Figures of history,foundations of law: Acéphale,Angelus Novus,and the Katechon

In this paper, I offer the reader a survey of three figures of history, namely, Bataille's Acéphale, Benjamin's Angelus Novus, and Schmitt's Katechon. My approach will not be to provide an exhaustive exegetical account. Instead I focus on the primary texts and provide the reader with comparative sketches. This is important because each of these figures respond to the crisis of authority in the 1930s. Each of them uses the concept of the moment or now as a way of questioning law, and legitimate authority. My aim is to explore the similarities and differences that relate them.     

Yellow River, Cradle of China

THE Yellow River is the Mother River of China. In the hearts of the Chinese people, it is not just an ancient river measuring 4,845 kilometers long that passes through nine provinces and regions, but also a symbol. The poets say that the waterway is the image of ancient China. Thephilosophers say the river is the shadow of a dragon. The river     

Problems of Taxonomy,Issues of Class,Citizenship, Consumption,and Avdot’ia Smirnova’s KoKoKo (2012)

Sundry discussions of Russian society by scholars, journalists, and politicians suffer from imprecise taxonomy, wielding labels such as middle class, civil society, and creative class in an automatic transfer of discursive categories long defining Western societies to one at increasing odds with numerous Western values. As various surveys by Russian sociologists have indicated, a ‘middle class’ and ‘civil society’ in the traditional sense do not exist in Russia. Moreover, even ‘the intelligentsia’, as historically defined, seems to have diminished, evaporated, or emigrated. Indeed, the incisive portrayal of contemporary Russian class distinctions in Avdot’ia Smirnova’s film KoKoKo (2012) exposes the impotence of the self-serving intelligentsia, contrasted to the vitality and drive of ‘the people’, who may be the only hope for Russia’s future – neither the radiant future fantasized by the Soviet Union nor the democratic future that seemed possible after perestroika, but one that meaningful resistance to the authoritarianism of Putin’s regime will need to elaborate step by painstaking step.     

The Feeble Strength of One? Interdependence, Strategic Interaction, and the Decentralization of Collective Bargaining

This paper contributes to research examining class formation processes among capitalists by analyzing the fracturing of multiemployer collective bargaining associations in the U.S. coal mining and steel industries. The paper evaluates three theories of bargaining decentralization and offers an alternative account. Analyzing both the earlier stability of multiemployer bargaining and its subsequent decline, the paper attributes decentralization to changes in relationships of interdependence and power among unionized firms. While broad processes of economic restructuring gave rise to these shifts, social processes involving conflict and negotiation determined the specific direction of institutional change.

Hubei,the Cradle of Chu Culture

HUBEI Province is also known as Chu, because from the eleventh to third century B.C., the State of Chu rose, developed and fell here. Hubei is situated in central China and covered with some thousand lakes, since the Yangtze and Hanshui Rivers join here. It has an area of 186,000 square kilometers and a population of 54.39 million. Hubei has good soil,     

Huizhou, the East Gate of Guangdong

HUIZHOU has a brilliant past. Ever since the famous Song Dynasty poet Su Dongpo (1037-1101) was banished to the city by the imperial court, Huizhou has had a certain measure of fame. Life in exile didn't make Su gloomy. Instead, he found inspiration in the mountains, the lakes, the rivers and the sea. He wrote many poems which said things like: "Savor three hundred lichees every day/How nice it is to live in the south!" Although Su Dongpo stayed in     

Psychotherapists’ Stereotypes of Heterosexual,Gay, and Bisexual Men

This study investigated stereotypes of heterosexual, gay, and bisexual men in a sample of 112 psychotherapists. Stereotypes were assessed with an open-ended measure asking participants to list characteristics that they associated with one of the three groups of men. Thematic analysis of these characteristics yielded 14 stereotype categories, including categories that reflected psychosocial difficulties (e.g., Depressed and Anxious), gender roles (e.g., Female Gender Role Attributes), and personality (e.g., Open-Minded). Sexual orientation differences were found for 8 of the 14 categories. For example, therapists were most likely to associate open-mindedness with bisexual men, traditional male gender role attributes with heterosexual men, and intelligence with gay men. Implications of results for practice and training are discussed.     

Degyi Dolkar,Vice Mayor of Lhasa

LHASA, the capital city of Tibet Autonomous Region, is the political, economic and cultural center of Tibet. Degyi Dolkar, of Tibetan nationality, is a vice mayor there. Degyi was born and brought up on the Tibetan Plateau, the nearest place to the sun, with its pure blue sky and beautiful clouds. She deeply loves her hometown and takes pride in it. Degyi Dolkar is kind and happy. She was one of the first group of people to be selected by the Tibetan government to go inland to study after the Tibetan democratic reforms of 1959. Then she studied to be a medical practitioner at the Tibet Institute of     

Tang Liying, GM of Aili Corporation, Talks with WOC

AILI Tower is famous in Haikou, Hainan Province, because it was built when the real estate market was at its most depressed. The completion of the Western-style building not only added another edifice to the landscape of this once-isolated island, but served to bolster people's confidence and strengthen their resolve to build China's second largest island into a     

Sociology of “primitive societies,” evolutionism,and Africa

Sociology of primitive societies has revised its earlier views about kinship, lineage, or lineage mode of production. It attempts now to show that lineage did not pervade African precolonial societies and that other relations, such as capitalist and class relations, were also present. This article seeks to reestablish, contrary to the revisionist view, the centrality of lineage in African precolonial societies to allow for a paradigmatic shift that repudiates evolutionism and brings precolonial societies back to the center of the African debate. Because in such a reoriented debate Africa ceases to be marginalized and on the fringes of other historical experiences, the shift allows, paradoxically, the integration of scholarship on Africa into universal social theory.     

Inequality of opportunity in the land of opportunities, 1968–2001

We measure inequality of opportunity for earnings acquisition in the U.S. between 1968 and 2001. Following recent theories of social justice, earnings determinants are divided into two parts: Circumstances, which are characteristics outside individual control and effort representing factors impacting earnings but under individuals’ responsibility. Equality of opportunity requires that inequality of circumstances must be corrected while differences of effort must remain unaltered. Circumstances are represented by parental education and occupation, ethnic origin, place of birth and age. Effort is modeled with schooling choices and labour supply decisions. Using the PSID from 1968 to 2001, we provide two alternative assessments of inequality of opportunity using counterfactual distributions. The statistical framework is semi-parametric and builds on duration models. Finally, we conclude that inequality of opportunity represents between 20 and 43% of earnings inequality, but decreases all over the period reaching around 18% in 2001.     

Forward,Ever Forward: a reading of Robert Harris,Photographic Album of South African Scenery,Port Elizabeth,c.1880–1886

Early copies of the Photographic Album of South African Scenery that was published between c.1880 and c.1888 by Robert Harris in Port Elizabeth consisted of 28 double-card pages with two, occasionally one, tipped-in photographs per page. During the near-decade of its production, the number of images increased, printed captions replaced handwritten captions and both the selection and arrangement of images became gradually more coherent and programmatic. The paper interprets these changes as Robert Harris’s attempt to construct a public identity for South Africa at the moment its economy and society were being transformed by the diamond mines at Kimberley and elsewhere that constitute the focus of the later form of the form Album. In the developed form of the Album, a narrative progression is suggested to move from Cape Town and the Western Province, to Port Elizabeth and the Eastern Province, to the Kimberley Diamond Fields, Natal, etc. In order to read this journey critically, the paper is arranged to demonstrate the constituent parts of this journey in the representation of cities and towns, laid out in grid plans on the African veld; the depiction of individual buildings with their expressive vocabulary of architectural style; and the idea of commerce – represented in street scenes, markets and seaports – and the facilitation of commerce through roads, bridges and mountain passes. The disproportionately large number of photographs of Kimberley, with both its mining operations and no less than three commercial markets, underlines the significance of commerce and industry in the new South African identity. The emphasis on commercial achievement in the Album leaves an obviously subordinate role for images of nature in both agriculture and landscape. Farming is represented through such exploitative practices as forest clearing and hunting, rather than the developed forms of agriculture of wine farming, sheep farming and wheat farming. And landscape in the Album is either a landscape subdued to the wants and needs of a settler population that would bludgeon its way through mountain passes or divert the course of rivers to facilitate commerce, or a landscape that is defined by the imported aesthetic conventions of the picturesque and sublime. Similarly, grouping the photographs of indigenous peoples that are scattered throughout the Album, one may see that their representation is entirely instrumental, divided crudely into roles of either war-like barbarians or pliant labourers. In these ways, the Photographic Album may be understood as a true mirror of the colonial achievement.     

Has the future of marriage arrived? A contemporary examination of gender, marriage, and psychological well-being

A long tradition of research and theory on gender, marriage, and mental health suggests that marital status is more important to men's psychological well-being than women's while marital quality is more important to women's well-being than men's. These beliefs rest largely on a theoretical and empirical foundation established in the 1970s, but, despite changes in gender and family roles, they have rarely been questioned. The present analysis of three waves of a nationally representative survey indicates that, with few exceptions, the effects of marital status, marital transitions, and marital quality on psychological well-being are similar for men and women. Further, for men and women, occupying an unsatisfying marriage undermines psychological well-being to a similar extent--and, in some cases, to a greater extent--than exiting marriage or being continually unmarried.     

Ideology,Practice, and Process? A Review of the Concept of Managerialism in Civil Society Studies

Managerialism is today a frequently applied concept in studies of how ideas and practices related to corporate management are diffused in society. Some assert that managerialism even is what mostly affects the development of contemporary civil society organizations. It is, however, far from clear how the concept of managerialism is used and defined across interest fields. The main conclusion in the present review, involving 105 peer-reviewed articles in civil society studies published between 1990 and 2014, is that the concept of managerialism is so broadly defined that it runs the risk of losing its analytical powers. To avoid this, the paper argues for a more precise conceptual use and suggests that the concept of managerialism should be applied to denote an ideology, the concept of management to capture managerial practices, and the concept of managerialization to describe an organizational change process.     

Rituals of complicity,the ‘humanities’ rhetoric,and the closing of the South African mind

A mail survey undertaken in 1977 showed that a clear majority (64%) of final year students polled at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, answered in the affirmative to a question asking them whether they would permanently settle in a country other than South Africa. Almost all the respondents in the survey were desirous of change to the socio‐political structure of this country; in particular the Apartheid, pass laws, job reservation, educational and residential policies; although students expressing attitudes favourable to emigrating seemed to be slightly more concerned in this regard. Thus it appears that South Africa may lose many of those of its citizens who, if they remained, would be most likely to contribute to peaceful change.