Search results

Sociology of religion is the study of the relationship between religion and culture. Sociologists focus on the nature and structure of religious organizations and movements, leadership, the effect of religious commitment on individuals and social process or social change. Central to the discipline is the search for an adequate definition of religion and for a coherent explanation of the distinction between religious myth and social reality.

Uses qualitative data to explore how contemporary religious beliefs mark conceptions of work, particularly with regards to the beliefs of conservative protestant women. Compares liberal protestant women and men as well as conservative men against this group. States that conservative women consider motherhood as their most important work yet they are also most likely to feel “called” to their paid work. Cites that this has important implications for the sociological literature on gender and work. Builds on the original work of Max Weber.

In Sociology, the term ‘value’ has come to denote shared cultural standards related to objects of need, attitude or desire. Sociologists have generally confined their attention to values as empirical variables in social life whose scientific importance is not so much dependent upon their validity and ‘correctness’ as upon the fact that they are believed to be true and correct by those who hold them. For the scientific observer, values only have relevance if there is an observable relationship between the actions of subjects (individuals, groups, etc.) and the objects of their concern. Therefore, it is the holding of values and its social manifestations which is, arguably, the primary concern of the sociologist. The question of their derivation and possible ‘ontic status’ has been left largely to the uncertain ministrations of the philosophers. The possible objective validity of values tends to be regarded as a problem which falls outside the realm of science, but the insistence that social science remains value‐free, has raised the question as to what extent such freedom is really possible, and to what extent extrinsic values must always intrude.

The purpose of this paper is to report on an action research programme in the UK to address this through the notion of religious literacy.

Drawing on original research and analysis in UK higher education settings, the article will argue that health and social care educators, policy makers and practitioners need to develop their religious literacy in order to engage fully and competently with the religion and belief identities of their service users in a religiously diverse and complex world.

The relationship between religion and belief on the one hand and health and social care practice has been scarcely addressed, despite the important work of Furness and Gilligan in the UK and Canada in the USA. Their work appears as exceptional within a wider context of professions which have been forged in a predominantly secular milieu, despite having their roots in Christian social services in the USA, Canada and the UK. New research in the sociology of religion shows that religion and belief themselves vary in form, number and mix around the world, and that the religious landscape itself has changed enormously in the period during which secular social work has been changing significantly in recent years. It has been observed that in the UK secular assumptions reached a peak of confidence in the 1960s, when social work was most rapidly consolidating as a public profession (Dinham 2015). The inheritance has been generations of health and social care practitioners and educators who are ill-equipped to address the religion and belief identities which they encounter. In recent years this has become a pressing issue as societies across the West come to terms with the persistent – and in some ways growing – presence of religion or belief, against the expectations of secularism. In total, 84 per cent of the global population declares a religious affiliation (Pew, 2012); globalisation and migration put us all in to daily encounter with religious plurality as citizens, neighbours, service users and professionals; and internationally, mixed economies of welfare increasingly involve faith groups in service provision, including in social work and welfare settings across Europe and North America. Yet the twentieth century – the secular century – leaves behind a lamentable quality of conversation about religion and belief. Public professionals find themselves precarious on the subject, and largely unable to engage systematically and informedly with religion and belief as they encounter them.

Religion and belief have been bracketed off in education in departments of Theology and Religious Studies. Social work education has largely neglected them, and professional standards, benchmarks, values and toolkits, have tended to use proxies for religion and belief, such as “spirituality”, which are often ill-defined and vague. In a context of the reemergence of public faith, and a widespread acknowledgement that religion and belief did not go away after all, health and social care face the pressing challenge of engaging skilfully. This article draws on an action research programme in the UK to address this through the notion of religious literacy. Reflecting on original research and analysis in UK higher education settings, the article will argue that health and social care educators, policy makers and practitioners need to develop their religious literacy in order to engage fully and competently with the religion and belief identities of their service users in a religiously diverse and complex world.

Surely the absence of a sociology of morality has to be one of the major weaknesses of academic sociology, and a mysterious one at that. For Durkheim, one of sociology's founding fathers, morality was to have a central place as an object of inquiry; moreover, he was passionately interested in it on the existential level, as was Weber.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of conceptions and misconceptions relating to Weberian thought after 100 years of synthesis.

Extensions of the theories espoused are discussed and a brief review of several relevant empirical research projects is highlighted. Weberian theory is taken as the basis for the discussion of the paper. Its fundamental assertions are discussed and current discussions elucidated. Modern (post‐1980) research directions and findings are summarized for helping the scholar understand the current state of Weberian research and the potential for future paths.

There are numerous areas for future theoretical and empirical exploration discussed. Such areas as the effects of the Protestant work ethic on social networks across multi‐cultural (of which religion and religiousity play a role) boundaries and the dynamics of cultural change within, and between cultural dimensions will provide ever‐changing opportunities for at least another century. Inter and intra‐national diversity and its dynamics will also provide munificence in this field of study.

This paper provides scholars a brief review of the status of Weberian research and should evoke new thought related to this theoretical base as well. With the renewal of interest in entrepreneurship and its effects on communities, this area should be a fertile field for researchers, practitioners, and the public in general.

The index case of COVID-19 in Nigeria was reported on 27 February 2020. Subsequently, the exponential increase in cases has brought about the partial and total lockdown of cities, the closure of all schools and the shutdown of government offices in order to curtail the spread of COVID-19. COVID-19 and its subsequent drastic curtailment policies have implications on vulnerable groups, especially, informal workers who constitute about 70% of the active working population in Nigeria. This reflective discourse critically engages the plight of informal workers in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria.

The research was guided by the epistemology of pandemic interpretationism. It engages contextual reflections of the plight of economically vulnerable informal workers in Nigeria. Data were collected from secondary sources while rapid case studies were conducted with ten informal workers in Lagos and Ibadan. Afterwards, data were contextually analysed.

Economically vulnerable informal workers in Nigeria have contextually interpreted COVID-19 as an elite disease, imported into Nigeria by the wealthy. In addition, the mass population views COVID-19 containment measures such as lockdowns, movement restrictions and stay-at-home orders as elitist policies, which are aimed at protecting the wealthy and frustrating the poor and economically vulnerable who live on the fringes of poverty. Many informal workers have slipped below the poverty line while struggling to supply livelihood needs, as they were unable to earn daily income and cannot access palliatives. Consequently, they are of the opinion that “Hunger Virus is deadlier than Corona Virus”.

This paper is a contextual reflection on the plight of economically vulnerable informal workers during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and movement restrictions in Nigeria. It presents pandemic interpretationism as an epistemological guide and reflectively examines the poverty impact of COVID-19 on the Nigerian informal sector via contextual analyses of secondary data and rapid case studies. The paper uncovers various COVID-19 livelihood experiences and the responses of the informal workers; furthermore, it provides policy recommendations.

Once the domain of theologians, sociologists and (religion) anthropologists, we have seen more recently how consumer researchers have enriched the study of spirituality and religion. Researching the sacred can be fraught with challenges, in and out of the field. Russell Belk, Samuelson Appau and Diego Rinallo address key questions, issues and conceptualisations in the scholarship on sacred consumption, contemplating the past and mapping future research avenues. A reading list is also included for those interested in joining the authors in this collective discovery of the sacred.

Contributors answered the following four questions: How has the study of sacred consumption evolved since you started researching the field? What would be the critical methodological issues that researchers need to consider when approaching the “sacred”? What are some of the key authors that have influenced your thinking? What do you think will be the key questions that researchers will need to focus on?

Rinallo, Belk and Appau’s reflections on studying the sacred provide food for thought for both novice and weathered researchers alike. Researching the sacred both shapes and is shaped by our positionality: by our insider/outsider status, our gender and race and our cosmovisions as believers or sceptics. Researchers should be mindful and reflective of their subject positionings as they approach, enter and leave the field. Researching the sacred requires an open mind as we broaden our vision of what constitutes the sacred. Such research calls for scholarly as well as phenomenological curiosity. Reading widely and across disciplines to better familiarise ourselves with our sacred context helps to craft novel and meaningful research.

This paper provides a multivocal genealogy of consumer culture work on religion and spirituality, methodological advice and reading resources for researchers.

This study aims to analyze the effects of religion on gender equality at the national level.

The study distinguishes between the concepts of religiosity and religious affiliation and introduces a measure of religious diversity. The study defines religiosity and gender equality as multidimensional concepts and relies on a wide range of secondary data from credible sources such as the World Value Survey, the United Nations, Gender Gap Report and the World Economic Forum to analyze the effect of religious factors on gender equality in more than 70 countries.

The analyses show that after controlling for the effects of socio-economic development, religiosity tends to impede gender equality. It is found that Muslim and Hinduism affiliations are negatively and Protestant affiliation is positively associated with gender equality. Furthermore, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox affiliations and religious diversity do not significantly affect gender equality.

At the theoretical level, this study distinguishes between religious affiliations and religiosity and relies on the modernization theory to offer valuable insights into the relationship between religion and gender equality. This study's findings could serve managers and policymakers in dealing with gender disparities in different spheres of social life at the practical level.