Concise Encyclopedia of Comparative Sociology


Book Description

The Concise Encyclopedia of Comparative Sociology presents the current state of knowledge in comparative sociology for students, scholars, and the educated lay public. The major aim of comparative sociological research is to identify similarities and differences among societies, studying variation across both geographical regions and historical periods. This volume is divided into six broad categories: Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Comparing Societies, Comparative Historical Sociology, Comparing Institutions and Social Structures, Comparing Social Processes, Comparing Nation States and World Regions, and Biographies of Exemplary Comparative Sociologists. Nearly 60 essays written by distinguished experts in their fields focus on the first five categories, while the biographical section contains forty biographies of both classical and contemporary sociologists who have made major contributions to comparative sociology. Contributors include: David Baker, Wenda Bauchspies, Hans-Peter Blossfield, Harriet Bradley, Sandra Buchholz, Miguel Centeno, Karen Cerulo, Brett Clark, Amy Corming, William D'Antonio, Mario Diani, Mattei Dogan, Riley Dunlap, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Mike Featherstone, Claude Fischer, Joshua Fishman, William Gamson, Julian Go, Jack Goldstone, Ralph Grillo, John Hall, Steve Hall, Robert Heiner, Joseph Hermanowicz, Margret Hornsteiner, David Johnson, Andrew Jorgenson, Jack Levy, Robert Marsh, Bill McCarthy, David Johnson, James Midgley, Peter Mohler, Linda Molm, Benjamin Moodie, Victor Nee, Anthony Orum, William Outhwaite, Anthony Pogorelc, Harland Prechel, Danielle Resnick, Glenn Robinson, Luis Roniger, Thomas Saalfeld, Stephen Sanderson, Michelle Sandhoff, Masamichi Sasaki, Saskia Sassen, Andrew Savchenko, Harald Schoen, Howard Schuman, David Segal, Michael Siemon, Tom Smith, Joonmo Son, Hendrik Spruyt, Robert Stebbins, George Steinmetz, Piotr Sztompka, Henry Teune, Arland Thornton, Kathleen Tierney, Jonathan Turner, Nicholas van de Walle, Henk Vinken, Veljko Vujačić, Erich Weede, Michel Wieviorka, Ekkart Zimmermann.




Comparative Sociology and Social Theory


Book Description

Crow traces the interconnectedness of the 'disorganisation' of capitalism in the industrialised west, the transformation of former state socialist societies, and the divergent fortunes of third world countries.




New Frontiers in Comparative Sociology


Book Description

This book is a collection of notable papers from the first six volumes of the journal "Comparative Sociology." Its content represents leading-edge and contemporarily astute analyses in the burgeoning science of comparative sociology, especially relevant to a globalizing world in transition. Given that not everyone is acquainted with comparative sociology, this book offers an opportunity to enlighten readers unfamiliar with the discipline about the importance of comparative sociology to the new world order. Taken together, the articles illuminate various aspects of comparative sociologya "theoretical, methodological, substantive. Some compare social entities in subjective, case-study fashion, while others report on rigorous social research. All contribute in one form or another to describing the many and varied facets of the exciting a oenewa science of comparative sociology. The content of this volume has previously been published in "Comparative Sociology" volumes 1 a " 6.3.




Cooking, Cuisine and Class


Book Description

This wide ranging book explores the relationship between cuisine and class structure, and examines how cooking in the Third World is changing as a result of the impact of the West. Material discussed is both historical and anthropological, and ranges from China to Britain.




The Sociology of Elite Distinction


Book Description

This major new contribution to the study of consumption examines how dominant groups express and display their sense of superiority through material and aesthetic attributes, demonstrating that differences from one society to another, and across historical periods, challenge current understandings of elite distinction.




An Introduction to Comparative Sociology


Book Description

Not your typical sociology primer, this straightforward yet challenging text begins with a discussion of foundational theories, central concepts and areas of study. Drawing on anthropology, archaeology and history to illustrate key points, the book offers a thorough examination of the field, covering such often neglected topics as the mass production of deviance (Stalin's lethal purges, for example) and the sociology of war. This multifaceted approach provides a broad overview of the discipline through a clear-eyed investigation of human society at its best and worst.




Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology


Book Description

This book provides a powerful new theoretical framework for understanding cross-national cultural differences. Researchers from France and America present eight comparative case studies to demonstrate how the people of these two different cultures mobilize national "repertoires of evaluation" to make judgments about politics, economics, morals and aesthetics. This approach goes beyond essentialist models of national character to compare varying attitudes on topics ranging from racism and sexual harrassment to identity politics, publishing, journalism, the arts and the environment. The book will appeal to sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists alike.




Urban Outcasts


Book Description

Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional research, Urban Outcasts takes the reader inside the black ghetto of Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of Paris to discover that urban marginality is not everywhere the same. Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loïc Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos. It stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to 'anti-ghettos'. Comparing the US 'Black Belt' with the French 'Red Belt' demonstrates that state structures and policies play a decisive role in the articulation of class, race and place on both sides of the Atlantic. It also reveals the crystallization of a new regime of marginality fuelled by the fragmentation of wage labour, the retrenchment of the social state and the concentration of dispossessed categories in stigmatized areas bereft of a collective idiom of identity and claims-making. These defamed districts are not just the residual 'sinkholes' of a bygone economic era, but also the incubators of the precarious proletariat emerging under neoliberal capitalism. Urban Outcasts sheds new light on the explosive mix of mounting misery, stupendous affluence and festering street violence resurging in the big cities of the First World. By specifying the different causal paths and experiential forms assumed by relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this book offers indispensable tools for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the public debate over social inequality and citizenship at century's dawn.




New Directions in Quantitative Comparative Sociology


Book Description

The comparative method is at the core of sociological inquiry and gained new importance, emphasis and practitioners particularly after the second world war as a consequence of a large variety of international and global scale developments. The contributions to this book regard nations or countries as contextual units of analysis and treat them as variables. Theoretical explanations are presented of how social phenomena are systematically related to characteristics of the nation states and these explanations are tested empirically using the qualitative tools of mainstream sociology. The chapters in this book can be useful to a broad audience and a range of social scientists who are interested in the understanding of contemporary social phenomena that are no longer limited to national borders but that are transnational or of a global order. Contributors are Toril Aalberg, Wil Arts, Carole B. Burgoyne, Loek Halman, Piet Hermkens, Guillermina Jasso, Mebs Kanji, James R. Kluegel, Ola Listhaug, David S. Mason, Petr Matěju, Neil Nevitte, Thorleif Pettersson, David A. Routh, Svetlana Sidorenko-Stephenson, Johan Verweij, Bernd Wegener, and Peter Van Wijck.




Comparative Sociology of Examinations


Book Description

Contemporary societies are constructed, constricted, and constrained by various series of examinations. Governments of both Western and non-Western countries tend to conduct detailed, multi-layered and continuous systems of tests or examinations. International tests, such as PISA and TIMSS, have also been introduced to compare the relative performances of learners within diverse educational institutions across different countries. Examinations therefore provide a methodological pivot for comparing a range of societies. They enable us to contrast the West and the East; the North and the South; tribal and mass society; ancient and postmodern civilization; and so on. Comparing parallel societies from across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America, this book proposes fundamental transitions in sociological research from system to process and from communication to composition through intensive studies on examinations. It uses ethnographies, interviews, questionnaires, documents, statistics, and big-data analyses to make comparisons on broad scales of time and space. In so doing, it suggests hypotheses encompassing different kinds of societies in human history, including those in the Axial Age and the Modern Ages.