Collins Dictionary of Sociology [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Sociology is not a tidy subject. As the 'science of society and social relations' its boundaries are wide and difficult to draw. It overlaps with all other social science disciplines, which, as the general science of socicty, it must take into account or can even be said to include. Since, in addition, its discourses are also continuous with those of 'lay' society, its subject matter is often controversial and charged by 'values' as well as by disciplinary disputes. Tnese features and other complexities of the subject are not a weakness of the subject, but are in many ways its strength: the fact that sociology reflects and interacts with real world issues and has no arbitrarily constructed disciplinary closure. However, they do present the compiler of a dictionary of sociology with considerable problems, not least the need to arrive at working criteria of inclusion and exclusion when no one set of criteria is likely to reflect all possible conceptions of the subject. It is important, therefore, to make clear what the criteria have been for this volume. Included are: (a) major sociological terms and topic areas which have been central in the development of the subject or which are currently important, together with many more minor sociological terms; (b) entries on other social science disciplines, including key terms from these disciplines where the terms have achieved a wide usage within sociology; (c) entries on the most influential sociologists, and entries on major social theorists and philosophers whose influence on the subject has often been on a par with those whose disciplinary links are more explicitly with sociology; (d) entries on the main research methods used in sociology, including basic statistical terms, together with entries on epistemological and ontological terms and issues which sociology shares with philosophy; (e) a selection of frequently used 'common language' terms in sociology where these are likely to present problems for students. The breadth of coverage attempted means that the volume includes a greater number of headwords than most previous dictionaries of the subject. A further general feature is that, whereas other dictionaries have mostly adopted a discursive approach in communicating the meanings of terms, in this volume a brief definition (or definitions) immediately follows every headword. This is intended to be useful to the person who wishes to use a dictionary to establish a meaning without having to sort through many paragraphs to arrive at it. This is not to say that the reader will find only short entries in the Dictionary. On the contrary, it contains many longer, more encyclopedic entries, but these always begin with initial briefer definitions. It should finally be noted that this Dictionary does not set out to be a comprehensive or a definitive work vii