General Politics

For those having trouble adjusting to life within society, halfway houses offer services and support, including 24 hour monitoring and guidance, that aims to help individuals function independently.

Discourse theory is a branch of postmodernism. It generally holds that each society has an underlying "discourse," or set of assumptions and ideological axioms that inform all behavior. What that...

Social pragmatics derives from the broader school of pragmatic philosophy developed famously by John Dewey and William James. It posits that something is true, or that an action is good, solely on...

The conflict perspective on deviance assumes that deviance, that is, behavior that departs from the social norm, is a social creation. It assumes that there is no "human nature" that sets a...

Functionalism is the oldest of the major sociological theories and is the first to treat it as a pure science. Functionalists believe social structures can be studied rationally through surveys...

Prosocial behaviors are normally defined as those external actions or internal motivations that promote or maintain solidarity within a specific group. As a result, sociologists and psychologists...

Social reality theory maintains that criminal behavior is a choice made by individuals who feel disenfranchised by society. Powerful forces within that society exploit those at the bottom, thus...

Social change theory refers to the struggle to find causes for movement in society. Societies are in constant change, adjustment and development, and trying to disentangle cause from effect is...

Social power is a central element in analyzing human society and the way it is organized. All human societies, regardless of their normative background, are based around different sources of...

Changes in the environment, population demographics and economic or political climates can influence the way that governments, individuals and the traditional institutions of society see things....

Psychologists and sociologists use social context to study social changes over time. Social context theory is based on the interplay between social forces that affect individual behavior and...

The 21st century's first recession has resurrected the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes. These theories, which state that the government's role in an economy is to regulate it in order to...

Justice is at the heart of many legal, political, religious and philosophical arguments. Social justice, a term coined by nineteenth century Catholic scholar Luigi Taparelli, refers to treating...

Most people want to live in a just society even if they disagree on what makes a society just. Some emphasize preferential treatment of the poor, insist that the economy should serve people,...

Radical feminism challenges and seeks to overthrow a patriarchal system that oppresses women through an extreme reordering of society. Developed as an extremist version of feminism in the 1960s,...

Any effort to curb government power is by definition also an effort to empower the individual. Libertarianism is a political philosophy that strongly supports such efforts. Socialism is a...