Joseph Nye coined the term "soft power" in the late 1980s. It is now used frequently-and often incorrectly-by political leaders, editorial writers, and academics around the world. So what is soft power? Soft power lies in the ability to attract and persuade. Whereas hard power-the ability to coerce-grows out of a country's military or economic might, soft power arises from the attractiveness of a country's culture, political ideals, and policies. Hard power remains crucial in a world of states trying to guard their independence and of non-state groups willing to turn to violence. It forms the core of the Bush administration's new national security strategy. But according to Nye, the neo-conservatives who advise the president are making a major miscalculation: They focus too heavily on using America's military power to force other nations to do our will, and they pay too little heed to our soft power. It is soft power that will help prevent terrorists from recruiting supporters from among the moderate majority. And it is soft power that will help us deal with critical global issues that require multilateral cooperation among states. That is why it is so essential that America better understands and applies our soft power. This book is our guide.

Soft Power: The Means To Success In World Politics

This chapter reviews social capital as discussed in the literature, identifies controversies and debates, considers some critical issues, and provides conceptual and research strategies for building a theory. It argues that such a theory and the research enterprise must be based on the fundamental understanding that social capital is captured from embedded resources in social networks. Such measurements can strength of tie network bridge, or intimacy, intensity, interaction and reciprocity be made relative to two frameworks: network resources and contact resources. There are many other measures, such as size, density, cohesion, and closeness of social networks which are candidates as measures for social capital. Network locations are necessary conditions of embedded resources. By considering social capital as assets in networks, the chapter discusses some issues in conceptualization, measurement, and causal mechanism. A proposed model identifies the exogenous factors leading to the acquisition (or the lack) of social capital as well as the expected returns of social capital.

Building a Network Theory of Social Capital

Soft power is the ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction rather than coercion or payment. A country's soft power rests on its resources of culture, values, and policies. A smart power strategy combines hard and soft power resources. Public diplomacy has a long history as a means of promoting a country's soft power and was essential in winning the cold war. The current struggle against transnational terrorism is a struggle to win hearts and minds, and the current overreliance on hard power alone is not the path to success. Public diplomacy is an important tool in the arsenal of smart power, but smart public diplomacy requires an understanding of the roles of credibility, self-criticism, and civil society in generating soft power.

/pdf/public-diplomacy-and-soft-power-4h8xp4j97b.pdf

Public Diplomacy and Soft Power

This ethnography explores the emancipatory dynamics of the Burning Man project, a one-week-long antimarket event. Practices used at Burning Man to distance consumers from the market include discourses supporting communality and disparaging market logics, alternative exchange practices, and positioning consumption as self-expressive art. Findings reveal several communal practices that distance consumption from broader rhetorics of efficiency and rationality. Although Burning Man's participants materially support the market, they successfully construct a temporary hypercommunity from which to practice divergent social logics. Escape from the market, if possible at all, must be conceived of as similarly temporary and local.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/10.1086/339919.pdf

Can Consumers Escape the Market? Emancipatory Illuminations from Burning Man

Roy Rappaport argues that religion is central to the continuing evolution of life, although it has been been displaced from its original position of intellectual authority by the rise of modern science. His book, which could be construed as in some degree religious as well as about religion, insists that religion can and must be reconciled with science. Combining adaptive and cognitive approaches to the study of humankind, he mounts a comprehensive analysis of religion's evolutionary significance, seeing it as co-extensive with the invention of language and hence of culture as we know it. At the same time he assembles the fullest study yet of religion's main component, ritual, which constructs the conceptions which we take to be religious and has been central in the making of humanity's adaptation. The text amounts to a manual for effective ritual, illustrated by examples drawn from anthropology, history, philosophy, comparative religion, and elsewhere.

/pdf/ritual-and-religion-in-the-making-of-humanity-3k07j0crff.pdf

Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity

Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America

An investigation of society s heroes during any time period will reveal the personnel deemed worthy of being emulated at that particular time by that particular society There will be many old and time-tested figures, sometimes with new faces and new profiles; there will also be a mix of new faces Thus the hero like history itself is constantly in transition, and both the hero and the transition are fundamental to the study of a culture These essays turn the pantheon of heroes around before our eyes and reveal the many complicated aspects of hero worship"

The Hero in Transition

The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia

The Presidency of the United States, and its seat in the Oval Office, like any overwhelming power, is a charge powerful enough to save or destroy the country and the world. An effort to understand the White House, its power room, its personnel and the President was the 2002 NBC special entitled The Real West Wing, hosted by Tom Brokaw. Depending on your politics, and perhaps your knowledge of the politics of Washington, you praised the production for its truthful insights or lambasted it as a whitewash. (Either way, the documentary only scratched the surface.) That conflict of opinions continues today and needs academic analysis and reflection, both of which it gets in this enlightened and knowledgeable coverage of both angles of the cameras and producers. The essays of The Wests Wing: The American Presidency as Television Drama explore in multiple directions: major issues are examined; language and structure critiqued; documentary and perceptual matters are evaluated. All sides in some way add light to the perceptions offered by the Brokaw special for TWWs home network, NBC. The cynics among us may find the most amusing (or most infuriating) essays those in the last section where the harshest attacks on the series are lodged. But not to worry. Power is most impressive when it is not used. But in a democracy it must be used and tested and all sides heard— though we in the middle ground always wish for more \"truth\" or reason in the arrows, even when we expect none. Yet a less abused and more informed public would strengthen not weaken the real West Wing. The two editors of this volume recognize this truth and have given needed approaches. They stand in the middle looking and hearing both ways. In an insightful and comprehensive Introduction they give a history of a much praised and condemned series—and the furor it has raised in some quarters. They recognize the human dimensions— frailties and nastinesses—of all participants. Yet through all the din their voices—and most of the rest of us Americans— ring clear: \"There is much to be learned if we approach such issue-laden television as The West Wing in a thoughtful manner, informed by both historical scholarship and media analysis that translates the politics of visual language.\" This collection of essays and the ongoing NBC television series itself may, as the editors say, \"reflect America's best image of itself.\" If not that, only comments on human nature and both are commendable and necessary for in an effort to achieve democracy through our popular culture; we need to remember the words of the nineteenth-century English poet Robert Browning \"One's reach should exceed one's grasp or what's a heaven for?\" In this splendid effort the editors' grasp almost touches their reach.

Ray B. Browne

Papers

Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America

The Hero in Transition

The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia

The West Wing: The American Presidency as Television Drama

American Popular Culture Through History: The 1960s