Showing papers in "Theory and Society in 1992"

Postmodernism, Urban Ethnography, and the New Social Space of Ethnic Identity

Abstract: The relentlessly self-reflexive ways of representing reality now fashionably termed "postmodern" are flourishing in an increasingly wide range of domains. In social theory, postmodernism has been used to characterize the diverse philosophical work of such Continental post-structuralist theorists as Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault. Commentators have identified a multiplicity of other postmodernisms in architecture, the visual arts, literature, performance, television, video, film, music, and fashion.1 The term has entered the debate on urban form largely by way of the impact of postmodern architecture on the built environment of cities. It has entered the realm of urban theory by way of debates in urban sociology, anthropology, geography, and political science, on the interplay among global socio-spatial restructuring, the cultural transformation of cities, the formation of personal identities, and the politics of collective action.

Decoding television news: The political discourse of Israeli hawks and doves

Abstract: Present-day Israel is a one-issue country. In regard to the Israeli-Arab conflict, its population is divided between hard-liners on the right those who will not yield occupied territories in exchange for peace and those more inclined to compromise. Members of the young generation are politically more hawkish than their parents.' This move to the right can be seen in voting behavior, but even more significantly it is evident in the rise of hatred of Arabs and the recent emergence of population "transfer" as an acceptable solution. In a study analyzing this trend from the perspective of political socialization that takes place within families, we find that whereas all parents have a better than random chance to reproduce their political outlook in their adolescent children, hawks are more successful than doves.2

The Intelligentsia in the Constitution of Civil Societies and Post Communist Regimes in Hungary and Poland

Abstract: The most prominent actor in the 1989 transformation of Eastern Europe has been the intelligentsia, a class whose basis for power is its control over a special form of teleological knowledge, and a culturally constituted group whose claim to authority is its historic role as leaders of East European nations. 2 In the wake of revolution they have in most places replaced the communist party and won political authority. In this article I explain the process through which the intelligentsia has apparently come to power, the character of its authority made in struggle, and what alternative futures post-communism might have for the prospects of the intelligentsia. The commonality of the intelligentsia's authority suggests a powerful and common structure at work in communism's fall. I argue that there is indeed such a deep structure of antagonism between the intelligentsia and the Soviet-type system on the one hand, and considerable determinism in the initial shape of post-communism on the other. But to lose sight of the contingencies shaping the transition itself would suggest a determinism in process that is analytically, it not also empirically, indefensible. The intelligentsia's ascension depended on the possibilities of a negotiated settlement between it and reformers in the communist party, which itself depended on the at least implicit acceptance by the popular classes of the intelligentsia's representation. The intelligentsia won this authority by becoming spokespersons for a new universalism, civil society. But this civil society contained several possible meanings, and excluded many significant questions from its conceptualization. The future of post-communist systems depends on how civil society's contradictions and exclusions are worked out as conflicts within and about the intelligentsia and its efforts to legislate a new society rage.

Dual dependency and property vacuum

Abstract: "Gold Rush." These were the parting words of the high-profile U.S. Ambassador to Budapest when asked, at his last press conference, to describe his understanding of the recent changes in East-Central Europe.' The Ambassador's powerful metaphor projects a "Wild West" imagery on the politcal economy of post-state-socialism. It also rhymes with the American real estate industry's discourse of urban gentrification.2

The revolutions of 1989: Socialism, capitalism, and democracy

Abstract: Many journalists and scholars will look for the correlation of that chain of spectacular transformations that changed, as if at one blow, the fates of tens of millions of individuals and the hitherto firm bipolar picture of the modern world ... Today, many people are talking and writing about the role of the intellectuals, students, and the theatre, or the influence of the Soviets' perestroika, and economic difficulties. They're right. I myself as a playwright would also add the influence of humour and honesty, and perhaps even something beyond us, something maybe even unearthly.

Beyond structuralism and voluntarism: The politics and discourse of Progressive school reform, 1890–1930

Abstract: "When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within ... community [life], saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guarantee of a larger society which is worthy, lovely, and harmonious."' So wrote John Dewey in The School and Society, one of the earliest and most fundamental texts of what was to become the Progressive movement in education. Inspired by Dewey's vision, a wide range of educators, parents, and community leaders came together during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in an impassioned crusade to transform American public schooling. They set out to reduce drastically the size of local school boards and to dismantle structures of "patronage democracy" that then pervaded educational administration. They also implemented, among a host of curricular and pedagogical initiatives, new courses of study in "character education" and "civics." These programs, overlooked today by virtually all educational historians of the period, sought to create a new type of "democratic character," one equipped for responsible citizenship in the new "national community" that was emerging.

Liberty and discipline: Making sense of postmodernity, or, once again, toward a sociohistorical understanding of modernity

Abstract: Seeking a response to the question "Can Modernity Survive?" Agnes Heller recently described the state of the social sciences as follows: "Social science has promised certitude and self-knowledge as the result of a new, rationalist quest for meaning This promise has not been kept Where there was certainty, there was neither meaning nor self-knowledge; where there was meaning and self-knowledge, there was not certainty"' No sensitive observer of contemporary reality will deny that there is what some have called a deep-seated "crisis of representation,"2 which reaches far beyond the academic discourses on society into all major societal institutions

Adaptive justice: Local distributive justice in sociological perspective

Abstract: Issues of distributive justice arise in many areas and at all levels of society: whenever resources are scarce and cannot be given to all who lay a claim on them. They have attracted generations of scholars in the social sciences and probably received more attention than any other subject area. Yet there remain substantial gaps in their treatment in the existing literature. Accounts of distributive justice have traditionally focused on (i) normative questions, i.e., the justification or defense of one or more distributive principles that ought to be applied within a given society or societal context,1 (ii) perceptual and judgmental matters, i.e., the beliefs that people hold about norms of distributive justice and their appropriate application in different domains of social life,2 and (iii) consequences, i.e., the observed or expected distributive outcomes of given societal arrangements or potential revisions thereof.3 What has not been analyzed in any detailed and systematic way, however, are the processes and decisions whereby most social goods are distributed in contemporary society. Almost all institutional sectors of society are regularly or occasionally faced with the choice of how to allocate a given number of material or immaterial, positive or negative goods at their disposal or within their responsibility. Examples include, among numerous others, the allocation of scarce medical resources, the admission of students to universities, the promotion or laying off of workers, and the selection of soldiers for military service. But although many such choices have significant impacts upon the life chances of affected persons, very little is known about how they are made. There are a number of valuable case studies in single areas, but, as Jon Elster notes, "virtually no attempts" have been made to develop a conceptual and theoretical framework that allows us "to study the whole range of questions of this kind."4 His concept of "local justice," advanced in a number of essays and systematized in a recent book, is a first major step in that direction.5

The real city, the discursive city, the disappearing city: Postmodernism and urban sociology

Abstract: Poststructuralist and postmodern theories have already had a considerable impact in anthropology, and mainstream sociology is beginning to consider the implications of these developments. A recent issue of a sociology journal is devoted to a "symposium on postmodernism," in which a radical rethinking of sociological theory is proposed (by Steven Seidman) and debated.' Somewhat ironically, the sociology of culture and the arts (my own field) has been slow to engage with critical work in the humanities (literary studies, film theory, and cultural studies), a reluctance that seems to perpetuate the disciplinary divide in the study of culture and to block a more productive collaboration between those interested in essentially the same project, namely a sociological analysis of the arts.2 But urban sociologists and urban theorists have been addressing these questions (notably David Harvey and Edward Soja, but also contributors to the journal Society and Space), and Michael Smith's article in this volume should be seen as part of the important project of rethinking both the city and urban studies from the point of view of postmodern theory.

Object, genre, and Buddhist sculpture

Abstract: For sociologists, interpretations of cultural objects, whether grouped into genres or taken individually, are intermediate steps toward understanding more fully the contexts in which they are produced. This does not deny the satisfaction implicit in grasping the significance of aspects of objects themselves; I hope that the analysis I have presented lends viewing the Sangatsu-dō sculptures a degree of comprehension, and pleasure, not present before. The ultimate test, however, and the justification for undertaking any sociological examination of cultural objects, is the usefulness of the resulting account in confirming or rejecting ideas about the social conditions surrounding their production. The important question in judging the appropriateness of examining individual objects is therefore not whether sociologists (as opposed, for example, to art historians) ought to concern themselves with such analysis; it is whether such analyses increase the ability of objects to serve as evidence in investigations of interesting social phenomena.

Power restructuring in China and the Soviet Union

Abstract: Comparing types within the same species, Raymond Aron once wrote, is the essential task of sociology.' Comparative analysis is especially vital in studying the two major communist systems of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union and Communist China. These systems of power represented powerful historical syntheses of imperial national culture, social revolution, and Marxist-Leninist ideology and organization. Despite periods of stability, the Soviet and Chinese Communist systems have been repeatedly shaken by restructuring processes set in motion from within. Notable instances include the Stalin Revolution of

Beyond the problem of meaning: Robert Wuthnow's historical sociology of culture

Abstract: The revival of historical sociology in the last twenty years has focused on class, state, revolution and political mobilization, family and demography. New attention to cultural factors a central part of earlier historical sociology is overdue. Robert Wuthnow's Communities of Discourse is a major effort to meet this need.2 It reflects also the current rapid growth of the sociology of culture. Especially in America, however, sociology of culture suffers from a strange disciplinary deformation. For some reason, many sociologists think they must repress the interpretation of meaning in order to be rigorous. Sociologists of culture, therefore, often try to study cultural phenomena without attention to the substance or content of culture. Wuthnow is no exception.

The alternative in Eastern Europe at century's start: Brozozowski and Machajski on intellectuals and socialism

Abstract: It is unfortunate how unfamiliar social theorists and philosophers from Western Europe and even more so North America are with the East European critical intellectual legacy. Debates among leading East European communist intellectuals are usually part of the Western critical repertoire, and occasionally some anarchist contributions might inform Western thinking. But it is relatively rare to find theorists such as Machajski and especially Brzozowski in the bibliographies of Western products, even while the experiences of Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. are becoming the stock of what transforms the critical perspective. This, I believe, is a major handicap for the analysis of socialism, as the issues that are central to the problem of socialism - the relationship between intellectuals and other classes on the one hand, and on the other the relationship between class and nationality - are dealt with in a more sustained manner by East European than by other intellectual cultures. I shall return to this claim in the conclusion of this essay, but it might be an argument difficult to sustain with East Europeans today as the Polish critical legacy pales in the light of the angloamerimania of contemporary Eastern European intellectual culture. One will not find many intellectuals focusing on Machajski and Brzozowski in Poland today. Indeed, Maehajski has never really been much of a part of Polish intellectual culture, given his anti-intellectual and anti-national stance. 2 Brzozowski is periodically fashionable in Polish culture, but at the present he is quite invisible in intellectual life.