Locating Zombies in the Sociology of Popular Culture

In this essay, focusing primarily on the cinema of the walking corpse, I provide an overview of zombie studies and suggest potential avenues for sociological inquiry into zombie phenomena. I argue that zombie films, comic books, novels, video games, and the like can be seen as significant cultural objects that reflect and reveal the cultural and material circumstances of their creation. Despite emanating from complex culture‐producing institutions and (arguably) capturing extant social anxieties, sociology has remained quiet on zombie phenomena. Issues of significance, history, and definition are discussed. I then locate three avenues of inquiry ideally suited to the sociological toolkit: symptomatic analysis of content, production, and audience response and interaction. I conclude by calling for a multipronged sociological analysis into “zombie culture.”     

Environmental Sociology in Japan and Environmental Problems in Asian Societies

This paper discusses typical aspects of environmental sociology in Japan and what characteristics can be found in Japanese environmental problems when they are viewed from their relation to environmental problems in Asian societies.
The most prominent feature of environmental sociology in Japan is that it has been mainly the sociology of environmental problems, whereas in the United States is has been mainly the sociology of the environment. The second characteristic is closely related to the first: environmental sociology in Japan has focused on the local community and the life of people and victims affected by environmental problems.
The third property would be that many studies by environmental sociologists have been accumulated by the Japanese Association for Environmental Sociology, which was set up in 1990.
The approach to the study of environmental problems in Asian societies reflects these characteristics. Views from the historical interaction between Japan and other Asian countries are essential to the study of environmental problems in Asian countries.     

Bringing Identity Theory into Environmental Sociology

In an effort to explain pro‐environmental behavior, environmental sociologists often study environmental attitudes. While much of this work is atheoretical, the focus on attitudes suggests that researchers are implicitly drawing upon attitude theory in psychology. The present research brings sociological theory to environmental sociology by drawing on identity theory to understand environmentally responsive behavior. We develop an environment identity model of environmental behavior that includes not only the meanings of the environment identity, but also the prominence and salience of the environment identity and commitment to the environment identity. We examine the identity process as it relates to behavior, though not to the exclusion of examining the effects of environmental attitudes. The findings reveal that individual agency is important in influencing environmentally responsive behavior, but this agency is largely through identity processes, rather than attitude processes. This provides an important theoretical and empirical advance over earlier work in environmental sociology.     

An Environmental Sociology for the Anthropocene

Attention to the relationship between nature and society has been a defining feature of environmental sociology since its inception. Early research, incorporating insights from ecology, argued for the need to (1) theorize the causal connections between nature and society and (2) contextualize those connections in terms of biophysical limits resulting from resource scarcity. Over the past two decades, partly in response to new forms of existential threat such as climate change, the treatment of nature and society as distinct entities has given way to a focus on socio‐natural assemblages. Using the Anthropocene as a lens to explore this emerging view, it is argued (1) that current theorizing on the socio‐natural assemblage needs to pay more attention to the issues of temporality and complexity, (2) that taking these factors into account reconceptualizes the nature‐society relationship as a complex, evolving socio‐natural assemblage, (3) that this evolutionary process needs to be understood in the context of cosmic evolution and the tension between entropy and the emergence of local complexity, and (4) that constraints on human development arise from the tension between these two tendencies, not from resource scarcity. An environmental sociology for the Anthropocene, one based on assumptions about the nature of causal dynamics and context consistent with our understanding of current earth system science, is proposed. L'attention portée à la relation entre la nature et la société a été un trait caractéristique de la sociologie de l'environnement depuis sa création. La recherche initiale, intégrant les connaissances de l'écologie, a soutenu la nécessité de (1) théoriser les liens causaux entre la nature et la société et (2) contextualiser ces connexions en termes de limites biophysiques résultant de la pénurie de ressources. Au cours des deux derniéres décennies, en partie en réponse à de nouvelles formes de menace existentielle telles que le changement climatique, le traitement de la nature et de la société en tant qu'entités distinctes a fait place à un accent sur les assemblages socio‐naturels. En utilisant l'anthropocéne comme une lentille pour explorer ce point de vue émergeant, on fait valoir (1) que la théorisation actuelle sur l'assemblage socio‐naturel doit accorder plus d'attention aux questions de temporalité et de complexité, (2) que prendre ces facteurs en compte reconceptualise la relation entre la nature et la société en tant qu'assemblage socio‐naturel complexe et en évolution, (3) que ce processus évolutif doit être compris dans le contexte de l'évolution cosmique et de la tension entre entropie et émergence de la complexité locale, et (4) sur le développement humain découlent de la tension entre ces deux tendances, et non de la pénurie de ressources. Une sociologie de l'environnement pour l'anthropocéne, fondée sur des hypothéses sur la nature de la dynamique causale et du contexte compatible avec notre compréhension de la science actuelle du systéme terrestre, est proposée.     

Locating Gender Neutrality in Formal and Informal Aspects of Organizational Cultures

This article describes and analyzes the practices that conceal gender at work in the contexts of different organizational cultures. The case studies on which I base my discussion derive from clerical work in two organizational settings. The interpretation I suggest is that regardless of their sex, age or hierarchical position at work, employees regard gender as a personal and intimate issue that, with the exception of pay, does not belong to the sphere of work. Gender issues raise questions that disturb the preferred harmony in everyday life in workplaces. Consequently, the employees seemed to think that hierarchical differences are located in society at large, not in their own workplaces. The analysis shows that age, position and technology shaped differences not only between women and men in organizations, but also among female clerical workers. Thus the results relate both to the practical realities at work and to the gender identities of clerical employees in their organizational cultures.     

Sociology and Studies of Gender,Caregiving, and Inequality

This review focuses on scholarship that illuminates the ties between gendered care and persistent gender inequality. After an overview of work on gender and care across the disciplines, it examines sociologies of care and suggests how sociology might further enrich research and theory in this area. I explore the areas of work–family intersection, state care policy, and the organization of paid care work. I argue that the sociology of caregiving needs to better understand institutional effects on care and the interactions that transmit and resist them, organizational influences on paid care work, and how care policies relate to gender equality.     

The Impact of Gender Characteristics on Mentoring in Graduate Departments of Sociology

There has been much research on gender inequality in graduate education and the benefits of mentoring. However, most of this research focuses on how mentoring addresses female graduate students’ experiences of gender inequality instead of how the gender characteristics of departments impact the level of mentoring they offer. In particular, I examine how the gender composition of departments in terms of faculty and administration as well as faculty awareness of gender inequality or feminist issues influences the types of mentoring structures found in graduate departments of sociology. Bivariate correlations indicated that these characteristics (gender characteristics in particular) had significant relationships with mentoring structures in departments. This study concludes with a discussion of these relationships, an overview of policy implications, and suggestions for future research.     

Sociology of Gender in the French Caribbean: a Slow and Fragile Process

The issue of gender emerged quite recently in French Caribbean sociology. For decades, it has been tackled, and often hidden, within other disciplines - mainly Anthropology, but also Demography, Public Policy, Historical Demography, the history of slavery, and Women’s history – and other fields or labels, like family structures, fertility, the status of women, sexuality. However, a specific field of sociological research on gender issues started really to develop since the end of the last century through the works of the Research Group «Gender and Society in the French Antilles » (setting in the Centre de recherche sur les pouvoirs locaux dans la Caraïbe).Through surveys on French Caribbean familial structures, domestic violence, cultural studies, the GESA questions gendered stereotypes and socialization, under the prism of a colonial legacy, strongly rooted in these French non independent territories.     

Environmental Social Work: Accounting for Gender in Climate Disasters

Abstract

The person-in-the-environment concept has largely been interpreted by social workers to indicate social networks and relationships, ignoring the physical environment and its complex impact on human health and wellbeing. This article examines the environmental domain, noting the critical role social workers can have in this field as a consequence of climate events and global warming. The article notes the significance of gender as a key factor in vulnerability to disasters and outlines the need for social workers to consider gender as a critical indicator in their work in this emerging area. Embodiment, connection to place, poverty, and cultural awareness are also significant, but often overlooked, factors in a social work response to environmental disasters. Ecological and ecofeminist theories give a direction for social work theory and practice in the postdisaster space. The article challenges social workers to reconsider the person-in-the-environment as a complex and critical emerging domain of social work theories and practice, a domain where gender awareness is fundamental.     

Environmental and Resource Sociology: Theoretical Issues and Opportunities for Synthesis1

Abstract Rural sociologists have been disproportionately represented among the major contributors to environmental sociology. In part, this is because several areas of longstanding rural sociological interest (e.g., sociology of resource management and outdoor recreation, studies of resource-dependent communities) essentially came to be redefined as environmental sociology during the 1970s. The most significant role of rural sociologists in building environmental sociology, however, has perhaps been the fact that the material and biophysical nature of the phenomena they have traditionally studied contributed to a general predisposition to recognize the “materiality” of social structure and social life. I assess the major strategies that have been developed for theorizing this materiality, and then indicate some of the most critical lines of debate and dissension. I argue that if these debates are examined in their specifics—rather than as incompatible perspectives or “paradigms”—some opportunities for synthesis become apparent. Some suggested avenues of synthesis are set forth.     

The Sociology of Innovation: Organizational,Environmental, and Relative Perspectives

Innovation is risky. New products and firms are subject to high failure rates. To minimize the risk associated with innovation, most scholars agree that firms should engage simultaneously in two types of activities: exploring new alternatives and exploiting existing competencies. Firms that simultaneously engage in explorative and exploitative activities are called ambidextrous organizations. Research on ambidextrous organizations, however, inadequately considers the importance of the environment in which organizations operate for innovation success. The sociological view of innovation fills this gap by emphasizing the importance of social context for explaining innovative outcomes. The sociology of innovation highlights, first, the structural arrangements – characteristics of social networks, organizations, and institutions – that influence innovation and, second, the relative nature of innovation – whether an object is considered novel depends on one's vantage point. Drawing on the relative view of innovation, I develop a typology that outlines several paths to innovation with respect to two vantage points: the organization and the environment. I argue that minimizing the risks associated with innovation is most likely to occur when firms follow the path of innovation that consists of generating novel solutions that simultaneously exploit knowledge and resources that are both available to the firm and in the firm's environment.