Sociology
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Letter from the Editor in Chief
About the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Sociology
Substantive, peer-reviewed, and regularly updated, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Sociology combines the speed and flexibility of digital with the rigorous standards of academic publishing. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Sociology will soon be available to institutions worldwide via subscription and perpetual access and to individuals via subscription.
Find information about the scholars who will shape the content of this exciting new resource.
At its core, sociology is the systematic study of society, human behavior, and the relationships between individuals and groups. Through empirical research and theoretical frameworks, sociologists aim to uncover patterns, trends, and underlying principles that govern social life. By examining the dynamics of groups, institutions, and cultures, sociologists shed light on the factors influencing human behavior. This understanding is invaluable in various academic disciplines, including psychology, political science, and anthropology. Sociological research often complements and enriches the perspectives of these fields, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration. To the extent that the field is marked by islands of knowledge while innovative research draws on cross-fertilization across approaches or topics, the encyclopedia presents an opportunity to create connections, focus on mechanisms, provide a sense of context and history, and help identify research questions that can inform new research, whether in classic areas or emerging ones. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Sociology will serve as a springboard to provide new contributions for faculty and graduate students alike.
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Sociology is part of the larger online Oxford Research Encyclopedias (OREs). OREs are dynamic digital encyclopedias which are continuously updated by a community of leading scholars and researchers.
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Oxford would like to invite you to join an engaged community of authors, scholars, librarians, and students to build a better reference platform of enduring academic values. Whether you wish to contribute, provide insights and recommendations, or simply ask a question, email us at sociology.ore@oup.com to connect with the editorial team. We look forward to hearing from you.
Editorial Board
Editor in Chief
LYNETTE SPILLMAN
Lyn Spillman is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Notre Dame. Her research and teaching interests are grounded in cultural sociology and extend to economic sociology, social theory, comparative historical sociology, qualitative methods, and political sociology. Her work examines cultural influences in social processes: how meaning-making varies, how meanings influence human action, and how meaning-making affects social cohesion and conflict. She is especially interested in understanding economic and political culture in long-term historical processes. She teaches classes in cultural sociology, economic sociology, qualitative methods, social theory, and political sociology, and she has been a member of over seventy committees supporting students’ thesis research. Her work for cultural sociology includes What is Cultural Sociology (Polity, 2020), Cultural Sociology (editor) (Blackwell, 2002), and articles, encyclopedia entries, and special issues on cultural theory, interest-oriented action, mixed methods, and causal logic. Her work on economic culture includes Solidarity in Strategy: Making Business Meaningful in American Trade Associations (University of Chicago Press, 2012), winner of the Viviana Zelizer Award for Best Book in Economic Sociology, and the Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in Cultural Sociology. She has also published articles, chapters, and encyclopedia entries on business associations, culture in economic life, economic culture in the public sphere, and professions. Her work on political culture includes Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1997), as well as articles and chapters on nations, nationalism, collective memory, and constitutional conventions. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an ASA/NSF Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline Award, she has served as Chair and as Secretary-Treasurer of the ASA Section on Cultural Sociology, and on the Executive and Nominations Committees of the Social Science History Association. She has also held numerous other offices in the ASA sections for Theory, Comparative-Historical Sociology, Economic Sociology, and Political Sociology, and Altruism. A current or former member of the editorial boards of American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Sociological Forum, the ASA Rose Monograph Series, and Sociological Theory, she is currently North American Editor for Cultural Sociology, and Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology. She is also a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame.
Editorial Board
DEBRA DAVIDSON
Debra Davidson is Professor of Environmental Sociology in the Department of Resource Economics and Environmental Sociology at the University of Alberta. Debra began her career at the University of Alberta as Assistant Professor in 1999. Since that time, her teaching and research has been focused on the social impacts of and responses to climate change, with particular attention to energy-society relations. Her work is featured in several books and journals, including Science, Nature, Global Environmental Change, and British Journal of Sociology. She was Lead Author in Working Group II on the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change and is currently a member of the United Nations Environment Program’s Expert Foresight Panel. Between 2013 and 2023, she also served as Director of Prairie Urban Farm, a community farm located at the University of Alberta, and she is also Convenor of the Climate Action Coalition at the University of Alberta.
ANNA LUND
Anna Lund is a professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology at Stockholm University and a faculty fellow in the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University. Her work incorporates cultural sociological perspectives across various empirical fields. In her current work, she investigates the social and cultural dimensions of opportunity structures for migrant youth in Sweden. She is also researching existential rituals in life-altering situations. Her recent work has appeared in journals such as Poetics, British Journal of Sociology of Education, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Ethnography, and Emotion, Space and Society. In 2019, she was a co-editor of the volume The Nordic Civil Sphere (eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Anna Lund, and Andrea Voyer) published by Polity Press.
CECILIA MENJÍVAR
Cecilia Menjívar holds the Dorothy L. Meier Chair and is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UCLA. Her research focuses on two areas: the effects of immigration laws and enforcement policies on Central American immigrants in the United States and gender-based violence against women in Central America. The general theoretical strand connecting her work centers on the state and its actions (and inactions, neglect, and abandonment). She has authored three award-winning books, edited 17 volumes, and published dozens of articles, chapters, and essays. She has received two career awards, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. She served as Vice-President of the American Sociological Association (2014-2015) and as its President (2021-2022). She also was named a Social Justice Hero by the Museum of Social Justice in Los Angeles.
RICHARD OCEJO
Richard Ocejo is professor of sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author or editor of five books, including Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City (Princeton University Press, 2024), Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy (Princeton University Press, 2017) Upscaling Downtown: From Bowery Saloons to Cocktail Bars in New York City (Princeton University Press, 2014). Ocejo’s work has appeared in such journals as Social Problems, Urban Affairs Review, Journal of Urban Affairs, Sociological Perspectives, City & Community, and Poetics. He is the Editor of City & Community, the official journal of the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, and serves on the editorial boards of the journals Work and Occupations, Metropolitics, and the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. Finally, he is the director of the MA program in International Migration Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.
SMITHA RADHAKRISHNAN
Smitha Radhakrishnan is the Marion Butler McLean Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College. Her research examines the cultural, financial, and political dimensions of gender, development, and globalization, with particular focus on India, the United States, and South Africa. She is currently working on a multi-sited study of household indebtedness that examines how precarious families leverage exploitative debt in order to make ends meet in a financial context that is saturated with loans but lacking in basic social provisions. Radhakrishnan is author of The Gender Order of Neoliberalism (with Cinzia D. Solari, Polity Press, 2023, Winner, 2024 Immanuel Wallerstein Book Award) and Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India (Duke University Press, 2022, Alice Amsden Book Award 2024, Honorable Mention). She has published in Gender and Society, Theory and Society, World Development, and Sociology of Development, and received fellowships from the ACLS, AAUW, and NSF, among other grants and awards. Dr. Radhakrishnan received her PhD in Sociology from University of California, Berkeley.
GAY SEIDMAN
Gay Seidman is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has explored questions involving labor and other social movements, gender, and policy debates in the global South, usually using a comparative-historical approach, and generally including South Africa and Brazil. Her books include Manufacturing Militance (1994), Beyond the Boycott (2008), and most recently, a volume co-edited with Michael Burawoy, titled Engaging Erik Olin Wright (2024).
Letter from the Editor in Chief
Humans are social creatures: our social groups and social relationships affect all we do. Sociology offers essential perspectives and new knowledge about all our human groups and interactions. The range of topics inviting sociological analysis is very broad, and new areas of investigation proliferate. So I am pleased to celebrate and commend to you the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Sociology as an invaluable resource offering a systematic map of the field for researchers, practitioners, teachers and students alike.
Originating in the transition from smaller to larger and more complex societies, sociology as a field seeks to understand the impact of large social forces on social institutions like family, religion, education, the media, cities, medicine, the criminal justice system, and many more. It also seeks to examine their distinctive internal dynamics. Within broad institutional spheres, sociology analyzes formal and informal social groups and networks, like churches, professions, schools, companies, unions, subcultures, and social movements. And sociology investigates how individual identities, actions, and life course are shaped by and influence those broader institutional spheres, social groups and networks. Fundamental social dynamics like differentiation, change, conflict, inequality, solidarity, and socialization link all these levels.
Sociology’s core concern with social groups and social relationships creates strong pathways for continuing interdisciplinary contributions, too. It offers distinctive approaches to understanding economic and political action and institutions beyond those offered by economics and political science. Similarly, links with psychology are strong through its perspectives on interaction and on cognition. Overlaps with the concerns of anthropology, history, and communications studies also generate mutual contributions.
And sociology brings diverse theoretical perspectives and analytic methods to understanding social groups, social relationships, and social identities. It is distinctive among other social sciences for the extent to which it recognizes and sometimes combines scientific, humanistic, and pragmatic concerns. Theoretical contributions range from the analytic and universal to the deeply historical and grounded. Methodological approaches range from the highly quantitative and statistical to the deeply qualitative and particular, with many intermediate combinations. Pragmatically, sociological analysis can contribute to public debate and social change with general principles, new background knowledge, particular policy recommendations for governance and contextual knowledge for activists.
This compelling range of sociological contributions makes the ORE of Sociology an invaluable platform and portal for multiplying their impact. An international board of advisory editors will guide selection of expert contributors providing authoritative, peer-reviewed articles on each topic. Its digital format will allow regular updates and extensive cross-linking. Perhaps most important, the ORE offers the prospect of keeping pace as sociology continues to engage new topics, refresh theoretical traditions, and test new methodologies.
I look forward to seeing this wonderful repository of sociological insight grow and flourish, becoming not only a well-traveled path between different areas of sociology but also a force multiplier for sociology’s public impact.
Lyn Spillman
Editor-in-Chief
Emeritus Professor of Sociology
University of Notre Dame
Word from the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Sociology team
Oxford University Press is a proud publisher of insightful and informative books in sociology. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Sociology complements and reinforces our commitment to the community of scholars and students in this field, as it provides incisive articles on both fundamental and innovative topics. And uniquely, it is designed to present various perspectives on important approaches, issues, and topics, reflective of the tensions and debates that make sociology such an exciting field.
A novel tool for contemporary research needs, the encyclopedia incorporates vanguard innovations in digital publishing. The ORE articles are published and updated on a continual basis and feature embedded multimedia content, cross-referenced links, and intuitive search and browse functions—all while maintaining the rigorous standards of top-quality, vetted scholarship that readers have come to expect from Oxford University Press.
We hope you will visit and revisit this site as new content is added each month. And please consider getting involved. Contributors to the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Sociology are presented with a rare opportunity: each new article has the potential to become the definitive explanatory essay on its topic. And as a reader, your feedback is essential as the ORE continues to develop through collaboration between the global community of sociologists and Oxford University Press.
Anthony Wahl
Executive Editor, Scholarly Reference
