Sociology

How do humans, ants, and other animals form societies?

Forming groups is a basic human drive.  Modern humans are all simultaneously members of many groups — there is the book club, your poker buddies, all those fellow sport team enthusiasts. Most basic of all these groups is the connection we form with our society. This is one group people have always been willing to die for. During most of human history, foreigners have been shunned or killed. Allowing an outsider to join a society is typically an arduous process, when it is permitted at all.

Geek Chic

By Gary Alan Fine

Stigma seems a heavy burden to bear, but groups, when they band together in common cause, can reveal astonishing skills of communal jujitsu. Words can lose their moorings and be transformed through the alchemy of collective action: insults become identity markers, and outsiders can find a welcoming home.

Londoners calling: biography from the ‘bottom up’

How do you write a person’s life story? For contributors to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography this is a familiar question and its answer depends, in large part, on who’s under discussion.

Why is Obama the first sitting president to declare support for gay marriage?

By Mark McCormack
The progress of gay rights is again subject to political warfare in the United States. Despite his recent proclamation in support of gay marriage, many have been disappointed by the pace in which President Obama has addressed issues of sexuality equality: particularly regarding the length of time it took to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the lack of progress on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. This sentiment is flamed by the passage of homophobic legislation, with 38 states prohibiting marriage equality—the most recent being North Carolina just this week.

How loneliness became taboo

By Susan J. Matt
Are we lonely because of Facebook? For the last few weeks, sociologists, technologists, and other pundits have debated this question. Facebook’s critics claim the technology isolates its users, while its defenders seem unwilling to concede that their social networking results in loneliness. Largely absent from the conversation has been the historical perspective, which sheds important light on the topic. When one takes the long view, it becomes clear that Facebook has not made us lonely, for Americans have been lonely for at least two centuries, and have often struggled to find ways to assuage these feelings.

Why are Russians attracted to strong leaders?

By Geoffrey Hosking
After a decade of a chaotic but exhilarating democracy in the 1990s, Putin as president and prime minister has been restoring a strong state. At least, that is how we usually understand it. He has certainly restored an authoritarian state. On assuming office in 2000, he strengthened the ‘power vertical’ by ending the local election of provincial governors and sending in his own viceroys – mostly ex-military men – to supervise them. Citing the state’s need for ‘information security’, he closed down or took over media outlets which exposed inconvenient information or criticised his actions. Determined opponents were bankrupted, threatened, arrested, even murdered. He subdued the unruly Duma (parliament) by making it much more difficult for opposition parties to register or gain access to the media, and by encouraging violations of electoral procedure at the polls. Until recently, the Russian public seemed to accept this as part of the natural order.

Unqualified but Required

By Dr. Allan Barsky
As social workers, the NASW Code of Ethics suggests that social workers not only have ethical duties to their clients, but also to their colleagues and employers (e.g., Standards 1.01, 4.01, 2.02, 2.10, and 3.09). So what happens when these obligations collide? How do we determine our primary responsibility, and how do we choose the most ethical course of action when there is no ideal choice?

Older men do care…

By Dr Mark McCann
Older men have been getting a bad press. Women are admitted to nursing and residential homes at a greater rate than men of the same age and health. There is an assumption that the reason for this gender difference is that older men are less willing than older women to care for their dependent partners: that for cultural or personal reasons ‘old men don’t do caring’.

Self-immolation by Tibetans

By Michael Biggs
Since March 2011, over thirty Tibetans have set themselves on fire to protest against repression in China. This is the latest manifestation of a resurgence in suicide protest — where someone kills him or herself for a political cause, without harming anyone else. The most famous recent case is Mohammad Bouazizi in Tunisia, whose self-immolation sparked the Arab spring in 2011, and whose example was followed by many others in North Africa. Less familiar in the West, the campaign for a separate state of Telangana within India (to be carved out of Andhra Pradesh) was accompanied by a wave of self-immolation in 2010-2011.

The myths of monogamy

By Eric Anderson
Sexual taboos are falling in Western cultures. Largely due to the Internet, today’s youth take a much more sex-positive view to what comes naturally than the generations before them. They have shed the fear and misconception of masturbation. They enjoy a hook-up culture, where sex is easier to come by; and there is less of a double standard for women who also enjoying these freedoms.

Retirement plans and the sexes

By Rosemary Wright
In 2011, the oldest Baby Boom workers reached the age of 65 — an age that more than 60 million Baby Boomers will reach by 2030. The issue of retirement weighs particularly on women, who are likely to outlive men and therefore have a longer period of retirement to finance.

Making space for well-being?

By Mia Gray, Linda Lobao, and Ron Martin
“There is a paradox at the heart of our lives.  As Western societies have got richer, their people have become no happier” (Layard, 2005). Layard has not been alone in questioning the relationship between economic growth and well-being.  Theoretically, empirically, and politically, there is increasing dissatisfaction with growth as the main indicator of well-being.   As such, there is renewed interest in analysing the institutions and conventions through which the economy and society are measured and understood.

Turning Data into Dates

By Sydney Beveridge
Cupid scours a trove of demographic data to guide his arrows. This Valentine’s Day, let Social Explorer help you map your way to love.

Home for the holidays

By Susan J. Matt
It’s that time of year again, the season when It’s A Wonderful Life pops up on every single television channel. Viewers seem not to tire of watching the story of George Bailey, the man who never left home but still managed to find meaning and a measure of success among friends and family in Bedford Falls. For Americans, known for their restlessness, George Bailey seems an improbable hero, and It’s a Wonderful Life an unlikely hit.

Memo from Manhattan: Occupying Wall Street—and Fifth Avenue

By Sharon Zukin
Until the early morning of November 15, a few hundred Occupy Wall Street protesters spent the chilly nights of a glorious autumn camping out in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park. Despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s disapproval with their politics and under the New York City Police Department’s anxious eye, the occupiers captured public attention in a remarkably peaceful way. Regrouping for the winter, they will take stock of what they have achieved so far and the work that remains.

His Eminence of Los Angeles

The American Catholic Church of today is a product of many dramatic transformations, especially those that took place in the 1960s. Here is an excerpt from The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever where Mark S. Massa recounts some of the practices Archbishop James Francis McIntyre instituted in Los Angeles.