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Preferred term

social cohesion  

Definition

  • In the work of the founders of sociology, society was conceived of as an organism that needed to respond to the main challenge posed by modernity: How do societies marked by social differentiation and distinct social groups create mechanisms to live together? The concept of social cohesion features prominently in the work of its originator, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), for example, and was later revisited, though not always under the same name, in the functionalist tradition. However, Durkheim, in his major work on the subject (1893), used the notion of solidarity to describe ways in which social integration is achieved. [Source: International Encyclopedia of Political Science; Social Cohesion]

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https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/social_cohesion

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