Manuel Castells Oliván is a Spanish sociologist. He is well known for his authorship of a trilogy of works, entitled The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. He is a scholar of the information society, communication and globalization.
A new religious movement (NRM), also known as alternative spirituality or a new religion, is a religious or spiritual group that has modern origins and is peripheral to its society's dominant religious culture. NRMs can be novel in origin or they can be part of a wider religion, in which case they are distinct from pre-existing denominations. Some NRMs deal with the challenges that the modernizing world poses to them by embracing individualism, while other NRMs deal with them by embracing tightly knit collective means. Scholars have estimated that NRMs number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most NRMs only have a few members, some of them have thousands of members, and a few of them have more than a million members.
A social movement is a loosely organized effort by a large group of people to achieve a particular goal, typically a social or political one. This may be to carry out a social change, or to resist or undo one. It is a type of group action and may involve individuals, organizations, or both. Social movements have been described as "organizational structures and strategies that may empower oppressed populations to mount effective challenges and resist the more powerful and advantaged elites". They represent a method of social change from the bottom within nations. On the other hand, some social movements do not aim to make society more egalitarian, but to maintain or amplify existing power relationships. For example, scholars have described fascism as a social movement.
Environmental sociology is the study of interactions between societies and their natural environment. The field emphasizes the social factors that influence environmental resource management and cause environmental issues, the processes by which these environmental problems are socially constructed and define as social issues, and societal responses to these problems.
David G. Bromley is a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, specialized in sociology of religion and the academic study of new religious movements. He has written extensively about cults, new religious movements, apostasy, and the anti-cult movement.
Social movement theory is an interdisciplinary study within the social sciences that generally seeks to explain why social mobilization occurs, the forms under which it manifests, as well as potential social, cultural, political, and economic consequences, such as the creation and functioning of social movements.
The academic study of new religious movements is known as new religions studies (NRS). The study draws from the disciplines of anthropology, psychiatry, history, psychology, sociology, religious studies, and theology. Eileen Barker noted that there are five sources of information on new religious movements (NRMs): the information provided by such groups themselves, that provided by ex-members as well as the friends and relatives of members, organizations that collect information on NRMs, the mainstream media, and academics studying such phenomena.
Mobilization is an academic journal that publishes original research and academic reviews of books concerned mainly with sociological research on protests, social movements, and collective behavior.
Christopher K. Chase-Dunn is an American sociologist best known for his contributions to world-systems theory.
Peter Bernard Clarke was a British scholar of religion and founding editor of the Journal of Contemporary Religion.
Stefan Berger is the Director of the Institute for Social Movements, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, and Chairman of the committee of the Library of the Ruhr Foundation. He is Professor of Social History at the Ruhr University. He specializes in nationalism and national identity studies, historiography and historical theory, comparative labour studies, and the history of industrial heritage.
Social Movement Studies is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal covering social science research on protests, social movements, and collective behavior, including reviews of books on these topics. It was established in 2002 as a biannual journal by founding co-editors Tim Jordan, Adam Lent, and George McKay, soon to be joined by Anne Mische, and is published by Routledge. The current editor-in-chief is Cristina Flesher Fominaya. Previous editors-in-chief include and Kevin Gillan, Graeme Hayes and Brian Doherty.
A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States is a sociological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in the Northeastern United States. It was written by American sociologist Helen A. Berger of the West Chester University of Pennsylvania and first published in 1999 by the University of South Carolina Press. It was released as a part of a series of academic books entitled Studies in Comparative Religion, edited by Frederick M. Denny, a religious studies scholar at the University of Chicago.
Pagan studies is the multidisciplinary academic field devoted to the study of modern paganism, a broad assortment of modern religious movements, which are typically influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan beliefs of premodern Europe. Pagan studies embrace a variety of different scholarly approaches to studying such religions, drawing from history, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, folkloristics, theology and other religious studies.
Lucien van der Walt is a South African writer, professor of Sociology and labour educator. His research engages the anarchist/syndicalist tradition of Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin; trade unionism and working class history, particularly in southern Africa; and neoliberal state restructuring. He currently teaches and researches at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, and previously worked at the University of the Witwatersrand. His 2007 PhD on anarchism and syndicalism in South Africa in the early 1900s won both the international prize for the best PhD dissertation from the Labor History journal, and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa prize for best African PhD thesis.
Ferdinando Sardella, born 1960, is a Swedish scholar of the history of religions, Hinduism, and religious studies, the former director and coordinator of the Forum for South Asia Studies at Uppsala University.
Collective Behavior and Social Movements (CBSM) is a section of the American Sociological Association (ASA) composed of sociologists who focus on the study of emerging and extra-institutional group phenomena. These include the behaviors associated with crowds, disasters, fads, revolutionary movements, riots, and social movements. The purpose of the section is to foster the study of these topics, which is done so by communicating through its newsletter Critical Mass, organizing research-related participation, and sponsoring workshops.
Verta Ann Taylor is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with focuses on gender, sexuality, social movements, and women's health.
Marisa von Bülow is a Brazilian political scientist and sociologist. She is a professor in the Political Science Institute at the University of Brasília. She studies networks in international trade, the theory of social movements, and the collective action problems that confront international organizations.
Becoming Activists in Global China: Social Movements in the Chinese Diaspora is a non-fiction book by Andrew Junker, an adjunct assistant professor in sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Published by Cambridge University Press in 2019, the book is a sociological study of the Falun Gong movement and the post-1989 democracy movement (Minyun), both suppressed in China. By comparing these two movements from a social movement perspective, Junker argued that Falun Gong's more enduring mobilization results from its decentralized organizational structure and demonstrates the potential for progressive social change.
