Social theory

About: Social theory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 11421 publications have been published within this topic receiving 624898 citations.

Toward a Social Theory of Law: An Essay on the Study of Law and Development

Abstract: Law is a practical science. It does not ordinarily dwell on fundamental questions about the social, political, and economic functions of the legal order. Satisfied with implicit working assumptions about these matters, legal thought moves rapidly to more tractable questions. But when law's solutions to social problems fail to satisfy, it becomes necessary to examine the basic theory from which they derive.' This is such an era. In a time when men speak casually of a crisis of law, and ask \"is law dead?\" 2 it is clear that law's role in society has become problematic. Such an age demands a social theory of law. It is now necessary to frame explicit and concise questions on the relationship between law and social life, and to answer these questions by disciplined inquiry. Since the implicit, a priori conclusions about the role of law are no longer valid, we must turn to systematic efforts to understand the relationships among the legal, social, economic, and political orders. In any such effort, comparative research and crosscultural generalization will play a major role. This essay examines one area in which such research has begun, the field of \"law and develop-

New Directions in Bioarchaeology: Recent Contributions to the Study of Human Social Identities

Abstract: As a discipline that bridges the biological and social sciences, bioarchaeology has much to contribute to a contextualized and theoretically sophisticated understanding of social identities. Here, we discuss the growing methodological sophistication of bioarchaeology and highlight new developments in osteological age and sex estimation, paleodemography, biodistance analysis, biogeochemistry, and taphonomy, particularly anthropologie de terrain. We then discuss how these methodological developments, when united with social theory, can elucidate social identities. More specifically, we highlight past and future bioarchaeological work on disability and impairment, gender identity, identities of age and the life course, social identity and body modification, embodiment, and ethnic and community identities.

Cyberspace: The World in the Wires

Abstract: From the Publisher: This text is a thorough overview of cyberspace, presented along with international case studies, illustrations and a guide to the literature in this area. It brings together material from social theory, cultural studies, sociology, political science and geography and planning.

Machine Translation: Mining Text for Social Theory

Abstract: More of the social world lives within electronic text than ever before, from collective activity on the web, social media, and instant messaging to online transactions, government intelligence, and digitized libraries. This supply of text has elicited demand for natural language processing and machine learning tools to filter, search, and translate text into valuable data. We survey some of the most exciting computational approaches to text analysis, highlighting both supervised methods that extend old theories to new data and unsupervised techniques that discover hidden regularities worth theorizing. We then review recent research that uses these tools to develop social insight by exploring (a) collective attention and reasoning through the content of communication; (b) social relationships through the process of communication; and (c) social states, roles, and moves identified through heterogeneous signals within communication. We highlight social questions for which these advances could offer powerful ...