Karl Lamprecht: Pioneer of Historical Sociology?

Abstract This contribution is an outline of the life, work and scientific impact of the Leipzig cultural historian Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915); Lamprecht's work was very controversial within German historiography at the turn of the century. He was accused of writing history from a materialist viewpoint. Anong his international contemporaries, however, Lamprecht was held in high esteem. There are divergent evaluations of the consequences of his methodological and substantive suggestions in the inter-war era, in the era of the Third Reich, and later in the two German states which emerged after 1945. The article tries to highlight some lines of continuity which point especially to the regional historiography and to the sociology of the 1920s and 1930s. From there a connection with the social historiography after 1945 may be made.     

Max Weinreich,assimilation and the social politics of Jewish nation-building

Through an analysis of the methodological and theoretical writings of Max Weinreich that were devoted to the inter-war Jewish youth research programme at the Jewish Scientific Institute (YIVO), this article discusses the ideological and political assumptions that lay behind this scientific project. Deconstructing the main research categories of the project, the author presents ways in which Weinreich and his associates constructed the Jewish nation and its place in the new inter-war political and social reality. This reality was seen in a complex manner, as a simultaneous chance for Jewish modernisation, upward mobility, productivisation, and as a response to the threat of modern state institutions that were introducing discriminatory policies, and, most importantly, assimilation. The last process was seen as the biggest danger, which could fragment and finally even dissolve the essentialist, secular and national model of Jewish community as envisioned by Max Weinreich and YIVO. The author shows how the essentialist vision of the nation omnipotent in inter-war Poland (among both Polish and Jewish communities) introduced unresolved tension between the need for social and cultural integration of the Jews, which was important for Weinreich and his circle, and the simultaneous aim of building a culturally and politically coherent Jewish nation. Further discussion shows how this kind of perception of social reality transformed a scientific research project into a kind of social intervention and nation-building programme, comparable to the ideologies of Jewish national secularist political parties. While presenting itself as a universal, national institution and addressing its call to all Jewish youth, YIVO promoted a particular political view of the Jewish nation and its tradition, history and religion. By engaging Jewish youth in a research programme devoted to its “personality,” one of the hidden aims of the project was to influence the political and social consciousness of Eastern Europe's Jewish youth.     

The Reproduction of Gender Inequality in Sweden: A Causal Mechanism Approach

In many respects, Sweden is maybe the country where public policies to increase the equality between men and women have been most prolonged and advanced. In 1996 the UN declared Sweden to be the most gender‐equal country in the world. However, women still take much more responsibility for children and domestic work than men do, leading to the reproduction of gender inequality in the labour market and in society at large. A causal mechanism is used to analyse this phenomenon, starting from the observation that men are on average three years older than women and thus already have a stronger position on the labour market when a heterosexual couple is formed. This increases the risk that the woman will lose the first negotiations on how to divide household and wage labour when they have children. This will in turn lead to increasing returns for the man, increasing the risk that she will lose subsequent negotiations about the division of labour. What seems to be a rational arrangement for both (increasing the total income for the family) results in the reproduction of gender inequality. The analysis shows that gender inequality in a country like Sweden is reproduced behind the backs of the agents.     

Editorial

In Belgium, as in most other Western countries, the inter-war years were a period that saw new ideas about housing being introduced among various sections of the population. Acting as intermediaries in communicating the housing ideas of architects and government to those being housed, were diverse social organizations. One of those organizations, the Katholiek Arbeidersvrouwen (KAV—Catholic Working-class Women) grew during those years to become one of the most influential of its kind, devoting itself to improving the lot of the working class by way of a multifaceted program of education for working-class women. A crucial theme in the KAV program from the early 1920s was workers' housing, which, towards the end of the 1930s, became the central plank of the organization's wider policy. At that time, indeed, the KAV was promoting a new type of domesticity in defense of the Catholic person and Catholic family life against the increasing herding of people into a mass society. The argument advanced by the KAV for this new form of domesticity interwove political ideas with views about hygiene, anti-materialism and gender.     

The Globalization of Care

The purpose of this article is to theorize a concept of global citizenship that challenges feminized neo-colonialism. Migrant Filipina domestic workers are creating such a notion out of their experiences and struggles at a number of interconnected levels. We demonstrate the value of a relational approach to rights by showing how Kant’s right to hospitality is transformed as it is actualized within the context of feminized neo-colonial relations of care. We show how Kant’s right to hospitality can frame world citizenship as an anti-colonialist practice and how feminized neo-colonial relations of care in turn reshape this right and the practice of world citizenship. Our overall argument is that in order to dismantle feminized neo-colonial relations of care, world citizenship must be embedded in a multi-layered notion of citizenship.

Our argument differs from Kant’s notion of citizenship because his notion is genderbiased, since servants and women have world citizenship, but are excluded from state citizenship. Our aim is not merely to add women to state citizenship, but to show how the incorporation of migrant domestic workers requires a different multi-layered notion of citizenship that reaches from the household to the global. The case of migrant domestic workers illustrates how the pressing of rights brings paid care

workers and inevitably the issue of care into public discourse and policy. Migrant workers show how the global interdependence of care, because it is negotiated by states, is ripe for a feminist global politics of care.     

The origins and consequences of public trust in government: a time series analysis

The study of citizens' trust in the national government has been primarily individual-level, cross-sectional analysis. In the current research, we develop a quarterly time series measure of trust in the U.S. national government from 1980 to 1997 and conduct the first multivariate time series examination of public trust in government. We find that negative perceptions of the economy, scandals associated with Congress, and increasing public concern about crime each lead to declining public trust in government. Declining trust in government in turn leads to less positive evaluations of Congress and reduced support for government action to address a range of domestic policy concerns. These results provide new evidence of the influence of public concern about crime and the centrality of Congress in understanding public evaluations of the national government and new evidence of how declining levels of trust in government may influence elections and domestic policy making.     

Russia and the Kyoto Protocol: The Long Road to Ratification

The Russian Federation played a crucial role in the Kyoto Protocol's ratification. Indeed, after the United States withdrawal, its ratification turned out to be indispensable for the Protocol to become legally binding. In early 2002, Russia decided to initiate the ratification process. However, the country long hesitated to fulfil its promises, and for the last two years it sent numerous contradictory signals with respect to its position on climate policy. Consequently, the factors that shape Russia's behaviour in the context of climate negotiations have received increasing attention. The main focus has been on the economic and international aspects motivating the Russian strategy. This paper attempts to complete this analysis by concentrating on a further feature that significantly contributed to Russia's final decision, namely, domestic forces. These factors have often been overlooked in the discussion of the Russian strategy. In order to fill this gap, this paper reconstructs the Russian ratification process, trying to identify the main domestic players and their role.     

The interrupted chain: traditional receiver countries,migration regimes,and the East European Jewish diaspora, 1918–39

This article focuses primarily on countries that had been, prior to 1914, among the most favored destinations for East European Jewish migrants: chiefly the United States, Canada, Palestine, Brazil and Argentina. In the inter-war years, these ceased to be the only ports of final entry for Jewish migrants. However, despite restrictive migration regimes and unfavorable economic conditions, traditional receiver countries continued to absorb the largest share of such migrants (the U. S. and Palestine, between them, accounting for over 800,000). Jewish migration to countries other than the United States peaked around 1933; was just about equal to the U. S.-bound migrant stream by 1938; and fell off in 1939–1940. The Jewish case raises several theoretical and methodological issues, including the definition of migrant motivation as well as the framing of immigration policy as products of mixed factors – both political and economic.     

‘Come to Corby’: A Scottish Steel Town in the Heart of England

Cross-border migration to England is a long-established feature of the Scottish diaspora. In the twentieth century, that phenomenon was demonstrated most visibly and persistently in the Northamptonshire steel-making centre of Corby, which from the 1930s to the 1960s was transformed from an English village into an outpost of Scotland in the heart of the Midlands. The migration, which helped to reconfigure the industrial landscape of inter-war and post-war Britain, offers an insight into the social, economic and cultural repercussions of large-scale relocation within both the donor and host communities. The article explores the causes, immediate consequences and long-term legacies of Corby's Scottish influx.     

The Impact of Europeanization upon Party Systems in Slovakia and Romania

Usually the concept of Europeanization refers to processes that download the European Union (the EU) regulations and institutional structures to the domestic level. Moreover, in the last few years the specialized literature has become increasingly preoccupied by the development of national patterns of government through the impact of European policies, processes and institutions. The developments and changes in domestic systems—much more visible in the new member states—suggest that the EU has enormous political and institutional influence. In line with this view, the paper examines the different degrees in which Europeanization has become a transforming political process, particularly in two new post-Communist democracies: Slovakia and Romania. More specifically, the interest is to survey the impact and the way in which Europeanization was incorporated in the rationale of party discourse, identity and policies in the Central-Eastern countries in the pre-accession period.      

Relations Among Intimate Partner Violence,Maternal Depressive Symptoms,and Maternal Parenting Behaviors

The authors examined the relations among intimate partner violence (IPV), maternal depressive symptoms, and maternal harsh intrusive parenting. Using a cross‐lagged, autoregressive path model, they sought to clarify the directionality of the relations among these 3 variables over the first 2 years of the child's life. The results indicated that, in this diverse sample of families living in predominantly low‐income rural communities (N = 705), higher levels of early IPV were associated with increases in maternal depressive symptoms, which in turn were associated with increases in maternal harsh intrusive parenting behaviors. These findings suggest that interventions aimed at improving the parenting of women exposed to domestic violence may want to simultaneously target IPV and depressive symptomatology.     

The Need for a Decaying Past: An Archaeology of Oblivion in Contemporary Galicia (NW Spain)

Abstract

This article uncovers the fierce inter-war debate provoked by the British Government’s decision to remove state subsidies for building larger “parlour-type” houses in 1923. Examining the various defences that were put forward in support of the working-class parlour it argues that the parlour was seen as a key marker of respectability in working-class communities with the potential to shape the behaviours and outlook of its inhabitants. Drawing on a variety of contemporary and autobiographical sources it suggests that the occasional use of the parlour, a keystone of its opponents’ criticisms was precisely what gave most value to the room for its owners. Recent controversy over the bedroom tax in Britain suggests that “extra” space remains a contentious issue in subsidised homes today.     

FOREIGN TRADE AND DOMESTIC COMPETITION

This paper contains estimates of the determinants of the commodity composition of U. S. trade flows and of price-cost margins in U. S. domestic manufacturing in a simultaneous context. Above-competitive profits in U. S. manufacturing appear to provide a powerful incentive to import competition. These imports, in turn, provide a check on the ability of domestic firms to earn monopoly rents. The estimates indicate that failure to account for imports leads to a substantial underestimation of the impact of market structure on price-cost margins. The linkages between exports and domestic market conditions appear to be of second-order importance.     

Housework,Housewives, and Domestic Workers

ABSTRACT

This article sets established historical narratives of a mid-twentieth-century turn to privacy, new domestic identities, and new ways of thinking about housework into a broader history of domestic service. I argue that the new forms of domesticity were only ever partially and unevenly established in middle-class households. Domestic service emerges as a tenacious institution, which continued to be influential in the organization of middle-class or privileged homes throughout the mid- to late twentieth century. Middle-class women were exhorted to manage their homes without servants, and were offered the consolation of greater privacy and intimacy within their homes, as well as the dignity and emotional rewards of a housewife identity. But few found that this made the prospect of being “servantless” attractive. I will therefore examine the failures of the “servantless” home and the “strange survival” of domestic service in twentieth-century Britain.     

Wealth and inheritance in Britain from 1896 to the present

Personal wealth has grown since the 1970s twice as fast in real terms as national income. Has this rise in the wealth-income ratio led to a corresponding increase in the wealth being passed on from one generation to the next? Are we returning to the levels of inheritance found in the 19th century? The aim of this paper is to construct UK evidence on the extent of the transmission of wealth in the form of estates and gifts inter vivos. It takes a long-run view of inheritance, starting from 1896, when the modern Estate Duty was introduced, and exploits the extensive estate data published over the years. Construction of a long-run time series for more than a century is challenging, and there are important limitations. The resulting time-series demonstrates the major importance of inheritance in the UK before the First World War, when the total transmitted wealth represented some 20 per cent of net national income. In the inter-war period, the total was around 15 per cent, falling to some 10 per cent after the Second World War, and then falling further to below 5 per cent in the late 1970s. Since then, there has indeed been an upturn: a rise from 4.8 per cent in 1977 to 8.2 per cent in 2006. This increase was more or less in line with the increase in personal wealth, and has to be interpreted in the light of the changing net worth of the corporate and public sectors of the economy.     

Gendering (Trans)National Advocacy

Whether lauded or deplored, transnational organizing among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) generally, and women's NGOs specifically, is recognized as an active player in debates about international economic policy. In this article, I turn attention toward one consequence of women's transnational NGO organizing that has been under-analyzed: the impact that transnational activism has on domestic political organizations and opportunities. The recent increase in activism on gender and policies of free trade in the USA is the product of women's transnational political organizingover the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the case of NAFTA, theoretical insights about the ways that gendered categories undergird the economy were made visible by and through the transnational advocacy in which feminists engaged.And, this article indicates, these transnational advocacy efforts have helped to shift the domestic political terrain of women's organizing in the United States. I argue that as women's rights advocates in the United States were confronted with the realization that the nexus between gender and trade policy was important to many women's rights and feminist activists around the world, they began to question why the gendered implication of trade policy did not hold a comparable place in the US feminist arena. Thus, changes in the domestic political landscape of non-governmentalactivismmay be one of the longest lasting (and most overlooked) consequences of transnational political engagement.     

The Venezuelan Government and the Global Field: The Legislative Battle over Foreign Funding for Nongovernmental Organizations

In recent years, several governments have targeted nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) by enacting legislation that prohibits foreign funding for them. This article uses diplomatic cables, newspaper articles, and interviews with representatives from NGOs and donors to explain the Venezuelan government's passage of legislation prohibiting foreign funding for political NGOs in 2010. Existent political, sociological, and globalization‐oriented theories fail to explain the passage and timing of this legislation. Instead, I utilize and extend global fields theory to examine the Venezuelan government's redirection of its foreign relations, which I argue generated the political opportunity for the government to pass this legislation. I show that the government initially remained keyed into a global subfield involving groups that successfully pressured it to reconsider a more radical form of legislation prohibiting direct foreign funding for all NGOs when it came up for discussion in 2006, including the U.S. and Western European governments, and domestic NGOs. By 2010, however, the government had become embedded within a global subfield involving authoritarian and anti‐imperial governments that had already passed similar legislation, and domestic community councils. These newfound relations insulated the government from reconsideration and allowed it the political opportunity to pass a new, less radical piece of legislation.     

‘Give us Asylum and Help us Leave the Country!’ Kurdish Asylum Seekers in Greece and the Politics of Reception

This essay examines the ways in which the social organization of migration interacts with domestic structures in the reception country. Taking the case of Greece, the current reception policy encourages temporary migrant settlement, while the socio-economic structures and cultural familiarity with the host society support individual integration in the society and the informal economy, but discourage migrant community representation. In addition, the political environment has supported Kurdish diaspora politics that, in turn, enhanced existing fragmentation within the ethnic group. The aim of this essay is to highlight the dimensions affecting temporary and permanent migrant settlement in Greece through empirical findings.     

The use and abuse of female domestic workers from Sri Lanka in Lebanon

Women who migrate from Sri Lanka to become domestic workers in Lebanon face gender, class, and race discrimination that often results in abuse, yet the predicament of these women is largely ignored by local and international humanitarian and human rights agencies. Public consciousness about the plight of Asian domestic workers in the Persian Gulf region was raised in 1990 when domestic workers were repatriated in the wake of the Gulf War. In Lebanon, nearly half of the work permits granted to foreigners in 1997 were to women from Sri Lanka. This migration began in the 1970s and is sanctioned by the Sri Lanka government because of the economic benefits accruing from wages sent home by these women. Lebanese families procure domestic positions through an employment agency that arranges transportation and entry for the Sri Lankan women. These women, especially minors, often have to bribe Sri Lankan government agents to falsify travel documents. Upon arrival in Lebanon, the women have no support systems or job security. Most employment contracts last 3 years and pay $100/month with no benefits or protection from local labor laws. Domestic workers are made vulnerable by employers who withhold salaries or travel documents. Upon return to Sri Lanka, former domestic workers face social disapproval and marital problems. To redress this situation, the governments of sending and receiving countries must take action to protect female migrant workers, and nongovernmental organizations must publicize the plight of these women and take action to address the abuses they face.     

Therapeutic Responses to Domestic Violence in Australia: A History of Controversies

This paper reviews controversies about domestic violence occurring in heterosexual relationships discussed in the Australian context by practitioners and academics and published in the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy over the past three decades. Controversies arose in relation to the provision of therapeutic interventions for domestic violence, primarily in individual and couple counselling and group programs. After a literature review, the following controversial issues are identified: (1) the role of patriarchy: Is a patriarchal culture the main cause of domestic violence? (2) Systemic family therapy and gendered violence: Does systemic family therapy hide men's responsibility for domestic violence? (3) Therapeutic and educational interventions for domestic violence: Does therapy turn a ‘crime’ into a ‘psychological problem’? (4) Men as victims: Do both men and women perpetrate domestic violence in equal measure? (5) It takes two to tango: What part do women play in eliciting men's violence?