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Social movement theory is an interdisciplinary study within the social sciences that generally seeks to explain why social mobilization occurs, the forms under which it manifests, as well as potential social, cultural, political, and economic consequences, such as the creation and functioning of social movements.
The term "critical mass" is borrowed from nuclear physics, where it refers to the amount of a substance needed to sustain a chain reaction. Within social sciences, critical mass has its roots in sociology and is often used to explain the conditions under which reciprocal behavior is started within collective groups, and how reciprocal behavior ...
The term social mechanisms and mechanism-based explanations of social phenomena originate from the philosophy of science. The core thinking behind the mechanism approach has been expressed as follows by Elster (1989: 3-4): “To explain an event is to give an account of why it happened. Usually… this takes the form of citing an earlier event ...
The field of social dynamics brings together ideas from economics, sociology, social psychology, and other disciplines, and is a sub-field of complex adaptive systems or complexity science. The fundamental assumption of the field is that individuals are influenced by one another's behavior.
Social mobility is the movement of individuals, families, households or other categories of people within or between social strata in a society. [1] It is a change in social status relative to one's current social location within a given society. This movement occurs between layers or tiers in an open system of social stratification.
The term new social movements (NSMs) is a theory of social movements that attempts to explain the plethora of new movements that have come up in various western societies roughly since the mid-1960s (i.e. in a post-industrial economy) which are claimed to depart significantly from the conventional social movement paradigm.
Value-added theory (also known as social strain theory) is a sociological theory, first proposed by Neil Smelser in 1962, which posits that certain conditions are needed for the development of a social movement.
The topic has seen rapid growth since the 1990s, reflecting curiosity about the process of social change and "fueled by interest in institutional arguments and in network and dynamic analysis." [1] The theory uses a case study of the growth of business computing to explain different mechanisms of diffusion.