Handbook of the Sociology of Morality

by Hitlin, Steven; Vaisey, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9781441968944
• ISBN10: 1441968946
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-09-01
• Publisher: Springer Nature

Summary

Human beings necessarily understand their social worlds in moral terms, orienting their lives, relationships, and activities around socially-produced notions of right and wrong. Morality is sociologically understood as more than simply helping or harming others; it encompasses any way that individuals form understandings of what behaviors are better than others, what goals are most laudable, and what "proper" people believe, feel, and do. Morality involves the explicit and implicit sets of rules and shared understandings that keep human social groups intact. Morality includes both the "shoulds" and "should nots" of human activity, its proactive and inhibitive elements.At one time, sociologists were centrally concerned with morality, issues like social cohesion, values, the goals and norms that structure society, and the ways individuals get socialized to reproduce those concerns. In the last half-century, however, explicit interest in these topics has waned, and modern sociology has become uninterested in these matters and morality has become marginalized within the discipline. But a resurgence in the topic is happening in related disciplines ' psychology, neurology, philosophy, and anthropology - and in the wider national discourse. Sociology has much to offer, but is not fully engaged in this conversation. Many scholars work on areas that would fall under the umbrella of a sociology of morality but do not self-identify in such a manner, nor orient their efforts toward conceptualizing what we know, and should know, along these dimensions.The Handbook of the Sociology of Morality fills a niche within sociology making explicit the shared concerns of scholars across the disciplines as they relate to an often-overlooked dimension of human social life. It is unique in social science as it would be the first systematic compilation of the wider social structural, cultural, cross-national, organizational, and interactional dimension of human moral (understood broadly) thought, feeling, and behavior.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Return of the Moral	p. v
Contributors	p. ix
Sociological Perspectives on Morality ("What Is It"?)	p. 1
Back to the Future	p. 3
The Cognitive Approach to Morality	p. 15
Four Concepts of Morality	p. 35
Adumbrations of a Sociology of Morality in the Work of Parsons, Simmel, and Merton	p. 57
The (Im)morality of War	p. 73
Social Order as Moral Order	p. 95
Sociological Contexts ("Where Does It Come From?")	p. 123
Natural Selection and the Evolution of Morality in Human Societies	p. 125
The Sacred and the Profane in the Marketplace	p. 147
Class and Morality	p. 163
The Unstable Alliance of Law and Morality	p. 179
Morality in Organizations	p. 203
Explaining Crime as Moral Actions	p. 211
What Does God Require? Understanding Religious Context and Morality	p. 241
The Duality of American Moral Culture	p. 255
Education and the Culture Wars	p. 275
The Creation and Establishment of Moral Vocabularies	p. 293
Morality in Action ("How Does It Work?")	p. 313
The Trouble with Invisible Men	p. 315
The Justice/Morality Link	p. 331
Toward an Integrated Science of Morality	p. 361
The Social Psychology of the Moral Identity	p. 385
Morality and Mind-Body Connections	p. 411
Moral Power	p. 425
Moral Dimensions of the Work-Family Nexus	p. 439
Moral Classification and Social Policy	p. 455
The Moral Construction of Risk	p. 469
Moral Discourse in Economic Contexts	p. 485
Morality in the Social Interactional and Discursive World of Everyday Life	p. 503
Future Directions for Sociological Science	p. 527
Morality, Modernity, and World Society	p. 529
The Social Construction of Morality?	p. 549
What's New and What's Old about the New Sociology of Morality	p. 561
Subject Index	p. 585
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