Handbook of the Sociology of Morality

ISBN-13: 9781441968951 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 595 str.

Steven Hitlin

Opis

Human beings necessarily understand their social worlds in moral terms, orienting their lives, relationships, and activities around socially-produced notions of right and wrong.

Morality is sociologically understood as more than simply helping or harming others; it encompasses any way that individuals form understandings of what behaviors are better than others, what goals are most laudable, and what "proper" people believe, feel, and do. Morality involves the explicit and implicit sets of rules and shared understandings that keep human social groups intact. Morality includes both the "shoulds" and "should nots" of human activity, its proactive and inhibitive elements.

At one time, sociologists were centrally concerned with morality, issues like social cohesion, values, the goals and norms that structure society, and the ways individuals get socialized to reproduce those concerns. In the last half-century, however, explicit interest in these topics has waned, and modern sociology has become uninterested in these matters and morality has become marginalized within the discipline.

But a resurgence in the topic is happening in related disciplines - psychology, neurology, philosophy, and anthropology - and in the wider national discourse. Sociology has much to offer, but is not fully engaged in this conversation. Many scholars work on areas that would fall under the umbrella of a sociology of morality but do not self-identify in such a manner, nor orient their efforts toward conceptualizing what we know, and should know, along these dimensions.

The Handbook of the Sociology of Morality fills a niche within sociology making explicit the shared concerns of scholars across the disciplines as they relate to an often-overlooked dimension of human social life. It is unique in social science as it would be the first systematic compilation of the wider social structural, cultural, cross-national, organizational, and interactional dimension of human moral (understood broadly) thought, feeling, and behavior.

Spis treści

Foreword. The Return of the Moral (Michele Lamont).- Part 1: Sociological Perspectives On Morality (“What is it”?).- Chapter 1. Back to the Future: Reviving the Sociology of the Future; Steven Hitlin and Stephen Vaisey.- Chapter 2. The Cognitive Approach to Morality; Raymond Boudon.- Chapter 3. Four Concepts of Morality; Christopher Powell.- Chapter 4. Adumbrations of a Sociology of Morality in the work of Parsons, Simmel, and Merton; Donald Levine.- Chapter 5. Classical Approaches to Morality: War and Modernity; Edward Tiryakian.- Chapter 6. Social Order as Moral Order; Ann Rawls.- Part 2: Sociological Contexts (“Where does it come from?”).- Chapter 7. Social Selection, Evolution, and Human Morality; Jonathan H. Turner.- Chapter 8. Cross-Cultural Understandings of Embodied Moral Codes; Frederick Wherry.- Chapter 9. Social Class and the Development of Morality; Andrew Sayer.- Chapter 10. Legal Systems and Moral Codes; Carol Heimer.- Chapter 11. Morality in Organizations; Robert Jackall.- Chapter 12. Explaining Crime as Moral Actions; Per-Olof Wikstrom.- Chapter 13. Religious Contexts and Moral Development; Chris Bader and Roger Finke.-Chapter 14. American Moral Culture and Values; Wayne Baker.-  Chapter 15. Education and the “Culture Wars”; James Davidson Hunter and Jeffrey Dill.- Chapter 16. The Creation of Moral Vocabularies; Brian Lowe.- Part 3: Morality In Action (“How does it work?”).- Chapter 17. Altruism and Cooperation; Robb Willer, Matthew Feinberg, Kyle Irwin, Michael Shultz and Brent Simpson.- Chapter18. Justice and Exchange as Core Moral Processes; Karen Hegtvedt and Heather Scheuerman.- Chapter 19. Towards an Integrated Science of Morality: Linking Mind, Society and Culture; Rengin Firat and Chad Michael McPherson.- Chapter 20. Moral Identity; Jan E. Stets.- Chapter 21. Morality and the Mind-Body Connection; Gabriel Ignatow.- Chapter 22. Moral Power in Social Movements; Christopher Winship and Jal Mehta.- Chapter 23. Moral Dimensions of the Work/Family Nexus; Mary Blair-Loy.- Chapter 24. Moral Categories and Public Policy; Brian Steensland.- Chapter 25. The Moral Construction of Risk; Leslie Roth.- Chapter 26. Moral Discourse in Economic Contexts; Rebekah P. Massengill and Amy Reynolds.- Chapter 27. Morality and Discourse; Jason Turowetz and Doug Maynard.- Part 4: Future Directions For Sociological Science.- Chapter 28. Morality, Modernity, and World Society; Sabine Frerichs and Richard Münch.- Chapter 29. Moral Relativism and the Shaping of a Field of Inquiry; Steven Lukes.- Chapter 30. Classical Approaches and Contemporary Questions: What Next?; Gabriel Abend.

O autorze

Steve Hitlin received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is now Assistant Professor of sociology at the University of Iowa. His research interests include social psychology, self and identity, values, morality, social theory, life course studies and gender. His primary focus is on contributing to the sociology of morality, including building bridges between scholars and disciplines around this enterprise. In 2009, he received a grant from the National Science Foundation to host an interdisciplinary conference on the sociology of morality. His research focuses on various dimensions of the social shaping of individual moral orientations, as well as helping to establish the importance of moral dimensions for properly understanding social actors. His other research programs have looked at the development and social psychological nature of racial identities and attempts to empirically measure “human agency” to engage core sociological debates.