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In urban sociology, fragmentation refers to the absence or underdevelopment of connections between a society and the grouping of certain of its members. These connections may concern culture , nationality , race , language , occupation , religion , income level, or other common interests.
Manifest functions are the consequences that people see, observe or even expect. It is explicitly stated and understood by the participants in the relevant action. The manifest function of a rain dance, according to Merton in his 1957 Social Theory and Social Structure, is to produce rain, and this outcome is intended and desired by people participating in the ritual.
Social deprivation is the reduction or prevention of culturally normal interaction between an individual and the rest of society. This social deprivation is included in a broad network of correlated factors that contribute to social exclusion; these factors include mental illness, poverty, poor education, and low socioeconomic status, norms and values.
Social disruption is a term used in sociology to describe the alteration, dysfunction or breakdown of social life, often in a community setting.Social disruption implies a radical transformation, in which the old certainties of modern society are falling away and something quite new is emerging. [1]
An alternative usage of this term is in cognitive psychology. Here, George Kelly developed "constructive alternativism" as a form of personal construct psychology, this provided an alternative to what he saw as "accumulative fragmentalism". In this theory, knowledge is seen as the construction of successful mental models of the exterior world ...
Herbert Blumer was the first to specifically use the term "social contagion”, in his 1939 paper on collective behavior, where he gave the dancing mania of the middle ages as a prominent example. From the 1950s, studies of social contagion began to investigate the phenomena empirically, and became more frequent.
Social polarization is the segregation within a society that emerges when factors such as income inequality, real-estate fluctuations and economic displacement result in the differentiation of social groups from high-income to low-income. It is a state and/or a tendency denoting the growth of groups at the extremities of the social hierarchy ...
The pursuit of interests generates various types of conflict, which is thus seen as a normal aspect of social life, rather than an abnormal occurrence. Competition over resources is often the cause of conflict. The theory has three tenets: Society is composed of different groups, which compete for resources.