The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

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

After virtue, a study in moral theory

Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care

Sexuality features prominently in European debates on multiculturalism and in Orientalist discourses on Islam. This article argues that representations of gay emancipation are mobilized to shape narratives in which Muslims are framed as non-modern subjects, a development that can best be understood in relation to the ‘culturalization of citizenship’ and the rise of Islamophobia in Europe. We focus on the Netherlands where the entanglement of gay rights discourses with anti-Muslim politics and representations is especially salient. The thorough-going secularization of Dutch society, transformations in the realms of sex and morality since the ‘long 1960s’ and the ‘normalization’ of gay identities since the 1980s have made sexuality a malleable discourse in the framing of ‘modernity’ against ‘tradition’. This development is highly problematic, but also offers possibilities for new alliances and solidarities in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and questioning (LGBTQ) politics and sexual and cultural citi...

Sexual Politics, Orientalism and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands

Responsibility, participation and choice are key policy framings of active citizenship, summoning the citizen to take on new roles in welfare state reform. This volume traces the emergence of new discourses and the ways in which they take up and rework struggles of social movements for greater independence, power and control. It explores the changing cultural and political inflections of active citizenship in Germany, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, France, Italy and the UK, with ethnographic research complementing policy analysis. The editors then look across the volume to assess some of the tensions and contradictions arising in the turn to active citizenship. Two final chapters address the reworking of citizen/professional relationships and the remaking of public, private and personal responsibilities, with a particular focus on the contribution of feminist research and theory.

/pdf/participation-responsibility-and-choice-summoning-the-active-1m21avyeoh.pdf

Participation, responsibility and choice: summoning the active citizen in Western European welfare states

This article reviews how activation policies frame citizens as individual welfare agents. The analysis focuses on the framing of feeling rules employed by governments that encourage active citizenship, in this instance in the Netherlands and England. In England, encouraging voluntarism is central to the Big Society agenda; in the Netherlands, it is at the heart of the 2007 Social Support Act and more recent ideas on citizenship. Governments cannot compel their citizens to volunteer their time; they can, however, try to seduce people by playing on their emotions. Based on an analysis of thirty-nine policy documents and political speeches, we find that English politicians employ ‘empowerment talk’ calculated to trigger positive feelings about being active citizens, while Dutch politicians employ ‘responsibility talk’ conveying negative feelings about failure to participate more actively in society. Responsibility talk runs the risk that citizens respond with counter-responsibility claims, whereas empowerment talk can fail to incite sufficient enthousiasm among citizens.

Talking active citizenship: framing welfare state reform in England and the Netherlands

Though Arlie Hochschild is a leading contemporary sociologist, her theoretical framework is hardly used outside her own field. The purpose of this article is to critique Hochschild’s theoretical framework in order to make it more broadly applicable. The main problem I identify is an analytical gap between her core microlevel concepts “feeling and framing rules” and macro-level phenomena such as “commercialization.” I propose the concept of “citizenship regimes” to bridge this gap. “Citizenship regimes” are located at the same (meso-) level as “ideologies”, the concept Hochschild uses. Ideologies, however, only concern ideas, while citizenship regimes include tangible practices and routines, laws and informal rules, and organizational and material arrangements. Citizenship regimes, like ideologies, change. But due largely to their material presence, earlier regimes linger on; individuals thus often live under the influence of several regimes, and the tensions between them explain the conflicts they experience among their feelings, feeling rules, and framing rules. The wider phenomenon of commercialization is thus experienced very differently, and can be traced back to the influence of competing citizenship regimes. The claim is illustrated through an empirical study of informal care in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Evelien Tonkens

Papers

Sexual Politics, Orientalism and Multicultural Citizenship in the Netherlands

Participation, responsibility and choice: summoning the active citizen in Western European welfare states

Talking active citizenship: framing welfare state reform in England and the Netherlands

Working with Arlie Hochschild: connecting feelings to social change

Culturalization of citizenship in the Netherlands