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Topic Review
Benazir Income Support Programme
The Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) also Known as Ehsaas Programme Pakistan is a federal unconditional cash transfer poverty reduction program in Pakistan . Launched in July 2008, it is the largest single social safety net program in the country with nearly Rs. 90 billion ($900 million) distributed to 5.4 million beneficiaries in 2016. The Department for International Development of the United Kingdom is the largest foreign backer of the program, providing $244 million (or 27%) of the total funds in 2016 with the Pakistani Government providing the rest. As of 2016, the program distributes Rs.19,338 (or approx. $195) per annum distributed per month. The stipend is linked to the Consumer Price Index and is paid through a smart card. For now, Dr Sania Nishtar is Chairman of BISP in regime of PTI governance.
  • 9.4K
  • 21 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Socialism in One Country
Socialism in One Country was a theory put forth by Joseph Stalin and Nikolai Bukharin in 1924 which was eventually adopted by the Soviet Union as state policy. The theory held that given the defeat of all the communist revolutions in Europe in 1917–1923 except Russia, the Soviet Union should begin to strengthen itself internally. That turn toward national communism was a shift from the previously held position by classical Marxism that socialism must be established globally (world communism). However, proponents of the theory argue that it contradicts neither world revolution nor world communism. The theory was in opposition to Leon Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution.
  • 9.0K
  • 17 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Bible Belt
The Bible Belt is a region of the Southern United States in which socially conservative Protestant Christianity plays a strong role in society and politics, and church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. The region contrasts with the religiously diverse Midwest and Great Lakes, and the Mormon corridor in Utah and southern Idaho. Whereas the states with the highest percentage of residents identifying as non-religious are in the West and New England regions of the United States (with Vermont at 37%, ranking the highest), in the Bible Belt state of Alabama it is just 12%, and Tennessee has the highest proportion of evangelical Protestants, at 52%. The evangelical influence is strongest in northern Georgia, Tennessee , Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, southern and western Virginia, West Virginia, the Upstate region of South Carolina, and East Texas . The earliest known usage of the term "Bible Belt" was by American journalist and social commentator H. L. Mencken, who in 1924 wrote in the Chicago Daily Tribune: "The old game, I suspect, is beginning to play out in the Bible Belt." In 1927, Mencken claimed the term as his invention. The term is now also used in other countries for regions with higher religious doctrine adoption.
  • 8.9K
  • 24 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Law
Law is a system of rules that are created and enforced through social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior. Law is a system that regulates and ensures that individuals or a community adhere to the will of the state. State-enforced laws can be made by a collective legislature or by a single legislator, resulting in statutes, by the executive through decrees and regulations, or established by judges through precedent, normally in common law jurisdictions. Private individuals can create legally binding contracts, including arbitration agreements that may elect to accept alternative arbitration to the normal court process. The formation of laws themselves may be influenced by a constitution, written or tacit, and the rights encoded therein. The law shapes politics, economics, history and society in various ways and serves as a mediator of relations between people. A general distinction can be made between (a) civil law jurisdictions, in which a legislature or other central body codifies and consolidates their laws, and (b) common law systems, where judge-made precedent is accepted as binding law. Historically, religious laws played a significant role even in settling of secular matters, and is still used in some religious communities. Islamic Sharia law is the world's most widely used religious law, and is used as the primary legal system in some countries, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia. The adjudication of the law is generally divided into two main areas. Criminal law deals with conduct that is considered harmful to social order and in which the guilty party may be imprisoned or fined. Civil law (not to be confused with civil law jurisdictions above) deals with the resolution of lawsuits (disputes) between individuals or organizations. Law provides a source of scholarly inquiry into legal history, philosophy, economic analysis and sociology. Law also raises important and complex issues concerning equality, fairness, and justice.
  • 7.8K
  • 25 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Social System
A social system refers to a complex network of interrelated social entities, such as individuals, groups, organizations, and institutions, that interact and influence one another within a shared environment or society. These interactions are guided by norms, values, roles, and patterns of behavior, which collectively shape the functioning and structure of the social system. Social systems exhibit patterns of organization, stability, and adaptation, serving various functions and purposes within society.
  • 7.6K
  • 02 Feb 2024
Topic Review
Polygyny
Polygyny (/pəˈlɪdʒɪni/; from Neoclassical Greek πολυγυνία; from grc πολύ 'many', and γυνή 'woman, wife') is the most common and accepted form of polygamy around the world, entailing the marriage of a man with several women.
  • 7.5K
  • 17 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Libertarian Marxism
Libertarian Marxism is a broad scope of economic and political philosophies that emphasize the anti-authoritarian and libertarian aspects of Marxism. Early currents of libertarian Marxism such as left communism emerged in opposition to Marxism–Leninism. Libertarian Marxism is often critical of reformist positions such as those held by social democrats. Libertarian Marxist currents often draw from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' later works, specifically the Grundrisse and The Civil War in France; emphasizing the Marxist belief in the ability of the working class to forge its own destiny without the need for a vanguard party to mediate or aid its liberation. Along with anarchism, libertarian Marxism is one of the main currents of libertarian socialism. Libertarian Marxism includes currents such as autonomism, council communism, De Leonism, Lettrism, parts of the New Left, Situationism, Socialisme ou Barbarie and workerism. Libertarian Marxism has often had a strong influence on both post-left and social anarchists. Notable theorists of libertarian Marxism have included Maurice Brinton, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Raya Dunayevskaya, Daniel Guérin, C. L. R. James, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Negri, Anton Pannekoek, Fredy Perlman, Ernesto Screpanti, E. P. Thompson, Raoul Vaneigem and Yanis Varoufakis, who claims that Marx himself was a libertarian Marxist.
  • 7.4K
  • 11 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Feminist Political Economy
Feminist political economy is a concept from feminist material scholarship.  It connects market relations with domestic relations. It examines the roles of women, tensions related to women’s paid and unpaid work, how production and reproduction issues affect women, and the interactions at the micro, meso, and macro level contexts within women's lives.  
  • 7.2K
  • 28 Oct 2020
Topic Review
Queer Theory
Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of queer studies and women's studies. Queer theory includes both queer readings of texts and the theorization of 'queerness' itself. Heavily influenced by the work of Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Judith Butler, Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, queer theory builds both upon feminist challenges to the idea that gender is part of the essential self and upon gay/lesbian studies' close examination of the socially constructed nature of sexual acts and identities. Whereas gay/lesbian studies focused its inquiries into natural and unnatural behavior with respect to homosexual behavior, queer theory expands its focus to encompass any kind of sexual activity or identity that falls into normative and deviant categories. Italian feminist and film theorist Teresa de Lauretis coined the term "queer theory" for a conference she organized at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1990 and a special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies she edited based on that conference. Through the context of heterosexuality being the origin and foundation of society’s heteronormative stability, the concept of queerness focuses on, “mismatches between sex, gender and desire” Queerness has been associated most prominently with bisexual, lesbian and gay subjects, but its analytic framework also includes such topics as cross-dressing, intersex bodies and identities, gender ambiguity and gender-corrective surgery. Queer theory holds that individual sexuality is a fluid, fragmented, and dynamic collectivity of possible sexualities and it may vary at different points of his life. Its attempted debunking of stable (and correlated) sexes, genders, and sexualities develops out of the specifically lesbian and gay reworking of the post-structuralist figuring of identity as a constellation of multiple and unstable positions. Queer theory also examines the discourses of homosexuality developed in the last century in order to place the "queer" into historical context, deconstructing contemporary arguments both for and against this latest terminology.
  • 7.1K
  • 17 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Social Order
Social order refers to the structured arrangement of norms, values, roles, and institutions within a society that guides individuals' behavior, maintains stability, and regulates interactions. It encompasses the established patterns of social organization and governance that provide cohesion, predictability, and coherence to social life, shaping the dynamics of social relations and collective behavior.
  • 6.9K
  • 02 Feb 2024
Topic Review
Peer Pressure
Peer pressure is the direct or indirect influence on people of peers, members of social groups with similar interests, experiences, or social statuses. Members of a peer group are more likely to influence a person's beliefs and behavior. A group or individual may be encouraged and want to follow their peers by changing their attitudes, values or behaviors to conform to those of the influencing group or individual. For the individual affected by peer pressure, this can result in either a positive or negative effect or both. Social groups include both membership groups in which individuals hold "formal" membership (e.g. political parties, trade unions, schools) and cliques in which membership is less clearly defined. However, a person does not need to be a member or be seeking membership of a group to be affected by peer pressure. Research suggests that organizations as well as individuals are susceptible to peer pressure. For example, a large company may be influenced by other firms in their industry or from headquarters. Peer pressure can affect individuals of all ethnicities, genders and ages. Researchers have frequently studied the effects of peer pressure on children and on adolescents, and in popular discourse the term "peer pressure" is used most often with reference to those age-groups. For children, the themes most commonly studied are their abilities for independent decision-making. For adolescents, peer pressure's relationships to sexual intercourse and substance abuse have been significantly researched. Peer pressure can be experienced through both face-to-face interaction and through digital interaction. Social media offers opportunities for adolescents and adults alike to instill and/or experience pressure every day. Studies of social networks examine connections between members of social groups, including their use of social media, to better understand mechanisms such as information sharing and peer sanctioning. Sanctions can range from subtle glances that suggest disapproval, to threats and physical violence. Peer sanctioning may enhance either positive or negative behaviors. Whether peer sanctioning will have an effect depends in part on members' expectations that possible sanctions will actually be applied. It can also depend on a person's position in a social network. Those who are more central in a social network seem more likely to be cooperative, perhaps as a result of how networks form. However, this goes both ways and so they are also more likely to participate in negative behaviors. This may be caused by the repeated social pressures they experience in their networks.
  • 6.4K
  • 07 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Urban Sociology
Urban sociology is the sociological study of life and human interaction in metropolitan areas. It is a normative discipline of sociology seeking to study the structures, environmental processes, changes and problems of an urban area and by doing so provide inputs for urban planning and policy making. In other words, it is the sociological study of cities and their role in the development of society. Like most areas of sociology, urban sociologists use statistical analysis, observation, social theory, interviews, and other methods to study a range of topics, including migration and demographic trends, economics, poverty, race relations and economic trends. Urban sociology is one of the oldest sub-disciplines of sociology dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. The philosophical foundations of modern urban sociology originate from the work of sociologists such as Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Georg Simmel who studied and theorized the economic, social and cultural processes of urbanization and its effects on social alienation, class formation, and the production or destruction of collective and individual identities. These theoretical foundations were further expanded upon and analyzed by a group of sociologists and researchers who worked at the University of Chicago in the early twentieth century. In what became known as the Chicago School of sociology the work of Robert Park, Louis Wirth and Ernest Burgess on the inner city of Chicago revolutionized not only the purpose of urban research in sociology, but also the development of human geography through its use of quantitative and ethnographic research methods. The importance of the theories developed by the Chicago School within urban sociology have been critically sustained and critiqued but still remain one of the most significant historical advancements in understanding urbanization and the city within the social sciences. The discipline may draw from several fields, including cultural sociology, economic sociology, and political sociology.
  • 6.3K
  • 01 Nov 2022
Topic Review
List of Socialist States
Several past and present states have declared themselves socialist states or in the process of building socialism. The majority of self-declared socialist countries have been Marxist–Leninist or inspired by it, following the model of the Soviet Union or some form of people's or national democracy. They share a common definition of socialism and they refer to themselves as socialist states on the road to communism with a leading vanguard party structure, hence they are often called communist states. Meanwhile, the countries in the non-Marxist–Leninist category represent a wide variety of different interpretations of the term socialism and in many cases the countries do not define what they mean by it. Modern uses of the term socialism are wide in meaning and interpretation. Because a sovereign state is a different entity from the political party that rules that state at any given time, a country may be ruled by a socialist party without the country itself claiming to be socialist or the socialist party being written into the constitution. This has occurred in both one-party and multi-party political systems. In particular, there are numerous cases of social democratic and democratic socialist parties winning elections in liberal democratic states and ruling for a number of terms until a different party wins the elections. While socialist parties have won many elections around the world and most elections in the Nordic countries, many of those countries have not adopted socialism as a state ideology or written the party into the constitution. Several countries with liberal democratic constitutions mention socialism. India is a liberal democracy that has been ruled by non-socialist parties on many occasions, but its constitution makes references to socialism. Certain other countries such as Croatia, Hungary, Myanmar, and Poland have constitutions that make references to their communist and socialist past by recognizing or condemning it, but without claiming to be socialist in the present.
  • 6.1K
  • 22 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Cultural Memory
Historic urban landscapes (HULs) are composed of layers of imbedded tangible and intangible features such as cultural memories. As the collective memories of city inhabitants, cultural memories can affect elements of social sustainability such as health, well-being, community identity, place perception and social engagement. This topic review points to the value of recalling cultural memory features in HULs, which can be used to achieve social sustainability.  In addition, it contributes to sustainable development through the contribution of cultural memory and its influence on the formation of place identity, sense of place, civic pride and quality of life in HULs. 
  • 6.1K
  • 27 Oct 2020
Topic Review
University Social Responsibility
University Social Responsibility (USR) enhances educational development and the impact of universities on society. As a stakeholder in USR, it is imperative to develop a comprehensive literacy scale that reflects the development of students’ citizenship in social engagement.
  • 6.0K
  • 26 Apr 2022
Topic Review
Social Evolution
Social evolution refers to the gradual and continuous change in social structures, behaviors, and institutions over time. It encompasses the development and transformation of societies, including advancements in technology, shifts in cultural norms, and alterations in political and economic systems, often driven by factors such as innovation, conflict, and interaction with the environment. This concept underpins various theories in sociology and anthropology, offering insights into how societies adapt and evolve in response to internal and external pressures.
  • 5.9K
  • 26 Jan 2024
Topic Review
Phenomenology
Phenomenology (from Greek φαινόμενον, phainómenon "that which appears" and λόγος, lógos "study") is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany . It then spread to France , the United States , and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work. Phenomenology is not a unified movement; rather, the works of different authors share a 'family resemblance' but with many significant differences. Gabriella Farina states:Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness. Phenomenology can be clearly differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects, sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one another. Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticized and developed not only by him but also by students and colleagues such as Edith Stein, Max Scheler, Roman Ingarden, and Dietrich von Hildebrand, by existentialists such as Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, by hermeneutic philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur, by later French philosophers such as Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, by sociologists such as Alfred Schütz and Eric Voegelin, and by Christian philosophers, such as Dallas Willard.
  • 5.8K
  • 28 Nov 2022
Topic Review
Media Ecology
Media ecology theory is the study of media, technology, and communication and how they affect human environments. The theoretical concepts were proposed by Marshall McLuhan in 1964, while the term media ecology was first formally introduced by Neil Postman in 1968. Ecology in this context refers to the environment in which the medium is used – what they are and how they affect society. Neil Postman states, "if in biology a 'medium' is something in which a bacterial culture grows (as in a Petri dish), in media ecology, the medium is 'a technology within which a [human] culture grows.'" In other words, "Media ecology looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving." Media ecology argues that media act as extensions of the human senses in each era, and communication technology is the primary cause of social change. McLuhan is famous for coining the phrase, "the medium is the message", which is an often-debated phrase believed to mean that the medium chosen to relay a message is just as important (if not more so) than the message itself. McLuhan proposed that media influence the progression of society, and that significant periods of time and growth can be categorized by the rise of a specific technology during that period. Additionally, scholars have compared media broadly to a system of infrastructure that connect the nature and culture of a society with media ecology being the study of "traffic" between the two.
  • 5.5K
  • 23 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Human Sex Ratio
In anthropology and demography, the human sex ratio is the ratio of males to females in a population. More data are available for humans than for any other species, and the human sex ratio is more studied than that of any other species, but interpreting these statistics can be difficult. Like most sexual species, the sex ratio in humans is close to 1:1. In humans, the natural ratio between males and females at birth is slightly biased towards the male sex, being estimated to be about 1.05 or 1.06 or within a narrow range from 1.03 to 1.06 males/per female born. Sex imbalance may arise as a consequence of various factors including natural factors, exposure to pesticides and environmental contaminants, war casualties, sex-selective abortions, infanticides, aging, gendercide and problems with birth registration. The sex ratio for the entire world population is 100 males to 100 females (2021 est.). Human sex ratios, either at birth or in the population as a whole, are reported in any of four ways: the ratio of males to females, the ratio of females to males, the proportion of males, or the proportion of females. If there are 108,000 males and 100,000 females the ratio of males to females is 1.080 and the proportion of males is 51.9%. Scientific literature often uses the proportion of males. This article uses the ratio of males to females, unless specified otherwise.
  • 5.4K
  • 08 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Courtship
Courtship is the period of development towards an intimate relationship wherein a couple get to know each other and decide if there will be an engagement, followed by a marriage. A courtship may be an informal and private matter between two people or may be a public affair, or a formal arrangement with family approval. Traditionally, in the case of a formal engagement, it is the role of a male to actively "court" or "woo" a female, thus encouraging her to understand him and her receptiveness to a marriage proposal.
  • 5.3K
  • 25 Nov 2022
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