting of land by lords to their vassals); the fragmentation of authority; and the existence of a confinable and taxable but otherwise self-disciplining peasantry. What inevitably (but regrettably in Bloch's view) followed from the institutionalization of vassalage, was the tarnishing of ‘the purity of the (original) obligation’, and the gradual dissolution of the way of life constructed around it.
Almost by definition, no properly sociological approach to social phenomena is likely to start from the assumption that each society must be considered separately and as wholly unique, and this certainly has proved to be the case in the literature relating to feudalism in Western Europe (if not in Japan). On the contrary, the sine qua non of most macro-sociological explanation is the assumption of comparability, and what differentiates explanations from one another is whether they depend upon comparisons that were made before or after the formulation of the concepts upon which they rest; that is, whether they depend upon empiricist or realist modes of formulation, respectively.
Where the mode of formulation is empiricist, as in the case of the contributors to the collection edited by Joseph Strayer and Rushton Coulborn (Feudalism in History, 1956), a large number of cases of possible feudalisms are compared and any shared characteristics are then formed into a generalization. Interestingly, in this case the generalization is to all intents and purposes the same as that produced by Bloch, minus the romanticism and, by the same token, any means of grasping the internal dynamics of the system.
Because it is not a straightforward empirical generalization Weber's ideal type of feudalism does not share this weakness. Although it is nowhere explicitly formulated, this ideal-type may be extracted relatively easily from the discussions of feudal social relations to be found in Weber's Economy and Society (1922) and General Economic History (1923). In Weberian terms, feudalism represented an instance of the routinization of charisma, in the context of a traditional mode of domination. Thus, power was organized in a patrimonial manner, underpinned by a system of enfeoffment, and rested upon a system of exploitation whereby serfs (unfree peasants) were forced, in exchange for the right to work land, to pay varying and often multiple forms of rent (in labour, cash, or kind) to their lords. According to Weber it was the last of these, the struggles over rent, that gave the system its internal dynamic.
There is some textual evidence to suggest that Weber derived his concept of feudal rent from that constructed by Marx on the basis of the latter's realist mode of concept formation. Certainly, there are striking similarities between the two concepts, as well as in the reasoning used in their support. Most importantly, both theorists explain why exploitation took the form of rents extracted on the basis of the lords' superior might by arguing that the lords had no alternative, given their exclusion from the process of production. However, in their book Precapitalist Modes of Production (1975), Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst argue that Marx would have, or at least should have, revised this argument, in the light of the advances he made in refining his general concept of mode of production in Capital. They support this stance by arguing that feudal lords did in fact play an important role in the production process. On this basis, then, Hindess and Hirst argue that the importance ascribed by Marx and others to political coercion as the critical component of feudalism should be rejected, as a sign of conceptual underdevelopment, and replaced by a specification of the economic relations which allowed the lords to extract surplus product from the serfs.

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fiat, measurement by

See MEASUREMENT BY FIAT.

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field experiment

An experiment carried out in a ‘natural’ setting; that is, unlike in the case of laboratory experiments, the setting is not created by the researcher. Field experiments are relatively rare since identifying settings where experimental intervention is both feasible and ethical is difficult. Less artificial than laboratory experiments, fewer variables are controlled, so inferences are often difficult. For a review and discussion of examples see
, Research Design (1987
).

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field theory

An approach developed by German-American psychologist Kurt Lewin in the 1950s, influenced by Gestalt theory. Individual behaviour is seen as being determined by the totality of the individual's situation–their psychological field or life-space. This contains the individual with goals, needs, and their perceived environment, and can be mapped using vectors.

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fieldwork

Data collection for any study that involves talking to people or asking them questions about their activities and views, sometimes including attempts at systematic observation of their behaviour. Fieldwork ranges from large-scale survey interviewing by hundreds of professional interviewers, to the lone researcher recording information collected through participant observation in a small-scale case-study (see
, In the Field: An Introduction to Field Research, 1984
). The term is sometimes extended to any research activity that takes one out of the office and into the ‘field’ that is the subject of study.

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figurational sociology

See ELIAS, NORBERT.

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figure–ground contrast

See PERCEPTION.

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financial capitalism

See CAPITALISM.

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first-order constructs

See PHENOMENOLOGY.

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First World

North America, Western Europe, Japan, and Australasia. The term was originally applied to the first group of countries to industrialize and to achieve high levels of growth and a rising standard of living for their populations. See also THIRD WORLD.

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fiscal crisis (of the state)

A term coined by James O'Connor (The Fiscal Crisis of the State, 1973), to denote the ‘structural gap’ in advanced capitalist societies between state revenues and expenses, which leads to economic, social, and political crises; now used more widely to describe such fiscal difficulties. For example, in Contradictions of the Welfare State (1984) and Disorganized Capitalism (1985), the German sociologist Claus Offe examines the legitimation problems of advanced welfare-capitalist societies, and what he calls the ‘crises of crises management’; namely, the problems faced by states in attempting to manage the socio-political problems (notably the fiscal crises, demand overload, and decline of the ‘achievement principle’) that he sees as being inherent in such social systems.

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fixed capital

See CAPITAL.

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fixed-choice question

See CLOSED RESPONSE.

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flexibility, labour-market

See LABOUR-MARKET FLEXIBILITY.

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flexible employment

Said increasingly to characterize the industrial firms and economies of the post-industrial world, it assumes two forms. Functional flexibility (or post-fordism) means the adaptation of work organization, skills, and machinery, so as to cope with the constantly changing market and technological environment of the global economy of the late twentieth century. So-called flexible firms are also said to adopt numerical flexibility, using non-standard forms of employment to allow rapid changes in labour recruitment and discharge, in the face of product-market fluctuations. Only equivocal empirical evidence exists of flexible employment growth; likewise, that it is due to long-term change, rather than relatively short-term cyclical influences. See also FORDISM.

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flexible work, flexible production, flexible specialization

These terms are part of a widespread debate about changing industrial structure and work organization. It is argued that increasing national and international competition is forcing greater flexibility on firms in order to respond more quickly to changes in the product-market. This includes greater flexibility in employment levels (numerical flexibility), job tasks and skills (functional flexibility), and payment systems (financial flexibility). Flexible specialization implies small, decentralized firms oriented towards niche markets, rather than (as in fordism) large, centralized, mass-production firms. Much of the debate has been prompted by studies of Japanese manufacturing and corporations (see
, Flexible Rigidities, 1986
). For a case-study of the international automobile industry see
, Flexible Production (1994
). See also FLEXIBLE EMPLOYMENT; JUST-IN-TIME SYSTEM; SOCIO-TECHNICAL SYSTEM.

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focus groups

A research strategy which involves intensive discussion and interviewing of small groups of people, on a given ‘focus’ or issue, usually on a number of occasions over a period of time. The technique is fully expounded in both
, Focus Groups as Qualitative Research (1988)
and
, Focus Groups: A Practical Guide (1988)
.

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focused crowd

See CROWDS.

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focused interaction

A concept applied to the co-ordinating of face-to-face interaction by two or more actors. The contrast is with unfocused interaction, which is communication by gestures and signals that arises simply through actors being co-present, as in the case for example of body language. The distinction is used by Erving Goffman, in his description of the framing of interaction, and Anthony Giddens builds the idea into his structuration theory.

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folk devils

A term employed most famously by Stanley Cohen in his study of the moral panic about the ‘Mods’ and ‘Rockers’ subcultures in England during the 1960s (see
Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 1972
). Drawing upon interactionist approaches to the sociology of collective behaviour, Cohen suggests that society creates a gallery of social types ‘to show its members which roles should be avoided and which should be emulated’. Those groups seen as deviant, and of which society disapproves, occupy ‘a constant position as folk devils: visible reminders of what we should not be’. The term has since been used widely in other studies of representations of deviance. See also LABELLING.

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folk society

An ideal type referring to ‘primitive’ agrarian societies in all historical periods which, it is assumed, have none of the economic or socio-cultural characteristics of ‘modern’ urban-industrial societies. The concept is often criticized on theoretical and empirical grounds and for its ideological bias. See also FOLK–URBAN CONTINUUM.

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folk–urban continuum

A concept relating to the transition from rural to urban societies. Investigation of the social, cultural, and economic characteristics of individual societies allows them to be positioned at different points along an evolutionary path. See also FOLK SOCIETY.

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folkways

A term associated with the work of William Graham Sumner, whose major contribution to sociology was his analysis of the nature, origins, and significance of folkways and mores. The former are group habits (or customs). In Sumner's view, societies develop (by trial and error) the particular ways of acting that are suited to their milieu; these ways of behaving are repeated and produce habits (in individuals) and customs (in groups); and these habits–or folkways–then become the commonly accepted ways of doing things in that society. Sumner is vague about the precise origins of folkways, and inconsistent in stating their relationship to mores, which are essentially folkways embodying moral imperatives about what is right and true. Sometimes the two terms are opposed, but occasionally folkways are deemed to include all commonly accepted ways of thinking, including mores (see
Folkways, 1906
).

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food, sociological studies of

An area of sociology which, with some significant exceptions (as in the work of Norbert Elias on table-manners), is of very recent interest, despite the quite widespread and long-standing attention to the rituals surrounding food in the work of social anthropologists. (
's studies, such as The Raw and the Cooked, 1970
, are a notable illustration of the latter.) The anthropological interest in food no doubt arises from the attention to the details of everyday life that are a feature of ethnographic studies. The prohibitions and prescriptions relating to food provide a useful vehicle for the examination of cultural differences. Without the same concern to describe the full detail of everyday behaviour, so much of which is taken for granted, ideas and practices concerning food have until recently generally seemed of little significance to sociologists, except in the context either of studies of poverty and deprivation, or of the study of agriculture and industry.
The expanding sociological interest in food stems most obviously from, and is a reflection of, the growing social and cultural significance of food in affluent industrial societies. Whereas the preparation and consumption of food may often have been simply seen as the meeting of a biological need, they are now seen as of diverse cultural and social significance. On the one hand, they are regarded as of major significance to the individual's bodily health, with diet identified as a key health-related behaviour, and a range of studies now examining many aspects of food and diet. There has also been an enormous increase in eating disorders, such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia, which are more frequently detected in women than men and are seen as in part a reflection of the cultural significance attached to diet and the body. On the other hand, the preparation and consumption of food within the home are seen as important aspects of the gender-based division of labour and distribution of resources. In addition, the consumption of food in the public sphere is not only an increasingly common leisure activity, but is also seen to be important to the maintenance of the social networks surrounding paid employment.
The sociology of food is therefore likely to be an expanding area of research for some years to come. Jack Goody's Cooking, Cuisine and Class (1982) and Stephen Mennell's All Manners of Food (1985) give good–though quite different–impressions of the field.

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forces of production

Marxist political economy makes an analytical distinction between two aspects of economic activity. On the one hand are the ‘social relations’ of production, which relate to the maintenance of social domination, the extraction of an economic surplus, and the exploitation of labour. On the other hand, there are the ‘forces of production’, those elements and relations which are necessary, whatever the social structure, if materials, objects, and forces, drawn from nature, are to be modified into a form suitable to meet some human purpose (‘use value’). There is no agreement about the exact scope of the term ‘forces of production’, but at various times Marx and Engels included the following: ‘raw materials’, the bodies or substances to be worked upon in the labour-process, and always considered by Marx and Engels to be the products of prior expenditures of human labour; ‘instruments of production’, the tools or machinery employed in modifying raw materials (including in some versions, human organs themselves); the human capacity for work (‘labour-power’), a function of bodily organization, fitness, skill, knowledge, and such like; and, finally, the forms of social division and co-ordination of labour required by the particular characteristics of a given labour-process (sometimes called ‘technical relations’ of production). A further category of requirements for production–land, air, water, and other broadly environmental or contextual conditions–was recognized by Marx and Engels, but often mistakenly included among the instruments of production. Marx and Engels postulated a long-run historical trend in human societies, dramatically accelerated by capitalism, for the forces of production (combined human productive powers) to develop. This developmental process would enhance humanity's capacity to control and regulate nature, and so meet universal human needs with a minimum of expenditure of unrewarding effort. This state of developed productive forces was to be a pre-condition for the future communist realm of freedom beyond scarcity and the necessity for labour.

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fordism

As defined by Antonio Gramsci, this refers to a form of productive organization thought to be typical of advanced capitalism and exemplified by Henry Ford's system of mass automobile production. This allied labour management according to the principles of scientific management (‘Taylorism’) with a wider reorganization of production and marketing, involving a moving assembly line, standardized outputs, and demand stimulation by a combination of low prices, high wages, advertising, and consumer credit. Gramsci suggested that high levels of production could only be sustained by ‘tempering compulsion … with persuasion’. Fordism provided workers with high wages and rising levels of consumption in exchange for an intensified work regime.
Many subsequent (mainly neo-Marxist) theorists have used the concept in analysing the industrial and social order of full employment, mass production, the welfare state, and rising standards of consumption, which characterized advanced capitalist societies after the Second World War. However, the term is used variously to refer to assembly-line mass production, certain leading sectors of industry, a hegemonic form of industrial organization, or a ‘mode of regulation’–the meaning of which probably comes closest to that intended by Gramsci.
Following the economic crises of the 1970s and 1980s, with associated changes in the social and technical organization of production and the alleged coming of post-industrial society, some suggest that fordism is in terminal crisis, being succeeded by ‘post-fordism’, based on so-called flexible production systems. This new terminology also carries varying meanings according to the context of use and author. See also REGULATION THEORY.

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foreign aid

The transfer of state resources through loans, grants, or provision of goods, from more to less developed countries, for development or emergency relief purposes. This can be done on a bilateral basis, or through multilateral bodies such as United Nations agencies, the European Economic Community, or World Bank. From the 1970s it has increasingly been queried as a means of promoting economic growth.

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formal justice

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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formal operations stage

See PIAGET, JEAN.

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formal organization

See FORMAL STRUCTURE.

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formal rationality

As defined by Max Weber in his account of the market and economic action, this refers to the extent of impersonal quantitative calculation (that is, risk assessment) which is possible and applied in provisioning for needs. Money is the best means for ensuring such calculability within a particular institutional order. The concept is best understood in contradistinction to (as well as in the context of) ‘substantive rationality’, which involves provisioning according to some ultimate values, be they status, egalitarian, social justice, or indeed any infinite variety of value-scales by which to judge the outcome of economic action. Given certain substantive conditions–such as legal formalism, bureaucratic administration, free labour, and a system of property rights–formal rationality refers to the calculability of means and procedures, sub-stantive rationality to the value of ends or outcomes. The two are in constant tension, in so far as social action is oriented to ends, beliefs, and value commitment.

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formal structure, formal organization

A term first used by the Human Relations Movement for the managerial blueprint, organizational chart, or chain of authority and communication in an organization. It may be contrasted with the informal organization or system of human relations through which the organization actually operates, and which typically departs (sometimes widely) from the formal structure. See also ORGANIZATION THEORY.

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formalism, formal sociology

A branch of sociology usually considered to have been founded by Georg Simmel, which aims to capture the underlying forms of social relations, and thus to provide a ‘geometry of social life’.
Simmel distinguished the ‘content’ of social life (wars, families, education, politics) from its ‘forms’ (such as, for example, conflict), which cut across all such areas, and through which social life is patterned. Conflict, as a social form, may be found in situations as diverse as those of family life and politics, and to it certain common features will accrue. Contents vary–but forms emerge as the central organizing features of social life. Among the forms central to Simmel's thinking were the significance of numbers for group alignments (isolated individuals, dyads, triads), patterns of superordination and subordination, group relationships (conflicts, competitions, coalitions), identities and roles (the stranger, the poor), disclosures (secrets, the secret society), and evaluations (prices, exchanges).
Most sociology concentrates upon content: there are sociologies of education, the family, the media, and so forth. Formalism shuns this approach to sociology, by cutting across such topics, and seeking to identify generic processes and patterns through which they are socially constituted: stigma, stratification, and secrecy, for instance, may be forms cutting through the substantive areas of education, family, and media.
After Simmel, the earliest development of such an approach was to be found in the work of the Chicago interactionists. Robert Park was a student of Simmel's, and brought to Chicago a concern both to study the richness of the empirical world as revealed in the city, and a concern to detect the patterns of city life. The most popular textbook of the day (
's An Introduction to Sociology
) is largely organized according to ‘forms’.
Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss have attempted to develop formal sociology in their work on dying, moving from a rich substantive area of research (cancer wards and the dying process), to a more sustained theoretical analysis of common forms (such as status passages and awareness contexts). For example, moving from a detailed case-study of a dying patient, they were able to seek comparisons with other major status changes in order to develop a formal theory of status passage, which postulated many features in common with other status passages (see
Status Passage, 1967
). From a grounded substantive study came more comparative, abstract, and formal theory. More recently,
(‘Generic Social Processes’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 1987)
has outlined five key dimensions of group life that are needed for a processual generic sociology: acquiring perspectives, achieving identity, being involved, doing activity, and experiencing relationships.
There have been a number of other attempts to construct a formal theory of social life, including John Lofland's Doing Social Life (1976) and Carl Couch's Constructing Social Life (1975), as well as more specific case-studies, such as Lewis Coser's The Functions of Social Conflict (1956) and Erving Goffman's Stigma (1961).
There is some dispute about the role and nature of formal sociology. Some see it as seeking fixed structures of an obdurate social order; others view it as depicting the very interactions out of which social life is constituted; while for many it is simply an analytic device produced by sociologists seeking to impose order on an otherwise chaotic universe. See also SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM.

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Fortes, Meyer

(1906–83)
A South African social anthropologist, passionate defender of structural-functionalism, who spent much of his working life in Britain. His ethnographic work was concerned especially with the kinship system of the Tallensi of Northern Ghana (The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi, 1949) and segmentary political systems (African Political Systems, 1940).

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Foucault, Michel

(1926–84)
A controversial French post-structuralist philosopher, professor of ‘the history of systems of thought’, who had a pronounced (some say unfortunate) impact on sociology from the mid 1970s onwards. His work defies easy description and characterization. The one major intellectual influence on his work was probably Nietzsche.
The most straightforward way to approach Foucault's work is to read his case-studies of madness, medicine, prisons, and sexuality. In Madness and Civilization (1961), he charts the emergence of a world of reason and unreason, symbolized in the segregating asylum and the birth of psychiatry. The book spans the period that was Foucault's principal concern: the Middle Ages through the Renaissance to the Modern Period starting with the early nineteenth century. In The Birth of the Clinic (1963) he charts the shifts from the anatomo-classical method to modern scientific medicine. As ‘the gaze’ shifts from outside the body to inside it, medicine becomes the founding science of humanity, and the human being becomes an ‘object of positive knowledge’. In Discipline and Punish (1975) Foucault examines changes in penal regimes, the ‘micro-physics of power’ from the public execution of the classical era to the timetable of the modern prison, from the regulation of the body to the regulation of the soul. The strategies of confinement in the prison eventually become the model for the whole of modern society: a regime of observation, surveillance, classification, hierarchy, rules, discipline, and social control. The History of Sexuality (vol. i, 1976) was to appear in six volumes but was uncompleted at the time of Foucault's death. It is in this work that Foucault's much debated account of power is most clearly stated in the proposition that ‘discursive formations’ (structures of knowledge or epistemes) both constitute and exert power over social objects (including human bodies).
These four studies are probably the most accessible to students. However none can be seen as a straightforward history of progress. Rather, Foucault's aim is to demonstrate major shifts in the discourses through which such topics become constituted: to show how new ‘regimes of truth’ order our knowledge, our categorization systems, our beliefs, and our practices. Foucault's work therefore moves well beyond the case-study to broader theoretical speculations, about the organization of knowledge and power in the modern world, and the implications of particular discursive formations for social control (see especially
The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969, and The Order of Things, 1966
).
Foucault's writing has been described both as profoundly original and hopelessly opaque. It achieved enormous popular status and some of his studies became best-sellers. There has also developed a substantial industry of critical commentary and analysis. Alan Sheridan's Foucault: The Will to Truth (1980) provides probably the most systematic, sympathetic, and accessible overview of the literature. In 1991 the first of probably many biographies was published—Didier Eribon's Michel Foucault–which situates his life and ideas in their intellectual milieu.

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frame, framing, frame analysis

In Frame Analysis (1974), Erving Goffman defines a ‘frame’ as ‘definitions of the situation [that] are built up in accordance with the principles of organization which govern events–at least social ones–and our subjective involvement in them’. Frame analysis is therefore concerned with the organization of experience. In a wider context, there is a considerable body of research literature (mainly in social psychology but also in sociology) to suggest that people's responses to questionnaire or interview items are partly dependent on how they ‘frame’ the questions, most notably whether a particular query is defined as being a distant issue of ‘macro’ or systemic concern, or a ‘micro’ issue that affects individuals directly. Similar ‘framing’ effects have been observed as a result of issues being defined as aspects of the economic rather than the non-economic' spheres of life; the perceived time-horizon involved; and the definition of the imputed goals that are imagined to be the objectives of particular interactions (see, for example,
, ‘Income and the Idea of Justice: Principles, Judgements and their Framing’, Journal of Economic Psychology, 1991
).

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frame, sampling

See POPULATION; SAMPLING ERROR.

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Frankfurt School (of social theory>)

See CRITICAL THEORY.

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fraternal polyandry

See POLYANDRY.

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Frazer, Sir James George

(1854–1941)
Born and educated in Scotland, Frazer came to Cambridge to carry out research in 1879, remaining there for the rest of his long career. Originally trained as a classicist, he came to comparative anthropology under the influence of the work of W. Robertson-Smith and Edward Burnett Tylor, although this was based on correspondence with travellers, rather than on fieldwork, and focused almost exclusively on religion and systems of belief.
Frazer was best known in his lifetime for the much read and many-volumed Golden Bough (1890), in which he examined the meaning of divine sacrifice, compulsively adding more and more examples from ethnography, folklore, mythology, and the Bible. Espousing an evolutionary approach, he claimed to have discovered the intellectual history of human societies, progressing from magic, through religion, to science. He viewed the last of these as a return to magical techniques and logic–but using correct (empirically tested) hypotheses and methodologies. It has been suggested that the huge popularity of his work rested on the implication that Christianity is simply a form of magic, an idea that appealed to emerging rationalistic philosophy. His books are little read now, although it is generally acknowledged that his work stimulated ethnographic activity world-wide.

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Frazier, Edward Franklin

(1894–1962)
A member of the Chicago School of Sociology, former President of the American Sociological Society, and author of numerous studies of black family life in urban America, including The Negro Family in the United States (1939), The Negro in the United States (1949), and Black Bourgeoisie (1957). In the last of these, Frazier described the black business class in the USA as a ‘lumpen-bourgeoisie’, which exaggerated its economic well-being to help create a world of make-believe into which its members could escape from their inferiority and inconsequence in American society. (The term ‘lumpen-bourgeoisie’ had been used slightly earlier by C. Wright Mills in his White Collar (1951), to designate the multitude of white firms ‘with a high death rate, which do a fraction of the total business done in their lines and engage a considerably larger proportion of people than their quota of business’). Although sometimes accused of being empirically suspect, Frazier's work ranges far beyond its overt subject-matter of race relations, and makes a number of stimulating and still controversial points about the values and culture of modern Americans.

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free association

See PSYCHOANALYSIS.

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free market

See MARKET.

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free rider

A person who takes advantage of a public good, or other collectively funded benefit, while avoiding any personal cost, or evading personal contributions to collective funding. Fare-dodging on the railway is (literally) free riding; as is, for example, benefiting from a wage-increase that results from strike action in which one took no part. See also collective action.

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free will

See VOLUNTARISM.

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frequency distribution

See DISTRIBUTION (STATISTICAL OR FREQUENCY).

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frequency polygon

See BAR CHART.

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Freud, Sigmund

(1856–1939)
Famous as the founder of the psychoanalytic movement, Freud developed the basic ideas which still underlie psychoanalysis, in all its variants. His influence on modern psychology has also been immense but often indirect. He has been regarded with at least suspicion, often hostility, by mainstream psychology, which has been dominated by behaviourist and, more recently, cognitive approaches.
Born in Vienna, Freud took up a medical career and worked as a neurologist, becoming increasingly interested in psychology, hypnosis, and the ‘talking cure’. It was not until The Interpretation of Dreams (1899–1900) that he made the leap into what is now the centre of psychoanalytic theory. For the rest of his life he wrote prolifically and devoted much time and energy to organizing the psychoanalytic movement, which experienced several famous schisms, in particular those associated with the ideas of Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung. He died in exile in London, having left Austria in 1938, five years after his books had been burned in Berlin.
A more detailed account of psychoanalytic theory can be found elsewhere in this dictionary. The present entry will concentrate on Freud's contribution to sociological thinking. Four different approaches to society can be found in his work.
The first, and least acceptable to modern sociology, suggests that human society and the human individual develop through the same evolutionary stages. This type of analysis usually focuses on the evolution of religion as the manifestation of the social super-ego (see
Totem and Taboo, 1913
;
Moses and Monotheism, 1939
; and
The Future of an Illusion, 1927
).
The second theory which is sometimes incorporated into sociology sees society in terms of the repression and sublimation of the instincts; that is, the potentially destructive sexual and aggressive instincts are sublimated into socially useful activities, such as friendship in the former case, and the struggle against external enemies in the latter. Freud saw this as an ambivalent relation. Sublimation involves sacrificing the immediate gratification of our desires, and therefore creates a degree of misery: the greater the level of civilization, the greater the misery (see especially
Civilization and its Discontents, 1930
). This thesis was taken up by Talcott Parsons as part of his theory of socialization (see his
Essays in Sociological Theory, 1949
) and from a radical point of view by Herbert Marcuse (in
Eros and Civilization, 1955
).
Thirdly, Freud's theory of the development of sexuality from polymorphous perversity through the oedipal stage to relative heterosexuality has been developed into a theory of the origins of civilization (which is also how Freud thought of it), and employed by some modern feminists in explaining the existence of patriarchy. Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1975) is typical.
Finally, in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud offers a way of conceptualizing social relations in terms of identifications, introjections, and projections. This too has been used by modern feminists writing about gender. An example is Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering (1978). See also AGGRESSION; KLEIN, MELANIE; NARCISSISM.

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frictional unemployment

See UNEMPLOYMENT.

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Friedmann, Georges

(1902–77)
A French sociologist, originator, and the driving-force behind the Sociologie du Travail in early post-war France; also a trenchant critic of the scientific management movement. Sociologie du Travail developed out of Friedmann's seminars on the nature and evolution of the labour process; several leading investigators (including Michael Crozier and Alain Touraine) were strongly influenced by him; and much of the subsequent research programme was shaped by his way of selecting and posing problems.
The major part of Friedmann's huge published output was his critique of fragmented labour and technicism. His studies of work fragmentation and the destruction of craft skills prefigure the much later (and more widely known) critique of de-skilling in the work of Harry Braverman. Fragmented work, according to Friedmann (and Braverman), is a characteristic of capitalism, produced by the drive to separate execution from control, and thus de-skill workers. By comparison, skilled craft work is not only more interesting, but results in a moral and ethical transformation of the individuals so employed: its technical features exercise an educational and humanizing force on practitioners. Friedmann, who was rather obsessed with skilled work and the craft, believed strongly enough in this thesis to take an apprenticeship himself as a metal-worker. However, he is better known to sociologists as the author of The Anatomy of Work (1961) and Industrial Society: The Emergence of the Human Problems of Automation (1964). See also DEGRADATION-OF-WORK THESIS.

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friendship

Although friendship is a common term in modern cultures it has not been studied much by social scientists. The word is loosely applied in Anglophone society, although there seems to be general agreement that it has a deeper meaning in Europe than in North America. Arguably, in non-Western cultures, it has a more explicit meaning and is used as the basis of structured social relationships. In all contexts, friendship is not a kin term, but it does imply some type of reciprocity and obligation between otherwise unrelated individuals, although this varies according to situation and context. Friendships can range from the relatively casual, depending on shared activity or setting (such as a sports club), to deep and enduring relationships of mutual support.
The systematic study of friendship has two main strands. The first is the social-psychological study of the ways in which children develop friendships, and the correlation of types of friendship with chronological age in childhood. Studies of friendship among adults concentrate on patterns of sociability and tend to focus on class differences. Graham Allan (Friendship: Developing a Sociological Perspective, 1989) claims that working-class friendship choices are dominated by kin links, although neighbours and workmates also feature. The middle classes, on the other hand, have a greater fascination with personal relations and a wider, more conscious choice of friends.

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frustration-aggression hypothesis

See AGGRESSION.

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function, functionalism

Although the use of the concepts of function and functionalism is usually associated with the work of Talcott Parsons in modern sociology, there is a long tradition of functional explanation in studying societies, and a form of modified functionalism is now undergoing a revival. Among the founders of sociology, Émile Durkheim is most closely associated with functionalism, since he often employs analogies with biology. The most prominent of these is an organic analogy, in which society is seen as an organic whole, each of its constituent parts working to maintain the others, just as the parts of the body also work to maintain each other and the body as a whole. This idea is basic to his conception of organic solidarity. Durkheim did distinguish between functional and historical explanations and recognized the need for both. A functional explanation accounts for the existence of a phenomenon or the carrying out of an action in terms of its consequences—its contribution to maintaining a stable social whole. For example, a functional explanation of the existence of crime is that it serves to mark out and reinforce (through punishment) the boundaries of socially acceptable behaviour, so that crime is therefore a normal feature of social life. Similarly, religious institutions serve to generate and maintain social solidarity. Historical explanations are an account of the chronological development of the same phenomena or actions. Modern functionalism, through the work of Robert Merton, distinguishes between manifest functions (intended consequences or consequences of which the participants are aware) and latent functions (unintended consequences of which the participants are unaware). The latter may or may not be generally beneficial.
There has been a strong and often explicit functionalism present in sociology and social anthropology throughout most of this century. There has also been an implicit functionalism in the more determinist forms of Marxist theory, where so-called surface features of the social formation (such as political systems, ideologies, and trade unions), are seen as produced by, in order to maintain, the underlying relations of production. However, probably the most famous functionalist analysis in sociology is the so-called functional theory of social stratification offered by Kingsley Davis and Wilbert Moore, although Davis also wrote a functionalist textbook, Human Society (1949), and made a spirited defence of functionalism in his Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association in 1959 (see
‘The Myth of Functional Analysis as a Special Method in Sociology and Anthropology’, American Sociological Review, 1959
).
's celebrated essay on ‘The Positive Functions of Poverty’ (American Journal of Sociology, 1972)
, said by some to have been written as a parody of structural-functionalism, is actually a superb example of ideologically neutral functional analysis.
In the late 1960s functionalism came under sustained attack from various sources. It was argued that this approach could not account for social change, or for structural contradictions and conflict in societies, and that its reliance on stability and on the organic analogy rendered it ideologically conservative: it became fashionable to refer to functionalism as consensus theory. This particular group of criticisms is not entirely accurate. Parsons's evolutionary theory, seeing historical development in terms of the differentiation and reintegration of systems and subsystems, can account for change and at least for temporary conflict until the reintegration takes place. The existence of functional explanations in Marxism indicates that they can exist alongside a recognition of contradictions in social systems. Durkheim himself was able to combine functionalist explanations with a sometimes radical form of guild socialism.
The telling criticisms of functionalism have been epistemological and ontological. The epistemological argument is that a functionalist explanation is not an explanation at all in that it does not identify causal mechanisms and processes; it is, instead, assumed that social institutions are adequately explained in terms of their putative effects. The ontological arguments have to do with what we think is the nature of society itself. Some theorists, who are happy to accept that society has an existence over and above individuals, nevertheless also argue that we cannot attribute needs (for example Parsons's four, famous, so-called functional prerequisites of adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency) to a society as such, since that is to grant societies the same qualities as human beings. Furthermore, even if we can attribute needs to a society, it does not follow that because these needs exist they will be met. It requires a proper historical and causal explanation to show why and how they are met. Anthony Giddens argues that all functionalist explanations can be rewritten as historical accounts of human action and its consequences; that is, human individuals and their actions are the only reality, and we cannot regard societies or systems as having an existence over and above individuals.
For most of the 1970s and a good part of the 1980s, it seemed as if functionalism as a school of thought and as a way of understanding and explaining social phenomena had disappeared, but during recent years there have been some interesting attempts at a revival: in America under the impetus of Jeffrey Alexander; in Germany in the work of Niklas Luhman; and, in Britain, in an interesting revision of Marxism by the philosopher G. A. Cohen.
Alexander argues (in Neofunctionalism, 1985) that functionalism is perhaps best understood as a broad school (rather like Marxism), in which there are many variations of approach, rather than a systematic theory in the manner of Parsons. He maintains that we should not take it as providing explanations, but as a description which focuses on the symbiotic relationships between social institutions and their environment, taking equilibrium (stability) as a reference-point for analysis, rather than as something which necessarily exists in reality, and treating structural differentiation as a major form of social change. This effectively strips functionalism of the determinism of systems theory. For Alexander, functionalism is simply one approach among many, and has the virtue of focusing attention on aspects of the social ignored elsewhere.
Cohen's argument (in Inquiry, 1982) takes up a position which can be found in a different form in Durkheim's work. He suggests that societies can be seen, not as having needs in the way that individuals can be said to have needs, but as having what he calls dispositional facts; that is, features of a social environment which encourage the continued existence of a particular institution, but did not actually cause that institution to come into existence. Cohen's example is racism, which historically might be the result of a range of factors, but which survives because once in existence it helps the capitalist system to survive, by dividing the working class and making social control easier. In a rather similar way Jon Elster, a leading exponent of modern rational-choice theory, argues that we have to employ a functionalist explanation to show why capitalist firms on average adopt a policy of profit maximization. Independently of how they come into existence, the market selects for survival those that come closest to this optimal strategy, and thus imposes it upon them (see
Ulysses and the Sirens, 1979
). Functionalism, then, still has a place in sociology–albeit a more restricted place than when the Parsonsian version was dominant. See also DEVIANCE, SOCIOLOGY OF; DEVELOPMENT, SOCIOLOGY OF; DIVISION OF LABOUR; MALINOWSKI, BRONISLAW; RADCLIFFE-BROWN, A. R.; SOCIAL INTEGRATION AND SYSTEM INTEGRATION; SYSTEMS THEORY.

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function, latent

See FUNCTION.

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function, manifest

See FUNCTION.

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functional equivalents

See CIVIL RELIGION.

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functional flexibility

See FLEXIBLE EMPLOYMENT.

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functional imperatives, functional prerequisites

See PARSONS, TALCOTT; SYSTEMS THEORY.

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functional inequality

See FUNCTIONAL THEORY OF STRATIFICATION; JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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functional rationality

A concept originating in the work of Max Weber and used by Jürgen Habermas in his development of Parsonsian social theory. It refers to the rationality of the social system, developing by differentiation and reintegration through the media of money and power, and now ‘colonizing’ the rationality of the ‘life-world’ of interpersonal relationships. See also CRITICAL THEORY; PARSONS, TALCOTT.

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functional theory of stratification

In a classic article outlining
‘Some Principles of Stratification’ (American Sociological Review, 1945),
argued that unequal social and economic rewards were an ‘unconsciously evolved device’ by which societies ensured that talented individuals were supplied with the motivation to undertake training which would guarantee that important social roles were properly fulfilled. In this way, the most important functions would be performed by the most talented persons, and the greatest rewards go to those positions which required most training and were most important for maintenance of the social system.
The theory was (and remains) highly influential but has generated enormous controversy. (
's Readings on Social Stratification, 1970
, offers a good selection of the classic contributions to the debate.) Davis and Moore's argument is based on the functionalist premiss that social order rests on consensual values which define collective goals that are in the general interest. In order to encourage those who are best able to realize these goals it is necessary to offer unequal rewards. Both of these propositions have allegedly been found empirically wanting. Critics have also suggested that the theory is simply an apologia for inequality. Some also maintain that it is tautological (circular), since it proposes that the occupations and other social roles which are most highly rewarded are most important to social stability, and then cites the high levels of reward as evidence of their social importance. What was lacking throughout the lengthy debate, and has yet to be found, is a criterion of ‘social importance’ that is conceptually independent of the rewards being allocated. Nevertheless, the theory continues to inform important topics of sociological discussion, including for example the literatures on social mobility and social justice. See also STATUS ATTAINMENT.

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fundamentalism (religious)

A movement or belief calling for a return to the basic texts or ‘fundamentals’ of revealed religion–usually contrasted, therefore, with modernism and liberalism in religion. The term has been applied to Protestant trends within Christianity, since the 1920s, and recently to trends within Islam. Despite its theological character it is usually linked to projects of social reform and the acquisition of political power.

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futurology

The attempt to forecast the future by constructing theories of history is as old as philosophy itself. But the systematic practice of futurology–projecting statistical trends in order to construct realistic future scenarios–dates from the 1950s and is a distinctively social scientific enterprise. Early predictions such as those of Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener in The Year 2000 (1967) tended to be optimistic, and even utopian.
This pattern changed with the Club of Rome's report on The Limits to Growth (1972). Futurology in the 1980s and 1990s has been more pessimistic, and sometimes apocalyptic, focusing on negative trends in population, environment, and social order. However, positive predictions can still be found in books like American Renaissance by Marvin Cetron and Owen Davies (1989).
Most forecasting depends on identifying historical trends and patterns, and projecting them into the future. The simplest forecasts focus on a specific vector of change, like population or technology. These may offer more or less definite answers about the future: world population will definitely grow by one billion in the next decade; technology will definitely become more sophisticated, and so on. Other vectors like economic performance, drug use, crime, religious belief, or social attitudes are far more difficult to predict. Sophisticated modelling systems can take many variables into account, but they offer so many branching pathways of change that their usefulness is limited. Futurology in general is interesting as a speculative exercise, but has little or no scientific basis, and has an almost complete record of predictive failure.

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G

Galton's problem

The Galton problem is named after Francis Galton, the nineteenth-century British polymath, who became embroiled in a celebrated exchange about the logic of comparative analysis with the anthropologist Edward Tylor. In 1889, Tylor published an article which purported to show clear correlations between the economic and familial institutions of a wide range of past and present societies, and attempted to explain these in functionalist terms. Galton's rejoinder argued that correlations between social institutions might not only arise under pressure of functional exigencies (that is, through processes operating within societies), but also as an effect of cultural diffusion between societies. In this way he questioned Tylor's assumption that each of his national cases represented an independent observation (see the debate in the
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1889
).
This problem of distinguishing between autonomous institutional development on the one hand, and institutional development influenced by cultural diffusion on the other, remains a central issue in comparative macrosociology. For example, it is plausible to argue that the national institutions associated with the emergence of modern welfare states have in different ways been influenced by the examples of the Beveridge Plan for post-1945 Britain, nineteenth-century Bismarckian social policy in Germany, or the contemporary so-called Scandinavian model. Indeed, some observers argue that the process of globalization, the emergence of the world-system, and policies of certain multinational corporations and political organizations are accelerating and intensifying the effects of cultural diffusion, to the point at which these undermine the very possibility of a comparative macrosociology based on ‘independent’ national observations: we may be moving towards a world in which N = 1.
Empirically, the problems posed for cross-national comparative analysis by processes of cultural diffusion seem to vary across different spheres of social life, being particularly pronounced in the study of economic and social policy (where governments purposively do often emulate each other). Similarly, it is clear that theorists wishing to develop general accounts of rebellion that emphasize indigenous causes must recognize that revolutionaries have everywhere learned from each other, so that (for example) the course of the Chinese revolution was in part shaped by the earlier Russian experience. Elsewhere, however, such as in the study of class differentials in educational attainment, there is evidence to suggest that national variations are in fact largely attributable to processes of social selection which are distinctive to indigenous institutions—despite the apparent cross-national similarities in programmes of educational expansion and reform. It is also possible to model cross-national interdependence into comparative macrosociology, for example by using event-history analysis to study how institutional and policy development is affected both by domestic factors, and by the timing of cross-national influences of particular kinds.
For an excellent discussion of the implications of Galton's problem for the methodology of comparative macrosociology, of both a case-oriented (qualitative) and variable-oriented (quantitative) kind, and of wider problems of theory development and testing in this field, see the symposium in volume 16 of the journal Comparative Social Research (1997). See also COMPARATIVE SOCIOLOGY; FUNCTION.

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gambling, sociology of

Strictly speaking, to gamble is to engage in a game of chance in pursuit of some gain, with skill playing no part. In practice, however, the term is used more broadly. Diverse forms of gambling have been subject to a mixed history of permissiveness and prohibition. Lotteries are revealed in the Bible as a means of discerning God's will in making certain decisions; today they generate funds for charities, state governments, and (most obviously) their promoters. Historically, there have been periods during which it has been difficult to distinguish between gambling, speculative enterprise, and insurance, with consequent constraints upon each (see, for example,
, Gambling and Speculation: A Theory, a History, and a Future of Some Human Decisions, 1990
). Most countries now acknowledge the popularity of licensed or legal betting, for example on various sports contests such as races, or on the outcome of games of chance (like roulette) or strategy (such as poker)—or some mix of the two.
Where prohibition is in force, informal and criminal economies related to gambling may develop, and both serious criminal profiteering and political corruption are common. Note, however, that licensed gambling does not prevent illegal forms also prospering. Where it has been criminalized, gambling is often described as a victimless crime.
Attempts to exert restrictive controls over gambling in Western societies can be associated with the principles of Protestantism and the capitalist work ethic: the virtues of thrift, discipline, prudence, and rational calculation are inverted by the gambler's hedonism, trust in chance, and decision-making based on superstition. If allowed to spread such values would erode fundamental bases of the spirit of rational industrialized (modern) capitalism. Of course this is an idealized and somewhat artificial contrast: in truth, success in modern capitalism may well depend upon risk-taking, bold and aggressive unpredictability, and an element of luck (an entrepreneur playing the market in ‘futures’ would be an example). Conversely, David Downes and his colleagues (Gambling, Work and Leisure: A Study across Three Areas, 1976), have argued that the majority of gamblers are not reckless, use any large win thriftily, and budget their expenditure with considerable care.
Explanations of the motivations for gambling tend to mix the sociological and psychological, although psychoanalytic theories may also dwell on compulsive, neurotic character traits. Some have argued that gambling represents part of a combative instinct that can acceptably be expressed in modern, civilized society, via the medium of playing games. There is little or no evidence in research to suggest that petty gamblers are significantly different from non-gamblers—although their life-styles may be more secular. For non-compulsive players, gambling offers one or both of two principal attractions, namely entertainment and the chance to win wealth (see
, Gambling: Hazard and Reward, 1972
).

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game theory

The general theory of the rational behaviour of two or more people in circumstances where their interests are, at least in part, conflicting. In The Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour (1947), John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern attempted to develop a theory covering both zero-sum games and non-zero-sum games. In this context a ‘game’ is any social situation where interaction occurs between at least two ‘players’ who are competing with each other at least some of the time. Such situations might include marriage, war, rivalry between political parties, the labour-market, and more specifically employer–worker negotiations. The key contribution of game theory is to provide an abstract mathematical theory to model what choices are possible, or likely, in situations with certain common features (such as the number of participants, or players, and whether the ‘prize’ is of fixed size or is variable).
Zero-sum games represent circumstances in which the gain of one participant is the loss of another; that is, situations where the size of the ‘cake’ is fixed, and everyone seeks to get as large a slice of it as possible. Two-person zero-sum games were the first to be studied by Von Neumann, who showed that in certain cases there would be a relatively stable equilibrium point (or minimax-maximin combination), at which one player's optimum choice met the other's.
In non-zero-sum or non-constant-sum games, it may pay all or some of the participants to co-operate actively to increase the total benefits achieved, so analysis focuses on the formation of coalitions and their outcomes. In effect, collaboration increases the size of the cake, but participants cannot always predict their rival's choice. The most famous examples are the well-known Prisoner's Dilemma and (more recent) Problem (or Tragedy) of the Commons, both of which capture clearly situations in which choices that maximize each individual's self-interest produce the worst possible outcome overall. Only if each participant chooses what is in the collective interest, rather than narrow self-interest, will the collective optimum result be achieved. In most laboratory experiments based on these games, nearly two-thirds of all subjects make the selfish, or distrustful choice; the co-operative outcome is achieved in a small minority of cases. However, they have been run on a vast scale using computer simulations to assess the effectiveness of various strategies pitted against each other; and, on this longer time-horizon, co-operation was found to evolve in a society of completely self-interested individuals.
While few social scientists use the mathematical models of game theory, the general theory and concepts have already had a profound effect on all the social sciences which study situations of conflict, competition, and potential co-operation (notably, for example, in studies of the military and of markets). See
, A Primer in Game Theory (1992
) and
, Fun and Games (1992
).

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gangs

Frederic M. Thrasher (The Gang, 1927) challenged earlier images of gangs as simply loose groups of street-roaming law-breakers, and presented an analysis influenced by the approach of the Chicago School: gangs as structured groups of working-class youth, bound by loyalty, territoriality, and a hierarchy. Furthermore, the formation of gangs reflects social dynamics, such as identity search in the face of urban change; thus, to quote Thrasher, ‘the gang develops as one manifestation of the economic, moral and cultural frontier, which marks the interstice [between areas of the city]’. Other key works include
, Street-Corner Society (1955)
and
, Delinquent Boys (1955)
. Questions of race and gender were neglected until recently. See also DELINQUENCY; SUBCULTURE; YOUTH CULTURE.

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gatekeeping

The hierarchical structure of formal organizations places certain individuals or groups in crucial positions from which they can control access to goods, services, or information. They therefore wield power far in excess of their formal authority. Sociologists have examined this phenomenon in numerous contexts. One example is provided by the urban managerialist perspective on the city, a label applied to a number of studies in the 1960s and 1970s, all of which made the broad claim that ‘urban managers’ (such as planners and local government officials) played a crucial role as gatekeepers in controlling access to urban resources (housing, land, permissions to build, and so forth).

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gay studies

See LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES.

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gaze

Laura Mulvey first introduced the theory of the gaze in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Screen magazine (1975). She argued that women are objectified and stereotyped on the screen because of the way cinema is structured around three male ways of looking—or ‘gazes’. First, the way the camera looks in any filmed situation is voyeuristic, as most films are made by men; second, there is the gaze of men within a particular film itself, which is structured to make women appear as objects of their gaze; third, there is the gaze of the actual male spectator. Mulvey's theory was much influenced by Jacques Lacan's ideas about psychoanalysis. It has become important in feminist art theory and it has since been argued there is a female gaze as well as a male gaze.
Sociologists are increasingly beginning to consider the importance of visual representation in everyday life; arguably the distinction between social analysis and visual representation has become less clear-cut. Elizabeth Chaplin's Sociology and Visual Representation (1994) contains a good discussion of some key areas. The concept of gaze is increasingly seen as being important to the discussion of more traditional sociological topics—such as that of the family. Thus, for example, drawing on Michel Foucault's theory of the panopticon, as well as Bryan Turner's writings about the body, David H. J. Morgan has argued that the parental gaze over children is an important aspect of surveillance within families (see Family Connections: An Introduction to Family Studies, 1996).

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Geddes, Sir Patrick

(1854–1932)
A Scottish polymath who coined the term ‘conurbation’ and attempted to provide town-planning with a social-scientific base and methodology of ‘survey–analysis–plan’. Some of his ideas have greatly influenced urban-planning theory and practice.

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Geiger, Theodore

(1891–1952)
A German sociologist who taught mainly in Denmark. Much of his work has not been translated into English, although his study of social mobility in Denmark (Soziale Umschichtungen in einer dänischen Mittelstadt, 1951) was a classic early critique of the status-attainment tradition of taking occupational prestige as the sole basis of mobility analysis.

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Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften

German words used to denote respectively the human (or social) sciences and the natural sciences. For some three decades prior to the outbreak of the First World War, German academic life was dominated by a number of related disputes about methodology (the so-called Methodenstreit), the most general (and probably the most important) of which dealt with the relationship between the natural and the cultural (or historical) sciences. The philosopher Wilhelm Windelband, arguing from the premiss that reality is indivisible, proposed an a priori logical distinction between natural and social sciences on the basis of their methods. Natural sciences, according to Windelband, use a ‘nomothetic’ or generalizing method, since they seek to discover law-like and general relationships and properties, whereas social or cultural sciences employ an ideographic or individualizing procedure, since they are interested in the non-recurring events in reality and the particular or unique aspects of any phenomenon. Wilhelm Dilthey, on the other hand, contrasted Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften in terms of their subject-matter, this criterion following logically from the alternative premiss that reality can be divided into autonomous sectors—a fundamental distinction being that between the realms of ‘nature’ and of ‘human spirit’—with each sector being the prerogative of a separate category of sciences.
The most interesting contribution to this debate, from the point of view of sociology, is probably that of Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), the neo-Kantian professor of philosophy at Freiberg and then Heidelberg, a contemporary and friend of Max Weber. Rickert's theory of concept formation in the sciences (as described in Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung: Eine logische Einleitung in die historischen Wissenschaften, 1902, and Science and History: A Critique of Positivist Epistemology, 1898–1902) was a strong influence on Weber's methodological writings and substantive analyses (notably, for example, the ideal-typical methodology employed in the essays on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). The sociological significance of the Methodenstreit is explained in
, ‘Max Weber and the Methodological Controversy in the Social Sciences’, in , Sociology and History (1964)
.

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Gellner, Ernest

(1925–95)
Although Gellner was born in Czechoslovakia, his family (who had Jewish origins) left immediately after the German occupation in 1939, and he spent most of his working life in England. Between 1949 and 1984 he taught sociology then philosophy at the London School of Economics, before moving to a professorship of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. In 1993 he returned to Prague to become full-time Director of the Centre for the Study of Nationalism at the Central European University.
His writings are enormously wide-ranging. His first book was a critique of linguistic philosophy (Words and Things, 1959), which he condemned as complacent, unimaginative, and parochial. In Thought and Change (1964) he proposed the controversial thesis that social orders are seen to be legitimate only when they meet the requirements of affluence and nationalism. (Gellner's later writings attempted to insert the idea of liberty into this otherwise harsh conception of modernity.) An ethnography of the North African Berber (Saints of the Atlas, 1969), critical studies of psychoanalysis (The Psychoanalytic Movement, 1985) and of Soviet ideology (State and Society in Soviet Thought, 1988), and many essays and books on nationalism, Muslim society, relativism, pluralism, and the methodology of the social sciences all followed. Just before his death he completed volumes on nationalism (Nationalism Observed) and Wittgenstein and Malinowski (Language and Solitude), although a study of the conditions for successful transitions from socialism to democracy remained unfinished.
This prolific output is difficult to characterize. One unifying thread is a defence of rationalism against relativism in the social sciences. Another is a long-standing interest in nationalism, of whose horrors Gellner was keenly aware, but whose influence on the development of citizenship he saw as decisive. His own influence on Anglo-Saxon sociology is evident in the publications of successive generations of British and American historical sociologists and social theorists whom he taught.

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Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

Usually taken in tandem, these German terms generally refer to Ferdinand Tönnies's ‘community’ and ‘society’ couplet, although the latter is sometimes also translated as ‘association’ (see
, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 1887
). According to Tönnies's thesis on European modernization, the passage from the former to the latter proceeds through a rationalizing process, involving a move from relationships based upon family and guild to those based on rationality and calculation. Gemeinschaft was the world of close, emotional, face-to-face ties, attachment to place, ascribed social status, and a homogeneous and regulated community. Gesellschaft has come to be linked with urbanism, industrial life, mobility, heterogeneity, and impersonality. Much of the debate about the concept of community has been structured in these terms (see
, Community Studies, 1971
).
In essence, the concepts constitute ideal types, as do similar notions of tradition and modernity. In practice, elements of both are to be found in differing proportions in most social relations and societies. The intellectual heritage of the concepts of traditional and modern societies is usually traced to Émile Durkheim's distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity (and the attendant forms of collective conscience), but is also (and perhaps most clearly) to be found in the writings of Max Weber, where status, connubium, commensality, and style of life contrast with interests, economic groups, and classes. Parsonsian value-orientations—for example the distinctions between particularism and universalism, ascription and achievement—also grew out of this basic pair of polar concepts, all geared to understanding the essence of institutional and agency change attendant on modernization. See also PARSONS, TALCOTT.

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gender

According to Ann Oakley, who introduced the term to sociology, ‘“Sex” refers to the biological division into male and female; “gender” to the parallel and socially unequal division into femininity and masculinity’ (see
Sex, Gender and Society, 1972
). Gender draws attention, therefore, to the socially constructed aspects of differences between women and men. But the term gender has since become extended to refer not only to individual identity and personality but also, at the symbolic level, to cultural ideals and stereotypes of masculinity and femininity and, at the structural level, to the sexual division of labour in institutions and organizations.
In the 1970s, sociological and psychological interest was focused upon demonstrating that gender exists; that is to say, upon showing that the differences and divisions between men and women cannot be accounted for by biological difference, and that the culturally dominant ideas about masculinity and femininity are stereotypes which correspond only crudely to reality. It was shown that there are huge cross-cultural variations in ideas about gender and in the roles of men and women. There were studies of the ways in which baby boys and girls are turned into adult men and women by the processes of socialization in child-rearing, education, youth culture, employment practices, and family ideology. At the structural level, there were studies of the unequal division of labour in the household, even between women and men who both have full-time jobs outside, and of discrimination in employment, where sex (rather than individual skills and qualifications) plays a large part in determining types of job and chances of promotion. More recently, interest has turned to the changing formations of gender at the cultural level. Much of this work has been interdisciplinary, drawing upon anthropology, history, art, literature, film, and cultural studies to explore issues such as the interconnections between ideas of racial purity, White women's sexual purity, and Black masculinity in the United States; or the myth of motherhood as natural and universal. Much of this literature is reviewed in Sara Delamont's The Sociology of Women (1980).
There have been two major kinds of criticism of the concept of gender. The first is that it is based upon a false dichotomy between the biological and the social. This relates to a general criticism that sociology has tended to see the social as disembodied, with the infant as a tabula rasa upon which socialization may write at will, to produce social consciousness and action (as in the work of Émile Durkheim). Following the more recent writings of Michel Foucault, sociologists are now less inclined to take the body for granted, and to see it rather as an object of social analysis, recognizing that the social meaning of the body has changed through history. But in a sense this too can be another means by which biology is discounted and biological science dismissed as merely a social discourse. One criticism of the sex versus gender distinction has been Foucauldian, denying that there is a biological difference—sex—that is in any sense outside of the social. On the other hand, there is the criticism that would reassert biological difference as being extra-social, and argue against a view of gender that discounts the true significance of the body. The sex/gender distinction, it is said, is linked to a particular form of feminist politics that seeks the eradication of gender and a move towards androgyny; it leaves little space, for instance, for other feminist concerns with the biological politics of menstruation, contraception, reproductive technology, abortion, or the management of childbirth.
The second kind of criticism relates to the way in which the concept of gender focuses on differences between women and men at the expense of power and domination. Some writers would prefer to use the term patriarchy as the main organizing concept, in order to keep the question of power to the fore, both analytically and politically. There are many problems with this term, but the important one to note here is that it conflates sex and gender by treating a biological category as a social one: women and men are treated as pre-constituted groups in the description of patriarchy, and the biology of procreation is often used in the explanation of it.
On a lighter note, ‘gender’ has been criticized as a prudish way of avoiding the word ‘sex’. This is clearly not the case when it is used correctly in sociology, but it is true that it has entered everyday speech in this sense, when people talk (for example) about ‘the opposite gender’. Some sociologists, too, are guilty of this when they refer to ‘gender roles’ or ‘gender discrimination’.
The term gender can be used fruitfully with some awareness of these problems. If it is recognized that there is a need to consider biological difference and structures of power in relation to the elaborate social construction of difference, then the concept of gender has the great advantages that it encourages a study of masculinity as well as femininity, the relations between the sexes as well as the social position of women, and a recognition of historical and cultural variety and change rather than a universalizing analysis. See also DOMESTIC DIVISION OF LABOUR; FAMILY, SOCIOLOGY OF; GENDER SEGREGATION (IN EMPLOYMENT).

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gender discrimination

See GENDER.

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gender roles

See GENDER.

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gender segregation (in employment)

This term refers to the unequal distribution of men and women in the occupational structure—sometimes also (and more accurately) called ‘occupational segregation by sex’. There are two forms: ‘vertical segregation’ describes the clustering of men at the top of occupational hierarchies and of women at the bottom; ‘horizontal segregation’ describes the fact that at the same occupational level (that is within occupational classes, or even occupations themselves) men and women have different job tasks. Degrees of sex segregation vary inversely with the level of aggregation of data. See also LABOUR-MARKET; LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION; OCCUPATIONAL SEGREGATION.

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gender stereotypes

These are one-sided and exaggerated images of men and women which are deployed repeatedly in everyday life. They are found commonly in the mass media because they operate as a widely understood shorthand. Sociologists often see stereotyping as part of the process by which children are socialized into sex roles and by which adults and children are denied opportunities for more individually varied development.

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gene, genotype

The fundamental unit of biological inheritance. In sexually reproducing species every individual's genotype is composed of half of each biological parent's genes. This underlying genetic structure combines in complex ways with a wide variety of environmental influences to produce the individual phenotype—or outward appearance. Modern evolutionary theory rests on the premiss of genetic inheritance, but this did not constitute part of Darwin's original formulation. It was not until some thirty years after the publication of the Origin of Species, when the significance of the work of Mendel was recognized, that genes (the actual carriers of genetic information) were first identified. Bio-chemical technology has subsequently advanced to the stage where it is now possible, via genetic engineering techniques, to alter the composition of human genetic material—although the ethical problems involved mean that only limited applications have been permitted.
The implications of these findings for the social science are discussed in Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976), a book which did much to popularize the sociobiological vision of Edward O. Wilson. In Dawkins's volume, the unit of natural selection is identified as the gene itself, with the individual organism representing merely a survival machine or carrier for its genetic cargo. If the argument is taken to its logical conclusion then the imperatives of gene survival and reproduction determine all behaviour. The inherent reductionism of this position has been the focus of much criticism. See also CHROMOSOMES; DARWINISM; EUGENICS; HEREDITY.

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genealogy

An important tool in kinship theory and a vital part of the political organization of kinship-based societies. A genealogy is the means of tracing real or fictive kinship links across and between generations.

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General Distance Model

See MULTI-DIMENSIONAL SCALING.

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general fertility rate

See BIRTH-RATE.

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General Health Questionnaire (GHQ)

See SCREENING INSTRUMENTS.

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generalized other

See SELF.

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generation

A generation is a form of age-group consisting of those members of a society who were born at approximately the same time. In recent years there has been an increasing interest in generational analyses which examine the contribution of emerging age-groups to social change. Karl Mannheim, in his essay on The Problem of Generations (1952), describes how people located in the same generation may see the world in very different ways from their counterparts in earlier generations. Thus the unique experiences common to each generation group allows for social change. In a more recent work, Children of the Great Depression (1974), Glenn H. Elder shows how the generation brought up in a time of great frugality had a very different view of the world from those raised in a time of economic prosperity. Generation is also used to refer to the period that elapses between one generation and the next. Studies of differences in the socialization of successive generations have disagreed about the extent of continuity or discontinuity of both values and behaviour, although inter-generational conflict is a pervasive theme. Within any one generation, however, there can also be conflicting views of reality, in part due to other social characteristics such as sex, ethnicity, and social class. A further question of interest concerns the persistence of generational identities; for example, what happens to participants of youthful protest movements when they reach middle age? Thus research on life-course and ageing is closely linked to the interest in generations. See also AGE-GRADES; COHORT ANALYSIS.

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generic social processes

See FORMALISM.

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genetics

See GENE; HEREDITY.

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genocide

A term devised during the Second World War by Raphael Lemkin and adopted by the United Nations Convention in 1948. Sociologists have been most concerned with five matters: how to define the term; its typological manifestations; the conditions which give rise to genocide; a historical analysis of it; and the consequences of genocide, not just for the victims, but also for the perpetrators.(The best general discussion is F. Chalk and K. Jonassohn's The History and Sociology of Genocide, 1989.)
There are many controversies around what constitutes a genocide, Should the witchcraft purges throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries be seen as genocide? The bombing of Hiroshima could also be included, if one is concerned with all forms of ‘death on a large scale’, but this was an (almost) unique and distinct form. Irving Horowitz (in Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power, 1980) defines genocide as the ‘structural and systematic destruction of innocent people by a state bureaucratic apparatus’. Genocide usually entails an outgroup or pariah group being defined as less than fully human, and the existence of a centralized bureaucratic authority capable of administering the deaths in a large-scale and impersonal way. In the past this has often meant the slaughtering of whole populations in war or the sacrifice of large groups for religious purposes (for example in Carthage, where the younger sons were sacrificed to the Gods). Often, in earlier periods, the consequences for the perpetrators of such large-scale murders were minimal.
Some have suggested that the conditions for genocide coincide with the conditions of modernity, and indeed that the twentieth century—far from being a century of progress—has been decisively the age of genocide. The Nazi Holocaust, Stalin's purges, and the ‘Year Zero’ or ‘killing fields’ activities of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia are frequently cited as instances of modern ‘ideological’ genocide. In a celebrated study of the Holocaust (Modernity and the Holocaust, 1990), Zygmunt Bauman has argued that the Nazi mass exterminations were symptomatic of the dark side of modernity, of conditions ripe for large-scale bureaucracies, mass technology, and ideological control. This may be overstated: there have certainly been many other cases of genocide throughout history.

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gens

See PHRATRY.

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gentrification

The upgrading of decaying, normally inner-city housing, involving physical renovation, the displacement of low-status occupants by higher-income groups, and (frequently) tenure change from private rental to home ownership. The term was first used by the British urban sociologist Ruth Glass (London: Aspects of Change, 1964).

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gentry

A term applied to the stratum immediately below the aristocracy (see UPPER CLASS) in the social hierarchy of late medieval and early modern Britain. Untitled, the gentry were an intermediate grouping whose wealth lay in landholding, mineral rights, or rents from urban property. They were tied loosely to the nobility by marriage ties and similar lifestyles, and to the middle class by family ties and their interest in farming. At various times this rather diffuse stratum has been held to have played a decisive part in English history; for example, by sponsoring the agricultural revolution and the commercialization of farming during the seventeenth century, and (conversely) offering a ‘gentlemanly ideal’ to the sons of nineteenth-century, industrialists (a factor which is sometimes said to have contributed to Britain's relative lack of success in manufacturing).

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geography

See HUMAN GEOGRAPHY.

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gerontocracy

Rule by old men. A term introduced by social anthropologists in the 1930s to describe certain societies in Africa south of the Sahara, in which social stratification was based on age-sets or age-grades, public roles were allocated by age-grade (as well as gender), with governance functions allocated to the oldest age-group. The term is now used more generally to describe societies in which the most senior decision-making and political roles are dominated by the oldest males, with negative consequences in periods of rapid change and instability, when innovation and flexibility are at a premium.

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gerontology

The study of the processes of ageing, old age, and the elderly. Frequently viewed as a branch of biology, with a focus on the role of genetic factors (the extent to which ageing is pre-programmed), the study of the social aspects of ageing, sometimes termed social gerontology, is now well established. Interest in ageing has grown enormously with twentieth-century demographic changes. Increases in life expectancy and reduction in childbearing have transformed the age-structures of the population of advanced industrial societies, increasing significantly the proportions of the elderly (usually defined as persons aged 65 or over). Since the use of many forms of welfare provision (especially health care, personal social services, and state benefits) rises markedly amongst those over 65, increases in the numbers of the elderly (especially in the growing numbers of those aged 75 or over) are of major concern to policy-makers and policy analysts.
However, although policy issues are of great importance, the sociological contribution to gerontology comes from the study and analysis of age as a social category, and of the way in which the structures of society shape the ageing process, including the way it is experienced by individuals. The status of the elderly varies significantly across time, place, and social arrangements, including the extent to which retirement policies, pension provisions, and housing can foster independence or generate dependence, with important implications for physical and psychological health. There is growing awareness of the salience both of stratification by age and of ageism in society.

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Gesellschaft

See GEMEINSCHAFT AND GESELLSCHAFT.

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Gestalt theory

An early twentieth-century development in psychology and an alternative to empiricist theories of perception and knowledge. A gestalt is a coherent whole with its own laws, seen as a construct of the perceiving mind and eye, not as given in reality. (Gestalt is a German word meaning pattern, form, or configuration.) Gestalt theory argues that the functioning of the various parts of a social entity is determined by the behaviour and nature of the whole, seeks to organize human and social phenomena in terms of larger units of analysis, and is therefore opposed to atomism (or analysis of ‘wholes’ in terms of their constituent and simpler parts). It is a background influence in much phenomenological sociology.

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gesture

Part of George Herbert Mead's theory of the self. A gesture is the act of an organism which stimulates a response on the part of other organisms: a dog growling may provoke another dog to growl, and a ‘conversation of gestures’ ensues. Such responses are merely impulsive or instinctive for most animals; among humans, the process depends upon significant symbols and vocal gestures, which call up more complex reflective responses.

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ghetto

An inner-urban area characterized by the spatial concentration of disadvantage. The term is often associated with particular ethnic groups—for example black North Americans—and was originally applied to the urbanized Jewish populations of Europe. The classic study is by Louis Wirth, who argued that the ghetto could only be understood as a social psychological as well as an ecological phenomenon, since ‘it [the ghetto] is not so much a physical fact as it is a state of mind’ (The Ghetto, 1928). In this respect, much of Wirth's analysis prefigures his later classical essay on
‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’ (American Journal of Sociology, 1938)
, and should be read against this broader theoretical background. See also URBAN SOCIOLOGY; URBANISM.

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Giddings, Franklin H.

(1855–1931)
An early American sociologist who applied the evolutionary ideas of Herbert Spencer in comparative and historical analyses. Although his texts now seem dated (see for example Principles of Sociology, 1896; Elements of Sociology, 1898; Studies in the Theory of Human Society, 1922; and The Scientific Study of Human Society, 1924), his work displays several characteristic traits of mainstream American sociology, including an emphasis on quantification and an interest in the theories of psychologists. His earlier work is characterized by psychological evolutionism; his later studies by an enthusiasm for quantification and behaviourism that provided an important stimulus to American neo-positivism

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gift relationship

Social scientists usually regard a gift as an expression of the relationship between donor and recipient. In The Gift (1954) Marcel Mauss argued that gifts are widely obligatory and reciprocal. This behaviour could not be explained in terms of the ‘rational economic man’ model espoused in much Western formal economic thought, Mauss asserted that the economic is inseparable from other social fields. In every society, economic relations are infused with values and moral relations, and it is misguided to separate the rational and the non-rational—or affection and self-interest. Mauss came to the conclusion that economic value has a religious origin, a perspective shared by his mentor, Émile Durkheim. The utilitarian values of things are renounced in order to gain social status; so ceremonial values transcend economic values. To give an example from the fieldwork of Bronislaw Malinowski, people in the Trobriand Isles deny their desire to eat yams, and stockpile them in order to give them away and gain prestige. Among the Kwiakutl of the American Pacific Northwest, such conspicuous ritual gift-giving reached epic proportions in the so-called potlatch, when vast quantities of possessions would be destroyed (see
, Fighting with Property, 1950
). In both of these societies the gift relationship has been seen by anthropologists to be a major political institution.
Marshall Sahlins (Stone Age Economics, 1972) has created a typology of gift-giving relations in different societies, ranging from the gratuitous gift at one pole, to the exploitative relationship at the other. Generalized reciprocity refers to the European ideal of gift-giving, where one does not give in order to receive, and the return of the gift is not constrained by time, quality, or quantity. Generalized reciprocity usually operates within a kin network. Balanced reciprocity, on the other hand, expresses a continuation of social relations in a way it does not within the family, signifying more non-contractual, long-term relationships. In this form, equivalents must be exchanged within a relatively short time-scale, as with the buying of drinks in a bar: there may be some temporary imbalances but these cannot be tolerated indefinitely. Sahlins's third category is negative reciprocity, where each party is looking to maximize his or her own advantage, at the expense of the other.
The above analyses of gift-giving have been developed primarily in relation to so-called traditional societies, yet 5 per cent of consumer expenditure in the United Kingdom is on gifts, and the proportion of gift-goods in the modern West is as high as in more traditional societies.
Gifts of money in Western societies can be problematic, since they may focus attention upon the economic value of the gift, rather than its symbolic meaning. It is for this reason that, at least in most Western societies, the use of money as a Christmas gift is highly circumscribed, and generally acceptable only if it passes down a status hierarchy, such as from older to younger generations within a family. If a gift of money conforms to this pattern it can reflect a recognized difference in status without loss of face for the recipient and is an accepted means of expressing affection by providing for his or her material needs. By comparison, it would generally be judged unacceptable for a grandchild to give a grandparent money, since this runs the risk of commodifying affection (see
, ‘Christmas Gifts and Kin Networks’, American Socilogical Review, 1982
).
Monetary gifts also help illustrate the way in which taboos may act to maintain the barrier between the economic and other spheres of life. For example,
(‘Human Values and the Market’, American Journal of Sociology, 1978)
describes the ‘repackaging’ that had to be done before the idea of life insurance became acceptable to modern Americans. Initially this form of commercialization—putting a price on someone's life—was strongly resisted. Life insurance was therefore very difficult to sell. However, the problem was overcome by changing the apparent meaning of the insurance money, so that instead of an economic transaction between the buyer and the company, life insurance was redefined as a means by which a man could express love for his family, through continuing to provide for them after his death. In this new definition of the situation, rather than death becoming commodified by its association with market exchange, the money paid out for life insurance itself became a (nearly sacred) gift—a one-way transfer from father to family.
The modern phenomenon of gift-giving (including the making of charitable donations) continues to be a somewhat under-researched phenomenon among sociologists, by comparison with (say) psychologists, who have conducted systematic studies of the meaning of gifts and of the social acceptability of various goods involved in different sorts of gift relationships. See also EXCHANGE THEORY; KULA RING.

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Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

(1860–1935)
Gilman was an American writer who published a huge range of work across a broad spectrum of disciplines, including sociology, literature, political science, economics, and women's studies. Her best-known volume is The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), written after her nervous breakdown in 1885. It can be taken as a semi-autobiographical record of psychiatric treatment and the descent into ‘madness’, but can also be interpreted as a metaphorical account of women's situation generally, and particularly that of married women in a patriarchal society. Her more specifically sociological work addressed the culturally repressed status of women and how this impeded full intellectual development.
Like Harriet Martineau in her earlier works, and also some contemporary radical feminists, Gilman suggests an analogy between women's social situation and slavery. She rejected Herbert Spencer's theory of social determinism, and maintained that humans are dynamic agents who are not determined by inherited traits or ruthless competition, but can plan and direct their own destiny. She subscribed to Lester Frank Ward's gynecocentric theory, which saw women as the original and dominant form of the species, with men serving only as assistants in the fertilization process. She thus dismissed the basic tenets of Marxism because she saw sex as a more fundamental social division than class, arguing that women's social repression is a direct result of their singular role of motherhood, a role that impedes and minimizes creativity and expression.
Children, she believed, should be entrusted to child-care experts, and she saw strong state agencies as essential to maintaining a more just society for women. Similarly, she argued that private housekeeping was both inefficient and wasteful, and suggested that households and the economy generally would be more productive if women worked in the labour force and co-operative kitchens were set up for the mass-preparation of food. Gilman published some 2,173 written works, including Herland (1915), and The Home: Its Work and Influences (1903).

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Gini coefficient

A statistic conventionally used in order to describe in summary form the degree of inequality in distributions (usually of income and wealth). It is calculated by determining the area between a Lorenz curve of the distribution (that is a graph of the cumulative income share against the cumulative share of recipients) and the line of perfect equality. This area is then expressed as a percentage of the whole triangular area under the diagonal. The resulting statistic reduces the position of the curve to a single figure. A distribution of perfectly equal incomes has a Gini coefficient of zero. As inequality increases, and the actual Lorenz curve bellies out, the Gini coefficient moves towards its maximum value of 1 (only one recipient receives all income).
The Gini coefficient is one of several measures of inequality (others include the coefficient of variation and inter-decile ratio) which purport to rest exclusively on the mathematical properties of a distribution. Such indices tend to give conflicting answers when they are asked to determine whether any particular distribution is more unequal than another. For example, one statistic may be more sensitive than another to a scatter of low incomes, and each indicator tends to attach different weights to different forms of inequality within the distribution. More sophisticated measures—such as the Theil index and Atkinson index—have therefore been devised, which attempt to express in a single number the degree of inequality in a distribution as a whole, but in ways which explicitly weight inequalities in different parts of the distribution—in line (for example) with the observer's judgements about the relative value of each additional unit of currency accruing to a rich as against a poor person. (Atkinson's formula for his index contains a coefficient which expresses the researcher's aversion to inequality.)
A good account of the various properties of the different measures will be found in
, Egalitarianism and the Generation of Inequality (1988)
. See also INCOME DISTRIBUTION.

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Ginsberg, Morris

(1889–1970)
An early professor of sociology in Britain, notable mainly for his influence on generations of inter-war and post-war sociologists at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an early textbook on
Sociology (1934)
. His published work mainly comprises rather moralistic essays on topics such as
‘The Idea of Progress’, ‘The Nature of Responsibility’, and ‘The Unity of Mankind’ (see his three volumes of Essays in Sociology and Social Philosophy, 1947–61
).

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Glass, David V.

(1911–78)
A British sociologist who is justly famous for his pioneering work on demography and social mobility. His landmark study of Social Mobility in Britain (1954) was based on a sample of men and women interviewed in 1949. He and his colleagues found a fairly stable social structure showing a high degree of association between the status of fathers and sons; mobility concentrated at intermediate levels, where it tended to be both short-range, and rather transitory; and no evidence of an increase in social mobility in the first half of the century. Glass called for an egalitarian opportunity structure to create a more just society than he observed, although he recognized that equal opportunities policies in education and employment did not necessarily undermine differential access to privilege, where distributional inequalities in resources persisted. His many other publications include Population Policies and Movements in Europe (1940), The Trend and Pattern of Fertility in Britain (1954), and Numbering the People (1973).

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Glass (née Durant), Ruth

(1912–90)
A British urban sociologist, former Director of Research at the influential Centre for Urban Research, University of London. Her publications include Watling: A Social Survey (1939), Middlesbrough: The Social Background of a Plan (1947), Newcomers: The West Indians in London (1960), and a much reprinted (and telling) attack on the anti-urbanism of the British generally, and of British social anthropology and sociology in particular (
‘Urban Sociology in Great Britain’, Current Sociology, 1955
).

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global commodity chains

See COMMODITY CHAINS.

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globalization, globalization theory

Globalization theory examines the emergence of a global cultural system. It suggests that global culture is brought about by a variety of social and cultural developments: the existence of a world-satellite information system; the emergence of global patterns of consumption and consumerism; the cultivation of cosmopolitan life-styles; the emergence of global sport such as the Olympic Games, world football competitions, and international tennis matches; the spread of world tourism; the decline of the sovereignty of the nation-state; the growth of a global military system; recognition of a world-wide ecological crisis; the development of world-wide health problems such as AIDS; the emergence of world political systems such as the League of Nations and the United Nations; the creation of global political movements such as Marxism; extension of the concept of human rights; and the complex interchange between world religions. More importantly, globalism involves a new consciousness of the world as a single place. Globalization has been described, therefore, as ‘the concrete structuration of the world as a whole’: that is, a growing awareness at a global level that ‘the world’ is a continuously constructed environment. Perhaps the most concise definition suggests that globalization is ‘a social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede and in which people are becoming increasingly aware that they are receding’ (
, Globalization, 1995
).
Globalization is thus more than merely the sociology of international relations. It is also distinct from the world-systems theory which has analysed the growth of global economic interdependence—and which claims that cultural globalism is simply the consequence of economic globalism. It is also important to avoid confusing the globalization thesis with an earlier argument about the convergence of nation-states towards a unified and coherent form of industrial society. Contemporary globalization theory argues that globalization comprises two entirely contradictory processes of homogenization and differentiation; that there is a complex interaction between localism and globalism; and that there are powerful movements of resistance against globalization processes.
The proponents of the argument are critical of traditional sociology which continues to focus on the nation-state rather than the world as a system of societies. However, there are problems with globalization theory. What, for example, is the distinction between globalization and modern patterns of imperialism? There are also difficulties in specifying the relationships between economic and cultural globalization, and between globalization and modernization. Both the theory and its problems are well illustrated in the essays collected in
, Globalization, Knowledge and Society (1990)
.
Globalism increasingly became part of the conventional wisdom of sociologists during the 1990s. Almost every subject of sociological interest that could be given a global gloss was so endowed. Thus, for example, in a single issue of the journal Contemporary Sociology (September 1996), there were reviews of books on such diverse subjects as the Women's Movement, the international economy, biological reproduction, immigration, apartheid, racism, the forest products industry, transnational corporations, the production and distribution of food, central banks and international monetary arrangements, American foreign policy, the growth of Third World cities, and value-change in advanced societies—all of which contained the words ‘global’, ‘globalization’, or ‘globalism’ in their titles.
It is undoubtedly true that, on a planet in which the same fashion accessories (such as designer training-shoes) are manufactured and sold across every continent, one can send and receive electronic mail from the middle of a forest in Brazil, eat McDonald's hamburgers in Moscow as well as Manchester, and pay for all this using a Mastercard linked to a bank account in Madras, then the world does indeed appear to be increasingly ‘globalized’. However, the excessive use of this term as a sociological buzzword had largely emptied it of analytical and explanatory value, as a perusal of many of the studies mentioned above will reveal. See also COMMODITY CHAINS; CYBERSOCIETY; DEVELOPMENT, SOCIOLOGY OF; ENVIRONMENT; FLEXIBLE EMPLOYMENT; FLEXIBLE WORK; INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF LABOUR; INTERNET; MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION; NEO-COLONIALISM.

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glossing

See ETHNOMETHODOLOGY.

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goal, goals

The end-results towards which an individual or collective action is directed. The term is commonplace in sociology, although its logical and explanatory status varies greatly, according to context and authorship. Numerous typologies exist, so that it is possible to distinguish between (for example) the informal goals of individuals, and the explicitly stated objectives of formal organizations; between personal and superordinate goals (the former pertaining to individuals and the latter to a common aim which cannot be attained without a co-operative effort between individuals or groups); or between permissive and prescriptive goals (a distinction employed by Talcott Parsons). Most schools of thought in sociology assume that social action is (to a greater or lesser degree) goal-directed, although the terminology of goals is most frequently encountered in normative functionalist writings, where it is generally argued that the ends (goals) of social action are largely set by the institutionalized value-systems of societies (which define the roles and statuses that comprise the social system). This same literature developed the related concepts of goal differentiation (distinctions between the specific goals that are morally approved for different individuals); goal generalization (the tendency for social systems to define expectations attached to roles in such a way that, whatever the wide variety of particular goals held by individuals within a role, these are channelled into a single kind of role-specific activity); and goal displacement (the process by which the particular means selected to achieve a goal become ends in themselves, as for example in the case of bureaucracies, where adherence to set procedures becomes a primary objective of officials rather than a means by which they can accomplish whatever tasks the organization has been set). See also ACTION THEORY; EXCHANGE THEORY; TELEOLOGY.

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goal differentiation

See GOALS.

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goals-displacement

The substitution by an organization, of the goal or goals which it was established to serve, for other goals. The latter frequently serve the interests of employees. First noted by Robert Michels in a classic study of the German Social Democratic Party. See also ORGANIZATION THEORY.

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goal generalization

See GOALS.

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Goffman, Erving

(1922–82)
The most influential micro-sociologist during the 1960s and 1970s, Goffman pioneered the dramaturgical perspective for sociology. The influences on his work were many. After completing his first degree at the University of Toronto he pursued graduate work at Chicago during the late 1940s. Here he came under the influence of the symbolic interactionists, especially Everett Hughes and Herbert Blumer; of the neo-Durkheimians, especially Lloyd Warner, Edward Shils, and Edward Banfield; and of social anthropology. In this way, his attention was drawn to the importance of symbol and ritual in everyday life, and to the research techniques of participant observation.
He conducted his first major fieldwork study on one of the Shetland Islands off Scotland (whilst based in Edinburgh). His observations of everyday life in this crofting community subsequently informed his highly influential The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) in which he outlines his dramaturgical framework. In this early work Goffman analyses social life via the metaphor of the theatre, and is concerned with the ways in which people play roles, and manage the impressions they present to each other in different settings. He also reveals his abiding concern with the interaction order—with what people do when they are in the presence of others.
His next two books continued his dramaturgical interest but applied this framework to the field of deviance. Stigma (1964) provides a formal analysis of the features of those who experience stigma, whilst Asylums (1961), reports on fieldwork inside a mental hospital, and traces the moral career of a mental patient. From this case-study, he developed a more general account of the workings of total institutions. Both these studies were also very influential in the development of labelling theory, the latter being particularly relevant to the critique of institutionalization, and perhaps having some impact in encouraging the process of decarceration.
Many of Goffman's other studies, including Encounters (1961), Behaviour in Public Places (1963), and Relations in Public (1971), pursued the themes of dramaturgical analysis, and provided a dictionary of new sociological concepts which facilitate understanding of the minute details of face-to-face interaction—‘mini concepts’ as one commentator has called them. These have influenced a whole generation of scholars interested in studying everyday life. But by the late 1960s Goffman's works also show signs of an increasing interest in phenomenology and sociolinguistics. Thus, in Frame Analysis (1974), there is an attempt to depict the organization of consciousness, and in Forms of Talk (1981) language becomes a major focus.
Although Goffman has had many followers he remains unique in the annals of sociology. He broke almost all the rules of conventional methodology: his sources were unclear; his fieldwork seems minimal, and he was happier with novels and biography, than with scientific observation; his style was not that of the scientific report but of the essayist; and he was frustratingly unsystematic. Likewise, he is very hard to place in terms of social theory. Sometimes he is seen as developing a distinct school of symbolic interactionism, sometimes as a formalist following in the tradition of Georg Simmel, and sometimes even as a functionalist of the micro-order, because of his concern with the functions of rituals (especially talk) in everyday life. He appears to have had a notoriously difficult temperament, which adds to the popular view of him as an intellectual maverick.
He has had more than his share of critics. Apart from the confusions raised above, he has consistently been accused of neglecting the wider macrosociological concerns of social structure, class, and the economy in his writings—a charge he accepted, saying that these were not his concerns, but they were more important than his concerns! Others accused him of conservatism, because of his emphasis on the importance of ritual, order, and (in his later works) gender, for preserving aspects of the status quo. In Alvin Gouldner's Coming Crisis of Western Sociology he is depicted as an apologist for capitalism, overly cynical, and far too concerned with the trivial. However, others found his work too radical, since its constant demonstration of the fragile nature of routine life seemed akin to anarchism or ethnomethodology.
Goffman's prime contribution lies in showing the deeply textured way in which societies are ordered through a multiplicity of human interactions. He developed an array of concepts to help us see this, and through his writings challenged the aridity of a methodologically sophisticated sociology lacking in much substance. He attempted ceaselessly to show that the interaction order was the bridge between the micro and the macro concerns of social life and sociology. His last paper,
‘The Interaction Order’ (American Sociological Review, 1983)
, lays out a summary of his major arguments. It is too soon to judge whether the corpus of his work, which was so widely influential in his lifetime, will become a significant influence on sociology in the future. See
, The View from Goffman (1980
). See also FRAME; IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT.

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Goldmann, Lucien

(1913–70)
A Belgian Marxist philosopher and literary critic, pupil and follower of György Lukács, and humanist socialist. He is best known for his sociology of literature, in particular The Hidden God (1955), a study of Pascal and Racine, in later life he became an important critic of structuralism.

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Goldthorpe class scheme

A categorization which allocates individuals and families into social classes, devised mainly by the English sociologist John Goldthorpe. The scheme is used increasingly widely throughout Europe, Australasia, and North America, notably in the study of social mobility and in the analysis of class more generally. Because of its complex genealogy it is variously referred to in the literature as the Goldthorpe, Erikson–Goldthorpe, EGP (Erikson–Goldthorpe–Portocarero), and CASMIN (Comparative Study of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations) typology.
For the Oxford Social Mobility Study of England and Wales in the early 1970s, Goldthorpe developed a sevenfold scheme, the categories of which were said ‘to combine occupational categories whose members would appear, in the light of the available evidence, to be typically comparable, on the one hand, in terms of their sources and levels of income, their degree of economic security and chances of economic advancement [market situation]; and, on the other hand in their location within the systems of authority and control governing the processes of production in which they are engaged, and hence in their degree of autonomy in performing their work-tasks and roles [work situation]’ (see
Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, 1980
). The subsequent requirements of conducting comparative research involving nations having occupational structures quite different from that found in Britain led Goldthorpe and his colleagues in the later CASMIN Project to subdivide some of the original class categories. In a series of revisions to the initial framework, routine non-manual employees were subdivided into clerical (higher) and personal service (lower) categories; the petite bourgeoisie of own-account workers was separated into its constituent elements of small proprietors with employees, small proprietors without employees, and farmers and smallholders; and agricultural workers were distinguished from other rank-and-file semi-skilled and unskilled manual labourers. These amendments yielded the now standard elevenfold Goldthorpe class scheme shown in Table 1.

TABLE 1. The Goldthorpe Class Categories

I

Higher-grade professionals, administrators, and officials; managers in large industrial establishments; large proprietors

II

Lower-grade professionals, administrators, and officials, higher-grade technicians; managers in small industrial establishments; supervisors of non-manual employees

IIIa

Routine non-manual employees, higher grade (administration and commerce)

IIIb

Routine non-manual employees, lower grade (sales and services)

IVa

Small proprietors, artisans, etc., with employees

IVb

Small proprietors, artisans, etc., without employees

IVc

Farmers and smallholders; other self-employed workers in primary production

V

Lower-grade technicians; supervisors of manual workers

VI

Skilled manual workers

VIIa

Semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers (not in agriculture, etc.)

VIIb

Agricultural and other workers in primary production

As the categories of the schema have been refined over the years, so too have its conceptual and theoretical foundations. For example, in their report of the findings from the CASMIN Project, Erikson and Goldthorpe (The Constant Flux, 1992) state that the rationale of the schema is ‘to differentiate positions within labour markets and production units or, more specifically … to differentiate such positions in terms of the employment relations they entail’. For this reason it is important to distinguish between the self-employed and employees. However, within the fairly heterogeneous category of employee, it is also possible to make ‘meaningful distinctions’ according to differences in (what has now become) ‘the labour contract and the conditions of employment’. In their words, ‘employment relationships regulated by a labour contract entail a relatively short-term and specific exchange of money for effort. Employees supply more or less discrete amounts of labour, under the supervision of the employer or of the employer's agents, in return for wages which are calculated on a “piece” or time basis. In contrast, employment relationships within a bureaucratic context involve a longer-term and generally more diffuse exchange. Employees render service to their employing organisation in return for “compensation” which takes the form not only of reward for work done, through a salary and various perquisites, but also comprises important prospective elements—for example, salary increments on an established scale, assurances of security both in employment and, through pension rights, after retirement, and, above all, well-defined career opportunities.’
It is clear that, despite these changes in terminology, the nature of the employment relationship has always been central to the scheme. As Erikson and Goldthorpe insist, it is ‘the distinction between employees involved in a service relationship with their employer and those whose employment relationships are essentially regulated by a labour contract that underlies the way in which, within our class schema, different classes have been delineated’. So-called service-class (or salariat) occupations offer incremental advancement, employment security, and the possibility of exchanging commitment to the job against a high level of trust on the part of employers. Working-class occupations, on the other hand, tend to have closely regulated payment arrangements and to be subject to routine and greater supervision. If the circumstances of those who buy labour, and of those who neither buy the labour of others nor sell their own (that is, employers and the self-employed respectively), are also taken into account, then the origins and basic structure of the classification can readily be grasped.
Despite its increasing popularity and use, the scheme has been the subject of intensive criticism and much controversy, although a good deal of this has been misconceived. It is often suggested that the service-class category is of limited value in empirical analyses because it is too broad, failing to distinguish between the employment situations of the capitalist élite on the one hand, and the mass of professional and managerial employees on the other. Critics have also argued that the scheme lacks validity: because (in research practice) people are allocated to social classes on the basis of their employment status and the title of their occupation, the classification may not in fact measure those characteristics (relations or conditions of employment) that are central to Goldthorpe's concept of class. Feminist critics have claimed that, because the original categories were designed for an investigation into social mobility among men, it is male conditions of employment that inform the algorithm which is used to construct the classes. This is said to make the categories (and any analysis on which they are based) sex-specific.
These and other criticisms have prompted a huge secondary literature, involving extensive validation studies of the scheme, a debate about the relationship between class inequality and gender segregation, investigations of the cross-national and temporal reliability of the categories, and of the strengths and weaknesses of alternative operationalizations of Goldthorpe's concept of class. All of these issues and most of the related literature are discussed at length in
, Against the Odds? Social Class and Social Justice in Industrial Societies (1997)
. See also BOURGEOISIE; MANUAL VERSUS NON-MANUAL DISTINCTION..

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goodness of fit

A statistical term used to indicate the correspondence between an observed distribution and a model or hypothetical mathematical distribution. In many statistical tests of significance the hypothetical or expected distribution is a model based upon there being no relationship between the dependent and independent variables. The tests then measure whether any observed deviation from the expected model may reasonably be accounted for by chance sampling variation, or whether it is sufficiently large to indicate a real difference, generalizable to the population from which the sample was taken. See also SIGNIFICANCE TESTS.

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Gouldner, Alvin W.

(1920–81)
An American sociologist who eventually became as much a critical intellectual as a sociologist. His early work was recognized as important within the then orthodox sociological framework, especially Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (1954), but even at that stage he adopted a critical attitude towards the dominant functionalist perspective. His essay ‘Anti-Minataur: The Myth of a Value-Free Sociology’, published in 1964, was a controversial interpretation of Max Weber's work, arguing that Weber did not believe sociology was capable of simple objectivity, although his name was often erroneously used to support such a proposition.
From the beginning Gouldner was influenced by European traditions of thought (see
Enter Plato, 1967
) and he himself eventually settled in Europe. His most influential work was The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970). This offers a substantial and exhaustive argument for a so-called reflexive sociology. Against the view that science in general and sociology in particular is concerned with producing objective truths, Gouldner argued that knowledge is not independent of the knower, and that sociology is intimately bound up with the political and socio-economic context in which it exists. It is therefore important to be aware of this connection and of sociology's role as part of the way we look at ourselves and our future. The book was critical of all the mainstream approaches of modern sociology, but the major part was devoted to a systematic critique of Parsonsian structural-functionalism.
His later work did not have the same impact but pursues similar themes. He insisted on a need for at least an attempt at a totalizing theoretical critique of modern culture and was concerned with the nature of intellectuals as a new class. His criticism of Marxism and of intellectuals made a distinction between those who see themselves as producing objective knowledge about society and history, on the one hand, and on the other critical thinkers who are less concerned with objective truth than with understanding history in order to change it. His sympathies clearly lie with the latter. In this context, he argued that ideology should not be taken simply as falsehood used in the interests of a dominant group, although this is often the case: it is developed by intellectuals but has a wider reach and depth and can also become a means of social transformation. These ideas are expounded in The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (1976), The Two Marxisms (1980), and Against Fragmentation (1985).

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Gramsci, Antonio

(1891–1937)
A prominent Italian Marxist theorist and noted critic of economic determinism. After a childhood marked by poverty and ill-health, Gramsci entered the University of Turin, where he seems to have been a particularly talented student of language-related matters. However, because of continuing poverty and deepening political involvements, he left the university in 1915 after four years of study and without graduating. Thereafter he became, in turn, an influential journalist, a prominent political activist and parliamentarian, the leader of the Italian Communist Party (1924–6), and, finally, a political prisoner in Mussolini's gaols (1926–37).
Without denying in any way his immense political importance before and after his death, it nevertheless seems reasonable to say that his current exalted reputation amongst Marxist social scientists rests on the writings now known as The Prison Notebooks (1929–35, edited and translated into English in 1971). Among the topics discussed in the notebooks are: intellectuals, education, Italian history, political parties, fascism, hegemony, and fordism.
These, then, are the ideas and concepts that made Gramsci a pivotal figure in the debates and developments within Marxist social science during the 1970s—as, first, Nicos Poulantzas used them to develop his political sociology; and, later, numerous others used them as a conceptual bridge connecting the Marxist tradition with that of discourse analysis. A good introduction to his life and work, which discusses most of the sociological concepts and topics mentioned above, is James Joll's Gramsci (1977). See also IDEOLOGY.

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grand theory

A term coined by C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination (1959) to refer to the form of highly abstract theorizing in which the formal organization and arrangement of concepts takes priority over understanding the social world. His main target was Parsonsian systems theory.

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graph theory

A branch of mathematics used to represent relations and networks. A graph consists of a set of points (nodes or vertices) and the pairwise links between them (arcs or lines). In sociological applications, the nodes are typically individuals, roles, or organizations, and the links are social relationships (such as kinship, friendship, communication, or authority). The links may take account of direction (a digraph) or ignore it (an undirected graph) and they may be at any level of measurement. Apart from the usual binary graph (where a link either exists or does not), special cases of interest include asymmetric graphs for representing tournaments, ordered graphs and lattices for organizational structures, trees for hierarchies and classification systems, signed (+, -) graphs for structural balance, real-valued graphs for distribution and assignment problems, and links which express the probability of a relationship (stochastic graphs).
Graph theory provides theorems (proved consequences) and algorithms (step-by-step procedures) used to obtain information, such as properties of individual points (popularity, centrality, liaison, or bridge status), of pairs (shortest path between two points) or subgroups (clique-detection, triads), and sub-graphs (blocks of points which are ‘structurally equivalent’ by having the same pattern of links).
Earliest sociological uses include sociometry and clique-detection, and more recently social network, kinship and citation structures, and ‘vacancy chains’ tracing the movement of occupational or housing vacancies through a system. Graph theory has also been extended to treat very large networks and to compare actual network structure with randomly constructed graphs.

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green revolution

A popular term referring to a particular type of technical change in Third World agriculture arising from improved genetic material, intensive fertilizer use, and controlled irrigation. Mainly associated with wheat and rice production and widely diffused in South and East Asia and Latin America, but not Sub-Saharan Africa.

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Gross National Product (GNP)

An unduplicated measure of the total flow of output in any economy during a specified time-period. Unduplicated means that the measure excludes intermediate goods and services that are used as inputs in the production of further goods and services—such as the use of flour to make bread for sale. The aim is to measure final products—the consumer goods and services which constitute the ultimate aim of all productive work. It is accepted by economists that GNP excludes large amounts of consumption work and other types of work. See also INFORMAL ECONOMY.

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grounded theory

An idea pioneered by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (in their book The Discovery of Grounded Theory, 1967) in which theory is developed from close observation of the world. In contrast to formal or abstract theory, which is developed by deducing (according to logical rules) hypotheses which are then tested against observations, the grounded approach argues for inductive theory-building: that is, developing theoretical ideas from observations of the data themselves. Glaser and Strauss argue that such theory should construct ‘sensitizing concepts’ from observation, drawing out comparisons with other linked areas (in a process they call the constant comparative method), and should sample theoretically (for example by sampling critical cases). The approach is closely linked to symbolic interactionism, and is one of the few logics of qualitative research, another being analytic induction.

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group, social group

A number of individuals, defined by formal or informal criteria of membership, who share a feeling of unity or are bound together in relatively stable patterns of interaction. The latter criterion is necessary in order to distinguish social groups from other aggregates dealt with by sociologists which are grouped only in the statistical sense that they share some socially relevant characteristic (including, for example, social categories such as suburban residents or junior managers). However, the term is one of the most widely used in sociology, and will often be found applied to combinations of people who may or may not share a feeling of unity (as in social class groups) and may or may not be involved in regular social interaction (as in the case of members of certain ethnic groups). See also COOLEY, CHARLES HORTON; DESCENT GROUPS; DYAD; GROUP DYNAMICS; OUT-GROUP; PARIAH GROUP; PEER GROUP; PRESSURE GROUPS; REFERENCE GROUP; STATUS GROUP; SUMNER, WILLIAM GRAHAM; TRIAD.

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group, descent

See DESCENT GROUP.

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group, pariah

See PARIAH GROUP.

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group, peer

See PEER GROUP.

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group, pressure

See PRESSURE GROUP.

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group, primary

See COOLEY, CHARLES HORTON.

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group, reference

See REFERENCE GROUP.

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group, status

See STATUS.

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group dynamics

In one sense, all sociology is about group dynamics, but the term is usually applied to the structure of, and processes within, small face-to-face groups. The terrain is largely occupied by psychologists, but is integrated into sociology, mainly through the work of Talcott Parsons and the American social psychologist Robert F. Bales (see
Family, Socialisation and Interaction Process, 1955, and Working Papers in the Theory of Action, 1953
). Bales's related publications include Interaction Process Analysis: A Method for the Study of Small Groups (1950), and SYMLOG: A System for Multiple Level Observation of Groups (1979).

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group marriage

The idea of group marriage probably originated in the incorrect observations of eighteenth-century explorers (such as Cook) of the sexual habits of Polynesian societies. Lewis Henry Morgan suggested that group marriage, in which sexual and reproductive rights in a group of women were acquired by a group of men, was the original family form. Friedrich Engels also used this notion in his evolutionary theory of the family and the development of the state.

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group therapy

A psychotherapeutic technique usually involving six to eight subjects in the presence of one or two psychotherapists. There are many different types, although as
points out (‘The Group Therapies in Perspective’, Free Association, 1990)
, most assume that the origin of psychological difficulties lies in patterns of poor social relationships.

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group work

See CASEWORK.

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groups, closed and open

See CLOSED GROUPS AND OPEN GROUPS.

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guerrilla

A Spanish term meaning ‘little war’, universally applied to low-level or irregular warfare, using social, political, and geographical advantages against conventionally superior forces. It is often associated with resistance by peasants, and was developed as a form of revolutionary and anti-colonial movement in the post-1945 period, based on the theories of guerrilla warfare propounded by Mao Zedong and Che Guevara. The idea is much romanticized but has had some practical successes.

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guilds (gilds)

Medieval trade associations which sought to regulate trade and to protect the interests of employers and which in some countries survive vestigially as curious gentlemen's clubs. The nineteenth-century view that they could be seen as precursors of trade unions is now seldom advanced. Guild Socialism proposed industrial unions which were to manage major industries.

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Gumplowicz, Ludwig

(1838–1909)
A Polish sociologist, Social Darwinist, and materialist, who argued that social evolution represented a struggle for economic resources resulting in the survival of the fittest. Because of ethnocentricism, this struggle is characterized by conflict between (in an evolutionary sequence) racial groups, nation-states, and classes. Little of his work has been translated into English (the notable exception being his Grundriss der Soziologie, 1885) and his writing is popularly discredited by its authoritarian and racist overtones, although theorists of global processes have recognized his contribution in drawing attention to large-scale social conflicts such as conquests and wars. See also military and militarism.

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Gurvitch, Georges

(1896–1965)
A Russian-born sociologist, who spent most of his professional life in France, and exerted a strong influence on the development of French sociology via his organizing and entrepreneurial activities in Strasburg and Paris. Although some of his work has been translated into English (see, for example, his
Sociology of Law, 1942 and The Spectrum of Time, 1958
), it is largely alien territory to American and British sociologists, mainly because of its strongly philosophical character. Gurvitch described his approach as ‘hyper-empiric dialectics’ (the dialectical method grounded in reality), and was critical of Hegel and Marx for recognizing only one form of dialectics (polarization and then synthesis of opposites), whereas he claimed to have identified five: complementarity (in which two apparently distinct elements are part of a larger whole); mutual involvement, in which elements interpenetrate each other; ambiguity and ambivalence, where there is both attraction and repulsion; polarization of opposites (as in the Hegelian dialectic); and reciprocity of perspectives, or differentiation between parallel manifestations of the same elements.

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Guttman scale

A Guttman scale (sometimes also known as a scalogram analysis) consists of a set of dichotomous items with a simple unidimensional cumulative structure: a positive response to a higher item implies the same to all lower items, and individual response patterns interlock to form a joint ordinal scale. Perfect forms rarely occur empirically (except in the cases of social distance and psychosomatic symptoms) and methods exist to obtain a ‘best solution’.

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H

habitus

A set of acquired patterns of thought, behaviour, and taste, which is said by Pierre Bourdieu (Outline of Theory and Practice, 1977) to constitute the link between social structures and social practice (or social action). The concept offers a possible basis for a cultural approach to structural inequality and permits a focus on agency. According to some critics it is also notoriously elusive. The best exposition will be found in Richard Jenkins's Pierre Bourdieu (1992).

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Halbwachs, Maurice

(1877–1945)
An early French sociologist, much influenced by Émile Durkheim (see his
Les Causes du suicide, 1930
), and one of the first in that country to write systematically about the nature of social class. His most innovative work concerned the nature of collective memories.

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Halévy thesis

The argument advanced by the historian Élie Halévy (see
A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, 1962
), that the stability of English society during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (when the rest of Europe experienced revolutionary upheaval) was in significant part due to the influence of Methodism, which taught the working classes the bourgeois virtues of thrift, sobriety, and individual achievement. By preaching individual rather than collective salvation, and personal rather than political change, Methodism also defused incipient tendencies to popular revolt. According to Halévy, it offered a ladder of opportunity to respectable members of the lower orders, and helped prevent the social and ideological polarization of English society in the wake of the process of industrialization. In short, this is a variation on the theme of embourgeoisement, and on which has proved no less controversial among historians than has its later and more familiar sociological counterparts.

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halo effect

This refers to a common bias, in the impression people form of others, by which attributes are often generalized. Implicitly nice people are assumed to have all nice attributes. This can lead to misleading judgements: for example, clever people may falsely be assumed to be knowledgeable about everything.

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hate crimes

Crimes committed out of racial, religious, or sexual prejudice, which target minority groups, and which often violate anti-discrimination laws. Such crimes are usually crimes of violence motivated against (for example) women, Jews, Blacks, or gays (see
, Hate Crimes, 1992
). During the 1980s legislation was developed around the idea of hate crimes.

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Hawthorne studies

The experiments which inspired Elton Mayo and others to develop the Human Relations Movement. From 1924 the Western Electric Company of Chicago, influenced by scientific management theories, measured the impact of different working conditions (such as levels of lighting, payment systems, and hours of work) on output. The researchers, Fritz Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, concluded that variations in output were not caused by changing physical conditions or material rewards but partly by the experiments themselves. The special treatment required by experimental participation convinced workers that management had a particular interest in them. This raised morale and led to increased productivity. The term ‘Hawthorne effect’ is now widely used to refer to the behaviour-modifying effects of being the subject of social investigation, regardless of the context of the investigation. More generally, the researchers concluded that supervisory style greatly affected worker productivity.
Later work, involving covert observation of working practices, showed how the pace and organization of work is regulated by informal social norms and organization among workers. These studies led Mayo to claim that workers are not primarily motivated by economic factors but by management styles and informal work organization. Enhanced productivity therefore depends on management sensitivity to, and manipulation of, the ‘human relations’ of production. Critics point to methodological defects in the Hawthorne experiments and question the key conclusion drawn from them—that economic factors are less important in determining productivity than the degree of psychological satisfaction which work provides. The best discussion of the studies is still to be found in John Madge's The Origins of Scientific Sociology (1963). See also EXPERIMENTER EFFECTS.

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Hayek, Friedrich A.

(1900–92)
Born in Vienna, where he later gained doctorates in law and political science, Hayek taught for many years at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Chicago, before returning to Austria in 1962. In an ironic coupling, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics jointly with Gunnar Myrdal. The irony arises because Hayek was even better known for his immoderate free-market liberalism than Myrdal was for his measured social democratic views. Given his later fame as the leading theorist of the anti-Keynesian monetarism that became influential in the 1980s, it is appropriate that his first book was entitled Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933), and that he used the ideas set out therein to criticize Keynes's Treatise on Money (1930).
In 1944 Hayek published the book that for the first time gained him a wider public, The Road to Serfdom. In it he drew out the political consequences of his laissez-faire economics, stressing in particular that centralized economic planning threatened the very liberties that were then being fought for. The post-war success of the more or less managed mixed economies of Western Europe and the United States, and related ascendancy of Keynesian economic theory, appeared to disprove many of his most dire predictions. Undaunted, Hayek continued to elaborate his essentially pre-sociological views in a more positive manner, publishing The Constitution of Liberty in 1960 and his three-volume Law, Legislation and Liberty in 1982. For Hayek, as the British Prime Minister Mrs Thatcher once rather crudely put it, ‘there is no such thing as society’—only individuals competing and co-operating with one another. Any theories that suppose otherwise are therefore to be understood as ideological in general and as contaminated by collectivism in particular. And, harking back to the argument of The Road to Serfdom, any political programmes or social policies that suppose otherwise are to be feared as presaging impoverishment and totalitarianism. On this basis, and not without a certain bathos, he felt able to identify the legal protection afforded Britain's trade unions as the fundamental cause of all the country's woes in a famous pamphlet published in 1980. See also JUSTICE, SOCIAL; LIBERTARIANISM; MONT PELERIN SOCIETY.

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hazard model, proportional-hazard model

A statistical technique for determining ‘hazard functions’, or the probability that an individual will experience an event (for example first employment) within a particular time-period, given that the individual was subject to the risk that the event might occur (in this case, given continuing initial unemployment).
Since the hazard or risk of re-employment is likely to change over time, it is necessary to decide upon the functional form by which the hazard may depend upon time and the different explanatory variables, although there may in fact be little information upon which to base this decision. Cox's ‘proportional hazard model’ is a particular approach to a class of such models which is easily estimated. In the above example, for any two individuals the ratio of their ‘hazard’ in terms of finding employment is considered to be constant at all points in time, hence ‘proportional’. The technique allows for individual observations to be ‘censored’ (the event of interest has not occurred) or ‘uncensored’ (the event of interest has occurred) in producing estimates (see
, Event History Analysis, 1984
). See also EVENT-HISTORY ANALYSIS.

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head of household

This term conventionally refers to the senior male in any household, in the role of husband and (perhaps) father, but in his absence is usually ascribed to the principal earner. The practice of taking the adult male of a household as the ‘head’ has been much criticized—at least in most industrialized countries—for its implicit assumption of male primacy. For example, the literature on social class is characterized by a long-standing controversy about the appropriate unit of analysis, a debate which turns on the acceptability or otherwise of classifying a whole household, in class terms, according to the class standing of its (usually male) head of household.

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health and illness, sociology of

A field of sociology concerned with the social dimensions of health and illness, it covers three main areas: namely, the conceptualization of health and illness; the study of their measurement and social distribution; and the explanation of patterns of health and illness. Clarification of the concepts of health and illness is the starting-point of sociological discussion in the field, with emphasis given to the cultural variability of the boundaries of health and illness, to the multi-faceted nature of the concepts, and to their evaluative nature. Ill-health refers to a bodily or mental state that is deemed undesirable, consequently intervention to ameliorate or remedy that condition can be justified—a position analysed most fully by Talcott Parsons in his highly influential discussion of sickness as a social role in which processes of social regulation and social control play an important part.
The measurement of patterns of health and illness is far from easy, even when definitions have been agreed. Researchers employ two main sources when measuring ill-health—official statistics and community surveys. Official statistics provide data on persons who have had some contact with the health services—so-called ‘treated’ cases. This means that, whilst the data are more readily accessible, they are contaminated by illness behaviour; that is, by people's willingness to use health services, their access to services, their perception of their illness, and so forth. Community surveys circumvent this problem by screening general populations independently of health service contact. However, they usually rely on various self-report scales for measuring ill-health, and the relation between these measures and clinically defined sickness is problematic. Not surprisingly perhaps, mortality statistics are often used as a substitute measure of morbidity statistics on the grounds that in developed societies where many people die from degenerative conditions, the age at which an individual dies offers some measure of their life-time health. Given the limitations of these different measures it is necessary, where possible, to examine a range of data in analysing the social distribution of sickness.
There can be no doubt, whatever the difficulties of measurement, that there are major differences in patterns of health and illness between societies, over time, and within a particular society. Historically, there have been long-term reductions in mortality in industrial societies, and on average life-expectancies are considerably higher in developed than developing societies. Ill-health and mortality are also related to age and sex. The young and the old are more vulnerable to sickness and death, and in most societies women live longer than men, though by some indices women experience more ill-health. There are also major differences by social class and ethnicity within societies. For example,
Inequalities in Health: The Black Report (, 1982)
found that in Britain death-rates of those aged 15 to 60 were some two and a half times as high for a person in social class V than in class I, and there is no sign of these differences declining.
Explaining these patterns of health and illness, or the distribution of specific illnesses, is far from easy. It is fashionable among the public and the medical profession to focus on so-called ‘health-related behaviours’, especially alcohol consumption, smoking, diet, and exercise, and the importance of these behaviours is, on the whole, quite well supported. However, sociologists generally seek to move beyond these individual behaviours, and to understand health and illness in terms of the broader features of society. Whilst the focus on health-related behaviours directs our attention to cultural factors determining patterns of consumption, as well as to the material resources that enable or inhibit particular patterns of consumption, there has also been considerable attention given to the impact of the productive process on health and illness, not only via occurrences such as industrial and environmental pollution or accidents at work, but also via stress-related diseases.
Though the evidence is often open to different interpretations, what is very clear is that social factors play a major part in generating health and illness. For example, epidemiological studies support the idea that autonomy and control at work are important factors in the aetiology of heart disease, and some suggest that what has been called the ‘effort-reward imbalance’—a work situation involving high demands but with low career prospects, job security, and financial reward—may also be a significant contributory factor. Reductions in opportunities for career advancement and differences in control over work have been linked to a number of other adverse consequences for health. Some studies show that pension rights may be important in explaining mortality differentials among adult and retired men and women from different class backgrounds.
A good overview of the field is given in
, Sociology of Health and Illness—A Textbook (1988)
. See also BLACK REPORT; SICK ROLE.

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health-care system

A term used rather loosely to refer to the arrangements in a given society for the provision of health-care (both preventive and curative) whether organized into a coherent system or not. The term may embrace informal as well as formal (paid) care and care by non-specialists as well as specialists.

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health-maintenance organization (HMO)

A type of health-care organization developed in the USA, initially on co-operative principles, now increasingly run by profit-making corporations. Unlike fee-for-service medicine, HMOs (a 1970s term) are group practices, providing relatively comprehensive (primary and hospital) services for a standard prepayment, so helping to reduce costs and increasing medical incentives to health maintenance.

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health-related behaviour

See HEALTH AND ILLNESS, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich

(1770–1831)
A German idealist philosopher whose major influence on the development of sociological thought has been through Karl Marx and Marxism. He developed a philosophy of history, particularly of the history of thought, which he saw as a determinant of social and political history. History is seen as a dialectical progress towards rational truth. This process involves an initial proposition (thesis), which is inadequate and generates a counter-proposition (antithesis), and the rational content of both are taken up into the synthesis. Truth is seen, not in terms of isolated individual propositions, but as a totality where the meaning of each proposition depends upon its relationship to others. The movement of history is then seen as the estrangement or objectification of the mind from itself and the transcendence of that estrangement. In sociological terms, the bourgeois state of his period was seen as representing the final transcendence of divisions in history, which goes hand in hand with the development of truth as a whole. A good starting-point for those interested in Hegel's philosophy is his volume on The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Peter Singer's Hegel (1983) is an excellent commentary on the man and his work.
Karl Marx, in a famous phrase, ‘stood Hegel on his head’, giving priority to economic, social, and political history over the history of ideas, but maintaining something of the same dialectical method. Hegel's influence and mode of reasoning can also be found in the Marxism of György Lukács and the Frankfurt School (see CRITICAL THEORY).

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hegemony

This concept is to be understood in the context of Karl Marx's historical materialism. It refers to the ideal representation of the interests of the ruling-class as universal interests. The cumulative nature of the universalization of ideas not only broadens the scope of each ruling-class hegemony but at the same time sharpens the conflict between it and each subsequent ascendant class until such a time as a class (the proletariat) emerges which really does represent the universal interest. According to Marx, each ruling class does actually represent a broader range of interests than its predecessors, by providing (for example) avenues of social mobility into a higher class; hence, it comes to power not only on the illusion of the common interest, but also because it does in fact serve a broader range of interests. Likewise, the ideas which express the dominant material relationships within and between classes also take a firmer grip, and for that reason are all the more embedded, providing no obvious alternatives. However, in due course the specific class interests of the ruling class become apparent, demanding a more radical negation for its transcendence.
The major vehicle for bourgeois hegemony is civil society. Antonio Gramsci locates hegemony within the role of the ‘private’ or non-state levels of superstructure, distinguishing this social hegemony from the use of force, as the principal means of maintaining social order in capitalist societies. Seen in Weberian terms, it would correspond to the ‘myth of natural superiority’, or the legitimating of a status order. It is, in short, the manufacturing of consent. Cultural hegemony, which is generally identified as the major dimension of this manipulation, involves the production of ways of thinking and seeing, and of excluding alternative visions and discourses. For that same reason it is difficult to identify what are non-hegemonic modes of reasoning and penetrative analysis, especially since hegemony permeates all of the levels distinguished in Marx's schema, from the basic items of labour-power and capital, through the connections of commodity fetishism, into the fractions of classes and politics. According to Marxists, therefore, hegemony has to be confronted at every level. The same conceptual as well as methodological strictures as apply to false consciousness and its transcendence must be applied in the case of hegemony.
The sociological significance of the concept, and some idea of its use in empirical research on ideology, is demonstrated in
, ‘Hegemony and Consciousness in the Thought of Antonio Gramsci’, Political Studies (1975)
.

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Heidegger, Martin

(1889–1976)
A German existentialist philosopher, who adopted Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method, in order to investigate the nature of human existence. His most significant work is Being and Time (1926), which was an important influence on post-modernism, and a source for Anthony Giddens's ideas about time and space.

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Heider, Fritz

(1896–1988)
A psychologist who was born in Vienna and, after a period in Germany, emigrated to the United States. Heider's most influential work is The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (1958) in which he uses concepts from Gestalt psychology to develop his theory of balance and causal attribution. Cognitive dissonance and attribution theory both stem directly from Heider's work.

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heredity

The passing down by genetic transmission of the characteristics of plants or animals from one generation to the next (‘like begetting like’). The idea of biologically transmitted similarities is an old one. However, ideas as to the means of this transmission and its malleability by environmental influences have changed. Present-day ideas are grounded in research on genetics (a term first coined in 1905 for the science of heredity) that has its origins in Mendel's classic studies cross-breeding peas. This and other research provided the missing link in Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection by specifying the mechanism through which species variation and similarity could occur.
The impact of such ideas on the study of human behaviour was considerable. Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, explored the role of heredity in accounting for individual differences in personality and intelligence. He also introduced the term eugenics for the body of knowledge that could be used to direct human evolution–an interventionist strategy that has remained highly controversial. Subsequent academic debate, juxtaposing heredity and environment in an exhaustive specification of causal factors, has continued the attempt to assess the relative contributions of genetics and environment in the causation of human characteristics and behaviour, with individual differences receiving much of the research attention. Twin studies, comparing monozygotic or MZ (identical) twins with dizygotic or DZ (non-identical) twins have been widely employed, although the methodological difficulties are considerable. However, whilst the attempt to quantify the genetic or environmental contribution to differences between individuals continues, there is increasing recognition that both genetics and environment are essential to all human behaviour. See also GENE; NATURE VERSUS NURTURE DEBATE; SOCIOBIOLOGY.

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hermeneutic circle

See INTERPRETATION.

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hermeneutics

See INTERPRETATION.

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Herskovitz, Melville Jean

(1895–1963)
An American economic anthropologist who was influenced by Franz Boas and A. A. Goldenweiser during his studies at Columbia University, and himself taught at Northwestern University. He is probably best known for his research into the retention of Africanisms in Afro-American culture (see
The Myth of the Negro Past, 1941
) and his writing on economic anthropology (Economic Anthropology: A Study in Comparative Economics, 1952). He criticized the early theory that the individual must be the starting-point of economic analysis, without himself retreating to economic determinism, and pointed to the importance of looking at how individuals make an economic choice in the face of social constraints and resources and cultural values.

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heterosexism

A diverse set of social practices—from the linguistic to the physical, in the public sphere and the private sphere, covert and overt—in an array of social arenas (including work, school, church), in which the binary distinction of homosexual (attracted to members of the same sex) versus heterosexual (attracted to members of the opposite sex) is at work in such a way that heterosexuality is privileged. Allied concepts include those of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and the more psychological notion of homophobia.

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heuristic device

Any procedure which involves the use of an artificial construct to assist in the exploration of social phenomena. It usually involves assumptions derived from extant empirical research. For example, ideal types have been used as a way of setting out the defining characteristics of a social phenomenon, so that its salient features might be stated as clearly and explicitly as possible. A heuristic device is, then, a form of preliminary analysis. Such devices have proved especially useful in studies of social change, by defining bench-marks, around which variation and differences can then be situated. In this context, a heuristic device is usually employed for analytical clarity, although it can also have explanatory value as a model.

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hidden crime

See CRIME.

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hidden curriculum

In education, the hidden curriculum refers to the way in which cultural values and attitudes (such as obedience to authority, punctuality, and delayed gratification) are transmitted, through the structure of teaching and the organization of schools. This is different from the manifest or formal curriculum that is subject-based or topic-based. Philip Jackson's classic work on Life in the Classroom 1968) points to three aspects of the hidden curriculum: crowds, praise, and power. In classrooms, pupils are exposed to the delay and self-denial that goes with being one of a crowd; the constant evaluation and competition with others; and the fundamental distinction between the powerful and the powerless, with the teacher being effectively the infant's first boss. Much sociological research has been concerned with undesirable aspects of the hidden curriculum, whereby schools are said to sustain inequality, through sexism, racism, and class bias. If, as Émile Durkheim postulated, schools reflect the larger society of which they are a part, it is not surprising that, for good or for ill, the hidden curriculum reflects the values that permeate the other societal systems that interact with education.

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hierarchical clustering scheme (HCS)

See CLUSTER ANALYSIS.

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hierarchical linear-model, hierarchical linear regression

See MULTI-LEVEL MODELS.

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hierarchy of credibility

A concept introduced by
(in ‘Whose Side Are We On?’, Social Problems, 1967)
, to capture social inequalities and the moral hierarchy of society. For Becker, those at the top (of an organization or a society) are seen to be more credible, those at the bottom less so. Indeed, the ‘underdogs’ may be completely discredited and pathologized, and often do not have a voice at all. He argued, as part of a wider debate in deviancy theory about the role of values in sociological research, that it may be the sociologist's task to help the marginalized ‘underdogs’ to find a voice.

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high-trust system

See TRUST AND DISTRUST.

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Hinduism

A belief-system with a history stretching back some five thousand years, and practised today by approximately five hundred million people, mainly in India. This religious tradition is very diversified: there is no generally acknowledged single teacher or creed, and some commentators speak of the Hindu tradition embracing several religions, while not a few question whether the Western concept of religion is at all applicable in this context.
The distinctive features of Hindu religion (its vast complexity aside) are the caste system and the view of life referred to by the term samsara. Hindus think of their present life as merely one in a succession of lives, taking various forms, not all human and not all lived on this earth. This is linked to the concept of karma, which denotes a moral causation whereby what and where a person is today is largely a consequence of how he or she has conducted him- or herself in all of his or her past lives, especially in regard to dharma (or sacred law). Finally, the associated concept of moksha signifies emancipation from the bonds of present existence, to be attained through transcending avidya (ignorance) and maya (illusion). However, these basic ideas have not existed from the beginning of the tradition, and some scholars apply the term Hinduism only to the beliefs and practices which were established around the beginning of the Christian era.
The disparate nature of Hinduism is well illustrated in Hindu scripture, which includes the Vedas (knowledgeable texts written some two thousand years before the Christian era), a mixture of hymns to various Gods, philosophical texts, and prose dealing with rituals; and the enormously diverse smirti, which include the great Hindu epics, manuals and law-books, as well as popular stories and legends. Not surprisingly, no fewer than twelve schools are described as orthodox, including Sankhya dualism (which names no god), Sankara non-dualism (which embodies a qualified belief in god), and the theism of Ramanuja (which posits no belief in god). There are numerous well-established sectarian movements, such as the Jains and bhakti, who appeal for different reasons to different castes.
Sociological interest in Hindusim has mainly taken the form of studies of the caste system, as an extreme form of ascriptive stratification, and speculations about the likely consequences of Hindu beliefs for the development of rational capitalism of the Western type. The latter tradition was initiated by Max Weber's essays on the
‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ (1916–19, the relevant sections being translated as The Religion of India, 1958)
, which argue that Hinduism effectively blocked this form of economic development. The debate about Weber's interpretation continues today (see, for example,
, Western Sociologists on Indian Society, 1979
). The classic study of caste is Louis Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus (1970), although this makes the controversial claim that the Indian caste system cannot be analysed in terms of concepts applicable to other forms of social stratification, a claim that would seem to be undermined by anthropological and historical research demonstrating that social mobility processes of a kind familiar elsewhere (involving status usurpation resulting from status incongruities associated with shifts in the distribution of power) were also endemic in the traditional caste order.
The literatures on stratification and religion come together in the dispute about whether or not Weber's claim that a form of fatalism, arising out of the belief in the karma doctrine of compensation, was a major factor in stabilizing the caste system—despite its extreme inequalities of condition and social rigidity. This issue is pursued in
's essay on ‘Fatalism: Durkheim's Hidden Theory of Order’, in , Class and the Division of Labour (1983)
.

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histogram

See BAR CHART.

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historical demography

The study of the size and structure of past populations and of the historical relationship between demographic, economic, and social changes. Measuring the demographic characteristics of populations prior to the advent of the census and national vital registration presents a major challenge since available data are often fragmentary. It is necessary to draw on a range of sources, such as ecclesiastical registers, bills of mortality, wills, tombstones, military records, property lists, and so forth, and painstakingly reconstruct a demographic picture of the period.
Attempts to measure the demographic characteristics of past populations predate the second half of the twentieth century. However historical demography emerged as a distinctive branch of demography in the post-war period, and was associated with the development of new techniques for studying historical populations, particularly the method of family reconstitution pioneered by Louis Henry of the French Institut d'Études Démographiques in the 1950s. Henry used parish registers, first of the Genevan bourgeoisie and then of the peasantry in Crulai in Normandy, to reconstruct the demographic experiences of families in these communities. His approach to family reconstitution involves taking a particular marriage pair and tracing information about their birth, their parents, the marriage, their own childbearing, and their deaths, a procedure repeated for each family in turn.
In the United Kingdom, E. A. Wrigley employed the same techniques to study families in Colyton in Devon, using parish registers covering the period 1538–1837. His influential article on
‘Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England’ (English History Review, 1966)
argued that birth control was widespread and that families were able to respond to social and economic pressures by delaying childbearing and restricting family size. Together with Peter Laslett, he established the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, which since 1964 has served as the focal point for historical demography in Britain. Work from groups such as this has done much to challenge established views about family and household life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Laslett's work in particular set new and formidably high standards for the use of quantitative historical materials in analyses of the Western family (see
The World we Have Lost. 1965; Household and Family in Past Time. 1972; and Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations, 1977
). However, it should be noted that his rediscovery of the nuclear family as the norm in pre-industrial England has since been challenged by several critics (both sociologists and historians), who have argued that the existence of small households as a unit of residential organization, and small (that is nuclear) families as a framework of meaning for everyday life are not necessarily one and the same thing. See also SOCIAL DEMOGRAPHY.

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historical materialism

A term applied by Karl Marx himself to his theory of society and history. ‘Historical’ entailed the analysis of how particular forms of society had come into existence, and the specific historical contexts within which apparently universal or eternal social forms—state, religion, market, and so forth—were located. Materialism denoted the rejection of Hegelian idealism and the primacy of socio-economic processes and relations. A sustained attempt to defend Marx's account of the determining role in history played by the productive forces is made by William H. Shaw (Marx's Theory of History, 1978).See also BASE; ECONOMIC DETERMINISM; FORCES OF PRODUCTION; HISTORICISM; LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE; MARXISM; MODE OF PRODUCTION; RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION; SUPERSTRUCTURE.

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historical sociology

The term commonly applied to sociological analysis based on historical data sources—either primary (such as original documents in archives) or secondary (the written history produced by historians themselves).
There has been widespread and sometimes acrimonious methodological debate among historians and sociologists as to the boundaries and relationship between the two disciplines. In the early 1960s E. H. Carr (What is History?) argued that ‘The more sociological history becomes and the more historical sociology becomes, the better for both. Let the frontier between them be kept open for two-way traffic.’ However, Carr's views can be contrasted with those of Charles Wilson (Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge), who used the occasion of his inaugural lecture (in 1964) to observe that ‘the economic historian and historical sociologist have, it seems, never had things so much their own way … There is, I think, no great harm done if they go on talking their latest professional jargon to each other in private; if economic historians prattle of liquidity, variables, or backward sloping curves, or sociologists of motivation, elites and social roles. Provided always that we return to some common plain language which recovers this specialized shorthand for purposes of civilized intercourse and ultimate history’. The less controversial view of most sociologists and historians is probably that aired by Philip Abrams (Historical Sociology, 1980), who argued that ‘history and sociology are and always have been the same thing’, so that any dispute about their relationship to each other was merely a matter of prevailing institutional arrangements rather than one of intellectual substance. History tends to be individualizing (ideographic) and to describe singular or unique phenomena, whereas sociology is generalizing (nomothetic) in formulating theories that apply to categories of phenomena, but this is a matter of emphasis rather than a hard and-fast principle of method, since (to quote
, Central Problems in Social Theory, 1979
) ‘there simply are no logical or even methodological distinctions between the social sciences and history—appropriately conceived’. The common objective of practitioners in both disciplines is a causal analysis of the meaningful behaviour of individuals and groups, with a proper appreciation of process, context, and change.
Notwithstanding these epistemological matters, the major issue confronting historical sociologists relates to the practical difficulties of using primary historical materials as evidence, since (as E. P. Thompson so eloquently put it) we cannot interview tombstones. Such materials include public and private written documents such as official reports, surveys, parish registers, records of organizations, letters, and diaries. Among othe things, the researcher needs to establish the authenticity of documents, identifying their authorship and degree of completeness; the credibility of documents, given likely sources of error and distortion, the possible motives of their authors, and the different conditions under which each testament was produced; and the representativeness of the various surviving documentary materials. In other words issues of reliability are especially acute. The question of validity is also to the fore, since few surviving sources were constructed for precisely the purposes which the modem researcher has in mind, so that he or she is usually attempting to establish the meaning of data by reading ‘against the grain’ of the purposes for which they were originally compiled.
It is often the case, therefore, that extant historical data cannot directly answer the questions which are asked of them by the sociologist. In particular, it has proved very difficult for the historical sociologist to explore the subjective aspects of behaviour, especially given the traditional reliance on written documents as sources of evidence. People's motives for action, the meaning and feeling they might attach to (for example) their relationships with kin, their attitudes, values, and beliefs, and the salience of all of these things in their daily lives, have proved among the most elusive of quarries. Such subtleties cannot easily be recovered from the official statistics and semi-official records which are by far the most common source of information regarding individual and collective behaviour. While oral histories, diaries, letters, novels, and so forth can give us an impression of the ‘temper’ of a particular time, they are themselves often partial and have methodological problems of their own which restrict the extent to which the historical sociologist is able to draw inferences from these materials.
Such scepticism should apply, of course, to secondary as well as primary historical materials. There is an unfortunate tendency among some historical sociologists to treat the written accounts produced by historians as if these were somehow unproblematic collations of the historical facts about particular episodes. Such accounts are then raided to provide illustrations with which to fill the empty boxes provided by preconceived sociological models and theories. Historical sociology on this grand scale—in which one ignores the specific historicity (or context) of events, ignores any disputes surrounding the interpretation of the original data offered by the historian, and merely collects his or her inferences as facts which can be arranged in attractive patterns according to the requirements of one's sociological model—is said by its critics to offer practitioners ‘a delightful freedom to play “pick-and-mix” in history's sweetshop’. One such critic has specifically cautioned sociologists against turning too readily to historical sources, where appropriate sociological data can be generated, since to do so is to abandon a position of comparative advantage whereby the sociologist can generate his or her own evidence (via appropriate surveys, interviews, or observations) whereas the historian is necessarily condemned to work with such evidence as can be culled from among the stock of documentary ‘relics’ that happen to have survived (see
, ‘The Uses of History in Sociology’, British Journal of Sociology. 1991
).
Despite this methodological controversy—or perhaps one should say fuelling it—some of the most prominent works in recent years have been within the domain of historical sociology. These include Barrington Moore's The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World System (1974,1980), Michael Mann's The Sources of Social Power (1986), and Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions (1979), all of which have provoked an enormous secondary literature and no little controversy.
Moore's text exemplifies this sort of work and was significant as the first of a new wave of historical sociology in the late 1960s. The central argument of the book is that it was variations in three sets of social relations which determined whether particular nation-states took a democratic or dictatorial route to modernity. On the basis of sustained reflection on the transition from feudalism to capitalism in a range of societies which includes England, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, China, and India, Moore suggests that the critical sets of relations are the following: the relations between the landed aristocracy and the monarchy, which remained evenly balanced where there was a democratic outcome; the relations between the aristocracy and the peasantry, which involved the granting of considerable autonomy to the latter, where there was a democratic outcome; the relations between the aristocracy and the urban bourgeoisie, which were mutually supportive vis-à-vis the monarchy, where there was a democratic outcome. Ther are numerous critical treatments of this work. The best of these is probably Dennis Smith's Barrington Moore: Violence, Morality and Political Change (1983).

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historicism

According to Karl Popper, historicism is ‘an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the “rhythms” or the “patterns”, the “laws” or the “trends” that underlie the evolution of history’ (The Poverty of Historicism, 1957). Historicism is therefore the belief in laws of history, of social development, or of progress. Political ideologies such as fascism and communism are often said to be erected upon historicist foundations.
Popper's critique of historicism has several aspects. He accuses those guilty of it of making predictions about the future course of history in the form of unconditional prophecies, whereas scientific predictions can only be conditional in character. In an independent argument. Popper claims that human history is also radically unpredictable, because of its dependence upon knowledge. New knowledge cannot be predicted because to do so would be to be already in possession of it. Marxism is rejected because of its determinism and historicism, but also because its predictions have turned out to be false. It is at best a former scientific conjecture which has been subsequently falsified. To continue one's adherence to Marxism in the face of its empirical refutation is, in Popper's view, to abandon science in favour of metaphysical or quasi-religious faith.
The debate about historicism seems to revolve around the question of human agency and class agency. As regards the former, critics such as Popper challenge the structural determinism contained in various political philosophies and social theories, and assert the essential unpredictability of history and appropriateness of the methods of piecemeal social engineering. But related to this is a critique of historicist arguments concerning the role of the working class in history. Marxists who have ascribed a revolutionary role to this class are coustantly seen to be baulked by historical reality and therefore modifying their predictions in the face of historical contingency. Among Marxists, capitalist hegemony is generally presented as the reason for the incorporation of the working class into society, although critics argue that this reasoning (and indeed Marxist interpretations of working-class culture generally) are the result more of what John H. Goldthorpe describes as ‘wishful rather than critical thinking’ (see
‘Intellectuals and the Working Class in Modern Britain’, in , Social Stratification and Economic Change, 1988)
. It should be noted, however, that Goldthorpe is no less critical of liberal theories of industrial society (as represented by the work of Daniel Bell, Clark Kerr, and others). In both cases he objects to what he calls the ‘halfhearted and covert historicism’ of the theories of social change advanced by these authors.

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historiography

The art of, or employment of, writing history. To study historiography is to study the methodological (including epistemological) questions raised by the writing of historical accounts.
In an article published in the
Polish Sociological Bulletin in 1981 (‘Narcissism or Reflexivity in Modern Sociology’),
and Howard Newby argued that sociology in the 1970s had been damaged by an obsession with epistemological matters, evident in the growth of a specialized sociology of sociology. A quite proper concern for reflexivity had degenerated into narcissism, and had threatened a degree of angst and a paralysis which seriously undermined empirical research into issues of social and sociological concern. By contrast, historians (even Marxist historians) had long avoided the dangers of the epistemological anomie that beset sociology (despite facing even more severe problems of reliability and validity), by the simple expedient of dealing with issues of historical methodology under a separate heading from that of ‘doing history’; that is, historiography. As they put it, ‘since epistemology cannot be allowed to dominate the practice of history to the exclusion of all other considerations without leading to historical enquiry grinding to a halt, it has had to be separately institutionalized. As a result historians have invented historiography, within which issues pertaining to the philosophy of history may be discussed without calling a halt to the ongoing activity of historical research’.
However (as Bell and Newby themselves recognize), it is doubtful if sociologists would accept a similar division of labour, on the grounds that it tends to suggest that theory and data can be regarded as somehow entirely separate entities. See also EPISTEMOLOGY; METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM; METHODOLOGY.

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history, social

See SOCIAL HISTORY.

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Hobbes, Thomas

(1588–1679)
An English philosopher and social theorist of the Enlightenment. Hobbes's most influential writings in political philosophy span the period of the English Civil War, and are widely interpreted as an intellectual response to the experience of political instability and personal insecurity. His major work Leviathan (1651) offered a justification for absolute political authority which purported to be a deduction from human nature. Hobbes's account of human nature was an extraordinarily thoroughgoing and ingenious extension of the science of mechanics (as learned from Galileo). According to Hobbes, the whole range of human psychological attributes—sense-perception, memory, imagination, thought, speech, and the passions—were effects of the motions of the minute particles of matter of which we, like other material bodies, are composed. On this view of our nature, action is governed by the passions, which are in turn classified as ‘aversions’ and ‘appetites’. These passions are the basis of moral judgement, and issue in actions whose tendency is self-preservation.
In Hobbes's view, then, human action is governed by the twin passions of fear of death and desire for power. If we imagine humans living in a ‘state of nature’ prior to the establishment of any law or political power to keep them ‘in awe’, each individual, lacking any reason for expecting goodwill from the others, will be caught up in a restless pursuit of ever more power. In such a situation, the desire for security on the part of each individual must issue in perpetual antagonism and instability, a state in which (to use Hobbes's famous phrase) life would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. But humans are possessed of rationality and foresight (capacities which Hobbes characteristically accounts for in mechanical terms). They are thus able to recognize that their security would be better guaranteed by a voluntary act of giving over their individual powers to an individual or group who would thereby be established as a sovereign power over all of them. On Hobbes's bleak view of human nature, the sole function of government is to guarantee the security of the national citizen.
In his own day, Hobbes was able to make himself acceptable to Royalists and Parliamentarians alike. Subsequently, his materialistic view of human nature and political power has been praised by Marxists, whilst his view of humans as essentially self-interested and his authoritarian view of the minimal state have been popular with the political right. He was one of the earliest and most brilliant exponents of a naturalistic approach to social science. Hobbes's political philosophy remains influential in the study of international relations. See also SOCIAL CONTRACT.

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Hobhouse, Leonard Trelawney

(1864–1929)
An early British sociologist and social philosopher, author of a multi-volumed evolutionary treatise on the Principles of Sociology (1921–4), and a number of other comparative studies of societies. By comparison with (say) Max Weber, his German contemporary, Hobhouse's work (almost as broad-ranging in scope) seems dated and naïve, although his The Elements of Social Justice (1922) contains a stimulating discussion of the relationship between individual freedoms and an economically regulating state. John E. Owen's excellent biography (
, Sociologist, 1974
) disputes this rather negative overall assessment of Hobhouse's achievements and attempts heroically to rescue him from comparative obscurity as a classic founder of the discipline.

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holism

See INDIVIDUALISM.

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Homans, George C.

(1910–89)
An American social theorist, probably best known for his argument that theory should be based on a series of propositions about individual behaviour, which were to be derived from ‘covering laws’. For Homasn, the most general covering laws are found in behavioural psychology. In Social Behaviour: Its Elementary Forms (1964), Homans puts forward a set of propositions which form the basis of his exchange theory, which states that individual assessments of costs and benefits are the basis of such social phenomena as competition and cooperation, authority, and conformity. Exchange theory, with individuals rather than groups, institutions, or societies as its starting-point, and with its ultimate grounding in behavioural psychology, attracted considerable criticism from the start. However, several later theories, including rational-choice theory, have been strongly influenced by it. Besides his contributions to social theory, Homans maintained a lifelong interest in the study of small groups, industrial sociology, and historical sociology. He was President of the American Sociological Association in 1964. His other major publications include English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (1941), The Human Group (1950), Sentiments and Activities (1962), Certainties and Doubts (1987), and his autobiography, Coming to my Senses (1984). See also BEHAVIOURISM; CAUSE; SUCCESS PROPOSITION.

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homework, homeworking

A form of wage work undertaken by family members in their own homes, for large or small firms, usually on a piece-rate basis. Not to be confused with school–children's tasks set by the school to be undertaken at home, nor with unpaid domestic labour, the latter referring to the goods and services (including housework) produced within the home for consumption by household members. See also OUTWORK.

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homophobia

A term coined by George Weinberg, in Society and the Healthy Homosexual (1972), to refer to the psychological fear of homosexuality. Scaling devices have been used to measure it, and a number of studies have pointed to the characteristic ‘homophobia personality’, after the fashion of Adorno's authoritarian personality. However, the concept is very limited as it focuses upon a psychological attribute, and tends to neglect the wider structural sources of the homosexual taboo.

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homosexuality

The term homosexual describes those who have sex with, or are sexually attracted to, persons of the same (Greek:homo) sex. It was devised in 1869 by a Hungarian doctor (Benkert), as part of the emerging medical and scientific discourse around sexuality, discussed by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality (1976). During the following century, a great deal of scientific writing was concerned with depicting homosexuality as a morbid pathology, although several more sympathetic strands of thought did emerge during the early part of the twentieth century. For Sigmund Freud homosexuality was not an illness; for Alfred Kinsey it was a statistically widespread phenomenon; William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson saw it as physiologically normal; and, by 1973, it was no longer classified as a disease by the American Psychiatric Association.
In modern Western usage, male homosexuals are referred to as ‘gay’ and female homosexuals as ‘lesbian’. In all societies men have had sex with men (and probably women with women, though this is less well documented), but having this behaviour as a basis for a social—and especially an organizing or life-long—identity is a recent and Western phenomenon. Other societies have had other arrangements: generation–specific (and often mandatory) ritualist homosexuality in Melanesia; age–and role–specific relationships (Ancient Greece); and specified inter-role or third–role identity (American Indian Berdache). Even in well–documented Western societies, the varieties of homosexual identity, arrangements, and life–styles show considerable diversity, including episodic and time-limited activity (for example same–sex institutions), admixture with heterosexual activity (bisexuals and married gays), and wholly casual and anonymous encounters (‘cottaging’ and ‘cruising’).
Although the shift in both popular attitudes towards homosexuality and the social organization of homosexual identity and subculture must be seen largely as a consequence of the rise of a lesbian and gay movement, the sociological analysis of this field has proved important. The pathbreaking article was by
(‘The Homosexual Role’, Social Problems, 1968)
, in which she argued that homosexuality was not a condition at all, but a social role which has emerged since the seventeenth century in the Western world—a proposition which sponsored the so-called social constructionist theory of homosexuality.
It is useful to distinguish homosexual behaviour, feelings, and identity, which may or may not be congruent. Estimates of prevalence are notoriously difficult to establish due to the stigmatized and often socially invisible nature of the gay and lesbian identities. The pioneering studies by Kinsey in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s introduced a seven–point scale, ranging from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual, and showed that changes in the definition of what counts as homosexual behaviour lead to estimates of male homosexuality between 4 per cent (life–long, exclusively homosexual activity) and more than 40 per cent (some significant homosexual activity to orgasm during sexually active life). Recent studies converge on a figure between six and twelve per cent for those exclusively or predominantly homosexual for most or all of their sexually active life.
Studies of the aetiology of homosexuality, though extensive, are inconclusive and make little sense outside the context of the aetiology of sexual orientation in general. Much sociological attention has been focused instead on the nature of homosexual identity and whether it is primarily inherent (essentialism) or socially elicited and moulded (constructionism). For an overview see
, Against Nature (1991
). See also HETEROSEXISM; HOMOPHOBIA; SEX, SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF.

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hooligan, hooliganism

The work ‘hooligan’ emerged in the late 1890s and literally meant gangs of rowdy youths. But as Geoff Pearson demonstrates in Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (1983), the term also encapsulated wider anxieties about the state of the nation's youth and the breakdown of traditions of order and stability in late Victorian England. Fears about hooligans, their territorial gang fights, and their distinctive dress style went hand in hand with anxieties ranging from the failure to instil stable work habits among working-class youths, and perceived decline in the national character, to the lowered morality of the new ‘city type’ or urban degenerate. The destruction of what were held to have been previously stable traditions of family and community, resulting in hooliganism and widespread juvenile delinquency, was to become a common background theme informing a number of schemes (including the Boy Scout movement) to reclaim the hooligans. Hooliganism, then and now, is almost invariably seen as an entirely unprecedented and alien phenomenon—as well as a threat to the ‘British way of life’. For a classic account of moral panics and the processes which generate other folk devils such as Teddy Boys and Hell's Angels see
, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972
).

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horizontal integration

See INDUSTRIAL INTEGRATION.

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Horkheimer, Max

(1895–1973)
A leading member of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, he is best known in sociology for his critique of the dominant rationality of late capitalism. His most important books are The Eclipse of Reason (1947) and Critique of Instrumental Reason (1967).

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horticulture, horticultural societies

Horticulture is the system of production that depends on the cultivation of plants. Horticultural societies are those in which this system predominates.

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hospice

An institution specializing in care of the dying. The focus is on the management of pain and suffering (often by controlled medication) and in dealing with the prospect of death. In the United Kingdom the hospice movement developed in the 1980s. Most hospices are charitably funded, small-scale institutions, providing short-term care.

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household

A group of persons sharing a home or living space, who aggregate and share their incomes, as evidenced by the fact that they regularly take meals together—the ‘common cooking-pot’ definition. Most households consist of one person living alone, a nuclear family, an extended family, or a group of unrelated people. The definition is sometimes varied so as to exclude, or include, households of non-related people who may set very variable limits, in practice, to the extent of their income-sharing or common expenditure.

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household, head of

See HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD.

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household allocative system

A term first coined by Jan Pahl, in a series of articles written in the 1980s, to describe the distribution of financial resources within households. The Pahl model provided a more sophisticated understanding of intra-household dynamics than had previously been attempted.
Five systems were identified for married couples, ranging from a ‘whole-wage system’ (where a single earner controls finances and dispenses a housekeeping allocation), to ‘independent management’ of separate incomes (with each partner taking responsibility for certain items of expenditure). ‘Pooling’ systems were either male–controlled or female-controlled–according to who managed and who had ultimate control over decisions on expenditure (see
, Money and Marriage, 1989
).
Recently the concept has been criticized on several grounds. It is evident, for example, that there are substantial difficulties involved in assigning couples to a pre–defined categorization of systems. In addition it is highly probable that systems are more flexible over time than has been recognized from cross-sectional data. Moreover, the categorization refers only to couple households, and not to more extended households or to inter–household allocations. And, finally, the only resources considered are financial. More recent contributions have therefore been concerned with extending and refining the Pahl model, to encompass more flexible allocative arrangements, different types of household, and a wider range of goods, services, and responsibilities than the purely financial.

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household dynamics

A reference both to changes in households (for example, changing household composition) and to the reasons for and patterns of such changes in terms of relations between household members. Research seeking to explain the timing and reasons for young people leaving their parental home would, at least in part, be a study of household dynamics.

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household work strategy

In essence, the division of labour between members of a household, whether implicit or the result of explicit decision–making, with the alternatives weighed up in a simplified type of cost-benefit analysis. It is a plan for the relative deployment of household members' time between the three domains of employment: in the market economy, including home-based self-employment second jobs, in order to obtain money to buy goods and services in the market; domestic production work, such as cultivating a vegetable patch or raising chickens, purely to supply food to the household; and domestic consumption work to provide goods and services directly within the household, such as cooking meals, child–care, household repairs, or the manufacture of clothes and gifts. Household work strategies may vary over the life-cycle, as household members age, or with the economic environment; they may be imposed by one person or be decided collectively.
The term was devised by Ray Pahl in his book Divisions of Labour (1984). His original use of the term refers to the division of labour between household members; the individual's own plan for allocating time to work within and outside the household; and all sources of labour used by a household, including work by relatives on a gift or barter basis, and bought-in services such as child-care and cleaning purchased from non-household members. His usage also involves other concepts, such as ‘household self-provisioning’ or ‘informal work’ that bear no direct relationship to the conventional economic terms for different types of market and non-market work.

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housework, sociology of housework

Until relatively recently, sociologists studied women as paid employees outside the home, or as wives and mothers—but did not consider unpaid domestic labour (the various tasks of cleaning, cooking, and so forth, associated with child-care and maintaining the household) as a job analogous to any other kind of work. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that systematic research was undertaken which applied to domestic labour the analytical tools of the sociology of industry and work. An early example is Helene Z. Lopata's Occupation: Housework (1971).
Studies such as Ann Oakley's The Sociology of Housework (1974) have since raised questions about housewives' satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the various domestic tasks; routines for maintaining standards of cleanliness and order; the self-image of women who did this sort of work; the monotony, fragmentation, and pace of activity during the day (work conditions); social interaction among housewives; self-reward (job satisfaction) in housework; and social-class differences and similarities in all of these. Typically, a majority of respondents in these studies are found to be dissatisfied with housework, which is the aspect of being a housewife which is most disliked. Housewives tend to have a long working week, to perceive their role as having low social prestige, and to feel particularly dissatisfied with it when they have experienced work satisfaction in a previous (paid) job. On the other hand, according to Oakley at least, these predominantly negative feelings about housework (low job satisfaction) contrast with a typically positive orientation to (or high identification with) the housewife role itself. This apparent paradox arises because ‘women locate their orientation to the housewife role within the context of a general view of masculine and feminine roles, according to which the place of each sex is clearly and differently defined’, and within which the equation of femininity with housewifery is axiomatic. See also DOMESTIC DIVISION OF LABOUR.

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housing, sociological studies of

There is not, nor can there be, any uniquely defined sociology of housing. The nature of housing as a physical artefact, its spatial distribution and the terms of its occupancy (physical, legal, financial), are affected by social structures and processes. Conversely, these features of housing have social effects. Thus housing may be seen both as a social construct and as socially causative. A wide range of sociological research considers housing in one or other of these contexts. At least five areas of study may be identified. First, the influence of culture and social divisions (class, gender, and so forth) on housing design. Second, how the distribution of social groups across residential locations is affected by social structures and processes, as for example in studies of urban ecology. Third, how the physical nature of housing and spatial relations between housing units affect patterns of social interaction at the micro-level, that is within and between individual households. Fourth, determinants of housing provision in differently constituted societies (socialist, capitalist, underdeveloped), how these patterns vary cross-nationally and temporally, and the significance of forms of provision for wider social processes (for example, the role of squatter housing in the development of informal economies, political processes, and social movements in Third World cities). Finally, the role of housing in creating or maintaining social divisions or social solidarity, involving (for example) studies of the relationship between housing and class, community, status, gender, race, or forms of consumption. See also CONSUMPTION SECTORS; HOUSING CLASS.

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housing class

A concept which emerged from a study of Sparkbrook, an inner-city area of Birmingham (UK), conducted by John Rex and Robert Moore during the 1960s (see
Race, Community and Conflict, 1967
). In this study, urban social groups are conceptualized in terms of a struggle over the allocation of scarce resources, the main focus being access to desirable suburban housing. In Birmingham ethnicity was a key issue in determining access, linked both with disadvantage in the market and the bureaucratic regulation of public-sector housing allocation. (Immigrants to the city from abroad lacked the sizeable and secure income necessary to raise a loan for house-purchase, and were excluded from local authority housing by a prior-residence qualification, which forced them into sub-standard multi-occupied dwellings supplied by private landlords in the inner city.) The outcome of this struggle is expressed in terms of the formation of different housing classes. Class is used here in the Weberian sense of being based on common life-chances.
The concept of housing class has been subject to much criticism. One objection is that position in the housing market is in fact determined by position in the labour-market; that is, by social-class position with reference to the sphere of production. Similarly, other critics have argued that there are status-linked advantages and disadvantages which determine this struggle for housing, and that these are the real source of the problems faced by particular ethnic groups. A further criticism has been directed at Rex and Moore's proposition that ‘the basic process underlying urban social interaction is competition for scarce and desired types of housing’. This assumes a unitary value system (the suburban ideal) which, subsequent empirical research suggests, may not in fact exist. Different residential outcomes may reflect (at least in part) different housing preferences and styles of life. However, most criticisms address the problems common to any attempt to produce a ranked classification of social groupings, notably those of how the categories themselves are defined and how to incorporate the possibility of different prospects for those currently occupying identical positions.
The theory of housing classes is thoroughly explored from the point of view of urban social theory in
, Social Theory and the Urban Question (1983)
. and assessed against the background of the literature on race in
, Racial and Ethnic Competition (1983)
.

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Human-capital theory

This is a moden extension of Adam Smith's explanation of wage differentials by the so-called net (dis)advantages between different employments. The costs of learning the job are a very important component of net advantage and have led economists such as Gary S. Becker and Jacob Mincer to claim that, other things being equal, personal incomes vary according to the amount of investment in human capital; that is, the education and training undertaken by individuals or groups of workers. A further expectation is that widespread investment in human capital creates in the labour-force the skill-base indispensable for economic growth. The survival of the human-capital reservoir was said, for example, to explain the rapid reconstruction achieved by the defeated powers of the Second World War.
Human capital arises out of any activity able to raise individual worker productivity. In practice full-time education is, too readily, taken as the principal example. For workers, investment in human capital involves both direct costs, and costs in foregone earnings. Workers making the investment decisions compare the attractiveness of alternative future income and consumption streams, some of which offer enhanced future income, in exchange for higher present training costs and deferred consumption. Returns on societal investment in human capital may in principle be calculated in an analogous way.
Even in economics, critics of human-capital theory point to the difficulty of measuring key concepts, including future income and the central idea of human capital itself. Not all investments in education guarantee an advance in productivity as judged by employers or the market. In particular, there is the problem of measuring both worker productivity and the future income attached to career openings, except in near-tautological fashion by reference to actual earnings differences which the theory purports to explain. Empirical studies have suggested that, though some of the observed variation in earnings is likely to be due to skills learned, the proportion of unexplained variance is still high, and must be an attribute of the imperfect structure and functioning of the labour-market, rather than of the productivities of the individuals constituting the labour supply.
Human-capital theory has attracted much criticism from sociologists of education and training. In the Marxist renaissance of the 1960s, it was attacked for legitimating so-called bourgeois individualism, especially in the United States where the theory originated and flourished. It was also accused of blaming individuals for the defects of the system, making pseudo-capitalists out of workers, and fudging the real conflict of interest between the two. However, even discounting these essentially political criticisms, human-capital theory can be regarded as a species of rational-exchange theory and open to a standard critique, by sociologists, of individualist explanations of economic phenomena.

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human ecology

The study of the relationships between individuals, social groups, and their social environments. Systematic study of human (or, as it is sometimes termed, ‘social’) ecology was initiated by Robert Park and the other Chicago sociologists who applied concepts taken from plant and animal ecology in their development of urban ecology.
In its later forms (see
, Human Ecology, 1950
) human ecology rejects any simple application to human societies of the competitive and evolutionary mechanisms by which biologists explain the distribution of species in varying physical environments. Instead it is ‘a logical extension of the system of thought and the techniques of investigation developed in the study of the collective life of lower organisms to the study of man’. This involves examining how human groups produce particular patterns of social relationships when adapting to their environment. Adaptation exhibits basic characteristics thought to be inherent properties of any social system: namely, human interdependence, and functionally differentiated social institutions, including dominant institutions performing certain key functions. Under normal circumstances social change is limited to that required to restore equilibrium conditions. Ecologists such as Hawley sought ecological explanations of human behaviour and culture as well as of spatial patterns (see his
The Changing Shape of Metropolitan America, 1955, and Urban Society, 1971
).
Human ecology is often claimed as a general approach, useful for the study of social life in a variety of disciplines, including social anthropology, human geography, and urban economics. Its direct influence on contemporary sociological thought is limited, although its has obvious affinities with structural-functional theory, notably in its emphasis on the adaptive mechanisms by which social equilibrium is maintained, seeing these as an inevitable basis for social existence, and largely discounting the more radical possibilities for social change occurring through human agency. See also URBAN ECOLOGY.

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human geography

Geography is generally defined as the science which describes the earth's surface, its form and physical features, its natural and political divisions, climates, and productions. This broad-ranging discipline has numerous points of contact with the natural and the social sciences. In the case of the latter the sub-discipline of social or human geography is particularly pertinent.
Human geography was pioneered by the French geographer Vidal de la Blache (Human Geography, 1918). A broadly similar development of social geography occurred in Germany. Unlike physical geography, which is concerned principally with the description and analysis of territory, human geography focuses on the interaction between human populations and territory. This relationship has largely been ignored by mainstream sociological theory and research (except by rural and urban sociologists) until recently. The initial rapprochement between sociology and geography resulted from the impact of Marxism on human geography (see especially
, Social Justice and the City, 1973
) and on urban sociology. Subsequently there has been a more wide-ranging discussion concerning the significance of spatially defined relationships for social structure and process (and vice versa). A notable contribution has been made by Anthony Giddens's incorporation of space (and time) in his theory of social structuration. This work, in turn, has influenced (together with realist epistemology) the development of so-called critical or post-modern geography, which attempts a reconstruction of the theoretical basis for geography, parallel to that attempted by Giddens for sociology.

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human nature

A variety of sociological writers refer to the concept of human nature in different contexts. Most frequently, however, the term implies a recognition of some core and loosely determining characteristics which are assumed to underlie human action and consciousness. The exact composition of these elements is a matter of debate. Some social and political theorists (such as Thomas Hobbes, Charles Darwin (see DARWINISM), Sigmund Freud, and utilitarians generally) have invested human nature with selfish and egoistic motives, perhaps emanating from deeper biological imperatives. Others—such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and Peter Kropotkin—have linked human nature in varying degrees to co-operation and altruism. The most influential perspective in sociology, typified for example by the work of Max Weber, has been to view human nature as a consequence of human histories and experience, rather than any predetermined essence. Indeed, many recent social theorists (including Michel Foucault, social constructionists, and post-modernists generally) have rejected the very notion of human nature itself.

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Human Relations Movement

A school of the sociology of industry originating in the United States before the Second World War, whose influence spread to Britain for a short period after it. Human Relations (often referred to simply as HR) comprised both an academic literature of varying quality and a set of prescriptions for managerial practice supposedly based upon it. Authority for the ideas in both components was initially developed out of the so-called Hawthorne experiments (or studies) which were carried out in Chicago from the mid–1920s to the early 1940s, under the aegis of the Western Electric Company, and in conjunction with the Harvard Business School.
Academically, HR sought both causes and solutions within the workplace, for worker dissatisfaction, trade-union militancy, industrial conflict, and even anomie within the wider community. Because, for a time, human relations and industrial sociology were virtually synonymous, the latter also tended until recently to study in-plant factors in isolation. However, human relations theorists have also been noted for a willingness to downplay the role of economic motivations even within the workplace itself, and to stress instead the supposed logic of sentiments affecting worker behaviour. Sentiments, and work-group norms deriving from them, create an informal structure within any organization that cuts across the goals and prescriptions of the organization's formal structure, which is dictated by the contrasting managerial logic of efficiency.
Within this broad analysis there is considerable variation. The naïve ideas of Elton Mayo, based on vulgarization of the social theories of Vilfredo Pareto and Émile Durkheim, are commonly taken as the major theoretical statements of the movement. They assert that market industrial societies suffer from a loss of empathy and community feeling that is (mistakenly) characterized by Mayo as anomie. Workers attempt to compensate for this by seeking social satisfactions in the workplace. But the formal structures and payment systems established under the vogue for scientific management fail to meet this need, with the result that supervision and productivity goals are resisted.
Mayo's analysis depends on an interpretation of the results of the Hawthorne studies which does not wholly coincide with that of F. J. Roethlisberger and W. J. Dickson, the authors of Management and the Worker (1949), the main report on the experiments themselves. In turn, the compatibility of their own interpretation with the actual findings as presented in the report itself, has been challenged by various authors. In particular, it has been argued that the findings do not confirm the authors' thesis that workers attach more importance to the social than to the economic rewards of work. The main interest of Management and the Worker today is, first, as a historical document showing the reaction against behaviourist and economic approaches to the industrial worker in social science; and, secondly, as a warning of the methodological traps awaiting unwary field-workers, especially in the industrial context. The most famous of these is the so-called Hawthorne Effect, in which the very act of setting up and conducting research produces reactions in the subjects, which are then reported as findings about social reality.
Greater methodological sophistication is to be found in the various ethnographic studies of W. Lloyd Warner, Melville Dalton, Donald Roy, and William Foote Whyte. All of these researchers developed or modified Human Relations doctrine in some way. Warner conducted a classic study of a major strike, caused by job losses and de-skilling characteristic of industrial decline and recession, among a hitherto quiescent labour-force. Dalton and Roy both carried out influential research by means of participant observation that showed how this method could illuminate the behaviour of industrial work-groups. Roy's work, especially, demonstrated that workers' treatment of pay incentive schemes is economically rational once allowance has been made for their long-term income expectations. Whyte's studies were among the first to acknowledge the effects of technology and work organization on industrial behaviour and job satisfaction.
Very little of the above work was carried out as entirely disinterested science: the search for successful management techniques to boost worker productivity is often explicitly acknowledged by Human Relations writers. This aspect was so prominent at one point that the perspective was dubbed ‘cow sociology’—from the saying that contented cows give the most milk. Managements were urged to enrich the experience of work by enlarging its content and understanding workers' problems. For Mayo, therapeutic counselling was the principal means of mollifying workers' antagonism to managerial plans; for other writers, effective employee-centred supervision provided the key. Increasingly, theorists working within the tradition prescribed participatory styles of management or even self-supervision by workers, in order to give a veneer of industrial democracy and to humanize employment (especially in factories). Nevertheless, no writer within the movement abandoned the idea that management constitutes a legitimate scientific élite, or ever proposed a permanent shift of effective control to the workforce. Ultimately, therefore, human relations managerial techniques were criticized as manipulative and as a classic example of a method of managerial control which one author has called management by responsible autonomy. The much later Quality of Worklife Movement is thought by some observers of management theory to be a recrudescence of Human Relations. The same might be said for the 1980s fad for so-called Japanization and for post-fordist management styles. Indeed, Japanese quality circles are a development of human relations prescriptions imported into Japanese companies from the United States after the Second World War, and developed there more successfully than in their country of origin.
There is an excellent account of the human relations approach—or, rather, two excellent accounts—in separate editions of Michael Rose's Industrial Behaviour (1975, 1988).

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human rights

See RIGHTS.

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humanism

A very wide-ranging set of philosophies that have at their core the belief that human interests and dignity should be of primary importance. Its roots are usually traced to ancient Greece, but seeds are also observed elsewhere: in the Renaissance concern with directing attention away from God and spirituality towards the study of ‘men’ and their work in art, literature, and history; in the progressive Enlightenment concerns with rationality; and in the Modernist movement with its belief in the death of God.
With variations, the humanist philosophies stress with Protagoras that ‘man is the measure of all things’, or with Pope that ‘the proper study of mankind is man’. Most commonly, humanism involves a rejection of religions which place a God at the centre of their thought. Humanist Associations throughout the world (as embodied, for example, in the journal the Humanist) affirm that ‘the nature of the world is such that human intention and activity may play the determining role in human enterprise, subject only to the conditioning factors of the environing situation’ (
, The Meaning of Humanism, 1945
).
Humanism appears in many forms in contemporary social science. For example, there is a Marxist humanism usually associated with the early writings of Karl Marx, and particularly his concern with alienation. Humanistic psychology, sometimes called the Third Force, stands in contrast to both behaviourism and psychoanalysis, and focuses upon the self and its potential, as for example in the work of Gordon Allport, William James, and A. H. Maslow. There is also a humanistic sociology, identified with the works of C. Wright Mills, Alfred McClung Lee, and others.
From the 1970s onwards a strong critique of humanism emerged in the writings of structuralists and deconstructionists. The work of Michel Foucault, for example, provided an ‘archaeology’ of the growth of the knowledges which centred themselves upon a human subject; the semiological work of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the author, and the ‘decentred’ nature of things, thus removing the human subject from the centre-point of creativity; and Louis Althusser claimed that a belief in the human being was an epistemological disaster, an ‘idealism of the essence’, and a ‘myth of bourgeois ideology’. However, despite such attacks, humanism has remained a pervasive influence on Western thought.

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humanistic sociology

Those sociologies which are opposed to (as they see it) mechanistic, overly technical, abstracted, and career-seeking approaches, and which attempt instead to provide a social analysis ‘in the service of humanity’, acting as ‘critics, demystifiers, reporters and clarifiers’ (see
, Sociology for Whom?, 1978
). C. Wright Mills is often cited as a major example, and since the 1970s there has been an Association for Humanist Sociology based in the United States, with its own journal Humanity and Society. Ken Plummer, in his introduction to the problems and literature of a humanistic method (Documents of Life, 1983), outlines four criteria for humanistic sociology: it pays ‘tribute to human subjectivity and creativity showing how individuals respond to social constraints and actively assemble social worlds’; deals with ‘concrete human experiences—talk, feelings, actions—through their social, and especially economic, organization’; shows a ‘naturalistic “intimate familiarity” with such experiences’; and a ‘self awareness by the sociologist of the ultimate moral and political role in moving towards a social structure in which there is less exploitation, oppression and injustice’.
The work of the American sociologist Robert A. Nisbet exemplifies humanistic sociology. (Nisbet was Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at Columbia University until his retirement in 1978.) His books include The Quest for Community (1953), The Sociological Tradition (1966), The Twilight of Authority (1975), History of the Idea of Progress (1980), and The Present Age (1988). The characteristic feature of all his work is the interweaving of sociology with philosophy and history, disciplines which he believed must never be separated. He has been labelled a neo-conservative and is certainly a moralist. Many of his books are explorations of the moral crisis of modernity, the centralization of power in the bureaucratic state, and the ambiguous legacy of liberalism. See also HUMANISM.

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Hume, David

(1711–76)
The most significant philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment and founding figure of empiricism, Hume is best remembered for his ‘constant conjunction’ account of causality, and the associated problem of induction. Hume is also remembered for his insistence that moral values could never be deduced from factual premisses (no inference from ‘is’ to ‘ought’) and for his rejection of the ‘self-interest’ view of human nature and morality. He also attempted to lay the foundations for an empirical science of human nature. See also CAUSE.

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hunter-gatherer, hunting and gathering societies

A mode of subsistence dependent on the exploitation of wild or non-domesticated food resources. This has been the means of subsistence for 99 per cent of humankind's history, and involves the hunting of animals, fishing, and the gathering of wild fruit, plants, honey, and insects. Many hunting and gathering societies comprised small nomadic bands, although others have shown greater social organization. The few surviving contemporary groups cannot be seen as offering a window on the past since they have their own history. For example, some have been pushed into marginal environments by invading groups and policies of ethnocide, while others were formerly agriculturalists.
Hunting and gathering groups are often organized about a division of labour by sex, with hunting done mainly by men, and gathering done by women. While meat is usually a source of prestige, gathering produces the indispensable food, thus suggesting that members might be more accurately labelled gatherer-hunters.
The popular image of early hunting and gathering groups struggling for survival, to the detriment of all other concerns, is a myth. There is no relation between a society's technology and the complexity of its intellectual and creative pursuits: many of these groups had a rich religious and artistic life. Indeed, Marshall Sahlins has suggested they were the ‘original affluent society’ (in Stone Age Economics, 1972), since they only needed to devote a few hours each day to subsistence activities in order to satisfy their limited material wants, thus leaving considerable periods of leisure.

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Husserl, Edmund Gustav Albert

(1859–1938)
See PHENOMENOLOGY.

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hybrid identities

See IDENTITY.

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hydraulic hypothesis, hydraulic society

See ORIENTAL DESPOTISM.

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hyper-inflation

This refers to annual rates of increase in the general price level that are above some arbitrarily defined high threshold, thought to imply a loss of monetary control over the economy. It usually requires drastic policy measures, such as currency substitution and a severe curbing of budget deficits, with high social and political costs. The phenomenon is particularly associated with parts of the Third World such as Brazil and Mexico. See also INFLATION.

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hypothesis, hypothesis testing

A hypothesis is an untested statement about the relationship (usually of association or causation) between concepts within a given theory. Hypothesis-testing involves the testing of a hypothesis in a scientific manner, and hence requires a precise statement of the supposed relationship between the concepts under investigation, and the data which would need to be collected for the testing to take place. It is normal in social science to assume the null hypothesis and to use statistical methods in the testing process. However hypothesis testing is perhaps best seen as involving also an element of falsificationism. See also DEDUCTION.

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hypothesis, null

See NULL HYPOTHESIS.

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hypothetico-deductive method

See DEDUCTION.

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I

iatrogenesis

Literally ‘doctor-generated’, the term refers to sickness produced by medical activity. Widely recognized as a phenomenon, the debate is over its extent. The term was introduced into social science by Ivan Illich (Medical Nemesis, 1976), as part of his more general attack on industrial society and in particular its technological and bureaucratic institutions, for limiting freedom and justice and for corrupting and incapacitating individuals. Illich claims that iatrogenesis outweighs any positive benefits of medicine. He distinguishes three major types of iatrogenesis. Clinical iatrogenesis concerns ill-health contracted in hospital—largely the unwanted side-effects of medications and doctor ignorance, neglect, or malpractice, which poison, maim, or even kill the patient. Social iatrogenesis refers to the process by which ‘medical practice sponsors sickness by reinforcing a morbid society that encourages people to become consumers of curative, preventive, industrial and environmental medicine’. It makes people hypochondriac and too willing to place themselves at the mercy of medical experts—a dependence on the medical profession that allegedly undermines individual capacities. Finally, cultural iatrogenesis implies that societies weaken the will of their members, by paralysing ‘healthy responses to suffering, impairment and death’. Here, the whole culture becomes ‘overmedicalized’, with doctors assuming the role of priest, and political and social problems entering the medical domain.
Illich's arguments may be placed in the context of wider debates about the excessive professionalizing and bureaucratization of modern life. Other sociologists (such as Jack Douglas) have suggested that medicine is not the only sphere in which the activities of the professionals may have unintended consequences: attempts at intervention in other social problems sometimes seem merely to exacerbate the original difficulties. This is also part of the labelling theory of deviance. See also MEDICALIZATION.

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id

See PSYCHOANALYSIS.

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ideal speech situation

See CRITICAL THEORY.

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ideal type

Ideal types in sociology are most closely associated with the name of Max Weber, although as a method of investigation and explanation they are more commonly found in economics, for example in the concept of the perfect market. For Weber, the construction of an ideal type was clearly a heuristic device, or method of investigation. An ideal type is neither an average type nor a simple description of the most commonly found features of real-world phenomena. Thus one does not construct an ideal type of bureaucracy by finding the features that are shared by real bureaucracies. Nor is ideal used normatively in the sense of a desirable objective.
Perhaps the best way of thinking about ideal types is as ‘idea types’; that is, something which the sociologist works out in his or her head with reference to the real world, but selecting those elements that are most rational or which fit together in the most rational way. Thus the ideal type of bureaucracy embraces those aspects of real bureaucratic organizations that fit together in a coherent means–end chain.
Implicit in Weber's work is the notion that constructing an ideal type is a way of learning about the real world. This is situated within a rationalist view of the human sciences: namely, that we all share a rational faculty, and the fact that we can think and act rationally gives order to the world. Thus, by constructing a rational ideal type, we learn something of how the world works. We can then learn more, by comparing the ideal type with reality, looking at how and why the real bureaucracy might differ from the ideal type. We do not end with a model of what a bureaucracy is, or of what it should be, but of what it might be if it were entirely rational. In this way we can learn much from the sources of apparent irrationalities in real bureaucracies.
The method is a difficult one and owes much to the neo-Kantian philosophical tradition from which Weber came. Anglo-Saxon sociologists have had trouble with it, and often treat ideal types as a sort of hypothetical model which can be tested against reality, thus giving Weber's account (at least) a distinctly positivist gloss. The best account will be found in
, Max Weber and Contemporary Social Theory (1983)
. See also IMAGES OF SOCIETY.

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idealism

A term used to refer to that position in the philosophy of the social sciences which assumes that the social world, like all other objects of external perception, consists of ideas originating from some source or other. Examples of such sources would be Hegel's ‘Geist’, Berkeley's God, or (most commonly in sociology) the minds of individual human beings. In other words, what idealism asserts ontologically is that society only exists in so far as human beings think that it exists. And what it asserts epistemologically is that the proper way to gain knowledge of society is through the investigation of this thinking.
The position set out by Peter Winch in his The idea of a Social Science (1958) comes closest to that of pure idealism in contemporary social science, although some versions of discourse analysis are also good approximations. More commonly, however, sociologists drawn to idealism have followed one of two courses: either they have based themselves on a synthetic ontology which assumes the coexistence of mental and material phenomena in the social world, and have combined this with a largely empiricist epistemology (as, some have argued, in the case of Max Weber); or, they have combined an idealist ontology with an empiricist stress on the epistemological primacy to be accorded to observation (as, perhaps, in symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology).

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identity

Although the term identity has a long history—deriving from the Latin root idem implying sameness and continuity—it was not until the twentieth century that the term came into popular usage. Discussions of identity take two major forms—psychodynamic and sociological. A central thrust of both traditions has been to challenge essentialist understandings of the concept. These assume a unique core or essence to identity—the ‘real me’—which is coherent and remains more or less the same throughout life. Against this the emphasis within both sociological and psychoanalytic theories has been, to varying degrees, the invented and constructed character of identity.
The psychodynamic tradition emerges with Freud's theory of identification, through which the child comes to assimilate (or introject) external persons or objects, usually the superego of the parent. Psychodynamic theory stresses the inner core of a psychic structure as having a continuous (though often conflicting) identity. The psycho-historian Erik Erikson saw identity as a process ‘located’ in the core of the individual, and yet also in the core of his or her communal culture, hence making a connection between community and individual. He developed the term identity crisis during the Second World War, in reference to patients who had ‘lost a sense of personal sameness and historical continuity’, and subsequently generalized it to a whole stage of life (as part of his epigenetic life-stage model of the eight life-stage of man). Here, youth is identified as a universal crisis period of potential identity confusion. Subsequently, the term ‘identity crisis’ has moved into common parlance.
The sociological tradition of identity theory is linked to symbolic interactionism and emerges from the pragmatic theory of the self discussed by William James and George Herbert Mead. The self is a distinctively human capacity which enables people to reflect on their nature and the social world through communication and language. Both James and Mead see the self as a process with two phases: the ‘I’, which is knower, inner, subjective, creative, determining, and unknowable; and the ‘Me’, which is the more known, outer, determined, and social phase. Identification, here, is a process of naming, of placing ourselves in socially constructed categories, with language holding a central position in this process. In the later works of Erving Goffman and Peter Berger, identity is stated clearly to be ‘socially bestowed, socially sustained and socially transformed’ (Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 1966).
Developments in social theory associated with structuralism and post–structuralism share the concern with language and representation more broadly which was integral to the symbolic interactionist approach to identity. Structuralism and post-structuralism, however, more assertively emphasize the constitutive or deeply formative role of language and representation in the making of identity. Underpinning both structuralism and post-structuralism are the insights of the Swiss structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (see
The Course in General Linguistics, 1949
). Saussure's work emphasized the way meaning in language was produced, not through the intention of the speaking or writing subject, but by the interplay of signs. Language itself was a structured system which produced meaning. In a radical formulation, Saussure suggested that it was language which effectively spoke the individual by subjecting him or her to its rules, rather than the other way around. Saussure's account of language has been used to argue that all social and cultural meanings are produced within language or systems of representation more generally. In other words the world around us, and our place in it, is given meaning—made meaningful—within representation. In an important sense, therefore, who we are—our sense of identity—is shaped by the meanings attached to particular attributes, capacities, and forms of conduct.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault, building on the broad thrust of Saussure's arguments, took this account of identity further through his work on discourse or discursive formations. Discourse, for Foucault, shaped ways of talking about or representing or knowing a particular object. In his work on the growth of the modern prison, for example, he argued that penal discourses (such as criminology) produced a distinct set of ways of talking about and knowing the criminal and the criminal mind (see his
Discipline and Punish, 1977
). Importantly, for Foucault, these discourses furnished positions for agency and identity. They did so both for the knowing subject (the expert criminologist) and for the known (the criminal). The raw material for identity, then, was formed within discourses, taken up and inhabited by an individual, shaping and forming a sense of identity in the process.
Foucault's work also introduces an element which has become central to recent accounts of identity. This is the insistence that we, as individuals, inhabit multiple identities. There are two key dimensions to this assertion. The first—and most important to Foucault himself—is that different discourses generate particular and often divergent positions for agency and identity. Discourses associated with religion, the state, sport, or consumption produce discrete and often contradictory versions of the self. We are, within this perspective, each addressed by a range of possible versions of ourselves: as devout believer, as taxpayer, football supporter, or hedonist. The second dimension is that the multiple identities we inhabit in relation to a range of social practices are themselves linked to larger structures of identity. What is usually cited here are structures like class, ethnicity, ‘race’, gender, and sexuality. It is important to note, however, that these different identities are not discrete—they interact with each other. As Catherine Hall has shown in relation to nineteenth-century middle-class men in Britain, their masculinity was dependent upon and secured not only through class-based dispositions, but also through particular kinds of ethnicity (‘Englishness’) and race (‘whiteness’) (see
White, Male and Middle Class, 1993
). Gender, ethnicity, and race, as in this example, are not partitioned but interwoven.
A further development of this concern with the interfusing of identities has emphasized the hybridity of cultural identities. The notion of hybridity suggests—most importantly in relation to ‘racial’ and ethnic identities—that identities are not pure but the product of mixing, fusion, and creolization. Underlying this account of identity is an attention to the mixing and movement of cultures. Figuring prominently in this are the diverse forms of cultural traffic—from the slave trade to the contemporary circulation of media forms—which have helped to shape the modern world (see, for example,
, Black Atlantic, 1993
). The resulting fusion or hybridity of identities is not the product of the assimilation of one culture or cultural tradition by another, but the production of something new. Studies of the hybridity of cultural identity are closely allied to accounts of diaspora identities. Diaspora is a term that was initially used to refer to the dispersal of Jewish people across the globe, but is now regularly used to describe a Black diaspora, the movement and trafficking of people of African origins across continents. Diaspora identities are shaped by this sense of having been, in Salman Rushdie's phrase, ‘borne across the world’ (see his
Imaginary Homelands, 1991
); of being ‘in’ but not entirely (or only) ‘of’ the West.
A different conception of identity is stressed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan developed Freud's work via the influence of Saussure and emphasized the split and alienated aspects of identity. In what is, in large degree, a rigorous reworking of Freud's writings on narcissism, Lacan defines the infant's first sense of itself (its first self-identification) as coming through its imaginary positioning by its own mirror-image (see his essay on
‘The Mirror Phase as Formative of the Function of the “I”’, 1968
). Looking at its own reflection, or literally reflected in its mother's eyes, Lacan argues that the infant misrecognizes itself as its mirror-image; and is taken in by its own image in a moment of gestalt. Lacan describes this as an instance of primary narcissistic identification, and it is for him the basis and prototype of all future identifications. The splitting or misrecognition at the heart of this process is exemplary for Lacan; it establishes the subject's enduring relation to the visual field as an alienated or decentred experience, a split between the external ‘ideal ego’ (the mirror-image) and the internalized ‘ego ideal’.
Discussions of identity have been prominent in sociology and have spawned a huge literature, including many plays and novels, in which the quest for identity or the breakdown of the self are primary themes. These accounts tend to divide into two main camps: an optimistic and a pessimistic version. For the optimists, the modern world has brought with it increasing individuality and choice over a wider range of identities. Thus, people are more likely to self-actualize: to discover an inner self which is not artificially imposed by tradition, culture or religion; and to embark upon quests for greater individuality, self-understanding, flexibility, and difference. By contrast, pessimists portray a mass society of estrangement: for example, the psychodynamic tradition highlights the loss of boundaries between self and culture, and the rise of the narcissistic personality; while the sociologists see a trend towards fragmentation, homelessness, and meaninglessness, and bemoan the loss of authority in the public world through the growth of self-absorption and selfishness.
There is, therefore, no clear concept of identity in modern sociology. It is used widely and loosely in reference to one's sense of self, and one's feelings and ideas about oneself, as for example in the terms ‘gender identity’ or ‘class identity’. It is sometimes assumed that our identity comes from the expectations attached to the social roles that we occupy, and which we then internalize, so that it is formed through the process of socialization. Alternatively, it is elsewhere assumed that we construct our identities more actively out of the materials presented to us during socialization, or in our various roles. However, Goffman's work (in particular The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), which looks at the complex ways in which we present ourselves to other people, a process which might be termed identity management) raises a crucial issue that is unresolved in all camps: namely, the question of whether or not there is an authentic self or identity behind the various masks which we present to others. See also PERSONALITY; PSYCHOANALYSIS; REFLEXIVE MODERNIZATION.

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identity crisis

This concept is most fully developed by the American psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. He uses it to refer to a crisis, having interlocking psychological and sociological aspects, in an individual's sense of self. Erikson sees such crises as common in the adolescent stage of development, when no clear social role has yet been developed, and the youth is more than a child but not yet an adult. Psychologically, this is complemented by a reworking of earlier stages of development, particularly in relation to sexuality and the ability to form intimate relationships outside the family. (See, for example, his
Life History and the Historical Moment, 1975
.)

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ideographic versus nomothetic approaches

The former term refers to those methods which highlight the unique elements of the individual phenomenon—the historically particular—as in much of history and biography. The contrast is with the nomothetic, which seeks to provide more general law-like statements about social life, usually by emulating the logic and methodology of the natural sciences. The distinction hails from the German philosopher Wilhelm Windelband, and provoked an acrimonious debate (the so-called Methodenstreit) in late nineteenth-century Germany and Austria, between proponents of generalizing and individualizing approaches to the social, historical, and cultural sciences. Many of Max Weber's methodological writings are directed towards this debate, notably his theory of concept formation and ideal types, although the issues have also been popularized via the psychological writings of Gordon Allport. See also GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN AND NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN; LIFE-HISTORY.

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ideological state apparatus

A term developed by the Marxist theorist Louis Althusser to denote institutions such as education, the churches, family, media, trade unions, and law, which were formally outside state control but which served to transmit the values of the state, to interpellate those individuals affected by them, and to maintain order in a society, above all to reproduce capitalist relations of production. In contemporary capitalist societies education has replaced the Church as the principal ideological state apparatus. Among Marxists, the term is contrasted with the so-called ‘repressive state apparatus’ of the armed forces and police, and is allotted a major role in securing compliance within developed capitalist societies. Beyond reproducing the assumption that the state itself reflects a particular class interest, the theory of ideological state apparatus has also been criticized for simplifying relations between these institutions and the state, and underestimating their autonomy or potential for such autonomy. It also allowed too facile an equation of challenging authority within education with weakening the capitalist system as a whole.

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ideology

This term has a long, complex, and extraordinarily rich history. As a specifically sociological concept, it originated in the work of Karl Marx, and to this day its deployment in a particular sociological analysis remains a sign that such analysis is either Marxist or strongly influenced by Marxism. This said, it is important to bear in mind that the social phenomenon to which the concept refers—the realm of ideas or culture, in general, and that of political ideas or political culture more specifically—together with the relationship between the realm of ideas and those of politics and economics, have also been discussed at length within other sociological traditions. What is more, these other discussions (especially those amongst Weberians, Durkheimians, and structuralists), have not infrequently had a considerable impact on Marxist conceptualizations of ideology (as well as vice versa).
Much of the complexity of the concept's history, and therefore the difficulties encountered by those who are asked to define it, is a consequence of the underdeveloped and partial nature of Marx's various fragmentary and sometimes conflicting discussions of the phenomenon to which it refers. In The German Ideology (1846), Marx was concerned to explain not simply why he was no longer a Hegelian idealist of any kind, but also why he and so many others had for so long been in the thrall of such ideas. In essence, and putting to one side all the ambiguities that subsequent commentators have reasonably and unreasonably claimed to descry, his argument was that the principal substantive tenet of idealism (namely the belief that ideas were the motive force of history) was not in any sense Reason's final coming to consciousness of itself; rather, this tenet was the product of a history that had hitherto been hidden from view, especially from that of intellectuals like himself, and as such it was an ideological doctrine. This hidden history was that history of ‘real, active men’ that he was soon to refer to as the ‘history of class struggles’, and the reason it had proved to be particularly difficult for the intellectuals to discern was because, to paraphrase Marx, they tended to be concerned with the ruling ideas of the epoch, which as in any epoch were the ideas of the ruling class.
In sum, then, this argument contains the following: first, the embryo of Marx's base versus superstructure model of society, with its suggestion that the realm of ideas is distinguishable from and determined by that of the economy; and, second, the notion that what makes some (the ruling) ideas ideological is the fact that they hide things to the benefit of the ruling class.
Marx's most sustained effort to explain the nature of the link between the economic and ideational realms, as well as how the ideas of the ruling class become ruling ideas, may be found at the end of the first chapter of Capital (1867). First, he explains the basic mechanism whereby there can occur a difference between how things really are in the economy and the wider society, and how people think they are. This he does by making an analogy with ‘the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world’. He then argues that ‘in that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race’. Finally, he concludes, as it is with ideas then ‘so it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour (in capitalist societies).’
The net result of the occurrence of this fetishism is that what people (including, he points out particularly, bourgeois economists, Christian clerics, and lawyers) think is going on is simply the buying and selling of things whose values are intrinsic to the things themselves. In fact, Marx suggests, these values are the product of certain relations between people that are obscured from them, by all the buying, selling, litigating, and justifying which, as he states at the beginning of the following chapter, they have to engage in by virtue of the fact that ‘commodities cannot go to market and make exchanges on their own account’. Thus, people in capitalist societies necessarily come to regard apparently equal (or neutral) market exchanges as the basic relationships within their societies, whereas in fact, according to Marx, the more basic relationships are the profoundly unequal ones that occur within ‘the hidden abode of production’. In this way, then, ‘the class which is the ruling material force of society… [becomes]… its ruling intellectual force’.
The metaphor of the fetish and Marx's specification of how fetishism occurs in capitalist societies have continued to have a great if sometimes very divergent influence amongst Marxist scholars. For example, György Lukács utilizes it both in his theory of false consciousness and his proposals as to how this might best be overcome. Lukács's treatment was also influenced by Weber. By contrast, and in his case influenced somewhat by Durkheim and the structuralist tradition, Louis Althusser developed Marx's ideas to produce both a conception of the ideological relation as in a rather special sense an ‘imaginary relation’, and a specification of the mechanism whereby people or subjects are positioned within such a relation as one of interpellation.
More recently, numerous scholars, often under the influence of Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony, have sought to incorporate various linguistic and other concepts of discourse analysis into the theory of ideology. Their hope is that this will enable them to investigate what might be termed the internal life of the ideological realm, and so give some content to what many have termed its relative autonomy. In so doing, their hope is also that they might be able to provide more detailed and sophisticated accounts of how it is that a society's ‘ruling ideas’ are produced—more sophisticated, that is, than those explanations that are possible on the basis of the theory of commodity fetishism, and its associated notion that such ideas must necessarily be those of the ruling class. Nevertheless, the theory of fetishism still has its defenders, for whom any such dalliance with post-structuralism and post-modernism is heretical.
The sociological literature on ideology is extraordinarily dense. Jorge Larrain's The Concept of Ideology (1979) and Terry Eagleton's Ideology—An Introduction (1991) are both reasonably accessible. See also DOMINANT IDEOLOGY THESIS; DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS; GOULDNER, ALVIN; IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUS.

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illness

See HEALTH AND ILLNESS, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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images of society

In the Sociological Review for 1966, the British sociologist
published an article on ‘Sources of Variation in Working-Class Images of Society’
, in which he drew together the findings from a range of existing studies of social imagery, voting behaviour, industrial sociology, and community life. From these, Lockwood derived an influential typology of the ‘world-views’ or ‘social consciousness’ of manual workers, distinguishing between the ‘traditional proletarian’, ‘deferential traditionalist’, and ‘privatized instrumentalist’ types.
The first of these is associated with mining, shipbuilding, or some similar such industry which typically gathers its labour-force into solidary communities, relatively isolated from the wider society. These workers tend therefore to be members of ‘occupational communities’: that is, social networks which are characterized by a high degree of job satisfaction among those involved, who also share strong attachments to primary work groups, and are committed to workplace relationships which carry over into the sphere of leisure. These sorts of manual workers reside in ‘traditional working-class communities’, comprising closely knit cliques of workmates who are also friends, neighbours, and relatives. Their circumstances are said to promote mutual aid, sociability, cohesion, and collectivism. Finally, they display a proletarian consciousness rooted in a power-based image of society, which makes a simple distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Deferential traditionalists, by comparison, proffer a prestige or hierarchical model of society in which people are ranked according to status. Characteristically, these sorts of manual workers defer to their ‘betters’ (status superiors) both socially and politically, for example by voting for traditional right-wing parties on the grounds that the established élites in society can be trusted to pursue national as opposed to sectional or class interests. According to Lockwood, this world-view is common among employees in small-scale family enterprises, or in work situations where paternalistic forms of industrial authority are prevalent, as for example among farm labourers. Typically, such workers live in small communities comprising a ‘local status system’, in which people tend to accord to individuals a position as individuals, within a localized hierarchy of prestige within which ‘everyone knows his or her place’.
Finally, there are privatized instrumentalists who have a predominantly monetary orientation to work and a home-centred and family-centred (privatized) suburban life-style, which together foster a pecuniary image of society in which class divisions are seen principally in terms of income and material possessions. These workers are attracted to jobs mainly for extrinsic (economic) reasons, are rarely members of solidary work-groups, and only infrequently socialize with their workmates. Their attachments to trade unions and left-wing political parties are less solidaristic and more instrumental (calculating) than those of the traditional proletarians, since they are ‘devoid of all sense of participation in a class movement seeking structural changes in society’, and conditional instead upon the ability of the workers' organizations and parties to improve their material circumstances (a type of sectional militancy which Lockwood termed ‘instrumental collectivism’).
Lockwood was ambivalent about the status of his argument, since he claimed both that it presented a series of ideal types which were sociological rather than historical concepts, but also that the image of society propounded by privatized instrumentalists of the age of post-war affluence was ‘prototypical’ of manual workers in general, in that the pecuniary world-view was rapidly replacing those of the traditional proletarians and deferential traditionalists of an earlier era. Nevertheless, both his typology and the highly original synthesis of many of the themes of post-war British sociology on which it rested acted as benchmarks for innumerable studies of British working-class life for more than a decade, and Lockwood's analysis continues to influence researchers on both sides of the Atlantic even today. See also DEFERENCE; EMBOURGEOISEMENT; WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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immanence

See TRANSCENDENTALISM.

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immigration

See MIGRATION, SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF; RACE, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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imperialism

Literally ‘empire-ism’, a term originally used in the 1860s to denote the political and military aspirations of Napoleon III in France, and later applied to Great Power rivalry in general, involving military competition and the acquisition of colonial territories in Africa and Asia. More recently, it has been used increasingly (now almost exclusively) to refer to the domination of colonial by more developed countries, and hence as a synonym for colonialism.
Theories of imperialism seek to provide explanations for the expansion of European control after 1870. They fall into three broad categories. The sociological theory of Joseph Schumpeter, drawing on a tradition of liberal thought, sees imperial policies as unnecessary and counter-productive. It analyses imperialism as a reflection of the existence of a pre-industrial and precapitalist social stratum within the imperial countries, a landed and military aristocracy, whose atavistic ideals and social position impel them towards something that is not in the interests of modern capitalist society. Marxist and more broadly economic theories see imperialism as a necessary product of capitalist industrialization and the limits which this has reached in the more developed countries. Here, imperialism represents either the search for markets, for pre-capitalist societies to subjugate, or for low wages or higher investment returns. For Lenin, imperialism (in the sense of colonialism) was the ‘highest stage’ of capitalism, and its abolition would spell the end of capitalism as a whole. Finally, strategic or political theories of imperialism see the expansion of the 1870s as but one of many such historical phenomena, in which more powerful states, for a variety of reasons (many of them non-economic) and through different mechanisms, seek to subject weaker states to their control; that is, there is nothing specifically economic or capitalist about the phenomenon. In this sense the term would cover such ancient empires as the Persian and Roman, as well as the Soviet bloc up to 1990, and informal empires such as those constituted by the economic influence of the United States in Latin America. See also NEO-COLONIALISM.

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impression formation

A social psychological term referring to the way in which strangers develop perceptions of each other. A long tradition of (largely experimental) studies have investigated the impact of initial impressions. These have identified phenomena such as primacy effects and halo effects.

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impression management

A dramaturgical concept, introduced by Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). It highlights the ways in which persons in the company of others strive to present an image of themselves in particular ways. See also ALTERCASTING; IDENTITY.

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import-substitution industrialization

An economic strategy aimed at encouraging national industrial growth so as to reduce imports of manufactured goods. It was associated with the United Nations Commission for Latin America and put into practice during the 1960s. It is now generally accepted that the policy was a failure, as a strategy for industrialization, and it was progressively replaced by a greater emphasis on export-led industrialization.

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incarceration

The process of being institutionalized, by a carceral organization such as the prison service, in a prison, mental hospital, juvenile detention centre, or other carceral institution which isolates inmates from the wider society. See also DECARCERATION; INSTITUTIONALIZATION.

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incentive payments

Payment by results: any method—such as individual piecework—of paying workers above a basic minimum and in relation to their output or productivity. Schemes may apply to individuals, small groups, or (as with some so-called profit-related pay arrangements) to entire workforces. Incentive payments require precise and acceptable measures of output and assume that workers are always motivated to maximize short-run money earnings. The aim, often unrealized, is to increase workers' effort and commitments to their tasks. See also EFFORT BARGAINING; HUMAN RELATIONS MOVEMENT; SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT.

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incest taboo

The prohibition of sexual relations between immediate relatives, usually between parents and children, and between siblings. The prohibition usually extends to persons adopted into or marrying into any of these primary relationships, and is thus attributed to a need to limit sexual activity to a single generation within the nuclear family group (to avoid conflict), as well as to the fear of inbreeding.

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inclusion

See CLOSURE.

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income distribution

There are two types—functional and size. The functional distribution of national income shows how the total is made up of income from land, labour, and capital, or the contribution of each factor of production to the national income. In this context, income redistribution concerns arguments about whether profits should be reduced to augment employment income, for example. The size distribution of personal income shows the distribution of direct financial resources received by individuals, families, and households. This is now the most common meaning of the term. The focus is on the receipt of money income, excluding the social wage income implied by access to public goods such as state-funded education and health services.
There is no precise agreed definition of personal income, and no unambiguous operational definition setting out which items are to be included or excluded, and in what manner. Definitions tend to rely in practice on whatever information is available within administrative records, regular surveys of income and expenditure, and other sources within official statistics. One of the most common definitions is thus the earnings distribution, because data on the wages and salaries of employees and the earnings and profits of the self-employed are available from many surveys. But the definition of personal income goes wider than this and can include profits of firms in the private sector when distributed as dividends (but not the profits of state enterprises); earnings in kind and fringe benefits (such as free housing, free meals, subsidized loans or the use of a company car); unearned income from investments; income from sub-letting and other imputed income from home ownership; income maintenance payments from the state and any other benefits or insurance receipts. A distinction is drawn between income and wealth, which is the net value of all assets which can be assigned to individuals, but in reality income and capital are not separate entities and can be converted one to the other. This is an important source of practical difficulty in defining income as visible money income.
Earnings and income can be measured as current income (such as income in the last week or previous twelve months), or as usual or normal income, which will differ in cases where the current income is untypical for any reason, such as sickness or unemployment. An important distinction is made between the pre-tax and after-tax income distributions, between original incomes and disposable incomes. The distribution of original income shows the position before any income redistribution policies take effect, and always displays the widest dispersion of income. The distribution of disposable (or net) income shows the position after deducting taxes, social insurance contributions, and any other obligatory deductions from original income, then adding income maintenance and related benefits. Disposable income provides a broad measure of spending power, as distinct from discretionary income, which is disposable income less necessary expenditure on housing, travel-to-work, and similar unavoidable costs.
The distribution of income is studied to assess the redistribution effects of government fiscal and social welfare policies; as a key factor in patterns of consumption; as a measure of economic and hence social inequality, and one that is more accessible to researchers than the distribution of wealth; and to measure poverty. It is sometimes used to study the unanticipated effects of policies overtly concerned with quite different matters, such as divorce or ill-health Economists are interested in the pattern of income distribution as an independent variable in its own right, for example whether greater income inequalities lead to higher savings, or whether industrialization leads to reduced income inequalities.
Most of the (many) methodological problems of investigating income distribution, especially changes therein, are discussed in
, Wealth, Income and Inequality (1980)
. The evidence for Britain is usefully summarized in
, Wealth and Inequality in Britain (1986)
. See also GINI COEFFICIENT; LORENZ CURVE.

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incommensurability

Measurement requires common units of measurement along a single continuum or scale for comparing ‘objects’. If these requirements are not met then the apparent measurements are said to be incommensurable.

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incorporation

The process whereby social groups, classes, and individuals are integrated into a larger social entity. This can be seen as being achieved either through the extension of rights and the subsequent exacting of obligations, as in citizenship communities, or through mechanisms such as social mobility, intermarriage, and urban desegregation. As with social closure, incorporation implies marginalized groups, élite-mass relations, and co-optation. The term has been widely employed in discussions about the allegedly revolutionary role of the proletariat, a historical mission which (it is claimed by some) has been frustrated by the incorporation of this class, via the mechanisms of the welfare state, political representation, home ownership, and more recently share ownership. See also CORPORATE SOCIETY.

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independence

See STATISTICAL INDEPENDENCE.

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independent variable

Within a particular study, analysis, or model, the independent (or explanatory) variable is the social element whose characteristics or variations shape and determine the dependent variable: for example, the age of marriage can help explain the likelihood of divorce. In an experimental situation, independent variables can be systematically manipulated, so that the effect on the dependent variable can be observed. Whether a variable is treated as dependent or independent is determined by the theoretical framework and focus of a study, but independent variables must precede the dependent variable, and should have causal powers. See also CAUSAL MODELLING.

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index

A quantitative social, economic, or political measure, often a weighted combination of a number of selected individual indicators for the domain of interest. One example is the Federal Bureau of Investigation's uniform crime index for the USA. Many countries have some kind of retail prices index which measures the rate of inflation in consumer goods. Indexes usually employ standardization to facilitate comparisons, for example showing the initial year of the time-series as base 100, or using the national figure as base 100 for presenting sub-national figures—as illustrated by standard mortality rates.
While these and many other simple indices are useful to sociologists interested in studying trends via longitudinal analysis, other more complex indices are of dubious utility, including (for example) the many available indices of deprivation and poverty. In the first place, the technical problems of combining multiple indicators of (say) deprivation into a meaningful single index are considerable. To mention only the most obvious, indicators may be closely correlated, although reflecting quite different processes; weighting, ranking, and collapsing of indicators is inevitably contentious, since these can all be done in many different ways (involving expert opinion, factor analysis, cluster analysis, and so on); and, finally, the causal analysis is undermined by the ecological problems (see ECOLOGICAL FALLACY) inherent in the resulting index (most clearly in the attempt to explain individual behaviour by reference to aggregated, usually district-level, data). In addition, many different indices have been created to cover the degree, extent, and intensity of deprivation, so that problems of interpreting the scores are further aggravated. The problems then involved in standardizing indicators across (say) countries simply underline the technical difficulties of creating meaningful composite indices.
Moreover, the availability of a growing range of sophisticated techniques for multivariate analysis renders these sort of composite indices increasingly obsolete. If relevant data are collected about (for example) unemployment, values, ethnicity, income, size and type of family, welfare dependency, and such like, from a sufficiently large sample, then the causal relationships between these characteristics can properly be treated as an empirical issue via the family of regression and other statistical techniques for causal modelling. The connections between structural location, behaviour, and beliefs can then be a matter for empirical investigation, and the researcher no longer needs to decide—a priori—how many of these attributes should be compounded before some putative condition of ‘deprivation’ is established.
Of course, politicians like to see league tables which rank local areas or regions in terms of a single index score purporting to reflect the degree of deprivation (or whatever), because such tables seem to provide a firm basis for public spending (and one which is easily understood). Sociologically dubious indices continue, therefore, to be a prominent feature of much policy research (see the report by UK Department of the Environment, 1991 Deprivation Index: A Review of Approaches and a Matrix of Results, 1995). However, whether they are good social science is quite another matter, and it is hard to see how such exercises help illuminate those causal relationships which constitute the primary interest of sociological research.

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index crime

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's uniform crime index in the USA is composed of seven index crimes: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny (theft), and motor vehicle theft.

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index of dissimilarity

See DISSIMILARITY, INDEX OF.

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indexicality

See ETHNOMETHODOLOGY; PEIRCE, CHARLES SANDERS.

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indicator

A quantitative measure which reflects change in some aspect of the economy or of society—such as mortality rates, measures of job segregation, or the retail price index. In the 1960s and 1970s, effort was invested in developing systems of social indicators, to monitor and evaluate social policy.

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indirect (causal) effect

See CAUSAL MODELLING.

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indirect difference, method of

See MILL, JOHN STUART.

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individualism

Broadly any set of ideas emphasizing the importance of the individual and the individual's interests, the term is used to characterize a range of ideas, philosophies, and doctrines. It is, for example, employed to describe a political philosophy usually described as ‘liberal individualism’ that stresses the importance of the individual and the value attached to individual freedom and individual choice. This philosophy is frequently contrasted with collectivism, where the collective rather than the individual good is paramount. Thus, the American sociologist Robert N. Bellah and his colleagues have recently proposed the controversial thesis that American individualism is becoming excessive, since it is destroying the moral integrity of that society (see
Habits of the Heart, 1985
). The term is also used to characterize certain religious ideas, as in the phrase ‘Protestant individualism’, since Protestant churches historically have emphasized the relationship of God and individual as being one that is not mediated by the organization of the Church itself.
Whilst sociologists frequently use the term as a description of the philosophy of a particular social or political group within society, they also use it to characterize an approach to social phenomena within their discipline. So-called methodological individualism refers to the position adopted by those who argue that, in studying society, sociologists must not only (inevitably) study individuals, but also that the explanations of the social phenomena they study—phenomena such as social classes, power, the educational system, or whatever—must be formulated as, or reducible to, the characteristics of individuals. This position stands in marked contrast to ‘methodological holism’, the theoretical principle that each social entity (group, institution, society) has a totality that is distinct, and cannot be understood by studying merely its individual component elements. (An example would be Émile Durkheim's claim that social facts can be studied and explained independently of the individual.)
The debate over methodological individualism reflects an underlying tension about the relation between the society and the individual. This tension is, however, now more commonly analysed in terms of structure and agency: discussions of methodological individualism as such are less common. See also LIBERALISM.

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induction, inductive

The inverse of deduction. Induction begins from particular observations from which empirical generalizations are made. These generalizations then form the basis for theory-building. So-called analytic induction is common in qualitative studies within sociology. This method requires that every case examined in a piece of research substantiates a hypothesis. The researcher formulates a general hypothesis from observation of initial cases; investigates subsequent cases in the search for a negative instance; and reformulates the hypothesis to cope with those confounding cases that are encountered. The process is deemed to be exhausted when no new discrepant cases can be found—a necessarily rather subjective judgement—and the (now revised) generalization is allowed to stand. See also CAUSE.

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industrial action

Certain sanctions available to groups of workers and employers in dispute with each other over employment conditions. A strike is a refusal by workers to continue working, usually involving a walk-out or concerted non-attendance at the workplace. Wildcat strikes are short and begin without notice. Unofficial strikes are called without formal approval from the workers' trade union. Sit-down strikes or sit-ins differ in that strikers remain on the employer's premises. Other sanctions available to workers and their trade unions include the work-to-rule, in which an officious and punctilious observation of factory or office rules is made to inconvenience management; go-slows in which work is carried out more slowly than normal; overtime bans in which workers refuse to work more than their standard hours; and blacking in which workers refuse to work with particular products or services. Aside from disciplinary action against individuals, the main equivalent sanction available to employers is the lock-out, in which the employer either dismisses workers or prevents them from entering the workplace. Measures of industrial action are often taken to be indicators of industrial conflict, though this is a broader and more difficult notion. Information on strikes and lock-outs, including numbers of disputes, numbers of working days lost, and numbers of workers involved, is available for many countries, though care is needed in analysis because of differing statistical definitions. Measures of other forms of industrial action are much less widely available.

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industrial capitalism

See CAPITALISM.

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industrial conflict

A term which refers to all expressions of dissatisfaction within the employment relationship, especially those pertaining to the employment contract, and the effort bargain. The many different kinds of industrial conflict may be divided into two broad classes—informal and formal.
Informal industrial conflict is so labelled because it is not based on any systematic organization, results directly from a sense of grievance, and supposedly is wholly expressive in nature. Many forms of industrial sabotage which appear irrational would constitute industrial conflict in this sense, as would purely individualized and even unconscious forms of protest, including absenteeism, frequent job-changing, negligence, and even accidents at work. Industrial sociologists have also regarded spontaneous walk-outs and strikes as examples of informal industrial conflict, as well as the constant opposition to management expressed in workgroup norms regulating output, restrictive practices, secrecy, or other guarded treatment of superiors. The idea of informal industrial conflict thus draws attention to the roots of behaviour which may appear incomprehensible from the point of view of management. Used too widely, however, it loses its vigour.
Formal industrial conflict is reserved for organized expressions of conflict articulated through a trade-union or other worker representative. Its supposed purpose is strategic or instrumental rather than (or as well as) expressive and may often involve workers who, by themselves, have no feelings or personal involvement regarding the issues at stake in the dispute. Its characteristic form is the organized strike: that is, a withdrawal of labour such as to constitute a temporary breach of contract, using the collective strength of the workforce to avoid sanctions and achieve adjustments to pay or conditions of work. Strikes may be reinforced by other types of formal sanction such as the go-slow and work to rule. They may be confined to those directly affected or may take the form of sympathy strikes by workers in related jobs and industries. Strikes are deemed to be official if they have been called at the behest of the union leadership and in accordance with the law and with procedural collective-bargaining agreements. The term unofficial or ‘wildcat’ is applied to strikes waged through unrecognized leaders such as shop stewards, or by a non-recognized union, or in some other way which breaches established collective-bargaining laws and procedures. Obviously, there is not a clear distinction in practice between wildcat strikes and some of the more collective forms of unofficial conflict.
At one time there was much debate in industrial sociology about the term strike-proneness—epitomizing the search for structural causes of industrial conflict. Attempts were made to link patterns of strike activity with industry type, with the degree of isolation and class homogeneity of the work community, with the use of mass-production technologies, the bureaucratization of management, and the structuring of work groups. Though weak correlations have been found with some of these factors, the frequency and incidence of strikes and similar forms of unrest is so erratic that plenty of discrepant occurrences could be found. Economists have had some success linking long-term strike patterns to economic indicators but they, like other investigators in this mould, are hampered by the varying quality and scope of national and international strike statistics. The conclusions tend therefore to be pitched at a highly general level. A fundamental objection to such structural explanations is that the more overt forms of industrial conflict have to be socially organized as well as provoked. Hence, explanations of them have to bear in mind the strategic considerations perceived by workers and their leaders, as well as the meaning of industrial action, which can (and clearly does) vary greatly between industrial relations cultures. It is said, for example, that the wearing of red hats during work is as serious an expression of dissent in the Japanese context as a protracted strike is in the British.
The theoretical and case-study literature is vast. For a cogent summary see
, Competition and Conflict at Work (1981
). See also KERR-SIEGEL HYPOTHESIS; WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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industrial democracy

An ideal in which citizenship rights in employment are held to include partial or complete participation by the workforce in the running of an industrial or commercial organization. The term, and others associated with it, is often laden with ideological overtones. At one extreme, industrial democracy implies workers' control over industry, perhaps linked with worker ownership of the means of production, as exemplified by producer co-operatives. Another approach is the appointment of worker or trade-union representatives to company boards or governing bodies. For others, industrial democracy takes the form of ‘worker participation’, such as collective bargaining in which trade unions operate as a kind of permanent opposition to managements. In this model managements are seen to propose, employees and their unions offer reactions and if necessary opposition, and negotiation subsequently leads to collective agreements more or less satisfactory to both sides. A fourth approach places less stress on power-sharing and more on consultation and communication: managers are seen as retaining all responsibility for decisions but make arrangements to consult worker representatives before changes are introduced. These and other approaches to industrial democracy which involve representative structures on the workers' side are often described as examples of indirect democracy. Where individual workers represent themselves without such intermediaries direct democracy is said to exist. An example would be an autonomous work group in a factory or office, charged with making its decisions about work organization and planning independently of higher management, but which is sufficiently small for all its members to take a personal direct part in influencing the group's decisions.
Industrial democracy challenges not only the characteristically authoritarian and bureaucratic structures of the capitalist enterprise but also centralizing tendencies in the planned economies of socialist regimes. Without participation, it is argued, worker alienation will persist. Critics claim, however, that participation may be used as a manipulative device to control workers' efforts or to weaken trade-union organization and unity. Actual examples testify that the degree of power achieved by or delegated to the workforce is a crucial consideration. Sceptics argue that, even in the extensive worker self-management of the decentralized state socialism of Yugoslavia, underlying party control is retained. The alternative of worker co-operatives, notably the Mondragon experiment in Spain, has attracted much interest. In Germany, a system of codetermination has been introduced as a result of labour-movement pressure to find a middle way between capitalism and socialism, and has influenced the labour policies of most countries in the European Community. Profit-sharing and share-ownership schemes may be regarded as examples of management-initiated systems of participation, which also include self-managed work-groups and teams, participatory leadership styles reflecting the ideas of the Human Relations Movement, and the quality circles based on Japanese practice.

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industrial integration

The tendency to link formerly separate firms, enterprises, or production processes, in order to reap economies of scale or finance. Integration may be vertical, combining separate stages in the manufacture of a finished good or provision of a service; or horizontal, combining ownership and control of activities within separate markets.

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industrial relations

See LABOUR RELATIONS.

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industrial reserve army

This term derives from Karl Marx's writing and refers to a disadvantaged section of the proletariat. These workers perform two functions: to regulate wages by the implicit threat posed by available labour; and to supply labour for sudden expansions in production. As the reserve army decreases then wages increase—and vice versa. There has been considerable recent debate about the role of women as reserve labour. See also LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION.

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Industrial Revolution, The

This term is used to refer to the period of rapid social, economic, demographic, and technological change which took place in Britain from the latter half of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century. There is much debate and disagreement over the precise characteristics of the Industrial Revolution, but broadly speaking it defines the transformation of Britain from a predominantly rural and agrarian society to an increasingly urban one based on manufacturing and industry. Although the term always refers to Britain (usually England), which was the first industrial nation, the phrase ‘Second Industrial Revolution’ is sometimes used to refer to the industrialization of other countries, especially Germany and the USA, during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The most important features of the revolution in Britain were as follows: first, there was a so-called ‘demographic transition’ from the late eighteenth century, which was characterized by a decrease in mortality rates, a declining age at marriage, a marked growth in population, and an increasing rate of migration from rural to urban areas. The escalating numbers of people who came to the rapidly expanding urban areas provided much of the labour-force for the new manufacturing industries, and formed the basis of a new industrial working class.
Second, there was a revolution in transportation. In the eighteenth century this was effected through the construction of canals and an improved road system, while from the first half of the nineteenth century the invention and development of the railway system radically improved the ease and speed with which goods could be transported. This meant food could be brought more readily from rural to urban areas, thereby satisfying growing demands from the new and expanding urban centres. As industry developed, the improved transportation network also became crucial for the extraction and transportation of raw materials, and the distribution of finished industrial products.
Third, an agricultural revolution improved farming techniques, which generated both increased agricultural production and growing prosperity for the farming classes. This resulted in rising demand in the countryside for better clothing and household goods, which stimulated urban industry and distribution, and was in turn aided by improved transportation facilities. As farmers became wealthier, they increasingly adopted the ways of, and identified with, the urban middle classes, and boundaries between the two groups became even less clear through intermarriage. Farmers often provided capital for industrial enterprises, their sons frequently trained in urban-based professions, and the urban middle classes tended more and more to idealize the rural way of life, often moving into the countryside when they could.
Fourth, increasingly large investments of capital, particularly in textiles, coal mining, and metal industries, partly facilitated by the expansion and development of colonial markets and outposts, enabled the growth of powerful manufacturing industries which in turn relied on, and were strengthened by, both expanding internal markets and exports overseas. The textile industry, for instance, relied on raw material from America; finished goods were sold internally but also abroad, especially in India, where British colonial rule was able virtually to destroy the once flourishing Indian textile industry by forbidding the export of Indian textiles.
Fifth, technological inventions and developments, in particular that of steam power, were crucial to the operation of trains, ships, and the larger factories, although recent research suggests that much industrial production was on a small scale and often not mechanized until late in the nineteenth century.
These radical changes, deemed revolutionary because of the speed at which many of them occurred, were all interrelated, although they developed at varying rates and in very different ways according to region and area. The desire to understand and analyse such sweeping and unprecedented change provided a catalyst for early sociologists to develop a raft of theories relating to the division of labour, capitalism, and bureaucracy. Comte, Spencer, Marx, Engels, and later Durkheim and Weber were all arguably responding to, and seeking to explain, the changes which accompanied industrialism, and altered not only the infrastructure but also the whole way of life of Britain, over an unusually short period of time.
There are long-standing controversies (mainly involving historians) about the causes and consequences of the Industrial Revolution (see, for example,
, The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England, 1967
). Among numerous available statements one lasting classic is E. J. Hobsbawm's Industry and Empire (1968). Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, in Family Fortunes (1987), give a detailed historical account of the interrelationships between the development of capitalism, urban industrial society, class, and family structures.

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industrial sector

Classification of the (changing) composition of economic activities with the passage from early to late industrialization. Rationalization and expansion of the primary sector (that part of the economy concerned with the extraction of natural resources) characteristically precedes the rapid growth of the secondary sector (that part of the economy concerned with the manufacture of goods from the raw materials supplied by primary-sector industries), which then becomes the major source of occupation and employment. Late (advanced or mature) industrialization is associated with the expansion of the tertiary sector (that part of a country's economy concerned with the provision of services). There are, however, important exceptions and qualifications to this broad pattern.
The primary economic sector therefore includes agriculture, horticulture, forestry, and fishing; the extraction of oils, minerals, and natural gas, mining and quarrying; and the water industry. These may also be referred to as primary industries. Note that the term ‘primary sector’ is used in a different way in labour-market segmentation theory. Which concept is intended should be clear from the context.
The secondary economic sector is often termed the manufacturing sector or manufacturing industries. The construction industry is sometimes included, but sometimes treated as a separate category, on the grounds that it covers repairs and other services as well as basic construction of new buildings and dwellings. Again, the concept is used with a different meaning in labour-market segmentation theory, and here too the intended meaning should be clear from the context.
The tertiary sector includes, for example, the leisure industry, financial services, education and health services, transport, and communication. Often this is called the service sector or service industries. See also DEINDUSTRIALIZATION; INDUSTRIALISM.

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industrial society

It is important to distinguish the descriptive from the analytical uses of this term. At a descriptive level, an industrial society is simply one displaying the characteristic features of industrialism, as listed under that heading. However, the term is also used in the abstract to denote the thesis that a definite type of society exists whose culture, institutions, and development are determined by its industrial production process. As such, theories of industrial society constitute a species of technological determinism, or scientific evolutionism. It is claimed that the logic of applied science, or of the technical processes based on scientific expertise and values, makes necessary certain fundamental and irreversible modifications to the traditional culture and institutions of a society. This view is expressed in the writings of Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon and by many nineteenth century social theorists, including Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Émile Durkheim. But the most influential example in classical sociology is to be found in Max Weber's interpretation of the modernization of the Western world as progressive rationalization, and the disenchantment of the traditional magical and supernatural systems of beliefs and values which once gave meaning to human life. For Weber's critics, however, a profound metaphysical pathos—a deeply pessimistic but unsubstantiated moral philosophy—underlies his claim that bureaucracy is inescapable in modern industrial society and politics.
The industrial society thesis assumed a much more tangible shape in the writings of post-war, mostly American, functionalist sociologists and industrial-relations specialists. These writers claimed to be following Durkheim in arguing that the cohesion and similarity of industrial societies depended on a social consensus, in each case around the same set of organizing values and norms. But in talking about the contents of these norms they were influenced by Weber, and stressed the rationalistic, impersonal (or universalistic) aspects of these societies, the primacy they gave to rationalized production of material goods and services, and the emphasis they placed on deferred gratification. Such societies, it was claimed, would tend over time to base the allocation of people to positions on their achievements, especially their education and technical competence, rather than on traditional ascriptive characteristics such as family connections, race, or gender. Simultaneously, mechanization and technical development would raise living standards and render many unpleasant manual jobs unnecessary, resulting in the embourgeoisement of the manual working class. The combined effect of all these factors would be that the dichotomous class structure typical of early capitalist industrialism would be replaced by a more divergent and less polarized system of occupational stratification. Marked class conflict in the workplace and industry would under mature industrialism, be replaced by institutionalized industrial conflict and collective bargaining. Political consequences would follow, for the complexity and diversity of industrial stratification implies a dispersal of power, referred to by these theorists as pluralism. Basically, this means the demise of authoritarian political systems, and their replacement by representative non-ideological mass parties. These predictions were synthesized in the work of a group of so-called convergence theorists who claimed that, because of the alleged logic of industrialism and its technology, capitalist and communist societies alike would develop into something resembling the ideal pattern of mature pluralist industrialism described above.
Critics of this theory have noted that the general features it ascribes to mature industrialism correspond very closely to the ideal picture which Cold War propaganda had painted in the United States. However, alternative and less blatantly ideological models of mature industrialism can be developed, by revising the assumptions made about the logic of the industrialization process. Students of Japanese society, for example, noted the persistence of ascriptive elements in the industrial culture of that country, elements which appeared to be compatible with a high rate of technological advance, aided organizational functioning, and prevented industrial unrest. They argued that emergent tendencies in the labour-markets, in the labour relations, and in the industrial enterprises of societies like the United States and Britain suggested that these nations might well be converging on a quasi-Japanese model of mature industrialism. The pattern of Japanese industrialism and industrial management has kept alive the search for universal and convergent trends affecting a number of highly industrialized societies in the form of theories of post-industrialism.
The notion of an abstract type of industrial society, with causal implications for the study of contemporary social change, is open to the same objections as its celebrated rival, the theory of capitalist society. Arguably, both are over-generalized, and cover too large an expanse of time and space to be of value for rigorous analysis. Even when reduced in scope they tend to ignore the specifics of history and culture. In particular, similar technologies injected into different social and cultural meaning systems may mean that individual nations coexist as similarly industrialized states, but remain vastly different entities in most other respects. The analytical usage of industrial society considered above is also open to objection on the grounds that its pedigree as a species of evolutionary theory implies the following: that the principal processes of social change are endogenous rather than exogenous; that the most decisive processes of social change are economic or material, rather than cultural, political, or military in nature; and that a society is the same thing as the nation-state. None of these statements would go unquestioned today and the concept therefore probably belongs to the discipline's past rather than its future.
The classic statement of the industrial society thesis is to be found in
, Industrialism and Industrial Man (1960, 1973)
. For a critique see
, ‘Employment, Class and Mobility: A Critique of Liberal and Marxist Theories of Long Term Change’, in , Modernization and Social Change (1991)
. See also REFLEXIVE MODERNIZATION.

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industrial sociology

See INDUSTRY, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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industrialism, industrialization

Both words denote the transition in methods of production which has been responsible for the vastly increased wealth-creating capacity of modern societies compared with traditional systems. It should be noted that, although industrialization is generally thought of as something affecting the manufacturing of goods, it is reasonable and indeed necessary to apply the term industrial to modern methods of raising productivity in agriculture and other industrial sectors, and in administrative contexts. It is important to add that industrialism is not the same thing as capitalism, for although capitalism was the first and principal agent of industrialization, it is not the only one. Capitalism pre-dated industrialization and arguably varies more in fundamental form over time and from society to society.
There has been a reasonable degree of agreement about typical features of industrialism but less about which ones are essential. Typical characteristics, all of which are discussed elsewhere in this dictionary, include a division of labour; cultural rationalization; a factory system and mechanization; the universal application of scientific methods to problem-solving; time discipline and deferred gratification; bureaucracy and administration by rules; and a socially and geographically mobile labour-force.
However, any such list of features is bound to raise the question whether a particular item is the result of industrialism as such, or should be attributed either to the coexistence of capitalism or the fact that capitalist societies were the first to industrialize. Much the same might be said of several other features of modernity which are variously attributed to capitalism or industrialization, including the indefinite expansion of markets, the growth of the money economy and the calculating outlook behind scientific rationalism, and the industrial spirit itself. See also INDUSTRIAL SECTOR; INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY.

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industry, sociology of

A loosely defined, but well-established sub-specialism within sociology, which can trace its origins back to the discipline's founders. Its expansion in the twentieth century was encouraged by the hope of certain company managements, notably in the United States, that sociological and psychological research might yield a set of management and supervisory techniques which could be used to prevent workplace conflict and raise productivity. Though its potential applications still impinge on the subject, later practitioners fought hard to establish the area as an independent field of academic study, which (from a variety of theoretical perspectives) accepts the inevitability of a so-called pluralism of interests in industrial work situations, and concerns itself with the consequences.
A major problem for industrial sociologists is to define their central term—industry. In practice, despite some important exceptions, a great deal of research in the subject has been about factory workers and factory work situations. It is far from clear how far these findings can be generalized; or indeed, under what circumstances the label ‘industrial’ is appropriately applied to non-factory work. The preoccupation with factories and manufacturing also resulted for a time in a tendency to over-emphasize the causal effects of workplace factors, especially technology and production methods, on worker and management behaviour both inside and outside the plant. Even today, there is considerable research on the internal and external effects of automation, information technology, and flexible methods of work organization. The result has been a tendency to technological determinism, and to the making of inferences about macroscopic change in industrial society, from findings gleaned in a few (usually large and possibly unrepresentative) industrial plants. A curious additional feature is that, because industrial sociology impinges on management education and theory, some of these over-generalizations have a self-fulfilling effect.
The explanatory emphasis on technology and methods of work organization has provided an important rationale for describing studies of non-factory work as industrial sociology. But, with the shift of research from (typically male) manual factory workers, the idea that factors within the workplace have an identifiable and independent causal influence on people's actions has been questioned. An important example is provided by research on white-collar workers. Clerks, technicians, and other white-collar workers have formed a growing proportion of employees in modern societies, as a result of the growth in company size, the expansion of public and financial administration, and the general increase in professional and service employment. However, it is clear that the attitude and behaviour of such workers towards (say) management or trade unionism, as well as the values with which they view their employment, are very different from those of their blue-collar counterparts, and are consonant with a higher class and status situation. A considerable body of literature attempted to explain these differences, and hence to say something about the dynamics of social stratification, by reference to workplace factors. These factors included the more personal dealings white-collar workers have with management, their greater personal autonomy, and the better remuneration and promotion prospects they were said to enjoy. It was also claimed that, as the many offices and white-collar workplaces became larger, more impersonal, and more automated, so the workers were becoming more like factory workers both in their objective work situation and in their subjective response to it. Recent research has revealed a more complicated picture from which the following findings have clearly emerged: social background and self-selection may be as important as workplace variables in shaping the characteristic attitudes and industrial relations of white-collar workers; technological change in offices was accompanied by major readjustments in the external labour-market for white-collar workers, which made it difficult or even unnecessary to separate out ‘in-house’ causal influences from external ones; not the least important of the labour-market changes was a shift to the employment of women, especially part-timers returning after a period spent at home. Thus, under the pressure of engaging with non-factory research agendas, the traditional approach of the industrial sociologist to this important topic tended to collapse into other well-established sub-specialisms: the sociology of class and status cultures, of labour-market structures, and of gender.
In recent years, the need for industrial sociologists to begin their inquiries outside the factory gates has been emphasized by a disparate range of studies which suggest that the effect of technology, work organization, and other workplace variables, is itself culturally and socially specific. For example, comparative surveys have examined factories with identical technologies, in different national and cultural milieux. The findings show that it is these factors (especially politics and the industrial relations system) rather than technology or organization, which exert the primary influence on behaviour, even within the plants themselves. Other comparative research has suggested that labour-management practices, job structures, training, skills, and supervision are all profoundly affected by the complex of political, legal, and educational regulation in a society, even to the extent of shaping overall national economic performance. Again, industrial sociology as such tends to be absorbed, this time into historical and comparative research on patterns of industrial culture.
Arguably, then, industrial sociology is a rather old-fashioned term. Nevertheless, courses and texts on the subject, especially in conjunction with management or trade-union education, continue to offer a welcome and interesting introduction to the sociological perspective for many who might otherwise not encounter it. Conventionally, such courses treat areas which these days, for reasons given above, and because of the expansion of the literature, have tended to become sub-specialisms in their own right, and for which separate entries will be found in this dictionary.
, The Sociology of Work (1991)
and
, Industrial Sociology and Economic Crisis (1991)
are among the textbooks which still attempt to cover the field as a whole. See also HUMAN RELATIONS MOVEMENT; INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT; INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY; REGULATION THEORY; SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT; SOCIOLOGIE DU TRAVAIL; WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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inequality, social inequality

Unequal rewards or opportunities for different individuals within a group or groups within a society. If equality is judged in terms of legal equality, equality of opportunity, or equality of outcome, then inequality is a constant feature of the human condition. Addressing the question whether it is also a necessary feature of modern societies brings to the fore a number of long-standing debates between liberals, Marxists, functionalists, and others.
Taking power as being distributed along the dimensions of material reward, and differing life-chances as determined by the market, status position, and access to political influence, then according to liberals such as Friedrich Hayek, inequality is the price to be paid for the dynamic economic growth that is characteristic of capitalism. The societies of real socialism (the then actually existing communist states of the Soviet Bloc), committed as they were to the historicism of the class struggle, sought to ameliorate if not abolish these inequalities, but in fact merely generated novel forms of their own, which were in turn less productive of economic growth and social welfare, and subsequently collapsed under the weight of social discontent. However, the arguments propounded by functionalists provide a rationale for inequality, but not (as is sometimes claimed) a proof of its universality and inevitability. In fact, many of the functionalist tenets may now have to face up to a form of egalitarianism which is no longer hampered by the odium of its communistic connotations. It will not be unstated competition between socio-economic systems which defines the agenda as regards inequality, but rather an investigation of what inequalities are justifiable on their own terms, rather than in comparison to some utopian-based alternative. The realities of social-class-determined inequalities of educational achievement, morbidity and mortality rates, and more generally of social mobility, will have to confront the growing problems of the underclass, of generational inequalities, and inequalities produced by the globalization of capitalism, all of which will be seen as part of the social consequences of the ‘peace dividend’. As societies in the post-Cold-War era come to be graded along the criteria of the political democratic audit, so also will the ‘quality of life’ scale be applied both internally and externally, and the extent and nature of inequality will be scrutinized.
Currently, the existence of inequality, its causes and consequences, particularly as they relate to social class, gender, ethnicity, and locality, continues to occupy the sociological foreground. See also FUNCTIONAL THEORY OF STRATIFICATION; INCOME DISTRIBUTION; JUSTICE, SOCIAL; STRATIFICATION.

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infancy, infant development

Derived from the Latin word infans, meaning ‘unable to speak’, infancy is the earliest period in the human life-span, usually taken to extend from birth through to the end of the first year. In demography, for example, infant mortality rates measure the deaths during the first year following birth. Similarly in psychology, infancy commonly refers to the first year of life, although the term is sometimes used more loosely to cover the first two or three years of life. In law, infancy as a legal status is typically more extensive, as the young child is usually deemed legally incapable of speaking long after language skills have developed.
Apart from their interest in infant mortality rates, sociologists rarely give much attention to infancy and usually do not treat it as a distinctive period in the life-cycle, subsuming it within the period of childhood. However, there is some sociological interest in psychological research on infant and child development, particularly because of its relevance to controversies about the relative importance of nature and nurture in explaining human behaviour.
Psychologists commonly regard the period of infancy as crucial to individual development and hence to adult behaviour. Sigmund Freud, emphasizing both innate tendencies and social and psychological experience, viewed the first five years of life as determining the individual's subsequent personality and emotional development, and regarded the experiences of the first year as essential to satisfactory ego development—ideas developed more fully by psychoanalytic theorists such as Melanie Klein. Other writers have focused on cognitive development. Jean Piaget's specification of stages of cognitive development, based on his detailed observations, has been especially influential. Recent research on infancy increasingly suggests that infants have considerable cognitive capacities—capacities which selectively regulate their experiences of the environment. See also NATURE VERSUS NURTURE DEBATE.

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infant mortality rate

See MORTALITY RATE.

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inferential statistics

Statistics which permit the researcher to demonstrate the probability that the results deriving from a sample are likely to be found in the population from which the sample has been drawn. They therefore allow sociologists to generalize from representative samples, by applying ‘tests of significance’ to patterns found in these samples, in order to determine whether these hold for populations as a whole. The other type of statistics in which sociologists are interested are descriptive statistics, which summarize the patterns in the responses within a data-set, and provide information about averages, correlations, and so forth. See also SIGNIFICANCE TESTS; STATISTICAL INFERENCE.

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inflation

A rise in the general level of prices in an economy which, if it continues, must bring about an increase in the money supply. Economists have offered a number of different explanations for inflation, and though it is generally accepted that excess aggregate demand is typically responsible (‘too much money chasing too few goods’), there is no accepted version of how this situation is created in the first place. A major axis of debate is about whether inflation is demand-led or induced by rising costs. Among the factors said to contribute to the latter are excess money-wage increases, administered price increases, import cost rises, rigidity in the distribution of investment and resources between industrial sectors, and inflationary expectations. What does seem clear is that, although inflation does not affect the real value of average living standards, it tends to redistribute real living standards among groups in an arbitrary way according to their ability to adjust the money value of their incomes to the general rise in the price—level. This engenders social tensions and conflict and these consequences have also attracted the interest of sociologists.
Though early sociological studies of inflation claimed to be addressing unexamined residual categories in economic theory, most later accounts sought not to displace, but rather to supplement the work of economists. The inflation—causing factors emphasized as the basis of difference between inflation—prone and price—stable industrial cultures may be classed as normative and structural. The normative argument, clearly influenced by Emile Durkheim's concept of egoism, is that in a market society, inequalities in income are not governed by some moral standard of a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. They reflect, instead, arbitrary variations in the market power of both individuals and organized groups. The extent to which resentment is engendered will depend on the degree to which there is a general acceptance of individualism and competitiveness as values in themselves. Resentment, in turn, sets off leap-frogging attempts by groups to advance their relative standing.
However, the effect of normative causes will be mediated by various structural factors, notably the extent to which the differential ability of groups to enhance their incomes is stabilized or regulated by law and institutional controls that promote trust between groups; the productive capacity of the economy, especially the degree to which claims are pursued against a surplus that is growing rapidly, or is fixed or increasing only slowly; and whether gains in profitability are reinvested in income-earning industrial capacity or siphoned off into financial speculation whose returns are not enjoyed by the workforce at large.
The best summary of the sociological literature on inflation is
's Inflation and Social Conflict (1986)
.

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informal care

Care given to dependent persons, such as the sick and elderly, outside the framework of organized, paid, professional work. Attention to the importance of informal care has increased with the adoption of community care policies which place increasing reliance on care provided by family, relatives, and friends, often women.

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informal economy

As used by sociologists, the term refers to non-market work, in some cases with the addition of black economy work (which is market work strictly defined). Economists are more likely to use the term as an alternative label for the hidden, underground, or black economy which is imperfectly measured within the Gross National Product. These incompatible uses are the source of many misunderstandings and confusion in debates, particularly in non-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, or policy contexts.
There is a great variety of non-market work encompassed by the sociological term informal economy: unpaid domestic work, consumption work, non-market productive labour, community service work, producing goods and services that are bartered or offered as gifts within extended families or communities, non-legal commerce (in drugs for example), and work on which income tax may not be paid in full (a matter for speculation more often than factual knowledge). Some writers even include market work that is home-based, and thus seems to them to be linked more to household activities, than to the abstract concept of paid employment. The only thing these activities have in common is that they are not covered at all, or only partially, by official statistics on employment. Sociologists often assume that this reveals a failure or inadequacy of the statistics in question; in fact the exclusions are in most cases intentional, and derive from the fact that labour-market statistics are constructed within an economic theoretical framework, rather than a sociological framework.
Economists have always been aware that the total volume of productive work and consumption work are greater than that measured by official statistics of employment and Gross National Product. They reserve the term ‘black economy’ for that portion which should be included but may not be fully reported due to tax evasion. The term ‘marginal’ work or workers is reserved for those people (usually women, and numbering millions in Britain and some other countries) who have very small earnings from employment and are thus, perfectly legitimately, excluded from income tax and social insurance systems, and from related statistics. But in industrial societies, by far the largest volume of work excluded from definitions of employment and GNP consists of consumption work. In Economics and the Public Purpose (1973), the economist John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out that the conversion of women into a crypto-servant class was essential for the development and continued growth of the modern economy: the limits on consumption are severe unless the work can be delegated; the conversion of women from productive work in pre-industrial societies to the role of housewives who administer household consumption, opens up the possibility of indefinitely increasing consumption in market economies, and also contributes to the continuous expansion of service industries. The servant role of women is thus seen as critical for the continuing expansion of consumption in the modern economy.
In the 1980s social scientists became interested in the many types of work excluded from official statistics of employment, and attempted (with partial success) to classify and measure them. Few sociologists fully understand the concepts and operational definitions underlying employment statistics, and operational definitions differ between countries, leading to confusion over boundaries and overlapping definitions between types of informal non-market work and paid employment. For example, if one distinguishes between domestic production work, leisure activities, and domestic consumption work in the household work strategy, the close relationship between participation in the market economy and non-market work becomes clear.

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informal-sector theories

This is the dominant paradigm in use for explaining poverty and inequality in Third World cities. There have been many versions since its first formulation in 1971, but most focus on differences in productivity and earnings associated with large- and small-scale enterprises. Employment in large-scale (formal) enterprises is associated with high wages, high skill levels, modern technology, unionization, and social security protection, while small-scale (informal) enterprises lack these characteristics. The term ‘formal’ is often taken to mean waged and salaried labour, while ‘informal’ refers to self-employment, one-person enterprises, artisanal production, and domestic service. Note, however, that in this literature both terms refer to paid, officially registered employment, although in advanced industrial societies ‘informal’ work has been taken to mean work that is not declared to official censors or the tax system, and may even include unpaid labour in the household. See also INFORMAL ECONOMY; LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION.

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informal social controls

See SANCTION.

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informant

See RESPONDENT.

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information society

A society in which low cost information technology, computers, and telecommunications are widely used to facilitate communication nationally and internationally, and to promote access to libraries, data archives, and other stores of information held by private organizations or in the public domain. It is argued that this greater facility of communication and increased access to information creates a qualitatively different society with attendant new problems, such as information overload, and the need for new forms of regulation to control information flows between persons, companies, and countries. Whereas market economies have traditionally been geared towards solving the problem of scarcity, information will practically by definition lead to problems of abundance, and questions about how tools should be developed to manage that abundance.
The digital convergence of information and communication technologies in the late 1990s constituted a major step forward for the information society, energizing every economic sector, opening up the potential for new products and services in the twenty-first century that are still being developed in business, the media, arts, and public administration. Some have argued that there will be a further transition from an information economy to a knowledge society, leading to renewed emphasis on lifelong learning and investment in education. Another consequence that is already in progress is the expansion of home-based work and neighbourhood work centres replacing public transport and the car for bringing together the worker and (white-collar) work. Similarly, new technologies permit certain types of white-collar work to be carried out anywhere in the world, leading to the globalization of enterprises and increased competition. See also CYBERSOCIETY; INTERNET.

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information technology (IT)

See CYBERSOCIETY.

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in-group

See OUT-GROUP.

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initiation, initiation rites

Rituals associated with the passage from childhood to adulthood, from one age-set to another, or the entry into membership of secret societies. Aspects of initiation influenced van Gennep's study of rites of passage. Rituals for the change of status from childhood to adulthood often involve physical change such as circumcision. In other ways the initiate has to undergo pain and humiliation. Rites associated with girls and women often affirm male control of reproductive powers.

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inner city

See ZONE OF (OR IN) TRANSITION.

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inner-directedness

See OTHER-DIRECTEDNESS.

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instincts

Species-characteristic patterns of behaviour considered innate and pre-determined rather than learned—a product of nature not nurture. What human behaviour, if any, is deemed instinctive varies between authors. Sigmund Freud's formulation of two primary instincts (drives)—life and death (Eros and Thanatos)—is well known. However, sociologists emphasize social learning, and typically eschew the concept. See also NATURE VERSUS NURTURE DEBATE; SOCIOBIOLOGY.

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institution, social institution

The use of the term institution in sociology, meaning established aspects of society, is close to that in common English usage. However, there have been some changes over time in the exact conceptualization of the term, and there are differences in the analytical precision with which it is used.
In some ways an institution can be seen as a sort of ‘super-custom’, a set of mores, folkways, and patterns of behaviour that deals with major social interests: law, church, and family for example. Thus, a social institution consists of all the structural components of a society through which the main concerns and activities are organized, and social needs (such as those for order, belief, and reproduction) are met. This was certainly the sense in which the term was used by Herbert Spencer and Talcott Parsons, for both of whom it was central to the notion of society as an organism or functioning system. However, as the functionalist perspective gave way to ideas based on society as being in a state of flux, with less consensus over values, so the Parsonsian association between institution and function also withered away.
The current concept of institution is more fluid, seeing the family or church, for instance, as comprising changing patterns of behaviour based on relatively more stable value systems. This allows sociologists to consider the moral ambivalence of human behaviour as well as its creative effects on social change.
In addition to these more global and theoretical concerns, there is also a tradition of the ethnographic study of institutions that constrain, or from some points of view determine, the behaviour of specific social groups. Chief among these are Erving Goffman's studies of total institutions—for example the mental hospital (see
Asylums, 1961
).

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institution, total

See TOTAL INSTITUTION.

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institutionalism

See INSTITUTIONALIZATION.

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institutionalization

A term used to describe the adverse psychological effects on individuals of residence in institutions, especially of long stays in large-scale institutions, such as mental hospitals and prisons. Most frequently mentioned effects, whose precise causes are debated, are dependency, passivity, and lethargy. These effects are sometimes termed institutionalism.

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institutionalization of (class) conflict

The thesis that, in the advanced capitalist societies, class conflict has been institutionalized; that is, has become controlled, and has therefore declined. This is said to result from the separation of political and industrial conflict (so that disputes in one sphere no longer reinforce lines of schism in the other) and by the extension of citizenship rights and greater equality of opportunity. Liberal political theorists often advanced this argument during the 1950s and 1960s. A good sociological example is Ralf Dahrendorf's Conflict after Class (1967). See also INCORPORATION.

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institutionalized discrimination

A long tradition of studies in sociology has shown that discrimination against some groups in society can result from the majority simply adhering unthinkingly to the existing organizational and institutional rules or social norms. Prejudice, stereotyping, and covert or overt hostility need not be factors in the exploitation of one group by another, or in the unfair distribution of rewards. Institutionalized sexism and institutionalized racism are the most common manifestations of this phenomenon. See also UNINTENDED OR UNANTICIPATED CONSEQUENCES.

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instrumental collectivism

See IMAGES OF SOCIETY.

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instrumental conditioning

See CONDITIONING.

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instrumental crowd

See CROWDS.

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instrumental orientation to work

See WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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instrumental reason

See CRITICAL THEORY.

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instrumental tie

See EXPRESSIVE TIES AND INSTRUMENTAL TIES.

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instrumentalism

See WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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integration (social)

In functionalist theory, the term integration is fundamental, and describes ‘a mode of relation of the units of a system by virtue of which, on the one hand, they act so as collectively to avoid disrupting the system and making it impossible to maintain its stability, and, on the other hand, to “co-operate” to promote its functioning as a unity’ (Talcott Parsons,
Essays in Sociological Theory, 1954
). In other theoretical traditions it is often used more loosely as a synonym for social consensus. See also EQUILIBRIUM; SOCIAL INTEGRATION AND SYSTEM INTEGRATION.

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integration, industrial

See INDUSTRIAL INTEGRATION.

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intellectuals

In modern societies intellectuals do not form a clearly defined group. Traditionally, the intellectual's role has been that of the thinker and truth-seeker. In simple societies they might be priests or shamans. In Europe, from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, they were the creators of high culture, the philosophers, and the scientific innovators of their times. Brilliant groups of intellectuals like those who joined Diderot in the production of the great French Encyclopaedia (1751–75)—d'Alembert, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and others—literally changed history by introducing new ideas and new knowledge into their tradition-bound societies.
Intellectual life flourished under two conditions: the relative independence of intellectuals themselves, and the unique position they held in societies that were largely illiterate. Democracy, mass literacy, and bureaucratization have all tended to undermine the role of the independent intellectual. In fact, intellectuals have become increasingly unpopular. Richard Hofstadter, in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962), explored the mistrust of intellectual talents in a practical, materialistic society. More recent critics like Paul Johnson (Intellectuals, 1988) and Steve Kimball (Tenured Radicals, 1988) dismiss intellectuals as unrealistic and even dangerous dreamers.
The heirs to the intellectual tradition work mainly in large institutions—usually universities—which are not hospitable to new or challenging ideas. Academics are by necessity careerists first and intellectuals second. Russell Jacoby's book The Last Intellectuals (1987) portrays the decline of independent intellectuals in the twentieth century, and their absorption into the bureaucratic, salaried world of government institutions.
Others have suggested a whole new role for intellectuals in post-industrial society. Daniel Bell in The Coming of Post Industrial Society (1964) and Alvin Gouldner in The New Class and the Future of Intellectuals (1981) have argued that the ‘knowledge society’ of the future will give intellectuals a central and honoured status.
Intellectual life continues to flourish on the margins of society, in the play of ideas in serious journals and books, films, videos, and computer networks. The true intellectual is not so much performing a role as expressing a particular personality, and those qualities will find an outlet under any social conditions. As Albert Camus put it, ‘An intellectual is a person whose mind watches itself.’

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intelligence, intelligence testing

A well-trampled arena of combat between the advocates of the supremacy of nature and nurture, intelligence is commonly thought of as synonymous with the Intelligence Quotient (IQ), devised originally by Alfred Binet in early twentieth-century France, for the purpose of identifying schoolchildren in need of remedial attention. IQ tests were subsequently developed in the United States into a measure designed to provide a unitary indicator of an individual's innate intelligence. They are standardized around an average of 100 and are calculated separately for men and women.
Many advocates of IQ testing assume that the usual battery of IQ tests combine to produce a measure of intelligence which is genetically transmitted and consequently immutable. Critics argue that the tests were not originally intended to provide a fixed measure of intelligence, unamenable to improvement, and that the assumption that a unitary measure can be provided at all is an unjustifiable reification of a culture-bound concept. Much effort and energy has been invested in this debate, but no convincing conclusions have been evinced in either direction, and estimates of the heritability of IQ still range between zero and 80 per cent. The majority of such estimates are based upon studies of individuals brought up in different environments, whose genetic characteristics are similar or the same (particularly siblings, most often twins). In these circumstances, it is claimed, the factors of inheritance and environment can be separated out, allowing estimates to be made of their respective effects. In reality, It is often very much harder to achieve this, and much criticism of these studies has been directed at the difficulties of ensuring that environments are sufficiently independent to allow such estimates to be made.
There have also been well-publicized accusations that one of the most influential contributors to the debate in the middle years of the century. Sir Cyril Burt, fabricated his results to make it appear that the heritable component accounted for the vast majority (around 80 per cent) of variability in IQ scores. Protagonists include Hans Eysenck, a psychologist who maintains a belief in a high heritable component for IQ, and Leon Kamin, a human geneticist who argues that the debate is unlikely ever to be conclusive, and in any case is misconceived for the reasons given above (see
, Intelligence: The Battle for the Mind, 1981
). In one analysis which provoked fierce controversy,
(‘How Much Can We Boost IQ and Educational Achievement?’, Harvard Educational Review, 1969)
argued that intelligence is largely explained by genetic factors, and that the poverty of American Blacks was not sufficient to explain away the differences in their test performances in relation to Whites. Critics argued that Jensen's data were unsound and the implications of his study unwarranted.
More recently, the relationship between IQ and social class has also become a focus for renewed academic discussion, after being many years in abeyance. For example, in his critique of the class analysis tradition of research, Peter Saunders starts by pointing to Michael Young's classic definition of a meritocracy in terms of individual rewards for ‘intelligence and effort’, deduces that one might therefore expect research on social mobility to include evidence on these two characteristics, but observes that the question of ability has tended to be overlooked in many studies. For Saunders, measured intelligence is a good indicator of people's abilities, and many studies of class mobility arrive unwarrantably at conclusions about inequality of opportunity because researchers fail to take IQ into account. His own research findings (which are hotly disputed) lead him to conclude that class differentials in educational and occupational attainment might simply be ‘a function of differences in average levels of measured intelligence between the classes’. IQ tests purportedly measure these variations in genetic endowments between different individuals. (The exchanges between Saunders and his critics will be found mainly in the journal
Sociology, 1995–7
.)
Similarly, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial account of the relationship between intelligence and both class and race in America (The Bell Curve, 1994) argues that IQ is a good indicator of natural ability, and appears to be a largely inherited trait. Here too, sceptics have replied by assembling no little evidence which casts doubt on both of these propositions, and have concluded that educational attainment and IQ scores are both products, not only of putatively natural or genetic origins, but also of socially determined influences. Most obviously, the results of intelligence tests are (at least in part) a reflection of attributes such as miscellaneous information picked up at home and on television, and of the inclination (mainly instilled by school teaching) to try harder at this particular task than at any other. In other words, test results are partly a function of socialization, substantial aspects of which are already influenced by existing inequalities in the distribution of resources between different classes and ethnic groups. The argument here is that, as John Miner (Intelligence in the United States, 1957) long ago observed, ‘no test item that has ever been devised taps native potential directly, independent of the past life and learning of the respondent’. The most sustained of the many critiques of Herrnstein and Murray's study will be found in
, Inequality by Design (1996)
, which argues that social inequalities depend more on social circumstances and the structure of society than they do on IQ, which is itself a social product. In particular, social policies set the ‘rules of the game’ within which individual abilities and effort matter, and it is these that perpetuate the differences between rich and poor.
What is undeniable is that IQ tests have, over their history, been considerably misused in the attempt to prove the inferiority of particular ‘races’, using culturally specific criteria of assessment. It is still not entirely clear that modern tests escape such bias. For this reason it would be imprudent to regard the overall results of these tests as giving a reliable indication of a fixed or innate level of general intelligence. For a comprehensive survey of the literature and issues surrounding intelligence testing see
, Intelligence (1992
). See also DARWINISM; EUGENICS; HEREDITY.

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intelligentsia

Nowadays this term is loosely applied to any educated stratum of society—normally including intellectuals and managers—which has an interest in ideas. Historically, the use of the term has been more restricted, and although its origins are contested they are usually sought in early nineteenth-century Russian and Polish usage. However, as a social category it differed in the two countries, for obvious historical reasons.
Formed from the déclassé elements of major estates in nineteenth-century Russia, the intelligentsia were at first marginally located, between Tsarist autocracy and the peasant masses. Their procedures of inclusion (see CLOSURE) nevertheless borrowed from gentry manners, and later added the imprimatur of educational qualifications, which were superseding military and other credentials. Both attributes tended to cut the stratum off from the bulk of society, towards which they none the less felt they had a mission of responsibility. In the Polish case, it was the maintenance of the national spirit, its intelligens or self-consciousness, during the century of partition where Polish nationhood survived with only a rump state to bolster it, that explains the emergence of this group.
In the absence of an indigenous bourgeoisie in Eastern Europe, and given the role of the state and foreign capital, there emerged complex intelligentsia ethos: of nationalism coupled with a Western orientation, anti-industrialism and emphasis upon cultural and humanistic values, criticism of the state, adherence to the gentry style of life, and criteria of good breeding demanded of the intelligentsia proper. These represented, in the words of one commentator, the ‘universal concomitant of the confrontation of a traditional society with a modern West’. After the advent of communism it was easy to see how, as some commentators have observed, the intelligentsia in its anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist ethos was compatible with Marxism. However, in the dominated countries of the Soviet bloc, that other feature of the intelligentsia—its sense of mission as a vehicle of national values—served to undermine the communist order.
It is a moot question whether, with the advent of market economies, capitalism will finally transform parts of the intelligentsia into its Western equivalent; namely, a loose category of intellectuals, rather than a solid social stratum. In the West, some critics have argued that the modern salariat or service class, if it tends to closure through self-recruitment and various forms of credentialism, could create a Western intelligentsia, distinguished—by its style of life, sense of status honour, and patterns of intermarriage—from the mass of post-industrial, late-capitalist society.

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intensive power

See ORGANIZATIONAL REACH.

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interaction (social)

See ACTION THEORY; CYBERSOCIETY; DRAMATURGY; FORMALISM; NEGOTIATED ORDER; SOCIAL INTEGRATION AND SYSTEM INTEGRATION; SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM.

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interaction (statistical)

See STATISTICAL INTERACTION.

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interaction, focused

See FOCUSED INTERACTION.

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interactional field theories

See SEQUENCE ANALYSIS.

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interaction effects (statistical)

See CONTINGENCY TABLE.

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interactionism, interactionist perspective

See SEQUENCE ANALYSIS; SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM.

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interest groups

A valuable element of democracy is the ability and willingness of citizens to organize on their own behalf, and to seek to influence legislatures, government agencies, and public opinion. Citizens so organized are often termed interest groups (a label which can also be synonymous with the terms pressure group, lobby, party, political action committee, and social movement).
Interest groups are voluntary associations with specific and narrowly defined goals, which may be moderate or radical, local or international in scope. Professional and trade associations work as interest groups, as do activist groups like the ecology movement. Interest groups may represent one segment of the public (such as pensioners or students), or they may represent a value (for example anti-abortion), at which point they shade into ideological or moral crusades.
From the democratic point of view, the limitation of interest groups is that they tend to represent mainly the wealthier and better-educated sections of the public, leaving the poor and minorities largely unrepresented. In Washington DC, for example, some 11,000 interest-group organizations compete for the attention of 535 legislators. Almost all these organizations represent business, financial, and professional interests.

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interests

In everyday speech the word interests has three main interrelated meanings. Someone may be said to be interested in a topic, in the sense that it excites his or her attention, or curiosity. The usage has had little specialist significance in the social sciences. In its second usage, interests may be used as a synonym for property, or investments. This usage is closely related to a more pervasive usage, according to which interests include whatever contributes to the general well-being, or fulfilment of the purposes of some individual. These latter usages have been very influential in philosophy and the social sciences.
Thomas Hobbes's political philosophy is founded upon a materialist view of human nature according to which self-preservation is the underlying motivation of all action. This self-interest view of human motivation was also widely assumed in the discipline of political economy. It was challenged by David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and others on several grounds. Humans were by nature social, so that no clear distinction could be made between self-interest and the interests of others. Ferguson particularly criticizes the association of interests with economic wealth and material possessions, arguing that virtues such as courage, honesty, and loyalty are much more highly valued attributes of the self, and so should take pride of place in any adequate account of interests.
Ferguson notwithstanding, the materialist tradition of conceptualizing interests primarily in relation to material wealth or political power and dissociating them from the sphere of values and principles has persisted, both in commonsense usage and in social and political science. However, a significant shift which took place in the nineteenth-century, especially in the context of the historical materialism of Marx and Engels, was the attribution of interests to hypothetical collective actors—social classes and fractions. This practice has subsequently been generalized in such fields as industrial sociology, political sociology, and the sociology of the professions, so as to apply to any group with identifiable common economic or social advantages to protect, or disadvantages to overcome.
The great utility of the concept of interests is its apparent ability to link analysis of the objective conditions of life of individuals or groups with their patterns of belief and action. It remains, however, a matter of dispute whether interests can justifiably be attributed to an individual or group without prior knowledge of their beliefs and intentions. If this cannot be done, then much of the apparent power of explanations in terms of interests dissolves into vacuity. Most sociologists would also argue that an individual's sense of social identity must precede his or her conception of self-interest—and for this reason interests can only be defined subjectively rather than (as some, especially certain Marxists, have claimed) objectively. See also CLASS INTEREST.

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intergenerational mobility

See MOBILITY, SOCIAL.

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interlocking directorate

An interlocking directorate (or directorship) is created when an individual who sits on the board of directors of one business organization takes a board seat with another. One study of 456 of the most important manufacturing firms in the United States in 1981 suggested that more than 70 per cent had at least one director who also sat on the board of a financial institution.
An extensive literature on the causes and consequences of corporate interlocks has developed since early studies in the 1960s. Some investigators suggest that within-industry interlocks are established in order to restrict competition in the market. Others propose that interlocks between financial institutions and business corporations perform a monitoring function by which the former control the profitability of their investments. Critics argue that the quantitative indicators used by most researchers fail to capture the complexity and dynamics of boardroom and inter-firm relations. For this reason it has proved difficult to establish convincing causal links between the structure of interlocking directorates and corporate behaviour in the market (see
, ‘What Do Interlocks Do? An Analysis, Critique, and Assessment of Research on Interlocking Directorates’, Annual Review of Sociology, 1996
). See also DECOMPOSITION OF CAPITAL.

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Intermediate technology

See APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGIES.

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internal colonialism (or domestic)

A term used widely to characterize exploitative relationships between a ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ within a single nation-state or society. It has been applied to White–Black relations in the United States, Indian–White and Indian–Mestizo relations in Latin America, and has also been used to describe the exploitative relationship between the Soviet state and Soviet society (particularly the conditions of the peasantry under forced collectivization and the working class under imposed industrialization). The situation of the Celtic fringe in British national development during the past four centuries has also been depicted in these terms (see
, Internal Colonialism, 1975
). The term is now largely discredited, mainly because of the obvious difficulties in drawing parallels with colonialism strictly defined. For example, the latter involves the control and exploitation of the majority of a nation by a minority of outsiders, whereas in America the Black population is a numerical minority and was, originally, the ‘outside’ group. However, advocates of the theory argue that these sorts of differences are less significant than the core stock of common experiences that have been shared by oppressed (often racialized) minorities throughout the world, and have defended the use of the term vigorously (see, for example,
's Racial Oppression in America, 1972
).

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internal labour-market

See LABOUR-MARKET; LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION.

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internal migration

Population shifts which occur within nation-states as labour migrates towards growth poles in the economy. Since the 1950s these shifts of population have often been of significant proportions—especially in developing countries. They have accompanied the processes of urbanization and industrialization and have involved large-scale movements of people from rural to urban areas. Debate has centred on whether ‘push’ or ‘pull’ factors are more important in explaining internal migration, and on the processes of proletarianization and depeasantization, which are seen to be a consequence. See also MIGRATION, SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF.

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international division of labour

The specialization of particular countries in distinct branches of production, whether this be in certain products, or in selected parts of the production process. The concept suggests that the spread of markets and production processes world-wide creates (as indeed this same process has done within particular economies) a growing differentiation of economic activity. However, whereas in orthodox economics the division of labour as such is seen as providing mutual benefit for these specialized branches of activity, alternative analyses of the international division of labour stress the inequalities and structured hierarchies which it creates. Thus, Folker Fröbel and his colleagues (The New International Division of Labour, 1980), analysing the industrialization of selected Third World countries in the late 1970s, showed how this involved the creation of a new (often mainly feminine) working class that worked for lower wages and in inferior conditions on new electrical and other assembly lines. Some theories and studies of post-industrial society suggest that a significant proportion of industrial activity, and particularly its ecologically damaging and low-skill elements, are being shifted to intermediate and developing countries (‘the new international division of labour’). See also LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION.

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Internet

A global network of computers (also known as the World-Wide Web) which allows instantaneous access to an expanding number of individual Web sites offering information about practically anything and everything—including the contents of daily newspapers, the price of goods in local shopping malls, library holdings, commodity prices, sports news and gossip, eroticism, and so-called chat-rooms (by means of which people can communicate with each other on-line about their interests, hobbies, and opinions).
The Internet is a product of the Cold War. It was originally developed by the Government of the United States during the 1970s as a means of sharing information and protecting communications in the event of a nuclear attack. During the 1980s it developed quickly, first into an academic exchange network, then as a means of mass electronic communication available in principle to anyone having access to a personal computer and a telephone line. In 1995 approximately 1 million people were using the Web. Two years later this total had reached an estimated 40 million. Between 1993 and 1997 the number of accessible pages on the Web grew from around 130,000 to more than 30 million. Most sites offer free access. (Pornographic ‘clubs’ are a rare exception since membership usually carries a monthly or annual charge.)
Most users find information by using one of many ‘search engines’ that are available. These are fast computers which produce organized lists of relevant Web sites in response to a query about particular topics or key-words. For example, typing in the name of a multinational corporation (such as ‘Nissan’) will generate dozens of sites giving information about the company's current products, economic performance, manufacturing capacity, retailing outlets, and so forth. Many of these will be ‘official’, being maintained by the company or its agents, but some will be unofficial sites supported by Nissan enthusiasts.
Use of the Internet continues to grow rapidly all over the world. The social implications of this are contested. It has been argued that the Internet is the greatest technological development of the twentieth century, comparable in importance to (say) the invention of printing, or even of electricity. It could change the way economies function, for example by depressing prices (as customers increasingly have the facility to search the globe for the cheapest products), holding down wages (some tasks can be farmed out electronically to cheap labour-markets), or making it possible for people to work from home. There are companies which subcontract routine administrative work (such as maintaining their personnel records) via the Internet to Third World agencies which can pay computer staff lower wages than would be required in the West. Increasingly, it is possible to shop on-line (for example to buy airline tickets direct from airlines), and this may affect the structure of retailing. Some forecasts suggest that the resulting so-called technological deflation may depress prices by as much as 25 or 30 per cent over the next decade.
There are also more than 3,500 sites where one can search for a job. This is said to be affecting the US labour-market, since people on the East Coast can explore vacancies in the West that they otherwise would not be aware of, and vice versa. The increasing availability of digital products (including on-line magazines and films) may lead to an under-recording of economic activity by conventional measures (such as Gross National Product) and may make it difficult for governments to collect certain taxes. Some observers maintain that the existence of the Web makes totalitarian regimes less likely to succeed, because the effects of propaganda can readily be countered by accessing alternative sources of information on the Web, and it has even been suggested that this will make new forms of participatory democracy possible in the near future.
Sceptics argue that much of the information available on the Internet is trivial. They also point out that global ‘Netizenship’ is restricted to those who can afford a personal computer, a modem to link it to the world's telephone lines, and who can then pay the associated running costs. It is estimated that in Britain, for example, fewer than 2 million people have PCs (as compared to 22 million households which have television sets). More than 96 per cent of Internet sites are located in the most affluent 27 nations. Fluency in English is virtually a prerequisite of Net use. This information revolution could therefore be creating a new international division of the world into a small group of ‘information-rich’ countries and individuals and a dispossessed majority who will be excluded from this particular form of power. The computers which serve the system also seem to be permanently on the edge of collapsing under the weight of demand. New capacity constantly has to be installed. Users often complain of information overload.
At the time of writing, there are signs that some of these shortcomings may be overcome by the mass production of cheap ‘network computers’ (which do not contain expensive components such as hard drives), and by making television the key medium through which the Web is accessed. This may make the Internet a truly universal and affordable source of information. If the problem of finding a secure method for payment of goods bought over the Web is also solved then the prospects for transforming retailing and other markets will also be dramatically enhanced. On the history of the Internet, and its possible implications for the organization of work, leisure, and politics, see
, Cultures of Internet (1996
). See also CYBERSOCIETY; TELECOMMUTING.

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interpellation

Within Louis Althusser's conception of the constitution of identity, this is the process by which agents (individuals) acquire their self-awareness as subjects, and the skills and attributes necessary for their social placement. Within the theory of discourse analysis the term refers to the ascription of such characteristics.

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interpersonal comparisons

See REFERENCE GROUP.

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interpretation, interpretive sociology

In one sense, any statement is an interpretation: if I call this thing in front of me a desk (rather than a dressing table) then I am interpreting a battery of sense impressions; if I say I feel happy (rather than, say, drunk) then I am interpreting certain physical sensations and a mental state. Not all sociologists recognize such a wide use of the word. Some, for example, use it more narrowly as in the sense of interpreting statistical data.
Interpretive sociology is a term usually confined to those sociological approaches which regard meaning and action as the prime objects of sociology. These differ in the extent to which they view interpretation as problematic. symbolic interactionism and much Weberian sociology, for example, generally interprets meaning on a commonsense level. Phenomenological sociology possesses a quite elaborate theory of interpretation, as do ethnomethodology, hermeneutics, and structuralism. Interpretive theories differ as well in the degree to which they go beyond the actor's own understanding of what he or she is doing.
For Max Weber (The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 1904–17), verstehen (or understanding) of people's actions is the method par excellence of sociology. Understanding and interpretation are closely related, and most sociologists would now recognize that some interpretation is involved in all acts of understanding, although some maintain a more naïve view that there are unproblematic meanings in social reality which can be directly understood. Weber distinguishes descriptive understanding (for example ‘John is walking across the room and opening a window’) and explanatory understanding (‘He is opening the window in order to ventilate this stuffy room’). In fact, both statements require an interpretation of what is happening, the second merely going rather further than the first. It is argued that the more complete our understanding or interpretation, the closer we are to a full explanation of an action. Alfred Schutz (in The Phenomenology of the Social World, 1932) develops a more elaborate conception by extending Weber's work and exploring the formation of goals from the stream of experience. This leads him to distinguish ‘because’ motives (which lie in past experience) from ‘in order to’ motives (which point to a future state of affairs that the actor wishes to bring about).
Most modern sociological conceptions of understanding recognize that it is also a process of interpretation. Some try to avoid this, by arguing that what we should be searching out are the rules by means of which we understand and interpret, since these remain the same whatever the content of interpretations. This lies behind Peter Winch's idea that all social action is rule-following; as well as the ethnomethodological focus on conversational rules; the concerns of structuralism with the rules which enable the production of meaning from an underlying structure; and, less obviously, the interest of post-structuralism in the constant and shifting play of meanings. Anthony Giddens (in The Constitution of Society, 1984) argues that all explicitly formulated rules become sites for interpretation, and the rules that are most basic to human action and interaction are not formulated, but rather, as far as the actor is concerned, are pre-conscious. They are, therefore, like the rules that govern mathematical progressions, and tell us how to proceed in the same way. Thus, given the beginning of a sequence (say 2, 4, 6, 8), we know how it continues (10, 12, 14) without necessarily knowing the rule which governs this progression.
Hermeneutics is the science of interpretation and maintains an interest in the content as well as the form of what is being interpreted. The term itself originated with the practice of interpreting sacred texts. It works on the principle that we can only understand the meaning of a statement in relation to a whole discourse or world-view of which it forms a part: for example, we can only understand (say) the statements of monetarist economics, in the context of all the other contemporary cultural phenomena to which they are related. We have to refer to the whole to understand the parts and the parts to understand the whole—the so-called hermeneutic circle. This in turn involves putting ourselves in the position of the author of the text and looking at the meaning of what is produced in relation to its context. Whereas biblical interpretation aimed at the correct meaning, it is now generally acknowledged that there is no such entity, although many philosophers hold that an approximation to the truth is possible. The German hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, for example, argues this is possible through a shared tradition (Truth and Method, 1960).
It should be evident by now that the systematic investigation of interpretation is largely the province of the philosophy of social science, and its influence on sociological investigation is variable. Perhaps its most important contribution has been to the problem of understanding other cultures, given the possibilities for cultural relativism. If we take Winch's position, for example, we must understand a culture in its own terms, through its own rules, and without imposing the framework of our own culture. In a classic paper on
‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ (in , Rationality, 1970)
he argues that we cannot make any judgement about the truth or otherwise of Azande beliefs about witchcraft. In Azande society, there are witches and witchcraft, whereas in our society we have science and scientists. The two are just different and one is not superior to the other by any transcendent standard: for us, science is better, but for the Azande witchcraft is better. All we can do is understand, this being made possible by the fact that we share a common human condition, since each society has to find a way of regulating and dealing with the birth of new members, sexual relations, and death.
For those approaches that posit the existence of a social structure independent of people's conception of their social world, the problem of the nature of understanding is much less important.

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intersubjectivity

A term used primarily in phenomenological sociology to refer to the mutual constitution of social relationships. It suggests that people can reach consensus about knowledge or about what they have experienced in their life-world—at least as a working agreement if not a claim to objectivity.

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interval scales

See MEASUREMENT; SCALES.

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intervening variable

A variable, used in the process of explaining an observed relationship between an independent and dependent variable(s), such that X T Y—where T is the intervening variable which is used to explain the X Y relationship. For example, if X is age and Y is reading ability, the causal relationship between X and Y might be explained by the intervening variable T, say education, which explains the X Y link. Hence X is an indirect cause of Y through the intervening variable T: T predicts Y but is simultaneously predicted by X.

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interview

A social interaction which results in a transfer of information from the interviewee to an interviewer or researcher. Interviews may be personal, conducted face to face, or by telephone (which has certain advantages for more sensitive topics), or may be conducted at one remove through a postal questionnaire (which gives people more time to consider their replies). The questions put to interviewees may treat them as a respondent who supplies information about their own circumstances, activities, and attitudes, or as an informant who supplies factual information about social phenomena within their experience and knowledge, such as the number of rooms in their home, an estimate of their total household income, characteristics of their local community, trade union, or employer. Less commonly, people are invited to be proxy informants for a respondent who is not available, such as a wife answering questions on her husband's job.
Interviews vary in style and format, from the structured interview based on a questionnaire (which is typical in sample surveys), to the unstructured interview based on a list of topics to be covered, to the depth interview or qualitative interview which may last hours and range widely around the topics in an interview guide. A somewhat different approach to interviewing consists of the group discussion, in which four to twelve people discuss the topic of interest to the researcher, under the guidance of the researcher (see FOCUS GROUPS).
The research interview has some similarities to other interview situations, such as job selection interviews, in that it is an interaction between unequals rather than an ordinary conversation: the topics are chosen by the researcher and interviewers must reveal nothing of themselves in case this biases responses. Researcher control over the interview is greatly increased by the use of computer-based questionnaires for personal and telephone interviews, such as Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) systems. See also INTERVIEW BIAS; INTERVIEWER BIAS.

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interview bias

Biases that appear in research findings because of the social nature of the interview. There are three major sources of such bias: the interviewer (who may, for example, have prejudices or ask leading questions); the respondent (who may wish to lie or evade questions); and the actual interview situation itself (especially the physical and social setting). See also INTERVIEWER BIAS.

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interviewer bias

The distortion of response to a personal or telephone interview which results from differential reactions to the social style and personality of interviewers or to their presentation of particular questions. The use of fixed-wording questions is one method of reducing interviewer bias. Anthropological research and case-studies are also affected by the problem, which is exacerbated by the self-fulfilling prophecy, when the researcher is also the interviewer. See also INTERVIEW BIAS.

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intragenerational mobility

See MOBILITY, SOCIAL.

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intrapreneur

See ENTREPRENEUR.

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intrinsic satisfaction

See WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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introspection

The process of looking into one's mind, to examine one's own thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Data from introspection can be of some value in examining mental processes, but our introspection may not be accurate, and many mental processes are not accessible to conscious introspection. See also BEHAVIOURISM.

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introspectionism

See BEHAVIOURISM.

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introversion

See EXTROVERSION AND INTROVERSION.

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invasion–succession model

A theoretical construct, setting out the sequence of competitive social actions by which a human group or social activity comes to occupy and dominate a territory, formerly dominated by another group or activity. See also CONCENTRIC ZONE THEORY; ECOLOGY; HUMAN ECOLOGY; URBAN ECOLOGY.

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inverse correlation

See CORRELATION.

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invisible hand

An expression deriving from Adam Smith's economic treatise on The Wealth of Nations (1776). It refers to the idea that when individuals pursue their own self-interest for gain in business their actions are led by an unseen force (‘invisible hand’) to promote the general good of society. Smith argued that, with some exceptions such as monopolies, individual economic action supplies benefits to society when it is allowed to progress without hindrance from the state. This contention has often supplied ammunition to those who would promote laissez-faire capitalism and are opposed to state intervention in the economy and in civil society generally. See also ECONOMIC LIFE, SOCIOLOGY OF; EXCHANGE THEORY; JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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invisible religion

This concept, which is associated with Thomas Luckmann (The Invisible Religion, 1963), involves the notion that religion is still an important feature of modern society, but it should not be defined narrowly as church-going behaviour. Religion involves the creation of meaning, which becomes objective in culture, and thereby transcends immediate experience. See also SECULARIZATION.

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involvement, types of involvement

See COMPLIANCE.

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lowa School of interactionism

See KUHN, MANFORD.

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iron law of oligarchy

See MICHELS, ROBERT; POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY.

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Islam

One of three great monotheistic religions of the world (the others being Judaism and Christianity). It originated in seventh-century Arabia with the prophet Muhammad, who first converted the trading cities of Mecca and Medina, and then rallied the hitherto polytheistic tribal population. Within a century Islam had spread through conquest to Persia, much of the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. It is represented by a succession of great empires: Ummayad to 750, Abbasid to 1258, and Ottoman to 1918. Today it encompasses around 45 countries and one billion or so people.
Islam is based on the principle of submission to Allah or God, its holy texts are the Koran (the word of God as revealed to Muhammad by an angel), and the Hadith or sayings of the Prophet. There are five main principles or ‘pillars’ of Islam: the affirmation that there is no God but God, and that Muhammad is his prophet; prayer five times a day; zakat, the giving of alms; fasting in the month of Ramadan; and hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in a lifetime. Jihad, or holy war, is sometimes regarded as another obligation of Muslims, but it does not have the same status, and is often interpreted as referring to a process of spiritual improvement rather than combat with non-Muslims.
Islam differs from Christianity in having no clerical hierarchy, in enforcing a number of prohibitions to do with diet, and in paying special attention to the status and clothing of women. Since the seventh century, it has been divided into a Sunni faction and a minority Shi'ite school, the latter dominant in Iran. The interpretation of Islam in the contemporary world has ranged from those who want to harmonize it with Western economic and political values to those who seek a return to the model of the seventh century. The Islamic revolution of Iran (1979) represented an attempt to pursue the latter path.
Sociological analysis of Islam began with Max Weber who identified two principal differences with Christianity: the lack of an ethic of this-worldly asceticism, and the domination of patrimonial or prebendary relations, through which the state inhibited the growth of private property. Both served to prevent the development of capitalism. This interpretation was later challenged in several works by Maxime Rodinson, who saw Islam as continent and its failure to evolve to capitalism as due to other factors, including international pressures. Later work on Islam focused on the debate between those who identified a distinct sociology of Islam derived from the Koran and other texts, and those who stressed the variety and contingency of Islamic social and political practices. A third area of interpretation was that of the rise of Islamic political movements in the 1970s and 1980s. Some saw this as a popular mobilization, using an Islamic idiom, against foreign domination; others viewed it as a retrospective usage of Islamic symbols by certain social groups (particularly clergy, merchants, and intellectuals) threatened by the processes of secularization and modernization.

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J

Jacobson, Roman Osipovic

(1896–1982)
A member of the Prague linguistic circle, developing the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, and who argued in particular for the fundamental status of binary oppositions (see his
Selected Writings, 1962 ff.
). He was an important influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss and modern structuralism generally.

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James, William

(1842–1910)
An American philosopher of the pragmatist school, notable mainly for his unusual accomplishment in significantly influencing the development both of neo-positivism and symbolic interactionism, via his view that the empirical consequences of an idea constitute its meaning. See also PRAGMATISM (PHILOSOPHY OF).

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Janowitz, Morris

(1919–88)
An American sociologist, student at Chicago University in the mid-1940s, then Professor in a number of North American departments. He was the author of numerous books, including The Professional Soldier (1946), Sociology and the Military Establishment (1959), Social Control of the Welfare State (1976), The Last Half-Century (1978), and The Reconstruction of Patriotism (1983). Janowitz will be remembered as probably the leading sociologist of the military, and for his argument that the transition from early to advanced industrial society created forms of institutional organizations that made democracy harder to sustain, although he also researched and published significant studies on the topics of urban and political sociology, race and ethnic relations, and sociological theory generally. A useful selection of his papers—prefaced by an excellent biographical introduction—is James Burk's Morris Janowitz—On Social Organization and Social Control (1991). See also MILITARY AND MILITARISM.

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Japanization

The introduction of human resource management practices said to be typical of Japanese workplaces, especially manufacturing plants, into equivalent workplaces in North America, Western Europe, and other industrial societies. The key features of Japanese personnel management are seen as practices that maximize or demand worker commitment to the firm, offer employees permanent employment and seniority plus merit pay increases, and demand in return job and task flexibility, teamworking, and reduced status differences between workers. The extent to which this process has occurred is much debated. see
, The Japanization of British Industry (1988
). See also FLEXIBLE WORK.

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job evaluation

This is a system of job classification which determines grading structures and pay scales according to characteristics of the job (skill, discretion, responsibility) rather than the employee. Job evaluation is favoured by the equal opportunities lobby because of its potential for reducing employee-based biases. In practice, however, many job-evaluation schemes simply reinforce prejudices and existing inequalities by the particular interpretation that is placed upon what counts as skill. Thus, for example, in segmented labour-markets (see LABOUR MARKET SEGMENTATION), jobs in which men are in a majority tend to be evaluated more highly than those in which women predominate (see
, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives, (1981
).

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job satisfaction

This is conventionally measured in interview surveys by asking a question along the lines of ‘How happy are you, overall, with your job?’, with 80–90 per cent of adults in industrial societies routinely responding that they are ‘satisfied’. Dissatisfaction is more often voiced in relation to specific aspects of a job, such as pay, promotion prospects, or conveniently flexible hours of work. Although job dissatisfaction, as defined by the standard question, is rare, research shows that it is closely associated with worker behaviour such as absence from work, job change, and labour turnover. See also WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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joint conjugal roles

Joint conjugal roles are those where the husband and wife carry out many activities together and with a minimum of task differentiation and separation of interests. Marriages in which couples share activities and have an overlapping social network are thought to be more stable. See also ROLE, CONJUGAL; SEGREGATED CONJUGAL ROLES.

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joking relationships

Clearly defined relationships of reciprocal, ritual, mildly abusive behaviour, between persons who are not only permitted but expected to behave in ways that would be offensive or insulting to persons not so related. These relationships express a form of friendliness by a show of mild hostility. Joking relatives are expected not to take offence but to respond in kind.
Joking relationships are therefore the obverse of avoidance relationships and are often found in the same social context. It has frequently been argued, indeed, that they serve the same social function. For example, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, 1950) maintains that ‘in the building of social structures means must be provided for avoiding, limiting, controlling, or settling conflict. In the new structural situation resulting from marriage … while there is a union of the husband and wife the two families … remain separated, only linked together by their separate connection with the new family … It is the separateness of the two groups, together with the need of maintaining friendly relations between them, that has to provide the basis for their personal relations’. In this situation, the social separation of the man and his wife's relatives is symbolically represented in sham hostility and the readiness not to take offence, both governed by strict conventions. Thus, for example, in agnatic (descended by male links from the same male ancestor) kinship systems, it is often considered appropriate for a sister's son to express symbolically his relationship to his uncle in joking customs of privileged familiarity (a situation found among the Winnebago and certain other North American tribes). Similarly, among the patrilineal Hutu of northern Rwanda, a joking relationship exists between a man and his matrilateral cross-cousins, male or female, whereas his behaviour towards his female patrilateral cross-cousins has to be kept discreet and formal.

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Judaism

A monotheistic world religion with origins in the prophetic activities of the Jews in relation to the God Yahweh. It is important to distinguish early biblical Judaism, before the fall of the Temple in 70CE, and later Judaism which was focused on the synagogue. Judaism was organized around religious teachers (the rabbis) and religious knowledge was contained in the Torah or teaching (especially the first five books of the Hebrew Bible). Judaism, which was based on the idea of a sacred covenant between Yahweh and his people, produced profound messianic movements throughout history.
In the Middle Ages, there were a number of important mystical movements, such as the Kabbalah, which gave an esoteric reading to traditional Jewish theology. In the nineteenth century, there were attempts to change and reform many traditional practices, giving rise to the creation of two separate religious movements, Reform and Conservative Judaism. The destruction of European Jewish communities in the Holocaust and the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 have transformed Judaism in the twentieth century.
Sociologists have been particularly interested in the nature of Jewish prophecy (see, for example,
, Ancient Judaism, 1917–19
), the relationship between Judaism and capitalism (see
, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, 1911
), and more recently the implications of the Holocaust for established social theories (see
, Modernity and the Holocaust, 1990
). See also CHRISTIANITY.

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Jung, Carl Gustav

(1875–1961)
A Swiss psychologist and psychoanalyst, for some time Sigmund Freud's heir apparent, although he eventually split from Freud in 1913, after disagreeing in particular about the importance of sexuality. His work is considered more spiritual than Freud's, offering analyses of the life-cycle and symbolism, and by comparison remains curiously ignored by sociologists. Anthony Storr's Jung (1986) is a good introduction to his work.

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jurisprudence, sociological

See SOCIOLOGICAL JURISPRUDENCE.

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just-in-time system (JIT)

This is a system of related production practices which aim to deliver the exact quantity and quality of raw materials, parts, and sub-assemblies ‘just-in-time’ for the next stage of production. Originally associated with Japanese firms, but now more widely diffused, it implies: flexible production methods; short production runs and rapid changes in product lines; inventory management determined by downstream suppliers rather than forward management planning; and networks of small firms linked by subcontracting.

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justice

See CRIMINOLOGY; JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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justice, social

Arguments about justice feature not only in sociology, but also in philosophy, political science, social policy, psychology, and of course law itself. Justice is a central moral standard in social life, is generally held to have a prominent role in social theory and social action, and so it is perhaps not surprising that all the social sciences have examined the concept at some length. (The best multi-disciplinary overview is R. L. Cohen's edited collection entitled Justice: Views from the Social Sciences, 1986).
It is conventional to distinguish ‘formal justice’ (the law) and material justice (morality and politics), although some theorists of justice treat the two concepts as parallel or overlapping, and argue that since legal or criminal justice concerns the distribution of penalties to the guilty, it has much in common with social justice, which deals with the allocation of scarce goods (and ‘bads’) to a population: both are premissed on the ideas of due process, impartiality, and distribution according to appropriate criteria. In older literature, a distinction is usually drawn between social (or as it is frequently termed ‘distributive’) justice, and retributive justice. The latter holds that the guilty should be punished simply because wrongdoing as such ought to be punished, regardless of the consequences of doing so in terms of deterring further misdemeanours, or making any other contribution to social utility. Retributivism is, therefore, only one theory of criminal justice. In the psychological literature, a fivefold distinction is sometimes made (following
, Justice: Its Determinants in Social Interaction, 1974
) between equity, or fair exchange, where equity is defined as the equivalence of the output to input ratios of all parties involved in an exchange; distributive justice, or fair allocation, involving the one-way distribution of resources, rights, obligations, or whatever across a category of recipients; procedural justice, or fair procedures and mechanisms, recognizing that an agreed and fair procedure might nevertheless result in a distribution of outcomes that some would define as unjust; retributive justice, or just compensation, dealing with fairness in the allocation of punishments or level of compensation for victimization; and, finally, justice as equality—which may be equality of opportunity, equality of objective outcome, subjective equality (equality of outcomes taking into account need or desert), rank-order equality (in which the allocation of rewards follows normative expectations in order to avoid felt injustice), or equity (equality relative to individual contributions). As will be evident by now this is a subject replete with typologies and codification.
A wide variety of principles are available to regulate social and economic inequalities and so the concept of social justice is the subject of great dispute. Different political ideologies yield different principles of justice. Among the variety of concepts and theories advanced in this way, those of desert, merit, entitlement, equality of outcome, equality of opportunity, need, and functional inequality would seem to be most relevant to sociologists.
Most academic debate about the concept of justice starts with John Rawls's famous ‘difference principle’, which asserts that inequalities in the distribution of scarce goods (power, money, access to healthcare, or whatever) are justified only if they serve to increase the advantage of the least favoured groups in society (see his
A Theory of Justice, 1972
). What makes this a principle of justice is the idea that justice consists in considering society from an impartial standpoint, in Rawls's case from an imagined ‘original position’ in which agreement is reached by hypothetical rational self-interested people deprived of information about their talents and attributes, choosing behind a ‘veil of ignorance’. According to Rawls, people constrained in this way to choose impartially would be concerned to maximize the well-being of the least advantaged members of society lest they themselves fall into that group, so they will agree to permit inequalities only if these contribute to the welfare of the poor. This proposition then forms part of Rawls's theory of ‘justice as fairness’, which rests on three principles, which because they may sometimes conflict are ordered in lexical priority as follows: the principle of greatest equal liberty (each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all); which takes absolute priority over the principle of equality of fair opportunity (positions are to be open to all under conditions in which persons of similar abilities have equal access to office); which, in turn, takes absolute priority over the difference principle itself, which (as we have seen) requires social and economic institutions to be arranged so as to benefit maximally the worst-off. Note that there is no suggestion anywhere in this theory that people in any sense deserve their advantages.
Theories of justice which demand that people be rewarded according to their differential desert or merit are probably more familiar to sociologists. If justice consists in giving people their due, and those dues are different, then justice seems clearly to require unequal outcomes. However, this approach to justice does then raise the question of what it is that constitutes the bases of desert or merit, and which qualities of individuals it is just to reward. For example, one can make a distinction between those attributes for which an individual can claim responsibility, and those which are his or hers merely by chance. It is by no means clear that justice is served by rewarding the latter. Against the theory of justice as desert, Rawls has argued that even a quality such as ability to work hard is itself a chance attribute, and thus an improper basis for reward.
If notions of desert are allied to the principle of equality of opportunity, then matters become yet more complex, since the latter is open to a variety of interpretations. Does it demand that, however unequal their abilities, people should be equally empowered to achieve their goals? This would imply that the unmusical individual who wants to be a concert pianist should receive more training than the child prodigy. Should people have equal resources to devote to their life-plans, irrespective of ability; or, less drastically, does this principle merely require that people with the same abilities should have equal opportunities to achieve their desired goals (an interpretation which is consistent with the idea that the talented should have more opportunities than the untalented).
The idea that unequal rewards might be just because people are entitled to unequal resources can be distinguished from arguments based on principles of desert or merit because it is possible to argue that people are entitled to certain goods without in any sense deserving them. Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State and Utopia, 1974) maintains that, even if one accepts that each individual's natural assets are arbitrary such that they cannot be said to deserve them, people are still entitled to the fruits of these assets and to whatever else other people choose freely to give them. Desert-based conceptions of justice are, in Nozick's terms, ‘patterned’ and necessarily conflict with those free exchanges and just transfers which justify an individual's entitlement to resources. Nozick's libertarian emphasis on property rights and freedom of choice leads to a conception of justice as entitlement which is quite different from the idea that people should get what they deserve.
Friedrich Hayek (The Mirage of Social Justice, 1976) has argued that one cannot justify market outcomes as reflecting merit or desert since luck plays too large a part in determining who gets what. However, in his view, the fact that market outcomes are unintended and unforeseen aggregate consequences means that they are not the kind of thing which it is appropriate to regard as just or unjust. Indeed, the whole idea of social justice is for Hayek a mirage, since it requires us to make the mistake of seeing society as an agent. Interestingly, Hayek concedes that the defence of market outcomes at the level of the general public rests upon the erroneous belief that such outcomes reward merit, and he suggests that such a belief is necessary if people are to tolerate the inequalities that the market produces. However, his own justification of the market mechanism is quite different, and points instead to its alleged efficiency because it directs scarce resources to where they bring the greatest return, so that even in an unequal distribution the poor are better off than under any other distributive system, since increased productivity works also to the advantage of those who have least. This argument has obvious parallels with functionalist theories of stratification.
It will be clear from this brief résumé of only a few of the philosophical arguments about justice that the concept is itself contested; that discussions of justice tend to spill over into disputes about cognate concepts (such as ‘efficiency’ and ‘equality’); and that this is an area in which it is wise to eschew labels in attaching particular views of justice to particular political ideologies. For example, while it is well known that socialists tend to place emphasis on justice as need and equality of outcome, it is perhaps less well known that Karl Marx considered the desert-oriented distributive principle ‘to each according to his labour’ as appropriate to the first or lower stage of socialism, to be superseded by the maxim ‘to each according to his need’ only in a second or higher stage. Similarly, liberals tend to endorse the value of equality of opportunity, with inequalities of outcome deemed legitimate if they reflect differences in merit, but then cannot agree either about the conditions that are necessary to ensure equality of opportunity or about what constitutes merit. Some liberals hold a more extreme libertarian position (often confused in popular terminology with conservatism), and argue both that people are entitled to do as they choose with whatever resources they have acquired legitimately, and that this is more important than equality of opportunity. Contemporary thinkers on the New Right tend to conflate the principles of entitlement and desert. For example, it is often argued that the market is to be praised because people get out what they put in (with entrepreneurship and hard work being rewarded), and because markets are the most efficient mechanism for creating wealth which can then trickle down to the poor. Here, unequal outcomes are justified simultaneously on the grounds that they are needed to give people incentives, and so contribute to social justice by helping the poor, and because they give individuals what they deserve. Old-style conservatives, by contrast, tend simply to regard hierarchy as a good thing, either because inequality is a necessary prerequisite of culture and civilized values, or because they respect tradition and inequality is traditional. From this point of view all talk of the principles of social justice, and perhaps even the notion of social justice itself, is inappropriately rationalist in tenor.
Much of the philosophical literature and political theory of justice has been predominantly normative in character. Like Rawls, most writers have been concerned mainly to identify particular rules which can be used to assess the rightness of an act or institution, in order thereby to encourage specific social arrangements that will promote procedural fairness, just allocation, or equality. However, among sociologists and social psychologists, the discussion has been empirical and descriptive rather than moral and prescriptive.
Psychologists have devised a panoply of imaginative studies (mainly laboratory experiments) in an attempt to arbitrate between the exchange theories of distributive justice suggested by George Homans and Stacy Adams, the status-value or status-attribution alternative proposed by Joseph Berger and his colleagues, and the various cost-benefit explanations proffered by certain theorists of social conflict. The framework of equity theory, with which the names of Homans and Adams are associated, rests on a contributions rule, which proposes that justice judgements among individuals reflect the relative ratio of one's contributions (or inputs) to one's receipts (or outcomes) from any transaction, so that justice is achieved when this ratio appears equal for all the parties to any exchange. Subsidiary propositions state that people try to maximize their outcomes, and that perceptions of inequity cause psychological distress, resulting in sustained efforts to restore equity. The status-value perspective, by contrast, argues that distributive justice issues arise only with regard to a stable frame of reference, and that justice evaluations are made with reference to generalized others (see SELF) rather than specific individuals. Berger has argued that through social exchange, individuals develop normative expectations about the levels of rewards typically associated with general classes of individuals, and that when people perceive themselves to be part of that general class they come to have expectations of similar rewards. In other words, as a consequence of generalized beliefs about the actual distribution of rewards, normative expectations are formed about what constitutes a just distribution.
Many of these studies have tried to discover a single rule of distributive justice that might even be expressed in the form of an algebraic formula. Their authors have sailed self-consciously for big prizes: the equity programme pursued by Homans and Adams, for example, is nothing less than a bid for a unified theory of human interaction, embracing central propositions from the theories of reinforcement, cognitive consistency, psychoanalysis, and social exchange. The literature here is now voluminous and has been the subject of numerous overviews and reappraisals (see, for example,
, Equity: Theory and Research, 1978
).
Sociological studies of social justice are much more diffuse and embrace research in the areas of (among others) welfarism, the family, education, and earnings. (For a concise summary see
, ‘Empirical Studies of Distributive Justice’, Ethics, 1982
.) For example, Wayne Alves and Peter Rossi have fielded surveys in order to explore the nature of fairness judgements about the distribution of earnings in the United States, and conclude that individuals disagree both about how various principles of justice are to be applied in practice, and about the merits of particular cases, seeming only to concur that the rules themselves involve balancing both merit and performance considerations alongside those of need (see
‘Who Should Get What?’, American Journal of Sociology, 1978
). Similarly, Jennifer Hochschild's intensive-interview research (reported in What's Fair? American Beliefs about Distributive Justice, 1981) suggests (to quote her conclusions) ‘that people generally use norms that derive from a principle of equality in the socialising and political domains, and generally use norms that derive from a principle of differentiation in the economic domain … Thus individuals begin from an assumption they are equal to all others in their home life, school, community, political rights, and policy interests; however, they begin from an assumption that they are either better or worse than—at any rate, not necessarily equal to—all others in their economic and social worth’.
Nevertheless, few people are either consistently egalitarian or differentiating, even within particular domains. In short, ordinary citizens (like academics and politicians) tend to combine principles of social justice that conflict analytically, tend to resolve justice dilemmas by fiat, and to switch from one norm to another without acknowledgement.
Recent years have seen the emergence of a developing consensus that research into social justice issues could most profitably be pursued within an interdisciplinary framework (see, for example,
, Justice: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 1992
). This has been attempted empirically by (among others)
, Against the Odds? (1997)
. See also MEASUREMENT BY FIAT.

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juvenile delinquency

See DELINQUENCY.

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K

Kant, Immanuel

(1724–1804)
One of the greatest, if not the greatest, of all modern philosophers, the German Immanuel Kant has had a profound and lasting influence both in philosophy itself, and across the full range of intellectual disciplines, including of course sociology. The core of Kant's critical philosophy is generally taken to be his synthesis of the two rival traditions of empiricism and rationalism which dominated epistemology (or philosophical theory of knowledge) in Kant's time. Kant argued, against the empiricists, that there were true synthetic a priori judgements; that is to say, judgements which were not mere tautologies, yet which were not derived from experience. Kant's great work the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) is devoted to the demonstration of this claim and to the systematic derivation of those synthetic a priori concepts and judgements which were conditions of the possibility of our apprehension of space and time (the ‘forms of intuition’), and our making of objective judgements of experience (the ‘categories’—causality, necessity, possibility, and others). For Kant, however, the categories, whilst not derivable from experience, could be legitimately applied only within the field of possible experience. To use the categories to offer accounts of ‘things-in-themselves’, beyond possible experience, was to fall into irresolvable contradiction. So, whilst rejecting a central doctrine of empiricism, Kant nevertheless shared with the leading empiricists a concern to defend the cognitive status of empirical science against theological and metaphysical claims to knowledge of ‘things-in-themselves’ beyond experience.
Howvever, for Kant, thought about ‘things-in-themselves’ was unavoidable, even if knowledge of them was impossible. This was not least because of the necessity of a rational grounding for objective moral judgement. For an individual to be bound by a moral maxim requires both freedom of will and a unitary personal identity, neither of which is to be found among the contents of experience. Kant's treatment of aesthetics (in the Critique of judgement, 1790) also makes use of ideas (such as ‘the form of purposiveness’) which can have no application in objective judgements of experience. Despite the anti-metaphysical leanings of the central arguments of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, therefore, there remains a tension between a realm of objectively knowable objects of experience, on the one hand, and unavoidable allusions to an unknowable realm of ‘things-in-themselves’, on the other. This latter realm is especially required in the grounding of moral and aesthetic judgement and the identity of the perceiving, knowing, and acting subject.
The principal non-positivist epistemologies which have been influential in sociology derive from various European traditions of interpretation and resolution of these tensions in Kant's philosophy (most especially neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics—for all of which see separate entries in this dictionary). Hegel's historical dialectic of self-realization of the ‘Absolute Idea’ arose from the critique of Kant's philosophy and went on to inform both the view of history and the epistemology of Marx and Engels.

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Kautsky, Karl

(1854–1938)
A German socialist politician and social theorist. His
‘On the Agrarian Question’ (1899)
argued that small-scale peasant production was doomed to disappear in the face of capitalist development, and that social democrats should not seek to defend peasant interests, their future lying in proletarianization. For Kautsky, the peasantry embodied the ‘backward’ social characteristics of isolation, tradition, and individualism. He was opposed to revisionism; that is, the electoral politics of Edward Bernstein in the 1900s, and adopted a pacifist position in the First World War. He criticized the Bolshevik revolution and its policy of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, attracting the hostility of Lenin, who attacked Kautsky as the epitome of the social democratic betrayal of the working class (see
The Road to Power, 1909, and The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1918
). See also MARXISM.

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Kelly, George Alexander

(1905–66)
An American psychologist who pioneered personal construct theory and the ‘role construct repertory test’. Kelly argued, in The Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955), that ‘a person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events’. Such constructs are the central subject of psychology. See also COGNITIVE THEORY.

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Kerr–Siegel hypothesis

In an article on
‘The Interindustry Propensity to Strike—an International Comparison’ (in , Industrial Conflict, 1954)
, Clark Kerr and Abraham Siegel offered an analysis of inter-industry differences in strike-proneness, and argued that high strike-rates among geographically or socially isolated, cohesive, homogeneous groups of workers (such as longshoremen, miners, and sailors) were a consequence of their alienation from the wider society and the unpleasant nature of their jobs. First, since the location of the worker in society determines his or her propensity to strike, and location is heavily dependent on industrial environment, then industries will be strike-prone where workers form a homogeneous group isolated from the general community. Moreover, by selection and conditioning, the nature of jobs determines the kind of workers employed: unpleasant, casual, unskilled work attracts (and fosters) tough, combative workers, who will be likely to strike. A combination of these two theories explains the differential strike-rates observed across industries.
The thesis generated an extensive secondary literature and considerable controversy. Critics argued, among other things, that the strike statistics that formed the basis of the argument were unreliable; that the analysis omitted certain key industries (such as steel) which contradicted the argument; and that the explanation of strike-proneness relied too much on a limited range of structural factors and ignored the attitudes of the different parties involved. See also INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT.

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Keynesian economics

An approach to economic theory and policy derived from the influential writings of the English economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). Prior to Keynes, governments tended to be guided by the argument of laissez-faire economics that an unregulated economy would tend to move towards full employment, and thence equilibrium. Keynes argued (in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936) that equilibrium could be established before that point was reached, and therefore that governments wishing to achieve full employment had actively to intervene in the economy by stimulating aggregate demand; and, conversely, that if full employment resulted in inflation they should act to reduce aggregate demand, in both cases by using the devices of tax (fiscal) policy, government expenditure, and monetary policy (changes in interest rates and the supply of credit). Keynesianism, though forming the basis of economic policy in most Western societies for three decades after the Second World War, was itself challenged by the appearance of stagflation (simultaneous recession and inflation) in the 1970s, and consequently by the economic theories of monetarism. The dispute between these two approaches currently forms the major axis of disagreement within modern economics.

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kibbutzim

Agricultural settlements inspired by socialist and anarchist ideals, established by Jewish settlers in Palestine, in which working and domestic arrangements, including child-care, are shared by members. They later came to employ wage labour and to form a small part of the Israeli economic system. They are interesting to sociologists primarily as experiments in egalitarian communal living (see
, The Children of the Dream, 1969
). See also COMMUNE.

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kinesics

See BODY LANGUAGE.

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Kinsey, Alfred

(1894–1956)
A zoologist who completed the first major large-scale social research into the sexual behaviour of men and women in North America. The findings, based on a sample of 18,000 interviews (nearly half of which Kinsey conducted himself), were published as Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female in 1953. Through the founding of the Kinsey Institute of Sex Research in Bloomington, Indiana, he did much to establish the credibility of such research. His findings were controversial, showing for example that 4 per cent of men in his sample were exclusively homosexual, and a third of men had engaged in homosexual acts. His findings have had an important cultural impact, discussed by P. Robinson in The Modernization of Sex (1976).

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kinship

Kinship is one of the main organizing principles of human society, and kinship systems have been extensively studied by social anthropologists, for whom they are of particular importance because of their primacy in non-state societies. Kinship systems establish relationships between individuals and groups on the model of biological relationships between parents and children, between siblings, and between marital partners. Relationships established by marriage, which form alliances between groups of persons related by blood (or consanguineous ties), are usually referred to as affinal relationships. Some social scientists make a distinction between the study of kinship and the study of affinity. All such studies depend on the assumption that these relationships are systematic, entailing the observation of norms relating to behaviour between those related by kin or affinity. The relationships between parents and children (and by extension between grandparents and grandchildren) determine modes of inheritance as well as the overall political relationships between generations. Like links between siblings, the parent and child dyad can be crucial in establishing incest rules, which determine not only sexual relationships but also the rules underlying affinity, by denoting prohibited or prescribed marital partners. As the social relationships between husband and wife set up relationships between their respective consanguineous groups, the entire complex of kinship and affinal relationships can be seen to be fundamental to the analysis of political, economic, and social relations in non-state societies.
It should be noted that actual biological relationships are not necessary for status within a kinship system to be established. For instance, it may be more important to establish that a child has a social father, who will take responsibility for its welfare and have a right to the product of its labour, than to find out who the biological father might be. Nevertheless, most kinship systems do operate to establish rights in the sexual, reproductive, economic, and domestic services of women. In patrilineal societies, where sons inherit from their fathers, all these rights in women rest with the father until a girl marries, at which point they pass in totality to her husband. Matrilineal societies, on the other hand, focus on the importance of the sibling group. Inheritance passes from mother's brother to sister's son—in other words from uncle to nephew. The variety of ways in which this is organized have been referred to as solutions to the ‘matrilineal puzzle’. In the basic forms it means that brothers have rights over their sisters until they marry. At this point they retain reproductive rights, thus controlling their sisters' sons for inheritance purposes; however, sexual rights pass to the husband, as may rights to domestic services. Economic rights to the products of the sister's labour are likely to remain with the brother or sibling group.
Inheritance apart, kinship and affinity rules may also affect residence, relationships between individuals, modes of address, and various other economic and political behaviours. The rules themselves have been investigated through the study of genealogy, kinship terminology, marriage preferences and cycles of social reproduction. Within social anthropology, kinship theories tend to be grouped according to the relative emphasis they place on rules of descent or rules of affinity. In other words, they concentrate on either parent and child relationship rules or on the bonds between groups established through marriage.
Between the 1930s and 1960s, descent theory was predominant, associated largely with the work of Africanist anthropologists, such as Meyer Fortes, and the theoretical work of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Descent theorists suggest that kinship systems function to make sure that lineage groups persist over time as political entities. This means that relationships within lineage groups must be established and maintained through actual or fictional descent links traced through either or both parents. Parent–child and sibling bonds are therefore the focus of attention. Descent and succession are stressed in these studies, which are also highly empirical and related to functionalist theory, entailing that, for descent theorists, kinship systems exist in order to allocate rights and duties in societies.
Alliance theory is more theoretical, being interested in how the rules setting up links between groups through marriage are generated. Marriage and incest rules are therefore central. This means that, for alliance theorists, kinship systems exist in order to generate marriage possibilities or impossibilities. Much of this perspective is derived from the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who designated kinship systems as being either ‘elementary’ or ‘complex’. In the former case, a spouse is selected according to social rules, whereas in the latter the marriage partner is not determined by structural rules but rather by individual choice. However, these are abstract principles rather than descriptions of empirical reality: in practice, all societies have incest rules that define marriage partners according to elementary structures, and all have complex aspects that allow for a measure of situational choice.
In the 1960s and 1970s, controversy between alliance and descent theorists was heated, being part of the debate between functionalist and structuralist schools in social anthropology. Since then the discussion has cooled, and it is now generally acknowledged that the difference lies more in the level of theory applied, than in either any fundamental difference in concrete kinship systems or necessary adherence to a particular theoretical perspective.
Almost any of the works of Rodney Needham provide a good entry into the relevant anthropological literature (see, for example,
Rethinking Kinship and Marriage, 1971
, or
Remarks and Inventions: Skeptical Essays about Kinship, 1974
). See also FAMILY, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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Kish grid, Kish selection table

A widely used technique in survey research, by which interviewers who have been issued with a sample of household addresses can then sample individuals on the doorstep, by following simple and rigorous rules for selecting one person to interview from among household residents. The technique involves constructing a list of eligible individuals at a particular address, ordered by age, and then selecting according to the serial number of the address itself. The system is devised so that all individuals in a household have an equal chance of selection. Its major difficulty is that the individual who supplies the household listing is often not the one to be interviewed (see
, ‘A Procedure for Objective Respondent Selection Within the Household’, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1949
).

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Klein, Melanie

(1882–1960)
An Austrian-born, second-generation psychoanalyst, trained under Sandor Ferenczi in Budapest and Karl Abraham in Berlin. She moved to London in 1926 and became a major figure in British and world psychoanalysis, the founder, within the British Psychoanalytic Society, of the Kleinian school.
Her innovations in technique were to analyse young children, substituting play for verbal free-association; to explore the importance of counter-transference—the analyst's feelings about the client; and to undertake the analysis of psychotics. She developed a more elaborate theory of the emotional life of the young baby than did Sigmund Freud. Her argument was that all infants progress through two positions: a paranoid-schizoid position, where bad feelings are projected into the external world, which is then felt to be threatening; and a depressive position, when these feelings are reintegrated into the personality. Thus everybody has the experience of, and at least the distant possibility of regressing to, madness. She gave a clinical meaning to Freud's concept of the death instinct, dealing with it as destructive envy (hatred), and emphasized the role of unconscious fantasy.
Over recent years her work has been drawn on for purposes of social criticism. For example, her analysis of the early stages of development can be used to understand characteristics of the modern personality (see
, The Minimal Self, 1984
), and her concern with the play of love and hate has been used to supplement critical theory (see
, Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory, 1989
). Her most important papers can be found in
, The Selected Melanie Klein (1986)
. See also OBJECT RELATIONS TEST.

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Klein, Viola

(1908–73)
An Austrian social theorist, she fled to England as refugee in 1939, becoming a domestic servant. Her second doctorate (obtained in 1944 from the London School of Economics) was published as The Feminine Character: History of an Ideology (1946), however her most famous study was conducted with Alva Myrdal on Women's Two Roles: Home and Work (1956, 1968 2nd edn.), an influential volume which was published before the advent of the second wave of feminism but anticipated many of its arguments.

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Kluckhohn, Clyde

(1905–60)
An American anthropologist who taught at Harvard University and whose writings combined elements of anthropology and psychology. His main publication was Navajo Witchcraft (1944), in which he argued that witchcraft served to channel tensions caused by pressures exerted from the wider society in the United States. For a number of years he worked alongside Talcott Parsons, in the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations at Harvard, and is generally recognized to have encouraged Parsons to take seriously the Freudian-influenced American cultural anthropology of the 1940s. See also CULTURE AND PERSONALITY SCHOOL; MAGIC, WITCHCRAFT, AND SORCERY.

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knowledge, sociology of

The sociology of knowledge is not a clear subdivision of sociology. Its concern is the relationship of knowledge to a social base—although what is meant by knowledge and social base is likely to vary from author to author. All the major sociological theorists have something to say about this topic, but as an integral part of their theory, not as a separate area of study, Émile Durkheim for example, in his sociology of religion, suggested that the basic mental categories by means of which we order the world are rooted in the way we organize society. Max Weber, in his sociology of religion, gave considerable weight to material conditions influencing the formation of religious beliefs.
The clearest tradition in the sociology of knowledge is Marxism—where discussion is tied specifically to the theory of ideology. The social origins of knowledge are seen as related to the possibility of grasping truth. It is sometimes argued that the content of knowledge depends upon social or economic position: the bourgeoisie will come to look at the world in one way (say in terms of individual competition and survival of the fittest), the proletariat in another (the point of view of co-operative enterprise and mutual support). These different viewpoints come directly from the experience of each class in the productive process. A more sophisticated tradition, building upon the work of Hegel and associated with György Lukács and the Frankfurt School (see CRITICAL THEORY), argues that it is the form of knowledge rather than its content that is important. Thus, for Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1923), the thought appropriate to the bourgeois period is marked by formal logic. It is analytic in form, breaking down its subject-matter into component parts, and centres around a number of so-called antinomies—categories such as subject and object which cannot be brought together into a coherent whole. Marxist thought, on the other hand, is claimed to be synthetic, totalizing, and dialectical. Each form represents the experience of a different social class. For both approaches the proletarian forms of thought are closest to the truth.
Karl Mannheim, in particular in Ideology and Utopia (1936), developed the standard non-Marxist interpretation, arguing that a range of other social positions (not merely social class) determine forms of knowledge; and, moreover, that it is not possible to grant one point of view greater truth-value than another. However, by virtue of their ‘free-floating’ social status, intellectuals can mediate between different positions and produce a more complete view.
As a distinct sub-area, the sociology of knowledge seems to begin and end with Mannheim, although various combinations of his ideas (and those of Marxism) can be found in the sociologies of modernity, religion, and science—the last of these often focusing on the knowledge-effect of particular institutions. These discussions are always haunted by the problem of relativism: how can one make a universal claim that all knowledge is dependent on social position since, presumably, such a claim is itself context-bound? This problem is discussed at length in
's The Sociology of Knowledge (1958)
—still one of the most exhaustive introductions to the classic literature.
Since the 1980s there has been a determined effort to revitalize the field, by sociologists interested in culture, science, religion, and ideology. The development of cultural studies as a separate discipline has also contributed to this initiative. The so-called ‘new’ sociology of knowledge concentrates not on the differing social locations and interests of individuals or groups, but rather on how particular kinds of social organization make whole orderings of knowledge possible. It also expands the field of study from an examination of the contents of knowledge to the investigation of ‘forms and practices of knowing’—and so, inevitably, to the structuring of political, cultural, and organizational discourse. Researchers have looked at the ways in which knowledge is preserved, organized, and transmitted by various media; at how social groups retain and alter their collective memories (for example by ‘inventing tradition’); at how organizational structures and practices influence ideas (evident, it is claimed, in the relationship between the structuring of scientific communities and the coherence of particular intellectual paradigms); and at how authority and power shape knowledge. For a useful summary of this increasingly diffuse literature see
‘The New Sociology of Knowledge’, Annual Review of Sociology (1994
). See also EVANS-PRITCHARD, E. E.; RELIGION, SOCIOLOGY OF; SCHELER, MAX; SCIENCE, SOCIOLOGY OF; SOREL, GEORGES.

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Kollontai, Alexandra

(1872–1952)
A leading feminist in revolutionary Russia. Her main concerns linked class and revolutionary activity to woman's role and motherhood. Always controversial, she is most noted in sociology for her free-thinking radical analyses of sex and love, which are usefully appraised in
's Alexandra Kollontai (1980)
.

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Kondratieff cycles

See BUSINESS CYCLE.

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Kroeber, Alfred Lewis

(1876–1960)
An American cultural anthropologist, ethnographer of Native Americans (see his
Handbook of the Indians of California, 1925
), and author of a philosophical and anthropological study of cultural development (Configurations of Culture Growth, 1944). The most concise account of his commitment to what was (against a background of nineteenth-century evolutionism) a refreshing historical particularism is his article on
‘The Eighteen Professions’ (American Anthropologist, 1915)
, a forceful statement of the ideographic approach to the study of social structures, and of his belief that history was (nevertheless) determined by cultural patterns and not accidents of personality (see also his
‘The Superorganic’, American Anthropologist, 1917
).

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Kuhn, Manford

(1911–63)
A leading symbolic interactionist, who developed a more quantitative strand of interactionism, and argued that the methodology of the Chicago School was too vague to permit scientific precision. Kuhn and his colleagues attempted to give operational definitions to such concepts as ‘social act’ and ‘the self’. The most familiar of his research instruments was the so-called Twenty Statements Test, which asked people to list twenty responses to the question ‘Who Am I?’, as a basis for a more objective study of the self.
Kuhn's distinctive Iowa School of symbolic interactionism is often contrasted with the more humanistic approach of Herbert Blumer and his colleagues at Chicago. The methodological pluralism of the School is illustrated in the work of Norman K. Denzin. Trained in the Iowa School, Denzin has subsequently undertaken research in the areas of childhood, emotions, alcoholism, life-histories, and film, using a variety of quantitative and qualitative techniques and advocating the research methodology of triangulation (see
The Research Act: A Theoretical Introduction to Sociological Methods, 1978, and Sociological Methods: A Sourcebook, 1978
). Most recently Denzin has described his work as Interpretive Interactionism (1990).

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kula ring

An exchange cycle in the Trobriand Isles documented by Bronislaw Malinowski in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). Twice each year, Trobriand islanders launch their canoes and visit other islands, carrying gifts and local specialities for barter. When they arrive, the travellers give gifts, barter, and are feasted by their hosts. These are not simple trading expeditions since the islanders aim to acquire, from special kula-exchange partners, armlets of white shells (mwali) and necklaces of red shells (souvlava). Kula shells are carried from one island to another in a ring, the armlets in one direction and the necklaces in another, in a constant cycle of exchange called ‘kula’.
Kula items have no monetary value and cannot be converted into consumer goods. They are merely for display and prestige, similar to the English crown jewels according to Malinowski, or to a sports trophy held only until the next encounter. The shells are highly esteemed by men who seek them from their lifetime partners in exchange, hence the local saying ‘Once in kula, always in kula’. Every man in the kula cycle receives all of the kula articles at some point. He keeps them for a while and then passes them on. The shells are formally transferred and no haggling is allowed. The time-lapse between the gift and counter-gift is an expression of confidence, on the part of the giver, that the partner will return his due. Men perform magic to ensure goodwill and affection so that shells will be returned, since a man's prestige depends on it.
Malinowski chastised writers who referred to kula shells as money. They are better seen as an exchange of gifts in a moral framework. Thus Malinowski used the kula to make the more general point that the economy is embedded in social relations. The kula ring welds together a large number of islands and their economies. He also stressed the political nature of kula. It provides internal status for men, and strengthens political stability among kula trading islands by reinforcing peace, since Trobrianders are highly reticent to attack islanders who are partners in kula. According to Malinowski, the many interactions which come under the ambit of kula (prestige, political influence, trade, and gift-giving) all form ‘one organic whole’. Malinowski's study of kula exchange is thus a major demonstration of the functionalist method in anthropology. See also EXCHANGE THEORY; GIFT RELATIONSHIP.

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Kuznets cycle

See BUSINESS CYCLE.

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L

labelling, labelling theory

Labelling theory was a major thrust of the sceptical revolution in the sociology of deviance during the 1950s and 1960s. The orthodox criminology of the immediate post-war period, both in Britain and America, treated a crime or act of deviance as an unambiguous occurrence which could readily be explained as a product of individual psychology or (even) genetic inheritance. Crimes were committed by criminal types–people with particular psychogenetic attributes or socio-cultural backgrounds.
This positivist tradition was challenged by members of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (in the United States) and the National Deviance Conference (in the United Kingdom), who argued that the established criminology was biased because it favoured authoritative definitions of deviance, was overly deterministic in its view of what caused deviant behaviour, and was uncritical of the thesis that the deviant was a particular type of person. The orthodoxy posed only behavioural and motivational questions about crime: ‘Why did they do it?’; ‘What sort of people are they?’; and ‘How can we stop them doing it again?’. Labelling theorists introduced a new relativism into the study of deviance by addressing a number of definitional issues hitherto largely ignored: ‘Why does a particular rule, the infraction of which constitutes deviance, exist at all?’; ‘What are the processes involved in identifying someone as a deviant and applying the rule to him or her?’; and ‘What are the consequences of this application, both for the society and the individual?’
In this way, the labelling perspective can be seen as a development of Edwin Lemert's distinction (in Social Pathology, 1951) between primary and secondary deviance; that is, between the initial behaviour (which may arise from a variety of causes), and the symbolic reorganization of self and social roles which may occur because of the societal response to any deviation from norms. The leading American proponent of labelling theory was Howard S. Becker, who argued in Outsiders (1963) that deviance is created by society, in the sense that ‘social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance and by applying those rules to particular persons and labelling them as outsiders’. From this point of view, deviance is not a quality of the act a person commits, but rather a consequence of the application of rules: ‘deviant behaviour is behaviour that people so label’. Others (for example,
in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 1972
) developed the proposition that labelling can induce amplification of deviance. That is, attempts at social control may stigmatize individuals by defining them in dehumanized ways (as thugs, acid-heads, or whatever), and have the unintended consequence of encouraging the deviance they seek to eliminate, by constraining individuals to employ a deviant identity as a means of defence, attack, or adjustment to the problems created by the societal reaction. In this way amplification may occur. An act of non-conformity or alleged deviance is defined as being worthy of attention and is responded to punitively; the deviant is therefore isolated from conventional society; begins to define himself or herself in deviant terms, and to associate with others in a similar position, leading to more deviance; which in turn exposes the group to further punitive sanctions by conformists.
Although labelling theory quickly generated an impressive body of empirical studies it was subjected to considerable criticism during the 1970s. The most common complaints were that it ignored the sources of deviant behaviour; could be applied to only a limited range of criminal activities; was too deterministic in its conception of the labelling process; and neglected issues of power and social structure. To those on the political right, the theory seemed tantamount to a claim that many criminals were in fact victims, more sinned against than sinning. It made societal reaction (especially the activities of the police, courts, and other agencies of social control) the crucial variable. The accusation was often made that this new sociology of deviance seemed more intent on excusing than explaining criminal activity. Labelling theory was particularly vulnerable to this charge since it could be caricatured as offering a crude ‘no deviance, leads to slam on label, leads to deviance’ model of crime. This perception was heightened by the fact that the theory could most obviously be applied to expressive deviance, and for the large part victimless crimes, such as homosexuality, drug addiction, alcoholism, gang membership, and mental illness. The labelling perspective thus became known in some quarters as ‘the sociology of nuts, sluts, and perverts’.
Critics on the political left argued that the theory did not go far enough in its attack on the status quo. By directing attention towards lower-level agencies of social control–the media and social welfare departments for example–it ignored the governing e´lites in whose interests these institutions actually operated. Labelling theorists studied rule-enforcers rather than rule-makers. Their sympathy for the underdog was not translated into a systematic critique of private property and other allegedly repressive and exploitative structures of capitalist societies. Ironically, some of this criticism later emerged from within the National Deviancy Conference itself, among so-called radical criminologists such as Ian Taylor, Paul Walton, and Jock Young (The New Criminology, 1973).
Much of this criticism was undoubtedly unfair and stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding about the aspirations of the labelling theorists. The definitive defence of the theory is
's ‘Misunderstanding Labelling Perspectives’ (in , Deviant Interpretations, 1979)
. Plummer points out that the labelling perspective was concerned only with the social processes governing the nature, emergence, application, and consequences of labels. For this reason it could easily be accommodated to studies of deviancy conducted from a variety of otherwise incompatible theoretical standpoints. Many labelling theorists worked within the interactionist tradition, which posits that society is constructed via an exchange of gestures, involving symbolic communication and the negotiation of meaning between reflexive actors. This general perspective is obviously consistent with the particular propositions of labelling theory. But some labelling studies were predominantly functionalist, phenomenological, dramaturgist, or ethnomethodological in character. It often transpired, therefore, that critiques of labelling theory were actually critiques of its supposedly irreducible interactionist, phenomenological (or whatever) premisses and propositions. In fact labelling arguments can be accommodated to a range of social theories.
Seen in this light many of the standard criticisms of the theory simply miss the point. Labelling theory does not identify the causes of primary deviance because it does not set out to do so: it offers an explanation of labels rather than of behaviour. Most exponents drew on other sorts of explanations to account for the primary deviance towards which societal reaction was directed. Not even Becker makes the claim that labels themselves are the root cause of deviant behaviour. Nor is there anything inevitable about labelling or amplification. The transition from primary to secondary deviance is a complicated process full of contingencies. Labels may be provisional, negotiable, or rejected. Similarly, it is unfair to complain that labelling theorists ignored large areas of deviant behaviour, since they clearly did not purport to offer a universal explanation for every known form of crime. Rather, proponents made the considerably more modest claim that labelling may alter the direction, intensity, and incidence of the deviant experience. At worst, therefore, labelling theorists can only be accused of setting themselves rather modest aetiological objectives.
Despite many new developments in the study of deviance since the 1970s, labelling theory has remained a prominent influence, especially in North America. Indeed, and ironically (given its radical roots), it may have become something of a new orthodoxy. See also CRIMINOLOGY, CRITICAL; DEVIANCE AMPLIFICATION; FOLK DEVIL; MORAL PANIC; SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM.

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labour

In most sociological contexts this term is synonymous with wage-labour. However, in Marxism attention is often drawn to the conflicting interests of ‘Labour’ and ‘Capital’. The former is here a reference to the proletariat, and alludes to the theory of the exploitation of labour-power by the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie. Occasionally, as for example in anthropological discussion of ‘labouring’ or sociological analyses of domestic labour, the term may be equated with work rather than the more restricted category of paid employment.

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labour, decomposition of

See DECOMPOSITION OF LABOUR.

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labour, division of

See DIVISION OF LABOUR.

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labour aristocracy

A concept developed by Friedrich Engels to designate an upper section of the working class which was in receipt of higher wages and hence liable to be bribed into a surrender of its class interests. The money for this payment was, in Lenin's interpretation of the argument, held to come from colonial profits.
The major discussion of the concept has been in relation to the development of class relations in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (the so-called ‘labour aristocracy debate’ of the 1970s). Among other things, the principal protagonists (who included sociologists of class and culture) disputed the definition of the concept itself; the role of this stratum in promoting working-class militancy and quiescence; standards of living in the immediate aftermath of the Industrial Revolution; conditions of employment, authority in the workplace, and the social construction of skill; the cultural and political elements in class consciousness; the emergence of the ‘domestic ideal’ and the changing role of women in industrial society; and the links between the development of the British working class and nineteenth-century British imperialism. The debate petered out—largely unresolved—but yielded a prodigious amount of excellent historical research at both the national and local levels of analysis. A convenient summary of the issues will be found in Robert Gray's The Aristocracy of Labour in Nineteenth-Century Britain, c. 1850–1914 (1981).

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labour-force participation rate

This refers to the number of people in work and unemployment and those seeking work, as a proportion of a specified baseline population. Rates may vary according to how the base group is defined, for example male, female, the total adult population over 16 years, or the working-age population (16–65 years). Difficulties arise over female participation rates, especially in Third World countries, because of ambiguity in the definition of women's work. The same applies to child labour.

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labour-market

In a labour-market, human effort (or labour power) is made into a commodity, which is bought and sold under terms which in law are deemed to constitute a contract. The purchase and sale of formally free labour developed extensively with capitalism, but alternative paths to industrialization (such as real socialism) have entailed wage employment, though not strictly a free market for labour. Economists argue that, as with other factors of production, the market for labour can be understood as a special case of the general theory of prices, with the price (wages or salaries) being determined by supply and demand. However, research on actual labour-markets has shown that, in practice, many of the basic conditions assumed by price theory are usually absent. Mobility of workers between jobs is often sluggish or non-existent; the anarchic structure of earnings differentials bears only the loosest relation to labour supply and demand; discrimination, labelling, racism, and sexism are rife. Economic explanations of labour-market processes have to be supplemented, and sometimes replaced, by sociological analysis, creating a promising field for interdisciplinary research.
Neo-classical economic theory views exchanges in the labour-market as voluntary, and engaged in because, for each party, the results of the exchange are better than their other options. The labour-market is a competitive market because there are many potential buyers for each seller and vice versa. The supply of labour from existing and potential workers and the demand for labour from employers interact so as to reach an equilibrium price for labour. If the price of labour rises above equilibrium level for any reason, for example due to a national minimum wage or strong trade-union bargaining, employers will reduce the number of jobs offered. If the price of labour falls, employers will increase the number of jobs offered, all other things being equal. Economic theory of the labour-market also posits that both monopolies and discrimination will disappear in the long run, and are thus unlikely to be enduring constraints to individuals. On the other hand, economic models of the labour-market see workers forming a queue for the available jobs, with employers choosing the best first: people with higher qualifications, more experience, and wider skills will be offered jobs before those with less to offer. It follows that the unemployed will always consist of those with few or no qualifications, fewest skills, and least employment experience; and that people with social, psychological, or other problems will be less readily hired. So the model allows for certain forms of rational discrimination.
Many economic models assume that people have perfect information with which to make rational decisions within given constraints, and adjust their offer and demand prices accordingly. Empirical research has persuaded some economists to recognize that information gathering and analysis are costly in time and money, so that market imperfections arise from incomplete or inadequate information, and satisficing models are accepted as more realistic than maximizing models of behaviour.
Basic to sociological studies of labour-markets is the recognition that, although labour effort is nominally bought and sold, it lacks many of the attributes of other commodities in the capitalist economy. These differences in turn go some way to explaining why the market for labour presents such a confusing picture to the price theorist. At least four factors should be considered here.
First, like any service which is bought, there is scope for ambiguity about what precisely constitutes a satisfactory amount of work (or effort) done in fulfilment of the contract. Ambiguity about what constitutes a fair day's work for a fair day's pay is endemic, especially if there are frequent changes in work tasks. Because this effort bargaining occurs in even the most routine work situations, then values, custom and practice, administrative rules, and the relative power of employer and employees, are all equally as important as the price mechanism in shaping labour-market outcomes.
Second, inequality of wages and conditions reflects the level of organization of the workforce, as well as market competition. Though in legal theory a contract of sale assumes equality of both parties to it, this is inconsistent with the power inequality usual between any worker negotiating individually, and a potential employer. Consequently, in a wide variety of situations and nations since the onset of industrialism, workers have sought to offset this by forming trade unions. Collective bargaining, when it occurs, undermines standard notions of a market by replacing wage-fixing through the price mechanism by wage-fixing through rules. It also brings law and politics into the regulation of labour matters. The acceptability of collective labour contracts and wage-fixing agreements tends to be a potentially destabilizing political issue everywhere in the industrialized world, as is the legality of the unions and associations which represent the collective worker, to say nothing of the sanctions and stratagems used by both sides during the course of industrial conflict. Most societies have therefore sought to surround the labour-market with a body of law and politico-administrative control.
Third, both unions and employers frequently seek to create so-called internal labour-markets: that is, networks and hierarchies of jobs to which access is restricted by entry rules and internal promotion. For example, by enforcing job-entry controls, unions can restrict access to craft training and relatively favourable wages and conditions. Employers likewise can segment their demand for labour by varying benefits and promotion, seeking to reward and retain valued workers, while offering others only non-standard or flexible employment. (Some scholars also claim that internal markets based partly on discrimination and wider prejudice help employers to divide and rule the workplace.) Family and neighbourhood networks frequently reinforce exclusiveness of job access outside the actual workplace, producing extended internal labour-markets.
Fourth, there remain many industries and situations where workers are relatively powerless and unorganized, so that pay and conditions can be expected to be less favourable than if workers use their collective strength. Union organization has typically been found to be difficult among workers in small-firm industries, in the retailing and personal services sector, in part-time and subcontracted labour, and among women, ethnic minorities, and young people. Isolation and powerlessness do much to explain the common research finding of widespread low pay and insecurity of work among such groups.
For some years, so-called dual labour-market theory claimed that labour-markets can be divided into a primary sector, consisting of relatively well-paid internal labour-market jobs; and a secondary sector, comprised of more insecure low-wage employment, which does more closely resemble the competitive model. Theory of this type has encouraged collaborations between those sociologists and economists who are prepared to question the preconceptions of both disciplines. But empirical research by both economists and sociologists suggests that the anomalies and segmentation of labour-markets cannot be accommodated easily into a simple dualism, and is leading to the development of more complex, multi-disciplinary approaches (such as labour-market segmentation theory).
One major form of dualism in the labour-market, however, is well documented if not wholly understood: the persistent divisions in pay, conditions, and types of work between men's and women's employment. For example, economists predicted that equal pay legislation would increase the relative price of female labour, and thus reduce the number of women's jobs offered by employers. In fact, total female employment rose at the same time as the rise in female earnings resulting from equal pay rules. These trends can perhaps be explained by seeing the labour-market as divided into a number of separate markets—for female labour, manual labour, young untrained school-leavers, older workers, professional workers, and so forth—with limited competition between labour-markets. The most developed versions of this theoretical refinement are found in labour-market segmentation theory.
In general terms, therefore, the sociologist's most important contribution to labour-market theory is to identify the cultural, institutional, and structural factors that help determine people's allocation to one or another market, the imperfections of market processes, the reward systems operating in different markets, and the nature of power relationships in the market.
's essay on ‘Employers and the Labour Market’ (in , Employment in Britain, 1988
) reviews the various theories of labour-markets, examines the evidence for flexible employment, and contains a good bibliography of British and American case-studies. For examples of empirical analyses see
, Employer Strategy and the Labour Market (1994
). See also DIVISION OF LABOUR; HUMAN-CAPITAL THEORY; OCCUPATIONAL SEGREGATION.

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labour-market flexibility

A term used to refer to all or some of a variety of features of particular jobs, or of the labour-market as a whole, including: reduced demarcations between categories of worker and flexible job descriptions; the fluidity of workers' movement between jobs, employers, or regions; flexible or non-standard work hours; flexibility of wages; and any other innovation in the organization of employment and patterns of work, such as home-based work, or telecommuting. In this context, wage flexibility more often means wages that rise or fluctuate in line with company profits and financial performance, than the adoption of incentive payment schemes. The concept of flexibility is often laden with positive value-judgements and counterpoised to the notion of labour-market ‘rigidities’, which are regarded as self-evidently noxious in periods of rapid technological change and economic instability. See also FLEXIBLE EMPLOYMENT; JAPANIZATION.

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labour-market segmentation

In essence, neo-classical economic theory sees a market for labour, with buyers and sellers in open competition with each other, which functions in broadly the same way as other markets. There are differences of course. It is recognized that labour is not a completely homogeneous commodity: workers differ in their tastes and preferences for leisure rather than work and for monetary rather than non-monetary rewards; they differ also in human capital, their investment in education and training, work skills, and experience. But it still makes sense to analyse labour supply and demand in the aggregate.
This model of the labour-market has been refined over the years to accommodate the fact that doctors and dress designers, for example, work in entirely different markets. The British economist Alfred Marshall first introduced the idea of non-competing groups in the labour-market in the 1880s. The most significant dividing-lines have been identified as occupational, geographical, and industrial. Occupational labour-markets arise from the division of labour, increasing differentiation and specialization, with workers unable to switch between occupations requiring significantly different skills and extensive investment in training and qualifications. Nurses and doctors, for example, constitute separate occupational labour-markets, even if they work side by side in the same organizations. By restricting entry to an occupation, for example by specifying the minimum qualifications and experience required, those already in it can control the supply of labour and help to push up their wages. Labour-markets are also defined spatially, given that neither employers nor workers can move to another location without incurring substantial costs. As a result wages can remain high in big cities, for example, even when there are substantial numbers of unemployed in other parts of the country. The term ‘local labour-market’ is often used in reference to the market for jobs within a particular locale—such as a travel-to-work area, town, or city. Industrial labour-markets arise where employers in certain industries require particular skills, or combinations of skill, and seek to retain workers long-term after they have been trained. For example, police officers, civil servants, and coal-miners may be mobile across regions of the country and even employers, while exercising the same range of skills in their work, and obtaining similar or industry-standard terms of employment.
The idea of non-competing groups has been developed much further in theories that are identified under the general label of labour-market segmentation theory. The two key formulations are dual (or split) labour-market theory and internal labour-market theory, both developed in the United States by
(Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis, 1971)
and others (
, Labor Market Segmentation, 1975
), and extended through empirical research. A framework obtained by integrating these two into a single model has since been developed in Europe and is shown in the figure below.
Dual labour-market theory revolves around the identification of a split between two analytically distinct sectors in the economy and national labour-market: a primary sector and secondary sector with quite different wage and employment characteristics and processes. The theory states that job mobility between the two labour-markets is very restricted in normal circumstances; in effect workers in the secondary sector are trapped there unless, say, they go to college and obtain higher qualifications. The secondary sector is marked by pervasive under-employment and unemployment; jobs are mostly low-skilled, require relatively little training, and can be learnt relatively quickly on the job. There are few barriers to job mobility within the secondary sector. Because the jobs are unattractive there is little incentive to stay, and there are high levels of labour turnover, with workers moving on to other jobs or employers. Wages are generally low, and terms and conditions the poorest offered. Theorists differ in their emphasis on ‘bad’ jobs in terms of pay and conditions, or on relatively unskilled work, and on whether the primary and secondary sectors also have distinctively different work cultures. The primary sector generally contains the higher-grade, higher-status, and better-paid jobs, with employers who offer the best terms and conditions. In some formulations the emphasis is on occupational labour-markets with controlled entry to them; in others the emphasis is on industrial labour-markets and the characteristics of employers. The primary sector is sometimes sub-divided into an upper and lower tier. These economic concepts of primary and secondary sectors draw on and have close similarities with sociological theory on social stratification and social mobility between classes. Similarly, the theory of internal labour-markets has close parallels in sociological debates on the ‘Balkanization’ of labour-markets, industrial feudalism, and the question of property rights in a job. Labour-market segmentation theory has been more accessible to sociologists than most classical economic theory (see LAISSEZ-FAIRE ECONOMICS), and has facilitated multi-disciplinary research on labour-market functioning.

FIGURE 4: Organizational and firm-specific labour-markets

The internal labour-market is an administrative unit, such as an office or factory, where the levels of employment and wages are determined by a set of internal administrative rules and procedures. It is quite separate from the external labour-market of conventional economic theory, where pricing, allocating, and training decisions are controlled by economic variables. The two markets are connected, with movement between them at specified ports of entry and exit. Otherwise jobs in the internal market are filled by the promotion or transfer of workers who have already gained entry. Jobs in the internal market are shielded from the direct influences of competitive forces in the external market. Another formulation of this perspective is insider—outsider analysis, which identifies the wage advantage attached to certain labour-market positions, types of employer, or industry.
In a study for the European Commission, R. Loveridge and A. Mok (Theories of Labour Market Segmentation, 1979) integrated these theoretical strands into the four-fold classification of firm-specific labour-markets shown in the figure above. Jobs in the primary internal segment are those typical of the hard core of stable employees in a firm, need long on-the-job training in firm-specific skills, have security and good promotion prospects, a high span of discretion, and high material rewards. Professional and skilled craft work requiring occupation-specific rather than firm-specific skills, and often supplied on a contract or self-employed basis, would be typical of the primary external segment. The secondary external segment provides jobs that are low skilled, offer little autonomy and responsibility, low and unstable earnings, and poor working conditions, including casual and seasonal work. The secondary internal sector offers jobs that are generally low grade but with some on-the-job training, security, and promotion prospects. The model makes it clear that movement between the primary internal and secondary external segments would be virtually ruled out, with varying amounts and directions of movement between adjacent segments, determined by changes in human capital and employers' responses to the changing economic environment.
Empirical research on industrial societies generally shows women, ethnic minorities, and migrant workers to be concentrated in the secondary labour-market. However, social scientists differ as to whether empirical analysis should focus on workers, jobs, occupations, companies, workplaces, industries, or some combination of these.
The concepts of primary and secondary labour-markets (or sectors) have now passed into conventional thought, with the primary labour-market commonly understood to mean people with secure jobs and good conditions of work in public-sector employment, the large corporations, and highly unionized industries; while the secondary labour-market is understood to cover small employers, non-unionized sectors of the economy, and highly fragmented and competitive industries such as retailing, where jobs are less secure and conditions of work and pay generally poorest. See also INDUSTRIAL RESERVE ARMY.

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labour movement

A term applied descriptively to include all organizations representing workers who sell their effort in the labour-market. A labour movement may be divided heuristically into its industrial and political wings: the former consists of trade unions as well as other voluntary associations seeking narrowly defined economic objectives, such as higher wages, greater industrial democracy, or industrial education; the latter comprises one or more political parties attempting to influence or control state power on behalf of labour. Historically, labour movements have been very fragmented; there is a long-running theoretical debate about this because of the profound influence of Marxism and socialism within labour organizations. These have tended to view labour movements holistically, as embodying the organized working class or proletariat, thus implying an underlying momentum towards unity between the various elements. Even so, disagreement exists about revolutionary strategy, between syndicalist expectations of the working class seizing political control through organized industrial action alone, and the Leninist view that trade-union action must give way to political struggle. Students of the labour movement of a more conservative cast of mind have tended to reflect the outlook of Selig Perlman, a pioneer of labour-relations studies in the United States. Strongly influenced by the example of the American working class, Perlman claimed that labour movements embody what he called a communism of opportunity, expressing limited occupational and communal loyalties, rather than a communism of the intellectuals which sought to unify the whole working class. Certainly, in recent years, much greater attention has been given to the historical, cultural, and institutional diversity of the labour movements of different industrial societies (see
, The Future of Labour Movements, 1992
).

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labour-power

See LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE.

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labour process

Analysis of the labour process may be traced back to Karl Marx's interest in the means by which human labour is harnessed in the creation of products for human need. This process is seen to be socially organized and to vary historically between different modes of production. Under capitalism, what appears as a relationship between things or objects in production, is in fact a social relationship between owners of the means of production and their workforce. The key to understanding this relationship lies at the point of production in the management of the labour process.
In Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974), Harry Braverman attempts to update this thesis, by an analysis of the labour process in the era of monopoly capital. His focus is on the so-called degradation of work associated with ever-tightening management control. It is postulated that a subordination and de-skilling of labour will emerge from the combined effects of modern management and new styles of mechanization and automation. The ideal management objective is the removal of all worker control or autonomy, to be achieved through the specialized division and subdivision of tasks. Skilled craft-work is thus reduced to the status of unskilled labour. Taylorism, or scientific management, which developed at the beginning of the twentieth century, is seen as the conscious and systematic expression of this process of degradation. It is argued that one overall effect of the degradation of work will be to produce an affinity between intermediate-level workers (such as routine clerical staff) and the mass of the working class.
Factors which Braverman sees as bound up with the changes he postulates are state regulation of the economy, increasing emphasis on planning, the expansion of clerical work and office computerization, and the emergence of dual labour-markets. Precisely how these developments are linked to his central argument is not made clear—though this is also true of some related criticisms.
Braverman's conceptualization of the process of change has been queried in that it represents a unilinear trend, rather than a complex of factors, which may not necessarily cohere. There could, for example, be different patterns in different industries. Similarly, he is attacked for accepting one model of management as universal, when in fact there are many and varied strategies. For example, bureaucratized management could offer the possibility of incorporating the workforce into the management process, in order to ensure their co-operation. Some contributors to the debate have attempted to extend Braverman's original thesis along these lines. (A good example of the post-Braverman treatment of these issues is R. Edwards's Contested Terrain, 1979.) Other questions revolve around the nature and definition of skill, which is felt to allow more scrutiny than Braverman allows. The connection between the demise of craft skills and the process of rationalization is argued to be insufficiently explored, whilst the de-skilling hypothesis itself is apparently challenged by a dependence on newly emergent skills. On the specific issue of class relations, Braverman's account seems to under-emphasize the possibility of worker opposition to tightening management control, especially where there are strong trade unions; whilst, conversely, his equating of worker skill with weaker managerial control has been challenged. His analysis is particularly limited since it addresses only the objective nature of class relations, not the subjective experience of the working class. Again, sympathetic commentators have tried to rectify these shortcomings, in a sustained programme of empirical research. (See, for example,
, The Politics of Production, 1975
) These criticisms are, however, testament to how influential Braverman's work has been in setting an agenda for debate, much of which has continued to be framed in the original terms of his argument. See also PROLETARIANIZATION.

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labour relations

Labour relations, or industrial relations as it is known in Britain, is the interdisciplinary and somewhat diffuse study of the institutions and rule-fixing processes of the labour-market. Its core subject-matter has always been collective bargaining between trade unions or analogous organizations of employees, on one hand, and employers and their associations on the other. A widening of scope has been evident for some years however, as a result of the need to put dealings between organized labour and employers into their legal, historical, economic, political, and sociological contexts. The term ‘employee relations’, found increasingly in management writing, was once a synonym for industrial relations; it now usually denotes parts of the field in which management–trade union relationships either play a smaller role or are argued to be inappropriate.
Differences in definition derive partly from the fact that, despite a long history of academic investigation, no single disciplinary core has yet emerged in descriptions and explanations of industrial relations behaviour. Today, therefore, work in the subject includes the following: historical and contemporary aspects of the law of labour contract; the difference in theory and practice between wage-fixing by negotiated rules as opposed to competitive or free-market processes; reasons for state involvement in labour relations together with historical and contemporary aspects of the politics of employer–employee bargaining; the normative basis of wage differentials and wage negotiation; historical and contemporary causes of industrial conflict and its relation to class conflict; the relationships between the organized and unorganized sectors of the labour-force; labour-market segmentation and dualism; the relationship of employment and wage policy to social policy; training, skill, and unemployment.
Sociologists, historians, economists, psychologists, lawyers, and others continue to make contributions, often with scant regard for each other. In recent years the notion of industrial relations systems (
, Industrial Relations Systems, 1958
, and
, The Transformation of American Industrial Relations, 1986
) has been regarded as bringing a degree of unity into studies of the field. Critics of the notion argue that it is incomplete, unhelpfully static in conception, and too broad in scope to be more than a classification device with little or no explanatory power. See also LABOUR PROCESS; PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT; TRUST AND DISTRUST.

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labour theory of value

The idea that labour is the ultimate source of all wealth—a commonplace among the early political economists. Adam Smith, for example, argued that, in a market society in which workers owned their own means of production, the prices of goods would be proportional to the amount of labour required to produce them. However, where a class of non-labouring capitalists hired a propertyless class of workers to do the labouring, then competition in the market would establish an average rate of profit, such that capitalists would price goods at a level at which they could pay their workers a fair wage, and retain a profit equal to the average yield on capital. In this way, Smith (and later David Ricardo) used the idea as part of a justification for the existence of, and for the privileges associated with, the ownership of private property.
Later neo-classical economists somewhat embarrassedly distanced themselves from the theory, on the grounds of its metaphysical and immeasurable quality, preferring instead to argue that, far from prices being determined by the role of labour in the production process, they simply reflected people's subjective preferences (or feelings of so-called utility). By contrast, Karl Marx reformulated the theory such that it became the basis for a whole new way of looking at society, and for criticizing the system of private-property ownership itself.
Almost thirty years elapsed between Marx's first use of the term and the publication of his reformulation in volume i of Capital (1867). It appears in chapter 6 and represents the critical moment in the entire text. The earlier chapters lead up to, and the later ones follow from, this proposition. As Marx said (chauvinistically) of the wife of one Dr Kugelman, if she could understand this chapter, even she would be able to understand the remainder of Capital.
Some sense of the pleasure that Marx derived from the achievement of this reformulation may be gathered from the way in which, following the method of critique, it is suddenly produced, like a conjurer's rabbit, as a solution to a problem whose appearance of impenetrability he takes great pains to create. This problem is as follows: why do those with money invest in production, when all commodity exchange, as symbolized by the existence of money itself, is the exchange of equivalents? Marx's answer is that, within what had hitherto been ‘the hidden abode of production’, the investor may find and purchase a unique commodity which, when used, creates more value than it costs. This commodity is labour-power. The reason that it possesses this unique attribute is that, with the advent of the capitalist mode of production, labourers finally lost all rights in their means of production, and therefore both had to and were able to sell their labour-power to those with property in the means of production, in order to live.
Thus, when the market rule that all commodities exchange for their equivalents is applied in the realm of production, the result is that labourers are not paid on the basis of what they produce but on the basis of what it takes in the way of food and other necessities of life to enable them to continue presenting themselves and their offspring for work. This, then, is what creates the possibility of ‘surplus value’—since the value of the labourer's subsistence (‘necessary labour’) should be produced, under normal conditions, in less than the total number of hours worked. The result is that capital has at its disposal a quantum of ‘surplus labour’ whose product it is free to realize for its own sole benefit.
Like most other aspects of Marxist doctrine this particular theory has proved to be highly controversial. Arguably, it has been largely discredited, since not only mainstream economists but also many Marxists themselves have demonstrated its technical deficiencies. One obvious problem, for example, is that the costs of subsistence vary historically and culturally, so that there is no absolute definition of ‘necessary labour time’. The quantitative connection between labour and prices in Marxist economics has proved extremely difficult to specify. Conversely, some Marxists have argued that the central position accorded the theory within the Marxian system is unwarranted and indeed unnecessary, since a useful Marxist analysis of the exploitative nature of property relations is possible without recourse to the theory itself. Nevertheless, the labour theory of value (though not necessarily its Marxian variant) remains the principal alternative to orthodox utility theories of value, and the debate continues (although largely, these days, within highly specialized sub-fields of economics).

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labour union

See TRADE UNION.

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Lacan, Jacques

(1901–83)
Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and doctor of medicine who reinterpreted the work of Sigmund Freud in the light of the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. He trained at the Paris Medical Faculty, in 1963 became Chargé de Conférences at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and founded the École Freudienne de Paris. He is largely associated with the structuralist and post-structuralist movements, and during the 1960s his seminars were a major focus of intellectual life in Paris. His work, which is often obscure and replete with puns and word-plays, has had a considerable influence on feminist theory, because of his argument that Freud's hypotheses must be interpreted symbolically rather than literally; and, in particular, that Freud's controversial idea of ‘penis envy’ should be treated metaphorically.
The unconscious, Lacan argues, is like language because it operates by using metaphor and metonymy—that is, it works symbolically. His refinement of Freudian theory has been seen by many as crucial because it avoided Freud's controversial and arguably contradictory idea that there are biological ‘drives’ that reduce all individuals to identical development patterns. Language, according to Lacan, constructs meaning throughout culture, but language is also mutable, so that change is therefore not only possible but also inevitable, both at a social and a personal level. Lacan's theory thus enables the development of identity and subjectivity to be seen much more as socially constructed than biologically determined.
Crucial to Lacan's overall theoretical system is his idea of the ‘mirror phase’ of infant development. He argues that, at around the age of six months, a baby, who has previously thought of itself not as a separate being from its mother, grows aware of being separate. Lacan uses the metaphor of a mirror to illustrate this process, for the baby, looking at the mother as if looking into a mirror, finds an image reflected back which it regards as a coherent and unified whole. In fact, however, the image it sees is the mother/other and not itself. It is this misinterpretation that splits the human psyche into two, because we all identify with something or someone who seems like what or who we want to be, and yet which is in fact separate and alien. This leads to a false belief in the wholeness and stability of the ego, which Lacan sees as a continually restructured process.
As a baby develops, it falls in love with its mother and begins to see the father as threatening to its desire to have the mother to itself. Lacan argues that it is this longing for the mother, and the denial of it by the father who symbolizes culture and the outside world to the baby, which acts to create the unconscious. This process splits the child, the subject, into consciousness and the unconscious, and the whole process is an essential part of a young child's acquisition of language. Awareness of gender difference and the acquisition of gendered subjectivity are also integral to this process. Indeed, the idea of ‘difference’ is itself fundamental to Lacan's theory.
Lacan is most often referred to by sociologists for his complex decentred conception of the subject and of gender differences. His most accessible works are probably Écrits (1966) and Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1979). Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, offers a clear and useful account of his major ideas.

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Laing, R. D.

(1927–89)
The best-known British anti-psychiatrist. Laing's overriding emphasis was on the intelligibility of madness. His books explored individual subjectivity (The Divided Self, 1960), interpersonal and family dynamics (The Self and Others, 1961; Sanity, Madness and the Family, 1963) and the wider social context, including the values involved in judgements of sanity and madness (The Politics of Experience, 1966). Though he subsequently renounced his more radical views, his ideas still attract attention, and remain controversial. His autobiography, Wisdom, Madness and Folly (1985) recounts his first thirty years.

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laissez-faire economics

An approach to economics that asserts the importance of the free, competitive market of individual suppliers and individual purchasers to the efficient production, distribution, and allocation of goods and services as well as to the maximization of individual choice, and emphasizes the need to keep state regulation to a minimum. Current laissez-faire economic theorizing has its origins in the work of the classical economists, such as David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Adam Smith at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. In The Wealth of Nations (1776) Smith, for example, argued that though individuals in the market would pursue their own self-interest, the market's ‘invisible hand’ would lead to the realization of the common good.
In the twentieth century, the slump of the 1930s was followed by a period in which Keynesian economics, with its emphasis on state intervention and the value of public spending as a means to reduce unemployment, were dominant. An increasingly mixed economy, combining public and private enterprise, was developed. However, since the end of the 1970s, following the state's fiscal crisis and the increasing influence of New Right philosophies, laissez-faire economics is now once more in the political foreground, with writers such as Friedrich A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom, 1944) and Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom, 1961) providing inspiration. The result has been an increasing privatization of state activities and a return to an all-pervasive market economy. However, despite its impact on government policies, the criticisms of laissez-faire theorizing are powerful, not least because actual markets bear so little relation to the theorists' idealized models of rational, atomized individuals making choices in the market. In the real world, markets are beset by so-called imperfections: there are often monopolies of supply, imperfect information, few purchasers, external constraints, and so forth. Moreover, individuals' preferences are shaped and limited by culture and social norms, so reducing choice. The idea of efficient, let alone equitable, allocation via the market is something of a chimera: it functions far more effectively as myth than reality. See also LIBERALISM; MONT PELERIN SOCIETY, THE.

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language

Any verbal or non-verbal communication engaged in by humans, animals, or even machines. The general field of study which deals with the socio-cultural functions and construction of language is known as sociolinguistics. Sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and psychologists all contribute to this area.
The ability of the human race to structure sentences out of essentially arbitrary words which are themselves constructed from individually meaningless sounds (phonemes) is sometimes thought to be the feature that most distinguishes it from other species. All societies have languages that allow humans to express ideas of equal complexity: there is no such thing as a ‘primitive’ language, although societies may need to borrow or invent new words, in order to express new concepts.
All human beings possess the ability to learn languages, although brain damage or severe retardation may affect certain areas of language competence. According to Noam Chomsky, children are born with an innate, biological programme that prepares them for how languages are structured. His first book, Syntactic Structures (1957), analysed three models of language, arguing that only the third and most complex, involving what he called transformational grammar, is capable of accounting for the infinite range of sentences contained in natural languages. In the same year, the psychologist B. F. Skinner published a study of the acquisition of language (Verbal Behaviour), which Chomsky reviewed. Skinner offered a behaviourist account of language acquisition that was incompatible with Chomsky's ideas about language. Against the behaviourist view that language was acquired through learning in early childhood, Chomsky convincingly argued, in a series of subsequent publications, that a child must be born with an innate linguistic competence—an innate knowledge of the structures of language. It was not possible, he contended, for young children to infer from the language to which they are exposed in the first years of life—its surface structure—the underlying rules or deep structure of language that is necessary to be able to use the language correctly (see especially
Rules and Representations, 1980
).
Others maintain that it is just the child's natural intelligence that enables it to learn the often very complicated rules and exceptions that structure all language systems. Small children, such as those of international parentage, often have the ability to learn more than one language system. There is fierce debate among linguists as to whether this bilingualism affects the child intellectually—although the basis for some arguments would appear to be more political than scholarly.
The political considerations of bilingualism is just one aspect of the relationship between language and culture. Languages in many ways reflect the culture of a society, hence the importance that anthropologists place on learning the local language, when studying other societies. For example, languages show how societies classify and evaluate their environment, including kinship relations, the animal kingdom, colours, food, and the natural world. Each society has its own distinctive system of classification which serves in part to maintain boundaries between insiders and outsiders. Mutual comprehension of the cultural as well as the linguistic significance of language used is therefore essential in order to avoid misunderstanding; the translation of culturally constructed concepts and ideas into terms comprehensible to members of another society is a major element of the work not only of anthropologists, but also cross-cultural specialists.
The power of language can be seen in political rhetoric or slogan-making, where single words (such as ‘democracy’) or phrases (such as ‘Black is Beautiful’) can mobilize large and diverse groups to political action. Language also demonstrates important divisions within societies that reflect broader political and economic factors. For example, Basil Bernstein has shown that, although middle-class and working-class speech codes are linguistically of equal validity, the working-class (or restricted) code is liable to be discriminated against in the educational arena. A similar phenomenon may be perceived in the relationship between language and regional, ethnic, or religious background. On the other hand, ethnic groups may utilize their languages as a symbolic means of fostering or developing their own self-identity, or as a means of defence against encroachment by outsiders (as, for example, in the case of Cockney rhyming slang or the rapping style of West Indian youth in Britain). See also CONVERSATION ANALYSIS; ELABORATED AND RESTRICTED SPEECH CODES; ETHNOMETHODOLOGY; SAPIR–WHORF HYPOTHESIS; SEMIOLOGY; STRUCTURALISM; WITTGENSTEIN, LUDWIG.

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langue and parole

See POST-STRUCTURALISM; SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE.

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Lasch, Christopher

(1932–94)
An American social historian, whose early work was concerned with the history of the American Left, where his political sympathies lay. He subsequently turned to psychoanalysis and formulated a trenchant critique of modern American society based on the theory of narcissism (see
Haven in a Heartless World, 1977, The Culture of Narcissism, 1980, and The Minimal Self, 1984
).
In his later years Lasch launched a defence of American populism and communitarianism. For example, in the posthumously published The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995) he attacks America's governing and wealthy élites, who have insulated themselves from the wider society, and feel no responsibility for the welfare of either the poor or the middle classes. The members of this ‘new aristocracy of brains’ or ‘knowledge class’ inhabit an ‘artificial world’ of restaurants, health clubs, and aeroplanes. They are ‘at home only in transit, en route to a high-level conference, to a grand opening of a new franchise, to an international film festival, or to an undiscovered resort’. They favour a fashionable social-issue liberalism' ‘obsessed with the rights of women and minorities, with gay rights and unlimited abortion rights, with the allegedly epidemic spread of child abuse and sexual harassment, with the need for regulations against offensive speech, and with curricular reforms designed to end the cultural hegemony of “dead white European males”’. As a result, according to Lasch, cities decay, minorities are marginalized, politics are trivialized, crime increases, and society moves towards anarchy. Lasch traces this breakdown (in a somewhat uneasy admixture of ideas) to both the ideology of economic liberalism (which, in his view, justifies unfettered self-interest and the abandonment of civic virtue) and the left-wing culture of educational institutions (schools and especially universities) which have given up teaching facts in favour of fashionable theories expressed in (as he sees it) politically correct and incomprehensible jargon. Relatedly (and no less controversially), Lasch also penned one of the most provocative critiques of modern feminism, which he saw as contributing to various damaging aspects of late capitalism (Women and the Common Life, 1996).
Critics have argued that Lasch himself sometimes pays scant regard to facts and tends to use evidence loosely; for example, liberals have long recognized that the market needs regulation, and that the poor need some protection by the state. Lasch is also unclear about precisely who are the members of the offending élite—although his depiction of modern America carries strong echoes of Milovan Djilas's critique of communism (The New Class, 1957—see REAL SOCIALISM) and Michael Young's satire on meritocracy (The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1958). Like many modern communitarians, Lasch was also vague about concrete suggestions for improvement, although as a populist he identified himself with the lower middle class of ‘small proprietors, artisans, tradesmen and farmers’, whose culture he saw as valuing the community (rather than personal ambition) as the highest good, and whom he admired for its ‘moral realism, its understanding that everything has its price, its respect for limits, its scepticism about progress’ (see, for example,
The True and Only Heaven, 1991
).

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latent function

See FUNCTION.

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latifundia

Large land-holdings in Latin America which originated as imperial grants to settlers from the Spanish crown. With the incorporation of that continent into the world economy they slowly evolved from a form of feudalism into capitalist estates producing meat, hides, and crops for export. The distribution of latifundia lands through land reform is often seen as a means of promoting economic and social development.

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law, sociology of

Law—rules of action or statutes established by authorities such as states—was a central object of theoretical and substantive concern to each of the founding figures of sociology.
Although Karl Marx did not write a systematic treatise on law, he nevertheless had much to say about it (see
, Marx and Engels on Law. 1979
), including two points which were particularly influential in subsequent studies. The first was that, because the legal system is part of the bourgeois state, it was an instrument of class oppression. The second was that, because ‘the ruling ideas of a period are the ideas of the ruling class’, even the most basic of legal concepts (most famously ‘rights’) are part of the system of bourgeois domination.
Émile Durkheim likewise did not write a treatise that was specifically devoted to law, although he came closer than Marx in that much of the argument of his The Division of Labour in Society (1893) was devoted to explaining why the legal systems of so-called mechanically solidaristic societies are ‘retributive’, whilst those of organically solidaristic societies should be ‘restitutive’. In addition, his Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (1950) contains a sustained and significant account of the development of contract and property law during the nineteenth century.
Finally, and alone amongst the founding figures, Max Weber did actually write a full-blown treatise on the law. It takes up most of the second volume of his Economy and Society (1922) and is a remarkable tour de force, covering as it does the theory, history, and social role of the law across a wide variety of different societies. Like Durkheim, but on an entirely different basis, Weber took a much more positive view of the law than Marx, in that he regarded it as an integrative force in society. However, his position was not without a certain ambivalence, since he regarded the law as both an important contributor to the general, historical rationalization of Western societies (on which point see also his
General Economic History, 1923
), and a critical component in the system of legal-rational domination specific to the most advanced capitalist societies.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that Talcott Parsons periodically returned to the law in the course of his general theorizing, law lost its position as a major focus of macro-sociological work after the death of the discipline's modern founders. Perhaps for this reason, and certainly because of the rise of empiricism and the existence of a high level of official interest in the results of research related to the operation of the legal system, theoretical issues virtually disappeared from the interests of sociologists of law until the 1970s. In their absence there appeared numberless studies of the police, lawyers, judges, and the court and other regulatory systems, plus many purporting to report on the social impact of various laws.
Mercifully, this prolonged bout of usually highly abstracted empiricism appears to be coming to an end. Researchers with theoretical as well as substantive interests in sociological questions about the law have returned to the founders and sought to develop their work so that it can be applied to contemporary societies. Leading examples of such work include
, The Ownership of the Image: Elements for a Marxist Theory of Law (1979)
;
, The Radical Durkheim (1989)
; and, for the continuation of the Weberian legacy,
, Law in Modern Society (1976)
. There have also been several recent moves to reintegrate theory and empirical work (for an ambitious attempt to do this retrospectively in a textbook format see
, The Sociology of Law, 1984
). Why this should be happening is a question for the sociology of knowledge, but one obvious reason is the renewed interest in theoretical issues that has marked jurisprudence proper over the same period. Especially in the United States, the established approaches, represented by legal positivism and legal realism, have been challenged by the neo-liberal Law and Economics School (see
, Law and Economy, 1982
), as well as by the much more diffuse Critical Legal Studies Movement. These are challenges that the sociology of law too will have to respond to if it wishes to retain its current vibrancy.

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Lazarsfeld, Paul F.

(1901–76)
An Austrian-born sociologist who founded the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University. He was a leading authority on American popular culture, voting behaviour, and the influence of the mass media upon society. Among his best-known works are The People's Choice (1944) and Personal Influence (1955). Lazarsfeld was the principal proponent of survey analysis in post-war American sociology. His technique of hypothesis-testing via cross-tabulation set standards for quantitative data analysis that were transcended only with the advent of more advanced multivariate modelling techniques (such as those of loglinear analysis). Among contemporary critics, C. Wright Mills argued that Lazarsfeld's work exemplified abstracted empiricism, though this charge is hardly justified given Lazarsfeld's explicit interest in theories of the middle range. More recently, his work has come to be cited as illustrative of sociological positivism.

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Leach, Edmund R.

(1910–89)
An iconoclastic British social anthropologist, influential in introducing continental structuralist thought to the Anglo-Saxon world, as an antidote to the prevailing structural-functionalist orthodoxy. His major research was in the areas of political rhetoric, linguistic categories, kinship, myth and ritual, in works such as Political Systems of Highland Burma (1954), Rethinking Anthropology (1962), Genesis as Myth and Other Essays (1969), Levi-Strauss (1970), Culture and Communication (1976), and Social Anthropology (1982).

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learning difficulties

See MENTAL SUBNORMALITY.

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learning theory

The formulation of laws or principles of learning, learning theory is usually identified with behaviourist ‘stimulus-response’ models of learning, centred on the process of conditioning. However, psychologists now view learning as a process involving cognition and information handling, and as a rule do not attempt to develop highly generalized theories of learning. See also AGGRESSION.

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least-squares regression

See REGRESSION.

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legitimacy, legitimation

Legitimation refers to the process by which power is not only institutionalized but more importantly is given moral grounding. Legitimacy (or authority) is what is accorded to such a stable distribution of power when it is considered valid.
Max Weber, whose work is central to understanding the complexity of the relationship between power and legitimacy, distinguished ‘factual power’ and the ‘authoritarian power of command’ as two ideal types. The former refers to the subordination exacted on the basis of interests, where control over goods and services in the market involves the actor submitting freely to that power. As for the latter, in due course naked factual power needs to justify itself, and through the process of legitimation evokes the sense of duty to obey, regardless of personal motives and interests.
Legitimacy may be claimed by those with power on the basis of either traditional, charismatic, or rational-legal grounds. Likewise, legitimacy—and therefore authority—may be accorded to a distribution of power on the basis of tradition, on affectual or emotional grounds usually associated with revelation (charisma), on the basis of value-rational faith or belief in an absolute, or finally on grounds of belief in the legality of the order. The content of the justification for continued domination—its legitimation—constitutes the basis for the differences in such empirical structures of domination as bureaucracies.
Weber distinguishes the legitimacy of an order from its ‘validity’. An order becomes more valid as the probability increases that action will be guided by the belief in the existence of a legitimate order. An order is more or less valid, rather than more or less legitimate.
In Weber's writings, it is possible to identify factual power as being concomitant with the market and therefore with class, legitimate power with a status order and therefore with status groups. All orders are a mixture of the two, although it is clear that commercial classes, property classes, and social classes are associated with a diachronic movement towards the eventual legitimation of class power buttressed by the status order. The emergence of action guided by custom, habit, convention, legal enactment, and finally religious encoding indicates the stages in the legitimating process of the power of the rulers, and leads eventually to the stable distribution of power. However, when ‘the myth of positive privilege’ is no longer accepted unquestionably by the masses and the ‘class situation’ becomes visible as the determinant of an individual's fate, then legitimacy rooted in the status order and its accompanying ideological legitimation can be said to have broken down, and with it that status order itself. Weber does not provide specific accounts of what the factors are which precipitate the legitimation crisis, although the section on the conditions for the formation of communal class action in his famous essay on ‘Class, Status and Party’ provides some insight into such a scenario.
It is possible to see the ideology of citizenship as a modern example of a legitimating principle, where the incorporation through the extension of formal civil, political, and social rights provides a status order for the market-generated inequalities of late capitalism. However, the pressure to provide substantial content to formal rights (actual equality before the law, actual right to property, equal access to the freedom of speech, and the means to participate through social welfare provision within such a society) may all undermine the legitimating role of citizenship.

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legitimation crisis

See CRITICAL THEORY.

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leisure, sociological studies of

Leisure generally involves withdrawal from routine activities such as work, and involvement instead in a pleasurable activity, highly valued by the individual. It may or may not be productive but it does not involve the social responsibilities attached to one's other social roles. Playing of games is an obvious example—although so is the hard physical labour associated with rebuilding old cars or steam engines for pleasure.
The sociology of leisure has two main traditions. The first—which has been called the formal approach—consists of empirical studies into relatively discrete problems of which three are prominent: how leisure patterns shift across the life-cycle, as in R. and
, Leisure and the Family Life Cycle (1975)
; how work and leisure inter-relate, as in Stanley Parker's Leisure and Work, 1983, in which he outlines the interconnections of ‘extension’ (work and leisure are similar), ‘opposition’ (they are polarized and demarcated), and ‘neutrality’ (they are distinct but not polarized); and, finally, research into specific types of leisure, such as cinema attendance, football, or dancing.
By contrast, there is a more historical and theoretical approach, which asks questions about the changing nature of leisure and its varying role in social change. Two of the most prominent of such arguments are functionalist and neo-Marxist in tenor. The much criticized functionalist position, inherent in the ‘logic of industrialism’ arguments of Clark Kerr et al. (Industrialism and Industrial Man, 1960), suggested throughout the 1960s an inevitable movement towards a ‘leisure society’. By contrast, neo-Marxists saw an inevitable commercialization of leisure, turning leisure into a market product. The work of the Frankfurt School of critical theory also pessimistically analysed the emergence of the ‘culture industry’ of commercial mass entertainment (popular cinema, sport, television, comics, and so forth) which would exploit individuals and homogenize culture. However, not all neo-Marxists were as pessimistic: those located within the cultural studies tradition, for instance, argued that much of this culture was used by class fractions as a symbolic means of resisting incorporation into the dominant ideology (see for example
, Resistance through Ritual, 1976
).
Despite these debates leisure has rarely been a central concern of sociologists. However, as a consequence of the ‘cultural turn’ in English-speaking sociology in the early 1990s there were signs of increasing sociological interest in the media, sport, cultural studies, and consumerism, and so the subject of leisure generally may come to feature more prominently in future research (see, for example,
's Capitalism and Leisure Theory, 1985
).

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leisure, conspicuous

See LEISURE CLASS.

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leisure class

A term coined by Thorstein Veblen. In his book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Veblen postulates the growth of a conspicuously consuming, parasitic, leisure class in the United States, represented by an idle business élite. This élite is argued to be the product of the competitive struggles of modern business in industrializing America: ‘absolute ownership’ has isolated it from the ‘instinct of workmanship’ which Veblen believed was essential to continued technological development of societies. Instead, members of the élite are engaged in continuous public demonstrations of their status, a process which Veblen terms ‘conspicuous consumption’. This is a form of hedonism involving the ostentatious display and waste of possessions and goods—with women being among the symbols of wealth on show. It has a specific form which Veblen termed ‘conspicuous leisure’. He remarked that leisure itself, though costly, is invisible and offers no particular status advantage. In order to attract public admiration, leisure must be taken in ways that are both wasteful and highly visible—as for example casino gambling, or the use of expensive leisure products like resort clothes, sporting equipment, and the like, which signal wealth and status. Veblen's account is satirical and polemical, and has been criticized for conflating distinct elements of the élite, notably the landed gentry, bourgeoisie, and nouveaux riches.

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Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov)

(1870–1924)
A Marxist theoretician and revolutionary, born in Russia, whose early life was characterized by a more or less orthodox Marxism. However, from the late 1890s he developed a distinctive interpretation of Marx's ideas which has since carried his name. His major works are The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), commonly held to be his most reputable scholarly piece, What is to be Done? (1902), Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), and State and Revolution (1917).
Much of his writing is of historical and partisan interest only. However, a number of his ideas have been debated by sociologists, most notably his thesis that labour movements (such as trade unions) are inevitably reformist, seeking only an accommodation with capitalism that improves the workers' lot, so that revolutionary activity on behalf of the proletariat requires the ‘vanguard’ of a revolutionary party. The Party will then impose a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, assist the workers to transcend their ‘trad-union consciousness’ by developing a true (revolutionary) class consciousness, and so eliminate the intra-class divisions (‘working-class sectionalism’) that undermines the development of communism. A historical application of this thesis to the class struggles in nineteenth-century Britain (
, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, 1974
) has provoked a heated debate about the nature of the so-called labour aristocracy in early capitalism.
Lenin also offered an influential analysis of imperialism; a model of ‘democratic centralism’, in which lower party and state organizations were accountable to higher ones, with authority resting at the centre in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat; and a theory of ‘uneven development’ which challenged the notion that the transition from traditional society to modernization is via a smooth and unilinear trajectory. All of these have been debated well beyond the confines of Marxist intellectual circles.
Lenin was the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and, until his early death from a stroke, the leading politician in the new USSR. Whether everything that flowed out of that revolution finds its origins in Leninism–his particular marriage of revolutionary commitment, Marxist theory, and Russian reality–is still an open (and much debated) question. A useful short introduction to his life and work is Robert Conquest's Lenin (1972).

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lesbian and gay studies

This interdisciplinary field investigates the homosexual–lesbian and gay–experience. Although a first wave of such research can be traced back to the late nineteenth century (notably the research of Magnus Hirschfield), the major contributions started to appear in the 1970s, in the wake of the rise of a lesbian and gay social movement. By the 1990s there were courses, institutes, conferences, and publishing houses which specialized in the area. Much of this work has been dominated by sociological research, particularly the ideas of Michel Foucault, and by the women's movement. See also HETEROSEXISM; HOMOPHOBIA; HOMOSEXUALITY.

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less developed countries (LDCs)

See DEPENDENCY THEORY; THIRD WORLD.

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levelling

(Russian, uravnilovka) A form of wage and benefits egalitarianism which was countered during the 1930s in Russia, as workers and non-manual employees sought to increase their salaries, remove discrimination against the intelligentsia, and generally provide incentives for the massive industrialization drives of the Five-Year Plans.

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levels of measurement

See MEASUREMENT.

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Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien

(1857–1939)
A French philosopher, influential for his theories about ‘primitive’ peoples, who, he argued, held collective representations which were ‘pre-logical’ and mystical (see
How Natives Think, 1910, and Primitive Mentality, 1922
). Criticized as ethnocentric, he has been reinterpreted as having an early relativist concern for non-scientized ways of thinking.

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Lewin, Kurt

(1890–1947)
A German-born social psychologist who moved to America in the early 1930s and worked mainly at the University of Iowa and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His holistic field theory, derived from Gestalt theory but with added social and motivational elements, sees individual behaviour as a function of the psychological field or life-space–that is, the individual and an environment, which is perceived by the individual in terms of his or her needs and goals.

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Lewis, Oscar

(1914–71)
An American anthropologist, who vividly and sympathetically documented the experiences of Mexican and Puerto Rican families, and of what he termed the ‘culture of poverty’. His best-known (and best-selling) books, such as The Children of Sanchez (1961) and La Vida (1966), draw on lengthy interviews and recount in the words of his informants–with whom he became close friends–the life-stories of individual families. See also POVERTY.

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liberalism

Although liberalism is usually seen as the dominant ideology of the Western democracies, with its roots in Enlightenment thought, there are many variations and hybrids of its doctrines. Nevertheless it is clear what liberalism is opposed to: namely, political absolutism in all its forms, be they monarchist, feudal, military, clerical, or communitarian. In this opposition it attempts to ensure that individuals and groups can resist any authoritarian demands. In practice, this has most commonly meant a split between (on the one hand) a public world and a private world where rights are defined, the most common of which are to private property, and (on the other) the free exercise of religion, speech, and association.
Classical liberalism is usually identified with the philosophies of John Locke, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill (all of whom have separate entries in this dictionary). These writers emphasize social contract theory, a world where human beings are guided by enlightened self-interest, rationality, and free choice, and argue for the minimum intervention of the state in the lives of individuals. It is strongly associated both with economic doctrines of laissez-faire (as in the writings of Adam Smith), and with constitutional guarantees and representative democracies, in which all citizens are held to hold inalienable rights to certain freedoms—such as the right to life, to property, to free speech, association, and religion, along with the right to have some say in the running of the country (usually the right to vote).
The philosophy of liberalism has been attacked for creating a world of ‘possessive individualism’ (
, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 1962
). Among sociologists, the key objection has centred upon its (presumed) beliefs in the individual autonomous self, and in the possibility of neutral rules. Both arguments are asocial–assuming the existence of individuals and abstract rules without a society that shapes them. However these sorts of criticisms are often directed at a mere caricature of a particular liberalism. In fact, many liberals recognize the profoundly social nature of its claims, as can be seen, for example, in Susan Moller Okin's Justice, Gender and the Family (1989).
There are many debates and strands of divergent thought from the above simple outlines. Some liberals place much more emphasis on economic freedoms but wish for wider government intervention in the moral life (the political philosophies of Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan are often described in these terms). Others stress minimum state intervention in all spheres–a position often identified as libertarianism. Probably the most celebrated contemporary liberal is the philosopher John Rawls, whose book A Theory of Justice (1972) provides an original, formal theory of social contract, in which he aims to provide a moral basis for the just society by conceiving of a contract in which the rights and obligations of citizens would be laid down before they knew of their own social position and lacked knowledge of others'. It is a theory used to good effect in some sociological writings (such as W. G. Runciman's Social Justice and Relative Deprivation, 1966). Others who are critical of classical liberalism actually help refine it. Benjamin Barber criticizes ‘thin liberalism’–which aims only at representation–in favour of ‘strong democracy’ in which participation is much more central (see
Strong Democracy, 1984
). Michael Walzer advocates a democracy that can be balanced out over different spheres of social life (see
Spheres of Justice, 1983
). Still others have advocated a feminist liberalism which places the injustices of the family at the centre of the analysis (for example Susan Moller Okin).
It seemed at the end of the 1980s, with many of the other political ‘isms’ of the twentieth century in apparently dire health, that new versions of liberalism were likely once again to dominate the agenda of Western political thinking (see
, Liberalism and the Moral Life, 1989
). See also JUSTICE, SOCIAL; MONT PELERIN SOCIETY, THE.

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libertarianism

An anti-state ideology which takes the principles of liberalism to their logical extreme. Libertarianism is rooted in the writings of the seventeenth-century English political philosopher John Locke, who insisted upon the priority of individual rights to life, liberty, and property, and ‘the elimination of coercive intervention by the state, the foremost violator of liberty’. However, the valuing of individual liberty above all else is also an identifiable strand of conservative thought, and libertarians form part of the conservative radical right in both the United States and Britain. Modern libertarians include the American philosopher
(Anarchy, State and Utopia, 1974)
, who would reduce the role of the state to that of a mere ‘protection agency’, and the economist Friedrich Hayek. The latter maintains that the ideal economy and polity is a ‘catallaxy’–a spontaneous organization resembling the free market–within which interpersonal relationships are modelled on market exchanges; government is reduced to the minimal tasks of maintaining order and providing those public services which cannot spontaneously emerge because of huge initial capital outlays. This allegedly results in a plurality of personal and social values (see for example his
‘Principles of a Liberal Social Order’ in , Ideologies of Politics, 1975)
.
Libertarians advocate the maximization of individual rights, the minimization of government, and a free-market economy. These ideas have found strongest support in the United States, where they mix uneasily with conservatism and neo-liberalism. In his first term (1980–4) President Ronald Reagan stood for a policy that had many libertarian elements, although these were not fully carried out by his administration.
In philosophy, libertarianism describes a theory of human actions opposed to determinism, insisting that conscious human actions are not explicable in simple causal terms. See also JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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life-chances

A term used in Max Weber's analysis of class and status, in particular with reference to the concept of‘class situation’. The ownership of property and the disposal over goods and services in the marketplace, which are outcomes of the distribution of power in society, determine the ‘chance’ to realize an individual's goals in social action.
The term subsequently passed into general usage, notably in studies of social mobility, where the closed nature of a society diminishes the opportunities (chances) for advancement of social classes, women, and ethnic or racialized minorities. It includes chances for educational attainment, health, material reward, and status mobility.

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life-course

An expression denoting an individual's passage through life, analysed as a sequence of significant life-events, including birth, marriage, parenthood, divorce, and retirement. In much modern soci-demographic literature, the term life-course has replaced that of life-cycle in analysing these sequences of events, because the former carries fewer normative implications than the latter. See also EVENT-HISTORY ANALYSIS.

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life-cycle

A widely used metaphor denoting the passage of an individual through the successive stages of life, from birth to death through childhood, adolescence, adult life, and old age, and implying a return to infancy in old age. The term is broadly synonymous with those of life-course and life-stages.
In some societies, these stages are collectively defined by membership of an age-grade or age-set. In Western societies, certain transition points, such as the age of consent to sexual intercourse, the age of legal majority, or the age when education ceases to be compulsory, are defined and regulated by law, but the stages of the life-cycle are otherwise loosely structured and allow a degree of personal choice, for example in the age of marriage. For this reason, research analyses rarely use age alone to define stages in the life-cycle, the more common approach being to use marital status and the presence of children in full-time education, or under school-leaving age, who live with the respondent. Among men, the category of prime-age males is often separately identified, especially in labour-market analyses: these are men in the prime of life, usually defined as aged 25 to 55 years (sometimes 25 to 50 years), when employment levels are at their highest. Demographic analysts identify fewer life-cycle groups than would sociologists: for them the two dependent groups are children under 15 years and old people aged 65 (or 60) and over, who are supported financially and otherwise by the population of working age or active population.
Life-cycle stage is a variable often used in analyses of employment patterns, housing preferences and needs, patterns of social relationships in the community and the extended family, studies of poverty, and migration patterns. However, although still widely employed, it has dropped out of favour in modern socio-demographic literature because of its normative resonances. See also LIFE-EVENT.

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life-event

Defined for the purposes of event-history or life-course analysis, a life-event may consist of any demarcated change in demographic, educational, employment, health, or other individual circumstances locatable to a particular point in time. The temporal sequencing of such events may then be analysed to provide information on the interrelationships between different life-events.
Major events in the life of an individual would include the age of puberty and marriage; the birth of any children; death of a spouse, parent, sibling, or other significant person in that person's life; migration to another region or country; major illnesses; and the onset of physical incapacity in old age. Some would add major events connected with employment, such as getting a job, redundancy or unemployment, any return to further education in adult life, or changes of employer or occupation; others would treat these as secondary events. Life-events constitute significant turning-points in a person's life, in the roles and activities they are encouraged to adopt, and the groups they interact with, and may be associated with changes in attitudes and values.

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life-expectancy

The number of further years of life a person can expect at a given age. The measure is calculated from a life-table, and since it is expressed as an average for persons of that age and sex in a country, depends upon prevailing (current) levels of mortality at different ages within the population or sub-population to which the individual belongs. Since, in all societies, mortality rates between birth and the first birthday tend to be particularly high, life-expectancies at birth are usually considerably lower than life-expectancies at year one. As one would expect from variations in mortality rates between countries, life-expectancies also vary considerably, being around 30 to 40 years at birth in certain developing countries, and reaching 75 and over for women in the major Western industrialized societies. Life-expectancy at birth is a widely used indicator of health standards and social and economic living standards. It is also possible to derive life-expectancies for different sub-groups of populations, for example different social classes, providing mortality rates are known.

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life-history

An ideographic approach which provides an intensive account of a life, usually gathered through unstructured interviewing, but often also involving the analysis of personal documents such as letters, photographs, and diaries. The approach is clearly akin to the gathering and examination of autobiographies and biographies. There are many early examples of the method, but two classics are those of Wladek, whose life is displayed in some three hundred pages of
's The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918)
, and
, The Jack Roller (edited by , 1930)
. Both are associated with the Chicago School of sociology.
The life-history approach achieved some prominence during the 1920s and 1930s in North America, and prompted a debate over the value of ideographic versus nomothetic methods. By the late 1930s, the dominant trends had moved towards abstract theory in the work of Talcott Parsons and quantitative methodology in the work of Paul Lazarsfeld, so the life-history approach became less prominent in sociological research. From the 1960s onwards, however, there has been a revival of interest in life-histories, and one writer has referred to a ‘multiple renaissance’ in life-history studies across a range of academic disciplines, as part of the post-structuralist concern with narratives and the construction of text.
Two main approaches to life-history may be distinguished. The more traditional approach aims to provide an objective account of the life in order to throw light on social processes: it may help explore the subjective dimensions of a life, trace the historical connections between a life and a social structure, or provide access to ambiguity, flux, and social change. For this reason, the method is frequently used to explore new fields of enquiry, and to complement more statistical and generalizing studies. A more recent approach, however, deals with the interpretive procedures through which biographical work gets done, and with the analysis of life-story production. The distinction between the two approaches is prominent in Norman Denzin's Interpretive Biography (1989). See also CASE-HISTORY.

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life review

A process of reminiscence common amongst the elderly, and described by Robert Butler (in Psychiatry, 1963) as one in which the ‘personal sense and meaning of a lIfe’ is unfolded, and ‘past experiences and unresolved conflicts’ are increasingly brought to consciousness.

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life-stages

See LIFE-CYCLE.

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life-style

A concept with somewhat different meanings and usages. In British sociology it has often been employed in the embourgeoisement debate about the nature of the British class structure. In this particular context, it is argued that workers are increasingly adopting middle-class mores and attitudes, such that social class differences are becoming less significant as members of all classes come to share similar patterns of consumption and social behaviour.
But the term can have a much wider usage. For example, it can signpost different ways of living as between urban life and rural life, so that (following Georg Simmel and Louis Wirth) urbanism becomes a way (or style) of life. Alternatively, it can refer to contrasting ways of life found among different groups in society, such as the young, unemployed, or deviant. In its most common and general usage, the term conceptualizes alternative ways of living, usually conspicuous through values and modes of consumption, which are attendant upon the increasing differentiation of advanced capitalist societies. Such differentials, which are in some ways similar to Max Weber's notion of status groups, are sometimes seen to be replacing socio-economic class as the cardinal principle of social division. See also SUBCULTURE.

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life-table

The life-table provides a summary, for a population or sub-population, of the relationship of mortality to age, based on prevailing mortality rates. It includes, for each age x, measures such as life-expectancy at age x and the probability of dying before age x + 1. The basic data necessary for the construction of a life-table are population totals and numbers of deaths per five-year age-groups (for an abridged table). Life-tables are used by demographers interested in comparing detailed mortality schedules between countries and sub-populations, and by actuaries in the calculation of life-insurance premiums.

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life-world

A phenomenological concept referring to the world of the shared, ongoing flow of experience, from which we constitute objects and abstract concepts (see
, Life-World and Social Realities, 1986
). See also INTERSUBJECTIVITY.

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Likert scale

A widely used technique for scaling attitudes. Respondents are presented with a number of items, some positively pharsed and some negatively phrased, which have been found to discriminate most clearly between extreme views on the subject of study. For example, in a study of popular perceptions of social justice, respondents might be presented with items such as ‘The distribution of income in the United States is unfair’, and ‘In our society everyone has an equalopportunity to obtain a good education’. They are asked to rate each item in terms of agreement. Typically, responses are scored using five-point bipolar categories (strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree), coded as 2,1,0, minus 1, and minus 2. These scores are aggregated to form ‘summated ratings’ or a ‘test score’; or may be intercorrelated and factor analysed, to form a numerical unidimensional scale.

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liminality

A term introduced by Arnold van Gennep (Rites de passage, 1909), liminality refers to an intermediate ritual phase during initiation, in which initiates can be considered either sacred or potentially polluting to the mainstream society because of their anomalous social position. New social rules are commonly taught during the liminal phase, and strong, endearing, and creative bonds often develop between fellow initiates.

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line-and-staff

A classification of organizational functions and employees made by scientific management theorists. The line function refers to the main organizational pattern of hierarchical control and a unified chain of command; the staff function refers to the role of specialists, advising line-managers, but not in their chain of command.

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line of best fit

See REGRESSION.

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lineage

See DESCENT GROUPS.

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linear correlation

See CORRELATION.

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linear growth

A quantity increasing in line with another variable, in a relationship which approximates to a straight line on a graph.

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linear regression

See REGRESSION.

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linguistic relativity thesis

See SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS.

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linguistics

See CONVERSATION ANALYSIS; DISCOURSE; ETHNOMETHODOLOGY; LANGUAGE; SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS; SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE; SEMIOLOGY; STRUCTURALISM.

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Linton, Ralph

(1893–1953)
An American cultural anthropologist whose early fieldwork focused on the Polynesians. Later, he attempted to develop a systematic cultural science, focusing especially on the relationships between personality and society (see
The Cultural Background of Personality, 1954
). His most important book, The Study of Man (1936), reconciled the theoretical premisses of functionalism with a historical approach to culture. He pioneered the concepts of role and status, which for him provided the key to understanding the internal consistency of a social system, because of the importance they play in the relationship between the individual and society.

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local labour-market

See LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION.

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locality studies

See COMMUNITY STUDIES.

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Locke, John

(1632–1702)
An English philosopher and political theorist. The seventeenth-century revolution in physical science found in Locke one of its principal philosophical advocates. With dubious consistency, Locke combined together the leading doctrines of the empiricist theory of knowledge (that there are no ‘innate ideas’ and that all of our substantive knowledge is derived from experience) with a commitment to the prevailing mechanical view of the nature of reality and our perception of it. Some properties (colours and tastes for example) were held to be ‘secondary’, and functions of the effects of external bodies upon our senses, whereas others, the ‘primary qualities’ (solidity, shape, state of motion, and so on) were held to be ‘really in’ things themselves. However, at the same time Locke also held that all we are directly acquainted with in perception are our own ideas, so it is difficult to see how this distinction could be sustained. Nevertheless, Locke remains important as one of the founding figures of the enduring alliance between modern science and the empiricist tradition in epistemology.
Locke's poltical philosophy is also of continuing importance as an early rational justification for modern constitutional monarchy. As was characteristic for his time, Locke's argument takes the form of a hypothetical state of nature in which humans were supposed to live together without benefit of law or sovereign power. The disadvantages of such a state, though not approaching the catastrophic vision offered by Thomas Hobbes, would be sufficient to provide good reasons for individuals to enter into a voluntary contract to put themselves under the rule of law and government. However, the state of nature is not so dire that unlimited or absolute power on the part of the sovereign should be tolerated. The citizenry pool their powers in the person of the sovereign on trust that it will be used for their good, and so retain their right to rebellion. Of particular interest in Locke's political philosophy is his analysis of the sources and limits of private property rights, in a world initially held in common by humankind. Since all individuals are held to be owners of their own persons, the mixing of their labour with some part of the material world gives them property rights in what they produce.
However, this is so only on condition that what they take does not go to waste, and that enough remains for others. The institution of money (whose establishment, like governmental power, Locke takes to have been a matter of voluntary agreement) allows for the transfer of property rights, and for the potentially limitless accumulation of wealth. See also LIBERALISM.

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lock-out

See INDUSTRIAL ACTION.

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logical empiricism

See VERIFICATION; VIENNA CIRCLE.

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logical positivism

See POSITIVISM; VIENNA CIRCLE.

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logical reduction

See REDUCTIONISM.

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logical universals

A term sometimes applied in the secondary literature to the major analytical concepts in the writings of Talcott Parsons: that is, the pattern variables, systems problems, and evolutionary universals (all of which are discussed separately in this dictionary).

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logistic growth

The logistic curve
y = k/(1 - ea+bx)
, with b < 0, has an S-type form of slow (linear) growth, followed by exponential growth which slows to a stable level. Most physical and social growth follows this pattern, including industrial growth, indicators of scientific activity, and diffusion of rumour through social networks.

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logistic regression (or logit regression)

A form of regression analysis that is specifically tailored to the situation in which the dependent variable is dichotomous (or binary). For example, among a sample of people under investigation, a researcher might be interested in what factors are associated with the likelihood of someone being employed rather than unemployed, receiving university education or not receiving university education, or voting Republican rather than Democrat. However, so-called multinomial logistic regression is increasingly common, involving analyses in which the possible causal effects of independent variables on a categoric dependent variable having three (rarely more than three) outcome categories are assessed via comparison of a series of dichotomous outcomes: for example, the probability of someone identifying themselves as lower class rather than middle class or upper class (taken together); as compared with the probability of someone claiming an upper-class rather than a middle-class or lower-class identification (again with these last two taken together).
The results of logistic regression models can be expressed in the form of odds ratios, telling us how much change there is in the probability of being unemployed, receiving university education, voting Republican (or whatever), given a unit change in any other given variable–but holding all other variables in the analysis constant. More simply, the results (as measured by the changed odds on being found in a particular category) tell us how much a hypothesized cause has affected this outcome, taking the role of all other hypothesized causes into account.
Most published accounts of research using this particular technique report three statistics for the models. The first of these is the beta (parameter estimate or standardized regression coefficient), which is–crudely speaking–a measure of the size of the effect that an independent variable (let us say social class) has on a dependent variable (for example the probability of being found in employment rather than among the unemployed), after the effects of another variable (such as educational attainment) have been taken into account. The standard error provides us with a means of judging the accuracy of our predictions about the effect in question. One rule of thumb is that the beta should be at least twice the size of the standard error. Finally, many investigators include the odds ratios themselves, since these tend to make the relative probabilities being described in the model intuitively easier to grasp.
For a short introduction to the technique see
, Statistics for the Social Sciences (1990)
. A more advanced discussion will be found in
, Linear Probability, Logit, and Probit Models (1984)
.

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loglinear analysis

A statistical technique for analysing relationships within contingency tables. Cross-classified tables of data are very common in sociology–for example cross-tabulations of political preference by sex, educational attainment by social class, and so forth. Conventionally these tables are analysed by looking at departures from statistical independence by using the 2 test. This principle of independence can be written as:
lognnij = logni + lognj - logn
(hence involving the logarithms of the data combined in an additive or linear composition). This makes the analysis simpler, more akin to analysis of variance (see VARIATION, STATISTICAL), and more easily generalizable to three or more variables. It also allows interaction effects to be studied; that is, the effect which both i and j together have, over and above the effect of i and the effect of j.
Loglinear analysis begins with a (definitionally true but trivial) ‘saturated’ model, where all possible direct and interaction effects are specified. Simpler models are then examined which leave out some of these effects (on the basis of theory or hunch) to see whether good fits to the data can be obtained with fewer effects (that is, with a more parsimonious model), and in this way the researcher may infer what variables are most important and what the pattern of effect actually is in the data. It is a very flexible multivariate procedure, best adapted to analysing attributes (variables at the nominal level of measurement), and is only feasible using computer programs.
Nigel Gilbert's Modelling Society (1981) and David Knoke and Peter J. Burke's Log Linear Models (1980) are both excellent introductions to topic. For substantive examples, and an explanation of how to read and interpret the various models, see
, Against the Odds? (1997
). See also MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS; MOBILITY, SOCIAL.

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Lombroso, Cesare

(1836–1909)
An Italian army physician who developed the theory of the criminal type. Although he modified his views over his life, he is primarily known for studying the physiognomies of criminals, and suggesting that much crime was biological and hereditary, theorizing from Darwinian evolutionary theory that many criminals were atavistic throwbacks to an earlier and more primitive species. He is often considered to be the founder of modern positivist criminology.

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longitudinal study

See LIFE-HISTORY; PANEL STUDY.

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long-wave theory, long-wave cycles

See BUSINESS CYCLE.

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looking-glass self

Charles Cooley's theory of the self highlighted the ways in which an individual's sense of self is derived from the perceptions of others. Just like the reflections in a mirror, the self depends on the perceived responses of others; or, as he himself puts it, ‘each to each a looking glass | Reflects the other that doth pass.’
The looking-glass self has three components: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of their judgement of that appearance; and self feelings, such as pride. In Cooley's work, the self is solipsistic, where society essentially comprises ‘imagining imaginations’.

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Lorenz curve

A graph which is used in the study of social stratification in order to show the extent to which the actual distribution of a particular good (usually income, earnings, or wealth) deviates from a condition of perfect equality.
In the hypothetical example shown in Figure 5, the cumulated percentage of income recipients is plotted against the cumulated percentage of total income, for two separate time periods. In each case, the researcher is posing the question ‘What proportion of total income is received by 5 per cent, 10 per cent, 15 per cent (and so on) of all income recipients?’ (In this case families are the unit of analysis.) If every family had the same income, the first 5 per cent of families would have 5 per cent of all income, the first 10 per cent would have 10 per cent of all income, and so on. These points, plotted on the graph, would form a straight line (a gradient of one for one) on the diagonal at 45 degrees, This is the line of complete equality. If, on the other hand, all income went to one recipient, the points plotted would lie along the horizontal axis (5 per cent of recipients receive zero per cent of total income, as do 10 per cent, 20 per cent, and on), until—at almost 100 per cent of the recipients–the line would extend straight up the vertical axis.
Real distributions will tend to form curves lying somewhere between these two extremes. The nearer the curve is towards the line of complete equality, the more equal the distribution; the nearer it is towards the rectangular boundary, the more unequal the distribution. In the figure shown, for example, the curves suggest that the degree of income inequality was greater at time i that an time ii. See also GINI COEFFICIENT; INCOME DISTRIBUTION

FIGURE 5: Lorenz Curves showing the degree of inequality in distributions of family income at two different times

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Lowie, Robert H.

(1883–1957)
A student of Franz Boas, Lowie's book Primitive Society (1920) was the first modern survey of social organization in non-Western societies since the decline of evolutionism. Lowie was not afraid to attack the theories of Lewis Henry Morgan and did this on the basis of his own ethnography among Native Americans. His major works (The Origin of the State, 1927, and Social Organization, 1948) expanded on Morgan's speculative theories of the development of the state. According to Lowie, the state is based on territoriality, legitimacy, and the monopoly over the means of violence, a far more modern analysis than that of Morgan. However, Lowie insisted on imposing a rigid scientism on his research, which is not really suited to the study of human subjects.

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low-trust system

See TRUST AND DISTRUST.

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Lukács, György

(1885–1971)
A Hungarian Marxist philosopher who was a government minister during the short-lived Hungarian revolution of 1919, after which he spent many years in exile in Stalin's Russia, spending a short period there in prison.
Lukács came to Marxism via both Kant and Hegel. His early critical position is sometimes regarded as existentialist: this is particularly true of The Soul and its Forms (1911) and to a lesser extent of The Theory of the Novel (1920). He argued that Marxism offers a solution to the dualisms of classical European philosophy, in particular the reconciliation of subject and object. In History and Class Consciousness (1923), he maintains that the experience of the working class itself is that of the subject and the object of history, and that Marxism is able to construct this experience into a theory of the social totality. The notion of totality is, for Lukács, the most important concept in Marxism, because it enables one to penetrate the appearances of social reality (dominated by commodity fetishism and reification), to understand the real human relationships that underlie these surface manifestations. He developed a theory of political organization which reconciles the importance that Lenin gives to the party with Rosa Luxemburg's emphasis on spontaneity.
His political writings tend to be prominent during periods of left-inspired social upheaval and often forgotten in between. In the 1920s his political position came under attack in the Comintern and he concentrated instead on literary theory, developing a notion of socialist realism that goes beyond the crass simplicity of Stalinist orthodoxy, but which never succeeded in coming to terms with literary modernism. The good realist novel is seen as one which portrays underlying social relations rather than surface appearances. See in particular The Historical Novel (1947) and Studies in European Realism (1935–9). See also CRITICAL THEORY; IDEOLOGY.

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lumpen-bourgeoisie

See FRAZIER, EDWARD FRANKLIN.

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lumpenproletariat

Defined emotionally and colourfully by Karl Marx as ‘the scum, the leavings, the refuse of all classes’, he included amongst their number swindlers, confidence tricksters, brothel-keepers, rag-and-bone merchants, organ-grinders, beggars, and other ‘flotsam of society’ (see
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852
). They were a ‘class fraction’ in that they constituted the political power-base for Louis Bonaparte in 1848. Here, the financial aristocracy of Louis-Philippe displayed an enormous appetite for wealth created through financial gambles, where both the manner of acquiring that wealth and the enjoying of it went against ‘bourgeois law’. In this sense, both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were progressive, advancing the historical process by developing the labour-power of human species-being and their all round capacities, whereas the lumpenproletariat was marginal, unproductive, and also regressive.
Paradoxically, contemporary sociologists are as much concerned with many of the supposedly marginal social categories which Marx dismissed under this label (who are now seen as the victims of modern society), as they are with the major class protagonists which he situated at the heart of the historical process.

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Lundberg, George A.

(1895–1966)
An influential American sociologist, vigorous proponent of a neo-positivist approach to the study of social behaviour, most notably in his books Foundations of Sociology (1939) and Can Science Save Us? (1947). Lundberg argued that, for sociology to be a science, it must model its theories and methods on those of the natural sciences. His work is therefore characterized by behaviourism and an emphasis on quantification. He was opposed to introspection, although he accepted the study of values and ideals as a task for sociology, providing these could be defined operationally in an explicit and quantifiable way. (He was, for example, an enthusiast of attitude scales.) Arguing for science over tradition and religious beliefs, he claimed that in science lay the hope for the future, since humanity must become more rational or else fail to survive.

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Luxemburg, Rosa

(1871–1919)
Though born in Poland, Luxemburg is best known as a leading theorist and political leader in the German working-class movement. She vigorously opposed the revisionist current in the German Social Democratic Party, and was imprisoned for her opposition to the First World War. After the war she supported the Russian Revolution, but was sharply critical of the Bolshevik suppression of popular democracy. Her major theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital (1913), argued that imperialist expansion was necessitated by capitalism's dependence on a non-capitalist ‘third market’. The global triumph of capitalist expansion would also mark its final breakdown. Luxemburg played a leading part in the revolutionary upheaval in Germany which followed the end of the war. She was arrested by army officers in Berlin and clubbed to death by soldiers on her way to prison.

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Lynd, Helen Merrell

(1896–1982)
Helen Lynd was an American ethnographer and social theorist whose most famous books, co-authored with her husband Robert S. Lynd, concerned life in a small Midwestern town. The Lynds lived in the community they studied (‘Middletown’–in reality Muncie, Indiana) 1924–6, and published the first volume of the work. Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture, in 1929. Their analysis is organized around major activities for community survival, including making a home, earning a living, training the young, and participating in religious and community activities. The second volume, a longitudinal study entitled Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (1935), was published in the middle of the Depression. In this they described class strains and privileges as being more apparent, although there was little evident workers' solidarity: the radical socio-economic changes of the time did not generate radical class movements. Despite the shared research and authorship, it is more often Robert Lynd who is given most credit for these classic studies.
Helen Lynd was also a teacher and political activist and was subject to harassment during the McCarthy witch-hunts. In 1958 she published On Shame and the Search for Identity, a critique of Sigmund Freud and Talcott Parsons, in which she argued that these writers failed to provide either a historical context for or a historical content to their sociological theories. She also published studies of student-teacher interaction in colleges, Field Work in College Education (1945), and a historical study entitled England in the Eighteen Eighties: Toward a Social Basis for Freedom (1944). Central to all her work was the investigation of human meaning and action.

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M

McDonaldization

The author of this term, the American sociologist George Ritzer, defines McDonaldization as ‘the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world’ (see The McDonaldization of Society, 1993). The way in which the hamburger chain prepares food for consumption is taken as an exemplar of Max Weber's theory of the rationalization of the modern world: the company uses the methods of scientific management and fordism to guarantee predictability, efficiency, and calculability to customers. The hamburgers are the same the world over, the restaurants are almost identical, so that customers are guaranteed no surprises. Such rational techniques of production and consumption are, according to Ritzer, being increasingly applied to the service sector as a whole. We now have junk-journalism (inoffensive and trivial news served up in palatable portions), and ‘McUniversities’, featuring modularized curricula, delivering degrees in a fast-track pick-and-mix fashion to satisfy all tastes. The diminished quality of these products can only be disguised by extensive advertising which constantly repackages them to look new.
McDonaldization suggests that modern societies are in many respects increasingly standardized, predictable, and uniform. The references to scientific management and fordism are however not entirely appropriate, since the proponents of these earlier strategies for the routinization of production sought to exchange standardized and intensified work for high wages and incentive payments, whereas employment in fast-food restaurants and similar ‘McJobs’ is characteristically low-paid and insecure. This essentially Weberian view of the trajectory of industrialism is also somewhat at odds with, for example, the theory of reflexive modernization and the risk society proposed by Ulrich Beck and others–who paint pictures of an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.

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Machiavelli, Niccolò

(1469–1527)
An influential Florentine political theorist and humanist. Believing human nature to be essentially selfish, Machiavelli advocated the need for strong government, notably in The Prince and Discourse (written between 1513 and 1521). His work has been most influential in political science, but a number of sociologists have also been intrigued by his theory of statecraft, for example
(see A Sociology of the Absurd, 1970)
.

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machine production

See FACTORY SYSTEM; INDUSTRIALISM.

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MacIver, Robert M.

(1882–1970)
A pioneering but neglected Scottish sociologist, who–after brief scholarships at Aberdeen and Edinburgh—became chair of sociology at Columbia University in New York in 1929, where he stayed until 1950. His classic textbook Society (first published in 1931, revised 1937, 3rd edn. 1949 with Charles Page) reveals his concern with developing a systematic, theoretical, humanistic, yet evolutionary sociology. His prime interests were the state (The Web of Government, 1947) and community (Community, 1928). Full biographical details can be found in As A Tale That is Told: The Autobiography of Robert M. MacIver (1968).

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macrosociology

Macrosociology is usually contrasted with microsociology. Whereas the former examines the wider structures, interdependent social institutions, global and historical processes of social life, the latter is more concerned with action, interaction, and the construction of meaning. In general, theories such as symbolic interactionism, exchange theory, and ethnomethodology are regarded as microsociological theories, whilst Marxism, functionalism, and systems theory are regarded as microsociological. (All of these theories are treated under separate headings elsewhere in this dictionary.)
Needless to say, however, it is important not to push this distinction too far, since much sociological research is neither clearly in one camp nor in the other, and can be seen as part of a continuing debate over the relationship between social system and social actor. Are micro and macro theories irretrievably autonomous levels of analysis which cannot be synthesized? Is one mode of analysis superior to the other? Is a linkage or even a synthesis possible? Most of the classical theories are concerned with this tension. For example, whilst Max Weber is often characterized as a sociologist of social action, his work rapidly moves to the analysis of broad historical processes and comparative structures. Similarly, the work of Talcott Parsons may be seen as an ambitious attempt to create grand theory of a type that would allow units of action to be built up into integrative institutions, with the pattern variables, for example, being capable of characterizing both two-person interactions and whole societies.
The tension and controversies between these two sociologies take many forms. There are some so-called holists who argue (with Émile Durkheim) that the logic of sociology dictates a concern with the social sui generis, that microsociology cannot capture either the logic of collective action or the constraints of institutional structures, and is for that reason unsatisfactory. Methodological individualists, by contrast, maintain (among other things) that society is a reification and is always reducible to its component individuals. This is part of a much wider debate over ontology, in which realists and nominalists make competing claims about the nature of social reality. Similarly, Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration and Johnathan A. Turner's A Theory of Social Interaction (1988), both of which attempt to transcend the dichotomy of macrosociological and microsociological concerns, can be contrasted with the position of Alan Dawe, who in a classic paper maintained that ‘there are… two sociologies: a sociology of social system and a sociology of social action. They are grounded in the diametrically opposed concerns with two central problems, those of order and control. And, at every level they are in conflict. They posit antithetical views of human nature, of society and of the relationship between the social and the individual The first asserts the paramount necessity, for societal and individual well-being, of external constraint; hence the notion of a social system ontologically and methodologically prior to its participants. The key notion of the second is that of autonomous man, able to realise his full potential and to create a truly human social order only when freed from external constraint. Society is thus the creation of its members; the product of their construction of meaning, and of the action and relationships through which they attempt to impose that meaning on their historical situations’ (
‘The Two Sociologies’, British Journal of Sociology, 1970
). See also GALTON'S PROBLEM.

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madness

See MENTAL ILLNESS.

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magic, witchcraft, and sorcery

The art of performing charms, spells, and rituals, to seek to control events or govern certain natural or supernatural forces. Magic can be good, as in love magic or the canoe magic of the Trobriand Islanders before a hazardous voyage. It can also be malevolent in the sense of witchcraft or sorcery. Sorcery implies magic where powers are intentionally used for a harmful purpose, often involving artificial means. Witchcraft implies the possession of a supernatural power through a pact with evil spirits; this power may be exerted involuntarily. Magic, witchcraft, and sorcery generally function at the level of the individual, and often in opposition to organized religions. Magical beliefs deal with the individual crises and acts of fate which religious morality cannot explain.
Initial attempts to explain magical beliefs foundered on nineteenth-century scientism and simplistic psychological theories. For Lucien Léevy-Bruhl (Primitive Mentality, 1922), magic was a form of ‘pre-logical thought’, which was incommensurable with and antithetical to Western scientific thought. In Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1900) an evolutionary typology postulated a developmental progression from magic to religion to science. Bronislaw Malinowski (Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays, 1948) shared many of the prejudices of earlier approaches towards magic and explained it as an essentially meaningless emotional response to the unknown and otherwise uncontrollable. Magic thus served a psychological function only when technical knowledge was inadequate.
Later anthropological approaches have seen magic as containing a symbolic logic and meaning, and have sought to place it into a context of the cosmology and social relations of the people concerned. This approach derives fundamentally from E. E. Evans-Pritchard's classic study of Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937). This was one of the first attempts to study in detail the beliefs and practices relating to magic, witchcraft, and sorcery. The Azande of Southern Sudan invoke witchcraft to explain nearly any misfortune that could befall a person. All deaths are seen to be caused by witchcraft. This explanatory framework does not posit witchcraft as a cause of misfortune. The Azande know that misfortunes are part of life: that houses are eaten by termites and fall down, that people become ill if they drink bad water, and so on. However, witchcraft ideas explain why a misfortune happens to a particular person at a particular time; that is, they answer the vital question ‘Why me? Why now?’ (‘Why did the termites destroy my house, rather than another, and why did it collapse when I was inside, rather than at another time?’)
Among the Azande, witchcraft is the domain only of commoners, who use internal psychic powers to do harm. Witchcraft is a physical property, located in the intestines, which allows a witch to go out at night and harm other people. Good magic is seen to be moral, and uses spells, medicines, and herbs as means for fighting witchcraft. Bad magic, or sorcery, is performed only by the Azande nobility, and is seen to be more deadly than witchcraft. Unlike witchcraft, the apparatus of sorcery is external to people, involving spells, rites, and medicines. If a misfortune is significant, a diviner is called in to determine who is the witch causing the malaise, and to convince that person to repent and remove the spell. Accusations tend to occur in disputes where a person is not likely to get retribution through the chief's court. Evans-Pritchard showed how such accusations are related to the points of social tension within Azande social organization. In general, other anthropologists have followed this approach, arguing that witchcraft beliefs are functional to maintaining the order of society by resolving tensions, aggression, and envy. For example, they may function as a levelling mechanism, with individuals who amass too much power or wealth often being accused of acquiring these by means of witchcraft. However, other researchers have argued that witchcraft beliefs generate tensions, as well as helping to resolve them.
Some analysts have located their study of witchcraft within the context of colonialism. Clyde Kluckhohn (Navajo Witchcraft, 1944) argued that Navajo witchcraft ideas served to channel tensions and aggressions created by the larger White society. In Moon, Sun and Witches (1987), Irene Silverblatt argued that female witches formed an integral part of an anti-colonial movement in the Andes.
Ideas about magic and witchcraft have sparked off a lengthy, acrimonious, and unresolved debate about the rationality or otherwise of non-Western peoples, a debate that has grown to engage philosophers and sociologists as well as anthropologists (see, for example,
, Rationality, 1970
). Evans-Pritchard insisted that the Azande have two distinct models of apprehending the world, one mystical and the other mundane, or empirical. These are invoked at different levels of explanation: witchcraft is invoked to explain why tragedy befalls people; how the events themselves occur is explained in a prosaic way which Europeans think to be empirically true. The Azande, according to Evans-Pritchard, are logical but wrong. In opposition to this view, relativists such as Peter Winch (The Idea of a Social Science, 1958) have argued that each society constructs its own notions of reality and rationality, and all are equally valid. Anthropologists, therefore, should not judge alien beliefs like witchcraft on the basis of a Western discourse of science. Many of these issues are discussed, and their sociological implications made clear, in
's ‘How Real is the Charmed Circle in African and Western Thought?’, Africa (1973)
. See also CULTURAL RELATIVISM.

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Maine, Sir Henry James Sumner

(1822–88)
Sir Henry Maine was a pioneer of comparative jurisprudence. Like Lewis Henry Morgan, he was convinced that the legal basis of ‘primitive societies’ lay in ties of blood and kinship. In his two best-known works, Ancient Law (1861) and Popular Government (1885), he argued for the evolutionist proposition that the history of human societies showed a progressive move from societies based on status ascribed through kin ties to advanced politics based on legally binding agreements (or ‘contract’). See also TRIBE.

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male chauvinism

A term particularly associated with the 1970s women's liberation movement and used to attack men's attitudes towards women. It suggests blind, arrogant, excessive, and narrow-minded assumptions of innate male superiority, of male ascendancy over women, and of men's pursuit of their own collective interests.

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Malinowski, Bronislaw Kaspar

(1884–1942)
A Polish anthropologist, born in Cracow, where he completed a doctorate in physics and mathematics. A chance reading of Frazer's The Golden Bough attracted him to social anthropology. Subsequently, in London, he completed a thesis on the Australian Aborigines. Between 1915 and 1918 he conducted fieldwork for periods amounting to nearly two years in the Trobriand Islands, New Guinea. Here he developed the now classical methods of intensive fieldwork, pitching his tent in the villages. He stressed the importance of learning the people's language and acquiring the ‘native’ point of view. In 1927 he was appointed to the first chair in social anthropology at the London School of Economics, where his seminars attracted and he supervised many now celebrated anthropologists.
Malinowski came to be identified with the theory of functionalism. All human culture could eventually be reduced to the satisfaction of basic needs. Rituals, kinship patterns, economic exchanges (including the famous kula ring), were not to be explained in terms of their origins, but their current use. Previous theories which attempted to explain all customs and practices in terms of ‘survivals’ from some distant era were discredited. Malinowski's emphasis on the current significance alone of institutions meant the neglect of any historical context. He idealized the harmonious equilibrium of a given society. This ahistorical approach gave the impression that the Trobrianders were still locked in the Stone Age and without underlying conflicts which might generate change. The emphasis on intensive fieldwork with the indigenous people, ideally by-passing the secondary sources of colonial administrators, missionaries, and traders, carried the risk of ignoring the powerful interventions of external and colonial forces. Even the self-contained description of the Trobriand political structure neglected recent changes. Malinowski's posthumously published diary reveals the very visible presence of powerful White outsiders, whom he tried to eliminate both from his participant fieldwork, and from his final texts. His functionalist methodology brought lasting implications–despite the theory's flaws. Anthropologists were encouraged to examine a society holistically. Beliefs, rituals, kinship, political organization, and economic practices could no longer be studied each in isolation, but in terms of their interrelation.
Malinowski published several key monographs exploring different aspects of the Trobriands. Of these, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926), Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927), The Sexual Life of Savages (1929), and Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935, 1948) are now classics of the discipline. His international fame brought visits and appointments in Africa and the United States. He was encouraged to pronounce on colonial policies, often in areas where he had no ethnographic knowledge. His functionalism did not foresee self-determination by the colonized. His A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1967), often to the consternation of some of his early disciples, has been recognized as an important text for understanding the cross-cultural encounter between the anthropologist and others.

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Malthus, Thomas Robert

(1766–1834)
An early political economist whose Essay on Population, first published in 1798 and frequently revised, had an enormous impact on theories of population. Malthus's father, a liberal English landowner and a friend of Rousseau, educated his own son until he went to Cambridge. There, Malthus was appointed a Fellow in 1793, and in 1797 he took Holy Orders. In 1805 he became Professor of History and Political Economy at the East India Company College at Haileybury.
In his Essay Malthus engaged with the contemporary debate about the perfectibility of humankind. Against writers such as Godwin and Condorcet, who believed that the human race was capable of ever greater improvement and happiness, Malthus, drawing on the work of Adam Smith and David Hume, pointed to the pressures and difficulties for the human race arising from what he called the ‘principle of population’. This was the natural tendency of populations to expand faster than resources. Populations could expand geometrically; resources no more than arithmetically. Inevitably, therefore, actual population growth was checked by insufficiency of resources, either by ‘positive’ checks (deaths from disease and starvation) or by ‘preventive’ checks (postponing marriage or sexual abstinence).
Malthus's views have been widely challenged, not least for the implication that attempts to remedy poverty by increasing resources must be unsuccessful since this only leads to further population expansion and further pressure on the ‘necessaries of life’, a view that was used to justify the harshness of the 1834 Poor Law Reforms in Britain. Karl Marx, for instance, contended that a population's capacity to feed itself depended primarily on economic and social organization: capitalism–not population growth–was to blame for poverty.

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management

Either the process of supervision, control, and co-ordination of productive activity in industrial and other formal organizations, or the persons performing these functions. As a process, management is conventionally divided into the line or general management of the main goals of the organization, and staff or specialist management dealing with support roles, such as personnel, legal matters, or research and development. A managerial stratum of persons in industrial society developed as a result of the joint-stock corporation, the growth in size of enterprises, and the expansion of public bureaucracy. Usage of the term is loose enough to include, at one extreme, directors and other senior staff who have a personal stake of some kind in their companies and are, in effect, also employers; and, at the other extreme, propertyless waged or salaried employees entrusted with, or promoted to, varying levels of supervisory responsibility. Managers in this second sense make up a growing proportion of white-collar workers. An excellent account of the role of ideologies of management in the course of industrialization is Reinhard Bendix's Work and Authority in Industry (new edn., 1974). Mike Reed's The Sociology of Management (1989) is a more general textbook. See also CONTINGENCY THEORY; LINE-AND-STAFF; MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION.

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management of knowledge

A term used in the ‘new’ sociology of education in the 1970s to link the subject with sociologies of knowledge and power. It refers to the process by which schools and the educational curricula control what passes for valid knowledge, together with the methods by which knowledge is recognized as such, and the emergence of deviant paradigms and interpretations is prevented. For a review of the arguments which relate these to the origins and growth of the sociology of education itself see
, Knowledge and Ideology in the Sociology of Education (1977)
. See also EDUCATION, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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management science

See ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY; ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE.

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managerial revolution

A concept which points to the shift, within the modern corporation, from the owner to the professional manager as the key figure in the enterprise. This is associated with the change from ownership to control as the key source of power and vested interests, and with the declining importance of family capitalism and private property in contemporary capitalism.
The concept originates in a book of that title by James Burnham (1941) who asserted that not only industrial establishments but state agencies and all other significant organizations would become dominated by a new ruling class of managerial professionals pursuing their own interests. It is also associated with AdolfA. Berle and Gardiner C. Means (The Modern Corporation and Private Property, 1932), who believed that managers would pursue broader corporatist goals, even at the expense of short-term profitability. Like most theories about management, the ideas are in practice untestable. See also BOURGEOISIE; DECOMPOSITION OF CAPITAL.

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managerial strategies

See TRUST AND DISTRUST.

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managerialism, urban

See URBAN MANAGERIALISM.

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manifest function

See FUNCTION.

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Mannheim, Karl

(1893–1947)
A Hungarian sociologist who emigrated to Germany and finally to England shortly after Hitler came to power. His most enduring contribution was to the sociology of knowledge, which he defined as a theory of the social or existential conditioning of thought. Mannheim viewed all knowledge and ideas as bound to a particular location within the social structure and the historical process. Thus, thought inevitably reflects a particular perspective, and is situationally relative. Mannheim was influenced by both Marx and Weber, and in most of his writing, he conceives the different social locations of ideas mainly in terms of class factors or status groups. For example, he contrasts utopian thought rooted in the future hopes of the under-privileged, with ideological thought propounded by those benefiting from the status quo. However Mannheim also gave special attention to generational differences in relation to ideas. A person's generation, like their social class, gives an individual a particular location in social and historical time and thereby predisposes them to a certain mode of thought.
When Mannheim insisted that all thought necessarily has an ideological character he was accused of adopting a position of total relativism, a charge he strenuously, but somewhat unsuccessfully denied. His major contributions were not so much epistemological as substantive, and some of his central and most important ideas can be found in Ideology and Utopia (1929), Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge (1928), and Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1935).

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manual versus non-manual distinction

A broad dichotomy in the study of occupational stratification, which correlates with many social indicators such as income, health, and educational attainment, as well as conditions of employment broadly defined. It is, nevertheless, based on a value-judgement about the status and nature of different occupations in the working class and the middle class, according to the amount of mental (non-manual) as opposed to physical (manual) labour they are supposed to require. A closely related distinction is that between blue-collar and white-collar work. Although widely institutionalized in everyday life and in law, attempts to reach agreed operational definitions of manual and non-manual work reveal that the distinction tends to be arbitrary. This is well illustrated by considering gender differences in occupational position: women doing mental work in white-collar jobs tend not to be accorded either the same pay or prestige as white-collar men. Ambiguity has not prevented sociologists themselves from identifying and describing broad inequalities of life-chances, life-style, and prestige as being associated with so-called manual/working-class and non-manual/middle-class occupations. More sophisticated classifications now used in the sociology of stratification attempt simply to reflect the subjective value element which samples of lay judges themselves employ to distinguish the prestige of jobs; however, the idea that there is a consensus in society about the relative worth of manual or mental labour is itself not borne out by empirical research. See also GOLDTHORPE CLASS SCHEME; NEW WORKING CLASS; OCCUPATIONAL CLASSIFICATION; OCCUPATIONAL PRESTIGE.

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manufacturing

The making of articles and goods for sale as commodities. Manufacturing makes up the greater part of what is sometimes referred to as the secondary sector of the economy. See also FACTORY SYSTEM; INDUSTRIAL SECTOR.

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Maoism

The theory and policies identified with the Chinese revolutionary communist leader Mao Zedong (1893–1976). Mao's relationship to Marxism is disputed, since many commentators deny either that he made any novel contributions to social theory, or that his writings were distinctively Marxist. He is principally associated with an heretical theory of socialist revolution (see REBELLION, REVOLUTION) which accords primacy to the role of the revolutionary peasantry— hardly surprisingly, given the economically backward circumstances of China in the 1920s, when Mao set out on his political career. Although Marxists continue to dispute vigorously both his relationship to Soviet Marxism, and the practical consequences of his policies on Chinese economic development (especially the effects of the notorious
‘Cultural Revolution’ of 1966–7
), his significance for sociology is limited by the impenetrability of much of his philosophical (as opposed to his political and strategic) writing–a weakness exemplified, for example, in his essays
‘On Practice’ and ‘On Contradiction’ (1937)
.
At various times during the Cold War period, neo-Marxist sociologists turned to Maoist China in the hope of finding a socialist state that was less wedded to doctrinaire Marxism than was the Soviet Union, and as a result there are several excellent (though somewhat idealized) ethnographies of life in Maoist China that have achieved almost classic status (including J. Myrdal's Report From a Chinese Village, 1965, and China: The Revolution Continued, 1970; and W. Hinton's Fanshen, 1966). However, students would be well advised to balance these with a reading of a more sceptical account, such as Zhang Xinxin and Sang Ye's oral history of contemporary China (Chinese Lives, 1986).

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Marcuse, Herbert

(1898–1979)
A German philosopher who was a member of the Frankfurt School in exile in the United States. Unlike others, he remained in America after the end of the war, and maintained a commitment to radical politics until the end of his life. He had a strong influence on the ideas of the student left in the 1960s.
His version of critical theory grew out of the mainstream of European philosophy: the work of Hegel, phenomenology and existentialism, and the meeting of these with some aspects of Marxism. His writings covered politics and aesthetics, as well as philosophical and cultural criticism, and were especially concerned with what he regarded as the totalitarian tendencies of modern societies. Capitalism had, as he saw it, transcended the economic condition that Marx analysed and the working-class had failed to develop as a revolutionary force. He hoped that those groups excluded from the system (for example Blacks, and for a limited period of their lives students), might provide a sense of opposition. His most important books were Reason and Revolution (1941), a presentation of a Hegelian, critical or ‘negative’ Marxism, and a vigorous critique of positivist philosophy; One Dimensional Man (1964), concerned with the ways in which modern capitalism restricts the possibility of opposition; and Eros and Civilization (1955), which appropriates some of the more metaphysical ideas of Freud, particularly his notions of the life and death instincts, into a critique of the way in which modern culture transforms and alienates desire. The best–though highly sceptical–examination of his thought is still Alasdair MacIntyre's Marcuse (1970).

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marginal employment

See INFORMAL ECONOMY.

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marginal totals, marginals

See CONTINGENCY TABLE.

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marginalist revolution

See NEO-CLASSICAL ECONOMICS.

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marginalization

A process by which a group or individual is denied access to important positions and symbols of economic, religious, or political power within any society. A marginal group may actually constitute a numerical majority–as in the case of Blacks in South Africa–and should perhaps be distinguished from a minority group, which may be small in numbers, but has access to political or economic power.
Marginalization became a major topic of sociological research in the 1960s, largely in response to the realization that while certain developing countries demonstrated rapid economic growth, members of these societies were receiving increasingly unequal shares of the rewards of success. The process by which this occurred became a major source of study, particularly for those influenced by dependency, Marxist, and world-systems theories, who argued that the phenomenon was related to the world capitalist order and not just confined to particular societies.
Anthropologists, in particular, have tended to study marginal groups. This stems in part from the idea that, by looking at what happens on the margins of a society, one can see how that society defines itself and is defined in terms of other societies, and what constitute its key cultural values. See also EXCLUSION.

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market

In both economics and sociology a market is understood to be an area over which any well-defined commodity is exchanged between buyers and sellers. Such commodities are considered to be of two kinds–goods and services. The total amount of a commodity produced and available for purchase is referred to as the supply of the commodity, while the total amount being sought for purchase is termed the demand. Because human wants are, in themselves, potentially infinite, it should be noted that in the study of markets demand must be effective, that is to say backed by money or purchasing power.
Note that a market need not be a physical location–as in the case of a Stock Exchange. It is any arrangement for bringing buyers and sellers together. Improvements in telecommunications networks have speeded up communication to such an extent that financial markets and commodity markets are now international in scope. The central purpose of certain regional political initiatives is to create larger integrated markets for goods and services, such as the European Economic Community, or the proposed Latin American Economic Community.
Mainstream economic theory mostly assumes that competition in markets is perfect. That is to say, there is a large number of buyers and sellers, none of whom can exert undue individual influence on the process by which the market price is fixed. Perfect competition, it is argued, ensures that there is an inherent tendency for supply and demand to adjust to each other through the prevailing price which, if all participants act rationally, will rise or fall according to the relative scarcity of the commodity and the competitive efficiency with which it is supplied by producers and purchased by consumers. Competition also explains the relationship between markets: all products are in competition with each other for a share of consumers' limited purchasing power, and all producers are in competition for access to a limited total stock of raw materials, machinery, labour, and investment capital. The competitive process will then penalize any departures from rationality among producers or consumers by driving them out of the market altogether.
Market economies are seen as placing the individual consumer in command of production. Each individual, using income derived in the main from his or her own productive activities, expresses his or her desires and preferences by the way he or she distributes this income for the various goods and services available in markets. This economic theory is associated with a political theory which places the citizen, as a voter, in ultimate authority over the production of public goods, such as education services, weapons, or art. The market system is thus argued to be democratic in essence.
A market is not the only method of allocating goods and services since a central planner could achieve the same result. One of the longest-standing debates in economics has been over which is the more efficient method. Hence the command economies of socialist countries are contrasted with the market economies of capitalist countries. In the market economy, also called free economy or free enterprise economy, the greater part of the activities of production, distribution and exchange are conducted by private individuals or companies rather than by the government, and government intervention is kept to a minimum. Exceptions are sometimes made in the provision and distribution of health services and education services, which are funded by and organized by central or local governments, in which case the term mixed economy would be more appropriate.
Markets are recognized to have some obvious disadvantages. They tend to have trade-cycles which mean that resources are periodically not fully employed. In the case of labour, under-utilization means unemployment, which threatens workers' living standards and this may in turn have a wide range of social as well as economic effects. An uncontrolled market system produces undesirable outputs as well as the goods and services sold on the market. The classic example now is environmental pollution, with waste products being dispersed into the atmosphere, rivers, and oceans. Markets have no morals. The production and sale of weapons, access to basic health care, scientific research, artistic products, and religious services are determined entirely by the level of demand for them. Most societies have value systems which are not wholly consistent with and subservient to the amoral functioning of the market, so that market outcomes may at times be judged to be socially unacceptable. Disadvantages such as these are quite separate from a range of practical imperfections in the functioning of any market. For example markets work best when there is perfect information available to all buyers and sellers, so that demand for commodities and the supply of them interact until prices reach an equilibrium. In practice, full information may not be available, or only at disproportionate cost, or information may be unequally distributed among market participants.
Since few social scientists have been entirely happy with the notion of perfect competition, one fruitful area for collaboration between economics and sociology is the attempt to develop a systematic account of how the empirical world supports or departs from the competitive ideal. From the outset, economics has sought to understand the distortions to economic processes introduced by any government which attempted to displace the effects of unregulated economic transactions with the political allocation of resources and commodities, even within a single society. Departures occur, however, because of monopoly and other concentrations of economic power and interest; or because of cultural or administrative barriers. All of these issues are central to the concerns of the sociologist of economic life but it is only in the study of labour-markets that any real attempt at integrating economic and social theory has occurred.
One of the few exceptions to this generalization is Robert E. Lane's The Market Experience (1991), which comprehensively reviews the literature on the market economy, drawing on material from economic philosophy, economic anthropology, economic psychology, and the sociology of work. Controversially, Lane argues that the research evidence from these fields offers a powerful critique of market economics, notably by demonstrating that two of its major premisses are mistaken: namely, that (contrary to mainstream economic theory) work is not a disutility, but is in fact one of the two major sources of lifetime satisfaction; and that monetary income, although a source of utility which does compensate for sacrifices at work, contributes little to a person's sense of well-being.

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market, free

See MARKET.

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market, labour

See LABOUR-MARKET.

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market economy

See CAPITALISM; MARKET.

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market research

Qualitative and quantitative research on the tastes, values, and perceptions, on the personal, household, and neighbourhood characteristics, and on the purchasing behaviour, of individual consumers of (or industrial customers for) equipment and services. Usually carried out by agencies who specialize in this activity, although some large companies have their own market-research divisions, and some market research companies are also involved in academic research (for example large-scale surveys) on a contract basis.

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market situation

See CLASS POSITION.

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market socialism

See COMMAND ECONOMY

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marriage

Marriage is traditionally conceived to be a legally recognized relationship, between an adult male and female, that carries certain rights and obligations. However, in contemporary societies, marriage is sometimes interpreted more liberally and the phrase ‘living as married’ indicates that for many purposes it makes no sense to exclude cohabitation. It should be noted, however, that even this more liberal definition usually excludes homosexual couples. Although cohabitation is increasingly accepted, and is now the normal prelude to marriage, people continue to make a distinction between living together and a ‘proper’ wedding and marriage.
Much recent sociological research, both in Britain and America, has been concerned with the growing fears that marriage as an institution is in decline. These fears stem from two roots, the first being concern for increasing marital breakdown and subsequent divorce, and the second the fact that marriage is going out of fashion, with more people cohabiting and even rearing children outside matrimony. Certainly, divorce is on the increase, and if current divorce-rates in Britain continue then one in three marriages is likely to end in divorce. In recent years, the median age at first marriage has increased and teenage marriages have declined significantly, with a growing proportion, albeit still a small minority, never getting married. At the same time, rates of cohabitation are increasing, with it now being virtually the norm to cohabit before marrying. Moreover, an increasing number of children are conceived and born outside marriage. Looking at these statistics, one might reasonably conclude that the future of marriage looks bleak, but marriage still remains the preferred way of life for the vast majority of the adult population. Even among those whose first marriage fails, a majority are sufficiently optimistic to marry a second time.
Why do people marry? In Western societies, the emotional aspects of marriage are stressed, and what Lawrence Stone calls affective individualism prevails (see
The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, 1977
). Choice of a mate is influenced primarily by the desire for a relationship offering affection and love–although, as Peter Berger observes, the ‘lightning shaft of Cupid seems to be guided rather strongly within very definite channels of class, income, education, racial and religious background’ (see
Invitation to Sociology, 1963
). The tendency for people of similar backgrounds to marry (marital homogamy) is strong, but there is no clear understanding of why it occurs, or whether the degree of rigidity in mate selection differs among different social groups. Surprisingly, some recent American research suggests that the higher the class position, the less the homogamy (
, Dating, Mating, and Marriage, 1990
). The same study also indicates that homogamy is a poor predictor of marital success.
Concern with marital success and marital adjustment has played an increasingly prominent part in recent research. As David Morgan (The Family, 1985) suggests, marriage has become ‘medicalized’, with therapists and marriage-guidance counsellors at the ready to tackle marital problems and enhance marital quality. This raises the question of how marital success should be measured. Clearly, stability is not a sufficient indicator, as some couples stay together even though they are totally miserable, whereas others divorce, despite having a relationship that some would envy. A variety of marital quality inventories have been developed and recently it has been recognized that marital quality and marital problems are in fact independent. For example, conflict and arguments may be signs of caring and engagement in some marriages.
Marriages clearly face different problems at different times of the life-cycle, and raising a family, especially for parents of younger children, is associated with high marital strain. Remarriages appear to be at greater risk of breaking up than first marriages, especially when step-children are involved. This may be in part because remarriage is an incomplete institution, in the sense that societal expectations and norms still reflect the traditional expectation that marriages will last a lifetime. As Anthony Giddens has pointed out, terms like ‘broken marriages’ and ‘broken homes’ embody the traditional ideal and have unfortunate negative connotations, especially regarding children whose parents are separated or divorced.
Increasingly, research is focusing on the interrelationship of employment and family life, including marriage. The primary focus has been on how women's employment has affected the marital relationship. Using longitudinal surveys, American researchers have found that women who contribute a higher share of the household income are more likely to divorce than women who contribute a lower share, or housewives. It may be that wives who become less dependent upon their husbands financially are no longer willing to tolerate a subservient position–and have the resources that enable them to leave. Another important question is whether the employment of women has led to greater egalitarianism within marriage. Some family researchers have painted a rosy picture of how families are becoming more symmetrical, whereas others continue to exercise scepticism, asserting that the traditional division of labour within the home persists, even when women also hold full-time employment.
Jessie Bernard (The Future of Marriage, 1972) has claimed that there is not one marriage but two–the wife's marriage and that of the husband. Studies have consistently shown that marriage tends to be more beneficial for men than for women, with married men being in better psychological health, and showing fewer symptoms of stress than married women. Some feminists who see marriage as an oppressive institution have urged women not to marry. The inequalities of marriage, however, are reflections of the inequalities of the sexes in society. As Chris Harris states, ‘it is to be expected that however great the formal equality between the spouses, wives’ sense of inequality in marriage will persist as long as they cannot, for whatever reason, participate on equal terms with men in the labour-market' (Family and Industrial Society, 1983). Bernard goes further, suggesting that the metamorphosis of housewife to bread-winner sends tremors through every relationship. Dual-earning marriages are sowing the seeds of change. However, despite the dire statistics, marriage seems to be a rather resilient institution; perhaps, very gradually, the benefits for both husband and wife will become more balanced. See also ROLE, CONJUGAL; DOMESTIC DIVISION OF LABOUR; DUAL-CAREER MARRIAGE; FAMILY, SYMMETRICAL; HOUSEHOLD ALLOCATIVE SYSTEM.

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marriage, dual-career

See DUAL-CAREER MARRIAGE.

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marriage, dual-earner

See DUAL-CAREER MARRIAGE.

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marriage, group

See GROUP MARRIAGE.

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Marshall, Alfred

(1842–1924)
An English economist, author of the highly influential Principles of Economics (1890), and (among other things) contributor to the marginalist revolution (see NEO-CLASSICAL ECONOMICS) of the 1870s in economics. Marshall is principally of interest to sociologists because, in The Structure of Social Action (1937), Talcott Parsons reviews his work and claims to find therein a significant critique of the notion of marginal utility in an implicit theory of values, a residual category which falls logically outside the analytical scheme of economics, and provides a justification for the theoretical framework of sociology in general and Parsons's ‘action frame of reference’ in particular.

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Marshall, Thomas H.

(1893–1982)
An English sociologist and professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, he is best-known for his theory of citizenship. He argued (in Class, Citizenship and Social Development, 1963) that citizenship has expanded from legal rights (such as a fair trial) in the eighteenth century, to political rights (such as voting) in the nineteenth century, to welfare rights (such as social security payments) in the twentieth century. These rights were institutionalized in law courts, parliament, and the welfare state. He developed the notion that modern societies are ‘hyphenated societies’ in The Right to Welfare and Other Essays (1981), because they are organized around the conflicting principles of welfare, class, and democracy. He also wrote an influential study of social policy (Social Policy in the Twentieth Century, 1965). His concept of citizenship continues to be influential although it has been criticized. For example, he neglected the idea of industrial democracy as a further stage in the development of citizenship rights. His account is also said to be Anglocentric and evolutionist (see
, ‘Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship’, Sociology, 1987
). His ideas exerted a significant influence on the work of numerous distinguished sociologists, including (in the United States) Robert Merton, S. M. Lipset, and Reinhard Bendix; and (in Britain) Ralf Dahrendorf, A. H. Halsey, and David Lockwood.

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Martineau, Harriet

(1802–76)
Harriet Martineau was effectively the first woman sociologist. Martineau, who was English, wrote the first systematic treatise in sociology, carried out numerous cross-national comparative studies of social institutions, and was the first to translate Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive into English. A professional and prolific writer, she popularized much social-scientific information by presenting it in the form of novels. Feminist, Unitarian, critic, social scientist, and atheist, she matched her activism about the issues of slavery and the ‘Woman Question’ to her arguments for equal political, economic, and social rights for women. She undertook many pioneering methodological, theoretical, and substantive studies in the field that would now be called sociology: the analysis of women's rights, biography, disability, education, slavery, history, manufacturing, occupational health, and religion all came within her gamut.
One of her best-known works. Society in America (1837), compared American moral principles with observable social patterns, and outlined a yawning gap between rhetoric and reality. Martineau's How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838) is arguably the first systematic methodological treatise in sociology, in which she outlined a positivist solution to the dilemma of reconciling intersubjectively verifiable and observable data with unobservable theoretical entities. She tackled the classic methodological problems of bias, sampling, generalization, corroboration, and interviews, as well as outlining studies of major social institutions such as family, education, religion, markets, and culture. Long before Marx, Weber, or Durkheim, Martineau also studied and wrote about social class, suicide, forms of religions, domestic relations, delinquency, and the status of women. Her neglect by sociologists in subsequent years is therefore often cited as an illustration of the ways in which academic sociology has until more recently excluded women sociologists from its agenda.

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Marx, Karl

(1818–83)
A German social theorist, founder of revolutionary communism, and in sociology of historical materialism. Marx began studying law at the University of Bonn and completed his studies at the University of Berlin. Soon after arriving in Berlin, he joined an iconoclastic and bohemian intellectual group (who were to become known as the Young Hegelians), and took up philosophy. After completing his studies in 1841 he became a journalist on, and later the editor of, a radical bourgeois newspaper called the Rheinische Zeitung. Rather unluckily, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia happened to read an attack on himself that Marx had penned, and prevailed upon the Prussian government to close the paper down.
In 1843 a jobless Marx married his childhood sweetheart, Jenny von Westphalen, and moved to Paris. During the two years he spent in Paris, Marx met and quarrelled with many of the leading radicals of the time, including the anarchists Bakunin and Proudon, and the poet Heinrich Heine. More important for his own development were some of the unknown people he met, especially the socialist artisans and Friedrich Engels, the son of a German manufacturer who was already managing his father's factory at Manchester in England. Engels was to become Marx's lifelong friend, collaborator, and much-put-upon patron.
Marx's more or less simultaneous discovery of socialism and the works of the British political economists, principally Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and James Mill, enabled him to distinguish himself clearly from his Young Hegelian mentors and so lay the foundations for his own theoretical system. Of the three manuscripts he wrote during this period, only the two historically less significant ones were published. The Holy Family and The Poverty of Philosophy. Very likely, as would still be the case today, this was because these two were studies of better-known contemporaries rather than statements of an original position by an unknown author; this was not true of the third text, that which has become known as The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. These early publications did little to create a reputation for Marx. By contrast, the ideas outlined in the Manuscripts provided him with the intellectual sustenance necessary to sustain himself over a long career as an émigré activist and private scholar, a career marked by poverty and academic as well as political neglect (the interest of the likes of Tsar Nicholas proving to be short-lived). Moreover, although the Manuscripts were not published until the 1930s, their appearance even then was a major intellectual event and had a profound effect on Marxist scholarship, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. For some, they represented the key to a hitherto suppressed humanistic Marxist and socialist tradition that provided a basis for the criticism, not only of capitalism, but also of all ‘actually existing socialisms’, whether Stalinist or social-democratic. For others, they made explicit and so allowed the identification and removal of anachronistic, non-scientific traces in Marx's mature theory, and restored its explanatory potential.
The Manuscripts are most often celebrated for the passion with which the concept of alienation (the wage-worker's lack of control over the production and disposal of his or her product) is presented, but equally noteworthy is the general nature of the argument of which this concept is a part. This is because the argument represents an accessible as well as an extremely powerful instance of the mode of argumentation that has become known as critique: that is, exposing the often unjustified assumptions upon which intellectual positions commonly rest. In what still seems like a striking instance of lateral thinking, Marx chose to go about his ‘settling of accounts’ with his philosophical past by applying the method of critique to the aforementioned British political economists, and drawing conclusions about the validity of Hegel's theory of history. What he discovered was that both bodies of thought unproblematically assumed that inequality and all of its attendant sufferings follow from the accident of birth. Thus what Marx shows is that wherever one looks in the conceptual schema of the political economists what one finds is that it rests upon the unjustified assumption of the prior existence of private property.
Marx's own explanation for the existence of private property remains very underdeveloped in the Manuscripts, resting as they do on the concept of alienation. Instead, he is far more concerned to spell out what he sees as the consequences of the psychological and social estrangements that follow from this lack of control, and the resulting universal human need for revolution (see REBELLION, REVOLUTION). It was to take him a further twenty years to specify exactly why alienation occurred.
Marx made his first move towards this goal just one year after he wrote the Manuscripts, in the short text that has become known as The Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach was the ‘Young Hegelian’ to whom Marx owed most. The critique of his ideas was eventually to have a significance which extended far beyond Marx's own theoretical system. The thought that launched not just Marxism but structuralism more generally is most concisely crystallized in the sixth thesis, which states that ‘the essence of man is not an abstraction inherent in each particular individual. The real nature of man is the totality of social relations.’
Once Marx had in this way defined his starting-point, he moved rapidly on to the specification of the concrete nature of these relations. In The German Ideology of 1846, also unpublished at the time, he used the terms ‘productive forces’, division of labour, and ‘internal intercourse’ or ideology to conceptualize them, and on this basis was able to distinguish four different forms of society covering the whole span of human history: primitive communism, ancient or slave society, feudalism, and capitalism. He also began to explore the issue of how one form was succeeded by another. His suggestion was that, over time, contradictions gradually developed within each form of society because of the constraints imposed upon the development of the productive forces by the ruling ideologies of property. These contradictions resulted in struggles over the distribution of any surplus between the classes created in all societies (except communist ones) by the organization of the division of labour. Marx identified the principal classes of capitalist societies as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
The theory lying behind the concept of class was still incomplete since the theoretically critical varying modes of surplus appropriation had yet to be specified. Nevertheless, Marx was clearly extremely excited by the analytical possibilities opened up by his possession of this concept, and he spent the next ten years writing empirically orientated texts in which he sought to demonstrate them. Among the most important of these were The Communist Manifesto (1848), The Class Struggles in France (1850), and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte (1852).
It was not until 1857, and nine years after he had settled in London, that Marx returned seriously to his theoretical studies and the problem of what it was about the ways in which particular forces of production, divisions of labour, and ideologies of property were combined, which divided people into classes. The result of these labours were the eight hundred or so pages that have become known as The Grundrisse (1858). Because Marx was by now a reasonably well-known journalist, he at last found a publisher for his theoretical work. With great difficulty Marx managed to extract a slim volume entitled A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859) from The Grundrisse. Its publication was a resounding failure, and with the exception of the famous base versus superstructure metaphor contained in its Preface, the text itself appears to have been incomprehensible even to many of his closest friends. Marx and his publisher lost interest in publishing any more volumes of such material. This was unfortunate because it meant that it was to be several more years before Marx was forced to present the missing link in his economic theory, the labour theory of value, and to elaborate upon its consequences in a publishable form. This he finally did in 1867 when the first volume of Capital appeared. Two more volumes were published posthumously in 1885 and 1893. Chief amongst the theoretical deductions drawn from the labour theory of value in these later volumes was the theory of crisis he constructed around what he termed ‘the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’ and its ‘counteracting influences’.
In sum, then, Marx died having solved (for himself at least) the principal problem remaining in his economic theory; namely, why should the mode of appropriation of surplus that is specific to capitalism organize those engaged in production into two antagonistic classes? What he did not do was to specify what consequences, if any, his new-found theoretical precision might have for his understanding of the mode of surplus appropriation specific to the other social forms that he had identified. Nor did he enlarge on the more or less incidental remarks he had made throughout his career on such topics as the state, ideology, class, law, socialism, and (of all things) communism. One ironic consequence of this unevenness in the development of Marx's thought was that the humane concerns underlying his economic theory were forgotten by many later Marxists, as they often ruthlessly acted upon the extremely powerful, but very partial political and social insights produced by the same theory.
Of the countless biographies and expositions of his thought, David McLellan's Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (1973) still commends itself, for its clarity and attention to detail. Marxist sociology has, of course, been both controversial (sometimes self-consciously so) and heavily criticized. Much of this is discussed elsewhere in this dictionary (see especially those topics listed under the heading ‘Marxist sociology’). See also CAPITAL; MARXISM; MEANS OF PRODUCTION; MODE OF PRODUCTION; RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION.

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Marxism

The body of theory and diverse political practices and policies associated with (or justified by reference to) the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. For a substantial part of the twentieth century, and until the closing years of the millennium, Marxism was the alleged organizing principle of societies which contained more than one-third of the earth's population. Its influence on culture, history, sociology, politics, economics, and philosophy is explained and documented in
, Marx: The First Hundred Years (1983)
. However, one of the best treatments is still to be found in
, The Marxists (1962)
, which offers an especially useful introduction for students of sociology because it is suitably sceptical and avoids Marxist jargon.
In one way the political success of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in establishing itself as the principal voice of the German working-class movement in the 1880s was unfortunate for the further development of Marxism as an intellectual and sociological system. This success encouraged the premature systematization of the somewhat inchoate ideas of Marx and Engels around their economic core, so that they could better serve as the doctrinal basis for what was a rapidly developing international movement (the German-led Second International). Engels's own contribution to this process, as represented by his formulation of the doctrine of dialectical materialism, was probably its critical moment.
The one undoubted benefit arising from the economically determinist nature of this systematization was a political one; namely, the fusing within social-democratic thought of Marxism's revolutionary ideas with an acceptance of so-called bourgeois democracy. (Nothing could prevent the replacement of capitalism by socialism so there was no need to challenge the fundamental rules of the democratic system.) The person most often credited with this accomplishment was the SPD's leader Karl Kautsky. Almost as soon as Kautsky's ‘orthodox Marxism’ became the dominant current within his party, it was challenged from both the right (by Eduard Bernstein's revisionism), and the left (by Rosa Luxemburg's spontaneism). Bernstein criticized the retention of Marxism's revolutionism, whilst Luxemburg was opposed to the acceptance of parliamentarianism. Luxemburg's ideas briefly challenged the dominance of those of the orthodoxy, during the course of the ill-fated Spartacist Uprising of 1918, which took place in Berlin. But Bernstein's ideas eventually triumphed over the orthodoxy at the SPD's 1959 Bad Godesburg conference.
In terms of global politics, however, what was vastly more important than these German oppositional currents in determining the fate of both socialism and Marxism for most of the twentieth century was an oppositional current that arose in Russia in the early years of the century. This was the Bolshevism fashioned by Lenin, during the course of his struggle with the Russian equivalent of German orthodox Marxism, namely Menshevism. For the reasons set out with matchless clarity by Herbert Marcuse in his Soviet Marxism (1958), the establishment of Marxism-Leninism or Stalinism as the ruling ideology of the Soviet state led to the self-strangulation of the most influential body of Marxist thought as a creative and critical enterprise. The significance of this human and intellectual tragedy was then hugely magnified by the Comintern's (and latterly the Third or Communist International's) successful export of these ideas to much of the rest of the world, most notably to China.
By contrast, although it was of course powerfully influenced by the rise of Marxism-Leninism, Marxism retained much of its critical political and intellectual edge in the non-communist world. In the underdeveloped world it helped to stimulate and guide numerous national liberation movements–although there has been considerable dispute about precisely what might be the specifically Marxist elements in some of these movements (on which point see
's celebrated article on ‘Neo-Marxist Approaches to Development and Underdevelopment’, in , Sociology and Development, 1974
). In the developed world it has played an equally vital role in the emergence of the welfare state and latterly the new social movements. Here too, however, Marxism has been driven by internal disputes between different groups claiming to represent the authentic tradition established by Marx and Engels. (The most acrimonious of these debates has involved competing ‘structuralist’ and ‘humanist’ interpretations, and probably reached its nadir in the debate about the work of Althusser, as for example in E. P. Thompson's vitriolic attack on structural Marxism in his The Poverty of Theory, 1978).
In sum, despite Marxism's complicity in the crimes associated with Marxism-Leninism, with some irony it remains a highly significant element in the pursuit of knowledge and social justice in the post-communist world. It may even survive politically, in the form of the soviet as a mode of social organization, despite the statist interpretation these were given in the USSR. The concept of the soviet was inspired by an anarcho-libertarian strand in the Marxist tradition, which was suppressed and marginalized under communism, but survives in some quarters as a utopian ideal, suggesting the possibility of a society constructed on the basis of competitive, self-managing enterprises and ‘associative’, democratic political institutions. As practised in certain communes, for example, it offers an alternative to the various forms of market regimes. See also ANARCHISM; CRITICAL THEORY; HUMANISM; POST-MODERNISM; STRUCTURALISM.

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Marxist sociology

See ABSOLUTISM; ANALYTICAL MARXISM; ASIATIC MODE OF PRODUCTION; CAPITAL; CAPITALISM; CENTRE–PERIPHERY MODEL; COLLECTIVE CONSUMPTION; CONTRADICTORY CLASS LOCATION; CRIMINOLOGY, CRITICAL; CRITICAL THEORY; EDUCATION, SOCIOLOGY OF; LEISURE, SOCIOLOGICAL STUDIES OF; RACE, SOCIOLOGY OF; SCHOOL CLASS; STATE; STRUCTURALISM.

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masculinity

The characteristics of, and appropriate to, the male sex. Although feminists would argue that most sociology has been by men, about men, and for men, the problem of analysing men and masculinity as issues in their own right remained relatively neglected until (ironically) the advent of second-wave feminism itself. Thus, for example, studies of delinquency (such as A. Cohen's Delinquent Boys, 1955) or of social class (say,
, The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure, 1969
) were in effect the study of boys and men, but did not see gender itself as a concern. The issue of masculinity was largely ignored and gender served as a taken-for-granted variable.
There were some notable exceptions. Margaret Mead's comparative work suggested the cultural basis for, and relativity of, masculinity and femininity (a finding subsequently challenged by Mead's critics). Likewise, from the perspective of functionalism and role theory, Talcott Parsons described the sex roles of men and women as instrumental and expressive respectively. Parsons and his colleagues argued that such roles were internalized by young children and led to a neat division of labour in adult life, with men and women becoming well integrated into the social system, hence enabling it to function smoothly. In psychology, too, the idea of the male role was present, often coupled with the view that much of masculinity was a defence against an identity crisis, serving to mask men's essential vulnerability (see, for example,
's The Myth of Masculinity, 1981
).
Nevertheless, it was not until the 1970s that the topic of masculinity as such started to be more extensively researched, largely as an offshoot of the women's movement, proponents of which suggested that the problem of patriarchy was in fact ‘the problem of men’. Pioneering studies of gender roles and masculinity were conducted by Mirra Komarovsky, examining the functional significance and cultural contradictions of sex roles (see her
Blue Collar Marriage, 1964, and Dilemmas of Masculinity, 1976
). Subsequently, with the development of the so-called Men's Movement, studies of masculinity began to appear in greater numbers. Andrew Tolson (The Limits of Masculinity, 1976) attempted to demonstrate that masculinity had to be located within a wider social framework of class, education, work, and age. Masculinity, like femininity, was far from a uniform cultural product, but itself assumed many dimensions. The centrality of seeing masculinity not as an essence but as a product of cultural and historical forces became paramount. By the 1980s, Men's Studies had become established as a specialist area of inquiry replete with its own internal schisms, theoretical debates, differing emphases, and divergent politics (see, for example,
, ‘Towards a New Theory of Masculinity’, Theory and Society, 1985, or , Masculinity and Power, 1989
).
Whilst some sociologists have continued to use and develop traditional role theory, others have drawn from the work of feminist scholars and gay and lesbian studies, and have highlighted the prominence of patriarchy, heterosexism, and power for the analysis of masculinity. In Robert Connell's work, for example, there has been an increasing emphasis not on masculinity per se but on gender relations organized largely through power (see his
Gender and Power, 1987
).
In 1990 Kenneth Clatterbaugh (Contemporary Perspectives on Masculinity) reviewed the whole field, and suggested there were several distinct theoretical stances with respect to the sociological issue of masculinity. The first continued a conservative line of thought, seeing masculinity as universal, unchangeable, and rooted largely in biology. Pro-feminist positions, by contrast, generally followed the analyses laid down by feminist theory, both in its liberal and radical versions. Third, there were the advocates of Men's Rights, who argued that men also were the victims of patriarchy and sexism. Fourth, a newly emerging position suggested the need for men to regain their spiritual roots, an argument exemplified in Robert Bly's Iron John (1991). Finally there were a range of arguments which linked the study of men with class, race, and gay issues. See also CULTURE AND PERSONALITY SCHOOL.

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Maslow, Abraham H.

(1908–70)
An American psychologist who developed a theory of self-actualization from his observations of well-functioning individuals. He is often seen as the leading proponent of the so-called Third Force in psychology—emphasizing humanism and existentialism over behaviourism and Freudianism. See also NEEDS, HIERARCHY OF.

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mass communication

See COMMUNICATION; MASS MEDIA, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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mass culture

See POPULAR CULTURE.

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mass hysteria

A psycho-social phenomenon whereby people in large groups behave in a similar and often emotional manner. Often used (somewhat ethnocentrically) in trans-cultural psychiatry, together with the term collective epidemics, in reference to the pressure to conform to group norms in the societies of the Third World.

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mass media, sociology of

A medium is a means of communication such as print, radio, or television. The mass media are defined as large-scale organizations which use one or more of these technologies to communicate with large numbers of people (‘mass communications’). Dependent upon innovations in the electronics and chemicals industries, the period between 1860 and 1930 was a formative moment for the mass media. These years saw the development and introduction of still photography, moving photography (cinema), cable telegraphy, wireless telegraphy, the phonograph, the telephone, radio, and television. These new technologies formed part of the wider transformation in popular culture during this period and typified the new more intensive capitalization of the leisure industries and their associated concern to address mass audiences.
As defined by C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite (1956), the mass media have two important sociological characteristics: first, very few people can communicate to a great number; and, second, the audience has no effective way of answering back. Mass communication is by definition a one-way process. Media organizations are bureaucratic and (except in societies where all media are state-controlled) corporate in nature. Media output is regulated by governments everywhere, but the restrictions vary from very light advisory regulation (for example no cigarette advertising or nudity on TV), to the most comprehensive forms of censorship in totalitarian societies.
Mass media dominate the mental life of modern societies, and therefore are of intense interest to sociologists. From the earliest studies in the 1930s, the main concern was with the power implicit in new media technologies, especially radio and television. Adolf Hitler's successful use of radio for propaganda was an object lesson in the possible dangers. The concept of mass society added force to the idea that the electronic media might create an Orwellian situation of mind control, with passive masses dominated by a tiny élite of communicators.
Early studies by Harold Lasswell, Paul Lazarsfeld, and others seemed to show that media effects were indeed direct and powerful–the so-called ‘hypodermic’ model of influence. But more intensive research revealed that mass communications are mediated in complex ways, and that their effects on the audience depend on factors such as class, social context, values, beliefs, emotional state, and even the time of day.
Media research has expanded enormously since the 1960s, with most attention going to television as the most pervasive medium (
's Mass Communication Theory, 1983
, is an excellent introduction and overview). Four distinct areas of research can be distinguished. First, media content studies, concerned with the cultural quality of media output, or with specific biases and effects such as stereotyping or the promotion of anti-social behaviour and violence, especially on children's television. Second, patterns of ownership and control, the integration of more and more media into a few large corporations, cross-media ownership, and the increasing commercialization of programming. Third, ideological influences of the media in promoting a total pattern of life and thought. Fourth, the impact of electronic media on democratic politics via agenda-setting, the distortion and reduction of news, deflecting public attention from social problems, and the use of television advertising in political campaigns.
Some critics have suggested an even more fundamental influence of television. Since the first modern newspapers were published in the early seventeenth century, mass media have been linked to the spread of literacy and education. Neil Postman (in Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985) is among those who have argued that the electronic and visual media have reversed the trend towards greater literacy and understanding, and are in the process of destroying the foundations of traditional education.
The national organization of the press and broadcasting (radio and television) has been a distinctive feature of these mass media throughout this century. However, a number of writers have argued that this organization of the mass media has increasingly been challenged, especially since the 1960s. Most clearly in relation to television broadcasting–the pre-eminent medium of the post-war years in Europe, America, and a good deal of Asia–it is argued that we live in a transitional period. In Britain, this is characterized as a movement from an era dominated by a conception of public-service broadcasting based upon channel scarcity, a national service, and a particular set of communication technologies (including terrestrial broadcasting), to a new age of global media corporations, new technologies, and more segmented (as opposed to mass) audiences. Government policy in Britain has been central to this process. A neo-liberal concern to open up media markets to greater competition has challenged public-service notions of broadcasting as dealing in social goods. This has been accompanied by a shift away from seeing the audience of radio and TV as citizens to seeing them as consumers being offered choice. Opening up media markets has primarily offered new opportunities to emerging global media organizations such as Time Warner, Sony, and News Corporation. These corporations have been concerned to detach audio-visual markets from the space of national cultures. New generic channels (dedicated to sport or news or movies) have spearheaded the new service, carried along new delivery systems (satellite, cable and telephone lines), funded by new forms of payment (subscription or pay-per-view).
Underpinning these developments has been not only the tighter integration of the media sector, but also the convergence of entertainment and information businesses with the telecommunications industry. Driving this process of convergence has been a concern to reap the rewards of media synergy. It has been argued that there are four dimensions to this process (see
, Cultures of Production/Production of Culture, 1997
). The first concerns ‘synergies of software’. This refers to the simultaneous presentation and promotion of a performer or author across a range of media, entertainment products, and leisure goods. In practice this means linking together in a highly systematic way discrete forms such as audio recordings, still images in books or magazines, T-shirts, advertising, film, TV broadcasts, home video, and computer games. The second form of synergy refers to the integration of software and hardware. The electrical goods manufacturer Sony's decision to buy CBS Records and its listing and back catalogue of artists (‘software’) represents one example of this phenomenon. The third form of synergy concerns the convergence of previously distinct hardware components and is the result of new micro-processing systems and digital technology. Popularly known as ‘multi-media’, this enables still and moving photos, sound, and text to share the same (digital) format. Finally, new media synergy is possible through new technologies of distribution. The key development here is the fibre optic cable, which can deliver media products and services such as movies or banking along its length. In doing so it lays the basis for the so-called information super-highway.
Discussions concerning the social and cultural implications of this reconfiguring media landscape have focused around the issues of democracy, access, and the creation of new public spheres. Positively, developments such as pay-per-view and subscription are seen to introduce an element of consumer responsiveness into programming, whilst the more developed forms of interactivity associated with video, digitalization, and the Internet allow consumers to organize their own way through particular media experiences. The Internet is also seen to offer positive possibilities for groups previously marginal to the mass media to organize themselves and establish a space of communication and identity.
In a more negative vein, however, critics have pointed to the increasing gap between the so-called ‘information rich’ and the so-called ‘information poor’ in the new media universe. Access to the new technologies looms large in this argument, and with it questions of social marginalization, where groups are denied opportunities to express themselves via these new means of representation. What is striking here is the enormous concentration of ownership across media production, reproduction, and distribution. In this sense, although the new media may represent greater social and cultural diversity in their range of products, this is not reflected in the social make-up of the media corporations themselves.

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Mass Observation

An independent social research organization created in 1937 in Britain, which collected data and published reports until 1949, when it became a conventional market-research company. It organized the world's largest participant observation study of a society by its members through a national panel of volunteers who kept diaries and recorded their social observations in response to regular directives (see, for example,
, Speak for Yourself: A Mass-Observation Anthology, 1984
).

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mass society

The modern image of mass society, although not the label, begins with the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States in the 1830s in search of the secret of democracy. He was struck by the similarity of ideas and values among the people, and speculated that such a society might fall victim to a mass or herd mentality which he called ‘the tyranny of the majority’. Tocqueville's classic description of mass society has echoed through the whole subsequent history of social theory: ‘…an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest. His children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them but he sees them not; he touches them but he feels them not.’
Nineteenth-century sociologists shared many of de Tocqueville's concerns about the emerging culture of industrial societies. Émile Durkheim diagnosed anomie in the new order, and Max Weber focused on the dead hand of bureaucracy. Ferdinand Tönnies, in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), reflected unfavourably on the crowded, urban, mass societies then emerging in Europe.
These ideas were largely ignored or dismissed as élitist nostalgia until the 1950s, when sociologists and political scientists began to write about the immediate past history of totalitarianism in Europe and the Soviet Union. In The Politics of Mass Society (1959), William Kornhauser argued that populations cut adrift from stable communities, and having uniform and fluid values, would be highly vulnerable to the appeals of totalitarian mass movements.
Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, and others of the Frankfurt School (see CRITICAL THEORY) focused their attention on the narrowly ideological nature of ‘mass culture’, and a whole critical literature developed around this perspective. Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man (1964) developed this line of argument to its fullest extent, asserting the absolute hegemony of mass culture and the impossibility of social change. Salvador Giner provided a comprehensive summary of both conservative and radical theories in his 1976 book Mass Society.
The term mass society has fallen out of fashion in sociology because of its essential vagueness and its value-laden character. But social theorists as various as Krishan Kumar, Christopher Lasch, Peter Berger, and Robert Bellah continue to explore the social relationships and cultural meanings created within large-scale, highly institutionalized societies which lack traditional community ties.

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master status

Each individual occupies a number of status positions, some ascribed (such as sex or race), and some achieved (such as educational level or occupation). The master status of an individual is one which, in most or all social situations, will overpower or dominate all other statuses. The term was coined by American sociologist Everett Hughes in the 1940s, with special reference to race. Occupation, race, and sex may all function as master statuses in Western societies, and can produce powerful contradictions and social dilemmas when important status positions contradict perceived roles and stereotypes–for example the female astronaut, or the African-American surgeon. In these situations, social actors must make status decisions, which may take the form of denial (the astronaut labelled ‘unnatural’ or the physician as ‘exceptional’); or responses may take the form of exclusion, or the acceptance of a new master status. Master status influences every other aspect of life, including personal identity. Since status is a social label and not a personal choice, the individual has little control over his or her master status in any given social interaction.

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material culture

See CULTURE, ADAPTIVE AND MATERIAL.

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material justice

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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materialism

In sociology and related disciplines, the word materialism has three quite distinct meanings which are, however, to some extent interconnected, and very commonly confused with each other. The first meaning is drawn from popular moral or political controversy, according to which materialism refers to a prevailing pattern of desire for mere sensory enjoyments, material possessions or physical comfort, at the expense of any higher moral or spiritual values or concerns. This usage is generally pejorative.
The second meaning is to designate a range of metaphysical positions (philosophical views about the fundamental nature of reality). Though recognizably materialist metaphysical positions were advocated as early as the fifth century BCE in Greece, promulgation of materialism as a modern world-view dates from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries CE in Europe. Whereas in classical times matter had been opposed to form, the dominant early modern contrast was between matter and spirit or mind. Descartes's metaphysics reduced all existence to two fundamental substances: matter, characterized by extension, the substance of bodily existence; and mind, not spatially located, and characterized by thought. The contemporary advances in the science of mechanics provided the basis for early modern philosophical accounts of matter, and also seemed to hold out the promise of ultimately accounting for all phenomena in mechanical terms. The early chapters of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan are a remarkable early example of such a materialist attempt (contra Descartes) to account for human mental operations such as perception, memory, volition, the emotions, foresight, reasoning, and so on, in terms of the concepts of mechanics.
In a period during which clerical authority and political power were closely intertwined, such doctrines were bound to be seen as radical and subversive in their implications. In the nineteenth century socialist and communist doctrines were associated with materialism, by advocates and opponents alike. However, with changes in science and especially with the development of the life-sciences, the content of materialist doctrines also shifted. Organic (as distinct from mechanical) metaphors became more prominent, and processes of development and historicity entered into philosophical representations of the material world. These features were particularly evident in the mid-nineteenth century materialist revolt against the German idealist tradition, led by Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels.
These thinkers rejected both idealism and the narrower reductive forms of materialism which had been based on mechanics, and which had been incapable of taking full account of sensuous existence, of the emergence of conscious and active human subjects. These phenomena were, however, to be understood not by any concession to idealism; but, rather, by taking advantage of the increasingly complex and sophisticated account of matter itself, as made available by ever-advancing scientific knowledge. Engels later came to systematize the principles of this philosophical approach under the title dialectical materialism.
The third meaning of materialism in familiar sociological usage is also associated with Marx and Engels. In this meaning, materialism asserts the primacy of need-meeting interaction with the natural environment both to the understanding of human social structures and patterns of conflict, and also to long-run sequences of historical change. Though there is an obvious affinity between this doctrine and metaphysical materialism, they are quite logically independent of one another. The later writings of Marx and Engels contain attempts to define and classify the basic variant forms of human society in terms of the social organization of the activities of material production, distribution and consumption. The modes of production thus distinguished were held to have their own distinctive patterns of social dominance, subordination, and conflict, as well as definite tendencies for historical change, and possible transition to new forms. Cultural forms, ways of thinking, and political institutions were held to be characteristic of each mode.
This approach to social explanation, so-called ‘historical materialism’, is often criticized for its over-emphasis on economic life at the expense of political or cultural processes. Arguably, however, both Marx and Engels distanced themselves from such economic determinist or reductionist interpretations of their work. Partly this is a matter of the non-correspondence between their concept of ‘mode of production’, on the one hand, and the set of activities conventionally labelled ‘economic’, on the other. Also, however, even in societies where there are institutional separations between economic and political, artistic, and other practices, historical materialism asserts that such non-economic activities have their own relative autonomy within a range of sustainable possibilities whose limits are set by the economic structure. One of the most challenging problems addressed by twentieth-century Marxists has been to provide more rigorous and empirically defensible accounts of these relationships. It is arguable that historical materialism, with its emphasis on need-meeting interactions with nature, is only beginning to reveal its full potential towards the close of the twentieth century, as social scientists increasingly turn their attention to environmental problems.

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materialism, dialectical

See DIALECTIC.

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maternal deprivation

John Bowlby's term for the absence of the maternal care considered necessary for later mental health. Subsequent research sought to specify child-care requirements–such as love, attachment, and stimulation–and the respective effects of their lack or distortion. Feminists denounce the idea for its ideological role in subordinating women to motherhood; others attack its imprecision.

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maternal mortality rate

See MORTALITY RATE.

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mathematical sociology

Mathematical sociology uses mathematics (including logic and information science) to formalize theoretical propositions and model empirical social processes. Examples include the algebraic formalization of measurement theory; use of graph theory and finite mathematics in sociometry, social network analysis, and studies of kinship; and the extensive use of probabilistic Markov chains for modelling social mobility and stratification. The specialist Journal of Mathematical Sociology covers the field.
The work of the American sociologist Leo A. Goodman is typical of this approach. Goodman, who has substantive interests in demography, social mobility, and stratification generally, has pioneered the use of loglinear and latent structure techniques in the analysis of contingency tables. Analysing Quantitative/Categorical Data (1978), a collection of ten articles published between 1970 and 1975, is a representative collection of his writings. For a more recent example see
The Analysis of Cross-Classification Having Ordered Categories (1984)
. See also NEO-POSITIVISM.

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matriarchy

There are two uses of the term matriarchy. The first is identical to common usage, denoting a type of social organization in which mothers head families, and descent may be reckoned through them. The occurrence may be idiosyncratic rather than the basis of social structure.
The second usage, which is speculative and based in evolutionary theories, refers to a society in which mothers hold the main power positions. This theory was popular in the nineteenth century; it was, for example, a vital ingredient in Friedrich Engels's Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Engels argued that early hunter-gatherer societies, in which property rights did not exist, would have been ruled by women because of their reproductive powers. However, once land and goods became private property, in the development of sedentary agriculture or pastoralism, it became important for men to ensure the legitimacy of their offspring in order to transfer wealth by descent. Thus arose the system of patriarchy, in which men began to control the reproductive power of women, who lost the political power they had enjoyed under matriarchy.
Like all evolutionary theories the claim that human prehistory was characterized by a shift from mother-right to father-right fell out of favour in the early twentieth century. Despite the attractiveness of this speculation for feminist theory, there is no accredited evidence from either archaeology or anthropology for the existence of matriarchy in this second sense, at any time in history or in any human society.

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matrilineal

Matrilineages are unilineal descent groups that claim real or fictive kinship through maternal ties to a common ancestress through known genealogical links. In matrilineal systems, inheritance is traced from the maternal uncle (mother's brother) to the nephew (mother's son). The tendency is to preserve the economic and political identity of the sibling group. The means by which this is ensured entail control of women's labour, sexuality, and reproductive powers, by distributing them between husbands and brothers. Matriliny should thus never be considered as a system which somehow empowers women–and should not be confused with matriarchy.

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Mauss, Marcel

(1872–1950)
Originally trained as a philosopher at the Universities of Paris and Bordeaux, Mauss spent his professional life as a researcher, despite never acquiring a doctorate. With his uncle, Émile Durkheim, and in the company of an impressive group of sociologists, anthropologists and historians that included Henri Hubert and Robert Hertz, he founded the influential journal Année sociologique, in which most of the fundamental ideas of social anthropology were first explored. Mauss's influence on social anthropology cannot be overstated. Through exploring the nature of gift relationships (The Gift, 1925) he exposed the principles of reciprocity that are unchallenged in either functionalist or structuralist anthropology. Indeed, it can be argued that the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss would be unthinkable without its basis in the work of Mauss, not only with respect to reciprocity but also classification (see
, Primitive Classification, 1903
). The sociologies of exchange relations and belief systems have both been influenced by Mauss's ideas. However, despite the pathbreaking nature of his work, Mauss tended to write essays and critiques rather than books, often in collaboration with others of the Année sociologique group, and among sociologists his work has probably not received either the attention or credit that it rightly deserves. See also EXCHANGE THEORY.

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Mayo, Elton

(1880–1949)
Founder of the Human Relations Movement. He criticized the so-called rabble hypothesis that social order requires hierarchical control. Instead, co-operation is seen as an inherent and necessary condition for society, but is obstructed by slow adaptation to technical change–which management can resolve by fostering appropriate social skills in the workforce.

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Mead, George Herbert

(1863–1931)
A leading American pragmatist, philosopher of the Chicago School, and one of the founders of the sociological tradition that came to be known as symbolic interactionism after his death. His thought is often classified as social behaviourism.
Mead's contribution is most frequently seen as centring upon the development of a theory of Mind, Self and Society, the title of his posthumously published book (in 1934). In this work, he laid the foundations for a sociological social psychology, emphasizing the following: an analysis of experience located firmly within society; the importance of language, symbols, and communication in human group life; the ways in which our words and gestures bring forth responses in others through a process of role-taking; the reflective and reflexive nature of the self; and the centrality of the ‘act’.
But Mead's work went well beyond this. Indeed, as John Baldwin has argued in his book George Herbert Mead (1986), Mead provided a much wider ‘unifying theory’ for sociology, which anticipated, at one level, developments in sociobiology, and at another, broad historical transformations. Uniting all this was his unswerving commitment to the role of science in human affairs. ‘The scientific method’, he wrote, ‘is the method of social progress.’
Mead fostered a position sometimes designated ‘objective relativism’: he often refers to the ‘objective reality of perspectives’. There are many accounts of reality possible, depending upon whose standpoint is taken. History, for example, is always an account of the past from some person's present. A theory of the social construction of time was another major aspect of Mead's work.
When Mead died he had not published a unified statement of his ideas. His four posthumous books are edited versions of his lecture notes and of notes recorded by his students. This gives much of his written work an unsatisfyingly incomplete and piecemeal character. Despite this, his influence on modern sociology has been enormous. For a selection of his writings see
, George Herbert Mead on Social Psychology (1964); and for a valuable bibliography, see , ‘George Herbert Mead: A Bibliography of the Secondary Literature’ in Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 1986
. See also REFERENCE GROUP.

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Mead, Margaret

(1901–78)
An American cultural anthropologist and student of Ruth Benedict. She argued that personality patterns were culturally rather than biologically determined. Her celebrated Coming of Age in Samoa (1928) has been attacked by sociobiologists. It was based on rather insubstantial fieldwork and could be reassessed for reasons which do not discredit her discipline. She pioneered a critical study of gender in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). Her many field trips included the South Pacific Islands, New Guinea, and Bali, and are vividly described in the autobiographical Blackberry Winter (1972). She popularized social anthropology, partly by challenging ethnocentrism in the dominant ideology of the United States. She was marginalized by what she saw as the male world of academia, and remained attached to New York City's American Museum of Natural History, moving from assistant to curator. See also CULTURE AND PERSONALITY SCHOOL.

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mean

See CENTRAL TENDENCY (MEASURES OF).

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meaning, meaningful action

It would be difficult to imagine any sociological study which did not, implicitly or explicitly, look at how people think about the social world and social relationships–in other words at the meanings that the social has for individuals and groups. Indeed, some schools of thought argue that meaning is the only object for sociology, as against those which look for causal explanations by reference to, for example, social structures.
The concept of meaningful action is most closely associated with Max Weber, who distinguishes it from behaviour; that is, from merely physical movement to which the actor does not attach a meaning (for example blinking). Meaningful social action, by contrast, is action directed towards others and to which we can attach a subjective meaning. In this sense, praying alone in a church is meaningful action, as is participating in a church service. Most later theorists accept that these distinctions cannot easily be maintained and take the view that attaching a meaning to something (‘mere behaviour’) is itself an action; and, moreover, a social action because it draws on a socially constructed and accepted language. See also ACTION THEORY; INTERPRETATION.

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means of production

The means that are used to produce goods and services, including the social relations between workers, technology, and other resources used. The term is prominent in Marxist theory, since Marx's characterization of capitalism hinges on the distinction between those who own the means of production (capitalists), and those who have nothing to sell but their own labour-power (proletarians).

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means-testing

See SELECTIVE VERSUS UNIVERSAL BENEFITS.

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measurement

Measurement raises four main issues for the sociologist: representation (how many properties of the empirical world can best be modelled?); uniqueness (how unique are the resulting measurement numbers?); appropriate statistics (what indices may legitimately be used to summarize the measures?); and meaningfulness (what do the measurement numbers signify?).
Measurement itself is concerned with the exact relationship between the ‘Empirical Relational System’ and the ‘Formal (or Numerical) Relational System’ chosen to represent it. Thus, a strict status relationship between individuals or positions can be shown to have the same properties as the operators ‘>, <’ (greater than, less than) in the set of numbers, and may be thus represented. Most social and psychological attributes do not strictly have numerical properties, and so are often termed ‘qualitative’ or ‘non-metric’ variables, whereas properties such as wealth or (arguably) measured intelligence or cardinal utility are termed quantitative or metric.
For any given domain of interest, a measurement representation or model states how empirical data are to be interpreted formally; for example, a judgement that x is preferred to y may be interpreted as saying that x is less distant from my ideal point than is y. Once represented numerically, uniqueness issues arise. S. S. Stevens (among others) postulates a hierarchy of levels of measurement of increasing complexity, defined in terms of what transformations can be made to the original measurement numbers, whilst keeping the properties they represent (see, for example, his essay
‘On the Theory of Scales of Measurement’, Science, 1946
). The simplest version distinguishes four such levels. At the nominal level, things are categorized and labelled (or numbered), so that each belongs to one and only one category (for example, male = 0, female = 1). Any one-to-one re-assignment of numbers preserves information about a categorization. At the level of ordinal measurement, the categories also have a (strict) order (such as a perfect Guttman scale), and any order-preserving transformation is legitimate. Interval-level measurement requires that equal differences between the objects correspond to equal intervals on the scale (as in temperature) and that any linear transformation preserves the differences. At the ratio level, the ratio of one distance to another is preserved, as in moving from (say) miles to kilometres.

(‘A Theory of Psychological Scaling’, Engineering Research Institute Bulletin, 1946)
has shown that there are many other such scales (such as partial orderings) which are useful in the social sciences, and urges keeping to lower levels, rather than quantifying by fiat. Procedures for transforming data into higher levels of measurement are known as ‘scaling’ or ‘quantification’. If the representation can be made on a straight line it is unidimensional scaling (as in Guttman and Likert scales), but if it needs two or more dimensions it is multidimensional scaling.
Most textbooks on survey research explain the different levels of measurement, with examples, and describe the statistics and techniques that are appropriate to the different levels (see, for example,
, Surveys in Social Research, 1985, 1991
).

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measurement by fiat

Procedures for quantification of data which make no claim to be representational measurement, but rather assign numbers on the basis of arbitrary units, face validity, or intuition. This often happens when sociologists refer to a concept which seems on commonsense or a priori grounds to be important, but which they do not know how to measure directly, so that a measure is then imposed on the concept arbitrarily.
According to Warren Torgerson (Theory and Method of Scaling, 1958), this form of measurement ‘depends on presumed relationships between observations and concepts of interest. Included in this category are the indices and indicants so often used in the behavioural sciences’. Thus, for example, we might be interested in the concept of socio-economic status, and so decide to measure perceptions of occupational prestige, which we presume to be related to it; or, similarly, we may be interested in the concept of ‘political awareness’ and decide to measure it by scaling such attributes as the ability to name prominent politicians, or propensity to vote at national and local elections. Rating scales are another obvious example of what is the most common form of measurement in the social sciences.
References to, or accusations of, measurement by fiat usually occur in the context of wider philosophical discussions of the epistemological basis of the social sciences. Radical critics of so-called positivist approaches are prone to use the term freely–as, for example, in the ethnomethodological critique of sociological theories and methods offered by Aaron Cicourel (Method and Measurement in Sociology, 1964).

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measurement error

See CODING; ERROR (SAMPLING AND NON-SAMPLING).

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measurement levels

See MEASUREMENT.

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measures of dispersion

See VARIATION (STATISTICAL).

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measures of similarity and dissimilarity

See ASSOCIATION COEFFICIENTS.

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mechanical management systems

See CONTINGENCY THEORY.

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mechanical solidarity

See DIVISION OF LABOUR; SOCIAL ORDER.

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media

See MASS MEDIA, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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median

See CENTRAL TENDENCY (MEASURES OF).

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medical model

An imprecise and widely used term. The characteristics of the medical model are rarely specified. The term sometimes refers to the framework of assumptions underpinning the relationship between doctor and patient. Erving Goffman, in Asylums (1961), viewed the medical model as a particular version of a more general ‘tinkering services’ model that assumes a technically expert server and an individual client with an object in need of repair. In medicine the object is the body, and Goffman explored the special characteristics of this ‘medical servicing’ relationship.
More commonly, the term medical model refers to medicine's ideas and assumptions about the nature of illness, notably its natural scientific framework and its focus on physical causes and physical treatments. As such the term is frequently invoked in the context of ideological and political debates and inter-professional rivalries in which the relevance of this particular set of ideas is called into question. One problem with the term is that it suggests a uniformity of medical ideas about causation and treatment that does not fit the empirical diversity very well, since doctors do not focus exclusively on physical factors, even in relation to physical illness. For this reason some prefer the term ‘bio-medical model’, since it clearly indicates the focus on the biological, and allows that there are other medical models. An alternative model of health and illness, employed by some doctors but especially favoured in nursing circles for its greater breadth, is a ‘bio-psycho-social model’ encompassing the biological, psychological, and social aspects. However, attempts to integrate these three terrains present considerable problems, and the term is arguably more rhetoric than reality.

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medical sociology

See MEDICINE, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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medicalization

A concept made fashionable by Ivan Illich and Michel Foucault, the term commonly denotes the spread of the medical profession's activities, such as their increasing involvement in the processes of birth and dying. Greater power is usually assumed to follow increased pervasiveness. For that reason, the term may also be used to imply expansionist, imperialist strategies.

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medicine, sociology of

A field of sociology that focuses on medicine as a set of ideas and practices. However, exact delineation of the field is problematic. In the first place, there is disquiet about identifying a field of sociology in terms of its relation to another profession. This issue has often been raised by drawing a contrast between sociology in medicine and the sociology of medicine. Sociology in medicine, it is argued, works within the constraints and parameters of medicine, accepting its objectives and priorities. Sociology of medicine adopts a more detached, critical approach, in which the sociological enterprise has priority over the medical. According to this argument, the sociology of medicine is consequently a legitimate field of sociology, whereas sociology in medicine is not. However in both cases the field is still defined in relation to medicine. Other writers prefer a broader designation of the territory, such as the sociology of healing or of healers, or the sociology of health-care systems, in order to make it clear that doctors are not the only group involved in healing or the only components of the health-care system. There are a range of health carers such as nurses and physiotherapists, as well as informal carers, whose work needs to be examined and should not be subsumed under the umbrella of medicine. A further problem with the delineation of the field concerns the relation of the sociology of medicine to the sociology of health and illness. Many would argue that the sociology of medicine necessarily embraces the sociological study of health and illness, since these are the core of medicine's concern; others would argue that the focus should be rather narrower and concentrate on medicine as a profession, and that the sociology of health and illness should be treated as a separate field of study.
Notwithstanding these territorial difficulties, the sociology of medicine, broadly defined, has flourished since the 1950s. Although its roots lie in part in the social medicine of the inter-war years and earlier, its sociological impetus came primarily from Talcott Parsons's influential work on the medical profession and the sick role, which put medicine and illness into the mainstream of sociology.
Leaving aside the questions concerning health and illness, the sociology of medicine in its narrower definition focuses on two major issues. A first and dominant concern is to analyse the nature, extent, and origins of the power of the medical profession, and the relation of the medical profession to other allied professions. The work of Eliot Freidson in The Profession of Medicine (1971), with his emphasis on autonomy as the defining feature of a profession, exemplifies this tradition. It has been further developed by a number of feminist writers, such as Ann Oakley, who have examined the exclusionary tactics deployed by the medical profession in the medicalization (a term particularly associated with Ivan Illich's study Medical Nemesis, 1976) of events such as childbirth–a medicalization that not only excludes the female midwife but also increases the powerlessness of women who are giving birth.
Doctor-patient relationships constitute the second major focus of the sociology of medicine, with work ranging from in-depth studies of doctor-patient interactions, including analyses of tape-recorded doctor-patient exchanges, to large-scale surveys of doctor-patient satisfaction, the time spent with patients, and so forth. The care of the dying has received especial attention, as has the socialization of medical students. Ruth Laub Coser's Life in the Ward (1962) illustrates this tradition.
However, whilst these two areas will no doubt remain at the core of the sociology of medicine, it seems likely that the activities of the medical profession will be increasingly located within the context of the study of other health workers and the wider health-care system (see
, Ideas about Illness: An Intellectual and Political History of Medical Sociology, 1989). 's Medical Sociology (1983)
is one of the many textbooks dealing with this specialism.

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megalopolis

In ancient Greek, a large planned town. Used by Lewis Mumford (The Culture of Cities, 1940) to refer to a great metropolis growing uncontrollably, and now to denote a very large, functionally interconnected system of cities and suburbs. See also CONURBATION; METROPOLITAN STATISTICAL AREA.

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melting-pot

The idea that societies formed by immigrants from many different cultures, religions, and ethnic groups, will produce new hybrid social and cultural forms. The notion comes from the pot in which metals are melted at great heat, sometimes melding together into new compounds, with greater strength and other combined advantages. See also ASSIMILATION.

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members' methods

A term used by ethnomethodologists to refer to the methods by which people make sense of activities to themselves.

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membership group

See REFERENCE GROUP.

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mental illness

A disputed concept (see for example the entries elsewhere in this dictionary on Laing and anti-psychiatry) founded on the everyday contrast between mind and body which, when applied to illness, generates an opposition between two contrasting types of illness–mental and physical. Mental illnesses are illnesses characterized by the presence of mental pathology: that is, disturbances of mental functioning, analogous to disturbances of bodily functioning. Like physical illness the concept is, therefore, fundamentally evaluative and linked to issues of social control and regulation. The disturbances of thought and feeling that characterize mental illness, such as delusions, hallucinations, excessive elation, or depression, are often associated with behaviour that is considered bizarre, awkward, disruptive, or disturbing. It is this disturbed and disruptive behaviour that, more than anything else, leads to mental illness being treated as a very distinctive form of illness, requiring special services and attention. What seems to be particularly problematic within society is the apparent irrationality and loss of reason that mental pathology involves. Mind and reason are the distinctive hallmarks of human beings, and their loss (full or partial), if not taken to be a sign of supernatural powers, is generally viewed as profoundly disturbing and threatening. Mental illness is therefore usually more stigmatizing than other forms of illness (obvious exceptions are diseases such as AIDS, other sexually transmitted diseases, and to a lesser extent cancer).
Historically, the medical concept of mental illness has its basis in lay judgements of mental states, which were embodied in notions such as insanity and lunacy–real madness–as well as in concepts such as ‘troubled in mind’, ‘mopish’, and ‘distracted’, which encompassed the less severe forms of psychological disturbance. Then as now these terms were applied to persons whose behaviour seemed in some way inexplicable or irrational. Deviant or delinquent it might be, but it could not be understood as readily as the usual forms of delinquency, often because it involved a rejection of what was highly valued in society. Present-day medical conceptions of mental illness are still intimately linked to lay judgements of what is rational, reasonable, and appropriate. However, psychiatry has embraced and transformed the everyday lexicons, classifying and listing a diverse set of mental illnesses. These range from conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, which are known to involve brain pathology, through the archetypical mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and manic depression (which belong to the group of psychoses), to conditions such as anxiety states, phobias, and obsessions (frequently termed neuroses), as well as to the so-called behaviour disorders such as alcoholism, anorexia nervosa, drug addiction, and sexual deviations.
Psychiatrists' lists of mental illnesses provide a formal specification of the boundaries of mental illness, however the boundaries are changing and contested. The distinction between mental illness and physical illness is itself highly problematic. It is most obviously made in terms of manifest pathology, but is often not clear-cut, with many illnesses having mental and physical symptoms; once we turn to causes the distinction is even more problematic and the idea of two mutually exclusive categories of illness soon founders. An identifiable mental pathology may well have physical causes, as in the case of Alzheimer's disease; equally, some physical pathologies such as ulcers have mental causes (as the concept of psychosomatic illnesses allows). Indeed, the interrelation of mental and physical has frequently been used to justify attempts to integrate mental health services with other health services. In practice, where the boundary is set between mental and physical illness is a matter of convention, and depends on ideas about causation as well as on the extent of the manifest mental and behavioural problems.
The boundary between mental illness and deviance (‘madness and badness’) is equally problematic, especially in relation to behaviour or personality disorders, where symptoms are very obviously behavioural. Analytically the distinction is one of referent: mental illness is a judgement of mind, deviance one of behaviour. However, since observations of behaviour are the basis for judgements of mind, in practice confusions and difficulties arise. Here, as on its other margins, changing conventions are involved in determining the boundaries between the two, as in the increasing tendency to see child abuse less as a form of deviance than as indicative of underlying mental pathology. Finally, there is the boundary between what is normal and abnormal mental functioning. Again this boundary is largely set by changing conventions, and as with other boundaries its location also varies from individual to individual, according to social background and circumstances.
Ideas about the causes of mental illness vary. Psychiatry, by virtue of medicine's emphasis on physical processes, has focused on physical causes and treatment and given them primacy, frequently and mistakenly seeing physical explanations as precluding the necessity for any examination of the place of psychological and social factors. In contrast, a number of sociologists and social theorists have made significant contributions to the understanding of the social causes of mental illnesses, as for example in the case of George Brown and Tirril Harris's work on depression, or feminist analyses of anorexia nervosa.
However, the sociological contribution to the understanding of mental illness also derives from the analysis of mental illness as a social construct. This construct, as is noted above, sets the boundaries of normal, acceptable mental functioning in different cultures and societies, and as such is part of the social regulation of human conduct. See also COMMUNITY CARE; SICK ROLE.

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mental labour

See MANUAL VERSUS NON-MANUAL DISTINCTION.

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mental subnormality

One of a cluster of terms–others include mental deficiency, mental impairment, mental retardation, and mental handicap–that refer to states of arrested or incomplete development of intellectual capacities, where intelligence is considerably below normal. To reduce stigma, the favoured concept changes; the loose term ‘learning difficulties’ is the current preference.

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mercantile capitalism

See CAPITALISM.

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mercantilism

A much disputed term which, according to one authority (
, Predecessors of Adam Smith, 1937
), has become a ‘positive nuisance’ since it is commonly confused with nationalism, protectionism, and autarky. It refers to the economic theories and strategic thinking which guided relationships between states in early-modern Europe. The term gained popular currency through Adam Smith's critique of the seventeenth and eighteenth century ‘mercantile system’ in The Wealth of Nations (1776).
According to Smith, mercantilists operated with a zero-sum conception of wealth (one person's gain inevitably meant another's loss), and so were particularly concerned with the conditions under which the state might intervene in the economic sphere in order to secure a favourable balance of trade. The central characteristics of the mercantilist system were therefore an obsession with policies designed, on the one hand, to encourage exports of manufactured goods and provision of imported raw materials; and, on the other, to discourage imports of manufactures and loss of domestically produced raw materials. The principal dogma of mercantilism is well expressed in Thomas Mun's insistence (in his Englands Treasure by Fforraign Trade, 1664) that ‘The ordinary means to increase our wealth and treasure is by Fforraign Trade’, wherein the cardinal rule to be observed is ‘to sell more to strangers yearly than wee consume of theirs in value’. The resulting regulation of trade, accumulation of bullion, and international power struggles to protect the interest of ‘state-making as national-economy-making’ allegedly benefited only merchants and manufacturers (hence the term ‘mercantilism’).
Classical political economists such as Smith offered a systematic critique of mercantilist doctrines, and emphasized real capital accumulation as the key to economic growth, arguing that the systematic pursuit of self-interest by individuals (persons or countries) could be mutually beneficial through increasing the size of the economic cake (rather than merely offering a ‘beggar-your-neighbour’ strategy).
It is important to remember that the system's coherence is largely an ex post facto creation. The motives, logic, policies, and practice of mercantilism varied from country to country, although its effect was often the same: namely, to lead to plunder, warfare, and international violence.

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merit

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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meritocracy

A social system in which status is achieved through ability and effort (merit), rather than ascribed on the basis of age, class, gender, or other such particularistic or inherited advantages. The term implies that the meritorious deserve any privileges which they accrue. In practice it is difficult to find reliable measures of merit about which social scientists can agree.
The term was coined by Michael Young in The Rise of the Meritocracy 1870–2033 (1958) to refer to government by those identified as the most able high achievers, with merit defined as intelligence plus effort. His fantasy attempted to foresee the extreme consequences of a society which fully implemented the goal of equality of opportunity through the educational system, with the most able rising to the upper echelons, leaving intellectual dullards to carry out humble manual work. The book warned that the new focus on intelligence and ability in the educational system merely institutionalized inequality of intellectual ability in place of inequality based on social class. Since judgements about what constitutes effort are inescapably moral (does a lazy genius merit rewarding? And, if so, why not a hard-working dullard?) the term remains highly contested (see, for example,
, ‘Problems of “Meritocracy”’, in , Can Education Be Equalized?, 1996
). See also ACHIEVEMENT; JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice

(1905–61)
A French phenomenological philosopher who was especially concerned with the relationships between the body, consciousness, and the outside world; one-time friend and colleague of Jean-Paul Sartre. His work on language is often seen as linking phenomenology and structuralism. Merleau-Ponty's most important book is The Phenomenology of Perception (1945). His work is rarely used by sociologists although Anthony Giddens has taken up some of his ideas in The Constitution of Society (1984).

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mesostructure, mesodomain

A term used by some symbolic interactionists to depict the interactional region between the face-to-face encounter and the wider social structure. It is a web of negotiated orders that builds up into a wider society–and thus a conscious attempt to discredit the ‘micro versus macro’ distinction of much sociology. In other sociological literatures, civil society is sometimes said to occupy, and to be constituted at the meso-level or in the mesodomain. See also MACROSOCIOLOGY.

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messianic movement

The term is derived from the religious concept of the ‘Messiah’, from the Hebrew word for ‘anointed one’, who is sent to humanity to bring about a new age or the Kingdom of God. Jesus Christ was regarded by the early Christian church as the Messiah. In the sociology of religion, the term is used more generally to refer to any social movement which is based on the expectation and anticipation of a coming Messiah, who will release people from their current misery. Messianic movements, especially in Third World societies, are typically associated therefore with deprivation; messianic beliefs offer hope for a better world. Messianic movements are often based on a synthesis of Christian and aboriginal belief systems, in which Christian themes of salvation are blended with indigenous world-views.
There is much debate in sociology about whether messianic beliefs are irrational. Some anthropologists claim that messianic movements are rational responses to a world which appears, from the point of view of native peoples, to be out of control and irrational. From a Marxist perspective, messianic movements are an effect of the alienation of aboriginal peoples, whose social reality has been destroyed by white colonialism and oppression. See also MILLENARIANISM; NEW RELIGIONS.

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meta-narrative

See POST-MODERNISM.

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metaphysical pathos

The underlying mood of pessimism expressed in many analyses of large-scale social organizations and bureaucracies in the modern world. There is a sense of fate and vanishing freedom in this perspective, which was captured poignantly by Max Weber in such images as the ‘iron cage of bureaucracy’ and ‘the disenchantment of the world’.

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metaphysics

The most ambitious of all philosophical projects is to devise a theory of the nature or structure of reality, or of the world as a whole. This project is commonly termed metaphysics, and its intellectual viability has been widely challenged in twentieth-century Western philosophy. Metaphysics flourished in classical Greece, and also in the context of scientific revolution in seventeenth-century Europe. Philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza thought that a systematic use of reason could lead them to a view of the nature of the world, which turned out to be very different in character from our ordinary, everyday understanding of it. But science, too, had this consequence. The philosophers Immanuel Kant and David Hume are the sources of modern scepticism about the pretentions of metaphysics. For both thinkers, significant use of language is possible only within the bounds of possible experience. Metaphysicians appear to make sense by using words drawn from everyday language, but in using these words to speak about a world beyond the limits of possible experience they fall into contradictions and incoherence. Some modern analytical philosophers have defended a more modest vision of metaphysics–‘descriptive’ as distinct from ‘speculative’, or ‘revisionary’–as the attempt to analyse and describe the framework of basic concepts and their relationships underlying everyday and scientific discourse.

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metatheory, metatheoretical beliefs

See AXIOM.

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Methodenstreit

See GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN AND NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN; IDEOGRAPHIC VERSUS NOMOTHETIC APPROACHES.

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methodological artefact

See ARTEFACTS, STATISTICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL.

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methodological holism

See INDIVIDUALISM.

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methodological individualism

See INDIVIDUALISM.

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methodological naturalism

See EMPIRICISM; NATURALISM.

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methodological pluralism

During the 1970s sociologists were prone to argue that a long-standing positivistic hegemony in sociology had crumbled, and that the idea that there was one style of social research (underpinned by a unified philosophy of social science and methodology) had given way to the realization that there were many such styles. The positivist orthodoxy was usually associated with the names of Talcott Parsons (leading theorist of functionalism) and Paul Lazarsfeld (principal proponent of so-called abstracted empiricism). The new methodological pluralism was a consequence of the emergence of phenomenological and structuralist sociologies, the fragmentation of Marxism into sectarian neo-Marxisms, and the emergence of philosophical relativism. Some observers employed the alternative terms epistemological pluralism or epistemological anomie to describe the now seemingly normless situation in which many different theories of knowledge or paradigms competed for sociological primacy. One commentator, Paul Feyerabend (Against Method, 1975), argued that, even in the natural sciences, researchers often changed what they were doing and how they did things. They had no single method as such; indeed, successful science demanded that there be no slavish adherence to a single method, but required instead a state of epistemological anarchy. Feyerabend, therefore, declared himself to be against method and in favour of such anarchy.
In large part these various labels are interchangeable. Each implies a rejection of methodological exclusiveness, and each rests on a somewhat misleading contrast with a positivist orthodoxy which never actually existed, since neither functionalism nor abstracted empiricism ever held hegemonic sway over the theory and practice of sociology during the previous period. Marxism, idealism, and symbolic interactionism (to take only the most obvious examples) offered ever-present philosophical and methodological alternatives.

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methodology

The word is sometimes used to refer to the methods and general approach to empirical research of a particular discipline, or even a particular large study, although the term ‘research techniques’ is perhaps more apt in this context. The principal concern of methodology is wider philosophy of science issues in social science, and the study of how, in practice, sociologists and others go about their work, how they conduct investigations and assess evidence, how they decide what is true and false. The topics addressed include whether the social sciences are in fact sciences; whether the social scientist needs to understand a sequence of social actions to explain it fully; whether there are laws in the social sciences which can predict as well as explain; whether research can be, or should be, value-free; causation and causal powers; inductive and deductive theory; verification and falsification; and other problems in the philosophy of knowledge and science (most of which are treated under separate headings in this dictionary). See also NEO-KANTIANISM; NEO-POSTIVISM.

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methodology, feminist

There have been a number of proposals that feminist social science–or social science in general, or even science in general–requires a new methodology. Some of these have been concerned with research design, some with epistemology, and some with ontology. Proposals for feminist research methods have either been directed to the elimination of unconscious sexist bias in research, when a male perspective and double standards are taken for granted, or to the replacement of supposedly objective structured interviews and quantitative analysis by more reflexive and interactive unstructured interviews and a method of writing sociology that is said to allow the subjects to speak for themselves.
In terms of epistemology, one view is that striving after objectivity, truth, and control over nature is a masculine urge; women are thought to make less of a distinction between knower and known, self and other, mind and body, subject and object, and to be more tolerant of ambiguity and multiple truths. Another influential idea has been that of the ‘feminist standpoint’, the idea that women, as a subordinated group, are in a better position to arrive at an adequate representation of social reality than men, who are too caught up in their project of control. This epistemological advantage is not necessarily reflected in women's actual beliefs and attitudes but requires a feminist political effort and analysis. It leads towards an understanding of society which incorporates reproduction, bodily work, and intimate relations–the concrete realities of women's everyday existence–rather than working with abstract notions of isolated individuals making rational choices. The ‘standpoint’ position sees feminism as being capable of getting a truer picture of reality than masculinist science. In terms of ontology, then, it is a realist position. In this respect it differs from feminist post-modernism, which is sceptical about all claims to scientific objectivity, sees all knowledge as being produced in specific historical and local situations, and recognizes important differences among women (of race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation), as well as between women and men.

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metonym, metonymy

See DESIRE.

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metropolis

From the ancient Greek for mother and city, it denotes large urban centres and surrounding suburbs, often capital cities. Various statistical and descriptive definitions have been proposed. See also CONURBATION; MEGALOPOLIS; METROPOLITAN STATISTICAL AREA.

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metropolis-satellite relationship

See DEPENDENCY THEORY.

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metropolitan area

See CONURBATION.

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Metropolitan Statistical Area

A functional geographical classification of urban areas (formerly S[tandard]MSA), it comprises a large population nucleus and adjacent communities having a high degree of economic and social integration with the nucleus. Urban areas may contain more than one MSA (these are P[rimary]MSAs), and more than one PMSA (these are C[onsolidated]MSAs). See also CONURBATION; MEGALOPOLIS; METROPOLIS.

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Michels, Robert

(1876–1936)
A German sociologist and economist who wrote on a wide range of issues including nationalism, fascism, secularism, power, élites, intellectuals, and social mobility. His is most famous for the study of the leadership of left-wing democratic parties to be found in Political Parties (1911).
With particular reference to the Social Democratic Party in Germany, Michels explored the role of political leaders in shaping demands and aspirations, and in mobilizing popular support for Party initiatives. He was particularly interested in the ways in which organizational dynamics inhibit the realization of radical objectives. He concluded that all organizations have oligarchical tendencies, a proposition which he formulated as an ‘iron law of oligarchy’, which states that ‘it is organization which gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors, of the mandatories over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organizations says oligarchy.’ According to Michels, as a political party grows and becomes more bureaucratic, it is increasingly dominated by officials who are committed to internal organizational goals rather than social change, and by middle-class intellectuals who pursue their own personal objectives which are usually different from those of the party rank-and-file. He also noted the process of embourgeoisement within parties, as working-class leaders become more middle-class as a result of social mobility, and so less committed to radical objectives. As a consequence, even in democratically governed organizations, a schism develops between the rulers and the ruled. Organizational procedures are often employed to stifle popular initiatives. Michels championed more heroic, principled forms of leadership, which would withstand incorporation. He was highly critical of political compromise.
Empirical researchers of Michels's iron law have found it difficult to demonstrate that the institutionalization of radical parties is in fact the product of the embourgeoisement of their leaders. It has also been argued that Michels's theory may have been valid for the early period of the development of socialist parties in Europe, and as a description of the élitist tendencies of the Bolshevik Party which sponsored a form of bureaucratic domination in Russia, but that the theory has since been undermined by widespread awareness of the dangers of oligarchy itself. A host of other processes have also intervened to create revisionist rather than revolutionary left-wing parties. Michels's theory has also been applied to trade unions, and used to explore the way in which, as organizations, they have become ends in themselves rather than a means to an end. Much of this secondary literature is summarized in
's ‘Introduction’ to the English-language translation of Political Parties (1962)
.

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microdata

Data-sets containing information on individual respondents to an enquiry, be they persons, households, or organizations such as schools or companies. Microdata are virtually always anonymized, with not only names and addresses omitted to preserve confidentiality, but also detailed geographical or industry codes sometimes deleted or broadbanded to obscure identities. See also AGGREGATE (COLLECTIVITY).

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microsociology

See MACROSOCIOLOGY.

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middle class, middle classes

In many ways this is the least satisfactory term which attempts in one phrase to define a class sharing common work and market situations. The middle stratum of industrial societies has expanded so much in the last hundred years that any category which embraces both company directors and their secretaries must be considered somewhat inadequate.
In popular perception, all white-collar work is middle class, but sociologically it is necessary to sub-divide this class into distinct groups sharing similar market, work, and status situations. For example, John H. Goldthorpe (Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain, 1980) distinguishes the service class of senior managers and professionals; the junior or subaltern service class of lower professionals such as teachers, junior managers, and administrators; routine non-manual workers such as clerks and secretaries; and owners of small businesses (the traditional petit-bourgeoisie). Conventionally, the service class is referred to as the upper-middle class; the junior service class as the middle class proper; and the others as the lower-middle class. Thus defined, in Britain the upper-middle class comprises some 10 per cent of the population; the middle class accounts for around 20 per cent; and the lower-middle class takes in a further 20 per cent. Taken together, therefore, the middle class is the largest single class in the overall structure.
However, some sociologists (especially those of a Marxist persuasion) would not accept that most routine white-collar workers were middle class, on the grounds that their employment situation is generally equivalent (or even inferior) to that of many working-class people. They prefer to call this group the new working class. This is not a view which most white-collar workers themselves share, nor one which is substantiated by sociological evidence. Equally, the term ‘middle class’ is now often used by journalists and politicians to refer to what might better be called the ‘middle mass’ of those earning somewhere close to average incomes. Evidence from Gordon Marshall et al.'s national study of Social Class in Modern Britain (1984) shows that ordinary people are somewhat more discriminating. For example, 35 per cent of the sample defined the middle-class as professionals; 11 per cent mentioned managers; only 7 per cent talked of the middle class as being all white-collar workers.
As with the term upper class, distinctions can be made between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ middle class. The former generally refers to the petite bourgeoisie and independent professionals (whose existence as distinct groups pre-dates the twentieth-century expansion of the class as a whole), while the latter refers to all other elements of the middle class: that is, salaried professionals, administrators and officials, senior managers, and higher-grade technicians who together form the service class, and routine non-manual employees, supervisors, and lower-grade technicians who form a more marginal middle class (or, in Marxist terms, a new working class). See also CLASS POSITION; CONTRADICTORY CLASS LOCATION; PROLETARIANIZATION.

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middle class, new

See CONTRADICTORY CLASS LOCATION; PROLETARIANIZATION.

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middle-range theory

Advocated by the distinguished American sociologist Robert Merton in Social Theory and Social Structure (1957) to bridge the gap between the limited hypotheses of empiricist studies and grand abstract theory of the sort produced by Talcott Parsons. He describes middle-range theories as ‘theories that lie between the minor but necessary working hypotheses that evolve in abundance in day to day research and the all-inclusive systematic efforts to develop unified theory that will explain all the observed uniformities of social behaviour, organization and social change’. Merton consistently argued for, and demonstrated the necessity of, this sort of work in a long series of convincing sociological essays in such areas as structural-functional theory and the sociologies of science, deviance, organizations and occupations. Many of the concepts developed in these theories have become part of the basic sociological lexicon (and are therefore given separate entries in this dictionary): retreatism, ritualism, manifest and latent functions, opportunity structure, paradigm, reference group, role-sets, self-fulfilling prophecy, and unintended consequences. The idea of middle-range theory has directly and indirectly been an important influence on the way many sociologists see their work. The full range of the discussion stimulated by Merton's work is most evident in the excellent collection of commentaries edited by
, Robert K. Merton: Consensus and Controversy (1990)
.

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migration, sociological studies of

Migration involves the (more or less) permanent movement of individuals or groups across symbolic or political boundaries into new residential areas and communities. Sociological studies of migration are diverse and usually form part of larger problems in (for example) research into kinship, social networks, or economic development. It is conventional to distinguish push from pull factors in the analysis of migration. The former (for example high rates of unemployment in the area of origin) are usually viewed as inducing migration of a conservative, security-maximizing nature, while the latter (economic expansion in the host country or region) are said to encourage risk-taking and income-maximizing migration. A distinction is also made between external migration (between countries) and internal migration (between regions).
There is a considerable literature on rural-urban migration in developing countries, and this has confirmed the importance of family and friends in the destination area, as an explanatory variable for the rate of migration out of particular areas of origin (see for example
, ‘Rural-Urban Migration and Family Ties’, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 1981
). Employers have often made use of kin networks in recruiting ‘green labour’ from one area or country to another. (This topic is discussed fully in
's Keeping it in the Family. 1987
).
The issue of kin-connected entry and recruitment strategies is also addressed in the other major sociological literatures on migration in the fields of employment studies and ethnic relations. Studies of job-search behaviour have identified the practices of chain employment and chain migration, where the successful migration of one family member creates a chain of opportunities for the whole kin network, as for example in Gary Mormino's study of early twentieth-century Italian emigration to Tampa, which shows that the core of the local Italian community originated from only three villages in south-west Sicily and one community in Palermo (
‘We Worked Hard and Took Care of Our Own’, Labour History, 1982
). This literature often has an ethnic dimension, evident also in Tamara K. Haraven's study of Irish, Italian, and French-Canadian emigration into the New England mill-towns during the same period (
‘The Labourers of Manchester, New Hampshire, 1912–’, Labour History, 1975
). A less benign view of the nature and consequences of ethnic migration is offered in Stephen Castle's and Godula Kosack's controversial and much-discussed thesis that the extensive foreign migrant workforce that moved to the advanced industrialized countries of Europe during the years of post-war affluence in the 1950s and 1960s served the twin functions of dividing the indigenous working class and creating a new reserve army of labour (Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe, 1973). Others have argued that such immigrants form part of an underclass, since they are discriminated against in markets for employment, labour, and housing, and therefore cannot be assimilated into the indigenous class structure. One specifically Marxist interpretation is that migrant labour (in Britain and elsewhere) constitutes a ‘racialised fraction of the working class’, the explanation for which cannot be reduced simply to the existence of labour shortages which migrant labour power often serves to address. (These differing interpretations are reviewed in
, Racism and Migrant Labour, 1982)
.
It used to be believed that migration implied separation from kin, a thesis consistent with the functionalist view that the extended family was in decline in urban industrialized countries, although it is now accepted that the relationship between family, employment, and migration is more complex and historically contingent than hitherto suggested. As early as 1940, Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball (Family and Community in Ireland) pointed out that geographical dispersal did not destroy familial bonds of obligation and affection, so that (for example) Irish peasants having emigrated to urban America still sent back money to relatives at home. See also CULTURAL THEORY; DIASPORA; LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION.

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migration, internal

See INTERNAL MIGRATION.

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militancy

Willingness to engage in oppositional rhetoric and action. Often used with reference to trade-union activities, it may be industrial (concerned with advancing wages and conditions), or political (concerned with the position of the working class as a whole). Which is uppermost has as much to do with national cultures and traditions as with economic conditions.

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military and militarism, sociological studies of

It is conventional wisdom that sociologists have tended to neglect military concerns. In fact this is a somewhat misleading claim, since not only have numerous studies taken the military as a substantive area of interest, but (more importantly) it is hard to see what, if anything, is specifically sociological about militarism and war. The threat of global annihilation, implicit in the Cold War antics of the superpowers, would seem to be a subject of rather more than merely sociological interest.
In any case, Kurt Lang's Military Institutions and the Sociology of War (1972) offers an early review of relevant literature, and an annotated bibliography of more than 1,300 items on organized violence. These suggest that sociological studies of the military may conveniently be considered under three headings. First, there has been extensive research into the involvement of the military in politics, both in the developed and developing world. C. Wright Mills's account of the American military-industrial complex during the Cold War period is a good example of the former. During the 1980s, in a significant extension of this tradition of study, some prominent social theorists (notably Anthony Giddens) and historical and comparative researchers (including Michael Mann) began investigating the relationship between military changes, on the one hand, and (the more usually explored) economic, political, social, and ideological changes on the other. In a more limited way, the endemic militarism (that is, the tendency to look for military solutions to political problems and conflicts) in some parts of the developing world is examined fully in volumes such as J. J. Johnson's The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries (1962), which both identifies some of the many forms which militarism can take in politics (direct rule, indirect influence, strategic alliances), and also offers a long list of factors which predispose towards military intervention in government in particular societies (relative strength of armed forces, political stalemate, administrative corruption, and so forth). (It should be noted, however, that there is little or no agreement about precisely which of these factors are most important.)
Second, one might point to the attention given to the topics of war and violence in the sociological theories of Social Darwinists and evolutionists such as the Polish social theorist Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909) and the Austrian Gustav Ratzenhofer (1842–1904), both of whom extended their theories about the origins of conflict between social groups to include the military struggles between states. Gumplowicz traced such violence to an insurmountable hatred that allegedly exists between different races, on account of their lack of a common blood-bond, and hypothesized that wars between states express an urge for conquest that arises from a desire for improved economic conditions at the expense of other groups. Ratzenhofer (a field-marshal and president of the supreme military court of Austria) produced a typology of interests which were said to be rooted in human nature and governed social life, these being procreative, physiological, individual (self-assertion), social (group welfare), and transcendental (religion). These generate conflict between groups (because of an innate human predisposition to obey primary impulses and to hate), but at the same time form the basis of social order, since this struggle for existence soon becomes organized on a group basis and leads eventually to the appearance of (competing) nation-states.
Finally, there are a large number of studies of different aspects of the military as a formal organization, including such classics as
. The American Soldier (1949)
,
's The Man on Horseback (1962)
, and Morris Janowitz's The Professional Soldier (1960). Many of these studies have identified social phenomena of more general theoretical and substantive importance (such as the experience of relative deprivation investigated by Stouffer and his colleagues). By far the best overview of this literature, and still probably the best introduction to the field as a whole, is Janowitz's Sociology and the Military Establishment (3rd edn., 1974). A good recent overview of the field is given in
, The Sociology of War and Peace (1988)
. See also IMPERIALISM.

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military capitalism

See MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.

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military-industrial complex

A term used to describe the alleged dependence of advanced capitalist economies on the marriage of economic and military-political objectives during the period of the Cold War. A number of sociological studies of this phenomenon were undertaken, the best-known of which is probably C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite (1956), in which he argued that the homogeneous governing clique in post-war America represented an alliance of economic, military, and political power, and (contrary to the arguments of pluralists) had established the USA as simultaneously a ‘private corporation economy’ and a ‘permanent war economy’ within which ‘virtually all political and economic actions are now judged in terms of military definitions of reality’. Mills's account of the American power élite, and the ‘military capitalism’ it encouraged by perpetuating the arms race, was echoed in later studies. Fred J. Cook described America as a ‘warfare state’ in which political life was dominated by military definitions of foreign policy and economic rationality (The Warfare State, 1962). Similarly, John Kenneth Galbraith's study of The New Industrial State (1967) argues that Cold War imagery served to stabilize aggregate demand in the American economy, since ‘if the image is one of a nation beset by enemies, there will be a responding investment in weapons … [and so] … in public affairs as well as in private affairs, and for the same reasons, we are subject to contrivance that serves the industrial system’.
The main problems with this interpretation of the American social structure were that it was difficult to verify empirically (much of Mills's own evidence is perhaps best described as circumstantial) and that it was implicitly functionalist (witness Galbraith's claim that the weapons competition between the United States and USSR ‘is not a luxury: it serves an organic need of the industrial system as now constituted’).

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Mill, John Stuart

(1806–73)
An English philosopher, proponent of liberalism and utilitarianism, and social reformer, who attempted to provide ‘a general science of man in society’ in his A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Deductive (1843). Ronald Fletcher (The Making of Sociology, 1971) argues that Mill's ‘contribution to the making of sociology is little known and has been considerably under-estimated’. However, this appraisal seems to rest largely on the fact that Mill publicized the works of Auguste Comte in Britain, and developed the utilitarian works of his own father James Mill (1773–1836) and his godfather Jeremy Bentham–thus providing a common critical starting-point for almost every school of sociological thought that has developed since.
Arguably, therefore, Mill's relevance to contemporary sociologists lies mainly in his logical classification of the methods properly to be applied in the human sciences, that is, the five ‘methods of experimental inquiry’: of difference (comparing two particular instances which are alike in every respect except the one which is the object of inquiry); indirect difference (comparing two classes of instances which agree in nothing, excepting the presence of a specific circumstance in one case, and its absence in the other); agreement (where two or more instances of the phenomenon under investigation have only one circumstance in common, which is then hypothesized to be the cause of the phenomenon); concomitant variation (the method of establishing statistical correlations between aggregates); and the method of residues (in which the investigator studies only one instance of a phenomenon, eliminates all those effects of the causes of which he or she already possesses a clear knowledge, and then concentrates on clarifying the relationships between the residual causes and effects). Mill raised objections against all of these kinds of experimental method, which he regarded as inappropriate to the study of society. However, he also rejected pure deductive methods, and suggested instead that the most suitable methods for a general science of society were the ‘concrete deductive method’ (which today would be termed the ‘hypothetico-deductive method’) and the ‘inverse deductive method’. The former involves the statement of a clear hypothesis, making of inferences from this, and testing of predictions by reference to artificial manipulation of empirical data (as in a laboratory experiment). Often, however, the social sciences proceed in the opposite manner: from empirical generalization, from which one has to try to generate hypotheses which will satisfactorily explain generalizations about events that have already happened, and in this way arrive at causal explanations of social processes.
In recent years, Mill's treatise on The Subjection of Women (1869) has also become fashionable, as an early argument against inequality between the sexes.

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Millar, John

(1735–1801)
A leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, who is sometimes acknowledged as an early sociologist, on the grounds that his essay on The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771) offers a theory of the evolution of societies (which connects forms of property-holding to types of authority and government), and an early account of the division of labour in society (see
, John Millar of Glasgow, 1735–1801: His Life and Thoughts and his Contributions to Sociological Analysis, 1960
).

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millenarianism

A term used to refer to a religious movement which prophesies the coming of the millennium and a cataclysmic end of the world as we know it; or, more formally, which anticipates imminent, total, ultimate, this-worldly, collective salvation. Examples include Christadelphianism, Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, Fifth Monarchy Men, North American Indian Ghost Dance Movement, and Jehovah's Witnesses. As will be evident from this list of examples, these movements display great variation in the degree of activism expected among followers; the extent to which they are Messianic or charismatic; and the organizational structure of the movement as a whole.
Millennial movements occur inside all religions, including early Christianity and Islam, but also develop outside organized religions. Millenarianism therefore can take many different forms. However, it usually involves explosions of discontent, a rejection of the status quo, and the proposal that the coming millennium will see the installation of a new social order. This new society is usually constructed as egalitarian and just. Millenarianism often develops in a colonial situation and can have grave consequences for the dominant political order. There is little chance of political compromise since the followers of millenarian movements are not afraid of death; for example, they have been known to run against the guns of an army, believing that the millennium is about to end anyway. Millennial doctrines are often anti-reproduction, and ban sexual intercourse and the planting of crops, since there will be no next year. There is always the tension within millenarianism between an other-worldly message with no earthly content and one where the divine returns into the political process to rule justly. Inevitably, the millennium does not come, and the movement collapses. It either fades away or part of the message is recovered and institutionalized–as in the case of Christianity.
The best-known modern examples of millenarianism are the so-called cargo cults in Melanesia. These usually believe that the ancestors or a culture hero are on their way back to this world in a magic ship to create a timeless order which has been interfered with by Europeans. There will be the return of a cargo of precious material goods to their rightful Melanesian owners, bringing about an era of universal happiness and plenty, where the colonized people will be liberated from White domination. Explanations of the emergence of these cults abound. Peter Worsley (The Trumpet Shall Sound, 1957) argues that Melanesian cargo cults are not irrational ‘madness’, but are the result of frustrations caused by colonialism. The movements are fundamentally opposed to imperialism and use a religious idiom to attempt to explain the power of colonizers. This mystical power comes from the ability of Whites to intercept riches (cargo) bound for local peoples. Millenarianism is invoked as a last resort in dealing with this power when political opposition has failed. Alternative interpretations include those of Kenelm O. L. Burridge (Mambu, 1960), who argues that cargo cults express certain moral and emotional imperatives in Melanesian society, and Peter Lawrence (Road Belong Cargo, 1964), who offers a historical and structural account which emphasizes the ‘mismatch’ between Western and Melanesian norms of reciprocity and exchange.
At a more general level, the numerous theories of millennial movements as a whole include interpretations in terms of relative deprivation; those which see such movements as being rooted in the strains associated with rapid social change; and some which emphasize the social isolation, disruption, and normlessness characteristic of situations of anomie. A fairly representative selection of such accounts will be found in the collection edited by Sylvia L. Thrupp (Millennial Dreams in Action, 1962).

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Mills, C(harles) Wright

(1916–62)
An American sociologist whose most important work was published during the 1950s. As a radical on the political left, he was an unusual figure in American sociology at this time, taking up a position that might be better described as liberal-populist rather than socialist. His most important substantive studies were probably White Collar (1951), an analysis of the American middle class, and The Power Elite (1956) in which he argued that the United States was governed by a set of interlocking and self-perpetuating élites.
He is remembered primarily for The Sociological Imagination (1959)–an excellent introduction to and outline of the humanist impetus behind sociology as a discipline. The sociological imagination is the sociological vision, a way of looking at the world that can see connections between the apparently private problems of the individual and important social issues. He argues for a humanist sociology connecting the social, personal, and historical dimensions of our lives, and which is critical of abstracted empiricism and grand theory alike. His translation of long passages from the work of Talcott Parsons into simple English sentences is an exemplar of critical discussion. See also MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX; UNEMPLOYMENT.

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Minitab

See COMPUTER PACKAGES.

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minority group

Since the 1930s this term has been applied to social groups that are oppressed or stigmatized on the basis of racial, ethnic, biological, or other characteristics. Louis Wirth, for example, defines a minority group as ‘a group of people who, because of their physical or cultural characteristics, are singled out from the others in the society in which they live for differential and unequal treatment and who therefore regard themselves as objects of collective discrimination’. However, seen in these terms, a minority group could in fact constitute a numerical majority in any society–for example Blacks in South Africa. It might be more useful, therefore, to distinguish between groups which are actually a minority in numbers and those which are marginal in terms of their access to power. The study of minorities has recently been linked to the study of deviance, exclusion, labelling, stigma, racism, the authoritarian personality, homophobia, and sexism (all of which are given separate entries in this dictionary). See also MARGINALIZATION.

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mirror phase (of infant development )

See LACAN, JACQUES.

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miscegenation

Literally ‘mixing of races’, a racist term denoting sexual relations between different races, especially White and Black. Miscegenation was promoted in some systems–for example Portuguese colonialism and the Baha'i religion–as a means of overcoming artificial ethnic barriers. The concept is treated pejoratively in racist ideology as a source of social and economic degeneration.

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misogyny

Literally, hatred of women. Kate Millet brought the idea of misogyny to the fore in Sexual Politics (1970), where she provided a broad theoretical base for radical feminism. She argued that patriarchal power creates a sexist society and that sexual politics grounded in misogyny result in women's oppression both within the private realm and within social institutions such as the class system and the education system. Andrea Dworkin and Susan Brownmiller pointed to important links between misogyny and men's sexual violence towards women, while Susan Griffin suggested connections between militarism and misogyny. Adrienne Rich defined misogyny as institutionalized, organized, normalized hostility and violence against women. Feminist psychoanalysts, following in particular the work of Melanie Klein and the Object Relations School, have argued that misogyny is rooted in the infant's primitive rage towards its mother in the context of a society in which child-rearing is almost invariably carried out by women. Nancy Chodorow (The Reproduction of Mothering, 1978) contends that only the full participation of men in infant care would eradicate the roots of misogyny.

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mixed economy

An economy which combines elements of the market economy with elements of a command economy; that is, combines characteristics of capitalism and socialism. In a mixed economy, some but not all of the activities of production, distribution, and exchange are organized by the state, and the state generally plays a larger role in setting policy, rules, and objectives, and in controlling labour, than would occur in a purely market economy.
The term is sometimes used more loosely to refer to an economy which includes any elements other than a pure market economy, for example pockets of subsistence farming in particular areas of the country.

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MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory)

A personality test developed in the 1940s for clinical use, but also employed by US sociologists in the 1950s and 1960s. Subjects sort descriptive statements as either true of themselves, false, or ‘cannot say’. Scores on fourteen scales yield the personality profile. Arguably the test's reliability, validity, and standardization are all poor.

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mob

A solidaristic, focused, acting crowd. A mob intending to effect a lynching is the classic case.

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mobility, contest and sponsored

See CONTEST AND SPONSORED MOBILITY.

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mobility, occupational

See OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY.

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mobility, social

The movement–usually of individuals but sometimes of whole groups–between different positions within the system of social stratification in any society. It is conventional to distinguish upward and downward mobility (that is, movement up or down a hierarchy of privilege), and intergenerational from intragenerational or career mobility (the former referring to mobility between a family of origin and one's own class or status position, the latter to the mobility experienced during an individual career, such as respondent's first job compared to his or her present job). Other distinctions–most notably that between structural and non-structural mobility–are more contentious.
Most sociological attention has focused on intergenerational mobility, in particular the role of educational achievement as compared to that of social background or of ascriptive characteristics such as race, in explaining patterns of occupational attainment. Although there have been many case-studies of élite recruitment (for example P. Stanworth and A. Giddens's Elites and Power in British Society, 1974), the most popular research instrument has been the large-scale sample survey, and the most common points of comparison have been occupations. Some sociologists have studied social mobility in pre-industrial contexts (see, for example,
, Historical Research on Social Mobility, 1977
), and others in contemporary developing countries such as India (see
, Caste, Class and Power, 1965
), but the great majority of studies have dealt with the modern industrialized West and, to a lesser extent, the former communist states of Eastern Europe.
The study of social mobility has a long sociological pedigree, extending back to the mid-nineteenth-century writings of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, with major contributions in the early twentieth century from Vilfredo Pareto (who proposed a theory of the ‘circulation of élites’) and Pitirim Sorokin. The now vast literature on the subject is inextricably entangled with wider discussions of (among other things) education, gender, culture, power, statistical techniques, and the role of theory in social research.
It is possible, indeed, to trace many of the classic debates in modern sociology back to the early arguments about mobility. For example, in Social Mobility (1927) Sorokin wrote that ‘channels of vertical circulation exist in any stratified society, and are as necessary as channels for blood circulation in the body’. In an argument that prefigures the later functionalist theory of stratification, he suggested that these ‘staircases’ or ‘elevators’ are necessary to the efficient allocation of talents to occupations, and that failure to achieve this promotes inefficiency and disorder. However, unlike Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore writing two decades later, Sorokin did not then conclude that high rewards were necessary to motivate individuals to undertake training for functionally important positions in society. More plausibly, he maintained that the incumbents of these positions were able to exploit their strategic occupational roles, in order to attract material and other privileges. Sorokin was particularly interested in the role of educational institutions in allocating people to the various occupational positions. Anticipating the radical critiques of the new sociology of education of the 1970s, he argued that schools function primarily as ‘a testing, selecting, and distributing agency’; in other words, they merely certify children for particular positions in the labour-market, rather than promote each individual's abilities or encourage the development of talent.
Confronted by this potentially vast field of interest, it is useful for heuristic purposes to view the modern literature on social mobility as a dispute between two divergent research programmes which have set the terms of discussion for this subject since 1945, and continue to dominate the field even today. On the one hand, there are those investigators who view mobility in the context of a social hierarchy, within which individuals can be ranked according to income, educational attainment, or socio-economic prestige. On the other, there are those who set it within the context of a class structure, embracing social locations defined by relationships prevailing within labour-markets and production units. During the 1950s and 1960s, the former hierarchical perspective was dominant, culminating in the so-called status-attainment tradition of mobility studies emanating principally from the United States. This was increasingly challenged, during the 1970s and 1980s, by researchers schooled within or influenced by the European tradition of class analysis.
The status-attainment programme sees the principal interest of mobility studies as being an attempt to specify those attributes which are characteristic of individuals who end up in the more desirable rather than the less desirable jobs. Characteristically, these studies investigate the extent to which the present occupational status of individuals is associated with the status of their family of origin, rather than individual achievements such as educational attainment. One virtue of this approach, as compared to earlier cross-tabulations of father's occupation by son's occupation, was that it disentangled at least some of the processes that linked the generations. For example, researchers explored the effects of father's education on son's occupational attainment, and showed that these were distinct from the effects of father's occupation. Most studies maintained that son's education was the crucial link between family background and occupational success, arguing that as much as half of the association between the two was mediated via education, with children from more privileged family backgrounds being higher educational achievers than their poorer peers. Later researchers extended the field of interest to include data on income, with most concluding that the impact of family background on earnings is substantial, but operates entirely indirectly through educational and occupational attainment.
Most of these studies employed the statistical techniques of regression analysis (and in particular path analysis). Most were also underpinned by a tacit adherence to a liberal model of industrial societies as increasingly homogeneous, middle class, meritocratic, and open. Typically, therefore, they tended to conclude that structural shifts in advanced industrial economies (especially the expansion of managerial, professional, and administrative occupations) created more ‘room at the top’ and so increased the opportunities for upward social mobility of individuals from working-class origins. This increasing social fluidity was reinforced by a progressive shift from ascriptive to achievement criteria as the dominant factors determining status attainment, a movement towards meritocratic selection that, together with the prevailing high rates of social mobility, undermined the potential for class formation and class conflict in industrial societies. Peter M. Blau and Otis D. Duncan's The American Occupational Structure (1967) is generally held to be the paradigmatic example of a study of social mobility within the status-attainment tradition.
The Blau-Duncan model prompted an enormous number of related and derivative studies. Whatever their differences and similarities, however, they all rested upon the assumption that occupations can be ranked within a status hierarchy about which there is a wide degree of consensus within and between societies. In some studies this social hierarchy was conceptualized narrowly as being one of occupational prestige. In others it was generalized to include additional wider aspects of socio-economic status. Rather than dispute the details of the occupational hierarchy, however, European class analysis came increasingly to challenge the basic premiss of the status attainment research programme; namely, that social mobility was most appropriately viewed as a matter of hierarchical occupational attainment among competing individuals.
The class analysis tradition starts from the rather different assumption that individuals are born into distinct social classes, membership of which has clear consequences for life-chances, values, norms, life-styles, and patterns of association. Representatives of this tradition argue that the socio-economic status scales at the heart of the status-attainment perspective display many unresolved methodological weaknesses. Most importantly, because these scales are a composite measure of popular judgements about the relative prestige or social standing of the various occupations, they rank alongside each other, as having similar levels of socio-economic status, occupations which have quite different structural locations. For example, skilled manual workers may have the same prestige score as routine clerical workers and self-employed shopkeepers, or office supervisors may be ranked alongside farmers and schoolteachers. In other words, the synthetic categories of the scale typically contain occupational groupings that are subject to different structural forces: because of sectoral and other changes in the occupational structure, some occupations will be in expansion, others in contraction, and some will be static. Such heterogeneity merely muddies the water of mobility: it is impossible to distinguish adequately the various structural influences on mobility from those which originate in other factors, and impossible also therefore to isolate hierarchical effects (family background, educational attainment, or whatever) from other effects of a non-hierarchical kind (such as changes in the occupational division of labour, industrial or sectoral growth and decline, government policies of protection, and so forth).
The class analysis programme of social mobility research, initiated in the 1970s, abandoned the Blau-Duncan form of occupational prestige-scaling in favour of discrete class categories whose members shared similar positions within labour-markets and production units. In Europe probably the most widely used class categories are those devised by John Goldthorpe (see GOLDTHORPE CLASS SCHEME) for the Oxford Mobility Study during the 1970s, a class scheme which attempts to aggregate occupational groupings whose members share similar ‘market situations’ and ‘work situations’ (a theory of class which Goldthorpe derived from his earlier collaboration with David Lockwood during the Affluent Worker Study of the 1960s). In the United States, the ‘new structuralism’ of the 1970s alerted some analysts of social mobility to the importance of labour-market influences on mobility trajectories, and led to the emergence of ‘multiple regression Marxists’ (such as Erik Olin Wright) who adapted the methods of Blau and Duncan to a theoretical stance which pointed to the importance of ownership, authority, and autonomy in the workplace.
Along with this new theory went new methods and conclusions. Class analysts argued that mathematical techniques of loglinear modelling were better suited to the analysis of mobility data, both because they did not require ordinal-level data (and therefore unsubstantiated assumptions) about a status hierarchy, and because they allowed researchers analysing a standard mobility matrix (a contingency table cross-tabulating class origins against class destinations) to distinguish absolute or total mobility rates (including those changes in mobility occasioned by shifts in the occupational structure) from changes in social fluidity or openness within the structure as such (relative rates). Applied to the same sorts of large-scale data-sets as were used within the status-attainment programme, the class analysis perspective and the new techniques of loglinear modelling suggested that the liberal assumptions of the earlier studies were unwarrantably optimistic. In most industrialized societies absolute levels of mobility have indeed increased significantly over the past three-quarters of a century, in accordance with the growth in skilled non-manual occupations, but relative mobility chances have remained largely unaltered throughout this period. More room at the top has not ensured greater equality of opportunity to get there, since proportionately more of the new middle-class jobs have been captured by the children of those already in privileged class locations. As a result, the association between an individual's class of origin and eventual destination has remained remarkably stable across successive birth-cohorts, despite economic expansion, educational reform, and redistributive social policies.
In the mid-1980s, Goldthorpe (together with collaborators in Sweden and Germany) designed the CASMIN (Comparative Analysis of Social Mobility in Industrial Nations) Project, an intensive comparative study of this problem. The project produced data which show that the mobility profiles of advanced societies are more complex than is allowed within either the liberal theory of industrial society or Marxist accounts of capitalist society. The most important findings suggest that, measured in absolute rates, the amount and pattern of mobility displays considerable variation across societies; that relative rates (or fluidity patterns) display a ‘large commonality’ across societies; and that changes in social fluidity over time follow a pattern of ‘trendless fluctuation’ rather than showing evidence of a general increase. In short, therefore, there is no long-term ‘loosening’ of the class structure, no increase in ‘fluidity’, and (by implication) no move towards meritocracy.
Each of these research programmes disputes the principal substantive conclusions arrived at by the other. The relevant journals are littered with acrimonious exchanges about matters of theory and method. Sometimes these leave outsiders puzzled or bemused: one sceptical observer has described the field as a ‘set of statistical techniques in search of a problem’. Others argue that, for a variety of different reasons, debates about social mobility continue to raise the fundamental issues of the discipline as a whole. For example, feminists have pointed to the fact that most mobility studies are based on samples of males only, and this has prompted wide-ranging discussion of the relevant ‘unit of mobility analysis’ (individual or family), the nature of so-called cross-class families (where two adult wage-earners are in different class positions and have different mobility trajectories), and the implications of the occupational division of labour by sex for mobility studies. The best overview of these and other related debates is Anthony Heath's Social Mobility (1981).
However, much dispute in the area is of a highly specialized and technical, rather than theoretical, nature. The longest-running controversies hinge on the possibility of distinguishing structural and non-structural sources of mobility. In earlier studies, some sociologists attempted to distinguish between structural (or net) and circulation (or exchange) mobility, the former being that amount of mobility required by the structure of the table itself (the fact that, if the marginal totals showing the distribution of fathers and that of sons are regarded as being fixed, then their differences mean that some respondents must fall into the off-diagonal cells in the table). The percentage of respondents who were mobile because of the very structure of the table was said to represent the amount of structural mobility in a society. Circulation mobility was then simply the difference between the total number of respondents who were mobile and those defined as being structurally mobile. However, both of these concepts are statistical artefacts with no clear substantive interpretation, so the somewhat artificial distinction between structural and circulation mobility has given way to a dispute about the concepts of absolute and relative mobility rates. In any origin to-destination mobility table, the row and column marginal totals (say, the distribution of fathers as compared to sons) will be different, an asymmetry that is due in part to changes in the occupational structure itself (such as, for example, sectoral shifts of the kind noted above). The use of loglinear techniques (based on the technique of odds ratios) permits the calculation of relative mobility chances which allow for (exclude) that portion of total mobility that is due to changes in the marginal distributions of the table. Many class analysts insist that this technique therefore distinguishes meaningfully between mobility which is the result of changes in the shape of the class structure and that which reflects of changes in its degree of openness. Critics maintain that the concept of relative mobility is no less artificial than that of structural and circulation mobility since, whether or not social mobility is caused by sectoral shifts alone, absolute or overall mobility is ‘real’—whereas respondents do not experience the ahistorical and acontextual phenomenon of ‘relative mobility chances’. In part this is also a dispute about the relationship between occupational mobility and class mobility; and, therefore, is inescapably a debate about the very definition of social class itself. See also BENINI COEFFICIENT; CONTEST AND SPONSORED MOBILITY; FEATHERMAN-JONES-HAUSER HYPOTHESIS.

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mobilization, mobilization model

The process by which a group goes from being a passive collection of individuals to an active participant in public life. (Demobilization is thus the reverse process.) Used in this way, the term has had a wide currency in sociology, and has been applied in particular to studies of collective action in the literatures on modernization, social movements, and revolution (see REBELLION, REVOLUTION). Mobilization is usually seen as resource mobilization; that is, significant gain over the control of assets, where assets may be viewed as coercive (weapons, armed forces, technologies), utilitarian (goods, money, information), or normative (loyalties or obligations) in nature—a typology suggested by Amitai Etzioni in The Active Society (1968). The most complete formal statement of the theory, illustrated by a range of subject-matters to which the mobilization model of collective action can be applied, is Charles Tilly's From Mobilization to Revolution (1978). See also COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOUR.

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mobilization of bias

See COMMUNITY POWER.

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mode

See CENTRAL TENDENCY (MEASURES OF).

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mode of production

Within Marxist theory, this is the constitutive characteristic of a society or social formation, based on the socio-economic system predominant within it–for example capitalism, feudalism, or socialism.
Mode of production was conventionally defined in terms of the interaction of the relations and forces of production; that is, the system of ownership of the means of production, and the level of development of the latter. For Karl Marx, this formed the foundation or base of all social systems, and from it other social, economic, ideological, and political relations were derived. Considerable debate took place within Marxism as to how far the other areas of social activity–the superstructure—could be derived from the socio-economic base, or mode of production, and how far they enjoyed an autonomy. Friedrich Engels remarked that the economic sphere was determinant ‘in the last instance’, summing up this ambiguity, and initiating an unresolved debate about the relative autonomy of the political and ideological realms.
Marxism also analysed societies in which more than one mode of production was present, either because the society was in transition from one to the other, or because subordinate modes survived or were even maintained by the dominant one through a process of ‘articulation’ of modes of production—as for example in the case of slavery within the early capitalism of the Americas, or capitalist sectors within predominantly socialist societies.

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model

This is a term which has been given a wide variety of different meanings by sociologists. In some cases it has been used as a synonym for theory, but in others as a reference to a system of abstract concepts at a more general level than a theory. Equally, it is used to refer to a statistical model, as in causal modelling. Whichever definition is used the essence of a model is that it requires the researcher to engage with theory and thus avoid empiricism.
At root, models seek to simplify phenomena, as an aid to conceptualization and explanation. In sociology structural-functionalism is a model in the first two senses suggested above, since it provides a broad frame of reference (a meta-theory which states that society is like an organism) and a set of conceptual propositions (a theory showing how the parts of society are integrated and make a contribution to the functioning of the whole). Where a hypothesis about the relationship between concepts is specified, and the concepts can be measured, we may speak of an operational model. These models are sometimes expressed diagrammatically, and may be set out more formally in mathematical terms, as for example in a regression model or loglinear model. Model building, a key aspect of mathematical sociology, involves the refinement of models from the stage of a flow diagram to a formal mathematical expression. Causal models may be of either type. Whatever form it takes, a model is an aid to complex theoretical activity, and directs our attention to concepts or variables and their interrelationships. See also MULTI-LEVEL MODELS; MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS.

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modelling

See CAUSAL MODELLING; MODEL.

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Modernism

Modernism is the generally accepted term to describe the sweeping changes that took place, particularly in the arts and literature, between the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the Second World War. There is, however, no clear demarcation by date, and although the term post-modern is increasingly used to describe changes since the Second World War, there are some who argue Modernism persists, and others who see its demise as having occurred much earlier. Roland Barthes, a French semiologist, defined Modernism as the pluralization of world-views deriving from the evolution of new classes, technology, and communications that were gathering momentum in the mid-nineteenth century, while the English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf regarded it as a historic opportunity for change in human relationships and the human character.
Although there is little unanimity as to when it began or exactly what its characteristics were, stylistically Modernism is usually depicted as a movement towards sophistication, mannerism, introversion, technical display, internal self-scepticism, and as a reaction against Victorian realism. Friedrich Nietzsche, often regarded as one of the first modernists because of his proclamation that ‘no artist tolerates reality’, argued that the aim of art should be its own self-realization, and that art itself makes life. His emphases on the individual and the drama of the artist's own consciousness were influential in a number of ways for the development of Mofernism, as were Sigmund Freud's theories of the unconscious, and the importance he placed on sexuality.
Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Symbolism, Imagism, Voriticism, Dadaism, and Surrealism: all of these movements sprung from what is generally called Modernism, and all were, to varying degrees, subversive of the realist or romantic impulse and disposed towards abstraction. In music, Modernism was characterized by atonalism, in poetry by vers libre, in fiction by stream of consciousness writing, while in architecture it is associated with functionalism. But Modernism was not just a movement associated with the arts. Rather, it was a broad intellectual movement affecting, and affected by, technological, political, and ideological changes and developments of the time. Einstein's theory of relativity, the discovery of X-rays, the beginning of the mass production of cars, and, crucially, shattering new developments in warfare during the First World War, all led to generalized traits of crisis, fragmentation, and introversion which can be seen as affecting all realms of culture and society at the time, and arguably still resonate at the end of the twentieth century.

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modernity

See ADORNO, T. W.; FOLK–URBAN CONTINUUM; GEMEINSCHAFT AND GESELLSCHAFT; GENOCIDE; INDUSTRIALISM; TRUST AND DISTRUST, AND URBAN SOCIOLOGY.

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modernization, modernization theory

A term and approach that came into widespread use in the early 1960s, as a consequence of the efforts by a group of development specialists in the United States to develop an alternative to the Marxist account of social development.
In its most sophisticated variants, modernization theory explains modernization by reference to the onset of the process that Talcott Parsons refers to as structural differentiation. This is a process which may be triggered in many different ways, but which is most likely to be initiated by changes in either technology or values (as in Parson's ‘pattern variable’ schema). As a result of this process, institutions multiply, the simple structures of traditional societies are transformed into the complex ones of modern societies, and values come to bear a striking resemblance to those current in the United States of the 1960s.
A good example of the genre is the work of the American comparative sociologist Alex Inkeles, best known for his many studies of the attitudinal aspects of modernization, mostly using survey data and psychological tests to explore ‘the process whereby people move from being traditional to become modern personalities’ (see, for example, his article on
‘Industrial Man’ in the American journal of Sociology, 1960, and the jointly authored Becoming Modern, 1974
). These sorts of studies of national character and personality type are also now thought to be contentious. See also DEVELOPMENT, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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moiety

The two or more primary subdivisions in a political or kinship grouping. Some writers restrict the meaning of this term to exogamous groups, whereas others prefer a wider usage, referring to any dual organization (as, for example, in
, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1969)
.

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monetarism

An economic theory which posits that the whole economy of a country can be managed through control of the money supply, that is, money in circulation or the cost of credit. The main policy levers are central bank operations to put more or less money in circulation; interest-rates, which are raised and lowered to discourage or encourage credit purchases and bank loans; and direct government control over the volume of lending by banks and other financial institutions. Economists disagree as to the relative effectiveness of monetarist policies—as compared, for example, with fiscal policy—in regulating the level of economic activity. They also differ as to the priority to be given to the cost of credit, credit controls, and the quantity of money in circulation, as the focus of monetarist policies.

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monism

Any philosophical theory which states that all being may ultimately be referred to a single category. In sociology, theories such as historical materialism are often described as monist, and the term is also applied more loosely to causal accounts which attach sole importance to a single explanatory factor.

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monoculture

See CASH CROP.

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monogamy

A system in which one man marries one woman. Where partners divorce and marry other partners, occasionally repeating the pattern more than once, the term ‘serial monogamy’ may be used.

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monopoly

In general terms, monopoly refers to exclusive possession or control of some resource by a single actor or group of actors. In an economic context, it refers to market concentration and imperfect competition; that is, the dominance by one firm of a particular commodity market which gives it the power to set prices, rather than be subjected to price competition with other firms. In real life, few markets are dominated by one firm alone; more common is domination by a small number of firms, a situation which is commonly referred to as oligopoly. Where two or more businesses reach a formal or informal agreement to limit competition among themselves, for example by fixing similar prices or agreeing separate marketing areas, they are said to form a cartel.

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monopoly capitalism

See CAPITALISM.

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monotheism

This is the belief in a single, transcendental God, who is revealed to human beings through events occurring in history. It is contrasted with polytheism or the belief in many gods. Islam, Judaism, and Christianity are the classical illustrations of religions based on the idea of a single, omnipotent, and omniscient Creator. Examples of polytheism include the supernatural beliefs of classical Greece and Rome, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, and numerous indigenous religions of Africa and the Americas. Polytheism is particularly condemned in Islam, where shirk (or associating another deity with Allah) is regarded as a form of atheism. See also THEISM.

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monotonic regression

See REGRESSION.

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Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de

(1689–1755)
Best known for his satirical commentary on early eighteenth century Parisian life (the Persian Letters, 1721) and for his later masterpiece The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Montesquieu was a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, and arguably one of the founding figures of modern social science. His work in political philosophy explicitly recognized cultural diversity and related the different types of government and law to locally prevailing conditions, institutions, and mores. These ideas were profoundly influential on the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment (especially Hume, Ferguson, and Smith). Montesquieu was also a formative influence on Émile Durkheim. Latter-day commentators have tended to scorn Montesquieu's inclusion of climate and terrain among those conditions which shape law and government, though the more recent concern with environmental questions may yet qualify that judgement. An excellent introduction to his work and its sociological significance is given in Raymond Aron's Main Currents in Sociological Thought (1965).

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Mont Pelerin Society, The

An informal and international association of scholars and public figures dedicated to the generation and dissemination of liberal ideas through its world-wide network of members. Described by one of its founders, the economist Friedrich Hayek, as a ‘kind of international academy of political philosophy’ having the aim of ‘regenerating the ideas of classical liberalism and in order to refute socialism’.
The Society first met in 1947, when socialist interventionist views were in the ascendant, in the Hôtel du Parc on Mont Pelerin sur Vevey in Switzerland. Its members were concerned about the decline of liberalism and the threat to their vision of the free society posed by the post-1945 political settlement in favour of collectivism in democratic-capitalist regimes and the authoritarian socialism of the Soviet empire. Since that time there have been more than 50 meetings; by 1968 the membership of 350 covered 31 countries; in 1984 a survey of members revealed that 50 per cent were academics, 25 per cent were in business, 10 per cent belonged to private research institutions, 7 per cent were politicians, 5 per cent lawyers, and 3 per cent government officials and others. Distinguished scholars who have belonged to the Society include Carlo Antoni, FrankH. Knight, Michael Polanyi, Karl Popper, Lionel Robbins, GeorgeJ. Stigler, Carl Iverson, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, JamesM. Buchanan, and GaryS. Becker.
The Society did not attempt to shape the formation of government policy directly, being more a ‘meeting of minds’ than a physical organization or pressure group, but there are those who claim that, by waging a constant ‘battle of ideas’ against interventionism, individual members exerted considerable indirect influence on the world of politics generally, and contributed significantly to the revival of liberalism in the West in the 1980s. For example, twenty-two of the seventy-six economic advisers to Ronald Reagan during the 1980 US presidential campaign were members of the Society, and a dozen or so members were subsequently involved in the implementation of the Reagan programme. Two of the principal architects of German post-war economic prosperity—Walter Eucken and Ludwig Erhard—were also members. The Society continues to act as a network for the effective dissemination of liberal ideas. There is an interesting official history by R. M. Hartwell (A History of the Mont Pelerin Society, 1995).

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moral career

See CAREER.

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moral community

A term used by Émile Durkheim to describe traditional rural communities, in contrast to cities. The moral community is characterized by social integration (extensive and intimate attachments) and by moral integration (a set of shared beliefs about morality and behaviour). In modern usage, any small group with these qualities, such as a religious sect or military unit, may be termed a moral community.

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moral crusade

A social movement which campaigns around a symbolic or moral issue such as alcohol or pornography. Classic sociological accounts of moral crusades include JosephR. Gusfield's study of the Temperance Movement, Symbolic Crusade (1963), and
, Citizens for Decency (1976)
. The term is part of the wider theory of moral enterprise introduced in Howard Becker's Outsiders. See also MORAL PANIC.

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moral enterprise

Within labelling theory, there is an interest in how rules are produced and enforced, an issue which Howard Becker (in Outsiders) calls the theory of moral enterprise. Moral enterprise thus refers to the processes involved in creating an awareness of issues and following them through into the statute-book. Moral entrepreneurs are the rule-makers, campaigners, and enforcers. See also MORAL CRUSADE; MORAL PANIC.

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moral entrepreneur

See MORAL ENTERPRISE.

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moral hazard

A problem created by the tendency for the group in receipt of a benefit (such as a welfare benefit) to grow in size as a consequence of the virtually costless (to the individual) availability of certain social benefits. Thus, for example, Charles Murray (Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–80, 1986) has argued that the breakdown of traditional family structures and the rise of illegitimacy in the post-war United States is partly a consequence of the availability of new welfare benefits for unmarried mothers.

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moral panic

The process of arousing social concern over an issue—usually the work of moral entrepreneurs (see MORAL ENTERPRISE) and the mass media. The concept was used most forcefully by Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1971), with reference to the concern over the teenage styles of Mods and Rockers in England in the mid-1960s, but it has since been applied in the analysis of the societal reaction to many other social problems, including football hooliganism, child abuse, AIDS, and numerous adolescent subcultural activities. See also LABELLING.

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moral statistics

Numerical data which are generally held to be indicative of social pathology. These would include, for example, statistics on suicide, divorce, mental health, illegitimacy, and abortion. In certain nineteenth-century European societies (most notably France and Britain), such data were widely cited in debates about social reform—although they were usually deployed in very unsociological (indeed unsophisticated) ways.

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morbidity statistics

Morbidity (illness) statistics are widely used by epidemiologists in the analysis of ill-health within human populations. There are two major types of morbidity rate: the prevalence rate and the incidence rate. The prevalence rate gives an indication of the number of individuals in a population suffering from a particular condition at any time, while the incidence rate shows how many individuals develop a condition within a particular period of time, usually one year. Morbidity rates are generally presented for specific conditions rather than as a general rate, and may be reported as absolute numbers within a year (for example 200 cases of rabies), or as incidence rates per thousand population, to facilitate comparisons between different sub-populations (such as sexes, age-groups, or occupations). Unlike mortality rates, which are uniquely reported in official statistics, morbidity statistics are available from a variety of sources, including the following: official statistics on contagious diseases and other notifiable illnesses, hospital in-patient records, records of claims for sickness benefit, and local or national interview surveys which obtain self-report data on ill-health.

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mores

Mores refer to moral rules or ways of behaving that most members of a society believe are essential for maintaining standards of decency. Mores are vigorously enforced and transgressions punished by either group disapproval and sanction or, where mores become laws, by legal action. See also FOLKWAYS.

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Morgan, Lewis Henry

(1818–81)
A New York State lawyer whose interest in the ethnography of native Americans led him to develop a kinship classification system (Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, 1871) that eventually yielded a conjectural history of the family (Ancient Society, 1977) which was the basis of Friedrich Engels's work on the origins of the family and the state.
Morgan was an essentially evolutionary theorist (see EVOLUTIONISM), whose project was to examine the progress of human society from a state of original promiscuity to modern monogamy, which he saw as the basis of the modern state. History was thus driven by a moral imperative, and the legitimacy of modern state forms and monogamous relationships were neatly coincident. Although his conjectural history is no longer taken seriously, the moral link between family and state persists in the twentieth century, not only in political thought but also in functionalist theories of the family.

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morphological classification (or aetiological classification)

See SUICIDE.

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mortality, mortality rate

The death-rate, usually standardized by age and sex, to facilitate comparisons between areas and social groups. It provides a measure of health risks, improvements in the quality of health care, and the comparative overall health of different groups in the population. It is thus used as a reliable indicator of social and economic change, and of comparative standards of living, as well as by epidemiologists who are interested in monitoring the risk of death from infectious diseases and other causes. A variety of mortality rates are used, each with its own purpose, with the overall national death-rate used as the starting-point for comparisons between areas and social groups in a society.
The crude death-rate is the number of deaths in a year per 1000 population in a defined geographical area. In effect a refined version of the absolute number of deaths, this is not very informative, as so much depends on the sex-ratio and age-structure of a population. Crude death-rates can be multiplied by Area Comparability Factors to produce corrected rates which are comparable one with another and enable direct comparisons between areas. More commonly, age-standardized death-rates are calculated separately for men and women, to produce overall Standard Mortality Ratios (SMR) for each sex, or for both sexes combined, for a given area or social group. The SMR compares age-specific death-rates for a given area or social group with national average age-specific death-rates. It is computed as the actual or observed number of deaths in the group of interest, divided by the expected number of deaths, multiplied by 100. (The expected number of deaths is the number that would have occurred if age-specific death-rates in the group of interest were equal to the national averages for the year.) Age-specific crude death-rates and SMRs can also be calculated to identify the age-groups accounting for mortality rates above or below the national average. Five-year and ten-year age-bands are normally used, but broader bands are sometimes used for age-standardization calculations. Mortality rates are also calculated for specific causes of death, such as cholera, cancer, or suicide; and to monitor the control of infectious diseases, improvements in health care, or the social consequences of high unemployment.
Some mortality rates are already age-standardized. The infant mortality rate is the number of deaths within the first year of life divided by the number of live births in the same year times 1000. The neonatal mortality rate is the number of deaths within the first four weeks of life divided by the number of live births in the same year times 1000. The perinatal mortality rate is the number of still-births plus the number of deaths within the first week of life, divided by total births (still-births and live births) in the same year, again times 1000. The maternal mortality rate is the number of maternal deaths divided by total births times 1000. See also LIFE-TABLE; MORBIDITY STATISTICS.

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mortification

See DESOCIALIZATION.

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Mosca, Gaetano

(1858–1941)
An Italian political theorist and proponent of the theory of élite domination. In his most famous book The Ruling Class (1896), he argued that there are inevitably two classes of people, the rulers and the ruled. The former is a highly stable, privileged stratum, which enjoys wealth, power, and honour. In other words, he criticized Marxists who failed to explain the persistence of dominance, and liberals who assumed that the transition to industrial society would lead to the demise of rule by an élite separated from the masses.
While the ruling class may become heterogeneous as a result of increased social mobility and élite circulation, nevertheless, for Mosca it remains oligarchical. Even in communist societies, there is an organizational need for leadership, and in consequence élite dominance. Like Robert Michels, Mosca believed that liberal democracy was a sham, and its ideals could not be realized. It merely hides the inevitability of domination by the ruling élite. Mosca was particularly critical of the symbolic role of political leaders who convinced the masses to support them by means of various ‘political formulae’. Such self-justification perpetuates élite dominance. That said, he later acknowledged that industrial society consists of multiple social forces, at least some of which the ruling class must try to assimilate. These societies are not entirely closed where a range of interests must be accommodated: this hinders the development of an overly centralized bureaucracy. Mosca's theory has been difficult to substantiate—not least because his definition of the ruling class is rather vague (see
, Pareto and Mosca, 1965
). See also ÉLITE THEORY.

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motherhood

A term encompassing the practical realities and social significance of being a mother. The nature of sociological interest in mothering (the process) and motherhood (the condition) has varied over time. Prior to the 1970s, the focus was either on having children as a demographic event (where women rather than men were typically the unit of analysis), or on child-rearing. In both cases the child was the centre of attention, whether as a numerical addition to the population, or as a potential adult member of society. On the one hand, patterns of fertility were examined: the age of childbearing, the spacing of births, family size, contraceptive use, illegitimacy, and so forth. On the other hand, the concern was with the impact of the mother's (and to a lesser extent the father's) behaviour on the child, and hence on the subsequent adult. Sociological analyses drew on anthropologists' influential cross-cultural studies of child-training and psychologists' analyses of child development (in both cases the Freudian legacy was strong). Sociological work located child-rearing within the broader framework of the process of socialization—a process occurring at all stages of life and involving a range of agents, not just parents, in which individuals are trained to accept the prevailing social norms. Given the marked empirical differences in maternal and paternal roles, research on childhood socialization inevitably showed some awareness of gender differences, but tended simply to take them for granted. Indeed, macro-theoretical analyses, like that of Talcott Parsons, asserted the functional necessity in advanced industrial societies of women's role in child-care within the home.
The feminist movements of the 1970s had a marked impact on the sociological study of motherhood, critically questioning the parental division of labour, although empirical studies showed and continue to show that the bulk of parenting is carried out by women. One consequence of this attention to gender differentiation was an interest in fatherhood. Feminism also equally importantly shifted the attention from the mother as a producer and creator of children to the mother herself. In the first place, the experience of being a mother has been placed centre-stage. Second, the impact and significance of motherhood on women's position in society and on the gender division of labour has been addressed by a range of feminist theorists. Women's experience of both having and rearing children, the significance of motherhood to women's identity, and the cultural pressures to have children have all been explored in a range of empirical studies, most notably those of Ann Oakley. Many of these studies have challenged the common assumption that women have some instinctive desire to have children and to care for them, and have also examined the dissatisfactions and frustrations of being a mother, especially if one is confined to the home. Not surprisingly, some feminist theorists have suggested that it is the biological fact of childbearing that is the key source of women's oppression, a view developed most fully in Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering (1978). However, such claims have been hotly contested, and feminists' views on the significance and value of motherhood in women's lives are a matter of vigorous debate. See also MATERNAL DEPRIVATION.

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motivation crisis

See CRITICAL THEORY.

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motive, motivation

See INTERPRETATION; PSYCHOANALYSIS; SANCTION, SOCIAL SANCTION; VOCABULARIES OF MOTIVE.

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Moynihan Report

The name conventionally given to the volume on The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, published by the US Department of Labor in 1965, and authored by the American social scientist and politician DanielP. Moynihan.
Moynihan assembled what his critics subsequently claimed was a highly selective account of existing (mainly sociological) research into poverty in the United States. This seemed to place responsibility for being poor on the victims themselves, mainly because the ‘lower-class sub-culture’—in particular that of Blacks—was said to be dominated by ‘matriarchy’, emasculated males, educational failure, crime, delinquency, and drug addiction, all of which ultimately were attributable to the breakdown of the family structure. In the words of the report, ‘At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of weakness of the Negro community at the present time … The white family has achieved a high degree of stability and is maintaining that stability. By contrast, the family structure of lower class Negroes is highly unstable, and in many urban centres is approaching complete breakdown.’ Moynihan argued that ‘so long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.’
The Report provided the basis for a presidential speech that established new federal policy goals, provoked a public political controversy, attracted a host of academic and other critical reactions, and became a prominent issue in the civil rights debate and movement. Much of the discussion and many of the issues were later restated in relation to the concepts of the culture of poverty, cycles of deprivation, welfare dependency, and the underclass. For a commentary on the Report and an assessment of its significance in shaping American public policy and race relations see
, Culture and Poverty (1968
).

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multicollinearity

Multicollinearity occurs where there is a high correlation between two or more independent variables in a regression analysis. There is considerable disagreement about the degree of correlation that must exist between independent variables before they are considered to be multicollinear. Extreme multicollinearity (for example a correlation of .70 or higher between two independent variables) has adverse effects on the standard errors of the regression coefficients (and hence on tests of their statistical significance and confidence intervals).

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multi-cultural society

A society characterized by cultural pluralism—as in the cases of the United States and post-war Britain. As an ideal, multi-culturalism celebrates cultural variety (for example linguistic and religious diversity), and may be contrasted with the assimilationist ideal assumed in many early studies of race, ethnicity, and immigration.

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multi-dimensional scaling

Often, a set of data (for example attitude items) cannot be represented in one dimension, such as in a unidimensional scale or factor analysis. The items may then be modified or selected, so that they can be so represented (as in item analysis and scale construction); or, alternatively, a representation can be sought in a space of two or more dimensions. The purpose of multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) is to seek as good a representation of the data as possible in as few dimensions as possible.
In the simplest case (non-metric Euclidean distance MDS), data are thought of as giving information on the similarity or dissimilarity between pairs of objects: for example, positive correlations can be interpreted as similarities, such that the higher the value the more similar are the variables. The purpose of MDS is to represent each variable as a point in a low-dimensional space so that the distance between the points accurately reflects the relative size of the data similarities and dissimilarities. Non-metric (or ordinal) MDS preserves only the rank order of the data; metric (linear or power) MDS preserves the quantitative information. Computer programs implementing MDS usually seek such a solution iteratively; that is, from a preliminary guess successively brought into closer conformity to the data, in a cycle of improvements.
MDS is a very useful and general family of procedures (a General Distance Model) appropriate to a wide variety of data, including (for example) two-way correlation matrices, rectangular individual by variable matrices, and three-way stacks of data; to different models (distance, scalar-products or factor, weighted distance); and different levels of measurement (such as monotonic/non-metric, linear/metric, and power transformations). It has been used successfully on a wide range of sociological and psychological data (see
, Multidimensional Scaling, 1978
).

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multi-level models

A set of closely related approaches to examining the links between macro- and micro-levels of social phenomena. Multi-level (also known as ‘contextual’ or ‘hierarchical’) models in sociology attempt to identify the effects of social context on individual-level outcomes.
The idea that individuals are affected by and respond to their social surroundings is fundamental to sociology as a discipline. Among the classic sociologists, Durkheim studied the impact of community structure on suicide rates, and Weber the impact of religious communities (such as the Protestant sects) on economic conduct. However, since the mid-1980s, new theories have been developed and new statistical techniques applied to a variety of sociological problems, and these represent a significant advance over earlier approaches.
There are a number of multi-level models, going under a variety of names, most of which are extensions of the ‘contextual regression analysis’ used in sociology since the 1960s. These include the hierarchical linear model, hierarchical linear regression, random coefficients model, hierarchical mixed linear model, and bayesian linear model. Numerous other types are being developed by sociologists of education, stratification, and criminology. These involve, among others, the extension of event-history and contingency table analysis to include multi-level effects. The essential feature that they have in common is that all make allowance for contextual effects; that is, for macro-processes that are presumed to have an impact on the individual actor, over and above the effects of any individual-level variables that may be operating. In this definition, an ‘individual’ is any unit of analysis that is micro relative to some other macro-level in the study, and contextual effects may be those associated with, for example, space (nation, community), time (history), or organizations (schools, corporations). Multiple contexts can apply to any given unit.
Multi-level models explain micro-level outcomes either by showing that the parameters of models specified at the micro-level (where micro-level outcomes are explained by micro–level covariates) are a function of context, or by showing that micro–macro relationships can be expressed in terms of characteristics of the context, in the form of macro-level variables. Thus, for example, researchers have used multi-level event-history models to specify community effects in outcomes such as the timing of marriage or fertility (
, ‘A Multi-level Analysis of Marital and Nonmarital Fertility in the U.S.’, Social Forces, 1992
). There is an extensive literature on school effects. Some research suggests that the effects of race are reduced in orderly schools, while those of class and academic background are reduced in smaller schools, as well as those where discipline procedures are effective and fair. Other studies have looked at the impact of local labour-market effects on decisions to remain at school (see, for example, the article by
, on ‘Schooling and the Discouraged Worker’, in the journal Sociology, 1989
). There have also been numerous multi-level analyses of the effects of organizational structure and labour-market segmentation on career outcomes, based on data collected at the individual, firm, and labour-market levels. For example,
(‘When Bigger is Better: Differences in the Individual-Level Effect of Firm and Establishment Size’, American Sociological Review, 1988)
examined the impact of firm size and other organizational characteristics on individual earnings, and how this varied across occupations and the sexes.
Although multi-level models promise greater understanding of precisely what context means, and how it may affect individual outcomes in which sociologists are interested, the approach is not without its problems. Robust statistical estimates for model parameters can be hard to provide if models are too complicated. (Some studies have used five-level models having ten variables on each level.) Missing data may also bias statistical estimates.

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multinational corporation

A form of capitalist enterprise in which the financial structure, managerial control, and integration of productive activity span national boundaries and are oriented to international (or global) markets. See also INDUSTRIAL INTEGRATION.

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multinational logistic regression

See LOGISTIC (OR LOGIT) REGRESSION.

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multiple causation

See CAUSAL MODELLING.

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multiple deprivation

See DEPRIVATION.

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multiple linear regression

See REGRESSION.

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multi-stage sample

See SAMPLING.

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multivariate analysis

Univariate analysis consists in describing and explaining the variation in a single variable. Bivariate analysis does the same for two variables taken together (covariation). Multivariate analysis (MVA) considers the simultaneous effects of many variables taken together. A crucial role is played by the multivariate normal distribution, which allows simplifying assumptions to be made (such as the fact that the interrelations of many variables can be reduced to information on the correlations between each pair), which make it feasible to develop appropriate models. MVA models are often expressed in algebraic form (as a set of linear equations specifying the way in which the variables combine with each other to affect the dependent variable) and can also be thought of geometrically. Thus, the familiar bivariate scatter-plot of individuals in the two dimensions representing two variables can be extended to higher-dimensional (variable) spaces, and MVA can be thought of as discovering how the points cluster together.
The most familiar and often-used variants of MVA include extensions of regression analysis and analysis of variance, to multiple regression and multivariate analysis of variance respectively, both of which examine the linear effect of a number of independent variables on a single dependent variable. This forms the basis for estimating the relative (standardized) effects of networks of variables specified in so-called path (or dependence or structural equational) analysis—commonly used to model, for example, complex patterns of intergenerational occupational inheritance. Variants now exist for dichotomous, nominal, and ordinal variables.
A common use of MVA is to reduce a large number of inter-correlated variables into a much smaller number of variables, preserving as much as possible of the original variation, whilst also having useful statistical properties such as independence. These dimensionality-reducing models include principal components analysis, factor analysis, and multi-dimensional scaling. The first (PCA) is a descriptive tool, designed simply to find a small number of independent axes or components which contain decreasing amounts of the original variation. Factor analysis, by contrast, is based on a model which postulates different sources of variation (for example common and unique factors) and generally only attempts to explain common variation. Factor analysis has been much used in psychology, especially in modelling theories of intelligence.
Variants of MVA less commonly used in the social sciences include canonical analysis (where the effects are estimated of a number of different variables on a number of—that is not just one—dependent variables); and discriminant analysis (which maximally differentiates between two or more subgroups in terms of the independent variables).
Recently, much effort has gone into the development of MVA for discrete (nominal and ordinal) data, of particular relevance to social scientists interested in analysing complex cross-tabulations and category counts (the most common form of numerical analysis in sociology). Of especial interest is loglinear analysis (akin both to analysis of variance and chi-squared analysis) which allows the interrelationships in a multi-way contingency table to be presented more simply and parsimoniously.

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multi-vocal symbols

Symbols which are capable of more than one interpretation, hence becoming a possible cause of conflict, as different groups attempt to have their particular definition adopted as the standard.

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mutualism

See ANARCHISM.

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myth

A sacred or religious tale whose content is concerned with the origins or creation of natural, supernatural, or cultural phenomena. The anthropological meaning differs from that which implies an untruth. Myths have been studied as fractured sources of oral history, as clues to the society's dominant values, as a ‘social charter’, and (by Claude Lévi-Strauss) for their universal structures.

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N

Nadel, Siegfried Frederick

(1903–56)
Nadel came to British social anthropology from a background in psychology and philosophy from the University of Vienna, where he had already gained a doctorate. He studied at the London School of Economics under Seligman and Malinowski and carried out fieldwork in West Africa, largely among the Nupe of Nigeria (see
A Black Byzantium, 1942, and Nupe Religion, 1954
). He is probably best remembered for his theoretical work, although this is now little read, in which he attempted to link sociology, social anthropology, and psychology in a single frame of analysis (see
The Foundations of Social Anthropology, 1942
). His relatively early death, when he was at the height of his powers, undoubtedly contributed to the decline in interest in his work among the next generation of social scientists.

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narcissism

Used in everyday life to indicate self-love and egoism, the concept has a more technical meaning to orthodox psychoanalytic theory. Primary narcissism refers to the love of self which, Freud argues, must precede the ability to love others. This stage of development is also typified by the opposite of self-love—self-hatred. Secondary narcissism is identifying with, and then introjecting, an object (person) making it part of oneself. A ‘narcissistic object choice’ involves identifying with a person on the basis of that person's similarity to oneself.
The concept has been extended by the American social historian Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism, 1980, and The Minimal Self, 1984) into an instrument of social analysis and criticism. Lasch, who is unusual on the political Left for promoting the virtue of family life, argues that modern society has crippled human abilities for love and commitment. The social changes associated with modernity (the development of large bureaucracies and technological change), and consequent changes in family relationships (especially the comparative absence of the father), have allegedly made it difficult to develop beyond narcissism. The dominant personality type of modern society is said to be internally impoverished, fluctuating between exaggerated self-love and self-hatred, consequently needing parasitic relationships to reinforce the former; it is unable to tolerate frustration, inadequacy, and strong feelings, due to a lack of ego-development. Lasch sees a number of cultural phenomena—from the emphasis on health and sporting achievement through to the New Left of the 1960s, sexual liberation movements, and much modern feminism—as manifestations of narcissism. The narcissistic personality is often successful in the outside world, but feels an inner emptiness, and concentrates on survival rather than investing in the future.

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national bourgeoisie

See COMPRADOR.

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national character

See CULTURE AND PERSONALITY SCHOOL; MODERNIZATION; NATIONALISM.

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National Deviance Conference (NDC)

The name given to a group of radical and critical criminologists (see CRIMINOLOGY, CRITICAL) and deviance theorists in the United Kingdom, who met regularly at York University, between 1967 and 1975. They were strongly identified with labelling theory. Typical of the publications associated with the group are
, Images of Deviance (1971)
, and
, Politics and Deviance (1973)
.

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National Socialism

See FASCISM.

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nationalism

Sentiment, aspiration, and consciousness are all terms applied to what constitutes nationalism, or the valuation of the nation-state above all else. However, it also entails certain assumptions about the will to self-determination, the existence and indeed desirability of diversity, the superiority of the sovereign state over other forms of rule, and the centrality of national loyalty to political power as a basic form of legitimation. Authors as diverse as Émile Durkheim and Lenin have argued that the prerequisite of genuine, solidaristic internationalism is mature nationalism, which alone recognizes the commonalities of diversity. However, others maintain the concept involves spurious notions of natural boundaries, and merely provides a convenient political epithet for both Left and Right alike (see
, Theories of Nationalism, 2nd edn., 1983, and National Identity, 1991
).
Variants of nationalism have tended to move away from the German version associated with the writings of J. G. Herder, which stressed the organic unity and ties of a nation, emphasizing subordination to the whole (in this case the state), a sense of mission, national purity, and the soul of a nation. This form of organic nationalism was more affectual than other West European rational associational nationalisms. There were also differences between German and Slav nationalisms, the latter tied to liberationist mobilization rather than irredentism, and to a nationalist intelligentsia rather than the whole people or Volk.
In his classic book on The Idea of Nationalism (1945), Hans Kohn distinguishes ‘Western’ type nationalism of the kind that emerged in England and France during the period 1600–1800 from the ‘Eastern’ type of nationalism which appeared in later centuries. In the former case, the nation is identified with the masses and with popular forms of politics, and thus serves to provide a cultural justification for an already existing political structure. In the latter, nationalism is used to justify the creation of nation-states in economically and politically less-developed parts of the world, by redrawing political boundaries in conformity with ethnographic demands—in other words it provides a justification for the invention of states and political processes. This distinction, like most other subsequent typologies of nationalism, serves descriptive and normative purposes; that is, it both classifies the types of nationalism found in the modern world, and simultaneously declares these to be politically valuable or dangerous forms. The Western variant is authentic, liberal, democratic, and good, while the Eastern is alien, ethnic, racist, and generally bad.
A similar, subsequent, and currently controversial typology distinguishes between ‘civic nationalism’ and ‘ethnic nationalism’ (see for example
, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, 1992
). The former equates nationality with citizenship; is defined primarily in political or legal terms; implies a commitment (embraced voluntarily) to certain duties and rights; and can therefore be acquired and lost. The concept of civic nationalism means that some individuals can be without a nationality at all. Ethnic nationality, on the other hand, is rooted in biological necessity rather than individual choice. It runs in families and is believed to be an inherited characteristic. People are born into a particular nationality, which then determines their interests, sentiments, and sense of attachment to a particular nation. This distinction is appealing to many Western and liberal observers, because it allows them to differentiate between the idea of a freely chosen, politically decent nationalism (such as one might find in the civic pride of Americans), and the nationalism that celebrates inherited cultural identity (of the type that is found in, and causes conflict within, many East European countries).
Many of the typologies of nationalism have been accused of being Eurocentric, and of failing to address Latin American and emerging African post-colonial nationalisms, and the artificiality of imperially imposed boundaries upon tribal lands which were more fluid than the nation-states which followed.
Some writers have suggested that nationalism is itself a modern religion—or is at least akin to what elsewhere in sociology has been called a civil (or civic) religion. Indeed, there are specifically ‘religious nationalisms’, associated mainly with Islam and Judaism but evident also in, for example, the recent histories of Poland and Ireland (where Roman Catholicism has formed a central element in the national—secular—identity). Others maintain that nationalism is an essentially secular form of consciousness, so that the most which can be claimed is a functional equivalence between religion and nationalism.
Some accounts of nationalism appear deterministic. For example, Ernest Gellner's writings (see
Nations and Nationalism, 1983
) suggest that history can be seen as a succession of changing technologies, each of which generates the need for a specific socio-political order, and that nationalism is the style of politics that is best suited to the current (industrial) technology (because industrial societies, unlike agrarian ones, need homogeneous languages and culture in order to work efficiently). According to Gellner, ‘a man without a nation … provokes revulsion’, so where nationalism does not exist it is (as it were) necessary to invent it. In Gellner's account, emphasis is placed less on spontaneous collective aspirations (of the ‘civic’ kind) or culture (‘ethnic’ considerations), than upon the deliberate (and necessary) nation-building policies of government élites (or aspirant governments), pursued by means of public education and the culture industries. Perhaps not surprisingly Gellner's account has been criticized as materialist and functionalist. In social psychology, the social identity theory (SIT) of Henri Tajfel (see
Human Groups and Social Categories, 1981
) and his associates traces nationalism to (possibly innate) human tendencies to affiliate in social groups, and then act in furtherance of these groups. Within this particular research paradigm, social identities are viewed as integral aspects of an overall sense of self; those rooted in racial or national groups are found to be particularly important for self-esteem; and so it is difficult for people not to think nationalistically, to feel loyalties to their given (even if ‘imagined’) national community, and to pursue its particular interests against those of other nation-states. (For a summary of SIT research in European social psychology see
, Group Identifications, 1988
.)
The post-communist transformations in Russia and Central Europe raise the possibility of examining hypotheses about the relationships between nation-building, in terms of the search for new sources of social identification, and the advent of capitalism. In particular, the ‘value vacuum’ created by the collapse of official Marxism-Leninism has provided for a burgeoning of nationalist and populist ideologies, although these often refer to the nationalism of ‘small nations’ which do not possess the attributes necessary for full-blown nationalism.

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nativism

In sociological contexts, this term is used most commonly to refer to the negative, ethnocentric responses of native-born populations towards immigrants. The classic study of such responses is
, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925 (1955)
.

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nativistic movement

See MESSIANIC MOVEMENT; NEW RELIGIONS.

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natural area

A term used in urban ecology to denote an area inhabited by a population which shares common ‘social heritage, occupation, interests, or other distinguishing cultural possessions’ (
, Human Ecology, 1950
). In short, a distinctive community. See also CONCENTRIC ZONE THEORY.

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natural experiment

An experiment in which the independent variable is not artificially manipulated, but rather changes naturally in terms of its level or presence, so that these alterations can be used to monitor its effect and attempt to determine its impact upon a dependent variable or variables. Such studies are understandably rare in sociology, although one example is provided by John Gaventa's study of quiescence and rebellion among Appalachian coal miners (Power and Powerlessness, 1980), which investigates the impact of historically variable power relationships (most notably the mobilization of bias (see COMMUNITY POWER)) involving large business corporations in local communities.

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natural law

The ambiguity of the term natural law rests upon a metaphorical link between regularities in nature and the authoritative regulation of human activity. In its latter use, ‘natural law’ refers to principles of law and morality, supposedly universal in scope and binding on human conduct. In medieval Christian theology natural law was held to be a God-given system, but from the Reformation onwards, attempts were made to give natural law secular foundations in human nature and reason. In the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes, for example, ‘laws of nature’ provide rational grounds for the social contract, and so for the establishment of political authority. Since the eighteenth century, legal theory has tended to be hostile to the notion of natural law—the conventional, socially and historically formed character of law being more commonly emphasized. However, the increase in moral authority attaching to human rights since the Second World War owes much to the natural law tradition.
The idea of the natural world as created by God, and so being subject (like human society) to God's authority, led to the metaphorical extension of the notion of natural law to refer to regularities in nature. Here, again, the idea had its religious and its secular adherents, though from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the principal division was between rationalists and empiricists. The former tended to attribute necessity to the laws of nature, some of them (such as Leibniz) supposing these to be rationally demonstrable from a priori principles. The empiricists held that knowledge of the laws of nature could be established only on the basis of observation and experiment. On this view the regularities summarized in laws of nature could not justifiably be held to have any necessity about them. Our expectation that such regularities would continue into the future, however unavoidable in practical life, was (David Hume argued) nevertheless rationally ungrounded, and a mere habit of mind.

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natural selection

See DARWINISM.

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naturalism

In sociology and moral philosophy the term naturalism has several distinct but related uses which are frequently confused with one another. In moral philosophy, naturalism is the thesis (contra Hume's famous denial that ‘ought’ can be derived from ‘is’) that moral judgements can be deduced from (or are a type of) factual statements. In sociology, however, the most common use of the term derives from the long-running dispute about whether sociology can be a science in the same sense as the natural sciences; and, relatedly, whether its methods should be based on those of the natural sciences. Naturalism in this usage of the term (‘methodological naturalism’) is the view that sociology is, or can become, a science, and that the methods of the natural sciences—experiment, inductive generalization, prediction, statistical analysis, and so on—are directly, or by analogy, usable by sociologists. Anti-naturalists argue that a radically different methodological approach—closer to literary criticism, textual interpretation, or conversational analysis—is required.
Generally implicit in this methodological dispute are disagreements of an ontological kind about the nature of the subject-matter of sociology (and the other human sciences). In general terms, the opposition may be characterized as a dispute about whether human beings and their social life should be understood as a part of nature, continuous with the subject-matter of other sciences, or whether humans represent a radical discontinuity, a qualitative exception in the order of nature. In this area the dispute between naturalists and anti-naturalists clearly overlaps with that between materialists and idealists. However, further distinctions need to be made if we are to make sense of the different positions commonly taken up by sociologists. Ontological naturalists can themselves be divided into two broad groups. Those (such as, for example, sociobiologists) who take the view that sociology may become a science through direct annexation as a sub-division of the existing natural sciences (evolutionary biology, in the case of the sociobiologists), may be termed ‘reductionist naturalists’. Other ontological naturalists insist that humans and their social life are a part of nature, but nevertheless recognize that language, culture, complex forms of normatively ordered social life, and so on, establish a distinct order of reality (‘emergent properties’) which poses special challenges for scientific investigation. Émile Durkheim, for example, recognized the sui generis reality of social life, its irreducibility to the facts of biology or psychology, yet advocated a methodology modelled upon that of the natural sciences.

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nature versus nurture debate

The common description of the controversy over the relative importance of heredity (nature) and environment (nurture) in the causation of human behaviour. The debate has been particularly important in certain fields of sociology, including education (with a focus on the heritability of intelligence), crime (with, for instance, dispute over the idea of an inherited criminal personality), and gender divisions (with heated debate over the importance of biology to observed differences in male—female behaviour).

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Naturwissenschaften

See GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN AND NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN.

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need

A need is something that is deemed necessary, especially something that is considered necessary for the survival of the person, organization, or whatever. The concept is widely used in the social sciences, with especial attention being placed on so-called human needs. Needs are commonly contrasted with wants (or desires), needs referring to things that are necessary, wants to those that are desired. Since the concept itself suggests that needs ought to be satisfied, it has frequently been invoked in the rhetoric of political and policy debates, notably in support of claims for action and intervention. It is central to discussions of poverty and deprivation and to welfare—a term referring to the meeting of human needs. Not surprisingly, however, the specification of needs is strongly contested. It is not too difficult to get agreement over a list of basic requirements for survival—such as the physiological and material needs for food, sleep, and shelter. However, determining necessary levels of these requirements is more difficult. Moreover, although academics and policy-makers may agree on a core of basic human needs, many would dispute whether this exhausts the set of basic human needs. Some would wish to include psychological and social needs, such as the need for love and care, for companionship, for the opportunity to learn, and so forth, as universal requirements. It has also been suggested that such needs can be viewed hierarchically. There is disagreement, too, over whether needs should be defined in absolute or relative terms, should be assessed objectively or subjectively, and indeed over the value of the concept itself.
Sociologists, especially those of a functional persuasion, have also used the concept of need in studying the functioning of societies. Talcott Parsons, for example, explicated the functional prerequisites of the social system—the things necessary for the survival of the society—such as adequate motivational support for the system itself. In a similar vein, Marxists talk of the needs of capitalism, mentioning most frequently the needs for production, reproduction, and legitimation. However, critics have pointed both to the difficulty of identifying the needs of society with any precision, and to the frequently tautological nature of the endeavour. See also NEEDS, HIERARCHY OF.

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needs, hierarchy of

The central concept in Abraham Maslow's theory of self-actualization. He proposed that human desires are innately given and exist in an ascending hierarchy. Basic physiological needs—food, sleep, protection from extreme hazards of the environment—must first be met. Then the needs for safety and security become paramount: we need some kind of order, certainty, and structure in our lives. Once these are met the third need, to belong and to love, comes into play. Fourth in the hierarchy is the need for self-esteem—for both self-respect and esteem from other people. When all these needs have been met, the fifth and highest need emerges: namely, the need for self-actualization, or the desire to become everything that one can become. As Maslow states in Motivation and Personality (1970), ‘a musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature.’ Part of Maslow's research involved the study of self-actualized people, and he provided substantial listings of the characteristics of such individuals. His work has led to the study of ‘peak’ experiences, and the growth of a transpersonal, often more spiritual psychology.

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negative correlation

See CORRELATION.

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negotiated order, negotiation of order

A theory developed largely within symbolic interactionism to depict social organization occurring in and through people negotiating with each other. Designed in part as a response to the critique that interactionists had no tools for analysing social structure and were too subjective, the theory attempts to depict social organization as an active achievement of social actors, and not as a static or reified concept. It can be traced back to a number of classic sources: George Herbert Mead's dialectical concept of society; Herbert Blumer's idea> of the interpretive process and the joint act; Robert Park's characterization of society as a succession of conflicts, accommodations, and assimilations; and Everett Hughes's concern with institutional flexibility. The term is stated and developed most explicitly, however, in the writings of Anselm Strauss and his colleagues, especially Psychiatric Ideologies and Institutions (1963), and his later book Negotiations (1978). Strauss depicts social order as ‘something at which members of any society, any organization, must work. For the shared agreements … are not binding for all time … review is called for … the bases of concerted action (social order) must be constituted continually, or “worked out”’. The theory highlights emergence, change, and temporality; the embedded and contextual nature of order; the omnipresence of specific power relations; and the constant segmentation and fragmentation of social orders.

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neighbourhood

See COMMUNITY.

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neo-classical economics

Economics, as an academic discipline, is predominantly the study of the allocation of scarce resources to alternative uses via market prices. The dominant paradigm in modern economics is neo-classical theory which developed from the so-called marginalist revolution pioneered by Leon Walras, William Stanley Jevons, and Alfred Marshall in the late nineteenth century. This posits that prices are determined by marginal utility (of consumers) and marginal productivity (of factors of production). Neo-classical theories are based on simple behavioural models at the micro-level (households, firms) which assume perfect information, freedom of movement, individual choice, optimizing and rational decision-making. The basic conditions for these models are private enterprise, consumer sovereignty, and market-clearing prices. Institutional influences on individual behaviour are defined exogenously as given characteristics and do not form part of the basic behavioural model. However, game-theoretic approaches have been developed recently to explain individual behaviour within institutional rules.
A recent development in modern economic theory, developed in the USA, goes under the name of ‘political economy’ and has nothing to do with radical or Marxist versions to which the label is more commonly applied. This literature applies neo-classical principles to areas outside the economy, such as public policy, focusing on artificially induced scarcities (‘rents’) which are produced by political pressure exerted by economic interest groups.

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neo-colonialism

A term often applied to the economic situation of many former colonies after political independence has been secured. Neo-colonialist interpretations of economic development in the Third World suggest that, as a budget-saving and humanitarian act, political decolonization nevertheless left in-tact the West's monopolistic control over the production and marketing of goods in the former colonies. By using international law, corporate property rights, and the power of major commercial banks the former colonial powers could retain economic influence and control over their former dependent territories. In Marxist discourse this phenomenon is usually termed neo-imperialism.
Under neo-colonialism, as under direct colonial rule, the relationship between centre and periphery (or metropolis and satellite) is said to involve the export of capital from the former to the latter; a reliance on Western manufactured goods and services which thwarts indigenous development efforts; further deterioration in the terms of trade for the newly independent countries; and a continuation of the processes of cultural Westernization which guarantee the West's market outlets elsewhere in the world. The operations of transnational corporations in the Third World are seen as the principal agents of contemporary neo-colonialism, since (at least within dependency theory) these are seen as exploiting local resources and influencing international trade and national governments to their own advantage. See also CENTRE-PERIPHERY MODEL; COLONIALISM.

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neo-Darwinism

See DARWINISM; GENE.

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neo-imperialism

See NEO-COLONIALISM.

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neo-Kantianism

In the wake of the German idealist tradition, the growing popularity of scientific materialist world-outlooks in mid-nineteenth-century Germany provoked intellectual and cultural resistance in the shape of neo-Kantianism. This movement was very diverse, and had a pervasive influence in the humanities and social sciences in Germany from 1860 onwards. The historian of philosophy Kuno Fischer called for a ‘return to Kant’ in 1860, and the call was answered by many of Germany's leading intellectuals, including Friedrich Albert Lange, Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Windleband, and Wilhelm Dilthey. In its broader cultural and political significance the movement included liberal-humanist resistance to the increasingly virulent racism of the German Social Darwinist movement led by the materialist Ernst Hasckel, as well as moderate conservative hostility to materialism as associated with revolutionary socialism.
More narrowly, the neo-Kantians were concerned to establish a bulwark against the spread of natural scientific methods into the sphere of the humanities and social sciences. Kant's critical philosophy (in their various interpretations of it) provided resources for this project in two ways. First, the duality in Kant between a perceptible and therefore knowable world of ‘appearances’, and a world of ‘things-in-themselves’ presupposed in morality, freedom, aesthetics, and the unity of the self, could be employed as the justification for a radical separation between the natural sciences and the ‘human’, ‘cultural’, or ‘historical’ sciences. Sometimes this distinction was made in terms of the radical differences of subject-matter between the two complexes of disciplines, and sometimes (as in the work of Rickert) in terms of the distinctive character of our interest in the two domains. According to the latter view, our concern in the natural sciences is with objects of experience in so far as they are instances of universal laws, whereas in the cultural sphere our interest is in particular meaningful expressions in virtue of their relevance to values. Moreover, the distinctive character of the objects of the cultural sciences as complexes of meaning requires a distinctive form of understanding (Verstehen) not reducible to the sensory perception typical of natural scientific method.
The second way in which Kant was important for the neo-Kantians was his philosophical method. The neo-Kantians (and others, such as Dilthey, who, though sharing many of the preoccupations of the neo-Kantians, was not strictly one of their number) sought not only to establish the autonomy of the human, historical sciences from the natural sciences, but also to parallel Kant's philosophical defence of natural science with an analysis of the conceptual and methodological conditions for objective knowledge of human historical and cultural expressions. Neo-Kantianism was profoundly influential in providing the philosophical and methodological basis for German interpretative sociology, of which the most important representatives were Georg Simmel and Max Weber. Later, leading figures in the distinctive twentieth-century tradition of Western Marxism (such as György Lukács) derived their main philosophical orientation from neo-Kantianism, as did the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, and the founding figure of cultural anthropology Franz Boas. See also GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN AND NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN.

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neo-liberalism

A loosely knit body of ideas which became very influential during the 1980s and which were premissed upon a (slight) rethinking and a (substantial) reassertion of classical liberalism. The most prominent neo-liberals are libertarians, enthusiastic advocates of the rights of the individual against those of the ‘coercive state’, chief amongst whose protagonists are Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Robert Nozick. As these names suggest, neo-liberalism has had far more influence in economics and political science than in sociology.

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neo-Marxism

A term loosely applied to any social theory or sociological analysis which draws on the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but amends or extends these, usually by incorporating elements from other intellectual traditions—such as, for example, psychoanalysis (as in the case of critical theory), Weberian sociology (as in Erik Olin Wright's theory of contradictory class locations), or anarchism (as in the example of critical criminology).

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neonatal mortality rate

See MORTALITY RATE.

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neo-positivism

A movement in early twentieth-century American sociology which blended together the three themes of quantification, behaviourism, and positivist epistemology. Its principal proponents were Franklin H. Giddings and George A. Lundberg, although the mathematical sociology of writers such as George K. Zipf (1902–50) can be seen as a development of neo-positivist theory.
In his Studies in the Theory of Human Society (1922), Giddings offered a defence of behaviourism, arguing that ‘psychology has become experimental and objective. It has discriminated between reflex and conditioning’. He also insisted that ‘sociology [is] a science statistical in method’ and that ‘a true and complete description of anything must include measurement of it’. Similarly, Lundberg maintained that sociology could be modelled on the natural sciences, and should observe the behaviour of human beings in social situations but without reference to concepts such as feelings, ends, motives, values, and will (which he described as ‘the phlogiston of the social sciences’). Like Giddings, Lundberg argued that science dealt in exact descriptions and generalization, both of which required ‘the quantitative statement’. He emphasized the importance of attitude scales in this context, and insisted (in common with earlier positivists) that science cannot formulate value statements, and that sociology must be a science in this mould.
In so far as neo-positivism had a lasting influence on the development of American sociology, this is perhaps best seen in later mathematical sociology, as for example in Richard M. Emerson's attempt to integrate mathematical theory and exchange theory (reported in
, Sociological Theories in Progress, 1972)
. There are those (see, for example,
, Sociological Theory Construction, 1972
) who continue to insist that the most important criterion of a scientific theory is testability, and that only a mathematically formalized theory is empirically testable.

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net mobility

See MOBILITY, SOCIAL.

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network, social network, network theory

The term network refers to individuals (or more rarely collectivities and roles) who are linked together by one or more social relationships, thus forming a social network. Examples of relationship links include kinship, communication, friendship, authority, and sexual contact. When individuals are represented as a point and links as a line, use can be made of graph theory as a model. The pairwise choices or relationship links can be arrayed in a table (called a sociomatrix) and the network drawn from this information is often referred to as a sociogram, which features centrally in sociometry, an elaborate but simple form of analysis pioneered by J. L. Moreno in the 1940s. The mathematical basis of network analysis is graph theory.
Initially, much work concentrated on small-group and institutional structures, describing individual points (stars and isolates) and forms of cohesion (clique-detection), but after the 1950s network analysis concentrated more on structural characteristics, such as ‘bridges’ (persons who formed the only link between strongly connected groups), ‘balance’ (the tendency of highly cohesive groups to polarize), and more refined definitions of cliques. In the 1960s and beyond, the analysis of social networks was strongly influenced by mathematical sociology under Harrison White, became much more highly theoretical, and now supports its own journal (Social Networks). White was the focus of a highly productive and innovative group of students and staff at Harvard University in the 1960s and 1970s, and is best known for insisting upon social rather than individualistic concepts (for example, movement of clergy vacancies versus movement of individual clergymen), and for developing block-modelling techniques for studying ‘structural equivalence’ of network members sharing the same pattern of contacts.
Three main foci typify work in the area of network analyses. Egocentric networks are rooted in a single individual and depend usually on that individual's report of his or her network (such as, for example, E. Bott's study of the effect of overlap between spouse's networks, Family and Social Network, 1957). Systemic networks are constructed from all the participants in the network, and concentrate on the structure of the network itself, as in Mark Granovetter's identification of the importance of the ‘weak tie’ in obtaining new job information—whereby new information comes not from those who are in one's close circle of interaction, but from those in one's network who have access to different sources (see Getting a Job, 1974). Finally, diffusion studies explore the shape and form of flows within the networks, as in the processes of innovation, rumour, or epidemiological diffusion. For an overview of the field as a whole see
, Social Structure and Network Analysis (1982
). See also BALANCE THEORY.

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neurosis

Initially a disorder of the nerves, although Sigmund Freud distinguished ‘actual’ and ‘psycho-neuroses’ (the latter having psychological origins), and the term is now used in this sense. Frequently contrasted with psychoses, neuroses are considered less severe, involving an exaggerated response to reality, such as excessive fear (phobia) or anxiety. Some psychiatric classifications, such as the DSM-III, eschew the concept for its aetiological implications. Neuroticism is sometimes identified as an important personality dimension. See also DEPRESSION; MENTAL ILLNESS.

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neurotic anxiety

Anxiety of sufficient severity to be deemed clinical; that is, indicative of a pathological, not a normal state. Psychiatric classifications specify that the anxiety can be diffuse, may involve attacks of panic, and is not attributable to real danger.

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neurotic depression

An alternative label for reactive depression, it is commonly contrasted with the more severe psychotic or endogenous depressions, although the distinction is now challenged. Worry, tearfulness, feeling worse in the evening, and difficulty in making decisions are considered typical. The hallucinations, delusions, agitation, retardation, and early wakening considered symptomatic of psychotic depression are not usually present. See also DEPRESSION.

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neutralization of deviance, neutralization of guilt

See VOCABULARIES OF MOTIVE.

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new deviance theory

See CRIMINOLOGY, CRITICAL; DEVIANCE; LABELLING; NATIONAL DEVIANCE CONFERENCE.

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new international division of labour

See INTERNATIONAL DIVISION OF LABOUR.

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New Left

The label commonly applied to humanist dissidents from communist parties and to followers of Western Marxism during the period of the Cold War. The contrast is with the Old Left; that is, pro-Soviet and other traditional communist currents, such as for example Trotskyists, Maoists, and anarchists. The New Left developed in the late 1950s as a self-conscious Marxist and radical intelligentsia, particularly in the United States and Britain, which was critical of capitalism and state socialism of the Soviet model in equal measure. It sponsored a number of journals of which New Left Review was the most prominent. The movement was given additional impetus by the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

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new middle class

See CONTRADICTORY CLASS LOCATION; PROLETARIANIZATION.

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new religions, new religious movements (NRMs)

This concept refers to two separate religious phenomena. First, there are the new religious movements of aboriginal and tribal people in the Third World, which are the result of an interaction between local, indigenous religions and Christianity, and to a lesser extent Hinduism and Buddhism. Various terms have been given to such movements: messianic, nativistic, and revitalization movements. They are seen by anthropologists to be responses or adjustments by relatively powerless people to their social dislocation in the face of direct or indirect colonialism. The movements often borrow the radical theology of early Christianity to express a profound symbolic protest.
Second, there are new religious movements in the developed, industrial societies of the West, which are often associated with youth movements and the counter-culture. These movements are often syncretist, borrowing elements from many different religious and philosophical traditions. Sociologists have claimed that such movements satisfy the psychological and social needs of young people seeking a meaning for life which they cannot find in the mainstream religious traditions. Examples include the Divine Light Mission, Hare Krishna, the Unification Church, and Scientology.
Numerous typologies of the latter will be found in the literature. For example, in The Elementary Forms of the New Religious Life (1984), Roy Wallis offered a threefold distinction which identified world-rejecting, world-affirming, and world-accommodating types. The first of these represent attempts to escape from the impersonality, materialism, bureaucratization, and individualism of modern life. The International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Children of God, and Unification Church (‘Moonies’) are cited as examples. By comparison, movements such as Scientology, Transcendental Meditation, and the Japanese Soka Gakkai claim to offer practitioners greater success in achieving goals already set by the status quo, including individual material advancement, psychological well-being, and social popularity: they are therefore world-affirming. Finally, innovatory religions with a world-accommodating orientation carry few implications either for individual conduct in, or for rejection of, the larger secular world, since their primary purpose is to provide stimulation for personal and spiritual experiences. Movements such as the Charismatic Renewal and Neo-Pentecostalism simply instruct adherents to live life (however it is lived) in a more enthusiastically religious manner.
Wallis's typology is, however, only one of many possible classifications of the NRMs. Some idea of the alternatives, and of the enormous literature now available on this general topic, can be gained from
's lengthy bibliographical essay on ‘Cults, Converts and Charisma’, Current Sociology (1988
). See also SECULARIZATION.

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New Right

A political philosophy and its proponents, particularly associated with the Thatcher and Reagan administrations in Britain and the United States during the 1980s, that represented a radical break with social democratic values—most visibly in rhetoric but also in practice. Frequently listed beliefs include commitment to the free market, to individual freedom, and to the reduction of state intervention and welfare; a populist morality; and authoritarianism (see AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY).
During the 1980s, some sociologists built on New Right ideas to argue that their discipline had come to be dominated by the domain assumptions of a Leftist or Social Democratic political agenda, being implicitly opposed to the market and obsessed by issues of inequality. In one of the most elegant of such critiques, Peter Berger offers fifty propositions about prosperity, equality, and liberty, which link the attainment of all three closely to the aggressive pursuit of a free-market capitalism (see The Capitalist Revolution, 1986).

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new social movements (NSMs)

See SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.

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new structuralism, new structuralists

The label given in the United States to researchers who, from about 1980 onwards, examined how processes of occupational attainment were influenced by structural constraints such as those imposed by segmented labour markets, occupational segregation, and the operation of the dual economy. This literature covers the same terrain as the status-attainment programme, but from an explicitly critical standpoint, since it emphasizes the ways in which certain features of economic systems and formal organizations enhance or constrain the distribution of opportunities for particular categories of people. For example, from this point of view, the over-representation of some ethnic minorities in poor (badly paid, unskilled, insecure) jobs is viewed as a consequence of processes involving discrimination—rather than as a consequence of the failure, on the part of the victims, to invest in the human capital necessary for occupational success. One of the hallmark articles is
's ‘Bringing the Firms Back In: Stratification, Segmentation, and the Organization of Work’ (American Sociological Review, 1980)
, but the boundaries of the movement are difficult to draw precisely, since they are often stretched to include (for example) the neo-Marxist theory of contradictory class locations formulated by Erik Olin Wright.

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new technology

Any set of productive techniques which offers a significant improvement (whether measured in terms of increased output or savings in costs) over the established technology for a given process in a specific historical context. Defined thus, what is seen as new' is obviously subject to continual redefinition, as successive changes in technology are undertaken.
At the time of writing, the current new technologies that are of most interest to sociologists are the information and communications technologies based on micro-electronics, the application of which is said by some to be revolutionizing the organization of work. Among the trends which have been identified as alleged consequences of these technologies are those towards de-skilling, proletarianization, automation, telecommuting, flexible employment, just-in-time systems, and the creation of dual or split labour-markets and a new international division of labour—all of which are dealt with separately in this dictionary. The assumed effects of new technology sometimes form the basis for apocalyptic accounts of wholesale social change—as, for example, in the theories of post-industrial and self-service societies.
Systematic sociological research invariably reveals that all of these tendencies and theories are overstated by their authors, and that the social and political impact of new technologies is complex and contingent, being subject to variations in managerial strategies, worker resistance, and a host of other cultural and political circumstances (see, for example, the series of case-studies reported in
's The Shopfloor Politics of the New Technology, 1983
).

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new working class

A term associated with the thesis that process workers in automated industries, and white-collar workers in large industrial corporations, possess the potential to assume the historic revolutionary role of the proletariat anticipated by Marxism. Both groups have become productive workers in the functional sense that their expertise is indispensable to the most advanced sectors of the capitalist labour process. Yet, at the same time, it provides them with the intellectual tools to recognize and challenge the power structure of capitalism and the (from their point of interest) allegedly irrational market system by which it is accompanied. Though most recently associated with Serge Mallet, and other members of the Sociologie du Travail movement in France, the argument that ‘engineers’ are in some sense a new revolutionary vanguard may be found in the writings of Thorstein Veblen and the Technicist Movement.
In La Nouvelle Classe ouvrière (1965), Mallet argued that the old working class of the archaic industries (coal-mining and such like) could no longer envisage an alternative society. Rather, ‘only the strata of the active population who are involved in the most advanced processes of technological civilization are up to formulating alienations and envisaging superior forms of development’. Modern industries (such as oil-refining and chemicals) are characterized by automation, which is said to increase the responsibility and involvement of workers in enterprises; to make obvious the links between the well-being of the firm, the workers' pay, and his or her expertise; and so encourage employees to campaign for greater control over management of the processes of production. Plant-based unionism (syndicalisme d'entreprise) further encourages workforce solidarity, and ‘the more the modern worker reconquers at the collective level the occupational autonomy he lost during the mechanization phases of work, the more trends develop towards a demand for control.’ By restoring issues of autonomy and control to the centre-stage of the struggle between labour and capital, the new working class transcends the narrow economism (wage-orientation) of its predecessors, and comes to form the vanguard of a grass-roots revolutionary movement for socialism.
For a thesis which was (at best) weakly substantiated by some rather questionable data, Mallet's argument proved remarkably influential in the Western industrial sociology (not to say the industrial and political turmoil) of the late 1960s, although systematic research soon made its empirical weaknesses obvious (see, for example,
's In Search of the New Working Class, 1978
). Factual inaccuracies aside, the thesis also suffered from technological determinism, analogous to that which underpinned the alternative arguments proffered by the embourgeoisement theorists; a failure to take the power of the state seriously; ambiguity about precisely which strata of employees were involved (Mallet identifies two types of ‘new worker’—process workers and technicians—but both groups include a list of rather vague occupational categories); and serious imprecision, both in defining central concepts (such as automation), and in specifying the precise causal mechanisms linking technical milieu, high earnings, and unionization of employees.
Recent empirical work stimulated by the new working-class thesis shows that it greatly oversimplifies and even exaggerates the extent to which the latest technologies of large-scale industrial production transform traditional distinctions between mental and manual labour (see MANUAL VERSUS NON-MANUAL DISTINCTION). On the other hand this research yielded much evidence that the objective class situation (though not necessarily the class consciousness) of much white-collar work is being affected by information technology. However, in the opinion of some writers, the more precarious global markets of the late twentieth century have ushered in an era of post-fordism and flexible employment, involving smaller-scale firms and more traditional craft-based forms of production, as a result of which automated technology and large-scale production, and along with it the thesis of the new working class, appears passé.

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newly industrializing countries (NICs)

The dozen or so countries which, in the 1970s and 1980s, achieved high levels of industrial output and penetration of external markets. These include the so-called Four Little Dragons (Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan), a group of Latin American countries including Brazil and Mexico, and a handful of late industrializing states in Europe such as Spain and (for a time) Yugoslavia. The emergence of the NICs was seen by neo-classical economists as significantly undermining the claims of dependency theorists that less developed nations were doomed to stagnation because of their inability to compete with the West for markets. However, the success of the NICs has been contingent on a considerable degree of state intervention, in order to secure the conditions favourable to industrialization. The NICs therefore offer no simple formula by which the Third World can emulate its more industrialized counterparts.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich

(1844–1900)
A German philosopher, one of the great (if not the greatest of) modern iconoclasts, Nietzsche has been read as the precursor of such varied phenomena as Nazism and post-modernism. Essentially, he appears to have been outraged by the lack of reflexivity (see ETHNOMETHODOLOGY) among philosophers and scientists who failed to apply to their own thoughts the rigorous questioning they applied to those of others, a reaction which led him to dispute the supposed rationalism, scientism, and humanism of modern Western societies. Against this, he upheld the ideals of individualism, self-reliance, competition, and élitism. The three terms that summarize both the reasons for the continuing controversy over his thought, and the results of his own self-questioning, are ‘nihilism’, ‘will to power’, and ‘superman’. Among those said to have been influenced by his works are Max Weber and Michel Foucault. Most of his books are available in good modern translations. Amongst the best-known are The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–92), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), and Ecce Homo (1908).

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nomads, nomadism

Terms used to refer to groups who move from place to place, without a year-round permanent residence; bedouins are an example. Anthropologists have distinguished two broad types based on hunting-gathering and pastoralism respectively. The extent to which hunter-gatherers or pastoralists are independent of other sedentary groups is empirically variable. In the ideal type they are economically self-sufficient. A third nomadic group, excluded from the classical typology, are Gypsies, who are always interdependent with another economy, within which they provide occasional goods and services. Groups may be semi-nomadic—as in the case of some contemporary Lapps. See
, The Traveller-Gypsies (1983
).

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nominal measurement, nominal data

See MEASUREMENT.

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nominalism, philosophical

See REALISM; TARDE, GABRIEL.

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nomothetic

See IDEOGRAPHIC.

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non-conforming behaviour, non-conformism

See ABERRANT BEHAVIOUR.

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non-constant sum game

See GAME THEORY.

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non-decision-making

See COMMUNITY POWER.

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non-material culture

See CULTURE.

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non-parametric statistics

A branch of statistical inference which makes no assumptions about the underlying distributional form of variables. While parametric statistics are based upon an ideal hypothetical mathematical form for the data (usually the normal distribution), some statisticians claim that for social science data the assumptions required to do this are hardly ever justified, and consequently that it is always preferable to use non-parametric statistics (see, for example,
, Practical Nonparametric Statistics, 1980
). A well-known example, equivalent to the parametric t-test, is the Mann-Whitney U-test.

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non-participant observation

A research technique whereby the researcher watches the subjects of his or her study, with their knowledge, but without taking an active part in the situation under scrutiny. This approach is sometimes criticized on the grounds that the very fact of their being observed may lead people to behave differently, thus invalidating the data obtained, as for example in the famous case of the so-called Hawthorne effect. To overcome this, researchers normally observe a number of similar situations, over a period of time. Although video-recorders can now be used in non-participant observation, this too may alter (indeed almost certainly will alter) the behaviour of the research subjects. See also PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION.

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non-probability sampling

The distinction between probability and non-probability sampling is fundamental to discussions of sampling. In the former case, each unit of a known population has a specifiable probability of being included in a sample, drawn according to simple random, stratified random, multi-stage cluster, or some other form of representative sampling technique that permits the use of inferential statistics. Non-probability samples, on the other hand, are generated by a variety of ad hoc techniques (such as snowballing), usually in those circumstances where no suitable sampling frame exists, or the research design does not actually require probability sampling. Studies of business élites offer an example of the former, since no convenient and exhaustive lists are generally available of (let us say) company directors holding multiple directorships in large business enterprises, whereas studies of (for example) members of a religious sect rarely require probability sampling: a selection of the membership (not necessarily statistically representative) is usually considered to be sufficient for most sociological purposes.

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non-response

The proportion of people among those invited to participate in a non-compulsory interview survey, or other study, who choose not to take part or are unobtainable for other reasons. Non-response covers all causes of non-participation: refusals; people who are away temporarily, on holiday for example; and non-contacts for other reasons, who may be covert refusers. Those who are found to be outside the scope of the survey are classified as ineligible and excluded altogether. Ineligibles would include people who had died or moved to an area outside the survey area, businesses that had closed down, and demolished addresses. Non-response is a good indicator of response bias: as a general rule the higher the proportion of non-respondents to a survey, the greater the degree of bias among those who chose to participate. Rules of thumb for acceptable levels of survey response vary, but 60 per cent would generally be regarded as the bare minimum, with 75 per cent regarded as very good, and anything above that as excellent. Non-response above 40 per cent would normally be regarded as high enough to vitiate the results obtained from a survey or study, as non-participants roughly equal participants.
Non-response analysis compares the characteristics of respondents and non-respondents; usually this is limited to information from the sampling frame, such as sex and geographical area. Where additional information is available in the sampling frame it may be possible to assess more precisely the extent of response bias. In industrial societies, there are periodic declines in survey response rates, as reflected in all the regular major national surveys which monitor response-rates very closely. Declining response rates are met with renewed efforts to encourage participation, and reassure people on doubts about confidentiality and uses of the data. But they indicate that the survey method could become over-utilized, and that people are becoming increasingly well informed about social research and its uses. See also SAMPLING; SAMPLING ERROR.

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non-standard worker, non-standard employment

These terms refer to forms of employment that lack the job-stability and entitlement to fringe benefits, union membership, and the social security of full-time, stable (‘standard’) employees. Non-standard employment includes part-time work, temporary work, fixed-term contracting and subcontracting, self-employment, and homework. Non-standard forms of employment are thought to have grown in recent years with the increase in flexible production methods. See also LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION.

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non-structural mobility

See MOBILITY, SOCIAL.

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non-verbal communication

Forms of communication which do not rely on the spoken or written word. Facial gestures and hand signals can often give messages to another person without a word being said. In some cultures, for example, the reverse ‘V’ sign often speaks louder than words. Most such forms of communication, including rude gestures, are culturally specific in their meanings. See also BODY LANGUAGE.

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non-zero-sum game

See GAME THEORY.

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norm, social norm, normative

In sociology a norm is a shared expectation of behaviour that connotes what is considered culturally desirable and appropriate. Norms are similar to rules or regulations in being prescriptive, although they lack the formal status of rules. Actual behaviour may differ from what is considered normative and, if judged by existing norms, may be deemed deviant. Consequently the concept is intimately linked to issues of social regulation and social control and to the dominant sociological problem of social order. In this sense the idea of what is normative is crucial to lay and sociological understandings of social interaction. The terms norms and normative are, however, also frequently used in a statistical sense to refer to what is common or typical, whether of behaviour or some other phenomenon.
The sociological concept of norm is closely allied to that of role, which is commonly defined as a set of norms attached to a social position. Although both concepts have been central to functionalist sociology, and especially the theorizing of social order in the writings of Talcott Parsons, they have become less fashionable since the 1960s, not least because they seem to suggest a fixed set of expectations of individual behaviour and a static model of social interaction. Interactionist sociology (with its focus on the negotiation of meanings), ethnomethodology, and now post-modernist theory, all tend to emphasize the complexity and diversity of meanings, and the shifting and fragmented nature of individual identities, in which the static notion of norm has little place. Other theorists, notably Marxists, have emphasized the importance of power and coercion rather than normative consensus to the maintenance of social order.
The contrast between the Parsonsian and social identity theories of norms is succinctly drawn in Francesca Cancian's What are Norms? (1975). The former suggests that norms are beliefs about what individuals ought to do, and become part of a person's motivation through socialization, so that people come to act in conformity with the norms of their society precisely because they want to conform. However, from the latter perspective norms are perceptions of what actions will lead others to validate an identity (rather than personal beliefs), so that people are thought to conform to norms in order to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are a particular kind of person. Cancian's studies (of a Mexican Indian community) tend to vindicate this interpretation.

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norm of reciprocity

See EXCHANGE THEORY.

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normal curve

See NORMAL DISTRIBUTION.

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normal distribution

In common usage, normality is treated as synonymous with natural, conventional, acceptable, or ordinary. In statistics, normality is defined as the most commonly occurring, the numerically most frequent type, which is then used as the base-line for identifying the unusual and the statistically rare.
A hypothetical mathematical distribution, the normal distribution provides an idealized model for comparison with observed variable distributions, and is the most commonly used mathematical model in statistical inference. In form it is a symmetrical, bell-shaped curve. The normal distribution for any particular variable is defined by its mean and standard deviation.
The mathematical properties of the normal distribution can be used to estimate the proportion in a sample falling above or below any particular reading or measurement for any variable to which the model is being applied. It is said to be relatively ‘robust’ to non-normality in observed variable distributions: in other words, in many circumstances it will serve as a reasonable model, even in cases where observed variable distributions appear to be rather inadequate approximations to normality. Even when a population does not itself have a normal distribution, the distribution of sample means will tend to approximate to a normal distribution. See also VARIATION (STATISTICAL); CENTRAL TENDENCY (MEASURES OF).

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normal science

See PARADIGM.

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normalization

The normal distribution is one of the key distributions providing the basis for probability statistics, so that when a particular distribution is not normal, some transformation of the data may be attempted so as to achieve a normal distribution—for example charting the logarithms of values instead of the values themselves. This is known as normalizing the distribution.

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normative functionalism

See PARSONS, TALCOTT.

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normative order

Any system of rules and shared expectations governing a particular social situation. The concept occurs most frequently in functionalist theory, especially the normative functionalism of writers such as Talcott Parsons, where the various elements of the normative order (notably shared value-commitments but also obligations of membership and sentiments of loyalty) operate to secure social order. The centrality of the societal normative order to Parsonsian accounts of social stability is evident in his claim that ‘societal order requires clear and definite integration in the sense, on the one hand, of normative coherence and, on the other, of societal “harmony” and “coordination”. Moreover, normatively-defined obligations must on the whole be accepted while conversely, collectivities must have normative sanction in performing their functions and promoting their legitimate interests. Thus, normative order at the societal level contains a “solution” to the problem posed by Hobbes—of preventing human relations from degenerating into a “war of all against all”’ (The System of Modern Societies, 1971). This is probably as concise a statement of the organizing principle of Parsons's sociological theory as occurs anywhere in his voluminous writings. See also CONSENSUS; HOBBES, THOMAS.

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normative power

See COMPLIANCE.

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normative theory

Hypotheses or other statements about what is right and wrong, desirable or undesirable, just or unjust in society. The majority of sociologists consider it illegitimate to move from explanation to evaluation. In their view, sociology should strive to be value-free, objective, or at least to avoid making explicit value-judgements. This is because, according to the most popular philosophies of the social sciences, conflicts over values cannot be settled factually. Moral pronouncements cannot be objectively shown to be true or false, since value-judgements are subjective preferences, outside the realm of rational inquiry. Thus, in his classic statement of the role of values in sociological research, Max Weber informed his audience that ‘if Tolstoi's question recurs to you: as science does not, who is to answer the question: “What shall we do, and, how shall we arrange our lives?” … then one can say that only a prophet or a saviour can give the answers’ (
‘Science as Vocation’, 1919
).
The majority of sociological enquiries are therefore analytical and explanatory. They do not pose normative questions such as ‘Which values ought to provide for social order?’ and ‘How ought society to organize itself?’ (Marxist sociologists are of course excluded from this generalization, since they generally subscribe to a different view of the relationship between facts and values, arguing with Marx that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point … is to change it’.)
However, without necessarily claiming to be prophets, some contemporary (non-Marxist) sociologists have nevertheless attempted to find non-relativist foundations for solutions to ethical issues, for example by identifying (in the interests of a value such as justice or progress) those moral principles which ought to regulate social relationships and institutions. Derek L. Phillips (Toward a Just Social Order, 1986) has advanced the controversial argument that since claims about truth and knowledge (no less than statements about what ought to be) rest on consensus among a community of enquirers, both explanatory and normative theories share the same epistemological status, and are therefore equally open to rational justification.
This sort of normative theorizing is still a minority pursuit within the discipline, although sociologists generally are often subject to accusations that their analyses are tacitly normative, being biased in favour of particular values and political objectives. Thus, for example, the French sociologist Raymond Aron once commented that the problem with most British sociology was that it was obsessed with the intellectual problems of the British Labour Party.

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nuclear family

See FAMILY, NUCLEAR.

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nucleated group

See COOLEY, CHARLES HORTON.

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null hypothesis

The principle underlying significance tests, which proposes that any differences observed between two samples, or sub-sections of one sample, are in fact due to random sampling error rather than to real differences.

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nurture

See NATURE VERSUS NURTURE DEBATE.

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O

Object Relations Test (ORT)

A projective test, developed during the 1950s at the Tavistock Clinic in London, and based on the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein. Klein argued that children introject as ‘good objects’ and ‘bad objects’ those images of a person associated with situations of gratification or pain and deprivation. Over time, normal development sees these separate images fuse into a single object, comprising both good and bad elements. The test itself consists of 12 pictures with one, two, three, or groups of ambiguous figures, plus a blank. Respondents tell a story about what is happening. Responses are assumed to indicate conscious and unconscious personality dynamics.

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Object Relations Theory

Since its formulation by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalytic theory has developed into many distinct schools of thought. One of these is the so-called Object Relations School, which was originally associated with the names of (among others) W. R. D. Fairbairn and D. W. Winnicott, but also much influenced by the work of Melanie Klein. In essence, Object Relations Theory offers a much more social view of psychological development than does the earlier Freudian account, seeing individuals as formed in relation to, and seeking connection with, other individuals. Instead of Freud's notion of libidinal stages of child development, it emphasizes the gradual differentiation of the self through the formation of reflections of experiences of real people from earliest infancy, or in other words of internal ‘objects’. The term ‘object’ denotes the person or persons (or his or her inner representatives) with whom a subject is intensely involved emotionally. It is these initial experiences with other people, according to the theory, that structure and form later relationships.
A central aspect of Object Relations Theory is the primary attachment of infants to their mothers. Feminist theorists have been attracted to this emphasis on the centrality of the maternal, and have drawn on the theory to develop a causal account of gender difference. Gender differences, it is argued, originate in the infantile development process in which female and male infants experience different patterns of struggle to separate from the mother. For example, Nancy Chodorow (in The Reproduction of Mothering, 1978) describes how personality develops in terms of both innate drives and relations with other people, or ‘objects’.

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objective, objectivity

In the dispute between those who view sociology as actually or potentially a science, and those who advocate some other model of intellectual activity (such as textual interpretation, the sympathetic understanding characteristic of interpersonal dialogue, or the struggle for self-clarification on the psychoanalyst's couch), the concept of objectivity is an important weapon. The term objective may refer to an attitude of mind deemed proper to a scientific investigator: detached, unprejudiced, open to whatever the evidence may reveal. Alternatively, it may be applied to the method of investigation employed, or to its outcome—some theory or substantive knowledge-claim. Much of what is taught in courses on sociological method are procedures designed to protect investigations from bias in the collection or interpretation of evidence: random sampling, the use of controls, piloting of questionnaires with alternative wordings, and so on are designed to eliminate biases and ensure objectivity. A study conducted in the appropriate spirit of scientific objectivity, having rigorously employed such methods, may justifiably claim to be objective in the further usage of adequately representing the object of study, rather than the subjective wishes and prejudices of the investigator.
Opponents of the scientific model for sociological enquiry often argue that objectivity (in attitude, method, or outcome) is either unobtainable or inappropriate in sociology. This may be because of what are deemed to be special features of sociology (and other social sciences) or it may be that (as in the case of some radical feminist critiques of‘logo-centrism’) objectivity is rejected as an appropriate or attainable standard for any form of enquiry, including the natural sciences.
Objectivity as an attitude on the part of the investigator may be rejected as inappropriate in signalling a morally or politically reprehensible detachment in relation to other human beings, or as unattainable, given the sociologist's own unavoidable social or political engagement. Methodological objectivity may be rejected on similar grounds, but also for independent methodological objectivity may be rejected on similar grounds, but also for independent methodological reasons. It may, for example, be argued that only an expression of shared values, or mutual activity on the part of investigator and subject of research, could elicit the required inter-subjective understandings. Objectivity in the results of sociological research may be rejected on ontological grounds (social action and relations are constituted by shared meanings not amenable to objective analysis; human social life is radically unpredictable because of the special properties of voluntary agency; and so on), or on grounds derived from various forms of epistemological scepticism or relativism.
The rejection of objectivity (even as a regulative ideal) is fashionably widespread in sociology, but it is vulnerable to a number of objections. One obvious source of pragmatic difficulty is that if the best that sociologists can do is offer elaborations of their own subjective prejudices and biases, why should anyone else listen to them, let alone pay out large sums for sociological research?

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observation

See COVERT OBSERVATION; NON-PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION; OVERT PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION; PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION.

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observer bias

This refers to the cultural assumptions which all researchers bring to their work and which help determine their method of research and their observations. It has been argued by some that all enquiry (including ‘pure’ science) is simply a reflection of such biases. In any event, researchers are usually encouraged to make any known biases explicit in reporting their findings, in order to assist others wishing to reach a judgement as to the validity of the results.

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occupation

An economic role separated from household activity as a result of the growth of markets for labour. Such roles form part of a wider economic division of labour in an industrial enterprise, formal organization, or socio-economic structure. See also LABOUR-MARKET; OCCUPATIONAL CLASSIFICATION; OCCUPATIONAL SEGREGATION.

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occupational career

See CAREER.

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occupational classification

The smallest unit of an occupational classification is the concept of a job, defined as a set of tasks to be performed by an individual, and commonly identified by a job title. Occupation is often synonymous with job but may refer to a group of similar jobs identified with a common occupational title. Jobs and occupations can be described not only in terms of tasks, but also in terms of associated characteristics such as skill, responsibility, earnings, entry qualifications, and prestige (see STATUS). More diffuse characteristics may derive from the incumbents of occupations, such as life-style, cultural mannerisms, and so forth.
Occupational classifications are essentially ways of grouping and ranking jobs and occupations. Systems of classification vary according to which criteria are given priority during the exercise, and these may differ depending upon the purpose of the intended analysis, and the theoretical framework deployed. Most classifications are developed by national census offices for the production of national employment data, the most common classification being the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) developed by the International Labour Organization, of which there are now several versions distinguished by their year of first publication (hence the ‘ISCO-68’ and ‘ISCO-88’ classifications). The latest (1988) classification is based on the concepts of job (‘the set of tasks and duties executed’) and skill (both in terms of skill level, or ‘the complexity and range of the tasks and duties involved’, and skill specialization, defined by ‘the field of knowledge required, the tools and machinery used, the materials worked on or with, as well as the kinds of goods and services produced’). This yields a pyramid whose hierarchical structure consists of ten major groups, at the top level of aggregation, subdivided into 28 sub-major groups, 116 minor groups, and 390 unit groups. Thus, for example, within major group 4 (clerks), sub-major group 41 is office clerks, which includes minor group 412 (numerical clerks), comprising the two unit groups 4,121 (accounting and book-keeping clerks) and 4,122 (statistical and finance clerks). The US Census Bureau and UK Office of National Statistics produce their own—rather different—classifications.
In sociology, occupational data are commonly used for the analysis of status attainment and occupational mobility, so consistent criteria of classification and a hierarchical arrangement of grouped data are sometimes considered important. Class theorists who focus on work situation and market situation favour classifications of occupations based on sources and levels of income, employment status, or conditions of employment, the best example being the Goldthorpe Classes (referred to in some countries as the Erikson–Goldthorpe–Portocarero Classes), which are derived in the British case from the UK census office classification of occupations and employment statuses (see
, The Constant Flux, 1992
). Those who equate social class with social status have often used subjective assessments of occupational prestige as the basis of class standing, as for example in the Hope—Goldthorpe Scale of Occupational Prestige (see
, The social Grading of Occupations, 1974
).
Most occupational classifications are said to embody a male bias, reflected in the way occupations are distinguished, grouped, and ranked. Occupations filled largely by women are frequently grouped together at a very low level of aggregation (as, for example, in the case of clerical occupations) so that they cannot subsequently be disaggregated and relocated as circumstances change. Similarly, the skill and status level of occupations dominated by women may be underestimated, possibly distorting the location of such occupations in some subsequent derived status classifications.
Social and economic change continually modifies the occupational structure and limits the capacity of any particular classification to reflect this structure over time. Continual updating is therefore necessary, although this then further complicates the process of identifying changes in the occupational structure over time, since some of these may simply be artefacts of the changing classification itself.

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occupational community

See IMAGES OF SOCIETY.

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occupational mobility

Often wrongly called social mobility. It refers to the movement of an occupational group itself, or of an individual member of an occupation, or of an occupational vacancy, through the stratification system of social space. Studies of the Hindu caste system illustrate the first; father-son occupational achievement the second; and Harrison White's study of clergy vacancy-chains the third.
Most studies assume a unidimensional scaling or gradation of occupations in terms of their prestige or status against which movement is then assessed. Thus, ‘downward’ mobility refers to loss, and ‘upward’ mobility to increase in occupational prestige. An important distinction is to be drawn between within or intra-generational mobility (for example career patterns) and between intergenerational mobility (for example caste mobility or father-son achievement). Following classic studies in the United States and Europe, many national studies now exist of status achievement of children (especially sons) from their parental origins, symbolized by the Father-Son Turnover Table, which indicates the occupational destination of the offspring of parents in a given occupational category, and conversely, the parental occupational origins of children now in a given category. The analysis of this table forms the core of many conventional studies of occupational mobility, but structural models, which interrelate the complex network of dependence of variables affecting achievement, are now the preferred form of analysis. See also STATUS ATTAINMENT.

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occupational prestige

Occupational prestige refers primarily to the differential social evaluation which is ascribed to jobs or occupations. What people know about jobs, or how people view occupations, is to a greater extent a given; much more variation exists in the value that they ascribe to them.
To ask how people rate the ‘general standing’ of an occupation (the most common question) is taken to be a measure of an occupational prestige and hence of the social status of occupations, though many other criteria have been proposed, including ‘social usefulness’ as well as ‘prestige’ and ‘status’ themselves. In order to obtain the scale of occupations (which is invariably taken to be national in application), respondents' ratings are aggregated, typically by taking either the average or, as in the classic American study by
in 1947 (‘Jobs and Occupations: A Popular Evaluation’, Opinion News)
, by taking the percentage who adjudged the occupation as having ‘excellent social standing’. The resulting aggregate rank-order gives the scale. Variations in ratings are given little attention, though they are often considerable and consistent, and it is a matter of some dispute whether there exist consistent social differences in perception and evaluation. Much has been made by structural-funictionalists of the extent to which different national averaged rankings correlate, but this is probably due as much to the necessary restriction to a few very familiar stereotypical occupations, as to any widespread cross-national consensus.
Occupational prestige scores feature centrally in a wide range of empirical sociological studies of social class formation, educational attainment, and occupational inheritance through social mobility, though their substantive and methodological meaning is sometimes obscure. The most widely used scale of occupational prestige in comprative studies of occupational mobility is probably the so-called Treiman Scale (see
, occupational Prestige in Comparative Perspective, 1977
). See also STATUS ATTAINMENT.

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occupational segregation

The division of labour, in the context of paid employment, as a result of which men and women (or members of different ethnic or religious groupings) are channelled into different types of occupational roles and tasks, such that there are two (or more) separate labour forces. It is conventional to distinguish vertical job segregation, by which (say) male or white employees are concentrated in the higher-status and better-paid positions, from horizontal job segregation (where the different sexes or ethnic groups work in different types of occupation—men are engineers, women are typists, and so on). This distinction is discussed further in the entry on the division of labour.
It is important not to confuse occupational segregation (which refers to those processes by which individuals or groups holding particular jobs are kept apart, so that there is little effective competition between them) with labour-market segmentation (the term usually applied to the differentiation of labour-markets into discrete firm-specific segments, each offering different career rewards, conditions of employment, and so forth). There is no necessary relationship between the two, since there are societies where the sexes are separated into different sorts of occupations, but women enjoy relatively good working conditions and career opportunities (at least when compared with other societies in which there is a similar degree of occupational segregation by sex).
Occupational segregation by sex is widespread in all industrialized societies (although it occurs to varying degrees); segregation by ethnic group is more common in the United States than Europe; occupational segregation by religion occurs less frequently (although, for example, to some extent there are still separate labour markets for Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland).
Measurement problems loom large in empirical studies of occupational segregation. What proportion of workers in one occupation as against another need to belong to a particular ethnic group in order for us to speak meaningfully of occupational segregation? To what extent must one sex rather than the other dominate the higher-grade and higher-paid occupations before vertical job segregation can be said to exist? One popular measure of horizontal segregation is the dissimilarity index, but various alternative coefficients of both vertical and horizontal segregation are in common use, including for example the coefficient of female representation (which is calculated for each of the major occupational groupings by dividing its female share of employment by the female share of total employment). Many of these indices are sensitive to the degree of detail in the occupational classification that is being used—the more detailed the classification, the greater the degree of occupational segregation that tends to be identified—an important point when comparisons are being made across time and nations (since cross-national standardized occupational classifications are still encountered relatively infrequently in both social surveys and official statistics). Researchers are increasingly aware that any single number index of occupational segregation is unlikely to reveal patterns of change within the occupational structure. One alternative is to measure the differences between integrated and segregated occupations in terms of their relative importance across groups and time. These sorts of measurement problems are analogous to those discussed in the literature on social mobility.
Various theories of patriarchy and human capital link the segregation of men and women in employment to the domestic division of labour. Ethnic segregation in employment is also addressed by human-capital theory, but more commonly explained as a consequence of discrimination, or (historically) as a legacy of colonialism. Catherine Hakim's Key Issues in Women's Work: Female Heterogeneity and the Polarisation of Women's Employment (1996) contains a comprehensive review of the measurement problems and competing explanations for occupational segregation by sex; offers an empirical study of employment data for a number of industrial societies; and suggests a (controversial) interpretation of workforce polarization and women's subordination in terms of beliefs about the sexual division of labour in the home and the ideology of sexual differences in general—rather than the more commonly suggested consequences following from inequalities of opportunity between the sexes. For contrasting interpretations of similar sorts of data see
, Gender Segregation and Social Change (1994
).

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occupational socialization

The learning of attitudes and behaviours necessary to recognized and sustainable competence within a context of employment. These include skills acquired through training, informal work norms, and peer-group values and relationships.

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occupational structure

This refers to the aggregate distribution of occupations in society, classified according to skill level, economic function, or social status. The occupational structure is shaped by various factors: the structure of the economy (the relative weight of different industries); technology and bureaucracy (the distribution of technological skills and administrative responsibility); the labour-market (which determines the pay and conditions attached to occupations); and by status and prestige (influenced by occupational closure, life-style, and social values). It is difficult to attach causal primacy to any one of these factors; moreover, their role in shaping the occupational structure changes over time, as society changes. For example, during the early phase of European industrialization, the dominance of manufacturing made for a preponderance of manual occupations, while in recent times the shrinking of this sector, together with the growth in services, has made for an expansion of white-collar occupations. The distinction between manual and non-manual occupations has also become blurred.
The occupational structure is described and analysed by means of various classificatory schemes, which group similar occupations together according to specific criteria such as skill, employment status, or function. Such classifications are also used as a basis for the empirical analysis of economic and social class. See also INDUSTRIAL SECTOR; OCCUPATIONAL CLASSIFICATION.

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odds ratio

The odds ratio is the ratio of two odds. If, for example, there is an experimental process (pe) and a standard process (ps) then the odds ratio is defined as pe (1 - ps)/ps (1 - pe). Unlike most measures of association, 1.0 represents a complete absence of relationship, with deviations in either direction representing an increasing relation. In sociology odds ratios have been most widely used in the study of social mobility, where their insensitivity to changes in the marginals of a mobility table is said by class analysts to have enabled the distinction to be made between relative and absolute rates of mobility. The mathematics and characteristics of the odds ratio are perhaps easiest understood in this substantive context.
For example, in the hypothetical situation shown in Table 2 we have simple mobility tables for two societies, in which men can be mobile from working-class or middle-class origins to working-class or middle-class destinations. In society A, three-quarters of men from middle-class origins arrive at middle-class destinations, while the remainder are downwardly mobile. Similarly, three-quarters of those born into working-class homes are to be found in working-class destinations, while one-quarter are upwardly mobile. If we calculate the odds of being mobile using the formula shown—that is, the chances of someone born in the middle class arriving at a middle-class rather than a working-class destination, relative to the chances of someone born into the working class achieving a middle-class position rather than remaining in the working class (or, in other words, the ratio of the former to the latter set of odds)—then simple arithmetic shows that the odds ratio in this particular case is approximately nine. That is to say, in the competition to achieve middle-class and avoid working-class destinations, the chances of someone who starts from middle-class origins are nine times greater than those for someone having a working-class background. This odds ratio is then a measure of the unequal mobility chances of individuals having these different class origins.

TABLE 2. The odds ratio

Now compare the data for society B. Here too, three-quarters of those born into each of the two classes remain there, while one-quarter are socially mobile. However, it should be noted that the working class is relatively much larger in society B, which has also undergone an intergenerational shift in the class structure that is evident in the marginal totals of the table: the middle class comprises 33 per cent (1,000/3,000) of all class origins but almost 42 per cent (1,250/3,000) of class destinations. If one then considers the inflow rate from working-class origins into the middle class, in comparison with that to be found in society A, it appears that society B is less closed. Some 40 per cent (500/1,250) of the middle class in this society are from working-class origins. In society A this is true of only 25 per cent (250/1,000) of those to be found in middle-class destinations. This straightforward consideration of absolute inflow rates alone suggests that society B is the more open. Furthermore, the working class is twice as large in this society, and greater numbers are upwardly mobile. However, as will be seen from the figure, the chances of mobility for the working class, relative to those of the middle class, are in fact the same in both societies (the odds ratio is approximately 9 in each case). This apparent contradiction is simply a consequence of absolute (inflow) rates failing to take into account structural differences in the sizes of classes in the two societies in question.
Odds ratios, in the context of a social mobility study, therefore allow us to appreciate comparative mobility chances—regardless of how class structures may vary across societies (or across time, or between different ethnic groups, or the two sexes) merely because of structural processes which have altered the relative sizes of the classes. In other words, they facilitate a clear distinction between absolute (or total observed) mobility rates, and relative mobility chances (or social fluidity). This is important from the point of view of arguments about equality of opportunity, which is an inherently comparative concept, because it refers to equal opportunities rather than the absolute chance of mobility from any particular class. If, therefore, changes in the class structure create more ‘room at the top’, as for example happens in society B, we are interested in the chance of someone from working-class origins moving there as compared to the chance of someone from middle-class origins staying there. Most researchers argue, therefore, that it is necessary to adopt this comparative approach (and consequently the technique of odds ratios) in order to address issues such as those that are raised by the concept of meritocracy.
Odds ratios form the basis of a family of statistical techniques for multivariate analysis of data comprising categoric variables, including those of loglinear modelling and logistic regression, and are widely used in sociology wherever researchers are interested in modelling relative probabilities or chances—as, for example, in the study of health and illness, labour-market outcomes, and voting behaviour.

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Oedipal stage, Oedipus complex

See PSYCHOANALYSIS.

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official statistics

Statistical information produced, collated, and disseminated by national governments, their agencies, and the international bodies which link them. These data are almost invariably nationally representative, because they are obtained from complete censuses or very large-scale national sample surveys, and they usually seek to present definitive information conforming to international definitions and classifications or other well-established conventions. The impersonal character of official statistics, and their resistance to innovation, stand in sharp contrast to statistics and data-sets from other sources: academic research, market research, independent research institutes, commercial organizations, local, regional, and state bodies.
Official statistics used invariably to be published in large tomes and preserved in book libraries as the definitive record. This method of dissemination underlined their inflexibility, forced the results of enquiries to be presented in a relatively small number of selective statistical indicators and indexes, and is disappearing rapidly with extensive use of information technology. In the 1990s and beyond, government statistical information is far more likely to be disseminated as computer tapes of anonymized microdata, as data subsets on diskette, or as specially compiled harmonized time-series on diskette with monthly updates sent through national and international computer networks or the telecommunications system. Instead of finding the statistics one needs in a printed volume, interested parties may now have to create and extract them from a diskette with built-in software, or dial into a national-user-service computer centre from a desk-top terminal and extract the figures required from regularly updated databases.
As yet, national governments have refused to pass legislation permitting large-scale data linkage between government agencies, and such a proposal would require a system of unique identity-card numbers (or other referencing system) for each person in the population, to be used from birth to death. Data protection policies currently impede such a development within the commercial sector also, although area-based social profiles are widely used in Western industrial societies. Until such time as massive government data-banks are permitted, the only information held by central government agencies is that supplied directly to them by citizens in response either to public enquiries, or to regulations that specify events to be formally recorded in public records and the like.
Almost all official statistics originally came from registers in which were recorded the details of specified events as and when they occurred: births, deaths, marriages, divorces, crimes, certain contagious diseases, and later notifiable diseases such as cancer, AIDS, and so on. Similar procedures are involved in administrative records of non-compulsory activities, such as claiming unemployment benefits. A decreasing proportion of data comes from these sorts of records. Their chief advantage is that they constitute complete censuses of the events in question, and are thus reliable, up-to-date, and cheap to use as sources of statistics. The obvious disadvantage is that only a fairly narrow range of information lends itself to being collected through such procedures. While the fact of a death may be easy to record, its cause may be more arguable; and other related factors are simply too complex to deal with in that way, however relevant. Certain statistics are still obtained from compulsory registrations and administrative records—for example hospital records of patient illnesses, police records of crime, and records of people claiming various types of social insurance benefits. But they are supplemented with, and increasingly replaced by, specially designed data collections: compulsory censuses of population, housing, and employment, and voluntary interview surveys with national samples of the whole adult population or particular sections of it.
Censuses are usually carried out only once a decade, and are supplemented by a range of regular surveys that provide statistical information on a quarterly basis, an annual basis, or at less frequent intervals. Most countries now have an annual multi-purpose household survey to collect social and economic data in the intercensal decade. In Germany it is called the microcensus and in the United States the Current Population Survey; in most other countries it is called the Labour Force Survey; and it collects a much wider range of information than the census it replaces. In addition there is a great variety of other data collections using survey methods with personal, postal, or telephone questionnaires to collect information of a kind that can be coded and quantified to produce statistics on a great range of matters: earnings and incomes; trade; illness, health, and usage of the medical services; housing, job change, and migration; household expenditure patterns; the Retail Price Index; national economic accounts; government expenditures; patterns of food consumption and nutrition; any experience as the victim of crime; leisure activities; travel patterns to work, for business, and for leisure; international travel, immigration, and emigration. In addition there is a huge range of ad hoc sample surveys carried out by national governments on a wide variety of topics of public concern, sometimes on a once-off basis, sometimes with repeat surveys every five, ten, or twenty years.
The exact number and variety of regular and ad hoc national government-funded surveys varies in line with local needs and circumstances. In many cases they are funded and carried out jointly with other bodies, such as independent research institutes, international bodies, charitable foundations, or commercial organizations. The dividing-line between ‘official’ and ‘non-official’ statistics and data-sets is being eroded by the change of emphasis from public-sector records and registers, which are necessarily a government preserve, to interview surveys, which are available to all sectors of society, and may even be more successful if carried out by a non-governmental agency.

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Ogburn, William Fielding

(1886–1959)
An early Chicago sociologist, President of the American Sociological Association in 1929, his prime interest was in processes of social change, and in this context he developed the concept of cultural lag. A good selection of his work will be found in On Cultural and Social Change (1964).

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oligarchy

Any form of government in which there is ‘rule by a few’; for example, by members of a self-regulating élite having domination over a larger society. See also MICHELS, ROBERT; POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY.

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oligopoly

Competition amongst the few, where perceptions of competitors' policies and reactions to perceived intentions count for more than price—output considerations. Duopoly (control exercised by two competing agencies) is a special case of oligopoly, and a concrete example of the problems this creates for competition and the entry of new actors into the market is demonstrated by the privatized UK electricity supply industry, which is a very effective duopoly. See also MONOPOLY.

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ontology

Any way of understanding the world, or some part of it, must make assumptions (which may be implicit or explicit) about what kinds of things do or can exist in that domain, and what might be their conditions of existence, relations of dependency, and so on. Such an inventory of kinds of being and their relations is an ontology. In this sense, each special science, including sociology, may be said to have its own ontology (for example, persons, institutions, relations, norms, practices, structures, roles, or whatever, depending on the particular sociological theory under consideration). The core of the philosophical project of metaphysics is to provide an ontology of the world as a whole. In some versions of metaphysics this takes the form of an attempt systematically to order the relations between the ontologies of the special sciences.

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open groups

See CLOSED GROUPS AND OPEN GROUPS.

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open response, open-ended question

An interview question that has no predetermined reply categories. The respondent's reply must be written down by the interviewer verbatim, and coded after all interviews are completed, or grouped into broad categories of reply for verbatim quotes in a report. See also CLOSED RESPONSE; CODING.

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open societies and closed societies

These terms were introduced by Karl Popper in his book The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), and further explored in The Poverty of Historicism (1957). Popper argued that both science and human history are essentially indeterminate and fluid. Applied to social theory, this produced Popper's lively and devastating attack on historicism. Theories such as those of Plato, Hegel, and Marx, which proposed the existence of laws of history and a knowable human destiny, were dismissed by Popper as scientifically insupportable and politically dangerous. He proposed that all such theories would lead to authoritarian and inhumane regimes, which he called closed societies because they were closed to the normal processes of change. Open societies by contrast were based on the activity, creativity, and innovation of many individuals, and would develop unpredictably through piecemeal social engineering. They are those societies in which social policies are monitored for unintended consequences, openly criticized, and altered in the light of such criticism. Such societies must be both liberal and democratic, in the sense that it must be possible to remove from office rulers who fail to respond to justified criticism. The implied contrast, of course, was between the totalitarian regime of what was then the Soviet Union (as a closed society) and the Western democracies (as open societies).
Popper's arguments were rightly seen as decisive logical refutation of the very foundations of Marxism—both its claim to scientific status, and its claim to reveal the course of future history.

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operant conditioning or learning

See CONDITIONING.

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operational definition, operationalization

The transformation of an abstract, theoretical concept into something concrete, observable, and measurable in an empirical research project. Operational definitions are pragmatic and realistic indicators of more diffuse notions. For example, one way of operationalizing the concept of social class might be to ask people what type of job they do, and code their replies as either ‘working class’ or ‘middle class’. An alternative operationalization of the same concept would be to ask respondents to which class (if any) they felt they belonged. As will be seen from this example, operational definitions are crucial to the process of measurement, and are often the most controversial aspect of any research design.

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operational model

See MODEL.

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opinion polls

The measurement of opinions on specific issues through interviews with a representative sample of the group whose views are to be described. Polls are often referred to by the name of the interviewing company, as in Gallup poll. The most common topics in polls are voting intentions and political party support, views on the government of the day and its policies, and views on major current public issues; hence opinion polls are regularly used to forecast election results, often successfully. Opinion polls were an important source of data for social scientists for decades before social surveys became widespread; for example, Gallup polls provide data as far back as 1937 in Britain. Some polling companies now seek to create cross-national comparative data-sets.

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opportunity structure

Building on Robert Merton's theory of delinquency, this term was developed by Richard A. Cloward and Lloyd B. Ohlin in Delinquency and Opportunity (1960), to further elucidate the pathways to success in American culture. When such pathways are blocked (for example through failed schooling), other opportunity structures may be found, and these could lead to diverse patterns of deviance. In this characterization, a combination of anomie theory and cultural transmission theory (see SUBCULTURE), there were three major delinquent opportunity structures: criminal, retreatist, and conflict. Their argument was influential in establishing new careers programmes in North America during the 1960s.

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optimal matching, optimal alignment

See SEQUENCE ANALYSIS.

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oral history

An approach to writing history that relies in large part on interviews with elderly people who provide retrospective data on the events, attitudes, and activities of their childhood, adolescence, and adult life—in effect a transfer of the interview survey method from sociology to social history, or the large-scale collection of life-histories. There is an internationally organized Oral History Society with its own journal (Oral History) and a number of national Oral History data archives. The standard text is Paul Thompson's The Voice of the Past (1978). The articles in Thompson's Our Common History (1982) are typical of the field.
The time-periods and topics that can be covered by this approach are clearly restricted, and typically include a focus on family life, social structure and social relationships, employment in the market sector, work in the informal economy, leisure activities, perceptions of major public events, and attitudes and values as reconstructed in old age. In a fascinating study of childhood delinquency (Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–1939), Stephen Humphries demonstrated that hooliganism, vandalism, teenage gangs, and classroom rebellions have a long history among underprivileged children and youths, and are not simply a product of recent social changes in contemporary societies. Oral history interviewing can be used in a rough equivalent to the national survey (with samples truncated by the deaths of age-cohort non-survivors), studies of local communities, and casestudies of particular social phenomena, such as the changing pattern of home-based employment.

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order, social

See SOCIAL ORDER.

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ordinal scales

See MEASUREMENT; SCALES.

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organic analogy (or biological analogy)

Used by Émile Durkheim specifically to bring out the distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity, where in the latter ‘the unity of the (social) organism is as great as the individuation of the parts is more marked’. Although Durkheim did accord to society the attributes of an object, particularly as it affected and intervened in human action through the agency of collective representations, he did not extrapolate this beyond the reasonable limits of an analogy. The same distinction between analogy and reality was less clearly to be made by the most famous proponent of society as social organism, namely Herbert Spencer, for whom the processes of differentiation, individuation, and the elaboration and mutation of both structures and functions marked the transition from homogeneous to heterogeneous complex societies. Spencer's Social Darwinism, which emerged out of his organicism, was explicit in his anti-state interventionism, and for that reason was received more easily in the United States than in Europe or Britain. The differences between society and living organisms are well rehearsed, but it is the ability to handle the problems of social conflict and the limits beyond which the plasticity of society cannot go, which both Spencer and Durkheim were unable to explain. See also FUNCTION; SOCIAL ORDER.

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organic composition of capital

The ratio between constant and variable capital in total capital, measured in value terms. In lay terms this can be understood as the capital/labour ratio, or the proportion of output contributed by raw materials, machinery and other inputs, relative to labour. Karl Marx thought the organic composition of capital would rise with the development of capitalism because of labour-displacing technical change. See also CAPITAL-INTENSIVE PRODUCTION.

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organic management systems

See CONTINGENCY THEORY.

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organic nationalism

See NATIONALISM.

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organic solidarity

See DIVISION OF LABOUR; ORGANIC ANALOGY; SOCIAL ORDER.

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organization

See FORMAL STRUCTURE; ORGANIZATION THEORY.

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organization, formal

See FORMAL STRUCTURE.

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organization man

Originally the title of an influential book (published in 1956), a classic of American pop sociology by William H. Whyte, which claimed that white-collar employees in large organizations are dominated by corporate life and loyalties. In cutting themselves off from friends, families, and communities, organization men came to assume a new ‘bureaucratic, personality structure’. This favoured conformity, a privatized life-style in mass-produced suburbia, and subverted the American values of competitive individualism.

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organization theory, sociology of organizations

In practice these terms are used interchangeably, although the former has a slightly wider remit than the latter as it also covers work by non-sociologists, including those who are concerned to provide advice to management on how organizations should be designed and operated.
As various forms of organization pervade social life some difficulty also attaches to the definition of those which are the subject-matter of the sociology of organizations. In a useful discussion of this problem David Silverman (The Theory of Organizations, 1970) has suggested that the ‘formal organizations’ with which this branch of sociology is concerned have three distinguishing features: they arise at an ascertainable moment in time; as artefacts they exhibit patterns of social relations which are less taken for granted than those in non-formal organizations (such as the family) and which organizational participants often seek to co-ordinate and control; consequently, considerable attention is paid to the nature of these social relations, and to planned changes in them.
Early organization theory developed along two parallel tracks, reflecting its dual sociological and managerial origins. The growth of industrial societies in the nineteenth century involved the expansion of large-scale organizations—especially those of the factory and the state. The former of these gave rise to the doctrines of scientific management, associated with Frederick William Taylor, and the latter provided the exemplar which Weber had in mind when developing his idealtypical account of the structure of bureaucracy. Both these theories concentrated on analysing the structures of organizations; that is, the nature of the various positions occupied by organizational personnel, the powers and duties attaching to these positions, and their relationship to the work required to carry out the explicitly stated goals of the organization. Both also viewed organizations as hierarchical structures, essential for the managerial control of work.
However, in the 1930s and 1940s, a variety of studies (such as those of the Human Relations Movement, by Chester Barnard, and the now classic study of the Tennessee Valley Authority by the sociologist Philip Selznick) opened up a second area for analysis: the study of the social processes occurring in organizations, often with a particular emphasis on how informal, ‘unofficial’ social relations could constrain or even subvert the official goals of the organization, and with organizations as co-operative rather than hierarchically controlled social institutions.
There now exists an immense variety of sociological studies of organizations and theories about them. Indeed, most of the major schools of sociological theory have contributed to this literature. Stewart Clegg and David Dunkerley (Organization, Class and Control, 1980) identify four major groupings among the diverse approaches. These are as follows.
Typologies of organizations: involving attempts to classify organizations according to a variety of key characteristics, such as who benefits from their operations, or how they obtain compliance from their members. Works by Peter Blau, Amitai Etzioni, Robert Blauner, and Tom Burns and G. M. Stalker are among the best known of such studies.
Organizations as social systems: an approach particularly identified with Talcott Parsons's structural-functionalist theory of action and with Philip Selznick and Robert Merton's more focused work on organizations. Organizations consist of social systems in interaction with other social systems (therefore ‘open systems’) whose values and goals are oriented to those of the wider society. According to Parsons, key requirements for organizational maintenance (which is seen to be the overriding goal of any organization) are those which apply to all social systems; namely, adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and pattern (or value) maintenance. Organizations as empirically contingent structures: an approach particularly associated, in the United Kingdom, with research at the University of Aston. The typological and social systems approaches have difficulty in clearly defining the organization as a theoretical object. (Is it defined solely by a set of typological characteristics? Or, if it is an open system, where are the system boundaries to be drawn?) The Aston Programme applies insights derived from psychology, together with statistical techniques such as scaling and factor analysis, to relate measures of organizational performance to different dimensions of organizational structure (such as the degree of specialization of tasks and centralization of authority). The latter are then related to independent contextual variables such as size, technology, and location of the enterprise. This essentially empiricist approach is subject to all the usual criticisms which apply to such a methodology.
Organizations as structures of action: approaches which focus on the circumstances determining the actions of individuals in organizations. An early contribution was made by Herbert A. Simon's work on satisficing. Later work, for example by David Silverman, is influenced by phenomenological sociology (especially ethnomethodology) and interactionism (see SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM). Instead of reifying the organization (referring to organizational goals and needs as if the organization, like a human being, could have such things) organizations are here analysed as the outcome of motivated people attempting to resolve their own problems. They are socially constructed by the individual actions of members having habituated expectations of each other. This approach throws doubt on whether it makes sense to refer to organizations as institutions which pursue organizational goals. In any event, there have been many studies which show (for example) that official goals may bear no relationship to actual or operative goals; that organizations frequently have multiple and conflicting goals; and that goal displacement may occur. The informal culture of work within organizations has been and continues to be extensively studied by sociologists influenced by the Chicago School of sociology. This tradition is illustrated in the work of, for example,
(Human Relations in the Restaurant Industry, 1948)
,
(‘Quota Restriction and Goldbricking in a Machine Shop’, American Journal of Sociology, 1952)
, and
(Boys in White, 1961)
.
A great deal of organization theory has been criticized for its normative (in this case pro-managerial) bias; for its individualistic analysis of the members of organizations (that is, for being more informed by psychological, than by sociological perspectives); and for embodying an inadequate analysis of how wider relations of power and control in society affect and are affected by organizations (in other words for concentrating mainly on the internal exercise of managerial authority and attempts to subvert it).
For some reason textbooks on organization theory tend to be rather dull—a curious phenomenon since the many case-studies of organizations are usually quite the opposite. Notable exceptions in the textbook field include
, The Political Economy of Bureaucracy (1982)
and
's more polemical In Defence of Organization Theory (1985)
. See also ADMINISTRATIVE THEORY; BOUNDED RATIONALITY; CONTINGENCY THEORY; FLEXIBLE EMPLOYMENT; FORDISM; FORMAL STRUCTURE; GOAL-DISPLACEMENT; HAWTHORNE STUDIES; LINE-AND-STAFF; MICHELS, ROBERT; ORGANIZATIONAL CUTLURE; SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT; SYSTEMS THEORY.

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organizational culture

The values, norms, and patterns of action that characterize social relationships within a formal organization. This concept came to the fore in a series of British and American management texts of the 1980s, which attempted to explain either (or sometimes both) the difficulties of Western businesses in coping with economic recession, and the challenge of the Japanese. Many of these texts— including best-selling accounts by
(Theory Z, 1981)
,
(In Search of Excellence, 1982)
,
(The Winning Streak, 1984)
,
, The Art of Japanese Management, 1981)
, and
(Corporate Cultures, 1988)
— simply reiterate the insights of the Human Relations perspective on industrial relations. (Ouchi, for example, explicitly calls for ‘a redirection of attention to human relations in the corporate world’.) Deal and Kennedy, on the other hand, largely reiterate the analysis and conclusions reached earlier by
(in The Management of Innovation, 1961)
, notably those regarding the workings of plural social systems within organizations, and the necessity of matching management systems to their economic and political environments. In short, this is an extensive and curiously influential concept and literature, given that it seems to be just so much rediscovering of some commonplace sociological wheels. See also CONTINGENCY THEORY.

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Organizational Design Movement

Also known as the ‘neo-human relations school’ or ‘organizational psychology’, this was a group of writers who were influential in American and European business schools in the 1960s. The most notable OD theorists were
(The Human Side of the Enterprise, 1960)
,
(‘New Patterns of Management’, in , Management and Motivation, 1970)
, and
(‘Understanding Human Behaviour in Organizations’, in , Modern Organization Theory, 1959)
. What these writers shared was a conviction that conventional formal organizations (see FORMAL STRUCTURE) embodied the (regressive) psychological assumptions of their designers; that such organizations often resulted in psychological distress for individuals working within them; and that better organizational structures were possible. Each built loosely on the theories of Abraham H. Maslow. McGregor stresses the importance of the worker's self-fulfilment. Likert favoured restructuring the hierarchical command structure of organizations as a series of interlinked collaborating groups. Argyris argued against the dependence and frustration produced by the constraints of directive leadership and in favour of organizational designs which facilitated self-actualization among employees. These ideas became one of the principal elements feeding into the later Quality of Work Life Movement (see QWL MOVEMENT), despite the fact that much of the OD programme rested on questionable empirical evidence, and an undemonstrated assumption that frustration of the higher needs in Maslow's needs hierarchy generated a narrow and destructive money-mindedness in employees.

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organizational reach

In his extensive historical study of The Social Sources of Power (vol. i, 1986), the British sociologist Michael Mann offers a fourfold typology of types of organizational reach, a term he uses to describe the characteristics of social power networks. One dimension of the typology distinguishes between the extensive and intensive power of organizations; that is, ‘the ability to organize large numbers of people over far-flung territories in order to engage in minimally stable cooperation’ (extensive power), as against ‘the ability to organise tightly and command a high level of mobilization or commitment from the participants’ (intensive power). The other dimension of the typology distinguishes authoritative and diffused power; that is, ‘power actually willed by groups and institutions’ (including definite commands and conscious obedience), as against power which ‘spreads in a more spontaneous, unconscious, decentred way throughout a population’ (for example an understanding that certain shared social practices are natural or moral). Examples of the four forms of organizational reach thus generated include an army command structure (intensive and authoritative), militarist empire (extensive and authoritative), a general strike (intensive and diffused), and market exchange (extensive and diffused).

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organized crime

All profitable crime is socially organized, but this term is usually reserved for situations where a large number of people in a hierarchical structure are engaged in an on-going pattern of criminal activities. The most common activities are extortion and the provision of illegal goods and services, such as drink, drugs, gambling, money-lending, and prostitution. All of these involve continuous relations with the victims or clients, who have contact with the lower echelons of the organization. To be successful, therefore, organized or syndicated crime involves some degree of corruption or intimidation of the police or other agents of law-enforcement. It is often thought to be synonymous with a secret society, such as the Tongs of the Chinese diaspora, the Camorra of nineteenth-century Naples, the Mafia of Sicily, and Cosa Nostra in the United States. It seems more likely that if such societies exist at all, they do not actually run criminal activities, but rather act as fraternal organizations for some of the racketeers. The myth of the secret society helps the criminals by intimidating victims and helps the authorities because it justifies police ineffectiveness. It is often fuelled by racism, though criminal activities themselves are usually ethnically mixed. Organized crime is associated with violence and threats in the course of extortion, but also in the maintenance of control over subordinates, struggles for power within groups, and struggles for monopoly control between groups.

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oriental despotism

A concept popularized by the German sociologist Karl Wittfogel, a member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory who fled the Third Reich in 1933, and spent much of the rest of his academic career in the United States (see his
Oriental Despotism, 1957
). Wittfogel, an expert on Chinese civilization, was a controversial figure who seems, during the course of a colourful career, to have traversed the political spectrum from Stalinism to McCarthyism. His fame rests largely on the dispute engendered by his concept of oriental despotism and his analysis of the so-called ‘hydraulic society’.
In his early work, Wittfogel described China as having experienced feudalism, on the grounds that the Chou state was based on the collection by ruling clans of tithes, in the form of communal labour by peasants working on public fields. Subsequently, a transition from labour-rent to rent-in-kind and money-rent implies that the feudal relation between the peasant communities and local lords gave way to ‘oriental despotism’, in which the primary mode of extracting surplus value from direct producers became money-rent paid to the centralized state. Although Wittfogel is by no means clear about the sequence of events (in his later work Chou China is reclassified as an instance of oriental despotism), he argues that the transition between the two modes of production was prompted mainly by the expansion and intensification of agriculture by means of large-scale irrigation, control of which necessitated co-ordination by a centralized state. This is the so-called ‘hydraulic hypothesis’, which states that irrigation is a major cause of the emergence of centralized political authority, and is thus a significant force in the development of early civilizations. Oriental Despotism considers this thesis in relation, not only to China, but also wider Marxist arguments about the Asiatic mode of production.
Wittfogel's work has been criticized as empirically unsound, inconsistent, ecologically determinist, and implicitly functionalist. However, his characterization of the agrarian state bureaucracy of early hydraulic societies prompted an enormous literature on state formation and class relationships in South-east Asia, and he has also been described as a sophisticated multilinear evolutionist.

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orientations to work

See WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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original income

See INCOME DISTRIBUTION.

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Osgood's semantic differential scale

See SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL.

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Ossowski, Stanislaw

(1897–1963)
A noted Polish sociologist and philosopher. Together with his wife Maria Ossowska, a philosopher in her own right, he published extensively in the philosophy and psychology of science. However it was the publication of Class Structure in the Social Consciousness in 1957, after the barren Stalinist years when sociology had ceased formally to exist in Polish universities, which projected him into the sociological limelight.
This work was a typology of the various views of class, social structure, and social processes, and the intellectual milieu from which they emerged. He argued vigorously against the crude bipolar Marxist class analysis of the time. More importantly, he articulated a view in which the existence of status privilege and economic inequality persists, even after the formal abolition of the class system. In particular he sought to introduce the importance of the study of subjective perceptions of inequality, of attitudes, and to research what was new, inherited, or even absent within the supposedly classless societies of real socialism. He also drew attention to similarities between capitalist and socialist societies, in the way in which they presented their societies as classless, and attempted to remove the bases for ‘group solidarity amongst the underprivileged’. The nationalization of the means of production may have been a necessary condition for moving towards the kind of society envisaged by the Marxist-Leninists, but it was certainly not a sufficient condition, and he asserted that many old forms of inequality had re-emerged in a new guise.
Ossowski had the intellectual breadth as well as the moral courage to write this treatise at a time when even the discussion of social stratification with reference to socialist peoples' democracies was taboo. He displayed his socialist concerns alongside intellectual rigour and scholarly autonomy and thus set the foundations for a sociology which survived and flourished in conditions of repression where in other countries of real socialism it all but disappeared.

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other-directedness

A term coined by David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd, 1950), referring to a personality type which seeks approval and acceptance from others—as opposed to inner-directedness, acting independently, and according to a personal moral code. Other-directedness is said to result from a bureaucratic society geared to consumption. Subsequent volumes entitled Faces in the Crowd (1952) and Individualism Reconsidered (1954) further explored Riesman's thesis that the American character was moving from inner-directedness to other-directedness with the advance of industrialization and growth of population density.

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out-group

In his classic study of Folkways (1906), William Graham Sumner observed that people tend to like their own group (the in-group) over other competing or opposing groups (the out-group). The terms are closely linked to the concept of ethnocentricism.

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outlier effects

The pattern created in a sample by the inclusion of a few atypical cases or groups. For example, if one finds that data from twenty different schools show there has been an overall decrease in the ratio of staff to students, it will be necessary to check whether this decrease is general or specific merely to one or two institutions. If the staff:student ratio has decreased dramatically in one school but not others, this idiosyncratic case could create what appears to be a general pattern, when combined with other schools in which there has been little or no change. These effects can also be observed in regression analysis, because outliers can distort regression lines and coefficients, so the prudent researcher usually checks for their presence by also displaying data fully in a contingency table or scattergram.

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outwork, outworking

These terms refer to the employment of individual workers by firms outside the firm workplace—usually in workers' own homes. The employer supplies materials (and possibly machinery) and workers are paid on a piece-rate basis. It commonly involves light assembly work. See also HOMEWORK.

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over-determine, over-determination

Terms devised by Sigmund Freud to denote multiple determinations—and hence interpretations—of dreams. The concept was subsequently used by Louis Althusser in For Marx (1966) to indicate multiple historical causation. Althusser contrasted this view of causation with the Hegelian notion of simple contradiction. He argued that revolutions occurred when a combination of factors—a ‘ruptural unity’—was present.

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oversampling

A departure from simple random sampling, in which the same sampling fraction is applied to all cases in the population being studied, so that an invariant one in 50 or one in 200 (for example) are selected for interview. Oversampling is the selective application of a higher sampling fraction to rare sub-groups of particular interest in the population studied, so as to ensure that the final sample includes a sufficient number of these rare cases to permit separate analysis. For example, ethnic minority groups are often oversampled, as compared with the sampling fraction for the majority ethnic group, to enable researchers to analyse the results for each group separately. When summary results from the complete survey are reported, sampling weights are used to restore the original importance of sub-groups in the total population.

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over-socialized conception of man

A phrase devised by the American sociologist Dennis Hume Wrong, as part of his critique of functionalism in general, and the sociology of Talcott Parsons in particular. Wrong rejected Parsons's views on socialization and social integration. In
‘The Oversocialised Conception of Man’ (American Sociological Review, 1961)
he argued that Parsons's account of socialization had completely lost the tension in Sigmund Freud's contrast between human nature and the requirements of civilized social order. Wrong rejected the view that social actors are simply acceptance-seekers; rather, he argued, human beings should be seen as social without being entirely socialized.

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overt participant observation

Participant observation carried out with the agreement of the subjects being studied. This agreement may be tacit or formally expressed. In the latter case, the sociologist makes it clear that social science research is being undertaken, and the subjects themselves are then invited to give explicit permission for the research to proceed. In the former, the researcher also reveals his or her identity as an outsider, but states the purposes of the study less clearly, usually in the form of a general statement of interest in the subjects ‘in order to write a book’ about them. If this is sufficient to gain entry to the field, then no further details are offered to those being studied, unless specifically requested by the subjects themselves. Most researchers enjoy telling the story of how they gained entry to the field; indeed, often this is crucial to understanding the research, since the relationship that is established between researcher and subjects may well affect the quality of the data obtained. Most published accounts of overt participant observation therefore report in some detail on the observer's assumed role in the group or society being studied.

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over-urbanization

See URBANIZATION.

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ownership versus control debate

See BOURGEOISIE; DECOMPOSITION OF CAPITAL.

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P

Paine, Thomas

(1737–1809)
The pre-eminent pamphleteer and radical democrat of the American Revolution. Paine was born in England and came to America in 1744. His 1776 revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense was enormously popular. In the spirit of Locke, Paine proclaimed that ‘Government even in its best state is a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.’ Paine wrote many pamphlets during the war, becoming an articulate spokesman for democratic and egalitarian institutions in the new nation. In 1791–2 he published The Rights of Man, defending the doctrine of natural rights against Burke. Briefly imprisoned in Paris during the period of Revolutionary Terror, Paine returned to the United States in 1802.

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paired comparisons

See RANKING.

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panel study

A study that provides longitudinal data on a group of people, households, employers, or other social unit, termed ‘the panel’, about whom information is collected over a period of months, years, or decades. Two of the most common types of panel are age-cohorts, people within a common age-band, and groups with some other date-specific common experience, such as people graduating from university, having a first child, or migrating to another country in a given year or band of years. Another type is the nationally representative cross-sectional sample of households or employers that is interviewed at regular intervals over a period of years. Because data relate to the same social units, change is measured more reliably than in regular cross-sectional studies, and sample sizes can be correspondingly smaller (often under 500), while remaining nationally representative, as long as non-response and sample attrition are kept within bounds. These are the key problems for panel studies, as initial samples are eroded by deaths, migration, fatigue with the study, and other causes. Another problem is that people become experienced interviewees, leading to response bias. For example, they may report ‘no change’ since the previous interview, so as to avoid detailed questioning on changes that have in fact occurred.
Data are usually collected through interview surveys with respondents in the panel, with other informants (such as parents, doctors), with their spouses and other members of their household. With the respondent's permission, data from administrative records may be added, such as information from educational or medical records, which are usually more precise than the respondent's recollection. A panel element is sometimes added to regular cross-sectional surveys, and rotating sample designs are a hybrid between panel study and regular survey.
Because they yield longitudinal data, panel studies offer possibilities for examining the relationships between individual life-histories, cohort effects, and period effects due to social change. A number of specialized techniques have therefore been developed for analysing these data (see, for example,
, Longitudinal Data Analysis, 1982
).
, Changing Households (1994)
, is a good example of the range of substantive issues that can most usefully be addressed using panel data—in this case those from the British Household Panel Study. Topics include, for example, changes in household composition, patterns of residential mobility, and stability in voting intentions over time. This volume also contains a useful overview of the methodological problems involved in conducting panel surveys.

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panopticon

This term was first used by Jeremy Bentham in 1791 to describe his idea of an ‘inspection house’ to be used for surveillance purposes in public institutions such as prisons, asylums, and workhouses. The panopticon was a circular construction of open single ‘cells’, built around a central inspection tower, by means of which both the inspector and the inmate were under constant surveillance. Michel Foucault discussed the idea at length in Discipline and Punish (1975) and describes the panopticon as an apparatus of power by virtue of the field of visibility it creates. Because it made inmates always conscious of being visible, he argued, an automatic functioning of power was ensured. As a consequence of constant surveillance, individuals became ensnared in an impersonal power relation which both disindividualized the power relationship itself, and individualized those subjected to it. Foucault saw this as an essential development in, and metaphor for, the increasing surveillance, hierarchy, discipline, and classifications of modern society, by means of which individuals became ever more regulated and controlled by impersonal institutions. The idea of the panopticon as discussed by Foucault has also been important and influential in recent theories of the gaze.

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pantheism

See TRANSCENDENTALISM.

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paradigm, paradigmatic

In ordinary speech the word paradigm designates a typical example or model to be replicated or followed. This connotation is carried over into the technical use of the term introduced by the philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn, and thence into a wide range of sociological contexts. The term paradigm plays a key part in Kuhn's account of the practice which he calls ‘normal’ science. In ‘normal’ (that is non-revolutionary) periods in a science, there is a consensus across the relevant scientific community about the theoretical and methodological rules to be followed, the instruments to be used, the problems to be investigated, and the standards by which research is to be judged. This consensus derives from the adoption by the scientific community of some past scientific achievement as its model or paradigm. Scientific training in the discipline involves familiarization with this paradigm, or its textbook representations. To acquire the status of a paradigm, a scientific achievement must offer sufficiently convincing resolutions of previously recognized problems to attract the adherence of enough specialists to form the core of a new consensus. It must also have enough unresolved problems to provide the puzzles for subsequent research practice within the research tradition it comes to define.
The concept revolutionized thinking about the philosophy of science. Until the mid-twentieth century, at least in the English-speaking world, philosophy of science was conducted largely in abstraction from the history or social realities of scientific practice. Generally, an ideal-typical model of science (sometimes, as in the work of Sir Karl Popper, this was explicitly prescriptive) was subjected to philosophical analysis, and its key features commended as demarcation criteria separating science from pseudo-science, religious faith, speculative metaphysics, or other (usually less worthy) activities. Kuhn's major work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 1970), was one of the first successful attempts to pose philosophical questions about the nature of scientific knowledge by way of a serious conceptualization of the history of the sciences.
Kuhn's account challenges widespread assumptions about scientific progress as the piecemeal accumulation of knowledge, and about scientific rationality as a formal process of matching theory to evidence. His alternative vision is of a discontinuous history, in which periods of consensual normal science were interspersed with crises and intellectual revolutions, some of which called into question the most fundamental epistemological assumptions of science itself. Far from advancing in a cumulative, gradual way, revolutionary changes in science therefore involve abandonment of much previously accepted knowledge, and proceed by abrupt qualitative transitions of perspective. By contrast, normal science displays few of the features—bold conjecture, preparedness to abandon assumptions in the face of the evidence, and so on—widely attributed to scientists in Popperian and empiricist philosophies of science. Routine puzzle-solving in terms provided by a shared conventional paradigm is how Kuhn characterizes the great majority of scientific activity in non-revolutionary times.
The attention Kuhn gives to the role of the scientific community, its shared norms, its role in the resolution of periods of revolutionary crisis, the organization of scientific communication and education, as well as the recognition of extra-scientific pressures in the instigation of scientific revolutions, all ensured that his work would be influential amongst social scientists, well beyond the circles of philosophers and historians of science. In sociology, his work was of great importance in enabling sociology of knowledge to extend its scope to include the natural sciences. It was also important in discussions about the history and nature of sociology itself, and of the significance of a persisting lack of consensus around a single paradigm in sociology, and indeed the other social sciences. Was the persistence of rivalry between alternative perspectives evidence that sociology was still in its ‘pre-paradigmatic’ (that is, pre-scientific) stage; or, rather, did it suggest that the model of ‘scientific consensus’ was permanently unattainable, or inappropriate to sociology? Though Kuhn was himself a determined anti-relativist, many of his arguments pointed in a relativist direction, and his work was widely used by those whose main aim was to debunk the view of science as an especially authoritative form of knowledge. George Ritzer has suggested that sociology is a ‘multiple paradigm’ science (
Sociology, 1975
) and argued forcefully for more paradigmatic integration in the discipline (Toward an Integrated Sociological Paradigm, 1981).

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paradigmatic and syntagmatic

See SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE.

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paralanguage

The various non-semantic aspects of speech (such as volume, pitch, and emphasis) by which individuals communicate meaning.

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parallel cousin

This is a term used in kinship theory to denote first cousins who have related parents of the same sex; in other words, their mothers are sisters or their fathers are brothers. In some societies there are rules that forbid marriage between parallel cousins. See also CROSS-COUSIN.

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parallel descent

A term applied by social anthropologists to a form of arranging descent that does not result in groupings containing both sexes: instead, there are matrilineal groups of females, and patrilineal groups of males. In such systems, the purposes for which the female groups exist are strictly limited, for example to the holding of certain forms of property. It has been argued that the term may be a misnomer, since the system to which it applies exists alongside the familiar marriage arrangements, as for example among the Apinaye of Brazil, who practise what is essentially a patrilineal system according to which men exchange sisters for wives.

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parametric statistics

A branch of statistical inference which makes assumptions about the underlying mathematical distributional form of observed variables. The most familiar of these hypothetical mathematical distributions is the normal distribution. Binomial and Poisson distributions are also widely used. Some statisticians believe that these models are inappropriate to the social sciences, since they rest on assumptions that are violated by much social science data, and prefer instead to rely on non-parametric statistics.

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paranoia, paranoid reactions

In psychoanalysis, paranoia involves the projection of internal threatening feelings on to the external world, which is then experienced as persecutory. Psychoanalysts concerned with society are interested in the way paranoid reactions can be mobilized for political purposes (see for example
, The Authoritarian Personality, 1950
).

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para-religion

Since the 1960s, the proliferation of cults, sects, private religions, invisible religions, and esoteric belief-systems in general has left sociologists of religion struggling to define their core subject-matter. It has seemed increasingly unsatisfactory simply to assume that religion happens in churches (or, indeed, that Churches are necessarily concerned primarily with the promotion of religion). As a result there have been numerous attempts to impose order on the field. In one such effort, A. L. Greil and T. Robbins (eds.) (Between Scared and Secular, 1994) distinguish between religions (as conventionally understood), on the one hand, and ‘para-religions’ and ‘quasi-religions’ on the other. Para-religious phenomena ‘involve expressions of ultimate concern’ but make no claim to be religions because no supernatural beliefs are involved. Examples include psychotherapy as practised in a communal setting and ritualistic aspects in corporate and consumer life. Quasi-religions do make supernatural claims but these are ‘anomalous given the American folk category of “religion”’. Occultism, New Age spiritualism, astrology, and Scientology are cited as exemplars. The fact that the last of these has been involved in a long history of political and legal wrangling in order to have itself recognized as a Church illustrates the difficulties of defining clear boundaries in this particular sphere of sociological interest.

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parasuicide

See SUICIDE.

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parenthood, parenting

See CHILDHOOD; FAMILY, SOCIOLOGY OF; FATHERHOOD; MOTHERHOOD.

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Pareto, Vilfredo

(1848–1923)
An Italian economist and sociologist, subject of an extensive treatment in Talcott Parsons's The Structure of Social Action (1937) as a co-founder of the ‘voluntaristic theory of action’, but since largely ignored by sociologists.
Already famous for his contributions to equilibrium theory as a mathematical economist, in his later years Pareto turned his hand to sociology, and in 1916 published his magnum opus the Trattato di sociologia generale (translated in four volumes as The Mind and Society in 1935). Although some read it as a proto-fascist work, the publication of the Trattato confirmed Pareto's fame in his own lifetime, although little of this reputation has survived into the present. Pareto is probably best known today for being the first person to use the term ‘élite’ to refer to the few who rule the many. He also exerted an early influence on the development of social systems theory. Samuel E. Finer's Vilfredo Pareto, Sociological Writings (1966) contains a useful selection of his most important sociological texts, together with a substantial introductory essay by Finer himself. See also ÉLITE THEORY; PARETO PRINCIPLE.

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Pareto-improvement

See PARETO PRINCIPLE.

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Pareto optimality

See PARETO PRINCIPLE.

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Pareto principle

A principle of welfare economics derived from the writings of Vilfredo Pareto, which states that a legitimate welfare improvement occurs when a particular change makes at least one person better off, without making any other person worse off. A market exchange which affects nobody adversely is considered to be a ‘Pareto-improvement’ since it leaves one or more persons better off. ‘Pareto optimality’ is said to exist when the distribution of economic welfare cannot be improved for one individual without reducing that of another.
The principle rests on three assumptions: that each individual is the best judge of his or her own welfare; that social welfare is exclusively a function of individual welfare; and that if one individual's welfare is augmented, and nobody's is reduced, then social welfare has increased. Since these assumptions are empirically questionable, and probably embody value-judgements about well-being and satisfaction, they are somewhat controversial. It has also been argued that they constitute a rather weak basis for welfare judgements, since they explicitly forbid interpersonal comparisons, are concerned entirely with the subjective choices of individuals, and privilege the position occupied by the status quo (since any move from the status quo which was vetoed by one person would not be considered a Pareto-improvement). Most sociologists object to Paretian welfare economics because of its silence on the initial distribution of resources.

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pariah group

In the narrow sense, a pariah is an untouchable or an outcast found in the caste system of stratification; however, the term is often used more generally to refer to any outsider. See also EXCLUSION.

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Park, Robert Ezra

(1864–1944)
A leading member of the Chicago School, who introduced the work of Georg Simmel to a generation of American sociologists, mainly indirectly and via the widely used textbook Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921) co-authored with Ernest W. Burgess. Park and Burgess were leading practitioners of (and coined the term) human ecology. Much of the theory of what came to be called ‘classical human ecology’ was stimulated by Park's writings and teaching at Chicago (see, for example, his definitive article on
‘Human Ecology’ in the American Journal of Sociology, 1936)
. Park argued that the basic process underlying social relationships was competition; however, because of human interdependence due to the division of labour, this competition always involves elements of unplanned co-operation (thus yielding ‘competitive cooperation’). In this way, people come to form symbiotic relationships, both at the spatial and cultural levels. These ideas are developed in the collection of essays (many by Park himself) on The City (1925) and his monograph on Human Communities (1952).

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Parkinson's law

A principle formulated by the British political scientist C. Northcote Parkinson (Parkinson's Law, 1958) to the effect that ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’.

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parliamentary government

A system of government which allocates public decision-making powers to a house of elected representatives, or parliament, typically including decisions on national laws and regulations, the government budget and fiscal policy, and declarations of war with other nation-states. Specific arrangements vary widely between countries, for example regarding the frequency of elections, the number of chambers in parliament, who is entitled to vote, whether voting is obligatory or optional, how votes are converted into a number of appointed representatives, rules which affect the number of political parties or independent representatives, and the relationship between elected representatives and the head of state or the government. The common feature of such systems is that they seek to achieve a proper balance between governmental power and governmental responsiveness.

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parole and langue

See POST-STRUCTURALISM; SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE.

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parsimony, parsimonious

The principle that the best statistical model among all satisfactory models is that with the fewest parameters. Hence, more generally, the principle which asserts that if it is possible to explain a phenomenon equally adequately in a number of different ways, then the simplest of explanations (in terms of the number of variables or propositions) should be selected.

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Parsons, Talcott

(1902–79)
For some twenty to thirty years after the Second World War, Talcott Parsons was the major theoretical figure in English-speaking sociology, if not in world sociology. An American who worked all his life in the United States, apart from a brief period of postgraduate study in Europe, his sociological theory (most often labelled structural-functionalism or normative functionalism) was commonly seen as a product of modern, affluent American society, where structural social conflicts had been largely eliminated or were of a transient nature, and where there appeared to be a general social cohesion and shared adherence to democratic values. Parsonsian theory came under increasing criticism as the post-war consensus itself showed signs of dissolving, particularly under the impact of the Vietnam War.
From the beginning, Parsons set out to provide an integrated, totalizing theory for sociology, bringing together into a unified whole the diverse insights of the major founders of sociology. In particular this involved an attempt to integrate Weber's individualism and Durkheim's holism. His focus was on ideas, values, norms, and the integration of individual actions oriented to norms and values into overarching social systems.
For Parsons, the prime task was to develop a set of abstract, generalizing concepts describing the social system. The main criteria by which we can judge such a set of concepts is their rational coherence, and they can then be used to derive propositions about the world. In his first book, The Structure of Social Action (1937), he argued that the classical sociological theorists could be seen as moving towards a voluntaristic theory of action, conceiving of human beings as making choices between means and ends, in a physical and social environment that limited choices. A central aspect of the social environment is the norms and values by which we make our choices. Within this context, actors aim at maximum gratification, and behaviour and relationships that achieve this goal become institutionalized into a system of status roles. This is the social system and it presupposes three other systems: a personality system (the actor himself or herself); a cultural system (or wider values giving coherence to the norms attached to status roles); and a physical environment to which the society must adjust.
Parsons then builds up an elaborate model of systems and subsystems. In order to survive, each system must meet four functional prerequisites, or four requirements that must be fulfilled. These are adaptation (to the physical environment); goal attainment (a means of organizing its resources to achieve its goals and obtain gratification); integration (forms of internal co-ordination and ways of dealing with differences); and latency or pattern-maintenance (means of achieving comparative stability). Each system, therefore, develops four specialist subsystems in the process of meeting these requirements. This is one of Parsons's most famous taxonomic devices—the so-called AGIL schema.
This was then developed into an evolutionary view of history as moving from the simple to the complex, societies developing rather as amoeba, through a process of splitting and then reintegration. Systems and subsystems are organized into a cybernetic hierarchy, those systems which have a high level of information (such as the cultural system, including norms and values), controlling systems which have a high level of energy (such as the human biological system).
The four systems mentioned above—cultural, social, personality and biological— form what Parsons calls the general system of action. Each system corresponds to a functional prerequisite. Similarly, the social system itself has four subsystems, these being (in hierarchical order) the socialization system (pattern maintenance); the societal community or institutions of social control (integration); the political system (goal attainment); and the economic system (adaptation). Each of these can, itself, be seen in terms of further, more specialized, subsystems.
We can also analyse actions, social relationships, and whole systems according to what Parsons calls pattern variables—or choices between pairs of alternatives. For example, in any relationship we may treat its object as unique, or as an example of a general class (this is the dilemma between particularism and universalism); may draw on or ignore emotional commitments (affectivity versus affective neutrality); may value something or someone for their own sake or for what can be done with it or them (quality versus performance); and may relate to all aspects of an object or to one only (diffuseness versus specificity). Institutions tend to cluster round opposing poles: in the family, for example, relationships are particularistic, affective, quality-oriented, and diffuse; in a factory they are typically universalistic, affectively neutral, performance-oriented, and specific.
These ideas were developed over some 40 years, Parsons's other main works being The Social System (1951), Towards a General Theory of Action (with Edward Shils, 1951), Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (1966), and The System of Modern Societies (1971). His structural-functionalism is perhaps best understood as a vast classificatory scheme, enabling us to categorize any level of social life, at any level of analysis. It is not surprising that C. Wright Mills's labelling of the approach as grand theory has stuck. The explanations that it offers are of a functionalist nature and many of the criticisms directed at Parsons's work have been criticisms of functionalist explanations as such. It has also been criticized for its abstraction and lack of connection with empirical research; for its social determinism (although it is a theory of social action it seems that, ultimately, systems prescribe the activities of each actor); for its implicit conservatism; and its inability to take account of action oriented to material rather than normative interests.
Parsonsian theory seemed to disappear in the 1970s, with rising interest in a wide range of other theories, but in recent years there has been a renewal of interest (see, for example,
, ‘The Parsons Revival in German Sociology’, in , Sociological Theory 1984, 1984, and , ‘Parsonsian Theory Today; In Search of a New Synthesis’, in , Social Theory Today, 1987
). However, American and German neo-functionalism are markedly less systematic, and far more open than the original. See also ACTION THEORY; CONSENSUS; EQUILIBRIUM; EVOLUTIONARY UNIVERSALS; NORMATIVE ORDER; SCHOOL CLASS; SICK ROLE; SOCIAL INTEGRATION AND SYSTEM INTEGRATION; STRUCTURAL DIFFERENTIATION.

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partial regression coefficients

See REGRESSION.

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participant observation

A major research strategy which aims to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given area of study (such as a religious, occupational, or deviant group) through an intensive involvement with people in their natural environment. The method originated in the fieldwork of social anthropologists and in the urban research of the Chicago School. John Lofland's study of the Moonies in Doomsday Cult (1966), Laud Humphreys's study of homosexuals in Tearoom Trade (1970), and William Foote Whyte 's study of the gang (Street Corner Society, 1955) are classic exemplars. Such research usually involves a range of methods (all of which are separately discussed elsewhere in this dictionary): informal interviews, direct observation, participation in the life of the group, collective discussions, analyses of the personal documents produced within the group, self-analysis, and life-histories. Thus, although the method is usually characterized as qualitative research, it can (and often does) include quantitative dimensions.
The central methodological problem of such research is balancing adequate subjectivity with adequate objectivity. Since a major aim of participant observation is to enter the subjective worlds of those studied, and to see these worlds from their point of view (a method akin to the notion of understanding or Verstehen), the problem of adequate subjectivity is posed directly: how can researchers know that they are accurately representing the point of view of the other, rather than imposing their own views upon the research subject? On the other hand, simply to stay with the subject's own view may risk the problem of conversion and ‘going native’, thus being able to see the world only from the point of view of the research subject or subjects. Here the problem of maintaining adequate objectivity is posed: namely, that of maintaining enough distance to be able to locate the subject's view in a wider theoretical and social context. Participant observers are forever trapped in this dilemma: too much detachment weakens the insights that participant observation brings, but too much involvement will render the data of questionable value for social science. The most comprehensive discussion of these issues is T. S. Bruyn's The Human Perspective in Sociology (1966).
Participant observation may take several forms. In a classic article on
‘Roles in Sociological Field Observation’ (in the journal Social Forces, 1958)
, Raymond L. Gold distinguishes four roles that may be adopted within such research. They are ranged along a continuum of involvement, from complete participant through participant-as-observer and observer-as-participant, to complete observer. This taxonomy again captures the subjectivity versus objectivity dilemma: the first position approaches ‘going native’ whereas the last may well be too distant and uninvolved to generate insights into the subjective aspects of behaviour. See also COVERT OBSERVATION; OVERT PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION.

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participation rate

See LABOUR-FORCE PARTICIPATION RATE.

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participatory democracy

The twentieth-century reincarnation of the ancient Greek ideal of government by the people (demos). Participatory democracy is direct democracy, in the sense that all citizens are actively involved in all important decisions. The youth and student movements of the 1960s, in Europe and America, adopted direct democracy with enthusiasm. In practice, this meant that all debates and decisions took place in face-to-face meetings of the whole group. Direct democracy was especially important in the American New Left, the French and British student movements, the early women's movements, and the anti-nuclear and peace movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was also a feature of the ecological and community movements that survived into the 1980s and 1990s. The difficulty with participatory democracy is a practical one—that it complicates and slows down the decision-making process. Its strength is that it binds individuals to the group through their active involvement in all decisions. By general agreement, participatory democracy can be effective only in groups with 500 or fewer active members.

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partisan dealignment

See VOTING BEHAVIOUR.

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party, political

See POLITICAL PARTIES.

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passive resistance

A tactic of non-violent resistance to authority pioneered by Mahatma Gandhi in his campaign against the British government in India in the 1930s and 1940s. Passive resistance has since become an accepted way for minorities to place moral pressure on majorities. It failed in Czechoslovakia in 1968, but had great success in the American Civil Rights Movement between 1955 and 1964, when many thousands of activists were arrested for violating racial segregation rules in the South, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The tactic has also been widely used by peace movements, anti-nuclear-power movements, and anti-abortion movements. In general, passive resistance involves groups of protesters occupying some public or forbidden space, and allowing themselves to be arrested or otherwise harassed by authorities, without offering any violence in return. The power of passive resistance is essentially moral. The images it creates can sway public opinion via the mass media, and may create guilt and uncertainty among politicians and power-holders. See also CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE.

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passive worker thesis

See FATALISM.

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pastoralists, pastoralism

A nomadic or semi-nomadic form of subsistence which is mainly dependent on herds of domesticated animals. Those groups who move according to regular seasonal routes for pasture are called transhumant. Pastoral nomads are found in most areas of the world, including Southern Europe. Many have faced pressures of enforced settlement.

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paternalism

A loosely defined term which is often attached to social relationships within which the dominant partner adopts an attitude and set of practices that suggest provident fostering care for his or her subordinates. The concept carries implications of unwelcome meddling in the lives of the latter by the former. It also alludes to gross inequalities in access to, and exercise of, power.
A wide variety of social relationships have been described and analysed as characteristically paternalist, including those between husbands and wives, master and slave, employer and employee. The relationship between certain factory owners and their employees, for example during the early phase of industrialization in the West, has often been viewed in this way. The former group exerted almost unrestrained power over the latter. However, as a tactic for securing social control, the early mill-owners attempted to convert power relations into moral ones; or, in the terminology of Max Weber, to translate domination into traditional authority. This was to be achieved by the institutionalization of such practices as periodic gift-giving, charitable religious and educational activity, provision of company housing and insurance schemes, and support for company-affiliated voluntary associations and clubs. One of the most systematic studies of this form of paternalism, which examines employer domination and operative responses in the Northern textile mills of Victorian England, is Patrick Joyce's Work, Society and Politics (1980).
The suggestion is often put that paternalism, practised in this way, is a device for managing and legitimating overtly and potentially disruptive hierarchical and exploitative relationships: it serves the interests of men rather than those of women, the ruling class rather than the proletariat, or of White masters as opposed to Black slaves. However, it has proved difficult to demonstrate empirically that the ritualistic (usually deferential) responses of subordinates to the paternalistic strategies of their superiors indicate identification with or approval of the status quo, rather than merely an external and calculated management of impressions (or what has been called ‘the necessary pose of the powerless’).

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path analysis

A form of multiple regression, in which standardized regression coefficients (path coefficients) are computed by stipulating the structure of hypothesized relationships between variables, in an explicitly formulated causal model. The causal connections are conceived as unidirectional and presented in a path diagram. In essence, therefore, the technique is merely a diagrammatic representation of a set of regression equations for which the variables are assumed to have a temporal ordering (see
, Causal Modelling, 1983
).
A hypothetical example is provided in the diagram below, which indicates the causal connections between the four variables of father's occupation, father's education, respondent's education, and respondent's occupation. In this model, social origins are placed before respondent's educational achievement, which is in turn placed before his or her occupational attainment. This technique attaches quantitative estimates to the causal connections in question, although it does not actually establish causality, since the pattern of relationships between the variables is entirely dependent on the researcher's own judgements about the likely causality among the variables. Where it is impossible to specify directionality, variables are deemed to be correlates (as in the case of social background and parental education above), and the link between them is conventionally described by a curved arrow having two heads.
The principal advantage of path analysis is that it allows the researcher to estimate the relative influence of variables within a causal network. The obvious disadvantage is that the model depends upon the researcher's own conception of the likely causal sequences involved, and since this cannot be validated or invalidated by the analysis, misleading path diagrams are sometimes produced. See also MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS.

FIGURE 6: An example path analysis of the causal connections between a respondent's and his/her father's education and occupation

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pathology

Strictly speaking, the scientific study of organic diseases, their causes and symptoms (hence, ‘pathologist’). However, pathological suggests morbidity and abnormality, so the term has also been extended to certain branches of psychiatry and criminology, most obviously in the widespread use of the term ‘psychopath’. In sociology, pathology was once held to be analogous to deviance and social problems or ‘social disease’ (notably in the work of Émile Durkheim), and the concept also blurs into the associated notion of social pathology (see, for example,
, Social Pathology, 1951, and , Social Science and Social Pathology, 1959
).

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pathology, social

See SOCIAL PATHOLOGY.

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patriarchy

Literally ‘rule of the father’; the term was originally used to describe social systems based on the authority of male heads of household. It has now acquired a more general usage, especially in some feminist theories, where it has come to mean male domination in general. Sociological and feminist research has documented a huge variety of instances of patriarchal domination—many of which are described elsewhere in this dictionary (see, for example, the entries on labour-market and the domestic division of labour).

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patrilineal

A term used in kinship theory to denote the tracing of kinship through the male line. The term agnatic is also used. A patrilineal group is a descent group that traces its ancestry to a single male ancestor and acts as a corporate group for political purposes. Patrilineal systems depend on the principle of passing on property and status from father to legitimate son. However, like legitimacy, membership of a lineage may not only be through actual blood ties but can be socially ascribed.

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patrimonialism

A form of political domination described by Max Weber (Economy and Society, 1922), in which authority rests on the personal and bureaucratic power exercised by a royal household, where that power is formally arbitrary and under the direct control of the ruler. This last criterion implies that domination is secured by means of a political apparatus staffed by slaves, mercenaries, conscripts, or some other group (not a traditional land-owning aristocracy) which has no independent power-base. By controlling the instruments of power in this way, the patrimonial ruler can extend personal grace and favours, at the expense of traditional limitations on the exercise of authority. Where an extreme development of the ruler's discretion has occurred then patrimonial authority shades into what Weber calls ‘sultanism’. He cites certain traditional African and Oriental societies as examples of patrimonial bureaucracies (the Chinese Empire is an obvious case), and suggests that these systems are relatively unstable, because they encourage palace revolts as the only means of voicing dissent. The absence of a ‘rational-legal’ state and bureaucracy also, in his view, acts as a significant hindrance to the development of modern (Western-type) capitalism.

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patron-client relationship

The roots of the patron-client relationship have been traced by some to the dependence of plebians on patricians in the Roman Empire. However the relationship is perhaps more obvious in the system of servitude known as serfdom that was widespread in Europe in the Middle Ages. The various systems of tenancy that followed the fall of the ancient societies of Greece and Rome had a common factor in that a large number of those who worked the land were unfree. They were tied to both land and landlord by bonds of service. The system of servitude in Europe was as much a system of authority as it was an economic adaptation. Prestige for the lord lay in the protection of as many serfs and dependent tenants as possible: hand in hand with this prestige went military capacity and political power.
While the system of serfdom was established by law, the dependency of tenants was ensured through a mixture of economic and religious ties, which are covered by the general terms ‘patronage’ and ‘clientage’. These set up a relationship between a politically and economically powerful patron, usually a landlord, and a weaker client. While the relationship may be regarded as socially necessary and honourable by both parties, its inequality makes it a potent source of exploitation. The ties established may link two families over many generations and may be reinforced by accumulated debts that make the client fundamentally unfree.
The economic means of establishing patron—client relationships nearly always have their basis in systems of landholding, such as share-cropping. Client families may be lent money, seed or goods by the patron, in order to see them through bad seasons, often in return for the unpaid labour of client family members. This can be regarded as benevolent, but also creates debts that may never be paid off. This is one of the underlying factors in systems of debt bondage (sometimes called bonded labour) that are widespread in India, although forbidden by both national and international law.
The ties of patron-clientage were basic to the system of land tenure and agricultural production in feudal Europe, where they still persist in Northern Mediterranean countries. Clienteliamo is the basis of the varied contractual relationships throughout Southern Italy, for example. Its essence is not the fixed and contractual but rather the informal and flexible. It is a face-to-face relationship, and many writers stress its importance in giving clients a degree of political power, through their support of the patron in his external political activities.
The conquerors and colonists of Latin America imported many of the values and legal institutions of feudal Europe, including patron-client relationships. The predominance of Roman Catholicism in Latin societies links this system of asymmetrical political and economic relationships to the system known as compadrazgo, or godparenting. The godparent-godchild relationship established in baptism is actually a link between two sets of parents, the biological and the spiritual. In systematic compadrazgo, the child links a powerful godparent, who is supposed to ensure its spiritual welfare, to economically and politically weaker natural parents. Co-parenting ties, once established, give the natural parents the right to call on the godfather for material assistance and legal support. In return, their obligation is to support the political activities of the godfather, and to work for him when he requires it. Being a godfather confers prestige as well as economic and political advantages. Although the term patron-client relationship is not always used within or about compadrazgo, it clearly applies.
Compadrazgo is a form of fictive kinship that enables actual kin networks to be extended. In the Arab world, the transition from kin-based networks to the more complex relationships of modern states is also marked by extensive political patronage, although this is not nearly so strongly characterized by economic exploitation as the form found in Latin societies. Despite stressing the asymmetry of the patron-client relationship, writers on this area emphasize the political content: the role of the patron as a cultural broker, and a system of obligations that is moral rather than monetary. Clients may become wealthy, but they do not lose their jural status as clients.
For anthropological accounts of this form of (what has been called) ‘lop-sided friendship’ see
, The People of the Sierra (1954) and , A Spanish Tapestry (1961
).

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pattern variables

See PARSONS, TALCOTT.

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Pearson coefficient

See ASSOCIATION COEFFICIENTS.

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peasants, peasantry

The word ‘peasant’ is a typical example of the confusion of the common use of a word with its sociological definition. Probably the common use, in this case, is more correct. People always know whether or not a person is a peasant, even though they may be referring to rich smallholders, share-croppers, or landless labourers, in a vast range of historical and cultural contexts. Social scientists, on the other hand, have devoted a good deal of time and passion to arguing over the exact definition.
There have been attempts to define peasant economies, particularly in Marxist theory, in such a way as to link social groups as diverse as feudal tenants, independent farmers, and rural day-labourers. These have variously stressed the importance of the peasant family as a unit of both production and consumption, the relationship of capitalist to non-capitalist agriculture, the use of family labour in a rural setting, and the exploitation of poor, or relatively poor, agricultural producers. There have been attempts to define a peasant mode of production, through the notion of the family-labour farm, as well as assertions that the peasantry is a class. The latter is related to debates about the revolutionary potential of the peasantry—again particularly among Marxist theorists.
Among social anthropologists, peasants have been defined by their cultural habits and norms, by narrowness of vision, and clinging to tradition. These attempts to characterize peasants as a generic human type have been littered with typologies that try to agglomerate all the different social and economic forms that are variously called peasant. However, as with Marxist economics, no precise or useful definition has been produced, and the term is best regarded as an imprecise socio-economic category of descriptive rather than heuristic usefulness.
There are extensive literatures on the social structure of peasant societies and on peasant movements and rebellions. The writings of Eric R. Wolf still offer one of the best introductions to these topics (see
Peasants, 1966, and Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, 1971
).

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pedagogy

The science or art of teaching. Some sociologists of education use the term ‘pedagogical practices’ with reference to the methods and principles that inform educational techniques, and make a distinction between the expressed pedagogy (which the teacher purports to use), and his or her observed pedagogy in practice. The former may be liberal (or ‘progressive’), emphasizing the needs and autonomy of the individual child, whereas the latter may be conservative (aimed at preserving the authority and expertise of the teacher as a professional). This distinction is therefore analogous to that between the formal and hidden curriculum.

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peer group

A set of individuals who, sharing certain common characteristics such as age, ethnicity, or occupation, perceive themselves and are recognized by others as a distinct social collectivity. The group is seen to have its own culture, symbols, sanctions, and rituals, into which the new member must be socialized, and according to which those who fail to comply with group norms may be ostracized.

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Peirce, Charles Sanders

(1839–1914)
One of the founders of pragmatism and semiology whose work has generally been neglected in both traditions. One of his key ideas is embodied in the maxim to ‘consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object’. Pragmatism for Peirce is not a theory of truth but a theory of meaning. His semiological writings introduce the idea of ‘indexical signs’, a reference to the fact that a token may have different meanings in different contexts, an insight that is basic to the ethnomethodological principle of the ‘indexicality’ of all language.

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penology

The study of the management and punishment of criminals. The term is associated with the nineteenth-century movement in penal reform, which redefined prisons as correctional rather than retributive establishments, and at that time described a large number of interested parties (including reformers and lawyers) and a discrete debate. However, in its contemporary usage it normally refers to specific sociological or criminological studies of punishment and deterrence, rather than a separate intellectual or academic discourse.

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perception

The faculty of acquiring sensory experience. Study of the processes by which we gather and interpret visual information is largely the province of social psychologists, who have identified several general principles (‘laws’) of perception, and also some effects upon it of (among other things) motivation and attention. The former includes the phenomenon of the ‘figure-ground contrast’; that is, how we perceive objects distinctly from their surroundings. This can be studied via so-called projective tests. ‘Constancy’ is also a principle of perception; that is, objects maintain perceptual stability through transformations of various types, such as alterations in size and proportion. The most systematic attempt to study the organization of perceptual phenomena is probably that of the Gestalt (‘form’, ‘figure’, or ‘holistic’) psychologists, who emphasize the role of innate patterning in visual perception, although behaviourist approaches have also been influential, notably in America. See also ATTITUDES; ATTRIBUTION THEORY; COGNITIVE THEORY.

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perinatal mortality rate

See MORTALITY RATE.

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period rates

See FERTILITY.

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personal construct theory

A social psychological theory developed by George Alexander Kelly in The Psychology of Personal Constructs (1955), which argues that ‘a person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which he anticipates events’. Like phenomenology, social constructionism and symbolic interactionism, the theory therefore examines the ways in which people construct meanings. In this case, the orientation is to the future, the argument being that a person's personal constructs (the distinctive categories by which he or she orders close interpersonal relationships or role-constructs) are an anticipation of future events in terms of similar events experienced in the past. Kelly devised the ‘repertory grid technique’ (the generalized form of an earlier ‘role-construct repertory test’) as a way of revealing these personal constructs to the researcher. Subjects are asked to distinguish triads of people known to them into a series of similar pairs and different individuals, and to explain their selections, in this way building up a series of binary distinctions unique to the respondent, and by means of which he or she is said to anticipate events. The structure of categories that is then mathematically derived from these distinctions is said to correspond to the structure of the psychological space utilized by the individual at a particular point in time. The technique was originally applied to the detection of mental disorder but has since been used more widely.

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personal documents

These are documents, used in social science, which record part of a person's life—most frequently in their own words. The most obvious examples are letters, diaries, biographies and life-histories, but the term can be stretched to include many other items from photographs to inscriptions on tombstones. (The surprisingly wide sources of data are fully described in K. Plummer's Documents of Life, 1983.) Personal documents aim to capture the subjective side of a person's life and are valuable as part of an ideographic research strategy. They are often used in the early and exploratory stages of research but can also be used as case-studies for theory generation and falsification. Personal documents were particularly popular in the work of some of the early Chicago sociologists: for example, Clifford Shaw gathered many life-histories of delinquents, and the classic study by
The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918)
analysed a series of letters, as well as presenting a major life-history.

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personal income

See INCOME DISTRIBUTION.

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personality

One of several concepts used by social scientists to refer to the individual (others include self and identity). The concept has its origins in the Latin word persona (meaning ‘mask’), and refers to the set of more or less stable characteristics, as assessed and judged by others, that distinguish one individual from another. These characteristics are assumed to hold across time and place and to underlie behaviour. The term personality consequently refers to the individual as object (the object of external evaluation) whereas the concept of self refers to the individual as subject (as the source of action and self-reflection).
Like attitude, the notion of personality is primarily invoked in the attempt to predict or explain individual behaviour, and refers to what an individual brings to a situation that belongs to them. However, whereas attitudes are object-specific— that is, they are directed towards specific persons or things—the term personality refers to broader, more general orientations and tendencies. The underlying assumption is that behaviour is a function of two factors—personality (or attitudes) and situation—the relative importance of the two varying from situation to situation. Some situations almost entirely override personality differences (a fire in a cinema creating widespread panic); others allow personality differences to flourish.
The precise way in which personality is conceptualized and measured varies enormously. These is an underlying tension between the concept's connotations that each individual is unique, with a distinctive personality which should be described as a whole, and the demands of positivist science for generalizations based on the exploration of standard personality characteristics across a range of persons. The former suggests an ideographic approach to personality, in which the description and analysis of the unique individual is the focus, whereas the latter suggests a nomothetic approach in which the emphasis is on studying a range of people and examining shared characteristics. This is usually associated with more atomistic and fragmented models of personality. To some extent, however, this opposition is deceptive since most approaches to personality attempt both to develop general models of personality and to describe individual cases.
The Freudian theory of personality has been most widely used in the detailed examination of an individual's personality, as in Freud's own classic case-histories, like those of Dora and the Wolf Man. These detailed analyses are, however, grounded in a general theory of personality which, in its best-known version, delineates a tripartite personality structure of id, ego, and superego. Behaviour is the result of the dynamic interplay of the forces of id, ego, and superego, and the individual's personality is determined by his or her success in progressing through the different stages of psycho-sexual development during the first five years of life.
Freudian theorizing has been most influential in clinical contexts where the particular individual is the focus and it is necessary to describe and examine the individual's personality in detail. This is mainly accomplished through observations made in the course of diagnostic interviews and therapy. However, projective tests have also been widely used in clinical contexts, as an aid to the exploration of personality dynamics. Within academic psychology, nomothetic approaches have been more usual, and there has been a greater focus on the development of standardized measures of personality. One common approach has been the so-called trait approach. The term trait refers to a personality characteristic or disposition—a tendency to act or react in certain ways—and the trait approach seeks to identify the key personality traits, to describe individuals in terms of these traits, and to examine the association of these traits with behaviour.
The American psychologist Gordon Allport, in his study Personality (1937), developed the idea of personality traits, sorting through the enormous number of words in everyday language used to describe individuals and grouping and selecting them on a commonsense, intuitive basis. He emphasized the uniqueness of the individual and the interconnectedness of personality traits, and his concerns were more ideographic than nomothetic. In contrast, Raymond B. Cattell used factor analysis to select out a far more restricted list of independent personality traits, and developed a personality test to measure them. He conceptualized sixteen traits as bipolar dimensions of personality: such as dominance versus submission, radicalism versus conservatism, emotional sensitivity versus toughness. In a similar vein, Hans Eysenck further reduced the number of personality factors, postulating that the two key personality dimensions are extraversion-intraversion and neuroticism. Although the factor analytic techniques used by Cattell and Eysenck have been strongly criticized, the type of pencil-and-paper tests of personality they generated have been widely used.
Sociology's relation to the study of personality has often been ambivalent if not overtly hostile. Durkheim's assertion of the need for a distinctively sociological explanation of suicide led him to reject the relevance of psychological factors such as ‘psychopathic states’. There has been a general tendency to see personality as belonging to the domain of psychology rather than sociology. What this means in practice is that some measure of personality may be included in a social survey simply to establish that observed differences are not due to personality. However some sociologists, notably Talcott Parsons, have attempted to explore the possible relationships between personality and social structure. Drawing on the work of cultural anthropologists who linked culture and personality, work which was itself strongly influenced by Freudian theorizing, these sociologists have examined not only the way in which personality is shaped by social forces, but also the fit between personality characteristics and the social organization (whether the broader society or some more restricted institution or organization such as a business company or religious group). Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) can be viewed as one such study. See also (AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY; CULTURE AND PERSONALITY SCHOOL; MASS SOCIETY; NARCISSISM.

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personnel management

Within organizations that employ people, this is the function with policy responsibility for the selection and recruitment of staff, training, performance assessment, career development, disciplinary proceedings, pre-retirement advisory work, equal opportunities policies, pay bargaining, and industrial relations. In small organizations these functions may be combined with other management responsibilities; in large organizations a substantial separate department may be involved in setting policy, its implementation, and in keeping up to date with developments in labour law. In recent years the newer alternative term ‘human resource management’ has come into use, reflecting the increased importance of this function in labour-intensive service-sector industries.

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Peter principle

A principle which states that employees tend to be promoted to a level above the level at which they are competent and efficient, a process which creates incompetent senior management in any organization.

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petite bourgeoisie (or petty bourgeoisie)

Defined by Karl Marx as a ‘transitional class’, in which the interests of the major classes of capitalist society (the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) meet and become blurred, the petite bourgeoisie is located between these two classes in terms of its interests as well as its social situation. It represents a distinctive form of social organization in which petty productive property is mixed with, and owned by, family labour. Small shopkeepers and self-employed artisans are the archetypes.
Marx derides what he sees as the petit-bourgeois self-delusion that, because it combines both employment and ownership of the means of production, it somehow represents the solution to the class struggle. This class was progressive in a limited sense, as witnessed by its claims at various times for co-operatives, credit institutions, and progressive taxation, as a consequence of felt oppression at the hands of the bourgeoisie. However, these were (in terms of the Marxist view of history) strictly limited demands, just as the ideological representatives of this class have been constrained by their own problems and solutions (see
's essay on ‘The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850’
).
This traditional ‘petty’ bourgeoisie (the widespread adoption of the pejorative epithet speaks volumes about the limitations of Marxism), discussed by Marx in his own writings, was replaced by the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ identified by Marxist writers such as Nicos Poulantzas, and consisting of engineers, supervisors, and other modern additions to the class structure who, on the basis of ideological, political, and economic criteria, are unproductive wage-earners but who are none the less carriers of ideological domination. Erik Olin Wright, for his part, found small employers to occupy a contradictory class location between the petty bourgeoisie proper and the bourgeoisie itself. The application of a whole range of criteria extracted from Marx's writings does little to eradicate the essentially derogatory meaning of the term.
According to Marx, concentration and centralization of capital was eventually to throw the petty bourgeoisie into the ranks of the increasingly immiserated working class, just as the peasantry were to become proletarianized despite their attachment to the land. However, the urge to self-employment, to own the means of livelihood, coupled with the growth of the services sector and the persistence of ‘shopkeepers’, mean that this class continues to defy not only elimination but also neat categorization into the proletariat, the middle class, or salariat, and as such it is usually accorded the status of a survival from a previous era. The values that its members are commonly deemed to represent—of entrepreneurship at the grass-roots level, self-help, individualism, family, and careful husbanding of resources—mean that, however buffeted by recessions and mounting bankruptcies, the petite bourgeoisie continues to provide a stereotyped model of past virtues. However, research suggests that it is here to stay, since the tendencies of modern capitalist society seem to have no uniform effects on its situation: in some countries its position is weakening, while in others it is numerically and politically in the ascendant (see
, The Petite Bourgeoisie: Comparative Studies of the Uneasy Stratum, 1981
).
For the emerging capitalism of post-Soviet societies in Eastern and Central Europe, it represents a potent image of small-scale (and therefore the only successful form of) privatization, at least to date. Paradoxically, it was the survival of the petty-bourgeois mentality within the second economy of these largely statist societies which contributed in large measure to the collapse of Soviet-style communism (see
, Socialist Entrepreneurs, 1988
). It also led to the identification of property ownership with political freedom, and therefore propelled these societies towards an almost uncritical commitment to universal privatization as the panacea for previous ills.

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petty accumulation

See CAPITALISM.

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petty bourgeoisie

See PETITE (OR PETTY) BOURGEOISIE.

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petty commodity production

A Marxist concept which refers to a form of production in which: the producer has ownership or de facto possession of the means of production; the goods or services produced are commodities (that is, sold through the market); the producer does not systematically hire wage workers, but may use unpaid family labour; the scale of production is small and there is little capital accumulation. This concept is widely used in the study of peasants, family farmers, and artisans. See also SIMPLE COMMODITY PRODUCTION.

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phenomenology, phenomenological sociology

Phenomenology is a philosophical method of inquiry developed by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. It involves the systematic investigation of consciousness. Consciousness, it is argued, is the only phenomenon of which we can be sure. It is assumed that our experience of the world, including everything from our perception of objects through to our knowledge of mathematical formulae, is constituted in and by consciousness. To trace this process of constitution, we have to disregard what we know about the world, and address the question of how, or by what processes, that knowledge comes into being. This strategy is known as bracketing or phenomenological reduction.
On the face of it phenomenology does not seem to offer much inspiration to sociology. Husserl started with individual consciousness and found himself in trouble over establishing that other people actually exist. It is less surprising that phenomenology was developed principally by the major existentialist thinkers of the twentieth century. The (controversial) bridge to sociology was established by a pupil of Husserl, Alfred Schutz, who fled the rise of fascism in Europe and combined his work as a philosopher, in the United States, with work as a banker. His Phenomenology of the Social World (1932) sets out the basic principles of phenomenological sociology. It describes how, from a basic stream of undifferentiated experience, we construct the objects and our knowledge of these objects that we take for granted in our everyday lives. The basic act of consciousness is (first-order) typification: bringing together typical and enduring elements in the stream of experience, building up typical models of things and people, and building a shared social world. The job of the sociologist is to construct second-order typifications: a rational model of the social world based on the (first-order) theories which actors offer to explain their own activities. Schutz talks about sociology as creating a world of rational puppets which we then manipulate to discover how people might act in the real world.
Phenomenology became a resource for sociologists in the late 1960s as many of the orthodoxies of the post-war period were rejected. Its most lasting influence has been on ethnomethodology. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, in The Social Construction of Reality (1966), offered a general social theory based on phenomenology claiming to combine the features of theories both of social action and social structure: the social world is constructed through processes of typifications, which then take on an objective quality, above and beyond the social groups who produce them. Around the same time, this notion of objectification was connected by some authors to Karl Marx's theory of alienation, in an attempt to produce humanist forms of Marxism. One source of inspiration for this work was Husserl's later studies of science, which argued that the sciences had become divorced from the fabric of human experience, and were in fact obstructing (alienating) our understanding of ourselves.
A few of these ideas have fed into the sociological mainstream but there is no distinctive phenomenological school of sociology now in existence. See also COMMONSENSE KNOWLEDGE; INTERPRETATION.

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Phillips curve

In a famous article on ‘The Relation Between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861–1957’, published in the journal Economica (1958), the economist A. W. Phillips argued that an inverse relationship existed between unemployment and wage inflation in the UK throughout the period in question. The rate of change in money wages tended to be high in conditions of low unemployment and low (or even negative) when unemployment was high. Thus, the so-called Phillips curve suggested that maintenance of full employment would necessarily involve some inflation, whereas inflation was only likely to be reduced by an increase in unemployment. This belief informed much economic discussion, and formed part of the accepted wisdom that provided the backdrop to policy-making throughout the two decades that followed, since it suggested that it was possible to calculate the terms of the trade-off between the policy objectives of full employment and zero inflation. However, the statistical association at the core of the argument clearly broke down (in Britain and elsewhere) during the 1970s, and its interpretation was challenged by the rise of monetarist explanations of inflation and unemployment.

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philosophy

As an intellectual activity, philosophy is the most broad-ranging of the academic disciplines, since it addresses a wide range of interlinked questions about the nature of understanding, logic, language, and causality, many of which occur in the various other sciences. The sociologist is most likely to encounter philosophical debate in the fields of epistemology and ethics—both of which branches of philosophy are dealt with elsewhere in this dictionary.
The philosophy of the social sciences is a recognized specialism among sociologists, and asks questions about (among other things) the processes of concept-formation, the relationships between theory and evidence, the place of values, nature of motivation, role of language, and the nature of proof in the social sciences generally and sociology in particular. Again, many of the most significant arguments and most influential schools of thought concerning these issues have been treated separately, as discrete items in this dictionary.
It has sometimes been argued that much of what passes as sociological theory (for example in the works of Anthony Giddens) is actually social philosophy, since it consists mainly of metaphysical speculation about the human condition, rather than concrete or testable propositions about social life. However, this is probably a minority view, although there is quite widespread agreement that sociology has in the past (most obviously during the 1960s) suffered from an excessive reflexivity and obsession with exploring the epistemological foundations of the discipline. See also HISTORIOGRAPHY; METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM.

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philosophy of social science

See PHILOSOPHY; SCIENCE, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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phratry

In many pre-industrial societies, social organization is based on kinship groups through descent in either the male or female line, but these kinship groups are then aggregated according to non-kinship principles into larger groups which (in some cases) the anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan termed ‘phratries’. Examples include several American Indian and Australian Aboriginal tribes. In other societies, extended kinship groups include the clan (usually a matrilineal descent group), and gens (patrilineal descent group). It is now common to designate as phratries any grouping or association of clans which recognize some relationship to each other. Often, therefore, phratries are organized around either a division of labour or distinct ritual functions. Moieties (the division of societies into two groups, based on any principle, such that there is a dual organization of the whole) are a particular form of phratry. However, all of these terms are subject to the vicissitudes of context, and have sensibly been used in very different ways. Students of kinship groups therefore have to live with a great deal of variation in the use of (sometimes poorly chosen) terminology—and are strongly advised to verify specific definitions and usage in particular circumstances.

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Physiocrats, Physiocratic Thought

A school of social theory associated with the writings of the French political economist François Quesnay (1694–1774) and others. Physiocratic thought is mainly of interest to sociologists for its influence on (in curiously equal measure) Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The Physiocrats criticized the mercantilist belief that wealth originated in exchange, and accorded priority instead to the land, arguing that improved farming techniques, fiscal reform, and free trade in agricultural produce would stimulate capital accumulation, surplus value, and wealth generally. Smith endorsed the principle of laissez-faire and applauded the Physiocratic emphasis on private property as the key to improved living conditions. Marx, in his turn, described Quesnay as the founder of modern political economy, since his works introduced to modern economics the notions of capital and the interdependence of production, circulation, and distribution in a surplus-producing economy. Although Marx's attribution of this insight is now quite widely shared, the Physiocrats are generally criticized for glorifying the concept of the agricultural surplus, and failing to realize that there was also a surplus attributable to labour.

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Piaget, Jean

(1896–1980)
A Swiss psychologist who made a major and distinct contribution to theories of human intellectual development, arguing that individuals actively make sense of the world, rather than merely being conditioned by it.
Piaget conducted a long series of experiments with children which led him to the conclusion that people pass through successive stages of cognitive development. He distinguishes four such phases, each characterized by its own distinctive logic, and each associated with the development of particular intellectual skills. In the sensorimotor stage (from birth to approximately 18 months), the child does not know that it exists as a separate object, and therefore cannot distinguish between its self, its actions, and the external objects upon which it acts. Its intelligence is expressed only in terms of sensory and physical contact with the environment. The pre-operational stage (from about age 2 to 7 years) is characterized by an increasing command of language, and an ability to think about concrete objects which are not actually present, but also by extreme egocentrism. At this stage of development children cannot take the role of others. They also lack understanding of abstract concepts such as causality, quantity, and weight. In the stage of so-called concrete-operations (which lasts from about the ages of 7 to 11 or 12), children start to classify objects, can take the role of others and understand the nature of cause and effect, but still have difficulty thinking about abstract concepts without referring these to real events or particular images with which they are familiar (hence ‘concrete’ operational stage). Finally, in the formal operations stage (12 years onwards), the young person is able to create his or her own classificatory systems and thus to achieve formal and abstract thought. Adolescents can apply general rules to particular problems, reason logically from premisses to conclusions, and think in terms of theories and concepts. Not all adults progress to this final stage however, since many people have great difficulty comprehending abstract concepts, and so do not move beyond the phase of concrete operations. Abstract thinking is dependent upon a social environment which exposes the individual to formal cognitive reasoning: the internal processes of the mind only develop through social interaction. Piaget argued that the various stages of cognitive development were the same cross-culturally; however, since the content of cultures varied, the particular beliefs that people learned in each of the stages would vary in time and place. If the surrounding culture teaches that cause and effect are related to magic then, clearly, this is how the individual will come to interpret the world.
Piaget's approach to intellectual development and the notion of developmental stages has been a major influence in cognitive psychology. Unlike most other psychologists, who have been concerned with behavioural aspects of cognition (such as short-term memory), Piaget has highlighted the epistemological questions surrounding the definition and categorization of knowledge. His theories of child intellectual development have also been incorporated by some teachers and educationalists into methods of teaching young children. Most of his extensive writings are now translated into English (see
, The Essential Piaget—An Interpretive Reference and Guide, 1977
).

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piecemeal social engineering

In The Poverty of Historicism (1957), the philosopher Sir Karl Popper criticized historicist (notably communist and fascist) attempts to foretell the future, and argued that the holistic social experiments based on these theories were doomed to failure, because the course of human history is strongly influenced by the growth of knowledge, and we cannot (rationally or scientifically) predict the future growth of scientific knowledge. Rather, by analogy with the central role of piecemeal experiments in the sciences, he argues that the only form of social engineering that can be rationally justified is one which is small-scale, incremental, and continuously amended in the light of experience. The crucial point about this approach is that it is based on trial and error rather than a prior historicist vision; or, as Popper puts it, ‘we make progress if, and only if, we are prepared to learn from our mistakes: to recognize our errors and to utilize them critically instead of persevering in them dogmatically’. Piecemeal social engineering is, therefore, nothing less than the introduction of (Popper's conception of) scientific methods into planning and politics.

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pie-chart, pie-graph

A form of descriptive statistics in which data are presented graphically or pictorially as in the hypothetical illustration below. Here, we show the relative proportions of people who are admitted to universities, based on social-class background. The distribution has been divided into four social classes (salariat, self-employed, routine clerical, working class), and the ‘pie’ has been divided into ‘slices’ proportional in size to the frequency of university admission in the various categories. The principal advantage of this way of presenting data is that it makes it easy to see the proportion of the total pie obtained by each category. Where the primary intention of the presentation is to compare the relative sizes of categories then a conventional bar chart is to be preferred.

FIGURE 7: Social class origins of university entrants

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pillarization

This term is a translation of the Dutch word Verzuiling, first used by the political scientist J. P. Kruyt to describe the peculiar nature of the social structure and political institutions in the Netherlands, although it has since been applied elsewhere (for example with reference to Belgium). For much of the twentieth century, Dutch society was divided by cross-cutting class-based and religious cleavages into four dominant interest groups or blocs–Catholics, Protestants, Socialists, and Liberals–around which formed ‘virtually all politically and socially relevant organizations and group affiliations’ (
, The Politics of Accommodation, 1968
).
Both religious blocs incorporated sections of the working and middle classes, whereas the secular forces divided along class lines (working-class Socialists; middle/upper-class Liberals). Separate political parties represented each bloc (two for the Protestants) and politics was characterized by bargaining and accommodation between them. Many other social institutions were similarly constituted: for example, trade unions, media, voluntary associations, social welfare, and education. Patterns of elite formation, friendship, marriage, job recruitment, and other social relations were also affected.
Political scientists have been interested in how mutual accommodation, cross-cutting ideologies (such as nationalism), and the diverse class composition of some of the blocs have allowed democratic institutions to survive in this divided society. However, from the 1960s the cleavages began to erode–with, for example, mergers between the religious parties. A growing secularization of society and the rise of new social and political concerns has led some to conclude that pillarization is of little contemporary relevance.

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pilot study

Any small-scale test of a research instrument (such as a questionnaire, experiment, or interview-schedule), run in advance of the main fieldwork, and used to test the utility of the research design. Pilot studies therefore very in size and nature, Interview-schedules for a large-scale survey may be piloted on a substantial sub-sample of the relevant population–perhaps as many as 500 respondents. In-depth interviewing techniques, on the other hand, may be adequately piloted on only a few acquaintances and friends. Quantitative sociologists and social survey research agencies will insist on full briefing and debriefing of interviewers who conducted the pilot, in order to identify and rectify logistical and analytical difficulties in the research design, including (for example) ambiguous questions, incorrect routeing or filtering through the questionnaire, replies which cannot be coded, and items about which there appears to be no variance (see VARIATION, STATISTICAL) in the responses. If the difficulties are substantial a second pilot may also be required in order to confirm that the amendments to the original design have proved effective.

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Pitt-Rivers A. Lane-Fox

(1827–1900)
A controversial and eccentric aristocrat who was a general in the British army, landowner, archaeologist, anthropologist, and government inspector. He has been called the ‘father of scientific archaeology’, having excavated over forty classic sites in the United Kingdom. He was also an anthropologist and follower of Charles Darwin, advocating a gradualist evolutionary doctrine.

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placebo

A treatment which has no effect, and is administered to a control group in experimental research, in place of a treatment whose effects are being studied. This usually happens only in medical research; in social research, control groups are rarely offered a placebo experience or treatment.
In the medical context, a substance lacking known pharmacologically active ingredients is given to the sick in order to please them; that is, for possible beneficial effects arising from faith in the powers of treatment (the placebo effect). Placebos are also widely used as controls in evaluating the therapeutic efficacy of the active components of new drugs. Conventionally, the experimental treatment is given to cases selected at random, with the ineffective placebo given to all other cases, even though they are suffering from the same illness. In the ‘double blind’ situation, even the person administering the treatments does not know which is which, as the medicines are made to look the same, to prevent him or her inadvertently communicating their knowledge to recipients.

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planned economy

See COMMAND ECONOMY.

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plantations

Plantation economies developed in the course of European economic and social expansion, particularly in Latin America and South-east Asia. They are associated with a large-scale, limited range of export-oriented, staple-crop production in tropical or sub-tropical environments.
The traditional form of plantation was associated with slave labour. The socio-economic system that resulted was, in many cases, regarded as synonymous with the organization of colonies because of the investment of foreign capital and transfer of wealth from periphery to core. Historical changes have led to a variety of modern forms of plantation, ranging from those based in labour-intensive cultivation (often making widespread use of migrant or other unskilled unfree labourers), to more capital-intensive agro-industrial enterprises. In general, plantation agriculture is regarded as being exploitative of labour, land, and developing nations.

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plural social systems

In the 1960s the industrial sociologist Tom Burns argued that organization theorists were mistaken to assume that individuals within organizations act solely in accordance with the formal purposes of the enterprise, since they may well be motivated by concerns that conflict with those of the organization itself. Rather, organizations can be conceived as the simultaneous working of at least three social systems, only one of which is the formal authority system in terms of which all decision-making overtly takes place. There is also a career system, within which people compete for advancement, and a political system in which individuals and departments compete for power. Thus, within firms, one should expect to find ‘conflict [about] the degree of control one may exercise over the firm's resources, the direction of the activities of other people, and patronage (promotion and the distribution of privileges and rewards)’. In short, a ‘plurality of action systems’ are available to the employee, who ‘may invoke any of them as the dominant reference system for this or that action, decision or plan’ (see
‘On the Plurality of Social Systems’, in , Operational Research and the Social Sciences, 1966
). Burns's research was important in demonstrating that it was naive for organizational theorists to conceptualize the firm as a unitary system which could be equated with the formal structure set down in the organization chart or blueprint.

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plural societies

Societies which are divided into different linguistic, ethnic, religious, or racial groups and communities. Arguably, this description could apply to almost any society, with the result that the term is sometimes (unhelpfully) treated as synonymous with ‘multi-cultural society’ and applied to states as different as the contemporary United States and Brazil. Originally, however, the concept had a more limited application. It referred to those states in the developing world created by colonial rule–notably Burma and Indonesia–in which different ethnic groups occupied distinct places in the division of labour, existed as largely self-contained communities, and therefore felt little or no sense of obligation to the national society (see
, Colonial Policy and Practice. 1948
). In other words, not only is there cultural heterogeneity, but also formal diversity in the institutional systems of kinship, religion, education, recreation, and economy (and sometimes, though not always, government).
In plural societies, people of different ethnic origins meet only in the market-place, where the various groups must trade and exchange goods and services with each other. No common ‘social will’ therefore develops to restrict the exploitation of the members of one group by members of another. In order to prevent market anarchy, some social framework has to be devised to govern inter-group transactions; in the case of Indonesia, the major attempted resolutions of the plural dilemma have included the imposition of a caste system, of the rule of a common law, a nationalist democracy, and federalism. A good account of the rise and (partial) demise of pluralism in that society is W. F. Wertheim's Indonesian Society in Transition (1956).
Later writers (including, for example,
, The Plural Society in the British West Indies, 1965)
extended Furnivall's usage to include the post-colonial and multi-racial societies of the Caribbean and South Africa–which were seen as being socially and culturally pluralist (if not strictly so in terms of the division of labour). The principal critics of the plural societies thesis have been Marxists, who have attempted to translate observed ethnic or cultural (‘ideological’) inequalities into underlying class conflicts, and to highlight relationships of dependency between developed and developing societies.

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pluralism

The term refers primarily to two major and very different bodies of work in political science. Most commonly, it refers to a body of American, empirically oriented work, which was highly influential during the 1960s. Largely on the basis of studies of political decision-making in local communities, most famously exemplified by Robert Dahl's Who Governs? (1961), the pluralists argued that the United States was a democratic society because political power was widely distributed amongst the competing interest groups that operated therein: none of these groups was all-powerful and each was powerful enough to secure its own legitimate interests. The empirical claims made by the pluralists have been subjected to serious criticisms by scholars working within the Marxist and élitist traditions (see, for example,
, Who Rules America?, 1967
), who argue that visible exercises of power may disguise the fact that some groups wield power in less obvious ways, and that expressed political preferences are not necessarily equivalent to objective (or ‘real’) interests. Nevertheless, this variety of pluralism continues to exercise considerable influence as a body of normative political theory (see, for example,
's A Preface to Economic Democracy, 1985
).
Less commonly, the term also refers to a body of British political theory, associated with such names as George Douglas Howard Cole, John Neville Figgis, and Harold J. Laski, which attracted equal attention in the 1920s. It argued that the sovereign power, whose concentration in the state is accepted by all other political theories save that of the anarchist tradition, should not simply be competed for, but should in addition be distributed amongst the self-governing associations of civil society. This latter body of work appeared to have died a death until it was exhumed by Paul Hirst in his The Pluralist Theory of the State (1989). According to Hirst, the ‘associationalism’ of the British pluralists may be combined with the American stress on group competition to produce a concept of ‘associational democracy’, which provides a model for a socialist polity which contrasts sharply with that provided by the social democratic and Marxist-Leninist traditions. See also COMMUNITY POWER; ÉLITE THEORY; MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX; POWER ÉLITE.

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pluralism, epistemological

See METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM.

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Poisson distribution

A probability distribution applied in studies of rare events, such as earthquakes, or when the probability of an event taking place is small. It approximates to the binomial distribution, in certain cases, but is otherwise highly skewed.

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Polanyi, Karl

(1886–1964)
An influential and internationally renowned Austrian-born economic historian, who taught widely throughout Europe and the United States, and has a substantial and continuing influence in sociology because of the way in which his empirical studies undermine many of the assumptions of neo-classical economic theory.
His best-known publication is The Great Transformation (1944)–which has a Foreword by Robert M. MacIver –inwhich he seeks to document the causes of the two world wars, the depression of the 1930s, and the basis of the ‘new order’ of the mid-twentieth century. His was a stringent study of the consequences of the emergence of the ‘world market’ and the manner in which society can protect itself against its consequences. He warned against promoting the economy to the point at which power becomes highly concentrated, economic decision-making escapes human control, and human dignity and freedom are threatened. This economism could destroy society by undermining social cohesion; it requires that the economy be embedded within relations of social control similar to those found in traditional societies.
His other major publications, notably the co-authored Trade and Markets in the Early Empires (1957) and the posthumously published The Livelihood of Man (1977), develop Polanyi's so-called substantivist critique of liberalism, challenging the idea that freedom and justice are inextricably tied to the free market, and documenting the various ways in which economic processes in any society are necessarily shaped by its cultural, political, and social institutions.
Polanyi was a genuinely interdisciplinary scholar: an entry on him is also likely to be found in dictionaries of economics, history, anthropology, and political science. Most recently, his work has become part of the debate around the possibility for a ‘Third Way’ in the transition from communism to the market. Untrammelled market economics, as exported by most Western advisers, are seen by some East European social scientists and policy-makers as likely to create the kinds of problems associated with the self-regulating market that Polanyi documents across a range of historical examples. The opposition between the ‘logic of the economy’ and the ‘logic of society’ are particularly acutely felt by these post-communist societies as they leave their protective states and face the uncertainties of a rapid transition to the market.

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polarization

The tendency towards concentration at two opposing extremes, observed by sociologists in a large number of diverse contexts. For example, on the basis of research on the Isle of Sheppey, R. E. Pahl (Divisions of Labour, 1984) identified a process of social polarization which was said to be producing in Britain a division into ‘work rich’ and ‘work poor’ households. Pahl argued that opportunities in both the formal and informal sectors of the economy tended to cluster in the same households; or, put somewhat differently, that households whose members were unemployed did not (indeed according to Pahl could not) compensate for this by informal economic activities in the hidden, underground, or so-called black economy.
Many sociological typologies are descriptions of polar types or extremes: one obvious example is Ferdinand Tönnies's distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (association). Sociologists are also prone to polarization when describing processes of social change–as, for example, in Karl Marx's account of the polarization of classes in capitalist societies into the ‘two great hostile camps’ of bourgeoisie and proletariat.

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policy research

Social scientific research which has non-university groups as its main intended audience (although the results may in practice also interest academic audiences). For the most part such research attempts to apply social scientific findings to the solution of problems identified by a client. The term ‘applied sociology’ is also given to such exercises. For example, the development of game theory was funded by the US Department of Defence with reference to its relevance to military strategy, but it has also made a fundamental contribution to social science theory.
Policy research may be descriptive, analytical, or deal with causal processes and explanations; it may evaluate a new or existing policy programme, describe examples of best practice, measure social change, develop projections on the basis of large-scale modelling exercises, or consist of large-scale experimental research in real-life settings running for years and even decades. Most policy research espouses a multi-disciplinary approach and avoids narrowly disciplinary jargon. Thus policy research is rarely explicitly sociological, even if sociology contributes more than any other discipline to the theoretical foundations, design, and methodology of a study.
In principle, policy research will focus on actionable or malleable social factors to a greater extent than theoretical research. For example, the family may be the most important source of sex-role or racial stereotypes, but policy research would focus on the role of the public educational system in changing children's perceptions in directions considered desirable. Policy research has created some multi-disciplinary hybrid fields of study, such as industrial relations (see LABOUR RELATIONS) and social policy. When carried out in the commercial sector the term ‘consultancy work’ is often preferred. For a review of the issues and an account of some interesting case-studies see
, Social Policy Research (1978)
. See also BLACK REPORT; BROKEN WINDOWS THESIS; COLEMAN REPORT.

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political behaviour

The term refers to any form of (individual or collective) involvement in the political process, or any activity which has political consequences in relation to government and policy. This broad definition embraces both legitimate forms of political participation (such as voting in elections, activism in interest groups, or social movements) and illegitimate political activities (including coups d'état, terrorism, and revolutions (see REBELLIONS)). While formal participation aims at containing social conflict within the extant political system, so that the political order remains stable, dissent which cannot be channelled via existing political structures is likely, not only to pursue changes in policy, but also to challenge the political order itself. The study of political behaviour also embraces the study of inactivity and apathy, as well as the analysis of political ideologies, values, and attitudes as the basis of participation and non-participation in the political sphere.

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political crime

Historically, the term refers to conspiracy, and the actual deed of challenges to political rulers or sacred authority. Political criminals were likely to suffer much more gruesome punishment than ordinary or common criminals. Over time, however, the meanings of the term–and indeed attitudes toward political criminals themselves–have undergone significant shifts.
For example, politically motivated crimes came to be redefined as offences against the state in Western Europe during the nineteenth century, and there were also debates about whether offenders such as the Suffragettes and the Fenians should be dealt with in the conventional criminal justice system because of their self-proclaimed political status. By the late twentieth century the political criminal had been transformed into the ‘arch-criminal’–the terrorist–who uses illegitimate violence against innocent citizens. However, human rights campaigners and some criminologists have also raised questions about the way in which the state itself can use its monopoly of force in a criminal way, in the pursuit of socio-political and military objectives (for example through torture, disappearance, and genocide). Some writers even argue that only states can be truly terrorist because they have the wholesale capacity to deploy terror as a systematic mode of domination and governance (see, for instance,
, The Culture of Terrorism, 1988
).

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political culture

The norms, values, and symbols that help to legitimate the political power system of a society (for example, in the United States, the constitution, democracy, equality, the flag). When a political culture collapses or is thrown into doubt, a crisis of legitimacy is created, as happened in Central Europe and the former USSR in 1989–91. Political culture, like culture in general, is made up of fragments of received knowledge which people in a given society take to be truth. Scandals, revelations, failures, and political disasters can quickly undermine citizens' faith in the whole system. For this reason the preservation of political culture is a major preoccupation of politicians and state bureaucrats at every level.
The modern use of this term dates from the period after the Second World War. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba's The Civic Culture (1963) is a classic comparative study of political attitudes and democracy in five countries, aiming to show how cultural development and political development move hand in hand. The value of the concept does not depend on this particular political agenda. More recent research has tried to distinguish between ‘real’ political cultures (which citizens actively believe in and support) and ‘imposed’ political cultures (which are no more than artificially created ideologies imposed on citizens by threat or force). A question for the future is how once-powerful political cultures like those of the United States and the old Soviet Union will adapt to the centrifugal pressures of ethnicity and nationalism.

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political economy

In the strict sense, an influential body of writings on economic questions associated principally with the French and English Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and which culminated in the economic theories associated with Adam Smith. However, because the nineteenth-century classical economists who built on Smith's ideas continued to refer to their work as political economy, some vagueness and broadening of the use of the term occurs in social science literature. It is, in fact, in the broad sense rather than the narrow sense that classical sociology is widely viewed as a critique of political economy.
Early political economy resulted from the combined influence of the following: the progressive substitution of rationalism and science for the religious modes of thought in philosophy, and the attempted application of empirical methods to moral and social questions; the rise of capitalist industrialism and the need to give an intellectual and ideological account of the emergent economic order; hostility to the so-called mercantilist policies still being pursued by governments and which attributed the prosperity of states to a favourable balance of foreign trade. Though political economy was never a unified doctrine, its characteristic outlook stemmed from attempts to show that surpluses of value originate from production, in particular from productive labour, rather than trade as such. For the Physiocrats (and to some extent perhaps Smith himself), agriculture is the only source of surplus, but political economy from Smith onward also recognized the importance of manufacture and the overall organization of productive activities through the division of labour. This, they argued, should not be hampered by mercantilist efforts to control prices, wages, and money. Indeed, money is a mere symbol of value, not its source.
Though Smith's famous treatise in support of free-market exchange. The Wealth of Nations (1776), is taken as the beginning of the modern discipline of economics, he and his distinguished contemporaries of the Scottish Enlightenment (such as Adam Ferguson) also wrote about a wide range of social, moral, and historical issues, much of which can be viewed as early sociology. However, the sociological element implied a more holistic view of society than did the economic doctrines. The latter are sharply individualistic, and in stressing the role of self-interest as the basis of co-operative order, contain in embryo form some key elements of what has since come to be known as rational exchange theory. But the later separation of economics from other disciplines would have been wholly alien to early political economy. This separation owes much to the fact that the so-called classical economists of the next generation, notably David Ricardo and his disciples among the nineteenth-century English utilitarians, began to abstract the economic ideas from the rest and to formalize them—a process which has continued ever since. Despite their many divergences in outlook and purpose, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and the other founders of sociology shared a conviction that the abstraction of the economic from other aspects of social life ignored crucial questions about the nature of modernity and capitalist production itself.
So-called radical political economy is a term associated with the renaissance of Marxist thought in the 1960s. Hostile to functionalist-dominated academic sociology and economics in the United States and Britain, it sought to transcend the (from its points of view) ideological disciplinary divisions in social science, by developing a common basis in a resurgent historical materialism. See also NEO-CLASSICAL ECONOMICS.

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political parties

Formal organizations for representing the aims and interests of different socio-economic forces in the political sphere–although not all societies have a party-political system of government. Political parties are the organizational means by which candidates for office are recruited and ideologies are propagated. Parties seek to organize and dominate the organs of government and to provide national leadership.
Party systems also take a variety of different forms, from the multi-party system at one extreme, to the one-party monopolistic state at the other. Multi-party systems (often with two principal parties) are strong in liberal democratic societies like Britain, the United States, France, and Germany, while the dominance of one political party is especially evident in African countries such as Kenya and Zimbabwe. It has been suggested that the type of party system is linked to the stage of development of a society, but local historical and political factors are probably more important in influencing the type of system that emerges.
Political sociologists have focused on political parties as organizations and studied their organizational dynamics. Issues of interest include the socio-economic background of leaders, activists, and supporters; the socio-political ideologies espoused by parties; the distribution of power between the different collectivities embraced by the party organization; and the techniques for mobilizing support. A major pioneering study of political parties was conducted by the German sociologist Robert Michels. In his study of organizational power, he noted the oligarchical tendencies of party leaders and officials who come to dominate the party, as it becomes increasingly bureaucratic. Their beliefs and attitudes, directed towards their own personal goals, are invariably less radical than those of rank-and-file members. Furthermore, where organizational procedures are used to stifle popular aspirations, radical objectives are inhibited. However, evidence from research elsewhere suggests that the oligarchical tendencies of party leaders should not be overstated, especially in accounts of the institutionalization of political parties.
Political scientists have also explored the role of parties in the political process and the extent to which different political regimes may be described as open or closed. The liberal view is that political parties, along with pressure groups and other interest groups, engage in competition for power as the representatives of different socio-economic groups in society. As a result of open competition, power in pluralist political systems is non-cumulative and shared. This benign view of the role of political parties in liberal democracies has been the subject of much criticism. It has been argued that certain groups dominate the political decision-making process–most obviously those who dominate in the economic realm. Furthermore, while observable party politics is worthy of study, the more subtle forms of power (such as agenda-setting) should not be ignored. Thus, while liberals emphasize the important role of political parties in representative democracies, neo-Marxists play down their significance. In capitalist societies, it is argued, since the dominant economic power is also the ruling class, parliamentary politics is illusory, and simply an ideological strategy which diverts attention away from the real sources of political power.
Many have argued that this Marxist view of political parties and power is at least as unsophisticated as the liberal alternative. True, power may be concentrated, but it is possible for the views of ordinary people to influence political outcomes. In this respect, political parties are not inconsequential, and play an important role in the political sphere of advanced capitalist societies.

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political science

An academic discipline which studies power and the distribution of power in different types of political systems. Political scientists inquire as to the sources of power, how it is exercised and by whom, how processes of constraint and control operate, who gains and who loses in power struggles. All of these topics raise further issues of political alignment, organization, conflict, and stability within political systems. The study of power takes various forms, from the investigation of individual political attitudes and behaviour, to the examination of state activities at a national and international level. Increasingly, from an initial narrow interest in the machinery of government, political science has broadened its terrain and now overlaps with political sociology in many of its substantive topics and theories. Dennis Kavanagh's Political Science and Political Behaviour (1983) is a good guide to the American and British literature.
In the narrow sense, the study of politics and power involves an examination of the various political institutions, such as the state, government, political parties, interest groups, and other non-government intermediary organizations active in the business of policy-making. The state, in particular, has been the subject of much attention since it dominates the political process in liberal democracies. However, taking a wider view, the operation of power is not confined exclusively to formal institutions and institutional activities. Rather, power lies also in non-decision-making processes which may lie outside the political system: for example, the power of business groups within capitalist economies is considerable. Political scientists, particularly those engaged in historical and comparative research, are also increasingly interested in the exercise of power across the world economy and in terms of international relations, rather than merely within particular nation-states.

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political socialization

The process of induction into a political system—by acquiring information on political symbols, institutions, and procedures, learning the role of a passive or active member of the polity, and internalizing the value-system and ideology supporting the whole enterprise. The process can be understood and analysed both as individual learning and as cultural transmission by the community as a whole. Nations perpetuate their political traditions by inducting new generations into established patterns of thought and action-through the educational system, the mass media, the workplace, the neighbourhood committee, as well as through political institutions themselves. In Third World countries, where new political institutions may be created or existing structures reformed within short periods of time, the educational system, mass media, and community structures may all be used explicitly as means of political education and re-education. In older and more stable polities, the political socialization functions of social agencies are latent rather than manifest, often subtle enough to be invisible and publicly denied.
Studies of political socialization look at the degree of ideological stability over the life-cycle; the relationship between political attitudes and active participation; the selection and socialization of political élites (for example through the educational system); social class patterns of behaviour and anomalies (such as working-class conservatism and so-called false consciousness); the relationship between personality traits and political orientations; induction into political roles; and the relative influence of family, school, and workplace on political ideas and behaviour.

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political sociology

The branch of sociology which is concerned with the social causes and consequences of given power distributions within or between societies, and with the social and political conflicts that lead to changes in the allocation of power. A major focus of political sociology is the description, analysis, and explanation of the state, the institution which claims a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory, and constitutes possibly the largest single concentration of power and authority in any society. Whereas political science deals mainly with the machinery of government, the mechanisms of public administration, and the formal political realm of elections, public opinion, pressure groups, and political behaviour, sociological analysis of political phenomena is concerned rather more with the interrelationships between politics, social structures, ideologies, and culture. Even if the state is the most common object of study, political sociology deals more broadly with the study of the sources and utilization of power, authority, and influence in all social contexts including, for example, the family, friendship groups, clubs, and local communities. Power relationships in the labour-market and the workplace could also be included, but are now usually studied under the label of industrial relations instead. A political system is any persistent pattern of human relationship that involves (to a significant extent) power, rule, or authority. Hence it is possible to study the politics of stateless societies, which have not yet developed any formal central institutions to monopolize power, but still have decision-making and rule-making processes which may be dominated by some members more than others.
Political sociology has been concerned with political parties as social institutions and relations between members and party leaders–for example in the widespread apathy of the majority of members that can leave greater power to the leadership, and in the iron law of oligarchy (See MICHELS, ROBERT), which argues that leaders of an organization tend to substitute their own self-interests for those of the organization and seek to retain their positions of power to serve these interests. It addresses the phenomena of despotic and totalitarian regimes as well as parliamentary democracies, seeking to explain the origins and stability of specific political regimes and institutional structures. Studies of political participation, especially through the electoral system, address the interest theory of political behaviour which argues that people choose options that maximize their narrow self-interests and wider class interests rather than the public good. Political sociology has concentrated attention on élites, their membership, and the wide gap separating them from the ruled classes. In one view ‘the study of politics is the study of influence and the influential … The influential are those who get most of what there is to get … Those who get the most are the élite; the rest are mass’ (
, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How, 1958
). Political sociology studies the manifestation and regulation of conflict, including social protest behaviour and the causes of revolutions; the formation and activities of interest groups (which are often not self-aware) and formal pressure groups; political ideologies, political cultures, and the formulation of political opinion and public opinion; political socialization in childhood, adolescence, and adult life, through educational institutions and experiences in the workplace. Analyses of the tensions and cleavages which arise from the social and economic order are often carried out on a comparative basis in order to show how political choices are made from among the full range of possible or available alternatives.
Political sociology employs all the methods of sociological analysis and attitude research, including case-studies of individual organizations, or particular local, state, or national governments; opinion polls; interview surveys of electors, political participants, and political representatives; documentary evidence and content analysis to study political ideologies and government policy-making; and mathematical modelling of decision-making processes and outcomes. Comparative cross-national studies are more common than in other fields of sociology.
, Political Sociology (2nd edn., 1986)
is a good introductory text. See also COMMUNITY POWER; POWER ÉLITE; PSEPHOLOGY.

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poll

See OPINION POLLS.

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polyandry

A term denoting the marriage of one woman to two or more men. It is a rarely encountered form of marriage and usually occurs when one woman marries two or more brothers, in which case it is known as either adelphic or fraternal polyandry. One motive in this case would be the maintenance of land and property within one family, because inheritance passes to the children, who are all regarded as being offspring of the same father(s).

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polygamy

Although strictly speaking this term denotes the concurrent marriage of one sex to two or more members of the opposite sex, some writers appear to use it to mean marriage of one man with two or more women, which should properly be termed polygyny.

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polygyny

A term denoting the concurrent marriage of one man with two or more women. This is not uncommon and is widespread in human societies. Where the women involved are sisters it is termed sororal polygyny. Some writers appear to use polygamy rather than polygyny to denote this kind of marriage, although strictly speaking, polygyny and polyandry are both versions of polygamy.

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polytheism

See MONOTHEISM.

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polytomy, polytomous variable

See DICHOTOMY.

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pop sociology

Given that many of the concerns of sociology have an immediate connection to everyday life in general, and social problems in particular, sociology perhaps more than other academic disciplines is open to a stream of popularizations. Almost anybody, it seems, can call themselves a sociologist–even without formal professional training.
Four kinds of pop sociology can be distinguished. First, anyone who elects to comment on or write about social matters may be seen as a pop sociologist. Second, there are many sociologists who see it as an important part of their professional work to make their ideas and findings accessible to a wider social audience than those found in universities and colleges. They may even work alongside social movements in an attempt to achieve this (as, for example, in the case of Alain Touraine), or aim to popularize their work through publishing their writing outside academic journals. They may also be regular media commentators on the issue of their concern. Thirdly, there are academics who find in the course of their work that their studies have received a certain prominence (for example, sensational findings on crime and drugs), and who are momentarily forced into the public eye, often against their will and sometimes against their talents. Some of these may enjoy short-run celebrity status. Finally, there is a special group who conduct sociological studies intended for popular consumption. For example, Vance O. Packard, an American journalist and freelance writer, became a well-known popularizer of sociology through books such as The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and The Ultra Rich (1989). In that capacity, he confused a generation of American students by appending to his best-selling analysis of
The Status Seekers (1959), the entirely inappropriate subtitle ‘An Exploration of Class Behaviour in America’.

Being able to draw a clear line between academic sociology and pop sociology is therefore not always easy.
Popper, Sir Karl Raimund (1902–94) An Austrian philosopher who, after an early period of teaching in New Zealand (1937–45), worked for most of his adult life at the London School of Economics and Political Science (where he became Professor of Logic and Scientific Method).
Popper made a number of major contributions to the philosophy of social science and epistemology, which provoked much discussion and some controversy at the time, but rightly remain highly influential throughout the mainstream of the social sciences. These include his formulation of the principle of falsification, his critique of historicism, his concept of the open society, and arguments in favour of piecemeal social engineering. All of these are discussed at length elsewhere in this dictionary. His earlier work–The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), The Poverty of Historicism (1957), The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959), and Conjectures and Refutations (1963)–spell out all of his most important arguments. Later volumes, many of which were written after his retirement in 1969—including Of Clouds and Clocks (1966), Objective Knowledge (1972), Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics (1982), and others–elaborate upon these by applying his ideas to studies of the natural sciences.
Popper was knighted in 1965, but remained curiously isolated from the philosophical mainstream throughout his professional life, mainly (it is often said) because he was never a professor at the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge.

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popular culture

Culture is the central concept of anthropology, and denotes all the knowledge, technologies, values, beliefs, customs, and behaviours common to people. While simple societies may have only a single integrated culture that is shared by everyone, complex societies can accommodate many layers and levels of cultures and subcultures.
One important distinction is between popular culture and what is usually called high culture. The latter includes things like classical music, serious novels, poetry, dance, high art, and other cultural products which are usually appreciated by only a relatively small number of educated people. Popular culture, sometimes also called mass culture, is far more widespread and accessible to everyone. The main business of popular culture is entertainment and, in Europe and the United States (for example), it is dominated by sports, television, films, and recorded popular music.
Traditionalists from Wordsworth on have lamented the poor quality of popular culture. Liberal and radical critics have been more inclined to support the popular as an authentic expression of public taste, and to dismiss the remote products of high culture as élitist. Sociologists have become involved in the analysis of popular culture because it provides a window into public consciousness, and is an important element of solidarity within social classes and of division between them. Conflict theorists focus on the production of popular culture by large, capitalist corporations, and suggest that the product may be not only inauthentic but also an instrument of ideological domination.
Studies of popular culture overlap with those of subcultures, youth cultures, ideology, leisure, and the mass media.
, Popular Culture (1986)
and
, Popular Culture and Social Relations (1986)
, indicate the range of topics which can be subsumed under this general heading. See also CULTURAL STUDIES.

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population

In statistical terms, a population refers to the aggregate of individuals or units from which a sample is drawn, and to which the results of any analysis are to apply–in other words the aggregate of persons or objects under investigation. It is conventional to distinguish the target population (for which the results are required) from the survey population (those actually included in the sampling frame from which the sample is drawn). For practical reasons the two are rarely identical. Even the most complete sampling frames–electoral registers, lists of addresses, or (in the United States) lists of telephone numbers–exclude sizeable categories of the population (who fail to register to vote, are homeless, or do not possess a telephone). Researchers may sometimes deliberately exclude members of the target population from the survey population. For example, it is standard practice to exclude the area north of the Caledonian Canal from the sampling frame for national sample surveys in Great Britain, on the grounds that the Northern Highlands are so thinly populated that interviews in this area would be unacceptably expensive to obtain. However, for most sociological purposes, this particular gap between the target and survey populations is not deemed to be significant—although, in a survey of ‘attitudes to public transportation in thinly populated areas’, it would clearly be problematic. See also STATISTICAL INFERENCE.

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population studies

See DEMOGRAPHY.

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populism

A term that entered the vocabulary of American politics with the formation in 1892 of the Populist Party. Most of the party's supporters were small farmers in the South and especially the West of the country. The principal plank in the party's platform was the idea that their supporters' grievances against the banks (who always seemed far too keen to foreclose on their mortgages) and the railroad companies (who were able to charge exorbitant haulage rates because of their monopoly positions) would be best resolved if the state nationalized the land and the railways.
Today, the term is most often used within Marxist and neo-Marxist circles in a broadened and transformed sense to refer to any political movement which seeks to mobilize the people as individuals, rather than as members of a particular socio-economic group, against a state which is considered to be either controlled by vested interests or too powerful in itself (see, for example,
, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, 1978
). For this reason, too, and somewhat ironically since they were promoted by the state itself, the policies of British governments during the 1980s, and the ideology which informed them (so-called Thatcherism), were sometimes described by those on the political left as ‘authoritarian populism’.
Populism has been a potent political force in developing countries–Peronism in Argentina is an obvious example–and has emerged as a major phenomenon in post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe. In both cases the connections with nationalism are important.

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positional economy

All those goods, services, occupations, or other social relationships that are either scarce in an absolute or socially imposed sense, or subject to crowding or congestion through more extensive use. Examples would include everything from top jobs, pleasant tourist locations or desirable residential areas, to front seats at the opera.
What these diverse goods and situations have in common is that the satisfactions obtained from them derive in part from scarcity and social exclusiveness. Moreover, shortfalls in the supply of such items cannot be overcome by economic growth alone, since (to put the matter at its most simple) expansions in productivity do not change the fact that not everyone can be President of the Company and not everyone can have tickets to the Superbowl. In Social Limits to Growth (1976), Fred Hirsch identifies a wide range of jobs and goods that are subject to positional competition, and argues that affluent societies (see EMBOURGEOISEMENT) are increasingly prone to distributional conflict over facilities and services which cannot be acquired or used by all without spoiling them for all. Or, as Hirsch puts it, ‘what each of us can achieve, all cannot’. A few tourists can enjoy the attractions of a secluded beach; if we all attempt to enjoy them then the attractions themselves are destroyed.
Hirsch's view of positional competition contrasts with the optimism of many conventional theories of economic growth. The latter tend to assume that increases in productivity solve distributional issues (since there is more pie to go round), and overlook the fact that the expanding sphere of what is generally called ‘public consumption’ actually contains some of the characteristics of private goods, in that its costs and benefits can be or are confined to a limited group. Few consumption items are either purely private or wholly public. To a thirsty worker, the satisfaction of a cold beer is unaffected by the beers other people drink, since the drink itself is a private good. At the other extreme, clean air is a pure public good, since the quality of the air each individual breathes is wholly dependent on what other individuals do by way of encouraging or preventing pollution. However, in advanced capitalist societies, the major (and a growing) part of so-called private consumption actually contains a social (positional) element. Paradoxically, social scarcity is therefore a consequence of affluence, and (for Hirsch at least) this tends to suggest that the principle of self-interest will not serve by itself as a basis for social organization, since a distributional or social morality will be required in order to manage positionality problems. Unfortunately, such societies possess a ‘depleting moral legacy’ of pre-industrial and pre-capitalist status orders, and concern for the welfare of the community has largely given way to the increasing pursuit of individual advantage.
The issues of positionality have provoked stimulating interdisciplinary exchanges between social scientists in economics, politics, sociology, and psychology, although critics have since challenged Hirsch's pessimistic view of growth and his possibly romantic view of the West's pre-industrial past (see
, Dilemmas of Liberal Democracies, 1983
).

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positive correlation

See CORRELATION.

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positive discrimination

Policies and practices which favour groups (mainly ethnic groups and women) who have historically experienced disadvantages (usually in the fields of employment and education). In the United States the alternative terms ‘affirmative action’ and ‘reverse discrimination’ are also widely used. It is argued by advocates of positive discrimination that, given the existing structure of inequalities and stereotypes, the policy is necessary in order to create equality of opportunities with historically privileged groups. However, it is highly controversial, and has generated much legal and political debate. Most sociological interest focuses on the implications of positive discrimination for the concept and practice of equality of opportunity. See also JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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positive reinforcement

See CONDITIONING.

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positivism

The acknowledged founder of positivism or ‘the positive philosophy’ was the French philosopher and social scientist Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Comte is also accredited with the invention of the term ‘sociology’ to describe his proposed science of society.
Positivism is, above all, a philosophy of science. As such, it stands squarely within the empiricist tradition. Metaphysical speculation is rejected in favour of ‘positive’ knowledge based on systematic observation and experiment. The methods of science can give us knowledge of the laws of coexistence and succession of phenomena, but can never penetrate to the inner ‘essences’ or ‘natures’ of things. As applied to the human social world, the positive method yields a law of successive states through which each branch of knowledge must pass: first theological, then metaphysical, and finally positive (or scientific). Since the character of society flows from the intellectual forms which predominate in it, this gives Comte a law of the development of human society itself. The phase of anarchy and revolution through which France had recently passed resulted from intellectual anarchy. Irresolvable disputes on metaphysical questions such as the Divine Right and the sovereignty of the people must now give way to a positive science of society. Well-grounded knowledge would form the basis of consensus, and could also be applied to remove the causes of disorder, just as natural-scientific knowledge had been applied in the taming of nature.
Comte's work was much admired by John Stuart Mill, amongst others, and positivism became something of a popular movement in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Comte's views shifted later in his life, under the influence of Clotilde de Vaux. He came to see that science alone did not have the binding-force for social cohesion, as he had earlier supposed. He argued that the intellect must become the servant of the heart, and advocated a new ‘Religion of Humanity’.
However, Comte's wider and continuing influence in social science derives almost exclusively from his earlier writings. Today, positivism signifies adherence to an empiricist view of the nature of science, and the project of a scientific approach to the study of social life on the empiricist model. In the case of the social sciences, this is most commonly taken to mean a modelling of the methods of social science on those of natural science; the attempt to discover social laws analogous to the law-like regularities discovered by natural sciences; and an absolute insistence on the separation of facts and values. The close link between the empirical knowledge generated by these methods, and questions of political or industrial policy, is also very much in line with Comtean social engineering.
Criticisms of positivism commonly focus on the inappropriateness of natural-scientific methods in the human or social sciences. Consciousness, cultural norms, symbolic meaning, and intentionality are variously held to be distinctive human attributes which dictate a methodological gulf between natural science and the study of human social life. However, following the work of Thomas S. Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and others, it has also become common to reject the empiricist account of the natural sciences. Since the positivist proposal for a unified science of nature and society is premissed upon empiricism, these questions have to be considered afresh, on the basis of alternative views of the nature of science.
The term positivism (more usually ‘logical positivism’) is also used to refer to the radical empiricism and scientism advanced in the early decades of the twentieth century by the Vienna Circle. This is usually considered to be the major influence on modern, twentieth-century sociological positivism, via the philosophy of the social sciences advanced by such theorists as Ernest Nagel (The Structure of Science, 1961) and Carl G. Hempel (The Philosophy of Natural Science, 1966), and as exemplified in the work of Paul Lazarsfeld. A qualified defence of positivism, which specifically takes issue with much (misguided) sociological criticism, is mounted in
's ‘Is Positivism Dead?’, Sociological Review (1980)
.
In an innovative article on
‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’ (Theory and Society, 1997)
, which claims to offer a ‘positivist’ analysis of' a phenomenon normally assumed to forbid the possibility of positivism: the multiple and seemingly incommensurable meanings assigned to human events' (that is, ‘ambiguity’), Andrew Abbott starts from the controversial premiss that there are two basic problems with the established philosophical critique of positivism. These are that, ‘first, even though positivist social science has been shown to be in principle impossible, the vast majority of social-science effort (and funding) is in fact spent doing it’. In Abbott's view, it is foolish to ignore this research, because it is intellectually and politically consequential. Second, ‘proclamations against positivism often mask an arbitrary unwillingness to think formally about the social world. One asserts that the world is constructed of ambiguous networks of meaning, argues for the complexity of interpretations and representations, and then simply assumes that formal discussion of the ensuing complexity is impossible.’ Abbott argues this is untrue, and attempts to show how a formal analysis of typical positivist research reveals it to be a source of untapped information about those multiple meanings, revealing so-called positivism to be ‘a complex and subtle terrain’.

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positivist criminology

See CRIMINOLOGY, POSITIVIST.

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post-enumeration survey

Also called census quality checks, post-enumeration surveys are carried out in selected areas immediately after population censuses have attempted to obtain a 100 per cent count, or enumeration, of the population. They have two purposes, usually achieved through separate exercises. Census coverage checks assess whether the 100 per cent enumeration was in fact achieved, and provide statistical estimates of any under-enumeration in particular types of area (such as inner-city areas with highly mobile populations), or in particular social groups (such as ethnic minorities). Census quality (validation) checks assess the quality of responses to the census, to provide statistical estimates of the validity of responses, gross and net error rates due to questions and/or response codes being misunderstood or misapplied. As errors cancel each other out to some extent, net error rates are always lower than gross error rates. Post-enumeration surveys repeat the census exercise in selected areas, but with a higher input of resources and more experienced survey interviewers than can be applied in the full census, so as to measure the quality of the larger data collection. They are now routinely carried out after every census and are quite different from census follow-up surveys which are occasionally carried out in a few countries.

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post-fordism

See FLEXIBLE EMPLOYMENT; FORDISM.

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post-industrial society, post-industrialism

Terms popularized by the publication of Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society in 1973. According to Bell, a post-industrial society is one where knowledge has displaced property as the central preoccupation, and the prime source of power and social dynamism. It is therefore also one in which technicians and professionals are the ‘pre-eminent’ social groups, as well as one in which the service industries are more important than manufacturing.

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post-modernism

There is some consensus about what this term refers to as a body of theory: namely, a selection of texts by such writers as Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, augmented by a particular reading of a further selection of texts by post-structuralists such as Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. (It should be noted, however, that most if not quite all of these thinkers would deny the applicability of the label to their work–a fittingly ironic state of affairs, some would say.) However, what it is that this body of theory (and its architectural, cinematic, and literary equivalents) has in common, is certainly much less settled.
Despite the fact that he neither invented the term nor claimed a very broad meaning for it (the word itself is commonly credited to Arnold Toynbee), it was Lyotard's announcement in 1979 (The Postmodern Condition) that the inhabitants of the advanced capitalist societies had been living in a post-modern world since at least the early 1960s, which made post-modernism a topic of sociological interest. What he did that was new was to declare that post-modernism was a generic social condition, and not just a new creative style or body of theory: to wit, a condition wherein there exists a widespread if belated recognition that the two major myths or ‘meta-narratives’ that have legitimated scientific (including social scientific) activity for the past two hundred years, are no longer widely believed.
On the one hand, ‘The Myth of Liberation’ has been rendered incredible by the complicity of all the sciences in the great crimes of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust, the Soviet gulags, and the creation of weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction. On the other, ‘The Myth of Truth’ has been rendered incredible by the sceptical thoughts of historians and philosophers of science (as, for example, in the relativism of Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn)— in other words, the disbelief of those who are supposed to know. The net result of such a generalized ‘incredulity towards meta-narratives’, according to Lyotard, is that the inhabitants of advanced capitalist societies now live in a world in which the following is the case: there are no guarantees as to either the worth of their activities or the truthfulness of their statements; there are only ‘language games’; and there are no economic constraints on the cultural realm.
Perhaps surprisingly, it is the American Marxist literary critic, Fredric Jameson, who has provided the most concrete and influential description of what the culture of this supposed new world looks like. In so doing, he may also be read as specifying what it was that the post-modernists and their precursors are either sensitive to, or have been instrumental in producing (see his
Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1984
). According to Jameson, a survey of recent aesthetic, philosophical, and social criticism reveals multiform ‘senses of the end of this or that’, and as a result projects an image of a culture that is assertively concerned with surfaces, and hence exhibits a certain ‘depthlessness’; is voraciously hungry for variations in surface decoration and hence very adept at pastiche and careless of historical time; is aware of its own depthlessness, and hence characterized by both a penchant for irony, and a certain ‘waning of affect’ or chariness as regards the expressing of strong emotions; is fascinated with, and hence productive of, schizophrenic psychological conditions; and, finally, is strikingly utopian on the grounds that what you dream is what you might get.
Post-modernity, in whatever guise it appears, thus implies the disintegration of modernist symbolic orders. It denies the existence of all ‘universals’, including the philosophy of the transcendental self, on the grounds that the discourse and referential categories of modernity (the subject, community, the state, use-value, social class, and so forth) are no longer appropriate to the description of disorganized capitalism. There is instead a new culture of ‘paralogy’–of imagination, inventiveness, dissensus, the search for paradox, and toleration of the incommensurable. Post-modernism is therefore characterized by ‘a pluralisation of life-worlds’. Its most conspicuous features are, to quote Z. Bauman (Intimations of Postmodernity, 1992), ‘variety, contingency, and ambivalence’, the ‘permanent and irreducible pluralism of cultures, communal traditions, ideologies, “forms of life” or “language games”’.
Sociologists have been largely concerned to argue about whether or not post-modernism as a social condition exists; and, if it does, why it exists (the latter interest prompted no doubt by the post-modernists' own blithe lack of concern with this issue). Perhaps strangely, few even of those who accept that the condition exists have asked themselves what, if anything, would or should happen to sociology itself, if it took post-modernist ideas seriously. By far the best sociological treatment is David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity (1989)–a text which makes this whole difficult literature readily accessible to the uninitiated.
The implications of post-modernist theory for the actual conduct of sociological analysis and research are perhaps best understood in relation to an (all too rarely encountered) concrete illustration. For example, the field of class analysis has been subjected to a sustained post-modernist critique, most notably in a series of critical essays by Jan Pakulski and others (see
, The Death of Class, 1996; , Postmodernization, 1992
). These authors maintain that, even under organized capitalism, the various class categories begin to decompose and fragment, as social inequalities come progressively to be structured more by patterns of consumption than production (see CONSUMPTION, SOCIOLOGY OF). This results, in the later stages of capitalism, in a ‘hypercommodification of products in which they are consumed not in terms of use values but in terms of their semiotic capacity to establish unequal relationships’; and then, under conditions of post-modernity, in a ‘simulation of multiple and cross-cutting identities which are situated in equally multiple “imagined communities” … membership of [which] is a function of taste, choice and commitment [so that] the categories are therefore fluid in relation to one another and indeterminate at the boundaries’.
Nowadays, therefore, we are experiencing a process whereby ‘classes are dissolving and the most advanced societies are no longer class societies’. One allegedly obvious aspect of this change is ‘an attenuation of the class identities, class ideologies, and class organizations that framed West European corporatist politics in the middle of the century’. Equally, ‘the communal aspects of class, class subcultures and milieus, have long since disappeared’. The decomposition of economic class mechanisms, though perhaps proceeding more slowly, is steadily being accomplished via ‘the wide redistribution of property; the proliferation of indirect and small ownership; the credentialization of skills and the professionalization of occupations; the multiple segmentation and globalization; of markets and an increasing role for consumption as a status and lifestyle generator’. In this way, according to Pakulski and his colleagues, we have arrived at a social condition and at forms of everyday life that are the very antithesis of a class society.
There is incontrovertible evidence that, here as elsewhere, the post-modernist critique of conventional sociology has simply detached itself from empirical reality (compare, for example, the broad-ranging and persisting class inequalities documented in
, Repositioning Class, 1997
). More importantly, if (as Pakulski and his colleagues claim) post-modernity does indeed entail ‘the final erosion of boundaries between the knowledges and practices of science and those of other domains’, then it follows (as they conclude) that the truth claims of social science ‘enjoy no guaranteed salience or guaranteed cognitive privilege’, that ‘sociology is quite free to tell what stories it likes about change or any other matter’, and that ‘these stories are part of a more general economy of discourse in which they must fight to find an audience and establish a salience in competition with other stories, and in the absence of guarantees’. In other words sociology has the same epistemological status (see EPISTEMOLOGY) as do (say) New Age beliefs in reincarnation. However, if sociologists are expected to take this critique seriously, then they should be clear that it commits the discipline irrevocably to the world of the cultural madhouse. They might also recall that when the resolution of language games is linked solely to the exercise of power, then the result is invariably a totalitarianism in which the definitions that stick belong to those who wield the biggest stick, and in earlier times this has included both the Church and the Party.
The term itself is now applied as an adjective to an alarmingly large number of nouns. For example, there is now a recognized ‘post-modern feminism’, represented in the work of (among others) Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva. In Kristeva's case, the label is usually justified by reference to her suspicion of and deconstructive attitude towards all essentialisms, including those propounded by feminists. A very useful English-language introductory selection of her work may be found in Toril Moi, The Kristeva Reader (1986). See also CULTURAL STUDIES.

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post-structuralism

A broad-based and therefore loosely structured interdisciplinary movement which originated in France during the 1960s and spread rapidly to other countries thereafter. Post-structuralism's prime achievement has been to rediscover and extend the radical analytical possibilities inherent in Saussure's theory of language as a significatory rather than a representational phenomenon. According to its proponents, these possibilities were obscured for a long time by the scientistic readings of Saussure which dominated the work of linguists, as well as such other usages as those associated with the likes of Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and other structuralists.
More specifically, its achievement had been to rediscover the possibilities implicit in Saussure's insistence that language is a self-subsisting if not a self-sufficient social entity; that is, an entity wherein the two aspects of all signs (their ‘signifiers’ (physical images) and their ‘signifieds’ (mental images)) are brought into alignment with one another, but not with any referent they may have in the extra-linguistic world. Putting the point another way, what excited the post-structuralists were the analytical possibilities created by the realization that words (and signs more generally) may mean something, without referring to anything in the extra-linguistic world; and, therefore, that all language and language-borne phenomena (philosophies, ideologies, sciences and even whole societies, for example) might be far more autonomous, in relation to other social phenomena, than had hitherto been suspected.
The scientistic appropriations of Saussure's theory which for so long obscured the theory's more radical implications did so because their authors made the claim that their words, if no others, were verifiable accurate depictions of what they referred to, whether the latter objects were aspects of language, literature, kinship systems, or modes of production. However, with the exception of the pioneering Jacques Lacan, rather than return to Saussure directly and try to reformulate what had become known as ‘the structuralist tradition’ on a nonscientistic basis, the leading post-structuralists sought to counter scientism by resorting to bodies of thought which were located outside of the tradition itself— for example, the philosophies of Nietzsche, in the case of Michel Foucault, and Heidegger in that of Jacques Derrida. Whichever strategy was adopted, the result was similar in that in each case the conclusion arrived at was that there was both more and less to words than met the eye: more, in that even individual words always carry ‘traces’ of other words and texts (Derrida), provide evidence of and for the ‘unconscious’ (Lacan), and project power as elements in ‘discourse’ (Foucault); less, in that, for Lacan and Derrida (if not necessarily Foucault), words were no longer understood to carry aspects of the extra-linguistic world into thought.
The full relativistic implications of the post-structuralist critique are perhaps most easily seen in the work of the French social theorist Jacques Derrida. The starting-point of Derrida's self-differentiation within the structuralist tradition, and therefore of his post-structuralism, is his claim to have detected a residual humanism within the former. This humanism inheres in the unconscious privileging of speech over writing which, ironically, underpins Saussure's decision to make langue (language as an established system of rules and units) rather than parole (language in use as actually produced speech) the object of study of linguistics. In Derrida's view it is the spoken rather than the written language that Saussure is concerned to elucidate. This privileging of speech, or ‘phonocentrism’, betrays a ‘metaphysics of human presence’ buried deep in the heart of the text that has commonly been supposed to be the founding document of the non-humanist approach to the study of social phenomena. Such a metaphysics, because it unconsciously privileges the speaker, vouchsafes not just the possibility of stable meanings, but also the possibility of a knowable truth, and for no convincing reason.
On the basis of this insight, which may be found in the opening essay of his Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida proceeds to elaborate on the method, if that is not too strong a word, that made it possible. The essential elements of this are: that writing should not be disprivileged, compared to speech, but that both should simply be taken as instances of ‘texts’; special attention should be paid to the decorative and rhetorical aspects of the text (especially if it is one that makes claims to any special rigour); and, finally, the reader should be given an authority as a ‘meaning-giver’ that is at least equal to that commonly ascribed to the author. Under these conditions, the pursuit of meaning becomes the pursuit of an endlessly receding horizon, whose centripetal movement (differance) is the product of the proliferation of connotations (traces or grams for Derrida) that occurs whenever we use (as we must) other signifiers to define what is signified by any particular signifier. In other words, the true meaning of a text can never be known, and nothing can ever be said about it that is anything other than a provisional account of its ‘intertextual’ nature.
In sum, Derrida provides a means, not so much of subverting truth claims, but of showing how the texts wherein such claims are made subvert (or ‘deconstruct’) themselves. The deconstructive method would appear to possess great power when applied to texts that either claim or are claimed to validate themselves (for example religious scriptures). It does not, however, appear to possess the same degree of meaning-deferring power when applied to texts that either do not claim or cannot be claimed to validate themselves. Such texts (those of the social and natural sciences for example) have recourse to modes of validation which refer to phenomena that are beyond their boundaries. Notwithstanding the fact that neither these modes of validation nor the interpretation of their results are innocent of complicity with the texts or counter-texts involved, the possibility of external validation remains ever present, and cannot be denied by deconstructionists without involving them in a self-contradictory claim to know the truth.
The significance of post-structuralist ideas for sociology has been twofold: on the one hand, to stimulate new methods of approach to old problems, especially in relation to the study of the ideological realm; and, on the other, to stimulate apocalyptic thoughts about the impossibility of sociology. That said, some authorities have claimed that sociology might profit from a sustained programme of deconstructive readings which would enhance the reflexivity of its practitioners, by drawing their attention to the self-subverting sub-texts that are imported into their discourse, with the myriad metaphors upon which they too often depend in order to make their meanings clear. For a measured assessment (which nevertheless opens with the statement that ‘structuralism, and poststructuralism also, are dead traditions of thought’) see
, ‘Structuralism, Post-structuralism and the Production of Culture’
, in
, Social Theory Today (1987)
. See also EPISTEMOLOGY.

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potlatch

See EXCHANGE THEORY; GIFT RELATIONSHIP.

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Poulantzas, Nicos

(1936–79)
Greek by origin, Poulantzas made his name in France, as (together with Louis Althusser) the leading representative of so-called structuralist Marxism. The first book of his to gain significant attention was his Political Power and Social Classes, which was published in the midst of the 1968 troubles in France. In it he outlined the concept with which his name is normally associated—the relative autonomy of the capitalist state. This concept, and the ‘regional theory’ of the political of which it was a part, were then applied to an analysis of the rise of fascism in the inter-war period (Fascism and Dictatorship, 1970).
In the years that followed, Poulantzas devoted himself to purely theoretical matters, and in 1974 published his Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, which was an extensive elaboration of the anti-humanist concept of class that he had first mooted in 1968. His last two books were a study of the collapses of the Iberian dictatorships (The Crisis of the Dictatorships, 1975), and an intervention into several then contemporary disputes in sociological theory (State, Power, Socialism, 1978). The latter is noteworthy for its trenchant critique of Michel Foucault's conception of power in capitalist societies.
Poulantzas made a significant contribution to the reconstruction of Marxism and (some have argued) to sociology generally, although it has also been suggested that the latter has yet to be fully appreciated, thanks to the combination of his own early death and changes in academic fashion (see
's Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy, 1985
). For a more sceptical assessment see
's discussion of ‘The Problem of Class Action’ in his Solidarity and Schism (1992)
.

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poverty

A state in which resources, usually material but sometimes cultural, are lacking. It is common to distinguish between absolute and relative definitions of poverty. Poverty defined in absolute terms refers to a state in which the individual lacks the resources necessary for subsistence. Relative definitions, frequently favoured by sociologists (especially when studying poverty in advanced industrial societies), refer to the individual's or group's lack of resources when compared with that of other members of the society—in other words their relative standard of living. Since relative poverty is a matter of differences in levels of material resources—that is, of inequalities in their distribution across a society—measures of relative poverty are potentially no less objective than those of absolute poverty. They are not simply a matter of subjective feelings of poverty, though such feelings may be of importance when analysing the consequences of poverty.
Subsistence definitions of poverty are of considerable value in examining Third World poverty, and international studies show that the overall level of poverty measured in subsistence terms is very high, with some studies suggesting that almost half of those in low-income countries live in absolute poverty. The very high level of poverty is unquestionable even though very precise measures of poverty are hard to obtain in societies where income gives only an imprecise indication of access to the means of subsistence. Significantly, the classic studies of poverty in Britain by Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree also used subsistence definitions and identified rather high levels of poverty, though not as high as those of present-day Third World societies. Booth, in his seventeen-volume study of The Life and Labour of the People in London (1889–1903), used income as a measure of poverty. Introducing the concept of a poverty line, a level below which families were unable to meet the necessities for subsistence, he provided evidence that somewhere near one-third of the whole population in London were in poverty. Rowntree's study of poverty in York at the turn of the century also used a subsistence definition. However, he introduced rather more precision by trying to determine the basic diets necessary for subsistence and then calculating the income needed to provide these subsistence diets, with an allowance for clothing and housing. His evidence showed some 15 per cent of York's population were in primary poverty, with earnings insufficient to meet basic needs. Adding in secondary poverty, where earnings were sufficient but were spent on other things, some 28 per cent were living in obvious want or squalor. His 1936 survey, using modified measures, yielded figures of just under 7 per cent and 18 per cent respectively. By 1950 poverty in Britain appeared almost to have disappeared following the introduction of the welfare state, and Rowntree concluded that fewer than 2 per cent were in poverty.
In the 1960s, however, poverty was ‘rediscovered’. In Britain, writers such as Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend argued that the measures of poverty used by researchers such as Rowntree had not been properly adjusted to take account of changes in the purchasing power of incomes over time, and so were underestimating subsistence poverty. (A parallel story can be told about the United States—for which see the references at the end of this entry.) They also contended that poverty was better defined in relative than in absolute terms. Families might have sufficient resources for survival, but this did not mean they had enough to keep themselves warm or to afford the new consumer durables (such as televisions or fridges) which were coming to seem increasingly necessary, or to participate in the social and leisure activities enjoyed by other families. They were consequently excluded from the ‘ordinary social life of the community’. Abel-Smith and Townsend used as a measure of relative poverty a family's position vis-à-vis social security (welfare payment) levels, finding nearly 15 per cent of the population in poverty. Subsequent studies, such as Townsend's monumental study Poverty (1978), refined the measures of relative poverty and continued to show significant proportions in poverty—proportions that seemed to increase during the 1980s with growing inequality and reductions in welfare provision. Recent figures suggest that perhaps one in five of the British population are in poverty, although these are the subject of much controversy, as indeed are the poverty figures for almost all advanced industrial societies.
The immediate causes of poverty vary over time and over the life-cycle. Booth and Rowntree found low and irregular earnings were a major cause. (Rowntree showed that at least half of primary poverty in 1897–98 was due to low wages and over a fifth to large families.) However, Rowntree's 1936 study suggested that unemployment and old age were more significant causes than formerly. By the time of Townsend's study, the main immediate causes were low pay, loss of the breadwinner, ill-health, unemployment, and old-age, with the key groups in poverty being the elderly, single parents, the long-term sick and disabled, the low-paid, and the unemployed. Women are over-represented amongst the poor—a finding that has led some writers to talk of a feminization of poverty.
This mapping of change in the immediate causes of poverty indicates that it is economic and structural factors and social misfortune, not individual weakness in the form of idleness or imprudence, that are the major causes of poverty. Indeed, in order fully to understand poverty, it is necessary to examine the general distribution of wealth and of social inequality in society. A range of theories attempt to do this. Liberal neo-classical accounts stress the role of the market in distributing resources in relation to talents, skills, and motivations, arguing that poverty is necessary to provide a system of incentives to individual effort, and that those who end up in poverty lack the appropriate talents and skills. Subsidizing the poor can interfere with the smooth functioning of the market. However, such accounts, though they refer to structural features, are non the less often associated with assumptions that individuals are themselves to blame for their poverty: it is their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviour that are at fault. This argument has been applied to the family and the social group, not just the individual, via concepts such as the ‘culture of poverty’: that is, a cultural milieu characterized by fatalism, resignation, and idleness, which is antithetical to achievement, hard work, and self-reliance, and tends to be passed on between generations. Such views have, however, been challenged by a range of empirical studies of the lives of the poor.
In contrast, Marxist accounts emphasize the role of capitalism and capitalist interests in generating poverty, both nationally and internationally. The argument here is that capitalism is based on the exploitation of labour and this applies both nationally and globally. Depending on the state of capitalist development and the particular requirements of capitalists, there may be a need for cheap labour and pressures to keep wages down, for a high level of unemployment, and for a minimization of welfare benefits, so that profits are maximized. Stripped of its Marxist gloss, the argument is that the level of poverty is a function of the nature of economic organization, and of processes concerning both the distribution of wealth and of welfare benefits. It is less that poverty is necessary to the smooth-running of the market, but that it may be politically and economically advantageous for those with power to pursue policies that increase rather than diminish inequality and poverty.
The extensive sociological literature on poverty overlaps with that on race, ethnicity, subcultures, the underclass, and stratification generally—more so in the United States than in Britain (see
, Poverty Policy and Poverty Research, 1987
). On the ‘rediscovery’ of poverty in the United States during the 1960s see the Appendix by
, ‘Urban Poverty: A State-of-the-Art Review of the Literature’, in , The Truly Disadvantaged (1987
).

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poverty line

The ‘line’ that sets the boundary, and consequently the numbers, of the poor. There is much controversy over where and how it should be drawn. In Britain, the most common definition of poverty involves drawing the line in terms of the receipt of income support (‘social security’), formerly supplementary benefit payments. Families and individuals who receive such support are deemed to be in poverty.

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poverty trap

The situation low-income individuals or families may face when taking up paid employment or securing higher earnings, if the loss of means-tested state welfare benefits and/or new income tax payments are equal to, or even exceed additional earnings. The poverty trap is, consequently, a deterrent to work. See also SELECTIVE VERSUS UNIVERSAL BENEFITS.

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power

Power is the concept which is at the heart of the subject of social stratification. It is therefore not surprising that we have seen so many disputes concerning its meaning (including disputes about what particular sociologists meant when they used the term in the past).
Perhaps the best known of all the definitions is that of Max Weber in his essay ‘The Distribution of Power within the Political Community: Class, Status, Party’ (in Economy and Society, 1922). Weber regarded power as the fundamental concept in stratification, of which class, status, and party were three separate (sometimes related) dimensions. Broadly speaking, classes were the outcome of the distribution of economic power (in Weber's terms, market relationships); status was a kind of normatively defined social power; and parties were groups active in the political sphere in pursuit of various goals. Power was then defined by Weber in general terms as the probability of persons or groups carrying out their will even when opposed by others. Note that power is therefore a social relationship. Hence, for Weber, the differential distribution of power leads to a situation where life-chances are also differentially distributed; that is, the ability to obtain economic, social, and political resources is unequally distributed. In Weber's famous phrase, ‘classes, status groups and parties are all phenomena of the distribution of power in a society’. Weber took this view in a fairly explicit attempt to counter the crude Marxism of his day, which made too easy an elision between economic control and political rule. He wished to make clear his view that power need not depend on the possession of economic resources—hence the importance of the concept of status, and his various observations concerning this in his general sociology.
Weber made further observations concerning the nature of power in his political sociology. Few groups in society base their power purely on force or military might. Instead, ruling groups attempt to legitimate their power, and convert it into what he termed domination (or, as Talcott Parsons translates it, ‘authority’). According to Weber there are three bases of domination: traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic.
Is Weber's conception of power adequate—or are there more satisfactory ways in which the phenomenon can be conceived? Steven Lukes (Power: A Radical View, 1974) argues that power is an essentially contested concept; that is, one whose definition and application will always be a matter for dispute between sociologists. How we define power and how we operationalize it will be dependent on our theoretical position and value-orientation. Accepting that, however, is it still possible to improve on the Weberian conception of power?.
If we examine Weber's definition, it obviously has built into it a notion of conflict and intention. The notion of intention can be seen in the view of someone or some group ‘carrying out their will’. This implies a quality of conscious, rational, and calculated action in pursuit of a specific goal. Now, this may well characterize some power relationships, but does it characterize them all? Can power be exercised unwittingly? Should we perhaps see power as involving the achievement of one's preferences—whether by intention or not—rather than as the pursuit of one's will? The other problem we can see in Weber's definition is the assumption of conflict or antagonism which it incorporates. As various critics have noted, the definition suggests that A has power over B to the extent that he or she overcomes the resistance of B if it is offered, implying that—at least some of the time—the interests of B are being sacrificed to those of A. Weber was certainly interested mainly in power in situations of conflicting interests. Many sociologists since Weber have assumed that power involves—even provokes—subordinate resistance which must be overcome by superordinates. Does this mean power can never be exercised in a consensual context; that is, where subordinates accept it as being used legitimately? This is where we have to be more specific about the nature of the power being used. Where power is used over subordinates who attribute genuine legitimacy to superordinates we could talk of authority of persuasion. These are clearly very different from power which rests on force or manipulation. Yet we have to remember that all four of these terms refer to types of power relationships.
The idea of power used in an apparently consensual context also leads to further problems. For example, where legitimacy is attributed in a power relationship, does this legitimacy flow from subordinate to superordinate, implying authority (which is what Parsons and many political scientists would say); or is legitimacy imposed from above, by ‘swinging’ of social norms, implying manipulation (a view which has firm roots in Marxism, especially the Gramscian notion of ideological hegemony)? As Alvin Gouldner (The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, 1970) noted, ‘power is, among other things [the] ability to enforce one's moral claims. The powerful can thus conventionalize their moral defaults.’ And, of course, this is part of what Weber meant by the term social status.
For all these reasons one should therefore remember David Lockwood's dictum: commenting on the problems of studying power, especially when it is recognized that power is a latent force, he observed that ‘power must not only refer to the capacity to realise one's ends in a conflict situation against the will of others; it must also include the capacity to prevent opposition arising in the first place. We often hear that the study of power should concentrate on the making and taking of important decisions. But in one sense power is most powerful if the actor can, by manipulation, prevent issues from coming to the point of decision at all’
(‘The Distribution of Power in Industrial Society—a Comment’, in , Power in Britain, 1973)
. So, power involves not only decision-making but also non-decision-making, not only the overt but the covert.
Finally, we should consider power resources. Power is a dispositional concept: it refers to the possibility of a certain action occurring rather than to its actual occurrence. So, power is a potential quality of a social relationship, and as such rests on actors' access to power resources. Quite obviously, in an advanced capitalist society, economic resources such as wealth and control over jobs are vital, but many other power resources exist: for example, organizational capacity, numerical support, competence, expert knowledge, control of information, occupation of certain social positions, control of the instruments of force, and reputation for power itself. The last of these is a unique power resource: it depends not on the actual possession of power but the mere belief by others that it is possessed. Equally, one does not have to own a power resource, but only to control it: senior civil servants and managers provide examples. Between all these potentials for power, and their manifestation, lies one's willingness (and efficiency) to use it. Potential power depends upon certain attributes. Manifest power, however, is revealed not by attributes but through social relationships; and part of the definition of a social relationship is its reciprocal nature. Consequently, the exercise of power involves feedback: A acts, B reacts, A reacts to B's reaction, and so on. Subordinates must have some effect on superordinates for there to be any relationship at all—a point noted long ago by Georg Simmel.
We can begin to see, then, how complex and difficult a concept power is to handle. Once we try to operationalize it we quickly appreciate Lukes's point concerning its essentially contested nature. This, and most of the other issues raised in this entry, are discussed is Dennis Wrong's Power (1979). See also BUREAUCRACY; COMMUNITY POWER; COMPLIANCE; FOUCAULT, MICHEL; GATEKEEPING; MICHELS, ROBERT; ORGANIZATION THEORY; ORGANIZATIONAL REACH; POLITICAL PARTIES; REFERENT POWER; STATE.

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power, referent

See REFERENT POWER.

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power dependence

Power is often characterized as ‘zero-sum’. That is, power is something that A has over B, such that if A gains in power B correspondingly loses. However, the notion of power dependence suggests that power is also a relational concept, such that the power of A is dependent on B. The exercise of power is an exchange of resources and so A needs B—is dependent on B—in order to exercise power. An example is evident in Britain, where the power of the Prime Minister is dependent on the Cabinet recognizing his or her authority, and implementing his or her decisions.

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power élite

A concept developed by C. Wright Mills in his book of that name (published in 1956) and used by him to refer to the American ruling élite. According to his analysis this was an élite which was composed of business, government, and military leaders, bound together by the shared social backgrounds of these leaders and the interchange of personnel between its three segments. Mills's text provoked considerable controversy. A representative selection of liberal and radical responses, together with a retrospective essay by Mills himself, will be found in
, C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite (1968)
. See also MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.

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pragmatism (philosophy of)

An influential and important, perhaps the central, North American philosophy. It rejects the quest for fundamental, foundational truths, and shuns the building of abstract philosophical systems. Instead, it suggests a plurality of shifting truths grounded in concrete experiences and language, in which a truth is appraised in terms of its consequences or usevalue. It is a down-to-earth philosophy, born in a period of rapid social change, which seeks to unify intelligent thought and logical method with practical actions and appeals to experience. William James, in his Pragmatism (1907), neatly summarizes the perspective when he states that ‘the Pragmatic method …is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true?’
Pragmatism has sometimes been maligned as the philosophy of capitalism— since it has an apparent emphasis upon the ‘cash value’ of ideas. While differing significantly in emphasis, its key proponents are generally agreed to be the realists Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, and the nominalists William James and George Herbert Mead. It is identified with the Chicago School of sociology, and Paul Rock has argued (in The Making of Symbolic Interactionism, 1979) that it was important in shaping the theory of symbolic interactionism.

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praxis

A philosophical term referring to human action on the natural and social world. It emphasizes the transformative nature of action and the priority of action over thought. It is often, but not always, associated with Marxism and especially the work of Antonio Gramsci.

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preference theory

Preference theory seeks to provide an empirically based, predictive explanation for the differentiated choices women make between productive work and reproductive work in rich modern societies, after the contraceptive revolution gave women control over their own fertility. It posits that women are heterogeneous in tastes and preferences, being divided into three distinct groups: a minority of work-centred women who often remain childless by choice (about 20 per cent of the adult population); a minority of home-centred women who usually have many children and do little paid work (about 20 per cent of the adult population); and a majority of adaptive women who seek to combine paid work in the labour market with childbearing and child-rearing. Preference theory states that the three groups differ qualitatively, for example in responsiveness to particular social and economic policies, to the point where they have conflicting interests on certain policy issues. The theory constitutes a break with sociological and economic theories that treat all labour as essentially homogeneous. See
, Preference Theory (1998)
.

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prejudice

Prejudice, in normal usage, means preconceived opinion or bias, against or in favour of, a person or thing. While it is important to remember that biases can be positive as well as negative, nevertheless the term most commonly refers to a negative or unfavourable attitude towards a group, or its individual members. Prejudice is characterized by stereotyped beliefs that are not tested against reality, but rather have to do with a person's own feelings and attitudes. Gordon Allport, in his classic book The Nature of Prejudice (1954), defines prejudice as ‘an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual member of that group.’ Some people are more prone to prejudiced outlooks than others: psychoanalytical theories point to an authoritarian personality type that is more likely to hold the sort of inflexible attitudes associated with prejudice.
Prejudice became a very popular term in social psychology during the 1920s and 1930s, partly out of a concern with the development of attitude theory (and new techniques for scaling attitudes such as the Bogardus social distance scale); partly because of a concern with the widespread existence of hostility to ethnic minorities in the United States and the rise of anti-semitism in Europe; and partly due to a generalized concern with minority groups. The original tradition of prejudice research reached its peak with the publication of two major books:
, The Authoritarian Personality (1950)
and
's The Nature of Prejudice (1954)
. The former provided the most detailed analysis of the personality foundations of prejudice; the latter attempted a synthesis of research findings, trying to integrate the psychological, structural, and historical foundations of prejudice. Although much research has continued in this tradition, the term has also been heavily criticized within sociology, notably for its individualistic implications.
Sociological definitions of the term tend also to stipulate that prejudice violates some social norm such as rationality, justice, or tolerance. Overgeneralization, prejudgement, the refusal to take account of individual differences, and thinking in stereotypes all violate rational thought. Similarly, in so far as the net effect of prejudice is to place the individual or group at some disadvantage that is not merited, prejudice is inherently unjust. Prejudice also involves intolerance and even the violation of human dignity. Zygmunt Bauman, in Thinking Sociologically (1990), suggests that prejudice results in double moral standards. What the members of the in-group deserve as of right will be an act of grace and benevolence if done for the people of the out-group. He goes on to insist that ‘most importantly, one's own atrocity against out-group members does not seem to clash with moral conscience’. Identical actions are called different names, alternatively loaded with praise or condemnation, depending on which side has undertaken them. One person's act of liberation is another's act of terrorism.
Prejudice is both a consequence of and a reinforcement for the existence of in-groups and out-groups, which embody the distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’. In-group and out-group attitudes are intrinsically related, because in-group feeling results in out-group sentiment, and vice versa. It could almost be claimed that one side derives its identity from the fact of its opposition to the other. In this sense the out-group is necessary for the cohesion and emotional security of the in-group, and an out-group might need to be invented, if one does not already exist. A classic but ethically disturbing example of how an in-group and out-group were experimentally created is described in
, An Outline of Social Psychology (1956)
. The authors structured activities at a boys' camp such that two specially created clubs had to compete with each other for rewards. The respective members soon developed hostility towards, and stereotypes of, each other—despite initially having equal numbers of friends in each club. The authors conclude that these stereotypes must have been created rather than learned.
Groups also tend to close ranks when an enemy is at hand. Prejudice, by magnifying the vices of the enemy, ensures that norms of justice and tolerance no longer apply. Prejudice does not always result in any hostile action, but when prejudice is made manifest it can range from (at minimum) avoidance or discrimination, through to mass extermination, as in the Holocaust.

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pre-operational stage

See PIAGET, JEAN.

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Present State Examination (PSE)

A test developed by psychiatrist John Wing and colleagues at the Maudsley Hospital in Britain in the 1960s. The aim was to facilitate the standardized identification of psychiatric cases and to improve psychiatric classifications, both for research and clinical purposes. (Wing is committed to a disease model of mental malfunctioning.) The test is designed to assess the individual's present mental state (questions refer to the past month only) in order to identify any mental pathology. It involves a standard checklist of items, though some flexibility is allowed in questioning, especially in follow-up questions. Interviewers have to be trained but do not have to be psychiatrists.
Analysis of the answers to different questions, in which clinical judgements play a part, allows the data to be transformed into a series of symptom and syndrome scores. Further historical and aetiological information is required if a psychiatric diagnosis is to be generated, and a computer package (CATEGO) has been developed to assist this process.
The Present State Examination has been widely used as a screening instrument in studies of psychiatric epidemiology, both national and international. It has the advantage over the simpler research instruments which attempt to measure ‘caseness’ on a single dimensional scale, in providing measures of a range of syndromes, although behaviour disorders (such as alcoholism and organic syndromes) are not covered. It was the instrument used by George Brown and Tirril Harris to identify depression in community samples in their much discussed volume on Social Origins of Depression (1978) and in their subsequent studies.

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pressure groups

Groups of persons, employers, or other organizations joining together to represent the interests of a particular sectional group vis-à-vis governments, the public at large, or other interest groups. Pressure groups, lobby groups, and interest groups are distinct from other clubs or social groups, in that their explicit purpose is to mobilize public opinion in support of their aims and to put pressure on decision-making bodies to agree to and support their demands, be they for the continuation of the existing state of affairs or for some change or innovation. Pressure groups coexist with other forms of interest aggregation, such as political parties, seeking to influence rather than to govern. Interest groups may develop into political parties by adopting a more open, less restricted platform; and some pressure groups have a special relationship with a political party, as illustrated by trade unions and the Labour Party in Britain.
A distinction is sometimes drawn between protective and promotional groups, the former defending a section of society, the latter promoting a cause. The first category includes trade unions, professional associations, employer and trade associations, and motoring associations defending the interests of car owners. The second category would include societies seeking to prevent cruelty to animals or to children, groups arguing for or against censorship, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The distinction between the two types of interest group is obviously not watertight. For example, trade unions frequently campaign for national minimum wage laws as a means of defending the interests of their members, although the case is always offered as being in the public interest.

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prestige

See STATUS.

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primacy effect

This refers to the process by which early information colours our perception of subsequent information. The commonsense notion that first impressions are the most compelling is not always correct. First impressions may count most because subsequent information is more difficult to absorb—although recent information may be remembered most clearly. See also RECENCY EFFECT.

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primary and secondary deviance

Introduced by Edwin Lemert in his Social Pathology (1951), the distinction is central to labelling theory. Primary deviance refers to differentiation which is relatively insignificant, marginal, and fleeting; secondary deviance is pivotal, central, and engulfing. The mechanism by which marginal deviance and casual rule-breaking becomes more central depends upon labelling or the societal reaction.

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primary group

See COOLEY, CHARLES HORTON.

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primary labour-market

See LABOUR-MARKET.

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Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area

See METROPOLITAN STATISTICAL AREA.

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primary sector

See INDUSTRIAL SECTOR.

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primitive communism

A term usually associated with Karl Marx, but most fully elaborated by Friedrich Engels (in The Origin of the Family, 1884), and referring to the collective right to basic resources, egalitarianism in social relationships, and absence of authoritarian rule and hierarchy that is supposed to have preceded stratification and exploitation in human history. Both Marx and Engels were heavily influenced by Lewis Henry Morgan's speculative evolutionary history, which described the ‘liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes’, and the ‘communism in living’ said to be evident in the village architecture of native Americans. Engels worked this notion into the evolutionary theory of historical materialism, arguing that the transition to subsequent modes of production involved the change from production for use to production for exchange, and transformation of communal family relations and equality between the sexes to individual families as economic units and female subordination. The thesis has been much debated in anthropology (see, for example,
, ‘Marxism and Anthropology’, in , The Left Academy, 1981
), where dispute centres on the nature of property rights, status, and authority among so-called primitive peoples.

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primitive society

A term used to refer both to the earliest societies and to recent examples with simple technology. It fell into disfavour as a description of any society of recent centuries, since none are relics of an earlier evolutionary stage, and each has its own history and development. Moreover, improvisation of existing materials is subtle, not simple.

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primogeniture

The tradition, principle, or law by which the right of succession to property and title falls to the first born. In theory this can be through the male or female line although the former is more common.

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principal components analysis

See MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS.

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principle of least interest

The generalization that, in any relationship, the person who cares least about maintaining it is in the best bargaining position.

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principle of population

See MALTHUS, THOMAS.

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Prisoner's Dilemma

A paradigmatic instance in game theory, which takes its name from a story of two prisoners, who are interrogated separately and cannot communicate with each other. There is insufficient evidence for the police to convict either prisoner of armed robbery, so that unless they confess, each will receive a relatively light sentence of one year's imprisonment for illegal possession of firearms. The prosecuting authorities offer each prisoner a deal, whereby they may confess and turn state's witness against the other prisoner (putting him away for ten years), while they themselves will be set free. The catch is that, if both prisoners confess, each will be convicted of armed robbery and sent to jail for six years. The dilemma facing the individual prisoner is whether or not to confess. The self-interested prisoner is better off confessing, no matter what his partner does, since if both prisoners see the issue in this way they will each spend a maximum of six years in jail. If, on the other hand, each could be sure that the other would act in the group interest (rather than pursuing self-interest), both would hold out, and each spend only a year in jail. The worst possible outcome would be to act in pursuit of the group interest while one's partner acted self-interestedly—since ten years in jail would be the result. The case of the Prisoner's Dilemma is commonly used to illustrate the dangers of committing the fallacy of composition and to explore the conditions of collective action. See also ALTRUISM.

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private religion

In conventional sociological terms, religion is a public activity involving communal practices (such as worship and sacraments), and commonly shared beliefs. In modern society, where there has been some secularization of religion, some sociologists argue that religion can only survive as a more private set of beliefs or feelings. Max Weber, in his essay on ‘Science as a vocation’, argued that religion would continue only ‘in personal human situations, in pianissimo’. The concept is occasionally used as equivalent to invisible religion.

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private sphere and public sphere

See PUBLIC SPHERE VERSUS PRIVATE SPHERE DISTINCTION.

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privatism

The tendency for people in advanced industrial societies to spend their lives less in the public domain and more within the confines of the nuclear family. In other words, increasing ‘home-centredness’ and ‘nuclear family-centredness’, and withdrawal from the public realm of community organizations and activities, such as those associated with the church, union, pub, or political party. A forceful statement of the argument is Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man (1977). Sennett's main theme is that of the dissolution of the ‘public culture’ (the street life and social intercourse of the café and local marketplace) and the rise of privatism. The extent of this phenomenon, and the allegedly secular trend towards it, are both contested by the majority of sociologists. The most useful contemporary assessment is Fiona Devine's Affluent Workers Revisited (1992). The process of privatism should not be confused with that of privatization.

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privatization

The transfer of responsibilities from the state to the private sector of the economy (see
, Privatizing the Public Sector, 1982
). Privatization takes many forms, depending on the nature of the responsibilities concerned, and to whom they are transferred. It may involve the highly publicized transfer of the ownership of the property and assets of public corporations or of local authority housing. Equally, it may involve the more gradual and less publicized running down of state provisions, subsidies, and regulation. A commitment to privatization has been a hallmark of conservative governments in Britain and many other West European countries during the 1980s. For an interesting case-study see
, Privatism and Urban Policy in Britain and the United States (1989)
. By far the largest programmes of privatization were initiated after the fall of the communist regimes in the former state socialist societies of Eastern Europe. The term should not be confused with the more obviously sociological concept of privatism.

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probability, probability distribution

See DISTRIBUTION (STATISTICAL OR FREQUENCY); SAMPLING; SIGNIFICANCE TESTS; STATISTICAL INFERENCE.

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problem family

A colloquial and pejorative label used by workers in social agencies and by the public to refer to families whose behaviour or social conditions they deem in some respect problematic. Its generalizing and stigmatizing properties have led to strong criticisms of its use.

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Problem of the Commons (or Tragedy of the Commons)

An example in game theory which is used to explore problems of resource distribution (see
, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science, 1968
). The use of commons (publicly available land on which farmers graze their cattle) becomes a problem when one such farmer reasons that he or she can expand his or her herd since this small addition to the total stock will contribute little harm to the available pasture. However, if other farmers reason likewise, these incremental additions to the stock using the land lead to overgrazing and thus the destruction of the resource itself. In other words, if each individual in this situation rationally pursues his or her own short-term interest while disregarding others similarly pursuing theirs, then the long-run consequence is that everyone loses their share in the collective resource.

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problem of theodicy

See RELIGION, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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problematic

A structuralist Marxist term, popularized by Louis Althusser, which refers to ‘the particular unity of a theoretical formation’, the interdependence of its component concepts, and the way in which this facilitates the posing of certain problems and issues while excluding others from consideration (see For Marx, 1965). Althusser contrasts the openness of scientific problematics (specifically the mature works of Marx) with the closed problematics of various ideologies (idealism, classical political economics, and so forth). What allegedly distinguishes the two is that the latter operate within a ‘closed space’ or ‘vicious circle of the mirror relation of ideological representation’ within which all problems are posed in ways that prejudge the solutions (see
Reading Capital, 1968
).

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procedural justice

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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production

The transformation of resources, which include time and effort, into goods and services. Resources are understood always to be too scarce to provide for all wants and needs, so there is an emphasis on the efficiency of production, or productivity. Similarly, the costs of choosing certain goods and services are not measured by the money spent on them, but by the opportunity cost of the alternative uses of the available resources. See also GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT.

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production, flexible

See FLEXIBLE PRODUCTION.

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production, petty commodity

See PETTY COMMODITY PRODUCTION.

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production, simple commodity

See SIMPLE COMMODITY PRODUCTION.

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productivity

The ratio of output to input. Neither element is easy to measure completely or consistently over time; they are often converted into money values. Labour input can be expressed in numbers of workers, total number of hours worked, or wage costs in a given period. Similar choices exist for other factors of production. Outputs may be measured in differing ways, some physical (such as the number of items made), some related to value (such as the sale price or value added). Different measures can produce wide variations in the resulting values for productivity. Typical examples are volume of output per human hour worked or per machine hour; or sales value per dollar labour costs or per dollar invested.

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productivity bargaining

A form of collective bargaining in Britain in which higher rates of pay are traded against employees' acceptance of greater flexibility in work tasks and functions, or other changes in working practice, or where productivity payments are related directly to volume of output.

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profane versus sacred distinction

See SACRED VERSUS PROFANE DISTINCTION.

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professions, professionalism, professionalization

Respectively a form of work organization, a type of work orientation (see WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF), and a highly effective process of interest group control. As an organizational form, a profession includes some central regulatory body to ensure the standard of performance of individual members; a code of conduct; careful management of knowledge in relation to the expertise which constitutes the basis of the profession's activities; and, lastly, control of numbers, selection, and training of new entrants. Max Weber contrasted professions with bureaucracy, and regarded them as the paradigm form of collegiate authority, in which rational-legal power is based on representative democracy and leaders in principle are first among equals.
The work orientation of the professional supposedly entails exclusive concern with the intrinsic rewards and performance of a task, and is typically associated with personal services involving confidentiality and high trust, as found for example in medicine, education, religion and the law. In the mainstream of the sociology of work and organizations, professionalism is contrasted with bureaucracy, and the so-called bureaucratic mentality.
Recent sociological work has tended to view professionalization as the establishment of effective interest-group control over clients with socially constructed problems as a method of exercising power in society. This approach treats professional ethics as an ideology, rather than an orientation necessarily adhered to, or meaningful in practice. Entry and knowledge controls function as a form of status exclusion from privileged and remunerative employment In this respect, professional organizations make an interesting comparison with trade unions, for although formal professional ethics preclude collective bargaining and industrial conflict, in practice many associations have found themselves becoming more unionate, whilst many unions practise quasi-professional job-entry control. From the huge literature of potential relevance to this entry (much relevant material occurs, for example, in discussion of labour-markets, gender, and the sociology of medicine) see
, The System of Professions (1988)
,
, Professional Powers (1986)
, and (for an interesting case-study)
, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982)
. See also CLOSURE.

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profit

See CAPITAL; ENTREPRENEUR; LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE.

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progress

The idea of progress, conceived as the increasing sophistication of knowledge and the improving quality of life, has been the driving force of Western civilization for at least three hundred years. During the twentieth century, the same idea has been adopted, with variations, by virtually every culture on earth. In the Third World, development and modernization are taken to be synonymous with progress.
The history of the idea of progress is complex, and even the meaning of the word is fundamentally disputed. Contemporary scholars disagree over whether the philosophers of classical antiquity had any expectation of progress in its modern sense. Robert Nisbet in The History of Progress (1980) finds some evidence that they did. But cyclical theories of civilization's rise and decline were far more common in the ancient world, and continued to be supported into the modern age by such distinguished scholars as Montesquieu, Helvetius, Gibbon, and Spengler. Another tradition of thought about human history is entirely pessimistic, seeing nothing but decline from an earlier golden age.
The idea of a universal history of human progress was developed during the eighteenth century, in the works of Voltaire, Turgot, Herder, and Kant, among others. With Kant we arrive at the fully developed idea of a unified human race moving towards the ideal of a ‘universal civil society’ founded on justice and based on the maximum individual freedom for all.
It is no exaggeration to say that philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became obsessed with the idea of progress. As hopes of a spiritual heaven faded, people's thoughts turned to the dream of heaven on earth, achieved through progress. The eighteenth century idea had five elements: the continuing Deistic belief in Benevolent Providence, an essential optimism about the meaning of human life and destiny; the belief that history was not a chaos, but moved through predictable stages according to knowable laws; the belief in posterity, fulfilling the promise of progress and honouring the forerunners who had made it possible; the centrality of knowledge as the driving force of progress; the belief in the ultimate perfectibility of humankind. There was a powerful element of religious nostalgia in all this, and many historians have argued that the whole progressive ideology down to the present day is a mirror-image of Christianity, with the secular utopia substituting for the promise of paradise (see, for example,
, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, 1932
).
While the French Revolution dealt a severe set-back to this optimistic eighteenth-century philosophy, two of the most secular elements were carried forward into the nineteenth century, with earth-shaking results: the centrality of knowledge and the search for laws of history. Saint-Simon, and more especially Comte, combined these two elements with Kant's vision of a universal human history to produce an enormously influential theory of progress. Comte proposed that humanity evolved as the human mind evolved, and that human history could be divided into three distinct stages based on the level of human understanding. The Theological Stage was characterized by primitive, animist religious beliefs. The Metaphysical Stage (just ending, Comte believed, in his own time) produced more sophisticated and abstract religions. The emerging Positive Stage would be an era completely defined by science and rationality, which would produce an earthly utopia. Although criticized then and later, Comte's grand theory entered into Western consciousness. Its rational, scientific utopia was the very model of modernity.
Karl Marx came to his theory of progress by way of a different philosophical tradition, but there seems little doubt that Comte and Saint-Simon were influences. Hegel's highly abstract theory of history envisaged the progress of the human spirit towards perfect apprehension of itself and the world. Marx grounded this vision in reality by relating progress to economic struggles. His theory of historical materialism predicts that the final utopian state (communism) will be brought about through the inexorable workings of economic laws.
Spencer's theory of Social Darwinism is another example of the nineteenthcentury fascination with progress. Social Darwinism was more fashionable in the United States than in Europe. It linked progress to the growth and increasing complexity of societies, and especially to the natural mechanism of the survival of the fittest, which Spencer believed would create the best possible society, if allowed to do so.
For most of the twentieth century, theories of progress followed the pattern of the nineteenth—optimistic, rationalistic, and increasingly materialistic. Sociology contributed its share in the form of early functional and post-industrial theories which predicated a future society of harmony and prosperity based on science. At the century's end, however, the idea of progress seems to be in eclipse. The great utopian ideologies have self-destructed at enormous cost. Science has not produced a moral utopia for most of humanity, and the future is clouded by environmental doubts. See also ENVIRONMENT; POST-MODERNISM.

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progressive tax

A tax is said to be progressive if the percentage of an individual's income which is paid in tax increases as their income increases, so that the rich pay relatively more than the poor.

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prohibition

Prohibitions are powerful, (theoretically) enforceable, and sanctionable social and/or legal restrictions on certain behaviours, events, or other activities—including, for example, sexual ‘deviations’, drug-taking or trafficking, and trade in endangered species. The term is often applied to the period (1919–33) during which alcohol production was outlawed in the United States. Sponsored by various religious and political moral entrepreneurs and economic interest groups, and described at the time as a ‘noble experiment’, the social consequences of prohibition were highly damaging and the experiment ultimately proved to be insupportable. Prohibitions frequently produce innovative, illegal counter-responses, and in this case criminal entrepreneurs maintained the illegal supply of alcohol. High profits and competition led to violence. Otherwise non-criminal individuals were caught up in the criminalization of a previously normal social activity. The rapid expansion of organized crime was also a legacy of the American experiment.

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projection

This term is used in two senses by social scientists. Most commonly it refers to prediction or inference from existing data as to what will happen in the future. However, in a psychoanalytic context, it describes the unconscious process in which the individual attributes to others his or her own emotions and impulses. Sigmund Freud regarded it as a common defence mechanism, used by the ego to control unacceptable feelings, thereby helping to reduce anxiety.

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projective tests

A type of test, primarily used by psychologists in clinical contexts, designed to measure overall personality dynamics rather than discrete personality traits or dimensions. The tests involve presenting subjects with a relatively unstructured task, such as completing a sentence, or describing a vague shape or picture. The assumption is that, in responding to the unstructured task, individuals project their own ideas and feelings onto the stimulus. Variations in response are held to reflect differences in personality.
The underlying principles of projective tests—the generic term was not introduced until the late 1930s—derive from psychoanalytic theorizing, particularly the idea of projection, and the principle of free association. Probably the earliest projective test was the Word Association Test, described by Francis Galton in 1879, in which the individual has to respond to each word on a list with the first that comes into mind. The paradigmatic projective test is undoubtedly the Rorschach Test, first outlined in 1921, consisting of a set of ink-blots. Other projective tests include the Thematic Apperception Test, the Object Relations Test, and various sentence completion tests.
Analysis of an individual's test responses involves psychodynamic interpretation and comparison with population norms. Although attempts have been made to produce standardized scoring systems, detractors point to poor scoring standardization, inadequately established norms, and low validity, condemning the tests as unscientific. Proponents of the tests argue that the very richness of the responses and the scope they offer for clinical interpretation and evaluation is the source of their value in assessing personality dynamics.

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proletarianization

This label is applied to the process by which sections of the middle class become absorbed into the working class. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued that capitalism would encourage a polarization in the class structure, between the ‘two great hostile camps’ of the bourgeoisie (business owners) and proletariat (working class). Intermediate groupings, such as small producers and self-employed artisans, would gradually disappear. The middle class of white-collar workers would also join one or other of the hostile camps.
Class analysts have long criticized Marx and Engels for ignoring the growing importance of the so-called new middle class of advanced capitalist societies: the expanding numbers of managers, administrators, and professionals. In reply, Marxist sociologists have maintained that the Manifesto deliberately paints an abstract picture of a pure type of capitalist system, whereas Marx's writings elsewhere acknowledge the complexities of actually existing societies. It is certainly true that in Capital, volume i (1867), for example, Marx observes that the development of joint-stock companies tends to generate a separation of the labour of management from the ownership of capital. The former is conducted by a growing army of ‘officers [managers] and NCO's [supervisors], who command during the labour process in the name of capital’.
The debate was given new impetus by Harry Braverman's claim, in Labour and Monopoly Capital (1974), that many groups of hitherto middle-class workers (notably routine clerical employees and skilled artisans) were being effectively proletarianized by having their labour dehumanized or de-skilled. According to Braverman, such a process was endemic to capitalist societies, since the imperatives of capitalist production compelled those who owned or managed industry to fragment tasks according to the principles of scientific management, in order to sustain profits and maintain control over labour. Braverman's work attracted much comment and provided the theoretical foundations for numerous neo-Marxist studies of the labour process.
Although Braverman's own data have largely been discredited, the popular perception is that debate about proletarianization remains unresolved, because participants have yet to agree about the criteria by which the process is to be measured. At least four different conceptions of proletarianization can be identified in the literature. For some commentators the argument is one about the relative size of classes. Proletarianization in this sense implies a growth in the proportion of working-class places in the overall class structure. Others have looked at social mobility data, attempting to calculate the likelihood of individuals being proletarianized by downward mobility into the working class, either from middle-class backgrounds or during the course of an occupational career. For these authors it is people, rather than places in the structure, that constitute the subjects of the process. A third criterion refers to the labour process itself. Some researchers have argued that many seemingly non-proletarian places in the class structure (such as those occupied by routine clerical workers) have often been so de-skilled, in terms of job content and the routinization of tasks, that they are indistinguishable from those occupied by the manual working class. A final criterion refers to proletarianization in its socio-political sense; that is, the extent to which certain middle-class groups within the labour-force come to identify themselves as working class or as allies of the working class, and so to share its political aspirations and culture.
One clear finding from the empirical research is that proletarianization may be present according to one criterion but absent according to another. For example, many routine clerical workers share proletarian conditions of employment (in terms of income, fringe benefits, autonomy at work, and chances of promotion), but display a typically middle-class socio-political profile (in terms of voting behaviour, propensity to join trade unions, and class self-identification). See also DEGRADATION-OF-WORK THESIS; EMBOURGEOISEMENT.

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proletariat

Karl Marx's working class under capitalism. Accorded the role of prime vehicle of revolutionary and emancipating change through its formation, ascendancy, and eventual triumph, the proletariat is today diminishing in size, political potency, and (it is sometimes claimed) internal cohesion and identity. It has even lost its headline position in Russia.
Formulated out of Marx's early writings on alienation, the proletariat represented the creation, loss, and eventual re-appropriation of the central defining feature of human essence or species being, namely labour-power (see LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE). Containing as it did both the needs whose fulfilment drove history along, as well as the powers or potential required to fulfil and generate new needs, labour-power was the means through which humanity was created. Labour so conceived abolished the distinction between humanity and nature, and subordinated the latter to its service. The enslavement of this labour-power (in the form of the productive worker under capitalism generating surplus value), and its eventual liberation after the necessary passage through the various historical epochs, was the core of the historical process. It is the continuous dynamic of the development of labour-power which generates the impetus to the growth in productive forces and their transmission through history which gives that history its coherence. If history is the history of the class struggle then it is a struggle to free this labour-power, and thus also the proletariat, which epitomizes the enslavement of this labour power and whose liberation will therefore be a universal liberation. This is the basis of the Marxist theory of historical materialism.
This humanistic conception of the proletariat is in accord with the ethical thrust of all of Marx's writings, and underpins the subsequent more structurally rigid definitions gleaned from readings of Capital. It suggests that, for Marx, class was a process of becoming, both of the proletariat to maturity, and of humanity to control of its developed capacities forged through the historical process. It was not (as it subsequently became in the so-called boundary debate (see CONTRADICTORY CLASS LOCATION)) the application of rigid formulae or criteria based upon relationships to the means of production, or productive (of surplus value) versus unproductive labour distinction, or supervisory and managerial hierarchies of control or autonomy. These exercises only succeeded in identifying an ever-diminishing category of those who were meant (in Marxist theory) to be growing in size, scope, and intensity.
There are, according to Marx, historical factors which propel the proletariat to take up its historical task. The combination of capital creates for the mass of workers a common situation and common interests. The commodity fetishism, which stands in the way of the individual's attempts to gain true control over his or her ‘social interconnectedness’, is overcome through the multi-dimensional concomitant processes associated with the intensification of the class struggle, the emergence of class consciousness, and its transfer into class action. As the proletariat emerges victorious, on the wings of the proletarian dictatorship, it not only regains political control over the state but also economic and eventually moral control over its productive life-processes.
This image of the proletariat contained in Marx can only be accepted if the premisses spelled out in his ethical writings are likewise taken on board: that is, that labour-power defines humanity, its relationship to nature, and the eventual goals of human development. However, if the proletariat is taken as a paradigm of the human condition at large, then its members continue to be with us in various forms, be it as underclass or racialized minorities, and seem likely to be so for a long time to come.

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property

Property and property rights are central to capitalist societies. Perhaps because they are largely taken for granted in this context they have received relatively little attention from sociologists. By comparison, political philosophers and economists have debated the nature of property at length, and fiercely contested its origins (see
, ‘The Concept of Property’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 1972, and , ‘Property Rights and Economic Theory’, Journal of Economic Literature, 1972
).
Possibly the most influential modern explanation of the origins of private property is John Locke's theory of natural rights, which states that property ownership rests on the individual's rights to use whatever is in the natural environment and is deemed necessary for the satisfaction of needs, and the right to own whatever one has expended labour upon (provided it is not then wasted). Locke's theory thus provides three criteria for a naturally just distribution of property: namely, need (or possibly desire), expenditure of labour (which includes creative entrepreneurship), and use (which some have interpreted as exploitation and accumulation).
Since Locke's theory held that property was that which a man had ‘mixed his labour with’, it offered a potential challenge to the early-modern status quo (although Locke himself had set out to defend this), on the grounds that it implied it was neither natural nor just for the privileged few in society to enjoy the surplus created by the labour of the many. Utilitarianism met this challenge, with the argument that private property and its laws had no origins or justification other than utility: that is, the rules of property arise out of conventions which experience has shown to be the most useful for the promotion of human happiness. For example, David Hume considered the principal rules establishing title to property to be those of present possession, first possession, long possession, accession, and succession, and argued that the justice of these rules was rooted in the history of social experience. The present system was the ‘right’ system because it had clearly evolved in response to people's needs. Since this approach offered not only an explanation but also a justification for the existing distribution of property it became central to the philosophy of classical liberalism during the nineteenth century.
The conservative reaction to this philosophy of property opposed the principles of utility with those of tradition, experience, and stewardship. Conservatives conceived of property as a partnership between the generations, epitomized by the continuity of the landed estate, of which the landowner was a steward who served (rather than owned) the property, under the obligation of maintaining allegiance to the status quo and thus preserving a stable social order.
The Scottish political economists–John Millar, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith—extended the analysis of property relations to take account of class formation. This, in turn, encouraged Karl Marx to offer the first systematic sociological account of the importance of property, stressing the links between property ownership, political domination, and ideological representations. In Marx's formulation, property is power, and the different forms of property define the ‘social conditions of existence’ upon which rises the superstructure of the state, civil society, and ideology. Somewhat later, Max Weber also argued that ‘property and lack of property are … the basic characteristics of all class situations’, although he accepted that the propertied classes were highly differentiated in the types of property they held and the meaning which they gave to its utilization.
This last observation opens up the issue which dominates contemporary sociological discussions of property. These have moved away from considering ideologies of property and the social organization of propertied strata, and concentrated attention instead on the consumption of property, notably the diverse ways in which ownership of certain types of property (for example houses, cars, and clothes) shapes social relations and social meanings, and plays an important role in the construction of social identities.
Most sociologists have been concerned with private property. However, non-capitalist forms of property ownership (including possession of symbolic property) have been extensively studied by anthropologists, and sociologists have recently extended their analyses to include state or collective ownership, and inheritance. The best short introduction to the topic is Andrew Reeve's Property (1986). For a sociological case-study of the material and symbolic significance of property see
, A Nation of Home Owners (1989
). See also BOURGEOISIE; COLLECTIVE CONSUMPTION; CONSUMPTION, SOCIOLOGY OF; CONSUMPTION SECTORS; GIFT RELATIONSHIP; KULA RING; PRIVATIZATION; PUBLIC GOOD.

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prostitution, sociological studies of

The provision of sexual favours for financial reward has probably been institutionalized in the form of prostitution in every society that has had a coinage. It has nearly always involved the prostitution of women to men, though male prostitution, especially to male clients, is not uncommon.
Kingsley Davis proposed a functional theory which saw prostitution as a safety-valve, helping maintain the respectability of marriage. Prostitution certainly flourished during the Victorian period of rigid sexual morality. But feminists have pointed out that prostitution provides no safety-valve for women, and indeed controls them by labelling those who are not chaste as whores. Victorian prostitution was connected with a double standard of morality, which was much more permissive for men than for women. Sociological studies of prostitutes show that their motivation is mainly economic and it seems likely that the number of prostitutes increases when there are fewer other job opportunities for women. International movements of prostitutes are nearly always from poor countries to richer ones. There are few studies of clients, though a Norwegian study found that while most of them are ‘Mr Average’, there are a number of single men who have difficulties relating to women who go to prostitutes quite frequently.
In Britain prostitution itself is legal, but soliciting in public, ‘kerb-crawling’, brothel-keeping, procuring, and living on the ‘immoral earnings’ of a prostitute are all illegal. Here, the commonest ways of working are as a street-walker, as an individual call-girl who advertises her telephone number, or in association with apparently legal work as a club hostess, escort, or masseuse. In some countries prostitution is regulated by the state, with prostitutes being required to register (and often to have regular medical tests), or with prostitution confined to designated red light districts or registered brothels.
See
, Prostitution (1991
).

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protestant ethic, protestant ethic thesis

The set of values embodied in early Protestantism, which has controversially been linked to the development of modern capitalism, most famously in Max Weber's classic essays on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).
Initially this relationship appears paradoxical, since protestant beliefs did not embrace the idea of economic gain for its own sake, yet clearly this is an essential (and novel) component of capitalism. Weber's argument is that, whilst capitalism had existed elsewhere in elementary form, it had not developed on anything like the scale seen in modern Europe. Its emergence here was a result of the relatively wide endorsement of the idea of accumulating capital as a duty or end in itself. This, in itself, is an irrational attitude: there is no rational reason why we should choose work against either leisure or consumption. For Weber, religion provides the key to understanding this peculiarly modern orientation to everyday life, since religion entails a choice of ultimate values which cannot be justified on rational grounds. Once we have chosen such a value, however, we can pursue it by rational means: it makes sense to talk of rational and irrational ways of realizing an ultimate value. (For example, if I were to choose communism as an ultimate value, it would be irrational of me to join a conservative political party.) Weber's argument is that the rational pursuit of the ultimate values of the ascetic Protestantism characteristic of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe led people to engage in disciplined work; and that disciplined and rational organization of work as a duty is the characteristic feature of modern capitalism—its unique ethos or spirit.
The crucial link to Protestantism comes through the latter's notion of the calling of the faithful to fulfil their duty to God in the methodical conduct of their everyday lives. This theme is common to the beliefs of the Calvinist and neo-Calvinist churches of the Reformation. Predestination is also an important belief, but since humans cannot know who is saved (elect) and who is damned, this creates a deep inner loneliness in the believer. In order therefore to create assurance of salvation, which is itself a sure sign (or proof) of election, diligence in one's calling (hard work, systematic use of time, and a strict asceticism with respect to worldly pleasures and goods) is highly recommended—so-called ‘this-worldly asceticism’. In general terms, however, the most important contribution of Protestantism to capitalism was the spirit of rationalization that it encouraged. The relationship between the two is deemed by Weber to be one of elective affinity.
This interpretation of the origins of Western capitalism provoked a huge response and even today continues to generate controversy. It was not intended, as is sometimes claimed, to be an alternative to Marxist accounts which offer explanations based on the economy. Weber argued against any simple, one-sided, or reductionist explanation of the rise of capitalist society. Protestantism did not cause modern capitalism, but it was one necessary pre-condition of its appearance. Much of the enormous secondary literature is reviewed in Gordon Marshall's In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism (1982), although the most sophisticated recent treatment is
's magisterial essay on ‘Weber's Last Theory of Capitalism’, in his Weberian Sociological Theory (1986)
. Despite a range of objections on empirical and theoretical grounds, particularly concerning lack of clarity in the argument, the thesis remains influential.

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Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph

(1809–65)
An autodidactic French brewer, early socialist thinker, and militant, who popularized the sayings ‘God is evil’ and ‘property is theft’. He is widely regarded as the founder of political anarchism, although his own followers applied the term ‘mutualism’ to their beliefs, emphasizing the need for justice as the means of ending conflict in society. Proudhon advocated production co-operatives and mutual interest-free banking as the basis for reorganizing society. His doctrine was located between extreme individualistic anarchism and those who envisage an anarchist communism. He emphasized the violent passions of individuals and the need for the family to control these. His Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of Poverty (1846) provoked a major rejoinder from Karl Marx.

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psephology

The study of elections, voting patterns, and electoral behaviour, and the forecasting of election results. This became a specialist field of political sociology with the spread of regular opinion polls on voting intentions, major post-election interview surveys, access to population census statistics for small areas, and sophisticated data analysis and modelling packages.

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psyche

See PSYCHOANALYSIS.

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psychiatry

A medical speciality, whose boundaries have always been contested, which focuses on the care and treatment of mental disorders. It developed as a professional grouping in the first half of the nineteenth century: the term was coined in Germany in 1808 and was more widely used in Europe and America from the 1840s. Medical interest and specialization in insanity was not new. However, the establishment of lunatic hospitals and asylums (first voluntary then public) from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, provided a solid foundation for the emergence of psychiatry as a profession. The asylum offered new opportunities for observation, treatment, and training, and new powers like certification that facilitated professionalization. Associations of asylum doctors were founded in Britain in 1841, the United States in 1844, and France in 1847; the first journals were published in Britain in 1854, the United States in 1844, France in 1843, and somewhat earlier in Germany.
In the 1820s to 1840s, medical interest in lunacy and therapeutic optimism were both high. Practitioners were often eclectic, many supporting moral treatment, which emphasized the therapeutic value of an ordered environment in building up inmates' capacities for self-control and self-esteem. However, higher-status practitioners were soon deterred from asylum work by the residency requirements in larger institutions, which restricted the opportunities for private practice, and by the predominance of pauper patients. Moreover, as the asylums grew and were increasingly filled with inmates having chronic and intractable problems, the medical role became primarily custodial rather than therapeutic. Increasing medical emphasis on the natural sciences was largely reflected in routine autopsies in the effort to identify brain pathology.
Two major changes occurred in the first half of the twentieth century. First, psychiatric work outside the asylums expanded, much of it on a private basis for more affluent patients, many with problems that Sigmund Freud identified as psychoneurotic. His influence on office psychiatry was considerable, especially in the United States, where private practice flourished. Second, there were major efforts to transform asylums into proper hospitals, and in the 1930s physical treatments such as electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) and psychosurgery (to be followed in the 1950s by new drug therapies) were developed, encouraging a new therapeutic optimism.
Both developments underpinned the acceptance of a policy of community care in the 1950s, initially as a supplement to asylum care, then as an alternative—the one representing a diversification of the locus of care and an increased role for psychiatry across a wider spectrum of conditions, the other a break with old pro-institutional and custodial models of care, a change facilitated by the introduction of voluntary admission in Britain in 1930 and the resulting decline in compulsory detention.
The implications for psychiatry of the subsequent run-down of mental hospitals and the shift to work in the community cannot yet be fully assessed. The loss of the old empire of the mental hospital has undoubtedly reduced psychiatrists' power, as has (to some extent) the development of multi-disciplinary teams. The power of psychiatrists now resides largely in their rights over prescribing and their expertise in the natural sciences. However, developments in biological psychiatry and the neurosciences could cut back the domain of illnesses deemed mental, to the advantage of neurologists and at the expense of psychiatry.

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psychoanalysis

A psychological theory and a method of treatment of psychological disorders, developed initially by Sigmund Freud, and extended in a variety of ways by later psychoanalysts. James A. C. Brown's Freud and the Post-Freudians (1964) is still a good introduction to the various schools.
The core of psychoanalysis is the theory of the unconscious and the structural model of the psyche as consisting of three interrelated systems of id, ego, and superego. The unconscious comprises ideas (and some would argue feelings) that are unacceptable, either because they are experienced as internally threatening to the existence of the individual, or because they are experienced as threatening to society. These ideas might be sexual in origin (Freud), aggressive and destructive (Melanie Klein), or connected with early experiences of fear and helplessness (D. W. Winnicott). The id is seen as the source of drives demanding immediate satisfaction, and the superego as internalized parental and social authority, the work of the ego being to mediate the resultant conflicting demands.
Freud's account of dreams provides the most elaborate analysis of the workings of the unconscious. He begins by stating that all dreams are wish fulfilments: they provide a fantasy satisfaction of desires that have been repressed into the unconscious. The unconscious itself is timeless and does not mature: we remain, at this level, infantile throughout our lives, demanding immediate satisfaction. Neither is it subject to the laws of logic, desiring contradictory things at the same time, a feature of human life often recognized when people point out that love and hatred of the same person are closely connected. When we sleep the repression of our unconscious desires is relaxed. However, they do not appear directly in our dreams, but are censored through processes that Freud refers to as dream work, of which there are four types: condensation, or the merging of several thoughts into one dream symbol (for example, a policeman in a dream might stand for a range of authority figures in life); displacement, in which a desire is displaced onto an object in some way connected with the original, perhaps by chance or similarity (thus, in the hackneyed example, we might dream of sexual intercourse as a train going through a tunnel); symbolization, or the turning of ideas into pictures (for example, dreaming of setting a table, but laying knives and forks without handles might indicate a feeling of being unable to handle a situation); and, finally, secondary revision, the rational gloss we put on a dream, turning it into a manageable story as we remember it. Freud thought that dream analysis should concentrate on symbols, rather than the story, which is merely a disguise.
The analysis of dreams leads to the central feature of psychoanalytic treatment—free association. The patient is asked to talk about whatever comes into his or her head in connection with the symbol, and from this a pattern of meaning emerges which allegedly takes us back to the original unconscious thoughts (see
's The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900
).
Over recent years these ideas have been taken up in particular by structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers in various disciplines: as a theory of literary criticism, for example, when a text is read as a dream; as a theory of the production of meaning; and as providing a so-called decentred theory of the subject. The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser incorporated the idea of a ‘symptomatic reading’ into his epistemology as a way of identifying the underlying structure (or problematic) of a theory.
Freud's theory of sexual development is probably the most widely known aspect of psychoanalysis. The child is seen as developing initially through oral, anal, and phallic stages, where the libido is expressed and satisfied at different points of contact between the body and the outside world—the mouth, anus, and genitals. Individuals can become arrested at or regress to any of these levels. However progress through them is the same for both sexes. An essential element of Freud's argument is that we begin life as bisexual, if not polymorphously perverse, and that heterosexuality is an often tenuous achievement, involving the subordination (repression or sublimation) of homosexual and other desires. This is achieved largely but not entirely unconsciously through the Oedipal stage of development. Both sexes take the mother as the first love-object. In the case of the little boy, sexual feelings towards his mother cannot be physically realized, and are experienced by him as a challenge to the father. This puts him in danger because of the father's superior strength and power. The danger is experienced as a threat of castration, and in the face of this threat combined with the promise of a woman of his own when he reaches puberty, the boy relinquishes his desire for his mother. The little girl has to make a more dramatic change from mother to father as the primary love-object. According to Freud, she experiences herself as already castrated, leading to early identification with her mother (see Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905).
This theory has played a prominent role in the development of modern feminism. For many it established Freud as irredeemably in favour of patriarchy; for others it provides a basis for an analysis of patriarchy. Juliet Mitchell, a British feminist, Marxist, and psychoanalyst, was the first modern feminist to defend Sigmund Freud, arguing that psychoanalysis offers a description and analysis of patriarchy, rather than a prescription for male domination (see Psychoanalysis and Feminism, 1976).
Freud's analysis of the development of the sexual object choice involves an understanding of the process by which the infant first of all seeks satisfaction through its own body (primary narcissism) and then through identifying with and introjecting the mother as part of its own psyche. Whereas classical psychoanalysis and Freud concentrated on the Oedipal stage, the development of psychoanalytic theory in Melanie Klein's work and British psychoanalysis in general focused on very early relationships with the mother, so that some feminists have tried to explain the development of gender differences in terms of the distinctive relationships between mothers and their young male and female children.
Psychoanalytic theory is not a monolithic block, but has developed through different national schools, and these schools tend to relate to social theory in different ways. The principal link between British psychoanalysis and social theory has been via feminist accounts of mothering. French psychoanalysis, through Lacan, has been associated with post-structuralism in general and post-structuralist feminism in particular. American ego psychology was incorporated by Talcott Parsons as a general theory of socialization. See also BOWLBY, JOHN; CRITICAL THEORY; JUNG, CARL GUSTAV.

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psychohistory

The psychoanalytic study of historical figures, or of the Weltanschauung of a particular historical period, based on the attempt to relate Sigmund Freud's theory of psychological development to prevailing social conditions and institutions; or, in the case of specific individuals, to significant life-events. A noted practitioner is the American psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, whose Childhood and Society (1950) and Life History and the Historical Moment (1975) are typical of the genre. Max Weber's life and work were analysed in this way by Arthur Mitzman in The Iron Cage (1969).

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psychology

Variously defined as the science of behaviour or the science of mind, psychology emerged as a distinct discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the work of researchers such as Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) who founded the first experimental laboratory of psychology in Leipzig. Much of the focus of the discipline has been on identifying the general mechanisms involved in processes such as perception, learning, motivation, and memory, although there has been some attention to individual differences, especially in relation to intelligence and personality.
Academic psychology has tended to be strongly positivist in orientation and the experimental method has been widely used—characteristics reflected in the strong support for behaviourism which became the dominant approach in Anglo-American psychology from early in the twentieth century through to the 1960s. The major focus of behaviourism was on learning and the approach was associated with a strong emphasis on environment and a rejection of the importance of innate factors in the development of human behaviour. Since the 1960s there has been a shift towards more cognitive approaches and acceptance of some innate capacities, with considerable attention paid to the way in which information is handled and processed. There has also been a renewed interest in neuropsychology. The experimental, positivist orientation remains, as does the long-standing hostility to psychoanalysis and other psycho-dynamic psychologies, although some psychologists and some departments are more eclectic than others. Certainly, both humanist and feminist psychology now usually find a place within the terrain of academic psychology.
As with other disciplines the delineation of fields changes over time. The older terrains of abnormal psychology or psychopathology have now been transformed and broadened into the field of health psychology. An important and long-standing area that has developed since the first decade of this century is that of social psychology. William McDougall published his Introduction to Social Psychology in 1908, though its terrain is ill-defined. Within the framework of psychology, social psychology focuses especially on the study of face-to-face social interaction, making considerable use of experimental studies of small groups. There is, however, a more sociological social psychology, particularly influenced by symbolic interactionism, and employing methods such as participant observation.
There is a large selection of introductory psychology texts from which to choose.
, A Survey of Social Psychology (3rd edn., 1986)
and
, Social Psychology (1986)
are both fairly comprehensive in their coverage.

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psychometrics

The measurement, representation, and analysis of psychological variables, primarily using mathematics, statistics, and computing. Of special relevance to sociology are the topics of the measurement of intelligence, psychophysics (quantification and interrelation of physical variables and their subjective counterparts), scaling methods, and artificial intelligence models.

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psychopath

The psychiatric label for individuals, commonly young males, who behave in disruptive, anti-social ways, showing little guilt or strong emotional ties. By way of explaining the behaviour, psychoanalysts point to a failure of superego development, learning theorists to an inability to learn from experience. Whether psychopathy is a mental disorder is contested. Barbara Wootton asserted the impossibility of differentiating such a behaviourally delineated condition from delinquency.

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psychosis

A severe mental illness often contrasted with neurosis. Psychosis is characterized by disordered thought, feeling or perception, as in delusions or hallucinations, and is said to involve loss of contact with reality. Organic psychoses have known bodily causes, functional psychoses do not, although they are often assumed. The two major psychoses are schizophrenia and manic depression.

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psychosomatic illness

Influenced by psycho-dynamic thinking, the term psychosomatic became widespread from the 1930s onwards, initially indicating a general approach to illness emphasizing a mind/body interaction. The concept usually denotes certain bodily illness, such as ulcers, with presumed psychological causes. However, attention to psychosocial stressors across the illness spectrum suggests the difficulty of maintaining any strict differentiation between the psychosomatic and the physical. See also AUTONOMY; STRESS.

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psychotherapy

An imprecise term that may embrace a wide variety of psychological methods of treatment, group or individual, provided by specialist therapists for the treatment of mental and behavioural problems (usually non-psychotic). Psychotherapy may include directive therapies involving suggestion, such as hypnosis, as well as non-directive, behavioural, and psycho-dynamic therapies. Narrowly defined, it denotes psychoanalytic therapies, excluding full psychoanalysis.

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psy-complex

The set of professions dealing with the psyche: psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychiatric nursing, and psychiatric social work. The term derives from the work of Michel Foucault and French post-structuralists such as Jacques Donzelot and Robert Castel, who analysed the role of the social and ‘psy’ professions in regulating family life, sexuality, mind, and rationality.

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public administration

The bureaucratic systems and their procedures which serve the government and implement its policies. Hence also the field of study which describes and analyses policy development and policy implementation processes.

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public good, collective good

Public goods were defined initially by
(‘The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure’, Review of Economics and Statistics, 1954)
as those where person A's consumption of the good did not interfere with person B's consumption. Ezra J. Mishan (Introduction to Normative Economics, 1981) prefers to designate these as ‘collective goods’.
Both terms refer to collectively funded services which either cannot be provided by the market or which particular governments choose to supply from public funds. Some goods and services cannot be priced accurately and hence cannot be efficiently supplied by private industry. ‘Non-excludability’ refers to services which cannot be withheld from any individual, even if they refuse to pay for it—such as street-lighting. ‘Impossibility of rejection’ means people cannot abstain from consumption, even if they wish to do so—such as the ‘protection’ offered by wars and national defence, even to pacifists. ‘Non-rivalness in consumption’ means a service supplied to one person is automatically supplied to others at no extra cost—as illustrated by a radio station, whose transmission costs are not determined by the number of listeners. The arguments for collective provision are often extended to other services, such as education, which are consumed by individuals as well as benefiting the economy and society as a whole.
In societies with exceptional natural resources that are exploited by the state, such as oil-rich countries, public goods are funded by the revenues from state enterprises and equivalent income. In most societies, public goods are funded from direct and indirect taxation, with more or less debate over how the funding burden should be distributed in relation to levels of use or benefit, and over which services should be funded as a public good and which purchased privately on the market. Services often treated as public goods, not always exclusively, include: national defence; public security, education, health services, fire and other emergency services, telecommunications networks, road, rail, and air networks and transport services, the preservation of national monuments, water supply, national radio and television services. Arguments offered in favour of public ownership of such services include economies of scale, national interest, the case for worker participation in enterprises, and the indirect social benefits (externalities) which would be ignored by private producers. Arguments against include the inefficiencies resulting from lack of competition, and unlimited demand generated by the absence of any pricing of services consumed. Many public goods cannot be valued easily—for example by carrying out cost-benefit analyses on their provision.
The concept of public goods has been considerably extended since Samuelson's formulation and a number of competing typologies are now available. For example, some writers prefer to distinguish public goods and welfare goods, the latter being those goods provided by a public agency to consumers (the public) free or at a cost below production cost. The objective of providing these is to redistribute goods in order to increase the total welfare of society.
Similarly, Richard Cornes and Todd Sandler (The Theory of Externalities, Public Goods and Club Goods, 1986) distinguish between public and private goods according to whether consumers are excludable (particular persons can be excluded from the benefits) or non-excludable (particular persons cannot be excluded from the benefits), and whether there is rivalry or non-rivalry in the consumption of the benefits (benefits are divisible or indivisible). By cross-classifying these two dimensions of property rights, one can then distinguish between private goods (excludable, having rivalry in consumption, as with most consumer goods available in the market); public goods (non-excludable, non-rivalry in consumption, such as the protection given to all Americans, whether they pay for it or not, by American nuclear weapons); club goods, or impure public goods, which are excludable but only partly (initially) non-rival in consumption (as in an exclusive golf-club, where an exclusion criterion acts like a boundary, but once you are in the club its resources are a pure public good, unless membership exceeds carrying capacity, such that crowding leads to either deterioration of the good or competition for access to it); and, finally, positional goods, or impure private goods, with rivalry in benefits and where consumers are at least partly non-excludable (as where goods are initially pure private goods, but during their consumption something happens to change their character, for example ‘bandwaggon effects’ among consumers lead even those who do not intend to consume the good to share in some of the benefits or losses, through conspicuous consumption or conspicuous waste).
These sorts of distinctions have had a significant impact on economic theory, and are central to game theory and theories of rational action; however, sociologists have been, on the whole, rather slow to explore their significance (for example for theories of (collective action). See also EXTERNALITY; FREE RIDER.

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public interest

The indivisible collective interests of a community or society as judged by the commentator. The provision of public goods is argued to be in the public interest—although practice varies on how wide the net is cast. See also PUBLIC GOOD.

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public opinion

An ill-defined concept, used in many ways, but perhaps most generally it refers to the approval or disapproval of publicly observable positions and behaviour, as expressed by a defined section of a society, and (usually) measured through opinion polls. Consequently, it is often taken to be synonymous with ‘what the polls report’—about morality, favoured consumer brands, politics, or whatever. The two groups most commonly surveyed under this label are adults of working age (variously defined as people aged 16, 18, or 20 to 60 or 65 years), and all adults over the age of compulsory education, including the elderly and retired (typically defined as people aged 16 or 18 and over).

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public sphere versus private sphere distinction

The public versus private distinction in Greek philosophy was based on a public world of politics and a private world of family and economic relations. In modern sociology, the distinction is normally used in reference to a separation of home and employment, a juxtaposition which has been seen as the basis for a traditional gendered division of labour.

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Public Use Sample (PUS)

An anonymous sample of records from the decennial population census. In the United States, these have been made available to researchers from the 1960 Census onwards, at the 1 per cent and 0.1 per cent levels. Following practice in the United States, similar data-tapes have been released in Canada, and—since 1991—in Britain (where they are termed SAR, or Samples of Anonymised Records).

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purdah

An Urdu word meaning ‘curtain’ or ‘screen’ and referring to a system of sex-role differentiation marked by strong physical and social segregation. Purdah is maintained by the segregation of physical space within the household and by the use of articles of clothing such as the veil. It is largely associated with Islamic religion and culture but immensely variable in the form and degree of observance amongst Islamic peoples.

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Q

qualitative comparative analysis (QCA)

The name given by Charles Ragin (The Comparative Method, 1987) to his proposed technique for solving the problems that are caused for comparative macrosociologists by the fact that they must often make causal inferences on the basis of only a small number of cases. The technique is based on the binary logic of Boolean algebra, and attempts to maximize the number of comparisons that can be made across the cases under investigation, in terms of the presence or absence of characteristics (variables) of analytical interest. Thus, for example, 18 cases (say, nation-states) involving 7 independent variables (presence or absence of economic recession, of an external threat to state security, and so on) might be examined in order to identify the causal factors involved in the emergence of revolutions, in this example yielding no fewer than 128 (2^7) different combinations of causal conditions. Ragin claims that the technique combines the strengths of case-oriented (qualitative) and variable-oriented (quantitative) approaches to comparative sociology. Critics argue that it allows only for logical rather than statistical representativeness; makes no allowance for missing variables or error in the data; that not all variables of interest have only two values; and that the method is therefore highly sensitive to the way in which each case must be coded in a binary fashion. For example, the choice between ‘presence of economic recession versus absence of economic recession’ makes no allowance for intermediate conditions, or for the length and severity of recession itself. These coding problems are heightened where (as is often the case) the researcher is dealing with continuous variables—such as income and the degree of inequality in its distribution—which can obviously be collapsed in different ways.

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qualitative versus quantitative debate

A methodological issue in sociology with arguments for and against a fundamental distinction between qualitative and quantitative studies. The debate arises from the distinction drawn between sociologies arising from different epistemological positions. Quantitative methodology, generally associated with positivist epistemology, is usually regarded as referring to the collection and analysis of numerical data. Qualitative methodology, generally associated with interpretative epistemology, tends to be used to refer to forms of data collection and analysis which rely on understanding, with an emphasis on meanings. The debate became prominent in the 1970s and arose through a backlash against the priority attached to scientific or positivist methodology in sociological textbooks. In these works, sections on qualitative or ‘soft’ techniques—if they were included at all—usually referred to them as being of interest only in respect of providing intuitions or hunches for the formulation of hypotheses, which could then be tested more rigorously using quantitative or ‘hard’ data. Growing interest in phenomenological approaches in the 1970s led to scepticism about the relevance of the natural scientific model of research for the social sciences.
An early attempt at reconciliation was made by
(in the journal Sociology, 1981)
, who claimed that all sociological research could be subsumed within the same broad framework of ‘socio-logic’, but since then the debate has been conducted primarily between those who believe that the epistemologies underpinning the different types of a data are so divergent that any attempt at combination or reconciliation is impossible, and those who have attempted to devise frameworks of analysis incorporating both types of data. An example of the latter is Norman Denzin's strategy of triangulation. Practising researchers have recently suggested that the distinction between the two types of data is considerably more blurred than is suggested in the theoretical debate. It has also been pointed out that different methodologies are not necessarily tied to particular epistemological positions, and that there are an increasing number of techniques of analysis that defy classification into a simplistic dualist typology.
The debate is paralleled in part—but only in part—by the distinction between macrosociology and microsociology. Some researchers adopt the position of there being a substantive difference between observing and analysing regularities and associations at the macro-level of social structures, institutions, and aggregate data, and observing or analysing interactions and causal processes at the micro-level of human actors. The former tends towards quantitative analysis while the latter encourages interpretive understanding.
In an important recent intervention, Gary King et al. (Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research, 1994) have restated at length and in detail the observation made by Mann, pointing out that although there are various styles of social-scientific research there is only one logic of scientific inference. The logic of good quantitative and good qualitative research designs does not therefore differ.

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Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs)

A measure, developed by health economists, which incorporates an assessment of quality of life into life-expectancies. The aim is to facilitate resource allocation using cost-benefit analysis, by providing a single measure of the value of any medical intervention. However, quality is narrowly measured, usually in terms of physical mobility and distress; consequently, evaluations of intervention are equally limited.

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quality of life

The idea of (improving) quality of life is central to many community programmes, to public policy, to development initiatives, and to much social legislation. However the concept itself is controversial.
The most commonly used indicators are straightforwardly economic—such as per capita GNP—but increasingly even economists recognize that these are crude measures of a citizen' quality of life. An alternative ‘capability approach’ suggests that the quality of life each person leads corresponds to the freedom that he or she has to live one kind of life rather than another. This is reflected in the combination of doings and beings (‘functionings’) that are possible, ranging from elementary matters such as being properly nourished and healthy, through to much more complex functionings such as having self-respect, preserving human dignity, and taking part in the life of the wider community. This approach suggests that an adequate measure of quality of life must be plural and should recognize that distinct components of well-being are irreducible to each other.
The Level of Living Surveys set up by the Swedish government to measure the welfare of individuals, and conducted periodically since 1968, use a wide variety of indicators. These measure (among other things) health and access to health care (ability to walk 100 metres, various symptoms of illness); employment and working conditions (unemployment experiences, physical demands of work); education and skills (years of education, qualifications obtained); housing (amenities, and number of persons per room); security of life and property (exposure to violence and thefts); and recreation and culture (vacations, access to leisure facilities)— as well as the more obvious economic resources (income, wealth, property, and so on).
Debates about the quality of life are not unlike discussions of poverty and deprivation; for example, the same issues of cultural relativism are raised, and similar measurement problems arise. Should measurement be related to the needs or resources of individuals? Which indicators should be used and how can these be summarized to give an overall picture of quality of life? (How do we compare a rich man who suffers from an untreatable illness which interferes with his enjoyment of life and a poor woman who keeps perfect health and enjoys life?) For a useful and wide-ranging discussion of the concept and the many methodological issues it raises see
, The Quality of Life (1993
).

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quasi-religion

See PARA-RELIGION.

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questionnaire

A document containing all the questions, closed and open-ended, for a survey. Normally, a separate questionnaire is used for each respondent to a survey, providing enough space for answers to be recorded, and subsequently coded for computer-based analysis of all replies to each question. Questionnaires range from the postcard, with a few questions to be filled in by respondents, to long documents to be filled in by trained interviewers. Good questionnaires require a great deal of care and effort, to ensure that the questions are clear and easy to answer, to exclude leading questions unless by conscious design, to prompt and probe respondents' recollections of events that may not always be very recent, and to shape the interview overall so that it is a pleasant and interesting experience for respondents. Special techniques have been developed for questions on sensitive topics, interviewing on life-cycle events and work histories, questions on attitudes, values, and preferences. Questionnaires must also be structured to ensure that people are correctly filtered into or past particular sections—for example, someone who has not been in employment for many years should not be asked questions about their work, and so on. Questionnaires help to standardize interviews, increasing the consistency of enquiry and response, but they cannot completely eliminate interviewer bias.
There is a large and specialized literature on questionnaire design. Experimental testing has shown that (among other things) question wording, the order in which items are presented, the use of intensifiers, and the number and distribution of response categories can all affect the distribution of answers produced by questionnaires. It is well established, for example, that one elicits a different pattern of responses to a question about class identification by asking people to choose between ‘upper class, middle class, and working class’, on the one hand, and ‘upper class, middle class, or lower class’, on the other. (Fewer people are willing to describe themselves as ‘lower class’ than ‘working class’.) Similarly, studies have shown that people respond differently to questions which use intensifiers (‘do you feel really unsafe … ?’, ‘have you been particularly dissatisfied … ?’), as compared to the same questions formulated without intensification.
The distribution of response categories that is offered to respondents may also affect the distribution of responses. Some studies suggest that when informants are offered alternatives in numerical form (‘How many hours each week do you watch television—(a) not at all (b) 1 to 3 hours (c) 4 to 6 hours (d) 7 to 9 hours (e) 10 or more hours?’), they think they are being offered a choice that reflects population norms, and may therefore be influenced to avoid the (apparently extreme) end-categories. Someone who watched 15 hours of television each week might feel guilty about appearing to be an outliner, and so choose the ‘7 to 9 hours’ response category instead. However, if the above scale was continued in like fashion and in such a way as to place ‘13 to 15 hours’ in the middle of the range of response options offered, a more honest answer would be elicited. Conversely however, and no less problematically for the researcher, it is also clear that non-numerical and vague quantifiers (Do you watch television ‘hardly ever’, ‘not much’, ‘regularly’, ‘quite a lot’?) mean different things to different people. Ten hours each week may suggest ‘regular’ watching to one respondent but ‘not much’ to another.
These and many of the other design factors that should be borne in mind when constructing a questionnaire are discussed in
, Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys: Experiments on Question Form, Wording, and Content (1996)
. See also CLOSED RESPONSE; OPEN RESPONSE.

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Quételet, Lambert Adolphe Jacques

(1796–1874)
A Belgian statistician, author of On Man and the Development of Human Facilities, An Essay on Social Physics (1835), who applied the mathematics of probability to social phenomena and demonstrated the importance of statistics to social science. Quételet argued that, in the case of social phenomena, the distribution usually follows a normal curve—a conclusion reached by (among other things) observing the height of soldiers in a regiment. However, his work was for a long time ignored by social scientists, and it was not until the early twentieth century that his writings were rediscovered.

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quintiles

The values observed at each of the four partition points when a frequency distribution is divided into fifths.

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quota sample

A cheaper alternative to random sampling commonly used in opinion polls, due to their narrow focus on political and other attitudes, and their high frequency—giving, in effect, constant replication. Instead of interviewers being issued with a fixed list of randomly selected addresses, they are instructed to achieve interviews with fixed numbers of people having specified characteristics, chosen to be representative of the population of interest. Most commonly interview quotas are set with only three variables: age, sex, and socio-economic status (social class). This works adequately for opinion polls, but there is little reason to expect that all other important characteristics are representative of the population when just two or three characteristics are representative, as this still leaves the interviewer considerable freedom of choice in his or her selection of respondents.

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QWL (Quality of Work Life) Movement

Initially a loosely organized network of a few dozen academics in the early 1970s, the QWL Movement had grown by the 1980s into an international grouping of trade union officials, personnel managers, and social scientists generally. Its central thesis was that work-tasks should be redesigned to generate worker satisfaction and harmony in the workplace. The movement therefore drew on intellectual currents that favoured such things as industrial democracy, worker participation in job design, and autonomous work-groups which operated without regular supervision. Some commentators view the QWL phenomenon as merely an updated version of the human relations approach. Sceptics have also argued that it amounted to little more than (yet another) managerial ploy for demonstrating that management was progressive. See also Organizational Design Movement.

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R

race

See RACE, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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race, sociology of

The placing of the term ‘race’ in inverted commas is now seen by some sociologists as a useful way of indicating that this manner of categorizing individuals and population groups is not based on any biologically valid distinctions between the genetic make-up of differently identified ‘races’. Racial categorization is frequently (though not always) based on phenotypical differences; that is, differences of facial characteristics, skin colour, and so forth. But these do not correlate with genotypical differences (differences in genetic makeup). Nor, reputable scientific opinion now agrees, are there innate differences of personality, intelligence, and so forth, between populations categorized on either of these bases. The sociology of race is largely concerned with examining the causes and consequences of the socially constructed division of social groups according to their so-called race, regardless of whether this is legitimated by reference to any of the above factors, or none of them (as, for example, in the case of anti-semitism).
However, a feature of this definition of race as a social construct is that it downplays the extent to which sectors of the population may actually form a discrete ethnic group; that is, share certain characteristics on the basis of common historical origin, close-knit patterns of social interaction, and a sense of common identity. Developments such as the Black Power movement in America in the 1960s, and the growth of ethnic minority cultural and political movements (especially among the young) have stimulated sociological research on the nature and forms of ethnicity. Again, like much of the rest of the sociology of race, this is a highly controversial field of study. Some sociologists argue that such studies, particularly when they involve research into what may somewhat ethnocentrically be defined as deviant subcultures, can confirm or reinforce racist attitudes and racial discrimination by the majority population. A related danger is that of the indiscriminate labelling or stereotyping of a racially defined minority as an ethnic minority (that is one which has a common culture and life-style) when this is not the case. There has also been a tendency, when ethnic minorities are studied in isolation from the wider society, to view their distinctive life-styles as a simple legacy of their past history, failing to recognize the ways in which these are shaped and changed by their current location in racially divided societies. In general, such research exaggerates the extent to which minorities are located in relatively enclosed ethnically defined social structures, separate from those of the majority society.
The location of racially defined groups in the stratification system of the wider society is a much-debated issue. Its salience partly reflects the historical circumstances in which this branch of sociology has developed: the legacy of slavery and continuing immigration of non-White minorities in the United States, the history of colonialism, and the more recent immigration of minorities from the Third World in Europe. There are several competing approaches (for an overview see
, Racism, 1989
).
The functionalist theories, largely developed in the United States from around the time of the First World War by Robert Park and others, assume an eventual assimilation of racially defined minorities into the stratification system of the majority host society and the restoration of social equilibrium which has been disturbed by their arrival. Racial prejudice and discrimination is a temporary phenomenon occurring in this difficult period of readjustment. Emphasis is here placed on the need for minorities to abandon their imported values and life-styles and accept those which it is assumed characterize the host society. This theory has been heavily criticized for its ethnocentric assumption that assimilation is (or ought to be) the outcome of host-immigrant encounters; for ignoring the possibility that continued conflict or some form of racial pluralism might occur; and for its underestimation of the empirically observable extent and persistence of racial prejudice and discrimination.
A more sophisticated approach, illustrated most clearly in the work of John Rex, builds upon Weberian premisses. What Rex call ‘race relations situations’ involve a particular type of intergroup conflict and result in racially categorized groups being distinctively located in the overall system of social stratification. In empirical work in the United Kingdom, Rex employs a Weberian concept of class to analyse differences in Black and White life-chances, and concludes that ‘race’ and racial discrimination result in Blacks being located at the bottom of and outside the main White class structure. In so far as this is creating distinctive forms of consciousness and political action then a Black underclass is in the process of formation.
Early Marxist theories (notably,
, Class, Caste and Race, 1948
) proposed a far simpler connection between race and class, seeing racism as a ruling-class ideology which developed under capitalism in order to divide—and hence help control—Black and White workers who shared a common and fundamental class identity. This argument has been heavily criticized as historically inaccurate and irredeemably functionalist—explaining the origins of racism by means of the functions which it has sometimes served under capitalism. A considerable range of neo-Marxist and post-Marxist approaches (between which controversy often rages) have subsequently been developed. These seek to provide a less deterministic account of the relations between race, class, and capitalism. For example,
(Racism and Migrant Labour, 1982)
analyses the construction of so-called ‘racialized class fractions’ in advanced capitalist societies.
Sometimes rather separated from these theoretical debates (though also generated by and contributing to them) there are a wide range of empirically grounded sociological inquiries—by far the best of which are by American sociologists. These include studies of racial belief systems; the extent and nature of racial discrimination and disadvantage; the politics of ‘race’ and the impact of state policies on racialized minorities; and the distribution, concentration, and segregation of minority populations—especially in housing- and labour-markets. Examples here might include Lee Rainwater's excellent (though controversial) study of Black families in a federal housing project (Behind Ghetto Walls, 1970); Howard Schuman et al.'s survey of Racial Attitudes in America (1985); and Black Men, White Cities (1973), Ira Katznelson's comparative study of the political responses to Black migration to the Northern cities of the United States and in the United Kingdom. The best summary of the evidence for Britain is David Mason's Race and Ethnicity in Modern Britain (1995).

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racialism, racism

Racialism is the unequal treatment of a population group purely because of its possession of physical or other characteristics socially defined as denoting a particular race (see RACE, SOCIOLOGY OF). Racism is the deterministic belief-system which sustains racialism, linking these characteristics with negatively valuated social, psychological, or physical traits. For an informative comparative study of racism in the United States and the Netherlands see
, Understanding Everyday Racism (1991
).

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racialization

The social processes by which a population group is categorized as a race.

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racism, institutionalized

See INSTITUTIONALIZED DISCRIMINATION.

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Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald

(1881–1955)
Radcliffe-Brown was one of the most influential of the founding figures of social anthropology, through his teaching in universities in England, North America, South Africa, and Australia. He was less noted for his field studies than for his teaching, yet he was the first to have an anthropological training as an undergraduate at Cambridge, and the first to hold a Chair in Social Anthropology at Cape Town, Sydney, Oxford, and Chicago.
In his theoretical approach Radcliffe-Brown owed much to Émile Durkheim, stressing the importance of structure in society, and of the functions of different institutions. This has led to criticisms of his approach as too rigid and mechanistic. However, he was clearly an excellent teacher, his influence being represented more by the range of students he influenced than by his (relatively small) published output. He preferred to publish definitive studies of what he called ‘comparative sociology’ that set out the rules governing human social relationships. Probably the most widely read of these works is still Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952), an accepted classic of social anthropology, setting out clearly many of the concepts that are now taken for granted in the discipline.

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radical criminology

See CRIMINOLOGY, CRITICAL.

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random sample, random sampling

See SAMPLING.

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random sampling error

See SAMPLING ERROR.

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range

See VARIATION (STATISTICAL).

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ranking, ranking scales

The technique of ranking is similar to that of rating, except that respondents are asked to compare a series of items, rather than place them on an absolute scale. Thus, for example, respondents might be presented with a series of occupational titles, and asked to rank these in terms of their general desirability, perceived social standing, suitability as employment for a woman, or whatever. The most common method of ranking uses the technique of paired comparisons, in which a series of paired stimuli (for example two different methods of allocating a reward) are presented to respondents, who are asked to say which is the greater or lesser in terms of some attribute in which the researcher is interested (in this case, perhaps, fairness). Each item is paired against every other item, and a method of scoring is used to construct a scale-value for the complete range of items, perhaps by simply scoring 1 for every preference recorded. (However, this would be a fairly crude technique, since it assumes that there is an equal interval between an item chosen twice and another chosen three times; various techniques have therefore been devised for deriving more complex and precise scale-values.) The method of equal appearing intervals developed by L. L. Thurstone is generally treated as a ranking-scale procedure.

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rank-order equality

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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rating, rating scales

Rating scales require respondents to make a judgement of absolute value—as, for example, in the case of a university professor grading student assignments according to their scholarly excellence. Typically, in sociological research, respondents are asked, for example, to indicate the prestige of different occupations on a scale from (say) one to ten; or, similarly, to indicate how enthusiastic or unenthusiastic they are about a range of government policies, on a (perhaps five-point) scale ranging from ‘entirely support’ at one extreme, to ‘entirely oppose’ at the other (with intermediate ratings of ‘mildly support’, ‘disinterested’, and ‘mildly oppose’). See also LIKERT SCALE; RANKING.

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ratio measurement

See MEASUREMENT.

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rational action theory

See EXCHANGE THEORY.

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rational-choice theory

See EXCHANGE THEORY.

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rational state

See ABSOLUTISM.

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rational-systems theory, rational-systems perspective

See CONTINGENCY THEORY.

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rationalism

Used loosely to indicate a rejection of faith or religion, and more strictly a view that all knowledge can be expressed in the form of a system, and that, in principle, everything can be known. In sociology it is sometimes used to refer to the alternative offered by Max Weber to the empiricist natural science model. The strong version of rationalism, that knowledge (at least in the social sciences) comes from reason alone (as opposed to sense-experience), is sometimes supported by writers as different as Weber, Talcott Parsons, and Louis Althusser. More recently, rationalism has been regarded by those labelled as post-modernist as a failed product of the Enlightenment; but, as Jürgen Habermas points out, such an argument is itself a rational one, and therefore self-defeating. It is difficult to see how any attempt to know the social world can avoid at least some rationalist assumptions. See also EPISTEMOLOGY; IDEAL TYPE.

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rationality, rational action

See ACTION THEORY; BOUNDED RATIONALITY; CRITICAL THEORY; ETHNOMETHODOLOGY; EXCHANGE THEORY; FORMAL RATIONALITY; INTERPRETATION; MAGIC, WITCHCRAFT, AND SORCERY; MEANING; PHENOMENOLOGY; RATIONALIZATION; WEBER, MAX.

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rationality, formal

See FORMAL RATIONALITY.

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rationality, functional

See FUNCTIONAL RATIONALITY.

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rationality, substantive

See FORMAL RATIONALITY.

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rationalization

Just as it is impossible to understand Karl Marx's concerns without seeing the centrality of labour power and its alienation into capital, so also it would be equally difficult to grasp the intellectual coherence of Max Weber's writings without understanding what Alvin Gouldner has termed the ‘metaphysical pathos’ associated with his vision of the rationalization of everyday life. This progressive disenchantment of the world, the eradication of mystery, emotion, tradition, and affectivity, and its replacement by rational calculation, informs much of his research and writing. It has created a whole industry among students of his work, who continue to debate the issue of whether or not Weber offers a fully developed theory of rationalization, and (if so) where precisely in his writings it is to be found (see, for example,
, Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, 1987
).
The process of rationalization is said by Weber to affect economic life, law, administration, and religion. It underpins the emergence of capitalism, bureaucracy, and the legal state. The essence of the rationalization process is the increasing tendency by social actors to the use of knowledge, in the context of impersonal relationships, with the aim of achieving greater control over the world around them. However, rather than increasing freedom and autonomy, rationalization makes ends of means (slavish adherence to the rules within modern bureaucracies are an obvious example), and imprisons the individual within the ‘iron cage’ of rationalized institutions, organizations, and activities.
Commentators have remarked that, in his concern over the rationalizing tendencies of modern societies, Weber was more pessimistic in the prognosis for human freedom than any of his contemporaries. Marx at least foresaw an emancipating revolution, whereas for Weber the only antidote to rationalization was the emergence of the charismatic figure. Socialism, Weber claimed, would create an even more confining cage, since it would combine formal rationality with substantive rationality. Whereas the market had counteracted bureaucratic state power under capitalism, socialism would see the two combined. That it was toppled in its Soviet variant by the charismatic individuals and movements of Wasa, Solidarity, Havel, and Civic Forum would seem to provide some optimistic respite, in the face of all-encompassing disenchantment. See also REFLEXIVE MODERNIZATION.

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Ratzenhofer, Gustav

(1842–1904)
See MILITARY AND MILITARISM.

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reaction formation

A psychoanalytic concept denoting one type of defence mechanism. When a feeling or idea is felt to be especially threatening it may be dealt with by enthusiastically embracing its opposite. Thus a man who is threatened by his own homosexual feelings might engage in aggressive heterosexual behaviour.

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reactive depression

See DEPRESSION.

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real socialism

With the non-applicability of the terms socialism and communism, given the divergence of the reality of Soviet socialism from the ideal as interpreted within the corpus of the Marxist-Leninist classics, an alternative term was required. ‘Actually existing socialism’, ‘developed socialism’, and ‘state socialism’ were just some of the contenders suggested by supporters and detractors alike. ‘Real socialism’, which emerged as the favoured caption, implied that the economic, political, and social make-up of the Soviet bloc societies was in fact a distinct mode of production, with its own immanent tendencies, which could not be grasped either by reference to the concepts of Western social science or by the instruments of official communist ideology.
Its defining feature was the primacy of politics over economics and the intertwining of the two. Although the features of capitalism (such as distinctive property rights, and markets of commodities, capital, and labour) were absent, this did not imply the existence of socialism. The latter would have required the organization of the economy along collective lines, with co-operation through a plan which articulated the interests of the direct producers, and tied consumption, production, and investment together, through the human logic of expressed (rather than imposed) needs. State ownership of productive means in fact led to a property vacuum. Absent ownership rights fostered corruption, eroded motivation, distorted managerial priorities, and diverted state energies into control rather than planning and directive functions. The power of lobbies replaced societal interest formation and articulation. The primacy of the nomenklatura system undermined professional and expertise criteria of performance, dissipated the mechanisms of accountability, and vested power in the hands of groups who ruled this monocentric society and whose aim was the maximization of power over a non-controllable economy. Party, state bureaucracy, security apparatus, and military formed a power élite, presiding over a bureaucratically centralized, segmented society. Extensive economic growth exhausted the natural and human resources of countries tied into patterns of dependence devoid of an economic logic but rooted within the overriding needs of the military-industrial complex. Soft budgets, poor labour discipline, the politicization of the workplace, the use of the factory-based welfare system to impose labour discipline in the absence of unemployment, all became attributes of the system of redistribution. Economic interests, rather than being based upon economic rationality, were distorted by this redistributional mechanism. Finely graded occupational and hierarchical privilege incorporated most of the population into an artificial set of dependencies.
For its part, society was effectively classless, although forms of social closure existed—particularly within the partocracy and the intelligentsia. Social atomization and amorphous structures were juxtaposed to the burgeoning second society where social self-organization existed around the satisfaction of interstitial but authentic needs. These social relations substituted for the absence of civil society, the missing meso-level, connecting the individual and family to the statesponsored organizations and institutions, and sought to break out of the segmentalism and opaqueness which allowed the rulers to manipulate sections of society, often against each other.
An interesting insider's view of real socialism is offered in Rudolf Bahro's Marxist critique of the East German State (The Alternative in Eastern Europe, 1977). Bahro identifies a fundamental contradiction in actually existing socialism, and not in class terms, but as the production of a ‘surplus consciousness’ that can transform society.
It is impossible at this stage to provide anything like a satisfactory characterization of real socialism, for it is only in the leaving of it that one can see clearly its economic and political axial principles, its major institutional contours, and social residues. Health crises, environmental despoliation, a debilitated work ethic, poverty, criminality, political malaise, and the almost endless litany of other failings of this system of imposed modernization tend to detract from some of its undoubted achievements.

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realism

In everyday use realism is commonly attributed to caution, or moderation in one's aspirations—the converse of utopianism. The word is also used to describe a variety of approaches in literature and the visual arts in which accurate depiction of reality is the aim. Each of these uses involves a contrast between human thought or imagination, on the one hand, and an external reality independent of mind, on the other. The notion that reality has a cognitive or normative authority over the mind is also generally present. In philosophy, realism signifies the assertion of the existence of a reality independently of our thoughts or beliefs about it. Controversy has centred especially on the question of whether universals (for example properties such as ‘redness’ or ‘softness’) really exist, or whether they are functions of our use of language (‘nominalism’).
Realism as a metaphysical doctrine is challenged by a range of sceptical arguments. Both in classical Greek philosophy and in the early modern period, sceptical arguments commonly began by appealing to our experience of such phenomena as dreams, illusions, and hallucinations, in which our senses mislead us. Since this does, unquestionably, sometimes happen, how do we know that it does not always do so? How can we be sure that, on any particular occasion, what we seem to observe may not turn out to have been illusory? More recently these arguments have been supplemented by analogous challenges to our ability to secure reliable reference to external reality in the use of language. Since we have no access to the world that is not mediated by thought or language, what independent check have we upon the reliability of what we think or say?
Such sceptical arguments do not necessarily lead to a denial of a reality independent of thought. It is possible to hold that there is a such a reality, but that we cannot know its nature (or, perhaps, that we cannot know that we know). More commonly, such epistemological scepticism lapses into phenomenalism, solipsism, or some other form of denial of the existence of a reality independent of mind, thought, or language.
In the philosophy of science, empiricists tend to be sceptical about the existence of the entities (many of them unobservable) postulated by scientific theories. On this view, the concepts of such entities are just convenient summaries of actual or possible observations, or grounds for prediction. Scientific realists, on the other hand, argue that the theories in question should be understood as claiming existence for the entities (sub-atomic particles, retroviruses, or whatever) they postulate. These claims may, of course, be either true or false. Many sociological opponents suppose that scientific realists are committed to an uncritical acceptance of the knowledge claims of science. This is not so. They are, rather, committed to an interpretation of those claims as claims about the nature of a reality which exists and acts independently of our knowledge or beliefs about it. Realists may be as sceptical as anyone else about whether those claims are true. The problem for the anti-realists is to make any sense at all of what science is about; and, in particular, of what it might be for scientific knowledge-claims to turn out to be false.
The leading British figure in the late twentieth-century revival of realist metatheory in philosophy and the social sciences is Roy Bhaskar. He and his associates have recently developed a form of scientific realism (variously termed ‘transcendental’ or ‘critical’ realism) which is offered as a comprehensive alternative to both empiricism and conventionalism in the philosophy of science. (The reference to critical is intended to indicate that the pursuit of knowledge is or should be emancipatory.) Activities such as scientific experimentation and the application of scientific knowledge are held to be unintelligible except on the assumption of a world independent of our beliefs about it. It is also necessary to distinguish the real causal powers and mechanisms of which science seeks knowledge, from the actual flow of events triggered by the activity of these mechanisms. The actual must, in turn, be distinguished from the empirical—that small sub-set of events which are observed by someone. Bhaskar claims that this view of science is applicable to both the human and the natural sciences in a way which is able to take fully into account the radical differences in the natures of their objects. Chief among his many publications are A Realist Theory of Science (2nd edn. 1978), The Possibility of Naturalism (1979), Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation (1986), and Reclaiming Reality (1989).

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realist criminology

See CRIMINOLOGY, REALIST.

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rebellion, revolution

Relatively rare but historically important events in which an entire social and political order is overturned, usually by violent means, and reconstructed on new principles with new leaders. The word revolution has come to be applied loosely to any dramatic social change—as in ‘industrial revolution’, ‘computer revolution’, ‘style revolution’, and so forth. But its central meaning is still political. It is difficult to make a sharp distinction between a political revolution and a rebellion, although some have argued that the term ‘revolution’ should be reserved for those instances in which the new governing élite attempts to make fundamental changes in the social structure of the post-revolutionary society, whereas rebellions are more limited political upheavals involving only the replacement of one ruling group by another. On this criterion, rebellions clearly shade into revolutions, depending upon one's judgement as to the scope and intensity of the social changes that follow the seizure of power.
The prototypes of all modern revolutions were the American and French Revolutions of 1776 and 1789. Both had a clear political agenda, and both resulted in a complete transformation of power relationships. In this century, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Revolution of 1948 had similar dramatic results. Not all revolutions in recent history have been socialistic or egalitarian, or even modernizing; many have been anti-democratic or right-wing. Fundamentalist Islam has swept through the Middle East, most notably in the revolutionary downfall of the Shah of Iran in 1979. The 1990s have witnessed a ‘reverse revolution’ in many former communist states.
Probably the most influential theory of revolution in sociology has been the historical materialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. However, it should be recognized that Marxism has come to embody several (by no means compatible) theories of revolution, including for example the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat advanced by Lenin and of peasant revolution proffered within Maoism. Many subsequent sociological studies of revolutionary change are explicit critiques of the Marxist view of history in general and of revolutions in particular.
Most studies of rebellions and revolutions have necessarily been historical, and have focused on causes and processes. Theories that stress social disequilibrium, rising expectations, and relative deprivation are plausible, but have not proved highly explanatory or predictive. In more recent work, Theda Skocpol has formulated a theory of revolution which stresses the inability of institutions to cope with normal crises (States and Social Revolutions, 1979), and Charles (Tilly) and Louis Tilly have proposed a historical model in which rebellions arise opportunistically out of a shifting balance of power and resources (The Rebellious Century 1830–1930, 1975). Skocpol's theory was particularly controversial. She proposes a macro-level, structural analysis, which makes a sharp distinction between political revolutions (leadership changes) and social revolutions (which transform the whole of society). Arguing against monocausal explanations of social revolutions (for example rising expectations, class conflicts) she proposes a complex, fluid model which emphasizes the differences between states, the role of external factors such as international economic competition, and the availability of grievance channels for different social classes. (This focus on the complexity of revolutionary social change is continued in her later work, including her edited and co-edited volumes on Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, 1984, and Bringing the State Back In, 1985.)
Revolutionary change in a society is never complete, and the outcomes are highly variable. Elements of the old order live on, as they did in France after 1789 and Russia after 1917, confounding the idealistic intentions which launched the revolution.

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recency effect

A recency effect is the tendency for individuals to be most influenced by what they have last seen or heard, because people tend to retain the most complete knowledge about the most recent events. However, under certain circumstances, primacy effects prevail and sometimes the first rather than the last event will be the most influential.

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recidivist, recidivism

Any person who is convicted of a crime on more than one occasion; a person who re-offends. Recidivism is usually measured in relation to the type of last sentence or last offence, as percentages re-offending, or reconvicted, within one, two, five, or ten years.

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reciprocity

See COMPADRAZGO; EXCHANGE THEORY; GIFT RELATIONSHIP; KULA RING.

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rectangular clustering

See CLUSTER ANALYSIS.

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redemptive movement

See SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.

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Redfield, Robert

(1897–1958)
An American anthropologist who, in 1930, published a study (Tepoztlan: Life in a Mexican Village) which outlines an idealtypical construct of folk society. Subsequently he suggested that the spread of urban-based civilization transforms folk societies. Depending on their social and cultural characteristics, individual settlements can be placed along an evolutionary folk–urban continuum.
According to Redfield, folk societies are small, isolated, non-literate, and socially homogeneous. There is strong group solidarity and kinship, a common culture rooted in tradition and religion, behaviour is personal and spontaneous rather than impersonal and law-bound, and there is little intellectual life. Urban societies are characterized by the converse traits: loss of isolation, heterogeneity, social disorganization, secularization, and individuality.
Redfield's ideal types encapsulate a distinction between industrial-urban and pre-industrial societies which others (such as Ferdinand Tönnies and Émile Durkheim) had earlier espoused. His work greatly influenced rural sociology and community studies. However, in 1951 Oscar Lewis published a re-study of Tepoztlan, examining aspects of village life—especially its economy, demography, and politics—which Redfield had ignored. His findings undermined Redfield's account of folk societies, which tended to gloss over conflict, poverty, and disorganization, and to present an idealized account of primitive societies. Lewis also rejected the over-simplified and ahistorical classification of individual settlements implicit in Redfield's approach. Later work on urban communities found this ideal type, and the concept of the folk—urban continuum, equally deficient.

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reductionism

In its most general usage, the term reductionism denotes any intellectual strategy for reducing apparently diverse phenomena to some primary or basic explanatory principle. For example, reductionist forms of materialism as applied to the natural sciences have attempted to explain the distinctive properties and powers of living beings in terms of the concepts and laws of chemistry. Attempts to explain patterns of difference in measured human intelligence, or social differences between men and women, in terms of genetic or physiological differences are commonly criticized by sociologists as examples of misguided biological reductionism. Some forms of Marxism, in which economic relations are supposed wholly to determine social and political life, are also commonly criticized as economic reductionism. Distinctions may usefully be made between logical reduction, in which the aim is to reduce the laws of the more superficial science to the more basic one; semantic reduction, in which the language of one science is defined in terms of the other; and explanatory reduction, in which the aim is to show that the phenomena of one science can be explained as effects of mechanisms identified in another.

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reference group

The term reference group was coined by Herbert Hyman in Archives of Psychology (1942), to apply to the group against which an individual evaluates his or her own situation or conduct. Hyman distinguished between a membership group to which people actually belong, and a reference group, which is used as a basis for comparison. A reference group may or may not be a membership group. Theodore Newcomb (Personality and Social Change, 1943) used reference groups to help explain the changing values and attitudes of students at Bennington, a liberal women's college. Many of the women who came from politically conservative backgrounds developed increasingly liberal attitudes over the course of their college careers, as they came to identify more with the college faculty, and less with their family of origin and home communities. The girls who changed most, according to Newcomb, were those ‘characterized by independence from their parents, a sense of personal adequacy in social relations, and modifiability of habits in achieving their goals’. Here, the college is regarded as a positive reference group, but one might view the parents as a negative reference group for their somewhat rebellious offspring.
In these early uses reference group was not well defined, nor was it linked in any clear way to social psychological and sociological theory. One distinction that is commonly made is that between functionalist studies, which highlight the functions of reference groups either in providing a normative standard or a comparative reference-point, and the symbolic interactionist approach which views reference groups as shared world-perspectives providing meaning to the self.
Robert Merton and Alice Kitt provide a systematic functionalist formulation of the concept in their classic ‘Contribution to the Theory of Reference Group Behaviour’ (in
, Continuities in Social Research: Studies in the Scope and Method of ‘The American Soldier’, 1950
). Their essay was stimulated by
's The American Soldier (1949)
, which reported that soldiers' feelings of deprivation were less related to the actual degree of hardship they experienced, than to the living standards of the group to which they compared themselves. Merton and Kitt point out that relative deprivation is a special case of comparative reference group behaviour. Merton later distinguishes reference groups and interaction groups (in Social Theory and Social Structure, 1957). The latter are a more general part of the individual's social environment— but neither set normative standards for the individual nor serve as a standard of comparison. He also specifies the circumstances under which an individual will select a membership or a non-membership group for normative reference, and claims that non-membership groups are likely to be chosen in highly mobile societies. Thus, an aspiring individual may emulate the life-style and attitudes of the local élite, in the hope of raising his or her own status. In a much-cited study of Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (1966), W. G. Runciman argues that attitudes to inequality (including people's feelings of relative deprivation) are a function of their restricted reference groups, although this argument has been criticized since it is clear from Runciman's evidence that the causal relationship in question could equally well run in the other direction.
The interactionist conception of reference group flows from George Herbert Mead's idea of the generalized other. According to Mead, in the acquisition of a self people move through very specific role-playing in the play and game stages of self-development (for example assuming roles of parents and peers); but in the later stages—known as the generalized-other stage—are able to assume the attitude of their whole community towards themselves. The generalized other thus serves both as a major anchorage in the wider social world and as a mechanism of social control. People come to see the world from the perspective of those who share their world in the wider community. From this starting-point Tamotsu Shibutani developed the idea that reference groups were in fact perspectives: ‘a reference group becomes any collectivity, real or imagined, envied or despised, whose perspective is assumed by the actor’. It is, in other words, ‘a group whose outlook is used by the actor as the frame of reference in the organization of his perceptual field’ (
‘Reference Groups as Perspectives’, American Journal of Sociology, 1954
). More recently, this idea has been extended in the ‘social world perspective’ of Anselm Strauss and his colleagues (Studies in Symbolic Interactionism, 1978), in an attempt to capture ‘universes of discourse’ which transcend particular groups—such as ‘medical worlds’ or ‘gay worlds’.
The question of the usefulness of the concept of reference group is still unanswered. Some critics claim it raises more issues than it solves. One of the basic problems is that we do not know what determines which group an individual will select or when. Indeed, it seems likely that a person will employ a variety of different reference groups at different times, and with respect to different goods. Another problem therefore concerns the degree of specificity or generality of reference groups. A study may indicate that a person's political orientation is influenced by his or her college peers, but it is not clear whether the same reference group is also likely to influence that person's views on (say) sexual morality or religion. However, although the concept of reference group may lack rigour and precision, it does seem to provide useful insights into social behaviour and continues to be widely used in the explanation of (for example) patterns of wage-bargaining and religious affiliation.

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referent power

In one of the many available typologies of power,
(‘The Bases of Social Power’, in , Studies in Social Power, 1959)
distinguished five types of power, according to their sources. These are the (self-explanatory) ‘reward’ and ‘coercive’ types; ‘legitimate power’ which stems from holding an office that is acknowledged to convey rights of decision-making over others (in other words authority); ‘expert power’, stemming from possession of a limited skill or ability, or access to scarce knowledge; and ‘referent power’, or the ability of one person to influence others, because of the latter's degree of identification with the former. Like other typologies of power, it is hard to see how this one is exhaustive, since it omits (for example) power stemming from control of a strategic channel of communication.

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reflexive modernization

A term devised by the German social theorist Ulrich Beck, which refers to the way in which advanced modernity ‘becomes its own theme’, in the sense that ‘questions of the development and employment of technologies (in the realms of nature, society and the personality) are being eclipsed by questions of the political and economic “management” of the risks of actually or potentially utilized technologies—discovering, administering, acknowledging, avoiding or concealing such hazards with respect to specially defined horizons of relevance’ (see his
Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, 1992
).
In Beck's periodization of social change, simple modernity is synonymous with the development of industrial society, and the new reflexive modernity with the emergence of the so-called risk society; that is, a condition wherein the growth of knowledge has everywhere created ‘manufactured uncertainty’ (for example the risk of ecological disaster), so that scientific expertise is increasingly called upon to alleviate the effects of earlier applications of science. Whereas industrial society was concerned primarily with the production and distribution of goods, the risk society is organized around the management and distribution of ‘bads’ or dangers, not only those associated with physical risk deriving from the application of technological processes but also with the consequences of risky organizational activity and social relations. Reflexive modernity—an intermingling of continuity and discontinuity that is said to be evident, for example, in the critique of science developed by the Green movement—dissolves those ‘forms of the conscience collective’ (such as class culture and family roles) ‘on which depend and to which refer the social and political organizations and institutions in industrial society’.
More specifically, according to Beck, during the 1950s ‘the unstable unity of shared life experiences mediated by the market and shaped by status, which Max Weber brought together in the concept of social class, began to break apart. Its different elements (such as material conditions dependent upon specific market opportunities, the effectiveness of tradition and of precapitalist lifestyles, the consciousness of communal bonds and of barriers to mobility, as well as networks of contact) have slowly disintegrated’. This ‘individualization of social inequality’ means that, ‘under the conditions of a welfare state, class biographies, which are somehow ascribed, become transformed into reflexive biographies which depend on the decisions of the actor’. Increasingly, therefore, everyone must take the risk of choosing between a huge array of disparate social identities, life-styles, opinions, and groups or subcultures. Attachments to social classes become weaker, people are separated from the traditional support networks provided by family or neighbourhood, and work loses its importance as a focus of conflict and identity formation. Ascribed differences—of ethnicity, gender, age, and nationality—provide the basis for new life-styles and self-conceptions that replace class solidarities. In Marxist terms, this is capitalism without classes, but with new and still emerging forms of differentiation and inequality.
In some quarters, Beck's celebrated account of reflexive modernization is highly regarded, mainly as a critique of post-modernism. (He argues that the perverse and dysfunctional effects of rationalization for social life can be understood and managed through a ‘radicalization of rationality’ rather than its negation.) Others have argued that this concept, like that of structuration developed by Anthony Giddens (with whom Beck has worked collaboratively to develop his ideas about, for example, trust and identity—see
, Reflexive Modernization, 1994
), is pitched at such a high level of abstraction that it not only lacks empirical foundation but is in principle untestable.

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reflexive sociology

See GOULDNER, ALVIN.

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reflexivity

See ETHNOMETHODOLOGY.

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reformative movement

See SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.

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region of rejection

See SIGNIFICANCE TESTS.

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regression, regression analysis

A term used originally to describe the fact that if, for example, parents' and children's weights are measured, the children's weights tend to be closer to the average than are those of their parents: unusually heavy parents tend to have lighter children and unusually light parents tend to have heavier children. This phenomenon was referred to as ‘regression to the mean’ (see CENTRAL TENDENCY (MEASURES OF)).
In statistical usage, regression refers in the simplest case (bivariate linear regression) to fitting a line to the plot of data from two variables, in order to represent the trend between them. Regression is asymmetric, that is, it assumes that one variable (Y, the dependent variable) is determined by the other (independent variable) X; that the relationship is linear (and hence that the variables are at the interval level of measurement); and that the fit is not perfect:
Yi = + ßXi + i
(that is, the value of the dependent variable Y for individual i varies in a straight line with the value of X, together with an individual error term, e). The slope of this line is represented by a constant multiplier weight or ‘regression coefficient’, ß, and a constant, , which represents the intercept or point at which the regression line crosses the Y axis—as illustrated in the figure shown below.
Statistically, it is assumed that the error terms (i) are random with a mean of 0, and are independent of the independent variable values. The main purpose of regression analysis is to calculate the value of the slope (ß), often interpreted as the overall effect of X. This is normally done by using the Least Squares principle to find a best-fitting line (in the sense that the sum of the squared error terms— discrepancies between actual Yi values and those predicted by the regression line— is as small as possible). The correlation coefficient (r) gives a measure of how well the data fit this regression line (perfectly if r = ± 1 and as poorly as possible if r = 0).
Simple regression can be extended in various ways: to more than one independent variable (multiple linear regression) and to other functions or relationships (for example monotonic or non-metric regression for ordinal variables, used in multi-dimensional scaling, and logarithmic and power regression). In the multiple linear regression, the model is written as:
Yi = + ß_1 X_1 + ß_2 X_1 + ß_3 X_1 + … ßk X_1 + i
where the regression weights ßk now represent the effect of the independent variable Xi on Yi, controlling for (or ‘partialling out’, that is removing the linear effect of) the other independent variables. These ‘partial regression coefficients’ or ‘beta weights’ are of especial interest in causal models and structural equation systems (see
, Applied Regression—An Introduction, 1990
). See also LOGISTIC (OR LOGIT) REGRESSION; MULTICOLLINEARITY; OUTLIER EFFECTS.

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regulation theory

A loose-knit body of empirically oriented, political-economic theory that originated in France in the 1970s, as part of the general effort then being made to overcome the limitations of Marxism's economic reductionism. According to what is sometimes referred to as the Parisian School, the concepts necessary to overcome this reductionism are the following: ‘regime of accumulation’, which refers to the organization of consumption as well as that of production; ‘mode of growth’, which relates the regime of accumulation to the international division of labour; and ‘mode of regulation’, which refers to the national and international, institutional, and ideological framework which facilitates the reproduction of particular regimes of accumulation and modes of growth. The best-known claim made by the regulationists is that the use of these concepts enables one to distinguish two successive modes of regulation in the history of twentieth-century capitalism—fordism and post-fordism.

FIGURE 8: An example of a regression analysis

Representative works in English include
, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The U.S. Experience (1976, trans. 1979)
;
, Prisoners of the American Dream (1986)
;
, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labour in the United States (1982)
; and
, Mirages and Miracles (1987)
.

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Reich, Wilhelm

(1897–1957)
A controversial Marxist neo-Freudian whose work stressed the importance of the physical body, especially the functions of the orgasm; the mechanisms of repression found in the authoritarian family leading to the creation of a character armour, and a rigid conforming personality; type and the role of society in structuring this conformity and a compulsive morality (see, for example,
The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1942, and The Sexual Revolution, 1972
). He anticipated many of the ideas of the Frankfurt School (see critical theory) on mass society, became a guru of the Free Love counter-culture movement, but died in the United States dismissed as a crank.

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reification

The error of regarding an abstraction as a material thing, and attributing causal powers to it—in other words the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. An example would be treating a model or ideal type as if it were a description of a real individual or society. In Marxist theory, reification is linked to people's alienation from work and their treatment as objects of manipulation rather than as human beings, and was popularized by György Lukács, but the term is given a variety of meanings by different schools of Marxist thought.

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reinforcement

See CONDITIONING.

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relations of production

Once Karl Marx had concluded that what labourers sold under capitalism was not their labour but their labour-power (see LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE), and so opened up a new dimension of analysis, he was able to shed his dependence on the inherited term division of labour as a means of conceptualizing what happens in production. Instead, he coined the term ‘relations of production’ to refer to the social relations specific to a particular mode of production, and reserved division of labour (these days the ‘technical division of labour’) for the concrete, structural composition and organization of production relations.
In chapter 7 of volume i of Capital. Marx specifies the relations of production specific to capitalism as being two-fold. The first or control relation is described as follows: ‘the labourer works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs; the capitalist taking good care that the work is done in the proper manner, and that the means of production are used with intelligence, so that there is no unnecessary waste of raw material and no wear and tear of the implements beyond what is necessarily caused by the work.’ The second or ownership relation is specified far more generally: ‘the labour process is a process between things that the capitalist has purchased, things that have become his property. The product of this process belongs, therefore, to him, just as much as does the wine which is the product of a process of fermentation completed in his cellar.’
The sum total of the relations of production comprise what Marx referred to (somewhat problematically) as the ‘economic structure’ of capitalist society, or its ‘real foundation’. As such, they also account for the division of that society into classes (the ‘social division of labour’), again somewhat problematically since the nature of control and ownership has changed vastly since Marx's time. Although he did not specify them himself with any great precision, Marx also clearly thought that distinctive sets of production relations could be identified for other modes of production, and later writers have addressed this problem at some length (see, for example,
, Pre-capitalist Modes of Production, 1975
). See also BASE.

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relative autonomy

The renewal of Marxist theory inaugurated by Louis Althusser and his associates in the 1960s had as one of its aims the rescue of Marxism from the charge of economism (or economic determinism). According to Althusser, the social totality consisted of four distinct sets of practices— economic, political, ideological, and theoretical—in complex combination with one another. None of these practices should be thought of as reducible to any of the others. On the contrary, each has its own ‘relative autonomy’ within limits set by its place in the totality. Critics have argued that in the absence of any specification of what these limits might be, the concept lacks explanatory content. The most sustained attempt to apply the concept in substantive analyses will be found in the works of Nicos Poulantzas.

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relative deprivation

See DEPRIVATION; REFERENCE GROUP.

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relative mobility

See MOBILITY, SOCIAL.

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relative poverty

See POVERTY.

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relativism

The word relativism is used loosely to describe intellectual positions which reject absolute or universal standards or criteria. Thus, epistemological relativism is the view that there are no universal criteria of knowledge or truth. What counts as true is a function of criteria which are internal and so relative to local cultures, historical periods, or socio-political interests (the scientific community, the ruling class, revolutionary proletariat, and so forth). The critiques of positivism which were influential in the 1960s and 1970s often (mistakenly) advocated some form of relativism as the only alternative. The subsequent work of Michel Foucault, linking ‘regimes of truth’ with power relations, added to the currency of relativist perspectives in sociology and related disciplines. Moral relativism, likewise, is the view that there are no objective moral standards. This view, like epistemological relativism, has become especially influential through the popularization of the work of the German philosopher Nietzsche by Foucault and others. Though often welcomed by sociologists in a spirit of tolerance and respect for cross-cultural difference, it is often forgotten that these views have strong historical links with political irrationalism, and (in particular) with European Nazism. It should be remembered that, from the standpoint of a thoroughgoing moral relativism, the values of respect and tolerance themselves have no general validity, but are mere peculiarities of particular, localized moral traditions (for example liberalism).
One of the most forceful statements of a thoroughgoing relativism can be found in the works of Paul Feyerabend. In a series of controversial polemics against scientific objectivity, method, and rationality, Feyerabend refers to himself as a ‘flippant Dadaist’. In Against Method (1975) he uses historical studies of scientific change (as had Thomas Kuhn) to show that for each proclaimed methodological principle of science, an at least equally good case could be made for adopting its opposite. The purpose of the argument was to weaken faith in method as such. The only principle Feyerabend was prepared to support was, famously, ‘anything goes’. In subsequent writings (such as Science in a Free Society, 1978, and Farewell to Reason, 1987), Feyerabend has made clearer the moral and emotional basis of his relativism. He sees a world increasingly dominated by a Western industrial-scientific way of life, which eliminates cultural diversity, destroys the environment, and impoverishes life. The key culprits in this scenario are science and its associated claims to objectivity and reason. This trio are so corrupted by their incorporation into global monotonization that they should be abandoned in favour of a free-for-all in which magic, witchcraft, traditional medicine, and other alternatives have equal access to power and resources.
Against Feyerabend it has been argued that misuse of science by powerful interests is not a sufficient reason for abandoning all the actual or possible benefits which might flow from its detachment from those interests. It might also be argued that the abandonment of reason has been historically no less destructive than its misuse. See also CULTURAL RELATIVISM; METHODOLOGICAL PLURALISM; PARADIGM; POST-MODERNISM.

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relativism, cultural

See CULTURAL RELATIVISM.

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reliability

When sociologists enquire as to the reliability of data, or of a measurement procedure, they are questioning whether the same results would be produced if the research procedure were to be repeated. Reliability embraces two principal forms of repetition: temporal reliability (the same result is obtained when the measurement is repeated at a later time); and comparative reliability (the same result is obtained when two different forms of a test are used, the same test is applied by different researchers, or the same test is applied to two different samples taken from the same population). Reliability raises many technical problems for the sociologist. For example, having once interviewed someone, a repeat interview may be contaminated by the earlier experience.
Reliability is usually contrasted with validity—whether or not a measurement procedure actually measures what the researcher supposes it does. However the two are not perfectly independent. One may have a highly reliable measure which is not valid: for example, we might measure IQ by standing subjects on a weighing machine and reading off the numbers, an extremely reliable procedure in both senses; but body-weight is hardly a valid indicator of IQ. A highly unreliable measure, on the other hand, cannot be valid. See also VARIABLE.

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religion

Religion is a set of beliefs, symbols, and practices (for example rituals), which is based on the idea of the sacred, and which unites believers into a socio-religious community. The sacred is contrasted with the profane because it involves feelings of awe. Sociologists have defined religion by reference to the sacred rather than to a belief in a god or gods, because it makes social comparison possible; for example, some versions of Buddhism do not involve a belief in God. Religion is also contrasted with magic, because the latter is thought to be individualistic and instrumental. See also INVISIBLE RELIGION; NEW RELIGIONS; SECULARIZATION.

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religion, invisible

See INVISIBLE RELIGION.

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religion, private

See PRIVATE RELIGION.

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religion, sociology of

The scientific study of religious institutions, beliefs, and practices had its origins in Marxism and the neo-Hegelian critique of religion, but it is primarily associated with the late nineteenth-century research into religious phenomena by Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, William Robertson Smith, Ernst Troeltsch, and Max Weber. A psychoanalytic theory of religious behaviour was also developed by Sigmund Freud (in, for example, Civilization and its Discontents, 1930). The sociology of religion should be distinguished from religious sociology, which has been employed by the Roman Catholic Church to improve the effectiveness of its missionary work in industrial societies, but it is related to both the phenomenology and anthropology of religion.
The sociology of religion should be seen as a critique of nineteenth-century positivist theories, which were concerned to explain the origins of religion on rationalist and individualistic assumptions. This positivist tradition regarded religion as the erroneous beliefs of individuals which would eventually disappear when scientific thought became widely established in society. It was assumed, for example, that Darwinism would undermine the religious belief in a divine creator. Religion was thought to be irrational.
The sociology of religion, by contrast, was concerned with religion as nonrational, collective, and symbolic. It was not interested in the historical origins of religion in ‘primitive society’. Religion was not based on erroneous belief, but responded to the human need for meaning. It was not individualistic but social and collective. It was about symbol and ritual rather than belief and knowledge. The growth of scientific knowledge was therefore irrelevant to the social functions of religion.
Émile Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) is the classical statement of this sociological perspective. He defined religion as ‘a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them’. By ‘elementary forms’ Durkheim meant the basic structures of religious activity; he rejected as unscientific any inquiry into the primitive origins of religion, concentrating instead on the social functions of religious practices. He rejected also the rationalist critique of belief by focusing on practices relevant to the sacred. His approach has remained fundamental to a sociological understanding of religion.
The sociology of religion has thus been bound up with the problem of defining religion and distinguishing religion from magic. It has largely abandoned the idea that religion is a collection of beliefs in God. There has been an emphasis instead on practice in relation to the sacred. Alternative perspectives have defined religion as the ultimate concern which all human beings have to address. Many sociologists have subsequently identified the religious with the social.
There are two generally contrasted traditions in the sociology of religion: those of Durkheim and Weber. Whereas Durkheim was interested in the social functions of religion in general, in relation to social integration, Max Weber was primarily concerned with the problem of theodicy (any explanation of the fundamental moral problems of death, suffering, and evil) and the comparative study of the salvation drive. Weber identified two major religious orientations towards the world—mysticism and asceticism—in his The Sociology of Religion (1922). He was especially interested in religious attitudes towards economics and eroticism. He argued that inner-worldly asceticism (or the ethic of world mastery) represented the most radical attempt to impose a rational regulation on the world. He explored this theme in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905).
Some sociologists have claimed that, in modern societies, there has been a profound process of secularization (or religious decline) as a consequence of urbanization, cultural pluralism, and the spread of a scientific understanding of the world. This thesis has also been challenged by sociologists who argue that religion has been transformed rather than undermined.
The sociology of religion was originally at the theoretical core of sociology as a whole, because it was concerned to understand the character of rational action, the importance of symbols, and finally the nature of the social. It has been argued, however, that contemporary sociology of religion has lost this analytical importance, because it has concentrated on narrow empirical issues such as the pattern of recruitment to the Christian ministry. The comparative study of world religions, which was fundamental to Weber's approach, has been neglected.
Bryan Wilson's Religion in Sociological Perspective (1982) and Steve Bruce's Religion in Modern Britain (1995) both offer an excellent introduction to most of the topics raised in this entry and to the field as a whole. See also CIVIL RELIGION; INVISIBLE RELIGION; PRIVATE RELIGION; PROTESTANT ETHIC THESIS; RELIGIOUS INNOVATION; RELIGIOUS REVIVAL; SECT.

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religions, new

See NEW RELIGIONS.

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religiosity

In The Religious Factor (1961), Gerhard Lenski analyses variations in orientations to economic and political issues, highlighting the differences between Jews, Protestants, and Catholics, partly in terms of an influential typology of the dimensions of ‘religiosity’—which he identifies as orthodoxy or belief, association (or religious attendance), devotion (dealing with such aspects as prayer), and communality (the degree of segregation of the religious group).

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religious innovation

Any change in religious practice, organization, or belief is religious innovation. The major world religions such as Islam and Christianity have developed orthodox bodies of belief, custom, and practice, which are regarded as part of a sacred tradition. Religious innovation is thus seen as a departure from orthodoxy, because it is a threat to tradition. Since religious innovation is inevitable, there is a permanent tension between belief in the unchanging nature of orthodox tradition, and the actual social change of religious organizations. See also SCHISM.

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religious nationalisms

See NATIONALISM.

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religious revival

A term applied to mass movements which are based upon intense religious excitement. Periodic religious revivals, which seek to restore commitment and attachment to the group, are a regular sociological feature of religious traditions. The evangelical revival of the eighteenth century included the Moravians and the Methodists. Revivalism has been a common phenomenon in the United States. See also EVANGELICAL; SECT.

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remunerative power

See COMPLIANCE.

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repertory grid technique

See PERSONAL CONSTRUCT THEORY.

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replication

Repeating a study, in exactly the same format, to check whether the same results are obtained a second or subsequent time (usually by a different researcher). One variation is simultaneous replication of the same study, either in the same context, or in contexts carefully selected for their known variation on one key variable. There can also be replication via secondary analysis of a major data-set, to re-test hypotheses, and to assess the impact of the particular program or software employed in the original analysis.
Arguably, and for a variety of reasons, not nearly enough resources in the discipline are devoted to replicating results: the effort, cost, and time involved in conducting social surveys usually preclude systematic replication; funding agencies are less likely to pay for investigations which seek only to confirm earlier findings; and there is little kudos for researchers (and, one suspects, not much career advancement) to be had in reproducing existing studies. (In psychology, by comparison, the dominant experimental methods lend themselves to the widespread use of replication studies.) However, although whole surveys are all too infrequently replicated, individual questions and batteries of questions often are—especially where these have been assembled into scales (for example to measure attitudes or personality traits).
Strict replication shades gradually into the idea of a ‘re-study’. Re-studies are also in a sense replications, but are usually conducted at time intervals such that observable differences from earlier findings can reasonably be attributed to real change in the subjects or processes under investigation, rather than to either chance or measurement error in the original study. Prominent and informative re-studies include the two community studies of the English town of Banbury, conducted by Margaret Stacey and her colleagues in 1948–51 and 1966–8 (compare Tradition and Change, 1960, and Power, Persistence and Change, 1975), and the studies by Robert Redfield and Oscar Lewis of Tepoztlan in Mexico (in 1926 and 1943 respectively). Redfield depicts the community in question as an ideal-typical type of folk society (smooth functioning, well-integrated, contented, well-adjusted) whereas Lewis paints a picture dominated by individualism, fear, lack of co-operation, envy, schism, and mistrust. Each party accused the other of methodological failings (for example asking the wrong questions of the wrong informants). The celebrated disjuncture between the two accounts was eventually resolved, when a further investigation revealed that the society had in all probability changed dramatically in the intervening years, due to increases in population pressure and a programme of radical land redistribution (see
, ‘A Watershed in Mexican Rural History’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 1971
). See also RELIABILITY.

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representation

Representation refers to the way in which images and texts reconstruct, rather than reflect, the original sources they represent. Thus a painting, photograph, or written text about a tree is never an actual tree, but the reconstruction of what it seemed to be or meant to the person who represented it. If it were a tree, it could not then be a photograph, painting, or text.
Representation is an important concept in semiology, linguistics, Marxism, and feminism, and points to an aspect of the way in which meaning is constructed. It can therefore be understood as contributing importantly to social processes. Feminists argue that representation is continually creating, re-creating, and endorsing stereotypical ideas of gender identity. All media images—for example in advertising or cinema—are constructed by somebody, for a specific purpose with a specific audience in mind, although they are usually presented as if they were a ‘slice of reality’. To try and understand what they mean, and how they construct meaning, it is important to examine what lies behind the image or text: who constructed it, where and when, for what purpose, and for which particular audience's gaze. Because watchers rarely have access to this process, images in particular tend to classify complex ideas into apparently simple meanings; they thus deny contradiction and ambiguity, and representations become like myths which are nevertheless accepted as ‘real’. Feminist critics of pornography have used the idea of representation to develop theories of how pornography functions in society, and how it is represented in relation to class, race, and gender (see
, The Pornography of Representation, 1986
; and
, Sociology and Visual Representation, 1994
).

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representationalism

See SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE.

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representative sample

See REPRESENTATIVENESS; SAMPLING; SAMPLING ERROR.

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representativeness

The ability to give a reasonably accurate portrayal of the research subject's characteristics and known diversity. As applied to survey samples, or case-study samples, this is judged by the extent to which key characteristics of the sample are the same as the characteristics of the population from which the sample was selected. In relation to single cases, the criterion would be the typicality of the case selected. The term is also applied to research reports, for example to assess whether verbatim quotations, incidents described in detail, or other selectively reported results reflect the full variety and weight of the results obtained. See also SAMPLING ERROR.

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repression

See PSYCHOANALYSIS.

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repressive state apparatus

See IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUS.

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reproduction rate

See FERTILITY.

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reproductive labour

See DOMESTIC LABOUR.

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reproductive technologies

A term applied by feminists to technologies used for regulating biological reproduction. They include technologies of contraception and abortion (such as the pill and IUD), childbirth (foetal monitoring), and infertility (for example the much-publicized in vitro fertilization). The term, implicitly contrasting the technological with the natural, usually suggests an overly interventionist application of science, and a wresting of power away from individuals themselves, usually women.

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research design

The strategic plan for a research project or research programme, setting out the broad outline and key features of the work to be undertaken, including the methods of data collection and analysis to be employed, and showing how the research strategy addresses the specific aims and objectives of the study, and whether the research issues are theoretical or policy-oriented. Hence also, the process of developing such a document, choosing between alternative types of study, their relative size, whether triangulation will be employed, and adjusting plans to the available resources and timetable. See also QUALITATIVE VERSUS QUANTITATIVE DEBATE.

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research ethics

The application of moral rules and professional codes of conduct to the collection, analysis, reporting, and publication of information about research subjects, in particular active acceptance of subjects' right to privacy, confidentiality, and informed consent. Until recently sociologists (and social scientists generally) often displayed arrogance in their treatment of research subjects, justifying their actions by the search for truth. This trend is now being redressed, especially in industrial societies, with the adoption of formal codes of conduct, and greater emphasis on ethical research procedures. Ethical issues are most salient in relation to case-studies and other research designs which focus on very few cases (with the risk that they remain identifiable in reports). Public opinion now resists invasions of privacy for genuine research purposes just as much as for publicity seeking mass media stories, as evidenced by periodic increases in survey non-response, despite the fact that anonymity is effectively guaranteed in large-scale data collections.
There are three key issues. Research subjects' right to refuse to co-operate with a study is clear-cut in relation to interview surveys, but is not always observed in relation to case-studies, especially when covert observation is employed. Research subjects' right for information supplied to researchers to remain not only anonymous but also confidential in the broader sense is rarely disputed, but again may be difficult to observe in practice, especially when analyses of study results reveal more than may be intended. The right to give or withhold informed consent, if necessary after the research has been completed, ensures that research results are not made public without the subjects' knowing agreement. These and other issues are raised by the excellent collection of (still fresh) case-studies reported in
, Ethics, Politics, and Social Research (1967)
. See also ETHICS.

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research methods

See ATTITUDES; CASE-HISTORY; CASE-STUDY; CONTENT ANALYSIS; INTERVIEW; LIFE-HISTORY; MULTI-LEVEL MODELS; OFFICIAL STATISTICS; PANEL STUDY; PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION; PERSONAL DOCUMENTS; QUALITATIVE COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS; QUALITATIVE VERSUS QUANTITATIVE DEBATE; RESEARCH DESIGN; RESEARCH ETHICS; SECONDARY ANALYSIS; SEQUENCE ANALYSIS; SURVEY; TRIANGULATION.

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reserve army of labour

See INDUSTRIAL RESERVE ARMY.

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residues

See ÉLITE THEORY.

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residues, methods of

See MILL, JOHN STUART.

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resocialization

The relearning of cultural norms and sanctions, on their return to a social system, by those who voluntarily or involuntarily left that system (such as prisoners re-entering society or expatriates returning from abroad) so that they can again be fully accepted within that system. For a fascinating case-study—which arrives at some surprising and controversial conclusions—see
, Japan's ‘International Youth’ (1990
).

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resource mobilization

Resource mobilization refers to a distinct perspective for understanding social movements, emphasizing the critical role played by material resources. Earlier studies of social movements tended to view them as spontaneous or hysterical reactions to high levels of frustration. Resource mobilization stresses rationality, and the importance of adequate funding, leadership, and organization.

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respondent

Someone who offers information to a researcher, for example in response to a questionnaire, or during the course of an interview. The term ‘informant’ is often used when informal research techniques (such as unstructured interviews) have been employed. See also CASE.

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response-rate

The percentage of an eligible random sample that agrees to participate in an interview survey. There is no response-rate for a quota sample. See also NON-RESPONSE.

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restrictive practice

An industrial and commercial agreement or arrangement which operates in restraint of free competition even though it may be within the law. The term originates from political and managerial usage but has come to be quite commonly used in the study of labour relations. For example, restrictive practices might be agreements fixing the prices to be charged for goods, services, or labour, or the quantity supplied, or the conditions of supply. In relation to restrictive labour practices, a large degree of judgement and convention determines whether rules or procedures are regarded as proper safeguards for the customer and the wider public, or are regarded as unjustifiable and reprehensible restrictions. A typical example is the extent to which certain types of employment are restricted to people with specified qualifications and experience, or to those who are members of a closed shop. See also INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT.

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re-study, re-studies

See REPLICATION.

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retirement centre

A town, coastal zone, island, or other geographical area to which many people move when they retire from employment, because of the temperate climate, tax regime, or good leisure facilities. As the elderly form an increasingly large share of the population in Western industrial societies, complete towns and housing developments are built for them in retirement centres—notably, for example, in the United States.

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retreatism

See ANOMIE.

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retributive justice

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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retrograde amnesia

Loss of memory of events and experiences occurring prior to an illness, accident, injury, or traumatic experience such as rape or assault. The amnesia may cover events over a longer or only a brief period. Typically, it declines with time, with earlier memories returning first.

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reverse discrimination

See POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION.

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revitalization movement

See MESSIANIC MOVEMENT; NEW RELIGIONS.

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revolution

See REBELLION.

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revolutionary science

See PARADIGM.

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Rickert, Heinrich

(1863–1936)
See GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN AND NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN.

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rights

The idea of ‘rights’ has been championed in many different ways throughout history. However, the modern Western conception of rights may be traced through the English Magna Carta to the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.
In the wake of international concern over the Holocaust, on December 10th 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which included the right to ‘life, liberty and security of person’, ‘recognition everywhere as a person before the law’, ‘freedom of movement’, ‘a nationality’, ‘freedom of thought, conscience and religion’, ‘freedom of peaceful assembly and association’, and ‘freedom to take part in government’.
In sociology, rights are usually seen to develop out of specific communities: they are social inventions that play an important—and contested—role in political life. For instance, in abortion politics in the United States, one side claims the ‘right to life’ whilst the other claims the ‘right to choose’. The concept of citizenship evokes notions of rights—as well as those of obligations (see
, Citizenship and Capitalism, 1986
). There is also an extensive literature on property rights (see, for example,
, A Theory of Property Rights, 1990
). For a general introduction see
, Rights (1991)
. See also CIVIL RIGHTS; COLLECTIVISM; LIBERALISM.

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riot

A sudden upsurge of collective violence, often directed at property, sometimes at persons in authority. There is considerable taxonomic dispute about the precise definition of the term, and the point at which collective unrest becomes riot, rather than (say) merely civil disorder. The issues here are not merely academic, since acts of collective violence often raise questions of legitimacy (especially when they are directed against the State itself), and can be discredited by those against whom they are directed by means of being labelled as a form of criminal lawlessness. For example, G. Rudé's study of The Crowd in History (1964) shows how the revolutionary crowd in European history was identified by the ruling classes as a frenzied criminal mob, while E. P. Thompson's reading of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English history (The Making of the English Working Class, 1964) suggests that a similar process occurred in respect of Luddism. Stanley Cohen's study of the British Mods and Rockers in the mid-1960s is an exemplary account of the contested labelling that often surrounds the moral panics which are associated with hooliganism and can promote a public discourse of riot.
Much media and other public discussion of riotous behaviour—be it in the contexts of labour militancy, ethnic unrest, or youth subcultures—therefore promotes a ‘lunatic fringe’ or ‘criminal riff-raff’ theory of such activities. Sociologists who have explored the underlying causes of riots have tended, rather, to view them as symptomatic of structural social tensions. Thus, for example, research into the urban riots in the United States in the 1960s showed that these had wide local support and participation, were not orchestrated by a lawless and unrepresentative criminal minority, and could therefore much more plausibly be seen as broad group responses to shared grievances (see, for example,
, ‘The Los Angeles Riot of August 1965’, Social Problems, 1968
). See also COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOUR.

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risk society

See REFLEXIVE MODERNIZATION.

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risky-shift effect

A social psychological term, referring to the observed tendency for people to make more daring decisions when they are in groups, than when they are alone.

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rites of passage

The rituals associated with a change of status, for example from youth to adulthood, and from unmarried to married state. In his classic study by the same name, Arnold van Gennep distinguished rites of separation, rites of segregation, and rites of integration. Rituals associated with a change in status were identified as having these three stages. Between each there are clear symbolic demarcations.

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ritual

Generally, an often-repeated pattern of behaviour which is performed at appropriate times, and which may involve the use of symbols. Religion is one of the main social fields in which rituals operate, but the scope of ritual extends into secular and everyday life as well. For example, the dramaturgical sociology of Erving Goffman makes extensive reference to ‘interaction rituals’, the various ritualized codes of everyday behaviour by which actors co-operate in acknowledging a shared reality and preserve each other's sense of self (see his
Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour, 1967
).
The Durkheimian approach (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912) makes a strong distinction between the sacred and the profane and locates rituals firmly in the former category. For Durkheimians, rituals create social solidarity, which is necessary to hold society together. Durkheim reduced ritual to social structure since he asserted that, through rituals, people correctly represent to themselves the pattern of relations in society. For Durkheim, the unit of significance in ritual is action, since action causes beliefs, not vice versa. Durkheim thus accorded to ritual a primary epistemological role—insisting that the necessary building-blocks of thought are transmitted through the shared ‘effervescence’ of ritual. Christel Lane's The Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society (1981) is a fascinating contemporary example of a Durkheimian interpretation of the socialist rituals of the former Soviet Union.
The Marxist approach to ritual, by contrast, proposes that rituals transmit only false consciousness. They mystify their participants by misrepresenting the pattern of social relations in the society (see, for example,
, From Blessing to Violence, 1986
).
A framework for categorizing the general structure of rituals was proposed by the Belgian anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (The Rites of Passage, 1909). Van Gennep wrote that a person is not just born into society, but has to be re-created through rites of passage as a social individual, and accepted into society. He outlined three stages in such rites, which transform the social identity of the initiand: separation, or the detaching of an individual from his or her former status; liminality, where the initiand is in ‘limbo’, having been detached from the old status but not yet attached to the new; and reincorporation, in which the passage from one status to another is consummated symbolically.
A common criticism of sociological interpretations of ritual is that analysts have merely imposed their own meaning on the events. G. Lewis (Day of Shining Red, 1980) argues that the search for meaning in rites outweighs the concern for what people may feel about them; that is, the emotional aspects. Thus rituals become like crossword puzzles—to be decoded in the hands of anthropologists and sociologists. Lewis argues that rituals must be understood in the terms of the participants' own meanings as well as those of the analyst.

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role, social role, role theory

Role is a key concept in sociological theory. It highlights the social expectations attached to particular statuses or social positions and analyses the workings of such expectations. Role theory was particularly popular during the mid-twentieth century, but after sustained criticism came to be seen as flawed, and substantially fell out of use. However the concept of role remains a basic tool for sociological understanding.
There are two rather different approaches within role theory. One develops the social anthropology of Ralph Linton and gives a structural account of roles situated within the social system. Here, roles become institutionalized clusters of normative rights and obligations: Talcott Parsons's celebrated account of the sick role is a good example. An alternative approach is more social-psychological in tenor and focuses upon the active processes involved in making, taking, and playing at roles: it is part of the traditions of symbolic interactionism and dramaturgy, the latter of which analyses social life through the metaphor of drama and the theatre.
The structural account of roles locates a status in society, such as that of a teacher, and then tries to describe the standard bundle of rights and duties associated with an ideal type of this position. These expectations, which are socially based, constitute the role. Any given person will possess a number of statuses (for example mother, teacher, golf-captain), and these constitute a status set, with each status harbouring its own role. Every role brings a number of different partners, each with their own set of expectations, so that a teacher (for example) may have students, colleagues, heads, governors, and parents as role partners, each of whom makes somewhat different expectations upon his or her behaviour. The sum total of the expectations of these partners is the role-set. When these expectations are in disagreement, as is frequently the case, sociologists talk of role conflict and role strain. In the Parsonsian system of social theory, these role patterns are defined through the so-called pattern variables, or choices between pairs of alternative norms. This theory is a useful heuristic device for mapping the organization of societies through normative patterns, but it does have a tendency to oversimplify normative expectations by assuming too much consensus in society, and by a reification of the social system. A sophisticated version will be found in Ralf Dahrendorf's Homo Sociologicus (1968), at one time controversial, now unwarrantably neglected.
The contrasting social psychological view is focused much more upon the dynamic aspects of working at roles: it examines the interactions in which people come to play their roles rather than describing the place of these roles in the social structure. Here, the emphasis is on the ways in which people come to take the role of the other (role-taking), construct their own roles (role-making), anticipate the responses of others to their roles (altercasting), and finally play at their particular role (role-playing). In some versions of this theory (for example that propounded by Erving Goffman), attention is given to the ways in which roles are performed: sometimes people may embrace their parts fully (role embracement) and play out the details of their role in cherished detail. At other times they may perform their parts with tongue-in-cheek (role distance)—showing that they are much more than the simple role they play. Or they may play roles cynically in order to manage the outcomes of the situation (impression management). In all of these accounts the concern is with the dynamics of working at roles, where roles are not fixed expectations, but emergent outcomes. Perhaps the most useful accounts of this approach to role theory are to be found in Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) and Encounters (1961).
Role theory is certainly not the prerogative of sociologists. The notion of analysing social life through the theatrical metaphor is obvious in Greek theatre, in Shakespeare's declaration that ‘All the world's a stage’, and in modern notions of ‘theotocracy’ such as are introduced in Stanford Lyman and Marvin Scott's The Drama of Social Reality (1975). Louis A. Zurcher's Social Roles (1983) is still a good introduction to the field.

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role, conjugal

The distinctive roles of the husband and wife that result from the division of labour in the family. In her classic study of Family and Social Network (1957), Elizabeth Bott observes that one spouse was usually responsible for supporting the family financially, and another for the domestic tasks involved in housekeeping and child-care. But there was considerable variation in the degree to which the conjugal roles were separated. While Bott did not regard conjugal roles as class-determined, nevertheless joint conjugal roles tended to be associated with middle-class marriages. In their earlier study of Family and Kinship in East London (1957), and again in their later book The Symmetrical Family (1973), Michael Young and Peter Willmott argue that, even among the working class, there is a shift towards joint conjugal roles, with the ‘companionable’ marriage now accepted as the ideal. However, while more recent empirical studies suggest that the traditional division of labour is becoming less rigid, it is clear that inequalities remain. Time-budget studies reveal that there has been remarkably little change in who does the household chores, although husbands may help out a little more around the home. Nevertheless, even when wives are working full-time, the full sharing of chores around the house is still unusual, and cases of working women married to ‘house-husbands’ are rare enough to be newsworthy. There is also little evidence that conjugal differences in power and control have disappeared. Studies of money-management in the household suggest that payments of house-keeping allowances to wives are common, with many wives still not knowing how much their husbands earn. All of these issues—the domestic division of labour, household time allocation, and patterns of money allocation within households—are given a rigorous empirical treatment, from the point of view of their implications for changing conjugal roles, in
, The Social and Political Economy of the Household (1994)
. See also DOMESTIC DIVISION OF LABOUR; FAMILY, SOCIOLOGY OF; HOUSEHOLD ALLOCATIVE SYSTEM; JOINT CONJUGAL ROLES; SEGREGATED CONJUGAL ROLES.

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role conflict

See ROLE.

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role distance

See ROLE.

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role embracement

See ROLE.

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role-making

See ROLE.

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role-model

A significant other, upon which an individual patterns his or her behaviour in a particular social role, including adopting appropriate similar attitudes. Role-models need not be known personally to the individual: some people model their behaviour in particular roles on the real and legendary example provided by historical figures. Role-models tend to provide ideals for a particular role only, rather than a pattern to be emulated across all the constituent roles of an individual's life and self.

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role-playing

See ROLE.

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role-set

See ROLE.

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role strain

See ROLE.

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role-taking

See ROLE.

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Rorschach Test

A widely used projective test, developed by Hermann Rorschach (1884–1922) and influenced by psychoanalytic thinking, especially the idea of free association. The test explores personality by examining the subject's responses to relatively unstructured stimuli: ten symmetrical ink-blots. Various scoring systems analyse location, content, use of form and colour, comparing these with established norms.

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Rose, Arnold M.

(1918–68)
An American sociologist, a somewhat eclectic symbolic interactionist who adopted an intermediate position between the humanistic approach of the Chicago School, and the more positivist stance of Manford Kuhn and his followers at Iowa. Rose argued that the interactionist perspective was compatible with a range of research techniques—including both participant observation and the social survey. This methodological and theoretical pluralism is evident in the widely used collection of essays on Human Behavior and Social Processes (1962), edited by Rose and with contributions from (among others) Howard Becker, Ralph Turner, Herbert Blumer, Robert Dubin, Herbert Gans, and Manford Kuhn, all of whom are seen as offering an interactionist approach to the study of society.

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rotating sample design

A procedure for combining the advantages of the regular cross-sectional survey with the panel study, in national statistical surveys measuring trends over time, such as the USA National Crime Survey and certain Labour Force Surveys. A proportion of the initial survey sample is dropped from each subsequent interview sweep and replaced with a fresh sample of equal size. The complete sample is thus replaced gradually over a period of months or years. A variety of rotation designs are in use, some of them complex. For example, the USA Current Population Survey uses a 4–8–4 rotation system, ensuring that 75 per cent of the sample is common from month to month, and 50 per cent of the sample is common from year to year.

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Rousseau, Jean-Jacques

(1712–78)
A controversial social philosopher and educationalist of the French Enlightenment, whose writings centred around the development of social contract theory, a theory of human nature as essentially open but subsequently enchained, and a democratic theory of government. Rousseau's status as an early social theorist depends upon the reader's attitude to the many contradictions in his work. In different places he argued both that scientific inquiry should be shunned, since it corrupted public virtue, yet himself offered systematic studies of social inequality; and insisted that nature and society were in irreconcilable contradiction, yet offered a theory of the state which presupposes the ability of individuals to reconcile their own interests with those of others, and to identify with the general will as expressed in the sovereign body. His major text is probably The Social Contract (1762)—although the conception of a legitimate polity proffered therein has been much more influential in political philosophy than sociology.

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routinization of charisma

See CHARISMA.

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Rowntree, Benjamin Seebohm

(1871–1954)
A company director and chairman (1923–41) of Rowntree (the chocolate manufacturer) in York, Seebohm Rowntree was also a social reformer, philanthropist, and social researcher, with strong interests in industrial and labour management and in poverty. He is best known to sociologists for his detailed empirical studies of poverty in York.
His reforming spirit owed much to his Quaker origins and the strong influence of his father's ideas. He joined the family business when aged 18 and became the company's first Labour Director, implementing a range of reforms: an eight-hour day in 1896, a pension scheme in 1906, a five-day (44-hour) working week and works councils in 1919, a psychology department in 1922, and profit-sharing the following year. These changes were founded on Rowntree's concerns for the needs of workers, whose improved welfare was, he believed, also likely to promote industrial efficiency—a philosophy of scientific management elaborated in books such as Human Needs of Labour (1918).
Inspired by Charles Booth's studies of poverty in London, Rowntree decided to assess the extent of poverty in York, carrying out his first survey in 1897–8. Poverty: A Study of Town Life appeared in 1901. Rowntree adopted a subsistence definition of poverty, attempting to measure the resources necessary for maintaining physical efficiency. He distinguished primary poverty (where resources were insufficient to maintain efficiency) and secondary poverty (where earnings were sufficient but were spent on other things)—a distinction he subsequently accepted was problematic. The first study showed some 15 per cent of respondents were living in primary poverty. His subsequent studies in 1936 and 1950 employed somewhat modified measures and showed some reduction in poverty.

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rules of correspondence

A major problem for empirical researchers is the nature of the connection between the language of theory and the language of observation. Rules of correspondence is a term sometimes applied to the means, criteria, and assumptions underlying attempts to connect these two levels, by means of common expressions (see
The Use of Official Statistics in Sociology, 1973
). In sociology, the passage from observation to conceptualization and back again requires a close examination of the manner in which our observations are organized and categorized (for example according to statistical criteria, tacit knowledge, or background expectancies), as well as to the operationalization of the concepts deployed to organize data.

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ruling class

See ÉLITE THEORY; MOSCA, GAETANO.

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rural sociology

Rural sociology has been powerfully influenced by anti-urbanism, producing a stereotypical view of rural society as stable and harmonious. The claim that certain social characteristics were typical of villages rather than towns was made by Ferdinand Tönnies in his discussion of the Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft distinction between different forms of social association. Later, Robert Redfield and others adopted a more simplistic view, claiming that rural (folk) societies were inherently characterized by (for example) traditional and close-knit family social networks, consensus rather than conflict, and ascribed not achieved statuses.
Such ideas provided the basis for an empiricist rural sociology, notably in the United States, where it supported state policies legitimated by a Jeffersonian conception of rural life. Much rural sociology consisted of community studies, effectively fact-gathering exercises to assess just how close the community came to exhibiting the ideal-typical rural way of life, and what was eroding this idyllic vision in practice. After 1945, and especially through its influence on international bodies such as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, this approach spread beyond America. However, its main concern remained that of rural development in advanced industrial countries. Major advances in the analysis of Third World rural change came more from the sociology of development and peasant studies. In state socialist countries, rural sociology was also relentlessly empiricist, although here it served policies of rural transformation rather than preservation.
By the 1960s these ideas about a rural way of life could no longer be sustained. Oscar Lewis, Ray Pahl, and other had shown that the countryside is as much characterized by allegedly urban as by supposedly rural forms of social association, conflict, and cohesion. However, much mainstream rural sociology remains obstinately wedded to the old paradigm, or is little more than abstracted empiricism.
In the 1970s, there was promising new work on the nature of capitalist agricultural production, and its social consequences for rural populations and the wider society. The emergence of a new sociology of agriculture occurred alongside a similar transformation of urban sociology. This paradigmatic shift opened up many new areas of research, for example regarding the peculiar nature of land as a factor of production, the role of differing patterns of land-ownership, and the study of rural power structures and social stratification. However, much of this work was deterministic, merely a reading off of the social consequences of rural change from the presumed logic of capitalist agricultural development.
Later studies move beyond these simplicities, exploring the historically and geographically variable nature of agricultural production, and its social consequences. Conceiving agriculture as a complex process of commodity-production, research topics include globally organized ‘food regimes’, the role of agribusiness (including its relation to state policies and use of new technologies), and agricultural credit systems. Theories derived from peasant studies and the sociology of development have also been influential. Topics such as environmental issues and the non-agricultural rural economy appeared in the 1980s, widening the research agenda still further. A good bibliographical essay is
's ‘Rural Sociology’ (Current Sociology, 1980
).

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rural-urban continuum

See FOLK–URBAN CONTINUUM.

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S

sacred, sacred versus profane distinction

For Émile Durkheim and all subsequent sociologists of religion, the recognition of the absolute nature of the distinction between these two terms was and has been fundamental to their sub-discipline, both as a social fact and as something to be explained. Durkheim's classic statement of the distinction is that ‘Sacred things are those which the [religious] interdictions protect and isolate; profane things, those to which these interdictions are applied and which must remain at a distance from the first’ (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912). Sacred phenomena are therefore considered extraordinary and set apart from everything else.

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Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de

(1760–1825)
A most unusual French aristocrat who lived through remarkable times. His powerful liberal and republican sympathies saved him from the guillotine during the French Revolution, and after the Bourbon restoration he developed a system of ideas about social progress. What he created has been called the ‘characteristic ideology of industrialism’: that everyone must work and be rewarded according to merit, that all progress is based on science, and that the society of the future will be peaceful, prosperous, and run on strictly scientific principles. Saint-Simon gathered a band of enthusiastic disciples who were regarded as radicals and even socialists—although there was not much about his system that would be called socialist today. From 1817 to 1824, when they quarrelled, Auguste Comte worked with Saint-Simon, whose influence on the younger man's theories is clear. See
, The Proffered Crown (1987
).

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salience

Salience refers to the centrality of a particular attitude, identity, or role. Salient events are those that are relatively important or are the focus of attention. Thus, at election time, politicians are anxious that the salient issues are the ones most favourable to their party.

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sample, quota

See QUOTA SAMPLE.

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sample, snowball

See SNOWBALLING TECHNIQUE.

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sample selection bias

Non-random selection is both a source of bias in empirical research and a fundamental aspect of many social processes. When observations in social research are selected so that they are not independent of the outcome variables in a study, sample selection bias (sometimes labelled ‘selection effects’) leads to biased inferences about social processes. For example, information on wages is only available for people in employment, but working women are a non-random sample of all adult women: they have a larger investment in educational qualifications and higher potential earnings than do non-working women, so the decision to do paid work is not independent of earning potential. Sociologists have only recently begun to recognize the contaminating influence—as illustrated by
, ‘An Introduction to Sample Selection Bias in Sociological Data’, American Sociological Review (1983)
and
, Making it Count (1985)
. Economists have been more alert to the impact of sample selection bias in distorting research results, for example from regression analyses, and have developed various techniques which are claimed to reduce the error. One of the most popular is Heckman's two-stage estimator, but this is not robust, and relies on strong assumptions about the way that selection occurs. Policy researchers have also developed models for assessing policy impacts and programme effects in experimental and non-experimental research which addresses the issue of selection effects (see
, ‘Models for Sample Selection Bias’, Annual Review of Sociology, 1992
).

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sample survey

See SURVEY.

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sampling

A method for collecting information and drawing inferences about a larger population or universe, from the analysis of only part thereof, the sample. Censuses of the population are an expensive way of monitoring social and economic change, and are carried out infrequently, usually at ten-year intervals. Sampling allows surveys of the complete population of a country, or sub-sections of it, to be carried out far more cheaply and frequently, and with resources devoted to improving the depth and quality of the information collected, in contrast with the shallow information obtainable from censuses. Sampling is also used in other contexts—for example as quality control in manufacturing industry. Within social science its use as the basis of sampling methodology and inferential statistics have contributed enormous improvements in the cost-effectiveness of empirical research.
Probability sampling requires that each case in the universe being studied must have a determinate, or fixed, chance of being selected; probability statistics can then be used to measure quantitatively the risk of drawing the wrong conclusion from samples of various sizes. It seems intuitively obvious that if one in two cases is randomly selected from a population, the risk of the half so selected being unrepresentative of the whole group is far lower than if one in fifty were selected. The higher sampling fraction of one in two must give more reliable information than the sampling fraction of one case in fifty. But the actual sample size is even more important in determining how representative the sample is. A sample of about 2,500 persons has broadly the same reliability and representativeness, whether it comes from a population of 100,000 persons or one million persons. Samples of 2,000–2,500 are in fact the most common size for national samples, especially when a fairly narrow range of characteristics are being studied.
There are a variety of sample designs. A random sample, or simple random sample, is one in which each case has an equal chance (or equal probability) of selection, so that the techniques of probability statistics can then be applied to the resulting information. A common variation on this is the stratified random sample: the population being studied is first divided into sub-groups or strata, and random sampling is applied within the strata. For example, random sampling might be applied to both the male and female groups of a population of political representatives, but using a sampling fraction of one person in twenty from the numerous male group and a sampling fraction of one person in two from the relatively small female group. Another common variation is two-stage or multi-stage (also known as complex) sampling. For example, random sampling is first used to select a limited number of local areas for a survey, and then a second stage of random sampling is applied to selecting persons or households or companies within the random sample of areas. The two stages can be extended to three or more stages, if necessary, so long as the eventual sample remains large enough to support analysis. All these sampling designs use random sampling in the final selection process, producing a list of persons from the electoral register, household addresses, company names, or other cases which constitute the final issued sample. All of them must be included in the study, with no substitutions allowed, in sharp contrast with the procedures for obtaining quota samples. For this reason, interviewers working on a random sample survey will exert great effort to persuade potential respondents to participate in the study. Failure to achieve interviews with the complete sample can produce non-response bias in the resulting data. The calculation of sampling errors for complex sample designs is statistically far more complicated than in the case of simple random samples.
Once the sampling fraction and sample size are known, probability theory provides the basis for a whole range of statistical inferences to be made about the characteristics of the universe, from the observed characteristics of the sample drawn from it. The standard deviation (see VARIATION) of the distribution of sample means, which is referred to as the standard error of the means for any given characteristic (such as age), can be calculated to assess the reliability of the sample data. Large standard errors reduce our confidence that the sample is fully representative of the complete universe. Similarly, the probability of two samples yielding different measures, and the probability of obtaining particular values of correlation coefficient or other measures of association, can all be calculated. Most of the relevant calculations and significance tests are supplied in the SPSS software package. Statistics textbooks supply details of the underlying calculations.
It must be emphasized that textbooks on sampling and probability statistics are written by statisticians, and refer exclusively to the case of the single random sample on a topic on which the statistician or researcher is entirely ignorant, having absolutely no substantive information other than that supplied by the sample. Deductions and inferences are therefore restricted to those that can be calculated mathematically. It is rare for a sociologist or other social scientist to be in this position. Good researchers bring a great deal of substantive knowledge to bear on assessing the validity and reliability of survey results, and they supplement statistical measures with other methods for increasing confidence in the reliability of sample survey results, and the interpretations placed on them. These methods include triangulation; repeat surveys (as illustrated by opinion polls); literature surveys which yield information on earlier replications; as well as theoretical assessments. Statistical measures of reliability, association, or significance are not the same as assessments of the substantive importance of a result. Social surveys can sometimes be over-engineered, in seeking (for example) to establish whether the exact incidence of something is 31 per cent or 36 per cent, whereas in practice all that matters is whether it is about one-third or about one in thirty.

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sampling, non-probability

See NON-PROBABILITY SAMPLING.

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sampling bias

See SAMPLE SELECTION BIAS; SAMPLING ERROR.

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sampling error

The principal aim of any sampling procedure is to obtain a sample which, subject to limitations of size, will reproduce the characteristics of the population being studied, especially those of immediate interest, as closely as possible. In practice two types of error will arise from any sampling procedure: first, sampling bias may arise in the way the selection is carried out; and second, random sampling error may arise in the sample obtained, due to chance differences between the members of the population included, or excluded, from the sample. Total sampling error in the sample issued for interviewing consists of these two taken together. The key difference between the two is that random sampling error decreases as the sample size is increased, whereas sampling bias is not eliminated or reduced in that way: it is a constant characteristic unless steps are taken to improve the quality of sample selection. An important source of sampling bias is a sampling frame (a list of the members of the total population of interest from which a sample for study is to be drawn) which does not in fact cover all of the intended population. For example, there may be systematic differences between people who do or do not enter themselves on the electoral register or own a telephone, so that lists of such persons are not completely representative of the adult population. Another source of bias is random sampling that is not in practice completely random, because the lists and records used as the sampling frame are not put together randomly, but presented in some systematic manner not known to the researcher using them.
After interviewing is completed, non-response bias may be discovered in survey results. The combination of sampling error and survey non-response bias together determine the representativeness of the survey data produced by the study.

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sampling frame

See POPULATION; SAMPLING ERROR.

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sampling weights

Weights are used in sampling to achieve proportionality. Sampling weights are the inverse of sampling fractions. When different sampling fractions have been applied to particular sub-groups within the population studied, sampling weights are used to reinstate the original importance of each group within the population. For example, survey results obtained from using sampling fractions of 1/50 and 1/2 must be multiplied by sampling weights of 50/1 and 2/1 to reinstate their correct representation in the population as a whole.

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sanction, social sanction

Any means by which conformity to socially approved standards is enforced. Sanctions can be positive (rewarding behaviour that conforms to wider expectations) or negative (punishing the various forms of deviance); and formal (as in legal restraints) or informal (for example verbal abuse). The term ‘informal social controls’ is sometimes applied to the last of these. As will be obvious, the list of possible sanctions in social interaction is huge, as is the range of their severity. Sanctions do not have to be activated to be effective; often the anticipation of reward or punishment is sufficient to ensure conformity. For example, in his famous article on vocabularies of motive, C. Wright Mills argued that the availability of a socially acceptable motivational account of behaviour was crucial to facilitating social action—and that, where such a rhetoric was lacking, the mere anticipation of probable sanctions (ranging from embarrassment to imprisonment) was often sufficient to restrain the behaviour in question. There is considerable latitude in the sociological interpretation of sanctions and their functioning. For example, Marxists and conflict theorists are likely to situate the terminology of sanctions in a conceptual context dominated by notions of power and social control, whereas systems theorists and normative functionalists will emphasize socialization and maintenance of value consensus.

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sanskritization

See CASTE.

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Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

This hypothesis—a position of linguistic relativity—argues that (to quote one of its authors) language ‘is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas, but is itself a shaper of ideas, the programme and guide for the individual's meaningful activity’. In short, language determines (or shapes) our perceptions of reality. The classic literary example of this is the ‘newspeak’ of the totalitarian rulers of George Orwell's 1984. The most famous commonly cited examples in social science are probably those of the Hanunoo, who have 92 names for rice, each conveying a different reality, and the Eskimo, who have over a hundred words for snow. Such fine differentiation permits these cultures to see important facets of their culture more clearly.
This is an important theory and there is broad truth in the argument that language plays a role in shaping reality. But it should not be overstated and collapse into extreme relativism: there seem also to be linguistic universals, or features common to every language; and words are often invented to reflect, rather than construct new phenomena in reality. (In the case of microwave ovens, for example, we need the word ‘microwave’ to depict a real phenomenon—not to invent the ovens themselves.)

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SAR

Sample of Anonymized Records from the population and housing census. This term was adopted in Britain instead of the term Public Use Samples (PUS) used in the USA and Public Use Microdata Files (PUMF) used in Canada for these types of anonymized microdata tapes. Such data-sets are available for varying sizes of sample (from 0.1 to 5 per cent of census records); for individual persons and, often separately, for families and/or households, with differing types of information at each level; and for both the most recent censuses and for nineteenth-century censuses for which the full manuscript records are already publicly available under the 100 years confidentiality rule.

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Sartre, Jean-Paul

(1905–80)
A French existentialist writer and philosopher who attempted to develop a humanist critique of and philosophical foundation for Marxism. His most accessible work of interest to the social sciences is The Problem of Method (1957) but see also Bein and Nothingness (1943) and The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960).

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satisficing

A term used in economic theory to describe how people make rational choices between options open to them and within prevailing constraints. Herbert A. Simon (Administrative Behaviour, 1957) argued that decision-makers can rarely obtain and evaluate all the information which could be relevant to the making of a decision. Instead, they work with limited and simplified knowledge, to reach acceptable, compromise choices (‘satisficing’), rather than pursue ‘maximizing’ or ‘optimizing’ strategies in which one particular objective is fully achieved. Satisficing is sometimes also referred to as a strategy of disjointed incrementalism.
The adoption of satisficing models instead of maximizing models of behaviour has been found useful in the theory of the firm and corporate behaviour. For example, to maximize its profits a firm needs complete information about its costs and revenues, which in practice is available only after the event. Satisficing models replace the search for the optimum outcome, which may be unattainable, with rules of thumb and compromises which work well enough. See also BOUNDED RATIONALITY; ORGANIZATION THEORY.

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Saussure, Ferdinand de

(1857–1913)
A Swiss linguist who is generally considered to have been the founder of modern structural linguistics and, therefore, the grandfather of structuralism. The revolutionary nature of Saussure's work only became clear somewhat fortuitously when, three years after his death, some of his former students published a book based upon notes they had taken in the course of his lectures. This is the text that has come down to us as The Course in General Linguistics.
According to the traditional representational theory, language consists of humanly created and ceaselessly modified symbols which name, and so may be understood more or less complicatedly and problematically to stand for, the things and happenings that humans wish to talk about.
Saussure deploys two sets of oppositions (langue versus parole and synchronic versus diachronic) in order to demarcate a rather different object of study: that is, not the diachronics (historical changes or dynamics) of parole (language in use), but the synchronics (system of relationships) of langue—or, the socially embedded, structural and tangible aspects of language, that explain its persistence and hence its capacity to serve as a medium of communication.
What persists, and how, is specified and explained by two further sets of oppositions: signified versus signifier, and syntagmatic versus associative (the latter of which is today usually termed paradigmatic). A ‘signifier’ is a differentiated graphic or sound image. A ‘signified’ is a differentiated item of thought or a mental image (note, not the thing or happening that the image might be about, which is commonly termed ‘the referent’). Together, signifier and signified produce a ‘sign’, which according to Saussure is an ‘unmotivated’ or arbitrary combination which is the product of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations specific to a particular language. In this context, a syntagmatic relationship unites elements present in a speech chain, whereas paradigmatic relationships unite terms in a mnemonic series. Thus, in the syntagm (or sentence) ‘I'm cold’, the word ‘cold’ has a syntagmatic relationship with ‘I'm’, but a paradigmatic relationship with the words ‘cool’, ‘chilly’, and ‘freezing’. To elaborate this thesis further, we may note that a sign gains value or meaning syntagmatically according to its linear position in discourse, for example as determined by grammar; it also gains value paradigmatically according to what signs could have been substituted for it but were not (as determined, for example, by the nature of a particular lexicon).
In sum, for Saussure languages do not consist of individually created and recreated representations, but rather of signs that are the product of extra-individual structures or systems of differences (such as alphabets, grammars, and lexicons). This displacement of the individual from the centre of concern in the analysis of so manifestly social a phenomenon as language is the move that initiated the so-called structuralist revolution. As a result, there remains no better or more essential introduction to this revolution than Saussure's Course. Sadly, however, a large number of sociological advocates as well as critics of structuralism appear never to have read it, with the result that their writings are replete with confusions, especially over what is meant by the term ‘signified’. See also SEMIOLOGY.

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scales, scaling

A form of measurement technique based on the observation of supposed common cultural meanings or shared social interpretations. One common sociological use of this technique is the attempt to devise measures of social prestige or social standing via occupational scaling—as, for example, in the Hope-Goldthorpe scale of occupational prestige (see
. The Social Grading of Occupations, 1974
). However, the most frequent application of scaling techniques in sociology is probably in the measurement of attitudes and personality traits, in which field a number of specialist scaling techniques have been devised. See also AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY; BOGARDUS SOCIAL DISTANCE SCALE; EQUAL APPEARING INTERVALS; GUTTMAN SCALE; LIKERT SCALE; MULTI-DIMENSIONAL SCALING; SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL.

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scaling, multi-dimensional

See MULTI-DIMENSIONAL SCALING.

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scalogram analysis

See GUTTMAN SCALE.

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scapegoat

One blamed, punished, or stigmatized for the misdeeds of others, after the classic atonement tale in Leviticus 16, in which one of two goats was sent into the wilderness after having the sins of the people symbolically placed upon it. Scapegoating theory has been developed in social science to examine the basis of prejudice (as in the work of Gordon Allport), and is implicit in much deviance theory, especially labelling theory and the work of Émile Durkheim on the functions of deviance. Thomas S. Szasz uses it in The Manufacture of Madness (1970) to explain the hostility towards the mentally ill.

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scatter diagrams

Sometimes referred to as ‘scattergrams’, these are two-dimensional representations of the relationship between pairs of variables, achieved by plotting each individual case on a graph—as in the hypothetical example shown below. The diagram thus represents the points at which the two variables intersect for each case in the sample. These diagrams can be routinely produced by most statistical computer packages. They allow easy and visual representation of three aspects of a pairwise relationship: whether or not it is linear; whether it is positive or negative; and the strength of the association. They can be useful aids to the understanding of the idea of correlation but are rarely reproduced in the published results of sociological analyses.

FIGURE 9. A scattergram showing the plot of income by education

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scattergrams

See SCATTER DIAGRAMS.

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Scheler, Max

(1874–1928)
Director of the Institute for Social Scientific Research and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cologne from 1919, Scheler was important in the development of phenomenology, the sociology of knowledge, and the sociology of culture. Under the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and Edmund Husserl, Scheler attempted to avoid the relativism of the sociology of knowledge by adopting an essentialist view of human nature in his philosophical anthropology, which was also shaped by his own Roman Catholic beliefs. He recognized the plurality and relativism of belief systems but argued that human nature was universal. For Karl Marx's ‘base/superstructure’ metaphor Scheler substituted a ‘life/spirit’ dichotomy. He held a pessimistic view of modern industrial society, which he saw as a corruption of genuine values. His principal works were Ressentiment (1912), The Nature of Sympathy (1913), Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge (1926), and Man's Place in Nature (1928). Scheler's contribution to the sociology of knowledge has been unwarrantably neglected.

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schism

A break or division in a social group, especially in a church or a sect. Schisms are common in evangelical Christian movements, where there is a special emphasis on conformity to orthodox belief and practice. Schism is also a common organizational problem in radical political movements.

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schizophrenia

A psychosis, more broadly defined in the United States than Britain, typically characterized by delusions or hallucinations, usually developing in late adolescence, and regarded as paradigmatic of madness. The term was introduced in the early twentieth century and applied to a condition identified in the mid-nineteenth century as dementia praecox. Evidence indicates genetic predisposition but also the aetiological importance of environment.

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school, schooling

Both an institution and a method of education. A process of learning and management of socially approved knowledge, involving an approved curriculum and pedagogy, paid professional educators, compulsory attendance of pupils, and school grouping.

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school class

A type of learning situation: a method by which schools function as organization by grouping their pupils according to various pedagogic principles. Learning in school classes entails a clear status distinction between the pupil group, and one or more professionals (teachers, instructors, or lecturers), charged with providing education (that is, a legitimate curriculum). Some of the most important insights into class interaction have come from the Durkheimian tradition, notably through the work of Basil Bernstein, emphasizing the cognitive impact of the hidden (as opposed to the visible) curriculum and pedagogy of the classroom. Ethnographic studies, influenced by symbolic interactionism, have emphasized the roles and moral careers of both teachers and pupils. Both groups create meanings about what is going on: for example, when pupil conformity is negotiated in exchange for relaxation of the demands of the official curriculum; or when self-fulfilling labels are attached to pupils and become the source of fixed behaviours and attainment. Sociologists from the mainstream traditions of sociology have tried to analyse the relation between such micro-processes and the reproduction of function and power on a macro level. A classic paper by Talcott Parsons stressed the progressive shift in classroom dynamics from the particularism of the elementary years (which supposedly mirrors the child's family) to the universalism of later stages (which anticipates the labour-market and employment). More recently, Marxist writing in the United States and Britain, drawing on a range of historical, statistical, and ethnographic data, has claimed that classroom learning is mainly significant in socializing a docile labour-force for capitalist industry. See also ELABORATED AND RESTRICTED SPEECH CODES.

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school grouping

An organizational constraint in mass education systems. So-called inter-school groupings define types of schools and the relation between them. Intra-school grouping defines the internal allocation of pupils to school classes. Conflicting school pedagogies in use typically cause grouping to vary by age, gender, educability, or cultural factors such as religion and language.

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Schumpeter, Joseph

(1883–1950)
A Moravian historical economist, whose interdisciplinary work addresses issues of interest to sociologists, and who taught throughout the Habsburg Empire, Germany, and the United States. Schumpeter himself saw sociology and economics as complementary disciplines, and often wrote about subjects which are today considered to lie within the province of the former, for example social class and imperialism.
Like both Karl Marx and Max Weber, Schumpeter was interested in the origins and development of the capitalist system, and attached similar importance to the profit-generating and risk-taking entrepreneurs who pioneered new products and techniques. This, together with his interest in the links between business cycle theory and capital formation, are characteristic features of the Austrian School of Economics—of which Schumpeter can therefore be seen as a direct descendant. His books included Theory of Economic Development (1912), Business Cycles (1939), and the best-selling Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). In the last of these, Schumpeter warned against both the tendency for entrepreneurs to be replaced by a more conservative class of industrial administrators, and the necessity of economic planning to encourage socialism. See also IMPERIALISM.

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Schutz, Alfred

(1899–1959)
See INTERPRETATION; PHENOMENOLOGY.

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science, sociology of

A specialism, originating in the United States, which studies the normative and institutional arrangements that enable science to be carried out; or, as Robert Merton puts it, ‘a subdivision of the sociology of knowledge, dealing … with the social environment of that particular kind of knowledge which springs from and returns to controlled experiment or controlled observation’ (see
‘Studies in the Sociology of Science’, Part Four of his Social Theory and Social Structure, 1968
). The best-known classic studies are those by Merton himself, who investigated the consequences of modernity for the development of science, including (for example) the effects of the rise of ascetic Protestantism and the spread of democratic ideals. Many of these investigations are gathered together in his The Sociology of Science (1973). During the 1970s it became conventional to distinguish this literature from the European (largely British) dominated ‘sociology of scientific knowledge’ (often referred to simply as ‘SSK’), which is concerned more directly with what is counted as ‘science’—and why. The content of scientific knowledge is largely ignored within the former approach, which tends to assume both universal standards of logic and rationality, and fixed points in the physical world and in Nature. Proponents of the latter view, on the other hand, initiated a relativist revolution which drew attention to the social construction of scientific knowledge—and claimed no access to a Truth or Reality beyond this human activity.
Not surprisingly these two traditions are often represented as being in competition or even opposition. The earlier American writers tended to be interested in how societies could be arranged so that truth would emerge. This focus (which is evident, for example, in B. Barber's Science and the Social Order, 1952) is perhaps best understood against the background of European totalitarianism. The more recent British contributions ask how it is that certain conclusions about the physical and mathematical worlds are deemed to be correct in particular societies at certain times, and can therefore be seen as a manifestation of the wider phenomenological revolution in the social sciences during the 1970s, a sociological parallel to the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy. (The writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein are a common source of inspiration.) Told in these terms, it is possible to see the European literature as a critical reaction against the traditional normative approach to the subject, however this undoubtedly exaggerates the epistemological differences between the two research programmes. According to Harry Collins, for example, the relationship between the two is one of ‘cognitive tangentiality with…an admixture of academic antagonism’ (see
‘The Sociology of Scientific Knowledge’, Annual Review of Sociology, 1983
). Certainly, practitioners working in the cognate fields of the philosophy of science and the history of science have addressed both literatures in more or less equal measure, in the former case to defend rational progress in science against the relativist critique, and in the latter to contribute historical case-studies to the discussion and development of sociological theory. The contrast should therefore be seen very much as a heuristic device. Thomas S. Kuhn's (American) work on the relativistic implications of the concept of paradigms shows that the boundary between the two approaches was by no means hard and fast.
Both traditions have sponsored substantial programmes of empirical research and vigorous theoretical discussion. For example, European researchers have investigated the mechanisms involved in producing scientific knowledge, and shown that merely following the rules for the conduct of ‘proper science’ does not fully explain the outcome of research, or how scientific controversies are resolved in practice. These sorts of studies usually involve both close familiarity with the technical details of the areas of science under investigation, and detailed interviews with the members of particular scientific communities and networks, although a minority of researchers have adopted the anthropological technique of participant observation (perhaps by working as a technician in a research laboratory). Researchers utilizing the former technique tend to focus on scientific accounts, notably the meaning that the actors give to their professional activities, whereas the anthropological approach encourages observations of scientific life and behaviour. In both cases, the final sociological report is itself often highly specialized, requiring considerable familiarity, on the part of the reader, with the scientific field under investigation. On the other hand, some sociological studies of scientific knowledge manage to be both engaging and revealing, as for example in the case of the many investigations of so-called ‘fringe sciences’ (such as parapsychology).
The best overview of this relatively small, but dynamic and well-organized sociological field, is Andrew Pickering's introduction to his Science as Practice and Culture (1992)—a volume which also contains a representative sampling of recent contributions by many of the leading contemporary practitioners. A highly readable collection of case-studies is summarized and discussed in
, The Golem: What Everybody Should Know about Science (1993)
.

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scientific knowledge, sociology of

See SCIENCE, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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scientific management

A leading example of technicism and a theory of work behaviour based on the highly influential and controversial writings of Frederick William Taylor (1856–1915). Taylorism sought to eradicate the industrial inefficiency and loss of leadership supposedly due to the growth in scale of enterprises and the managerial revolution. It sought a new legitimacy and discipline for management by basing it on the authority of science—time-and-motion studies. The result would be a supposed mental revolution in which worker-management conflict would be replaced by: scientific redesign of supervision and work organization, including the celebrated notions of functional foremanship, and a thinking department to research into task performance; detailed study and fragmentation of individual tasks so as to identify the ‘one best way’ to be adopted by all workers; selection and motivation of workers to give systematic matching of tasks and abilities; and incentive payments to determine by scientific (implicitly incontestable) means ‘a fair day's work for a fair day's pay’. In this way, individual economic reward was to be linked directly to task completion, as the only means of compelling workers to labour—the assumption being that, unlike management, workers are of limited intelligence, innately idle, and driven by a need for immediate gratification.
Scientific management was the beginning of systematic work study in industry, and impressed not only industrialists (notably Henry Ford) but also leading figures elsewhere, including Lenin. However, it was resisted strongly at grassroots level by workers, trade unionists, and even managers, because of its very tight control of personal work-life. Taylor viewed workers as if they were, or ought to be, human extensions of industrial machinery. Scientific Management (or ‘Taylorism’) ignores the nature of work as a social process, has a dehumanized view of workers, and treats work motivation in crude instrumental terms—defects later criticized by the ‘Human Relations’ school of industrial organization and organizational sociology. In recent sociological studies of the labour process, a lively controversy has surrounded the question of whether Taylorism was unique, or expressed a general tendency for capitalism to divide mental from manual labour (see MANUAL VERSUS NON-MANUAL DISTINCTION).

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scientific method

See GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN AND NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN; METHODOLOGY; RESEARCH METHODS; SOCIAL SCIENCE.

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scientific revolutions

See PARADIGM.

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Scottish Enlightenment

An intense period of intellectual endeavour and activity that took place among the social and cultural élite of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scotland. It included such expressions as painting (Allan Ramsay, Henry Raeburn, and others), architecture (Robert Adam and his brothers John and William), literature (Robert Burns, Walter Scott, and others), and engineering (James Watt, Thomas Telford, John Rennie, and other builders of steam-engines, canals, and bridges). One prominent strand of thought concerned the study of people as social and sociable beings. This was the central interest of the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, such as David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, and John Millar. These were the five leading literati of what may fairly be said to be a distinct eighteenth-century Scottish School of social philosophy that constitutes an important source of sociological thinking (see
, ‘Origins of Sociology: The Case of the Scottish Enlightenment’ British Journal of Sociology, 1970
).
The Scots were characterized by a common disagreement with the Hobbesian premiss that society arose out of a social contract made by individuals as a means of self-preservation against each other's otherwise selfish passions. By contrast, they took it as axiomatic that people were naturally social, that their capacities were meaningless outside a social context, and that societies were the natural state of humanity. This view was underpinned by an evolutionism, which saw humankind as having progressed from a ‘rude’ to a ‘refined’ condition, although they also offered the (rather sophisticated) view that this temporal movement did not necessarily imply betterment. A third characteristic of the Scottish School was its insistence that the study of society should be totalizing, dealing with ‘all that people did in societies’, from the holding of private property to the practice of music. Where the various luminaries disagreed with each other was in the attempt they then made to identify the few general principles by which one could order and systematize history.
It is generally recognized that the Scottish philosophers made an important independent contribution to the economic thought of the nineteenth century, to Marxist political economy, and to the development of the concept of the bourgeoisie and its place in the capitalist order. Ferguson was undoubtedly a forerunner of modern conflict theory.

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scree test

An alternative method of deciding how many factors should be retained in any particular factor analysis. The principal method of deciding how many of the smaller factors to exclude, after retaining those which explain most of the common variance in a set of variables, utilizes Kaiser's criterion to select out those factors which have an eigenvalue of less than one. In effect, this excludes those factors which explain less variance than a single variable, a procedure that is done automatically by most statistical computer packages. However, as an alternative or complement to this technique, a graph can be generated which shows the descending variance accounted for by the factors extracted in the analysis. The term ‘scree’ derives from the geological analogy of debris found at the bottom of a rocky slope. For example, in the hypothetical instance shown in the illustration, the scree test suggests that there is a clear break between the steep slope of the initial factors and the gentler slope of those extracted later. Unfortunately, interpretation of the plot is rarely as clear-cut as this, and in practice tends to involve a fairly subjective assessment of which factors fall below an imaginary straight line extrapolated from the plots of the smaller factors.

FIGURE 10. An example of a scree test

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screening instruments

Measuring instruments used in epidemiological studies and social surveys to screen for illness in community (non-patient) samples. The aim is to identify untreated illness; that is, illness independent of contact with a clinician. Many of the instruments use quite brief symptom checklists, often offering a general measure of health and ill-health, rather than of specific illnesses. Despite their deficiencies, measures such as the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) are widely used in social research.

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seasonal unemployment

See UNEMPLOYMENT.

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Second Industrial Revolution

See INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.

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Second World

See THIRD WORLD.

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secondary analysis

Any further analysis of an existing data-set which presents interpretations, conclusions, or knowledge additional to, or different from, those presented in the first report on the data collection and its results. Some disciplines, such as economics and demography, rely almost entirely on data collected by others, especially official statistics. With improved access to microdata from major government surveys, sociologists are also using secondary analysis of such data to complement, or replace, analysis of new data-sets (see
, Secondary Analysis in Social Research, 1982
).

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secondary groups

See COOLEY, CHARLES HORTON.

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secondary labour-market

See LABOUR-MARKET.

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secondary reinforcement

See CONDITIONING.

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secondary sector

See INDUSTRIAL SECTOR.

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second-order constructs

See PHENOMENOLOGY.

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sect, sectarianism

The sociology of religion developed a model of religious organization which is referred to as the ‘church-sect typology’. As originally formulated by Max Weber (The Sociology of Religion, 1922) and Ernst Troeltsch (The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 1912), it was argued that the church type attempted to embrace all members of a society on a universalistic basis. The church, as a result, is a large, bureaucratic organization with a ministry or priesthood. It develops a formal orthodoxy, ritualistic patterns of worship, and recruits its members through socialization rather than evangelical conversion. The church is in political terms accommodated to the state and in social terms predominantly conservative in its beliefs and social standing. By contrast, the sect is a small, evangelical group which recruits its members by conversion, and which adopts a radical stance towards the state and society. The medieval Roman Catholic Church was the principal example of a universalistic church; sects include Baptists, Quakers, and Methodists.
Contemporary sociologists have modified this typology by identifying the denomination as an organization which is mid-way between the sect and the church, and by defining various sub-types of the sect.
(‘An Analysis of Sect Development’, American Sociological Review, 1959)
defined four different sub-types in terms of the various ways in which they rejected social values or were indifferent to secular society. These sub-types are the conversionist (such as the Salvation Army), the adventist or revolutionary sects (for example Jehovah's Witnesses), the introversionist or pietist sects (for instance Quakers), and the gnostic sects (such as Christian Science and New Thought sects). These sub-types have different beliefs, methods of recruitment, and attitudes towards the world. The processes of social change within these sects are thus very different. Wilson is also the author of the best recent account of sects (The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism, 1992).

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sectoral cleavages

See CONSUMPTION SECTORS.

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secularization, secularization thesis

Secularization is the process whereby, especially in modern industrial societies, religious beliefs, practices, and institutions lose social significance. The decline of religion is measured by religious attendance, commitment to orthodox belief, support for organized religion in terms of payments, membership, and respect, and by the importance which religious activities such as festivals assume in social life. It is argued that, on these criteria, modern societies have gone through a process of secularization in the twentieth century.
The secularization thesis maintains that secularization is an inevitable feature of the rise of industrial society and the modernization of culture. It is argued that modern science has made traditional belief less plausible; the pluralization of life-worlds has broken the monopoly of religious symbols; the urbanization of society has created a world which is individualistic and anomic; the erosion of family life has made religious institutions less relevant; and technology has given people greater control over their environment, making the idea of an omnipotent God less relevant or plausible. In this sense, secularization is used as a measure of what Max Weber meant by the rationalization of society.
Critics of the secularization thesis argue that it exaggerates the level of commitment to organized religion in pre-modern societies; implicitly equates secularization with the decline of Christianity, and these two issues should be kept separate; underestimates the importance of new religious movements in so-called secular societies; cannot easily explain important variations between industrial societies (such as the United States and Great Britain) in terms of the nature and rate of secularization; fails to consider the role of religion in nationalist culture such as in Poland and Ireland; and overlooks secular alternatives to religion (such as humanism) which may function like a religion without involving a belief in the sacred (see, for example, the works of
, such as his The Religious and the Secular, 1969, or A General Theory of Secularization, 1978
).
Peter L. Berger (The Social Reality of Religion, 1969) has argued that human beings require a ‘sacred canopy’ in order to make sense of the world, because meaninglessness is a threat to our need for an orderly universe. Thomas Luckmann (The Invisible Religion, 1963) suggests that modern societies have an invisible religion. Supporters of the secularization thesis, such as
(see his Religion in Sociological Perspective, 1982)
maintain that the diversity, plurality, and fragmentary nature of new religious movements, youth cultures, and counter cultures is in fact evidence of the church's loss of social authority. Where religion appears to flourish, for example in the United States, it is primarily as a channel for nationalist sentiments. Therefore, when sociologists examine the complex relationship between ideology, nationalism, and religious change, it is clear that there are many different patterns of secularization. See also CIVIL RELIGION.

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segmentary societies

See ACEPHALOUS.

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segmented labour-markets

See LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION.

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segregated conjugal roles

Segregated conjugal roles are those in which the husband and wife have a clear differentiation of tasks and a considerable number of separate interests and activities. Marriages where couples also have separate social ties and obligations tend to be less durable.

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segregation

Social processes which result in certain individuals or social groups being kept apart with little or no interaction between them. An almost universal type of segregation is achieved by separate public toilet facilities for men and women. The tendency for people with a common culture, nationality, race, language, occupation, religion, income level, or other common interests to group together in social or geographical space produces varying degrees of natural, voluntary, de facto segregation in patterns of private residence, business districts, educational institutions, clubs, leisure, and other activities.
Even when patterns of segregation appear to emerge naturally, state policy may seek to destroy them, in the interests of achieving greater social integration and related benefits. One example from the United States are the experiments with busing children to schools outside their home area in order to achieve more racially mixed school populations. Equal opportunities and anti-discrimination policies seek to reduce existing levels of job segregation by race or sex.
In other cases state policy actively imposes de jure segregation: that is, a form of segregation imposed by the state, enforcing the rigorous separation of persons or social groups, and backed by law. Certain Islamic states enforce the segregation of men and women in public places and even in private homes. From 1948 to 1991 the policy of apartheid in South Africa enforced the segregation of Whites and non-Whites in marriage, area of residence and employment, and in public and private services. See also COLEMAN REPORT.

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selection effects

See SAMPLE SELECTION BIAS.

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selective versus universal benefits

A major dispute concerning the organization of welfare regimes, addressing the issue of whether welfare should be delivered selectively to those in need, or universally as claims that individuals make of each other as members of a community. Advocates of the former strategy argue that selective benefits are targeted towards those in greatest need and therefore do most to relieve suffering. The advantage of the latter approach is claimed to be that it obviates the need for means testing: that is, provision of the benefit only after a bureaucratic (by implication demeaning) investigation and assessment of income and wealth which demonstrates need (usually in the form of inability to pay). Communitarians also argue that the universal approach has the effect of promoting social solidarity as against the individualistic sentiments of selective entitlement. However, making certain welfare goods and services universally available can have some unintended consequences, as for example when placing a ceiling on property rents simply discourages landlords from letting, or where security of tenure and rent subsidies in public-sector housing encourage people to stay in these properties irrespective of need. See also COLLECTIVISM.

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self, the self

In sociology, the concept of self is most frequently held to derive from the philosophies of Charles Horton Cooley, William James, and George Herbert Mead, and is the foundation of symbolic interactionism. It highlights the reflective and reflexive ability of human beings to take themselves as objects of their own thought. For Mead, ‘it is the self that makes the distinctively human society possible’ (see
Mind, Self and Society, 1934
). In this work, a distinction is usually drawn between two phases of the self process: the ‘I’, which is spontaneous, inner, creative, and subjective; and the ‘Me’, which is the organized attitudes of others, connects to the wider society, is more social and determined. The ‘Me’ is often called the self-concept—how people see themselves through the eyes of others—and is much more amenable to study. The self evolves through communication and symbols, the child becoming increasingly capable of taking the role of others. Mead's discussion highlights this growth through the ‘play’, ‘game’, ‘and generalized other’ stages. The generalized other refers to the organized attitudes of the whole community, enabling people thereby to incorporate a sense of the overarching community values into their conception of self.
Among more recent writings on the self, those of Morris Rosenberg are particularly interesting, especially in relation to the study of youth cultures (see, for example, the co-authored
Black and White Self-Esteem, 1972
). In Conceiving the Self (1979), Rosenberg differentiates the content, structure, dimensions, and boundaries of the ‘self-concept’, which is defined as ‘the totality of the individual's thoughts and feelings having reference to himself as an object’. The content embraces ‘social identities’ (groups or statuses to which the individual is socially recognized as belonging, such as Black, female, or whatever) and ‘dispositions’ (tendencies to respond as a Black, female, and so forth, which the individual sees himself or herself as possessing). The relationship among the various social identities and dispositions gives the structure of the self. The attitudes and feeling one has about one's self are given on a series of dimensions (including salience, consistency, and stability). Rosenberg also distinguishes the extant self (our picture of what we are like); the desired self (what we would like to be like); and the presenting self (the way we present ourselves in a given situation). Finally, the boundaries of the self-concept refer to the so-called ‘ego-extensions’ to which it is applied, such as shame in one's humble origins, or pride in one's fashionable clothes.
The concept is also used in therapy, counselling, and psychology in somewhat different ways, highlighting the self as an inner need or potential. Social psychologists routinely deploy an armoury of associated and derived concepts, including self-awareness (focusing attention inward on one's self), self-conception (the view one has of one's ‘real’ self), self-disclosure (revealing one's ‘true’ self to another), self-images (transient concepts of self that change across situations), and self-perception (the processes by which individuals come to think about and know themselves). See also GOFFMAN, ERVING; IDENTITY; MASLOW, ABRAHAM; SELF-ACTUALIZATION.

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self-actualization

The theory most associated with Abraham Maslow, who argues from his studies of well-functioning people that there is a hierarchy of human needs, each having to be met before a person can achieve his or her full potential. In ascending order, the needs are physiological, security, love and belonging, esteem and status, and finally ‘actualization’: that is, the desire to become everything that one can become. Or, as Maslow puts it, ‘What a person can be, he or she must be’. See also NEEDS, HIERARCHY OF.

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self-awareness

See SELF.

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self-conception

See SELF.

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self-destroying prophecy

The logical converse of a self-fulfilling prophecy: that is, a situation in which a prediction (including a sociological generalization) is undermined precisely because of widespread familiarity with the prediction or generalization itself. For example, predictions of crowd trouble at a sporting event may forestall the anticipated violence, if probable trouble-makers foresee a huge police presence and therefore stay away from the venue. Note, however, that such predictions can equally well become self-fulfilling prophecies—as those likely to become involved in spectator violence are attracted by the publicity given to the event. No little sociological (and policy) effort has been spared in the attempt to determine which is the more likely outcome in particular instances.

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self-disclosure

See SELF.

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self-fulfilling prophecy

A concept introduced into sociology by
(see his Social Theory and Social Structure, 1957)
, and allied to William Isaac Thomas's earlier and famous theorem that ‘when people define situations as real, they become real in their consequences’. Merton suggests the self-fulfilling prophecy is an important and basic process in society, arguing that ‘in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evokes a new behaviour which makes the originally false conception come true. [It] perpetuates a reign of error’. See also SELF-DESTROYING PROPHECY; UNINTENDED OR UNANTICIPATED CONSEQUENCES.

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self-image

See SELF.

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self-management

Any system of industrial production which attempts through worker councils, factory committee, or peer group supervision to place all or part of the management function in the hands of employees themselves. See also INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY.

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self-perception

See SELF.

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self-psychology

A development in American psychoanalysis pioneered by H. Kohut (The Analysis of the Self, 1971) which shifts the focus of analysis from the ego to the self—basically one's sense of wholeness and togetherness. This means in practice an encouragement of narcissistic grandiosity which, it is argued, is able to modify itself as it comes into contact with the outside world. The therapist adopts an empathic rather than an analytic attitude to the patient. Daniel Stern, a developmental psychologist, has developed a theory of child development around these ideas which emphasizes the carer's ability to understand and communicate with the infant (The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 1985).

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self-service economy

An economy in which a large and increasing proportion of household expenditure is invested in durable goods (such as tools and machinery) which allow consumers to produce services for themselves (rather than buying the services as in a service economy). Two processes are said to be encouraging this trend in some advanced capitalist societies: technical innovation leading to cheaper and simpler capital machinery; and rising labour costs (see
, After Industrial Society?, 1978
). See also INDUSTRIAL SECTOR; SERVICE INDUSTRIES.

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semantic differential

A method devised by C. E. Osgood and his colleagues to study the connotative meaning of cultural objects, using a set of bipolar rating scales (for example sweet/sour, good/bad), in order to elicit data (see
, and , The Measurement of Meaning, 1957
). When scales are intercorrelated and factor analysed, three general components repeatedly appear, both for different objects and cross-culturally: namely, evaluation, potency, and activity. The technique can be used to compare the responses of one individual to different objects, experiences, concepts, or whatever; and of groups of individuals to same stimuli. It has been used in a variety of settings including market research and therapy.

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semantic reduction

See REDUCTIONISM.

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semantics

That branch of the study of symbols which deals primarily with the development of the meaning of words. Sometimes viewed as a branch of linguistics, sometimes as a sister discipline, semantics attempts to study the attribution of meaning to words, and how these are combined to produce complex meaningful utterances; the nature of meaning itself; and the difficulties people experience when meaning is confused or distorted. Semantics is a background influence in areas such as, for example, ethnomethodology and post-structuralism. See also MEAD, G. H.; PIAGET, JEAN.

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semi-colonialism

A term used, classically by Lenin and Mao Zedong (see MAOISM), to describe states that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were penetrated by imperial capital, trade, and political influence, but which preserved their juridical independence. Examples include Persia, China, Thailand, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Ethiopia. Factors seen as enabling such countries to maintain their independence include the strength of indigenous states, geographical remoteness, lack of desirable resources, cultural and military resistance, and (most importantly) competition between Great Powers. Semi-colonial status often meant states avoided significant capitalist development. The term has sometimes been misapplied to Japan. See also COLONIALISM; NEO-COLONIALISM.

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semiology, semiotics

The study of signs and sign systems. Semiology owes much to the structural linguistics of Saussure and developed as part of the upsurge of structuralism during the 1970s. It proved especially attractive to sociologists interested in the analysis of ideology—particularly those with a Marxist or feminist background.
The concept of the sign is taken from Saussure (Course in General Linguistics, 1916). It is seen as a combination of signifier (the material element, sound, or marks on paper) and signified (the concept with which the signifier is associated). The two are bound together like the two sides of a piece of paper. Saussure emphasized the conventional nature of signs. There is no necessary relationship between the sign and its referent; rather, the relationship is socially agreed. We could call our hands ‘daffodils’, and flowers ‘hands’, and nothing would change in the world: it is just that we commonly agree that the daffodil is a flower and the things at the end of our arms are hands. The meaning of any particular sign is defined by its relationship to other signs in the system. For example, we understand the meaning of ‘up’ in relation to the meaning of ‘down’, and cannot conceive of one without the other. Saussure's distinction between speech and language is also important: speech refers to individual speech-acts; language to the structure of signs out of which the speech-acts are formed.
The French structuralist literary critic Roland Barthes is one of the foremost proponents of semiology. Sociologically, his most important book to date has been Mythologies (1957), wherein he subjects various apparently innocent aspects of French popular culture—for example wrestling and steak-and-chips—to a semiotic analysis which reveals their ideological content. Food, for example, may be seen as a language or code. Each item of food is a sign and there are socially agreed rules governing the combination of signs. In some cultures, for example, one does not combine sweet and savoury items. Barthes develops the concept of the sign to analyse what he regards as modern myths. A mythology occurs where one complete sign then becomes a signifier for something else. A picture of an eagle, for example, is at one level a picture of an eagle—a simple sign. On another level, however, it can represent the determination and toughness of the American nation. Similarly, different forms of food carry a meaning beyond the realm of mere nourishment: caviar and hamburgers are more than simply alternative things to eat. By and large this type of analysis is formal: it shows us how sign systems work but it needs to draw on other sociological ideas to connect those workings to wider social processes.

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semi-periphery

World-systems theorists originally conceptualized global power relations in terms of core (metropolitan) capitalist states and their weaker underdeveloped dependants in the periphery. The concept of the semi-periphery was subsequently devised in recognition of the inadequacy of the bipolarity of the original formulation. It referred to those nation-states which were neither core nor peripheral but somewhere in between. These societies remained dependent, and to some extent underdeveloped, despite having achieved significant levels of industrialization. Examples include Greece and Ireland.

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semi-proletariat

A wage labour-force that is not wholly dependent on the wage for economic subsistence. Typically this occurs where wage-workers retain access to land, working it themselves or via members of their family. The term also includes seasonal workers, who spend part of the year on peasant plots, and part working in the harvests for wages.

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sensorimotor stage

See PIAGET, JEAN.

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sequence analysis

A series of questions about how social processes are ordered, either temporally or spatially, together with the techniques for answering these.
Many areas of sociology are concerned with events or actions in their temporal context—or with what we might call sequence problems. The literatures on careers and the life-course are obvious examples. Sequence analysis seeks to determine the patterning of events (types of job shifts or whatever) in an ordered list or chain. Since there is no assumption of real time (as opposed to symbolic time), it is possible also to examine the successive parts of a ritual, or the order of steps in a manufacturing process (where the ‘time’ involved is in some sense artificial), as well as the sequencing of real-time events such as the changes of status involved in a work history or criminal career. Events in any sequence can be unique or can repeat and may have varying degrees of interdependence. Whole sequences may themselves be interrelated. Sequence can be investigated as an independent or dependent variable; for example, we may wish to know which sequence of job experiences best predicts unemployment, or which prior variables explain sequential steps in an occupational career. Some sequence analysis is interested merely in determining patterns in a series of events as an end in itself—as, for example, in the case of research into the ordering of steps in a dance.
This is a newly developing area in which sociologists are taking their lead mainly from the other social sciences. There is a long tradition of sequence analysis in psychology, in such areas as learning, cognition, and theories of developmental stages. Economists have studied the sequences involved in (among other things) consumption behaviour and the emergence of innovations. Linguists often explore the steps involved in constructing meaningful text. Political science includes sequential studies of (for example) the process of federal budgetary decision-making.
In sociology, a simple conception of sequential analysis occurs in the linear stage theories of modernization, development, rationalization, revolution, and so forth, associated with the names of Karl Marx, Robert Michels, Robert Redfield, and others. More sophisticated are the various career theories, such as those to be found in the literature on work histories, since these allow for more contingency and accident than do stage theories. The most developed forms of sequence analysis permit all sequences to be interdependent in a complex network. Andrew Abbott, one of the leading proponents of sequence analysis in sociology, refers to these as ‘interactional field theories’, and claims that they are rooted in the ‘contextualist paradigm’ developed by the Chicago School between the First World War and the 1930s. Examples would include Harrison White's network analysis of the vacancy chain system in labour markets (Chains of Opportunity. 1970) and Abbott's own study of the careers of German musicians during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (
‘Measuring Resemblance in Sequence Data’, American Journal of Sociology, 1990
).
Techniques for coding sequences, together with the associated computer software for analysing these, tend to be borrowed and adapted from existing applications in biology, cognitive psychology, and related fields. There are many such programs available, and since developments in this area are being funded mainly by biotechnology money, advances tend to be rapid. One such method, much used and refined by Abbott himself, is that of so-called optimal matching or optimal alignment. This computes a distance between any pair of sequences, based on the minimum number of replacements and insertions that would be required to transform one sequence into another. (The technique is borrowed from biology, where it has been used to investigate the resemblance of DNA molecules, and to construct trees of descent among them.)
For example, one may code the rhetorical pattern in a decision-making process, such that a typical data sequence might be: 1Z2, 1Z8, 20Z4, 2Z6. The letter Z is here used simply to separate the number of times an element is observed (which precedes the letter) from the identity of the element (which follows it). This sequence might therefore mean something like: 1 unit of ‘summarizing the position reached during an earlier round of decision-making’; followed by 1 unit of ‘formulating a new proposal not earlier alluded to’; followed by 20 units of ‘debate of a proposal placed before the meeting’; followed by 2 units of ‘suggesting amendments to a proposition newly tabled’. Having collected and coded the relevant data in this fashion we can then see that (for example) it takes two changes to turn the sequence 1Z2, 1Z9, 2Z15, 20Z43, 5Z21, 5Z23 into the sequence 2Z2, 1Z9, 1Z10, 1Z15, 20Z43, 5Z21, 5Z23. This can be observed by arraying the sequences so that their similarities are aligned as follows:

1Z2

1Z9

2Z19

20Z43

5Z21

5Z23

1Z2

1Z9

1Z10

2Z19

20Z43

5Z21

5Z23

A unit of Z2 has been added and a unit of Z15 has been turned into a unit of Z10.
By a series of such iterations, the computer program assesses the distance (and therefore the similarities) between successive pairs of sequences, by calculating the number and types of insertions and replacements necessary for transforming sequences so that strings become fully or partially aligned. Different programs identify different sequence regularities, depending upon the interests of the researcher, using a variety of techniques (swaps, insertions, replacements, transposition) and alternative ways of assigning ‘costs’ to these operations. In this way regularities are identified in the ordering of events in sequences. The researcher may then use these to construct a causal narrative in which the sequences feature as explanandum or explanans.
In an entertainingly polemical article (
‘Of Time and Space: The Contemporary Relevance of the Chicago School’, Social Forces, 1997
), Abbott has argued that many sociologists today have ‘given up writing about the real world, hiding in stylized worlds of survey variables, historical forces, and theoretical abstractions’. He is particularly critical of the decontextualized ‘variables paradigm’ represented by most versions of contemporary causal modelling. In these approaches, the sociological variables of interest (class, bureaucracy, race, or whatever) are abstracted from their contexts in social (including geographical) space and social time, and can be connected only by inventing a series of just-so stories which assume that if people typically behave in such and such a way, then the variables will be related to a particular extent. (And, as Abbott observes, the variance explained is usually small and shows every sign of diminishing over the years.) By contrast, the questions and techniques associated with sequence analysis locate social facts in their real settings, and study actual patterns rather than decontextualized variables. By using these methods ‘we can look directly at social action by particular actors in particular social times and places’. In this way, according to Abbott, sequence analysis represents a return to sociology's disciplinary roots in the study of social process and social interaction.
Critics argue that decisions about the coding of data into sequences, about the definition and identification of discrete sequences, and about the choice of alignment procedures and protocols all seem disturbingly arbitrary.

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serfdom

This is a form of unfreedom, akin to slavery but associated with feudalism, principally in medieval Europe. This system of servitude, which tied particular tenants and their heirs, for life, to landlord masters through ties of fealty, was simultaneously a system of authority and economic adaptation.

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serial monogamy

See MONOGAMY.

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service class

A term first used by the Austro-Marxist Karl Renner (Wandlungen der modernen Gesellschaft, 1953) to describe employees in government (civil servants), private economic service (business administrators, managers, technical experts), and social services (‘distributive agents of welfare’). Subsequently adopted by the British sociologist John H. Goldthorpe, to describe those whose employment relationship is based on a code of service rather than a labour contract, and so involves trust as a key element with autonomy as its corollary. In the so-called Goldthorpe class scheme, the service class (his Class I) therefore refers in the main to professional, senior administrative, and senior managerial employees, for whom autonomy and discretion are a necessary part of the work situation. Since the reference to ‘service’ can sometimes be misleading (members of the service class are not all employed in the service sector or service industries) some writers prefer to translate Renner's concept as ‘salariat’.

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service industries

A loosely defined group of labour-intensive economic activities centred around finance, sales, distribution (transport, retailing, wholesaling), and a plethora of businesses and professions giving personal care in various forms. Optimistic theories of industrialization speak of the rise of a future service (or service-dominated) economy. More sanguine interpretations regard a large service sector as symptomatic of deindustrialization or of the salience of finance over industrial capital. See also INDUSTRIAL SECTOR.

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service sector

See INDUSTRIAL SECTOR; SERVICE INDUSTRIES.

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sex, sociological studies of

The study of sexuality was not a major concern in sociology until late in the twentieth century. None of the major figures in the discipline seems to have attached any importance to the topic as an area for research or analysis. Instead, a number of disciplines other than sociology made it a particular focus, and from these sociologists simply borrowed relevant materials.
Three traditions seem particularly important in this context. The first is the bio-medical, culminating in the laboratory tradition of Masters' and Johnson's sex laboratories. A second tradition is the psychoanalytic. Some of this writing has involved a sociological dimension, notably when considering the links between sexual drives, repression, and social order. Thus, in the works of Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown—loosely described as the ‘Freudian Left’—sexuality has been seen as a major foundation for social order. A third tradition is that of the social survey, associated with the work of Kinsey. Here, wide-ranging surveys are conducted of people's sexual behaviour, or of ‘who does what with whom, when and where’. This particular tradition has been very important for sociology: using survey techniques the frequencies of various sexual behaviours have been estimated; class, region, age, and gender correlations examined; and shifting patterns of sexuality throughout the latter part of the twentieth century suggested. These three ‘sexological’ traditions have been intelligently discussed and analysed in Paul Robinson's The Modernization of Sex (1976) and Janice M. Irvine's Disorders of Desire (1990).
Whilst sociology has often drawn upon these external traditions it was not until the 1960s that the discipline as such began to develop a stance of its own. A major contribution will be found in the writings of John Gagnon and William Simon (Sexual Conduct, 1973), and in similar studies contributing to the emergence of a new perspective on sexualities, a perspective that may be referred to as the constructionist view of sexuality. Gagnon and Simon both worked at the Kinsey Institute from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, but whilst conducting work in the survey tradition (primarily on sex offenders and homosexuality), they became increasingly disillusioned with the behavioural, biological, and atheoretical accounts of sexuality that dominated sexology. Starting to build the elements of a theory of sexuality that was sociological, they suggested that biology was no more important in the sexual sphere than any other, that the idea of powerful sex drives may well be a myth, and that human sexuality was open to a wide range of sociocultural variation. They argued for a move away from a language dominated by biological metaphor to one which could see sexuality as symbolic and scripted.
In recent writings on sexuality, the influence of Michel Foucault, feminism, and social constructionism is obvious. Each of these is critical of the notion of ‘sex as natural’ and they have highlighted the ways in which sexuality and gender are socially organized. See also HETEROSEXISM; HOMOSEXUALITY.

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sex discrimination

See SEXISM.

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sex-ratio

Conventionally defined as the number of males per 1,000 females in the population of a society. More boys than girls are born each year, but the excess number of males at birth is gradually reduced by the higher male mortality rate, to an age-point where the number of women begins to exceed the number of men. In most countries, the overall sex-ratio is below 1,000, with women outnumbering men. However, since the Second World War the sex-ratio has been rising in many Western industrial societies, so that the excess of females is now confined to older age-groups. In Britain, for example, the cross-over point rose from age 25 in 1901–10 to age 47 in 1930–2 and to age 57 years in 1980–2. Due to improvements in health care, and the (relative) absence of wars, men now outnumber women for most of their lives in many countries. Other factors affecting the sex-ratio are sex-selective migration patterns, and the female infanticide practised in countries where females are treated as socially inferior.
The sex-ratio is regarded as an important social indicator. It affects marriage rates, women's labour-market participation rates, and (it has been argued) sex roles.

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sex roles

Until the 1970s this was the main way that sociology conceptualized the differences and relations between women and men, seeing them as a product of socialization rather than biology. It has been subjected to the same criticisms as role theory in general, but also because it masks power and inequality between the sexes.
Sex roles prescribe the different ways men and women are supposed to act and the different tasks they are expected to undertake. In advanced industrial societies, most women are found in the home or in service occupations, in other words in ‘women's work’. Men spend their lives in a variety of careers outside the home and their work is often better paid and of higher status than that of women. Why do these sex-role differences occur? There are several competing theories. The biological and psychological perspectives emphasize inherent differences, which can range from genetic selection to biological tendencies that favour the nurturing qualities of women and the more aggressive and instrumental temperament of men. According to functionalists, sex roles are complementary, and the male and female division of labour increases the stability of the family. This viewpoint has been criticized by feminist writers who emphasize the power aspect of traditional sex roles. Feminists assert that sex roles are essentially a way of keeping women subservient to men and are the result of a patriarchal society in which men preserve their own self-interest by maintaining the status quo. Traditional women sometimes regard feminism with suspicion; however, in the main, both men and women's attitudes are shifting in favour of more egalitarian sex-roles. The evidence suggests, however, that sex-role behaviour is far more resistant to change. See also DOMESTIC DIVISION OF LABOUR; FEMININITY; LABOUR-MARKET; MASCULINITY; ROLE, CONJUGAL; SEXUAL DIVISION OF LABOUR.

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sex-typed

If certain attributes or pursuits are considered appropriate only for one sex then they are sex-typed. For example, computing science is becoming increasingly sex-typed, with few women entering the profession. In general, sex-typed behaviour is becoming less rigid, so that (for example) it is no longer considered unmanly to cry.

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sexism

Sexism is unfair discrimination on the basis of sex. It ranges from the blatant to the covert: as, for example, when a token woman is appointed so that an employer appears to be committed to a policy of equal opportunities. Sexism occurs at different levels, from the individual to the institutionalized, but all forms combine to preserve inequality. Normally, sex discrimination operates against women and in favour of men (as, for example, in the case of access to privileged occupational positions), however the obverse is not entirely unknown.

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sexism, institutionalized

See INSTITUTIONALIZED DISCRIMINATION.

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sexual division of labour

A term referring to the specialized gender roles of male breadwinner and female housewife; or, in the terminology of Talcott Parsons (Family, Socialisation and Interaction Process, 1956), the ‘instrumental’ and ‘expressive’ roles. This particular division of labour by sex is usually associated with the separation of workplace from home which followed industrialization in the West. Anthropological research shows that most pre-industrial societies also distinguish ‘men's tasks’ from ‘women's tasks’, although the sexual division of labour so identified may not correspond to the Western stereotype described above. For example, in some societies growing crops and weaving are tasks for women, whereas hunting and making pots are the responsibility of men. See also DIVISION OF LABOUR; DOMESTIC DIVISION OF LABOUR; SEX ROLES.

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shamanism

A term, originating from Siberia, used to describe diverse religious activities in a large number of technologically simple societies. The shaman is a part-time, non-institutionalized, charismatic religious specialist whose power emanates from his or her perceived ability (often enhanced by mind-altering drugs) to contact external spiritual forces; and, through them, to prescribe solutions to technological, political, and social problems of their own society.

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shanty towns

Improvised housing settlements, usually but not exclusively associated with Third World cities. Common characteristics include illegal occupancy of land (squatting); concentration on land of low economic value (such as river-banks or rabbish-tips); self-built housing; overcrowding; a lack of public utilities and social services; and low-income households. Over time, individuals and neighbourhoods may improve their circumstances, introducing considerable variation within and between shanty towns.

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share-cropping

The general term given to a variety of arrangements whereby landowners receive a portion of the harvest (‘share of the crop’) from those whom they allow to work their land. A classic example developed after the end of the Civil War in the United States. Freed Black slaves demanded their ‘forty acres and a mule’, and by 1868 share-cropping was the dominant economic arrangement in southern agriculture.
Various explanations have been offered for the emergence of share-cropping. One emphasizes favourable economic preconditions, such as a large class of landholders, combined with shortage of labour, and lack of incentives to mechanize. Neo-classical economists argue that share-cropping is a rational market response advantageous to both sides. However, an alternative explanation suggests that this arrangement typically meets the preferences of neither party, and arises through a ‘constriction of possibilities’ and only when all other alternatives have been defeated. (In the American South, for example, Blacks wanted full economic independence while White plantation owners sought an equivalent to slave labour.)
For an excellent case-study see
, The Origins of Southern Sharecropping (1993
). See also PEASANTS.

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Shaw, Clifford

(1896–1957)
A Chicago sociologist and pioneer of the life-history method, who collected over 200 life-histories of delinquents during his time at the Institute of Juvenile Research, the most famous being The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy's Own Story (1930)—subsequently re-studied by Jon Snodgrass in The Jack-Roller at Seventy (1982).

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shift-share analysis, shift-share technique

This is a frequently used technique in the analysis of changing occupational distributions and employment growth. It begins from an observed change at the aggregate level and then attempts to decompose this into three distinct components in order to understand the cause of the change.
For example, suppose that we observed an increase in the number of professional employees in Britain from 200,000 in 1911 to 1,200,000 in 1991, and wanted to know how much of this increase of 1,000,000 professionals was due to the changing industrial structure (differences in the relative growth and decline of different industries) in the past 80 years, and how much was related to technical changes in industry which favour the growth of some kinds of occupations over others. We can first ask how many professional employees there would have been in 1991, if their proportion within each industrial sector had remained constant, while the relative size of industrial sectors had changed in the way which it actually did between 1911 and 1991. This could be called the ‘industry-shift effect’. Effectively we are asking what share of the change in the numbers of professional employees is due to changes or shifts in the industrial structure—hence the term ‘shift-share analysis’. Let us say that this calculation of the industry-shift effect indicated that there would have been 600,000 professional employees in 1991, simply due to changes in the industrial structure; that is, that the number of professionals tripled because the industries most likely to employ them grew in size, relative to other industries. Next we can play a second counterfactual game, by reversing the original proposition and asking how many professionals there would have been if their proportion in each industry had changed the way it actually did, but the relative size of each industrial sector had been constant between 1911 and 1991. This could be called the ‘occupation-shift effect’; that is, the change resulting from the changing use of professionals in industry. Let us say that this calculation produces the answer that there would have been 300,000 more professionals in the labour-force due to changes in their use by industry. The third component—the ‘interaction-shift effect’—is a residual term and represents the simultaneous effects of industry and occupation shifts or changes. Since industry-shift plus occupation-shift plus interaction (must) equal observed changes, in our example the interaction effect is 1,000,000 (observed change) minus 600,000 (industry-shift) minus 300,000 (occupation-shift), which equals 100,000. That is, the joint effects of industrial and occupational change boosted the number of professionals by a further 100,000. In this case, therefore, shift-share analysis tells us that the main reason we now have more professionals is because of changes in the industrial structure. In other words, in the industries which have increased in size, professional employees are more concentrated (industry-shift). However, the number of professional employees has also increased (though to a lesser degree), because all industrial sectors now tend to use more professionals than in the past (occupation-shift).
This technique could, of course, be applied to other data. For example, we could ask how much of the employment change in a particular region is due to national factors (a national-shift effect); how much due to the different industry mix between the region and the nation (an industry-mix shift effect); and how much is due to different growth-rates between the same industries at the regional compared with the national picture (regional-shift effect).

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sib

A term used in some American cultural anthropology texts to refer to any unilineal descent group—known elsewhere in anthropology as a clan.

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sick role

A concept popularized by Talcott Parsons. He argued (in The Social System, 1951) that whilst disease involves bodily dysfunction, being sick—that is being identified and accepted as ill—is a role governed by social expectations, of which he listed four. First, exemption from normal social role responsibilities: this exemption must be legitimated by some authority, often a medical practitioner. Second, exemption from responsibility for being ill, which means that the sick must be looked after. Third, since sickness is deemed undesirable, the sick are obliged to want to get better; and also, fourthly, to seek technically competent help and co-operate in trying to get better.
The concept draws attention to the social regulation of illness: to the mechanisms that guarantee the compliance of sick persons, help to restore them to health, and ensure that only the genuinely sick are exempt from normal responsibilities. It also provides a means of analysing the motivational factors involved in illness. Indeed, Parsons suggested that because of these motivational components (he was influenced here by Freudian theorizing), illness could be considered a special form of deviance, functional to the social system in directing deviant tendencies away from group formation, solidarity, and successful claims to legitimacy.
Critics have questioned the universality of Parsons's specification of the expectations governing the sick role, the extent to which illness is motivated, the model's relevance to long-term sickness, and his focus on what is functional for society. None the less, the concept of the sick role has been central to sociological thinking about health and illness, and its importance would be hard to overestimate.

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sign, signs

See POST-STRUCTURALISM; SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE; SEMIOLOGY.

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significance tests

A variety of statistical techniques are used in empirical social research in order to establish whether a relationship between sample variables may be inferred to apply to the population from which the sample was drawn. These techniques assess the rarity, unusualness, or unexpectedness of the results obtained. Significance tests form the central core of statistical inference: they are the technique of analysis by which statistical inferences concerning the relationship between two or more variables in a sample can be generalized to a population. They are therefore subject to the same conditions concerning sampling procedures as apply to all statistical inference.
The starting-point is the null hypothesis, which states that interesting differences in the research results are due to sampling error, rather than to genuine differences: in other words there is no relationship in the population between the variables under test. In a simple test of the relationship between two dichotomous variables from a sample it is then established how similar the category proportions are in relation to the size of the standard error. The standard error is itself calculated in relation both to the sample size and to the variability of the dependent variable in the general population. The significance of the difference between the variable proportions in the sample with respect to the standard error is then calculated and assessed in relation to certain predetermined levels of significance. These depend upon the level of error which is deemed acceptable in drawing inferences about the relationship between the variables in the population based on that in the sample. The null hypothesis is rejected if a significance test statistic lies within a range which has a very small probability of occurring as deduced from theoretical distributions such as the normal distribution (the so-called region of rejection).
Significance tests offer various levels of significance or confidence: they state that a particular statistical result would only occur by chance less than one in a thousand times (the 0.01 level), less than one in a hundred times (the 0.1 level), or less than one in twenty times (the 0.5 level). Thus, for example, we can choose to say with a 5 per cent probability of error within what range the difference between the variable proportions in the population will fall. Or we can choose to reduce our probability of error to 1 per cent—which will have the effect of increasing the range within which we expect to find the difference in variable proportions within the population. The former is referred to as the 95 per cent level of significance and the latter as the 99 per cent level of significance. Depending on the degree of certainty required by the researcher, results at any of these levels might be accepted as significant, but the ‘less than one chance in a thousand’ level is regarded as the safest assurance that research results would so rarely arise by chance that they must be true reflections of the real world.
Having established the level of significance in which he or she is interested, the researcher can then consult published tables to establish (or the computer will produce) the maximum value of the difference between the sample proportions, in relation to the standard error, which needs to be exceeded to arrive at a statistically significant difference: that is, a sample difference which is large enough to suggest that it may also apply to the population. If this value is exceeded, one may conclude that there is evidence to reject the null hypothesis of no difference between the proportions in the population, and that the chance of being wrong in arriving at this conclusion equals the probability of error at whatever level of significance has been chosen (usually 5 per cent or 1 per cent).
There are two major types of significance tests belonging to two major branches of statistics—parametric and non-parametric statistics. In parametric statistics assumptions are made about the underlying distributional form of the variables in the population. Examples of parametric tests of significance are the SND tests (z-score tests) and the t-test. The best-known example of a non-parametric test of significance is the Mann-Whitney U-Test.
There are a large number of tests, for the testing of means, proportions, variances, correlations, and goodness of fit; there are tests for one-sample studies, two-sample studies, and multiple sample studies; and there are tests for nominal, ordinal, and interval scales. Those used by sociologists are provided by the SPSS package, but a textbook should be consulted to ensure a test appropriate to the data-set is chosen. The two best-known tests are probably the chi-square, which makes only some very simple assumptions about underlying distributional form, and is suitable for simple nominal variables; and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, one of the earliest to be developed, and the most widely used for variables consisting of ordinal or interval scales.
Statistical significance is not the same thing as the substantive importance of a research finding, which is determined by theory, policy perspectives, and other considerations. And although there is a relationship between the statistical significance and the size (or strength) of an association, correlation, difference between samples, and so on, there is no simple equivalence between the two. In effect, a research finding may be trivially small and relate to an unimportant subject, but still attain statistical significance. Consequently, some critics have argued that tests of statistical significance are often used unthinkingly and wrongly, and given undue weight in reports on research findings.

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significant others

This concept, which is derived from the Meadian theory of the self, highlights the ability of social actors to take the role of others. There are many others whose roles may be taken—ranging from those of strangers to that of the whole community. Significant others are those who have an important influence or play a formative role in shaping the behaviour of another. Since Mead, the concept has entered general and even popular use, as in Armistead Maupin's novel Significant Others.

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signifier versus signified distinction

See POST-STRUCTURALISM; SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE; SEMIOLOGY.

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similarity, measures of

See ASSOCIATION COEFFICIENTS.

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similarity hypothesis

See COMPLEMENTARITY HYPOTHESIS.

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Simmel, Georg

(1858–1918)
Simmel is generally considered to be the most neglected of the founders of modern sociology (although more so in Britain than in the United States). He published some twenty-five volumes and over three hundred essays during his lifetime. Born a Jew, but later baptized into Christianity, he spent most of his life in Berlin, gaining full professorship at Strasburg only four years before his death. This late recognition of such a prolific scholar signposts his maverick nature—as well as a certain anti-semitism on the part of some of his peers. He was one of a number of talented artists, scholars, and intellectuals who would meet regularly at Max Weber's house in Heidelberg.
Simmel's work is almost impossible to summarize or systematize and he was himself opposed to such attempts. In many ways he is a sociologist who seems dismayed by the very possibility of sociology. His style and approach differs from that of the other classical sociologists by virtue of its fragmentary and piecemeal character. Simmel wrote short essays, vignettes of social life, rich and textured in their detail of the microscopic order, but wholly unsystematic and often unfinished. His range of inquiry was vast and varied: from books on Kant and Goethe, through studies of art and culture, and on to major analyses of religion, money, capitalism, gender, groups, urbanism, and morality. Even love is among his many topics. Details, rather than abstract generalization, are given prime position in Simmel's work: he argued that, whilst it was not possible to understand the whole or the totality in itself, any fragment of study may lead one to grasp the whole. Thus, in The Philosophy of Money (1900), he proclaims ‘the possibility … of finding in each of life's details the totality of its meaning’. He saw this particular work as providing a more secure foundation for historical materialism and he was a major influence on the work of the Marxist philosopher György Lukács.
For Simmel there are three kinds of sociology. General sociology is a programme of method—‘the whole of historical life in so far as it is formed societally’. Formal sociology studies ‘the societal forms themselves’—the ‘forms of sociation’. Finally, there is philosophical sociology, which he defines as ‘the epistemology of the social sciences’. He wrote most often about the second of these, formal sociology, which is best seen as the centre of his enterprise. The ‘forms of sociation’ are the forms in which our interaction develops. His most famous short essays—
‘The Stranger’, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, and his essay on social conflict (all in , Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms, 1971)
—are part of his formal sociology, and this is the sociology that has been most influential in the United States.
Simmel's work was enormously influential in the development of early North American sociology. Paul Rock, in The Making of Symbolic Interactionism (1979), identifies him as one of the key founders of symbolic interactionism. Certainly he was an important mentor for Robert Park and other members of the Chicago School. Some of Simmel's ideas may also be found in the functionalism of Robert Merton (particularly his reference group theory and role theory) and of Lewis Coser (notably his theory of social conflict).
Simmel came to see social forms as dominating the life process, as a form of alienation, and his development of his own very individual method—and indeed of the essay form itself—was an attempt to resist this. In this respect he has been likened to the impressionists in the world of art—constantly trying to create new forms which are closer to our experience of the flux of life. It is no surprise that he has been seen as a precursor of post-modernism.
Almost any of David Frisby's numerous publications about Simmel give a good account of his sociological significance and relative neglect (see, for example, his
Georg Simmel, 1984
). See also FORMALISM; URBAN SOCIOLOGY.

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simple commodity production

This is a deductive Marxist concept which describes the production of commodities without surplus value: that is, without wage labour and capitalist profit. The definition is similar if not synonymous with petty commodity production, although some Marxists argue that unlike the latter it is a logical, rather than a historical or empirical category. The term itself was more often used by Friedrich Engels than by Karl Marx himself.

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simple random sampling

See SAMPLING.

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situs

A differentiation of role or status which is not associated with an evaluation of superiority or inferiority. Clan memberships may be situs distinctions, as may cohort distinctions, and even occupational standing—where, that is, the occupations are deemed to be of equal prestige and worth.

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skewness

A measure of asymmetry in frequency distributions. The skew in a distribution is the degree to which frequencies trail towards extreme scores in one direction away from the majority of cases. Negative skew means cases trail to the left and positive skew involves trailing to the right. It is important to know the shape of a distribution in order to know what measures (for example of central tendency) can best describe it.

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skill

In everyday speech, skill means a relatively precise set of manual or mental techniques which, though they may depend on aptitude, have to be learned through training or schooling. Sociological work, though not denying this aspect of skill, is primarily concerned with the management of skill; that is, how skill is defined, constructed, and recognized. Since the publication of Harry Braverman's work in the 1970s, much scholarship has been devoted to examining Karl Marx's claim that ‘valorization’ in the capitalist labour process requires a continual attempt to de-skill expensive forms of labour. De-skilling means either the disintegration and mechanization of craft techniques; or a refusal adequately to recognize established or new capabilities still required of the worker. The latter is very common in women's employment. Many writers, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, argue that de-skilling is not inevitable. Workers, individually or through trade unions, may resist mechanization, or insist that de-skilled processes are reserved for workers with established training, who continue to be paid a premium for their displaced skills. Also, employers may upgrade (or ‘upskill’) workers: because they wish to recognize and retain dependable or experienced workers; or to control and inhibit labour unrest; or because, notwithstanding Marx, the development of technology has created new skills in place of older ones. In any case, jobs may be de-skilled without necessarily implying the de-skilling of individual workers, or indeed the labour-force as a whole. A selection of empirical case-studies are reported in
, Skill and Occupational Change (1994)
. See also ABILITY.

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slavery

Slavery refers to a variety of forms of unfreedom, such as serfdom and bonded labour. However, it is normally associated with chattel slavery, in which the human being is a thing to be bought or sold, and does not have the status of personhood. Chattel slavery is thus distinguished from other forms of slavery by its property dimension. Slaves are not paid for their labour or services (even in cases where they can handle money or economic transactions). Thus they can be regarded as instruments of production.
There are both historical and recent cases of enslavement of peoples conquered in warfare. In modern, early capitalist situations, chattel slavery was used as an efficient (or, more accurately, cheap) labour system by the planters and slaveowners of the Americas between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the labour-supply ensured through the slave trade.
Plantation slavery could only exist through a codified legal system and mechanisms for its enforcement. These modern slave systems also existed in mining enterprises and industrial production. In plantation slavery the slave is the property of the master. By contrast, in the enslavement of whole peoples by conquest, the slave becomes the property of the whole society. The difference rests in the fact that plantation slavery is found in state societies and conquest slavery in pre-state societies.
There is a huge literature documenting the history of slavery (see, for example,
, Fruits of Merchant Capital, 1983
). For sociological and anthropological treatments see
, New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America (1986)
and
. The Anthropology of Slavery (1991
). See also CLIOMETRICS; COMPADRAZGO; PATRON—CLIENT RELATIONSHIP.

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Small, Albion W.

(1854–1926)
An American sociologist, less known for his substantive contributions to sociology than for his role in establishing (in 1892) the prototypical and for many years the leading sociology department, at the University of Chicago. Founder of, and prolific contributor to,
the American Journal of Sociology (1895)
, his publications include General Sociology (1907), Adam Smith and Modern Sociology (1907), and The Meaning of the Social Sciences (1910).

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Smith, Adam

(1723–90)
An eminent Scottish philosopher and social theorist, Professor of Logic then Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, whose influential publications include The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), and Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795).
Smith is best known as an economist—although even The Wealth of Nations is much more than simply a treatise on economic affairs. A total philosophy of society, rather than a narrowly economic perspective on social action, is suggested by passages such as the following: ‘Commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government, and with them, the liberty and security of individuals, among the inhabitants of the country, who had lived before almost in a continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon their superiors.’
Smith's exposition of the division of labour (which precedes his analysis of prices, resources, and distribution) is concerned to show that it is by dividing the labour process into increasingly specialized roles that industry advances and nations become rich. The first three chapters of The Wealth of Nations locate the origins of the division of labour in the propensity peculiar to human nature ‘to barter, to truck and to exchange’; explain how this is limited by the extent of markets; and observe its effects in massively increased production, as in the celebrated example of the manufacture of pins, such that ten people prepared to break this process down into its constituent eighteen parts will produce 48,000 pins in a day, whereas each working on their own could hope only to make a fraction of this total. In Smith's view, the division of labour increased production by increasing the dexterity of the worker, who was able to concentrate on fewer processes; by saving time, in making the concentration of the worker task-specific; and by encouraging the invention of labour-saving devices.
However, Smith was not blind to the deleterious effects of the division of labour, and accepted that, where individuals were confined to performing only one or two limited and repetitive operations, this could render them ‘as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human character to become’. He advocated the expansion of education as a means by which governments could combat the atomization and alienation implicit in the advanced division of labour. Unlike later classical economists, he also envisages the state taking an active and wide-ranging part in the organization of social affairs, going beyond the mere provision of justice, defence, and public works. There is, therefore, an ambivalence in his writings that has tended to be overlooked by free-market economists (but see
, ‘Adam Smith's Two Views of the Division of Labour’, Economics, 1964)

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SMRs (standard mortality ratios)

See MORTALITY RATE.

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snowballing technique, snowball sample

Snowball samples begin from a core of known elements and are then increased by adding new elements given by members of the original sample. They are so called on the analogy of the increasing size of a snowball when rolled down a snow-covered slope. Such samples are often used where there is no available sampling frame listing all the elements for the population of interest, for example illicit drug-users. Hence snowball samples are not random and not statistically representative of the population under consideration. They are, therefore, not amenable to inferential statistical techniques.

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social action

See ACTION THEORY; AGENCY; INTERPRETATION; MEANING; SEQUENCE ANALYSIS; SOCIAL BEHAVIOURISM.

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social action theory

See ACTION THEORY.

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social actor

See ACTION THEORY; COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOUR; SELF.

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social administration

The study of social arrangements and policies aimed at meeting social needs—especially state welfare systems. Academic social administration has typically adopted a practical, problem-solving, reforming approach, frequently criticized as being empiricist, prescriptive, and narrow; theoretically informed approaches to welfare are now more common. However, as the processes of transferring responsibilities for public welfare from the state to the private sector proceed, public-sector directors and managers increasingly replace administrators, and in this context the term social administration sounds somewhat dated. The social administration approach to social policy is well represented by the work of Brian Abel-Smith, whose influential books include A History of the Nursing Profession (1960), The Hospitals, 1800–1948 (1964), The Poor and the Poorest (1965), and Value for Money in the Health Services (1976).

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social anthropology

The study of the entire range of cultures and societies in the world, although originally the discipline tended to concentrate on non-Western and so-called primitive societies. There are significant overlaps with sociology, but also important contrasts. Historically, sociology has tended to study Western societies, and this has generated methodological and theoretical (as well as substantive) differences between the two disciplines. Most importantly, Western sociologists, studying their own society, could take the context for granted before isolating specific aspects for hypotheses in empirical research. Social anthropologists, by contrast, could take nothing for granted, and developed a holistic (see INDIVIDUALISM) method without inappropriate hypotheses for an unpredictable context.
Anthropology grew out of a curiosity with other cultures as described in accounts by explorers, traders, and missionaries, from the late fifteenth century onwards. The discipline emerged as an organized intellectual pursuit from the mid-nineteenth century, when learned societies were founded in France, the United States, England, and Germany. The earliest theories were evolutionist. The British anthropologist Edward Taylor posited a theory of social evolution which suggested stages from animism (see TOTEMISM) to religion and monotheism. Other evolutionist theories of the nineteenth century claimed that primitive societies were remnants of the distant past in a hierarchy of progress. Seemingly incomprehensible customs were described as ‘survivals’. By the end of the nineteenth century, social evolutionism and its controversial hierarchy of human groups was replaced by theories of diffusion and migration. Similarities or differences between cultures were explained by the spread of influences from some cultures or by the movement of peoples. Diffusionists encouraged the cumulative collection of customs for universal comparisons, although it is now widely acknowledged that such comparisons are fraught with difficulties, since there can be few shared definitions for cross-cultural phenomena. In the early twentieth century, Bronislaw Malinowski argued that customs should be explained in terms of their current function, although post-war anthropologists have rejected the crudities of functionalism, preferring instead to interpret cultural practices in terms of their current meaning. Structuralists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss have suggested that similarities between some cultures are to be explained by the limited number of possibilities open to humanity rather than direct contact between societies.
This transformation in anthropological theory has been accompanied by a revolution in research methods. The early tradition of armchair anthropology is well represented by the work of James Frazer, who attempted to synthesize others' disparate findings around the globe into a speculative theory of origins. Generally, however, professional anthropologists at the turn of the century moved from reliance on evidence from outsiders' accounts to that from their own expeditions. Franz Boas visited the Canadian Eskimos; Charles Seligman (1873–1940) visited New Guinea. With few exceptions, the material was acquired through interpreters in standardized interviews, which risked problems of translation and the loss of unique insights from the people themselves. Malinowski has been credited with the fundamental shift in methods. By the mid-1920s, and following his example, anthropologists were encouraged to live for periods of one or more years among the peoples whose language they had to learn. Emphasis was on the interrelationship of different aspects of a culture or the social structure, thus challenging speculative history, especially since there were often no written records. There was a move away from the sweeping comparison of isolated cultural traits to the intensive and holistic analysis of one culture by the specialist fieldworker.
In Britain contemporary social anthropology is separate from the specialized study of biological aspects of humanity. Physical anthropology has become concerned with palaeontology, genetics, and even primates. The physical and social dimensions of social anthropology were more closely linked in the nineteenth century, when it was mistakenly believed that existing primitive societies were lower down in a scale of social as well as physical evolution. British social anthropology is generally identified with figures such as Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Both were influenced by Émile Durkheim, and although their functionalism has been largely discredited, they left a lasting legacy of studying societies holistically and systematically. Anthropologists from the British school tend to have produced monographs on the politics, kinship, religion, and economy of a specific society. Casual priority is not given to one sphere. Some Marxist anthropologists have given priority to the mode of production. Others have elaborated the power of ritual and symbolism, although not necessarily rejecting the primacy of economic and power relations.
In the United States, by contrast, anthropology is still taught in universities as a unitary discipline. There, cultural anthropology is the closest equivalent to British social anthropology, and is identified with such names as Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Elsewhere in Europe, ethnology embraces the geographical and historical, and has included folklore.
Modern social anthropology has developed an approach which is relevant for any area, Western or non-Western, and in ways which are distinctive. It challenges ethnocentricism, being ready with cross-cultural comparisons, yet is alert to possible universals. The practice of long-term participant observation is now standard. Social anthropology aims to make other cultures familiar, but it simultaneously makes the anthropologist's own culture strange, exposing the taken-for-granded as in need of explanation. The discipline moved long ago from an emphasis on pre-literate societies to literate ones and to areas with world religions. It has been extended more systematically to the study of peasant and urban groups, to both the powerful and the powerless, and the full range of capitalist societies. After the independence struggles of former colonies, the Vietnam War, and the liberation politics of the late 1960s, anthropologists became more alert to the politics of research. A less economistic Marxism influenced the study of pre-capitalist societies. A new feminism fed into the critical study of gender across cultures. Studies were made by Western anthropologists of socialist and communist societies. The number of non-Western and indigenous anthropologists increased. Greater use was made of historical records to enhance the study of oral traditions. The role of the anthropologist as detached observer has been seriously questioned and, in some cases, resolved by a greater selfawareness. Racism has been clarified in contrast to ethnocentricism. Not only the content but also the style of writing have been open to experimentation. Literary traditions and the humanities are drawn on to enhance the re-creation of crosscultural experience. Meanwhile, others still emphasize the discipline's scientific status. There can be no unitary anthropology, given this multiplicity of approaches, but the discipline continues to flourish in universities throughout Europe and North America.

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social area analysis

A variant of urban ecology associated with the work of Eshref Shevky and Wendell Bell and their associates (see especially
, The Social Areas of Los Angeles, 1949
, and
, Social Area Analysis, 1955
). The original formulation offered an almost wholly descriptive account of residential differentiation in urban Los Angeles, distinguishing its social areas in terms of three (by no means clearly constructed) indexes of social rank, degree of urbanization, and segregation. The subsequent theoretical rationale, which emerged during the later study of San Francisco, hinges on the key concept of societal ‘scale’; that is, ‘the number of people in relation and the intensity of these relations’. The results of increasing scale are then identified with Louis Wirth's propositions about urbanism as a way of life. In the Shevky-Bell model, increasing societal scale is synonymous with the emergence of urban industrialized society, the prime mover for which is changes in the economy (caused, in turn, by technological innovation). In a later revision of the model,
(‘Societal Scale and Social Differentiation’, in , The New Urbanization, 1968)
departs from this economic determinism, attributing changes in scale to changes in industrial organization and the distribution of skills, on the one hand, and the aggregation of population and redistribution of resources in favour of cities, on the other. A large number of studies employing the social area model—most of which take the validity of the basic scheme for granted—were conducted (mainly in the United States) during the 1950s and 1960s. Readers will have noticed—as did critics at the time—that, despite the aura of sophisticated quantitative analysis pervading this literature, many of the central concepts and causal relationships are ill-defined. The discussion of social trends accompanying urbanization fails to explain why, or how, social differentiation actually occurs. Ultimately, the model fails to relate the effects of modernization to the axes of residential differentiation, and the latter have to be hitched to some other theory if they are to advance beyond the level of mere description. The best general account of the theory, which is now largely of historical interest only, is Duncan Timms's The Urban Mosaic (1971).

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social behaviourism

A term sometimes applied to the social theories of George Herbert Mead. Mead wanted to distinguish his interest in social action—the observable activities of human beings–from the behaviourism of contemporary psychologists such as John B. Watson. The latter attempted to exclude all reference to mental events and subjective experience (goals, cognitions, and such like) from explanations of human behavior. For Watson and other behaviourists, these subjective experiences were epiphenomenal, and unnecessary for the scientific prediction of behaviour. Mead, by contrast, was interested in the role of communication in explaining social acts. In his social behaviourism, human beings are distinguished from other animals by their ability to imagine themselves in the place of the other, and so anticipate his or her response. Language, gesture, communication, and role-taking are thus central to the symbolic interaction by which the self is constructed, and which forms the basis of social life.

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social capital

A concept devised by James Coleman, used to describe the types of relations that exist between individuals as located within both families and communities, and which are said to exert a strong influence on levels of educational achievement (see
, Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities, 1987
). The concept parallels those of physical and human capital in economics. Coleman and Hoffer argued that deficiencies in social capital–such as would follow from single-parenthood, decreased parental involvement with the child or with family activities, and low levels of interaction between adults and especially parents in local communities–were detrimental to development in adolescence.
Coleman maintained that ‘the social capital for a young person's development resides in the functional community, the actual social relationships that exist among parents, in the closure exhibited by this structure of relations, and in the parent's relations with the institutions of the community. Part of that social capital is the set of norms that develop in communities with a high degree of closure’. Closed networks, giving rise to functional communities, foster among children living therein such things as conformity to school norms, an interest in academic matters, and avoidance of deviance. Lack of interaction between parents and children, and between parents and other adults, fosters open networks, lack of communication, lack of adherence to and enforcement of norms and of family control, all of which reduces the probability of building up human capital and increases opportunities for deviant behaviour.
It has been suggested that this argument represents a significant shift in Coleman's thinking about academic socialization from his earlier work. In his classic The Adolescent Society (1961), Coleman stresses the importance for adolescence and educational achievement of the youth cultures within schools, whereas the concept of social capital emphasized the out-of-school influence of the family as it interacts with the larger community. However, it has also been observed that it is possible to marry the two accounts, by considering the possibility that social capital (lack of parental monitoring, the decision to reside in particular neighbourhoods, and to establish ties with some but not other types of parents and institutions in the local community) exerts an indirect influence on peer-group selection among children; that is, that social capital is an indirect determinant of the subcultures in which young people become involved, both in the community and at school.

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social categories

See CATEGORY.

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social change

See CHANGE.

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social class

See CLASS.

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social closure

See CLOSURE.

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social constructionism

Social constructionism is a general term sometimes applied to theories that emphasize the socially created nature of social life. Of course, in one sense all sociologists would argue this, so the term can easily become devoid of meaning. More specifically, however, the emphasis on social constructionism is usually traced back at least to the work of William Isaac Thomas and the Chicago sociologists, as well as the phenomenological sociologists and philosophers such as Alfred Schutz. Such approaches emphasize the idea that society is actively and creatively produced by human beings. They portray the world as made or invented–rather than merely given or taken for granted. Social worlds are interpretive nets woven by individuals and groups.
The term formally entered the sociological vocabulary through Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality (1966), a treatise on the sociology of knowledge, which attempts an innovative synthesis of the ideas of Émile Durkheim and George Herbert Mead. For Berger and Luckmann, the basic features of social order are captured in the principle that ‘Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product’. Their major case-study of social constructionism was religion (see
's The Social Reality of Religion, 1969
), but at the same time the labelling theory of deviance was being developed and popularized, suggesting in parallel fashion that deviance is socially constructed. Similarly, within the sociology of education, researchers were deploying arguments derived from the work of Mary Douglas and Basil Bernstein to the effect that educational knowledge was also socially constructed. From a number of somewhat different sources, therefore, the more general phraseology of constructionism emerged–and sometimes, as a result, the phrase carries little of the phenomenological baggage that came with its foundations (as, for example, in
, The Social Construction of Community, 1972
).
In psychology, a linked term–constructivism–is often associated with the work of Jean Piaget, and refers to the process by which the cognitive structures that shape our knowledge of the world evolve through the interaction of environment and subject. In social psychology the term is often used (for example in the work of Rom Harré) to capture a similar set of ideas to those outlined above.
Social constructionism is often contrasted with so-called essentialism because it moves away from the ideas of the naturally given or taken for granted and questions the social and historical roots of phenomena. See also EMOTION, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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social contract

A theory of social order that was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, although the idea goes back to Plato. The social contract is an unwritten agreement between the state and its citizens, in which the relative rights and duties of each are expressed. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau propounded three of the most famous contracts, each describing an ideal rather than a real distribution of power. Hobbes argued that security and order could only be achieved by a contract in which all citizens would give up all their individual powers to a central power (the Sovereign), in return for the protection of life and property. Locke suggested an almost opposite strategy of minimal and revocable government, his contract being grounded in the ‘natural laws’ of acquisitiveness and self-interest (a view which found its way almost unchanged into the American system of government); Rousseau imagined a contract requiring complete equality and democratic participation based on the expression of a ‘General Will’. Social contract theory, because of its fanciful and imaginative nature, has not been congenial to modern social scientists. But it still raises many interesting questions about the nature and purpose of government, and the characteristics of the ideal society.

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social control

A term widely used in sociology to refer to the social processes by which the behaviour of individuals or groups is regulated. Since all societies have norms and rules governing conduct (a society without some such norms is inconceivable) all equally have some mechanisms for ensuring conformity to those norms and for dealing with deviance. Social control is consequently a pervasive feature of society, of interest to a broad range of sociologists having differing theoretical persuasions and substantive interests, and not just to sociologists of deviance. The sociological issue is not the existence of social control, but determining its precise nature, and identifying the mechanisms at work in particular social contexts. By whom is control exercised? What techniques of control are employed? How far can and do individuals or groups resist processes of social control? In whose interests does control operate? The answers to such questions vary greatly. Normative functionalists tend to suggest that social control is of value to society as a whole, since it is essential to the maintenance of social order; others point to the sectional interests that are served in the process of social control, emphasizing the lack of normative consensus, the differences in power that are involved, and the close linkage between power and control.
Analyses of the main forms of social control differ. A common distinction is between repressive or coercive forms of control–so-called hard techniques, including direct physical constraint–and the softer ideological forms of control that operate through the shaping of ideas, values, and attitudes. The former techniques are particularly characteristics of institutions such as the police and the military, the latter of institutions such as the mass media. The best recent discussions of the topic are Stanley Cohen's Visions of Social Control (1988) and Jack P. Gibb's Control: Sociology's Central Notion (1989). See also CRIMINOLOGY; CRIMINOLOGY, FEMINIST; FOUCAULT, MICHEL; SANCTION; TRUST AND DISTRUST.

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social crime

Crime is sometimes regarded as social when it represents a conscious challenge to a prevailing social order and its values. Examples cited by Marxist historians include forms of popular action and popular customs in early-modern England (including poaching, wood theft, food riots, and smuggling), which were criminalized by the ruling class, but were not regarded as blameworthy, either by those committing them, or by the communities from which they came. The concept is controversial but does point to the fact that there may not be a consensus as to what constitutes a criminal act.

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Social Darwinism

See DARWINISM.

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social demography

A field of study concerned with the analysis of how social and cultural factors are related to population characteristics. Its major focus is the impact of social and cultural factors on demographic features of society, such as patterns of marriage and childbearing, the age-structure of the population, life-expectancy, and so forth. In addition, however, social demography also encompasses examination of the social consequences of demographic change. Since the demographic characteristics of a society or social group are themselves social phenomena, and the immediate product of the social (but also biological) events of birth and death, in one sense the demographic study of any human population is a form of social demography. However, whereas demography itself is primarily concerned with determining and measuring population characteristics and the interrelationship between demographic variables, social demographers seek to understand and explain these demographic patterns. In so doing they draw on the expertise of sociology as well as of demography.
The three main variables underlying population change are fertility, mortality, and migration, variables themselves associated with factors such as age at marriage, the proportions marrying, contraceptive use, levels and types of morbidity, rural-urban migration, and so forth. All receive attention from social demographers, who seek to understand these processes in terms of a range of standard social factors such as the levels and distribution of income, levels of education, the position of women, religion, and economic development. The possible linkages between variables are usually studied by means of social survey and correlational techniques. Regrettably, theorization in the field tends to be underdeveloped and restricted to simple models, and there is relatively little attention to meaning. The way in which culture may shape individuals' ideas and beliefs receives, with some significant exceptions, rather little attention. Ethnographic techniques are little utilized. The result of this narrowness of approach is that social demography, like demography itself, remains relatively isolated from the mainstream of sociology.

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social differentiation

See STRUCTURAL DIFFERENTIATION.

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social distance

Refers to similarity or closeness based upon social variables or networks—as in occupational mobility, or the Bogardus social distance scale based upon willingness to allow various ethnic groups to degrees of intimacy (for example, ‘Would you accept a [Saudi Arabian] as a member of your golf club? … as a husband to your daughter?’). Methods of multi-dimensional scaling are often used to represent such social space and distance.

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social drift

A term used in social epidemiology, referring to movement down the social scale consequent on long-term sickness, which contributes to the of tnoted concentration of sick persons in the lower social groups. This downward mobility, which may be measured intergenerationally or intragenerationally, usually accounts for only part of the association between class and illness.

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social dynamics and social statics

See COMTE, AUGUSTE.

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social ecology

See HUMAN ECOLOGY.

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social engineering

Planned social change and social development; the idea that governments can shape and manage key features of society, in much the same way as the economy is managed, assuming that adequate information on spontaneous trends is available through social indicators and social trends reports. For example, the extent of women's employment is clearly determined in part by government policy to promote or impede women's paid work. See also PIECEMEAL SOCIAL ENGINEERING.

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social equality

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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social equilibrium

See EQUILIBRIUM.

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social evolution

See EVOLUTIONISM.

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social exchange

See EXCHANGE THEORY.

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social fact

A complex notion, with attributes of externality, constraint, and ineluctability. It is to be understood within the context of Émile Durkheim's conception of collective conscience and collective representations. Social facts are ways of acting which emanate from collectively elaborated and therefore authoritative rules, maxims, and practices, both religious and secular. Norms and institutions are examples of social facts in more or less solidified forms. They constitute practices of the group taken collectively and thus impose themselves and are internalized by the individual. Because they are collectively elaborated they are moral and therefore constrain individual behaviour. The interesting problem for sociologists concerns the gap between the ideal representations and the material social organizations and their constituent actions–as, for example, between the socially approved norms and the actual practice.

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social fluidity

See FEATHERMAN–JONES–HAUSER HYPOTHESIS; MOBILITY, SOCIAL; ODDS RATIO.

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social forecasting

An approach to social theory which attempts to outline the probabilities of a range of historical tendencies. The classic example is Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), which carries the subtitle ‘A Venture in Social Forecasting’. Bell distinguishes his enterprise from earlier (discredited) attempts to formalize rules of prediction pertaining to particular social circumstances. Social forecasting, by contrast, attempts only to outline probabilities, and is possible only where ‘there are regularities and recurrences of phenomena’; or where there are trends whose direction ‘can be plotted within statistical time-series or be formulated as historical tendencies’; and where ‘one can assume a high degree of rationality on the part of the men who influence events’. Since (as Bell admits) these conditions rarely obtain, social forecasters are often restricted to specifying the constraints within which certain policy decisions can be made effective, rather than predicting the results of particular decisions.

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social formation

A Marxist concept, largely synonymous with ‘society’, which refers to the institutional context which provides the conditions of existence of the mode of production. The term was devised by the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser as a substitute for society, because he thought that the latter was too strongly marked by what he regarded as pre-Marxist humanist conceptions of social life as being (ultimately) the product of individual human beings. For this reason, its presence in a text normally indicates that the author works with a structuralist conception of social life, according to which social relations as such–rather than their bearers–are what determine what happens within societies. (It is worth noting that Marx himself rarely used the term.) For Althusser, a social formation is a complex of concrete economic, political, and ideological relations, bound together and given their particular character as capitalist, feudal, or whatever by the fact that the economic relations are, in his words, ‘determinant in the last instance’. Many of those who continue to use the term now reject this residual reductionism.

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social geography

See HUMAN GEOGRAPHY.

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social group

See DYAD; GROUP; TRIAD.

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social history

Any study of the past which emphasizes predominantly ‘social’ concerns. Since much modern social history deals with the very recent past there is considerable overlap with the substantive concerns of sociologists.
As a recognizable specialism, social history blossomed during the 1960s and 1970s, a self-conscious reaction against what was taken to be the élitism and empiricism of established practice in political and economic history. For many practitioners, the new social history was synonymous with ‘expressing the voice of the common people’, and this is reflected in the rapid expansion of interest in the values, life-styles, and everyday experiences of ordinary men and women. This new substantive terrain was explored by an expanded range of methods and techniques (including, for example, those of oral history) and an explicit attention to theory. A proliferation of new journals (for example Social History, History Workshop Journal, Journal of Social History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History) sprang up to act as outlets for the new materials uncovered in this way.
The majority of contemporary practitioners would (understandably) expand upon the above sketch in heroic terms, and would undoubtedly be correct in pointing to the narrowness of most institutionalized history up to the 1950s, compared to which the new concern with the ‘social’ comes as a breath of intellectual fresh air. However, a significant minority of social historians themselves have voiced concerns about the extent to which their speciality has rapidly become diluted by indiscriminate importing of concepts, theories, and methods from cognate disciplines (notably sociology). For example, among other complaints it has been alleged that too much contemporary social history is itself empiricist, and consists merely of mindless accumulation of data on a particular subject of popular concern merely because these data exist, rather than the pursuit of interesting historical problems or questions; that the obsession with model-building has led to indiscriminate application of (what are recognized elsewhere to be) problematic concepts and arguments derived from functionalism, modernization theory, structuralism, and so forth; that the babies of politics and economics have been thrown out with the bath-water of élitism; and that there is a widespread tendency to make unsubstantiated (usually trite) generalizations about the ‘mentality’ or ‘collective mind’ of the masses during some (usually ill-defined) period of interest. In short, for some critics at least, contemporary social history has become a sort of retrospective cultural anthropology, with a premium placed on the use of exotic sources and grandiose (often untestable) generalizations. (For a bad-tempered and polemical–but none the less telling—critique along these lines see
, ‘A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians’, History Workshop Journal, 1979
.)
However, this is surely to paint too negative a picture of what is undoubtedly a growing and dynamic interdisciplinary area, having some overlap with, and being of considerable relevance to, sociology itself. A much more positive picture of the methods of social history is painted in Arthur Stinchcombe's Theoretical Methods in Social History (1978). Of direct relevance to sociology are the large number of excellent social histories of working-class culture (see, for example,
, Work and Revolution in France, 1980
;
, Working Class Community in Industrial America, 1979
;
, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn, 1976
); of politics and class formation (
, Class, Politics and Early Industrial Capitalism, 1981
;
, Worker's Control in America, 1979
;
, The Glassworkers of Carmaux, 1974
); of the formation of nation-states (
, ‘State and Nation in Western Europe’, Past and Present, 1965
;
, ‘The Role of State Violence in the Period of Transition to Capitalism’, Social History, 1979
;
, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy, 1958
); and of social change and the family (
, ‘Modernization and Family History’, Signs, 1976
;
, Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism, 1976
;
, Women, Work and Family, 1978
). Feminist social historians have been particularly influential and have moved women's history well up the research agenda (see, for example, the excellent studies by
, Limited Livelihoods, 1992
, and
, Family Fortunes, 1987
). In all of this it is, of course, a moot point where social history ends and sociology–especially historical sociology–begins. See also CLIOMETRICS.

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Social Identity Theory (SIT)

See NATIONALISM.

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social indicators

Easily identified features of a society which can be measured, which vary over time, and are taken as revealing some underlying aspect of social reality. For example, the Retail Prices Index is used as a measure of inflation, which in turn is taken as a key indicator of economic performance. In general, the most commonly used indicators are derived from official statistics, and include unemployment figures, health and mortality data, and crime-rates. Quite frequently social indicators are used to assess the extent to which a society is ‘progressing’. Similarly they can be used to predict what might happen. For these reasons, social indicators are an important aspect of policy-related studies, and are widely used by governments. There is a well-defined area of research and a specialist scientific journal dedicated to the derivation and discussion of satisfactory social indicators. See also INDEX.

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social inequality

See INEQUALITY.

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social integration and system integration

These terms were first coined by the British sociologist David Lockwood, in order to indicate what he saw as fundamental problems in both the normative functionalist theories of the 1950s, and the conflict theories of writers such as Ralf Dahrendorf and John Rex, which set out to criticize functionalist approaches.
Social integration refers to the principles by which individuals or actors are related to one another in a society; system integration refers to the relationships between parts of a society or social system. Despite the use of the word integration there is no assumption that the relationships so described are harmonious. The terms social integration and system integration can embrace both order and conflict.
The major source of social integration which sociologists have identified in advanced capitalist societies is the class system. In feudal society, the system of estates played an equivalent role, as did caste in Indian society. In general (and following Max Weber's precepts about social stratification), status-based societies are likely to lead to harmonious forms of social integration, and class societies to conflictful forms of social integration. System integration, on the other hand, is a reference to the way in which different parts of a social system (its institutions) interrelate. Any adequate macro-sociological theory of change must attempt to link social integration with system integration. However, in Lockwood's original essay on social integration and system integration, he noted how conflict theorists emphasize the conflict between groups of actors as the basic motor of social change, while normative functionalists downplay the role of actors and seek to emphasize the (functional or dysfunctional) relationships between the institutions of society. For Lockwood, neither approach is adequate, precisely because each deals with only one side of the agency versus structure problem or couplet. The task of sociological theory is to overcome this dualism.
Beyond this, Lockwood's distinction points to those crucial features which need to be examined in any theory of social change. To illustrate this he notes how Karl Marx's theory of capitalist society refers to growing class antagonisms (social integration) which are related to the contradictions between the forces of production and the relations of production (system integration). That is, for Marx, system contradictions are linked to the actions of groups who respond to the contradictions by seeking to change or preserve the existing society. It is contradictions at the system level which lead to social (class) conflict: system integration is related to social integration. More recently, Anthony Giddens has also sought to use this distinction. Initially he employed it in a similar manner to Lockwood, but in his more recent work he seeks to use it as a way of replacing the micro versus macro distinction (and, thereby, the problems of agency and structure). Social integration comes to refer to situations where actors are physically ‘co-present’ and system integration to where they are not. This is unsatisfactory because face-to-face interactions (co-presence) are not confined to micro-processes. (Consider, for example, a meeting in Britain between the Secretary of State for Employment and the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress, to discuss industrial relations law.)
In summary, used as Lockwood originally intended, the distinction between social integration and system integration is fundamental to any theory which seeks to unite micro and macro levels of analysis. The writings of Jürgen Habermas contain a cognate distinction between ‘life world’ and (social) ‘system’. See also CRITICAL THEORY; MACROSOCIOLOGY.

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social interaction

See ACTION THEORY; DRAMATURGY; FORMALISM; NEGOTIATED ORDER; SEQUENCE ANALYSIS; SOCIAL INTEGRATION AND SYSTEM INTEGRATION; SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM.

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social institution

See INSTITUTION.

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social insurance

A state-administered system of contributions-based income-maintenance cover for unemployment, sickness, and retirement, and occasionally other events too. Systems vary between local and national states: some are funded through general taxation as well as contributions; income maintenance payments are often for fixed durations rather than indefinite periods; most systems have eligibility requirements, in addition to a contributions record, which serve to exclude many women and young people.

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social justice

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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social mobility

See MOBILITY, SOCIAL.

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social movements

An organized effort by a significant number of people to change (or resist change in) some major aspect or aspects of society. The term was first used by Saint-Simon in France at the turn of the eighteenth century, to characterize the movements of social protest that emerged there and later elsewhere, and was applied to new political forces opposed to the status quo. Nowadays, it is used most commonly with reference to groups and organizations outside the mainstream of the political system. These movements, often now abbreviated to NSMs (New Social Movements), have in the latter decades of the twentieth century become an increasingly important source of political change. Sociologists have usually been concerned to study the origins of such movements, their sources of recruitment, organizational dynamics, and their impact upon society.
Social movements must be distinguished from collective behaviour. Social movements are purposeful and organized; collective behaviour is random and chaotic. Examples of social movements would include those supporting civil rights, gay rights, trade unionism, environmentalism, and feminism. Examples of collective behaviour would include riots, fads and crazes, panics, cultic religions, rumours, and mass delusions. Social movements are one of the basic elements of a living democracy, and may be catalysts of democracy and change in authoritarian societies.
Social movements have specific goals, formal organization, and a degree of continuity. They operate outside the regular political channels of society, but may penetrate quite deeply into political power circles as interest groups. Their goals may be as narrow as legalizing marijuana, or as broad as destroying the hegemony of the capitalist world system; they may be revolutionary or reformist; but they have in common the active organization of a group of citizens to change the status quo in some way. Under the broad banner of a social movement (such as for example ‘the peace movement’) many individual social movement organizations (SMOs) may operate in a relatively independent way, sometimes causing confusion and conflict within the movement itself.
An early typology of social movements, developed by
(The Peyote Religion among the Navaho, 1966)
, classifies social movements along two dimensions: the locus of change sought (society or individuals), and the amount of change sought (partial or total). The four categories derived from this classification are transformative, reformative, redemptive, and alternative. These are (respectively) movements which aim at the complete restructuring of society (for example millenarian movements); those which attempt to reform some limited aspects of the existing order (such as nuclear disarmament groups); movements which seek to lead members away from a corrupt way of life (as in the case of many religious sectarian groups); and, finally, those which aim to change only particular traits of the individual member (for example Alcoholics Anonymous). The first two of these are therefore aimed at changing (all or part of) society; the latter pair at changing the behaviour only of individual members.
The dramatic visibility of social movements, and their challenge to the mainstream of society, has made them an object of great sociological interest. One school of thought treats social movements as a special case of collective behaviour, emphasizing their expressive and irrational qualities. Many studies have focused on the question: who participates and why? Once again, the pathological elements of social movements tend to be highlighted by this approach, as for example in
's The True Believer (1951)
and
The Authoritarian Personality (1950)
.
The wave of non-violent, largely middle-class social movements in the 1960s and 1970s produced more positive lines of research and analysis. Great attention was paid to the objective and subjective conditions of social movement activity: many theorists like Seymour Martin Lipset blamed the alienating conditions of mass society. Marxists and neo-Marxists proposed new forms of class division and class conflict as underlying causes. Others explored the effects of relative deprivation and rising expectations on the mobilization of citizens. Still other studies followed the stages of social movement development, from the initial recognition of a grievance to the fully developed movement organization: Neil Smelser's ‘value added theory’ remains a classic of this type (see
Theory of Collective Behaviour, 1963
). In his account, six sequential determinants of development are identified, each one progressively narrowing the range of possible outcomes. These determinants are structural conduciveness (the broadest social conditions necessary for the movement to occur); structural strain (a sense of injustice or malaise); the growth and spread of a generalized belief (such as an ideology which offers answers to people's problems); precipitating factors (events that trigger action); mobilization of participants for action (for example via conversion); and, finally, the operation of social control. In the 1970s still more detailed evidence of social movement dynamics came through multivariate analysis (
, Why Men Rebel, 1970
).
More recently, a critical distinction has been drawn by Jean Cohen (in Social Research, 1985), between two competing approaches to the explanation of social movements. ‘Resource mobilization’ theories are particularly influential in North America; ‘identity-oriented’ theories are more common in Western Europe. The former is exemplified in the work of Mayer N. Zald and John D. McCarthy (The Dynamics of Social Movements, 1979), who discuss movements as organizations, and focus especially on the needs of such organizations to mobilize resources. These theories investigate the range of resources that have to be mobilized by groups, examine the ways in which such resources are deployed, and consider the actions by which authorities may attempt to limit such resources. Within this perspective, the term ‘resources’ takes on a wide array of meanings, including economic resources, ideologies, rhetoric, and symbols. Factors like leadership, communications networks, available time, money, and business or political connections are seen as crucial in explaining the growth and success or failure of social movements. Identity-oriented theories, by contrast, see social movements as a special type of social conflict which is at the heart of modern society and social change. Thus, according to the French sociologist Alan Touraine, ‘the concept of social movement [should be] at the centre of sociology’ (The Return of the Actor, 1988). This perspective sees social movements as the central groups in the new social politics and realignments (for example the Women's Movement, and the Ecological Movement) and as sources of new political identities. Indeed, Touraine's method of intervention not only treats social movements as one of the most fundamental forms of citizen action, but also requires that sociologists join the action not just to study but to encourage it. Few British or American sociologists have followed Touraine into this delicate territory, and most sociology of social movements involves the objective analysis of organizations and political processes.

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social movements, urban

See URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.

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social needs

See COMPLEMENTARITY HYPOTHESIS.

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social network

See NETWORK.

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social norm

See NORM.

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social order

Explanations of social order, of how and why societies cohere, are the central concern of sociology. The ‘Hobbesian problem of order’, for example, preoccupied those classical sociologists faced directly with the apparent consequences of industrialization and urbanization: the demise of community, disruption of primary social relationships, loss of authority on the part of traditional agencies of social control, and general instability associated with rapid social change in the nineteenth century.
There are essentially two types of explanation of social order, which can be linked with the names of Émile Durkheim on the one hand, and Karl Marx on the other. The former, associated also with Talcott Parsons and the functionalist school of thought, focuses on the role of shared norms and values in maintaining cohesion in society. For Durkheim, this emphasis arose out of his critique of utilitarian social thought, popular especially among social and political theorists such as Herbert Spencer in Britain, who focused on mutual self-interest and contractual agreements as the basis of social order in increasingly complex industrial societies. For Durkheim, by comparison, questions of morality were central to the explanation of social integration. In his view, the ‘mechanical solidarity’ of pre-industrial societies rested on shared beliefs and values, located primarily in the conscience collective. However, the advent of industrial society sees the emergence of a new form of ‘organic solidarity’, based on interdependence arising out of socialization and differentiation (see STRUCTURAL DIFFERENTIATION). Moral restraints on egoism arise out of association and form the basis of social cohesion. While Durkheim did not deny the existence of conflict and the use of force, especially in periods of rapid social change, Parsons underlined the importance of a prior moral consensus as a necessary pre-condition for social order. He saw organic solidarity as a modified form of the conscience collective and argued that the acceptance of values by the internalization of norms is the basis of integration and social order in modern societies. Because of the importance which he attached to a shared body of norms and values, Parsons was persistently criticized for over-emphasizing consensus, and for neglecting conflict and change in his sociological analyses.
The second explanation of social order derives from the Marxist tradition within the discipline and offers a materialist rather than a cultural account of cohesion. Marx emphasized inequalities in material wealth and political power in capitalist societies. The distribution of material and political resources is the source of conflict between different collectivities–social classes—who want a greater share of those resources than they may already enjoy. Conflict implies there is no moral consensus and social order is always precariously maintained. It is the product of the balance of power between competing groups, whereby the powerful constrain weaker groups, and cohesion is sustained through economic compulsion, political and legal coercion, and bureaucratic routine. While many Marxists have increasingly embraced cultural accounts of social order, for example by explaining working-class incorporation through a dominant ideology, others have noted that economic and political coercion has proved a remarkably effective source of stability, especially where power is legitimated as authority. Nevertheless, persistent conflict implies tension and change, rather than enduring stability.
In the most original recent contribution to the theoretical debate about social order, David Lockwood (Solidarity and Schism, 1992) has demonstrated that neither Marxian nor Durkheimian theory satisfactorily resolves the issues, since each approach is forced to employ residual categories which turn out to be the central analytic elements of the other. In Durkheim's work, the concept of moral classification is the key to social structure, whereas for Marx it is production relations. That is, one theory emphasizes the socially integrative structure of status, the other the socially divisive structure of class. However, Durkheim cannot explain how anomic declassification (disorder) occurs or is structured (schismatic) without introducing concepts of power and material interests into his schema, whereas Marx cannot explain the persistence of capitalist societies without recourse to a generalized category of ideology which introduces the (unanalysed) conceptual problem of the nature and variability of consensus.
Explanations of social order tend to be macro-theories which focus on society as the unit of analysis, although studies of family obligations, crime, and leisure (to cite but a few examples) raise issues of social order at the micro level. Quite different accounts of how social order is reproduced during face-to-face interaction will be found in the writings of symbolic interactionists, in dramaturgy, ethnomethodology, and exchange theory (all of which are discussed separately elsewhere in this dictionary). The best general account of the various theories and the issues they raise is Dennis Wrong's The Problem of Order: What Unites and Divides Society (1994). See also FATALISM; HOBBES, THOMAS; SOCIAL CONTRACT; SOCIAL INTEGRATION AND SYSTEM INTEGRATION.

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social organization

See FORMAL STRUCTURE; ORGANIZATION THEORY; PARSONS, TALCOTT; SYSTEMS THEORY.

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social pathology

An early form of deviance theory, no longer in wide use, which drew upon the organic metaphor to suggest that parts of societies, like parts of bodies, could suffer breakdown and disease. See also PATHOLOGY.

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social policy

Precisely what counts as a social policy is a matter of debate. Both words are problematic. The term policy commonly refers to a more or less clearly articulated set of ideas about what should be done in a particular sphere, which is often set down in writing, and usually formally adopted by the relevant decision-making body. It differs from a plan in that plans specify in detail the way in which objectives are to be achieved, whereas a policy is typically formulated at a more general level, indicating only objectives and the intended direction of change. In academic contexts, however, the term policy is usually not restricted to formally adopted policies, since lack of action and continuation of the status quo (even if not formally agreed) itself constitutes a policy.
The term social is even more problematic. The most common interpretation is that social policies are government policies (both central and local) that are directed towards meeting the social needs of the population (social needs usually being interpreted as welfare needs), with the list including policies concerning social security, health, housing, education and (sometimes) law and order. However, such a view of social policy is arguably too narrow, since it directs attention to policies generated specifically within the usual list of welfare fields. It ignores key policy areas that also have a profound impact on welfare, especially areas usually assigned to the domain of economic policy, such as fiscal policies and policies on inflation and economic growth. Whilst these are properly labelled ‘economic policies’, they are also ‘social policies’—or policies with major implications for welfare, which cannot be excluded from the field of social policy. Equally, it is argued that exclusive concentration on government policies is mistaken, and that one should also include the policies of religious and charitable bodies as well as of private corporations (as, for example, in consideration of pensions policies)–a position that has become increasingly necessary with the privatization of arrangements for welfare.
There have been a range of approaches to the analysis of social policy, although much of the work has been developed in departments of social administration, outside the framework of sociology. The so-called social administration approach to social policy dominant in the 1950s and 1960s has, however, been widely criticized as atheoretical, and Marxist approaches were especially influential amongst sociologists in the 1970s (see, for example,
's The Political Economy of the Welfare State, 1979
). More recently, T. H. Marshall's analysis of citizenship (see his
Sociology at the Crossroads, 1963
) has once again shaped discussions of welfare and social policy. There is also a greater focus on comparative social policy (with the insularity of British writers on social policy showing signs of waning). The impact of feminist scholarship has also been considerable, with much greater analysis of the role women play in welfare provision, for example through informal care of the sick and disabled, and also greater attention given to women as the recipients of social welfare. See also EVALUATION RESEARCH; POLICY RESEARCH.

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social problems

A generic term applied to the range of conditions and aberrant behaviours which are held to be manifestations of social disorganization and to warrant changing via some means of social engineering. Typically, these problems include many forms of deviant behaviour (such as crime, juvenile delinquency, prostitution, mental illness, drug addiction, suicide), and of social conflict (ethnic tensions, domestic violence, industrial strife, and so forth). Most of these topics are discussed under discrete headings in this dictionary. In the complex social structures of modern industrial societies, individuals and groups are differentially exposed to these hazards, and people occupying different statuses and roles tend to differ in their appraisal of social situations and in their views as to what constitutes a social problem requiring a solution. For this reason, the range of possible social problems is almost infinite, and can include phenomena as diverse as declining standards of literacy and the demise of the work ethic. Similarly, the proposed solutions are also variable, and this too is (at least partly) due to the different interests and values of the various parties involved.

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social protest

See CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE; PASSIVE RESISTANCE; REBELLION; SOCIAL MOVEMENTS; STRIKE.

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social psychology

See PSYCHOLOGY.

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social revolution

See REBELLION, REVOLUTION.

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social role

See ROLE.

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social sanction

See SANCTION.

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social science

A general label applied to the study of society and human relationships. The development of social sciences, during the course of the nineteenth century, followed on the development of natural science. The designation of an area of study as a social science usually carries the implication that it is comparable in important ways to a natural science. Of the various disciplines that study human beings, psychology is often seen as a natural rather than a social science, and economics most frequently regarded as a comparatively unproblematic social science. Sociology, social psychology, politics, and geography have a more problematic status, while history is perhaps least often designated as a science.
Discipline boundaries are by no means always clear and the generic term social science usually covers most or all of the disciplines mentioned. All, to various degrees, are engaged in debates about the nature of science and scientific status. Are the social sciences directly comparable to the natural sciences, or does the fact that their object of study is human make them different? And, if they are different, in what sense (if any) are they scientific? Sociologists, in particular, have addressed these questions more or less continuously from the time of the classical theorists onwards. See also METHODOLOGY.

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social security

State-administered means-tested systems of income maintenance that are intended to prevent people falling into or remaining in poverty. Some are citizenship-based, others are residence-based. See also WELFARE STATE.

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social solidarity

One principal theme in the work of Émile Durkheim concerns the sources of moral and therefore social order in society. In particular, Durkheim was concerned to elaborate the connection between the individual and society, in a time of growing individualism, social dislocation, and moral diversification. In his famous treatise on The Division of Labour in Society (1893) he juxtaposed the solidarity of resemblance, characteristic of segmented, opaque societies where ‘mechanical solidarity’ prevailed, to the solidarity of occupational interdependence in morally dense societies characterized by ‘organic solidarity’. The transition from one to the other was neither obvious nor inevitable–as he was the first to admit in his afterwords on abnormal forms of the division of labour. In subsequent writings, Durkheim sought to make suggestions as to the institutional solutions to the problems of moral regulation and social integration in contemporary societies, in particular suggesting the importance of the ‘occupational association’ (a sort of modern equivalent of the medieval guild) as a mediator between the individual and society. In the Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), social solidarity–society–was found to be the very object of collective worship.

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social stability

See CHANGE; PROGRESS; SOCIAL CONTROL; SOCIAL ORDER; SOCIAL SOLIDARITY.

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social statics and social dynamics

See COMTE, AUGUSTE.

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social statistics

Quantitative information about social groups, including census and demographic data, used for descriptive policy and inferential analysis. As an application of statistical theory, increasing attention has been given to models of influence and measurement, and to multivariate models of analysis.

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social status

See STATUS.

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social stratification

See STRATIFICATION.

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social structure

See STRUCTURE.

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social survey

See SURVEY.

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social system

The concept of system appears throughout the social and natural sciences and has generated a body of literature of its own (‘general systems theory’). A system is any pattern of relationships between elements, and is regarded as having emergent properties of its own, over and above the properties of its elements. The system is seen as possessing an inherent tendency towards equilibrium and the analysis of systems is the analysis of the mechanisms which maintain equilibrium, both internally and externally, in relation to other systems.
The functionalism of Talcott Parsons offers the fullest employment of systems theory in sociology (see especially
The Social System, 1951
). In Parsonsian terms, social system can refer to a stable relationship between two actors, to societies as a whole, to systems of societies, or indeed any level between these. all are analysed principally in terms of their so-called cybernetic aspects; that is, as systems of information exchange and control, where equilibrium is maintained through symbolic exchanges with other systems across boundaries. In economic systems, for example, the exchange is not usually direct but mediated by money. Power is the medium of exchange in political systems.
More recently, Anthony Giddens (Central Problems in Social Theory, 1979) has criticized this conception of the social system on the grounds that systems do not possess emergent properties over and above the social actors who comprise them, but are rather produced and reproduced by structured and routine social practices. The systematic properties of social systems thus stem from the nature of social action rather than the system itself.

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social systems, plural

See PLURAL SOCIAL SYSTEMS.

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social theory

See THEORY.

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social trend

A notable pattern of change displayed by a social indicator or index. The term is also used more loosely to refer to national social reports which present unvarying distributions, as well as time-series data showing change.

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social work

The generic term applied to the various organized methods for promoting human welfare through the prevention and relief of suffering. In the late nineteenth century, social work was largely voluntary (notably as a charitable activity on the part of middle-class women), and aimed primarily at the alleviation of material poverty. In the period since the Second World War, social work practice has become increasingly professionalized, and now has a much wider remit embracing emotional and mental as well as economic well-being.
Contemporary social work tends to suffer from a lack of differentiation from the various other social services which comprise the modern welfare state. In Britain, for example, social workers have no legal obligation (and no practical resources) to deal with issues of unemployment, housing, and poverty–all of which are the responsibility of other social services. What they are expected to deal with are the wide range of problems which diminish the ‘quality of inner life’: for example, problems and crises associated with adoption, fostering of the young and old, marital reconciliation, sexual and physical abuse, and people's relationships with one another generally.
There are several models of social work practice. The ‘problem-solving’ approach involves the social worker in reinforcing the client's emotional and organizational resources to deal with his or her difficulties. The various ‘psycho-social therapies’ stress the need for prior psycho-social diagnosis as a prerequisite to psycho-social treatment. Partly as a reaction against the deterministic and mechanical view of action implied in these approaches, ‘functionalists’ have emphasized the role of the social worker in helping (rather than treating) the client, by sustaining an appropriate supporting relationship with him or her. Other models are oriented towards behaviour-modification, crisis-intervention, and short-term task-centredness. In reality, practice tends to be characterized by eclectic pragmatism, rather than adherence to a specific method. Strong recent influences include feminist theory and anti-oppressive practice. Good recent overviews are
, Modern Social Work Theory (1991)
, for Britain, and
, Social Work and Social Welfare (2nd edn., 1992)
, for the United States.
Not surprisingly, many outside observers have expressed concern at the periodic psychotherapeutic takeover of social work; similarly, given its inherently moral character, social work practice has been subject to repeated controversy involving those who view it as primarily a political tool–either for promoting or hindering social justice.

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social worlds

A term which is frequently applied to ‘universes of discourse’ through which common symbols, organizations, and activities emerge. They involve cultural areas which need not be physically bounded. Typical examples might be the ‘social worlds’ of surfing, nursing, politics, or science. The Gay Community is a self-conscious social world. The concept has a long but vague history in symbolic interactionism and is discussed most clearly by Anselm Strauss (in Norman Denzin's edited Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 1978).

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social world perspective

See REFERENCE GROUP.

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socialism

An economic and political system based on collective or state ownership of the means of production and distribution–although, like capitalism, the system takes many and diverse forms.
After almost two hundred years of socialist thought the collapse of Soviet communism has broken the grip of the Marxist-Leninist imprimatur on the provenance of this concept. However, the concerns that have been addressed by those who espoused or eschewed the cause still remain. The dichotomies of freedom and equality, individual and collective rights, and even the nature of the historical process (with its voluntaristic and deterministic connotations) all remain very much to the fore. To some extent these problems are now raised afresh since the system of ‘actually existing socialism’ or real socialism as it was called tended to put into suspended animation many of the processes which addressed these questions. Capitalism resurgent in Eastern Europe once again raises the questions of the limit to individual rights, the nature of the common good, and liberalism versus communitarianism (see COLLECTIVISM). Ethnic and national minorities, with their historically defined differences and animosities for so long cryogenically preserved, have starkly raised the question of collective rights and seeming historical inevitability.
Socialism as a doctrine, or some would say a utopia, is generally agreed to have been spawned as a reaction to capitalism. The Durkheimian version was rooted in the desire simply to bring the state closer to the economy, society closer to the realm of individual activity, and sentient parts to each other: in this way the pathologies of capitalism (including anomie) would be mitigated and eventually relieved. Socialism was a cry of pain which did not demand equality of condition but simply a genuine equality of opportunity. The imposition of the former, Durkheim argued, would destroy the very conditions for a healthy society, and society could not demand that which was against its interests for survival.
Max Weber, on the other hand, saw in socialism an accentuation of the process of rationalization commenced under capitalism. He derided the intellectuals who wanted to marry formal to substantive rationality in the socialist state, or as he put it ‘bureaucracy in the state and in the economy’, which would simply create the ‘cage of future bondage’.
The English tradition of so-called ethical socialism argues for forceful government intervention in market processes, state control of the conditions of labour, a collectivist social policy and strong welfare state, as represented in the non-revolutionary and pragmatic gradualism of the Fabians. This vision of socialism emphasizes the values of liberty, fraternity (particularly the importance of citizenship as a counter to the inequalities of social class), and equality, and is most explicitly spelled out in A. H. Halsey and Norman Dennis's English Ethical Socialism (1988). It is opposed to historicism and places moral motivation at the centre of human conduct and social organization. It is also opposed to Marxism-Leninism. The writings of T. H. Marshall and R. H. Tawney are typical of the tradition.
This particular philosophy of socialism has had a strong influence on British empirical sociology, obvious for example in the ‘political arithmetic’ approach to the sociology of education, which has been concerned with comparing the chances of children from different social backgrounds reaching successive stages in the education process. The work of Halsey himself is typical. Halsey's early studies of inequalities in access to education and educational attainment set much of the research agenda of the sociology of education in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s, and were influential in formulating the social policies of comprehensive and compensatory education, while his later work has continued to draw attention to the importance of schools (rather than academic ability) as a determinant of educational achievements (see
Social Class and Educational Opportunity, 1961, and Origins and Destinations, 1980
).
However, Karl Marx's views on the socialist future and the advent of communism have been the most pervasive in their influence on the definition of the letter, if not the spirit, of socialism. For Marx, socialism implied the abolition of markets, capital, and labour as a commodity. In fact, second economies, black markets, and other forms of private activity were never eradicated in state socialist societies, even under Stalinism. Very soon, ‘market socialism’ came to the rescue of the distributive as well as production shortcomings of the planned, command economy. Free labour was in fact dragooned and disciplined by subservient trade unions, and self-management only surfaced at times of crisis or in managerial forms, as in Poland and Yugoslavia. Shortage, rather than the surplus promised by the abolition of the anarchy of capitalist production, was testified to by food queues and price riots. Accumulation within the heavy industrial sector continued, as the bureaucratic state maintained its power by any means, including importing foreign technology rather than provide autonomy to any segment of society. If socialism meant anything it was the creation of social justice and the transition from the labour standard to the needs standard. In fact, socialism did not even create a working meritocracy, but only a political class of the nomenklatura, and despite its commitment to a leading role for the working class, it rewarded workers simply by promoting them into political and white-collar positions in an obvious process of inclusion.
The absence of key civil rights (freedom of speech, person, conscience, movement, property ownership) and political rights (assembly and franchise)–obviated, it was claimed, by the victory of the vanguard Party–was in no way compensated for by the socialist ‘welfare state’ or the satisfaction of need away from the realm of exchange value. Environmental despoliation characteristic of socialist industrialization, mortality and morbidity rates so bad as not to be publishable, gender divisions disguised by the common impoverishment, subsidies to housing and food consumption which provided an extra dimension to the cumulative inequality generated by the socialist system of redistribution–all of these factors and more provided a sorry summary of the achievements of actually existing socialism. Until the very end, ideologists within the Party clung to their socialist rhetoric and slogans, despite the fact that any generation which might have believed in them was by now in a minority.
The overnight collapse of the mass parties in Eastern Europe, and their almost total rejection even in the face of massive impoverishment, is perhaps the major indictment of socialism as it was practised in the Soviet bloc. How it affects the credibility of the doctrine, and what emerges to fill the value vacuum left by its demise, remains to be seen. Nationalism, populism, and varieties of neocorporatist solutions have already sought to take over the constituency of the political left as socialism still dares not to speak its name. See also ANARCHISM; BERNSTEIN, EDUARD; PLURALISM; SAINT-SIMON; SOREL, GEORGES.

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socialism, democratic

See STATE CAPITALISM.

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socialism, real

See REAL SOCIALISM.

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socialization

Socialization is the process by which we learn to become members of society, both by internalizing the norms and values of society, and also by learning to perform our social roles (as worker, friend, citizen, and so forth).
There is an ongoing dispute about the relative importance of nature versus nurture (or hereditary and environment) in human development. A related debate concerns the extent to which humans are over-socialized. Are humans ruled by their social manners and role-playing skills to the extent that basic human instincts are eradicated? This debate pits the psychological perspective of Freud, which views socialization as working against our natural inclinations and drives, against the functionalist perspective that sees socialization as essential for the integration of society. Recent studies have focused on social class differences in socialization, some of which have to do with language (see
, Class, Codes and Control, 1971
), others of which are more concerned with differences in value orientation (see
, Class and Conformity, 1969
).
Socialization is no longer regarded as the exclusive preserve of childhood, with the primary agents being the family and school. It is now recognized that socialization continues throughout the life-course. It is also recognized that socialization is not simply a one-way process, in which individuals learn how to fit into society, since people may also redefine their social roles and obligations. Any understanding of socialization must therefore take account of how the process relates to social change. In this sense, some schools of sociological theory imply an allegedly ‘over-socialized conception of man in society’, in that they overstate the extent to which values are internalized and action is normative in orientation—a charge often levelled, for example, against normative functionalism (see
, ‘The Oversocialized Conception of Man’, American Sociological Review, 1961
).

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socialization, political

See POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION.

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socialization, work

See WORK SOCIALIZATION.

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societal reaction

In the labelling theory of deviance, the societal reaction refers to the range of formal and informal agencies of social control–including the law, media, police, and family–which, through their responses towards the deviant, greatly affect deviance outcomes. For Edwin Lemert (Social Pathology, 1951), far from control necessarily reducing deviance, it may actually generate, structure, or amplify deviance. See also DEVIANCE AMPLIFICATION; PRIMARY AND SECONDARY DEVIANCE.

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societal scale

See SOCIAL AREA ANALYSIS.

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society

Generally, a group of people who share a common culture, occupy a particular territorial area, and feel themselves to constitute a unified and distinct entity–but there are many different sociological conceptions (see
, Society, 1986
).
In everyday life the term society is used as if it referred in an unproblematic way to something that exists ‘out there’ and beyond the individual subject: we speak of ‘French society’, ‘capitalist society’, and of ‘society’ being responsible for some observed social phenomenon. On reflection, however, such a usage clearly has its problems: for example, is British society a clear unity, or can we also talk of Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish societies? And, even within England, are there not wide cultural differences between (say) north and south? Is there one capitalist society–or many? Nor is a society the same thing as a nation-state. The former Yugoslavia clearly contained several societies: Croat, Slovenian, Serbian, and so on.
While many sociologists use the term in a commonsense way others question this use. Some symbolic interactionists, for example, argue that there is no such thing as society: it is simply a useful covering term for things we don't know about or understand properly (see
, The Making of Symbolic Interactionism, 1979
). Others, such as Émile Durkheim, treat society as a reality in its own right (see
The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895
).
Some sociologists have tried to develop more specific concepts to replace that of society. The Marxist theoretician Louis Althusser, for example, suggested the term social formation: a combination of three levels of relationships (economic, ideological, and political) which can have varying connections with each other (see
For Marx, 1969
). Anthony Giddens, arguing against the identification of society with the nation-state, prefers to talk about social systems and institutions which may or may not be limited by national boundaries (see his
A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, 1981
). See also FORMALISM; FUNCTION; GOFFMAN, ERVING.

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society, corporate

See CORPORATE SOCIETY.

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society, industrial

See INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY.

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society, plural

See PLURAL SOCIETIES.

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society, post-industrial

See POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY.

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society, primitive

See PRIMITIVE SOCIETY.

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society, stateless

See STATELESS SOCIETY.

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society, technological

See TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY.

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society, traditional

See TRADITIONAL SOCIETY.

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Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP)

A North American organization of sociologists, formed in 1951, as a body aiming to present a more radical and critical approach to deviance and social problems than the American Sociological Association. In its earliest days, it was dominated by labelling theory, as exemplified in
, The Other Side (1963)
. The British National Deviance Conference was in part inspired by this organization, which is now a major part of American sociology. A good overview of its activities can be found in the review of its work published on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary in the journal Social Problems (1976).

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sociobiology

A recently developed academic discipline, particularly popular in the United States, based upon the tenet that all animal and human behaviour is ultimately dependent upon genetic encoding moulded through evolutionary history by the processes of selection. This all-encompassing theme, according as it does with many common-sense assertions about human nature, is sufficient to have attracted an enormous quantity of media attention. The spotlight has focused particularly on its most well-known popularizing authors: Edward O. Wilson, who coined the term itself in his Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975); and Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene (1976). Wilson, an American biologist and authority on ant behaviour, also provided the first definition of the new subdiscipline as ‘the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behaviour’.
In the mid-1970s sociobiology brought together into a supposedly coherent theoretical synthesis the work of previous authors on the relationship between animal and human behaviour, including Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, and Desmond Morris. It was anticipated, at least by Wilson, that all social and biological sciences would eventually be regarded merely as branches of sociobiology. Unsurprisingly, many sociologists and anthropologists have been deeply suspicious of the ultimately all-encompassing claims of this synthesis, and have drawn attention to the enormous cultural diversity of human societies—a diversity which challenges the frequently androcentric and ethnocentric assumptions of much sociobiological writing. For example, serious questions have been raised by Marshall Sahlins concerning the theoretical adequacy of sociobiology, and its claims to be a respectable academic discipline in its own right (The Use and Abuse of Biology, 1976). Many social scientists have challenged its use of scientific evidence (see, for example,
, Vaulting Ambition, 1985
). Others have linked the emergence of sociobiology in the United States to a conservative backlash against the radicalism of the 1960s (see
, Not in our Genes, 1984
).
The general response of sociobiologists to these criticisms has been gradually to admit more that is environmental into their analytical framework, whilst still retaining an adherence to the ultimate determining effect of biology, at least in any aspect of behaviour attributed with evolutionary significance. Wilson, for example, has more recently argued that ‘genes hold culture on a long leash’. Whilst some academic analysis has become relatively sophisticated and complex, the level at which much sociobiological argument is expressed (particularly in its more popular versions) remains alarmingly reductionist.
The sociobiological enterprise is now well established, being supported by a raft of academic journals (including Ethology and Sociobiology, Human Nature, and Evolutionary Anthropology), and two interdisciplinary associations (the Human Behavior and Evolution Society and the European Sociobiological Society). In a sympathetic review of the field, Fran¸ois Nielsen argues that sociobiological and evolutionary thinking will increasingly affect sociology in a number of areas, including (for example) the study of sex and gender roles, collective action, and altruism (see
‘Sociobiology and Sociology’, Annual Review of Sociology, 1994
).

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socio-economic status

Any measure which attempts to classify individuals, families, or households in terms of indicators such as occupation, income, and education. One of the first major uses of socio-economic status can be found in the social class measures introduced by the British Registrar-General in 1911. See also STATUS ATTAINMENT.

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sociogram

See NETWORK; SOCIOMETRY.

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sociolinguistics

See CONVERSATION ANALYSIS; ETHNOMETHODOLOGY; LANGUAGE.

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sociological imagination

See MILLS, CHARLES WRIGHT.

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sociological intervention

A technique practised by the French sociologist Alain Touraine, which advocates the active intervention of the sociologist in the social movement that forms his or her subject, in order to expose the ‘actual social relations’ that lie behind the ‘mesh of approved and organized practices’.
His analysis of post-industrial society focuses on the extraordinary powers of control inherent in the uses of information technology. These powers give human beings the ability literally to make history (historicity), but citizens in general have little access to them. For this reason, Touraine gives primary political importance to social movements in which groups of citizens organize to challenge the dominant forms of knowledge, and to propose alternatives. The sociologist attempts to create a research situation within which the social movement can represent fully the nature of the struggles in which it is engaged. Touraine therefore advocates four research practices: entering into a relationship with the social movement by organizing its militants as groups; encouraging these groups in their militant roles; explaining the historical context of the movement to its activists; and participating in the self-analysis of the militant group's situation by interpreting what took place during the sociological intervention itself.
With his co-researchers at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Touraine embarked in the 1960s on a series of dramatic ‘sociological interventions’. The researchers joined the French student movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the regional Occitan movement, and the Polish Solidarity movement. Going beyond participant observation, they became actively engaged in the political ideas and actions of those groups as a way of understanding them more fully. Theoretically, this approach has been labelled actionalism. This combination of sociological fieldwork with active Marxism (praxis) and more subjective theories of social action was highly controversial. Probably its most successful product was the study of the French student and worker movement of 1968.
The most complete account of the technique, and its theoretical justification, will be found in Touraine's The Voice and the Eye (1978). Just how far removed this is from the conventional view of the sociologist as neutral or objective observer or recorder of the facts is evident in Touraine's claim that ‘the supreme moment of the intervention devoted to the students’ movement was dominated by a lengthy discussion between the militants and the research leader, who introduced with great vigour into the group the theme of knowledge and its social utilization, which to his mind, represented the only stakes capable of elevating the student struggle to the level of a social movement'.

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sociological jurisprudence

A term coined by the American jurist Roscoe Pound (1870–1964) to describe his approach to the understanding of the law. Central to Pound's conception was the very suggestive idea that in modern societies the law represents the principal means through which divergent interests are brought into some sort of alignment with one another. Unfortunately, perhaps because he was a jurist rather than a sociologist, he did not combine this insightful conception with a developed understanding of how these interests were formed and why some of them came to be privileged over others within the legal system. A sociologically informed account of Pound's work, which places it in the context of the historical development of the sociology of law, will be found in
, The Sociological Movement in Law, 1978
.

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Sociologie du Travail

A sociology of work, associated with the writings of certain French sociologists of the 1950s and 1960s, which provided at the time a refreshing critique of the factory-bound perspective of mainstream (mostly Anglo-Saxon) industrial sociology. This literature re-established the links which Karl Marx had sought to forge between, on the one hand, changes in work organization, technology, and production; and, on the other, personal alienation, class, and socio-political relationships. Leading figures were Georges Friedmann, Michel Crozier, Pierre Naville, Alain Touraine, and Serge Mallet, many of whose works have now been translated into English. Mallet's work stimulated an important debate about the existence of a new working class, but like much Sociologie du Travail, its iconoclasm was limited by technicism and technological determinism. Its influence on left-oriented research and thought in English has now been considerably eclipsed by more recent debates about skill and de-skilling, the labour process, post-fordism, and flexible employment. Michael Rose's Servants of Post-Industrial Power? (1979) is an excellent English-language history and analysis of the movement's theories and work.

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sociology

It has been argued that the very origins of the word ‘sociology’, from the latin socius (companion) and the Greek ology (study of), indicate its nature as a hybrid discipline that can never aspire to the status of a social science or a coherent body of knowledge. The discipline itself has an ambivalent genealogy and a controversial recent history as the newest of the social sciences to establish itself in universities in the English-speaking world. In Britain, for example, this did not happen on a large scale until the 1960s, when sociology departments were often accused of instigating student unrest. The difficulty of defining the subject is indicated by the easiest possible form of this entry: namely, a cross-reference to every other entry in the dictionary, which includes theories and concepts from philosophy through to economics. Of all the social sciences it is sociology that most closely scrutinizes change and conflict in the wider society. The range of the discipline, and the importance of the arguments that are disputed within it, still make it the most exciting of the social sciences.
Historically, the word itself was first used by Auguste Comte, although a concern with the nature of society can be found throughout the history of Western thought. However, it was not until the nineteenth century, in the aftermath of industrial revolution and consequent political upheavals, that we see a concern with society as such as a direct object of study. In Comte's work, sociology was to be the highest achievement of science, producing knowledge of the laws of the social world equivalent to our knowledge of the laws of nature. We could then determine, once and for all, what sort of social changes were possible and so alleviate the political chaos that followed the French Revolution. It is often argued that this is a profoundly conservative reaction to the liberal optimism of the Enlightenment: against notions of individual freedom and unlimited social progress, sociology asserts the importance of the community, and the comparatively limited possibilities that exist for social change. Similarly, in his book The Sociological Tradition (1967), Robert Nisbet has argued that much classical sociology reflects a generalized hostility to the industrial and political revolutions of that period. Marxists also maintain that, as the discipline developed during the nineteenth century, it was clearly as a bourgeois social science—a reply and alternative to the increasing political and intellectual influence of historical materialism. At the same time, however, sociology has often been taken up by social reformers: even the positivism of Comte was important in the growth of reform movements during the late nineteenth century. An alternative to this account of the history of sociology is the argument, found most clearly perhaps in the work of Talcott Parsons (see especially
The Structure of Social Action, 1937
) that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sociology broke free of its earlier ideological shackles and established itself as a science proper, especially in the work of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. Neither of these histories is adequate, as the recent work of Anthony Giddens has shown, although most sociology courses still point to the achievements of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim (and, in the United States, George Herbert Mead) in laying the theoretical foundations of the modern discipline.
In its present form, sociology embraces a range of different views concerning both what a social science should comprise, and what might be the proper subject-matter of sociology in particular. The latter provides perhaps the best way of making sense of the discipline. There are three general conceptions of the object of sociological interest—although these are not mutually exclusive. All three can be said to define the study of society but what is meant by society is in each case rather different.
The first states that the proper object for sociology is social structure, in the sense of patterns of relationships which have an independent existence, over and above the individuals or groups that occupy positions in these structures at any particular time: for example, the positions of the nuclear family (mother, father, children) might remain the same from generation to generation and place to place, independently of the specific individuals who fill or do not fill those positions. There are two main versions of this approach: Marxism, which conceptualizes the structures of modes of production, and Parsonsian structural-functionalism which identifies systems, sub-systems, and role structures.
A second perspective deems the proper object of sociology to lie in something that we might call, with Durkheim, collective representations: meanings and ways of cognitively organizing the world which have a continued existence over and above the individuals who are socialized into them. Language itself is the paradigm case: it pre-exists our birth, continues after our death, and as individuals we can alter it little or not at all. Much modern structuralist and post-modernist work (in particular discourse analysis) can be seen as part of this tradition.
Finally, there are those for whom the proper object of sociological attention is meaningful social action, in the sense intended by Max Weber. The implicit or explicit assumption behind this approach is that there is no such thing as society: merely individuals and groups entering into social relationships with each other. There are widely differing ways in which such interaction can be studied, including Weber's own concerns with rational action and the relationships between beliefs and actions; the symbolic interactionist concern with the production, maintenance, and transformation of meanings in face-to-face interaction; and the ethnomethodological study of the construction of social reality through linguistic practices.
A moment's reflection will confirm that, between them, these three possible candidates for sociological study almost exhaust the range of what one is likely to meet during the course of social relationships. It is no surprise, then, that sociology is sometimes seen (at least by sociologists) as a queen of the social sciences, bringing together and extending the knowledge and insights of all the other (conceptually more restricted) adjacent disciplines. This claim is perhaps less true now than during the period when it was expanding rapidly, but despite inevitable specialization among its practitioners there is still a strong totalizing tendency in the discipline, as a perusal of the work of Anthony Giddens or Jeffrey Alexander will establish. Indeed, Giddens himself argues that sociology emerged as an attempt to make sense of the profound social transformation between traditional and modern societies, and as that change continues and gathers pace so the attempt to understand it becomes more important.
Hence sociology is, and is likely to remain, both an attractive and internally divided discipline, and a discipline which attracts a great deal of criticism, especially from those who—for whatever reason—are most resistant to social change. See also CULTURAL STUDIES; EXCHANGE THEORY; SOCIAL ACTION; SOCIAL ORDER; SOCIAL INTEGRATION AND SYSTEM INTEGRATION.
See also individual entries on the sociologies of AGEING, THE BODY, CONSUMPTION, DEVELOPMENT, ECONOMIC LIFE, EDUCATION, EMOTION, THE FAMILY, FOOD, HEALTH AND ILLNESS, KNOWLEDGE, LAW, LEISURE, MEDICINE, RACE, RELIGION, SCIENCE; and entries on DEVIANCE, ENVIRONMENT, GENDER, MILITARY AND MILITARISM, ORGANIZATION THEORY, POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, POP SOCIOLOGY, RURAL SOCIOLOGY, URBAN SOCIOLOGY, WELFARE.

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sociomatrix

See NETWORK.

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sociometry

A term coined by J. L. Moreno in 1934 in Who Shall Survive? and originally developed as part of a sociodrama approach to interpreting social structure. Sociometry systematizes information from individuals in a group, concerning who prefers to associate with whom (or often the behavioural parallel of who associates with whom), in terms of a specified basis or for a given purpose. An early use by Moreno was to reallocate dormitory sleeping-arrangements to minimize conflict among reform-school inhabitants. Initial use thus tied the sociometric test (for example naming friends) to it having direct consequences, though this is now less common. The number of sociometric choices allowed may be either fixed (‘name three best friends’) or not (‘give as many names as you wish’); may be ordered; or may express the strength of the link. Originally, analysis of sociometric data centred on the number of choices received and given and the resulting point properties, such as stars and isolates receiving very many and no choices respectively. The information is drawn as points and lines on a single diagram called the sociogram, where individuals receiving most choices are located at the centre, and isolates at the periphery. Sociometry is widely used in education and other small-group contexts for understanding clique-structure, and has its own journal, Sociometry. In other contexts it has been subsumed by social network analysis.

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socio-technical system

A term devised to avoid the rather simplistic technological determinism in much mainstream organization theory. It was coined by the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in Britain, and used in the theory of organizational choice which guided their programme of applied research.
Though accepting the conventional wisdom of industrial sociology and the Human Relations Movement that in-plant technical factors affect the quality of social relationships at work, the Tavistock researchers argued that technology merely constrains human action, rather than rigidly determining behavioural outcomes. Conscious choice can build good human relations into the technical workflow. Indeed, for any productive problem there is typically a range of technologically equivalent solutions, with differing implications for human relations.
By emphasizing the element of choice, and the mutual influence of technology and the social systems of the workplace, the Tavistock researchers sought to move away from technological determinism towards greater appreciation within management of the need for consultation, innovation, flexibility, and an open mind in the design of work processes and procedures. The consultancy and action research work which led to the formulation of socio-technical systems was carried out in the coal-mining and textiles industries in Britain and India in the 1940s and 1950s, and seemed to show that work teams which operated a flexible allocation of tasks and jobs achieved higher productivity, lower absenteeism, and fewer accidents than work teams with a rigid division of labour and inflexible ‘segregated’ task groups.
The Tavistock studies were criticized for underestimating the difficulties of reconciling economic, technical, and social efficiency. However, the idea of the socio-technical system (though not the term itself) has passed into conventional thinking about work organization, flexibility issues, and the impact of technical change.

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solidarism

This term refers to a belief in the sharing of aims and interests. Solidarity is valued as a source of strength and resistance, and by implication, for its single-minded unity of purpose. A belief in solidarity as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end, was said to characterize the traditional working-class occupational community. In such settings, shared experiences of work and community life were said to generate and sustain strong feelings of fraternity, together with the values of mutual aid and participation. This sense of belonging was also said to be the source of working-class collectivism, although there has been little evidence to substantiate the case empirically, and it is doubtful whether such solidarism was ever as coherent and unified as has been claimed. See also IMAGES OF SOCIETY; WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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solidaristic orientation to work

See WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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sorcery

See MAGIC, WITCHCRAFT, AND SORCERY.

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Sorel, Georges

(1847–1922)
After a long career as an engineer in France, Sorel resigned to become an independent scholar, and in the thirty-five years before his death published a stream of books and articles on social theory, Marxism, and the philosophy of the social sciences (most notably Reflections on Violence, 1908, and The Illusions of Progress, 1908). As editor of Le Devenir social, he introduced theoretical Marxism into France, and sided with Eduard Bernstein in rejecting Marxism's pretensions to be scientific. However, rather than abandon revolutionary activity for reformism, he argued for an extreme form of anarcho-syndicalism. His significance for sociology lies in his writings on myth and violence. His analysis of the functions of myth in society complements Karl Mannheim's later writings on utopia. There is, in fact, a developed (though largely unacknowledged) theory of ideology in his writings. According to Sorel, many of the central tenets of Marxism were themselves myths, aimed at, and capable of, mobilizing working-class mass action against capitalism (most notably in the case of the ‘myth of the general strike’). His arguments that violent confrontation can be noble and civilizing, that the future is unknowable, and that there is nothing to suggest civilized men and women will ever wholly renounce violence to advance estimable causes, punctured the Edwardian belief that progress would necessarily lead to peaceful settlement of all disputes, and more generally are still a powerful counter to the tendency among some social theorists towards an optimistic historicism.

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Sorokin, Pitirim Alexandrovich

(1889–1968)
Born in Russia of humble origins, imprisoned and under threat of death, Sorokin was exiled in 1922, and found his way to the United States, where he eventually became Professor of Sociology at Harvard. During his career he published over thirty books on a wide range of topics including The Sociology of Revolution (1925), Social Mobility (1927), Rural Sociology (1930), and Social and Cultural Dynamics (4 vols., 1937–41). The last of these offers a cyclical theory of social change, which sees societies oscillating between three different types of ‘mentalities’, the sensate (emphasizing the role of the senses in understanding reality), ideational (religious ways of thinking), and idealistic (transitional types between the two). A prolific and profoundly iconoclastic sociologist (see, for example, his
Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences, 1956
), Sorokin's work is generally recognized as provocative and (in many respects) pioneering, yet later generations have been remarkably uninfluenced by it (with the notable exception of his analysis of social mobility).

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sororal polygyny

See POLYGYNY.

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Spearman's rank correlation coefficient

See SIGNIFICANCE TESTS.

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Spencer, Herbert

(1820–1903)
The Victorian prophet of Social Darwinism, who was famous in his time, and especially admired in the United States. Many of his ideas have entered Western culture as conventional wisdoms—or at least as conventional prejudices—yet few people read his books or remember his name today.
Born in the English Midlands of non-conformist parents, Spencer became a railway engineer and a draughtsman. After a time he moved into journalism and began to produce a steady stream of books which are the basis of his reputation in social science. The complete bibliography is formidable, but includes Social Statics (1851), First Principles (1862), The Study of Sociology (1873), and First Principles of Sociology and Descriptive Sociology in parts through the 1870s and 1890s. (For a full account, which discusses Spencer against the social background of his time, see
, Herbert Spencer, 1971
.)
Spencer was the sociological prophet of the high Victorian era. Unlike Marx, he saw nothing but progress in the Industrial Revolution. Spencer interpreted society as a living, growing organism which, as it becomes more complex, must self-consciously understand and control the mechanisms of its own success. The most important of those mechanisms was the intense competition for resources which Spencer labelled ‘the survival of the fittest’ (anticipating Darwin's ‘natural selection’ by several years). Spencer believed that the unrestricted application of this principle would eventually lead to the best possible society. His ideas were adopted with enthusiasm in America, notably by William Graham Sumner, and remain to this day the foundation of libertarian and laissez-faire social and economic theories.

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spiralism, spiralist

A type of middle-class occupational career pattern involving rapid geographical mobility in pursuit of occupational advancement. Many modern organizations expect such geographical mobility from staff in the course of career promotion.

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split labour-market

See LABOUR-MARKET SEGMENTATION.

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sponsored mobility

See CONTEST AND SPONSORED MOBILITY.

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SPSS

The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, commonly known as SPSS, is the most widely used software package among academic sociologists. Developed in the United States by social scientists, it provides a range of facilities, including tabulation, multivariate analysis, and virtually all the tests of statistical significance appropriate for sample survey data. SPSS was originally developed for mainframe computers, but is increasingly used on personal computers in both DOS (SPSS/PC+) and Windows (SPSS for Windows) versions. Market researchers who require report-quality output, and researchers working with large government-produced statistical surveys and Censuses, sometimes use other, more efficient and more powerful software and programming languages. Sociologists have been reluctant to abandon SPSS in favour of more powerful packages which are easier to use. See also COMPUTER PACKAGES.

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spurious correlation

A correlation between two variables when there is no causal link between them. A famous spurious correlation often quoted in the literature is that between the number of fire-engines at a fire (X) and the amount of damage done (Y). Once the size of the conflagration (T) is controlled for—that is, large fires cause more damage, and therefore require more fire-engines to extinguish them—the original relationship disappears. Hence the X Y relationship becomes T X, T Y, but X and Y are not causally related, where T — the size of the fire—is an antecedent variable. Note also that it is not really the correlation which is spurious, but rather the implicit causal model: there are indeed more fire-engines at fires where the greatest damage is done, but it is not the fire-engines which cause the damage. Similarly, in certain societies there is a close correlation between the volume of perfume imports, and the rate of marriage. Naturally enough, however, on closer inspection these two phenomena turn out not to be causally related. Rather, both are associated with a prior antecedent variable (in this case economic growth), and simply move up and down in a spurious manner in conjunction with the buoyancy of the local economy.

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S–R (Stimulus-Response) models

See CONDITIONING.

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stagflation

A combination of inflation and stagnation in the economy. A situation that arose in Britain and other economies since the late 1960s, as accelerating inflation fed through into price expectations and wage demands.

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Stalinism

A term that is generally identified with the economic, political, and social features imposed on Russia after 1929, until the first de-Stalinization attempt under Khrushchev in 1956. The period of High Stalinism commenced in 1934 with the purge trials subsequent to the Kirov murder. Physical terror and concentration or labour-camps, exile, and forced population movements, extermination, famine, and the total breakdown of social bonds of trust were just some of its features. One major characteristic was the forced collectivization of 100 million peasants, the legacy of which is still apparent in the food shortages and poverty-stricken countryside of much of the former Soviet Union. Forced industrialization and the first two Five-Year Plans saw the imposition of a harsh labour discipline as the country was put on a war footing and smoke-stack industries became the hall-mark of socialist progress. All this was overseen by a command economy which produced pathologies among worker and manager alike.
Ideologically, the system was underpinned by dialectical materialism of the most mechanical kind, as rooted in MELS—the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin—with the first three used to elaborate Stalin's own ‘cult of personality’. Socialist realism stunted the arts and culture. It is even questionable as to whether Stalinism helped the Soviet Union to survive the Nazi invasion in 1941, since not only was Stalin shown to be in gross error over the intentions of his partner in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but the depredations of the purges (particularly within the Officer Corps) had left the army leaderless.
Stalinism was not just the personal construct of one man. It was rooted in the Bolshevik seizure of power and the closure of the Constituent Assembly in 1918, after unfavourable elections. It was presaged by the practices adopted during War Communism and its aftermath the Kronstadt Revolt, The Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 and banning of factions within the Party, as well as the defeat of the opposition from the Left (Leon Trotsky) and Right (Nikolai Bukharin)—all of which created the blueprint and the practical means for Stalin's subsequent policies. Stalinism as terror was always associated with Yezhov, Yadov, Beria, and the security apparatus, allowing Stalin to distance himself from the atrocities. This enabled him to foster the image of Popular Hero of the Motherland War, Father of the Nations, and Great Strategist, and evade responsibility for the 20 million war dead and the equal number lost through the terror. By the time of Stalin's death in 1953, Soviet society was permeated with suspicion, corruption, inefficiency, and waste, ruled over by the KGB and a demoralized Party. However, the USSR was a major world nuclear power with surrounding nations in thrall, and this sense of superpower status was to keep the neo-Stalinist system which he bequeathed functioning at least until 1991. See also COLLECTIVISM; MARXISM.

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standard deviation

See VARIATION.

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standardization

In order to facilitate comparisons between different groups, data are standardized to some common basis. The simplest method is converting frequency counts into percentages, so that all values are shown to the common base of 100, or into decimal fractions of the total sum treated as unity (1.00). If the arithmetic mean (see CENTRAL TENDENCY (MEASURES OF) and standard deviation (see VARIATION)) are known, values can be divided by the standard deviation, thus treating the mean as the centre of the data and each case as a plus or minus deviation from it; the procedure is repeated for all sub-groups to be compared. Other procedures are used, depending on the methods of analysis to be applied to the data. See also INDEX.

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standardized mortality ratios

See MORTALITY RATE.

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Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test

The most widely used intelligence test for measuring the mental skills of children. Binet was the principal author of the original test, designed to identify those French schoolchildren who were in need of special education, in the early twentieth century. He compared the performance of each child with what was average or normal for his or her age. Researchers at Stanford University in the United States later adapted the test, linking it to the concept of an intelligence quotient (IQ), and standardizing test scores around an average IQ of 100. These scores express the alleged intelligence of each child relative to his or her peers in the population. Because they are standardized, it is possible to compare the performance of children in different age-bands, or the same child across time. The items in the test have been subject to periodic revision to allow for socio-economic and cultural change.
A number of other similar intelligence tests are also now in use. However, all such instruments have been subject to criticisms of cultural, class, racial, or sexual bias, and the whole area of intelligence testing remains highly controversial, in both academic and political circles.

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state, the state

The state is a distinct set of institutions that has the authority to make the rules which govern society. It has, in the words of Max Weber, a ‘monopoly on legitimate violence’ within a specific territory. Hence, the state includes such institutions as the armed forces, civil service or state bureaucracy, judiciary, and local and national councils of elected representatives (such as a parliament). Consequently the state is not a unified entity. It is, rather, a set of institutions which describe the terrain and parameters for political conflicts between various interests over the use of resources and the direction of public policy. Frequently there are conflicts over policy and resources, between elected politicians and non-elected civil servants, or between politicians in different parts of the state. It is therefore difficult to identify a state's interests, since different parts of the state apparatus can have different interests and express conflicting preferences.
It is also difficult to identify the boundaries of the state. Older administrative perspectives see the state as a clearly defined set of institutions with official powers. Others, including Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, question the distinction between the state and civil society and argue that the former is integrated into many parts of the latter. For example, Althusser maintains that civil organizations such as the Church, schools, and even trade unions are part of the ideological state apparatus. It is, indeed, increasingly difficult to identify the boundaries of the state. Many parts of civil society are given institutional access to the state and play a role in the development of public policy. The state also funds a number of groups within society which, although autonomous in principle, are dependent on state support. In addition, the boundaries of the state are continually changing, for example through privatization (transferring responsibilities from the civil service to private contractors) and the creation of new regulatory bodies. Often the nature of these quasi-autonomous organizations is ambiguous: it is simply not clear whether they are part of the state or part of civil society.
A further important issue in relation to the state is the nature of state power. The state as a set of institutions cannot act. It is the various actors within the state who make decisions and implement policy. This raises the important issue, much debated in recent years, of state autonomy. Pluralists generally see the state as acting in the interests of groups in society. State actions are therefore reactions to group pressures. For some pluralists, the state provides an arena for pressure group conflicts to take place, state policy being determined by the outcome of these conflicts. For others, the state is actually captured by pressure groups, while a third view is that the state determines what is in the national interest by arbitrating between the demands of the various interest groups.
For Marxist theorists, however, the role of modern states is determined by their location in capitalist societies. According to Nicos Poulantzas, for example (Political Power and Social Classes, 1968), capitalist states rule in the long-term political interest of capital. This raises the question of how the putative interests of capital are translated into state actions. So-called instrumentalists (such as
, The State in Capitalist Society, 1969
) argue that the state is dominated by an élite that comes from the same social background as the capitalist class. State personnel therefore share the same interests as the owners of capital and are linked to them via a whole panoply of social and political interconnections. As a result the state acts more or less at the behest of the capitalist class. Poulantzas, by contrast, argues that the question of who controls the state is irrelevant. Capitalist states act on behalf of the capitalist class, not because state officers consciously contrive to do so, but because the various parts of the state apparatus are structured in such a way that the long-term interests of capital are always to the fore and dominant.
Both the Marxist and pluralist approaches to the state may be said to be society-centred: that is, they view the state as reacting to the activities of groups within society, be they classes or pressure groups. However, other writings on the state (for example, the works of Eric Nordlinger and Theda Skocpol) suggest that state actors are to an important degree autonomous. In other words, state personnel have interests of their own, which they can and do pursue independently of (sometimes in conflict with) the various groups in society. Since the modern state controls the means of violence, and the various groups within civil society are dependent on the state for achieving any policy goals they may espouse, the relationship between state and civil society is asymmetrical and state personnel can (to some extent) impose their own preferences on the citizenry.
In his writings on the social sources of power, Michael Mann outlines two types of state autonomy. The first is despotic power, where the power of the state derives from force, and so is limited to the territory over which the ruler can exercise terror. However, in modern societies, state power is more likely to be infrastructural. Here, the state increases its power by negotiating administrative relationships with different groups in society, in order to develop its capabilities for intervening in particular areas of policy. The concept of infrastructural power suggests that the state-centred versus society-centred dichotomy is too simplistic. State actors do have interests but these interests develop in relation to groups in society. Moreover, in order to develop the means of intervention, state actors are dependent on allies in society. Force cannot be the only means of state power and, therefore, state actors do have to make concessions.
Any definition of the state has to recognize its complexity. Its boundaries are not clearly defined and constantly changing. It is the site of internal conflicts not only between different organizations but also within organizations. There is no single state interest but, rather, various interests within different parts of the state. These interests are neither solely state-centred nor wholly society-centred but develop instead through bargaining between different groups in civil society and different state actors. Roger King's The State in Modern Society (1986) is a good place to start when considering these various issues.
There is also an extensive literature on state formation. The issue here is one of identifying the processes by which states emerge. Can the formation of states be explained primarily in terms of the interests and struggles of social classes, or are other non-class actors involved? Is state-formation best viewed in terms of the internal dynamics and conflicts in a given country, or are there international dynamics involving, for example, conflicts of war or economic domination? Is there a discernible historical pattern in the emergence of capitalist states? Was the formation of national states in the West associated with the emergence of capitalism? These and related issues are pursued in
's ‘Recent Theories of the Capitalist State’, Cambridge Journal of Economics (1977)
,
's The Development of the Modern State (1978)
, and
's The Formation of National States in Western Europe (1975)
. See also MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX; POWER ÉLITE.

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state capitalism

A label which has been applied to at least three different forms of economic organization: the taking over by a state, within a capitalist society, of major sections of the economy (also known as etatisme or sometimes as ‘democratic socialism’); the necessary maintenance of a capitalist sector within a society in transition to socialism (as developed by Lenin in the early 1920s); and the thesis that the Soviet Union was not a socialist society, but simply another variant of capitalism, as a result of the bureaucratic control of the productive system through state ownership (a proposition advanced by Marxist critics of the USSR from the 1930s onwards). See also COMMUNISM.

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state monopoly capitalism

See COMMUNISM.

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state socialism

See COMMUNISM; REAL SOCIALISM.

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stateless societies

A general term which is often applied to acephalous or segmented societies, which lack a centralized state authority, but is occasionally (though incorrectly) extended to include those societies which have a political system based on an acknowledged chief or traditional ruler, and therefore lack a clearly defined state apparatus.

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statistical artefact

See ARTEFACTS, STATISTICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL.

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statistical association

See ASSOCIATION COEFFICIENTS.

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statistical control

Statistical techniques for excluding the influence of specified variables in an analysis. For example, if the data from a sample survey showed a strong association between unemployment and clinical depression, one might want to control for the effect of social class. Partitioning the data by class (middle versus working) would establish whether or not the relationship between unemployment and depression is constant across all classes. Similarly, an observed association between class and clinical depression might well disappear, once a control is introduced for unemployment. (Working-class people are no more likely to suffer from depression than middle-class people, but they are more likely to be unemployed, and the unemployed are more likely to be depressed than are those in work.)

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statistical effects

See CAUSAL MODELLING.

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statistical independence

Two variables (i and j) are statistically independent if the proportion who are both i and j (pij) is equal to the proportion who are i multiplied by the proportion who are j (pij = pi × pj or pij - pi × pj = 0). This principle forms the basis of the popular 2 (chi-square) test.

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statistical inference

The process by which results from a sample may be applied more generally to a population. More precisely, how inferences may be drawn about a population, based on results from a sample of that population.
Inferential statistics are generally distinguished as a branch of statistical analysis from descriptive statistics, which describe variables and the strength and nature of relationships between them, but do not allow generalization. The ability to draw inferences about a population from a sample of observations from that population depends upon the sampling technique employed. The importance of a scientific sample is that it permits statistical generalization or inference. For example, if we survey a simple random sample of university students in Britain and establish their average (mean) height, we will be able to infer the likely range within which the mean height of all university students in Britain is likely to fall. Other types of sample, such as quota samples, do not allow such inferences to be drawn. The accuracy with which we are able to estimate the population mean from the sample will depend on two things (assuming that the sample has been drawn correctly): the size of the sample and the variability of heights within the population. Both these factors are reflected in the calculation of the standard error. The bigger the standard error, the less accurate the sample mean will be as an estimate of the population mean.
Strictly speaking, therefore, inferential statistics is a form of inductive inference in which the characteristics of a population are estimated from data obtained by sampling that population. In practice, however, the methods are called upon for the more ambitious purpose of prediction, explanation, and hypothesis testing.

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statistical interaction

A statistically established relationship between two (or more) variables such that the values of one vary in some systematic way with the values of another. Statistical interactions between two or more independent variables can significantly complicate certain types of multivariate analyses where independent variables are assumed to be independent of (orthogonal to) each other. See also MULTICOLLINEARITY.

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statistics

See CLUSTER ANALYSIS; CONTINGENCY TABLE; DISSIMILARITY, INDEX OF; GINI COEFFICIENT; HAZARD MODEL; INFERENTIAL STATISTICS; LOGISTIC (OR LOGIT) REGRESSION; LOGLINEAR ANALYSIS; LORENZ CURVE; MEASUREMENT; MODEL; NONPARAMETRIC STATISTICS; NORMAL DISTRIBUTION; ODDS RATIO; OFFICIAL STATISTICS; PARAMETRIC STATISTICS; PIE-CHART; REGRESSION; SAMPLING; SIGNIFICANCE TESTS; STATISTICAL INDEPENDENCE; STATISTICAL INFERENCE; STATISTICAL INTERACTION; VARIATION (STATISTICAL).

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statistics, vital

See VITAL STATISTICS.

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status, social status

There are two approaches to the concept of status in sociology. In its weak form, it simply means the position which a person occupies in the social structure, such as teacher or priest. It is often combined with the notion of social role to produce the idea of a status-role.
In its stronger meaning, it refers to a form of social stratification in which status groups or strata are ranked and organized by legal, political, and cultural criteria. There are many versions of this approach to status. For example, the legal theorist Sir Henry Maine argued that we can conceptualize the history of Western society in terms of a transition from status to contract: that is, from a feudal organization of hierarchically organized strata, to market relations between individuals who are bound together by contracts. Max Weber adopted a similar historical view of the relationships between classes, status groups, and political parties in his famous categorization of power in terms of a distinction between class, status, and party. Weber defined status position in Economy and Society (1922) as the ‘effective claim to social esteem’. These status positions confer both negative and positive privileges, and status is typically based on a special lifestyle, and a formal training. Status is expressed through and maintained by exclusionary practices such as marriage, conventions and customs, and common living arrangements. An aggregate of persons with a common status position form a status group which enjoys a common esteem and certain status monopolies over the resources of the group. Status groups are competitive because they seek to preserve their monopolistic privileges by excluding their rivals from enjoyment of these resources. Finally, depending on the dominant pattern of social stratification, Weber distinguished between status society and class society.
Critics have noted that, especially in American sociology, the concept of status as a central notion of sociology was eroded, because it came to mean little more than a person's subjective evaluation of his or her position in the status hierarchy (that is ‘prestige’). The conflicting and competitive features of status-group relations were translated into the idea of status seeking by individuals (as in ‘prestigious roles’, ‘prestige ranking’, and so forth). Among many American sociologists, class and status came to be used interchangeably, as both concepts were used to measure subjective evaluations of positions in a system of social stratification.
Various attempts have been made to rescue the concept of status by arguing that it involves an objective organization of entitlements and privileges, which in many cases are guaranteed by law and the state, and not simply a subjective awareness of personal esteem. The best short introduction to the concept is Bryan S. Turner's Status (1988). See also CITIZENSHIP; CLOSURE; ESTATE.

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status, achieved

Any social position held by an individual as a result of his or her personal accomplishments in open formal or market competition with others. The position of (for example) university professor, doctor, or auto-mechanic is usually gained via competitive examination, followed by successful entry into the job-market. It is conventional to contrast achieved status with ascribed status. The latter refers to those social positions to which a person is allocated either by birth or by family background and which cannot (if at all) be altered according to individual accomplishments. Examples would include status ascribed on the basis of race, ethnicity, or gender.
The distinction between achievement and ascription is heuristic and by no means absolute. Arguably, for example, an individual's social class standing might be an achieved or an ascribed status—depending on whether the researcher chooses to define class in terms of occupational attainment or family background. Similarly, some apparently achievement-based outcomes (including examination performance and occupational attainment themselves), can at least in part reflect ascriptive mechanisms—such as gender discrimination or race prejudice. See also MERITOCRACY.

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status, ascribed

See ASCRIPTION; STATUS, ACHIEVED.

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status, master

See MASTER STATUS.

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status attainment, status-attainment theory

An extensive literature investigating how educational achievements and other indicators of skill and ability translate into jobs ranked according to socio-economic status or prestige. The classic studies are those by Peter M. Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan (The American Occupational Structure, 1967) and David Featherman and Robert Hauser (Opportunity and Change, 1978).
The status-attainment programme attempts to explain social mobility patterns by identifying those attributes which seem to facilitate the movement of individuals into desirable occupations. To what extent are occupational outcomes shaped by family of origin rather than personal attributes such as educational attainment? This approach depends upon the assumption that individuals are allocated to positions ordered in a continuous unidimensional hierarchy. In some studies, this social hierarchy was conceptualized narrowly as being one of occupational prestige—most commonly, how people rate the relative ‘general standing’ of different occupations. In others, it was extended to include additional aspects of socio-economic status, such as income and years of schooling. For a useful overview of the major contributions see
, ‘Cross-National Comparative Status-Attainment Research’, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility (1990
).
In the original Blau-Duncan model for the United States in 1962, the total correlation between son's current occupation and father's occupation was found to be 0.405. This could be decomposed into an indirect effect via education of 0.227 (57 per cent) and an effect net of education (direct or through the son's first job) of 0.178 (43 per cent). In this same study, the ratio of the effect of education on current occupation to the direct effect of father's occupation on current occupation was calculated to be 2.9 to 1, a finding which led Blau and Duncan to conclude that achievement was more important than ascription in determining occupational status in mid-twentieth-century America.
The later so-called Wisconsin Model, developed by William H. Sewell and his associates, continued in the Blau-Duncan mould by relating the family background and ascribed characteristics of students to their occupational status via the mediation of ability as well as educational achievement. Various Wisconsin studies showed that family background affected educational and occupational outcomes through its effects on parental and peer influences and on the shaping of educational aspirations. Academic ability was also found to have a strong effect on educational attainment (independently of social origins) and an effect on occupational attainment through its impact on educational and occupational aspirations. In other words, both schooling and family background affected status attainment, mainly through effects transmitted by social psychological processes.
The implications of these findings for arguments about equality of opportunity and meritocracy soon became a matter of controversy. Some observers (such as Robert Hauser) took them to mean that status attainment in the United States was mainly a meritocratic process since the effects of family background could (apparently) be overcome by those attributable to schooling. Others (including Christopher Jencks) argued that such results undermined meritocratic interpretations of the status attainment process because both ascription and achievement continued to exert a substantial influence on mobility outcomes. Moreover, Jencks and his colleagues maintained that the importance of family background was underestimated in the Wisconsin model, and that of aptitude and aspirations overestimated, because of measurement errors in the original studies (see, for example, the exchange between
, and others in the journal Sociology of Education, 1983
).
This approach to the study of social inequality remains controversial. The sociological concept of ‘socio-economic status’ which was regularly used as the dependent variable (that which people attain) in status attainment research has a bizarre history and referent. In the most widely used index of socio-economic status (that devised by Duncan), an occupation's socio-economic status is determined by a weighted combination of the average income and years of schooling characteristic of those in the occupation (although the reasoning behind this is never explained), while the weights are those that best fit perceptions of the occupational prestige attaching to people in certain specific occupations. (For the details see Duncan's classic article on
‘A Socioeconomic Index for All Occupations’, in , Occupations and Social Status, 1961
.) Is this then a measure of the occupation's prestige or its socio-economic resources?
Other versions of the theory take occupational prestige as a dependent variable. These sorts of scales depend upon the assumption that individuals are allocated to positions along a dimension of ‘social standing’ that is embedded in a societal consensus about social honour in general and honorific vocations in particular. There is considerable dispute about whether or not such an assumption is tenable. Since this seems to imply that social order rests upon consensual values, and that the prestige hierarchy is a function of widespread convergence in moral evaluations, the approach has been criticized as an extension of the functional theory of stratification—although its practitioners strenuously deny this charge.
During the 1980s, and in response to criticism by proponents of the new structuralism, researchers examining occupational outcomes within the explanatory framework of status attainment attempted to incorporate structural limitations as well as socialization processes within their explanations. That is, they moved away from the question of how family of origin and educational attainment affect occupational placement, towards analysis of the impact on occupational outcomes of variation in labour-market structures and processes. This change of emphasis was an attempt to overcome the perceived failure of status-attainment research to consider how structural effects impact upon educational and occupational attainment. The result was something of a hybrid between the status-attainment and class analysis traditions (see, for example,
, ‘Stratification and Meritocracy in the United States: Class and Occupational Recruitment Patterns’, British Journal of Sociology, 1981
). For a review of this later literature see
. ‘Comparative Perspectives on Work Structures and Inequality’, Annual Review of Sociology (1988
).

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status-attribution theory

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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status consistency

See STATUS CRYSTALLIZATION.

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status crystallization

A term devised by the American sociologist Gerhard Lenski (see
‘Status Crystallization: A Non-Vertical Dimension of Status’, American Sociological Review, 1954
). Lenski argues that inconsistencies in status attributes lead to status ambiguity which in turn creates social tension. However, the concept itself does not refer to attitudes and expectations, but to the felt status incongruence. It was left to later writers (such as George Homans) to take such notions as status crystallization and status integration, combine them with the concepts of relative deprivation and reference groups, and in this way show their relevance for broader debates about social justice.
Subsequently, in the work of East European sociologists such as Wlodzimierz Wesolowski (
Classes, Strata and Power, 1966
), status crystallization became the basis for a major school of social stratification. These authors took the indicators of status—such as occupational prestige, ethnicity, education, and income—and sought to measure the degree of crystallization (consistency or congruence); that is, whether or not individuals, roles, or groups were being ranked consistently across a range of status criteria, with high salaries attached to high-prestige occupations, and so forth. Crystallization could have consequences for role conflict, mental health, and social tension, particularly if awareness of status inconsistency emerged.
This approach was adopted by sociologists in communist societies during the 1960s and 1970s, in the attempt to introduce research concerning the extent of social inequality under real socialism, without broaching the taboo question of social class. Their general argument was that, in post-revolutionary societies, social class in the Marxist sense had lost its determining power over life-chances, but that social positions comprising status attributes, although decomposed or decrystallized, could re-emerge in a status-consistent form. This would point to the resurgence of systematic or structured social stratification and ultimately lead to social closure.

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status degradation ceremony

See DEGRADATION CEREMONY.

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status frustration

A concept developed by Albert Cohen in Delinquent Boys (1956), and used to explain working-class male delinquency as being a reaction formation towards middle-class values of success, as embodied in the school. Delinquent boys experience status frustration and invert the middle-class values of the school to create a delinquent subculture. Cohen's argument forms part of the anomie and strain traditions of delinquency and subcultural analysis.

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status group

See STATUS; STRATIFICATION.

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status set

An array of social positions (for example factory-worker, mother, church-goer) found in one person. The term was introduced by Robert Merton in Social Theory and Social Structure (2nd edn., 1957).

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status situation

See CLASS POSITION.

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status-value theory

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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stem family

See FAMILY, STEM.

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stereotype, stereotyping

Derived from the Greek (stereos = solid, typos = mark), and applied in the late eighteenth century as a technical term for the casting of a papier mâché copy of printing type, the concept was developed by the North American journalist Walter Lippman in his book Public Opinion (1922) to mean the fixed, narrow ‘pictures in our head’, generally resistant to easy change. It usually carries a pejorative meaning—in contrast to the sociological process of typification. See also GENDER STEREOTYPES; PREJUDICE.

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stigma

Although the term has a long history (in Classical Greece it is referred to a brand placed on outcast groups), it entered sociology mainly through the work of Erving Goffman (Stigma, 1960). It is a formal concept which captures a relationship of devaluation rather than a fixed attribute. Goffman classifies stigmas into three types—bodily, moral, and tribal—and analyses the ways in which they affect and effect human interactions.

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stimulus discrimination

A phenomenon identified in behaviourist learning theory: the individual learns to distinguish, for response purposes, between similar stimuli.

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stimulus generalization

In behaviourist learning theory the concept denotes the way in which responses, initially conditioned to a particular stimulus, are also evoked by other stimuli that bear some similarity to the original.

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Stimulus Proposition

See SUCCESS PROPOSITION.

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Stouffer, Samuel A.

(1900–60)
An American sociologist and quantitative methodologist who, during the Second World War, directed social research in the US War Department. His research there culminated in his most famous work, The American Soldier (1949), which made major contributions to social psychology and survey methodology, as well as developing the concept of relative deprivation. See also REFERENCE GROUP.

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strain theories of delinquency

See ANOMIE.

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stratification

The term stratification in sociology is usually applied to studies of structured social inequality; that is, studies of any systematic inequalities between groups of people, which arise as the unintended consequence of social processes and relationships. When we ask why there is poverty; why Black people or women in the United States are disadvantaged vis-à-vis (respectively) Whites and men; or what chances someone born into the working class has of achieving a middle-class position; we are posing questions about social stratification.
Social stratification is thus at the heart of macrosociology—the study of whole societies, in comparative perspective, in an attempt to understand processes of social stability and change. Social stratification begins from Weber's limiting cases of the more traditional status-based society (for example, societies based on ascriptive categories such as estates and castes, or where there is slavery so that inequalities are legally sanctioned), and the polarized but more fluid class-based society (typical of the modern West), where there is a greater element of achievement, where economic differences are paramount, and inequality is more impersonal. Status formation and class formation thus represent the two extreme poles of social integration—the ways people in a society relate one to another.
Studies of social stratification have three objectives. The first is to establish the extent to which class or status systems predominate at the societal level such that they are constitutive of modes of social action. Hence, to make the claim that Britain is a class society one would need to show that class relationships underlie predominant modes of social action, and represent the fundamentals of social integration. The second is the analysis of class and status structures and the determinants of class and status formation: for example, to pose questions such as why there is no socialism in the United States, or why the British working class did not produce a communist revolution, is to pose questions about the degree of class formation in society. Many sociological and historical studies have attempted to explain variability in the degree of such class formation. Finally, social stratification documents inequalities of condition, opportunities and outcome, and the ways in which groups maintain class or status boundaries. In other words, it addresses the question of social closure, and investigates those exclusionary strategies by which groups maintain their privileges and other groups seek to gain access to them. Often class and status interact in interesting ways. For example, advantaged classes may attempt to develop the characteristics of status groups in order to routinize, justify, and thereby maintain their privileges: the nouveaux riches the world over are notorious proponents of this strategy. Similarly, the complex articulation of class, race, age, and gender differences have come increasingly to interest researchers investigating the multifarious processes of social stratification in modern societies: the work of Joan Huber is a good illustration of this development (see, for example,
Sex Stratification, 1983
).
At the most general level, therefore, social stratification is concerned in different ways with the issues of class and status-group formation as the key to understanding social integration; that is, the extent to which social relationships are cohesive or divisive, and the consequences of this for social order. It is for this reason that we can claim that class and status are pre-eminently sociological concepts. As David Lockwood has observed, ‘since class and status formations are modes of social interaction which are not only empirically identifiable as variable configurations of total societies, but analytically distinguishable from the “economy” and the “polity”, it is understandable why, within the division of labour in the social sciences…“social stratification” should have come to be regarded as the distinctive subject matter of macrosociology. Furthermore, since status group consolidation and class polarization can be taken as limiting cases of social order and conflict, it is once again not hard to understand why the study of social stratification should be regarded as the specific sociological contribution to the analysis of social (as opposed to system) integration’ (see his
‘Class, Status and Gender’, in , Gender and Stratification, 1986
).

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stratified sample

See SAMPLING.

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streaming

See TRACKING.

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stress

An imprecise concept, popular in everyday and academic discourse. It may refer to external situational pressures (stressors) or to the responses to them (stress reactions)—responses usually assumed to have physical and psychological components, such as raised pulse-rate and adrenalin levels, and feelings of anxiety and discomfort. In either usage it is commonly invoked as a key factor in explanations of bodily and mental ill-health, various forms of under-performance, and deviant behaviour. Its attraction to social scientists lies in its potential to link features of the individual's present or recent social situation to some specified outcome.
Much of the sociological debate focuses on identifying and measuring the domain of the stressful. Some researchers assume only negative occurrences like divorce or unemployment are stressful, others any situation involving significant change (for example marriage, job promotion, or moving house); some incorporate only life-events, others include ongoing difficulties; some employ standardized measures (for example the Social Readjustment Rating Scale), others assess subjective meanings, arguing that what is stressful for one may not be stressful for another. However, subjective assessments of stressful experiences are problematic since they may be contaminated by the very feelings generated by that experience, as for example in the case of clinically depressed individuals who retrospectively identify a particular life-event as stressful in order either to co-operate in treatment or to facilitate self-understanding of their (otherwise mysterious) illness. George Brown and Tirril Harris, in their influential study Social Origins of Depression (1978), measure meaning not by direct subjective evaluations but through contextual evidence about values, objectives, and circumstances.
Of increasing interest in the field is the identification of factors such as social support that mediate between stressful situations and responses to them. Brown and Harris term these ‘vulnerability’ or, conversely, ‘coping’ factors, examining situationally generated rather than biological vulnerability.

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strike

A form of industrial action involving withdrawal of labour such as to constitute a temporary breach of the employment contract. Effective strike action means preventing the use of an alternative labour-force, usually through picketing the workplace, so causing the partial or total cessation of production until the matter in dispute is favourably resolved. Strikes are the characteristic sanction of trade unions and in this form are often characterized as official. Unofficial or wild-cat strikes arise from spontaneous, even unorganized walk-outs or action, by unrecognized rank-and-file leaders. Strikes are also used as a method of social and political protest, the withdrawal of labour or co-operation aimed at influencing government or state policies. Hence the ‘political strike’ or, where all or much of the population is involved, the ‘general strike’. See also INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT; KERR-SIEGEL HYPOTHESIS.

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strike-proneness

See INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT.

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structural adjustment

A package of policies associated with loans to Third World countries by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. There are three elements: stabilization (the control of inflation by restricting the rate of increase of the money supply via the budget deficit); liberalization (a reduction in government intervention in product and factor markets in order to bring domestic prices more in line with world prices); and privatization of public-sector institutions to improve the technical efficiency of production. Structural adjustment policies have had negative distributive effects in the short run, because of high prices and raised unemployment, and long-run effects have been variable.

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structural differentiation

A concept associated with evolutionary theories of history and with structural functionalism. Societies are seen as moving from the simple to the complex via a process of social change based on structural differentiation. The process may be imagined, in its simplest form, as an amoeba dividing, redividing, then redividing again. So-called simple societies are tribal societies where everything happens within and through the kinship system. In modern complex societies there are separate institutions of education, work, government, religion, and so forth, while the family now has more specific and limited roles—such as early socialization. Differentiation involves the increasing specialization of different subsytems and institutions within the society.
A classic statement may be found in the work of the Israeli comparative and historical sociologist Shlomo N. Eisenstadt (see especially
‘Social Change, Differentiation and Evolution’, American Sociological Review, 1964
), now unfashionable, mainly because of its association with the modernization theory of the 1960s. This neglect is probably unwarranted, since Eisenstadt offers a sophisticated theory of change that goes a long way beyond traditional evolutionary theories, and represents the most systematic attempt yet to deploy the concept of structural differentiation in substantive analyses (as for example in Modernization, Protest and Change, 1967, and Revolution and the Transformation of Societies, 1978).
Talcott Parsons sees the process as involving three stages: a process of differentiation; a process of adaptation and reintegration; and, finally, the establishment of a more general system of values which holds the more complex society together. The impetus towards differentiation comes from the need for a society to adapt to its physical and social environment. The basic evolutionary idea can be found in Herbert Spencer (Structure, Function and Evolution, 1876–1933), is developed and applied to a particular instance by Neil Smelser (Social Change in the Industrial Revolution, 1959), and expounded at the most general level by Parsons himself (Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, 1966).
Evolutionary theories such as this have been much criticized by sociologists during the past two decades. Anthony Giddens, for example, in The Constitution of Society (1984) argues that simple societies are actually not simple at all, and that the mechanism of adaptation is too vague and general to explain social change.

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structural equations

Structural equations specify, by means of a set of linear equations, how a set of variables are related to each other in terms of cause and effect (causal models) or paths through ordered networks of statistical dependence (path analysis). The variables within the system are referred to as endogenous and those external and unspecified as exogenous, the latter often treated together as error or disturbance terms, assumptions about which are crucial to making the equations solvable. Regression methods are used to estimate the numerical effect of one variable upon another. In sociology, structural equations are used particularly to analyse occupational mobility or status attainment. For an overview of the basic concepts, issues, and applications see
, Structural Equation Modelling (1995
).

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structural functionalism

See FUNCTION: FUNCTIONAL THEORY OF STRATIFICATION; MALINOWSKI, BRONISLAW; PARSONS, TALCOTT; RADCLIFFE-BROWN, A. R.

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structural mobility

See MOBILITY, SOCIAL.

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structural unemployment

See UNEMPLOYMENT.

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structuralism

At the most general level the term is used loosely in sociology to refer to any approach which regards social structure (apparent or otherwise) as having priority over social action.
More specifically, however, it refers to a particular theoretical perspective which became fashionable in the late 1960s and early 1970s and which spread across a range of disciplines including social anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and sociology. Its influence on sociology came from several directions: Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology and semiotic analysis of cultural phenomena in general; Michel Foucault's work on the history of ideas; Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis; and the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser.
Basic to the approach is the idea that we can discern underlying structures behind the often fluctuating and changing appearances of social reality. The model is Saussure's structural linguistics and the notion that a language can be described in terms of a basic set of rules which govern the combination of sounds to produce meanings. For Lévi-Strauss and semiotics generally, these underlying structures are categories of the mind, in terms of which we organize the world around us. For Lévi-Strauss, but not necessarily others, such categories can always be understood as binary oppositions (for example up/down, hot/cold). Structural Marxism replaced these mental categories by positions in modes of production (such as those of labourer versus non-labourer) and substituted relationships to the means of production for the rules governing the production of meaning.
The basic principle is perhaps most visible in the writings of Lévi-Strauss. He acknowledged three influences: namely, geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. All three reveal hidden (unconscious) laws or structures beneath surface manifestations, but that is the extent to which he pursued the implications of the latter two. In contrast to the tradition inspired by Bronislaw Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss was less interested in detailed, holistic studies of specific societies, but rather with potential universals and common structures of the mind. He examined an array of exotic classification systems and myths, Mythologies (four vols., 1964–71), arguing that they could be reduced to binary oppositions, while also demonstrating the complexity and richness of imagination among different peoples. Totemism (1962) and The Savage Mind (1962) reveal hidden logic and intriguing transformations in what might otherwise have been dismissed as mere superstitions: so-called primitives had a science of the concrete. Similarly, in the bulky and formidable The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), he aimed to show that the multiplicity of kinship systems could be reduced to just two types—either generalized or restricted exchange.
Whatever the form of structuralism, however, certain implications about the nature of the world necessarily follow. The first is that the underlying elements of the structure remain (comparatively) constant, and it is the varying relationships between them that produce different languages, systems of ideas, and types of society. The emphasis therefore shifts away from looking at distinct entities towards concentrating on the relationships between them—to the extent, indeed, of arguing that those things which appear to us as discrete entities are the artefactual products of relationships. This emphasis on relationships is carried much further by post structuralism.
Secondly, there is the implication that what appears to us as solid, normal, or natural, is in fact the end result of a process of production from some form of underlying structure. This is perhaps most startling in literary criticism, where even the realist novel is shown to be as much the result of a process of artistic production as its most avant-garde counterpart: it is not simply a good copy of something that exists ‘out there’ in reality. This idea has now become commonplace in, for example, sociological studies of gender, where it is often argued that masculinity, femininity, homosexuality, and so forth are social constructions. Similarly, it is frequently argued that scientific knowledge is not knowledge of a real, external world, but rather the result of certain social processes and ways of thinking that we call scientific.
Thirdly, structuralism transforms our commonsense notion of individuals: they too are seen as the product of relationships, rather than as the authors of social reality. Structuralism replaces the ontologically privileged human subject with a decentred conception of the self. Whereas structuralist Marxism would see the individual as a mere bearer of social relations (of ownership and non-ownership of the means of production), others conceptualize individuals as the product of discourses and the relationships between discourses. This shift in perspective is often placed in a steady progress of our understanding of the world—a process of so-called decentring. Thus, with Copernicus came the realization that the earth was not the centre of the universe; with Darwin the realization that human beings were not the centre of creation but a product of evolution; with Marx the realization that human beings were not the producers but the product of social relations; and with Freud the realization that individuals were not the conscious agents of choice but the product of unconscious desires. Indeed, at the height of the popularity of structuralism, it was common to talk of the death of the subject—the demise of the idea of individuals acting and choosing voluntarily. Some granted the role of agency instead to the underlying structure itself, and talked of ‘language speaking people’, ‘books reading people’, and so forth. This more extreme view has moderated with the development of post-structuralism.
Finally, structuralism heralded a change in our conception of history, away from the idea of a comparatively steady evolutionary development, with one form of society leading on to another, towards a view of history as discontinuous and marked by radical changes. The root of this shift in perspective lies in the distinction between diachrony and synchrony. The former refers to changes of which we are most immediately aware. If we take language as an example, then a language can be seen to change over a shorter or longer period, as new words and phrases enter general usage while others disappear. However, it can be argued that the structure remains constant throughout, since the changes are produced by new combinations already provided for or contained within the underlying rules. This constancy occurs at the synchronic level. Similarly, in the case of societies, it is possible to argue that the underlying structure of (say) capitalism remains the same and determines the history of apparent social change, this being the change that we actually experience. A change in the type of society itself would involve a much more dramatic shift in the underlying structure.
Structuralism (at least in its radical form) is no longer as fashionable as it was, although some of the above ideas have had an influence beyond structuralist circles. Its sociological significance is discussed fully in
, Lévi-Strauss, Structuralism and Sociological Theory (1975)
.

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structuration

A concept devised by, and central to, the sociological theory developed by the British social theorist Anthony Giddens. Structuration theory is a social ontology, defining what sorts of things exist in the world, rather than setting out laws of development or suggesting clear hypotheses about what actually happens. It tells us what we are looking at when we study society rather than how a particular society actually works. Giddens criticizes and rejects theories such as functionalism and evolutionary theory, which he regards as closed systems, insisting that social phenomena and events are always contingent and open-ended. He attempts to transcend the traditional division in sociology between action and structure by focusing on ‘social practices’ which, he argues, produce and are produced by structures. Structures, for Giddens, are not something external to social actors but are rules and resources produced and reproduced by actors in their practices. He also emphasizes the importance of time and space for social theory and social analysis: his historical sociology then explores the different ways in which societies bind these together.
There is no obvious single statement of structuration theory. Giddens began his project with a revision of the classical thinkers in sociology (Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, 1971), and this led in turn to the major formulations of structuration (Central Problems in Social Theory, 1979, and The Constitution of Society, 1984), although these have been developed further in a major enterprise in historical sociology (A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, 1981; The Nation-State and Violence, 1985; and The Consequences of Modernity, 1990). There is now a considerable secondary literature (see, for example,
, Structuration Theory, 1989
). Several fairly scathing critiques—which, among other things, accuse Giddens of ‘reinventing the wheel’ where sociological theories of action, structure, and change are concerned, and structuration theory in particular of obscurantism and empirical emptiness (drawing a parallel with the theoretical work of Talcott Parsons)—will be found in
, Anthony Giddens—Consensus and Controversy (1990)
.

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structure, social structure

A term loosely applied to any recurring pattern of social behaviour; or, more specifically, to the ordered interrelationships between the different elements of a social system or society. Thus, for example, the different kinship, religious, economic, political, and other institutions of a society may be said to comprise its social structure, as might such components as its norms, values, and social roles. However, there is no generally agreed meaning, and attempts at providing a succinct definition have proved singularly unsuccessful. Thus, for example, Raymond Firth arrives merely at the truism that social structure is ‘an analytical tool, designed to serve us in understanding how men behave in their social life. The essence of this concept is those social relations which seem to be of critical importance for the behaviour of members of the society, so that if such relations were not in operation, the society could not be said to exist in that form’ (Elements of Social Organization, 1951). Structure is generally agreed to be one of the most important but also most elusive concepts in the social sciences (see
, ‘A Theory of Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 1992
).
The term is central to the theories of structural functionalism, structuralism, and post-structuralism. In all three cases it is employed in both a nominative and explanatory capacity. Thus, whatever aspects of social life are designated as structure are also endowed with the capacity for structuring other aspects of the social, as when sociologists claim that gender structures employment opportunities, religion structures family life, or modes of production structure social formations. Not unreasonably, Sewell concludes that structure is not a concept and cannot therefore be defined precisely, since it functions rather as a metaphor in and of social scientific discourse.
Where structure has been placed at the forefront of sociological discussion it has tended to generate a causal determinism in which the efficacy of human agency is lost. Structures invariably seem to exist separately from, but nevertheless to determine, motivated social action. This often makes it difficult to explain change, since structures imply stability of patterns over time, if not permanency. These problems are widely recognized in the discipline. For example, specifically in response to the dualism of ‘agency versus structure’ Anthony Giddens has proposed a theory of so-called structuration, which states that structures are themselves dual; that is, they are ‘both the medium and the outcome of the practices which constitute social systems’ (A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, 1981). In short, structure shapes people's practices, but these practices constitute and reproduce social systems. Some have acknowledged this formulation as an imaginative step forward in social theory; others dismiss it as merely a redescription of the problem.
Such issues apart, the major divergence in sociological usages of structure is between those who see the term as referring to the observable patterned social practices (roles, norms, and such like) that make up social systems or societies, and those for whom structure comprises the underlying principles (for example relationships to the means of production) that pattern these overt practices. Structural functionalists exemplify the former; structuralists (such as structural Marxists) are a good example of the latter. See also FORMALISM; FUNCTION; SOCIAL ORDER; SOCIOLOGY.

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structure, formal

See FORMAL STRUCTURE.

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structured interview

See INTERVIEW.

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structured questionnaire

See QUESTIONNAIRE.

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subculture

Widely and broadly used, the core idea of subcultural theory is of the formation of subcultures as a collective solution to, or resolution of, problems arising from the blocked aspirations of members, or their ambiguous position in the wider society. Thus subcultures are distinct from the larger culture but borrow (and often distort, exaggerate, or invert) its symbols, values, and beliefs. The concept is widely used in the sociology of deviance—particularly in studies of youth culture.
In the American tradition, a major influence has been Robert Merton's reformulation of Émile Durkheim's concept of anomie, whilst the influence of the Chicago School is also important to note. Albert K. Cohen (Delinquent Boys, 1955) argued that delinquent subcultures developed around adolescent status problems. He described the status frustration of young working-class men, taught at school to aspire to middle-class values, yet remaining tied to their limited, working-class opportunity structures. Faced with a lack of legitimate opportunities, status could only be achieved within a subculture of oppositional, expressive, hedonistic, and non-utilitarian values.
(‘Lower-Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency’, Journal of Social Issues, 1958)
argued that delinquent subcultures were rooted in aspects of working-class culture; and, rather than being merely a reaction to middle-class society, were more an expressive emphasizing of the ‘focal concerns’ of the parent culture.
(Delinquency and Opportunity, 1960)
combined elements of the anomie approach with Edwin Sutherland's theory of differential association, identifying ‘strain’ as a result of the perceived blocking of legitimate means to attain internalized, conventional (middle-class) goals. Some youths resolved this strain by turning to the illegitimate opportunity structures of the local working-class community. Apart from legitimate opportunities these also offered ‘criminal’ or ‘conflict’ means of succeeding. ‘Retreatist’ behaviour (such as drug-taking or alcohol use) signalled a double failure to succeed in the spheres either of legitimate or illegitimate enterprise.
British subcultural studies have drawn heavily upon the American tradition, but frequently provided new perspectives: for example, in terms of the ways youth experiences British working-class culture (
, The Delinquent Solution, 1966
); the bohemian hedonism of middle-class youth subcultures (
, The Drugtakers, 1971
); the idea of subcultures as arenas of ‘cultural resistance through ritual’ (
, Resistance through Rituals, 1976
); and ‘reading’ the meaning of style in subcultures (
, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979
).
Subcultures can arise, according to some authors at least, as forms of symbolic resistance within social institutions which reflect aspects of the social organization of wider society, including schools (
, Social Relations in a Secondary School, 1967
) and prisons (
, The Society of Captives, 1958
), or can provide wider networks for those seeking to assert the sense of difference they feel, for example as homosexuals (see
, Sexual Stigma, 1975
). Feminist writers have explained the absence of girls from street youth culture by reference to a feminine ‘bedroom subculture’ (see
, ‘Girls and Subcultures’, in , Resistance through Rituals, 1976
).
Subcultural theory can be criticized on several grounds. It can overdraw differences between (and, relatedly, overemphasize the internal homogeneity of) groups identified by, for example, their social class or their age. A consistent failing in subculture studies has been their neglect of women and non-White groups. The idea of a subculture implies difference from a dominant, superordinate host culture, yet it can be argued that the plurality and fragmentation of modern or post-modern culture erodes the significance of the former concept. Since, latterly, subcultural theory has come to embrace many different (by no means wholly compatible) theoretical standpoints, it is hard to formulate definitive assessments. However, Stanley Cohen has proffered a fairly damning critique of the ‘resistance through rituals’ tradition of British subcultural theory, arguing that the exercises of decoding and deciphering the subcultural styles in question (punk, skinhead, or whatever) are politically partisan, and ultimately unconvincing, since they nowhere address themselves to the explicit intentions of the research subjects themselves (
Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 2nd edn., 1980
). See also Coleman, James S.

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subemployment

See UNDER-EMPLOYMENT.

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subject, the subject

A term used in preference to alternatives such as ‘actor’ and ‘individual’ by writers in the structuralist tradition. Its use indicates a rejection of what such writers regard as the humanist assumptions carried by the alternative terms. More specifically, what the use of the term minimally indicates is a rejection of the idea that individual human beings are the sole originators of social relations. Whether or not its presence also indicates that subjects are simply the bearers of social relations, and/or the sole substance of sociality, varies from author to author. See also ALTHUSSER, LOUIS.

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subjective equality

See JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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subjectivity

The self-conscious perspective of the person or subject. This is invariably contrasted with objectivity and is used pejoratively by positivistic social scientists. By contrast, it is seen as crucial within hermeneutics. Structuralist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic theories have suggested how the subject is constructed. See also INTERPRETATION; MEANING.

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sublimation

A term used by psychoanalysts, to refer to the unconscious process by which a sexual impulse is deflected, so as to express itself in some non-sexual and socially acceptable activity. For example, a child may wish to play with faeces, but in the light of parental disapproval may play with pies or make clay models instead (see
, An Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis, 1974
).

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subordinate value system

See DUAL CONSCIOUSNESS.

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subsistence economy

An agrarian economy based on production for consumption rather than exchange. Such economies are characterized by low levels of production, yielding a surplus capable of meeting little more than the basic necessities of life, and tend to be seen by development agencies as a major constituent of Third World poverty and a cause of underdevelopment.

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substantive rationality

See FORMAL RATIONALITY.

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suburbanism

This term refers to social and cultural characteristics which some sociologists have claimed typify suburban residents. Accounts of suburbanism as a way of life differ widely but commonly refer to the dominance of younger, middle-class, and family-oriented patterns of work and social life; a high level of social activity based on friendship rather than kinship networks; and a considerable degree of uniformity, even conformity, in style of life. A series of studies—notably by the American sociologists Herbert Gans and Bennett Berger—largely undermined these claims, showing that suburban areas vary considerably in class and age composition, and in patterns of social life, so that suburban life-styles and social relations are not determined by physical location (‘suburbia’) as such. Like the ‘folk’ and ‘urban’ ideal-types, the suburban ideal-type is largely a myth. The best general overview of this literature is
, Suburbia (1972)
. For an interesting case-study of processes of social control in the suburbs see
, The Moral Order of a Suburb (1988)
. See also ORGANIZATION MAN; SUBURBANIZATION.

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suburbanization

Suburbanization denotes the process by which cities expand peripherally, initially by out-migration of population and economic activity from dense urban cores, to less dense contiguous settlements. Developments in transport technology—such as railways, tramways, and improved roads—have aided suburbanization.
There are several partially competing explanations of the process. Economists and geographers stress the importance of competition in urban land markets, driving out activities which can no longer afford to locate centrally, and of market developments which make suburban business location desirable. Sociological studies have shown how individuals are motivated to relocate in suburbs to improve their quality of life. Marxists and others have traced the links between suburbanization and capital accumulation. Each account has some relevance to understanding this complex social and geographical phenomenon. See also COLLECTIVE CONSUMPTION; CONCENTRIC ZONE THEORY; SUBURBANISM; URBAN SOCIOLOGY.

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Success Proposition

In formulating his behavioural-exchange theory, George Homans (Social Behaviour: Its Elementary Forms, 1974) argued that social structures could be analysed as a series of social exchanges between individuals, exchanging material and non-material goods according to five interrelated principles (or propositional statements) borrowed largely from Skinnerian psychology. These stated that: ‘For all actions taken by persons, the more often a particular action of a person is rewarded, the more likely the person is to perform that action’ (the Success Proposition); ‘If in the past the occurrence of a particular stimuli, or set of stimuli, has been the occasion on which a person's action has been rewarded, then the more similar the present stimuli are to the past ones, the more likely the person is to perform the action, or some similar action, now’ (the Stimulus Proposition); ‘The more valuable to a person is the result of his action, the more likely he is to perform the action’ (the Value Proposition); ‘The more often in the recent past a person has received a particular reward, the less valuable any further unity of that reward becomes for him’ (the Deprivation-Satiation Proposition); and, finally, ‘When a person's action does not receive the reward he expected, or receives punishment he did not expect, he will become angry; he becomes more likely to perform aggressive behaviour, and the results of such behaviour become more valuable to him…When a person's action receives reward he expected, especially a greater reward than he expected, or does not receive punishment he expected, he will be pleased; he becomes more likely to perform approving behaviour, and the results of such behaviour become more valuable to him’ (the Aggression-Approval Proposition). See also EXCHANGE THEORY.

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successive categories or intervals

A method of data collection and (unidimensional) scaling, where attitudinal or questionnaire items have been judged by the respondent in terms of an ordinal scale of categories, such as the five-category bipolar scale ‘wholly agree, somewhat agree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat disagree, wholly disagree’. The method allows both the category intervals and the items to be quantified. See also MEASUREMENT.

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suicide

Commonly defined as the intentional killing of oneself. Émile Durkheim, in his classic study Suicide (1897), defined it as ‘every case of death which results directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act, accomplished by the victim himself which he knows must produce this result’. Controversially he did not require that the death must be intentional, arguing that intentions are hard to identify. Consequently he extended the definition, including for example heroic military deaths, where there is no chance of survival but no specific intention to kill oneself.
Durkheim chose to study suicide because it seemed to illustrate perfectly the necessity for and value of sociological explanation: a patently private, individual act, which was, none the less, subject to social forces and required a distinctively sociological explanation. He maintained that the tendency to suicide depended not on individual psychology or features of the physical environment, but on the nature of the individual's relation to society. Suicide as an individual action represented the failure of social solidarity and was indicative of the ineffectiveness of social bonds. He distinguished three main types of suicide according to causation. Altruistic and egoistic suicide depend on the individual's relations to social ideals and purposes. In altruistic suicide the individual is too strongly integrated into society—a society which encourages or even requires the individual to sacrifice his or her own life (as when a wife is expected to commit suicide on her husband's death). Conversely, in egoistic suicide the individual is insufficiently integrated into society, and so is not subject to the collective forces that prevent suicide—and, indeed, experiences an isolation and detachment conducive to it. Finally, anomic suicide depends on the social regulation of the individual's desires and ambitions. Where anomie—normlessness—is heightened in society, the individual's passions, ambitions, and appetites are increased to a level where they cannot find satisfaction.
Durkheim's analysis has been criticized on numerous grounds: for his definition of suicide and the mismatch between this definition and that embodied in the suicide statistics he employs to substantiate his argument; for his classification of types of suicide in terms of cause (so-called aetiological classification) which incorporates into the classification the very causal links he is seeking to establish; for his extreme polarization of social and psychological explanations (where complementarity should be assumed); and for using aggregate data to make inferences about individuals (the so-called ecological fallacy).
A major strand of subsequent sociological discussions concerns the limitations of official statistics of suicide. Jack D. Douglas, influenced by the work of interactionists and ethnomethodologists, argued in Social Meanings of Suicide (1967) that what was defined or treated as suicide differed from culture to culture, thereby calling into question cross-cultural and historical comparisons of suicide rates, or even data on suicide generated by different coroners. However, it does not follow that suicide statistics have no value in analysing the social causes of suicide; rather, that they need to be treated with exceptional care. One must assess the impact of social and cultural factors on the construction of suicide statistics as well as the tendency to commit suicide. Significantly, the tradition developed by Durkheim has continued, and a range of studies have provided some empirical support for his ideas and evidence of the impact of social factors (such as unemployment) on levels of suicide.
One important development has been the attention to attempted or parasuicide, frequently claimed to be a very different phenomenon from successful suicide, and representing a cry for help. However, some authors argue that the distinction between attempted and successful suicide is a matter of contingency, and it is wrong to exclude unsuccessful cases from the analysis.
The theoretical basis and empirical adequacy of Durkheim's explanation is most fully explored in Whitney Pope's Durkheim's Suicide (1976).

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Sumner, William Graham

(1840–1910)
An early American sociologist and noted laissez-faire Social Darwinist. Influenced by the works of Herbert Spencer, he argued that social life was governed by natural laws (as binding as those governing the physical world), the most basic of which stipulated evolutionary struggle and the survival of the fittest (meaning the most industrious and frugal). He accepted that societies could ensure the survival of the weakest (for example through welfare programmes) but regarded this as a stimulus to social decline. These beliefs have attracted the usual criticisms levelled against other varieties of economic determinism. In Folkways (1906) he argued the moral relativist position that each human group has its own appropriate folkways, mores, and institutions—the various group habits that, by trial and error, seem to be best suited to the particular circumstance prevailing at the time. The possible contradiction between this argument, and the belief in the universal superiority of folkways that support a laissez-faire economy, is not addressed in Sumner's work. He also coined the widely used terms in-group, out-group, and ethnocentricism. For the last two years of his life he was president of the American Sociological Association.

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superego

See PSYCHOANALYSIS.

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superstructure

Like the term base, that of superstructure was imported into Marxist discourse on the authority of Marx's reference to the sphere of production as being the ‘real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness’, which appears in his Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy (1859). Conventionally, therefore, the superstructure of a society comprises its political and cultural (or ideological) realms. Issues such as how the superstructure relates to the base, precisely what it consists of and the nature of its internal dynamics, were discussed by Marx when he spoke of ideology and the fetishism of commodities. Since Marx's time these issues have been approached through such concepts as hegemony and discourse. The net result has been that the architectural metaphor upon which the distinction between the base and the superstructure conventionally rests is no longer an adequate summary of the complex relations that are now understood to obtain between the economic and the other realms of society. Arguably, as commentators such as G. A. Cohen have recently observed, Marx himself did not intend such a crude view of unidimensional and unidirectional causality. See also MODE OF PRODUCTION; SOCIAL FORMATION.

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surplus drain

See DEPENDENCY THEORY.

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surplus value

See CAPITALISM; EXPLOITATION; LABOUR THEORY OF VALUE.

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survey, social survey

At first, a survey was any systematic collection of facts about a defined social group, and the term is still used in this way. The term survey is therefore not necessarily synonymous with ‘questionnaire survey’, since other methods of data collection (such as observation of behaviour) may be employed in a survey. In practice, however, most sociological surveys are based on written questionnaires. More precisely, the term usually refers to data collections that employ both interviewing and sampling to produce quantitative data-sets, amenable to computer-based analysis. Sampling and interviewing are employed in many other research designs. It is the combination of the two that has led to the social survey, or sample survey, becoming the most important single type of social research, used by all the social sciences, market research, and opinion polls.
Surveys can be used to provide descriptive statistics for national, regional, or local populations; to examine the clustering of social phenomena; to identify the social location and characteristics of subgroups for more intensive follow-up case-study research; and to analyse causal processes and test explanations. In recent years sociological survey analysis has been greatly extended to include the sophisticated multivariate modelling techniques that are common in econometrics. One of the main attractions of the sample survey for both policy research and theoretical research is its transparency and accountability: methods and procedures can be made visible and accessible to other parties, unlike research designs that depend heavily on the contribution of individual researchers. The key disadvantage is that surveys normally use structured questionnaires, which constrain an enquiry to paths fixed at the start of fieldwork. Other criticisms which are sometimes levelled at surveys are that numerical variables rarely provide adequate operationalizations of sociological constructs; the highly asymmetric power relation between researcher and interviewee is detrimental to the quality of the data collected; they provide a false aura of objectivity which makes their results vulnerable to political manipulation. Many of these criticisms can be overcome by good survey design and implementation.
Surveys can collect information on individuals, roles, social networks, social groups such as households or families, organizations such as schools, workplaces, or companies. In most cases the information is provided by individuals, but the information collected may be about any social unit of interest, with larger and more complex units requiring multiple interviews to avoid the information limitations or bias of a single informant. Surveys are used to study poverty, social stratification, social mobility, political orientations and participation, work and employment, and virtually all the issues addressed by sociologists and other social scientists.
Survey interviews may be personal, postal, or conducted by telephone. Telephone surveys are particularly common in the United States, where most households have telephones, and the size of the country makes face-to-face interviewing of a nationally representative sample of the population prohibitively expensive (see
, Telephone Survey Methods, 1987
). Major surveys, especially national surveys, are now carried out by specialist fieldwork agencies or national research institutes that have the necessary resources for questionnaire design, sample design, sample selection from available registers or other sampling frames, fieldwork planning and supervision, training and debriefing of interviewers, coding of completed questionnaires, consistency checks, and editing of the resulting data-tape. Such agencies often become centres for methodological research on sampling, survey techniques, and design.
CAPI (Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing) and CATI (Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing) techniques are increasingly used. These involve the interviewer in coding the answers given by each respondent directly on to a data-tape or file, using a personal or laptop computer, at the time of interview. This saves both time and money in the overall survey process, but does mean that particular care must be taken over matters of questionnaire design at the outset, to ensure that there are no filtering or other errors in the final interview schedule.
Most academic research consists of ad hoc surveys, carried out on a one-off basis, to address defined theoretical and other issues. Ad hoc surveys often employ the smallest sample size necessary to achieve representativeness, typically 2,000 respondents for a national survey, relying heavily on statistical inference to generalize the results to the target population. National opinion polls are carried out on a regular basis, but again employ the smallest sample size necessary to achieve representativeness, and necessitate the use of tests of statistical significance. With the change of emphasis from administrative records and registers to interview surveys as the basis of official statistics, a great variety of regular surveys are also carried out by national governments. These involve quite different orders of magnitude to the typical ad hoc survey, with national samples of 5,000–250,000 per year; samples as large as this begin to make tests of statistical significance as redundant as they are with census data, except when data subsets are analysed. In effect, the variety of surveys is now so wide that it ceases to be a homogeneous category of social research. Regular surveys may involve repeat cross-sectional surveys at defined intervals, such as annually every spring, or be carried out on the basis of continuous year-round interviewing so as to smooth out any seasonal variations in the activities covered. The USA Current Population Survey (CPS) and some equivalent Labour Force Surveys (LFS) employ rotating sample designs which offer many of the advantages of data from panel studies for measuring changes over time in the phenomena under study.
Surveys make demands on respondents and require their active co-operation to be successful. They require that respondents adopt the role of interviewee, in effect the role of citizen and commentator on their own lives, and the lives of those around them. This interviewee role has developed over decades in Western industrial societies, and there is increasing recognition that it is not universally understood or accepted in other cultures. For example, in some cultures it would be impolite to express open disagreement with the perceived or expected views of an interviewer, thus invalidating the invitation for respondents to express their own views. Surveys also make information demands that can be difficult to meet in societies where literacy and personal record-keeping are less widespread–so that even dates of birth may be difficult to recall accurately. New techniques of data collection are being developed for surveys in Third World countries and societies with different cultures and social conventions.
There are numerous textbooks on how to design and conduct surveys. Catherine Marsh's The Survey Method (1982) stands out as an elegant defence of the technique against critics who object that surveys are invariably superficial and merely descriptive.

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sustainable development

Defined in Our Common Future, the Report of the 1987 World Commission on the Environment and Development (the ‘Brundtland Report’), as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Rather than predicting greater environmental decay and hardship in a world of ever-diminishing resources, the Report foresees ‘the possibility of a new era of economic growth, based on policies that sustain and expand the natural environmental resource base’.
Economic growth and modernization have historically been pursued aggressively by nation-states, as a means not only of satisfying basic material needs, but also of providing the resources necessary to improve quality of life more generally (for example with respect to access to health-care and education). However, most forms of economic growth make demands on the environment, both by using (sometimes finite) natural resources and by generating waste or pollution. This jeopardizes growth for future generations. The philosophy of sustainable development attempts to resolve this dilemma by insisting that decisions taken at every level throughout society should have due regard to their possible environmental consequence. In this way, the right kind of economic growth–based on biodiversity, the control of environmentally damaging activity, and replenishment of renewable resources such as forests–is generated, and this can protect or even enhance the natural environment. Present-day economic development is therefore rendered compatible with investment in environmental resources for the future.
Although it is understandably hard to find authorities who are prepared to argue against the idea of sustainable development (it is in fact widely applauded by almost all governments and their agencies), it is often difficult for governments (which tend to be accountable to electorates over short-term periods such as five years or so) to accept the political consequences of promoting sustainable development, for example by imposing tolls or fines for the use of cars in cities (on the principle that the ‘polluter should pay’). Moreover, the environment is shared and is largely a public good, so that to a considerable extent its protection requires collective action. In practice, therefore, this has proved hard to organize because of the usual free-rider problems.

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symbol

Most generally, any act or thing which represents something else. More particularly, the smallest meaning-unit in the semantic fields of rituals, dream, or myth. In psychoanalysis, a symbol is an act or object representing a repressed unconscious desire. Symbols usually signify many things; that is, to use Victor Turner's phrase (The Forest of Symbols, 1967), they are multi-vocal. The link between symbol and referent is not always arbitrary, as with sign, but may be motivated by an association of attributes (for example, the crown as a symbol of monarchy).
Much of the research on symbolism has been done by social anthropologists rather than sociologists. For example, in Purity and Danger (1966), the British anthropologist Mary Douglas uses cross-cultural examples, including Hinduism, the Old Testament, and Western beliefs in hygiene, to argue that dirt is the symbol for matter out of place in a society's classification system. Clifford Geertz, the American cultural anthropologist and noted proponent of symbolic anthropology, has argued that human behaviour is fundamentally symbolic and therefore laden with meaning for social actors. The primary task of the ethnographer is to understand the ‘webs of significance’ which people themselves have spun. Thus, for Geertz, anthropology (and by implication sociology) is not an experimental science, looking for universal laws, but an interpretative science in search of meaning.
‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’ (in Daedalus, 1972)
is a classic example of Geertz's symbolic analysis. See also SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE; SEMIOLOGY; SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM.

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symbolic interactionism

A leading American social psychological theory which focuses upon the ways in which meanings emerge through interaction. Its prime concern has been to analyse the meanings of everyday life, via close observational work and intimate familiarity, and from these to develop an understanding of the underlying forms of human interaction. Heavily influenced by pragmatism, the Chicago tradition of sociology and the philosophical writings of George Herbert Mead, the term itself was coined by Herbert Blumer in 1937.
The theory has four key foci. The first highlights the ways in which human beings are distinctly symbol-manipulating animals. It is through symbols that they, alone of all the animals, are capable of producing culture and transmitting a complex history. Interactionists are always concerned to study the ways in which people give meaning to their bodies, their feelings, their selves, their biographies, their situations, and indeed to the wider social worlds in which their lives exist. Research strategies such as participant observation are employed, which enable the researcher to gain access to these symbols and meanings, as in Howard S. Becker's Art Worlds (1982) and Arlie Hochschild's The Managed Heart (1983). There is a broad affinity here to semiology, but unlike at least some positions in semiology which seek the structures of language, interactionists are more concerned with the ways in which meaning is always emergent, fluid, ambiguous, and contextually bound. R. S. Perinbanayagam has provided an important account of meaning in interactionism in his book Signifying Acts (1985).
This leads to a second theme: that of process and emergence. For the interactionist, the social world is a dynamic and dialectical web, situations are always encounters with unstable outcomes, and lives and their biographies are always in the process of shifting and becoming, never fixed and immutable. Attention is fixed, not upon rigid structures (as in many other versions of sociology), but upon streams of activity with their adjustments and outcomes. Concepts such as career, negotiated order, becoming, encounters, and impression management are central to this approach.
A third focus of interactionism highlights the social world as precisely that—interactive. From this point of view there is no such thing as a solitary individual: humans are always connected to ‘others’. The most basic unit of interactionist analysis is that of the self, which stresses the ways in which people can (indeed must) come to view themselves as objects, and assume the role of others through a process of role-taking. This idea is clarified in Charles Horton Cooley's notion of the looking-glass self and Mead's more general idea of ‘the self’.
A fourth theme, derived from Georg Simmel, is that interactionism looks beneath these symbols, processes, and interactions in order to determine underlying patterns or forms of social life. Interactionists seek ‘generic social processes’. Thus, while they may study the life-experience of doctors, dance-band musicians, drug-users, and the dying, they can detect common processes at work in all such seemingly disparate groupings. A good example is Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss's Status Passage (1967), which provides a formal, interactionist theory of status changes.
Symbolic interactionism developed in the University of Chicago, in the first few decades of this century, and first achieved prominence when the Chicago School came to dominate early American sociology. However, it again became very influential during the 1960s, as a challenge to the dominance of Talcott Parsons and Grand Theory (sometimes being referred to, during the heyday of functionalism, as ‘the loyal opposition’). It was particularly influential in the development of the labelling theory of deviance, but also in such fields as occupational research (Everett Hughes), medical sociology (Anselm Strauss), and in the study of classroom interaction. Strauss has pioneered a number of developments in interactionist theory. From his early work on identity (in Mirrors and Masks, 1969) to his formulation of the concept of negotiated order, his work exemplifies a major methodological concern with qualitative research (usually, for him, in medical settings), the development of appropriate strategies for doing such research (the so-called grounded theory approach), and the building of case-study theory which moves beyond itself into a more formal sociology. His work on dying patients (with Barney Glaser) is an exemplary study of all these concerns (see, for example,
Awareness of Dying, 1967, Time for Dying, 1968, and Anguish, 1977
).
In the 1970s interactionism attracted considerable criticism for its neglect of social structure, power, and history. More recent interactionist writings have shown this critique to be misguided; and, in the process, have revitalized the theory. For example, Sheldon Stryker has attempted to enunciate a version of symbolic interactionism which more clearly relates the conventionally microsociological concerns of that perspective to the organizational and societal levels of analysis, mainly by an imaginative restatement of role theory. In particular, Stryker has been concerned with the idea of ‘role-making’, the active creation of roles (rather than mere ‘taking’ of them), where some social structures permit more such creativity than do others (see, for example,
Symbolic Interactionism: A Social Structural Version, 1980
).
In the 1990s interactionism has provided analyses of a range of new phenomena, and has become more theoretically sophisticated (some might say eclectic) in creating links to post-modernism (in the work of Norman Denzin), feminism, semiology, and cultural theory. The best collection of interactionist writings, and one which gives a good indication of the tradition's virtues and limitations, is Ken Plummer's Symbolic Interactionism (2 vols., 1990). See also FORMALISM; GOFFMAN, ERVING; KUHN, MANFORD.

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symbols, multi-vocal

See MULTI-VOCAL SYMBOLS.

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symmetrical family

See FAMILY, SYMMETRICAL.

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synchrony

See SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE; STRUCTURALISM.

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syncretism

In a religious context, syncretism refers to the worship of one god using the form or tradition of another god. Thus, for example, the Hebrew prophets constantly condemned the tendency to revert to worshipping Yahweh using forms associated with local ‘baalim’ or deities.

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syndicalism

A political movement or ideology which promotes workers' control through the medium of the workplace. It was particularly strong in France, Italy, and Spain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but was extinguished in the 1930s.

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syndicated crime

See ORGANIZED CRIME.

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syntagmatic and paradigmatic

See SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE.

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synthesis

The combination of two (or more) contradictory phenomena to produce something qualitatively new. The term is usually associated with the dialectical logic employed by some Marxists: for example, the economic contradictions of capitalism and the class conflict they generate, together produce socialism.

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system integration

See SOCIAL INTEGRATION AND SYSTEM INTEGRATION.

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systems problems

See PARSONS, TALCOTT; SYSTEMS THEORY.

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systems theory, systems analysis

The concept of a system is not peculiar to sociology: it is used in any scientific analysis where a researcher is concerned to understand the pattern or structure between any set of parts or units. A system is thus any structured or patterned relationship between any number of elements, where this system forms a whole or unity. It is assumed that a system has an environment and thus there is the requirement of boundary maintenance. There is an interchange between a system and its environment. Systems theory which employs a cybernetic approach considers these interchanges in terms of the storage and control of information. It is further assumed that systems will tend towards an equilibrium state or homeostasis. Finally, systems change by becoming more internally differentiated. The concept of system has been influential in the natural sciences, especially in biology.
In sociology, the concept of social system was developed by writers like Herbert Spencer and Vilfredo Pareto, but its modern usage was heavily shaped by the social philosophy of Lawrence J. Henderson, who was inspired by Pareto (see
's Pareto's General Sociology, 1935
), and by the biologist Walter B. Cannon (see
The Wisdom of the Body, 1932
). Talcott Parsons, who was influenced at Harvard by Henderson's interpretation of Pareto, is the sociologist who, through the development of the theory of structural functionalism, is most generally associated with the elaboration of systems theory.
Parsons argued (in The Structure of Social Action, 1937) that the basic analytical component of a sociological theory of an action system is the unit act, which involves an actor, an end or goal, a situation composed of conditions and means, and norms and values by which ends and means are selected. An action system is a structured collection of unit acts. He then defined a social system as ‘a mode of organization of action elements relative to the persistence or ordered processes of change of the interactive patterns of a plurality of individual actors’ (The Social System, 1951). Parsons argued that a social system is faced by two major problems. One is the (external) problem of the production and allocation of scarce resources; the other is the (internal) problem of achieving social order or integration. This notion gave rise to Parsons's famous development of four sub-systems, which respond to the external and internal ‘functional prerequisites of a system of action’, namely adaptation (economy), goal-attainment (polity), integration (societal community), and latency (socialization). This was defined as the AGIL model of the social system. These subsystems are connected by flows of inputs and outputs, which Parsons called ‘media of exchange’ (Economy and Society, 1956). These are money (A), power (G), influence (I), and commitments (L). The equilibrium of a social system depends on these complex exchanges between the various subsystems.
Social systems theory has been much criticized, because it involves an organic analogy which is inappropriate; entails a conservative bias towards the study of social order rather than social conflict; does not provide a satisfactory theory of social change, since it merely describes the process of differentiation; has not generated an adequate explanation of social stratification, especially of social class; is tautological, because the concept of function cannot be given any substantive content; has developed a formal terminology which obscures rather than clarifies social phenomena; and, finally, because the assumptions of the theory cannot be operationalized.
Although these criticisms have been generally accepted by sociologists, in the 1980s there has been a revival of interest in systems theory. The American neofunctionalists (see
, Neo-functionalism, 1985
) have argued that it is possible to develop Parsonsian sociology as a perspective which can explain social change and conflict. There has also been a major development of social systems approaches in Germany. For example, Niklas Luhmann has rejected the idea that human individuals are aspects of social systems, which he defines as a system of communicative acts. Systems, according to Luhmann, function to reduce the complexity of meaning. Consequently, he has been interested in the system problems of successful communication on the basis of the development of codes. For him, the principal media of communication are truth, love, money, and power. Luhmann has applied these ideas to such diverse topics as law (A Sociological Theory of Law, 1985), differentiation (The Differentiation of Society, 1982), love (Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, 1986), and religion (Religious Dogmatics and the Evolution of Societies, 1977).

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T

taboo

The term taboo derives from the Tongan ‘tabu’, meaning ‘sacred’ or ‘inviolable’. However, its contemporary use is broader, most generally meaning a social and often sacred prohibition put upon certain things, people, or acts, which render them untouchable or unmentionable. The most famous taboo is the near-universal incest taboo, prohibiting sexual or marriage relations between particular categories of kin. According to both Sigmund Freud (Totem and Taboo, 1938) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1969), society itself originated with the incest taboo. Other authors have stressed the function performed by taboos in society. Raymond Firth (in Symbols Public and Private, 1973) interpreted taboo as a mechanism of social control. In Purity and Danger (1966), Mary Douglas drew attention to the way in which the taboo serves as a social marker, creating and maintaining social classifications.

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tabula rasa

Also known as the blank-slate or white-paper thesis, a name for the radically empiricist view of the mind and knowledge which inspired so-called associationism in psychology. According to John Locke, the contents of the mind are written on it by experience as if it were white paper, a view comparable with modern behaviourist theories which try to account for mental processes as a product of external stimulus and behavioural response.

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tabular presentation

Quantitative social science results are most commonly presented in the form of an analytic table. Tables should fulfil two main criteria: they should be easy to read; and they should support the inference drawn by the analyst. All tables should have a clear self-explanatory title; give the number of cases on which the statistics are based; and should include only the critical information relevant to the point that the table illustrates.

TABLE 3. Male and female attitudes to sociology

MEN (%)

WOMEN (%)

I like it very much

48

38

I like it somewhat

40

42

I dislike it

10

18

Don't Know

2

2

100

100

N =

(301)

(389)

The most basic type of analytic table is the percentage table. The simplest percentage table is the univariate type which presents the distribution of answers to a single question. A two-way (or two variable) table shows the relationship between a dependent and independent variable. For example, in the table above, the hypothetical responses to a question ‘In general, how do you like sociology?’ are broken down by sex. These hypothetical data would illustrate that male students are more positive about sociology than are female students. In order to be sure that the difference is not simply due to sampling error it would be necessary also to include the associated significance test. However, no table can show whether or not the difference is of substantive importance, and the scientist must establish in the text why the results matter. See also CONTINGENCY TABLE.

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tacit knowledge, tacit understanding

See COMMONSENSE KNOWLEDGE.

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Taeuber, Irene B.

(1906–74)
An American statistician and demographer who nurtured the development of demography within sociology, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, and was the premier editor of Population Index. A feminist and humanist, she was nevertheless committed to the ideal of scientific objectivity. Taeuber is well-known for her important international population studies, particularly her demographic work in East and South-east Asia. The Population of Japan (1958), a demographic survey of Japan from the start of the literate period until 1955, was her magnum opus.

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Taft, Jessie

(1882–1961)
An early Chicago sociologist who wrote her doctoral thesis on
‘The Women's Movement from the Standpoint of Social Consciousness’ (1913)
—with George Herbert Mead as her doctoral chair. The most influential of her numerous subsequent publications addressed issues of social work (see
, Jessie Taft: Therapist and Social Work Educator, 1962
).

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take-off point

An idea derived from the American economic historian Walt W. Rostow's Stages of Economic Growth (1953). Rostow postulated five such stages: traditional society; preconditions for take-off; take-off to maturity; drive to maturity; and maturity. In this way he claimed to identify a recognizable stage in a country's history, lasting perhaps 20–30 years, during which the conditions required for sustained and fairly rapid economic growth are consolidated, and beyond which growth is more or less assured. The theory assumes that levels of capital investment are crucial to initiating economic growth. Rostow applied this schema to the problems of the then developing countries; and (indirectly) influenced and justified American foreign and overseas-aid policies towards the Third World.
Although the concept of a take-off to self-sustaining economic growth has been influential, Rostow's argument was subsequently the object of a sustained critique by dependency theorists in sociology, most notably in a famous and much-reproduced article by
(‘Sociology of Development and Underdevelopment of Sociology’, 1967)
which castigates Rostow (among others) for ignoring the history of imperialism and neo-colonialism. The theory is now widely discredited but the idea of a take-off point remains part of the language of economic development.

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Tarde, Gabriel

(1843–1904)
A French criminologist, widely regarded as one of the founders of social psychology, a contemporary of Émile Durkheim who debated with him the nature of sociology. Tarde described the basic social processes as those of imitation (or repetition), opposition, and adaptation, and saw sociology as the attempt to discover the social laws that governed these processes. His analysis of the importance of imitation suggests that it is some sort of cosmic law, analogous to—but also offering an alternative to—laws of societal evolution, since imitation rather than a common evolutionary trajectory could explain cultural diffusion. Tarde was a social nominalist, for whom only individuals are real, and all social phenomena were ultimately reducible to relations between two persons exhibiting similar beliefs and desires and imitating each other through interaction. This explains his disagreement with Durkheim, a social realist who argued that social facts existed independently of individuals, and that external social constraint was the basis of social order. His major publications—The Laws of Imitation (1890) and Social Laws: An Outline of Sociology (1899)—are today of only historical interest, although attempts have been made to trace his influence in American interactionist sociology, and on the study of attitudes and collective behaviour.

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task-orientation versus time-orientation distinction

A distinction, widely employed in industrial sociology, to indicate contrasting orientations to work and forms of labour discipline. In the narrow sense, task-oriented workers relate the measurement of time to naturally occurring phenomena and cycles, such as ‘the time between sunrise and sunset’, the seasons of the year, or (quite simply) ‘the time it takes to complete the task in hand’. The important point is that there is a complete disregard for the artificial units (minutes, hours, and ‘working days’) of clock-time. Anthropological and historical evidence suggests that this attitude to work—in which labour is oriented to the completion of specific tasks with a minimal demarcation between work and leisure—was prevalent among traditional tribal and Western pre-industrial societies alike. The invention of clocks—or rather their utilization by employers as a means of measuring labour-inputs—generated (after well-documented initial resistance among workers) a labour discipline in which time was the principal currency. Effort was now bought and sold by the hour; time was ‘spent’ rather than ‘passed’; and the ‘time—effort bargain’ could be budgeted like any other commodity. The classic analysis of the change in work-discipline that accompanies the shift between task-orientation and time-orientation is E. P. Thompson's Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism' (in Past and Present, 1967).
In contemporary usage, the application of these concepts has become somewhat broader, with task-orientation and time-orientation often being treated as synonymous with ‘solidaristic’ and ‘instrumental’ orientations to work respectively. See also WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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tautology

The use of words to repeat (unnecessarily) the same statement or meaning. For example, the statement that ‘Britain is an island and surrounded by water’ is a tautology, since islands are by definition so described. Tautological explanations are similarly true by definition, or circular, and therefore unfalsifiable. Sociological explanations which locate the origins of social institutions in their effects tend to take this form. Thus, for example, some early functionalist anthropologists (including Bronislaw Malinowski) were prone to argue that, because certain (exotic) social practices (such as witchcraft) existed, then they must have a social function—and that one could assume they had that function precisely because the practices themselves existed.

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Tawney, Richard H.

(1880–1962)
An English economic and social historian, social reformer, and egalitarian social philosopher. He was equally well known as a historian and champion of socialism—in both of which roles he exerted a significant influence on early British sociology during the post–1945 period. His classic texts on Equality (1920) and The Acquisitive Society (1931) exemplify the English tradition of Fabianism and ethical socialism. His best-known historical publications are probably Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), Land and Labour in China (1932), and Business and Politics under James I (1962). Numerous collections of his essays are also in circulation (see, for example.
The American Labour Movement and Other Essays, 1979
). Tawney was a committed Christian and this informed his criticism of the exploitative elements of capitalism. He argued that citizenship, equality of opportunity, collectivism, and a corporate society were necessary to eradicate the injustices associated with social class and inherited wealth. Social equality required also that the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity operate on the factory floor. His is still an original critique of the excessive individualism threatened by capitalism and of the inefficiencies (for example the creation of poverty) in the free market.

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taxonomy

A taxonomy (or typology) is a classification. To classify social phenomena is not to explain them. For example, sociologists of religion commonly use a taxonomy of religious organizations which embraces the categories of church, denomination, sect, and cult. This classifies religious groupings according to their organizational structure (for example bureaucratic or informal), adjustment to the prevailing order (world-rejecting, world-accommodating, and so forth), and principal mode of recruitment (ascribed membership by birth or achieved membership by voluntary attachment). This particular classification does not explain why certain individuals practise religion, while others do not, nor does it offer a theory of how religious organizations arise or develop. In practice, however, many sociological taxonomies are implicitly aetiological (causal). A well-known example is Durkheim's classification of the types of suicide—egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic—a taxonomy which also embodies a theory about why people kill themselves intentionally.

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Taylor, Frederick William

(1856–1915)
The founder of scientific management, who developed controversial theories of work-study and industrial efficiency, in the conflict-ridden American steel industry at the end of the nineteenth century. Taylor achieved national renown but his hostility to trade-union controls on effort, and his technicism directed at financial interests, provoked both political and industrial opposition.

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Taylorism

See SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT; TAYLOR, F. W..

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technicism

A belief that technocracy is desirable or inevitable. Also a broad social movement, especially influential in the United States during the early twentieth century (the Technocracy Movement), calling for the elimination of the price system in favour of the government of industry and society by scientific or engineering principles. See also TECHNOCRACY.

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techniques of neutralization

See DELINQUENT DRIFT; VOCABULARIES OF MOTIVE.

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technocracy

A revolutionary or governing élite composed of, or drawn from, technical experts. See also BOURGEOISIE.

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technological determinism

A theory of social change, characteristically one of evolutionary progress or development, in which productive technique obeys a logic or trajectory of its own; and, in the process, acts as the principal determinant of institutions and social relationships. Since literal technological determinism is clearly untrue, most such theories also invoke a cultural lag between the introduction of a technology, and its full social impact. It should not be confused or equated with historical materialism. See also CULTURAL MATERIALISM.

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technological society

Some writers argue that there is a distinctive type of society, typically emergent from various forms of industrialism, in which technology and a technocracy increasingly determine the nature of institutions and change. Optimistic versions include much technicism and the so-called convergence thesis (see INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY) favoured by many American functionalists of the 1950s and early 1960s. An early, more pessimistic, account is given by Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society. In the tradition of the Sociologie du Travail, technology is treated as a form of alienation, and as domination by artefacts. The growing interest in alternative technology, ecology, and the environment may be regarded as a reaction born of an analogous interpretation of late twentieth-century industrialism.

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technology

A term used rather loosely in sociology, to mean either machines, equipment, and possibly the productive technique associated with them; or a type of social relationship dictated by the technical organization and mechanization of work. For an interesting comparative analysis of the historical and cultural importance of technology in human societies see
's Production and Reproduction (1975
).

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technology, new

See NEW TECHNOLOGY.

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technostructure

See BOURGEOISIE.

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telecommuting

White-collar employment which allows the worker to work in his or her own home, or in a neighbourhood work centre, communicating with an employer through a terminal which is connected with the employer's computer either directly or via the telecommunications network. Although much discussed as a revival of cottage industry, and as an illustration of labour-market flexibility, there were almost no true examples of this work arrangement in Europe by the early 1990s. Most people who used desktop computers at home still used conventional forms of communication, such as the postal service, or face-to-face meetings with employers and clients. However, there are cases of telecommuters working for a firm in another country or continent. Exaggerated claims of the incidence and growth of telecommuting are attributable to the rediscovery and revival of home-based employment in industrial societies, the vast majority of which does not involve computers or telecommunications networks. See also INTERNET.

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teleology

A teleological explanation either explains a process by the end-state towards which it is directed; or explains the existence of something by the function it fulfils. In sociology, the former tends to be confined to theories of purposive human action, whereas the latter is a feature of functionalism. It is widely argued that teleological explanations are admissible only with reference to individuals and groups since they alone have explicitly formulated purposes or goals. Societies, by contrast, set themselves no such objectives. Evolutionary and systems theories, as well as theories which imply a historical logic or inevitability (such as historical materialism), are often criticized as being unacceptably teleological—although there have been controversial attempts to argue that even these explanations can be translated into conventional causal accounts.

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tertiary sector

See INDUSTRIAL SECTOR.

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theism

A term which refers to the belief in the existence of a divine being, especially in the existence of a single God, who is thought to be personal and who is the Creator of the universe. Theism involves the idea of divine revelation, and consequently is contrasted with deism, the rational belief in divinity independently of faith in a revealed truth. See also MONOTHEISM; RELIGION.

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Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

A projective test developed in the United States in the 1930s, employing twenty monochromatic, indefinite pictures of human action. Respondents describe what is happening, what led up to this, and what follows. Narratives, which are assumed to reveal (through projection) something of the respondent's personality, are interpreted in relation to established norms.

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theodicy

In metaphysics, representation of the world as God's creation offered a method of demonstrating that the world must have certain characteristics, often ones which contradicted commonsense experience. Thus, from God's goodness and omnipotence it could be deduced that the created world must itself be good, despite the appearance of evil and suffering. The philosophical optimism of Leibniz and his followers (‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’) was ruthlessly satirized by Voltaire in Candide. The role of theodicies as reconciling, conservative ideologies has been noted by Max Weber among other sociologists of religion, but they may also have critical implications.

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theodicy, problem of

See RELIGION, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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theology

The systematic study of religious beliefs and systems of thinking about God (or gods), often from within a given tradition, such as Judaism or Catholicism. Theology is not far removed from philosophy and the sociology of religion when considerations of meaning and empirical manifestations of religion are primary.

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theories of the middle range

See MIDDLE-RANGE THEORY.

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theory, social theory

A theory is an account of the world which goes beyond what we can see and measure. It embraces a set of interrelated definitions and relationships that organizes our concepts of and understanding of the empirical world in a systematic way. Thus, we may establish a statistical relationship between poverty and crime, but to explain that relationship we might have to employ a number of theories: about people's motivations, the social meanings attached to poverty and crime, and the structural constraints which keep sections of the population in poverty.
Generally speaking there are three different conceptions of theory in sociology. Some think of theory as generalizations about, and classifications of, the social world. The scope of generalization varies from theorizing about a particular range of phenomena to more abstract and general theories about society and history as a whole. Others believe that theoretical statements should be translated into empirical, measurable, or observable propositions, and systematically tested. Thus, in the example above, we should test assumptions about motivations, social meanings, and so forth. This approach is usually characterized (rather unhelpfully) as positivism. Finally, yet others argue that theory should explain phenomena, identifying causal mechanisms and processes which, although they cannot be observed directly, can be seen in their effects. For example, Marxists might use the alleged contradiction between the forces and relations of production (unobservable) to explain fluctuations in the levels and development of class struggle (observable). The label realism is sometimes attached to this view.
The term social theory is also applied commonly to the most general level of theories of society—to perspectives such as structural functionalism, phenomenology, or Marxism—which embrace most or all of the social sciences. Some prefer to call this level ‘social philosophy’. See also AXIOM; EXCHANGE THEORY; HYPOTHESIS; PHILOSOPHY.

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theory, grounded

See GROUNDED THEORY.

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theory, normative

See NORMATIVE THEORY.

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theory-laden

A statement about the world is said to be theory-laden if it presupposes or rests upon a theory—in other words if it is not a pure observation. Many philosophers of science (including, for example,
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962)
argue that all observations are in some sense theory-laden.

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therapeutic community

Residential units run on psychodynamic lines, first introduced for war-time rehabilitation, then developed for those with neurotic and behaviour disorders. The aim is to create a therapeutic environment in which patients are actively involved in their therapy and the hierarchy between therapist and patient is fractured. Interpersonal interactions are analysed in regular group meetings.

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thick description

Intensive, small-scale, dense descriptions of social life from observation, through which broader cultural interpretations and generalizations can be made. The term was introduced in the philosophical writings of Gilbert Ryle, and developed by Clifford Geertz in anthropology, especially in his celebrated study of the Balinese cockfight (see his
The Interpretation of Cultures, 1973, and Local Knowledge, 1983
).

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Third World

By analogy with the ‘third estate’ in the French Revolution, a group of states independent of the two main camps in the Cold War. The term was originally used in the late 1940s to denote a potentially neutral bloc in Europe, but from the early 1960s referred to countries of the developing world, as distinct from the ‘first’ (developed) capitalist and ‘second’ (communist) worlds.

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Third World entrepôt

A term with three distinct (though similar) meanings: originally, a port used by colonial powers to deposit goods which were eventually destined for sale elsewhere; sometimes used to describe cities which receive migrants from less developed countries; often applied to cities or regions, usually in the poorer states, with a large commercial sector geared mainly to exporting primary products from the hinterland.

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Thomas, Dorothy Swaine

(1899–1977)
An American sociologist of population and demographic studies. Her published work also includes a study of Japanese- American evacuation and resettlement during the Second World War (The Salvage, 1952; The Spoilage, 1969). She married William Isaac Thomas in 1935 and became the first woman president of the American Sociological Association in 1952.

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Thomas, William Isaac

(1863–1947)
A student, instructor, and ultimately an influential professor at the University of Chicago, who collaborated with Florian Znaniecki to produce The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918), which pioneered the use of personal documents and life-histories. His theory of the ‘definition of the situation’ suggested that ‘when people define situations as real they become real in their consequences’. In 1927 he served as president of the American Sociological Association.

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Thomas Theorem

The classic aphorism, stated by W. I. Thomas, that ‘When people define situations as real they become real in their consequences’. See also SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY.

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Thurstone scale

See EQUAL APPEARING INTERVALS.

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time, sociological study of

Time is one of the central organizing features of social life, and has become an increasingly important topic of study for social scientists (see, for example,
, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life, 1981
, and
, Time and Social Theory, 1990)
.
At the broadest level it is useful to distinguish physical time—given in biology and the environment, such as phases of the moon, the ebb and flow of tides, the birth and death of bodies—and social time. The latter is the topic for social scientists and it is concerned with the nature, construction, and consequences of human activities organized around giving meaning to time. This can include the study of the construction of weeks, calendars, decades, and festival celebrations; the study of daily rounds of activities including the creation of timetables and time-lines; and the biographical ordering of time into narratives of life-stages, status passages, and careers.
A distinction which is sometimes drawn in sociological theory is that between the idea of durée, as the unstoppable personal flow of a person's experience, and la longue durée—the broader, almost timeless history of people relating to their environment in broad spans of history. The former leads to a social psychology of time—as described in the work of William James; the latter encourages a historical concern with temporal structures, as in the work of Fernand Braudel. La longue durée is the long time-period which forms a vast and critical backdrop to a whole frame of social life, and is often dominated by a particular organizing mode, such as religion (‘the Christian era’) or politics (for example ‘the Modern World and Capitalism’). See also CHANGE; EVOLUTIONISM; LIFE-CYCLE; LIFE-HISTORY; PROGRESS; SEQUENCE ANALYSIS; TASK-ORIENTATION VERSUS TIME-ORIENTATION DISTINCTION.

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time-and-motion studies

See SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT.

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time-budget studies

Surveys and other studies which require participants to keep time-use diaries, to report the activities occupying each hour of each day for a fixed period of time, such as a week or month. For a review and examples see
, Changing Times (1984
).

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time-orientation

See TASK-ORIENTATION VERSUS TIME-ORIENTATION DISTINCTION.

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time-series data

Data about a social phenomenon or phenomena which are ordered in time. In sociology the most common form of time-series data are those derived either from Censuses or panel studies, although opinion-poll surveys and some administrative records offer opportunities for time-series study. Occasionally, two or more unrelated ad hoc surveys have asked similar sorts of questions of similar populations, and allow an approximation to time-series analysis. In Britain the Central Statistical Office hosts a time-series data-bank, which contains information on some 2,000 variables.

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Titmuss, Richard Morris

(1907–73)
A key figure in the study of social policy and social administration in the post-war period. Titmuss was one of a group of British academics (notable others were Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend) who made a major contribution to the study of social needs and welfare provision at a time when the welfare state was expanding. Without formal academic training, his interest in social policy developed while he was working in an insurance office in the 1930s, and he began to write books such as Poverty and Population (1938) and Our Food Problem (1939). These led to his appointment as official historian to the War Cabinet in 1942. There he wrote a volume entitled The Problems of Social Policy which was published in 1950. Also in that year he was appointed as Professor of Social Administration and Head of Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he developed a strong organizational base and research team, whose work typified the reforming social administration approach to social policy. He was also active in political and wider public life, serving on various government committees, and as an adviser to the Labour Party. Subsequent publications included Essays on the Welfare State (1958), Income Distribution and Social Change (1962), and The Gift Relationship (1970). The last of these is a justly celebrated comparative study, offering a convincing critique of the use of the market to secure an adequate supply of blood for hospitals, and a powerful analysis of altruism.
An opponent of means-tested benefits (see SELECTIVE VERSUS UNIVERSAL BENEFITS), Titmuss did not believe that welfare services could solve problems of social inequality, but they could help to ameliorate them.

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Tocqueville, Alexis de

(1805–59)
An early French sociologist who travelled to the United States between 1831 and 1832 to observe democracy at work. His classic work Democracy in America (1835–40) identifies within democracies a tension between equality and liberty which cannot easily be reconciled. Since democracy tends to undermine hierarchy, it discourages the formation of intermediate groupings between the individual and society, and therefore promotes tendencies towards individualism and centralization which, if unchecked, will result in an authoritarian state. This proposition was illustrated in a systematic comparison of France and the United States. The post-revolutionary history of the former country revealed the dangers of attempting to impose equality without first establishing the liberty of self-government: administrative centralism fostered revolutionary despotism. In the case of the United States, the well-entrenched constitutional principle of federalism provided for a multiplicity of intermediate voluntary associations, and a decentralized mode of government to which people had ready access, and in which they could participate. In both cases, however, Tocqueville warned against the ‘tyranny of the majority’, by which ‘every citizen, being assimilated to ail the rest, is lost in the crowd’. His work is thus the starting-point for many debates about the nature of mass society (including, for example, D. Reisman's The Lonely Crowd, 1950, and R. Bellah's Habits of the Heart, 1985).

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Tönnies, Ferdinand

(1855–1936)
A German sociologist and founding member of the German Sociological Association. He is most famous for his distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (association). The distinction refers to the different types of relationships supposedly characteristic of small-scale and large-scale societies respectively. In the former, where the population is largely immobile, status is ascribed and the family and church play important roles in sustaining a clearly defined set of beliefs, emotional and co-operative relationships flourish. The village and small community are therefore characterized by gemeinschaftlich relationships. However, these dissolve into contractual and impersonal relationships as the division of labour grows more complex, so that large-scale organizations and cities express gesellschaftlich social forms. Tönnies lamented the loss of community and what he saw as the increasing dominance of competition and individualism in modern urban society. In this respect he was a critic of utilitarianism, a pessimist, and conservative. The distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft parallels Émile Durkheim's contrast between mechanical and organic solidarity—and shares many of the same weaknesses. As a theory of social change it is simply dualistic to an implausible degree.

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total institution

A term introduced by Erving Goffman in Asylums (1961) to analyse a range of institutions in which whole blocks of people are bureaucratically processed, whilst being physically isolated from the normal round of activities, by being required to sleep, work, and play within the confines of the same institution. Prisons and mental hospitals are Goffman's key examples, but he suggests others including concentration camps, boarding schools, barracks, and monasteries. In his book, Goffman analyses the lives of inmates and custodians within such institutions, and emphasizes the inevitable bureaucratic regimentation and manipulation of residents in the interests of staff. He also identifies tendencies to resistance in the informal inmate culture—or ‘underlife’— of the institution. The term became very popular, during the 1960s, as part of a wider critique of the mechanisms and regimes of social control in advanced industrial societies. See also DECARCERATION.

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total war

A form of warfare, characteristic of modern industrial society, involving the maximum mobilization of social and economic resources of a country for armed conflict, usually entailing the exposure of the civilian population and economy to enemy attack. Distinct therefore from regional or local war, and from nuclear as distinct from conventional conflict (see
, Dialectics of War: An Essay in the Social Theory of Total War and Peace, 1988
).

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totalitarian, totalitarianism

The term appears to have originated with the Italian fascists under Mussolini and with the philosopher Giovanni Gentile. Meaning ‘comprehensive, all-embracing, pervasive, the total state’, the label was applied to a variety of empires and orders of rule, and in general to rightist regimes; that is, until the period of the Cold War, when it gained renewed currency. In one of the more idiosyncratic usages the term was applied to the comprehensive welfarist state of Sweden.
Typically, it combines a syndrome of attributes which can be objectively assessed with a number of emotive connotations which are less open to investigation, as for example when it is equated with terms such as ‘evil empire’. The political scientists Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski were primarily responsible for shifting the meaning away from fascist regimes and toward reformulating it as a paradigm for Stalin's Soviet Union. Their six defining elements were intended to be taken as a mutually supportive organic entity and comprised the following: an elaborate, total ideology, making chiliastic claims, with a promise of a utopian future; a single mass party, typically led by one person; a system of terror, physical or psychic; a monopoly of the means of communication; a monopoly on arms; and central direction and control of the economy through bureaucratic co-ordination (see
Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy, 1963
).
This approach evoked reactions from those who claimed that the Soviet system, both politically and as a social entity, was in fact better understood in terms of interest groups, competing élites, or even in quasi-class terms (using the notion of the nomenklatura as a vehicle for the new class). The use of the term became intertwined with Cold War stances, and in social science the explanatory power of the concept was questioned, not least because of its ahistorical and generalizing nature. It fell into disuse during the 1970s, although the notion of ‘post- totalitarianism’ featured in the debates around the reformability of the Soviet system. In due course, as the Soviet system crumbled, opponents of the concept claimed that the transformation of the USSR under Gorbachev proved that the Soviet system was not totalitarian. Proponents argued that the homo sovieticus could now be identified more clearly and that, in any case, the factors leading to its collapse were exogenous. There is little doubt that the system of real socialism did generate a form of one-party rule, based around a tendency towards a personality cult, with a specific teleological ideology, censorship and terror, statist economy, and a monopoly on violence for which there are few competitors in other types of society even of the most repressive kind. An examination of its legacy will become possible as the affected societies seek to build democracies and create markets on the basis of citizenship rights.

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totemism

An association between human groups or individuals and specific animals or plants which entailed ritualized observances and sometimes eating avoidances. The term was first drawn to the attention of Westerners by J. Long in Voyages and Travels (1791), being derived from the American Indian Algonquin language. The ensuing debates read like a history of anthropological theory.
J. F. McLennan searched for the origins of totemism, asserting it to be a remnant of animism (the belief that natural phenomena, animate and inanimate alike, are endowed with spirits or souls which effect consequences in society). William Robertson Smith argued that people had totems because they expected something beneficial from them. James Frazer argued that totemism existed where ‘savages’ had no knowledge of the role of the human male in conception. Émile Durkheim took totemism as the most elementary form of religious life and suggested that it was the clan worshipping itself. Bronislaw Malinowski offered a matter-of-fact explanation: namely, that in order to survive, people had to have detailed knowledge and control over animals and plants, especially the indispensable species. E. E. Evans-Pritchard questioned functional utility as an explanation. The most useless animals could be the object of ritual attention. The relationship between humans and animals could be seen as metaphorical. Meyer Fortes linked the perceived relations between humans and animals to those between living men and their ancestors. Claude Lévi-Strauss concluded that the differences between animals or plants were used by humans to affirm differences between themselves. Animals were ‘good to think with’ and were just one example of humanity's need to classify. His arguments stimulated further studies of animal symbolism in both non-Western and Western societies.

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tracking, streaming

A widespread practice in American elementary and secondary school systems, tracking attempts to homogenize classrooms by placing students according to a range of criteria which may include pupils' performances on standardized aptitude tests, classroom performance, perceived personal qualities and aspirations, and social class and ethnic origin. Different tracks typically offer different curricula, types of student–teacher relationship, and educational resources. The higher college tracks have been found to be more intellectually demanding, with better resources, and more favourable teacher expectations of pupils. Studies have highlighted the implications of tracking in terms of its negative psychological consequences for those placed in the lower tracks, reinforcement of ethnic and social class segregation, and perpetuation of inequality in society. The practice, issues, and debates have their British equivalent in the system of so-called streaming.

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trade cycle

The well-documented tendency for the level of business activity to fluctuate over a regular short-term period with peaks and troughs occurring around a longer-term upward growth trend. Both short-term and long-term cyclical fluctuations in the economy are a major factor in unemployment and are the subject of bitterly contested explanations in economics. See also BUSINESS CYCLES.

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trade union

Any organization of employees established in order to substitute, or attempt to substitute, collective bargaining for individual bargaining in the labour-market. Unions seek generally to ensure that earnings and conditions are governed by rules applied consistently across their membership—although many unions also have broader social and political aims. Some are also professional associations.
It is customary to classify unions into types, according to the constituency from which they recruit, in the following way: craft (exclusive to skilled workers); occupational (all workers in an occupation regardless of industry); industrial (all workers in an industry regardless of occupation); general (amalgamations of occupational and industrial organization); and enterprise (all workers in a single company or plant). However, in practice, the typology breaks down in the face of the complexities of actual trade unionism. Numerous controversies surround unions. Can they, in the long run, raise labour's income-share in the face of market forces? How far are they an expression of a limited trade-union consciousness as against a common class consciousness oriented towards the pursuit of the interests of the labour movement as a whole? How are they affected by the particular goals, traditions, and political culture of their leaders, and of the rank-and-file? Do they embody an inherent contradiction between their democratic or populist origin and the oligarchy necessary to effective leadership? There are extensive sociological literatures addressing all of these questions. See also CORPORATE SOCIETY; LENIN; MICHELS, ROBERT; PROFESSIONS; UNIONATENESS.

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trade-union consciousness

See LENIN.

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tradition, traditions

A set of social practices which seek to celebrate and inculcate certain behavioural norms and values, implying continuity with a real or imagined past, and usually associated with widely accepted rituals or other forms of symbolic behaviour. Research has established that many traditions which are popularly perceived to be of long standing are in fact relatively recent inventions. Examples include the distinct Highland culture (of kilts, tartan, and bagpipes) of Scotland, a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century creation; and the supposedly indigenous political and economic traditions of many African societies (which were in fact invented by colonial authorities in order to make the necessary connections between local and imperial political, social, and legal systems). Some fascinating case-studies along these lines are reported in
. The Invention of Tradition (1983)
.

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traditional society

The term ‘traditional society’ is usually contrasted with industrial, urbanized, capitalist ‘modern’ society. It incorrectly groups together a wide range of non-modern societies, as varied as contemporary hunting and gathering groups on the one hand, and medieval European states on the other. It is a judgemental term, often implying negative traits associated with being backward, primitive, non-scientific, and emotional, although it is sometimes linked with a mythical golden age of close-knit family values and community. See also GEMEINSCHAFT AND GESELLSCHAFT.

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training, sociology of

Training implies preparation for a specific task or role by ordered instruction. Academic sociologists often contrast training with education. Sociologically, however, training should be conceptually opposed to schooling, leaving discussion of the educational merits of either to others. Training is carried out preparatory to employment, during the course of it, or for domestic work. Although in large industrial firms it is often formalized in separate training workshops, and is increasingly found in schools themselves, such instruction should, in principle, be considered as training so long as the quantity and quality of the curriculum is shaped by commercial and labour-market criteria, rather than by broader pedagogies governing the management of knowledge in schools. The relationship between schooling and training is enormously variable across industrial societies, and is the subject of interesting comparative research, suggesting (for example) that it is an important element in economic growth and the effective use of human capital. Training is also of considerable significance to mainstream sociological concerns. These include debates about skill, the labour process and labour-market, the relationship between the subjective experience of work and class consciousness (or the lack of it), trade unions, and unionateness (all of which are discussed under separate headings elsewhere in this dictionary). The theoretical debates surrounding training, together with an insightful case-study, are discussed in
, Scheming for Youth (1990)
. See also EDUCATION, SOCIOLOGY OF; VOCATIONALISM.

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trait

See PERSONALITY.

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transcarceration

See DECARCERATION.

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transcendentalism

This is the belief that God stands outside and independent of the universe of which He is the Creator. It is normally contrasted with the idea of immanence—the belief that God dwells in the world. The doctrine of immanence is common in pantheism, in which human beings and Nature are thought to be aspects of an all-inclusive divinity. Monotheism is normally transcendentalist. See also RELIGION; THEISM.

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transformative movement

See SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.

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transhumance

The seasonal movement of herd animals, together with the herding population, between regions, as pasture becomes available (often between highlands and lowlands). Transhumant populations, such as the Saami of arctic Scandinavia and the Nuer of Southern Sudan, differ from nomadic peoples in that their movement is regular, annual, and seasonal, rather than migrational.

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transinstitutionalization

A process whereby individuals, supposedly deinstitutionalized as a result of community care policies, in practice end up in different institutions, rather than their own homes. For example, the mentally ill who are discharged from, or no longer admitted to, mental hospitals are frequently found in prisons, boarding-houses, nursing-homes, and homes for the elderly.

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transmitted deprivation

See CYCLE OF DEPRIVATION; DEPRIVATION.

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transsexual

A person born into one sex who crosses over into the other, requiring sex surgery to change the sex organs, and being fully trained into the gender role of that sex. The ideal for many transsexuals is to pass completely and imperceptibly into the other sex and gender. Transsexualism was invented as a clinical phenomenon during the mid-twentieth century, but it is of great sociological interest in the study of gender and deviance. See also TRANSVESTISM.

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transvestism

The process of cross-dressing or wearing clothes appropriate to the opposite sex. Usually applied in the case of men who dress temporarily as women— and not to be confused with either transsexuality or homosexuality. Cross-dressing assumes many forms across different cultures. It was diagnosed as a condition in the West in the late nineteenth century. Transvestism is an important topic in the study of gender presentation, for it often involves men passing (masquerading) as women, and is more generally a significant factor in the sociology of dress (see, for example,
, Transvestites and Transsexuals, 1975
).

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trend, social

See SOCIAL TREND.

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triad

A triad, or three-person group, is often the least stable of small groups, as there is a tendency for triads to divide into a dyad and an isolate. Two weaker members may form a coalition against the stronger third, or the weakest member may gain power by dividing the other two.

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triangulation

The use of at least three, but preferably multiple studies, theoretical perspectives, investigators, and data-sets for research on one issue or theme. In particular, the combined use of micro-level and macro-level studies, using each to complement and verify the other, in order to achieve robust research results. The approach was elaborated most extensively by Norman K. Denzin.

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tribe, tribalism

This term usually denotes a social group bound together by kin and duty and associated with a particular territory. Members of the tribe share the social cohesion associated with the family, together with the sense of political autonomy of a nation. In Ancient Law (1861), Sir Henry Maine identified tribalism with a pre-civilized stage of human society, and the derogatory use of the term to denote emotional, pre-scientific, and irrational behaviour, unfortunately still lingers in the modern usage.

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trickle-down effect

A term associated with neo-classical economics, referring to the alleged tendency for economic growth in an unequal society to benefit the population as a whole, via the eventual downward percolation of wealth to the lowest strata. This thesis is usually deployed against the view that state intervention is necessary in order to eliminate poverty. See also JUSTICE, SOCIAL.

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Treiman scale, Treiman score

See OCCUPATIONAL PRESTIGE.

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Troeltsch, Ernst

(1865–1923)
A German philosopher and theologian, contemporary and close friend of Max Weber, who also made a major contribution to the sociology of religion (see his
The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 1911, and Protestantism and Progress, 1912
). Like Weber—whom he influenced greatly—Troeltsch was interested in the interrelationship of the material and ideal elements in social life. Again, like Weber and in criticism of Karl Marx, he insisted that religious beliefs could act as an independent variable influencing the development of material factors. His ‘church-sect typology’ subsequently proved influential in characterizing religious movements. See also SECT.

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Trotsky, Leon (Lev Davidovich Bronstein)

(1879–1940)
A Bolshevik revolutionary leader, Foreign Minister, and Commissar of War after the 1917 Revolution, who was ousted by Stalin in 1927, exiled in 1929, and murdered in Mexico in 1940. In 1938 he founded the Fourth International in order to oppose Stalin. He is mainly remembered as the theorist of ‘permanent revolution’, and of the USSR as a ‘degenerated workers' state’, in which the bureaucracy functioned as a new ruling class (see ÉLITE).

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trust and distrust

A strong tradition in sociology argues that stable collective life must be based on more than mere calculations of self-interest and that, even in a business situation, an element of trust is essential. Émile Durkheim's celebrated phrase that ‘in a contract not everything is contractual’ states this position most succinctly.
One of the most influential recent discussions of trust (
, The Consequences of Modernity, 1990
) defines it as ‘confidence in the reliability of a person or system’ and provides a useful summary of the chief issues which are raised by this concept. Giddens observes that some properties of trust apply regardless of the type of society under discussion. The human condition is essentially uncertain and threatening, but for day-to-day purposes, the upbringing of most members of society protects them from deep-seated anxiety by the development of ‘basic trust’ in others and in ‘taken-for-granted’ ways of living. Several traditions in psychology and psychoanalysis ascribe bizarre, aggressive, and disturbed behaviour to the failure of parents to transmit a sense of basic trust to their offspring, with the result that both the inner self and the external environment are perceived as unreliable and hostile.
That the onset of modernity fundamentally alters both the sources and the objects of basic trust is suggested by the classical and more recent writings alike. The broad consensus of this work is that modernity undermines the salience of kinship ties, breaks the hold of the local community, and questions the authority of religion and appeals to tradition. Giddens attributes these effects to various ‘disembedding mechanisms’ which detach social relations from local contexts and ‘restructure them across indefinite spans of time and space’. There are two classes of such mechanisms, both of which require a more abstract form of trust than in pre-modern circumstances: namely, symbolic tokens (the prime example being money), and expert systems (where trust is placed in a body of reflexive knowledge). The distancing of social relations in time and space, however, requires a learned ability to maintain trust and simultaneously tolerate absence. Modernity is therefore double-edged, since it threatens our ‘ontological security’, that is, our confidence in the continuity of personal identity and in the social and material environment. It also increases the likelihood of risk and anxiety as well as demanding trust in abstract systems.
Arguably, trust is a neglected and underdeveloped notion in sociological analysis, although there are clear signs of an awakening of interest (see, for example,
, Trust, 1988
). In this newer literature, issues of trust tend to be linked to wider discussions of rational action theory (see EXCHANGE THEORY) and game theory. To date, however, the main usage of the concept in a substantive research context has been in the comparative sociology of labour relations and management. For example, Alan Fox (Beyond Contract, 1974) proposed a distinction between labour-management systems with a low-trust and a high-trust ‘dynamic’ (ethos and methods of control), arguing that it could be applied to differences in both individual organizations and national bargaining structures. The amount of discretion allowed to the worker is related to remuneration and working conditions, job security, supervisory style, policy towards collective bargaining, and so on. Whereas British and American management styles historically have tended to reflect a low-trust dynamic, Germany and Japan are cited as examples of high-trust industrial cultures. It is important to note, however, that high-trust methods may be adopted by industrial management for calculative reasons, and may in the longer term be perceived by the workforce as manipulation, or the attempt to manufacture consent.
Fox's dichotomy has been rediscovered (and relabelled) by several later authors. For example, Andrew Friedman (Industry and Labour, 1977) contrasts managerial strategies of ‘direct control’ (close supervision, minimal worker responsibility, use of coercive threats), with those of ‘responsible autonomy’ (encouraging workers to identify with the goals of the enterprise, and to police their own efforts, by granting them authority, status, and responsibility). However, regardless of the terminology in which the contrast has been presented, it is vulnerable to the criticism that patterns of managerial control in the real world are more complex, and cannot be reduced to any dualist view of strategy.

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Turner, Victor

(1920–83)
A British social anthropologist who elaborated the study of rituals and symbolism. His main fieldwork was among the Ndembu in Africa, where he made detailed interpretations of colour symbols, rites of passage, and healing ceremonies, as well as a micro-study of village politics (see
Schism and Continuity in an African Society, 1957, and The Forest of Symbols, 1967
). Developing Arnold van Gennep's idea of limen or threshold, he explored the concept of liminality in pilgrimage and Western society, in The Ritual Process (1969).

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Twenty Statements Test

A measure of self-attitudes developed from the work of George Herbert Mead by Manford Kuhn at the University of Iowa. Respondents are invited to give twenty answers to the question ‘Who am I?’. The replies are said to reveal the social determinants of the self.

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two-career marriage

See DUAL-CAREER MARRIAGE.

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Tylor, Sir Edward Burnett

(1832–1917)
An English Victorian anthropologist who was the first to teach social anthropology under its name at Oxford, beginning in 1884. He is best known for formulating the first well known definition of culture as ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’.
In Primitive Culture (1871), Tylor contributed to the development of the tools of comparative religion, especially with his theory of animism (see TOTEMISM), which he saw as a primordial form of primitive religion. Tylor was a proponent of evolutionary theory, deeming some aspects of culture to be functionless survivals from the past, and seeing other elements as survival strategies. One of his famous statements on this subject was that, in the history of societal evolution, the choice facing many peoples was ‘to marry out or die out’. In this way, by creating alliances through intermarriage, potentially threatening groups could be co-opted.
Tylor was ground-breaking in his use of social arithmetic—the use of statistics in the analysis of societies. Using such methods, he demonstrated convincingly that the avoidance of in-laws by daughters or sons was based upon choice of residence at marriage. If residence is uxorilocal, the son would be expected to avoid his in-laws, but if residence is virilocal, the daughter is more likely to practise such behaviour. On the basis of this evidence, Tylor proceeded to explain other customs, including the presence of certain kinship terms. This style of analysis, which interwove distinct cultural practices, contributed to the development of functionalism, which later became the first major paradigm of modern British social anthropology.

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types of compliance

See COMPLIANCE.

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types of involvement

See COMPLIANCE.

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typification

See IDEAL TYPE; PHENOMENOLOGY.

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typology

See TAXONOMY.

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U

unconditioned or unconditional response

See CONDITIONING.

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unconditioned or unconditional stimulus

See CONDITIONING.

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unconscious

See PSYCHOANALYSIS.

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underclass

The extensive and acrimonious sociological debate about the underclass stems from a predominantly American literature which addresses two phenomena that are argued to be related: namely, high levels of youth unemployment, and an increasing proportion of single-parent households. Concern with single parenthood stems from the fact that this is the largest category of welfare dependence by virtue of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The Black population is disproportionately affected by both joblessness and single parenthood.
The term itself suggests a group which is in some sense outside the mainstream of society—but there is much disagreement about the nature and source of their exclusion. One interpretation, advanced most strongly by
(Losing Ground, 1984
), is that welfare dependency has encouraged the break-up of the nuclear family household, and socialization into a counter-culture which devalues work and encourages dependency and criminality. An alternative structural view, advanced by William Julius Wilson and others, emphasizes the failure of the economy to provide secure employment to meet demand, and the consequent destabilization of the male-breadwinner role. The former sees the source of exclusion to lie in the attitudes and behaviour of the underclass population; the latter situates it in the structured inequality which disadvantages particular groups in society.
The precise nature of this structural disadvantage is itself a matter of intense dispute. One central disagreement is about whether the problems of the disadvantaged Black population lie in their colour or their class position. Early in his work, Wilson makes reference to ‘a vast underclass of black proletarians—that massive population at the very bottom of the social class ladder, plagued by poor education and low-paying, unstable jobs’ (see
The Declining Significance of Race, 1978
). This conceptualizes the underclass as a Black phenomenon, defined in terms of vulnerability in the labour-market, and without reference to behavioural or moral factors. However, in a later study (The Truly Disadvantaged, 1987), Wilson writes of ‘individuals who lack training and skills and either experience long-term unemployment or are not members of the labour force, individuals who are engaged in street crime and other forms of aberrant behaviour, and families that experience long term spells of poverty and/or welfare dependency’. The emphasis has here shifted slightly: there is no explicit reference to ‘race’; unstable unemployment has become absence of employment; and the definition has expanded to include criminality and welfare dependence (thus incorporating a cultural dimension into Wilson's essentially structural approach).
Though discussion about the nature and extent of underclass membership has been most fully developed in the USA, the ideas which underpin it are by no means unfamiliar in Britain, not just in the upsurge of concern about (welfare) ‘dependency culture’ in the 1980s, but through studies dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, and perhaps most notably the literature on so-called cycles of deprivation. Other work in the 1970s focused on the disadvantage of inner-city Blacks in Britain, with (for example) John Rex and Sally Tomlinson arguing that systematic disadvantage in both employment and housing leads to a neighbourhood activity which is an expression of collective class awareness, such that ‘there is some tendency for the black community to operate as a separate class or an underclass in British society’ (Colonial Immigrants in a British City, 1979).
Charles Murray has played a considerable role in placing the concept of the underclass back on the political as well as the sociological agenda, but often in a highly controversial manner. In recent work he has argued that ‘the difference between the United States and Britain was that the United States reached the future first’. Using metaphors of ‘plague’ and ‘disease’, he suggests that an underclass defined by illegitimacy, violent crime, and drop-out from the labour force is growing, and will continue to do so because there is a generation of children being brought up to live in the same way (The Emerging British Underclass, 1990). This conclusion would seem to be undermined by the research emanating from the earlier debate about cycles of deprivation.
Unemployment has always posed a problem for stratification studies based on occupational ranking, and the notion of an underclass has been adopted by some class analysts, in an attempt to resolve this difficulty.
(‘How Many Classes are There in Contemporary British Society?’, Sociology, 1991)
argues that below the working classes of skilled and unskilled manual workers there is a distinct underclass, a term which ‘stands not for a group or category of workers systematically disadvantaged within the labour-market but for those members of British society whose roles place them more or less permanently at the economic level where benefits are paid by the state to those unable to participate in the labour-market at all … They are typically the long-term unemployed’. However, this definition is of questionable value, for strictly speaking it applies not to the unemployed, who are at least notionally still participant in the labour-market (albeit unsuccessfully), but rather to those more conclusively outside: namely, the aged, the long-term sick, and the severely disabled.
Another British sociologist, Anthony Giddens (The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies, 1973), defines the underclass as composed of people who are concentrated in the lowest-paid occupations, and are semi-employed or chronically unemployed, ‘as a result of a “disqualifying” market capacity of a primarily cultural kind’. Duncan Gallie has explored the potential for cultural cohesion and collective self-awareness as defining characteristics of the underclass, and concluded that the non-standard employment patterns and long-term unemployment of the 1980s may have provided a structural basis for a distinctive underclass, but not for its cultural underpinning (see
‘Employment, Unemployment and Social Stratification’, in his Employment in Britain, 1988
). Most of the recent American and British literature is discussed extensively in a debate about the evidence for and against the existence of a separate underclass, published in the
British Journal of Sociology (1996)
, in which the protagonists seem to agree only about the fact that the underclass is a particularly elusive and contested sociological subject.
The final word on the concept should perhaps therefore be left to
(‘Deconstructing the Underclass’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 1990)
, who concludes that ‘underclass is a quite distinctive synthesizing term that lumps together a variety of highly diverse people’. It probably has more value as political rhetoric than as a meaningful sociological concept.

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under-consumption, theories of

The notion of under-consumption posits a persistent shortfall in the demand for consumption goods which creates a tendency towards overproduction and stagnation in capitalist economies. It results from the conflict between capitalists' desire to restrain the tendency of real wages to rise and their need to realize surplus value through the sale of commodities. The term has been linked to theories of imperialism and underdevelopment, in that markets in the Third World are sometimes targeted to absorb the excess commodities produced in the First.

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under-development

A term associated with dependency theory and used to describe the condition of poverty and economic stagnation characteristic of many Third World societies. It implies that these societies are not simply suffering from lack of development, but also that they have not achieved the expected levels of development which would have occurred, had they not been exploited by the advanced capitalist states.

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under-employment

Suboptimal utilization of labour, also termed subemployment. Visible under-employment involves working fewer hours than a person normally works, or prefers to work. Invisible under-employment involves under-utilization of a person's skills, qualifications, or experience in a job that is lower grade than their usual job, or involves a skills mismatch, and may lead to low productivity and low income. The majority of part-time jobs are taken voluntarily in preference to full-time jobs, and so do not constitute visible under-employment. However, part-time jobs often involve invisible under-employment, for example when they are taken by women who revert to less skilled work on their return to the labour-market after an absence for child-rearing.

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understanding

See ACTION THEORY; MEANING; NEO-KANTIANISM.

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under-urbanization

See URBANIZATION.

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unemployment

The state of being unable to sell one's labour-power in the labour-market despite being willing to do so. In practice, unemployment is difficult to identify and measure, because willingness to be employed is partly affected by the extent and nature of demand for one's services. As a result, official definitions imposed by government employment agencies are affected by political theories about the causes of being unwilling or unable to be employed, on the one hand; and, on the other, by the rules allowing registration as out of work and eligible for such welfare benefits as may be on offer.
Unemployment was used by C. Wright Mills as a graphic illustration of the distinction between private troubles and public issues which he considered basic to sociology. Research on the unemployed has repeatedly shown that unemployment is rarely explicable simply as a private or individual problem of insufficient motivation and aptitude. It is, rather, a public issue caused by the failure of market processes.
Economists distinguish various causes of unemployment, the chief two of which are the structural decline of industry in a region or nation, and cyclical variations in economic activity. The former generates shifts in the occupational structure which render particular skills obsolete, as for example might follow technological innovation, changes in the market for goods and services, or the decision by companies to close or relocate their operations. The latter occurs when firms lay off workers (perhaps temporarily) during periods of economic recession. Other forms of unemployment include frictional unemployment (which is due to workers voluntarily switching jobs) and seasonal unemployment (when a change in the seasons reduces demand for particular types of workers, for example those involved in agriculture, or in the recreation and leisure industries).
Unemployment is a major factor in poverty, especially where the unemployed experience spells of joblessness alternating with so-called sub-employment, that is, low paid and uncongenial work with a high degree of insecurity of tenure. The unemployed must also endure the stigma of being unable to conform to the prevailing work ethic of Western societies—despite their own typically strong desire to find work.
There is an enormous sociological literature on the process of becoming unemployed and its social and individual consequences. A good place to start is Marie Jahoda's Employment and Unemployment (1982). An excellent series of empirical studies—examining the relationships between unemployment and (among other things) attitudes to work, household work strategies, psychological health, marital dissolution, welfare, deprivation, and involvement in social networks–is reported in
, Social Change and the Experience of Unemployment (1993
). See also UNDER-EMPLOYMENT.

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uneven development

A term used within later Marxist theory to denote the process by which capitalism transforms the world as a whole but does so in different ways, developing the productive and social forces in some areas, but (as part of the same process) restricting or distorting growth in others. It may be contrasted with the earlier Marxist belief in capitalism as producing a uniform world in its own image.

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unfocused interaction

See FOCUSED INTERACTION.

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unidimensional scaling

See GUTTMAN SCALE; LIKERT SCALE; MEASUREMENT.

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unilineal descent

See DESCENT GROUPS.

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unintended or unanticipated consequences

It is an old saying that things do not always turn out as we expect. The theme of the unintended consequences of action therefore has an understandably long pedigree in the social sciences. Many sociological observers have distinguished between the stated purpose or intent of social actions, and their generally unrecognized, but objective functional consequences. William Isaac Thomas noted how the co-operative institutions of Polish peasants served not just their specific objectives but also functioned to forge cohesion. More recently, Lewis Coser has argued that conflicts are not always destructive for an organization, but may, by their adaptive or safety-valve function, play a part in maintaining organizational stability (see
The Functions of Social Conflict, 1965
).
The classic sociological example of unanticipated consequences is found in Max Weber's thesis about the connection between the protestant ethic and the spirit of modern capitalism. The Calvinist doctrines of predestination and this-worldly asceticism had the unintended consequence of creating a climate suitable for the growth of capitalism by encouraging the accumulation of capital as a duty or end in itself. More recent illustrations are given by Jon Elster in Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (1989). One example deals with the way in which opinion polls can affect election outcomes. The publication of pre-election polls may actually alter the outcome of the election, either because they cause people to switch and support the leading candidate, or because people cast a sympathy vote for the apparent underdog. Of course, if everyone opted for the underdog, this would have the strange result of awarding victory to the less popular candidate. A somewhat similar example of the unintended is provided by the Hawthorne Studies, where the presence of the researchers inadvertently changed the behaviour of the workers they were studying, a phenomenon since designated the ‘Hawthorne effect’.
According to Robert Merton (Social Theory and Social Structure, 1949) the unintended consequences of actions are of three types: those which are functional for a designated system and therefore comprise latent functions; those which are dysfunctional for a designated system and are latently dysfunctional; and those which are irrelevant to the system since they have no functional consequences. As soon as these types are applied to a specific situation there are problems. Obvious questions include ‘Dysfunctional for whom?’ and ‘Performing a latent function for what?’ Moreover, it makes no sense to use unanticipated consequences to explain the function, because the consequences were not known at the time. An unanticipated consequence could, however, influence future actions. Think of a child throwing a tantrum in order to get an ice-cream. If the tantrum has the unintended consequence of attracting adult attention, then attention-seeking rather than ice-cream may motivate future tantrums.
Unanticipated consequences are important at the micro-level as social actors are often mistaken in their interpretation of the situation and can, by their action, bring unanticipated results. A special case of this is the self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the pronouncement of an erroneous belief may evoke behaviour that (apparently) vindicates that belief, thus making the prophecy come true. The labelling theory of deviance postulates precisely such a mechanism. Thus, to quote the early formulation by Frank Tannenbaum in Crime and the Community (1938), ‘the very process of making the criminal is a process of tagging, defining, identifying, segregating, describing, emphasizing, making conscious and self conscious; it becomes a way of stimulating, suggesting, emphasizing the very traits that are complained of …’ Unanticipated consequences are also important at the macro-level because so many events occur unintentionally. As Adam Ferguson observed, ‘History is the result of human action, not of human design.’ See also SELECTIVE VERSUS UNIVERSAL BENEFITS.

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unionateness

The nature and level of trade-union militancy and willingness to use strikes or other forms of industrial conflict to pursue the interests of labour. Also, the qualitative aspect of trade-union strength or weakness, as against the quantitative completeness (or so-called density) with which a union recruits from its potential constituency.

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unit act

See SYSTEMS THEORY.

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unit of analysis

See UNIT OF ENQUIRY.

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unit of enquiry

This is the unit—for example individual, household, corporation, or whatever—about which information is required in a research project. Students often confuse the unit of enquiry (sometimes also called the unit of analysis) with the sampling unit. The two need not be the same for any particular study. Thus, one may sample households, and then collect information (from one or more of its members) about all individual residents. Here, the sampling unit is the household, and the unit of enquiry is the household member.

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univariate analysis

See MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS.

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universal benefits

See SELECTIVE VERSUS UNIVERSAL BENEFITS.

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unobtrusive measures

Techniques for collecting data without the knowledge of respondents. Two types—the covert and the indirect—may be identified. The former include, for example, covert participant observation, undisclosed notetaking, or use of one-way mirrors. The latter involves the use of personal documents and other records which might offer indirect measures of variables such that the need for interaction between the investigator and his or her subjects is obviated. (For example, student satisfaction with new educational practices might be assessed by inspecting records of attendance at classes and rates of switching between course, rather than direct interview or questionnaire.) The justification of such methods is that, because respondents are unaware of their status as research subjects, their activities are unaffected by certain potential biases in the research situation itself—such as the desire to please the investigator. Although some of these techniques (most notably covert observation) are now frowned upon by professional sociological associations as being ethically suspect, the imaginative use of existing documentary sources for novel research purposes is occasionally very effective, although one is normally working ‘against the grain’ of the data since they have usually been collected for purposes other than those embodied in the research. See also INTERVIEW BIAS; RESEARCH ETHICS.

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unstructured interview

See INTERVIEW.

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upper class

Conventionally the upper class is often thought of as equivalent to the ‘aristocracy’: that is, the (often hereditary) noble class, comprising peers (in medieval England the dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons) and landed magnates (or ‘gentlemen’). However, while the aristocracy is an important symbolic element of the upper class, it does not completely account for its membership. We come closer to an understanding of what the upper class is if we equate it with Karl Marx's bourgeoisie or capitalist class. That is, the upper class is the property-owning class, those who live from earnings made from the ownership, control, and exploitation of property such as land, capital, large businesses, or share holdings. Proportionally, therefore, this is much the smallest class, perhaps as little as 1 per cent of the population of most advanced capitalist societies.
However, the power which the ownership of property confers is out of all proportion to the size of the upper class. Many members of this class effectively control large companies, either directly via their positions within these organizations, or more subtly through their occupation of key positions in the financial sector. Some of these individuals also have leading positions in politics and other spheres of public and cultural life. There are also important status distinctions within the upper class, between those who have ‘old money’, and the nouveaux riches. The highest status tends to be conferred on the landed upper classes, the true aristocracy, as represented by individuals such as the Duke of Westminster (the wealthiest individual in the UK after the Queen). Often they operate exclusionary strategies against the nouveaux riches, for example, by restricting the membership of very exclusive aristocratic clubs. ‘New money’ confers less status—though by no means less power. Hence, it is no accident that the nouveaux riches have long sought to acquire a more aristocratic status via inclusionary strategies, such as the purchase of landed estates, intermarriage with the aristocracy for themselves or their children, and the education of their children in élite schools.
Popular conceptions of the upper class correspond more with old money than with new. In their survey of social class in Britain in 1984 (Social Class in Modern Britain), Gordon Marshall and his colleagues discovered that two-thirds of their sample referred to the upper class in terms of status factors, for example rank or title; two-fifths of the sample mentioned income; and one-third referred to occupation. Only one-quarter of the sample mentioned property ownership as the defining characteristic of the upper class—although sociologically this is its key feature. The best sociological work on the upper class is to be found in the voluminous writings of John Scott (see, for example,
The Upper Class, 1982
). On the link between ownership and control of capital, on the one hand, and the development of modern corporate capitalism on the other, see
, The Large Corporation and Contemporary Classes (1989
). See also CLOSURE.

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urban agglomeration

See CONURBATION.

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urban ecology

Urban ecology, pioneered by Chicago sociologists in the 1920s, was central to the development of human ecology. Indeed the two terms are often used interchangeably.
Urban ecology applies principles derived from biological science to the explanation of spatial distribution in urban populations. This is said to result from ‘biotic’ competition for territorial advantage by human groups, each constituted by social basis, for example, common class position or ethnicity. Groups occupy distinctive ‘natural areas’ or neighbourhoods. The concentric zone model proposed by Ernest Burgess is an ecological representation of this urban system. The ecological concepts of invasion, domination, and succession describe the stages of change occurring as groups relocate due to competitive pressures. However, unrestrained biotic competition makes social order impossible, so a second level of social organization (‘culture’) overlays and limits territorial competition. This involves communication, consensus, and co-operation, seen in both the natural areas occupied by socially homogeneous groups, and in city-wide mechanisms of integration, such as mass culture, the media, and urban politics.
Few sociologists now accept the biologically derived assumptions underlying urban ecology. However, the urban ecologists' use of Chicago as a research laboratory contributed greatly to the development of empirically grounded sociology and its research methods, influencing directly the development of urban sociology, community studies, cultural sociology, the study of deviance and illness, social and religious movements, the family and race relations, and rural sociology. The recollections by Helen MacGill Hughes of her training in Chicago shed an interesting light on the (at times naïve) methodology of urban ecology (see
‘On Becoming a Sociologist’, Journal of the History of Sociology, 1980
).

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urban managerialism

A Weberian-influenced theory of urban processes proposed by R. E. Pahl and others. Urban managers (local government officials and finance officers, for example), controlling access to scarce resources such as housing and education, largely determine the socio-spatial distribution of the population. The theory placed issues of power, conflict, and the role of market and state institutions at the centre of urban sociology.

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urban social movements

Organizations formed by residents to protest about, or make demands for changes in, the urban environment and urban services. The term was originally applied narrowly by Manuel Castells to those urban movements which contributed to wider revolutionary social change. See also SOCIAL MOVEMENTS.

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urban sociology

Sociological concern with urbanization began with sociology itself, for it was the rapidly growing nineteenth-century industrial cities that first supported those social relationships and structures which inspired the new discipline. Most early sociologists shared the anti-urban bias of much Victorian thought and writing—and a correspondingly romanticized view of rural life. A key concern was the apparent breakdown of community and social control consequent upon urbanization.
Georg Simmel (The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903) incorporated these concerns in a brilliant, impressionistic discussion of urban life-styles and personality, viewing the social organization and culture which typified urban areas as the consequence of large population aggregates, thus linking causally the physical characteristics of cities with the social characteristics of their inhabitants. Simmel's analysis and ideas, derived from Darwinian ecology, shaped the Chicago School of urban sociology—the dominant paradigm from the 1920s to the 1950s. The most famous summation of this paradigm occurs in an article (
‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, American Journal of Sociology, 1938
) in which Louis Wirth derives ideal-typical social characteristics of urban life (urbanism) from three apparently universal features of cities—large size, high density, and social heterogeneity.
Chicago urban sociology stimulated important empirical research. However, by the 1960s the paradigm had disintegrated and the sub-discipline was a sociological backwater. Empirically, the work of researchers such as Herbert Gans (in the United States) and R. E. Pahl (in Britain) disproves any necessary connection between urban location (hence Wirth's universal features of cities), and particular life-styles. Theoretically, this approach involves a form of naturalism, reifying physical characteristics of cities, falsely identifying these as the causes not the consequences of social processes, and erroneously concluding that social patterns occurring in cities are caused by cities.
This suggests that to derive typical or characteristic patterns of social life from supposedly universal physical or demographic features of cities is to commit not just an empirical but also an epistemological error. Nevertheless, there have been several more recent attempts to provide a new unifying theoretical paradigm for urban sociology, including neo-Weberian theories of housing classes and urban managerialism; so-called non-spatial urban sociology focusing on consumption-sector cleavages; and neo-Marxist perspectives centring on collective consumption.
The last of these defined the new urban sociology of the 1970s. Its most important text was Manuel Castells's The Urban Question (1977). Drawing on the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas, Castells developed an elaborate account of the so-called structures and practices of capitalist urbanization, suggesting that modern (monopoly) capitalism was increasingly dependent on state-supplied urban goods and services (or ‘collective consumption’) to ensure adequate reproduction of its labour-force. This led to rising conflict between the state and urban social movements. The latter, in alliance with workplace struggles, might bring about revolutionary change in capitalist societies as a whole.

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The Urban Question

offered a seemingly powerful analysis of capitalist urbanization. It certainly inspired much new work in urban social theory and research. However, this tended to show that key aspects of Castells's formulation were theoretically and empirically wanting, notably his definition of cities as ‘spaces for collective consumption’, the importance given to urban social movements, and his structural-Marxist conception of the relatively autonomous state. Subsequently, indeed, in The City and the Grassroots (1983), Castells abandoned Marxist theory, and adopted a less dramatic view of the potential effects of urban social movements. In later work (The Informational City, 1989) he argues that the revolution in information technology marks a major new phase in capitalist production and consequential patterns of urban and regional development.
None of these more recent approaches has attained the degree of intellectual dominance formerly exercised by the Chicago School (although the influence of neo-Marxism is still substantial). However, they have resulted in extensive research (frequently of an interdisciplinary nature) on topics as diverse as the political economy of urban and regional development, urban politics, and social movements, and the relationship between space and the social structure (see
, Social Problems and the City, 1989
). Much of this literature has informed more general sociological concerns, such as social stratification, collective social action, and the distribution of power. While the search for a theoretically delimited urban sociology has failed, urban social research contributes substantially to sociology, and indeed other social sciences. See also BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT DISTRICTS; COMMUNITY STUDIES; PARK, ROBERT; SUBURBANISM; URBAN ECOLOGY.

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urbanism

Urbanism refers to patterns of social life thought typical of urban populations. These include a highly specialized division of labour, growth of instrumentalism (see WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF) in social relationships, weakening of kin relationships, growth of voluntary associations, normative pluralism, secularization, increase in social conflict, and growing importance of the mass media. In a key paper published in 1938 (
‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, American journal of Sociology
) Louis Wirth sought to ground these patterns in three general characteristics of cities—size, density, and social heterogeneity. However, later research showed that attempts to link social and cultural characteristics deterministically with physical locations are misconceived. See also URBAN SOCIOLOGY.

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urbanization

Narrowly defined, urbanization refers to city formation. The earliest cities date from about the fourth millennium BCE. In the Middle Ages the expansion of long-distance trade and mercantile capitalism stimulated the growth of major European cities. There is significant controversy about the relationship between urbanization, feudal decline, and the growth of capitalism.
Most sociological attention has focused on the large-scale urbanization accompanying industrialization and the emergence of modern societies. Although there is no invariant relationship between levels of economic development and urbanization, the term ‘under-urbanization’ is often used to describe the situation in (former) state socialist countries, where the growth of industrial agglomerations is not matched by a sufficient expansion of housing and urban infrastructure for the workforce. Similarly, the term ‘over-urbanization’ is applied to Third World cities which have large populations that cannot be absorbed into the formal economy. As the social changes accompanying industrialization diffuse throughout national territories the sociological significance of urbanization diminishes. In such urbanized societies the term may carry a wider meaning, signifying possession of an advanced industrial economy, and modernized social structure. See also URBANISM.

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use value

See COMMODIFICATION.

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utilitarianism

The name given by John Stuart Mill to a leading tradition of economic liberalism in political and moral philosophy and social theory. As a political and moral philosophy, utilitarianism is epitomized by a famous slogan coined by Jeremy Bentham, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. The most sophisticated version is to be found in the work of the philosopher David Hume, but Hume's arguments equating goodness and utility are rejected by Adam Smith in his moral writings, even though Smith is often misleadingly cast as a utilitarian in modern sociological literature. Utilitarianism flourished in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Britain, but European and American thinkers propounded similar notions. Bentham and his followers argued that the respective ‘happinesses’ of each individual are additive (the so-called utilitarian calculus of pleasure and pain) and that the test of the rightness of individual or social action is to maximize the sum of individual utility.
Utilitarians often erroneously justified both their moral doctrines and their advocacy of laissez-faire politics by means of an embryonic rational exchange theory of society, which goes back at least as far as the writings of Thomas Hobbes, and which is sometimes known as egoistic hedonism. It asserts that individual action is always the product of the pursuit of (implicitly selfish or self-referencing) pleasure and avoidance of pain. Later utilitarians include Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill himself, whose father James Mill had been a leading representative of the school in its heyday. John Stuart Mill struggled to retrieve some of the ambiguities and banalities to which the moral and social theory led, and because of his writings both on method and on substantive issues, he is sometimes considered as an early sociologist. However, most of the acknowledged founders of sociology were critical of the tradition of liberal political economy within which utilitarianism emerged, and which it helped to develop. As a result the label utilitarian is often somewhat indiscriminately applied (for example by Talcott Parsons in The Structure of Social Action) to the whole tradition of economistic methods and theories in social science.

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utility

In economic theory, utility is defined as the benefit or satisfaction which is derived from the consumption of a commodity. In eighteenth-century moral philosophy, it meant ‘the greatest happiness principle’: actions are right if they tend to promote happiness. Early sociologists, for example Émile Durkheim, criticized the utility principle, because it provided an inadequate explanation of social order.

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utopia, utopianism

A utopia is an imaginative account of a perfect society or ideal commonwealth. The term, which is often used derogatively to mean unrealistic, is derived from Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), but in sociology it is usually associated with the sociology of knowledge of Karl Mannheim. In Ideology and Utopia (1929), Mannheim claimed that subordinate groups and classes are attracted to utopian beliefs which emphasize the possibilities of change and transformation, whereas dominant social classes typically adopt an ideological outlook which emphasizes stability and continuity. For Mannheim, the radical views of the Anabaptist sects were examples of utopianism. However, Mannheim's interest in utopianism also had a philosophical and religious dimension: it is the capacity for utopianism which ultimately defines human nature, that is, the capacity to imagine alternative futures.
Mannheim's perception of the relationship between utopianism and human ontology was also shared by the Marxist social philosopher Ernst Bloch, whose The Principle of Hope (1959) examined the role of dreaming, fairy stories, utopian philosophies, and fantasies in human societies. For Bloch, utopianism was an anticipatory consciousness which is ubiquitous. Utopias have two dimensions, material and subjective, which he expressed in terms of the Not-Yet-Become and the Not-Yet-Conscious. Bloch's ideas were a protest against the failures of organized communism in Eastern Europe.
The utopian strands in Karl Marx's theory of communism are retained in even the most revisionist of contemporary neo-Marxisms. The work of André Gorz is typical in this respect. Born in Austria, Gorz became one of the leading social and political theorists of the French New Left, and for a time edited Les Temps modernes. He has written numerous short, popular articles, and a series of influential books including Ecology as Politics (1980), Farewell to the Working Class (1982), Paths to Paradise (1985), and Critique of Economic Reason (1989). Though strongly influenced by Marxist ideas, and especially by Sartre, Gorz has continually attempted to revise this heritage in the light of his own analyses of contemporary social changes, and his distinctive vision of a possible utopian future. His earlier work proposed a strategy for the labour movement based on an alliance between the declining ‘traditional’ working class and a growing ‘new’ working class. The meaninglessness and alienation of work in advanced capitalism were conditions shared by these different groups. Subsequently, however, Gorz ceased to assign to the working class in any form the revolutionary role expected by classical Marxism. Technological change in advanced capitalist societies is bringing about fundamental changes in the social structure: ‘worker-producers’ are increasingly outnumbered by a heterogeneous population in insecure, part-time, or temporary work, in other words a growing ‘post-industrial neo-proletariat’. At the same time, the obsession with economic growth and the commitment to the work ethic are increasingly destructive of both nature and of personal life in society. New social movements, especially ecological politics, point the way to a future in which class and domination are ended. A basic income will be provided independently of work. Technology will be employed to reduce to a minimum that element of unrewarding labour which remains necessary for the meeting of need. Meanwhile, such necessary labour as is required will be shared equally among the population. The progressive reduction in the working week made possible by these arrangements will free people for a creative, autonomous, and convivial use of their time and energies.
Gorz's work has been subjected to searching criticism in Boris Frankel's The Post-Industrial Utopians (1987). For a more general treatment of the topic see
, The Concept of Utopia (1990
). See also COMMUNE; MESSIANIC MOVEMENT.

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V

validity

The property of being genuine, a true reflection of attitudes, behaviour, or characteristics. A measure (such as a question, series of questions, or test) is considered valid if it is thought to measure the concept or property which it claims to measure. For example, it might be contested whether the answers to a question about job satisfaction are a valid indicator of alienation from modern society; the holding of paid employment on the part of a woman is a valid indicator of a feminist consciousness; or the divorce-rate in the United States is a valid indicator of the extent of social stress in that society. The validity of an attitude scale, or of the answers obtained by a question in an interview, is ultimately a matter for judgement, but techniques have been developed to supplement a researcher's own views, which may not be representative.
Rules of thumb have been developed which rule out certain types of question completely. For example, it is generally held to be pointless enquiring long after the event about the attitudes and reasons linked to a decision or choice made many years ago, on the grounds that views tend to be reconstructed with the benefit of hindsight. Arguments of validity rule out proxy interviews for anything except the most basic factual data, such as someone's occupation, if even that. Logical validation, checking for ‘face validity’ in theoretical or commonsense terms, continues to be the most important tool, which is strengthened by employing as wide a range of people as possible to make the checks. This can be extended into the use of panels of experts, judges or juries who are in fact ordinary people who have close familiarity with the topic in question, and can judge whether questions and classifications of replies cover all the situations that arise, and are appropriately worded. Another approach is to present the research instrument to groups of people who are known to have particular views or experience, and see whether it differentiates adequately between the groups. However, the ultimate test is whether the research tools, and the results obtained, are accepted by other scholars as having validity. It is rare for researchers to submit their work to the scrutiny of the research subjects themselves, though this sometimes happens in policy research. Population Censuses are unique in having post-enumeration surveys after each census to check data validity and general quality.
There are many different definitions of validity in the available literature. It is clear that different authors use the terminology in different ways. Part of the problem is that most of the relevant discussion takes place among psychologists, who also provide many of the examples and established procedures for testing for validity, but it is not clear that these always translate easily into sociological contexts.
One elementary and useful distinction sometimes made is that between criterion and construct validity. The former refers to the closeness of fit between a measure (let us say a concept) and the reality that it is supposed to reflect. For example, the Goldthorpe class scheme is intended as and claims to be a measure of ‘conditions and relations of employment’, in particular the material and other benefits of the ‘service relationship’ as against that of the ‘labour contract’. However, for practical reasons its operationization is effected via data about each individual's occupational title (teacher, nurse, or whatever) on the one hand, and employment status on the other (manager, employee, self-employed, and so on). One could therefore investigate the criterion validity of the Goldthorpe scheme by drawing a sample of individuals from within each of the social classes represented in the classification, and then collect independent data relating to the actual conditions and relations of employment of these respondents, for example evidence about their location on an established career ladder and incremental salary scale, enjoyment of enhanced pension rights, and of a certain autonomy in how they use their time at work. In other words, one would examine the degree to which the Goldthorpe classes measure those aspects of employment that they are said to measure, using independent criteria of the concept under investigation.
Construct validation, on the other hand, involves an assessment of whether or not a particular measure (a concept or whatever) relates to other variables in ways that would be predicted by the theory behind the concept. For example, in the case of Goldthorpe (or any other) social classes, one would expect—if this measurement of class was valid—that the social classes so identified would be readily differentiated in terms of (say) voting behaviour, levels of educational attainment, and inequalities in health (or literal ‘life-chances’). These are the sorts of things that, from our understanding of the theory of social class, we anticipate will be associated with the class location of individuals. For this reason construct validity is sometimes also referred to as ‘predictive validity’—rather misleadingly, perhaps, since one is here simply looking for correlations, rather than offering predictions about how weak or strong these correlations will be in actuality. Moreover, the term ‘construct validation’ is itself sometimes applied to the whole validation process, including those aspects earlier discussed under the label of criterion validity.
Arguably, all definitions and concepts of validity are to some extent circular, in the sense that one is attempting to confirm that a sociological construct (a classification, concept, or variable) actually measures what it claims to measure, by comparing that construct with something else (other indicators) that one hopes and assumes are independent of the original measurement. A useful discussion of the many complexities raised by this troublesome notion will be found in
, Measurement in the Social Sciences (1980)
. For elaboration of the example provided above, and an illustration of how tests for validity are conducted in practice, see
, ‘Identifying Class Structure: A Latent Class Analysis of the Criterion-Related and Construct Validity of the Goldthorpe Class Scheme’, European Sociological Review (1998)
. See also RELIABILITY; VARIABLE.

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value

A word with several quite different meanings: in statistical analysis of quantitative data-sets, the value is the score or figure observed on a particular variable for a particular case, or in specific circumstances, that is, it is a quantified amount. In economics the labour theory of value states that commodities are exchanged according to the amount of labour embodied in them, except in the Marxian theory of exploitation, which states that employers extract a surplus and hold wages down by creating a reserve army of labour. In attitude research, values are ideas held by people about ethical behaviour or appropriate behaviour, what is right or wrong, desirable or despicable. In the same vein, philosophers treat values as part of ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy.
Regarding values as a type of social data, distinctions are often drawn between values, which are strong, semi-permanent, underlying, and sometimes inexplicit dispositions; and attitudes, which are shallow, weakly held, and highly variable views and opinions. Societies can usually tolerate highly diverse attitudes, whereas they require some degree of homogeneity and consistency in the values held by people, providing a common fund of shared values which shape social and political consensus. It is usually held that the sociological theories of normative functionalists (or consensus theorists) in general, and of Talcott Parsons in particular, over-emphasize the importance of shared values in maintaining social order.
More generally, all sociology is concerned with value issues, and many of the classical writers—most notably Émile Durkheim and Max Weber—discussed the role of values in social research at some length. At this more philosophical level, the issues for sociology would seem to be twofold. First, since society itself is partially constituted through values, the study of sociology is in part the study of values. Second, since sociologists are themselves members of a society and presumably hold values (religious, political, and so forth), sociological work may become embroiled in matters of value—or even (as Marxists might put it) matters of ideology. Indeed, some have argued that, for this reason, sociologists may be incapable of the value-neutrality expected of scientists more generally.
These sorts of epistemological debates about the role of values in social science can impinge on sociological work at three stages: first, in the decision to study a particular topic such as religion or homosexuality, where issues of value-relevance are raised; second, in the actual execution of a study, where the issues of bias, value neutrality, and objectivity are raised; and, finally, in the consequences of particular theories or research for society, where the issue of ‘value effects’ is raised. In practice, most sociologists accept that such sharp distinctions cannot readily be made, and the various value issues overlap.
One of the defining characteristics of philosophical positivism is that it takes the sciences (including social sciences) to be value-neutral or value-free—the expectation being that scientists will (or at least should) eliminate all biases and preferences at each stage of their studies. Value-neutrality is therefore indispensable for a scientific sociology. Similarly, sociology is considered to have a purely technical character, reporting findings that carry no logically given implications for policy or the pursuit of particular values. In marked contrast, Marxists argue that every stage of sociological analysis is riddled with political and moral assumptions and consequences, such that sociology is itself irredeemably an ideological enterprise. However, most sociologists hold positions somewhere between these extremes, arguing (for example) that although the choice of research areas must raise matters of value, the execution of a study should be as impartial as possible, and the findings presented neutrally, at which point the way such findings are put to use by others will again raise value (that is policy) issues. A frequently encountered pragmatic solution to the apparently intractable epistemological issues raised by the question of values is the suggestion that sociology is always bound up with ethics, politics, and values, and since it cannot purge itself of them, sociologists should make the underlying debates explicit.
Some of the classic value debates involved such notables as C. Wright Mills, Howard S. Becker, Alvin Gouldner, George Lundberg, Robert Lynd, and Gunnar Myrdal (most of whose works are treated elsewhere in this dictionary). However, the major methodological statement is still to be found in the essays contained in Max Weber's The Methodology of the Social Sciences (1904–18), especially those sections where he discusses the philosophical basis of ‘value-relevance’ as a principle of concept formation. Here, Weber argues (following the epistemology of Heinrich Rickert (see GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN AND NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN)) that reality is infinitely complex and conceptually inexhaustible; that the natural and social sciences typically use generalizing and individualizing modes of concept formation; and that the objects of the latter are distinguished by being imbued with meaning and values. Value-relevance, for Weber, governs the selection of facts in the social and historical sciences by clarifying the value inherent in a situation or phenomenon under analysis. Of course, there are always several possible plausible interpretations of the values underlying cultural phenomena, and consequently several different points of view from which one might conceptualize the phenomenon (or ‘historical individual’) to be explained. However, once a historical individual is constructed for a particular inquiry, ‘objectively one-sided’ social scientific knowledge becomes possible through the discovery of causal relationships between the value-relevant description of the object of enquiry and antecedent historical factors, because the formation of these relationships is governed by the established rules of scientific procedure. If the particular value-standpoint according to which the object of enquiry has been conceptualized does not facilitate an explanation of the phenomenon which is both meaningfully and causally adequate, then there may be other values inherent in that phenomenon which permit a more satisfactory explanation to be constructed. This complex argument is described in full in Thomas Burger's Max Weber's Theory of Concept Formation (1976). See also NORMATIVE THEORY.

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value-freedom

See VALUE.

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value-judgements

See VALUE.

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value-neutrality

See VALUE.

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value-Proposition

See SUCCESS PROPOSITION.

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value-relevance

See VALUE.

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van Gennep, Charles Arnold

(1873–1957)
An ethnologist of Dutch and French parentage whose Rites of Passage (1909) is a classic in the social anthropological study of ritual. He encouraged an ethnographic approach to the study of European folklore. See also RITES OF PASSAGE.

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variable

In the physical sciences, variables are the characteristics of entities which are physically manipulated, such as the heat or volume of a substance. In the social sciences, the term refers to attributes which are fixed for each person or other social entity, but which are observed to be at different levels, amounts, or strengths across samples and other aggregate groups. Variables measure a social construct (such as social class, age, or housing type) in a way which renders it amenable to numerical analysis. Thus, the key feature of a variable is that it is capable of reflecting variation within a population, and is not a constant.
There are various difficulties involved in the process of creating variables from constructs (operationalization). The central considerations here are validity (that the variable is a true measurement of the construct it is aimed at) and reliability (that its measurement is reliable).
Variables may be measured at different levels of measurement, but the basic distinction is between continuous variables such as income, and categoric or discrete variables such as class. Relatively few social variables are continuous—forming interval scales such as income or age. Most are discrete, forming ordinal and nominal scales, such as highest educational qualification obtained, or sex, respectively. The different levels of measurement have implications for the types of analysis that can be undertaken.

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variable, dummy

See DUMMY VARIABLE.

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variable, intervening

See INTERVENING VARIABLE.

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variables paradigm

See SEQUENCE ANALYSIS.

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variance

See CAUSAL MODELLING; SEQUENCE ANALYSIS; VARIATION (STATISTICAL).

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variation (statistical)

The greater part of empirical research is concerned with the characteristics of groups, or aggregate social entities, rather than individual cases; that is, with men or women in general, rather than any particular man or woman. A range of statistical measures of association are employed to describe the features of groups, or types of case in the aggregate. Most of them are based on the normal distribution, the Binomial distribution, or the Poisson distribution, from which a number of statistical summary measures are derived. The mean, mode, and median provide measures of central tendency, the most common or typical value in the distribution, which coincide when the distribution is normal. Measures of dispersion attempt to concentrate information about the general pattern in single summary statistics. These include the range, mean deviation, quartile deviation, decile range, and the standard deviation, which is by far the most important. One of the properties of the normal distribution is that about 68 per cent of all cases are contained within one standard deviation on either side of the mean, about 95 per cent lie within two standard deviations, and some 99.73 per cent lie within three standard deviations on either side of the mean. The standard deviation of a distribution thus summarizes a great deal of information about the overall dispersion, the degree of clustering or concentration around the mean. The variance is the square of the standard deviation, and has the property of being additive. Analysis of variance measures variance within sub-groups in the data-set, and between the averages of these sub-groups. See also MEASUREMENT; SAMPLING.

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vassalage

See FEUDALISM.

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Veblen, Thorstein Bunde

(1857–1929)
A leading social critic of American industrialism, whose writings inspired so-called institutional economics, and influenced figures such as John Kenneth Galbraith and C. Wright Mills. The son of Norwegian immigrants, Veblen held several university posts, but his formal career was ruined by his outspoken and unconventional behaviour. His often eccentric writings are full of bitter satire and heavy irony and, arguably, their quality eventually suffered from his personal disappointments.
Veblen took the principal ideologies of late nineteenth-century entrepreneurial capitalism, in particular evolutionism and price theory, and turned them back on the society in which they flourished. In The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) he drew on fashionable evolutionary anthropology, comparing the conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure (see LEISURE CLASS) of the financially successful classes with the display rituals of ‘barbarians’ in tribal societies. He showed himself acutely aware of the ‘barbarian’ status of women and their continued exploitation by men in ‘civilized’ societies. In The Theory of the Business Enterprise (1904), and in numerous articles criticizing neo-classical price theories, he developed a systematic account of how the mechanism of the market in reality engenders waste, fraud, and the exploitation of the industry and inventiveness of the worker. His notion of ‘pecuniary business interests’ may, in some ways, be compared with the concept of finance capital developed by his Marxist contemporary Rudolf Hilferding. However, Veblen himself rejected the utopian character of Marxism, and at one time pinned his political hopes on a version of technicism. That Veblen, though unfashionable, remains important is attested to by the fact that many of his ideas and concepts have become commonplace in the social sciences.

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verification

In empiricist philosophy, knowledge-claims are accepted as scientific only if they are verifiable. To verify a statement is to provide evidence, generally of an empirical or observational kind, for believing it to be true. In logical empiricism the meaning of a statement was treated as equivalent to its method of verification, and only verifiable statements were accepted as meaningful. In non-empiricist philosophies of science, and in less extreme forms of empiricism, it is accepted that evidence may give good reasons for believing in the truth of a statement, whilst falling short of verification in the sense of conclusive proof. See also VIENNA CIRCLE.

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verificationism

See VIENNA CIRCLE.

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verstehen

See INTERPRETATION.

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vertical integration

See INDUSTRIAL INTEGRATION.

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victimless crime

An activity classified as a crime in the laws of a country, which may therefore be prosecuted by the police or other public authorities, but which appears to have no victim in that there is no individual person who could bring a case for civil damages under civil law. Unlike (say) a case of theft, the damage is to society as a whole, and to notions of morality, proper conduct, and so on. Examples might be drinking alcoholic beverages, reading Marxist literature, homosexuality, gambling, or drug-taking, in societies where such activities are prohibited. Corporate crime is sometimes regarded as a type of victimless crime. Here again, the damage could be seen to be to the business community as a whole, or to notions of trust and probity in financial matters which provides the necessary underpinning to the whole system; or the victims can be seen as the mass of shareholders, customers, and trading partners who have each sustained a tiny fractional share of the damage done. The concept is polemical, arguing in effect that certain crimes should not be prosecuted by the police, or should be decriminalized.

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victimology

The study of victims of crime, including such aspects as patterns of offence, place of incident, characteristics of and relationship between victim and offender, and the like. The field has recently been stimulated by the increased availability of victim surveys which provide data on the hidden incidence of crime. Common but sometimes controversial key themes include the idea that some individuals may be more prone to victimization than are others, and that some victims contribute to or ‘precipitate’ their victimization, for example because of their style of dress or by frequenting risky locations. The implications of the latter argument have been criticized within feminist criminology. Victim support organizations have developed in order to campaign for appropriate services and policies.

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Vienna Circle

In the 1920s and early 1930s, the empiricist tradition of philosophy of science was reinvigorated by a group of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists (including some social scientists) at the University of Vienna. The group included Moritz Schlick, Rudolph Carnap, Otto Neurath, Kurt Gödel, and others. The Vienna Circle had a significant influence on Sir Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein, though neither were members. The logical empiricist, or positivist philosophy of the circle was particularly influential in the English-speaking world, partly due to the work of A. J. Ayer, and also to the affinities between this approach and that of Bertrand Russell. In important respects the new philosophy of science was a response to the turn-of-century revolution in physical science. The project was to tie scientific knowledge-claims so tightly to supposedly indubitable observation-reports, that all speculative, metaphysical, unprovable elements would be removed from the privileged domain of science. In the most extreme version, the empirically unprovable would be denied even the status of meaningful utterance, a doctrine sometimes referred to as verificationism.

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visual sociology

Although modern sociology and photography appeared almost simultaneously at the start of the nineteenth century, their lives have for the most part been quite separate. A few early texts—such as Frederic Thrasher's The Gang (1927)—used photographs to illustrate the research, but in the main sociologists tended to ignore visual images. This was not true of all other social scientists; for example, many anthropologists worked with visual images and film to great effect, as in Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson's Balinese Culture (1942), while the documentary film has proved invaluable to social historians.
More recently, however, a branch of sociology known as visual sociology has flourished. Visual sociology usually has one of two major concerns. Much of it uses photography (and increasingly video and film) as a research tool to facilitate the gathering of data. Alternatively, visual images may be used as data in their own right, usually as part of a sociological study of culture, in which film and other artefacts may be examined, often with the aid of semiotics. The recent work of the American interactionist Howard Becker illustrates both developments, pioneering the role of photography in sociology (discussed in his book Doing Things Together, 1986), and observing the nature of art work (in his Art Worlds, 1980). Good overviews of these blossoming interests are to be found in
, Images of Information (1979)
, and
's essay on ‘Visual Sociology’, in . New Technology in Sociology (1989)
.

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vital statistics

Statistics of births, deaths, and marriages within a country, which provide the essential basis for demography. They include crude rates matching vital events to total populations, and more sophisticated measures of fertility, nuptiality, and mortality. Their quality depends on the accuracy of vital-event registers. State registration is now usual (in Britain since 1837); church registers formerly provided some vital-event data.

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vocabularies of motive

A concept outlined by the literary critic Kenneth Burke as one of his five dramatistic terms: who, what, when, where, and why? The term was first developed sociologically by C. Wright Mills (in American Sociological Review. 1944) to capture the language by which people describe their motivations and account for their conduct. The important point is that Mills's idea is not rooted in a psychology of motivation: he was not interested here in needs, drives, or inner compulsions, as was (for example) Sigmund Freud. Rather, his concern was with the ways in which people talk about their motives, in particular social contexts. Motivational talk is usually part of a wider ideology, such that certain stated motives will be much more acceptable in given contexts than in others, and motivational statements are hence relative. For instance, irrespective of the underlying psychological motivation, a thief may make different motivational claims about his thieving behaviour to his peers, his family, the court-room, to a criminologist, or even to him-or herself. The contexts and significant others shift what will be said in the motivational account.
Sociologists have been concerned with the ways in which such talk helps interaction proceed smoothly. They have explored the sources of motivational statements, classified their different varieties, and examined the consequences of their acceptance or rejection. A cluster of linked terms have been developed. Gresham Sykes and David Matza have developed a theory of delinquency which depends upon the delinquent employing a vocabulary to neutralize the legitimacy of the dominant order. These ‘techniques of neutralization’ include denying the victim, condemning the condemners, denying injury, denying responsibility, and appealing to higher loyalties (American Sociological Review, 1957). Stanford M. Lyman and Marvin B. Scott have developed this idea into a more general theory of ‘accounts’, as part of their existential sociology (discussed in their
A Sociology of the Absurd, 2nd edn., 1990
). They examine the patterning and consequences of different ‘excuses’ and ‘justifications’ that are offered when something untoward occurs and people are asked to explain what has happened. John P. Hewitt and Randall Stokes have also introduced the term ‘disclaimers’ to cover those situations in which people ‘want to ward off the negative implications of something they are about to do or say’. Such statements take the form ‘I'm not prejudiced, but…’ (American Sociological Review, 1975).
Analysing motivational talk in this way has become part of dramaturgical sociology, ethnomethodology, labelling theory, symbolic interactionism, and the sociologies of knowledge and language (all of which are treated separately elsewhere in this dictionary).

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vocationalism

An educational philosophy or pedagogy, claiming that the content of the curriculum should be governed by its occupational or industrial utility, and marketability as human capital. See also TRAINING, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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voluntarism

A term usually contrasted with determinism, voluntarism denotes the assumption that individuals are the agents of their actions, and have some control over what they do. Voluntarism's alliance with action contrasts with the deterministic emphasis associated with structure. By accepting human unpredictability, voluntarism renders sociological analysis more difficult, though arguably more interesting. Voluntaristic theories place issues of decision, purpose, and choice at the forefront of sociological analysis. In The Structure of Social Action (1937), Talcott Parsons develops a voluntaristic theory of action, so called because it includes normative elements, subjective categories, choices about means and ends, and effort.
Voluntarism in social science raises the philosophical issue of free will: namely, the belief that choice means freedom, in the sense of individuals being free to will what they will. Most sociologists—even those of a voluntaristic persuasion— recognize that individuals can only do otherwise than they do within limits (perhaps of a cultural or psychological kind). That is, a residual determinism is implied, even though social action is typically not reduced to physical and biological variables.

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voluntaristic theory of action

See PARSONS, TALCOTT.

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voluntary associations

Any public, formally constituted, and non-commercial organization of which membership is optional, within a particular society. Examples include churches, political parties, pressure groups, leisure associations or clubs, neighbourhood groups, and (sometimes) trade unions and professional associations. In some theories of democracy, emphasis is placed on the important role such groups can play in fostering participation in the civil society, and thus in maintaining social order.

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von Restorff effect

An effect named after the gestalt psychologist who first studied it, whereby individuals learn unusual or different items most rapidly, as for example in the case of a list in which all the items are printed in black ink except for one which is printed in red.

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voting behaviour

Voting is the main form of political participation in liberal democratic societies and the study of voting behaviour is a highly specialized sub-field within political science. The analysis of voting patterns invariably focuses on the determinants of why people vote as they do and how they arrive at the decisions they make. Sociologists tend to look to the socio-economic determinants of support for political parties, observing the correlations between class, occupation, ethnicity, sex, age and vote; political scientists have concentrated on the influence of political factors such as issues, political programmes, electoral campaigns, and the popularity of party leaders on voting behaviour. However, both disciplines share much the same terrain, and increasingly have tended to overlap in their analytical approaches (see
, Elections and Voters: A Comparative Perspective, 1987
).
A number of different (but not mutually exclusive) approaches to the explanation of voting behaviour can be distinguished in the literature. Structural (or sociological) approaches concentrate on the relationship between individual and social structure, place the vote in a social context, and examine the effects on voting of such variables as social class, language, nationalism, religion, and rural-urban contrasts. Ecological (or aggregate statistical) approaches relate voting patterns to the characteristic features of a geographical area (ward, constituency, state, or whatever). Social psychological approaches relate voting decisions to the voter's psychological predispositions or attitudes, for example his or her party identification, attitudes to candidates, and such like. Finally, rational-choice approaches attempt to explain voting behaviour as the outcome of a series of instrumental cost-benefit calculations by the individual, assessing the relative desirability of specific electoral outcomes in terms of the issues addressed and policies espoused by the different parties or candidates. Each of these broad approaches tends to be associated with different research techniques and each makes different assumptions about what motivates political behaviour.
In Britain there has been a long-running debate about whether the influence of social class on voting behaviour has declined (the so-called ‘class dealignment thesis’), and about the extent to which this process is associated with the dilution of loyalty to the two major parties (the Conservative Party and the Labour Party) which have dominated the political system since the Second World War (the ‘partisan dealignment thesis’). Proponents of these arguments (see, for example,
, Decade of Dealignment, 1983
) argue that both absolute class voting (the overall proportion of the electorate who vote for their ‘natural’ class party) and relative class voting (the relative strength of the parties in different classes) have declined continuously since the late 1960s and that this is connected to the decline in the share of the Conservative and Labour Party votes. They attribute this dealignment to a number of underlying social changes: changes in the occupational structure, the decline in the size of the manual working class, social mobility, and growth of cross-class families—all of which are said to undermine the socio-economic cohesiveness of class. As a result of class fragmentation, issues have become a more important influence on how electors vote, and voters evaluate the political parties as self-interested individuals rather than on a collective or class basis.
In a similar vein, proponents of the thesis of consumption-sector cleavages argue that increasing fragmentation has reduced the political distinctiveness of social classes, and that as a result of the growing importance of consumption, differences between those who are dependent on public rather than private consumption of goods and services (like housing, transport, education, and health) are the source of new political alignments. These sectoral distinctions have replaced class as the most salient structural cleavage, both in terms of debate between the political parties and in terms of voting behaviour. The private consumption of goods and services increases the propensity to vote Conservative while those dependent on public provision vote Labour. As with the theory of class and partisan dealignment, that of consumption sectoral cleavage emphasizes the growing importance of the media in shaping individual interests, and the particularly damaging effects of these changes on working-class support for Labour.
However, opponents of this view (such as
, Understanding Political Change, 1991
) argue that class dealignment is a consequence of partisan dealignment rather than a cause. While absolute levels of class voting have declined, ‘trendless fluctuation’ in relative class voting suggests that social classes still retain their political distinctiveness. Indeed, class remains the major influence on voting behaviour; and, furthermore, consumption cleavages such as housing tenure (which are not especially novel) are merely correlates of class, and do not have important independent effects on voting behaviour. Calling for what they call an ‘interactionist’ approach to the analysis of the relationship between social structure, party performance, and vote, Heath and his colleagues argue that Labour's electoral failure in the 1980s was largely the result of across-the-board political failures (rather than underlying social changes), principally the policy failures of the 1964–70 Labour governments, the increasing number of third party (Liberal) candidates standing in working-class constituencies, the failure of the Labour Party to devise a credible economic policy, and its internal disunity. Class origins and class attitudes still influence how people vote—although class organizations like the Labour Party have not always been successful in mobilizing this potential in the political sphere.
In recent years, studies of voting behaviour have become a methodological minefield, as advances in techniques for the analysis of large-scale data-sets have fuelled existing controversies between different theories and models of voting behaviour. Concluding their admirable and exhaustive review of this literature, Jeff Manza, Michael Hunt, and Clem Brooks observe that the relationship between class and voting in the capitalist democracies of Western Europe and North America shows no evidence of being subject to a universal process of class dealignment, and that, at this juncture, ‘only one conclusion is firm: in no democratic capitalist country has vote been entirely independent of class in a national election’ (
‘Class Voting in Capitalist Democracies since World War Two: Dealignment, Realignment, or Trendless Fluctuation?’, Annual Review of Sociology, 1995
). On the debates in the United States in particular see
, Controversies in Voting Behaviour (1993
).

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W

wage-labour

Employment as an employee for a specified weekly wage or monthly salary, normally on terms and conditions determined by the employer, whose offer may be constrained by employment law, collective-bargaining agreements, or pressure from trade unions. The term is often used to emphasize the weak bargaining position of people who have only their own labour to sell, and may be exploited. See also WORK.

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Wallis, Roy

(1945–90)
A British sociologist of religion, whose more general writings include notable studies of social movements (particularly moral crusades), and of the place of actors' motivational accounts in sociological analysis. An early study of the Church of Scientology (The Road to Total Freedom, 1976) generated the typology of ideological collectivities shown below. Cults and sects are both religiously deviant by comparison to the normatively sanctioned or respectable church and denominational orthodoxy. Unlike sects, however, cults are ‘pluralistically legitimate’ in the sense that membership is perceived to offer but one of a variety of possible paths to salvation. Sects, on the other hand, purport to offer adherents a unique access to such rewards.
In a subsequent study of contemporary sectarianism (The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1984), Wallis offered a tripartite typology of new religious movements, distinguishing between ‘world-rejecting’, ‘world-affirming’, and ‘world-accommodating’ types.

TABLE 4. The Roy Wallis's typology of ideological collectivities

RESPECTABLE

DEVIANT

UNIQUELY LEGITIMATE

Church

Sect

PLURALISTICALLY LEGITIMATE

Denomination

Cult

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wants

See NEED.

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war, total

See TOTAL WAR.

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Ward, Lester Frank

(1841–1913)
One of the pioneers of American sociology, founder of a psychological evolutionism, which (contrary to Herbert Spencer) ascribed an important role in evolution to human mentality. Self-educated from boyhood, Ward enlisted in the Union Army in 1863, and finally gained his university degrees through evening study. He was a geologist and palaeontologist until the age of 65—when he accepted a professorship in sociology at Brown University (where he continued to teach until his death). In 1906 he was elected to be the first president of the American Sociological Society. Greatly influenced by Comte and Spencer, Ward's sociology is organized around a theory of evolution. This process is described in terms of stages, these being the result initially of ‘genesis’ (spontaneous blind forces), but latterly of ‘telesis’ (purposive actions of humans based on knowledge and the anticipation of consequences). Ward conceptualized sociology as the systematic study of social forces, these being psychic in nature, and resulting in a continuous process of ‘social synergy’ by which new structures were created. He is significant mainly because his works, particularly his discussion of telesis, anticipate the emphasis that twentieth-century sociology was to place on culture (see
Dynamic Sociology, 1902
;
Pure Sociology, 1903
; and
Applied Sociology, 1906
). There is a useful introduction to his writings in
, The Making of Sociology, volume i (1971)
.

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Warner, William Lloyd

(1898–1970)
A leading American sociologist of the 1930s and 1940s. Among his many projects was the major and influential community study of New England life in the early 1930s, published in five volumes (the so-called ‘Yankee City Studies’) dealing with class, community, factory life, ethnic groupings, and religion and symbolism. The first of these (The Social Life of a Modern Community, 1941) spells out in detail the ahistorical functionalism that underpins Warner's sociology—and which is acknowledged as its most serious weakness. As one commentary has observed, Warner's work has so often been criticized that it is perhaps time to call a moratorium, although it should also be acknowledged that he broke an academic taboo and opened up discussion of stratification in the United States—even if his notion of class absorbed the three analytically distinct concepts of class, status, and party into one vertical dimension of so-called class, and is (in fact) a measure of prestige. An abridged version of the Yankee City series as a whole was published in 1963.

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wealth

See INCOME DISTRIBUTION.

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Webb, Beatrice (née Potter) and Webb, Sydney James

(1858–1943; 1859–1947)
Noted authors of a definitive History of British Trade Unionism, and leading thinkers and activists of the so-called Fabian socialist movement, who made a distinguished contribution to the development and characteristic outlook of the British Labour Party. The Webbs' work on trade unions shows a distaste for the strong craft tradition in Britain and looks forward to a time when state regulation of minimum wages, together with social insurance, will make unions obsolete. Their socialism was distinguished for its advocacy of building democratic socialist institutions by steady accretion. The welfare consensus between the political parties of post-1945 Britain owed much to their ideas.

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Weber, Alfred

(1868–1958)
German economist, brother of Max, who contributed to theories which explain patterns of industrial location as the outcome of competition for the most advantageous (cost-minimizing/profit-maximizing) locations; and, through this, to the development of geography as a social science. However, he is perhaps best known to sociologists for his cultural sociology (see
Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie, 1935
), in which he analyses the relationship between the growth of knowledge (especially science and technology and the ‘culture’ (or ‘soul’) of civilizations.

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Weber, Max

(1864–1920)
Weber, together with Émile Durkheim, is generally regarded as the founder of modern sociology as a distinct social science. Of the two, his work is the more complex and ambitious, still providing a rich source for interpretation and inspiration. His life, too, possesses a certain fascination. A mental breakdown in 1897 was followed by four years of intellectual inactivity. His wife Marianne was an early feminist, and the Webers were the heart of the most impressive intellectual circle in early twentieth-century Germany, centred on regular Sunday seminars at their Heidelberg home. Max Weber's contribution to sociology was immense. He offered a philosophical basis for the social sciences; a general conceptual framework for sociology; and a range of learned studies covering all of the great world religions, ancient societies, economic history, the sociology of law and of music, and many other areas.
Whereas Durkheim's attempt to found a science of sociology was based on the scientific positivism of his day, Weber's intellectual training was in the neo-Kantian school of philosophy associated with the names of Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert (see GEISTESWISSENSCHAFTEN and NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN), dominant in Germany at that time. This philosophy involved a radical distinction between phenomena (the external world we perceive) and noumena (the perceiving consciousness). In Weber's sociology, this became a distinction between the natural and social sciences, the latter concerned with the forms in which we apprehend the world. Thus, whilst we might wish to establish universal laws in the natural sciences, this was not the task of the social sciences—since their interest is in the causal explanation and understanding of social actions in their particular historical contexts. At the same time, human society was not a matter of chance but of ‘probabilities’, and what made social science possible was the fact that human beings act rationally for at least a large part of the time.
The proper object of social science, then, is social action: action directed towards significant others and to which we attach a subjective meaning. Sociology attempts an interpretative account of such action using an ideal-type methodology. Weber developed a fourfold classification of social action: traditional action undertaken because it has always been so performed; affectual action based on or driven by emotion; value-rational action directed towards ultimate values; and end-rational or instrumental action. Only the last two of these fall within the scope of rational action—although Weber also argued strongly that there can be no rational choice either of ends or ultimate values. However, once these have been adopted, they can certainly be pursued by more or less rational means. Weber saw the development of modern societies as a process of increasing rationalization in which the world loses its mystery. The growth of large-scale modern bureaucracy is a major part of that process and one of Weber's criticisms of socialism was that it would simply hasten this ‘disenchantment’ of life.
On a philosophical level, Weber's other main contribution was a theory of value-freedom, a complex formulation often mistakenly interpreted as a naïve belief in objectivity. For Weber, the choice of science and of sociology was a value choice, which could not be justified in terms of instrumental rationality. This was true also of the selection of a particular object of study. However, once these choices were made, a sociological study could be value-free in the sense that its rational coherence was subject to the criticisms of the scientific community. What might be meant by rational, however, was itself open to historical change. In this sense, social scientific work is hemmed in by values, not only the values of the individual sociologist but also those of the community of social scientists and the prevailing culture as a whole.
It is common to juxtapose Weber to Marx, and to see him as developing an alternative sociology, at once both more scientific and more bourgeois. In fact Weber's intellectual mentors are numerous and diverse. For example, in formulating the protestant ethic thesis (often read as an alternative to Marxist accounts of the rise of capitalism), Weber was explicitly building upon earlier theories of capitalism and of money propounded by Werner Sombart and Georg Simmel. Weber does, however, provide an important alternative to Marxist conceptions of class and politics. For Weber, class is defined not by relationship to the means of production, but by the sharing of a common market position leading to shared life-chances. This has enabled sociologists to talk about, for example, housing classes (owner-occupiers, tenants of private rentals, and so forth) as well as classes defined by possession of skills and other marketable assets. Beyond this he introduced the concept of status group as an important element of stratification: that is, groups differentiated according to positive or negative honorific criteria, and sharing a common style of life (such as ethnic groups or castes). He also argued that organized conflicts over power were an important aspect of social life and one not necessarily linked to economic class conflict.
There is considerable disagreement about Weber's political views, which are as ambivalent and complex as many of his sociological analyses. Was he, as some have claimed, a precursor of fascism; or, as seems much more plausible, a sophisticated liberal? The problem is that, as with much of his other work, his political writings do not fit the rather simplistic categories into which social theorists now try to fit them.
His publications are as voluminous as they are diverse, but his most important works (all available in English translation) are probably Economy and Society (1922, translated 1968), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905, translated 1930), General Economic History (1923), The Religion of China (1916, translated 1951), The Religion of India (1916–17, translated 1958), Ancient Judaism (1917–19, translated 1952), and the essays on methodology collected and translated as The Methodology of the Social Sciences (1949). Marianne Weber's fascinating biography of her husband (Max Weber: A Biography, 1975) is a sociological classic—though frequently economical with the truth about Weber's private and public life. The best short introduction to the main elements of Weber's sociological work is Frank Parkin's (often highly critical) Max Weber (1982). See also ABSOLUTISM; ACTION THEORY; CHARISMA; DOMINATION; FEUDALISM; FORMAL RATIONALITY; HINDUISM; INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY; INTERPRETATION; LAW, SOCIOLOGY OF; LEGITIMACY; PATRIMONIALISM; RELIGION, SOCIOLOGY OF.

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welfare, sociology of welfare

Welfare is the state or condition of doing or being well. The term is primarily invoked when some action is considered necessary in order to enhance individual or group welfare—that is when welfare is in some way in doubt. It is, consequently, a term employed first and foremost in the arena of policy, and is intimately linked to the concept of needs, since it is by meeting needs that welfare is enhanced: welfare policies are policies designed to meet individual or group needs. The needs at issue are not merely those necessary for survival, but those necessary for a reasonable or adequate life within the society. They include not only a minimum level of income for food and clothing, but also adequate housing, education, health care, and opportunities for employment (though this is not always included). Precisely how and to what extent these needs are met clearly varies from society to society. During the twentieth century, the role of the state in meeting welfare needs in advanced industrial societies has typically increased. However, over the past decade or more there has been some retrenchment in state welfare in a range of Western societies, with an increasing privatization of welfare services, and support for private provision dependent on the ability to pay, rather than upon need.
Since welfare issues are closely allied to policy, there has been a tendency to locate them within the field of social policy rather than sociology. However, this position has been regularly challenged by writers like Peter Townsend, who regards social policy—which includes welfare policy—as falling squarely within the province of sociology. This view finds support from the long-standing discussions, centred on Marxist theorizing, about the extent to which welfare states and welfare policies are functional for capitalism. Do they mitigate the harsh excesses of capitalism, so making the system more acceptable? Or are they the result of the successful struggle of workers to secure their own interests? (A still provocative treatment of these questions will be found in
, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare, 1971
.) Such debates have led, amongst other things, to a plethora of valuable research studies seeking to identify the recipients of state welfare. These show the extent to which, in most societies, the middle classes benefit disproportionately from certain forms of state welfare such as education (though this does not mean that state welfare is less equitable than private welfare). They also show the extent to which women are financially dependent on welfare support.
Equally, the view that the study of welfare is a proper part of sociology finds support from the work of writers such as Thomas H. Marshall, who links issues of welfare to those of citizenship and so to the sociological mainstream. In Marshall's view, welfare rights are the third and final group of rights acquired by members of a society. First there are civil rights, such as the freedom of association, organization, and expression; then there come political rights, such as the right to vote and to seek political office; finally, there are social and economic rights, such as the right to welfare and social security. Marshall's progressive, linear model of the acquisition of rights has been questioned; however, his formulation of a series of rights clearly has political value, providing a potential rallying call for political change. In so doing, it asserts in particular that welfare benefits should be awarded as a matter of legal entitlement on principles of universality, rather than on a discretionary basis. Perhaps not surprisingly the recent retrenchment in state welfare provision—along with important political changes including changing patterns of migration—has led to a new focus on the issue of citizenship, reaffirming the importance of welfare within the mainstream of sociology, and enlivening discussions in the field.
The relevant theoretical issues are introduced in
, Theories of Welfare (1984)
. For a more substantive treatment see
, Social Welfare in Developed Market Countries (1989
).

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welfare goods

See PUBLIC GOOD.

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welfare programme, welfare provision

See WELFARE STATE.

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welfare rights

See WELFARE.

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welfare state

A term that emerged in the 1940s to describe situations where the state has a major responsibility for welfare provision via social security systems, offering services and benefits to meet people's basic needs for housing, health, education, and income. More recently, fiscal crises and the influence of libertarianism and other New Right ideas have led many Western democratic governments to make major retrenchments in welfare states (see
, Controlling Social Welfare, 1987
).

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Weltanschauung

A German term which refers to the ‘world-view’ or ‘philosophy of life’ of different groups within society. For example, it is sometimes argued that the long-term unemployed have a fatalistic outlook, the middle classes an individualistic approach to life, while members of the working class hold a set of beliefs and attitudes which emphasize collectivism. Sociologists have posed a number of interesting questions around this topic. Do particular social groups actually adhere to identifiable world-views? If so, how do individuals come to hold specific images of society, and what is the relationship between membership of a group and an individual's subjective representations of it? The major problem confronting sociologists who address these issues is that of defining and describing a world-view itself. What beliefs and values may be said to constitute a world-view? Should we even expect people to hold to consistent world-views, given that (for example) research on class imagery suggests that, more often than not, people's attitudes and values are inconsistent or ambiguous, and rarely form a coherent whole? In short, use of this term usually points to a certain imprecision in an argument, and almost invariably indicates that data appropriate to the particular case are wanting.

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Westermarck, Edward Alexander

(1862–1939)
A Finnish sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher, who (as a Professor at the London School of Economics) was one of the founders of academic sociology in Britain. His bestknown work is The History of Human Marriage (1891) in which, using an early form of comparative anthropological study, he attempted to refute the (then fashionable) thesis that our earliest human ancestors lived in sexual promiscuity. Together with Franz Boas, Westermarck was a pioneer of fieldwork (mainly in Morocco), who communicated directly with his subjects, attempting to learn their languages and at least observe (if not participate in) their culture at first hand. His decontextualized use of the comparative method (aimed at uncovering correlations between institutions, across a range of societies, isolated from the social system of which they formed a part) was superseded by functional approaches in the 1920s and 1930s, which analysed local communities as functioning wholes, and his magnum opus is today of only historical interest. His other books included The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas (1912) and The Future of Marriage in Western Civilization (1936).

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white-collar crime

A term introduced by Edwin Sutherland in the 1940s in order to draw attention to the illegalities and misdeeds of ‘captains of industry’ and other middle-class members of the business world (see his
‘White-Collar Criminality’, American Sociological Review, 1940
, or
White-Collar Crime, 1949
). The great value of the idea was to redress the imbalance in criminology's obsession with crimes of the working class. The concept tends to be used very broadly, to include both activities carried out by employees against their employer (embezzlement, pilfering), and activities undertaken by corporate executives on behalf of the corporation itself (such as violation of anti-trust regulations or stock-market rules). Strictly speaking the latter should more accurately be designated corporate crime.

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white-collar work

See MANUAL VERSUS NON-MANUAL DISTINCTION.

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Windelband, Wilhelm

(1848–1915)
A prominent figure in the German neo-Kantian movement, Windelband is chiefly remembered for his monumental A History of Philosophy (1893, 1901), in which he outlines the classic distinction between nomothetic and ideographic approaches to science.

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Winnicott, Donald Woods

(1896–1971)
A British paediatrician and psychoanalyst whose work on the mother-baby relationship directed attention to the infant's environment and to ‘good-enough mothering’. Often discussed by modern feminist writers on parenting, his most accessible book is The Child, the Family and the Outside World (1964).

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Wirth, Louis

(1897–1952)
Born in Germany, he studied in the United States, where he became a leading figure in Chicago sociology during the 1930s. His doctoral thesis was published as The Ghetto (1925), and he maintained his interests in city life, minority group behaviour, and mass media throughout his influential career. He is best known as the author of a classic (and much discussed) essay on
‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’. For a sampling of his work, together with a comprehensive bibliography, see , On Cities and Social Life (1964
). See also URBAN SOCIOLOGY; URBANISM.

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Wisconsin Model

See STATUS ATTAINMENT.

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witchcraft

See MAGIC, WITCHCRAFT, AND SORCERY.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig J. J.

(1889–1951)
Though he was born in Vienna and lived in Austria until 1912, Wittgenstein is often regarded as the most important English-language philosopher of the twentieth century. His extraordinary achievement was to have produced two profoundly influential but mutually incompatible philosophies in the course of his relatively short academic career.
Wittgenstein's early philosophical work was influenced by Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics, and its most complete expression was the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in German in 1921 and then in English in 1922. At the core of this work was a view of language and meaning, according to which each sentence is a picture of some possible state of affairs. Sentences are combinations of names, which, in some ultimate analysis, must refer unambiguously to simple objects. For this relationship of picturing between reality, language, and thought to be possible, they must share a common logical form. But this logical form is, of course, not in the world and so cannot itself be pictured in language. Similarly, moral values and the relation of the self to the world are not states of affairs which can be pictured in language. These are metaphysical matters about which nothing meaningful can be said and about which one must be silent. Wittgenstein's early work was often misunderstood as sympathetic to the anti-metaphysical verificationism of the Vienna Circle. However, unlike the adherents of that school, Wittgenstein acknowledged the depth and seriousness of metaphysical questions, whilst denying their answerability.
Wittgenstein's later philosophy emerged piecemeal, in notebooks written during the 1930s and 1940s, and in his lecture-courses at Cambridge during the same period. It took the form of a devastating critique of the very view of language and meaning to which his earlier philosophy had been committed. The major source for this later philosophy is the Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953).
This work begins with descriptions of a series of imaginary ‘language-games’ in the course of which Wittgenstein tries to dispel the powerful temptation to think that there must be some single underlying essence of all language, that this essence consists in some relation of representation of the world, and that words function primarily or exclusively through naming. As described by Wittgenstein, language-games are rule-governed human practices, in which the meaning of utterances is given by the part they play in the context of the practice. Generally, the meaning of a word or sentence is its use in such a practice, and so meanings can be as diverse as the practices and purposes to which humans may put them. Similarly, the rules governing language use are not somehow fixed for all time by a definition or logical formula, but are established by social practice itself. To give the meaning of a word is to describe the practices in which it is used, to consider how it is learned, and under what circumstances misuse of the word can be corrected.
This, in turn, forms the basis of one of Wittgenstein's most influential and controversial arguments. If meaning depends on use, and use is itself established only in the context of a human practice in which misuse can be detected and corrected, then there can be no such thing as a logically private language. The important consequence of this is that a whole range of pervasive ways of thinking about the language in which we talk about our inner, subjective life have to be rejected. Indeed, widely held images of language itself as an external expression of our inner thoughts are exposed as radically misleading. Wittgenstein insists that if the language in which we talk about our thoughts, dreams, imaginings, sensations, and so on is meaningful at all, then it can only be so in virtue of there being some publicly accessible way of learning how to use it correctly, correct misuses, and so on. As he puts it, an inner process stands in need of an outer ‘criterion’.
Wittgenstein has been widely misrepresented as a kind of behaviourist, but far from denying that we do have an inner life or even that we can meaningfully talk about it, he rather offers a powerful account of what makes it possible for us to do so. The possibility for practices of talking about subjective life to become established, and to be learned by children, is grounded in a repertoire of natural expressions of pain, pleasure, distaste, and so forth, which can reliably and consensually be recognized in the course of living a common ‘form of life’. Here, interpretations of Wittgenstein diverge. Is a shared form of life a common natural history, such as might define and distinguish species (Wittgenstein's writings contain often amusing references to the psychological capacities of dogs, or lions), or does it designate the culture of a people, as in anthropology? The latter interpretation takes some of its followers in the direction of culturally relative views on language, meaning, and rationality. The former interpretation would be consistent with a more naturalistic approach which linked the possibilities of human social and cultural life with certain facts of the natural history of the species.
Wittgenstein's later philosophy has been profoundly influential across the whole spectrum of humanities and social sciences. His account of meaning in terms of rule-governed social practice provided an important means for bringing philosophy and the social sciences back into communication with one another, and offered a powerful challenge to positivistic forms of social science methodology. It is also arguable that in his rejection of essentialism, his displacement of representation as the core image for thinking about linguistic meaning, and in his way of treating human subjectivity, Wittgenstein anticipated some key themes of post-modernism.
For a good short introduction to his work see
, Wittgenstein (1988
).

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women's movement

This term refers to the mobilization of women around the project of changing and improving their position in society. It is often used interchangeably with ‘Women's Liberation Movement’ to describe the second wave of feminism from the 1970s onwards (the first wave being nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminism culminating in the struggle for votes for women).

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Woodward, Joan

(1916–71)
A British professor of industrial sociology who led the South-East Essex research team in a survey of manufacturing organizations in that area during the 1950s. Her many publications included The Dock Worker (1955), The Saleswoman (1960; an early and neglected study of service workers), and the influential Industrial Organisation: Theory and Practice (1965).
Woodward argued that differences in the organization of work and in behaviour at work (the number of levels of management, area of responsibilities of supervisors, division of functions among specialists, clarity with which roles and duties are defined, amount of written communication, and such like) could usually be traced to the immediate work situation itself. In particular, in the Essex survey, differences in technology accounted for many of the differences in organizational structure. She produced a widely discussed typology of production systems, distinguished according to their degree of technical complexity, ranging from unit and small-batch production, through large-batch and mass production, to the most complex form of process production. Often accused (unjustly) of technological determinism. Woodward's work was instrumental in setting new standards of empirical research in the sociology of organizations, and in demonstrating the possibilities of systematic comparison as against the (hitherto predominant) isolated case-study. See also CONTINGENCY THEORY.

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Wootton, Barbara

(1897–1988)
Trained as an economist, later Reader and then Professor of Social Studies at Bedford College (London) and a life peer (from 1958), Barbara Wootton's main contribution was to social policy. She served on numerous public committees, including four Royal Commissions, and wrote extensively on planning, incomes policy, social work, inequality, and delinquency. In The Social Foundations of Wage Policy (1955) she anticipates many sociological criticisms of exclusively economic explanations of inflation. Social Science and Social Pathology (1959), which is perhaps her best-known book, applies utilitarian philosophy and empirical sociology to the enlightened management of society, in the tradition of English ethical socialism.

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Word Association Test

See PROJECTIVE TESTS.

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word salad

One of the most common symptoms of schizophrenia is a disturbance in the use of language. Rather than select words which make communication possible, schizophrenics may combine words in idiosyncratic ways, or use associations that are out of context. This tendency may generate a minor language disturbance; or, in extreme cases, a word salad in which the combination of words is unintelligible to the listener and so makes communication impossible.

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work

The supply of physical, mental, and emotional effort to produce goods and services for own consumption, or for consumption by others. Productive work falls into three main categories: economic activity or employment, unpaid domestic and leisure activities, and volunteer community service. Boundary lines between the three categories are fuzzy and determined by national conventions for surveys and official statistics.
Employment is distinguished from unpaid domestic labour by the ‘third-person criterion’: whether the activity could be done by someone else without diminishing its utility. On that basis, schoolwork, studying, participating in sport for exercise, cooking or gardening for pleasure cannot be employment, even if they involve strenuous effort. Similarly, the manufacture of goods and services purely for domestic consumption are excluded from the definition of employment. Volunteer community services involve productive work for community development or to provide services to others, but are normally unpaid, and hence treated as a separate category from employment. See also BLACK ECONOMY; HOMEWORK; HOUSEHOLD WORK STRATEGY; INFORMAL ECONOMY.

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work, subjective experience of

In contrast to the relatively stable ideologies which constitute a work ethic, sociology also looks at the way work is actually experienced by individuals and groups. This includes orientations to work, attitudes in the job, job motivations, and job satisfaction. Though work is highly gendered, and is carried out as domestic as well as industrial labour, the former was largely invisible until recently and the literature on these topics deals almost exclusively with the subjective experience of paid employment.
The study of orientations to work has developed only recently and is especially associated with research carried out in the late 1960s and 1970s by John H. Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, and their colleagues and students. Logically, however, it deserves priority, being concerned with the values, purposes, expectations, and sentiments the workers bring to the work situation. In The Affluent Worker (1968) Goldthorpe and Lockwood distinguish three ideal-typical orientations to work. Employees with an instrumental orientation see work as a means to an end (the need to acquire income); have a primarily calculating attitude to the employing organization; and do not carry their work experiences and relationships over into other aspects of their lives. By contrast, the solidaristic orientation to work is characterized by an involvement in the task as an end in itself; high job satisfaction and strong identification with the work-group (against the employer); and the carrying over of work relationships and loyalties into an ‘occupational community’ outside the workplace. Finally, the bureaucratic orientation defines work as a service to the organization, in return for incremental and secure wages; embodies a relationship of trust between employer and employee; pursues status advancement as a central life interest; and carries over self-concepts and social aspirations formed at work into non-work activities and relationships.
's Manufacturing Consent (1979)
is a fascinating and much-discussed attempt to link the literature on orientations to work to the Marxist discussion of the labour process.
Past experience is important in developing work orientations. Workers who possess few skills or are stigmatized and discriminated against have little, if any, choice of job. Typically, their work orientations will reflect a vicious circle: the range of insecure, low-paid, and unattractive jobs available reinforces a fatalistic outlook, which is inimical to building up any long-term identification with a particular employer. Where workers have a genuine choice, work orientations will affect the kind of labour-force that is attracted to particular kinds of job. Research findings confirm the commonsense expectation that workers balance out the advantages and disadvantages of jobs according to their personal priorities and self-perceptions, as when they choose (for example) the cosiness of a small-firm working environment, despite the lower rates of pay and poorer fringe benefits characteristic of small-firm employment. The dedicated choice of historically relatively low-paid caring occupations (such as nursing), precisely because of the intrinsic moral satisfaction they offer, provides another example of the importance of work orientation. In contrast, workers with so-called instrumental orientations deliberately accept the boredom of high-paid though intrinsically monotonous jobs (such as assembly-line work), in return for the enhanced leisure and consumption which it makes possible. It has been suggested that such values brought to the workplace will be affected by the system of social stratification within the labour-market. Formidable methodological problems arise, however, in disentangling work orientations from the whole complex of subjective perceptions connected with a job or occupation.
Job-related attitudes have been the subject of research for a much longer time, largely because of the preoccupation of industrial sociology with in-plant factors. Studies have sought, not altogether successfully, to show that attitudes vary with such factors as type of occupation, size of firm, and management style. A great deal of this work has relied on attitude scaling, and has sought to standardize and measure common dimensions underlying the complexities of workers' perceptions of their jobs, which can then be used to compare different groups or to contrast attitudes characteristic of particular situations. One familiar such study is Robert Blauner's attempt to decompose alienation (in its original Marxist usage not an attitude at all) into a number of components such as isolation and meaninglessness to show that these vary with the level of technology. Such work has been extensively criticized, both for its implication that the agreeableness or otherwise of a job lies in the task itself rather than in the mind of the worker, and for the assumption that formal scaling can measure in a valid way all the complex factors which shape the subjective experience of industrial work. The literature on work orientations, for all its faults, provided a refreshing critique of attitude research, as did a switch to the greater use of ethnography in the sociology of work.
Work-motivation studies, of which there have been many since the Human Relations Movement, tend to reflect managerial preoccupations with discovering what goes on in the worker's mind and in this way securing greater commitment to the task. A major stimulus was the failure of incentive systems of wage payment and the fact that workers appeared to be acting irrationally by restricting their output below the level at which they could, in theory, maximize their short-term money earnings. Motivation in most cases turned out to consist of more than short-term instrumentalism and, among other things, to be affected by management's likely response to workers earning more than the average wage because of the incentive pricing of jobs.
Job satisfaction is also a term primarily associated with managerial interest in securing high productivity and a committed workforce. Satisfaction is a notion which raises acute methodological problems. Not to be satisfied with one's work might be seen as an admission of personal failure in many Western societies, and the earliest, rather unsophisticated studies found that a very high proportion of workers claimed to be contented. However, when the components of job satisfaction are disentangled, it becomes clear that the criteria by which satisfaction is judged vary widely. A particularly well-known distinction is between the extrinsic satisfactions of a job (notably wages, hours, and conditions), and the intrinsic or expressive satisfactions that might also be attached to it, such as opportunities for creativity, sociability, promotion, and social mobility.
Taken as a whole, the literature tends to suggest that intrinsic satisfactions are mostly found among professional and middle-class jobs requiring education and training, which also offer good extrinsic rewards. In contrast very many low-paid industrial jobs available to poorly qualified workers also offer little in the way of intrinsic satisfaction. See also HOUSEWORK; INDUSTRY, SOCIOLOGY OF; TASK-ORIENTATION VERSUS TIME-ORIENTATION DISTINCTION.

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work ethic

The idea of productive labour, or work, being valued in and for itself by those who do it, encouraging them to invest greater effort than could be achieved by social pressures, incentive payments, or other devices developed by employers to extract maximum output from their workforces. The concept is a unique product of Western European culture; other cultures rely on different social, religious, and political ideologies to encourage productive labour and the fulfilment of social obligations. The idea was derived originally from the protestant ethic, which presents work as a religious and moral obligation, and is now widely used as simplified popular version of that concept, especially in the context of explanations for low or high productivity and economic growth. The relevant American and British research in sociology, psychology, economics, and political science is reviewed systematically in
, Re-working the Work Ethic (1985)
. See also ACHIEVEMENT MOTIVATION; ENTREPRENEUR; TASK-ORIENTATION VERSUS TIME-ORIENTATION DISTINCTION; WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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work groups

Formal and informal groups in the workplace that collaborate as a team on work tasks, for short or for indefinite periods of time. The quality circles movement makes work groups central to the production system, with responsibility to study and resolve production problems.

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work orientation

See TASK-ORIENTATION VERSUS TIME-ORIENTATION DISTINCTION; WORK, SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF.

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work satisfaction

See JOB SATISFACTION.

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work situation

See CLASS POSITION.

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work socialization

The process of learning to labour in paid employment and conforming to the associated ideological structures: internalizing the norms, values and culture of the workplace, employing organization, profession, or occupational group; accommodating to power and authority relations at the workplace; acquiring the skills of secondary relationships; complying with the particular role and functions allocated to the individual worker; and adopting the behaviours preferred by employers (such as punctuality, team spirit, and loyalty). More generally, it involves learning to value the attitudes that reinforce the worth of work in general and the skills involved in doing particular jobs, such as strength, dexterity, numeracy, creativity, analytical abilities, or persuasiveness.

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working class

The working class is classically defined as that class which must sell its labour-power in order to survive. This was essentially what Karl Marx meant by the proletariat. However, this is hardly a satisfactory definition for late twentieth-century developed societies. If there is a working class distinct from the rest of society, then there must be distinctive features to its work and market situations, and indeed there are.
First, in terms of market situation, the working class is defined by the fact that it sells its labour-power in discrete amounts of time (paid by the hour or output piecework) in return for a wage. In the case of work situation, the working class comprises those who are in an entirely subordinate role, such that this is a key feature of their labour contract. Hence the working class basically consists of those who work in manual or blue-collar occupations. However, none of this should be taken to mean that there is one amorphous working class, since there are a number of ways in which the class is divided into distinct groups. One of these is in terms of skill. There is an upper working class or aristocracy of labour which consists of skilled workers—occupations such as fitters, electricians, and the like— where incumbents have been apprenticed or learned a trade. These constitute about one-third of the working class. The remainder are in so-called semi-skilled or unskilled occupations. A second division is that between those working in primary rather than secondary labour-markets. Some members of the working class have better paid and more secure jobs (in the primary labour-market) than have others. Most skilled workers belong to this primary labour-market. Many female and ethnic-minority workers are found in the lower-paid, more insecure secondary labour-market, lacking standard labour contracts, pension and illness entitlements, paid vacations, and so forth. It is among this group that both unemployment and under-employment (where people find that they have periods of employment and unemployment interspersed on a frequent and irregular basis) are most frequently found. The other notable feature of the working class in developed capitalist societies is that it is shrinking, largely due to a combination of technological change (notably automation), and the decline of the primary and manufacturing sectors. Only about one-third of the economically active would be working class by the definition given here.
Finally, what is the popular conception of the working class? In
Social Class in Modern Britain (1984)
, the authors report that 49 per cent of respondents mentioned being a manual or unskilled worker as the chief characteristic of the working class, and 16 per cent defined the class as those with low incomes. In general (and somewhat unusually), sociological views of the working class were in broad agreement with the popular conception. See also GOLDTHORPE CLASS SCHEME.

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working class, new

See NEW WORKING CLASS.

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world-system, world-systems theory

A historical description of the growth of the capitalist economic system, from centre to periphery, and of the effects of this growth on capitalist and pre-capitalist societies alike. It is associated mainly with the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and his colleagues at the Fernand Braudel Centre for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations, at the State University of New York at Binghampton (see especially
The Modern World-System, 2 vols., 1974, 1980; The Capitalist World-Economy, 1979
).
The obvious inadequacies of dependency theory encouraged two elaborations upon it during the 1970s: the theories of internal colonialism and of centre-periphery. The latter is, strictly speaking, not a theory at all; rather, a heuristic descriptive device which suggests that changes in the socio-economic structure of society are related to changes in its spatial structure. It is, in fact, a mix of ideas taken from geographical central place theory, classical political economy, Marxism, and theories of regional development. In general terms it provides a highly descriptive form of social area analysis in which the attributes of populations are catalogued and related to residential location. World-systems theory then gives a further sociological gloss to such accounts by documenting the expansion of capitalism across the globe. Its central propositions are that capitalism is organized globally rather than nationally, that the dominant core regions develop advanced industrial systems and exploit the raw materials of the periphery, and that the modern world is rooted in an international economic order and diverse political systems (whereas pre-modern empires display the opposite pattern).
Although Wallerstein's work is suggestive and has been influential, it does little more than direct attention to the relationships between centre and periphery in this expansion, suggesting a holistic analysis but not (of itself) providing that analysis. Different world-systems analysts have attached the centre-periphery metaphor to different theories in an attempt to explain the relationships they observe. (Wallerstein himself has moved from an early reliance on neofunctionalist categories to an accommodation with Marxist political economy.) There is also some internal disagreement among proponents of the approach as to precisely what factors explain the centralizing tendencies described. Critics—of whom there are many—have also suggested that world-systems theory neglects the effects of endogenous factors generally, and culture in particular, in explanations of social change (see
, ‘The Critique of World-System Theory’, in , Sociological Theory 1984, 1984
, and
Wallerstein's ‘World-Systems Analysis’, in , Social Theory Today, 1987
). See also CENTRE-PERIPHERY MODEL; GLOBALIZATION.

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world-wide web

See INTERNET.

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Y

youth

Typically regarded in sociology as an ascribed status, or socially constructed label, rather than simply the biological condition of being young. The term is used in three ways: very generally, to cover a set of phases in the life-cycle, from early infancy to young adulthood; in preference to the rather unsatisfactory term adolescence, to denote theory and research on teenagers, and the transition to adulthood; and, less commonly now, for a set of supposed emotional and social problems associated with growing up in urban industrial society.

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youth culture

Strictly speaking a subculture, the subject of an influential debate between (mainly) functionalist writers and their critics. Youth cultures are explained either by factors in the experience of adolescence, or by the manipulation of young people's spending and leisure, through advertising and other mass media. The functional separation of home, school, and work supposedly makes teenagers increasingly distinct from adults, more self-aware, and subject to peer-group rather than parental and other adult influences. But the relative affluence of teenagers in the decades after the Second World War, especially if they were in work, also encouraged the growth of a large and profitable market for goods and services specifically directed at young consumers. This has promoted the growth of distinctive youth fashions and styles in clothes, music, and leisure, many of them originating in the United States.
For some writers the cultural clash across generations has displaced social class as the primary form of conflict in modern industrialism. Yet class itself figures importantly in shaping the content of different youth cultures. Research in the United States distinguished the so-called college cultures of (mainly) middle-class youth from the rough or corner cultures of their working-class counterparts. The former were thought to manage the gap between conformist attitudes to achievement and the otherness of adolescent school life—of which the school itself is often the centre. Corner cultures, in contrast, were viewed as a response to working-class academic failure; centred around the neighbourhood gang rather than the school; and as reflecting a search for alternative, even deviant, status, identity, or rewards. In Britain, however, youth culture was almost exclusively identified with male working-class youth and the moral panic about its style and aggressiveness. Neo-Marxist studies saw this as a symbolic protest against, for example, the dissolution of the traditional working-class neighbourhood community, and mass control over what were once predominantly working-class forms of leisure (such as soccer). Much of this literature is reviewed in
, The Sociology of Youth Cultures and Youth Subcultures (1980)
.
Developments both in sociology and society itself, notably during the 1980s, greatly modified the terms of the debate. Feminist writers pointed to the invisibility of girls in the mainstream literature on youth and have researched gender variations in youth culture. The experiences of youth among ethnic minorities have also received more attention. But, above all, the period since the mid-1970s has seen the demise of the notion of the independent teenage consumer and rebel. The focus of research has switched instead to the youth labour-market, and the dependence of young people on the household, as a result of growing unemployment and the vulnerability of youth to flexible employment. See also Coleman, James S.

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Z

Zeitgeist

The characteristic spirit (Geist) of a historical era (Zeit). Eighteenth-century philosophers like Voltaire were intrigued by the idea of ‘the spirit of the age’, but it was most fully developed by Hegel. Philosophies and works of art, he argued, cannot transcend the spirit of the age in which they are produced. Their expression is always symbolic and imperfect, and the progress of the human spirit is marked by the greater or lesser degree to which it captures the absolute spirit, or truth itself, beyond the limitations of any particular era. The term Zeitgeist has come to be used more loosely to describe the general cultural qualities of any period, such as ‘the sixties’ or ‘the romantic era’, and does not carry the strong historicist connotations of Hegelian philosophy.

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zero-sum game

See GAME THEORY.

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zero tolerance

See BROKEN WINDOWS THESIS.

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Znaniecki, Florian

(1882–1959)
Born in German-occupied Poland, Znaniecki was one of the first Polish professors of sociology, initiating the Polish Institute of Sociology and the Polish Sociological Review. In 1914 he collaborated with William Isaac Thomas on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, a study which pioneered new methods (diaries, life-histories, letters); the methodology of the humanistic coefficient, in which the meanings to participants in social action are always considered; and the beginnings of a more systematic account of society. This was developed in his later books, Cultural Reality (1919) and Social Relations and Social Roles (1965).

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zone of (or in) transition

Defined by the Chicago urban sociologist Ernest Burgess as an urban area, between the central business district (CBD) and outer rings of working-class and middle-class residence, containing slum housing being displaced by CBD expansion. Inhabited by the poor, ethnic minorities, and socially deviant groups. The term is broadly synonymous with what is nowadays more commonly referred to as the ‘inner city’. See also CONCENTRIC ZONE THEORY.

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zoning

The means of publicly regulating land use in North America by allocating territorial areas to particular permitted uses. Originating in New York City in 1916, to protect commercial property values, zoning is often used to prevent lower-income residents moving into suburban areas. See also BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT DISTRICTS.

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OXFORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS
A Dictionary of Sociology

Contributors

Editor

Gordon Marshall

Official Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford

Diane Barthel

Professor of Sociology, State University of New York, Stony Brook, USA

Ted Benton

Professor of Sociology, University of Essex

David Bouchier

Writer and Broadcaster

Joan Busfield

Professor of Sociology, University of Essex

Tony Coxon

Research Professor in Sociology, University of Essex

Ian Craib

Professor of Sociology, University of Essex

Fiona Devine

Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Manchester

Judith Ennew

Senior Research Associate, Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge

Diana Gittins

Writer and Poet

Roger Goodman

Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Oxford

George Kolankiewicz

Lecturer in Sociology, University of Essex

Catherine Hakim

Senior Research Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science

Michael Harloe

Vice-Chancellor, University of Salford

David Lee

Former Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Essex

Maggy Lee

Lecturer in Sociology, University of Essex

Mary McIntosh

Former Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University of Essex

Dennis Marsden

Professor of Sociology, University of Essex

Gordon Marshall

Official Fellow in Sociology, Nuffield College, Oxford

Maxine Molyneux

Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London

Lydia Morris

Professor of Sociology, University of Essex

Sean Nixon

Lecturer in Sociology, University of Essex

Judith Okely

Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Hull

Ken Plummer

Professor of Sociology, University of Essex

Kate Reynolds

Local Management of Schools Team, Education Department, London Borough of Southwark

David Rose

Professor of Sociology, ESRC Research Centre for the Study of Micro-Social Change, University of Essex

Colin Samson

Lecturer in Sociology, University of Essex

Alison Scott

Reader in Sociology, University of Essex

Jacqueline Scott

Assistant Director of Research, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge

Nigel South

Reader in Sociology, University of Essex

Oriel Sullivan

Lecturer in Sociology, University of Essex

Bryan Turner

Professor of Sociology, Deakin University, Australia

Richard Wilson

Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, University of Sussex

Anthony Woodiwiss

Reader in Sociology, University of Essex

Edited by Gordon Marshall
2,500 entries
Compiled by an expert team of sociologists under the editorship of Gordon Marshall, this dictionary has international coverage of terms, methods, and concepts; related terms from psychology, economics, anthropology, philosophy, and political science; and material on topics such as cultural studies and identity, mass media, and the Internet, nationalism and McDonaldization.

ISBN 198605854

Second Edition, 1998

E-book copyright © 2003.

© Oxford University Press 1994, 1998, 2002