Author: Steven E. Barkan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781936126538
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262343460
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
How data science and the analysis of networks help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences. Social life is full of paradoxes. Our intentional actions often trigger outcomes that we did not intend or even envision. How do we explain those unintended effects and what can we do to regulate them? In Decoding the Social World, Sandra González-Bailón explains how data science and digital traces help us solve the puzzle of unintended consequences—offering the solution to a social paradox that has intrigued thinkers for centuries. Communication has always been the force that makes a collection of people more than the sum of individuals, but only now can we explain why: digital technologies have made it possible to parse the information we generate by being social in new, imaginative ways. And yet we must look at that data, González-Bailón argues, through the lens of theories that capture the nature of social life. The technologies we use, in the end, are also a manifestation of the social world we inhabit. González-Bailón discusses how the unpredictability of social life relates to communication networks, social influence, and the unintended effects that derive from individual decisions. She describes how communication generates social dynamics in aggregate (leading to episodes of “collective effervescence”) and discusses the mechanisms that underlie large-scale diffusion, when information and behavior spread “like wildfire.” She applies the theory of networks to illuminate why collective outcomes can differ drastically even when they arise from the same individual actions. By opening the black box of unintended effects, González-Bailón identifies strategies for social intervention and discusses the policy implications—and how data science and evidence-based research embolden critical thinking in a world that is constantly changing.

Author: Mark Plume
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781516554164
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
Based on over twenty years of classroom experience, Revealing Our Social World: An Introduction to Sociology is written with the teaching sociologist in mind. Humorous, accessible, and informal, the book introduces non-major students to the basic theories, concepts, and terms of sociology. Revealing Our Social World: A Brief Introduction to Sociology is organized into four sections, the first of which discusses the basics of the sociological perspective and imagination, along with the development of sociology as a discipline. In the second section the material examines how people fit into their social landscapes. This section features topics such as culture, socialization, groups, social institutions, and deviance. The third section addresses various forms of inequality, while the fourth examines the structure of "the daily grind" as it applies to marriage and family, religion, education, politics, and the economy. Each chapter lays out the basic elements of the topic using vivid cross-cultural examples and includes suggested readings, practical activities, and a section titled "There's an App for That." Revealing Our Social World: A Brief Introduction to Sociology is a fresh and engaging text for introductory sociology courses at the undergraduate level. Mark Plume earned his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Southern California. Dr. Plume has been teaching sociology for more than twenty years and is currently a professor at Reynolds Community College, where he teaches traditional and on-line courses in introductory sociology, marriage and family, and cultural and physical anthropology. Dr. Plume also teaches sex and gender and research methods at Virginia Commonwealth University. His research interests include alcoholic families, gender, and social class. His most recent work examines millennials and their belief in the afterlife. He is a member of the American Sociological Association and the Gerontological Society of America. Dr. Plume, his wife, and their miniature schnauzer make their home in central Virginia.

Author: Daniel F. Chambliss
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1506364101
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
The authors are proud sponsors of the 2020 SAGE Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award—enabling graduate students and early career faculty to attend the annual ASA pre-conference teaching and learning workshop. Congratulations to Daniel F. Chambliss, winner of the ASA Distinguished Contribution to Teaching Prize for 2018. The new Sixth Edition of Making Sense of the Social World continues to be an unusually accessible and student-friendly introduction to the variety of social research methods, guiding undergraduate readers to understand research in their roles as consumers and novice producers of social science. Known for its concise, casual, and clear writing, its balanced treatment of quantitative and qualitative approaches, and its integrated approach to the fundamentals, the text has much to offer both novice researchers and more advanced students alike. The authors use a wide variety of examples from formal studies and everyday experiences to illustrate important principles and techniques. A Complete Teaching & Learning Package SAGE coursepacks FREE! Easily import our quality instructor and student resource content into your school’s learning management system (LMS) and save time. SAGE edge FREE online resources for students that make learning easier.

Author: Tim Dant
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education (UK)
ISBN: 0335231314
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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"This should become a core text for second year courses in sociology and cultural studies... it synthesizes a vast body of literature and a complex range of debates into a text which is at once accessible, engaging and stimulating... it will lead to students seeing and thinking about the material world in a totally new light and can be used as a way into key theoretical debates." Keith Tester, Professor of Social Theory, University of Portsmouth In what ways do we interact with material things? How do material objects affect the way we relate to each other? What are the connections between material things and social processes like fashion, discourse, art and design? Through wearing clothes, keeping furniture, responding to the ring of the telephone, noticing the signature on a painting, holding a paperweight and in many other ways, we interact with objects in our everyday lives. These are not merely functional relationships with things but are connected to the way we relate to other people and the culture of the particular society we live in - they are social relations. This engaging book draws on established theoretical work, including that of Simmel, Marx, McLuhan, Barthes and Baudrillard as well as a range of contemporary empirical work from many humanities disciplines. It uses ideas drawn from this work to explore a variety of things - from stone cairns to denim jeans, televisions to penis rings, houses to works of art - to understand something of how we live with them.

Author: Jeanette L. McAfee
Publisher: Future Horizons
ISBN: 9781885477828
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Because of its unique focus on teaching the critical social skills that autistic children lack, this book has been cited by "Library Journal" as "Essential to All Collections."

Author: John Searle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199745862
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
There are few more important philosophers at work today than John Searle, a creative and contentious thinker who has shaped the way we think about mind and language. Now he offers a profound understanding of how we create a social reality--a reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets and cocktail parties. The paradox he addresses in Making the Social World is that these facts only exist because we think they exist and yet they have an objective existence. Continuing a line of investigation begun in his earlier book The Construction of Social Reality, Searle identifies the precise role of language in the creation of all "institutional facts." His aim is to show how mind, language and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how a single linguistic operation, repeated over and over, is used to create and maintain the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle then applies the account to show how it relates to human rationality, the freedom of the will, the nature of political power and the existence of universal human rights. In the course of his explication, he asks whether robots can have institutions, why the threat of force so often lies behind institutions, and he denies that there can be such a thing as a "state of nature" for language-using human beings.

Author: Wayne Sproule
Publisher: Prentice Hall
ISBN: 9780130410689
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Author: Wendy Griswold
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1452289409
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
In the Fourth Edition of Cultures and Societies in a Changing World, author Wendy Griswold illuminates how culture shapes our social world and how society shapes culture. She helps students gain an understanding of the sociology of culture and explore stories, beliefs, media, ideas, art, religious practices, fashions, and rituals from a sociological perspective. Cultural examples from multiple countries and time periods will broaden students′ global understanding. They will develop a deeper appreciation of culture and society, gleaning insights that will help them overcome cultural misunderstandings, conflicts, and ignorance; equip them to be more effective in their professional and personal lives, and become wise citizens of the world.

Author: Hartmut Rosa
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509519920
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 551

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Book Description
The pace of modern life is undoubtedly speeding up, yet this acceleration does not seem to have made us any happier or more content. If acceleration is the problem, then the solution, argues Hartmut Rosa in this major new work, lies in “resonance.” The quality of a human life cannot be measured simply in terms of resources, options, and moments of happiness; instead, we must consider our relationship to, or resonance with, the world. Applying his theory of resonance to many domains of human activity, Rosa describes the full spectrum of ways in which we establish our relationship to the world, from the act of breathing to the adoption of culturally distinct worldviews. He then turns to the realms of concrete experience and action – family and politics, work and sports, religion and art – in which we as late modern subjects seek out resonance. This task is proving ever more difficult as modernity’s logic of escalation is both cause and consequence of a distorted relationship to the world, at individual and collective levels. As Rosa shows, all the great crises of modern society – the environmental crisis, the crisis of democracy, the psychological crisis – can also be understood and analyzed in terms of resonance and our broken relationship to the world around us. Building on his now classic work on acceleration, Rosa’s new book is a major new contribution to the theory of modernity, showing how our problematic relation to the world is at the crux of some of the most pressing issues we face today. This bold renewal of critical theory for our times will be of great interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities.