Part I. Understanding Secularization: 1. The secularization debate 2. Measuring secularization 3. Comparing secularization worldwide Part II. Case Studies of Religion and Politics: 4. The puzzle of secularization in the United States and Western Europe 5. A religious revival in post-communist Europe? 6. Religion and politics in the Muslim world Part III. The Consequences of Secularization: 7. Religion, the Protestant ethic, and moral values 8. Religious organizations and social capital 9. Religious parties and electoral behavior Part IV. Conclusions: 10. Secularization and its consequences 11. Re-examining the theory of existential security 12. Re-examining evidence for the security thesis.

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Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

The central argument of network research is that actors are embedded in networks of interconnected social relationships that offer opportunities for and constraints on behavior. We review research on the antecedents and consequences of networks at the interpersonal, interunit, and interorganizational levels of analysis, evaluate recent theoretical and empirical trends, and give directions for future research, highlighting the importance of investigating cross-level network phenomena.

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Taking Stock of Networks and Organizations: A Multilevel Perspective

Peter Berger (1929) is an American sociologist best known for his collaboration with Thomas Luckman in writing The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. That book argues that human reality, and knowledge of it, is a social construct, emerging from the individual or group’s interaction with larger social structures (institutions). Social structures, once widely adopted, lose their history as social constructions (objectivation), and come over time, by the people who live within them, to be deemed natural realities independent of human construction (reification). Berger predicted, in his later book, The Sacred Canopy, near-term all-encompassing secularization of religion, which prediction has proved false, especially in the third world (as Berger himself has acknowledged in his later work, Desecularization).

神圣的帷幕 : 宗教社会学理论之要素 = The sacred canopy elements of a sociological theory of religion

After a very long hiatus, economists have begun again to study the relationship between economics and religion. This article seeks to summarize and evaluate the principal themes and empirical findings that have appeared in some 200 recent papers on the economics of religion. Although some of the research concerns the economic consequences of religiosity, most applies standard economic theory to the study of individual religious activity, the characteristics of religious groups, and the impact of regulation and competition on religious markets.

Introduction to the Economics of Religion

We establish for the first time a national mortality rate for religious congregations by determining the 2005 status of congregations in the 1998 National Congregations Study sample. The annual mortality rate for religious congregations is 1 percent, which is among the lowest mortality rates ever observed for any type of organization. This unusually low mortality rate probably indicates an organizational population whose weakest members live on in a weakened state rather than an organizational population that is unusually robust all the way down to its most vulnerable members.

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Dearly Departed : How Often Do Congregations Close?

We use the 2008 General Social Survey to estimate the prevalence of clergy sexual advances toward adults in their congregations. Overall, 3.1 percent of women who attend religious services at least monthly reported being the object of a sexual advance by a clergyperson or religious leader in their own congregation since turning 18; 2.2 percent of regularly attending women reported a sexual advance from a married leader that did not lead to an openly acknowledged relationship. We examine differences in the prevalence of this experience by education, region, religious tradition, marital status, age, and race.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40405672.pdf

The Prevalence of Clergy Sexual Advances Toward Adults in Their Congregations

Ordaining Women: Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations

The religious sector in the United States is distinctive for the degree to which institutional change occurs not through the birth and death of organizations, but through mergers and schisms occurring among preexisting denominations. In this article we analyze mergers among mainstream Protestant denominations, as a means both to deepen our understanding of the dynamics of denominationalism and to broaden the field of discussion about organizational merger. We argue that patterns of merger in any sector are institutionally embedded: in the religious sector, the interaction of ingrained tradition and historical contingency influences the range of possible merger partners, the perceived advantages to merger and the power of actors that may encourage or discourage merger We pursue this argument using event-history data from denominations in four Protestant families between 1890 and 1990 to test hypotheses about the determinants of merger The analysis shows that merger is influenced by denominational identity (family, racial makeup), organizational characteristics (size, centralization, and membership concentration), and the diffuse influence of the ecumenical movement; many of these effects are time dependent, a result of long-term shifts in the roles of denominational elites.

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Mark Chaves

Papers

Dearly Departed : How Often Do Congregations Close?

The Prevalence of Clergy Sexual Advances Toward Adults in Their Congregations

Ordaining Women: Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations

Organizational Consolidation in American Protestant Denominations, 1890-1990

Introducing the Fourth Wave of the National Congregations Study