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"As recently as the 1960s there was a wave of literature arguing that the prison was becoming obsolete. Now the prison stands as a key mechanism for how the government has dealt with its own powers, and this has reconfigured the role of government. The law-and-order movement invokes a radically different role of the state in relation to its citizens than the one of the post-New Deal era. Though an incomplete project, the New Deal had a model of the state as a guarantor of economic security and freedom. Now the state primarily interacts with society as a maintainer of order. For those hoping to rebuild freedom through the state, finding a new vision of how government works needs to be at the front of the agenda."
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An alternative account holds that our policy of mass incarceration reconfigures both the idea of the state and the way it carries out its duties. In this story, a government that creates mass incarceration is the obvious result of the ideologies of neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism that have come to dominate in the wake of the New Deal liberal order’s collapse.
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This view of policing as less a practice of rules than a perpetual struggle to properly administer violence and maintain hierarchy echoes the link between conservatives and violence that political theorist Corey Robin establishes in his book The Reactionary Mind. Conservatives display “a persistent, if unacknowledged, discomfort with power that has ripened and matured.” Rule that has become complacent and assumed has become weak and debilitating. Robin shows how conservatives have always looked for ways to struggle to renew their dynamism. He argues that many conservatives view “American decadence, traceable back to the Warren Court and the rights revolutions of the 1960s, [as the result of] the liberal obsession with the rule of law.” The supposed liberal imagining of the police–as boring rule administrators or competent investigators–is anemic compared to the reinvigorating struggle of police as a force against disorder.
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The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. The appeal of this idea is obvious: it’s always nice to be saturated in positive feedback. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. Brainstorming seems like an ideal technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is a problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work.
"What makes this set of assumptions a "pragmatist" approach? Fundamentally, because it understands the actor as situated within a field of assumptions, modes of behavior, ways of perceiving; and as being stimulated to action by "problem situations". So action is understood as the actor's creative use of scripts, habits, and cognitive frameworks to solve particular problems. (Gross refers to this as an A-P-H-R chain: actor, problem situation, habit, and response; 343.)"
"Joas thinks that this interpretation of action as extended intelligent adaptation to shifting circumstances helps to account for complex social circumstances that rational-actor and normative-actor theories have difficulty with. He illustrates this claim with the extended examples of reciprocity and innovation.
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Joas begins his account by framing the standard assumptions of existing action theory in terms of two poles: action as rational choice (e.g. James Coleman) and action as conformance to a set of prescriptions and norms (e.g. Durkheim, Parsons). He argues for a view that is separate from both of these, under the heading of "creative action".
However, the alternative that reaches even further beyond the routinized exchanges between rationalist and normativist theories of action seems to us an action-theoretic conceptualization that focuses on the notion of the creativity of human action. Such a theory can be based primarily on the tradition of American pragmatism that originated in philosophy and psychology but also has a significant sociological tradition. (270)
"Ms. Bradford, of Science magazine, agreed. “I would agree that a scientist’s career advancement should not depend solely on the publications listed on his or her C.V.,” she said, “and that there is much room for improvement in how scientific talent in all its diversity can be nurtured.”
Even scientists who are sympathetic to the idea of fundamental change are skeptical that it will happen any time soon. “I don’t think they have much chance of changing what they’re talking about,” said Dr. Korn, of Harvard. "
"Here is a list of peer reviewed papers that I’ve found that only discuss liberal-conservative differences in brain structure and function, in physiology, or in the kinds of stimuli that attract attention. And of course this is only one small area of research on liberal-conservative differences:"
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System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of "l'economie de la débrouillardise." Or, sweetened for street use, "Systeme D." This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy. A number of well-known chefs have also appropriated the term to describe the skill and sheer joy necessary to improvise a gourmet meal using only the mismatched ingredients that happen to be at hand in a kitchen.
"Harvey calls these cultural norms and belief systems our “mental conceptions of the world,” one of seven “distinctive activity spheres” that comprise the historical development of capitalism. All seven in Harvey’s words:
1. Technologies and organizational forms
2. Social relations
3. Institutional and administrative arrangements
4. Production and labor processes
5. Relations to nature
6. The reproduction of daily life and the species
7. Mental conceptions of the world"
"This article discusses relations among the multiple levels of analysis present in macro-sociological explanation—i.e., relations of individual, structural, and institutional processes. It also criticizes the doctrinal insistence upon single-level individualistic explanation found in some prominent contemporary sociological theory. For illustrative material the article returns to intellectual uses of Weber's “Protestant Ethic thesis,” showing how an artificial version has been employed as a kind of proof text for the alleged scientific necessity of individualist explanation. Our alternative exposition renders the discussion of Protestantism and capitalism in an explicitly multilevel way, distinguishing possible individual-level, social-organizational, and institutional linkages. The causal processes involved are distinct ones, with the more structural and institutional forms neither captured nor attainable by individual-level thinking. We argue more generally that “methodological individualisms” confuse issues of explanation with issues about microfoundations. This persistent intellectual conflation may be rooted in the broader folk models of liberal individualism."
"There isn't very much transparency about the deep structure of almost any complex modern society. For most people their primary impressions of the society's functioning comes from the mass media and their own personal experiences. We each see the limited bits to which we are fairly directly exposed through our ordinary lives -- the newsroom if we happen to be a beat reporter, the university if we are professors, the play-and-learn center if we are in the business of preschool education. We gain a pretty good idea of how those networks of institutions and organizations work. But it's very difficult to gain a birds-eye picture of the social system as a whole."
" A dichotomy that spans many of the social sciences is the opposition of structure versus agency. "Structures" are said to be the objective complexes of social institutions within which people live and act. "Agents" are said to be human deliberators and choosers who navigate their life plans in an environment of constraints. If structure and agent are considered to be ontologically distinct levels, then we have a series of difficult questions to confront. For example: Which has causal priority? Are structures determinative of social outcomes, with agents merely playing their roles within these structures? Or are agents the drivers of social causation, and structures are merely secondary effects of individual-level actions and states of consciousness? "
"It seems to me that there is a sturdy intermediate position that incorporates some of both extremes and does a superior job of capturing the truth about human behavior and mind than either. Certainly human cognitive and behavioral capacities have an evolutionary history. But equally, it is plausible that there is a great deal of plasticity and multiple-realizability that has been built into these systems -- with the result that there is no one-to-one relationship between biological origins and current behavioral patterns. Culture is a powerful intervening structure. "
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. One can envisage the battle as one between two groups that I have labeled “the spirit of Davos” and “the spirit of Porto Alegre.”
The objective of the two groups is totally opposite. The proponents of “the spirit of Davos” want a different system—one that is “non-capitalist” but still retains three essential features of the present system: hierarchy, exploitation, and polarization. The proponents of “the spirit of Porto Alegre” want the kind of system that has never existed heretofore, one that is relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian. I call these two positions “spirits” because there are no central organizations on either side of this struggle, and indeed, the proponents inside each current are deeply divided as to their strategy.
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I see a medley of tactics that might move us in the right direction.
The first is to place great emphasis on serious intellectual analysis—not in a discussion conducted merely by intellectuals, but throughout the populations of the world. It must be a discussion animated by a large openness of spirit among all those who are inspired, however they define it, by the spirit of Porto Alegre.
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"I think we see here a profitable way to reorganize institutions of higher learning. Who needs “departments” (English, Philosophy, Physics, Business)? We should have categories of people: we need Mystery-men, Inoculators, and Lamps."
We became indebted, in large part, because of a structural imbalance in society, one that skewed incomes, redirected wealth, and encouraged companies and individuals to lever up instead of seeking out and earning higher incomes. At the same time, our unwillingness to say no to great society programs, without raising taxes to pay for them, meant that we became beholden to the bond market for funding ongoing operations, this creating an elevated base of required income to service our rising debt.
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