The Causes and Consequences of Anomie

Our objective in this study has been to replicate as closely as possible our prior research with the 1945 birth cohort study. Investigation of another birth cohort in Philadelphia has afforded the opportunity to examine the effects on delinquency of growing up in a different time and sociocultural setting. The 1945 cohort was born in the final year of World War II, which sets its years of delinquent involvement in the period from 1955 through 1962. The 1958 cohort was born 13 years later, which frames the period of delinquency from 1968 through 1975. The social milieu of the two cohorts differs and may represent different pushes toward or pulls away from delinquency. For the 1958 cohort, the delinquency years at risk coincide with America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, the rise in drug abuse, social protest, and the like. This period of rapid social change and pervasive social unrest is in sharp contrast to the more tranquil period of adolescence experienced by the 1945 cohort.

About the Contributors

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsTheodore N. FerdinandTheodore N. Ferdinand is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Northeastern University.

4 - What sociology can help us understand about religion and mental health

Classical sociology is a theoretical domain that is often labelled outdated. Nevertheless, in the Sociology curriculum, almost all departments teach classical theory to their students. In Indonesia, several classical scholars like Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tonnies, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim have been consistently taught by sociology departments all over the universities. However, despite the unwavering effort to preserve classical tradition, there have been no scientific articles that reveal one of the founding fathers of French Sociology, Gabriel Tarde. This article attempts to respond to these shortcomings by bringing the fruits of Gabriel Tarde's thoughts to the surface. This study uses critical hermeneutics to explain key concepts initiated by Gabriel Tarde in a series of scientific works and biographies. In general, the study found two things. First, there are two dominant concepts in Gabriel Tarde's thought: imitation and monad. The idea of imitation is used by Tarde to explain how society exists, while the understanding of monads empowers Tarde to elaborate on the phenomenon of social change. Second, with the example of migrant workers and the processes of agricultural innovation, this paper endorses the application of Tarde’s theory of imitation and monads to explain myriad social phenomena in Indonesia. However, the article provides three criticisms toward Tarde: his blindness to economic or financial capital, the heavy reliance on natural science analogy, and the tendency of elitism and colonialism.

The first family courses at American colleges tended to be of the dating and mating variety, premarital and family education. As scientific sociology emerged from its American origins in social work, re ligion, reform, and marriage counseling, the family courses given by sociology departments often became highly theoretical. The family was analyzed within a cross cultural, institutional, structural-functional, or other framework. In many colleges and universities today, the family courses are an advanced elective in sociology and important training for sociology majors and those preparing for professions, such as teaching and health careers where the sociological perspective may help. Sociology professors, smarting under the reputation of sociology as easy courses and non-science, tend to assign rigorous reading in the literature of the family. The courses are certainly valuable for students able to absorb this rigor. However, it often happens that courses enroll many students who are in programs not remotely connected with social science or, for that mat ter, much intellectual content. Some of these students complain that the courses are beyond their understand ing and irrelevant to their lives. Many non-academic types fill our colleges as degrees became necessary for social and occupational success. Great numbers of stu dents take the family course expecting help in their fu ture families or in resolving issues with their families of orientation. This is intensified by the current crises in family life and generational conflict plus the tendency to look to experts. The sociologist's challenge is to offer a course with a solid sociological approach but within the interests and abilities of the students. The task also is for sociologists who (despite student confusion)are, after all, not psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, or so cial workers, to avoid being pushed by students or their own omnipotent fantasies into dispensing guidelines and advice. This can sometimes be dangerous since students have a tendency to disregard much of what professors say yet selectively seize on something as revealed truth that a professor had not so intended. Perhaps one way out of this dilemma is to enlarge the understanding of students about families by letting them observe the variety of family life styles, problems, and ways of relating to other institutions. Some students will then move beyond personal concerns and ethnocen trism and read in order to answer the questions raised by their own research. This way seemed to work in one of my classes at Northeastern University where of the 35 enrolled (soph omores through seniors) only a third were social science majors, seven were nurses, and the rest were in business, engineering, various para-medical programs and assorted other majors. In response to a questionnaire asking what they wished from the course, practically all non social science majors said, in one way or another, an un derstanding of the family that would help in their own lives or in helping others. The social science majors gen erally said this plus that they wanted increased knowl edge of sociology or psychology. In an open class dis cussion as to students' expectations in the course, non social science majors voiced concerns about competing with the majors for grades, while the majors complained that the course would be watered down because of the majority of non-majors. Asked if they wanted to write papers or take examinations, practically all non majors and lower classmen expressed feelings of in adequacy regarding papers. Yet all students agreed that it would be worthwhile to do some research of their own.

One of the goals of education is to develop each person to reach their highest potential and provide opportunities to achieve everything in life according to their natural abilities. However, there are still many people who doubt that any education system can achieve these goals perfectly. Several cases in schools that occur include inequality in school welfare with imperfect coordination of learning progress. The introduction of sociology in schools is rarely well received by students. In fact, people must be able to apply it in their daily social life. The method used is the qualitative research method Library Research using information collection such as books, journals, documents, magazines, stories and history from the library. The aim of this article is to understand how the history of the sociology of education developed in line with the development of social science. The result is that the birth of Sociology of Education was influenced by three factors, firstly the very rapid development of society, secondly by teacher factors, thirdly by motivational factors in education. Sociology became a separate science in the 19th century. In 1916, New York and Columbia universities established departments of educational sociology. In 1917, the first Sociology textbook was published, compiled by Walter R. Smith. In 1923, the Sociology of Education Association was formed by the Congress of the American Sociological Association. In Indonesia, the Sociology of Education course only appeared in 1967 and was included in the curriculum of the Didactic and Curriculum Department at the Faculty of Education, IKIP Yogyakarta. Figures in Sociology of Education include (a) Lester Frank Word (b) John Dewey (c) Emile Durkheim (d) Karl Mannheim (e) Talcott Parson (f) E George Payne.

Conceptions of adulthood have changed dramatically in recent decades. Despite such changes, however, the notion that young people will eventually "settle down" and desist from delinquent behaviors is remarkably persistent. This article unites criminology with classic work on age norms and role behavior to contend that people who persist in delinquency will be less likely to make timely adult transitions. The empirical analysis supports this proposition, with both arrest and self-reported crime blocking the passage to adult status. The authors conclude that desisting from delinquency is an important part of the package of role behaviors that define adulthood.

We are living in an era of turbulent social changes that affect our everyday life. The contemporary societal order has been put to pressures and exposed to challenges like never before in the history of human society. Many scholars believe that what we are witnessing nowadays is an era of value ambivalence and norm relativization that is intricately related to societal deviance. Many theories, classical, modern, and postmodern elaborate these phenomena. Such are the Emile Durkheim’s theory of anomie, Robert Merton’s theory of strain and Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of interregnum. In this paper, we are trying to elaborate those theories through the lenses of the distorted morals and values and the nexus with societal deviance in comparative European and Macedonian societal context. As far as methodology is concerned, we mainly use secondary data of available scientific literature and studies in the values and norms changes and its relatedness to societal deviance. We shall try to prove and elucidate the importance of the structural changes in values and norms and how they produce or are a product of societal deviance. Although mainly comparatively theoretical, the paper will try to overcome the possible limitations with its thorough comparative analyses of the most relevant scientific literature and research on this matter, mostly from sociological, socio-pathological, philosophical and securitological point of view. The paper will also try to summarize some relevant suggestions, proposals and recommendations on how to overcome these problems in European and Macedonian comparative perspective. Keywords: Societal Deviance, Values, Norms, Europe, Macedonia

This study investigates the contribution of educational expansion to changes in labour force participation among Europeans aged 55-74 between 2000 and 2019, while accounting for changes in educational inequalities in labour market activity. We use data from the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) for 26 countries and Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition methods to analyse the extent to which changes in the education structure may account for rises in labour force participation rates among older workers in these countries, and the degree to which returns to education have changed. Overall, we found that educational expansion is positively associated with increases in labour force participation, albeit with substantial cross-country variation in the scale of this association. A driving factor was the decrease in the share of the population with low education levels, followed by an increase in the share of those with high education levels. While activity rates rose in most countries and among all levels of education, the largest increases were observed among people with a medium level of education. Activity rates of low-educated older workers, especially women, grew at a substantially lower pace in some countries, exacerbating educational inequalities in labour force participation at older ages. The study suggests that educational expansion has been a driver of longer working lives in Europe. However, it also indicates that changes in health, working conditions and age norms at the microlevel, as well as pension and labour market reforms at the macrolevel, can be assumed to have played a dominant role in countries where increases in labour force participation were the most significant.

The aim of this unique study is to analyze the generational change in perceptions regarding fertility decisions between young Spanish adults in the mid-1980s and young Spanish adults in the early 2010s and to test the extent to which the theoretical perspectives on fertility are supported by individual narratives over time. For nearly thirty years, Spain has had low fertility levels that contrast with the persistent ideal family size of two children. However, the literature has barely explored individuals’ perceptions of fertility decision-making over time. This paper seizes the exceptional opportunity to analyze 97 in-depth personal interviews of highly educated young adults in urban Spain from two independent studies conducted in 1985 and 2012. The results indicate that although the value change associated with the second demographic transition remains over time, the changes in age norms and partnership formation norms underlie the main differences between the two generations. Economic uncertainty and the lack of support for work-life balance stand out as persistent structural factors that influence the fertility decisions in both samples. In addition, the respondents’ narratives confirm that the transition of gender-role norms towards greater egalitarianism remains unfinished. By assigning value to the perceptions of individuals, this study contributes to the understanding of how the normative framework and meaning of childbearing have changed under the rubric of the macrolevel theoretical perspectives that explain fertility decline.

Despite the growing research on emotion regulation, the empirical evidence for normative age-related emotion regulation patterns is rather divergent. From a life-span perspective, normative age changes in emotion regulation may be more salient applying the same methodological approach on a broad age range examining both growth and decline during development. In addition, emotion-specific developmental patterns might show differential developmental trends. The present study examined age differences in seven emotion regulation strategies from early adolescence (age 11) to middle adulthood (age 50) for the three emotions of sadness, fear, and anger. The results showed specific developmental changes in the use of emotion regulation strategies for each of the three emotions. In addition, results suggest age-specific increases and decreases in many emotion regulation strategies, with a general trend to increasing adaptive emotion regulation. Specifically, middle adolescence shows the smallest emotion regulation strategy repertoire. Gender differences appeared for most emotion regulation strategies. The findings suggest that the development of emotion regulation should be studied in an emotion-specific manner, as a perspective solely on general emotion regulation either under- or overestimates existing emotion-specific developmental changes.

Research & Practice, established early in 2001, features educational research that is directly relevant to the work of classroom teachers. Here, I invited Ron Evans to provide an historical perspective on the controversy that once again swirls around the studies curriculum. --Walter C. Parker, Research and Practice Editor, University of Washington, Seattle. In his foreword to Where Did Social Studies Go Wrong?, published in 2003, Chester Finn blames the deterioration of studies in U.S. on the lunatics who have taken over the asylum, and who are imparting ridiculously little knowledge to students. He lauds the volume's intent to explain where and how and why studies went awry. (1) The book has sparked a controversy over the current state of the studies curriculum. But is controversy over studies new, and does it matter to those engaged in the day-to-day work of teaching in this subject area? My aims in this article are, first, to capture the main camps and patterns of the social studies wars since the beginning of the twentieth century and, second, to describe critical episodes from that long history that will help put the contemporary controversies in historical perspective. I'll conclude by drawing three lessons that studies teachers today might consider from this history of curriculum disagreement in studies. Pendulum swings are a regular feature of the curriculum landscape, and the primary pattern has been this: toward traditional and discipline-based curricula during conservative times; toward experimentation, child-centered and inquiry or issues-oriented curricula during liberal times. If you don't like the current direction of curricular reform, take heart, it may not last. Despite ever-changing curricular fashions and trends, a set of competing interest groups is a relatively constant feature of the studies arena. There are five major competing camps, as I described in a recent book, The Social Studies Wars, struggling at different times either to retain control of studies or to influence its direction. (2) The first, traditional historians, supports history as the core of studies and emphasizes content acquisition, chronology, and the textbook as the backbone of the course. This camp defined its approach in the 1890s and has experienced a revival in recent years. A second camp advocates studies as science and includes those who want a larger place for teaching of the science disciplines in schools and those who support a structure-of-the-disciplines approach, which was at the heart of the 1960s new studies movement. A third group, efficiency educators, hopes to create a smoothly controlled and more efficient society by applying standardized techniques from business and industry to schooling. Most often, they have envisioned a scientifically constructed, more directly functional curriculum aimed at preparing students for various life roles. A fourth group is composed of meliorists. These are Deweyan experimentalists who want to develop students' reflective thinking ability and, thereby, contribute to improvement. These theorists advocate a reflective or issues-centered curriculum and often emphasize curricular attention to problems. A fifth and related group is composed of reconstructionists or critical pedagogues, who cast studies in schools in a leading role in the transformation of American society. Other camps may be identified as well, and other curriculum historians may provide a different breakdown. Herbert Kliebard, in a classic work, Struggle for the American Curriculum, described four main interest groups: humanists, developmentalists, efficiency educators, and meliorists. (3) Hazel Hertzberg, in Social Studies Reform, discussed two main camps in studies: federationists, who favor distinct disciplines, and unitarians, who favor curriculum integration. …

As part of our ongoing consideration of the past, present, and future of women's history, we offer a retrospective on a classic work in the field, Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott's Women, Work, and Family, published in 1978. We thought it would be interesting to consider how the model that Tilly and Scott develop in the book has held up in light of over two decades of subsequent scholarship. To that end, we asked Barbara Hanawalt from the perspective of medieval European history, Thomas Dublin from the vantage point of U.S. history, and Patricia Tsurumi from the angle of Japanese history to take up this task. (We at Ohio State University, I might add, have also asked our graduate students to tackle this question for their Ph.D. examinations!) The retrospective concludes with a comment by Louise Tilly.——Leila J. Rupp

The Encyclopedia of Semiotics is the first comprehensive guide to the topics, theories, and thinkers of this rapidly expanding field of knowledge. Drawing on classic and current work in linguistics, philosophy, literary theory, cognitive science, anthropology, and other disciplines, the Encyclopedia of Semiotics provides an unprecedented point of entry for students, teachers, and to a diverse, influential and rapidly growing body of knowledge. Semiotics informs an extraordinary number of areas in the humanities and social sciences, from literary and film criticism to design studies, computers, psychology, and linguistics. The Encyclopedia of Semiotics is an ideal tood for understanding across disciplines - mapping the history of the field, presenting its key terms and theorists, and illustrating the scope of semiotic analysis in many cultural domains. The Encyclopedia of Semiotics is valuable as a single-stop reference source of essential knowledge, including: The life and work of important authors and theorists: Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce, Christian Metz, Julia Kristeva, Alan Turing among many others. The impact of various centres and schools of thought: the Vienna Circle and the Copenhagen, Prague, Moscow-Tartu, and Paris Schools. The meaning of key concepts and terms: deconstruction, denotation, metonymy, markedness, meme, umwelt. The scope of semiotic analysis in social and cultural domains: advertising, gossip, electronic mail, postage stamps, cinema, photography, and more. The comtemporary debates and critiques in a remarkable arrange of related fields: cultural theory, narratology, nonverbal communication, biosemiotics, computer modeling of representation and interaction. This alphabetically arranged encyclopedia is packed with helpful features to speed students and scholars to the information they need. The articles are supported by up-to-date bibliographies and are readily accessible via the detailed index and system of cross-references.