Showing papers in "Contemporary Sociology in 2006"

Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital:

Abstract: When writing can change your life, when writing can enrich you by offering much money, why don't you try it? Are you still very confused of where getting the ideas? Do you still have no idea with what you are going to write? Now, you will need reading. A good writer is a good reader at once. You can define how you write depending on what books to read. This brokerage and closure an introduction to social capital can help you to solve the problem. It can be one of the right sources to develop your writing skill.

Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil:

Abstract: on the “wisdom” of wooing young consumers is based upon a seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of market research and public opinion polling as well as a series of remarkably candid interviews he conducted with (unnamed) industry executives. The book is also laced with some fine sociological insight. Bogart’s argument that the industry’s own efforts at content labeling have had the ironic, if not entirely unintended effect of making certain products appealing to the very audiences they are intended to discourage—forbidden fruit, as he calls it—is a casein-point. Bogart’s insider understanding of the social organization and inner-workings of mass culture industries lends this all additional ballast, texture, and depth. Ultimately, however, the whole of this volume doesn’t match the sum of its parts. Its most obvious failure, at least for readers of this journal, is as empirical social science. Establishing a causal link from changes in the media to the transformation of the culture simply requires historical data and a research design far beyond the range of a text like this. The fact that Bogart often reduces American culture to the mass media (and usually even further to television and movies) not only simplifies his argument substantially, but also makes it far less compelling. A close reading reveals that most of his claims about the degradation of commercial culture are based on a series of anecdotal observations about single episodes of specific shows rather than systematic content analysis, and this isn’t even to get into how Bogart’s aesthetic and moral judgments are hidden behind an ostensibly objective, value-neutral posture. That Bogart’s method does not conform to the usual standards and conventions of academic social science and cultural criticism is not entirely a bad thing. It frees Bogart to offer up the big, broad-ranging critique sociologists often aspire to but rarely achieve in their own empirical work. And few scholars these days have the courage of conviction to devote four chapters of a book with this title setting up an argument for social intervention and reform. But even on their own terms, these contributions raise questions. If the pursuit of youthful audiences is as economically and demographically mistaken as Bogart and his executives claim, one wonders why the market hasn’t corrected itself. Perhaps the problems of popular culture have less to do with immediate market dynamics than with the constant need of capitalist culture to innovate, stimulate, arouse, and provoke. And then there is the question of how Bogart’s supply-side analysis can be reconciled with his demand-side (not to mention state-based) solution. Perhaps a society like ours offers no other alternatives. But it could also be that the tensions between moral order and the demands of profit-driven economic accumulation are simply deeper and more problematic than someone firmly embedded in the system can allow.

The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of DemocracyThe Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy, by GirouxHenry A.. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2004. 194 pp. $21.95 paper. ISBN: 1594510113.

Abstract: essentially dross. Mildred Schwartz and Kay Lawson also go beyond American concerns to examine trends in party systems and cleavage structures West-wide, observing that because parties are not seen as advancing “a more perfect democratic governance” (p. 285)—the lodestar again—political sociology treats them too negatively. Chapters on the state take us into the welter of theories and studies of state formation (Ertman), democratic transitions (Markoff), revolutions (Goodwin), variations among democratic regimes (Tilly), neo-corporatist practices (Streeck and Kenworthy), undemocratic politics (Brachet-Márquez), and state bureaucracies (Oszlak). All range widely over the modern world and show that the field has moved far to satisfy Giovanni Sartori’s 1960s injunction that a “sociology of politics” concentrating on class and other societal determinants must incorporate the relative autonomy of political actors to form a political sociology. Nevertheless, political elites, the prime actors, are still not fully on stage. There is no Handbook chapter about elites, and references to them, though numerous, are fleeting except when discussing the debate, fueled by Bill Domhoff, about the American power structure. Chapters on state policies and innovations nicely canvas welfare state development and variation (Hicks and Esping-Andersen), how state policies shape women’s roles as workers, citizens, and mothers (Misra and King), and how in the name of “freedom” policies of liberal democracies disguise and leave racial discrimination relatively untouched (Redding, James, and Klugman). Gregory Hooks and James Rice argue grimly that the half-century just begun will be filled with wars, so that political sociology must come to grips with the increasing overlap of political and military power—another reason why the democracy lodestar may be misleading and why elites and their actions need more attention. The Handbook concludes with the puzzle of globalization. Two chapters depict it, in the guise of neo-liberal world hegemony, as a scourge that is reducing state capacity to protect citizens and diminishing democracy (McMichael), even though it is spawning transnational labor, women’s, and environmental movements that are “counterhegemonic” (Evans). With a wealth of data and a mastery of policy outcomes, Evelyn Huber and John Stephens show that globalization has not, at least so far, weakened northern and antipodean welfare states appreciably, but with the help of intermediating political forces it has had devastating effects in Latin America. Echoing in their own domain the foreboding of Hooks and Rice about wars to come, Thomas Janoski and Fengjuan Wang predict that immigration politics will become “a cauldron of emotions and wills for the next half century” (p. 630) and they chart this cauldron’s contours, particularly in the U.S. Despite a few dark scenarios, the Handbook’s contributors may too readily assume it is business as usual. It is striking, for example, that Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis receives not a single mention, while the fusion of nationalism and religious fundamentalism in the U.S. and elsewhere also receives little attention. The reciprocal vulnerability of elites and publics in the now advanced conditions of mass society—a worry of political sociologists in the 1950s but apparently no longer—is not discussed. The failure, or at least sluggishness, of economic development in major world areas and the social disorganization it is producing globally need more assessments of the kind that Huber and Stephens give to Latin America’s plight. We need not become a gaggle of Cassandras, but we should ponder if a long period of essentially flourishing conditions, during which political sociology assumed a bright future, is now behind us.

Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican ChicagoWorking the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago, by GenovaNicholas P. De. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 329 pp. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 0822336154.

Abstract: mission identity, policy, and direction in the midst of two conflicting Korean responses; a relatively favorable reception of Christianity on the one hand, and a strong demand for the implementation of secular education from Korean leaders and intellectuals on the other. During initial years of the Korean mission, missionary activities were focused primarily in medicine and education due to legal restrictions against Christianity outside of these sectors. Going into the 1890s, the mission priority shifted to evangelism due largely to the strong personal commitment on the part of two leading missionaries, Horace G. Underwood and Samuel Moffett. Chapter 3 focuses on the issue of identification. Missionaries made efforts to overcome barriers of national, cultural and racial bias and superiority in light of the ideals of the Christian mission with varying degree of success. The author discovers that individual attitudes, commitment, and the nature and frequency of encounters with Koreans were significant factors in the variation. In chapters 4 and 5, the author examines the home, family, and the type of work missionaries engaged in and how these respective factors affected Korean encounters and identification. Chapter 6 looks at the ways in which conflicts are negotiated and resolved between the American missionaries’ priority on evangelism and Korean Christians’ emphasis on nationalism and modernization. Although American missionaries gradually accommodated the demands for higher education originating from Korean church leaders, the strong emphasis on evangelical activities from early missionaries worked to establish the conservative and evangelical tone of Korean Christianity that still exists today. In order to adequately understand the history of the Korean church, it is imperative to learn what these early pioneers had in mind for its nature and future direction. The strength of this book lies in the original way it deals with subjective interpretations from the key actors who formulated and modified early mission policy and vision through everevolving interactions with, responses to, and demands of Koreans. The analysis is objective and fair, free of the nationalistic biases often found in the writings of modern Korean history by Korean authors. However, the inclusion of a couple of additional key elements may have added to the overall analysis. Horace G. Underwood is known, especially to older Koreans, as Won Du-woo. Many other missionaries also had Korean names, and a more detailed explanation as to the significance of name adoption among missionaries may have provided more insight into the study of identity formulation. Methodist missionaries also constituted a significant portion of the Christian mission, and many of the medical and/or educational mission projects in Korea were jointly sponsored by Presbyterians and Methodists. At least a minor reference to the contribution of Methodist missions and their mutual influences on the formulation of the mission identity and policy would have been helpful. Overall, the book is a significant contribution to the knowledge and understanding of the roots of the Korean Christian phenomenon.

Between Sex and Power: Family in the World, 1900–2000

Abstract: meaning of his findings. Chapter 5 succinctly summarizes the study. Those who already know Tim Owens’ research will find this book familiar; he previously published most of it in top-ranked journals. Still, these readers may experience a subtle synergy from reading the work as a whole. Considering the chapters on context selection and on context effects together, just after reading the overarching theoretical discussions, provides a much stronger sense of what happened to these young men than reading them separately. Readers who do not know this research will find a clearly written and technically excellent study. In short, Tim Owens has furthered our understanding of the impact of one of the most turbulent eras of recent U.S. history. He has done this with considerable theoretical and methodological sophistication—and that is quite an achievement. Sociologists of the life course, of the self, of the military, and of war and peace could all use this study as a starting point for expanding our understanding of how major social change affects the people caught up in them.

The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age

Abstract: olutionary intelligentsia a theocratic “Khomeini government” was indeed in the cards for Iran? Let’s just say that if he was deceived about this, he was in good company. The first prime minister of revolution, Mehdi Bazargan, to whom Foucault’s famous letter of protest is addressed to (pp. 260–63), complained in a private session (summer 1992) to the author of this review that Khomeini “deceived us all, that is, he deceived all but the devil himself.” Afary and Anderson don’t expect Foucault to have suddenly reversed a career of critiquing modernity at the threshold of this massive, anti-modern revolution. What they do fault him for is missing the dying canary in the mine—the trampling of women’s rights in Iran should have alarmed Foucault. It did not. The authors trace this failure to the blind spot that Foucault had allowed to grow in his privileged, male homosexual field of vision. Maxim Rodnison (whose critical essays along with the compendium of Foucault’s writings on Iran are included in an informative appendix to the present book) lays the blame on Foucault’s lack of familiarity with the hidden authoritarianism of an Islamic state. For the sources of Foucault’s naiveté, however, one needs not to look even that far. In an interview conducted in 1978 in Tehran (p.186), Foucault called the liberal democratic industrial capitalism “the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine.” The poverty of imagination underlying such a statement is breathtaking. Without abandoning one line of Foucault’s voluminous critiques of modernity and with all the due respect to postmodernism, it would not be hard for non-Westerner intellectuals to imagine a harsher, more savage, more selfish, more dishonest and, more oppressive society. And once they got over their idealism, they too would choose boring, slightly oppressive, slightly mendacious leafy suburbs of Paris, London, New York or Los Angeles over a utopian “political spirituality” that “takes nothing from Western philosophy, from its juridical and revolutionary foundations” (pp. 186–7). The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, by Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, translated by Assenka Oksiloff. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005. 240 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN: 1592132758.

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America:

Abstract: In Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America, Diana Kendall uses frame analysis to examine how news and entertainment media contribute to the social construction of social class in the United States. Framing is the process by which sense is made of events, and media framing is the process by which information and entertainment are packaged by the media before being presented to an audience. Kendall is less interested in how the framing of media texts results from journalistic practices and routines than in how potential readers and viewers might be making sense of the texts once they are in circulation. The texts, in this case, consist of newspaper articles (predominantly from The New York Times) and selected television entertainment shows. Calling the media “the primary storytellers of the 21st Century” (p. 18), Kendall examines the kinds of stories that are being told and speculates as to how they shape/influence our ideas about class and class inequality. She identifies six classes (following the Gilbert-Kahl model); each class is associated with a different set of media frames and the six substantive chapters of the book discuss these frames in detail. Overall, the frames associated with the middle and upper classes are more positive/admiring than those associated with the working and poverty classes. The rich, for example, are portrayed as generous and caring, or as leading enviable lifestyles, while the poor are often characterized as deviant in their behavior and the working classes as buffoons, bigots, or members of greedy unions. The middle class, by contrast, is framed as the model to which all Americans should aspire, despite also being framed as having a tenuous hold on economic stability. What the various frames have in common is the tendency to portray class as an individual rather than social or structural phenomenon. In keeping with the media’s penchant for telling stories around individual characters, class gets expressed as a matter of money (or lack of) and lifestyle rather than as a social location shaped by differential structures of opportunity. In the final and concluding chapter, Kendall addresses how the media may effect consumers, arguing that many people live vicariously through the media and spend more than they can afford trying to emulate wealthy celebrities. The book is written in accessible prose and engages the key literature on media and framing. Its conclusions are solid but not earth-shattering: sociologists and other media scholars have long lamented the promotion of consumerism through the media, as well as the proclivity of media professionals (not to mention Americans more generally) to think about social issues and events in individual rather than structural terms. As for the specific frames discussed, it’s difficult to know to what degree they reflect the class categories identified prior to analysis and/or the specific media included as data. There is not much information on data or methodology. Kendall says that she chose The New York Times because it is extensively archived and its stories are reprinted in other newspapers. Good reasons, but it’s also the case that the NYT has a largely middle-class, professional readership and thus its content can be assumed to channel the interests of that readership. By contrast, the various television entertainment shows that Kendall references—which are never systematically identified but were chosen, the author tells us, for their explicit focus on class themes— presumably cater to a less professionalized audience, television in general being a more “mass” mass medium than print. I found myself wondering about significant differences in frames and framing devices by medium and genre. It seems logical that the frames deployed by the NYT differ from those deployed by, say, Paris Hilton’s reality show The Simple Life. It would have been helpful to know why such disparate forms of media were treated as essentially equivalent forms of data, for being part of the same media system doesn’t necessarily render insignificant qualitative distinctions among media. Another quibble I have with the book is the lack of consistency in its stance toward the relationship between mediated and lived

Italians Then, Mexicans Now: Immigrant Origins and Second-Generation Progress:

Abstract: system. Indeed, as Karen Roberts states in the introduction (p. 1), the aim is to provide both a detailed introduction to workers' compensation for novices and fresh insights for the fully initiated. This stated objective is well met by the clearly written papers in the volume. Except for a few omissions detailed below, the book is quite comprehensive. Two papers extend beyond workers' compensation to discuss the economics of workplace safety and health: a posthumous survey article by Thomason, and a discussion by Seth Seabury, Robert Reville, Hil ary Rhodes, and Leslie Boden of how behavioral economics can inform research on workplace injuries. The other papers discuss research on workers' compensation systems, largely those in North America. The topics examined are the adequacy of income benefits (Boden, Reville, and Jeff Biddle), the determination of benefits for permanent partial disabilities (John F. Burton, Jr.), the growth of litigation and appeals in Canada

Sex Trafficking: The Global Market in Women and Children

Abstract: This book is one of a series on contemporary social issues. It provides a painstakingly researched analysis of the contemporary phenomenon of sex trafficking. As the author Kathryn Farr points out, the phenomenon is not all that contemporary, as women and children have historically been trafficked and enslaved for the purposes of prostitution, particularly during war: in World War II on the southern islands of Okinawa, the Philippines, Hawaii, Liberia, Japan, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, and more recently in Bosnia and Rwanda. Farr links the phenomenon to military socialization, especially to its patriarchal culture which celebrates hyper-masculinity, eroticizes violence, desensitizes soldiers to suffering and brutality and treats women as sex objects.

Insecurity and Welfare Regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America: Social Policy in Development Contexts:

Abstract: higher wages, or whether government subsidies and tax breaks to employers can offset these losses, is still up for debate. Ultimately, Kenworthy asks the reader to consider what standard of living is worth what level of inequality. His analysis reveals that contrary to expectations, countries with more generous social-welfare policies do not have higher income levels for most citizens at the lower end of the economic totem pole. However, what these numbers do not convey, Kenworthy argues, is “the value of government provided services such as health care, education and child care” (p. 120). Kenworthy has made a lasting contribution to the study of inequality. His current research lays the groundwork for examining how socio-economic policies and processes impact the ultimate goal of maximizing growth and fiscal health in a nation, while maintaining a high standard of living for its citizens at all income levels. If the standard is to question whether capitalism can flourish in an egalitarian context, now Kenworthy has flipped the script and demanded that societies consider whether capitalism can sustain itself when it does so at the expense of people who must learn to get by without vital resources. This book is not only critical reading for scholars of inequality studies, economics, political science and business administration programs, but also deserves the attention of those who wish to understand how economic, political and social policies operate in tandem to shape their fiscal experiences.

Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We Need to Learn

Abstract: vent elite withdrawal from the public sphere into private trust networks and how to nurture organizations such as unions that can facilitate proletarians’ active engagement in public politics. Trust and Rule concludes with speculations on the future. Tilly notes the emergence of networks, such as al-Qaida and web-based anti-globalization protesters, that attempt to create trust on an international scale. Tilly is doubtful that international trust networks can be sustained; the rarity of al-Qaida terror attacks suggests Tilly is correct. Tilly worries that Internet-based globalized protests “will divert time, energy, and other resources available from local, regional, and national public politics .|.|. it will weaken connections between activists’ trust networks and those smaller-scale sites of public politics. It may even make trust networks less significant for the maintenance of social movement activity” (p. 159). It remains to be seen how many democracies will decline along Tilly’s pessimistic trajectory. In any case, Tilly has provided us with a conceptual framework and a research program to identify the most fruitful courses of collective action if we hope to prevent a grim future.