A nation is a large type of social organization where a collective identity has emerged from a combination of shared features across a given population,such as language,history,ethnicity,culture,territory or society. Some nations are constructed around ethnicity while others are bound by political constitutions.
Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs,practices and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology. This objective investigation may include the use both of quantitative methods and of qualitative approaches.
Modernity,a topic in the humanities and social sciences,is both a historical period and the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms,attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissance—in the Age of Reason of 17th-century thought and the 18th-century Enlightenment. Some commentators consider the era of modernity to have ended by 1930,with World War II in 1945,or the 1980s or 1990s;the following era is called postmodernity. The term "contemporary history" is also used to refer to the post-1945 timeframe,without assigning it to either the modern or postmodern era.
The Frankfurt School is a school of social theory and critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research,founded at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1923. Active in the Weimar Republic during the European interwar period,the Frankfurt School initially comprised intellectuals,academics,and political dissidents dissatisfied with the contemporary socio-economic systems of the 1930s. The Frankfurt theorists proposed that social theory was inadequate for explaining the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics occurring in 20th-century liberal capitalist societies,such as Nazism. Critical of both capitalism and of Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems of social organization,the School's critical theory research indicated alternative paths to realizing the social development of a society and a nation.
Social theories are analytical frameworks,or paradigms,that are used to study and interpret social phenomena. A tool used by social scientists,social theories relate to historical debates over the validity and reliability of different methodologies,the primacy of either structure or agency,as well as the relationship between contingency and necessity. Social theory in an informal nature,or authorship based outside of academic social and political science,may be referred to as "social criticism" or "social commentary",or "cultural criticism" and may be associated both with formal cultural and literary scholarship,as well as other non-academic or journalistic forms of writing.
Peter Ludwig Berger was an Austrian-born American sociologist and Protestant theologian. Berger became known for his work in the sociology of knowledge,the sociology of religion,study of modernization,and theoretical contributions to sociological theory.
Werner Sombart was a German economist,historian and sociologist. Head of the "Youngest Historical School," he was one of the leading Continental European social scientists during the first quarter of the 20th century. The term late capitalism is accredited to him. The concept of creative destruction associated with capitalism is also of his coinage. His magnum opus was Der moderne Kapitalismus. It was published in 3 volumes from 1902 through 1927. In Kapitalismus he described four stages in the development of capitalism from its earliest iteration as it evolved out of feudalism,which he called proto-capitalism to early,high and,finally,late capitalism —Spätkapitalismus—in the post World War I period.
An imagined community is a concept developed by Benedict Anderson in his 1983 book Imagined Communities to analyze nationalism. Anderson depicts a nation as a socially-constructed community,imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of a group.
Collective consciousness,collective conscience,or collective conscious is the set of shared beliefs,ideas,and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society. In general,it does not refer to the specifically moral conscience,but to a shared understanding of social norms.
Modernization theory is used to explain the process of modernization within societies. The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx,Emile Durkheim and a partial reading of Max Weber,and were strongly influenced by the writings of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons. Modernization theory was a dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s,then went into a deep eclipse. It made a comeback after 1991,when Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of the Cold War as confirmation on modernization theory and more generally of universal history. But the theory remains a controversial model.
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.
National identity is a person's identity or sense of belonging to one or more states or one or more nations. It is the sense of "a nation as a cohesive whole,as represented by distinctive traditions,culture,and language". National identity may refer to the subjective feeling one shares with a group of people about a nation,regardless of one's legal citizenship status. National identity is viewed in psychological terms as "an awareness of difference",a "feeling and recognition of 'we' and 'they'". National identity also includes the general population and diaspora of multi-ethnic states and societies that have a shared sense of common identity identical to that of a nation while being made up of several component ethnic groups. Hyphenated ethnicities are an example of the confluence of multiple ethnic and national identities within a single person or entity.
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.
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural,political and economic legacy of colonialism and imperialism,focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. The field started to emerge in the 1960s,as scholars from previously colonized countries began publishing on the lingering effects of colonialism,developing a critical theory analysis of the history,culture,literature,and discourse of imperial power.
John Lie is professor of sociology at the University of California,Berkeley. His principal academic interests are social theory,political economy,social identity,and East Asia.
Eva Illouz is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. She was the first woman president of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.
Bildungsbürgertum is a social class that emerged in mid-18th-century Germany,as the educated social stratum of the bourgeoisie,men and women who had received an education based upon the metaphysical values of Idealism and Classical studies of the Graeco–Roman culture of Antiquity. In sociological contrast to the Kleinbürgertum,the petite bourgeoisie of Germany,the Bildungsbürgertum were the intelligentsia and the upper economic-stratum of the German bourgeoisie.
The Black Atlantic:Modernity and Double Consciousness is a 1993 history book about a distinct black Atlantic culture that incorporated elements from African,American,British,and Caribbean cultures. It was written by Paul Gilroy and was published by Harvard University Press and Verso Books.
Several scholars of nationalism support the existence of nationalism in the Middle Ages. This school of thought differs from modernism,which suggests that nationalism developed predominantly after the late 18th century and the French Revolution. Theories on the existence of nationalism in the Middle Ages may belong to the general paradigms of ethnosymbolism and primordialism (perennialism).
Modernization theory is the predominant explanation for emergence of nationalism among scholars of nationalism. Prominent modernization scholars,such as Benedict Anderson,Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawn,say nationalism arose with modernization during the late 18th century. Processes that lead to the emergence of nationalism include industrialization and democratic revolutions.
