Showing papers on "Ideology published in 1986"

Culture in action: symbols and strategies*

Abstract: Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or "tool kit" of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action." Two models of cultural influence are developed, for settled and unsettled cultural periods. In settled periods, culture independently influences action, but only by providing resources from which people can construct diverse lines of action. In unsettled cultural periods, explicit ideologies directly govern action, but structural opportunities for action determine which among competing ideologies survive in the long run. This alternative view of culture offers new opportunities for systematic, differentiated arguments about culture's causal role in shaping action. The reigning model used to understand culture's effects on action is fundamentally misleading. It assumes that culture shapes action by supplying ultimate ends or values toward which action is directed, thus making values the central causal element of culture. This paper analyzes the conceptual difficulties into which this traditional view of culture leads and offers an alternative model. Among sociologists and anthropologists, debate has raged for several academic generations over defining the term "culture." Since the seminal work of Clifford Geertz (1973a), the older definition of culture as the entire way of life of a people, including their technology and material artifacts, or that (associated with the name of Ward Goodenough) as everything one would need to know to become a functioning member of a society, have been displaced in favor of defining culture as the publicly available symbolic forms through which people experience and express meaning (see Keesing, 1974). For purposes of this paper, culture consists of such symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life. These symbolic forms are the means through which "social processes of sharing modes of behavior and outlook within [a] community" (Hannerz, 1969:184) take place.

The sources of social power

Abstract: Distinguishing four sources of power in human societies – ideological, economic, military and political – The Sources of Social Power traces their interrelations throughout human history In this first volume, Michael Mann examines interrelations between these elements from neolithic times, through ancient Near Eastern civilizations, the classical Mediterranean age and medieval Europe, up to just before the Industrial Revolution in England It offers explanations of the emergence of the state and social stratification; of city-states, militaristic empires and the persistent interaction between them; of the world salvation religions; and of the particular dynamism of medieval and early modern Europe It ends by generalizing about the nature of overall social development, the varying forms of social cohesion and the role of classes and class struggle in history First published in 1986, this new edition of Volume 1 includes a new preface by the author examining the impact and legacy of the work

Issues of Validity in Openly Ideological Research: Between a Rock and a Soft Place.

Abstract: In this paper, I attempt to reconceptualize validity within the context of openly ideological research.~ The usefulness of this reconceptualization is tested by applying it to examples from three explicitly value-based research programs: feminist research, neo-Marxist critical ethnography, and Freirian "empowering" research. 2 Finally, validity issues within research committed to a more equitable social order are discussed.

The Problem of Ideology-Marxism without Guarantees:

Abstract: In the past two or three decades, marxist theory has been going through a remarkable, but lop-sided and uneven revival. On the one hand, it has come once again to provide the principal pole of opposition to &dquo;bourgeois&dquo; social thought. On the other hand, many young intellectuals have passed through the revival and, after a heady and rapid apprenticeship, gone right out the other side again. They have &dquo;settled their accounts&dquo; with marxism and moved on to fresh intellectual

Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society

Abstract: This updated edition is presented with a new Preface. Lila Abu-Lughod lived with a community of Bedouins in the Western Desert of Egypt for nearly two years, studying gender relations and the oral lyric poetry through which women and young men express personal feelings. The poems are haunting, the evocation of emotional life vivid. But her analysis also reveals how deeply implicated poetry and sentiment are in the play of power and the maintenance of a system of social hierarchy. What begins as a puzzle about a single poetic genre becomes a reflection on the politics of sentiment and the relationship between ideology and human experience.

is homo hierarchicus

Abstract: Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. E. VALENTINE DANIEL. The Untouchable as Himself: Ideology, Identity and Pragmatism among the Lucknow Chamars. RAVINDRA S. KHARE. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. ASHIS NANDY.

The Critical Legal Studies Movement

Abstract: Critical Legal Studies (CLS) is a network of leftist legal scholars hostile to American political ideology and liberal political theory that traces its beginnings to the ‘Conference on Critical Legal Studies’ at the University of Wisconsin in 1977. 1 The movement has since seen many derivations. One of its main figures, legal scholar Duncan Kennedy, conceives CLS as both a network of leftist activists and as a branch of scholarly literature, arguing: ‘... critical legal studies has two aspects. It’s a scholarly literature and it has also been a network of people who were thinking of themselves as activists in law school politics. Initially, the scholarly literature was produced by the same people who were doing law school activism. Critical legal studies is not a theory. It’s basically this literature produced by this network of people.’ 2 Political and legal theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger notes that while the movement ‘continued as an organizing force only until the late 1980s, ... its founders never meant it to become an ongoing school of thought or genre of writing.’ He delves further into the movement’s activist role in this book-length revision of his long, seminal 1983 article, ‘The Critical Legal Studies Movement.’ Interesting for Unger’s followers, this new edition is accompanied by an extended discussion on the potential of law and legal thought to inform the self-construction of society under our current democracy. Put differently, Unger proposes a shaping of society based on a vision of human personality devoid of the hidden interests and class domination, which, for the CLS movement, are the pillars sustaining liberal legal institutions in the West.

Towards a critical understanding of accounting: The case of cost accounting in the U.K., 1914–1925☆

Abstract: Management accounting is commonly understood to be a set of techniques for collecting and processing useful facts about organisational life. The information obtained is viewed as an objective form of knowledge untaited by social values and ideology; the practitioners as technically skilled professionals whose political and social allegiances have no bearing on their practices. In this paper these views are brought into question through the “genealogical” method of looking in detail at one period in the history of accounting, examining the interplay between knowledge, techniques, institutions and occupational claims. In the period and place chosen — Britain during the First World War and the immediately following years, society was in a state of turmoil and this provides an ideal context for considering one part of the genealogy of management accounting.

Japan's modern myths : ideology in the late Meiji period

Abstract: Ideology played a momentous role in modern Japanese history. Not only did the elite of imperial Japan (1890-1945) work hard to influence the people to "yield as the grasses before the wind," but historians of modern Japan later identified these efforts as one of the underlying pathologies of World War II. Available for the first time in paperback, this study examines how this ideology evolved. Carol Gluck argues that the process of formulating and communicating new national values was less consistent than is usually supposed. By immersing the reader in the talk and thought of the late Meiji period, Professor Gluck recreates the diversity of ideological discourse experienced by Japanese of the time. The result is a new interpretation of the views of politics and the nation in imperial Japan.

Community Colleges and Social Stratification.

Abstract: The expansion of the community colleges in recent years repeats an American pattern that couples class-based tracking with "educational inflation." Shaped by a changing economy and by the American ideology of equal opportunity, community colleges are moving toward vocational rather than transfer curricula and are channeling first generation college students into these programs. The author examines the social forces behind the community college movement and the social processes within the community colleges that have produced a submerged class conflict in higher education.

The making of race in colonial Malaya: Political economy and racial ideology

Abstract: The conventional interpretation of the “race problem” in Peninsular Malaysia (Malaya) is founded upon the supposedly inevitable frictions between ethnic communities with sharply divergent cultural traditions. In this view, assimilation between the indigenous Malay population and the descendants of immigrants from China and India was always a remote possibility. In this paper I argue that modern “race relations” in Peninsular Malaysia, in the sense of impenetrable group boundaries, were a byproduct of British colonialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prior to 1850, inter-ethnic relations among Asian populations were marked by cultural stereotypes and occasional hostility, but there were also possibilities for inter-ethnic alliances and acculturation. Direct colonial rule brought European racial theory and constructed a social and economic order structured by “race.” A review of the writing of observers of colonial society provides a crude test of this hypothesis.

The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism

Abstract: Claude Lefort is a French social and political theorist. His analysis of contemporary political events are often related to a consideration of one or more of the major contributions to the history of political thought. His accounts of the development of bureaucracy and totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, and of the role of symbolism in modern societies are set against a study of Marx's theory of political ideology. While critical of many traditional assumptions and doctrines, Lefort develops a political position based on a reappraisal of the idea of human rights and a reconsideration of what democracy means today.

American romanticism and the marketplace

Abstract: "This book can take its place on the shelf beside Henry Nash Smith's "Virgin Land" and Leo Marx's "The Machine in the Garden.""-Choice "[Gilmore] demonstrates the profound, sustained, "engagement" with society embodied in the works of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Melville. In effect, he relocates the American Renaissance where it properly belongs, at the centre of a broad social, economic, and ideological movement from the Jacksonian era to the Civil War. Basically, Gilmore's argument concerns the writers' participation in what Thoreau called 'the curse of trade.' He details their mixed resistance to and complicity in the burgeoning literary marketplace and, by extension, the entire ' economic revolution' which between 1830 and 1860 'transformed the United States into a market society'. . . . "The result is a model of literary-historical revisionism. Gilmore's opening chapters on Emerson and Thoreau show that 'transcendental' thought and language can come fully alive when understood within the material processes and ideological constraints of their time. . . . The remaining five chapters, on Hawthorne and Melville, contain some of the most penetrating recent commentaries on the aesthetic strategies of American Romantic fiction, presented within "and through" some of the most astute, thoughtful considerations I know of commodification and the 'democratic public' in mid-nineteenth-century America. . . . Practically and methodologically, "American Romanticism and the Marketplace" has a significant place in the movement towards a new American literary history. It places Gilmore at the forefront of a new generation of critics who are not just reinterpreting familiar texts or discovering new texts to interpret, but reshaping our ways of thinking about literature and culture."-Sacvan Bercovitch, "Times Literary Supplement" "Gilmore writes with energy, clarity, and wit. The reader is enriched by this book." William H. Shurr, "American Literature"

The Discipline of the New Democracy: Mrs Thatcher's Domestic Statecraft

Abstract: Interpretations of the first Thatcher Administration can be divided crudely into two groups, those which divine some grand purpose and consistency in its operations, and those sceptical of any such conclusions. The former are concerned primarily with its ideas or ideology, the latter with its policies. This article adopts a different perspective. It stresses the need to examine the activities of party leaders in terms of their statecraft—namely the art of winning elections and, above all, achieving a necessary degree of governing competence in office. It suggests that this Administration aimed to achieve a governing competence by reconstructing traditional Conservative concerns with centre autonomy in matters of ‘high politics’. This statecraft was consistently and successfully pursued, although some of the methods initially employed to buttress that autonomy had to be abandoned quickly.

The retreat from class: A new "true" socialism

Abstract: A survey of influential trends in contemporary Marxist theory which examines the relationship between class, politics and ideology. The introduction discusses the relevance of the text in a post-Soviet world and argues for a re-examination of class politics by academia as an alternative to a cynical acceptance of capitalism.

The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession

Abstract: Awarded the Dexter Prize of the Society for the History of Technology."A thoroughgoing study of the engineering profession, emphasizing, and rightly so, its accommodation to business institutions. It is a book that is suggestive, challenging, and instructive."--Technology and Culture."First-rate."--American Historical Review.

The Imprisonment of Women

Abstract: '[A] valuable book...[it] deserves to be found on student reading lists as a useful text which reveals the importance of gender to historical, theoretical and policy analysis.' Sociology This is the first comprehensive account of women's prisons, examining their development from the eighteenth century to the present. Throughout the authors contrast the realities of prison life, with the ideologies and policies that emphasize therapy as the route to reform and show how these therapeutic ideals have not been properly applied.

What Do Bosses Really Do

Abstract: If employers make so much money, why don't workers hire machines and expertise and make the money instead? This question has generated a large body of writing, including Stephen Marglin's much-cited article “What Do Bosses Do?” Marglin draws on history to argue that the employer, who added nothing to technical efficiency, used specialization of tasks to divide labor and impose himself as boss, thereby creating an artificial, unproductive role. These arrangements were embodied in domestic industry and were reinforced when employers turned to the factory system as a more effective disciplinary mode. This article argues that such a thesis misreads history and is essentially ideological.

Islam and resistance in Afghanistan

Abstract: In this book, Olivier Roy examines the history, ideology and structures of the Afghan resistance. He argues that the forces opposing Marxist rule of the country, though advocating a return to the basic tenets of Islam, are far from reactionary or backward-looking. Indeed he sees an Islamic revolution, advocating a modernisation of Afghan society, taking place under the eyes of the Russian occupation forces, whose efforts to contain it have so far served mainly to consolidate it. This penetrating study charts the history of resistance to the present Afghan central government and its Russian ally. The first five chapters deal with the political, social and religious history of Afghanistan UP to 1978 and later chapters are concerned with the organisation of resistance, the parties involved and the differences between various groups, as well as their relations with Pakistan.

The Mental and the Material: Thought Economy and Society

Abstract: What is the specificity of the human race within nature? How is its history to be explained? What impact do material realities, natural and man-made, have on human beings? What role does thought, in all its dimensions, play in the production of social relations? How are the human sciences to be advanced today? These are among the crucial questions confronted by Maurice Godelier, the world's most distinguished Marxist anthropologist, in this key book of contemporary social theory. Its point of departure lies in a fact and a hypothesis. The fact: in contrast to other social animals, human beings do not just live in society, they produce society in order to live. The hypothesis: because they have the unique capacity to appropriate and transform nature, they produce culture and create history. Drawing on his own extensive fieldwork and ranging over the most diverse ethnographic data, Godelier substantiates his case by attending to the analysis of both social relations of production and the production of social relations. In a sustained challenge to currently dominant schemas, he offers a series of highly original theses on the constitution, reproduction and transformation of societies, recasting the distinction between infrastructure and superstructures, illuminating the relations between economic determination and political/ideological dominance, and clarifying the character of ideology and its central role in the perpetuation of dominance and exploitation. Theoretically ambitious and empirically rigorous, The Mental and the Material constitutes a great advance in the mode of production debate and demonstrates the enormous explanatory potential of historical materialism.

A Critical Theory of Organization Science

Abstract: Critical theory is presented as a general method for analyzing an organization science based on either a natural science or interpretive paradigm. This is accomplished by introducing epistemic inquiry into organization science methodology. Specifically, critical theory provides a means of examining the socio-political interplay among the researcher, the research enterprise, the practitioner, and the organization members. Such an analysis requires the examination of ideology, technology, and praxis.

Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas I. The Old Colonial System, 1688‐1850

Abstract: In an earlier survey of the history of British imperialism we suggested that closer attention should be given to the connexions between the slow and uncertain development of British industry and the pace and direction of overseas expansion.1 We also argued that insufficient regard had been paid to the influence of non-industrial forms of capitalism on both overseas development and imperial policy. In the course of that survey, the former problem was dealt with in some detail, whereas the latter was treated briefly and tentatively. The purpose of the present article is to correct this deficiency and to advance a new perspective on British imperialism for the period between the Glorious Revolution and the Second World War. We begin by emphasizing that, despite their many differences, Marxist and non-Marxist historians share a conception of imperialism which is derived from certain broad assumptions about the place of the industrial revolution in modern British history. These assumptions are made explicit in Marxist theories, which attempt to relate empire building to stages in the evolution of industrial capitalism. They also underlie the leading non-Marxist explanations, which emphasize the diverse commercial, political, and cultural forces brought to the fore by industrial progress. Thus, Gallagher and Robinson, though concerned to refute Marxist claims and to avoid charges of economic determinism, nevertheless started from the position that "British industrialization caused an ever-extending and intensifying development of overseas regions", and they proceeded to interpret the rise of free trade and the growth of informal empire from this standpoint.2 The implications of this common approach, based on the story of the "triumph of industry", extend well beyond the boundaries of the nineteenth century. Historians as far apart ideologically

Political Realignment in Advanced Industrial Society: From Class‐Based Politics to Quality‐of‐Life Politics

Abstract: Throughout this century, the Marxist Left in Europe has emphasized an economic interpretation of history, with state ownership of the means of production as the key element in their prescription for society. Political polarization is depicted as a direct reflection of social class conflict, with the working class the natural base of support for the Left. This diagnosis has become increasingly out of touch with reality in recent years, which have seen the decline of orthodox Marxist parties in Western Europe and the diminishing credibility of the ideology on which they are based. For as advanced industrial society emerges, economic determinism provides a progressively less adequate analysis of society, and class-based parties and the policies they advocate become less central to politics. Economic development reduces the impact of economic determinism. Though economic factors tend to play a dominant role in the early stages of industrial society, in advanced industrial society their relative importance diminishes; and self-expression, ‘belonging’ and the quality of the physical and social environment become increasingly important.