This book is a sociological inquiry into the nature of an emergent role passage. The book's focus is on 30,000 Roman Catholic nuns who left their convents to secular roles and lifestyles. It is the first work to consider systematically the substantive and theoretical dimensions of this type of role passage. In doing so it raises important questions about the salience of religious life in modern society, the transformation of women's position in social life, and the dynamics of role change in adulthood.

This book examines the phenomenal wave of revivals which swept the early nineteenth century, and shows the impact they had on several ideological movements. This study asks whether religious beliefs genuinely influence people's political positions or whether, instead, what appear to be religious motivations for political behavior are merely an outgrowth of their social positions. This book establihes the influence of religious beliefs and the revivalist movement on the political behavior of the past century.

This volume is an important and original collection of firsthand field reports and essays on contemporary African cults and churches. Using comprehensive ethnographic information, this volume focuses on the importance of religion as an agent and symbol of social change in emerging African nations, and the changing roles of gender in African society.

This major study of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship focuses on the significance of entrepreneurship in the socioeconomic development of a society, and the economic and noneconomic factors which promote its emergence. Comparatively and analytically, it looks at five societies that achieved industrialization during the 18th and 19th century (England, France, Prussia-Germany, Japan, and the U.S.) and one that did not (Russia).

Scholars remain locked in a battle over the relative importance of heredity and environment for such diverse matters as human intelligence, female institution, and racial stratification. The present collection is an attempt to contribute to the quality of this discussion, and focuses not only on the matter of relative weights, but the matter of interaction. Most of the contributions deal with the quality and character of the connection between the two. Four essays focus upon what is now known about this friendship in several areas of practical and theoretical significance. The authors...

This book provides insight into the lives and contributions of eigth master sociologists as perceived by their outstanding students. It provides perspectives on evolving cognitive traditions and the oral transmission of knowledge, the emergence of new ideas, the role of continuity and discontinuity in the developments of science, and the relations of these to social change.

Based on a four-year longitudinal study of urban adaptation in Lusaka, Zambia, this book offers both a theoretical analysis and a case study of African urbanization as a social process. The author's unique approach to this topic lies in her exploration of city-life adjustment through the subjective perception of the new urbanites themselves. The book contains the original interview material and numerous photos of the extensive fieldwork.