Showing papers on "Ideology published in 1987"

Choosing Preferences by Constructing Institutions: A Cultural Theory of Preference Formation

Abstract: Preferences come from the most ubiquitous human activity: living with other people. Support for and opposition to different ways of life, the shared values legitimating social relations (here called cultures) are the generators of diverse preferences. After discussing why it is not helpful to conceive of interests as preferences or to dismiss preference formation as external to organized social life, I explain how people are able to develop many preferences from few clues by using their social relations to interrogate their environment. The social filter is the source of preferences. I then argue that culture is a more powerful construct than conceptual rivals: heuristics, schemas, ideologies. Two initial applications—to the ideology of the left-right distinctions and to perceptions of danger—test the claim that this theory of how individuals use political cultures to develop their preferences outperforms the alternatives.

Bordieu: What Makes a Social Class?: On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups

Abstract: One of the main obstacles to scientific sociology is the use we make of common oppositions, paired concepts, or what Bachelard calls "epistemological couples:" constructed by social reality, these are unthinkingly used to construct social reality. One of these fundamental antinomies is the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism or, in more current parlance, between structuralism and constructivism, which can be roughly characterized as follows. From the objectivist point of view, social agents can be "treated as things," as in the old Durkheimian precept, that is, classified like objects: access to the objective classification presupposes here a break with naive subjective classifications, which are seen as "prenotions" or "ideologies." From the subjectivist point of view, as represented by phenomenology, ethnomethodology and constructivist sociology, agents construct social reality, which is itself understood as the product of the aggregation of these individual acts of construction. For this sort of sociological marginalism, there is no need to break with primary social experience, for the task of sociology is to give "an

Culture and cognition

Abstract: Undeniably, a great deal of order exists in the natural world we experience. However, much of the order we perceive in the world is there only because we put it there. That we impose such order is even more apparent when we consider the social world, in which institutions such as marriage, deeds such as lying, and customs such as dating happen at all because the members of a society presume them to be. D'Andrade (1984a:91) contrasts such culturally constructed things with cultural categories for objects such as stone, tree, and hand, which exist whether or not we invent labels for them. An entity such as marriage, on the other hand, is created by “the social agreement that something counts as that condition” (ibid.) and exists only by virtue of adherence to the rules that constitute it. Such culturally constituted understandings of the social world point up not only the degree to which people impose order on their world but also the degree to which such orderings are shared by the joint participants in this world, all of whom behave as though marriage, lying, and dating exist. A very large proportion of what we know and believe we derive from these shared models that specify what is in the world and how it works. The cognitive view of cultural meaning The enigma of cultural meaning, seemingly both social and psychological in nature, has challenged generations of anthropologists and stimulated the development of several distinctive perspectives (see Keesing 1974 for an early review).

Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society and the Individual

Abstract: PART ONE: THEORETICAL ISSUES Ontology and Rationalization in the Western Cultural Account PART TWO: THE WORLD-POLITY AND STATE STRUCTURE The World-Polity and the Authority of the Nation-State World-Polity Sources of Expanding State Authority and Organization, 1870-1970 Regime Changes and State Power in an Intensifying World-State-System Structural Antecedents and Consequences of Statism PART THREE: CONSTITUTING NATION AND CITIZEN Human Rights or State Expansion? Cross-National Definitions of Constitutional Rights, 1870-1970 Global Patterns of Educational Institutionalization On the Union of States and Schools World-Polity Sources of National Welfare and Land Reform PART FOUR: CONSTRUCTING THE MODERN INDIVIDUAL The Ideology of Childhood and the State Rules Distinguishing Children in National Constitutions, 1870-1970 Self and Life Course Institutionalization and Its Effects The Political Construction of Rape PART FIVE: RATIONALIZATION AND COLLECTIVE ACTION Comparative Social Movements Revivalism, Nation-Building and Institutional Change PART SIX: THE POSSIBILITY OF A GENERAL HISTORICAL THEORY Institutional Analysis

The role of annual reports in gender and class contradictions at general motors: 1917–1976

Abstract: This paper argues that studies of female exploitation frequently pay too little attention to the broader social context; particularly alienation and crises in the development of late capitalism. This criticism applies with equal force to the domestic labor/housework studies and labor process studies and labor process studies where male domination is often advanced as the primary explanatory variable in accounting for female oppression. Even where labor process researchers have emphasized mediating affects on partiarchial influences (technology and control processes for instance; c.f. Milkman, Politics and Society , pp. 159–203, 1983), we argue that the broader context of alienated capitalist social relations is frequently understated. Female subordination under capitalism is traced to two primary sources in this study: First, that part of the labor process where the existence of female labor facilitates surplus value appropriation by playing the part of an “industrial reserve army” (sometimes “latent”, at other times “floating”). Second, in times of overproduction and underconsumption, capital has invented a consumerist ideology about women to help resolve its crisis of realizing surplus value. Only by seeing these different instances of female oppression as part of a larger, mutually reinforcing configuration of “instances” — emanating from capitalist social relations — are we likely to begin to adequately comprehend the resilience of social ideology concerning women and develop effective political and social counter-strategies. In this research, the above considerations are explored using evidence from a longitudinal study of General Motors where the annual reports are used to monitor the evolution of managerial ideology vis-a-vis women over some sixty years. We see in this study how the manner of women's exploitation changes with changes in the crises facing capitalism. The implications of the study are severalfold: Firwt, we see how a socially “unreflective” view of “management” and “management control systems” may lead to practices that are oppressive and exploitative. Second, we find “the labor process” to be an important but insufficient conceptual terrain for understanding women's oppression; instead we propose that the starting point of any analysis should be capitalist alienation. Third, this work has implications for the various controversies about class essentialism and the primacy of class. (Wright, New Left Review , pp. 11–36, 1983; Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis , 1979; Miliband, New Left Review , pp. 57–68, 1983; Tinker, Journal of Accounting and Public Policy , pp. 1–20, 1984). as well as the relation between male domination and class oppression (Fox-Genovese, New Left Review , pp. 5–29, 1982, Goldelier, New Left Review , pp. 3–17, 1981) in that it examines the interplay between class and other forms of domination. Lastly, we see how annual reports may contribute to a general “world view” that aids social appropriation and domination.

Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason

Abstract: Hans-Georg Gadamer is one of the leading philosophers in the world today. Since the publication in 1960 of his magnum opus Truth and Method, his philosophical hermeneutics has been the focus of a great deal of attention and controversy. His ideas have been applied to questions of interpretation in the study of art and literature, to issues of knowledge and objectivity in the social sciences, and even to reevaluations of philosophy itself.This book is a systematic introduction to Gadamer's work, presented with a clarity of exposition and argument that makes it rewarding to non-philosophers and philosophers alike. It is constructed around a series of debates on historicism, authorial intention, subjectivism, ideology, and the "New Pragmatism," and it pays particular attention to how Gadamer's work has been interpreted and criticized by such philosophers as Hirsch, Habermas, Apel, and Rorty. The dialogic form, which is in itself a central feature of hermeneutic theory, gives the book an immediacy that textual exegesis cannot achieve.This is the first book in the series, Key Contemporary Thinkers, which will make available the ideas of some of the most influential philosophers of our time. The series will cut across academic disciplines and will include books on European, British, and American thinkers.

The Idea of Chinatown: The Power of Place and Institutional Practice in the Making of a Racial Category

Abstract: Racial categories are cultural ascriptions whose construction and transmission cannot be taken for granted. I focus here on the process by which racial categories are themselves constructed; in particular, I examine the presence of place and the role of state in the making of one such category, the “Chinese,” in a British settler society from the 1880s to the 1920s. I argue that “Chinatown,” like race, is an idea that belongs to the “white” European cultural tradition. The significance of government is that it has granted legitimacy to the ideas of Chinese and Chinatown, inscribing social definitions of identity and place in institutional practice and space. Indeed Chinatown has been a critical nexus through which the race definition process was structured. I examine this process in Vancouver, British Columbia, where the municipal authorities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sanctioned the intellectual milieu of race. They did this, I argue, as part of the historical exercise ...

The 'real' cultural significance of accounts.

Abstract: Typically, accounting is portrayed as a passive information service, dedicated to faithfully reporting on economic reality. This paper, in contrast, investigates the re-presentional aspects of accounting, and the part it plays as a symbolic, cultural and hegemonic force, in struggles over the distribution of social income. The issues are examined empirically through the publishing patterns of the Journal of Accountancy, Accounting Review, and Fortune magazine between 1960 and 1973. Chronicling the changes in accounting literature is not our primary concern however. Rather, this work explores the relationships between accounting discourses and the conditions of social conflict in which these discourses are embedded. The evidence suggests that: different accounting journals specialize in different rhetorical functions; that these functions are discharged in harmony with other media and cultural forces (data on Fortune's discursive practices is provided for comparison); and that, over time, the discursive roles of accounting journals change with the evolving hegemonic climate. This paper contends that viewing accounting literature as disinterested inquiry or rigorous scholarship understates the social origins of research. Instead, we suggest that discursive accounting practices are more productively regarded as ideological weapons for participating in conflicts over the distribution of social wealth.

Ideology and U.S. foreign policy

Abstract: This new edition of Michael H. Hunt's classic reinterpretation of American diplomatic history includes a preface that reflects on the personal experience and intellectual agenda behind the writing of the book, surveys the broad impact of the book's argument, and addresses the challenges to the thesis since the book's original publication. In the wake of 9/11 this interpretation is more pertinent than ever. Praise for the previous edition: "Clearly written and historically sound. . . . A subtle critique and analysis."-Gaddis Smith, Foreign Affairs "A lean, plain-spoken treatment of a grand subject. . . . A bold piece of criticism and advocacy. . . . The right focus of the argument may insure its survival as one of the basic postwar critiques of U.S. policy."-John W. Dower, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists "A work of intellectual vigor and daring, impressive in its scholarship and imaginative in its use of material."-Ronald Steel, Reviews in American History "A masterpiece of historical compression."-Wilson Quarterly "A penetrating and provocative study. . . . A pleasure both to read and to contemplate."-John Martz, Journal of Politics

Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740-1860

Abstract: In this interdisciplinary study, Ann Bermingham explores the complex, ambiguous, and often contradictory relationship between English landscape painting and the socio-economic changes that accompanied enclosure and the Industrial Revolution.

Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan

Abstract: One: Models of Law and Social Change Two Western Models A Japanese Model Two: Environmental Tragedy and Response Pollution in Minamata The Choice of Tactics The Government's Response Historical and Social Context of the Pollution Experience Three: Instrumental Violence and the Struggle for Buraku Liberation Development of the Buraku Liberation Movement The Yata Denunciation Denunciation Tactics in Court The Theory and Effectiveness of Denunciation Denunciation in Social and Political Context Four: Civil Rights Litigation and the Search for Equal Employment Opportunity The Litigation Campaign Impact of the Cases The Social and Political Role of Civil Rights Litigation Five: Legal Informality and Industrial Policy The Legal Framework of Industrial Policy The Sumitomo Metals Incident The Oil Cartel Cases Industrial Policy in the 1980s The Implications of Informality Six: Toward a New Perspective on Japanese Law The Ideology of Law in Japanese Society The Operation of Law in Japanese Society American Images of Japanese Law Notes Index

The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology

Abstract: There have been numerous attempts to understand the role and importance of the Great Dionysia in Athens, and it is a festival that has been made crucial to varied and important characterizations of Greek culture as well as the history of drama or literature. Recent scholarship, however, has greatly extended our understanding of the formation of fifth-century Athenian ideology—in the sense of the structure of attitudes and norms of behaviour—and this developing interest in what might be called a ‘civic discourse’ requires a reconsideration of the Great Dionysia as a city festival. For while there have been several fascinating readings of particular plays with regard to the polis and its ideology, there is still a considerable need to place the festival itself in terms of the ideology of the polis. Indeed, recent critics in a justifiable reaction away from writers such as Gilbert Murray have tended rather to emphasize on the one hand that the festival is a place of entertainment rather than religious ritual, and on the other hand that the plays should be approached primarily as dramatic performances.

Can There Be A Feminist Science

Abstract: This paper explores a number of recent proposals regarding “feminist science” and rejects a content-based approach in favor of a process-based approach to characterizing feminist science. Philosophy of science can yield models of scientific reasoning that illuminate the interaction between cultural values and ideology and scientific inquiry. While we can use these models to expose masculine and other forms of bias, we can also use them to defend the introduction of assumptions grounded in feminist political values.

Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory

Abstract: Preface Introduction to the Second Edition Introduction Chapter 1 Subjects and Agents 1.1. There concepts of agency 1.2. The orthodox conception of agents 1.3. Human nature: the need for a philosophical anthropology 1.4. Human nature: morality, justice and virtue. 1.5. Practical reason and social structures Chapter 2 Structure and Action 2.1. The concept of social structure 2.2. The basic concepts of historical materialism 2.3. Orthodox historical materialism 2.4. Rational-choice Marxism 2.5. Structural capacities and human action 2.6. What's left of historical materialism? Chapter 3 Reasons and Interests 3.1. Expressivism and the hermeneutic tradition 3.2. Interpretation and social theory 3.3. Charity, truth and community 3.4. The Utilitarian theory of action 3.5. Interests and powers Chapter 4 Ideology and Power 4.1. Collective agents 4.2. Falsehood and ideology, I 4.3. Falsehood and ideology, II 4.4. Nation, state and military power 4.5. A note on base and superstructure Chapter 5 Tradition and Revolution 5.1. Revolution as redemption: Benjamin and Sartre 5.2. Marxism and the proletariat 5.3. The rationality of revolution 5.4. Revolution and repetition 5.5. The tradition of the oppressed Conclusion Index

Christian humanism and the Puritan social order

Abstract: Preface Abbreviations 1. Introduction 2. Christian humanism as social ideology 3. The transmission of Christian humanist ideas 4. The spiritualized household 5. Work, wealth and welfare 6. Conscience and the great chain of being 7. The conservative reaction: Trent, Lambeth and the demise of the humanist consensus Bibliography Index.

Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries

Abstract: The contributors historians and anthropologists from a number of countries move beyond the traditional structural analysis of society to a finer understanding of people as actors. Native Andean initiatives and consciousness are clearly placed at the center of this inquiry, which merges the best methods of history an anthropology. Stern begins with a vigorously argued theoretical essay in which he identifies major findings and arguments running throughout the book, demonstrates their pertinence to the more general field of peasant studies, and draws out the implications for theory and method. He reappraises the role of peasant consciousness and political horizons; and the significance of ethnic factors in explaining "peasant" consciousness and revolt. The case studies themselves revamp the history of Andean peasant rebellion and consciousness in Peru and Bolivia. This is accomplished by studying violent uprisings as transitional moments within a long-term trajectory embracing varied forms of resistance, and by scrutinizing closely the ideological and cultural aspects of domination, political legitimacy, and rebellion. The results sharply alter our understanding of three major historical problems: the crisis of Spanish colonial rule and the outbreak of native Andean insurrection in the eighteenth century; the response to peasants to creole wars and nation-building efforts in the nineteenth century; and the political strategies and dilemmas of Andean peasants in the context of populist and radical politics in the twentieth century."

Proslavery : A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840

Abstract: A detailed study of American political consciousness in the colonial period and early years of the republic, this suggests that proslavery thought originated in conservative New England and was brought to the South by clergymen, where it was embraced and developed into full-blown ideology.

Two traditions in unionist political culture

Abstract: This paper identifies two ideological traditions within Northern Irish unionism. The first, Ulster loyalism, is defined by its primary imagined community of Northern Protestants and its secondary conditional loyalty to the British state. It treats religion and politics as inextricably interrelated. This ideology is reproduced by potentially dominatory marches. Ulster British ideology, in contrast, is defined by its primary imagined community of Greater Britain and its secondary regional patriotism for Northern Ireland. It professes liberal political values. This ideology is reproduced by the extensive linkages between Northern Ireland and Great Britain which create typical life paths for Ulster British individuals. After analysing the structure of each ideology in terms of its imagined community, its Other and its fundamental structuring concepts, the paper discusses the possibilities of change of each ideology.

Policy and politics in Sweden: Principled pragmatism

Abstract: Sweden is a country of paradoxes. Renowned for its liberal social welfare programs and pluralistic cooperation, its government is also characterized by rigid and highly structured behaviour. In this volume of the "Policy and Politics" series, Hugh Heclo and Henrik Madsen explore the contradictions that Sweden represents, its unique blend of innovation and conservatism, and the qualities that define 'The Swedish Way'. In describing the workings of the Swedish government, several factors must be considered: social democratic hegemony, structured consultation, and corporate representation. Respectively these terms refer to the predominant leadership and ideology of the Social Democratic party, the ritualistic forms of representing all factions, and the organized representation of any social group with an individual interest.Heclo and Madsen examine what they call 'The Swedish Way' and analyse how these attributes fit into policymaking behaviour. Characterizing the Swedes as intensely private, the authors contrast American emphasis upon individual achievement with Swedish approval of group-oriented behaviour. That factor together with the ethnic and cultural homogeneity of the people reduces the potential for conflict in the political realm. The Swedes also typically adopt a problem-focused approach whenever dealing with public or private sector policy and administration. The practical result of pursuing the welfare vision by means of a problem-focused approach is that problems of collective choice what the government should do to move Swedish society in the 'right' direction preoccupy the political system.Thus policymaking is in a state of constant adjustment. In this discussion of pioneering reforms, controlled conflict, and specific examples of policy formation and implementation, Heclo and Madsen explain the celebrated but paradoxical political system of Sweden. Author note: Hugh Heclo is Professor of Government at Harvard University. Henrik Madsen is a management consultant for McKinsey & Co., Copenhagen.

The Elements of the Concept of Ideology

Abstract: This article, based upon an extensive examination of the literature on the concept of ideology, identifies some 27 definitional components or ‘elements' which are discussed in turn to ascertain their utility and coherence as definitional criteria. On the basis of this examination a number of these elements are found to be essential to the concept, and are built into a definition which allows consideration of, among other things, the expressive and justificatory dimension of beliefs often ignored in other definitions.

State Political Culture and Public Opinion

Abstract: Do the states of the United States matter (or are they of no political consequence)? Using a data set with over 50 thousand respondents, we demonstrate the influence of state political culture on partisanship and ideology. For individuals, we find that the state of residence is an important predictor of partisan and ideological identification, independent of their demographic characteristics. At the aggregate level, state culture dominates state demography as a source of state-to-state differences in opinion. In general, geographic location may be a more important source of opinion than previously thought. One indication of the importance of state culture is that state effects on partisanship and ideology account for about half of the variance in state voting in recent presidential elections.

Resisting Novels : Ideology and Fiction

Abstract: Acknowledgements 1. Resisting the novel 2. The ideology of ideology 3. 'Known unknown' locations: the ideology of place 4. Characters, narrators, and readers: making friends with signs 5. Conversation and dialogue 6. Thick plots: history and fiction 7. Conclusion: the political novel, or - what is to be done? Notes Bibliography Index

Islam and the state

Abstract: Examining the theoretical problems which arose when the modern European ideology of nationalism was adopted by Muslim societies organized into formally modern states, this book also deals with the practical difficulties arising from the doctrinal incompatibility between Islam and the non-Muslim concept of the territorial nation-state. It illustrates this conflict with a consideration of the record of several states in the Islamic world. It suggests that whereas the state, an organization of power, has been a most durable institution in Islamic history, the legitimacy of the nation-state has always been challenged in favour of the wide Islamic Nation, the "umma", which comprises all the faithful without reference to territorial boundaries. To this extent too, the more recent conception of Arab nationalism projects a far larger nation-state than the existing territorial states in the Arab world today.

Islam and Ideology: Towards a Typology

Abstract: It is probably fair to say of labels such as “fundamentalist,” “modernist,” and “secularist,” which are in common use today in writing about modern Islam, that we cannot live very easily with them, but that we certainly cannot live without them.