Economy “versus” Environment: The Influence of Economic Ideology and Political Identity on Perceived Threat of Eco‐Catastrophe

Using data from a national survey of American adults, we examine the relationships between economic, political, sociodemographic, and religious characteristics with perception of the potential for eco‐catastrophe. We employ the treadmill of production theory to frame our understanding of views about ecological concerns, arguing that the treadmill discourse associated with economic development is hegemonic and fundamentally shapes public views of eco‐catastrophe. In line with this approach, economic ideology is the strongest predictor of attitudes about eco‐catastrophe, and its influence is conditioned by political identity. There is also significant patterning in these perceptions based on gender, race, education, and religion, but the influence of social characteristics is primarily indirect—mediated by economic ideology and political identity. These results provide useful information for addressing environmental problems in public discourse and bridging policy divides.     

新生代农民工社会心态及其影响因素

农民工是我国改革开放和工业化、城镇化进程中涌现出的一支重要力量,随着改革开放的不断深入．农民工中的新生代群体越来越多地受到党和政府以及社会各界的关注。对新生代农民工在经济社会发展、社会关系、文化生活、政治生活、情感心理及主体意识、个人发展等层面社会心态状况的考察发现．新生代农民工社会心态总体呈现健康、积极向上、理性平和的心态,也呈现出与传统农民工相异的特点．部分领域则存在消极、不健康的社会心态,值得关注。如此新生代农民工心态问题的出现既与当前社会变革、社会管理及保障机制不健全、社会支持不足、经济收入低等现实因素有关,同时也与农民工身份认同等主观因素密切相关,需要进行综合的分析。     

Toward a Social Theory of Resilience: Social Systems,Cultural Systems,and Collective Action in Transitioning Forest‐Based Communities

Impacts from post‐Fordist and poststaples economic transition in the Canadian natural resource sector have resulted in dramatic challenges to the livelihoods of many rural residents and the viability of many rural communities. This study seeks to understand community response to economic transition through a lens of social ecological resilience. This article puts forward Archer's theory of cultural morphogenesis as an analogous model of social ecological change that focuses attention on cultural systems, cultural elaboration, and collective action within an adaptive cycle of resilience. With case material from focused ethnographies of two forest‐dependent communities, we identify distinctive interactions between culture and agency over time that condition community response to change, and we make an analytical distinction between the social system and cultural system. These insights point to catalysts for collective action and adaptation within a resilient cultural realm that extend beyond institutional factors such as economic dependency or political opportunity. By integrating culture, we also deepen the social theory contribution to social‐ecological resilience.     

Offshore Oil,Environmental Movements,and the Oil‐Tourism Interface: The Old Harry Conflict on Canada's East Coast

Offshore oil development and nature‐based tourism offer alternative ways of living with and making use of coastal environments. We analyze a recent controversy over offshore oil extraction in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, in eastern Canada, and identify key points of alignment between environmentalism and the tourism industry that structure resistance to oil development. Our results are based on interviews with tourism operators, government, environmental groups, and recreational organizations, as well as an analysis of key Web sites and Web 2.0 content. Four discourses are used to challenge the normal separation of offshore oil and tourism development in Atlantic Canada: wilderness and wildlife; ecological risks of oil disaster; protecting existing social–ecological networks; and contesting political jurisdiction. Our findings show that the ecological and social value of the Gulf of St. Lawrence is used to justify opposition to oil development in the region. However, the project‐specific nature of this opposition neglects larger questions of social–environmental sustainability in an oil‐dependent political ecology.     

Creative precarity? Young fashion designers as entrepreneurs in Russia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the careers of young fashion designers as entrepreneurs in Russia. It discusses entrepreneurial experiences and labour practices of fashion designers in the context of precarity: that is, the structural conditions characterized by a lack of social, economic and emotional security caused by a shift of responsibilities for the labour market from the state to the citizens. The article takes the perspective of designers’ agency and answers the question of how young fashion entrepreneurs deal with such structural conditions using state support, community support, organizational practices and emotional management. The article also focuses on creative labour in the broader context of the circumstances of a creative class in an authoritarian state. We argue that in today’s Russia, the discourse on the creative class is perhaps more important than the discourse on precarity, since belonging to the creative class is a source of political identity for fashion designers. The issue of precarity, then, can become a further basis for solidarity and political action. The research draws from 21 in-depth interviews with fashion designers and experts conducted in the cities of Moscow, St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk between 2015 and 2016.     

The Historical Political Ecological and Political Economic Context of Mohawk Efforts at Land Reclamation in the Mohawk Valley

The purpose of this article is to elaborate on the history of the relationship between the political ecological and political economic changes occurring in the Mohawk communities in the Saint Lawrence river valley during the Twentieth Century with three Mohawk efforts at land reclamation in Upstate New York and the reestablishment of a Mohawk residential community in the ancestral homelands of the Mohawk river valley. I demonstrate how each of these efforts is conceptualized and should be understood in historical materialist terms as a social response to the changing social, economic, ecological, and political conditions in those communities and the processes involved in the reshaping and remaking of those communities.     

ETHNIC PILGRIMAGES: PEOPLE OF LITHUANIAN DESCENT IN LITHUANIA

A fascinating element in ethnic identity construction and reconstruction processes is the role of homelands. Ethnic identity is dependent in part on whether homelands are constructed as a place or as an idea. This social construction is partially determined by when and how individuals or their ancestors emigrated. The experiences of Lithuanian American economic immigrants, political emigres, and their offspring are explored. For many European Americans (including Lithuanian Americans), traditional measures of ethnicity (such as language retention and endogamy) are not as important as contemporary constructed or invented symbols of ethnic identity (such as ethnic festivals and display of ethnic artifacts). I argue that trips or "ethnic pilgrimages" to the ancestral homelands have received relatively little attention in the ethnicity literature but are central mechanisms of ethnic reconstruction and renewal.     

中东地区清真寺功能的演变

清真寺是伊斯兰教最重要的建筑物，其功能随着历史发展而不断演变。中古时期的清真寺以宗教功能为基础，兼具社会、政治和文化功能，在穆斯林生活中占据核心地位；近代以来，清真寺保持和加强民族认同以及提供情感依托和社会支持的功能得到强化，大众动员功能逐渐增强。这些功能在全球化时代得到进一步发展，在一定程度上缓解了全球化引起的伊斯兰国家民族认同危机、经济结构面临调整、人口跨国流动增加等压力。     

Creating Rural Citizens in Guadeloupe in the Early Third French Republic

This article examines the short-lived efforts of the French colonial state to create a class of independent peasant farmers in Guadeloupe at the end of the nineteenth century, a project that reversed earlier post-emancipation legislation. It argues that economic, and especially political, considerations drove the project. By promoting peasant farming, officials attempted to reform life on the colony and stem the spread of socialism without undertaking large-scale social or economic reform. The reform potentially opened up new opportunities for Guadeloupean men of color to be integrated more fully within the French nation as citizens; this inclusion, though, depended on the labour of other political marginalised groups, namely women and immigrant workers.     

Bandits,Brigands and Militants: The Historical Sociology of Outlaws

Outlaws have been prominent actors in a social context which is characterized by collective dissent, conflict, and violence. Bandits, brigands, and militants emerged in societies with the decline of social justice, political stability, and economic prosperity. Their emergence and social networks with different actors and agencies provide us principal motives to deconstruct the social identity of outlaws and determine the factors that fostered collective dissent, conflict, and violence in different societies. This special issue covers a vast geography and different time periods to theoretically and methodologically advance our knowledge in the historical sociology of outlaws. In doing so, we address complex social, political, and cultural issues that rendered outlaws inextricable part of social problems. Exploring the power and activities of outlaws in different social geographies offers us new perspectives to tackle the origins and outcomes of social, political, and cultural dissent across the world.     

Middle Class Identity in the Modern World: How Politics and Economics Matter

It is widely accepted that people tend to identify with the middle classes regardless of their social class position. Nevertheless, this “middle class identity bias” is not equally prominent in all western democracies. The goal of this article is to assess the role of political and economic conditions in shaping this phenomenon. By exploring the relationship between class identity and national context in 15 modern societies, I address two main questions: (1) how individual‐level income affects where people place themselves in the class system, and (2) how national political and economic context affects this relationship. In doing so, I offer several important findings. First, although there is a positive relationship between income and class identification in all 15 societies, middle class identification is weakest when income inequality is high. Consistent with previous findings, the results suggest that economic development has a positive impact on class identity. The results also uncover a role for political ideology by suggesting a lingering affect of Communist rule. Even after controlling for economic development and income inequality, respondents in former Communist countries are more likely than others to identify as belonging to a low social class.     

Individuelle und kontextuelle Determinanten der Teilhabe an Sozialkapital

We ask for conditions influencing membership in social organizations as strongholds of social capital. Beside individual characteristics, contextual factors such as political, social, or economic settings are also taken into consideration to explain individual decisions to participate in social organizations. The influences of individual and contextual level factors are tested simultaneously in several multi-level analyses. The results show that membership in social associations on the one hand is affected by individual characteristics such as marked trust in others, high level of education, church attendance, strong ties with the neighbourhood, age and sex, and on the other hand by contextual factors such as a catholic social context and institutional settings. In particular, Swiss direct democracy offering larger possibilities of participation facilitates membership in social organizations.     

Populism as a Collective Action Master Frame for Transnational Mobilization

Occupy Wall Street, the Greek and Spanish indignados , and other important movements swept across the Western world from 2011 onward, redefining political and social conflict during the global economic meltdown of the Great Recession. These movements have earned well‐deserved academic attention, but the resulting scholarship is lacking a crucial pillar: a comparative analysis of the collective action frames employed by movement entrepreneurs. To identify the master frame at work and uncover shared processes of strategic meaning making and collective identity construction during this transnational cycle of contention, I analyze primary data, exploring diagnostic, prognostic, and adversarial framing elements as found in the movements’ widely circulated manifestos. The populist frame emerges as the master frame of the cycle, encapsulating the adversarial discourse of the dominant dichotomy of a noble “people” and a corrupt “elite” that resonated strongly with mobilized individuals and allowed movement entrepreneurs to construct a transnationally shared collective identity across populations of widely diverging social, political, and economic backgrounds.     

Troubled Pastures,Troubled Pictures: French Agriculture and Contemporary Rural Sociology

Abstract In contrast to those of other industrialized western European countries, France's agricultural community continued to represent the majority of the national population for a long time and only became one of many minority groups at the end of the twentieth century. It then came under the influence of various trends, sometimes conflicting but nevertheless presenting a certain sociological and political unity. With the weakening of the demographic, territorial, economic, and political foundations of the French agricultural population, rural sociologists are now required to present a new analysis and a revised assessment of its position in French society. The object of this article is to promote better understanding of the reasons behind the blurring of images and representations associated with French agriculture. It invites readers to review and understand the different facets of an imagery that presents a paradox compared with the ideological constructs associated with the historical record of farming and the farming profession. Working in the tradition of the French school of rural sociology, we have set out to offer a sense of the social realities that now represent the main areas of analysis for French and European rural sociology.     

Rethinking assimilation and ethnicity: the Chinese in Thailand

US theoretical models of assimilation of ethnic groups within a larger culture usually assume a unilinear, unidimensional process, which is simplistic, does not account for the persistence of ethnicity, and oversimplifies the process of social change. The argument is advanced that ethnic identity is both primordial and situational (a private sense that is self-maintaining, cumulative, deepening, and self-affirming). Typically, a person has one primary ethnic identity, but where ethnic boundaries overlap, there is instrumental identity. Chinese in Thailand mostly adopt Thai values, speak the Thai language, go to Thai schools, join Thai associations, and celebrate Thai religious festivals. Their secondary identity as Chinese is integrated into their associations with other Chinese and in the home through the use of the Chinese language. Their Chinese identity appears also in ancestor worship. There are symbiotic relationships between native Thais and Chinese Thais along class lines. The Chinese are known to have great financial and economic resources, while the Thais have political and administrative control. These differences with the power elites separate the Chinese from the Thais and interfere with assimilation. The power is balanced. If the Chinese gained in political and administrative power, the balance would be upset, and the interests of both groups would be threatened. The view of Whitten and Whitten acknowledges that individuals and groups act to make the best of the situation and are not merely victims of social forces. Actions are maintained and resisted. The important consideration in theory-building is not the terms of assimilation but the terms specifying the conduct of the group as a whole and as individuals in daily social interactions. The theoretical discussion focuses on border crossings, the Skinner view of the Chinese, bilingualism and cultural education, socioeconomic organizations, occupational differences, and religion, tradition, and ethnic identification.     

Does more knowledge about the European Union lead to a stronger European identity? A comparative analysis among adolescents in 21 European member states

Strengthening European identity is often considered as one of the mechanisms to address the perceived lack of legitimacy of the European Union (EU). In this study we test the explanatory power of cognitive mobilization for the development of European identity (more knowledge about the EU leads to a stronger European identity) and we challenge this model by the inclusion of both an economic utilitarian explanation for European identity (benefiting more from EU integration leads to a stronger European identity) and a political trust approach (having more political trust leads to a stronger European identity). The multilevel regression analysis on the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study 2009 data, which is collected among adolescents in 21 member states, shows that knowledge about the EU has a significant but limited effect on European identity. Personal economic benefits because of EU membership and having trust in national political institutions, in contrast, are more important determinants for the development of European identity.     

Determining economic activity in a post-capitalist system

The main tendency of (both planned and market) post-capitalist system is cosidered to be the production of personal (and not only material) conditions of functioning of that system. That includes not only production of technical disposition to master things but also that of social disposition to master (or, at least, be superior to) other persons. These are as important organizing factors for an economic system producing its personal conditions as are value in exchange for the one producing its material conditions. Typical cases are cited when the economic activity is not determined by the price of the item produced by it, but, rather, by the social identity of the person producing it.     

Potential of the Net to Construct and Convey Ethnic and National Identities: Comparison of the Use in the Sri Lankan Tamil and Kashmir Situations

This paper argues that the potential of the Internet to construct and perpetuate identities, especially ethnic and national identities, depends on the social, political and economic factors that affect the region and the people. The paper goes along with the claim that the Internet is a powerful tool in the creation of national identities, especially when the members of the community are widely dispersed and perceive themselves as suppressed or oppressed by another power. The Internet offers communities one of the most effective means of reaching its members, who may no longer live in the geographical area of the nation, while at the same time enabling them to evade the authority and power of the oppressor. Thus, the Internet is the most potent tool for creating and sustaining identities among people who are physically far removed from the nation. However, the Internet's efficacy in the instillation and nurturing of national identity is largely affected by the political, social and economic conditions of the people and the region. The article elaborates this point by analysing the potential of the medium in the long-simmering Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan.     

Mapping the social space of transnational migrants on the basis of their (supra)national belongings: the case of French citizens in Berlin

In traditional migration theory, social self-identification is usually linked with the process and quality of integration and with the nationality of the countries of ‘origin’ and of residence. But in the context of a supranational integrated area like the European Union, the self-identification of European people living (also) abroad in another European country can be more complicated. What sorts of identity combinations do they produce in this situation? Could we interpret their choice in the light of their social, economic, cultural capitals and (multi)local integration? Based on an empirical analysis of French citizens in Berlin this article confirms that identity self-combining – not just the identity elements – and the position of the ego in the social space are related. The meaning of the same identity category depends on the respondent’s profiles.     

Ethnic entrepreneurs as carriers of ethnic identity: a case study among the Liangshan Yi (Nuosu) in China

In this article, the author examines the connection between Yi (Nuosu) entrepreneurship and ethnic identity. First the term identity is discussed, and then important factors for creating identity among Nuosu entrepreneurs are outlined. Concerning the Nuosu–Yi, until today the clan plays a predominant role. Through entrepreneurship, clan-transcending institutions and a clan-transcending ethnic identity are emerging. The author follows up by addressing identity issues in terms of the rewritten official Chinese history on the Yi. To understand the entrepreneurs' concept of identity, it is necessary to understand that their discourse on questions of status and identity very often coincide with arguments advanced by Yi scholars. Nuosu entrepreneurs, as a new economic and social elite, thereby contribute to the shaping of a new Nuosu collective consciousness. Time (history) and space (Liangshan) are crucial markers of Nuosu identity, but the author argues that economic success is an additional factor for developing a new identity as well. Notably, entrepreneurs are both carriers of ethnic symbols and agents of modernization who actively shape identity.