Fieldwork in forbidden terrain: The U.S. state and the case of Cuba

This paper introduces the concept of forbidden research terrains and examines one such terrain in detail: post-revolutionary Cuba. After exploring the characteristics of this forbidden research terrain, the paper examines how it was initially created. Through an historical analysis of U.S.-Cuban relations between 1959 and mid-1960, Cuba’s forbidden designation is shown to be the result of U.S. actions prompted by the very broad conception of U.S. interests held by state decision makers. Next, the consequences of Cuba’s forbidden status are investigated and found to include heightened state power in the foreign policy arena. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of other possible forbidden research terrains which are also politically inspired. Some of her past work on the politics of workers’ control in post-revolutionary Cuba has been published inLatin American Perspectives andWorld Development. Currently she is comparing unions in Cuba with those in the GDR.     

Social Relations, Core Values, and the Polyphony of the American Experience

This essay examines social relations and cultural values in the United States, paying special attention to recent characterizations of Americans as increasingly isolated, disconnected, and dangerously individualistic. In this essay, I refute such claims. And building on earlier work ( Cerulo, 2002 ), I show that U.S. social relations and cultural values are more multifaceted than such "new individualism" arguments suggest. Indeed, as Robin M. Williams Jr. discovered 50 years ago, when studied in a systematic way, U.S. values and beliefs present us with a multiplex system—a system in which individualism plays only a supporting role. This is true, I suggest, because Americans'"value focus"—that is, the prioritization of one value over another—shifts in concert with certain social events and structural conditions. In this way, we can think of U.S. values as part of a "cultural toolkit," with actors selecting or foregrounding the values needed to support certain strategies of action.     

The Evolution (or Devolution) of Privacy

This paper explores changes in the meaning of privacy. Because individuals understandings and experiences of privacy vary by sociohistorical contexts, privacy is difficult to define and even more challenging to measure. Avoiding common obstacles to privacy research, I examine privacy from the standpoint of its invasion. I develop a typology of privacy invasions and use it to analyze discussions of invasions of privacy in U.S. newspapers. I show that the nature of invasions discussed in the news is increasingly covert and continuous and find empirical support for the often-made claim that the concept of privacy is evolving in meaningful ways.     

World War II and the Transformation of the U.S. State: The Wartime Foundations of U.S. Hegemony

I present an analysis of the history of U.S. expansion and rise to hegemony in World War II, and argue that the concrete global perspectives and postwar ambitions of U.S. state managers were formed in the course of world war itself. They were not the result of preconceived economic or geopolitical policies or aims. I examine U.S. expansion and postwar goals in the military, economic, and political arenas, and show how social processes set in motion by world war in each of these dimensions were central in shaping the distinctive outcomes. I develop a theoretical perspective of world war as a social process, and argue that such an extraordinary period of violence, historical contingency, and state-led expansion involves potentially unique features of macrohistorical development and change.     

A sign of the times? Weak and strong polarization in the U.S. Congress, 1973–2016

Claims that the United States Congress is (becoming more) polarized are widespread, but what is polarization? In this paper, I draw on notions of intergroup relations to distinguish two forms. Weak polarization occurs when relations between the polarized groups are merely absent, while strong polarization occurs when the relations between the polarized groups are negative. I apply the Stochastic Degree Sequence Model to data on bill co-sponsorship in both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, from 1973 (93rd session) to 2016 (114th session) to infer a series of signed networks of political relationships among legislators, which I then use to answer two research questions. First, can the widely reported finding of increasing weak polarization in the U.S. Congress be replicated when using a statistical model to make inferences about when positive political relations exist? Second, is the (increasing) polarization observed in the U.S. Congress only weak polarization, or is it strong polarization? I find that both chambers exhibit both weak and strong polarization, that both forms are increasing, and that they are structured by political party affiliation. However, I also find these trends are unrelated to which party holds the majority in a chamber.     

Sin Coyote Ni Patrón: Why the “Migrant Network” Fails to Explain International Migration

The “migrant network” concept cannot explain large‐scale international migratory flows. This article goes beyond a critique of its a historical and post factum nature. First, I argue that restrictions on its composition and functions also render the migrant network unable to explain why such migratory flows continue or expand even further. Second, a review of five studies illustrates why this concept, the propositions on which it rests, the methods it employs, and the conclusions that it imparts must be reconsidered. Third, the network analysis literature, along with my research data from the Mexico‐U.S. case, suggest an alternative approach. “International migration networks” include those from the labor‐sending hometowns who are emphasized in migrant network studies, as well as a variety of other actors based in the militarized border zone and the labor‐receiving regions. I conclude that accurate studies of migration must include the employers that demand new immigrant workers, as well as the labor smugglers and all other actors that respond to this demand. Immigration studies that fail to do so provide erroneous analyses which camouflage the activities of many network actors, and furnish an academic fig leaf behind which unintended, counterproductive, and even lethal public policies have been implemented.     

Mann,war, and cyberspace: dualities of infrastructural power in America

Not long after the completion of Michael Mann’s “quadrilogy” on The Sources of Social Power (1986–2012), social scientists began to interrogate the meaning of his concepts of “despotic” and “infrastructural” power. While we know that the former is the most evident sign of danger in times of war, less well understood is the role of infrastructural power in state/civil society relations. Most important is the ambiguous relationship between the two types of power and the possibility that—especially in times of war—infrastructural power can become the vehicle for despotic ends. But infrastructural power is also reciprocal, offering firms and civil society groups channels with which to contest the state’s projects. In this article, I first explicate the different meanings that Mann gave to his concept of infrastructural power. In the second section, I turn to how the concept has been “received” in political science and historical sociology. In the third part, I argue that the main danger to American democracy in wartime lies not in its becoming a despotic state, but in the use of the state’s infrastructural channels for the exercise of despotic ends. The fourth part illustrates the complexities of infrastructural power in business/government/civil society relations in cybersecurity, which Mann—for understandable reasons—did not examine in his encompassing work.     

Things Still To Be Done on the Still‐Face Effect

Adamson and Frick (2003/this issue) have written a fine and challenging review of the research on the still‐face. Of special value is their placement of the face‐to‐face still‐face (FFSF) paradigm in a historical framework, which permits us to see how much about the still‐face effect and infant functioning we have learned in the past 30 years. Their review led me to think about several issues. First was the issue of whether or not to standardize the FFSF paradigm. Second, Adamson and Frick argue the still‐face put the “infant's reaction in a new interpretive frame,” but it is a reaction that still challenges our “understanding of young infants' social, emotional, and cognitive capacities.” Thus, I would like to discuss explanations of the still‐face effect. Last, I discuss some suggestions for further research. For an elaborated version of this article, additional archival material is located at http:www.infancyarchives.com .     

The concept of social care and the analysis of contemporary welfare states

Care is now a widely-used concept in welfare state research, firmly established in the literature by feminist analysis. We believe that the concept as it has been used and developed to date has limitations that have hampered its development as a general category of welfare state analysis. In essence we argue that the political economy aspects of the concept have remained underdeveloped. The main purpose of this article is to elaborate a care-centered concept--which we name social care--that countenances and develops care as an activity and set of relations lying at the intersection of state, market and family (and voluntary sector) relations. We are especially concerned to examine what the concept of social care can tell us about welfare state variation and welfare state change and development. The article works systematically through these themes, beginning with a brief historical sketch of the concept of care and then moving on to elaborate the analytic potential of the concept of social care. In the latter regard we make the case that it can lead to a more encompassing analysis, helping to overcome especially the fragmentation in existing scholarship between the cash and service dimensions of the welfare state and the relative neglect of the latter. The concept of social care serves to shift the centre of analysis from specific policy domains so that instead of focusing on cash benefits or services in isolation it becomes possible to consider them as part of a broader set of inter-relating elements. In this and other regards, the concept has the potential to say something new about welfare states.     

Sociology out to lunch: Grad students’ treat

This collective effort (the order of authors is purely alphabetical) explores our particular sociological perspective, explains the harriers we are encountering in developing that perspective, and describes the strategies we are employing to create a participatory educational environment. Our paper concludes that our alienation has decreased as our participation has increased. Now, three months after the paper went to the printer, developments in our department have to some extent reversed the sense of community and participation we discuss below. Our task is larger than we first thought, though we still hope to succeed. The “Minnesota Collective” consists of the following students at the University of Minnesota: Gayle Gordon Bouzard, a fourth-year student who currently is conducting research on the professional socialization of women in academe; Kristin Jonasdottir, a third-year student who currently is conducting historical research on the National Organization for Women; Michael E. O’Neal, a fifth-year student who is planning a dissertation on welfare state systems in the U.S. and Europe; and Randy Stoecker, a fourth-year student who is writing a dissertation on the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood movement in Minneapolis.     

Retrieving the religion in racialization: A critical review

Scholars across disciplines have argued that race and religion are co‐constituted in part because of their historical relationship. The concept of racialization, particularly as it is housed in racial formation theory, is the way that most empirical research in sociology has approached analysis of this co‐constitution. Such analysis however is often at the expense of empirically accounting for the historical relationship between race and religion. In this article, I argue for stronger empirical consideration of this historical relationship in research on racialization. I discuss what is at stake in deeper empirical analysis and what scholars gain by using religion as a starting point to understand racialization today.     

How Sexual Identities Change: Pragmatism,Habit, and Creativity in the ‘Situation’ of the Lascivious Costume Ball

How do individuals’ sexual identities, in the sense of who they are as sexual beings, change? Research addressing this question in the modern U.S. setting points to several factors, including macrolevel societal transformations, vernacular culture, interpersonal interactions, psychodynamics, and life course transitions. Yet it is less clear how these diverse factors are configured in broader social processes. This article draws on and extends the pragmatist mechanism-based approach to social theory to illuminate a key causal pathway whereby individuals’ sexual identities may change. I argue that habits, specifically taken-for-granted ways of doing and thinking about sexuality, are a crucial constituent of sexual identities. But when individuals encounter problem situations to which existing habits are inadequate responses, they are more likely to do and think about sexuality creatively. Incorporation of these creative responses into stocks of habits can readily encompass shifts in sexual identities. The argument is illustrated using people’s dramatic reflections on the first three iterations of the Lascivious Costume Ball, a sexuality-themed party that occurred at the University of Chicago. The Ball dramatized the radical historical moment of the Sixties and functioned as an exceptional problem situation for all but three of my respondents. The utility of the theory centers on its capacity to (1) generate more precise explanations of how individuals’ sexual identities change; (2) integrate distinct literatures on sexual identity into a carefully generalizable theory of individual change; and (3) highlight a crucial relational dimension of certain problem situations.     

African Americans,U.S. Poverty,and International Law

ABSTRACT

Statistical rates of poverty among African Americans often hide the cultural and historical nature of their intended consequences. Unfavorable outcomes for social change can occur when viewing poverty among African Americans in isolation from their unique historical and cultural experiences and U.S. social, political, and capitalistic influences. While pressures to subordinate African Americans continue, African Americans also exert pressure (e.g., social movements) as human agents in their efforts toward self-determination. In order to understand and/or ameliorate poverty in the US, policy makers, researchers, and educators must first deal with the cultural hegemony undergirding it.     

The U.S. Economic Polity,Social Identity,and International Human Rights

In this essay, I provide some complementary perspectives on certain themes that emerge in Judith Blau's (2016) timely and insightful article, “Human Rights: What the United States Might Learn from the Rest of the World and, Yes, from American Sociology.” In response, I offer some very brief reflections structured through two prisms by which we might think further about the United States and human rights. These perspectives pick up on the core issue of Blau's article, the U.S. rejection of socioeconomic rights, and how this issue in turn relates first to the “social identity” of the United States as a whole, and second to the role of the political economy in states' recognition of human rights.     

U.S. sociology and the Iraq War

The 2003 U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq had profound consequences for the people living in that nation. In this essay, I provide a brief overview of the dramatic changes that transpired in Iraq due to the war. I then move on to highlight the contributions U.S. sociologists have made in studies regarding the conflict, based on a review of articles published from 2003–2016 in ten generalist U.S.‐based journals. My review shows that while U.S. sociology has made significant contributions to further collective knowledge about American aspects of the Iraq War, U.S. sociologists have paid very little attention to the actual impacts of the invasion and occupation on Iraqi social organizations, Iraqi culture, and on the lives of individual Iraqis. I make the case that these historically significant events deserve more scholarly attention than they have been given so far. I further argue that U.S. sociologists have a special responsibility to document, study, and explain the consequences of their government's behavior when it causes extensive harm to people living in another land.     

A Quick Guide to Research Methods

In a hurry to understand that piece of research? Can't remember your undergraduate statistics lectures? Don't worry! Refer to this handy‐dandy quick reference for making sense of research design! Seriously. Too often when I am reading a research paper, terms are used which are either unfamiliar or ring only faint bells of recognition. I would like to have the capacity to remember everything I was taught, but apart from having a very bad memory, I am also beginning to suspect that it is actually better practice to check terms out even if I think that I remember what they mean.     

Gender-as-Knowledge and AIDS in Africa: A Cautionary Tale

This article is based on my experience with translating research about AIDS, masculinity and risk in Malawi into the public sphere. My work was misinterpreted as demonstrating that African men want to get AIDS because they think it reaffirms their masculinity. I use the concept of gender-as-knowledge to organize my analysis of this response. I argue that media representations of AIDS in 21st century Africa are filtered through a centuries-old prism of racialized gender knowledge, in which African men are presumed to be irrational, sexually voracious, and uninhibited. This article concludes with cautions about the complexities of translating social research into the public sphere.     

The sociology of U.S. gun culture

Despite the fact that a robust culture centered on the legal ownership and use of guns by law‐abiding gun owners exists in the United States, there is no sociology of U.S. gun culture. Rather, the social scientific study of guns is dominated by criminological and epidemiological studies of gun violence. As a corrective to this oversight, I outline what a sociology of U.S. gun culture should look like. In the first section, I give a brief history of U.S. gun culture from the founding era through the 1960s. Guns began as tools of necessity in the colonies and on the frontier, but evolved into equipment for sport hunting and shooting, as well as desired commodities for collecting. The second section examines these recreational pursuits which formed the core of U.S. gun culture for most of the 20th century. Although recreation remains an important segment, the central emphasis of U.S. gun culture has gradually shifted to armed self‐defense over the course of the past half‐century. The third section examines the rise of this culture of armed citizenship, what I call “Gun Culture 2.0,” the current iteration of the country's historic gun culture. I conclude by suggesting important avenues for future research.     

THE ROLE OF THE MEDIAN LEGISLATOR IN U.S. TRADE POLICY: A HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

In this historical analysis of U.S. trade policy, we apply the median voter model to explain legislative decision making. In this model, the level of tariff protection is expected to change with changes in the median legislator. We show that this simple model does a remarkable job if explaining trade policy until the mid-1930s, when it breaks down. We offer several possible explanations for the breakdown of this model, focusing particularly on the impact of domestic and international institutional changes that may have altered the role of the median legislator in trade policy formation.     

Commentary: The Emergence and Application of Active Aging in Europe

Active aging is established as the leading global policy strategy in response to population aging. In practice, however, the term active aging serves as a convenient shelter for a wide range of policy discourses and initiatives concerning demographic change. The twin purposes of this article are, first, to examine its European origins and how it has been applied in the world's oldest region. This policy analysis illustrates the contrast between the primarily European discourse on active aging, which emphasizes health, participation, and well-being, and the U.S. discourse that prioritizes productivity. The application of active aging in Europe has, nonetheless, been predominantly in the productivist mold. The examination of the emergence of this key policy concept in Europe is contextualized by an outline of the changing politics of aging in this region. The second purpose of the article is to set out a new, comprehensive strategy on active aging that is intended to realize the full potential of the concept. Understanding of the need for this broad vision of active aging is facilitated by the historical policy review.