French sociologist
Michel Maffesoli was perhaps the first to use the term
neotribalism in a scholarly context in his 1988 book
The Time of the Tribes. Maffesoli predicted that as the culture and institutions of
modernism declined, societies would embrace
nostalgia and look to the organizational principles of the distant past for guidance, and that therefore the
post-modern era would be the era of neotribalism. Work by researchers such as American political scientist
Robert D. Putnam and a 2006 study by McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Brasiers published in the
American Sociological Review seem to support at least the more moderate neotribalist arguments. The notion of neotribalism is used in the field of consumer research under the label
consumer tribes. == See also ==