Showing papers in "Contemporary Sociology in 2002"

Dynamics of Contention

Abstract: Part I. What's the Problem?: 1. What are they shouting about 2. Lineaments of contention 3. Comparisons, mechanisms, and episodes Part II. Tentative Solutions: 4. Mobilizations in comparative perspective 5. Contentious action 6. Transformations of contention Part III. Applications and Conclusions: 7. Revolutionary trajectories 8. Nationalism, national disintegration, and contention 9. Contentious democratization 10. Conclusions.

Servants of globalization : women, migration, and domestic work

Abstract: Introduction: migrant Filipina domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles 1. The dislocations of migrant Filipina domestic workers 2. The Philippines and the outflow of labor 3. The international division of reproductive labor 4. The transnational family: a postindustrial household structure with preindustrial values 5. Intergenerational and gender relations in transnational families 6. Contradictory class mobility: the politics of domestic work in globalization 7. The dislocation of nonbelonging: domestic workers in the Filipina migrant communities of Rome and Los Angeles Conclusion: servants of globalization: different settings, parallel lives Appendix A. Characteristics of the samples Appendix B. Tables Notes bibliography Index.

The Internet in everyday life

Abstract: List of Figures. List of Tables. Foreword: The Virtual Community in the Real World. (Howard Rheingold). Series Editora s Preface: The Internet and the Network Society . (Manuel Castells). Introduction: The Internet in Everyday Life. (Caroline Haythornthwaite and Barry Wellman). Part I: Moving The Internet Out Of Cyberspace. The internet in Everyday Life: An Introduction. (Caroline Haythornthwaite and Barry Wellman). Part II: The Place Of The Internet In Everyday Life. 1. Days and Nights on the Internet. (Philip Howard, Lee Rainie, and Steve Jones). 2 The Global Villagers: Comparing Internet Users and Uses Around the World. (Wenhong Chen, Jeffrey Boase and Barry Wellman). 3 Syntopia: Access, Civic Involvement and Social Interaction on the Net. (James Katz and Ronald Rice). 4 Digital Living: The Impact (or Otherwise) of the Internet in Everyday British Life. (Ben Anderson and Karina Tracey). 5 The Changing Digital Divide in Germany. (Gert Wagner, Rainer Pischner and John Haisken--DeNew). 6 Doing Social Science Research Online . (Alan Neustadtl, John Robinson and Meyer Kestnbaum). Part III: Finding Time For The Internet. 7 Internet Use, Interpersonal Relations and Sociability: A Time Diary Study. (Norman Nie, D. Sunshine Hillygus and Lutz Erbring). 8 The Internet and Other Uses of Time. (John Robinson, Meyer Kestnbaum, Alan Neustadtl and Anthony Alvarez). 9 Everyday Communication Patterns of Heavy and Light Email Users. (Janell Copher, Alaina Kanfer and Mary Bea Walker). Part IV: The Internet In The Community. 10 Capitalizing on the Net: Social Contact, Civic Engagement and Sense of Community. (Anabel Quan--Haase and Barry Wellman). 11 The Impact of Computer Networks on Social Capital and Community Involvement in Blacksburg. (Andrea Kavanaugh and Scott Patterson). 12 The Not So Global Village of Netville. (Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman). 13 Gender and Personal Relationships in HomeNet. (Bonka Boneva and Robert Kraut). 14 Belonging in Geographic, Ethnic and Internet Spaces. (Sorin Matei and Sandra Ball--Rokeach). Part V: The Internet At School, Work And Home. 15 Bringing the Internet Home: Adult distance learners and their Internet, Home and Work worlds. (Caroline Haythornthwaite and Michelle Kazmer). 16 Where Home is the Office: The New Form of Flexible Work. (Janet Salaff). 17 Kerala Connections: Will the Internet Affect Science in Developing Areas?. (Teresa Davidson, R. Sooryamoorthy and Wesley Shrum). 18 Social Support for Japanese Mothers Online and Offline . (Kakuko Miyata). 19 Shopping Behavior Online. (Robert Lunn and Michael Suman). Index

Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again

Abstract: This book is a fascinating re-examination of the theoretical basis of the social sciences. Flyvbjerg wishes to restore social science to its classical position as a practical, intellectual activity aimed at clarifying the problems, risks and possibilities faced by humans and societies. The emphasis is on the contribution social sciences make to social and political praxis. His exploration has been divided into two parts. In part one of the text Flyvbjerg deconstructs the conventional scientific ideal for the social sciences, with its emphasis on theory and contextindependence and instead argues that social science research inquires about a quite different form of knowledge and thus needs to be reoriented. Part two reconstructs a theoretical basis for the social sciences by exploring Aristotle’s division of knowledge and its relationship to the social sciences. Using Nietzsche and Foucault’ s modes of enquiry Flyvbjerg proposes an extension of Aristotle’s phronesis to include the phenomenon of power and maintains conflict and power ought to be established as major considerations when conducting social science research. Refreshingly, he does not enter the natural versus social sciences debate but rather points out that both methods have strengths and weaknesses. He claims these strengths and weaknesses differ however, along fundamentally different dimensions of knowledge. “...the social sciences are strongest where the natural sciences are weakest: just as the social sciences have not contributed much to explanatory and predictive theory, neither have the natural sciences contributed to the reflexive analysis and discussion of values and interests” (p. 3). For the novice Flyvbjerg carefully considers the three types of knowledge identified by Aristotle, namely ‘epesteme’, ‘techne’ and ‘phronesis’ and discusses the difference between them. Phronesis he claims is prudence, practical commonsense or wisdom. In other words, knowing how to behave in given situations and it is this type of knowledge that forms the basis for his “phronetic social science”. Behavioural scientists have come to grief, Flyvbjerg suggests, when the methods used for validation and prediction in ‘episteme’ and ‘techne’ are applied to ‘phronesis’. The social sciences, he maintains, cannot claim to be universal or predictive because they are always context-dependent and experienced by a particular reference group. Instead of asking the traditional questions, what is knowledge, what can we know; and under what circumstances can we know, he suggests social science, ought instead, to ask how do people acquire knowledge and skills (p.9)? He answers his question by using the five levels

The dignity of working men : morality and the boundaries of race, class, and immigration

Abstract: Introduction: Making Sense of Their Worlds The Questions The People The Research I. American Workers 1. The World in Moral Order "Disciplined Selves": Survival, Work Ethic, and Responsibility Providing for and Protecting the Family Straightforwardness and Personal Integrity Salvation from Pollution: Religion and Traditional Morality Caring Selves: Black Conceptions of Solidarity and Altruism The Policing of Moral Boundaries 2. Euphemized Racism: Moral qua Racial Boundaries How Morality Defines Racism Whites on Blacks Blacks on Whites Immigration The Policing of Racial Boundaries 3. Assessing"People Above" and"People Below" Morality and Class Relations "People Above" "People Below" The Policing of Class Boundaries II. The United States Compared 4. Workers Compared Profile of French Workers Profile of North African Immigrants Working Class Morality The Policing of Moral Boundaries Compared 5. Racism Compared French Workers on Muslims French Workers' Antiracism: Egalitarianism and Solidarity North African Responses The Policing of Racial Boundaries Compared 6. Class Boundaries Compared Class Boundaries in a Dying Class Struggle Workers on"People Above" Solidarity a la francaise: Against"Exclusion" The Policing of Class Boundaries Compared Conclusion: Toward a New Agenda Appendix A: Methods and Analysis Appendix B: The Context of the Interview: Economic Insecurity, Globalization, and Places Appendix C: Interviewees Notes References Index

Disaffected Democracies: What's Troubling the Trilateral Countries?

Abstract: It is a notable irony that as democracy replaces other forms of governing throughout the world, citizens of the most established and prosperous democracies (the United States and Canada, Western European nations, and Japan) increasingly report dissatisfaction and frustration with their governments. Here, some of the most influential political scientists at work today examine why this is so in a volume unique in both its publication of original data and its conclusion that low public confidence in democratic leaders and institutions is a function of actual performance, changing expectations, and the role of information.The culmination of research projects directed by Robert Putnam through the Trilateral Commission and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, these papers present new data that allow more direct comparisons across national borders and more detailed pictures of trends within countries than previously possible. They show that citizen disaffection in the Trilateral democracies is not the result of frayed social fabric, economic insecurity, the end of the Cold War, or public cynicism. Rather, the contributors conclude, the trouble lies with governments and politics themselves. The sources of the problem include governments' diminished capacity to act in an interdependent world and a decline in institutional performance, in combination with new public expectations and uses of information that have altered the criteria by which people judge their governments.Although the authors diverge in approach, ideological affinity, and interpretation, they adhere to a unified framework and confine themselves to the last quarter of the twentieth century. This focus--together with the wealth of original research results and the uniform strength of the individual chapters--sets the volume above other efforts to address the important and increasingly international question of public dissatisfaction with democratic governance. This book will have obvious appeal for a broad audience of political scientists, politicians, policy wonks, and that still sizable group of politically minded citizens on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific.

Talk of Love: How Culture Matters

Abstract: This text seeks to understand how the American culture of love shapes what people expect from love and what they actually find. The problem it seems is that people face a diverse culture with multiple perspectives and competing experts. American culture speaks of love that is perfect and instantaneous and yet it also talks of the constant need to improve relationships. \"Talk of Love\" shows how people navigate between discordant messages and how they learn to live with the contradictions they face. In exploring how Americans engage the culture of love, that author also probes what it means to have a culture. A culture includes platitudes and cliches, cynicism and disillusionment co-exist with high ideals, and people draw on these mixed messages to build and make sense of their lives. The Middle Americans interviewed for this book treasure the Hollywood picture of a perfect and sudden love, but they also recognize that love takes work; that \"real love\" is built by commitment and compromise, by taking the good with the bad and, above all, by communicating. This paradox between all-or-nothing romance and mature slow-growing partnerships is what this book resolves. In the process, the author discovers that culture gets organized inside the minds of individuals, and outside the self too, in different social contexts, codes and institutions.

Racialized politics : the debate about racism in America

Abstract: Are Americans less prejudiced now than they were in the 1970s, or has racism simply gone "underground"? Is racism something that is learned as children, or is it a result of certain social groups striving to maintain their privileged positions in society? In this text, political scientists, sociologists and psychologists explore the late-1990s debate surrounding the sources of racism in America. The essays represent three major approaches to the topic. The social psychological approach maintains that prejudice socialized early in life feeds racial stereotypes, while the social structural viewpoint argues that behaviour is shaped by whites' fear of losing their privileged status. The third perspective looks to non-racially inspired ideology, including attitudes about the size and role of government, as the reason for opposition to policies such as affirmative action. This collection provides a state-of-the-field assessment of the issues and findings on the role of racism in mass politics and public opinion.

Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America

Abstract: A vast amount of research has examined the causes of persistent racial inequality in access to employment and other labor market outcomes (see Tomaskovic-Devey, 1993, for a review). Much of this research has used the limited information available in large-scale labor market surveys to assess whether this inequality is due primarily to interracial differences in human and social capital or to racial stereotyping and other sources of statistical discrimination (Aigner and Cain, 1977). Researchers have argued that the answer to this question is particularly important because these sources of racial inequality require different public policy interventions; skill deficits can be remedied through training programs for

American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto

Abstract: In a typically thoughtful commentary on Loic Wacquant’s stirring (1997) attack on academic treatments of the American ghetto, Sharon Zukin (1998) wonders what has actually changed inside and outside the ghetto since the 1960s, and argues that ‘a more rigorous social science is needed ... to trace the historical failures of communal and public institutions, deal with metatheoretical issues of space and time, and analyze contemporary cultures of materialism and violence’ (p. 514). Sudhir Venkatesh’s remarkable and important American Project is exactly the sort of work that Zukin and no doubt many others were waiting for. Since the 1960s, there have been numerous, lengthy accounts of public housing in the US, both academic and journalistic; countless articles debating the existence and dubious terminology of an African-American ‘underclass’, and vast amounts of time and ink devoted to issues of urban segregation, ‘concentrated poverty’, violent crime and the drug economy, welfare retrenchment, gang formation and tactics, the spatial mismatch of housing and employment, and so on. This book is the most readable, balanced and sensitive piece of scholarship I have come across in this vast literature; a landmark study based on several years of meticulous research that I hope will prove instructive and valuable to scholars and students of housing, of sociology, of ethnography, of geography and of the changing American inner city. American Project is about the birth, life and impending death of the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago’s South Side, the largest and perhaps most notorious housing project in the United States. There is a common misconception among urban scholars and their students that all housing projects in American cities have discriminatory origins, but Venkatesh reminds us that the Robert Taylor Homes were a massive Le Corbusian experiment in social reform with admirable intentions. Built ‘to provide Chicago’s overcrowded black population with decent, affordable housing’ (p. 15), a stepping-stone to permanent detachment from poverty and slum malaise, 28 identical 16-storey ‘towers in the park’ housed over 27 000 people when they were completed in the early 1960s, and were opened amidst a fanfare of progress and celebration of American ideals. The author carefully documents the history of the housing development’s fall from grace; it is astonishing how quickly optimism eroded, how hope was displaced by despair, how promise evaporated as neglect set in. The explanation for what went wrong is a familiar one to scholars of public housing and ghetto formation in American cities: decades of municipal negligence; mismanagement by the Chicago Housing Authority (woefully left to their own meagre devices by successive federal governments, particularly the Reagan administration’s ‘New

From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration

Abstract: In the history of New York City, few events loom larger than the wave of immigration at the turn of the last century. Today there is a similar influx of immigrants. From Ellis Island to JFK, this study compares these two huge social changes.

Beyond Tocqueville : civil society and the social capital debate in comparative perspective

Abstract: Recent discussion about the role of civil society in democratic governance around the world and the decline of social capital in the US has raised pressing theoretical and empirical questions about the character of contemporary societies and the social and institutional correlates of sound and dynamic democracies. This debate has reached a North American and European audience that extends well beyond academia. The predominant refrain in the debate, following Alexis de Tocqueville's 160-year-old analysis of democracy in America, attaches tremendous importance to the role of voluntary associations in contemporary democracies. Participation in such groups is said to produce social capital, often linked to high levels of social trust. Social capital in turn is conceived as a crucial national resource for promoting collective action for the common good. Beyond Tocqueville presents 21 varied essays on how civic engagement and political and economic cooperation are generated in contemporary societies, linking theoretical discourse with public policy and actual behaviors.

Global Prescriptions: The Production, Exportation, and Importation of a New Legal Orthodoxy

Abstract: Breaking out : the proliferation of actors in the international system / Anne-Marie Slaughter -- Transnational advocacy networks and the social construction of legal rules / Kathryn Sikkink modern law as a secularized and global model : implications for the sociology of law / Elizabeth Heger Boyle and John W. Meyer -- What institutional regimes for the era of internationalization? / Robert Boyer -- Between liberalism and neoliberalism : law's dilemma in Latin America / Jeremy Adelman and Miguel Angel Centeno -- Legal education and the reproduction of the elite in Japan / Setsuo Miyazawa with Hiroshi Otsuka -- Cultural elements in the practice of law in Mexico: informal networks in a formal system / Larissa Adler Lomnitz and Rodrigo Salazar -- The discovery of law : political consequences in the argentine case / Catalina Smulovitz -- Hybrid(ity) rules : creating local law in a globalized world / Heinz Klug -- Legitimating the new legal orthodoxy / Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth.

Challenge to the Nation-State : immigration in Western Europe and the United States

Abstract: This volume presents the latest research by some of the world's leading figures in the fast growing area of immigration studies. Relating the study of immigration to wider processes of social change, the book focuses on two key areas in which nation-states are being challenged by this phenomenon: sovereignty and citizenship. Bringing together the separate clusters of scholarship which have evolved around both of these areas, Challenge to the Nation-State disentangles the many contrasting views on the impact of immigration on the authority and integrity of the state. Some scholars have stressed the stubborn resistance of states to relinquish territorial control, the continued relevance of national citizenship traditions, and the 'balkanizing' risks of ethnically divided societies. Others have argued that migrations are fostering a post-national world. In their view, states' immigration policies are increasingly constrained by global markets and an international human rights regime, membership as citizenship is devalued by new forms of postnational membership for migrants, and national monocultures are giving way to multicultural diversity. Focusing on the issue of sovereignty in the first section, and citizenship in the second, this compelling new study seeks to clarify the central stakes and opposing positions in this important and complex debate.

The Asian Gang: Ethnicity, Identity, Masculinity

Abstract: In recent years the British mass media have discovered a new and urgent social problem - the Asian gang. Images of urban deprivation and the Underclass have combined with fears of growing youth militancy and masculinities-in-crisis to position Asian, and especially Muslim, young men as the new folk devil. This reimagination of Asian young men has focused on violence, drug abuse and crime, set against a backdrop of cultural conflict, generational confusion and religious fundamentalism. The Asian gang, it seems, is the inevitable product of these social forces. But what is the reality? Based on three years fieldwork with a group of Bangladeshi young men in inner-city London, this book attempts to explore the complex mythologies and realities of contemporary Asian youth experience. Taking the gang as its starting point, the study examines the interaction of representation and reality, ethnicity and masculinity in a textured, in-depth and personal perspective that challenges traditional views on Asian communities and identities.