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Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination
Situations intends to address the current malaise of the radical imagination in both left theory and in popular consciousness. We aim to explore the social conditions and lived experiences that lead to this malaise and to support explanations which do not reduce political phenomena to a reflection. Situations will foster modes of thinking that recognize the creative role that society plays in its own production. In opposition to simple determinisms, Situations will attempt to show the contingencies and peculiarities of political phenomena.
Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: How to Stage a Revolution
Social scientists have studied the nature of effective leadership for centuries with limited success. Physicists, on the other hand, are new to the party, which gives them a chance to nab some low-hanging fruit. Today, Hai-Tao Zhang at the University of Cambridge, in the U.K., and a few buddies say that they have grabbed a particularly juicy piece by revealing a key strategy of effective leadership.
Stumbling and Mumbling: Marxism & the mainstream
Is there a difference any more between Marxism and orthodox social science? - plus evidence that Marxism converges with neoclassical and behavioral economics.
The Tipping Point: Fascinating but mythological? | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
Tipping point stories are fascinating, but do we observe them in the real world? I became intrigued with this question a while ago and eventually published a paper testing the predictions of the tipping point story for its original application – racial segregation of US neighbourhoods
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The basic prediction is that mixed neighbourhood are unstable but segregated neighbourhood are stable. Data on American neighbourhoods from 1970 to 2000 rejected these predictions – it was the segregated neighbourhood that were unstable. There was as much “white flight” out of all-white neighbourhoods as there was out of mixed neighbourhoods, and there was a white influx into segregated non-white neighbourhoods. Neighbourhoods are still very segregated in the year 2000, but not because of tipping. Maybe segregation exists because most whites really do want segregation, not because of a chain reaction due to herd behaviour.
Guest Post: “Why Everyone Younger Than You is Spoiled” Part II « A (Budding) Sociologist’s Commonplace Book
Jeff Lundy (Sociology PhD Candidate at UCSD and visiting scholar at Michigan) completes his discussion of the accounting errors that may partially explain why older people think the kids these days are so profligate.
Caught In Play - How Entertainment Works on You | Peter Stromberg
Does entertainment disguise something?
For all that has been written on individual pop icons and sitcoms and the liberating or oppressive power of popular culture, basic questions remain unanswered. What do we know about the overall effect of living in a society in which entertainment is so central?
Postmodern Economists, Empiricist Sociologists? The Problem of Unobservables « A (Budding) Sociologist’s Commonplace Book
In an excellent paper in a similar vein, Espeland and Hirsch (1990) give numerous examples of the kinds of manipulations possible of accounting profits that, they argue, made possible the conglomerates of the 1960s. Especially popular tricks allowed firms to count the earnings of acquired firms retroactively, thus increasing the apparent profitability of the firm post-merger
UnderstandingSociety: Theories of the Chinese Revolution
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The success of the revolution, therefore, depended on successful mobilization of the peasantry in the 1930s and 1940s. How are we to account for its success?
This question has naturally loomed large in Western discussions of the Chinese Revolution since 1949. Two influential theories offer political culture and class conflict as causes of revolution, and neither of these high-level theories appears to be altogether satisfactory. A more plausible analysis refers to the local politics of class. Rather than postulating a single large causal factor, it is more plausible to understand CCP success as a concatenation of a number of small causes and advantages, deployed with skill and luck to a successful national victory.
Overcoming Bias : Why Signals Are Shallow
Geoffrey Miller says we try too hard to collect shallow signals that don’t say much to those who know us well. But a boss who has known you for years may not promote you unless you get a better degree, even if school teaches you nothing useful on your job. He might not hire you without that degree, even if he knows and trusts folks who have known you for years. Why do people who know us well care so much about shallow signals?
Do you suffer from Internet fatigue? - CNN.com
Well, you're not alone, according to a recent report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit research group in Washington.
The report, written by John Horrigan, the project's associate director of research, says 7 percent of Americans use the Internet as their primary means of social communication and also feel conflicted about that fact. These online social network users, which Horrigan calls "ambivalent networkers," are so connected they feel like they can't quit.
Articles - How to Find Out How to Do Qualitative Research
Howard S. Becker reviews NSF reports on qualitative research in the social sciences and mentions some classic works.
Boston Review — Reentry
Reversing mass imprisonment
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The failure of the great experiment in mass incarceration is rooted in three fallacies of the tough-on-crime perspective. First, there is the fallacy of us and them. For tough-on-crime advocates, the innocent majority is victimized by a class of predatory criminals, and the prison works to separate us from them. The truth is that the criminals live among us as our young fathers, brothers, and sons. Drug use, fighting, theft, and disorderly conduct are behavioral staples of male youth. Most of the crime they commit is perpetrated on each other.
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Second, there is the fallacy of personal defect. Tough-on-crime politics disdains the criminology of root causes and traces crime not to poverty and unemployment but to the moral failures of individuals. Refusing to resist temptation or defer gratification, the offender lacks empathy and affect, lacks human connection, and is thus less human than the rest of us. The diagnosis of defective character points to immutable criminality, stoking cynicism for rehabilitative efforts and justifying the mission of semi-permanent incapacitation. The folk theory of immutable criminality permits the veiled association of crime with race in political talk. But seeking criminality in defects of character, the architects of the prison boom ignored the great rise in urban youth unemployment that preceded the growth in murder rates in the 1960s and ’70s.
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UnderstandingSociety: Proto social inquiry
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We sometimes imagine that the current disciplines and methods of the social sciences represent a more or less inevitable set of approaches to the problem of understanding social phenomena. But really, the latter task is much larger than the specific sets of disciplines and methods we have currently developed. It is worth turning back the dial a bit and reflecting on the intellectual currents that led to contemporary programmes for the social sciences.
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Several important changes occurred in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that created a new impulse towards a different kind of study of the social world. One was eighteenth-century globalization.
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End of the Line | The American Prospect
Review of Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market
By Pierre Bourdieu, Translated by Loïc Wacquant. Retrospective on Bourdieu's work.
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The intellectual, in French terms, is what Americans often call a "public intellectual" -- someone who not only works with intellect but intervenes authoritatively in political life on the basis of the central values of art, culture or scholarship. Intellectuals, Bourdieu always argued, don't just bring to the table relevant expertise or skill at public presentation. They import the moral norms of another social field.
Presumption is the intellectual's strength and weakness. Zola and Sartre are the two outstanding protagonists in this figure's development in France. Over the course of his career, Bourdieu had plenty to say about both. Zola created the modern image of the intellectual in 1898, when he famously came to the defense of a Jewish army officer, Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused of treason. He used the bohemian writer's studied indifference to money and power -- and, indeed, to ordinary politics -- to make a political stand. The consequences were not all good. Zola's example instilled in artists the determination to speak up for public causes, but his gambit also suggested that intellectuals must be still somehow above the reach of day-to-day affairs, superior and aristocratic.
The villain in Bourdieu's history of the intellectual was Sartre, who claimed to inherit the mantle of the "omnipotent intellectual." According to Bourdieu, Sartre had yoked together mediocre versions of several previously separate intellectual vocations: academic philosopher, avant-garde writer and Marxist, among others.
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