“Taking Back a Little Bit of Control”: Managing the Contaminated Body Through Consumption

In this article, we explore the lived experience of avoiding environmental chemicals through safer consumption, such as buying “eco‐friendly” products. Using focus groups and in‐depth interviews involving 50 subjects, we investigate how individuals become aware of environmental chemicals and how they adapt to this awareness. Our participants describe being surprised or alarmed to learn that chemicals are present in food and commodities that they believed were safe. They respond by developing a set of heuristics rendering the “dangerous” consumer landscape into a space that is amenable to personal control. They learn to read an ingredient label and look for organic certification seals on product packaging. We develop the idea of the “contingent boundary” to describe how participants perceive personal control as uneven: they believe they can activate a protective boundary in local and familiar contexts, but outside these contexts, they believe the boundary dissolves. They accept this contingency as normal and describe having to ignore some chemical exposures, for fear of becoming too “crazy.” We conclude that the individuals in our study accept that inverted quarantine (Szasz 2007) is out of reach, and instead try to impose order upon a ubiquitous risk.     

A comparative study of the water budgets of lawns under three management scenarios

The fate of irrigation in urban ecosystems is highly uncertain, due to uncertainties in urban ecohydrology. We compared irrigation rates, soil moisture, evapotranspiration (ET), stomatal conductance, and water budgets of landscape ecosystems managed with different turfgrass species and irrigation technologies. The “Typical” landscape had a cool-season fescue and was irrigated by an automatic timer. The “Alternative1” landscape had a warm-season paspalum and a “smart” soil moisture sensor-based irrigation system. The “Alternative2” landscape had a cool-season native sedge and a “smart” weather station-based drip irrigation system. ET was measured with a portable closed chamber and modeled using a Penman-Monteith approach, and the two methods agreed well. The water applied to the Alternative1 was 54 % less than the water applied to the Typical landscape, and the water applied to the Alternative2 was 24 % less. Soil moisture was similar in the Typical and Alternative2, while Alternative1 was drier in spring. The stomatal conductance of sedge was lower than the other two species, but its ET was not lower due to higher leaf area. Irrigation efficiencies (ET/applied irrigation) were 57 - 58 %, 86 – 97 %, and 78 - 80 % for the Typical, Alternative1, and Alternative2 landscapes, respectively. Runoff was less than 2 % in each landscape, and excess irrigation primarily drained below the root zone. Differences in irrigation efficiency between landscapes were due mainly to irrigation application, which varied more than species water use. Smart irrigation systems provided substantial water savings relative to a timer-based system, and prevented significant drainage losses. The utilization of smart sensors was more important than the choice of turfgrass species for irrigation efficiency.     

How Can Three Questions on Modernity Be Answered? The World-System Theory and Japanese Experiences

This article addresses three questions on modernity. Can “the premodern” and “the modern” be differentiated in the historical process? If they can, what is the relationship between “the premodern” and “the modern”? And what will become of these relationships in the future? This article attempts to answer these questions by criticizing the world-system theory and considering some of the experiences of the modernization process in Japan. The world-system theory has tried to relativize social theories from advanced societies in the global perspective. However, the world-system, born during the long 16th century, was defined from the start as modern and capitalist. Therefore, logically this theory cannot adequately grasp the modernization process. To overcome this challenge, this article first accepts the differentiation between “the premodern” and “the modern” and defines modern society as one in which “the modern” is not exclusive but dominant. Second, this article turns to some of the Japanese experiences of “modernization”, particularly in industrial relations. This article asserts that a Japanese-style society tends to keep “the premodern” over a longer term and to replace “modern” relations with “the premodern” ones in management. The author defined this process as informalization. Third, this article stresses that since the late 1990s with globalization, informalization is no longer derived from original “premodern” relations, which are nowadays reproduced by capital. An example of this is the “black company.” This article notes, finally, that capitalism is likely to reproduce premodern forms for its duration.     

Translating from multiple sources: Labour legislation reform in Turkey

Building upon the recent scholarship on “travelling ideas” and “translation”, the author discusses how ILO and EU labour standards were conveyed to Turkey's political landscape by domestic actors and how those standards were adjusted. The study first analyses the motivations of the Commission that drafted the 2003 Labour Act, and of employer and labour organizations, for choosing to draw on those international standards during the legislative reform process. It then focuses on the institutional outcomes of the reform by examining how domestic actors modified the international standards, while also preserving components of the old labour legislation, as on severance pay.     

Beyond the Comtean Schema: The Sociology of Culture and Cognition Versus Cognitive Social Science

In this essay, I argue that the very form of the grammatical construction “a sociology of culture and cognition” (which is a specification of the more general schema “a sociology of [X]”) is symptomatic of a deeply entrenched form of “Primitive Classification” (which I will refer to as the “Comtean schema”) that governs the way in which sociologists conceive of their place in, and engage with other denizens of, the social science landscape. I will also argue that while this style of disciplinary engagement might have worked in the past when it came to dealing with the standard (nineteenth‐century) social science disciplines and even some late‐twentieth‐century upstarts, it will not work as a way to engage the now‐sprawling postdisciplinary field that I will refer to as “Cognitive Social Science” (CSS). The takeaway point is that if sociologists want to be part of CSS (and it is in their interest to be part of it because this constitutes the future of the behavioral sciences), then they will have to give up the Comtean‐schematic thought style.     

Troubling Whiteness: Commentary on Harris's “The House of Difference”

This article focuses on Harris's (this issue) understanding of racialized subjectivity as a socially constructed phenomenon where fantasies about race are transmitted intergenerationally. I was raised as a “white” South African and I had two vivid associations to Harris's proposal that a “psychose blanche,” an invisible repository of unsignified, racially inflected thoughts, feelings, and selves exists at the heart of “whiteness.” In both cases I recalled a scene from my youth where I was taught that whites in apartheid South Africa deserved punishment and would receive this “come the revolution.” These lessons were crucial building blocks in the formation of my racialized subjectivity, and I describe and interrogate them in an attempt to add further variety and color to the landscape that Harris so deftly draws as she resignifies her “whiteness.”     

Theories on Modernization of Japan Today

Abstract When examining the issues related to the theories on modernization of Japan up until now, we can distinguish three extremely important trends of thought. I would like to refer to those three trends as the “Post War Theories” (P.T.), the “American Theories” (A.T.), and the “Beyond Western Theories” (B.T.). “P.T.” emphasize the importance of modernization as democratization, meanwhile the “A.T.” emphasize the importance of modernization as industrialization. In the “B.T.”, post-modern debate is included. In the context of Japan, modernization should be defined as a process which has two equally important elements: democratization and industrialization. It is a process that originated in the West, but was accepted by non Western countries mixing with their own traditions transforming and organizing the “World System”. Theoretical reconsideration on the subject of “acceptance” has crucial importance in this case. We need also to start from the pre-modern period as the initial condition for modernization. Concerning the Japanese pre-modern era, we need to analyze the “Ie” (household) system as a social structure, and worldly attitudes as a spiritual or value structure, and finally the bureaucratic system as the intermediate element of the above two structures. Edo (pre-modern) society was a compound of “Ie” and a bureaucratic system. Because the bureaucratic structure functioned by the very law of the period. the bushi warriors were expected to promote their abilities in judicature, administration, policy planning and decisions, and then they tended to become like modern bureaucrats in their characters. Peasant society also had a similar system as mentioned above. Japan's “Ie” existed as a certain social unit called “Ie-Kabu”. From that, Japanese “Ie” came to have a structure where families were bound within public control apparatus instruments. Thus the control mechanisms of the government effectively functioned down to the common people's level through this apparatus.     

Suburban landscape: Views of New Jersey artists 1

Suburban landscape predominates within New Jersey; people live in one suburb and drive to a job in another. Research on community ideologies suggests, however, that even suburban residents have vague images of suburbs. Vague images can mean, in turn, that the state's visual artists produce few images that incorporate the newly‐created suburban landscape that they see every day. Research on art worlds also suggests little encouragement for work that depicts the newer suburbs. Consistent with this, only a few of the visual artists living in New Jersey who have put slides in three large slide files include work that deals with the newer suburban landscape or with the process of creating suburbs. Instead, artists who depict New Jersey landscape concentrate on the state's “natural” landscape or on the state's older industrial suburbs. The privacy of newer suburbs no doubt also contributes to this pattern. In suburbs, even places designed for crowds, such as retail malls, are private.     

Separation Crises in Over-Attached Families

Families are described as “over-attached” whose members respond anxiously to the otherwise normal unfolding of separation-individuation processes and in the absence of past traumatic separations. It is observed that “anxious attachment” occurs with over-availability just as with under-availability of attachment figures and that attachment is an intra-familial process as well as a dyadic one. A reformulation of Bowlby's attachment theory is required in order to encompass this systemic perspective, and to allow also for the integration of intrapsychic and extrapsychic process. Bowlby's control systems model need not stand in opposition to either systemic or psychoanalytic thinking.     

Power at a distance: Organizational power across boundaries

Organizational approaches can help to make sense of social phenomena, including inequality, politics, and culture. This is partly because large organizations exercise great power, both over employees and in their external environments. Revising Charles Perrow's classic account of the “society of organizations” in the 20th century, we argue that the organizational landscape has changed. There has been a dis‐embedding of individuals from organizations that contrasts with Perrow's idea of individuals being “absorbed” by organizations. Despite this hollowing out, there is a persistence of concentrated economic power or “concentration without centralization.” Organizational power in this landscape is increasingly exercised at a distance, not only geographically but also in the sense of moving across organizational boundaries and through technologies of valuation. Three bodies of research exemplify different types of power at a distance. (a) Research on global production networks shows how power travels across geographic and network distances. (b) Research on financialization and its consequences shows how power is mediated by frames and metrics. (c) Emerging research on big data and Artificial Intelligence shows how power is encoded into seemingly neutral technologies and made to seem inevitable. This work helps to update the sociology of organizations and opens up new research questions.     

Enclosure: Palestinian Landscape in a “Not‐Too‐Distant Mirror”

This article develops an explanation for the fractured and partitioned landscape in Palestine by comparing it to the early modern enclosures in England, and framing this comparison within a theory of “territoriality.” Territoriality is a practice of power and refers to the efforts of individuals or groups to reorganize the economic life, politics, and culture of a place by reshaping landscape. The argument is that the Palestinian landscape is part of a long‐standing narrative in which groups with power seek to transform the economy, demography, and culture of territorial space through the time‐honored territorial practice of enclosing land. Enclosure consists of two basic instruments: a legal element that redefines rights of property by reorganizing systems of use, access, and socio‐economic relations on the land; and architectural elements that reshape the landscape itself. English estate owners and Israeli Zionists are parallel actor groups using law and the built environment to remake life on the landscape. Mobilizing the institutional power of property law and the material power of the built environment, these groups reorder land ownership, use, and circulation on the landscape in an effort to consolidate systems of control over subalterns and reorganize socio‐economic life and demography in a place. By exploring the contours of this pattern, this article seeks to uncover a more general meaning in the enclosure landscape of Palestine today.     

Kulturen und Spiralen des „Eigentlich“. Hierarchisch gesteuerte Veränderungsprozesse am Beispiel nachgelagerter Dienststellen des österreichischen Bundesministeriums für Bildung

Amidst the current debates on education, in Austria the former academies of the compulsory and vocational teachers’ training shall be transformed to educational “colleges” or even “universities”. The Federal Ministry is driving this process top-down, first and foremost tackling the manifest structures. This gradually unsheathes a latent “culture of eigentlich” within the affected educational institutions. It turns out that this culture, which is functional for the system in dealing with ambiguous, contradictory, or even unattainable requirements, does not disappear, but that it rather absorbs and transforms the manifest demands “from top” in practice “at the bottom”. This again provokes hierarchical interventions top-down, and eventually leads to self-enforcing dynamics between manifest and latent structures, fuelling the spiralling process.     

Secondary Popular Culture

In the context of “primary process” assumptions concerning mass distributed culture, the idea of “secondary process” assumptions is developed. A secondary popular culture process (1) is focused on the time period after “legitimate” distribution is conventionally considered complete, (2) treats “finished” cultural materials as raw materials, (3) takes for granted the design and actualization features of “legitimate” production and distribution (which is tantamount to “sacredness”), (4) “turns over” nationally (and internationally) produced wants (“markets”) at the local level for local profit, and (5) creates localized occupational, professional, and stylistic identities which are unanticipated consequences of the centralized producer's work. The idea is then illustrated through a brief discussion of the author's research concerning local popular music performers.     

Behavioral implications of shortlisting procedures

We consider two-stage “shortlisting procedures” in which the menu of alternatives is first pruned by some process or criterion and then a binary relation is maximized. Given a particular first-stage process, our main result supplies a necessary and sufficient condition for choice data to be consistent with a procedure in the designated class. This result applies to any class of procedures with a certain lattice structure, including the cases of “consideration filters,” “satisficing with salience effects,” and “rational shortlist methods.” The theory avoids background assumptions made for mathematical convenience; in this and other respects following Richter’s classical analysis of preference-maximizing choice in the absence of shortlisting.     

#FamiliesBelongTogether: Facts and Fictions of Race and Family in U.S. Immigration Policy

Family reunification is widely seen as a relatively stable feature of the contemporary U.S. immigration regime protected by the nation’s liberal democratic institutions and humanitarian values. Drawing on critical scholarship that situates immigration policies in racial nation‐building projects, this article explores the development of U.S. family‐based admission policies from 1965 to the early 2000s. I bring attention to the role of racial family logics in the changing character and meaning of these policies. Racial family logics reflect the emergent and contested ways in which families are both idealized and institutionally organized in relation to the state, the economy, and other social institutions to support racial projects. A normative conception of “the family” as a white, heterosexual, male wage earner, nuclear household unit informed the 1965 U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act and its emphasis on family‐based admissions. However, by the 1990s, the landscape of immigration, race, and family in the United States had shifted quite dramatically. The family‐based admissions system was now associated with immigrants from Asia and Latin America rather than Europe. The “browning” of the system was accompanied by its incorporation into racialized projects of state discipline, surveillance, and control over those deemed “undeserving” in relation to neoliberal values of self‐reliant and self‐regulating families.     

The Inseparability of “Career” and “Personal” Counseling

In this article it is argued that “career” and “personal” counseling should not be viewed as different types of counseling because: (a) the holistic philosophy of counseling emphasizes helping “whole” persons whose lives contain many important and meaningful roles; (b) recent research on the implications of gender and race for career development further demonstrates the inseparability of our career and “personal” lives; and (c) there are numerous commonalities in the “career” and “personal” counseling process.     

Suburban ethnicities: Home as the site of interethnic conviviality and racism

This article explores the ways in which the white working-class residents of a suburban English town reflect on their relationships with their British Asian Pakistani Muslim neighbors. Its focus is on how everyday constructions of home become sites for the intermingling of discourses of intercultural conviviality and racism. My contention is that the idea of home has not yet been given the detailed critical attention that it deserves in the sociological literature on everyday manifestations of multiculturalism, conviviality, and racism. My supposition is that a special focus on the idea of home as the site of conviviality offers a productive avenue to analyze how intercultural relationships are formed and how the norms of neighborliness are thought to break down, opening a space for commonplace racialized and racist stereotypes to take hold. The idea of home is central to the rhythm and landscape of the English suburbs. It conjures up the idea of a uniform and aspirational white space. Drawing on this imaginary of home, I shall trace how “white working class” “English,” “Scottish,” and “Anglo-Italian” residents’ everyday constructions of home become embroiled with their relationships with their British Asian Pakistani Muslim neighbors.     

The elephant in the room: media ownership and political participation in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong’s open and law-abiding society, applying the political principle of “one country, two systems” presents a challenge to the Chinese government, particularly regarding its efforts to control media ownership. Focusing on the structure of media ownership in Hong Kong, this paper describes the ways in which the Internet – especially social media – has empowered activists and alternative media by providing a means of avoiding censorship and social control. This paper also describes the Chinese government’s use of political power and capital to censor and shape the media landscape in Hong Kong in order to dampen public interest in politics and influence public opinion. Finally, this paper attempts to identify potential solutions to this problem.     

Disaster‐time Economy and an Economy of Morals: A Different Economic Order from the Market Economy under Globalization*

With the experience of two severe disasters (the Hanshin Awaji Earthquake disaster of 1995 and the Great East Japan Earthquake disaster of 2011), I wish to consider “subsistence” as human life, existence equaling the basic activities of life, an essential mutual act‐like existence economy. In this paper, I pursue a positive development of “disaster‐time economics” as a research object under the larger framework of the formation of a “moral economy,” as part of a critical process. In this paper, in order that a stricken area and society may aim at the realization of a new methodology about “creative revival” for newly developing independent research involving the state of the revival fund of a wide sense is carried out. Nevertheless, there is an overall understanding of who, in what areas, and using what methodology, has conducted research in the restoration and revival process, as well as the weak points that tend to hinder the process. There is no research on the rationality and function of public finance expenditures or national sources expenditures. Therefore, in this paper, the term “disaster‐time economy” is newly prepared. From this concept, many activities of the project, service, support, self‐efforts etc. of a social and private domain are grasped from a public sphere in connection with the process of maintenance/restoration under the disaster. The feature and subject point of the process are clarified. The market economy order that is going to be produced in this process does the basic work and determines the economic order for another self‐subsistence over life.