Showing papers in "Theory and Society in 1991"

A society of organizations

Abstract: It is a commonplace today that organizations are a key element of U.S. society and those of other industrialized nations. I argue here that the importance of large organizations in the United States is still insufficiently appreciated. The nineteenth-century industrial revolution, much of our politics and social structure, and many of the crises of the 1980s and 1990s must be reinterpreted in the light of "organizational variables." I cannot do all of this in an essay, but I lay out the argument and lightly illustrate it.

Middle classes, democratization, and class formation

Abstract: This analysis of the South Korean case demonstrates the importance of the historical context for understanding the political role of the middle classes. In late industrialization, as occurred in South Korea and other East Asian countries, the new middle class has emerged as a significant social class, before the capitalist class established its ideological hegemony and before industrial workers developed into an organized class. Neither of these two major classes was able to offer an ideological or organizational leadership to the middle classes. In this context, the middle class can act as more than merely a “dependent variable.” In South Korea, the minjung movement led by an intellectual segment of the middle class played a critical role in the formation of the working class, by providing an opposition ideology, new politicized languages, organizational networks, and other resources.

Explaining Asian economic organization

Abstract: Social theorists are challenged to explain an increasingly complex economic order It is clear that old theories that posited a developmental sequence from “undeveloped” to “industrialized” cannot explain the diverse patterns of industrialization that exist Certainly, Japan is as developed as Western nations but its patterns of development, its economic norms, and its industrial practices are substantially different from the United States and even its Asian neighbors in Taiwan and South Korea For example, the fact that Japan has the largest banks in the world, and Taiwan relatively few and weak ones (despite the world's largest per capita foreign reserve holdings), cannot be explained only by recourse to market or state factors, although each play a role Both countries were literally awash in money in the 1980s, and both countries are clearly capitalist societies where banking institutions are assumed to be critical to economic development, as they have been in the West But more than market and political economy factors are at work here In Japan, historically developed institutional factors, dating from before the Meiji Restoration and industrial revolution, created conditions for business group self-financing Modern-day keiretsu, such as Sumitomo and Mitsui, with their huge banks as centerpieces, trace their origins to pre-industrial merchant houses under family ownership Inheritance practices in Japan are based on primogeniture, inheritance of the entire fortune by the eldest son This practice allowed merchant family fortunes to remain intact under the stewardship of the heir Successful families thus had huge sums of money available to finance the businesses of affiliated branches operating under the “badge” of the mother house The descendents of the zaibatsu merchant houses, the keiretsu, continue to rely on their own sources of finance, now institutionalized in banks that serve their credit and other financial needs To see large banks encapsulated within business networks as only the outcome of distorted market conditions, or as only the result of a powerful business class, misses the institutional origins and overlooks the contemporary institutional underpinnings of the Japanese banking system Ironically, the weakness of Taiwanese banks can also be traced to a strong family system Chinese societies practice partible inheritance, that is, division of a family estate equally among all sons As a result, families divide their fortunes every generation, mitigating against the development of large sums of money Instead, there is great pressure within families to develop multiple businesses so that at the death of the family head, each son can claim an independent enterprise Because all Chinese families face the problem of setting up children in business (being an employee is not a desirable status in Taiwan as it is in Japan), a range of informal lending arrangements have arisen within families and among friends to generate investment capital Strong social norms dictate that one assist financially a kin member or close friend Banks play a relatively minor role in Taiwan because alternative institutional arrangements, also with preindustrial origins, have obviated the need for banks for some financial functions Again, market factors are important to understanding the strong curb market and weak formal banking system in Taiwan, and political economy factors, notably the absence of a strong central bank, are also significant But an institutional explanation integrates these factors into an explanation that begins with the character of the society being explained We need theories that can account for difference without reducing cases to unique instances, that do not presume the individualistic character of Western social orders, and that are sensitive to an array of ideal as well as material factors operating in different locations Although political economy, market, and culture theories each have contributions to make, an institutional perspective of the type I outline may be especially suited to the comparative analysis of emerging world economic organization I think, ironically, that a sensitivity to institutional factors may yield better theories of the West Rather than assume that the United States and Europe are the exemplars of advanced capitalism, the closest empirical instances of the idealized competitive market, Japan and other Asian nations are suggesting that the West is simply one form of capitalist economic development, an expression no doubt, of the West's own institutional heritage When we relinquish ethnocentric perspectives we can begin to look at ourselves and our own institutional heritage more clearly

Codes and conflict

Abstract: “If theory caused a more critical study of war, it would have achieved its purpose.” (Clausewitz) In this article I have shown that in times of war, beneath the apparently rational surface of modern societies and states there lurks a powerful religious dimension that is of crucial importance in structuring political and military activity, in informing public, political, and intellectual discourse, and in shaping opinion, beliefs, attitudes, sentiments, and social action. The religious dimension is neither a mere jumble of diffuse sentiments, beliefs, and ideas, nor a simple ideological reflection of social interests — it is an autonomous, internally coherent, analogically organized code that specifies sacred and profane elements and embodies an endogenous apophantic logic. This analytically autonomous code provides for the specification of war as ritual in concrete historical sequences. If the reader comes away from this article feeling that she better understands the role and organization of culture in war, and that consequently war cannot be explained, understood, and interpreted only in terms of economic, geopolitical, and psychological variables, then I will have achieved my chief objective here. However, I hope that this article also has a larger contribution to make. Sociology has inherited a rich tradition of ideas from its founding fathers. This tradition, enshrined in the classic works of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, has informed and shaped the discipline. It seems a shame that contemporary trends in social thought and research draw increasingly upon selected strands of thought in the legacy of only two of those gentlemen. The result of this movement, I believe, is not just a trend toward impoverished uni-dimensional studies of social reality, but also the loss of the auto-critical possibilities engendered by a discourse that draws upon diverse theoretical resources. As I have tried to demonstrate here, Durkheim's legacy, with its unique emphasis on ritual and symbolism, still provides a useful resource for the critique of social theory and the analysis of social life — even in those areas where one would least expect any fruitful insights to arise. More importantly, as Clausewitz recognized, theory contains the possibility not merely for the formal study, but also for the critical study of war. With its stress on voluntarism, a Durkheimian theory of war provides a vital and distinct contrast to those theories of war that attribute causation to factors outside of human control, be they psychological, geopolitical, or economic. The awareness of ethical responsibility arising from such an under-standing provides, one would like to think, the possibility for change.

Ideology, cultural frameworks, and the process of revolution

Abstract: The English and French revolutions were not the product of uniquely Western crises of capitalism or absolutism. They shared many elements with profoundly similar crises in the Eastern states of the Ottoman Empire and China. The divergence of Eastern and Western civilizations after the mid-seventeenth century thus cannot be simply attributed to a structural difference between Western “revolutions” and Eastern “peasant rebellions” or “dynastic crises.” In terms of institutional changes, particularly changes in local class structure, more extensive changes followed the seventeenth-century crises in Ottoman Turkey and Ming China than followed the English Revolution. The entire question of the divergence of Eastern and Western economic and political development, of Western dynamism and Eastern stagnation in the early modern period, therefore needs reexamination. In particular, the manner in which Western Europe forged ahead of the advanced Eastern civilizations of Islam and China needs to be explained in a way that accommodates the similarities of the seventeenth-century crises in each. Focusing on cultural frameworks and how they governed reactions to state crises and shaped state reconstruction provides an entry point for such an explanation. Different ideological legacies, embedded in state reconstruction after the seventeenth-century crises, profoundly influenced the later divergence of East and West. Discussions of culture and revolutions have been obfuscated by arguments over whether “material” or “cultural and ideological” factors are the primary agents of change. Clearly this false dilemma — asking whether history is governed by Marxist materialism or Hegelian idealism — fails to capture historical reality. A number of scholars have tried to overcome this dichotomy. Clifford Geertz, Clifford Geertz, (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Natalie Davis, Natalie Z. Davis, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975). and Robert Darnton Robert Darnton, (New York: Basic Books, 1984). have turned to deep analysis of texts or events, analysis designed to illustrate the creativity of individuals and groups in producing symbols and actions that both express and shape their material conditions. Other authors — Giddens Anthony Giddens, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982). and Bourdieu Pierre Bourdieu, , translated by R. Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). — have put forth general theories of culture that stress the ability of individuals to appropriate cultural elements and use them to reconstruct or reinforce material and institutional structures. All of these approaches attempt to free individuals from the determinism of materialist constraints, and also from the mechanical reproduction of a dominant culture. These approaches therefore have the virtue of avoiding either a simple socioeconomic or cultural determination of individual action. Yet they also are almost useless for long-term, causal historical explanation, for they tend to reduce to a halfway house between materialism and idealism, blandly asserting that, in general, individuals respond to both their material and their cultural environments with (more or less) creative responses that both reproduce and alter those environments. But as we have just observed, the creative response to a changing environment is not constant. These theories of culture fail to appreciate temporal variation, that the role of culture may be quite different in particular concrete historical settings. At some times, as in politically stable periods, the level of cultural innovation may be low; at other times, as in prerevolutionary periods, ideological innovation may increase, but chiefly in response to material forces that create a social crisis. At still other times, as during state breakdown and the ensuing struggle for power, ideological creativity may rise to great heights and develop its own dynamics. And in the restabilization of authority after a breakdown, as the ideological creations of the power struggle become embedded in the postrevolutionary cultural framework, cultural patterns and ideologies may dominate the future possibilities for material as well as cultural change. Interestingly, it was precisely those revolutions that failed to overcome traditional rule fully but did experience a phase of creative, tradition-repudating ideology, namely England and France, that left a legacy of fruitful and dynamic tension in postbreakdown society. Although the Puritans and Jacobins faded after the revolutions, a part of their views remained in a rich stock of antitraditional symbols, institutions, and ideals. State reconstructions in those countries thus were continually challenged by claims to principles that hedged absolute authority. In contrast, the ideological response that occurred in tradition-reinforcing cases of state breakdown — as in the Ottoman Empire, China, and Hapsburg Spain — sought to purify and reaffirm traditional institutions. In these cases, the crisis was blamed on deviation from orthodoxy, and the new regimes sought to strip away variety in the extant cultural framework, purging elements perceived as heterodox. The reconstruction of state and social institutions allowed a recovery of traditional prosperity; but the impoverishing of the cultural framework of post-breakdown society reduced the basis for future dynamism and fundamental change. Meiji Japan was a hybrid case, as marginal elites did sweep away certain aspects of the traditional government and its status system, releasing resources for development and imperial expansion. But the Meiji Restoration still was framed in traditional and conservative ideology, which left a legacy of conservative and traditonal emphasis that continued to dominate much of political and social life. In short, theories of culture that simply describe the interaction of individuals with cultural elements in general terms are gravely incomplete. Cultural frameworks act with particular power at the times when states are rebuilt or revised in times of state breakdown or crisis. A more complete theory of culture — whose development has begun in the works of Wuthnow Robert Wuthnow, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). and Swidler Swidler, “Culture in Action.” — thus must recognize that cultural dynamics vary over time, becoming more fluid and more creative at some times, more rigid and more limiting at others. But in addition, these diverse outcomes suggest that macrosociology has unduly neglected the role of culture in constraining state structure and dynamics, particularly during periods of state crisis and reconstruction. Theories of social change must recognize that at some concrete historical junctures it is material forces, while at other such junctures it is cultural frameworks and ideologies, that play the dominant role in causing and directing change.

Ethnic conflict in the Soviet Union

Abstract: If Heaven forbid! the Nobel Academy awarded a prize in political science, surely it would give high priority to anyone who provided a convincing answer to a simple question: under what conditions do ethnically identified populations make sustained, effective claims to control their own separate states? Thirty or forty years ago, the question seemed almost antiquarian, a reflection on primordial identities that political development would dissolve, a reminder of outmoded nineteenth-century nationalism. In that optimistic postwar mood, observers conveniently forgot that the hazards of lineage and conquest had usually formed Western states as linguistic and cultural mosaics. They forgot that Spain, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, and many other European states contained multiple ethnicities capable of mounting serious collective action. They forgot how hard European rulers had once worked to impose national languages, national educational systems, and even national religions. Decolonization reinforced that mood, as the vast majority of new states conformed to boundaries laid down by European conquests, therefore containing patchworks of language, religion, kinship, and mythified origin. Africanists spoke of "Europeanization" (more or less confidently) or "detribalization" (with trepidation).' In Africa and elsewhere, specialists hoped that parochialism would decline in favor of moder differentiation that Durkheim's dream of

Biography as historical sociology: The case of William Fielding Ogburn

Abstract: William Fielding Ogburn was located on and helped to create the “cutting edge” of developments in twentieth-century American sociology — particularly its increasing emphasis on statistics and objectivist methodology. His life, which spanned the period within which the changes he advocated were institutionalized, can be seen as having significance as a marker of a transition. From this perspective, studying well-chosen individual lives has the same heuristic value as studying particular historical events. They can, to quote Philip Abrams, “mark decisive conjunctions of action and structure;... moments of structuring at which human agency encounters social possibility and can be seen most clearly as simultaneously determined and determining.”1 My analysis of Ogburn's advocacy of scientific sociology — one that differentiated science from both emotion and politics — reflected and reinforced his solutions to problematics in his personal life. His “response” to the separate spheres that defined gender relations in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, helped to construct a reflection of them in twentieth-century American sociology. It is in this way — through concrete social action within specific historical conditions — that personal life and gender shaped the intellectual and professional culture within which he lived and worked.

Humanity, ethnicity, nationality: Conceptual and comparative perspectives on the U.S.S.R.

Abstract: 5/12/90 Although it was almost 11 pm, we could make out the features of a diminutive figure from the upstairs window of the Praga Restaurant The May light in Moscow is memorable to a first-time visitor Not only does the evening refuse to blacken, but it has a bleak translucence that plays a peculiar trick on the eyes: it appears actually to sharpen vision, to lengthen its focus As she moved slowly, agonistically it seemed to me, from Kallinnprospekt toward the Arbat, the young woman in the street below shifted a baby, swathed in newspaper, from her left side to her right She was obviously very young, her bowed body notwithstanding Although I was in a party of a dozen or so people, only one other, a Russian apprentice-ethnographer, saw her as I did Our eyes crossed So did our voices: "She is terribly poor," I heard myself murmuring, in a fit of banality "And the child ?" The scene reminded me passingly of a hollow, Hollywood script, ca 1910: the over-dressed, over-fed wealthy gaze down from their lush interior world onto the immiserated people of the snowbound streets as they make their way through their chill lives But this was not a celluloid romance It was all too real, it was 1990, and it was not snowing: "She's Uzbek," noted he, "they are very backward and poor" And then, over my silence: "They breed a lot It's their nature"

Sexuality and identity: The contribution of object relations theory to a constructionist sociology

Abstract: Over the past twenty years, a radical new theoretical perspective on the meaning of sexual behavior and sexual identity has been consolidated. This "social constructionist" perspective is an interdisciplinary enterprise, but sociology played an important early role, especially through the contributions of symbolic interactionism and labeling theory to the study of sexuality.' By refusing to treat sex as "natural" or as a biological given, constructionism has posed significant challenges to conventional thinking about sexuality. It has located sexuality in relation to other social institutions; emphasized the importance of subjective meanings in the study of sexual conduct; and demanded a greater attention to the historical and cultural specificity of sexual typologies that otherwise get taken for granted, such as the division of the world into homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual persons.

Politics as art

Abstract: Italian Futurism emerged in the first decade of this century as a movement of both art historical and political significance. Led by impresario poet and propagandist F T. Marinetti, Futurism inaugurated the avantgardist attack on the autonomous status of art in modern bourgeois society, the repudiation of tradition, and the emphasis on formal innovation that would characterize modernist movements for decades to follow. As Renato Poggioli said, "the Futurist moment belongs to all the avant-gardes and not only to the one named for it."2 The specific political affiliations and activities of the Futurists are by now well known. In "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" of 1909, Marinetti upheld the glory of war, "the world's only hygiene," as an announcement of the imminent crisis that would reveal the radical foundation of a new social and aesthetic world order. Futurist art, Marinetti declared, would act as an incendiary device, upholding the new values of speed, destruction, and violence necessary for a new age of Italian national grandeur. Active propagandists and campaigners for Italy's entry into the first World War, members of the movement formed a Futurist volunteer group to the front where several were wounded and killed, as Marinetti himself often boasted.3 In 1919, Marinetti not only led a group of arditi in the burning of the offices of the Milanese Socialist newspaper Avanti but appeared, as a member of the Central Committee alongside Mussolini, on the first list of Fascist candidates. In 1929, Marinetti accepted the prestigious appointment from Mussolini to the Accademia d'Italia.4

The strengths and weaknesses of Iran's populist alliance

Abstract: Between 1905 and 1911 Iran was convulsed by a mass upheaval known as the Constitutional Revolution, the first in a series of complex social movements culminating in the extraordinary revolution of 1979. The ruling Qajar dynasty (1800-1925) was shaken to its roots by a determined coalition of social classes that I designate a "populist alliance." One shah was forced to grant a national assembly (the majlis) and a constitution, and another was compelled to abdicate in favor of his young son. Political life assumed a level of freedom unseen until then in the Middle East, with a proliferation of parties, clubs, newspapers, and popular expressions of resistance to the state and foreign capital in Iran. Initial successes, however, were followed by the fragmentation of the alliance that had initiated the revolution, and capped by the intervention of Tsarist Russian troops in 1911 to prop up the weakened monarchy. The consequences of failure would be grave, as the door was opened for the political disintegration of the country in World War I, followed by the rise to the throne of an untutored cavalry commander named Reza Khan Pahlavi, whose son would gain notoriety as a repressive modernizer after World War II.

Collapse and convergence in class theory

Abstract: Class is both the most enduring and the most controversial of sociological concepts Perhaps this is because, although the idea of class is associated with the rise of capitalist industrial society,' it nevertheless manages to predate the institutionalization of sociology by at least half a century Even then, the writings of Marx and Weber, which place central theoretical emphasis on class, if allocating only fragmentary exegetical attention to it, did not influence sociological conceptualizations of inequality in Anglophone contexts until well into the twentieth century This is surprising, given the fact that in everyday experience class is an unremarkable category for ordering the social world: that is, people routinely use such terms as "middle class" and "lower class" as descriptions of their experience By contrast, within sociological discourse, not only the forms but also the existence of class is a matter for contestation and even denial Historically, class has never been comfortably accepted within sociology In most American sociologies, for example, it receives no reference; in British and other European sociology, while there is no dispute about its existence or importance there is an abject failure to agree on its meaning

Citizen radicalism and democracy in the Dutch Republic

Abstract: In this article I have investigated one of the supposed founder-members of R. R. Palmer's “Age of Democratic Revolution,” the Dutch Patriot movement of the 1780s. My purpose was to show that this movement, even though the Patriots made extensive use of such standard items of the democratic vocabulary as “popular sovereignty” and “representation,” did not envisage a political system that might be reasonably fitted into the revolution that Palmer had in mind.

World slavery and Caribbean capitalism

Abstract: The abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the Western Hemisphere is certainly among the most dramatic and significant occurences of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the strength and effectiveness of antislavery thought and action contributed importantly to the nineteenth century's self-consciousness as a period of the growth of human freedom and moral and material progress.' It may even be suggested that during this period slavery came to be understood as the antithesis of the emergent forms of polity, moral sensibility, and economic activity: it formed the negative standard against which the new forms of freedom were defined. In the elaboration of political economy, for example, the stark contrast between the African slave and the free worker of Europe and North America served to illuminate what was distinctive about

Structure and choice in the sociology of culture

Abstract: In the methodological appendix to my counterculture book I referred to an incipient crisis in ethnography brought about by the doubts of ethnographers regarding whether they know what they claim to know, and whether those claims do any good or any harm to what people in what quantities; and who cared about the resolution of these doubts. I also talked briefly about efforts at solution represented at that time by grounded theory, ethnomethodology, leftist advocacy, and the kind of reflexive, interpretive ethnography represented (among other representations) by my book.1

Ethnic conflicts in the context of democratizing political systems: Theses

Abstract: The long-term resolution of interethnic conflict and the overcoming of the antagonisms that have resulted from the crystallization and collision of ethnoregional interests in the U.S.S.R. is possible only within the framework of a democratic political system. Such a system would unite ethnic groups within a comparatively homogeneous political culture and on the basis of shared concepts and sociopolitical norms. This would not only ensure the legitimacy of the state and the regime but would also enshrine the general recognition of group rights and interests. The acceptance of a common set of sociopolitical values by all the component ethnic groups is a necessary prerequisite for the achievement of a national consensus, for the acceptance of compromise solutions in conflictual situations, for the selection of an optimal version of self government, and for the effective implementation of federalism as a model of national-state integration.

The First Amendment meets some new technologies

Abstract: The First Amendment guarantee of freedom of expression ("Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press") in principle creates an independent sphere of public opinion in current parlance, a "public sphere" between civil society (economy) and state The public sphere, as articulated in particular by Habermas, entails a space for a rational and universalistic politics distinct from both the economy and the state, an arena where people are addressed, and self-conciously address themselves, as citizens, as rational political beings, rather than as subjects or consumers' It is in the public sphere where democracy is (potentially) most concretely manifest, because that arena both represents and constitutes the independent political institution wherein citizens can engage in unrestricted discussion of matters of the commonweal

The re-making of the English working class?

Abstract: More than twenty-five years after its publication The Making of the English Working Class remains a landmark work in English history and the study of class formation. Thompson's formulation and application of agency and experience in understanding the process of class formation have altered the ways historians and social scientists approach the study of class. From its inception The Making has been a lightening rod for criticism, some of it piquant and politically charged. In the latest round of critique, Gareth Stedman Jones and Joan Wallach Scott have argued that Thompson seriously neglects the role of discourse in class formation, and in doing so has presented a partial and distorted picture. They each have offered analyses that find a central role for discourse in the process of class formation. Stedman Jones sees political radicalism as a guiding force of working-class collective action, while Scott finds a fundamental gendering of the ways in which the working class was organized through discourse. Both Stedman Jones and Scott are clearly correct in observing that discourse played an important role in this working-class history, yet their accounts are reductionist and highly skewed interpretations of a rich and complex history. By privileging discourse as a casual force in class formation they shunt experience and agency into minor roles, providing impoverished accounts of how the working class was indeed active in its own making. The alternative I have proposed is to focus on discourse as an intermediate process linking experience and agency, animated through social organization and collective action. The English working class of the early nineteenth century faced degradation of their labor and political oppression of rights they perceived as fundamental. In response to these trials they constructed expressions of their grievances and visions of solutions through the discourse streams available to them. Through the contextual use of various streams they articulated a consciousness of class. This process itself was part of the class struggle that was their making. In this sense, discourse framed the painting of the panorama, and perhaps added shading, hue, and perspective, but it did not create the picture. As Thompson, following Marx, has observed, it is people that do the making, even if it is not just as they please.

The Soviet empire before and after perestroika

Abstract: It is already evident that the Soviet Federation cannot be salvaged by "pouring new wine into old bottles," i.e., within the framework of the existing constitutional system and the dominant political and conceptual postulates on which it is based. At the same time, however, only the rudiments of "new thinking" have begun to be set forward in the plethora of party platforms, current reforms, new legislation (at both the allunion and republic levels), and the programs of the nationalist and other newly emergent sociopolitical movements that are concerned with this sphere. The activities of our politicians and legislators, as a rule, have been reactive and they have failed to keep up with the tumultuous pace of events. Perhaps most disturbingly, the profound polarization and obsessive intransigence that characterize our thinking, our manner of speaking, and our argumentation in the field of nationality issues frequently preclude any kind of consent and communication not only between ordinary citizens, but among scholar-specialists as well.

The Structural Context of Soviet Ethno-Nationalism

Abstract: The Soviet Union today is experiencing a severe crisis, a crisis that involves not only its political and economic institutions but that calls into question the very definition of the country itself. The Soviet articles in this collection make an extremely useful contribution to our understanding of this crisis; if they are somewhat less persuasive in their proposals for addressing it, the reasons are altogether understandable in view of the scale and complexity of the problems involved.

Comment on articles by Tomich, McMichael, and Roseberry

Abstract: The integration of the Americas into a European economy the European economy that would soon begin rapidly and unevenly to transform itself into an ever-widening world economy was intimately associated with particular substances. From ounces of gold to leaves of tobacco, from hogsheads of molasses to bales of cotton, from ivory tusks to rhinoceros horns, particular substances and the uses to which they could be put constituted a central stimulus to exploration, conquest and, in the longer term, to wars between European states. Neither interchangeable, nor of equal value by bulk, these substances-had to be secured or produced, then transformed from raw materials into finished products. This bespeaks the organization of capital, effort, technology, and labor for specific objectives, always taking into account the nature and the needs involved in the production of the substances themselves.

Immigration, proletarianization, and deproletarianization: A case study of the Jewish working class in Palestine, 1882?1914

Abstract: The strategy of deproletarianization attempted by groups of immigrants of the First and Second Aliyot was determined by the correspondence of three structures: settler capitalism, proletarianization, and ideology. These provided the realm of opportunities from 1882 to 1914. The Great War, which led to the downfall of the Ottoman empire and the establishment of a British administration, then changed the entire economy and politics of Palestine.

Nationalities problems in the Soviet Union

Abstract: The time when nationalities' problems in the Soviet Union could be considered without entering into a general analysis of the political situation in the country has long since passed. This is true because as perestroika has proceeded, the various nationalist movements have become increasingly interwoven with the overall stream of economic and political developments taking place throughout the Soviet Union.

Beyond perestroika: A comment on the articles by Prazauskas, Tishkov, and Yamskov

Abstract: The three articles that form the core of this issue fit neatly together. One focuses on general theoretical and comparative issues (Prazauskas), one on the nature of the Soviet nationalities crisis in a broad sense (Tishkov), and one on the causes and patterns of the ethnic conflict in one particular area, that of Nagoro-Karabakh (Yamskov). All three authors have produced interesting and challenging articles that address important questions. One need not agree with all the conclusions of the authors, but the scholarly spirit evidenced by these studies can only be welcomed.