Societal Level Of Analysis Research Articles

Secularization on Trial: In Defense of a Neosecularization Paradigm

According to its critics, the old secularization paradigm has been tried, convicted, and executed by recent scholarship in the social sciences of religion, and is being replaced by a new (poatsecularizafion) paradigm which highlights the continued vitality of religion in modern societies. This paper argues that claims to have definitively refuted secularization theory are exaggerated. It mounts a defense of neosecularization paradigm which retains the core insights of the old paradigm while incorporating criticisms leveled against the hubris and laziness of some deployments of the concept of secularization. Following Chaves (1994), this paper argues that the core of neosecularization theory is the proposition that secularization means not the decline of religion but the declining scope of religious authority at the individual, organizational, and societal levels of analysis. Three exemplars of this perspective in the area of religion and politics are highlighted: the work of Hertzke (1988), Demerath and Williams (1992), and Casanova (1994).

Introduction: The Scope of Religious Influences on Personal and Societal Well‐Being

That religious belief and behavior have far‐reaching influences on personal and social life, in both beneficial and deleterious ways, is self‐evident. The purpose of the present volume is to examine religious influences on a variety of aspects of well‐being, broadly defined to include both personal and societal levels of analysis. Religion and well‐being are both multifaceted constructs, and the empirical relationships between them prove to be highly complex. The authors in this volume examine these relationships across a diverse sampling of conceptualizations of well‐being (coping, mental health, physical health, and substance abuse and recovery), social issues and problems (religion‐related and ritualistic child abuse, prejudice and right‐wing authoritarianism, and HIV infection), and special populations (adolescents and the elderly).

Competencies for the Health Communication Specialist of the 21st Century

This article reports the results of an expert working group convened to define competencies required to function effectively as a health communication specialist. Participants were surveyed before the working group meeting on a range of issues related to training master's-level public health communication specialists. Survey responses were used to initiate the discussion at a subsequent two-day working group meeting. Survey and working group results clearly indicated that competence in this arena includes aspects of theory and practice. A pedagogical framework emerged, in which types of theories and practice-oriented skills were specified at both the individual and societal levels of analysis. This framework can be used to guide the development of graduate-level curricula in health communication.

An Empirical Test of Bott's Network Hypotheses, Based on Analysis of Ethnographic Atlas Data

Elizabeth Bott's Family and Social Network (1957) has stimulated much research in the area of kinship networks and network analysis in general. Her hypotheses have been tested and criticized, refined and modified. And still they remain provocative and controversial. Thepresentpaper is an attempt to test Bott, using the international data on 1,170 societies gathered by fieldworkers over the years and summarized in the Ethnographic Atlas materials (Murdock 1967). While there are no direct measures of Bott's key variables, it ispossible tofind useful indicators to represent them. This being the case, Bott's model can be tested, indirectly, on a far larger body of data than has ever been tested before. The data analysis supports Bott's linkages in the main, if only weakly. Network connectedness is related to sex-role segregation. Various factors, includingphysical mobility, economic interdependence, and the opportunity to make contacts outside the local area are related to network connected ness. In Bott'sfull model, network connectedness is an intervening variable; whereas this data analysis finds network connectedness to be a conditional variable, at the societal level of analysis.

Power, Status, and International War

Reference to the existence of a hierarchy or pecking order in the international system is a commonplace in the traditional literature of international relations and in the folklore of diplomacy. The widespread use of such terms as 'superpower', 'major power' or less flatteringly 'banana republic' reminds us that the society of nations is by no means classless. Even so self-consciously egalitarian a body as the United Nations makes a formal, constitutional distinction between ordinary state members and the privileged few the permanent members of the Security Council. Some scholars those whose major theoretical focus is the concept of power have attempted to specify the criteria which determine national placement on this rank-ordering, and to determine how this placement is related to national behavior.i Nonetheless, stratification and hierarchy in the international system have not received anything like the attention paid to the corresponding phenomena at the societal level of analysis. In recognition of this fact, a number of recent studies have attempted to draw upon the conceptual and empirical ricbness of the sociological literature on this subject to illuminate the situation at the international level. In particular, Galtung2 and others have focused attention on the concept of rank-disequilibrium or status inconsistency and its possible usefulness as an explanatory concept in the study of international conflict. Many sociological studies indicate that atti. tudes are affected not only by an individual's overall position in the social hierarchy, but also by the degree to which an individual's rankings on the major dimensions of his status set correspond. Individuals with inconsistent rankings for example, persons whose income and job status do not match up to their education and skills experience frustration in their social relationships and as a consequence manifest a greater degree of dissatisfaction and aggressiveness in their social and political behavior.3 Galtung has suggested that the relationship between status inconsistency and conflict behavior may be found in the international system as well. Nations which rank high on such 'achieved' statuses as economic and military capacity, yet are denied a correspondingly high rank on 'ascribed' ones such as recognition and prestige, appear to resent their lot. If this refusal to grant status is persistent and severe, the nation concerned can develop a good deal of generalized hostility towards its coevals as the example of presentday China seems to indicate. While the few empirical studies undertaken thus far lend some support to this hypothesis, they cannot be considered by any means conclusive. Fossum4 has discovered a relationship between national status inconsistency and military coups d'etat in Latin America, but did not examine the external conflict behavior of the nations in his study. Midlarsky5 addresses himself to inter-nation conflict, finding it to be associated with inconsistencies among the rates of change of a nation's various status positions over the period 1870-1945. He does not, however, examine the relationship of conflict behavior to status inconsistency per se. East6 undertakes such an examination, but it is based on only 17 annual observations within a time period (1948-1964) which can handly be considered representative of either the preceding or subsequent periods. It would seem, then,