International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 

About: International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society is an academic journal published by Springer Science+Business Media. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Democracy. It has an ISSN identifier of 0891-4486. Over the lifetime, 894 publications have been published receiving 9258 citations. The journal is also known as: Politics, culture, and society.

On Max Weber

Abstract: Wilhelm Hennis has written a book that is first and foremost a caveat as impassioned as it is well-documented and logical. The former characteristic may seem to contradict the latter. However, it is one of the author's considerable merits that he contrives to make them co-exist. From his foreword on, Hennis warns the reader against an intellectually improper strategy which he argues is being mounted quite openly the massive takeover of Max Weber, which is as swift and greedy as it is irresponsibly careless of the author's deepest original intention. It should not thus surprise us that the book brings to mind the warning call of a conscientious inspector of the ministry of Fine Arts, roused by the unscrupulous tomb-robbers smashing and looting Etruscan necropolises by night. The comparison is not too far-fetched. Anyone with even the slightest familiarity with current sociological 'production' will quickly see that the immense and apparently unsystematic output of Max Weber is cheerfully appropriated and decanted, as it were, by means of lifting it out of context. Whole propositions, concepts and standpoints are purloined for current studies in sociology, not unlike the way the first Christians behaved in constructing their basilicas with the aid of the pagan temples of classical antiquity. Hennis especially deplored the fact that this use of Weber is at once now universally practised and wholly unmindful, indeed, alien, to the author's basic intention. In the early 1960's, when I was writing Max Weber e il destino della ragione (Laterza, Bari 1964 English ed., Sharpe, N.Y. 1980), I discovered the Erfurt sociologist had been more or less crudely 'embalmed'. Wilhelm Hennis fiercely supports this same point of view in the present work. However, whereas I confined myself to attributing this sterilizing and embalming to a more or less conscious plan, under the 'systematic' attentions of Talcott Parsons and other North American sociologists

Shifting the Risk: New Employment Patterns, Informalization, and Women's Work

Abstract: The paper argues that the processes of informalization of jobs observed during the past decades have affected both high and low income countries. Starting at the micro level of the firm, the emphasis is on how economic restructuring and globalization have generated the growth of informal activities—resulting in the vicious circle of poverty and economic insecurity for an important proportion of the population. The second part of the paper analyzes the growth of women's participation in informal activities, emphasizing that there are contradictory forces at work regarding women's employment. Despite a stubborn persistence of gender discrimination and obstacles to women's advancement, progress has taken place on several fronts, such as in the education field and in the absorption of female labor in many production processes. The paper concludes by pointing out that poverty eradication programs must emphasize the need to generate decent jobs without which these programs will continue to be ineffective. In addition, re-distributive mechanisms and different forms of social protection are needed to counteract the forces and policies generating economic insecurity.

Shared History Project: A PRIME Example of Peace-Building Under Fire

Abstract: Minimal peace building during a violent conflict is suggested as a strategy for future post-conflict peace processes. This paper describes a process of five workshops in which Palestinian and Jewish-Israeli teachers developed a joint school textbook of two narratives (an Israeli and a Palestinian) in regard to three dates in their mutual conflict: the Balfour Declaration, the 1948 war and the 1987 Intifada. The teachers developed these two narratives to be taught in their classrooms. All these activities took place under severe conditions of asymmetry of power relations of occupation (of the Palestinians) and of suicide bombers (against Israelis) throughout the project. The Two-State solution requires in our view textbooks of two narratives, so students learn to respect the narrative of the “Other.”

The Sociological and Geographical Imaginations

Abstract: enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals....The first fruit of this imagination...is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own life chances in life by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances....The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two in society....Back of its use there is always the urge to know the social and historical meaning of the individual in society, and in the period in which he has his quality and his being (C. Wright Mills, 1959).

Collective Protest: A Critique of Resource Mobilization Theory

Abstract: Over the last two decades, “resource mobilization” (RM) analysts have emphasized the importance of institutional continuities between conventional social life and collective protest.1 There is much about this interpretation with which we agree. It is a corrective to some of the malintegration (MI) literature in which movements are portrayed as mindless eruptions lacking either coherence or continuity with organized social life. Nevertheless, we shall argue that RM analysts commit a reverse error. Their emphasis on the similarities between conventional and protest behavior has led them to understate the differences. They thus tend to “normalize” collective protest.