Showing papers by "Craig Calhoun published in 1998"

Community without Propinquity Revisited: Communications Technology and the Transformation of the Urban Public Sphere

Abstract: Recent discussions of the Internet have touted “virtual community” and a capacity to enhance citizen power in democracies. The present essay (a) calls for a more rigorous understanding of community; (b) suggests that relationships forged with the aid of electronic technology may do more to foster “categorical identities” than they do dense, multiplex, and systematic networks of relationships; and (c) argues that an emphasis on community needs to be complemented by more direct attention to the social bases of discursive publics that engage people across lines of basic difference in collective identities. Previous protest movements have shown that communications media have an ambiguous mix of effects. They do facilitate popular mobilization, but they also make it easy for relatively ephemeral protest activity to outstrip organizational roots. They also encourage governments to avoid concentrating their power in specific spatial locations and thus make revolution in some ways more difficult.

Explanation in historical sociology: Narrative, general theory, and historically specific theory

Abstract: L'A. examine le role du recit et de la theorie generale dans l'elaboration de l'explication en sociologie historique. Il analyse, de facon critique, la theorie d'Edgar Kiser et de Michael Hechter en ce domaine. Il denonce le role des theories generales mis en exergue par Kiser et Hechter. Il qualifie d'inductivisme la perspective defendue par ces derniers. Il etudie la fonction du recit dans l'epistemologie historique. Il etudie ce que recouvre la notion de causalite au sein des sciences historiques.

The Ordinary and the Extraordinary: An Anthropological Study of Chinese Reform and the 1989 People's Movement in Beijing.

Abstract: Part 1 Theory: anthropology and practice. Part 2 The ordinary: introduction the structure of China's urban society changes and continuities under the reforms. Part 3 The extraordinary: introduction the tradition of protest the People's Movement. Part 4 Conclusion: conclusion.