Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society

The achievement gap is one of the most talked-about issues in U.S. education. The term refers to the disparities in standardized test scores between Black and White, Latina/o and White, and recent immigrant and White students. This article argues that a focus on the gap is misplaced. Instead, we need to look at the “education debt” that has accumulated over time. This debt comprises historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral components. The author draws an analogy with the concept of national debt—which she contrasts with that of a national budget deficit—to argue the significance of the education debt.

From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools

Keywords: a Vocabulary of Culture and Society

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

Policing the Crisis

35th anniversary edition of this book.
This collaboratively authored book begins as an attempt to analyse the apparent rise in a new form of crime in Britain of the early 1970s, mugging. The authors expose the ways in which changes of operational procedure and priority on the part of the police were at least partly responsible for this phenomenon, as concern that mugging needed to be cracked down on led to more arrests as well as to more offences being classified as muggings. The coverage of the resultant court cases led to much media comment on this apparent new phenomenon, fuelling public concern which resulted in the handing down of greatly increased sentences to convicted muggers in the name of deterrence. Thus, the authors aim to demonstrate that the phenomenon was certainly fuelled and indeed, to a certain extent, created by the very institutions to which fell the task of controlling it. The authors then examine this chain of events as an instance by which a crisis of ideology within British society and late capitalism in general is managed by the authorities. Supposedly deviant groups, in this case young black males, are periodically singled out and placed at the centre of a series of moral panics which allow the state to demonstrate that it has the people's consent to maintain the status quo through an increasing reliance on a authoritarian `law'n'order' model. The book concludes with an extended and unashamedly polemical Marxist analysis of the situation of the black British as a super-exploited sub-proletariat, and attempts to lay the theoretical ground for those trying to reconfigure society for the better. Its sometimes uneven tone reflects its collaborative authorship, and the terms of the debate and the nature of the identified crisis root the book firmly in its 1970s point of origin, but there is nonetheless a great deal in this classic cultural study to provoke thought and debate into the twenty-first century.

Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (2nd ed.)

Managerialism and Social Welfare: A Challenge to Public Administration@@@The Managerial State: Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare

Authors John Clarke and Janet Newman present an original analysis of the creation of new state forms that critically examines the political forces that enabled "more and better management" to be presented as a solution to the problems of the welfare state in Britain. Examining the micro-politics of change within public services, the authors draw links among politics, policies, and organizational power to present an incisive and dynamic account of the restructuring of social welfare. Clarke and Newman expose the tensions and contradictions in the managerial state and trace the emergence of new dilemmas in the provision of public services. They show that these problems are connected to the recurring difficulties in defining the "the public" that receives these services. In particular they question whether the reinvention of the public as either a nation of consumers or a nation of communities can effectively address the implications of social diversity. A cogent critique of the social, political, and organizational conflicts and instabilities that are embedded in new state forms, The Managerial State will be essential reading for students and academics in social policy, public policy, and public management. It will also be of interest to academics in sociology, politics, and organization studies.

The Managerial State: Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare

Polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) body burdens in North America are 20 times that of Europeans and some “high accumulation” individuals have burdens up to 1−2 orders of magnitude higher than median values, the reasons for which are not known. We estimated emissions and fate of ΣPBDEs (minus BDE-209) in a 470 km2 area of Toronto, Canada, using the Multi-media Urban Model (MUM-Fate). Using a combination of measured and modeled concentrations for indoor and outdoor air, soil, and dust plus measured concentrations in food, we estimated exposure to ΣPBDEs via soil, dust, and dietary ingestion and indoor and outdoor inhalation pathways. Fate calculations indicate that 57−85% of PBDE emissions to the outdoor environment originate from within Toronto and that the dominant removal process is advection by air to downwind locations. Inadvertent ingestion of house dust is the largest contributor to exposure of toddlers through to adults and is thus the main exposure pathway for all life stages other than the infan...

John Clarke

Papers

Policing the Crisis

Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (2nd ed.)

Managerialism and Social Welfare: A Challenge to Public Administration@@@The Managerial State: Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare

The Managerial State: Power, Politics and Ideology in the Remaking of Social Welfare

Is House Dust the Missing Exposure Pathway for PBDEs? An Analysis of the Urban Fate and Human Exposure to PBDEs