The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology Providing an authoritative and comprehensive overview of the classical and the contemporary, this volume is an indispensable guide to the vibrant and expanding field of sociology Featuring over 600 entries, from concise definitions to discursive essays, written by leading international academics, the Dictionary offers a truly global perspective, examining both American and European traditions and approaches Entries cover schools, theories, theorists, and debates, with substantial articles on all key topics in the field While recognizing the richness of historical sociological traditions, the Dictionary also looks forward to new and evolving influences such as cultural change, genetics, globalization, information technologies, new wars, and terrorism Most entries incorporate references for further reading, and a cross-referencing system enables easy access to related areas This Dictionary is an invaluable reference work for students and academics alike and will help to define the field of sociology in years to come BRYAN S TURNER is Professor of Sociology in the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, where he leads the research team for the Religion and Globalisation cluster Prior to this, he was Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge Professor Turner is the author of The New Medical Sociology (2004) and Society and Culture: Principles of Scarcity and Solidarity (with Chris Rojek, 2001), and is the founding editor of the Journal of Classical Sociology (with John O’Neill), Body & Society (with Mike Featherstone), and Citizenship Studies He is currently writing a three-volume study on the sociology of religion for Cambridge University Press BOARD OF EDITORIAL ADVISORS Ira Cohen, Rutgers University Jeff Manza, Northwestern University Gianfranco Poggi, Universita di Trento Beth Schneider, University of California, Santa Barbara Susan Silbey, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Carol Smart, University of Leeds The Cambridge Dictionary of SOCIOLOGY General Editor BRYAN S TURNER CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521832908 © Cambridge University Press 2006 This publication is in copyright Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press First published in print format 2006 eBook (NetLibrary) ISBN-13 978-0-511-37145-5 ISBN-10 0-511-37145-4 eBook (NetLibrary) hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-83290-8 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-83290-X paperback ISBN-13 978-0-521-54046-9 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-54046-1 Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate To the memory of my parents Sophia Turner (ne´e Brookes) and Stanley W Turner Contents List of contributors page viii Acknowledgments x Introduction xi How to use this Dictionary xix THE DICTIONARY vii List of contributors Gabriel Abend, Northwestern University Gary L Albrecht, University of Illinois, Chicago Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University Tomas Almaguer, San Francisco State University Patrick Baert, University of Cambridge Jack Barbalet, University of Leicester James Beckford, University of Warwick Stephen Benard, Cornell University Michael Billig, Loughborough University Mildred Blaxter, University of Bristol Mick Bloor, University of Glasgow William A Brown, University of Cambridge Brendan J Burchell, University of Cambridge Stewart Clegg, University of Technology, Sydney Elizabeth F Cohen, Syracuse University Ira Cohen, Rutgers University Oonagh Corrigan, University of Plymouth Rosemary Crompton, City University, London Sean Cubitt, The University of Waikato, New Zealand Tom Cushman, Wellesley College Tia DeNora, University of Exeter Peter Dickens, University of Cambridge Michele Dillon, University of New Hampshire S N Eisenstadt, The Jerusalem Van Leer Institute Tony Elger, University of Warwick Anthony Elliott, Flinders University of South Australia Amitai Etzioni, The Communitarian Network, Washington Mary Evans, University of Kent Ron Eyerman, Yale University James D Faubion, Rice University Janie Filoteo, Texas A & M University Gary Alan Fine, Northwestern University David Frisby, London School of Economics Loraine Gelsthorpe, University of Cambridge Julian Go, Boston University David Good, University of Cambridge Philip Goodman, University of California, Irvine Susan Hansen, Murdoch University Bernadette Hayes, University of Aberdeen Chris Haywood, University of Newcastle upon Tyne John Heritage, University of California, Los Angeles John Hoffman, University of Leicester John Holmwood, University of Sussex Robert Holton, Trinity College, Dublin Darnell Hunt, University of California, Los Angeles Geoffrey Ingham, University of Cambridge Engin Isin, York University, Canada Andrew Jamison, Aalborg University Valerie Jenness, University of California, Irvine Bob Jessop, Lancaster University James E Katz, Rutgers University Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles Krishan Kumar, University of Virginia John Law, Lancaster University Charles Lemert, Wesleyan University Donald N Levine, University of Chicago Ruth Lister, Loughborough University Steven Loyal, University College, Dublin Mairtin Mac-an-Ghaill, University of Birmingham Michael Macy, Cornell University Jeff Manza, Northwestern University Robert Miller, Queen’s University, Belfast Jan Pakulski, University of Tasmania Edward Park, Loyola Marymount University Frank Pearce, Queen’s University, Canada Emile Perreau-Saussine, University of Cambridge Chris Phillipson, Keele University ` di Trento, Italy Gianfranco Poggi, Universita Dudley L Poston,* Texas A & M University Stephen Quilley, University College, Dublin Mark Rapley, Edith Cowan University Larry Ray, University of Kent at Canterbury Isaac Reed, Yale University Thomas Reifer, University of San Diego Derek Robbins, University of East London Chris Rojek, Nottingham Trent University Mercedes Rubio, American Sociological Association *Dudley Poston wishes to thank the following graduate students for their assistance: Mary Ann Davis, Chris Lewinski, Hua Luo, Heather Terrell and Li Zhang viii List of contributors Rogelio Saenz, Texas A & M University Kent Sandstrom, University of Northern Iowa Cornel Sandvoss, University of Surrey Jacqueline Schneider, University of Leicester Jackie Scott, University of Cambridge Martin Shaw, University of Sussex Mark Sherry, The University of Toledo Birte Siim, Aalborg University, Denmark Susan Silbey, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Carol Smart, University of Manchester Vicki Smith, University of California, Davis Nick Stevenson, University of Nottingham Rob Stones, University of Essex Richard Swedberg, Cornell University Piotr Sztompka, Jagiellonian University, Poland Edward Tiryakian, Duke University Kenneth H Tucker, Jr., Mount Holyoke College, MA Bryan S Turner, National University of Singapore Jonathan Turner, University of California, Riverside Stephen P Turner, University of South Florida Arnout van de Rijt, Cornell University Ann Vogel, University of Exeter Frederic Volpi, University of St Andrews Alan Warde, University of Manchester Darin Weinberg, University of Cambridge Andrew Wernick, Trent University, Canada Kevin White, The Australian National University Fiona Wood, Cardiff University ix women and work women and work One theme that has been consistently evident in writings about women and crime concerns gender role conditioning (whether as a result of biology, psychology, or patriarchy) Women’s own accounts for their pathways into crime bear out such claims, but also emphasize the role of insurmountable social and economic difficulties which lead some women towards crime Many female offenders indicate child sexual and violent abuse and other deprivations in early lives Not all who are abused go on to commit crime, of course; nevertheless, women’s accounts about pathways into crime, with all their contradictions, are no less valid than others Why some women commit crime can perhaps be approached by referring to the broad features of women’s structural positions and lifestyles in society and then focusing on what is offendingrelated Child sexual abuse and other related factors are often mentioned in this regard, although the connections between this and crime remain undertheorized It could well be that the low self-esteem engendered by the abuse and disadvantage fosters movement towards crime simply because crime provides a way of establishing some kind of autonomy in otherwise disempowered lives, but more research is needed here LORAINE GELSTHORPE women and work Work, both paid and unpaid, has been a key concept in sociological research on gender The activity of men has normally been valued more highly than the activities of women A major theme has been the distribution between wage work, care work, and housework, which is a key factor determining the gender division of work and the reproduction of the gender hierarchy The sexual division of work has changed radically especially since the mid-1970s, but there is at the same time a remarkable stability in the sexual division of work across time and place A key question in feminist research is how to reconcile wage work with care work Since the industrial revolution the fundamental gender differentiation in paid and unpaid work is connected to the capitalist division of labor in production and reproduction Women have always worked but women’s position on the labor market was tied to responsibilities for housework and care work determined by their class position and the ability to pay others to carry out this work The division between wage work and care work connected to the public/private divide has two aspects – one refers to a differentiation 674 between the state and the market, the other to the differentiation between state and family As Jane Lewis and Ilona Ostner have shown in “Gender and the Evolution of European Social Policies,” in S Liebfried and P Pierson (eds.), European Social Policies (1995), the male-breadwinner model was shaped by a discourse and policy premised upon men’s role as the main providers and women’s responsibility for children, the sick, the old, and the disabled As a result men received higher wages than did women even if they were not providers The meaning of work is contested and feminist research has redefined work to include house and care work In her Welfare State and Women Power (1987), Helga Hernes emphasized that care work is determined by a different logic from the state and the market Care work is invisible and, as Kari Wærness in her essay “On the Rationality of Caring” (in A S Sassoon [ed.], Women and the State, 1987) has argued, there is a different rationality connected to caring for husbands who can take care of themselves and caring for dependent family members During the 1970s and 1980s feminist scholars debated the increasing tendency for all women, including mothers and sole mothers, to become wage workers and for the state to regulate care work From the late 1980s there was growing interest in comparative differences in women’s participation in wage work and in the organization of care work The Anglo-American approach had a negative perception of the state and public policies as instruments for patriarchal control of women’s work, sexuality, and motherhood In contrast, Scandinavian research developed a positive perception of the state and “reproduction going public,” inspired by the expansion of the public service sector and women’s inclusion on the labor market European welfare states have since the mid1970s moved towards a dual-breadwinner model with an increasing political emphasis on the responsibilities of all adults to engage in paid work The increase in women’s and decrease in men’s labor market participation, as well as the changes in family structures towards an increasing individualization, has eroded the male-breadwinner model As demonstrated by comparative gender research there are different labor market patterns Diane Sainsbury, in Gender and Welfare Regimes (1999), differentiates between: (1) a male-breadwinner regime, where benefits are given solely to the male provider; (2) a separate gender roles regime, where benefits are given to both the women and work male provider and the female caregiver; and (3) an individual earner–carer regime, where both sexes have entitlements as earners and carers, found only in Scandinavia In terms of the mixed economy of care there are also different patterns In countries such as France, a general family support has given all children above three years a place in a publicly funded childcare center In countries such as the United Kingdom, provision is likely to be a mixture of kin, market provision, public provision, and voluntary provision Only the Nordic countries have a tradition for publicly funded childcare centers for under-three-year-olds Globalization and migration have created new forms of inequality in the division between work and care as women in the Third World increasingly migrate to the First World Scholars have identified a care deficit in the poor countries, in the sense that women from the Third World increasingly cover the caring needs of the rich countries They are hired to take care of children and housework for middle- and upper-class families in the rich world, while their own children often live in poor conditions in their home countries This has created what Arlie Russell Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich have called “global care chains” (Global Women: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, 2003) with the export of care from the poor to the rich world At the same time the family work for migrant women may be dominated by poor wages and exploitative working conditions Globalization and migration have increased class differences among women Scholars have identified a tendency towards a feminization of poverty in the global economy where women in poor countries most of the hard work and get the least resources Inequalities between women in the rich and poor countries and between women within many rich countries are growing At the same time women also have common interests as wage workers in equal pay, non-discrimination hiring and firing practices, and decent working conditions Gender interacts with other kinds of diversity and differentiation that must be taken into account in order to understand the dynamics of women’s work in a globalized world There is a growing awareness in the international system that women’s work is the key to economic development in many Third World countries Gender equality has become a political goal and mainstreaming has become a means to integrate a gender and ethnicity perspective in politics and planning The United Nations system has women’s studies strengthened women’s right to basic resources, including work, education, and equal pay, and has developed strategies to empower women and improve their living conditions and well-being BIRTE SIIM women’s health – see health women’s studies In modern democracies there is a close relationship between the women’s movement / feminism and women’s studies The women’s movement was a child of the American and French Revolutions that inspired demands for women’s equal rights among intellectuals such as Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) and John Stuart Mill The dramatic changes in relations between work and family and the integration of women in wage work after the industrial revolution were the background for studies of the women question During the twentieth century, women’s organizations demanded both equal civil, political, and social rights and special rights in relation to pregnancy and birth In her influential book The Sexual Contract (1988), Carole Pateman has analyzed Wollstonecraft’s dilemma – the tension between strategies based on equality that neglect women’s experiences “as women” and strategies based upon difference that reproduce women’s subordination in society Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal book The Second Sex (1949 [trans 1972]) was the first modern feminist study of the construction of women through socialization in the family, in education, and on the labor market The opening statement, “You are not born a woman, you become a woman,” is a critique of biological essentialism similar to the social constructivist position of postmodern feminism Women’s studies are defined as studies “for, by and about women.” The first women’s study program was established in 1969/70 in the United States, inspired by the new feminist movement and developed as an interdisciplinary approach at many western universities During the 1980s there was a growing criticism of the dominant “women-centeredness” that tended to neglect diversity among women of color Inspired by the critique from minority women and postcolonialism, many women’s studies centers changed their name to “centers for gender research” during the 1990s This marked a change from a focus on women’s common interests to a focus on men and 675 work and employment work and employment masculinity and on the interconnection between alty we feel towards corporate and political leaders gender, ethnicity, and sexuality The study of work in industrial societies has Feminist studies included liberal feminism, radical feminism, standpoint theory, and diversity been central to the discipline of sociology since feminism, inspired by postcolonialism Their strat- its inception Karl Marx, whose influence on sociegies have varied from the “inclusion” of women to “reversal” and “re-conceptualizing” the discipline, and their methods range from quantitative to interpretative and deconstructive methodology Since the 1990s there has been a growing critique of Anglo-American bias and the change from women’s studies to gender research was followed by more contextual and situated approaches The demobilization of the women’s movement in western democracies has contributed to strengthening postmodernist and poststructuralist gender research at western universities Judith Butler’s book, Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), illustrates the new tension between deconstruction and the normative goals of feminism Globalization and migration have been followed by a growth in the international women’s movement and a public discourse about gender equality in the international community Today there are women’s studies and gender programs all over the world In future, one of the challenges of women’s and gender studies will be how to overcome ethnocentrism and develop ways to overcome the tension between the universal goals of feminism – equal respect for women and men – and the particularism of women’s situation in BIRTE SIIM different contexts work and employment Paid and unpaid work of many varieties constitute defining experiences of individual identity, group life, and, indeed, societies as a whole Work refers to a set of tasks that people carry out, often for a wage, to produce goods or services for others This simple definition, however, merely scratches the surface of the myriad forms of work and employment relationships under contemporary global capitalism What makes both work and employment important is that they have direct implications for nearly all subfields of sociological inquiry From poverty to our access to health care systems, consumption, gender and race relations, families, social psychology, social movements – all are conditioned by the ways in which societies organize their systems and relations of work At an individual and group level, particular types of jobs or careers shape our lifechances They shape the rewards that are available to us, our experience of dignity, and the trust and loy676 ology has been considerable, posited that the terms and social relations of labor are the point of departure for studying societies, historically and contemporarily For Marx, the most essential fact about the human species is our capacity to engage self-consciously in the act of collective labor Our species being – that which makes us distinctly human – is most fully realized when we collectively plan what we make, how we make it, how we work together with others, and how we distribute the products of our efforts Under the capitalist mode of production, humans experience a deep-rooted alienation from that essence We sell our capacity to labor to others, are subjected to systems of control that diminish our autonomy, and experience spiraling exploitation as capitalists engage in a never-ending search to cheapen the costs of production and to reduce human input to little more than a mechanical factor of production The material and psychic injuries of capitalist social relations, according to Marx, would create irreparable class conflict, leading workers collectively to overturn capitalism as a mode of production Marx’s critique of capitalism remains one of the most influential perspectives in contemporary sociology Max Weber infused Marx’s critique of capitalism with a theory of a specific process that he considered to be inevitable in modern western society: rationalization and its manifestation in a particular political/economic mode of organization, bureaucracy Weber’s ideal-type bureaucracy embodies many features we find in contemporary capitalist workplaces, such as division of labor, hierarchy, the proliferation of formal rules and regulations (and clearly specified rewards and punishments for adhering to or disobeying them), and the centralization of authority and power In Weber’s view, rationalization and bureaucratization provide capitalists ideal tools of control and power over the workers they employ in industrial factories Whereas Marx believed that marginalized and deskilled workers would develop a critical class consciousness and lead a political revolution to overturn industrial capitalist society (leading to a classless society in the form of socialism, then Communism), Weber pessimistically argued that rationalization, the consolidation of elites, and the silencing of the political voice of those work and employment excluded from the ranks of the powerful, would simply become more intransigent, even under socialist society A colleague of Weber, Robert Michels, coined the term the iron law of oligarchy to describe this trajectory The insights of these classical theorists remain central to the study of work and employment in the economy of any advanced industrial society Core concepts raised in their scholarly work continue to thread throughout the literature on work and labor As industrial capitalism has been transformed into postindustrial and global capitalism, however, it has become apparent that other dimensions of work, aside from exploitation and alienation, are salient to working people These dimensions have complicated and undermined Marx’s prediction of a working-class revolution based on the premise of naked and intractable exploitation When we work, for example, we often derive intangible but important rewards How we feel about our jobs can depend on nonmaterial factors such as the feeling of inherent pleasure or gratification that we derive from our work, or the worth we assign to our laboring activities One example illustrates that how people feel about their jobs does not always follow from extrinsic factors such as wages or prestige Child-care workers are amongst the lowest-paid workers in the United States and the occupation is not highly attractive, judging by a perpetual shortage of workers and the rates of high turnover in the field Yet these workers often feel their work is valuable and derive intrinsic satisfaction from the occupation because they are nurturing and teaching small children, tasks that arguably constitute the very basis of social order Our collective work relationships and sense of membership in a community often counterbalance feelings of exploitation Many people regard their job as their most important source of sociability and humanity We receive self-validation as well as validation of our moral values in the course of working with others We take pride in jobs well done Work is often a place where a variety of personal needs are met Co-workers celebrate birthdays, holidays, births, and weddings together; people take their work relationships beyond the factory or office door, into public spaces such as bars, political organizations, or places of recreation Generations of family members have followed each other into the same factory, giving rise to cultural and oral traditions that become central to the definition of family itself More than simply deriving job satisfaction, work and employment then, what we in the workplace with others constitutes our very identity Other collective activities emanate from the workplace which are constitutive of the self and provide opportunities for personal growth and fulfilling group interaction Workers form mutually supportive “cultures of solidarity” in response to collective perceptions of injustice on the part of their employers Randy Hodson, in Working with Dignity (2001), points out that workplaces are sites in which we enact norms and procedures of organizational citizenship As organizational citizens we engage in constructive actions and relationships that improve our place of work in ways that exceed what we are required to by managers and employers Participating in unions and in labor movements is both a way to advance material and political interests and an important communal nexus in a world in which collectively oriented public life appears to be in decline For these reasons, workplaces in contemporary capitalist society are terrains of ambiguity, of unequal power and subordination, on the one hand, and experiential gratification and positive meaning on the other At the beginning of the twenty-first century, work and employment form a complex kaleidoscope of experience Paid work takes place where we most expect to find it: in factories, offices, and fields But sociologists and other social scientists also have found that people work for pay on the streets, in their homes, in the skies, and in the bowels of the earth Institutional and industrial context matters immeasurably For example, knowing the job tasks any individual carries out does not reveal the full story about that individual’s job, work experience, or social status Exactly the same type of work can vary based on the sectoral setting; a person who assembles mother boards for computers can so in the employ of a major core corporation, earn a living wage, enjoy job security, and receive benefits, while a different person who assembles these boards in precisely the same way might so working as a temporary laborer for a small peripheral firm, earning low wages, and lacking job security or benefits The first might be labeled a manufacturing worker while the second might be considered a mere assembler Revolutionary technological innovations have emerged in the era of globalization and the transnational corporation, innovations that facilitate the movement of information, knowledge, raw materials, finished products, and capital Thus, it has become increasingly common that workers 677 work and employment serve and produce for customers who are located literally on the other side of the planet, embedded in production systems and relations of inequality that have been configured at similar global remove Since Marx and Weber made their observations of early industrial capitalism, sociologists have introduced many new concepts and identified new forms of employment relationships They have broadened the scope of their research to adjust to the fact that the modal form of economic organization under capitalism is far more varied and global than was the period of early capitalism on which Marx based his theory They also have acknowledged that work cannot be viewed as onedimensional, but must be viewed as multi-faceted, with exploitation and disenfranchisement often co-existing with pleasure, gratification, and community Four major approaches to creating work systems have developed in industrial and postindustrial capitalist societies An understanding of each is important, for each one holds differential implications for material well-being, power, and subjectivities We find evidence of all these approaches today, depending on the type of work and the sector of employment and industry we study With the globalization of production, corporations have imported these approaches to recently industrializing societies as well The first major approach is scientific management, also referred to as Taylorism after Frederick Taylor, an engineer who lived in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century Because he viewed autonomous workers’ initiative, know-how, and social relationships as obstacles to productivity and efficiency, Taylor formulated a set of principles by which managers could rationalize and de-skill the labor process, undermining worker autonomy and control Scientific management relies on the use of time and motion studies, in which efficiency experts analyze and measure workers’ movements and their tasks They determine ways in which those tasks can be broken down into simple parts to increase efficiency, mechanisms by which the knowledge required for these tasks could be removed from workers and into the files and records of engineers and managers Such deskilling and control can be exerted personally, through the efforts of a supervisor, or impersonally, through technology such as assembly lines that simplify tasks and regulate their pace or through computers that measure every key stroke and generate reports on the quality of workers’ efforts This system of control – which isolates workers and 678 work and employment reduces their skill, autonomy, and dignity – historically has led many workers to form trade unions to organize collectively against employer domination Scientific management, as an organizing principle, persists today in many work settings, primarily where costs of worker training are minimal, and employers care little about turnover and actively discourage worker attachment to the firm A second approach to the organization of work and employment is the human relations model which was influential in the United States from the late 1930s to the 1960s Tracing its origins to American industrial psychologists Elton Mayo, Fritz Roethlisberger, and William Dickson, the human relations paradigm focuses on maximizing the creativity and loyalty of workers rather than marginalizing them, as the scientific managerial model would call for These researchers, ironically much in the same way as Marx, theorized that what was most important to humans was their social relationships Their goal, however, was to coopt those relationships They also posited that workers respond positively to managerial initiatives to cultivate and acknowledge their employees’ value Human relations theorists would design methods for taking advantage of workers’ desire to be social, methods that would create workers as loyal and committed organizational participants who would view their interests as being in synch with those of managers Such methods include soliciting workers’ input, giving them opportunities to determine how to carry out their tasks, and rewarding them for their accomplishments, although human relations theorists would not, in fact, advocate that management yield structural power to workers The human relations approach has appeared in different forms over the last century and is extremely pervasive in the world of management today A third orientation to organizing work is bureaucratic In a bureaucratic control system, as outlined by Weber, power is embodied in the organization itself, rather than directly in supervisors or managers As Michel Foucault has argued, power in modern bureaucratic institutions is ever-present and pervasive, yet invisible as it is embedded in rules, ranking schemes, and organizational structure Bureaucratic control systems are built on hierarchy, clearly specified avenues of vertical advancement that serve to motivate workers and elicit their consent, and on centralized and impersonal power Nearly all work organizations are bureaucratically work and employment organized to some degree but bureaucratic control is most fully developed in public-sector institutions and in the employment systems of large, monopolistic corporations In a bureaucratic system, those working at the lowest levels are most likely to be disempowered and their work rationalized Often, these workers lack access to formal ladders of mobility into the higher reaches of the bureaucracy On the other hand, workers in the middle ranges of the work organization historically have had access to internal labor markets, characterized by employment stability and in which career ladders are well defined and workers are expected to move up them continuously This type of control system has prevailed where employers wish to encourage the attachment of their workers to the firm and they so by offering implicit guarantees in the form of upward mobility and job security Finally, a fourth approach to organizing work in the contemporary economy is decentered control Researchers have identified this approach with many labels, including coercive autonomy, unobtrusive management, cultural control, and concertive control The key element of this system is that power and control are located throughout the organization, in many different sites, and in the hands of groups other than managers It is subtle to the participants of the work organization and, indeed, successful decentered control systems depend on workers who regulate themselves and their co-workers As is clear, decentered control is similar to the impersonal, invisible control made possible by bureaucratic control systems The main organizational mechanisms which make a system of decentered control possible include worker participation schemes, team-based production methods, cultural manifestos, and organizational decentralization Since the mid1980s, more employers have relied on building positive corporate cultures, designing flexible work systems (flexible specialization) that rely on greater employee participation and self-management, and shifting responsibility down into the hands of employees, in order to create more profitable work processes Much in the spirit of the human relations tradition, the goal behind the adoption of these new work systems is to align workers’ interests with the firm, to capitalize on worker expertise and knowledge, and to increase workers’ awareness that the firm’s success depends on their own efforts In a simultaneous counter-trend that marks a clear and deleterious departure from corporate practices of the mid twentieth century, however, work and employment corporate managers increasingly are unwilling to offer security and prosperity in return for greater worker involvement The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been marked by unpredictability and insecurity for working people across the occupational spectrum Firms have near-complete latitude to close down operations and move them overseas There, they can find an abundant supply of cheap labor, minimal environmental and labor regulation, and generous subsidies from governments eager to attract United States and other first-world operations to their own countries Top managers, responding to global competition and to pressure from stock market investors to improve their bottom lines, eliminate corporate divisions and lay off workers with little notice To an increasing degree, firms outsource their operations, externalizing specific functions to other business enterprises around the world Companies that, during the era of monopoly capitalism, offered their workforces lifelong employment, have reneged on that promise, leading to huge numbers of layoffs and the erosion of the stable employment contract Specifically, internal labor markets of large, bureaucratic corporations have eroded since the mid-1980s, as corporations have downsized and restructured in their pursuit of greater profits and becoming more globally competitive Even workers who were believed to be immune to layoffs and job insecurity – white-collar professionals and managers – have been subjected to job loss, longer terms of unemployment between jobs, downward mobility, and underemployment The studies of American sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter, published in Men and Women of the Corporation (1977), and employment relations specialist Paul Osterma, in Securing Prosperity (1999), show the two extremes of managerial and professional employment over the last thirty years Workers in most advanced industrialized societies have encountered these contradictory trends For these reasons, social theorist Richard Sennett and others worry that the erosion of the secure employment relationship will lead to a broader erosion of commitment to and trust in society itself Employment relationships are related to yet distinct from work itself, and the nature of the employment relationship has significant ramifications for individual and group well-being Anyone can carry out the exact same work in a variety of sectors and under a variety of employment conditions The majority of workers hold jobs in the formal sector of the economy Workers are engaged in formal employment relationships 679 work and employment when they receive a wage or salary from an employer in a stable economic organization and when their employment relationship is regulated by the state Sometimes they have secure, ongoing employment contracts Both full-time and parttime employment, and self employment, characterize work in the formal economy Workers also participate in the formal sector, yet in sporadic employment relationships, when they are paid only upon completion of a project or a batch of products produced in a home, or are hired by a temporary staffing agency to go into a firm and fulfill a temporary production need One of the most notable trends cross-nationally at the end of the twentieth century was the growth of the contingent work force, a different temporal approach to hiring workers The contingent category includes workers across the occupational spectrum who are employed on a short-term, unpredictable basis, such as temporary, contract, and seasonal workers Its expansion has been fueled by employers’ drive to remain competitive and profitable The theory behind the use of contingent workers, especially temporary workers, is that employers only need to have workers on their payroll when they need them, and can release them when they not Fine-tuning the size of corporate workforces in this flexible way provides some economies, such as minimizing payroll expenses and administrative costs as human resource management of temporaries is transferred to temporary help agencies But many costs are incurred as well: new conflicts, complexities, and administrative hierarchies are necessitated by this distinct employment arrangement For example, when company policy dictates that a certain percentage of jobs are to be staffed by temporary workers only, middle managers and supervisors often have to enter into complicated negotiations with staffing agencies over the qualifications they require of a temporary worker, the wage that will be paid, or training opportunities that temps are eligible to take advantage of Unanticipated hierarchies can develop when coworkers are requested to direct and even train temporary workers, acting as de facto supervisors The increased use of contingent workers has gone hand-in-hand with the corporate restructuring processes identified earlier People are casually employed when they work to earn income in the informal economy In the informal economy, goods and services are rendered and compensated outside formal employment relationships and institutions In nearly all societies, work in the informal economy pro680 work and employment vides a significant source of income for many people who face insurmountable obstacles to finding jobs in the formal sector Discrimination by employers, lack of adequate educational credentials, skills, or cultural capital, immigration status, lack of capital to start small businesses, and family responsibilities that can restrict women’s abilities to participate in the formal labor force are just some of the factors determining people’s decisions about whether to earn income by participating in the informal economy Such work might take the form of preparing food in one’s home and selling it on the street, doing construction or yard work as day laborers, sewing garments in sweatshops, cleaning houses, doing childcare, taking in boarders, doing laundry, and selling drugs Since informal economic activities are not scrutinized or regulated by the state, work in this sector of the economy – sometimes referred to as the underground economy – often places workers at a considerable disadvantage with respect to income, safety, and stability Since the 1960s feminist sociologists have highlighted the significance of unpaid work that is performed in the home Since women are not working for an employer they are not embedded in an employment relationship per se, nor they hold a job, technically speaking Unpaid domestic labor is an important case of work, nevertheless Historically, domestic labor was not considered to be productive work and was often viewed as a set of tasks quite distinct from work in the world of corporations and businesses Work in the home was not labor as work, it was labor as love Domestic work was not viewed as skilled or complex; rather, it was viewed as something that women carried out because they were naturally inclined towards these nurturing and relational activities To the contrary, contemporary feminist scholars have persuasively argued that preparing food, tending to the health, educational, and social needs of children and spouses, and maintaining normative standards of living – all work that has been carried out primarily by women, even when they work for pay in the marketplace, too – form the bedrock of the production and reproduction of the labor force under capitalism It is also fraught with tension because it combines the instrumentality of labor with the affectiveness of love, countervailing principles of social organization that are evoked in caring for one’s family Feminist sociologists such as Ann Oakley documented the complexities in the work of maintaining households and caring for children, and traced out the value of these tasks for sustaining work and employment society as a whole Family relations, as a nexus within which household labor is carried out, typically are relations of inequality and power between women and men, and in recent years research studies have shown that housework is a subject of contestation between husbands and wives Thus, close examination of domestic, unpaid work raises many of the same issues one encounters when studying paid work, such as alienation, dignity, inequality, and consciousness Increasing the complexity of analyzing domestic work is that paid domestic work, such as cleaning houses and caring for other people’s children, has been commodified and organized along the same unequal relationships of employment that have characterized work in formal capitalist workplaces Paid domestic work such as child rearing and housekeeping is vulnerable to the same tension found in unpaid domestic work, predicated on the dialectic of labor and love The world of work and employment has changed considerably over the last century What are the pressing issues and questions facing scholars who research in this field at this point in time? A major area of sociological research is the examination of ways in which work organizations are structured as vehicles of inequality in capitalist society This literature goes beyond the simple Marxist insight that class is the only basis for inequality, to the insight that within and across classes there is significant gender and race inequality as well Specifically, work organizations block opportunity for some groups while providing opportunities for upward mobility, status, and income to others The study of occupational segregation of jobs by sex and by race and ethnicity has been an important topic in this area Work organizations serve to perpetuate inequality when they have mechanisms which relegate white women and people of color to subordinate positions at work; when men and women are segregated into jobs with unequal wages, authority, and mobility; and when people of color and white women are barred from training, professional development, and leadership opportunities White women, and men and women of color, are more likely to be found in jobs that are deskilled, marginalized, part-time, and disempowered Of course, many sociologists have theorized how disadvantage can be corrected Moss Kanter, for example, argues that job ladders need to be created to link female corporate clerical workers in deadend positions to the middle and upper reaches of managerial positions Feminist sociologists and activists argue that comparable worth programs can work and employment rectify pay inequities between women and men that are based on unequal valuation of women’s work compared with men’s work A recent generation of scholars argue that organizations themselves are fundamentally gendered and racialized Historically, the study of work was gender- and race-blind Researchers often implicitly based their definition of “career” and the normative career worker on class-, gender-, and race-specific experiences They defined the “typical” career worker as an unencumbered professional who could uninterruptedly pursue vertical mobility on a continuous, fulltime-plus basis, ignoring the fact that this model of work conflicted with the lives of the majority of working women Several generations of feminist scholars, however, have corrected this gender- and race-neutral model They point out that the way jobs and careers are defined, the unnamed gendered and racialized assumptions that underlie particular organizational arrangements and policies, and the cognitive but unexamined biases that managers and employers have about who is appropriate for what type of work all play a role in maintaining gender and racial inequality in the workplace Gendered and racialized assumptions pervade the very fabric, culture, and structure of organizations, leading many to conclude that work organizations need to be much more fundamentally restructured than just changing job ladders, mandating diversity training, or recruiting more white women and people of color into executive management positions The recognition that work organizations are constructed around implicit biases against white women and people of color can be extended to the case of other categories of workers as well, such as the case of the disabled National laws forbid outright sex or race discrimination yet sociological research has uncovered ongoing, more subtle forms of discrimination, not amenable to easy measurement or observation So, too, legislation (in the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act) prohibits employers from preventing the disabled from acquiring jobs or gaining access to promotion opportunities Yet, in more subtle ways, work organizations hold assumptions about “ablebodied” workers that routinely present barriers to the employment and promotion of differently abled people The central insight that workplaces are predicated on unexamined and subtle assumptions about the characteristics and abilities of workers has been a major advance in sociological studies of work and employment 681 work and employment Another area of inquiry that continues to be fruitful is the study of worker participation, consent, and resistance Building on the labor process tradition, scholars working in this area examine the specific processes through which people their jobs, focusing on how technology can change, deskill, and upgrade jobs, systems of control, and worker resistance to them, and managerial ideologies about their workers At heart a Marxist tradition, labor process theorists argue that workers’ interests and subjectivities are shaped in the process of work and often are at odds with those of management Thus, workers often resist managerial directives when they watch with suspicion as engineers and managers try to simplify, speed up, and rationalize their jobs, or fragment their relations with co-workers Workers respond by fashioning their own pace and organization of work In other words, they work on their own terms even though they are constrained by management scrutiny and methodology Michael Burawoy’s classic study of male machine shop workers, Manufactured Consent (1979), showed how the machinists accepted production quotas set for them by management but achieved their quotas in ways that allowed them to play games and to use production methods that ran counter to management’s design of the production process The focus on resistance, consent, and subjectivity has been applied to a variety of work settings, including factories around the world, offices, restaurants, and other service-delivery organizations This field has yielded many insights to gender and race scholars who highlight how women and people of different race and ethnic backgrounds stand their ground and reject managers’ attempts to use cultural stereotypes to gain control over them Leslie Salzinger, in Genders in Production (2002), points out that in the contemporary global factory, transnational managers strive to construct multiple gendered subjectivities of male and female workers in order to meet their own production and professional objectives The rise of the global economy and competitive pressures facing corporations in industrialized nations have engendered a proliferation of new flexible work arrangements Researchers use different terms, such as flexible specialization and post-Fordism, to capture these arrangements and have shown the variety of ways in which flexible schemes are deployed in unionized blue-collar settings A major debate in these studies has been over whether new participative production arrangements give manufacturing workers genuine 682 world-systems analysis flexibility and autonomy in their jobs or whether they represent a form of co-optation of workers’ shop-floor power However, the literature on post-Fordism and flexible specialization has suffered from the adoption of a model based primarily on the experiences of white male industrial workers who are unionized Others argue that the salient question should not be about real empowerment versus cooptation with a narrow focus on industrial settings from which most unskilled workers of color, women, and immigrant workers historically have been excluded Instead, they argue, sociologists should shift the focus to workers who are typically left out of the debate, low-skill, low-pay workers in a variety of settings The mechanisms and meaning of empowerment can vary for diverse groups of people, depending on their particular class, ethno-racial, gender, and occupational experiences The subject is particularly urgent because the low-skill, low-pay employment model, often associated with the disadvantageous employment conditions of a huge retailer like Walmart, has become pervasive and is steadily corroding the union model of employment, based on a living wage and benefits Work and employment undoubtedly will remain among the most vibrant areas of study in the discipline of sociology As researchers continue to study the multi-faceted impact of current trends and identify new ones, they will be well positioned to provide critical insights about stratification, identity, and the potential for social change at the community, state, national, and global levels VICKI SMITH working class – see social class working-class conservatism – see conservatism world religions – see religion world-system theory – see world-systems analysis world-systems analysis This approach to macro-historical questions and social structures arose in the 1970s as a critique of the dominant liberal consensus of modernization and development theory, framed within the context of the structural-functionalist modernization school led by Harvard’s Talcott Parsons and world-systems analysis others, which took as its object of analysis nationstates developing along roughly parallel lines As has been pointed out, this was less the objective analysis of the world it pretended to be than what William Buxton, in his Talcott Parsons and the Capitalist Nation-State (1985), referred to as “political sociology as a strategic vocation.” World-systems analysis is associated most especially with Immanuel Wallerstein, who was a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University during the student revolts of 1968 over the Vietnam War and related issues, and a key part of a group of faculty supportive of the students In contrast to the modernization school, Wallerstein argues we are all participants rather than detached observers in the world-system, something no doubt the Columbia uprising helped teach him Moreover, in contrast with scholarly parochialism, Wallerstein calls not for a multidisciplinary but instead a unidisciplinary approach to the study of social systems Currently at Yale, Wallerstein was for decades a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Binghampton University (part of the State University of New York), which became for a time the center of world-systems studies There, Wallerstein and associate Terence Hopkins founded the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations, along with its journal Review Wallerstein and his colleagues – many of whom had taken up positions at various universities – formed an associated section of the American Sociological Association, the Political Economy of the World-System (PEWS), which also holds yearly conferences and publishes an annual set of papers Since its arrival on the scene, world-systems analysis has influenced numerous other disciplines in the United States and abroad Indeed, the work of Wallerstein and his colleagues has played a major role in the flourishing of what Randall Collins calls “the golden age of historical sociology.” Wallerstein’s holistic vision, inspired by socialist ideals of equality, fraternity, and liberty – in sharp contrast to both the brutality of “actually existing socialism” under Stalinist regimes, and global capitalism – poses a stark challenge to social scientific views of development as largely an internal process of modernization While development theory, including numerous Marxist variants, largely accepted the modernization approach, this was increasingly challenged by dependency theorists, who argued that development and underdevelopment were opposite sides of the same coin Previous to the work of Wallerstein, studies of west European and Third World economic development took place largely in isolation from each other world-systems analysis Rather than focusing on ostensibly modernizing separate states, Wallerstein instead posited that the proper unit of analysis for the study of historical social systems was the global division of labor Transgressing as it did the boundaries of territorially based states, this division of labor reflected the substantive economic interdependence between different states and regions in what was a capitalist world-economy, which became the key unit of analysis for world-system scholars Thus, worldsystems analysis, drawing on intellectual sources as diverse as the French Annales school with its emphasis on geoeconomic regions, the German historical school, dependency theorists, and Marxism, posited the study of the whole, or totalities A prolific author, Wallerstein is best known for the three volumes of his The Modern World-System (1974, 1980, and 1989) In these and a series of other works, Wallerstein brought together two largely separate areas of inquiry, European economic history and studies of the Third World Using this material, Wallerstein argued that between roughly 1450 and 1640 there emerged a new historical social system, a capitalist world-economy, the analysis of which was the key to understanding longterm, large-scale social change Development and underdevelopment and state formation and deformation were analyzed as part of a single historical process Whereas modernization theorists like Barrington Moore, Jr., focused on industrialization, Wallerstein instead emphasized the centrality of agricultural capitalism in the early European world-economy Wallerstein analyzed how, in the context of the crisis of feudalism, the emerging states of western Europe and their capitalist classes vastly expanded through overseas conquest and colonization Slowly but surely, a modern world-system emerged characterized by a global division of labor, within which there were formed a tripartite relational hierarchy of core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral zones, with surplus appropriation taking place between rich and poor states in a process of uneven development These economic zones reflected differences in productive structures, incomes, and state strength and had variegated modes of labor control, largely free wage labor in the core and coerced forms of labor control in the periphery With northwestern Europe emerging as the core, the former Habsburg Empire was relegated largely to the semi-periphery, while eastern Europe and the Americas formed peripheral zones, through informal empires or formal territorial conquest respectively Typical of Wallerstein’s work is his construction of analytical concepts through 683 world-systems analysis comparative analysis, for example his contrast of the notion of “world-empire” with a capitalist world-economy, or of the development of England as core and Poland as periphery in what Fernard Braudel (1902–85) termed “the long sixteenth century.” In addition, Wallerstein showed how racialethnic and ethno-national status hierarchies – including unequal forms of citizenship dividing the working class while simultaneously tying it to national state-corporate elites and their institutional structures – formed an integral part of the global division of labor Historical capitalism, rather than expressing the free play of market forces, is instead seen as decisively shaped by the power of state actors In their endless quest to accumulate capital – preferably through superprofits – capitalists aim to distort the market for their own monopolistic advantage The quest for accumulation, within the ongoing context of interstate competition and class conflict between labor and capital, thus forms a crucial set of keys for understanding historical change Yet while there is movement in and out of the core, semiperiphery, and periphery, it is relatively rare, and more importantly, does not change the overall structural inequalities inherent in the organization of the world capitalist system In the world-systems perspective, the capitalist world-economy is seen as subject to cycles of expansion and contraction and related processes of hegemonic rise and decline, which reflect some of its elementary contradictions as a historical system In addition to these cycles, there are secular trends, including expansion, commodification, proletarianization, bureaucratization, and mechanization Wallerstein and his colleagues also incorporated into their empirical accounts a host of factors, ranging from geography to ecology and epidemiology, though these are only weakly integrated into the overall analysis Among the topics studied by world-systems scholars and those influenced by them are processes of incorporation, whereby new locales became integrated into the world-system, and commodity chains, a concept used to analyze the production and distribution of rewards from commodity production on a world scale, be it the movement of coffee from the Third World to its consumption in the core or the role of raw cotton in the formation of the English textile industry Crucial here is the analysis of different productive regions, state structures, and social classes in a global perspective World-systems analysis spawned an enormous literature and has been drawn upon by people 684 world-systems analysis using different theoretical perspectives Among world-systems scholars there has been a proliferation of views Giovanni Arrighi – also a leading figure in development theory – is one scholar in particular who stands out In a landmark book, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (1994), Arrighi offered what many believe to be the most significant study of the longue dure´e of world capitalism to date Borrowing from Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism (1984), Arrighi argued that capitalism unfolded through a succession of what he called systemic cycles of accumulation (SCAs), wherein governmental and business organizations promoted material and trade expansions of the world-economy until their limits were reached, at which point capitalists shifted their investments into finance The obverse side of this expansion of financial activity was the reciprocal stimulus of military industrialization and high finance as part of the larger restructuring of the world-system that accompanies autumns of SCAs and the hegemonic structures of which they are a part These transitions were accompanied by organizational revolution in the strategies and structures of accumulation and the reconstitution of the global system on new and enlarged social foundations Unlike Wallerstein, but like Braudel, Arrighi locates the origins of capitalism not in the territorial states of Europe, but instead in the Italian city-states of the fourteenth century He traces the early alliance of Genoese capital and Spanish power that produced the great discoveries, before going on to analyze the Dutch, British, and United States hegemonies and related SCAs In earlier works, Arrighi analyzed the way in which the world labor movement was split as part of the polarization of the world-economy into peripheral and core locales in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries In his later work, Arrighi shows that the present-day resurgence of financial capital, the troubles of United States hegemony, and the rise of a new regional economic powerhouse in East Asia are more cyclical recurrence than purely novel developments, though the question of the future is left open A host of other world-system scholars have produced compelling scholarship in a wide variety of areas, such as Charles Bergquist’s Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela and Columbia (1986), to name but one example Bruce Cumings and a host of other world-system scholars have written some of the best work on United States foreign policy and world-systems analysis development in East Asia The contribution of world-systems analysts and their sympathizers to the literature on development and related issues is by now vast and includes work ranging from that of Dennis O’Hearn on Ireland to Paul Farmer on Haiti and global public health, Bernard Magubane on South Africa, Beverly Silver on global labor movements, Maria Mies on patriarchy, accumulation, and women, Antonio Benitez-Rojo on the Caribbean, and Walter Mignolo on Latin America Christopher Chase-Dunn, another leading figure in the field, developed a much more structural Marxist version of world-systems analysis, collaborated with Tom Hall on historical studies of different world-systems, and recently has set up a new Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside As for Wallerstein, he has published recent work on topics as diverse as the structures of knowledge, anti-systemic movements, and racism, sexism, and culture in the ideological structure of the world-system World-systems analysis has been greeted with celebration and criticism over the years, from both left and right Theorists from the bringingthe-state-back-in school of comparative historical sociology and others, including Anthony Giddens, Michael Mann, Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, and Aristide Zolberg, have criticized world-systems’ alleged economic reductionism and a neglect of the role of state violence and geopolitics, along with a failure to incorporate theoretically the importance of the latter into the perspective Others, notably Robert Brenner and Maurice Zeitlin, have attacked the supposed lack of attention to class forces and relations, as well as what is perceived to be a focus on circulation rather than production World-systems proponents have responded to these critiques in various ways Some have devoted more attention to military–geopolitical processes, yet in ways that retain the focus on the relationship with processes of capital accumulation Others have pointed out the great nuance and detail about state structure and class relations in the work of Wallerstein, while admitting the lack of integration of these details at times within the overall framework of analysis In many ways, the focus of world-systems on the global system anticipated much of the globalization literature The perspective has expanded its frontiers, akin to the world-systemic processes it studies Wuthnow, Robert (1946– ) Among the challenges facing the perspective in the twenty-first century will be to deal with some of the areas of relative neglect or weaknesses in its core analytical foundations, while building on its strengths by continuing to innovate, as it seeks to understand the world and contribute to its transformation in a more egalitarian, democratic, and peaceful direction as well THOMAS REIFER Wrong, Dennis Hume (1923– ) Editor of Social Research (1962–4) and Contemporary Sociology (1972–4) and Professor of Sociology at New York University, Wrong published influential studies of demography in Population and Society (1961) and Class Fertility Trends in Western Nations (1980), but he is best known for Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses (1988) Wrong was critical of sociology insofar as it had neglected Sigmund Freud, thereby accepting what Wrong called the oversocialized concept of man – the title of a famous article in 1961 in the American Sociological Review His other publications include Skeptical Sociology (1977) and The Problem of Order (1994) In his essays on The Modern Condition (1998), he describes himself as a “full-fledged New York intellectual,” serving at times on the editorial boards of Dissent and Partisan Review BRYAN S TURNER Wuthnow, Robert (1946– ) Gerhard R Andlinger Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton University, Wuthnow has undertaken research on American religion in The Restructuring of American Religion (1988) and God and Mammon in America (1994), and cultural analysis in Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis (1987) His current research interests are concerned with the moral meanings of the American Dream and with the moral basis of society in Acts of Compassion: Caring for Others and Helping Ourselves (1991) and Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America’s New Quest for Community (1994); and the place of spirituality in contemporary American society in After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (1998) His most recent publication is Loose Connections: Joining Together in America’s Fragmented Communities (1998) He edited the Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion (1998) His work has consequently contributed to the importance of the study of culture in sociological theory BRYAN S TURNER 685 Y Young, Michael (Lord Young of Dartington) (1915–2002) British sociologist, political activist, policy advocate in fields of health, poverty and education, also involved in founding the Consumers Association, the Open University, and other distance learning initiatives, Young set up the Institute of Community Studies, in 1952, from which he conducted most of his sociological work and policy research One of its early publications was the influential book Family and Kinship in East London, written with Peter Willmott, published in 1957, an ethnographic study based on observation of, and interviews with, members of the working-class community of Bethnal Green An early contribution to the genre of community studies in Britain, it subsequently provided a yardstick of traditional urban working-class life Its sequel was a study of the ways of life of former residents who relocated to the suburbs (Family and Class in a London Suburb, 1960) Again with Willmott, he published also the much-quoted The Symmetrical Family: A Study of Work and Leisure in the London Region (1975) His satirical essay The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) brought him greatest publicity for its social analysis in favor of equal opportunities in education During the 1980s, besides more policy reports and public campaigning, he published work on understandings of time, including The Metronomic Society: Natural Rhythms and Human Timetables (1988) Young was a prime example of a sociologist oriented to the project of improving social conditions who also engaged in political activism and organizational innovation ALAN WARDE youth At a general level, youth refers to a transitional period in the lifecycle between childhood and adulthood The social definition of youth in anthropology and sociology developed against an explanation of physiological changes and maturation in young people’s bodies as simply determined by nature or biology While recognizing the interplay between biological and social dimensions, sociologists stress that the category of youth 686 is complexly shaped within institutional settings by sociocultural, economic, and political factors Hence, the term youth has a diverse range of meanings, both historically within a society and across different societies The social definition of youth as an important stratified group experiencing shared processes of socialization developed within the specific conditions of urban industrial societies In the period after World War II, these conditions within western societies included increasing wealth across the population and the accompanying rise in disposable income, increasing numbers staying on in education, and the development of ever-expanding consumer markets Youth as a distinct age group came to be variously represented as: a social problem, teenage rebellion, male delinquency, and a barometer of social change More recently, within conditions of late modernity, youth and youthfulness as increasingly mobile categories emerged as defining features of consumer-based identities for increasing numbers of people across age cohorts in the lifecycle With youth and popular culture becoming disconnected, social behavior and cultural practices of consumption once exclusively associated with teenagers are displayed by people in their twenties and thirties, alongside active lifestyles among retired people The idea of youth culture suggests that young people organizing themselves within peer-groups have a distinct way of life from that of their parents It is suggested that the development of their own values, use of language, and distinctive leisure activities involving dress codes and musical styles result in an age-specific social identity At a more popular level, a moral panic is created with talk of a war between generations Earlier sociological explanations debated the notion of the emergence of youth culture as a means of resolving problems in the parent culture or the wider society Functionalists, as consensus theorists, stressed the integrative function of agespecific groups in contributing to the maintenance of the wider social system In contrast, Marxists, as conflict theorists, challenging the unitary youth notion of a youth culture, emphasized the need to place youth subcultures within the class-based social relations of capitalist society, with its underlying economic conflict of interests So, for example, the rise of skinheads was seen not as a result of shared age-specific problems but rather as a cultural response of resistance to collective experiences of a loss of traditional working-class community, a community that they were attempting to recover During the 1960s and 1970s, sociologists and media commentators with a more specific focus on youth subcultures, such as the skinheads, created a range of youth typologies In the United Kingdom, such spectacular types originally emphasized social-class background with later additions including gender, ethnic, and sexual profiles, including mods, rockers, hippies, and rastas The 1980s witnessed a shift in research away from the world of leisure, accompanied by media announcements of the death of subcultures This was a response to Britain’s economic decline and resulting mass youth unemployment, with the transition from school to the labor market as the new focus At the same time, youth culture, which had become increasingly commodified, represented a major aspect of the cultural industries within rapidly changing consumer capitalism More recent academic work has argued for both giving voice to young people and recognizing the independent explanatory role of culture, rather than assuming that the latter is necessarily responding to underlying economic and social causes Since the mid-1990s, cultural theorists have radically questioned the adequacy of the above theories in making sense of contemporary young people’s lives with the diversity of lifestyles and fragmentation of musical tastes Within the context of global changes in youth and youth subcultures, a range of contested accounts emerge, which have continuities and discontinuities with earlier approaches Some theorists, suggesting that we have moved from subcultures to club cultures, have focused on modern-day spectacular types, including ravers youth movements and new age travelers, with accompanying up-todate moral panics about drug-taking folk devils Others emphasize that postmodern youth styles are circulating globally through new technologies, including cyberspace, cable and satellite TV, and third-generation mobile telephone platforms Within this context young people are involved in a “pick-and-mix” consumer approach, blending styles of fashion and music At the same time, young people appear to be crossing social and cultural boundaries, taking up and developing cultural styles that are disconnected from their own social and cultural locations For example, violent girl gangs may adopt traditional masculine youth styles and young white people are celebrating North American “black rap” cultural forms “Youth movements” refer to young people’s involvement in a range of political, religious, or social reforms For example, a youth movement may be seen to emerge out of youth cultures Young people’s shared values, beliefs, and practices may be the source of an identifiable “movement.” Such movements often appear threatening to society as they may operate as a “counterculture,” an alternative to the dominant or regular forms of lifestyle Another use of youth movement refers to the process where groups of young people use conventional or democratic channels to achieve representation or get their voices heard These might include youth councils or youth forums Finally, youth movements may be sanctioned, run by, or promoted by the state, institutions, or religious movements For example, the Hitler Youth Movement in twentieth-century Germany sought to cultivate particular beliefs and values in young people Other examples might be the Scouting movement or the Young Men’s/ Women’s Christian Association MAIRTIN MAC-AN-GHAILL AND CHRIS HAYWOOD youth culture – see youth youth movements – see youth 687 Z Zola, Irving (1935–1994) A medical sociologist, Zola was one of the founders of the interdisciplinary field of disability studies and an activist in the disability rights and self-help movements in the United States His Harvard education opened the world for him but he never forgot his working-class roots, reflected in his interests in gambling, juvenile delinquency, and the downtrodden His early experience with polio and later involvement in a serious automobile accident left him with orthopedic and neurological impairments which resulted in a disability affecting his mobility Zola’s dissertation explored differential perceptions of pain and differences in behavior when seeking medical help among three diverse cultural groups in Boston: Irish Americans, Italians, and Jews His later work highlighted the subjective experience of disability, being an embodied subject, and the universality of disability He was Chair of the Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, founder of the Disabilities Studies Quarterly, which publishes 688 articles, personal statements, book and film reviews, and news of interest to the academic disability community, and a key member of the disability movement responsible for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the emergence of disability studies as a field He was one of the moving forces in establishing the Society for Disability Studies Zola was a scholar who contributed to symbolic interactionism, incorporating a critical component of pragmatism into his research by combining academic research and activism He was, on the one hand, a member of the National Academy of Sciences committee on disability, organized to identify the critical research issues in need of funding, and, on the other, an activist who could be seen demonstrating on the steps of a court house about accessibility His principal works include “Medicine as an Institution of Social Control” (1972, Sociological Review) Missing Pieces (1982), and “Bringing our Bodies and Ourselves back in” (1991, Journal of Health & Social Behavior) GARY L ALBRECHT AND MARK SHERRY