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"How do religiously-observant American parents pass on their religion to their children? Sociologist Christian Smith and his team sought to answer this question by interviewing over two hundred parents from across the U.S. affiliated with religious congregations of various types. The book presents the voices of parents from diverse socioeconomic and religious backgrounds interested in passing on their religious convictions and practices to their children, with the focus on why they think this matters, and how they do it. What Smith and his team found was surprising. Almost all the parents interviewed- whether Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish, Muslim, Mormon, or Hindu, and whether politically or...
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, sociologi...
Culture has returned to the poverty research agenda. Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists have begun asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of poverty, at times even explaining the behavior of low-income populations in reference to cultural factors. Unlike their predecessors, contemporary researchers rarely claim that culture will sustain itself for multiple generations regardless of structural changes, and they almost never use the term "pathology," which implied in an earlier era that people would cease to be poor if they changed their culture. The new generation of scholars conceives of culture in substantially different ways. In this latest issue of the ANNALS, readers are treated to thought-provoking articles that attempt to bridge the gap between poverty and culture scholarship, highlighting new trends in poverty research. This volume is vital reading, not only for sociologists but also for researchers across the social sciences as a whole.
A general critique of sociology, particularly sociology in the United States, from a critical realist perspective.
"The book contributes to social psychology's Milgram paradigm and the sociology of morality by offering an original theory of the emergence of moral dilemmas in social interaction. Taking Milgram's notorious "obedience" experiments as a case study of morality in interaction, it argues that Milgram's "obedient" and "defiant" behavioural outcomes should be understood in terms of the tension between participants' moral obligations to the confederate Learner and their institutional obligations to the confederate Experimenter. Using the theoretical and methodological approach of ethnomethodological conversation analysis, the book analyses a large number of archived audio-recordings of Milgram's e...
This is the first handbook focussing on classical social theory. It offers extensive discussions of debates, arguments, and discussions in classical theory and how they have informed contemporary sociological theory. The book pushes against the conventional classical theory pedagogy, which often focused on single theorists and their contributions, and looks at isolating themes capturing the essence of the interest of classical theorists that seem to have relevance to modern research questions and theoretical traditions. This book presents new approaches to thinking about theory in relationship to sociological methods.
This collection of original essays interrogates the 'crisis of journalism' narrative from a dramatically different perspective.
How does culture affect action? This question has long been framed in terms of a means vs ends debate—in other words, do cultural ends or cultural means play a primary causal role in human behavior? However, the role of socialization has been largely overlooked in this debate. In this book, Vila-Henninger develops a model of how culture affects action called “The Sociological Dual-Process Model of Outcomes” that incorporates socialization. This book contributes to the debate by first providing a critical overview of the literature that explains the limitations of the sociological dual-process model and subsequent scholarship—and especially work in sociology on “schemas”. It then ...
In recent years, many disciplines have become interested in the scientific study of morality. However, a conceptual framework for this work is still lacking. In The Moral Background, Gabriel Abend develops just such a framework and uses it to investigate the history of business ethics in the United States from the 1850s to the 1930s. According to Abend, morality consists of three levels: moral and immoral behavior, or the behavioral level; moral understandings and norms, or the normative level; and the moral background, which includes what moral concepts exist in a society, what moral methods can be used, what reasons can be given, and what objects can be morally evaluated at all. This backg...
In Religion for Realists, Samuel L. Perry argues that, as people in the West self-sort into partisan tribes, we need the scientific study of religion--the rational, data-driven analysis of religious life--now more than ever. This book presents a practical roadmap for ensuring that its insights are widely available, accessible, and impactful.