Handbook of the Sociology of Morality

Steve Hitlin received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is now Assistant Professor of sociology at the University of Iowa. His research interests include social psychology, self and identity, values, morality, social theory, life course studies and gender. His primary focus is on contributing to the sociology of morality, including building bridges between scholars and disciplines around this enterprise. In 2009, he received a grant from the National Science Foundation to host an interdisciplinary conference on the sociology of morality. His research focuses on various dimensions of the social shaping of individual moral orientations, as well as helping to establish the importance of moral dimensions for properly understanding social actors. His other research programs have looked at the development and social psychological nature of racial identities and attempts to empirically measure “human agency” to engage core sociological debates.

• Sociological Perspectives on Morality (“What Is It”?).- Back to the Future.- The Cognitive Approach to Morality.- Four Concepts of Morality.- Adumbrations of a Sociology of Morality in the Work of Parsons, Simmel, and Merton.- The (Im)morality of War.- Social Order as Moral Order.- Sociological Contexts (“Where Does It Come From?”).- Natural Selection and the Evolution of Morality in Human Societies.- The Sacred and the Profane in the Marketplace.- Class and Morality.- The Unstable Alliance of Law and Morality.- Morality in Organizations.- Explaining Crime as Moral Actions.- What Does God Require? Understanding Religious Context and Morality.- The Duality of American Moral Culture.- Education and the Culture Wars.- The Creation and Establishment of Moral Vocabularies.- Morality in Action (“How Does It Work?”).- The Trouble with Invisible Men.- The Justice/Morality Link.- Toward an Integrated Science of Morality.- The Social Psychology of the Moral Identity.- Morality and Mind-Body Connections.- Moral Power.- Moral Dimensions of the Work–Family Nexus.- Moral Classification and Social Policy.- The Moral Construction of Risk.- Moral Discourse in Economic Contexts.- Morality in the Social Interactional and Discursive World of Everyday Life.- Future Directions for Sociological Science.- Morality, Modernity, and World Society.- The Social Construction of Morality?.- What’s New and What’s Old about the New Sociology of Morality.