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:

POURQUOI PROPOSER LE PROJET DE L'IPS ? Modifier le debat tel qu'il est presente par les internationalistes Le projet de creation de l'IPS repose sur l'idee de decentrer le debat constructivisme mainstream theory en en montrant les limites, le caractere souvent americano-centre et en proposant une alternative reposant sur : Une epistemologie specifique qui se distingue des autres courants des theories de l'international. Un programme de recherche qui s'en inspire et qui croise des recherches contemporaines (...).

/pdf/sociologie-politique-de-l-international-une-alternative-9s4n9eo492.pdf

Sociologie politique de l’international : une alternative

The authors of this article focus on the term and the meaning of ‘organised crime’.Following their approach, it seems to be impossible to give an exact definition, because it has meant different things over time. There is a historical dimension but also a geopolitical dimension: South American, European and Russian historical developments have created different forms. Sometimes and somewhere organised crime is more or less ‘disorganised’, deregulated and connected with local frameworks. With regard to the organisation structures the authors distinguish five main ideal types: criminal networks with, firstly, ‘no social support structure in the milieu of operation’; those ‘rooted in marginalised subcultures’; those ‘rooted in mainstream society’; those with links ‘in power elites’; ‘criminal alliances between underworld and upper world or mafia-like organisations’.Moreover, the authors offer a versatile and complex picture of what organised crime means today. The contribution offers some suggestions for building future organised crime threat assessments.

https://bulletin.cepol.europa.eu/index.php/bulletin/article/download/225/192

International organised crime in the European Union

Sécurité, immigration et contrôle social. L'archipel des polices.

Cet article porte sur l’emergence de groupes transnationaux lies par une forme de solidarite attachee a leur travail quotidien, a des savoir-faire et des savoirs specifiques qui transcendent souvent les differences nationales. A travers l’etude de ces groupes, il s’agit de contribuer a une meilleure comprehension de la maniere dont se fabriquent les frontieres entre differentes echelles, dans un monde dit « fracture ». Il s’agit egalement de montrer que la construction de ces multiples limites releve de lignes transversales et de dynamiques de pouvoir. Ces groupes, lorsqu’ils echangent des informations, des savoir-faire, des lieux de vie au niveau transnational forment-ils ou non un ensemble coherent, une elite professionnelle, une classe sociale globale, qui disposerait d’un programme d’action et de priorites propres ? Repondant en partie negativement, nous proposons le terme plus precis de guilde transnationale pour faire comprendre ce qui se joue la.

/pdf/pour-une-sociologie-des-guildes-transnationales-3m2togfcbs.pdf

Pour une sociologie des guildes transnationales

Le visa n'est pas simplement un instrument technique. Il n'est meme pas uniquement une strategie plus efficace de gestion des frontieres. Il est centralement de l'ordre du Politique. C'est a travers le visa que l'on tient a distance et que l'on met a l'ecart les etrangers indesirables. C'est aussi a travers lui que l'on definit entre les pays de l'espace Schengen une liste d'ennemis non declares mais dont on tient a se proteger. En ce sens, le visa Schengen, en particulier sa cartographie, est susceptible d'une lecture schmittienne par la designation qui est faite de la limite entre les amis et les ennemis. Mais nous verrons que les gouvernements et la Commission preferent une politique plus ambigue et cherchent a brouiller les frontieres, tout comme ils ne tiennent nullement a declarer ce qu'ils font. La strategie de faible visibilite n'empeche neanmoins pas sur le fond l' importance politique du sujet et son impact sur les libertes publiques (...).

/pdf/le-visa-instrument-de-la-mise-a-distance-des-indesirables-3fwkkqylb2.pdf

Didier Bigo

Papers

Sociologie politique de l’international : une alternative

International organised crime in the European Union

Sécurité, immigration et contrôle social. L'archipel des polices.

Pour une sociologie des guildes transnationales

Le visa : instrument de la mise à distance des " indésirables "