NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein Penguin Books, 2009, 312 pp, ISBN 978-0-14-311526-7This book is best described formally as a general explanation of and advocacy for libertarian paternalism, a term coined by the authors in earlier publications. Informally, it is about how leaders, systems, organizations, and governments can nudge people to do the things the nudgers want and need done for the betterment of the nudgees, or of society. It is paternalism in the sense that "it is legitimate for choice architects to try to influence people's behavior in order to make their lives longer, healthier, and better", (p. 5) It is libertarian in that "people should be free to do what they like - and to opt out of undesirable arrangements if they want to do so", (p. 5) The built-in possibility of opting out or making a different choice preserves freedom of choice even though people's behavior has been influenced by the nature of the presentation of the information or by the structure of the decisionmaking system. I had never heard of libertarian paternalism before reading this book, and I now find it fascinating.Written for a general audience, this book contains mostly social and behavioral science theory and models, but there is considerable discussion of structure and process that has roots in mathematical and quantitative modeling. One of the main applications of this social system is economic choice in investing, selecting and purchasing products and services, systems of taxes, banking (mortgages, borrowing, savings), and retirement systems. Other quantitative social choice systems discussed include environmental effects, health care plans, gambling, and organ donations. Softer issues that are also subject to a nudge-based approach are marriage, education, eating, drinking, smoking, influence, spread of information, and politics. There is something in this book for everyone.The basis for this libertarian paternalism concept is in the social theory called "science of choice", the study of the design and implementation of influence systems on various kinds of people. The terms Econs and Humans, are used to refer to people with either considerable or little rational decision-making talent, respectively. The various libertarian paternalism concepts and systems presented are tested and compared in light of these two types of people. Two foundational issues that this book has in common with another book, Network of Echoes: Imitation, Innovation and Invisible Leaders, that was also reviewed for this issue of the Journal are that 1 ) there are two modes of thinking (or components of the brain) - an automatic (intuitive) process and a reflective (rational) process and 2) the need for conformity and the desire for imitation are powerful forces in human behavior. …

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness

Series Editor's Preface. Introduction by John Breuilly. Acknowledgements. 1. Definitions. State and nation. The nation. 2. Culture in Agrarian Society. Power and culture in the agro-literature society. The varieties of agrarian rulers. 3. Industrial Society. The society of perpetual growth. Social genetics. The age of universal high culture. 4. The Transition to an Age of Nationalism. A note on the weakness of nationalism. Wild and garden culture. 5. What is a Nation. The course of true nationalism never did run smooth. 6. Social Entropy and Equality in Industrial Society. Obstacles to entropy. Fissures and barriers. A diversity of focus. 7. A Typology of Nationalisms. The varieties of nationalist experience. Diaspora nationalism. 8. The Future of Nationalism. Industrial culture - one or many?. 9. Nationalism and Ideology. Who is for Nuremberg?. One nation, one state. 10. Conclusion. What is not being said. Summary. Select bibliography. Bilbliography of Ernest Gellner's writing: Ian Jarvie. Index

Nations and Nationalism

This 1966 paperback edition of a publication which first appeared in 1963 has by now been widely reviewed as a worthy contribution to the sociological study of deviant behavior. Its current appearance as a paperback is a testimonial both to the quality of the work and to the prominence of deviant behavior in this generation. In general the author places deviance in perspective, identifies types of deviant behavior, considers the role of rule makers and enforcers, and some of the problems in studying deviance. In addition, he develops a sequential model of deviance relying on the concept of career, a concept originally developed in studies of occupations. In his study of a particular kind of deviance, the use of marihuana, the author posits and tests systematically an hypothesis about the genesis of marihuana use for pleasure. The hypothesis traces the sequence of changes in individual attitude

Outsiders Studies in the Sociology of Deviance.

Nos últimos trinta trinta anos, houve profundas mudanças na forma como compreendemos o crime e a justiça criminal. O crime tornou-se um evento simbólico, um verdadeiro teste para a ordem social e para as políticas governamentais, um desafio para a sociedade civil, para a democracia e para os direitos humanos. Segundo David Garland, professor da Faculdade de Direito da New York University, um dos principais autores no campo da Sociologia da Punição e com artigo publicado na Revista de Sociologia e Política , número 13, na modernidade tardia houve uma verdadeira obsessão securitária, direcionando as políticas criminais para um maior rigor em relação às penas e maior intolerância com o criminoso. Há trinta anos, nos EUA e na Inglaterra essa tendência era insuspeita. O livro mostra que os dois países compartilham intrigantes similaridades em suas práticas criminais, a despeito da divisão racial, das desigualdades econômicas e da letalidade violenta que marcam fortemente o cenário americano. Segundo David Garland, encontram-se nos dois países os “mesmos tipos de riscos e inseguranças, a mesma percepção a respeito dos problemas de um controle social não-efetivo, as mesmas críticas da justiça criminal tradicional, e as mesmas ansiedades recorrentes sobre mudança e ordem sociais”1 (GARLAND, 2001, p. 2). O argumento principal da obra é o seguinte: a modernidade tardia, esse distintivo padrão de relações sociais, econômicas e culturais, trouxe consigo um conjunto de riscos, inseguranças e problemas de controle social que deram uma configuração específica às nossas respostas ao crime, ao garantir os altos custos das políticas criminais, o grau máximo de duração das penas e a excessivas taxas de encarceramento.

http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rsocp/n20/n20a15.pdf

The culture of control: crime and social order in contemporary, society

Migration is increasingly interpreted as a security problem. The prism of security analysis is especially important for politicians, for national and local police organizations, the military police, customs officers, border patrols, secret services, armies, judges, some social services (health care, hospitals, schools), private corporations (bank analysts, providers of technology surveillance, private policing), many journalists (especially from television and the more sensationalist newspapers), and a significant fraction of general public opinion, especially but not only among those attracted to "law and order." The popularity of this security prism is not an expression of traditional responses to a rise of insecurity, crime, terrorism, and the negative effects of globalization; it is the result of the creation of a continuum of threats and general unease in which many different actors exchange their fears and beliefs in the process of making a risky and dangerous society. The professionals in charge of the management of risk and fear especially transfer the legitimacy they gain from struggles against terrorists, criminals, spies, and counterfeiters toward other targets, most notably transnational political activists, people crossing borders, or people born in the country but with foreign parents. This expansion of what security is taken to include effectively results in a convergence between the meaning of international and internal security. The convergence is particularly important in relation to the issue of migration, and specifically in relation to questions about who gets to be defined as an immigrant. The security professionals themselves, along with some academics, tend to claim that they are only responding to new threats requiring exceptional measures beyond the normal demands of everyday politics. In practice, however, the transformation of security and the consequent focus on immigrants is directly related to their own immediate interests (competition for budgets and missions) and to the transformation of technologies they use (computerized databanks, profiling and morphing, electronic phone tapping). The Europeanization and the Westernization of the logics of control and surveillance of people beyond national polices is driven by the creation of a transnational field of professionals in the management of unease. This field is larger than that of police organizations in that it includes, on one hand private corporations and organizations dealing with the control of access to the welfare state, and, on the other hand, intelligence services and some military people seeking a new role after the end of the Cold War. These professionals in the management of unease, however, are only a node connecting many competing networks responding to many groups of people who are identified as risk or just as a source of unease. (1) This process of securitization is now well known, but despite the many critical discourses that have drawn attention to the securitization of migration over the past ten years, the articulation of migration as a security problem continues. Why? What are the reasons of the persistent framing of migration in relation to terrorism, crime, unemployment and religious zealotry, on the one hand, and to integration, interest of the migrant for the national economy development, on the other, rather than in relation to new opportunities for European societies, for freedom of travel over the world, for cosmopolitanism, or for some new understanding of citizenship? (2) This is the question I want to address in this essay. Some "critical" discourses generated by NGOs and academics assume that if people, politicians, governments, bureaucracies, and journalists were more aware, they would change their minds about migration and begin to resist securitizing it. The primary problem, therefore, is ideological or discursive in that the securitization of migrants derives from the language itself and from the different capacities of various actors to engage in speech acts. …

Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease:

Approches polémologiques. Conflits et violence politique dans le monde au tournant des années 1990

This paper addresses the possibility of using Bourdieusian concepts like fields of power, professional dispositions, and cultural habitus to explore transnational practices. To resolve questions of transnational field(s) we need to examine what constitutes transnational practices. I suggest reading ‘transnational’ as a signifier that is not limited to practices reserved for non-state actors and I show that transnational practices are constitutive of the field of state formation. It is here that the Bourdieusian approach to the state, not as an actor, but as a field, is central. It allows to analyse stateness today and its relatively new assemblage with private actors, with digital stakes, and with a modification of the use of force towards a use of surveillance and control at a distance. My research on the Five Eyes coalition of SIGINT(Signals Intelligence)-internet intelligence services and its members’ co-operation for the large-scale interception of data obliges us to rethink the nature of national security today and it gives empirical ground to the call to abandon the false dualism between territory and digital space in the exercise of state power, and suggests an alternative way of thinking national and transnational practices together, as one category of practice only.

Adjusting a Bourdieusian Approach to the Study of Transnational Fields. Transversal Practices and State (Trans)formations Related to Intelligence and Surveillance

Security research has constituted, over the pas few years, a strong priority for Community policies in the field of scientific research, industry, and justice and home affairs. Community efforts in this domain have been channelled, over the period 2002-2006, through the 6 Framework programme (FP6) and the Preparatory action on security research (PASR). FP6 has sustained, within its various thematic priorities, a series of projects and programmes dealing with technological developments in the field of security. The PASR is a targeted initiative of the European Commission aiming at developing contacts and partnerships between the actors of the European security industry, the public actors, and research bodies. PASR activities, in this respect, have mainly focused on technological development and the networking of actors, in anticipation for the thematic programme on security now established under FP7. The analysis of the contents of research being conducted under the FP6 and PASR is very revealing in this respect: it highlights the fact that this research is mainly oriented towards technological development as such, and unquestioningly takes security as a norm and a fundamental value. In this regard, and despite the odd exception, European security research does not include in its scope the effects that increasingly sophisticated technologies of control and surveillance can have on individual freedom and rights, particularly with regard privacy and the protection of personal data. It does not address the necessary limits to security. The point, then, is to envisage the modalities through which a reflection on the ethical, legal, political and social implications of security technologies can be strengthen and further integrated in European security research.

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Review of security measures in the 6th Research Framework Programme and the Prepa-ratory Action for Security Research

Les revelations autour des programmes secrets de la NSA ont confirme l’existence d’une surveillance de grande envergure de nos communications par les autorites gouvernementales americaines, qui touche egalement les pays allies des Etats-Unis en Europe et en Amerique latine. Les ramifications transnationales de la surveillance nous invitent a re-examiner les pratiques contemporaines des affaires internationales. Le debat ne se limite pas aux relations des Etats-Unis avec le reste du monde, ni a la surveillance et a la vie privee : il est beaucoup plus large. Cet article collectif decrit les specificites de la cyber-surveillance, y compris les pratiques hybrides des services de renseignement et des compagnies privees de telecommunications. Il analyse ensuite les impacts de ses pratiques sur la securite nationale, la diplomatie, les droits de l’homme, la democratie, la subjectivite et l’obeissance.

/pdf/repenser-l-impact-de-la-surveillance-apres-l-affaire-snowden-3bfv35dkrl.pdf

Repenser l’impact de la surveillance après l’affaire Snowden : sécurité nationale, droits de l’homme, démocratie, subjectivité et obéissance

Cet article propose de soumettre a la question la reponse militaire americaine de guerre contre le terrorisme et d’analyser par consequent les implications d’un tel choix. Dans cet article, Didier Bigo souligne combien la guerre contre le terrorisme est une formule incantatoire et rituelle dangereuse dans la mesure ou si l’efficacite face a l’ennemi prime sur le droit et l’ethique, le risque est alors de rentrer dans une rivalite mimetique ou tout est permis si l’adversaire le fait et de developper par consequent un arsenal juridique d’exception et la legitimation de pratiques inhumaines (internement arbitraire, torture,…). L’option coercitive contre le terrorisme est-elle la seule option possible ? Dans cet article, Didier Bigo repond par la negative et developpe les risques qu’il y a a confondre defense et securite, et a mettre en balance securite et liberte et pretendre pouvoir ecorner l’un au benefice de l’autre sans modifier en profondeur nos societes.

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Didier Bigo

Papers

Approches polémologiques. Conflits et violence politique dans le monde au tournant des années 1990

Adjusting a Bourdieusian Approach to the Study of Transnational Fields. Transversal Practices and State (Trans)formations Related to Intelligence and Surveillance

Review of security measures in the 6th Research Framework Programme and the Prepa-ratory Action for Security Research

Repenser l’impact de la surveillance après l’affaire Snowden : sécurité nationale, droits de l’homme, démocratie, subjectivité et obéissance

La voie militaire de la "guerre au terrorisme" et ses enjeux