Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Sociology - General

Kingsley Davis (1908-1997) was one of the pioneers in social demography, and was particularly identified with the theory of the demographic transition. This holds that the process of industrialization first causes mortality to decline, leading to a substantial rate of population growth and only later causes fertility to fall, leading eventually to the cessation of population growth. Kingsley Davis is especially remembered for his arresting and forceful critique of family-planning programs intended to achieve zero population growth.

Before he devoted his major attention to social...

An encounter with the death of another is often an occasion when the bereaved need to be sustained in their loss, relieved of the anxiety that the meeting with death engenders, and comforted in their grief. It is a time when those left behind often seek to redress wrongs in themselves or in the relationships that death has shaken and upset. In both collective and individual responses to the trauma of encountering death, we witness efforts to counter the misfortune and to explain the meaning of the loss, to turn memory into blessing, to reconcile life with death, to regenerate life, and...

The sociology of knowledge is generally seen as part of the sociology of cultural products. Along with the sociology of science, it explores the social character of science and in particular the social production of scientific knowledge. Knowledge in all its varieties is of crucial importance in social, political, and economic relations in modern society. Yet new realities, the editors argue in their introduction to this second edition, require a new perspective.

In the past half century, the social role of knowledge has changed profoundly. The natural attitude toward scientific...

These essays by the brilliant historian of political science Juan Linz comprise a remarkable intellectual review of the life and work of Robert Michels, his major book Political Parties, and the dimensions of democracy as a functioning system.

Linz elucidates the importance of Michels in a way that offers more than a mechanical view of political parties as some sort of precisely ordered system of authority and influence. Instead, Michels offers a view of politics that is bottom up and untidy, what he calls a "reciprocal deference structure." Michels is not simply the father of the...

In the early 1990s, more than 1.6 million Jews from the former Soviet Union emigrated to Israel, the United States, Canada, Germany, and other Western countries. Larissa Remennick relates the saga of their encounter with the economic marketplaces, lifestyles, and everyday cultures of their new homelands, drawing on comparative sociological research among Russian-Jewish immigrants.

Although citizens of Jewish origin ostensibly left the former Soviet Union to flee persecution and join their co-religionists, Israeli, North American, and German Jews were universally disappointed by the...

During the past several years the mass media in the United States has been awash with reports of priestly pedophilia, ecclesiastical cover-up, and clerical intimidation or financial settlements intended to silence victims. Based on journalistic accounts, or scholarly research, it might be assumed that this is a recent phenomenon. Journalist reports began only within the past few years. Similarly, most sociologists of religion and particularly specialists in deviance and criminology did not reflect awareness of clerical misbehavior in their work. Despite this, Anson Shupe shows that clergy...