Showing papers on "Politics published in 2004"

Comparing Media Systems: three models of media and politics

Abstract: This book proposes a framework for comparative analysis of the relation between the media and the political system Building on a survey of media institutions in eighteen West European and North American democracies, Hallin and Mancini identify the principal dimensions of variation in media systems and the political variables that have shaped their evolution They go on to identify three major models of media system development, the Polarized Pluralist, Democratic Corporatist, and Liberal models; to explain why the media have played a different role in politics in each of these systems; and to explore the force of change that are currently transforming them It provides a key theoretical statement about the relation between media and political systems, a key statement about the methodology of comparative analysis in political communication, and a clear overview of the variety of media institutions that have developed in the West, understood within their political and historical context

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Abstract: Written after September 11, 2001, in response to the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that have prevailed since then, Judith Butler critiques the use of violence and argues for a response in which violence might be minimized, and interdependency becomes acknowledged as the basis for global political community. Following the expressions of public mourning post-September 11, Butler asks why it's acceptable, even necessary to grieve some lives, while others are not valued or are even incomprehensible as lives at all. Questions of sovereignty, patriotism and censorship are all examined, especially in light of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Finally she investigates the way in which any criticism of the Israeli state is automatically labelled anti-semitic, thus rendering all criticism of Israel a political taboo in the US and the UK. She counters that we have a responsibility to speak out against both Israeli injustices and anti-semitism, and argues against the rhetorical use of the charge of anti-semitism to quell public debate.

Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis

Abstract: List of Figures and Tables ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Placing Politics in Time 1 Chapter One Positive Feedback and Path Dependence 17 Chapter Two Timing and Sequence 54 Chapter Three Long-Term Processes 79 Chapter Four The Limits of Institutional Design 103 Chapter Five Institutional Development 133 Conclusion Temporal Context in Social Science Inquiry 167 Bibliography 179 Index 195

Corporate Social Responsibility Theories: Mapping the Territory

Abstract: The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) field presents not only a landscape of theories but also a proliferation of approaches, which are controversial, complex and unclear. This article tries to clarify the sit- uation, ''mapping the territory'' by classifying the main CSR theories and related approaches in four groups: (1) instrumental theories, in which the corporation is seen as only an instrument for wealth creation, and its social activities are only a means to achieve economic results; (2) political theories, which concern themselves with the power of corporations in society and a responsible use of this power in the political arena; (3) integrative theories, in which the corporation is focused on the satisfaction of social demands; and (4) ethical theories, based on ethical responsibilities of corporations to society. In practice, each CSR theory presents four dimensions related to profits, political performance, social demands and ethical values. The findings suggest the necessity to develop a new theory on the business and society relationship, which should integrate these four dimensions.

After Method: Mess in Social Science Research

Abstract: John Law argues that methods don't just describe social realities but are also involved in creating them. The implications of this argument are highly significant. If this is the case, methods are always political, and it raises the question of what kinds of social realities we want to create. Most current methods look for clarity and precision. It is usually said that only poor research produces messy findings, and the idea that things in the world might be fluid, elusive, or multiple is unthinkable. Law's startling argument is that this is wrong and it is time for a new approach. Many realities, he says, are vague and ephemeral. If methods want to know and help to shape the world, then they need to reinvent themselves and their politics to deal with mess. That is the challenge. Nothing less will do.

States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and the Social Order

Abstract: Notes on contributors Acknowledgements 1. The Idiom of Co-production Sheila Jasanoff 2. Ordering Knowledge, Ordering Society Sheila Jasanoff 3. Climate Science and the Making of a Global Political Order Clark A. Miller 4. Co-producing CITES and the African Elephant Charis Thompson 5. Knowledge and Political Order in the European Environment Agency Claire Waterton and Brian Wynne 6. Plants, Power and Development: Founding the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies, 1880-1914 William K. Storey 7. Mapping Systems and Moral Order: Constituting property in genome laboratories Stephen Hilgartner 8. Patients and Scientists in French Muscular Dystrophy Research Vololona Rabeharisoa and Michel Callon 9. Circumscribing Expertise: Membership categories in courtroom testimony Michael Lynch 10. The Science of Merit and the Merit of Science: Mental order and social order in early twentieth-century France and America John Carson 11. Mysteries of State, Mysteries of Nature: Authority, knowledge and expertise in the seventeenth century Peter Dear 12. Reconstructing Sociotechnical Order: Vannevar Bush and US science policy Michael Aaron Dennis 13. Science and the Political Imagination in Contemporary Democracies Yaron Ezrah 14. Afterword Sheila Jasanoff References Index

Politically Connected Firms

Abstract: Examination of firms in 47 countries shows a widespread overlap of controlling shareholders and top officers who are connected with national parliaments or governments, particularly in countries with higher levels of corruption, with barriers to foreign investment, and with more transparent systems. Connections are diminished when regulations set more limits on official behavior. Additionally, I show that the announcement of a new political connection results in a significant increase in value.

Ethnicity without Groups

Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Ethnicity without Groups 2. Beyond "Identity" 3. Ethnicity as Cognition 4. Ethnic and Nationalist Violence 5. The Return of Assimilation? 6. "Civic" and "Ethnic" Nationalism 7. Ethnicity, Migration, and Statehood in Post-Cold War Europe 8. 1848 in 1998: The Politics of Commemoration in Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia Notes References Index

Do Institutions Cause Growth

Abstract: We revisit the debate over whether political institutions cause economic growth, or whether, alternatively, growth and human capital accumulation lead to institutional improvement. We find that most indicators of institutional quality used to establish the proposition that institutions cause growth are constructed to be conceptually unsuitable for that purpose. We also find that some of the instrumental variable techniques used in the literature are flawed. Basic OLS results, as well as a variety of additional evidence, suggest that (a) human capital is a more basic source of growth than are the institutions, (b) poor countries get out of poverty through good policies, often pursued by dictators, and (c) subsequently improve their political institutions.

Informal institutions and comparative politics: a research agenda

Abstract: Mainstream comparative research on political institutions focuses primarily on formal rules. Yet in many contexts, informal institutions, ranging from bureaucratic and legislative norms to clientelism and patrimonialism, shape even more strongly political behavior and outcomes. Scholars who fail to consider these informal rules of the game risk missing many of the most important incentives and constraints that underlie political behavior. In this article we develop a framework for studying informal institutions and integrating them into comparative institutional analysis. The framework is based on a typology of four patterns of formal-informal institutional interaction: complementary, accommodating, competing, and substitutive. We then explore two issues largely ignored in the literature on this subject: the reasons and mechanisms behind the emergence of informal institutions, and the nature of their stability and change. Finally, we consider challenges in research on informal institutions, including issues of identification, measurement, and comparison.Gretchen Helmke's book Courts Under Constraints: Judges, Generals, and Presidents in Argentina, will be published by Cambridge University Press. Steven Levitsky is the author of Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective and is currently writing a book on competitive authoritarian regimes in the post–Cold War era. The authors thank the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame for generously sponsoring conferences on informal institutions. The authors also gratefully acknowledge comments from Jorge Dominguez, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Dennis Galvan, Goran Hyden, Jack Knight, Lisa Martin, Hillel Soifer, Benjamin Smith, Susan Stokes, Maria Victoria Murillo, and Kurt Weyland, as well as three anonymous reviewers and the editors of Perspectives on Politics.

Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction

Abstract: List of Figures.List of Tables.List of Boxes.Introduction.The Goals of the Text.The Rest of the Book.Many Acknowledgments.Part I: What is Political Ecology?.1. The Hatchet and the Seed:.What is Political Ecology?.Challenging Apolitical Ecologies.Ecoscarcity and the Limits to Growth.Other Apolitical Ecologies: Diffusion, Valuation, and Modernization.Common assumptions and modes of explanation.The Hatchet: Political Ecology as Critique.The Seed: Political Ecology as Equity and Sustainability Research.The Dominant Narratives of Political Ecology.Big Questions and Theses.The Degradation and Marginalization Thesis.The Environmental Conflict Thesis.The Conservation and Control Thesis.The Environmental Agency and Social Movement Thesis.The Target of Explanation.2. A Tree with Deep Roots:.The Determinist Context.A Political Ecological Alternative.The Building Blocks.Critical Approaches in Early Human/Environment Research.Continental Critique: Humboldt, Reclus, Wallace, and Sommerville.Critical Environmental Pragmatism.From Sewer Socialism to Mitigating Floods: Hazards Research.The Nature of Society: Cultural Ecology.Historicism, Landscape, and Culture: Carl Sauer.Julian Steward: A Positivist Alternative.System, Function, and Human Life: Mature Cultural Ecology.Beyond Land and Water: The Boundaries of Cultural Ecology.The Limits of Progressive Contextualization.Taking the Plunge.3. The Critical Tools:.Common Property Theory.Green Materialism.Materialist History.The Case of Oriental Despotism.Dependency, Accumulation, and Degradation.Lessons from Materialism: Broadly Defined Political Economy.The Producer is the Agent of History: Peasant Studies.Chayanov and the Rational Producer.Scott and the Moral Economy.Gramsci and Peasant Power.Breaking Open the Household: Feminist Development Studies.Critical Environmental History.Whose History & Science? Postcolonial Studies and Power/Knowledge.Power/Knowledge.Critical Science, Deconstruction, and Ethics.Political Ecology Emergent.4. A Field Crystallizes:.Chains of Explanation.Peanuts and Poverty in Niger.Marginalization.The "Silent Violence" of Famine in Nigeria.Broadly Defined Political Economy.Struggle in Cote D'Ivoire's Fields and Pastures.25 Years Later.Part II: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges:.5. Destruction of Nature - Human Impact and Environmental Degradation:.The Focus on Human Impact.Defining and Measuring Degradation.Loss of Natural Productivity.Loss of Biodiversity.Loss of Usefulness.Socio-Environmental Destruction: Creating or Shifting Risk Ecology.Limits of Land Degradation: Variability, Disturbance, and Recovery.What Baseline? Non-Human Disturbance and Variability of Ecological Systems.What Impact? Variable Response to Disturbance.Can We Go Back? Variable Recovery from Disturbance.Methodological Imperatives in Political Analysis of Environmental Destruction.6. Construction of Nature: Environmental Knowledges and Imaginaries:.Why Bother to Argue That Nature (or Forests or Land Degradation...) is Constructed?.Choosing Targets for Political Ecological Constructivism.Three Debates and Motivations.Hard and Soft Constructivism."Radical" Constructivism."Soft" Constructivism.Constructivist Claims in Political Ecology."Barstool" Biologists and "Hysterical" Housewives: The Peculiar Case of Local Environmental Knowledge.Eliciting Environmental Construction.Talk and Text: Construction in Discourse.Categories and Taxonomies.Spatial Knowledge and Construction.Narratives of Ecological Process and Change.Genealogies of Representation: Environmental History.Methodological Issues in Political Analysis of Environmental Construction.Part III: Political Ecology Now:.7. Degradation and Marginalization:.The Argument.Degradation and Reversibility.Accumulation and Declining Margins.The Evidence.Amazonian Deforestation.Contract Agriculture in the Caribbean.Evaluating the Thesis.Research Example: Common Property Disorders in Rajasthan.Eliciting Rules of Use.Recording Environmental Practices and Response to Authority.Determining Ecological Outcomes.8. Conservation and Control:.The Argument.Coercion, Governmentality, and Internalization of State Rule.Disintegration of Moral Economy.The Constructed Character of Natural Wilderness.Territorialization of Conservation Space.The Evidence.New England Fisheries Conservation.Fire in Madagascar.Social Forestry Conservation in Southeast Asia.The Consistency of Colonial and Contemporary Forestry.The Limits of Social Reform in Forestry.Evaluating the Thesis.Riven Bureaucracies and Efficacious Species.Alternative Conservation?.Research Example: The Biogeography of Power in the Aravalli.A Classic Case of Conservation and Control?.Establishing historical patterns of access.Understanding contemporary land uses and enclosure impacts.Tracking unintended consequences.9. Environmental Conflict:.The Argument.Social structure as differential environmental access and responsibility.Property institutions as politically partial constructions.Environmental development and classed, gendered, raced imaginaries.The Evidence.Agricultural Development in Gambia.Gambia and the Gendered Land/Labor Nexus.Land Conflict in the US West.Evaluating the Thesis.Stock Characters and Standard Scripts.Research Example: Gendered Landscapes and Resource Bottlenecks in the Thar.Determining Differential Land Uses and Rights.Tracking Changes in Availability.Evaluating Divergent Impacts.10. Environmental Identity and Movement:.The Argument.Differential Risk and Ecological Injustice.Moral Economies and Peasant Resistance.Postcolonialism and Rewriting Ecology from the Margins.The Evidence.Andean Livelihood Movements.Modernization and Identity.Hijacking Chipko: Trees, Gender, Livelihood, and Essentialism in India.Women's Movement or Peasant Movement?.Evaluating the Thesis.Making Politics by Making a Living.The risk of primitive romances and essentialisms.The reality of dissent.In the Field: Pastoral Polities in Rajasthan.Agrarian Alliances and Traditional Technology as Resistance.Ambivalence, Research, and Ethics.Part IV: Where to Now?.11. Where to Now?."Against Political Ecology"?.Too Much Theory or Too Little?.Denunciations versus Asymmetries.Three Calls for Symmetry.From Destruction to Production.From Peasants to Producers.From Chains to Networks.The Hybridity Thesis.Political Ecologies of Success.New Substantive Research Mandates.Population Is Too Important to be Left to the Malthusians.Genetic Modification Won't Go Away.Cities are Political Ecologies.Against "Against Political Ecology": Retaining Both Theory and Surprise.In the Meantime...References.Index

What Kind of Citizen? The Politics of Educating for Democracy

Abstract: Educators and policymakers increasingly pursue programs that aim to strengthen democracy through civic education, service learning, and other pedagogies. Their underlying beliefs, however, differ. This article calls attention to the spectrum of ideas about what good citizenship is and what good citizens do that are embodied in democratic education programs. It offers analyses of a 2-year study of educational programs in the United States that aimed to promote democracy. Drawing on democratic theory and on findings from their study, the authors detail three conceptions of the “good” citizen—personally responsible, participatory, and justice oriented—that underscore political implications of education for democracy. The article demonstrates that the narrow and often ideologically conservative conception of citizenship embedded in many current efforts at teaching for democracy reflects not arbitrary choices but, rather, political choices with political consequences.

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

Abstract: Introduction: What Is to Be Done with Political Ecology? 1. Why Political Ecology Has to Let Go of Nature First, Get Out of the Cave Ecological Crisis or Crisis of Objectivity? The End of Nature The Pitfall of "Social Representations" of Nature The Fragile Aid of Comparative Anthropology What Successor for the Bicameral Collective? 2. How to Bring the Collective Together Difficulties in Convoking the Collective First Division: Learning to Be Circumspect with Spokespersons Second Division: Associations of Humans and Nonhumans Third Division between Humans and Nonhumans: Reality and Recalcitrance A More or Less Articulated Collective The Return to Civil Peace 3. A New Separation of Powers Some Disadvantages of the Concepts of Fact and Value The Power to Take into Account and the Power to Put in Order The Collective's Two Powers of Representation Verifying That the Essential Guarantees Have Been Maintained A New Exteriority 4. Skills for the Collective The Third Nature and the Quarrel between the Two "Eco" Sciences Contribution of the Professions to the Procedures of the Houses The Work of the Houses The Common Dwelling, the Oikos 5. Exploring Common Worlds Time's Two Arrows The Learning Curve The Third Power and the Question of the State The Exercise of Diplomacy War and Peace for the Sciences Conclusion: What Is to Be Done? Political Ecology! Summary of the Argument (for Readers in a Hurry...) Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

Ethnic Diversity and Economic Performance

Abstract: We survey and assess the literature on the positive and negative effects of ethnic diversity on economic policies and outcomes. Our focus is on both focus both cities in developed countries (the US) and villages in developing countries. We also consider the endogenous formation of political jurisdictions and we highlight several open issues in need of further research.

Why Deliberative Democracy

Abstract: The most widely debated conception of democracy in recent years is deliberative democracy - the idea that citizens or their representatives owe each other mutually acceptable reasons for the laws they enact Two prominent voices in the ongoing discussion are Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson In "Why Deliberative Democracy?", they move the debate forward beyond their influential book, "Democracy and Disagreement" What exactly is deliberative democracy? Why is it more defensible than its rivals? By offering clear answers to these timely questions, Gutmann and Thompson illuminate the theory and practice of justifying public policies in contemporary democracies They not only develop their theory of deliberative democracy in new directions but also apply it to new practical problems They discuss bioethics, health care, truth commissions, educational policy, and decisions to declare warIn "What Deliberative Democracy Means," which opens this collection of essays, they provide the most accessible exposition of deliberative democracy to date They show how deliberative democracy should play an important role even in the debates about military intervention abroad "Why Deliberative Democracy?" contributes to our understanding of how democratic citizens and their representatives can make justifiable decisions for their society in the face of the fundamental disagreements that are inevitable in diverse societies Gutmann and Thompson provide a balanced and fair-minded approach that will benefit anyone intent on giving reason and reciprocity a more prominent place in politics than power and special interests

How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localization and Institutional Change in Asian Regionalism

Abstract: Questions about norm diffusion in world politics are not simply about whether and how ideas matter, but also which and whose ideas matter. Constructivist scholarship on norms tends to focus on “hard” cases of moral transformation in which “good” global norms prevail over the “bad” local beliefs and practices. But many local beliefs are themselves part of a legitimate normative order, which conditions the acceptance of foreign norms. Going beyond an existential notion of congruence, this article proposes a dynamic explanation of norm diffusion that describes how local agents reconstruct foreign norms to ensure the norms fit with the agents' cognitive priors and identities. Congruence building thus becomes key to acceptance. Localization, not wholesale acceptance or rejection, settles most cases of normative contestation. Comparing the impact of two transnational norms on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), this article shows that the variation in the norms' acceptance, indicated by the changes they produced in the goals and institutional apparatuses of the regional group, could be explained by the differential ability of local agents to reconstruct the norms to ensure a better fit with prior local norms, and the potential of the localized norm to enhance the appeal of some of their prior beliefs and institutions.I thank Peter Katzenstein, Jack Snyder, Chris Reus-Smit, Brian Job, Paul Evans, Iain Johnston, David Capie, Helen Nesadurai, Jeffrey Checkel, Kwa Chong Guan, Khong Yuen Foong, Anthony Milner, John Hobson, Etel Solingen, Michael Barnett, Richard Price, Martha Finnemore, and Frank Schimmelfennig for their comments on various earlier drafts of the article. This article is a revised version of a draft prepared for the American Political Science Association annual convention, San Francisco, 29 August–2 September 2001. Seminars on the article were offered at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, in April 2001; the Modern Asia Seminar Series at Harvard University's Asia Center, in May 2001; the Department of International Relations, Australian National University, in September 2001; and the Institute of International Relations, University of British Columbia, in April 2002. I thank these institutions for their lively seminars offering invaluable feedback. I gratefully acknowledge valuable research assistance provided by Tan Ban Seng, Deborah Lee, and Karyn Wang at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies. I am also grateful to Harvard University Asia Centre and the Kennedy School's Asia Pacific Policy Program for fellowships to facilitate my research during 2000–2001.

Women as policy makers: evidence from a randomized policy experiment in india

Abstract: This paper uses political reservations for women in India to study the impact of women's leadership on policy decisions. Since the mid-1990's, one third of Village Council head positions in India have been randomly reserved for a woman: In these councils only women could be elected to the position of head. Village Councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas. Using a dataset we collected on 265 Village Councils in West Bengal and Rajasthan, we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved Village Councils. We show that the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided. Specifically, leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders.

New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood

Abstract: Preface 1 Introduction: Cities, States, and the 'Explosion of Spaces' 2 The Globalization Debates: Opening up to New Spaces? 3 The State Spatial Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis 4 Urban Governance and the Nationalization of State Space: Political Geographies of Spatial Keynesianism 5 Interlocality Competition as a State Project: Urban Locational Policy and the Rescaling of State Space 6 Alternative Rescaling Strategies and the Future of New State Spaces Bibliography Index

What Determines Corporate Transparency

Abstract: We investigate corporate transparency, defined as the availability of firmspecific information to those outside publicly traded firms. We conceptualize corporate transparency within a country as output from a multifaceted system whose components collectively produce, gather, validate, and disseminate information. We factor analyze a range of measures capturing countries’ firmspecific information environments, isolating two distinct factors. The first factor, interpreted as financial transparency, captures the intensity and timeliness of financial disclosures, and their interpretation and dissemination by analysts and the media. The second factor, interpreted as governance transparency, captures the intensity of governance disclosures used by outside investors to hold officers and directors accountable. We investigate whether these factors vary with countries’ legal/judicial regimes and political economies. Our main multivariate result is that the governance transparency factor is primarily related to a country’s legal/judicial regime, whereas the financial transparency factor is primarily related to political economy.

Institutions as the Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth

Abstract: This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two 'quasi-natural experiments' in history, the division of Korea into two parts with very different economic institutions and the colonization of much of the world by European powers starting in the fifteenth century. We then develop the basic outline of a framework for thinking about why economic institutions differ across countries. Economic institutions determine the incentives of and the constraints on economic actors, and shape economic outcomes. As such, they are social decisions, chosen for their consequences. Because different groups and individuals typically benefit from different economic institutions, there is generally a conflict over these social choices, ultimately resolved in favor of groups with greater political power. The distribution of political power in society is in turn determined by political institutions and the distribution of resources. Political institutions allocate de jure political power, while groups with greater economic might typically possess greater de facto political power. We therefore view the appropriate theoretical framework as a dynamic one with political institutions and the distribution of resources as the state variables. These variables themselves change over time because prevailing economic institutions affect the distribution of resources, and because groups with de facto political power today strive to change political institutions in order to increase their de jure political power in the future. Economic institutions encouraging economic growth emerge when political institutions allocate power to groups with interests in broad-based property rights enforcement, when they create effective constraints on power-holders, and when there are relatively few rents to be captured by power-holders. We illustrate the assumptions, the workings and the implications of this framework using a number of historical examples.

Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice

Abstract: 'A superb book, one of those rarities that can change entire ways of thinking. David Mosse is the first social scientist in a generation who can successfuly take cutting-edge insights from academic anthropology and use them to explain practical problems in development...For anyone interested in development, "Cultivating Development" is a do-not-miss experience.' Scott Guggenheim, Lead Social Scientist, The World Bank '[Mosse's] provocative thesis challenges the received wisdom of that world and compels us to examine afresh the politics and ethics of engaging with development. Amid the profusion of literature in this field, this book stands apart as an insider's account that is consistently critical yet steadfast in respecting its subjects. Highly recommended.' Amita Baviskar, Visiting Professor, Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University Development agencies and researchers are preoccupied with policy; with exerting influence over policy, linking research to policy and with implementing policy around the world. But what if development practice is not driven by policy? Suppose that the things that make for 'good policy' - policy that legitimises and mobilises political support - in reality make it impossible to implement? By focusing in detail on the unfolding activities of a development project in western India over more than ten years, as it falls under different policy regimes, this book takes a close look at the relationship between policy and practice in development. David Mosse shows how the actions of development workers are shaped by the exigencies of organisations and the need to maintain relationships rather than by policy; but also that development actors work hardest of all to maintain coherent representations of their actions as instances of authorised policy. Raising unfamiliar questions, Mosse provides a rare self-critical reflection on practice, while refusing to endorse current post-modern dismissal of development.

Enacting the social

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the power of social science and its methods. We first argue that social inquiry and its methods are productive: they (help to) make social realities and social worlds. They do not simply describe the world as it is, but also enact it. Second, we suggest that, if social investigation makes worlds, then it can, in some measure, think about the worlds it wants to help to make. It gets involved in 'ontological politics'. We then go on to show that its methods - and its politics - are still stuck in, and tend to reproduce, nineteenth-century, nation-state-based politics. How might we move social science from the enactment of nineteenth-century realities? We argue that social-and-physical changes in the world are - and need to be - paralleled by changes in the methods of social inquiry. The social sciences need to re-imagine themselves, their methods, and their 'worlds' if they are to work productively in the twenty-first century where social relations appear increasingly complex, elusive, ephemeral, and unpredictable. There are various possibilities: perhaps, for instance, there is need for 'messy' methods. But in the present paper we explore some implications of complexity theory to see whether and how this might provide productive metaphors and theories for enacting twenty-first-century realities.

Geographies of Responsibility

Abstract: Issues of space, place and politics run deep. There is a long history of the entanglement of the conceptualisation of space and place with the framing of political positions. The injunction to think space relationally is a very general one and, as this collection indicates, can lead in many directions. The particular avenue to be explored in this paper concerns the relationship between identity and responsibility, and the potential geographies of both.

Analysing Political Discourse : Theory and Practice

Abstract: This is an essential read for anyone interested in the way language is used in the world of politics. Based on Aristotle's premise that we are all political animals, able to use language to pursue our own ends, the book uses the theoretical framework of linguistics to explore the ways in which we think and behave politically. Contemporary and high profile case studies of politicians and other speakers are used, including an examination of the dangerous influence of a politician's words on the defendants in the Stephen Lawrence murder trial. International in its perspective, Analysing Political Discourse also considers the changing landscape of political language post-September 11, including the increasing use of religious imagery in the political discourse of, amongst others, George Bush. Written in a lively and engaging style, this book provides an essential introduction to political discourse analysis.

Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States

Abstract: Over the last decade, students of the welfare state have produced an impressive body of research on retrenchment, the dominant thrust of which is that remarkably few welfare states have experienced fundamental shifts. This article questions this now-conventional wisdom by reconsidering the post-1970s trajectory of the American welfare state, long considered the quintessential case of social policy stability. I demonstrate that although most programs have indeed resisted retrenchment, U.S. social policy has also offered increasingly incomplete risk protection in an era of dramatic social change. Although some of this disjuncture is inadvertent—an unintended consequence of the very political stickiness that has stymied retrenchment—I argue that the declining scope of risk protection also reflects deliberate and theoretically explicable strategies of reform adopted by welfare state opponents in the face of popular and change-resistant policies, a finding that has significant implications for the study of institutional change more broadly.

Media Education: LIteracy, Learning and Contemporary Culture

Abstract: Preface and Acknowledgments. Part I: Rationales:. 1. Why Teach the Media?. 2. New Media Childhoods. 3. Media Literacies. Part II: The State of the Art:. 4. Defining the Field. 5. Classroom Strategies. 6. Locating Media Education. Part III: Media Learning:. 7. Becoming Critical. 8. Getting Creative. 9. Defining Pedagogy. Part IV: New Directions:. 10. Politics, Pleasure and Play. 11. Digital Literacies. 12. New Sites of Learning. References. Index

The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World

Abstract: PrefaceThe Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures 2001The Nation in Heterogeneous TimePopulations and Political SocietyThe Politics of the GovernedGlobal/Local: Before and After September 11The Great PeaceBattle HymnThe Contradictions of SecularismAre Indian Cities Becoming Bourgeois At Last?Bibliography

Ain't I A Woman? Revisiting Intersectionality

Abstract: In the context of the second Gulf war and US and the British occupation of Iraq, many ‘old’ debates about the category ‘woman’ have assumed a new critical urgency. This paper revisits debates on intersectionality in order to show that they can shed new light on how we might approach some current issues. It first discusses the 19 th century contestations among feminists involved in anti-slavery struggles and campaigns for women’s suffrage. The second part of the paper uses autobiography and empirical studies to demonstrate that social class (and its intersections with gender and ‘race’ or sexuality) are simultaneously subjective, structural and about social positioning and everyday practices. It argues that studying these intersections allows a more complex and dynamic understanding than a focus on social class alone. The conclusion to the paper considers the potential contributions to intersectional analysis of theoretical and political approaches such as those associated with poststructuralism, postcolonial feminist analysis, and diaspora studies.