Cohesion in a social context can be defined in various ways depending on the scientific background of the researcher. Social cohesion has inspired many scholars from the beginning of many fields, mainly social psychology and sociology. Today, both fields suggest that cohesion does not just describe the social bonding of members of specific groups, community segments, or societies, but an array of more complicated structural, psychological, and biological processes.
Throughout history, religion has played both the role of a stimulus of cohesiveness and that of a power of deviance. We can study cohesion in different levels of analysis, such as the micro (group), the meso (community), and the macro (society). In order to understand the relational interactions of religion and cohesion, we should take into consideration all possible levels of analysis due to religion’s multivariable visibility and forms of expression.
This chapter aspires to examine how cohesion works in religious groups...
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Orfanidis, C. (2018). Cohesion. In: Leeming, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9_200160-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9_200160-1
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