William Sims Bainbridge
Biographic Data
| ID | 3633485 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William Sims Bainbridge |
| GIVEN NAMES | William Sims |
| FAMILY NAME | Bainbridge |
| SIGNATURE | BAINBRIDGE W S |
| AFFILIATIONS | U.S. National Science Foundation |
| ORCID | 0009-0002-5724-0593 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 123 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 329 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 121 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Cosplay and the Dressing of Identity by Vivian Asimos (review)
Victorian Women and the Gendering of Mountaineering in the Alps
This article explores the gendered segregation of Victorian mountaineering, highlighting how societal norms sought to confine women to passive roles within the alpine landscape. As Elizabeth Le Blond declared, ‘there is no manlier sport in the world than mountaineering’, encapsulating the pervasive attitudes of the era. Despite such views, several women like her navigated these constraints, forging spaces of resilience and agency. Victorian guide…
Tall talk about elephants: Hannibal's crossing through disciplines
The enigma of Hannibal's Alpine crossing has captivated minds and sparked debates across centuries, much like an elusive puzzle that resists a definitive solution. This article explores the fierce and often acrimonious scholarly debates surrounding Hannibal's journey, where the quest to separate historical fact from romantic myth has turned into a battleground for competing disciplines. Military historians, geographers and philologists have all s…
The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation
Global Revival of Legendism: Korean Online Games
In the context of modern secularization, Legendism can be defined as a cultural form adjacent to traditional religion, taking supernatural narratives seriously but not devoting faith or authority to them. Design teams in South Korea have been creating massively multiplayer online games inspired significantly by the folk religion of their country, but well-integrated into the cultural diversity of their worldwide audience. Extensive description of…
Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival and Cult Formation
Amelia B. Edwards and Romantic Egyptology
Amelia B. Edwards (1831–1892) was renowned for her profound mastery of Egyptology, possessing a knowledge some said surpassed that of her male counterparts. Her archaeological endeavours in Egypt merged with a vivid narrative approach, evident in seminal works such as A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877) and her captivating lectures across Britain and America. This harmonious blend of meticulous observation and romantic aesthetics not only carved …
Dimensions of Online Role-Playing: Anchored in the Tolkien Mythos
Based on close study of two multi-player games in the tradition of J. R. R. Tolkien, this study documents the complex features of modern role-playing in online virtual worlds and constructs a six-component typology of its dimensions. The Lord of the Rings: War in the North is oriented toward the popular movies based on Tolkien’s novels, and can be played by as many as three people. The Lord of the Rings Online is based directly on the novels and …
The Sociology of Religious Movements
Explaining how religion and society transform each other, this book explores such movements as Holiness, Adventism, religious communes, Satanism, New Age and democratization. The Sociology of Religious Movements is the culmination of work begun in The Future of Religion (the 1986 award winner of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion) and A Theory of Religion (1993 award winner of the Pacific Sociological Association). Explaining religi…
Nemesis in Mordor: The Possibility of Posthuman Savagery
Innovative computer games can sometimes serve as valid simulations of real sociocultural processes, exploring hypotheses about the possible impact of future technology on civilization. In February 2021, Warner Brothers was granted a patent for an artificial social intelligence system that it first used in Shadow of Mordor, a very popular computer game based on the legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien, but reversing his humanistic and precautionary value…
Against Ruskin: Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell's recasting of Venice
The images of Venice by Philadelphian Joseph Pennell (1857-1926) have never really escaped from James McNeill Whistler's long shadow. His etchings, drawings, pastels, and lithographs all show the influence of the master. Together with his wife, Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1855-1936), he would publish a two-volume biography of his friend (1908). Their allegiance to Whistler and the Barbaro Circle brought the Pennells to endorse a new image of Venice…
Historical Research: Oneida Online
Among the Scientologists: History, Theology, and Praxis, by Donald A. WESTBROOK
Both the name and the history of Scientology illustrate the ambiguous meaning of “religion” in an era marked by secularization. Psychoanalysis chose not to register as a religion, despite being based on the mystical concept of subconscious mind, while Scientology legitimately adopted that definition as it added spiritual elements to the Dianetics psychotherapy earlier developed by its creator, L. Ron Hubbard. Given how long Scientology has surviv…
Family History Digital Libraries
A Simulated Utopia: The Social System of a Virtual Ancient Egypt
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Recording Contemporary Family History Through Social Media
Massively Multi-Agent Simulations of Religion
Massively multiplayer online ( MMO ) games are not merely electronic communication systems based on computational databases, but also include artificial intelligence that possesses complex, dynamic structure. Each visible action taken by a component of the multi-agent system appears simple, but is supported by vastly more sophisticated invisible processes. A rough outline of the typical hierarchy has four levels: (1) interaction between two indiv…
Dynamic Secularization
Computational Sociology
Increasingly, computer and information science is providing new opportunities for sociologists, to develop and test theories, and to explore the new information society over the Internet. Artificial social intelligence is a general approach for evaluation of the logical implications and consistency of a theory, through the use of a technique such as multiagent computer simulation. Natural language processing is a set of techniques that can identi…
Titian Country: Josiah Gilbert (1814–1893) and the Dolomite Mountains
Star Worlds: Freedom Versus Control in Online Gameworlds
Star Worlds explores the future-oriented universe of online virtual worlds connected with popular science fiction—specifically, with Star Wars and Star Trek—that have been inhabited for over a decade by computer gamers. The Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, both of which have shaped the dominant science fiction mythologies of the last half-century, offer profound conceptions of the tension between freedom and control in human economic, politica…
Individual Incentives for Investment in Gameworlds
Virtual Sociocultural Convergence
Debatable Peaks and Contested Valleys: Englishness and the Dolomite Landscape Scenery
The toponym “Dolomites” qualifies a mountainous region in the north-east of Italy, located at the cultural and political frontier with Austria. They represent a unique borderland marked by competing ethnic and cultural divides, which are subtly obscured by their inclusion onto the World Heritage List (2009) and by the role they play within a globalized heritage of natural sites. It is the external voice of the first English travelers to the regio…
Gaming and Virtual Worlds
Networks of Faith: Interpersonal Bonds and Recruitment to Cults and Sects
A long tradition in social science explains recruitment to religious cults and sects on the basis of a congruence between the ideology of a group and the deprivations of those who join. A more recent approach to recruitment argues that interpersonal bonds between members and potential recruits are the essential element. In this paper we first show that these are complementary, not competing, approaches. Then, because the available evidential base…
Of Churches, Sects, and Cults: Preliminary Concepts for a Theory of Religious Movements
This paper constructs a set of concepts needed for a theory of religious movements. First, the boundaries for such a theory are set by defining religion and then by translating this definition into terms more useful for theorizing. Next, we demonstrate why a faulty understanding of ideal types has led to conceptualizations of church and sect that prevent theorizing. We adopt Benton Johnson's solution for defining the underlying church-sect axis. …
The Religious Ecology of Deviance
Towards a Theory of Religion: Religious Commitment
After the New Age
This article explores the connections between conventional religion and the New Age, using data from a major online questionnaire study, Survey2001, that was sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the National Science Foundation. It begins with two competing hypotheses. (1) Involvement in conventional religion discourages involvement in unconventional para-religion because conventional religion competes with para-religion. (2) Conventio…
Neural Network Models of Religious Belief
This paper applies neural network technology, a standard approach in computer science that has been unaccountably ignored by sociologists, to the problem of developing rigorous sociological theories. A simulation program employing a 'varimax' model of human learning and decision-making models central elements of the Stark-Bainbridge theory of religion. Individuals in a micro-society of 24 simulated people learn which categories of potential excha…
Scientology: To Be Perfectly Clear
Scientology, one of the largest and most influential cults, claims to have raised over sixteen thousand members up to a superhuman level of mental functioning known as “clear.” This paper presents a theory of how the cult can appear to have succeeded in accomplishing this task. We argue that clear has been transformed from a postulated objective state of being into a well-buttressed social status in the highly stratified social structure of the c…
The future in the social sciences
Cyberspace: Sociology's Natural Domain
WILLSAM SIMS BAINBRIDGE National Science Foundations technologies of e mail on the contrary, they lend themselves rather readily to monitoring. States have active interests in communications on an array of sensitive topics from military technologies to drug dealing. With such inter ests in mind, the Clinton administration has forcefully (if not yet effectively) sought to block cheap, effective encryption ofprivate elecS tronic communications. At …
Client and Audience Cults in America
Several sources of good information about client cults and audience cults are analyzed geographically. Data are taken from six directories, Fate magazine, Transcendental Meditation initiation records, classified telephone directories, and the Gallup Poll. The geographic distribution found in an earlier study of cult movements is replicated: the Pacific and Mountain regions have very high rates, while the East South Central region is very low. Rat…
Cult Formation: Three Compatible Models
This paper draws upon numerous ethnographies to outline three fundamental models of how novel religious ideas are generated and made social. The psychopathology model describes cult innovation as the result of individual psychopathology that finds successful social expression by providing apparent solutions to common intractable human problems. The entrepreneur model states that cultfounders consciously develop new systems of religious belief and…
Friendship, Religion, and the Occult: A Network Study
Shaker Demographics 1840-1900: An Example of the Use of U.S. Census Enumeration Schedules
William Sims Bainbridge, Shaker Demographics 1840-1900: An Example of the Use of U.S. Census Enumeration Schedules, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Dec., 1982), pp. 352-365
Sectarian Tension
Perspectives on Virtual Veneration
A reconnaissance of the potential for memorializing people through online avatars was carried out by participant observation, running ancestor veneration avatars (AVAs) based on deceased members of the author's own family. First, the AVA concept is introduced in the context of the changing social status of religion in postmodern society. Then the range of possibilities is sketched through four avatars, exploring how: (1) a priest character in Wor…
Demographic collapse
Explaining the Church Member Rate
Twenty variables, representing competing theories, were compared in their ability to explain church membership rates (CMRs) in 288 metropolitan areas for 1980, using multiple regression. Strong support emerged for social bond theory, which predicts low rates of church membership in communities with high social instability, such as that caused by geographic migration. Secularization theories, however, did not fare well. Their prediction that CMRs …
Secularization and Cult Formation in the Jazz Age
Johnson, Martin A. 1973 Family life and religious commitment. Review of Religious Research 14: 144-50. Josselson, Ruthellen 1980 Ego development in adolescence. Pp. 188-210 in Joseph Adelson (ed.), Handbook of Adolescent Psychology. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Kelman, Herbert C. 1961 Processes of opinion change. Public Opinion Quarterly 25: 57-78. Maccoby, Eleanor Emmons and Carol Nagy Jacklin 1974 The Psychology of Sex Differences. Stanford, Ca…
Motivations for space exploration
Religious Insanity in America: The Official Nineteenth-Century Theory
Throughout much of the nineteenth century, psychiatrists and ordinary citizens agreed that one of the chief causes of mental illness was religious excitement. Discovery f hitherto untouched data from the 1860 census, giving supposed cause of in anity for 2,258 inmates of 17 asylums, provides the opportunity forexploring the alleged role of religion in producing insanity. Enshrined in publications of the U.S. government and in the chief psychiatri…
Sex Role Ideology and Delinquency
This article explores the hypothesis that the great difference between rates of delinquency and criminality of males versus females results from differences in sex roles promulgated by the culture. Here, 'sex role' is conceptualized as an ideology about the behavior proper for members of a gender category, and is measured by two questionnaire scales: The Villemez-Touhey Index and a new College Sex Role Index. A survey incorporating these scales a…
Women's Access to Elite Careers: In Search of a Religion Effect
For at least the past ninety years, some social critics have charged that religion imprisons women in traditional sex roles and denies them access to high-status occupations. This article uses census data from the United States in 1930 and 1970, and from Canada in 1961, to explore this question, focusing especially on the professions of banker, lawyer, physician, and industrial manager. The critique of religion was not supported by American data,…
American-Born Sects: Initial Findings
This paper reports initial descriptive findings based on quantitative coding of basic features of 417 American-born sects still in existence. Sects are less numerous than are cults but are, on the average, older and larger. Nonetheless, most sects are small and very few are growing rapidly at present. Indeed, about a third have not grown since their initial formation. A major impediment to sect growth appears to be the fact that most begin in a s…
The 'Consciousness Reformation' Reconsidered
Social scientists often assume that individuals and societies orient themselves with respect to overarching symbolic frames of reference, sometimes called systems. But until the recent publication of Robert Wuthnow's analysis of San Francisco area survey data, evidence in favor of this key theoretical proposition has been lacking. This paper inspects both a new network survey of 1439 respondents and the original data in search of the four competi…
Titian Country: Josiah Gilbert (1814–1893) and the Dolomite Mountains
God's Blueprints: A Sociological Study of Three Utopian Sects.John McKelvie
The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study
Investigative Social Research: Individual and Team Field Research
How 'dirty' is field research? How close can it come to the social researcher's goal of 'learning the truth'? This book is part of a growing movement which strongly argues that field research has a great deal to offer both the discipline of sociology and the general study of human behaviour as well
The Shape of Science Fiction as Perceived by the Fans
The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study
Technology as a Social and Political Phenomenon
Satan's Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult
Cults of America: A Reconnaissance in Space and Time
This paper examines the geographic distribution of American cults based on 501 independent groups listed in the Encyclopedia of American Religions, Vol. 2 (Melton, 1978). A third of the nation's cults are in California. However, when population is taken into account, Nevada and New Mexico exceed California in terms of cults per million residents. Regionally, the Pacific states have the highest cult rate (6.9 per million) and the Southern region h…
Cult Formation: Three Compatible Models
This paper draws upon numerous ethnographies to outline three fundamental models of how novel religious ideas are generated and made social. The psychopathology model describes cult innovation as the result of individual psychopathology that finds successful social expression by providing apparent solutions to common intractable human problems. The entrepreneur model states that cultfounders consciously develop new systems of religious belief and…
Satan's Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Group
Of Churches, Sects, and Cults: Preliminary Concepts for a Theory of Religious Movements
This paper constructs a set of concepts needed for a theory of religious movements. First, the boundaries for such a theory are set by defining religion and then by translating this definition into terms more useful for theorizing. Next, we demonstrate why a faulty understanding of ideal types has led to conceptualizations of church and sect that prevent theorizing. We adopt Benton Johnson's solution for defining the underlying church-sect axis. …
Salvation and Witches in a "Secular" Age
Organized Miracles: A Study of a Contemporary, Youth, Communal, Fundamentalist Organization. By James T. Richardson, Mary White Stewart, and Robert B. Simmonds and Sacred Journeys: The Conversion of Y…
Organized Miracles: A Study of a Contemporary, Youth, Communal, Fundamentalist Organization.By James T. Richardson, Mary White Stewart, and Robert B. Simmonds and Sacred Journeys: The Conversion of Young Americans to Divine Light Mission.By James V. Downton, Jr Get access William Sims Bainbridge William Sims Bainbridge University of Washington Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces, Volume 59, Issue…
Scientology: To Be Perfectly Clear
Scientology, one of the largest and most influential cults, claims to have raised over sixteen thousand members up to a superhuman level of mental functioning known as “clear.” This paper presents a theory of how the cult can appear to have succeeded in accomplishing this task. We argue that clear has been transformed from a postulated objective state of being into a well-buttressed social status in the highly stratified social structure of the c…
Sectarian Tension
Satan's Power: A Deviant Psychotherapy Cult
Client and Audience Cults in America
Several sources of good information about client cults and audience cults are analyzed geographically. Data are taken from six directories, Fate magazine, Transcendental Meditation initiation records, classified telephone directories, and the Gallup Poll. The geographic distribution found in an earlier study of cult movements is replicated: the Pacific and Mountain regions have very high rates, while the East South Central region is very low. Rat…
Organized Miracles: A Study of a Contemporary, Youth, Communal, Fundamentalist Organization
Towards a Theory of Religion: Religious Commitment
Networks of Faith: Interpersonal Bonds and Recruitment to Cults and Sects
A long tradition in social science explains recruitment to religious cults and sects on the basis of a congruence between the ideology of a group and the deprivations of those who join. A more recent approach to recruitment argues that interpersonal bonds between members and potential recruits are the essential element. In this paper we first show that these are complementary, not competing, approaches. Then, because the available evidential base…
Technological and Social Change: A Transdisciplinary Model
"Moonies" in America: Cult, Church, and Crusade. By David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe, Jr. Beverly Hills: Sage Library of Social Research and Science, Sin, and Scholarship: The Politics of Reverend …
Journal Article “Moonies” in America: Cult, Church, and Crusade.By David G. Bromley and Anson D. Shupe, Jr. Beverly Hills: Sage Library of Social Research and Science, Sin, and Scholarship: The Politics of Reverend Moon and the Unification Church.Edited by Irving Louis Horowitz Get access William Sims Bainbridge William Sims Bainbridge University of Washington Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Social Forces,…
Reply to Jorgensen
Cult Membership in the Roaring Twenties: Assessing Local Receptivity
This paper extends our recent quantitative research on cults by examining data on cult membership and on client cult practitioners in the United States during the 1920s. In so doing we demonstrate the great utility of a series of strangely neglected nation-wide census studies of religion conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau during the first four decades of this century. These data permit examination of some rather remarkable aspects of the specifi…
Friendship, Religion, and the Occult: A Network Study
Sociology (82 works) · Political science (45 works) · Philosophy (43 works) · Computer Science (38 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (37 works) · History (29 works) · Psychology (29 works) · Law (28 works) · Art (25 works) · Epistemology (24 works)