Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Sociology - General

A good deal of consumer research is focused on social influence, since consumers make purchase decisions in the context of a social framework. This collection of innovative essays examines both the conscious and non-conscious effects of social influence on consumer behavior processes and outcomes, covering a wide variety of topics such as compliance, influence tactics, social networks, social relationships, family decision-making, and spokespersons.

The papers are authored by experts in consumer psychology from both psychology and marketing backgrounds. Some of their key insights...

Gambling is both a multi-billion-dollar international industry and a ubiquitous social and cultural phenomenon. It is also undergoing significant change, with new products and technologies, regulatory models, changing public attitudes and the sheer scale of the gambling enterprise necessitating innovative and mixed methodologies that are flexible, responsive and agile . This book seeks to demonstrate that researchers should look beyond the existing disciplinary territory and the dominant paradigm of problem gambling in order to follow those changes across territorial, political, technical,...

A classical sociologist can be defined as someone whose "works occupied a central position among the sociological ideas and notions of an era." Following this criterion, Michaela Pfadenhauer demonstrates the relevance of Peter L. Berger's work to the sociology of knowledge. Pfadenhauer shows that Berger is not only a sociologist of religion, but one whose works are characterized by a sociology-of-knowledge perspective.

Berger stands out among his fellow social scientists both quantitatively and qualitatively. He has written numerous books, which have been translated into many...

Little Ethiopia of the Pacific Northwest tells the story of the Ethiopian community in Seattle. The community began with approximately two dozen college students who came to the city during the Ethiopian revolution of 1974. These sojourning students earned college and university degrees, but were unable to return home to use them to modernize the developing nation. These stranded students became pioneers who built a micro-community in inner-city Seattle.

Providing background with an analysis of Seattle's geographic, demographic, social, and economic challenges, this...

The HKP (Hong Kong Police), Asia s Finest, is a battle-tested professional organization with strong leadership, competent staff, and deep culture. It is also a continuously learning and reforming agency in pursuit of organisational excellence. Policing in Hong Kong: History and Reform is the first and only book on the development of the Hong Kong Police from an inside out and bottom up perspective. Written by a scholar and veteran of the HKP, it is an amalgamation of indigenous theory and supporting data.

Part One begins by describing the development of police studies in Hong...

Exploring the way race and gender are portrayed in popular culture, this text focuses on the representation of black women. It incorporates a discussion of the politics of representation in Britain and North America, and the shift from negative stereotypes to positive images to postmodern knowingness. The author pays particular attention to the reach of various race/gender literacies, most notably the impact of North American racial discourse on British conceptions of Asian and Afro-Caribbean femininity.

This volume of collected papers, with the accompanying essays by the editors, is the definitive source book for the work of this important experimental psychologist. Originally published in 1991, it offered previously inaccessible essays by Albert Michotte on phenomenal causality, phenomenal permanence, phenomenal reality, and perception and cognition. Within these four sections are the most significant and representative of the Belgian psychologist's research in the area of experimental phenomenology. Extremely insightful introductions by the editors are included that place the essays in...

Tribal communities in western India, as elsewhere in the country, have been facing increasing marginalisation and poverty. This is so despite a relatively better record of social movements and work by civil society organisations among them and their political inclusion. Further, the existing literature on tribals focuses more on their socio-cultural situation and less on their economic and human development. Addressing this gap in scholarship, this volume details the processes of tribal development and associated challenges in Gujarat, often viewed as a high-growth economy.

Rich in...

Although Annie Marion MacLean, teacher, sociologist, and leader, gained international fame as an expert on working women's issues, her significant contributions are overlooked by contemporary scholarship. MacLean was extraordinary by any standard-her level of education; her precedent-setting behaviors, research, methodological innovations, public impact, and writing; her dedication to women's freedom and social justice; and her love for family and friends.

MacLean was a vigorous and creative exponent of the forceful spirit of Chicago sociologists. As a graduate of the department of...

Gifts have been given and received in all eras and societies; gifts are part of a universal human exchange. The importance of creating and sustaining social bonds with the help of gifts is widely acknowledged by social scientists, not only from anthropological but also from economic, sociological, and political science perspectives. Contemporary anti-corruption campaigns, however, have led gifts to be viewed with ever-increasing suspicion, because it is feared that the social bonds created by gift giving may contaminate professional decision-making.

Suspicious Gifts...

Japanese society in the 1990s and 2000s produced a range of complicated material about sexualized schoolgirls, and few topics have caught the imagination of western observers so powerfully. While young Japanese girls had previously been portrayed as demure and obedient, in training to become the obedient wife and prudent mother, in recent years less than demure young women have become central to urban mythology and the content of culture. The cultic fascination with the figure of a deviant school girl, which has some of its earliest roots in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,...

Secret and private organizations, in the form of Greek-letter organizations, mutual aid societies, and civic orders, together possess a storied and often-romanticized place in popular culture. While much has been made of these groups glamorous origins and influence such as the Freemasons genesis in King Solomon s temple or the belief in the Illuminati s control of modern geo-politics few have explicitly examined the role of race and ethnicity in organizing and perpetuating these cloistered orders. This volume directly addresses the inattention paid to the salience of race in secret...

Examining how youths in fourteen industrialized societies make the transition to adulthood in an era of globalization and rising uncertainty, this collection of essays investigates the impact that institutions working with social groups of youths have upon those youths' abilities to make adult decisions determining their life courses.

Covering both Europe and North America, the book includes case studies, and contains country-specific contributions on conservative, social-democratic, post-socialist, liberal and familistic welfare regimes, as well as data from the GLOBALIFE...