Sociology and Sisyphus: postcolonialism,anti-positivism,and modernist narrative in Patterson’s oeuvre

Theory and Society - This article argues that Orlando Patterson is a key contributor to postcolonial fiction and postcolonial theory as well as historical sociology and social theory, whose work...     

Editor’s Introduction: Semiotics and Sociology

This article provides a brief summary of the individual papers in the issue, indicating their logical and thematic connections as well as their relationship to Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics and Norbert Wiley’s model of ‘the semiotic self.’ The significance of the articles for the future development of sociology is also considered.     

Migrant women,place and identity in contemporary women’s writing

While recent scholarship on migration has reflected growing attention to gender and to the intersectionality of race, gender and sexuality, there has been little focus on women’s emotional and bodily responses to migration in the context of larger structures of sexism, racism and the legacies of colonialism. In this paper, I examine some literary portrayals of how migrant women’s relationships with specific places of origin and settlement, both steeped in structural relationships of unequal power and experienced on an immediate, psychological and bodily plane, are fundamental to migrant women’s changing sense of belonging and identity. Jamaica Kincaid in her novel Lucy, Tsitsi Dangarembga in her novel Nervous Conditions and Dionne Brand in the opening poems of her volume No Language is Neutral evoke some of the complex ways in which migration can affect women’s lives and identities, thus both complementing and critiquing some contemporary theorisations of migration and migrant identities.     

Victims,soldiers, peacemakers and caretakers: the neoliberal constitution of women in the EU’s security policy

Feminist scholars praise and criticize the UNSC Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security for its considerations of women and gender in conflicts. Poststructuralist feminists show how gender is constructed in the UN’s security policies and how these constructions reproduce gendered dichotomies between women and men and representations of women as victims, part of civil society and neoliberal subjects. Although the UNSC Resolutions 1325 and 1820 are implemented by the EU, there is no literature on how the EU is taking up the UN’s discourse. Scholars studying gender policies in and of the EU mainly analyze the (in)effectiveness of EU gender mainstreaming but rarely interrogate its discursive foundations. Using a governmentality perspective, I argue that on the one hand the EU produces a binary and stereotypical understanding of gender, and on the other hand constitutes women as neoliberal subjects responsible for their own well-being, ignoring broader structures of (gender) inequality and war and making gender equality solely an instrument to achieve more security and development.     

Mapping the City: Innovation and Continuity in the Chicago School of Sociology, 1920–1934

This paper examines the historical origins and theoretical underpinnings of the maps of the city of Chicago produced by sociologists at the University of Chicago between 1920 and 1934. I argue that the three mapping schemes produced in those years—the concentric zone map of The City (1925), the base map of 75 community areas and the census tract maps published in three volumes of Census Data of the City of Chicago (1920, 1930, 1934)—draw upon distinct historical antecedents and have distinct theoretical implications. The first scheme exhibits the strong influence of Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s location theory and maps produced by early Chicago city boosters, the second most clearly exhibits the influence of the Social Survey Movement and of pragmatist philosophy and the third, the influence of the financial and governmental interests of the organizations that made up the Chicago Census Committee. Literature on early urban sociology and mapping in Chicago has hitherto not adequately differentiated these three mapping schemes or problematized the implications of their differences for our understanding of the theoretical commitments of the “Chicago School.”     

Financialization,resistance, and the question of women’s land rights

The financialization of food and agricultural land has been a critical driver of the “land-grabbing” phenomenon in the post 2007–2008 period: the potential for land to be both a productive and financial asset has driven interest in long-term land rentals and sales. Scholars and activists have highlighted the negative effects of these trends for rural populations. International institutions have promoted the recognition of land rights as a means to secure land from seizure, ensure equal participation in land acquisitions, and enable low-income populations, including women, to access credit. At the same time, activists are promoting collective land rights, customary modes of land tenure and the rights of Indigenous peoples. For activists, land reform models that promote the collective rights of peoples to govern land are critical to resisting individualized land ownership models that encourage the alienation of land. This article reviews these rights-based frameworks using a critical feminist perspective and argues that both the institutionalist and activist approaches require more nuanced understandings of gender and difference in order to effect gender-equitable change. This article concludes by mapping new feminist research directions that consider land and resources within the context of local–global processes, the global economy, intersectionality and global rights-based discourses.     

Rurality and Income Inequality in the United States, 1975–2015

Recent events have focused attention on the perceived widening of the economic divide between urban and rural areas, and on the continued rise of national income inequality. We demonstrate that, in fact, the average income gap between urban (metropolitan) and rural (nonmetropolitan) households has not risen over the past 40 years, and makes virtually no contribution to national income inequality. Rising national inequality is driven by rising inequality within both urban and rural America, not by an urban/rural divergence. As is well known, the growing dispersion of household money income is partly driven by rising wage inequality, particularly in urban areas. Less well recognized is the role played by other income sources. We show that a decline in the progressivity of the distribution of social security payments and cash transfers, and an increase in the regressivity of the distribution of retirement incomes, have jointly made a comparably large contribution to rising income inequality. At the same time, the share of income from self-employment has declined, particularly in rural America, and because self-employment income is very unequally distributed, its diminution has retarded the growth of rural inequality. In 2014–15, however, rural inequality increased, cutting the urban/rural inequality gap in half.     

Talcott parsons and the “far east” at Harvard, 1941–48: Comparative institutions and national policy

This article traces the involvement of Talcott Parsons in research and teaching about Asian nations, especially China and Japan, in the period of World War II. The data indicate that, in contrast to his Eurocentric image, Parsons worked to develop a global perspective in studies on comparative institutions. This approach, inspired by the sociology of Max Weber, also addressed the practical needs of policy makers in connection with the war effort. Within Parsons’s intellectual biography, it stands between the “voluntaristic” framework of his early treatise, The Structure of Social Action (1937) and the later non-historical formalism of The Social System (1951) for which he is perhaps most famous. An understanding of this relatively unknown phase of Parsons’s work is therefore indispensable for an adequate appreciation of his career as a whole.     

The political is the personal: women’s participation in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement

This article examines women’s lived experiences as new activists in social movements. Taiwanese women – many of them housewives – joined the Sunflower Movement, a large-scale protest against a trade pact with China, and a related anti-nuclear movement in 2014. This study demonstrates how new women activists’ everyday political practices mutually construct the public and private spheres in the Taiwanese context. By ‘making private public’, these new activists use discourses of citizenship and maternalism to connect politics to social issues and daily life. Public participation makes these women feel empowered, and their daily actions transform politics from a set of formal, institutionalized practices to a practical fact of everyday life. This research also challenges the reproduction of a rigid private/public division in previous feminist scholarship that regards family and childcare as a separate realm that hinders women’s public participation. In a marked break from past accounts, these women don’t separate their caring responsibilities from their political actions. By focusing on new activists’ political action in and through their family and childcare, this research calls into question scholarly discussions that view maternalism primarily as a public discourse for mobilizing women or a visual strategy for collective protest. By considering the disruptive potential of all acts of mothering, this study paints a more complex and nuanced picture of women and mothers as protesters and reveals how activist women’s actions in the family and private social networks can be a central part of maternalist strategies’ radical potential.     

Male migration and women’s decision-making in Nepal

Review of Economics of the Household - This study examines the changes in women’s decision-making roles due to the foreign labor migration of men from Nepal. Using a mixed-method strategy,...     

Historical Sociology and the Prism of Biography: Lillian Wineman and the Trade in Dakota Beadwork, 1893–1929

Qualitative Sociology - How can researchers learn about the social lives of people and cultures who leave little or no written record of their lives? This article introduces the idea that one...     

Beyond liberal vs liberating: women’s economic empowerment in the United Nations’ Women,Peace and Security agenda

This article is about women’s economic empowerment within the United Nations (UN) Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Based on analysis of the core agenda-setting documents, it traces where two different versions of women’s economic empowerment, “liberal” (including women in the formal economy) and “liberating” (women collectively mobilizing to challenge the status quo), appear in the WPS agenda. It argues that the two exist in uneasy tension in the UN’s aspirations for women’s economic security post-war, but that when it comes to actual activities and achievements, the liberal version dominates over the liberating version. The article argues that it is important not to overstate the divide between the two approaches, and that the seeds of a liberating approach can be found within the liberal. It is initiatives to facilitate women’s economic empowerment that contain opportunities for collective action to transform the structures of the economy that WPS advocates should advocate. This would strengthen the WPS agenda and its ability to contribute to security as feminists envisage it, as encompassing freedom from want as well as freedom from fear.     

Social relations undone: Disciplinary divergence and departmental politics at Harvard, 1946–1970

This article examines the failed convergence of sociology, social psychology, cultural anthropology, and clinical psychology in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations. The analysis shows that from its inception, the department was torn by fundamental contradictions involving membership criteria, stratification, the opposed needs of faculty and students, and the requisites of disciplinary autonomy. These conflicts, which were especially intense with regard to psychology, ultimately made the department ungovernable and led to the restoration of earlier administrative boundaries.     

Sociology’s Sacred Victims and the Politics of Knowledge: Moral Foundations Theory and Disciplinary Controversies

The field of sociology has long been subject to critique for alleged ideological bias and left-wing groupthink linked to its social justice mission. Critics contend that the construction of “sacred victims” by progressive intellectuals hinders their ability to objectively appraise the circumstances of such vulnerable groups. To address this criticism, we survey 479 sociologists in national universities and colleges in the U.S. regarding three sensitive controversies: urban poverty in the black community; gendered differences in occupational choices; and immigration. We find significant patterns in the data. Commitment to the field’s “moral mission,” preferred research paradigm, gender, and especially political orientation are all significant predictors of sociologists’ views. The results, we suggest, can be understood by conceptualizing the field of sociology as an “emotive community.” In doing so, we draw upon current social psychological research on moral foundations theory developed by Jonathan Haidt and colleagues.     

Was Cicourel’s critique in Methods and Measurement in Sociology too radical?

This article is a contribution to a mini symposium on the 50th anniversary of the publication of A V Cicourel’s Method and Measurement in Sociology (1964). The central theme of the book is reviewed – the problem of the relationship between everyday language and cultural meanings, and the language of measurement in social research – and the lack of an adequate ontology of social actors is identified as being the cause of the problem. The solution offered by Alfred Schütz – that social scientific language should be derived from everyday language – is discussed and it is argued that this was probably too radical at the time the book was published, and is still generally neglected in the social sciences.