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In this review, we examine the idea of organizational restructuring as a conceptual tool and how it has been used to alter societal definitions and interpretations of employment. Although use of the term restructuring is relatively recent, the broad issue of changing employment conditions with which it is concerned has a long history, going back to the industrial revolution. Our main focus is a consideration of the causes and consequences of restructuring, in its more recent rhetorical and structural versions. In their pursuit of greater efficiencies, organizations adapt to the demands of increasingly global markets, and these adaptations are crucial components of what is popularly referred to as the new economy. Such developments are applauded in most economic theory, but sociologists examine both sides of their social impact, including the adverse effects and implications of such externalities as the social disruptions caused by downsizing and other organizational and corporate changes. These studies provide important contributions to our knowledge of how much, and when. promises of organizational efficiency are in fact deliverable and responsive to those affected by them. We argue that the language of restructuring is regularly used to mask, reframe, and sugarcoat economic slumps as possessing positive social outcomes. We conclude by positioning restructuring as an important component of the current American export of managerial ideology to transnational contexts and suggest further examination of how restructuring affects the culture of business in these other national contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that the most significant and influential research on television over the past five decades positions the medium as a key site for addressing the complex interrelationship between culture and institutional/organizational power. Granting that such work is theoretically and methodologically diverse, we employ an organizational frame that groups political-economic approaches on the one hand and cultural approaches on the other Political-economic approaches largely attend to issues of power at a macro level, focusing on how ownership and control of television along with the organization of television production practices shape and influence content; cultural approaches focus more on the expressive and symbolic dimensions of television programming and reception. At the same time, contemporary changes in the medium threaten to make past research on television appear quaint and anachronistic. The industry's transformation of television into continually emerging sets of multifaceted digital-interactive technologies challenges researchers to draw enduring perspectives from the older work and assess how they apply to the new-media environment. Consequently, we suggest the term "video cultures" in lieu of "television sociology" as a way of capturing future trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past three decades, five general theoretical approaches to understanding the dynamics of human emotions have emerged in sociology: dramaturgical theories, symbolic interactionist theories, interaction ritual theories, power and status theories, and exchange theories. We review each of these approaches. Despite the progress made by these theories, several issues remain unresolved: the nature of emotions, reeling, and affect; the degree to which emotions are biologically based or socially constructed; the gap between social psychological theories on emotions and macrostructural theorizing; and the relatively narrow range of emotions theorized, coupled with an equally narrow focus on the structural and cultural conditions producing these emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on organizations is increasingly informed by analysis of community context. Community can be conceptualized as sets of relations between organizational forms or as places where organizations are located in resource space or in geography, In both modes, organizations operate interdependently with social institutions and with other units of social structure. Because such relationships channel flows of resources, opportunities are granted or withheld from social actors depending in part on their organization connections. Such considerations encourage analyses of organizations in ways that spread the relevance of results beyond organizationally defined research problem areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization of law may be defined as the worldwide progression of transnational legal structures and discourses along the dimensions of extensity, intensity, velocity, and impact. We propose that a theory of the global penetration of law will require at least four elements--actors, mechanisms, power, and structures and arenas. A comparison of four approaches to globalization and law--world polity, world systems, postcolonial globalism, and law and economic development--indicates con siderable variation in perceived outcomes and gaps in explanation, but with possible complementariness in both outcomes and explanatory factors. Research demonstrates that globalization is variably contested in several domains of research on law: (a) the construction and regulation of global markets, (b) crimes against humanity and genocide, (c) the diffusion of political liberalism and constitutionalism, and (d) the institutionalization of women's rights. We propose that the farther globalizing legal norms and practices are located from core local cultural institutions and beliefs, the less likely global norms will provoke explicit contestation and confrontation. Future research will be productively directed to where and how global law originates, how and when global norms and law are transmitted and enforced, and how global-local settlements are negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the past decade, this review considers advances in the qualitative study of working poverty, welfare reform, patterns of family formation, neighborhood effects, class-based patterns of childhood socialization, and the growing European literature on social exclusion. We highlight the increasing importance of qualitative research embedded in large-scale quantitative studies of poverty. Within each of these areas, we suggest new directions for research that take into account the changing contours of poverty, including the increasing diversity of poor neighborhoods (reflecting the in-migration of the foreign born) and the growth of poverty in the older suburbs surrounding the city centers. The reintroduction of the language of class has been a hallmark of the past decade, drawing it closer to some of the original concerns of sociologists in the 1940s, contrasted with a nearly universal emphasis on race and ethnicity characteristic of more recent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, parents prefer a child of each gender, and on many dimensions parents tend to treat sons and daughters similarly. However, fathers' investments appear to be somewhat higher in families with sons. Fathers spend more time with sons than with daughters. Fathers more often marry and stay married and mothers report more marital happiness in families with sons--although associations are weakening and differentials are not large. Divorced fathers more often have custody of sons than of daughters. Daughters do more housework than sons, mirroring the gendered division of labor in adulthood. Parental support of educational activities varies, with some parental behaviors greater for sons but other higher for daughters. Whether parents encourage gender differences or whether children's gender-differentiated behaviors elicit differential parental treatment cannot be easily determined with studies to date, most of which are cross-sectional or limited in other ways that hamper conclusions about causal mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few decades, demographic concerns have shifted from rapid population growth fueled by high fertility to concerns of population decline produced by very low, sub-replacement fertility levels. Once considered a problem unique to Europe or developed nations, concerns now center on the global spread of low fertility. Nearly half of the world's population now lives in countries with fertility at or below replacement levels. Further, by the mid-twenty-first century three of four countries now described as developing are projected to reach or slip below replacement fertility. We review the research on low fertility through the predominant frameworks and theories used to explain it. These explanations range from decomposition and proximate determinant frameworks to grand theories on the fundamental causes underlying the pervasiveness and spread of low fertility. We focus on the ability of theory to situate previous and future findings and conclude with directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working within the functionalist perspective that he did so much to develop, Parsons (1951) conceptualized the physician-patient relationship according to a normative framework defined by the pattern variable scheme, As Parsons clearly recognized, this normative conceptualization was one that empirical reality at best only approximates. In the 1970s, two major studies established doctor-patient interaction as a viable research domain. In the present review, we consider approaches to the medical interview developing from these initiatives and that have a primary focus on observable features of doctor-patient interaction. Within this orientation, we consider literature dealing with social, moral, and technical dilemmas that physicians and patients face in primary care and the resources that they deploy in solving them. This literature embodies a steady evolution away from a doctor-centered emphasis toward a more balanced focus on the conduct of doctors and patients together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology can be an important disciplinary bridge between the study of what demographers call forced migration and mortality and what legal sociologists and criminologists understand as war crimes. The challenge is to develop a critically informed sociological synthesis that joins our understanding of the frequently politicized health and violence dimensions of what are also diplomatically called "complex" humanitarian emergencies. The frequency of these emergencies is growing, and there is an increasing amount of data collected by governmental and nongovernmental organizations exposing large-scale violations of human rights and war crimes. Yet analyses of these data are often inadequate. Although the humanitarian emergency in Kosovo marked a high point in collaborative human rights research, the circumstances that allowed this collaboration are probably atypical. We consider how, in increasingly challenging circumstances such as the Darfur region of Sudan, population health and legal and criminological surveys can be joined to provide more comprehensive estimates of deaths resulting from violent attacks as well as from disease and starvation. The discipline of sociology, with its expertise in population-based surveys and other measurement and analytic techniques, has the capacity to bridge differences and to provide more meaningfully synthesized conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter reviews and critiques recent work on prejudice, discrimination, and racism, with an emphasis on evidence of continuing discrimination in the United States and efforts to understand its basis in prejudice. Three lines of research are the primary subject of the review: recent work on the measurement of discrimination, especially audit methods; theories of new prejudice and new racism following the Civil Rights movement; and research on implicit prejudicial attitudes. The most sophisticated new work on prejudice and discrimination is characterized by a multidimensional understanding of prejudice and/or the use of experimental methods. This review argues that research on implicit prejudice, largely developed by psychologists provides an important new understanding of the basis of discrimination and should be incorporated in sociological accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although originally developed by R.K. Mertor to explain advancement in scientific careers, cumulative advantage is a general mechanism for inequality across any temporal process (e.g., life course, family generations) in which a favorable relative position becomes a resource that produces further relative gains. This review shows that the term cumulative advantage has developed multiple meanings in the sociological literature. We distinguish between these alternative forms, discuss mechanisms that have been proposed in the literature that may produce cumulative advantage, and review the empirical literature in the areas of education, careers, and related life course processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent are the social bases of political divisions in former communist societies consistent with those observed in Western democracies? This review critically examines theoretical and empirical work on social cleavages in East European, post-communist societies. It considers the initial wave of hypotheses concerning; the structuring of party support in the region and examines empirical evidence on the patterning of the social bases of political preferences that have accrued subsequently, as well as the somewhat sparser attempts at explaining the processes through which these patterns emerge and change. It points to the omissions and weaknesses of the analyses so far conducted and concludes that the post-communist era has seen the emergence of social bases to politics that are like those in the West and that help shape variations in patterns of party competition in these societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although classical theories of the state and key texts of historical institutionalism and American political development (APD) defined the American state as a fundamentally legal entity, contemporary studies of the American state show it range of roles for law and courts, from no role at all, to a constraint or obstacle, to a positive force for state development. This review maps these varying roles, showing that law and courts are most absent or play negative roles in studies of the growth of the national administrative welfare state. It highlights new studies in this area that show the American state as a legal state and surveys growing numbers of historical institutionalist and APD studies of the state and economic and social regulation, where lay, and courts are more prominent. It points to the important but mostly neglected subjects of criminal and tort law as areas for future study that unite law and the state. Finally it concludes by showing how concepts from the sociology of law--legal mobilization law/court effectiveness, and legal consciousness--can inform state-centered political studies. Portraying the American state as a legal state yields a richer conception, reveals new and important subject matter and explanatory strategies, and can encourage dialogue between scholars of law and scholars of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elections matter for democratic polities, creating linkages between voters, elected officials, and policy making. These linkages have often been challenging to study empirically owing to the limited availability of suitable data with which to link individual-level voting to aggregate-level policymaking, and also to enduring controversies in the study of mass political behavior. I discuss several new research programs that have begun to advance scholarly understanding of these political linkages. Underlying this work is progress in understanding the microfoundations of voting behavior, coupled with new analytical models of aggregate preferences. Following a discussion of these issues, I consider several innovative strains of research on opinion-policy linkages. This scholarship has significant potential for advancing empirical democratic theory and the study of linkages between voting behavior and other political processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religious fundamentalism has risen to worldwide prominence since the 1970s. We review research on fundamentalist movements to learn what religious fundamentalisms are, if and why they appear to be resurging, their characteristics, their possible links to violence, and their relation to modernity. Surveying work over the past two decades, we find both substantial progress in sociological research on such movements and major holes in conceptualizing and understanding religious fundamentalism. We consider these weaknesses and suggest where research might next be directed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To gain an in-depth understanding of legitimacy as a general social process, we review contemporary approaches to legitimacy within two areas of sociology: social psychology and organizations. A comparison of these distinct approaches allows us to explain the process, both in implicit and explicit ways at different levels of analysis, through which a social object is construed as legitimate. This comparison also suggests four stages in the process by which new social objects, both individual (worthy/unworthy individuals) and collective (organizational forms), gain legitimation: innovation, local validation, diffusion, and general validation. We then show how legitimation of the status quo--that is, the acceptance of widespread consensual schemas/beliefs in the larger society--often fosters the stability of nonoptimal actions and practices that are created as a result of these new individual and collective social objects. Finally, we discuss how consensual beliefs such as status beliefs and cultural capital fuel the reproduction of inefficiency and inequality in groups and organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is a large literature on social capital, empirical estimates of the effect of social capital may be biased because of social homophily, the tendency of similar people to become friends with each other, Despite the methodological difficulties, a recent literature has emerged across several different disciplines that tries to estimate the causal effect of social capital. This paper reviews this recent empirical literature on social capital, paying close attention to the statistical and theoretical assumptions involved. Overall, there is evidence that genuine progress has been made in estimating the effect of social capital. The reviewed articles should provide useful examples for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I draw on a professional life history to suggest how sociological knowledge is generated by encounters with changing research opportunities. here called targets of opportunity. In my case, a study of rural communities led to unanticipated conclusions concerning buffering mechanisms that protected authorities by absorbing dissatisfactions and rebellions. Wartime research in a military setting identified sources of group solidarity and effective performance under stress. Major societal changes in racial/ethnic relations provided opportunities to develop new concepts and empirical findings. Synoptic studies of post-World War II American society led to extensive research on values and institutions. These macrosociological analyses of ethnicity and social systems, in turn, led me to a new sociology of war and interstate relations. I also offer here some critical reflections on recurrent issues and chronic controversies in American sociology. Final sections of the review deal with the continuing search for conceptual clarity and cumulative knowledge. I note the obstacles of disciplinary fragmentation, but my closing judgment is that sociology now has the base of substantial scientific knowledge and methodological expertise necessary for investigating crucial twenty-first century problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The search for moral fulfillment brought the author first to medicine, the most obvious of relevant professions. As a premed student the author took a full load of courses in math, chemistry, biology, anatomy, and physics. But he really hated premed students, who were generally self-serving, competitive, and arrogant. Then his search for relevance brought him next to the social sciences. He began in psychology, to which he was attracted by its elegant experimental designs, complex theoretical models, and rigorous statistical analyses. After an early fascination with physical anthropology and hominid evolution, he became intrigued by the concept of cultural relativism and eagerly read ethnography after ethnography of nonwestern cultures. Eventually, however, he suffered another crisis of faith. If all judgments were culturally relative, and all cultures were equally valid, then the possibility of knowing anything at all seemed to disappear before his eyes as a solipsism. Indeed, he has come to the reluctant conclusion that sociologists have gone too far in privileging the social over the biological. The urban industrialism in the nineteenth century lulled sociologists into the false belief that society could be understood by studying social structures alone, without considering human beings as organisms with biological traits and predispositions.