Houellebecq,or, the Carnival of Spite

Despite their significance in social reality and in fiction, ressentiment and especially spite are surprisingly under‐researched topics. As the repressed other of the contemporary post‐political society, they often combine political impotence and enjoyment in passivity, two experiences that are closely related to the increasing transformation of the “city” into the state of nature, of politics to bio‐politics (or post‐politics) and of the “social” into the simulacra (the society of spectacle). The article discusses ressentiment and spite in Houellebecq's fiction, by taking point of departure in the way he depicts the contemporary society, combining this with a discussion of his artistic position and the affective economy of ressentiment and spite in his work. Finally it asks whether it is possible to imagine a sociality, a “city,” without spite.     

Toward a Sociology of Nature

Although we often believe that nature stands apart from social life, our experience of nature is profoundly social. This paper unpacks this paradox in order to (1) explain sociology's neglect of the environment and (2) introduce the articles in this special issue on “the sociology of nature.” I argue that sociology's disinterest in the biophysical world is a legacy of its classical concern with tracing society's “Great Transformation” from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft: while early anthropologists studied “primitive” societies that allegedly had not yet completed “the passage from nature to culture” (Lévi‐Strauss 1963 : 99), pioneering sociologists presumed that industrialization and urbanization liberated “modern” society from nature and therefore focused their attention on “urbanism as a way of life” (Wirth 1938 ). As exemplified by the articles in this symposium, environmental sociology critiques the nature‐culture and town‐country dualisms. One of environmental sociology's core contributions has been demonstrating that nature is just as much a social construction as race or gender; however, its more profound challenge to the discipline lies in its refutation of the sociological axiom that social facts can be explained purely through reference to other social facts. “Environmental facts” are a constitutive feature of social life, not merely an effect of it.     

The myth of the “data‐driven” society: Exploring the interactions of data interfaces,circulations, and abstractions

The prominence of data and data technologies in society, such as algorithms, social media, mobile technology, and artificial intelligence, have heralded numerous claims of the revolutionary potential of these systems. From public policy, to business management, to scientific research, a “data‐driven” society is apparently imminent—or currently happening—where “objective” and asocial data systems are believed to be comprehensively improving human life. Through a review of existing sociological literature, in this article, we critically examine the relationship between data and society and propose a new model for understanding these dynamics. “Using the concept of the informatic,” we argue the relationship between data and society can be understood as representing the interaction of several different social trends around data; that of data interfaces (that connect individuals to digital contexts), data circulation (trends in the movement and storage of data), and data abstraction (data manipulation practices). Data and data technologies are founded to be entwined and embedded in numerous social relationships, and while not all are fair and equitable relationships, there is ample evidence of the deeply social nature of data across many streams of social life. Our three‐part informatic framework allows these complex relationships to be understood in the social dynamic through which they are witnessed and experienced.     

Producing the natural: Mobilities and the managed aesthetics of nature

Nature can be a nebulous, often contradictory concept that holds immense cultural and emotional weight for many. Philosophers and social scientists have frequently dissected its meaning and shared significance, especially with respect to environmental issues. This paper analyzes nature as experienced and understood in everyday life in Western society, arguing that the most salient, intuitive mode of understanding the concept is a visual–pictorial one. It further argues that nature is expressed through emplaced aesthetics managed and produced through various forms of “mobility,” or socially produced movement, as theorized by the writers of the “new mobilities paradigm.” The paper considers two general contexts for this process: the production of aesthetic nature in urban settings and in extra‐urban landscapes. Furthermore, it argues that these aesthetic expressions have a great influence on the epistemology guiding popular sensibilities around our broader relationships to the nonhuman world and on the moral logic of much Western environmentalism.     

Interpretative Freedom and New Combination: The Way in Which the “Middle Class” Has Been Narrated

The English words “middle class” have experienced much more connotations and denotations—typically “bourgeoisie,” “white‐collar,” and professional—than any other class‐referring word since the latter half of the 18th century. On the one hand, in response to such diverse narrations during about two and a half centuries, I partially agree with some of the nominalistic theories of class, in that the middle classes were not created until they were named by contemporaries. On the other hand, my view diverges from those theories, in my asserting that the contemporaries have had an interpretative freedom to recognize “middle classes” only within the bounds of plausibility on the side of the realistic social world. The typical middle class in each period has emerged in such a way that Schumpeter's new combination is performed in a stage of recession by new entrepreneurs, who will move into the “middle” strata and hold some cultural leadership but still obtain inconsistent statuses, to be recognized as “middle class”ex post facto in a boom time. Two Kondratieff's cycles have had one recognition of the typical “middle class.” The new combination is one of the pressures bringing middle classes into a modern society, contrary to the so‐called class decomposition into the two poles.     

Framing the Fat Body: Contested Meanings between Government,Activists, and Industry*

Sociologists have long recognized that social problems do not derive solely from objective conditions but from a process of collective definition. At the core of some social issues are framing competitions, struggles over the production of ideas and meanings. This article examines competing cultural meanings about the fat body. Through frame analysis of organizational materials, I map the contested field of obesity and document three cultural frames—medical frame, social justice frame, and market choice frame—as represented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), and the food industry group the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), respectively. Using the “framing matrix,” I explore each frame's key signature elements and discuss its social and cultural significance. Notably, each frame leads to different outcomes for social equality and how society thinks about fat bodies, health, and public policy.     

The White City: Race and Urban Politics

Urban regime analysis and growth machine theory offer critical tools to study power and inequality in cities. However, the field of urban politics has moved away from critically addressing race. I discuss these theories' potential contributions before suggesting scholars “bring race back” to urban politics in several key areas: studying “White urban regimes” in addition to Black urban regimes; examining how Whiteness factors into growth (and anti‐growth) coalitions; exploring how racial discourse shapes urban regimes; and accounting for the relationship between suburbs and “fringe cities” and the city, including suburban regimes.     

Race,poverty, and markets: urban inequality after the neoliberal turn

Classic scholarship on the problem of urban inequality tends to highlight the absence of “the market” and the correspondingly problematic and inadequate role of the state in poor communities. This article explores how the relationship between markets and urban poverty has shifted in recent decades. Scholars have become increasingly attentive to the growing influence of market logics and privatization—core features of “neoliberal” change—in areas such as housing, education, federal policy, local politics, employment, and social services. I discuss how this recent work adds to our understanding of how markets shape urban disadvantage. I also argue that—given the rising influence of market logics in city governance—urban scholarship stands to benefit from a deeper engagement with insights from the field of economic sociology. Building bridges between the two subfields, I argue, will help to specify what markets mean in the lives of the urban poor, and also can bring issues of race and poverty to the attention of economic sociologists.     

Toward A Renewed Sociological Jurisprudence: From Roscoe Pound to Herbert Blumer and Beyond

This article, based on the Distinguished Lecture presented on August 21, 2001, at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Anaheim, California, proposes a synthesis of Herbert Blumer's macrosociological perspective on the race question with Roscoe Pound's philosophy and science of law (i.e., his so‐called sociological jurisprudence), Joseph Tussman's and Jacobus tenBroek's juridical methodology, and Philip Selznick's sociology of responsive law. The compound so produced will help to establish a foundation for a praxiological sociology of American constitutional law. The article focuses on the problem of legislative‐made “classifications” and their relations to the legitimate public purposes entailed in the enactment of statutes, laws, and decrees. Such classifications become problematic when they are said to be “underinclusive,” “over‐inclusive,” or both in seeking to effect their aims. Strategic research sites for this issue are racial and ethnic classifications that single out one or a limited cluster of racial or ethnic groups for special benefits (“affirmative action”) or restitution (“reparations”). Calling for a reinvigoration of Pound's pragmatic approach to sociological jurisprudence, I show how Blumer's analysis of the “color line”—when seen in relation to the original intent of the makers of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth post‐Civil War Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and, using Tussman's and tenBroek's showing of how such categorizations might be both methodically evaluated and applied to the challenged classifications—provides grounds for reconsidering whether the latter are instances of “reverse discrimination” and, hence, violations of the constitutional requirement of “equal protection of the law.” The science of law is a science of social engineering having to do with that part of the whole field which may be achieved by the ordering of human relations through the action of politically organized society. —Roscoe Pound, Justice According to Law We did not hold it necessary to wait for nature to put a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, and we shall not much longer hold it necessary to wait for nature to dig the legal canals that will give security to neglected human interests which clamor for recognition and protection. —Roscoe Pound, “Juristic Problems of National Progress”     

AMERICAN POVERTY CAUSE BELIEFS AND STRUCTURED INEQUALITY LEGITIMATION

Poverty cause attribution research has sporadically explored social stratification beliefs for over three decades with mixed results. Explanations given for why there are poor people in America may reveal much about underlying structured inequality legitimating mechanisms. Using multiple regression, one-way ANOVA, and frequency distribution analyses, I uncover a conservative-liberal continuum underlying American poverty cause attributions. Past explanations for the mostly mixed nature of American attributions toward poverty are questioned. I suggest a more simple and straightforward explanation: mixed attribution styles, situated on a conservative-liberal continuum, may arise from American's distinguishing between at least two groups of poor people—“deserving” and “undeserving”—suggesting policy and future research agendas.     

Amazonian Native Youths and Notions of Indigeneity in Urban Areas

The indigenous presence in urban areas of Amazonia has become more visible as Indian populations have negotiated their own spaces and acted in new contexts previously reserved for the dominant society. This article looks at ways in which today's young Indians in an urban area define and interpret their new cultural and social situations, drawing from research conducted with Apurinã, Cashinahua and Manchineri youths in Rio Branco, a city in Acre state, Western Brazil. These young people occupy a variety of “native” and “non-native” habituses and develop their notions of indigeneity within complex social networks as part of their strategy for rupturing the otherness associated with indigeneity. The text contributes to the discussion on the theory of practice and identity politics, as well as embodiment. Young Indians in urban Amazonia constitute their agencies in multiple ways and use various embodiments based in the practices and knowledge of their native groups and those of urban national and global society. The young natives break with the image of Lowland South American Indians as peoples uncontaminated by urban influences and help promote new interactions between native populations in the reserve and the city.     

Political Position and Social Knowledge1

The nature of social cognition—how we “know about” the social world—is one of the most deceptively obvious problems for sociology. Because we know what we know, we often think that we know how or why we know it. Here, we investigate one particular aspect of social cognition, namely, what we will call “political ideology”—that is, people’s self‐placement on a dimension on which persons can be arrayed from left to right. We focus on that understanding that is in some ways the “ur‐form” of social cognition—our sense of how we stand by others in an implicit social formation whose meaning is totally relational. At the same time, these self‐conceptions seem to be of the greatest importance for the development of the polity and of civil society itself. Our question is, when citizens develop such a “political ideology,” what does this mean, and what do they do with it? We examine what citizens gain from their subjective placement on the dimension from liberalism to conservatism by using the results of a survey experiment that alters aspects of a hypothetical policy.     

How manufacturing industries connect cities across the world: extending research on ‘multiple globalizations’

In this article, I concentrate on a macro‐level analysis of inter‐urban linkages in a ‘world city network’. Empirical research on the formation of a world city network has mostly concentrated on global service providers. Yet, globally operating manufacturing firms also choose distinct urban regions throughout the world as locational anchoring points. In this article, using social network analysis, I present the first global‐scale analysis of how manufacturing firms connected cities across the world (in 2010). To detect the differing ‘sectoral profiles’ and nodal centralities of cities functioning as geographical hubs of transnational production networks, it is necessary to analyse the network structure of distinct industrial subsectors within the global urban system. The data collected for analysis cover 120 top global firms from three manufacturing subsectors, of which two are analysed in more detail than the third. I then compare the nodal centralities of cities included in these subsectors' global networks with the GaWC research on the producer services sector that has been at the centre of previous analyses of the world city network. The comparison reveals the cities' differing positioning within ‘multiple globalizations’. The aim of the article is to extend research on world city networks.     

Max weber's vision of economic sociology

Max Weber's economic sociology is usually associated with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905), but in this paper I show that what Weber himself called his “Wirtschaftssoziologie”, or economic sociology, looked quite different and was something that he developed during the last year of his life, 1919–1920. I present and outline Weber's (later) economic sociology and pay particular attention to his ideas of “economic (social) action” and of the three different forms of capitalism (rational capitalism, political capitalism and traditional capitalism). I also show that to Weber, economic sociology was part of a more general science of economics that he often referred to as “social economics” (“Sozialökonomik”). The paper ends with a comparison between the paradigm of economic sociology, which can be found in the work of Max Weber, and the paradigm of what is known as New Economic Sociology.     

Things Still To Be Done on the Still‐Face Effect

Adamson and Frick (2003/this issue) have written a fine and challenging review of the research on the still‐face. Of special value is their placement of the face‐to‐face still‐face (FFSF) paradigm in a historical framework, which permits us to see how much about the still‐face effect and infant functioning we have learned in the past 30 years. Their review led me to think about several issues. First was the issue of whether or not to standardize the FFSF paradigm. Second, Adamson and Frick argue the still‐face put the “infant's reaction in a new interpretive frame,” but it is a reaction that still challenges our “understanding of young infants' social, emotional, and cognitive capacities.” Thus, I would like to discuss explanations of the still‐face effect. Last, I discuss some suggestions for further research. For an elaborated version of this article, additional archival material is located at http:www.infancyarchives.com .     

Effects of biodiversity and environment-related attitude on perception of urban green space

Green space in cities contributes to the quality of life for city dwellers, e.g., by increasing the opportunity for recreation. However, perception of urban green space is influenced by multiple factors. We investigated effects of biodiversity and environment-related attitudes on visual and auditory perceptions of urban green space. Field measurements of biodiversity were conducted in six sites across an urban gradient in Gothenburg, Sweden, and three categories of biodiversity—high, medium, low—were established. Households were sent a survey on aesthetic perception of urban green space, sound perception and the importance of trees and plants for the perception of bird species. Each respondent focused on the site that was located nearby. The environment-related attitudes comprised “Nature-oriented” and “Urban-oriented” persons and were based on participants’ own attitude estimations. It was shown that participants’ “subjective” aesthetic and sound-related perception of urban greenery were in line with the “objectively” measured subdivisions of high, medium and low biodiversity. So also were their estimations of the importance of trees and plants for perception of bird species in urban greenery, although differing only between high and medium/low biodiversity conditions. Persons rating themselves as highly nature-oriented were shown to give higher scores to urban green space aesthetics and to value greenery-related sounds higher, and to attach greater importance to trees and plants in their perception of bird species in urban greenery, than less nature-oriented persons. Highly urban-oriented persons compared to less urban-oriented persons did the same, but only regarding urban greenery-related aesthetics and sounds of nature. We conclude that environment-related attitudes influence perceptions of green space. Moreover, our findings support the idea that biodiversity per se also influences perceptions; people value green space significantly more with high than with low measured biodiversity. Urban planning needs to provide city inhabitants with green spaces that are species-rich, lush, varied and rich with natural sounds.     

Demolition for Development: A Critical Analysis of Official Urban Imaginaries in Past and Present UK Cities

This article analyses official urban imaginaries of “demolition for development” in two different UK cities and time periods: 1) the City Improvement Scheme in Birmingham (1875–1914) during a time of rapid industrial growth, and 2) a housing‐led neighbourhood regeneration scheme in Walker, Newcastle upon Tyne (2000–2011) during a time of post‐industrial uncertainty. The concept of the “official urban imaginary” is employed to critically examine assumptions of growth, progress and success within “demolition for development” policies across different times and places. Drawing on both historical and sociological qualitative case study methods, this research contributes to a range of debates on urban regeneration, gentrification, creative destruction, comparative methodology, and imagining the city. The article argues that there is a serious need to rethink urban policy trajectories of property‐led regeneration and “planned gentrification”, particularly in the post‐2008 context of recession.     

Environmental Degradation,Disproportionality, and the Double Diversion: Reaching Out,Reaching Ahead,and Reaching Beyond

Abstract Rather than seeking ivory‐tower isolation, members of the Rural Sociological Society have always been distinguished by a willingness to work with specialists from a broad range of disciplines, and to work on some of the world's most challenging problems. What is less commonly recognized is that the willingness to reach beyond disciplinary boundaries can contribute not just to the solution of real‐world problems, but also to the advancement of the discipline itself. This point is increasingly being illustrated in studies of environment‐society relationships. Most past discussions of humans' roles in environmental problems have focused on overall or average human impacts, but rural sociologists have played leading roles in identifying what I have come to call “the double diversion.” First, rather than being well‐represented by averages, environmental damages are often characterized by high levels of disproportionality, with much or most of the harm being created by the diversion of environmental rights and resources to a surprisingly small fraction of the relevant social actors. The dispropor‐tionality appears to be made possible in part through the second diversion, namely distraction—the diversion of attention, largely through the taken‐for‐granted but generally erroneous assumption that the environmental harm “must” be for the benefit of us all. There are good reasons why rural sociologists would have been among the first to notice both of these “diversions”— and why they will give even greater attention to both in the future.