A social class or social stratum is a grouping of people into a set of hierarchical social categories,the most common being the working class,middle class,and upper class. Membership of a social class can for example be dependent on education,wealth,occupation,income,and belonging to a particular subculture or social network.
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.
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education,the theory of sociology,and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France.
Ulrich Beck was a German sociologist,and one of the most cited social scientists in the world during his lifetime. His work focused on questions of uncontrollability,ignorance and uncertainty in the modern age,and he coined the terms "risk society" and "second modernity" or "reflexive modernization". He also tried to overturn national perspectives that predominated in sociological investigations with a cosmopolitanism that acknowledges the interconnectedness of the modern world. He was a professor at the University of Munich and also held appointments at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH) in Paris,and at the London School of Economics.
Political sociology is an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with exploring how governance and society interact and influence one another at the micro to macro levels of analysis. Interested in the social causes and consequences of how power is distributed and changes throughout and amongst societies,political sociology's focus ranges across individual families to the state as sites of social and political conflict and power contestation.
In the social sciences,social structure is the aggregate of patterned social arrangements in society that are both emergent from and determinant of the actions of individuals. Likewise,society is believed to be grouped into structurally related groups or sets of roles,with different functions,meanings,or purposes. Examples of social structure include family,religion,law,economy,and class. It contrasts with "social system",which refers to the parent structure in which these various structures are embedded. Thus,social structures significantly influence larger systems,such as economic systems,legal systems,political systems,cultural systems,etc. Social structure can also be said to be the framework upon which a society is established. It determines the norms and patterns of relations between the various institutions of the society.
John Harry Goldthorpe is a British sociologist. He is an emeritus Fellow of Nuffield College,Oxford. His main research interests are in the fields of social stratification and mobility,and comparative macro-sociology. He also writes on methodological issues in relation to the integration of empirical,quantitative research and theory with a particular focus on issues of causation.
Class analysis is research in sociology,politics and economics from the point of view of the stratification of the society into dynamic classes. It implies that there is no universal or uniform social outlook,rather that there are fundamental conflicts that exist inherent to how society is currently organized.
Social stratification refers to a society's categorization of its people into groups based on socioeconomic factors like wealth,income,race,education,ethnicity,gender,occupation,social status,or derived power. It is a hierarchy within groups that ascribe them to different levels of privileges. As such,stratification is the relative social position of persons within a social group,category,geographic region,or social unit.
Sociology as a scholarly discipline emerged,primarily out of Enlightenment thought,as a positivist science of society shortly after the French Revolution. Its genesis owed to various key movements in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of knowledge,arising in reaction to such issues as modernity,capitalism,urbanization,rationalization,secularization,colonization and imperialism.
Gøsta Esping-Andersen is a Danish sociologist whose primary focus has been on the welfare state and its place in capitalist economies. Jacob Hacker describes him as the "dean of welfare state scholars." Over the past decade his research has moved towards family demographic issues. A synthesis of his work was published as Families in the 21st Century.
Paul Quentin Hirst (1946–2003) was a British sociologist and political theorist. He became Professor of Social Theory at Birkbeck College,London,in 1985 and held the post until his death from a stroke and brain haemorrhage.
Thomas Humphrey Marshall was an English sociologist who is best known for his essay "Citizenship and Social Class," a key work on citizenship that introduced the idea that full citizenship includes civil,political,and social citizenship.
Mathematical sociology is an interdisciplinary field of research concerned with the use of mathematics within sociological research.
John Richard Urry was a British sociologist who served as a professor at Lancaster University. He is noted for work in the fields of the sociology of tourism and mobility.
Scott Lash is a professor of sociology and cultural studies at Goldsmiths,University of London. Lash obtained a BSc in Psychology from the University of Michigan,an MA in Sociology from Northwestern University,and a PhD from the London School of Economics (1980). Lash began his teaching career as a lecturer at Lancaster University and became a professor in 1993. He moved to London in 1998 to take up his present post as Director for the Centre for Cultural Studies and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College.
Historical sociology is an interdisciplinary field of research that combines sociological and historical methods to understand the past,how societies have developed over time,and the impact this has on the present. It emphasises a mutual line of inquiry of the past and present to understand how discrete historical events fit into wider societal progress and ongoing dilemmas through complementary comparative analysis.
Sociology is the scientific and systematic study of human society that focuses on society,human social behavior,patterns of social relationships,social interaction,and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. Regarded as a part of both the social sciences and humanities,sociology uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order and social change. Sociological subject matter ranges from micro-level analyses of individual interaction and agency to macro-level analyses of social systems and social structure. Applied sociological research may be applied directly to social policy and welfare,whereas theoretical approaches may focus on the understanding of social processes and phenomenological method.
Erik Olin Wright was an American analytical Marxist sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison,specializing in social stratification and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He was known for diverging from classical Marxism in his breakdown of the working class into subgroups of diversely held power and therefore varying degrees of class consciousness. Wright introduced novel concepts to adapt to this change of perspective including deep democracy and interstitial revolution.
Nicholas Abercrombie is a British sociologist and retired academic. He was Professor of Sociology at Lancaster University from 1990 to 2004.
