THE IMPURITY OF REPRESENTATION AND THE VITALITY OF DEMOCRACY

This article compares the conceptions of democratic representation found in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Hanna Pitkin. Whereas Laclau takes Pitkin as his foil, I contend that her treatment of representation has much more in common with Laclau's than he gives her credit for. Pitkin made a bold critique of foundationalist notions of responsiveness and acknowledged representation's constitutive function. Yet, her antipathy to symbolic representation made Pitkin recoil from the most radical implications of her argument: she would see as a threat to democratic politics that which Laclau casts as its vitality. Laclau's work, then, does not merely refute Pitkin's but advances a line of argument that she set into motion.     

MYTH,TEXT, AND INTERACTION COMPLICITY IN THE NEGLECT OF BLUMER'S MACROSOCIOLOGY

This article depicts a major line of assessment of the work of Herbert Blumer as constituting a series of myths. Portrayals of his work as subjectivistic and ideographic combine with the predominant myth that Blumer ignored issues of large-scale organization and social structure. Documentation of his analyses of corporate power relations, racial stratification, and industrialization and industrial organization reveals the mythical character of much published opinion regarding his work. The micro-macro distinction is an ideology within which these myths have been created and perpetuated. Interactionists who have benignly bought into that ideology contribute to the myth of Blumer's neglect of societal organization. In closing it is suggested that greater attention needs to be given to the influence of Robert Park on Blumer's perspectives and that such an assessment might contribute to a broadening of the base of symbolic interactionism.     

WORKER POWER, FIRM POWER, AND THE STRUCTURE OF LABOR MARKETS

The purpose of this article is to advance the conceptual development of structurally-oriented approaches to stratification by elaborating a behavioral model of the structure of labor markets that is based on power relations among both individual and collective actors. After reviewing the various approaches to the study of stratification and enumerating some of its shortcomings, a theory of the operation of labor markets that synthesizes a number of the elements in extant theories is presented. A labor market typology is developed based on the relative power of firms and workers and four distinct types of markets are delineated, i.e., worker-controlled, firm-internal, worker-firm negotiated, and competitive. In addition, the dynamics by which these labor markets are transformed is discussed. It is argued that this conceptual framework solves a number of problems inherent in extant theories of the operation of labor markets and the article concludes by suggesting areas for future research based on the theory.     

COMMODORE PERRY AND THE JAPANESE: A STUDY IN THE DRAMATURGY OF POWER

A study of face-to-face interactions between Commodore Perry and his subordinates on the one hand, and Japanese on the other, reveals that Perry consistently displayed power in a well-calculated manner in order to make the Japanese open the country. The Japanese were completely manipulated by him, and they yielded to his demand and opened the country. The American and Japanese documents of the time are analyzed in terms of Goffman's dramaturgical approach. Symbolic interactionism can be a useful approach in understanding international relations or social change.     

What Drives Progressive Policy? Institutional Politics,Political Mediation,Policy Feedbacks,and Early U.S. Old‐Age Policy

What drives progressive public policy? Because progressive policy challenges the interests of powerful people and interests that dominate policy making, it is puzzling that progressive policy ever happens. This article addresses this question by modeling and appraising institutional political, political mediation, and policy feedback theories and models of progressive policy making. Institutional political theory focuses on political institutional conditions, bureaucratic development, election results, and public opinion. Political mediation theory holds that social movements can have influence over progressive policy under favorable political conditions. Policy feedback theory holds that programs will be self‐reinforcing under certain conditions. The article goes beyond previous research by including and analyzing public opinion in institutional political and political mediation models and addressing positive policy feedbacks. We appraise five models derived from these three theories through fuzzy set qualitative comparative analyses of the generosity of early old‐age policy across U.S. states at two key moments. We find some support for each theory, and the results suggest that they are complementary. Left regimes or social movements can initiate progressive policy, which can be reinforced for the long term through positive policy feedback mechanisms. We discuss the implications for current U.S. politics and for progressive policy elsewhere.     

RISK SOCIETY,MEDIA, AND POWER: THE CASE OF NANOTECHNOLOGY

Risk society theory posits that the transformation of industrial to postindustrial society corresponded with a transformation of societal power structured by capital, to one structured by the ability to define risk. Perceptions of risk are, in part, socially constructed and created through the framing efforts of various institutional actors. The resulting struggle over meaning is particularly acute when the issues contain many unknown elements—as is the case with emerging technologies. Applying insights from media studies, frame analysis, and organizational theory, we analyze coverage of nanotechnology (NT) in popular press, trade, and general science publications. The findings document the extent to which the risks of this emerging technology are presented or ignored across, between, and within organizational subfields. The analysis empirically assesses a key proposition of risk society theory and reveals how institutional processes reflect and reproduce power differentials. We discuss the implications of the empirical findings for sociological theories of risk and society, power, and collective action.     

THE DISTRIBUTION OF POLITICAL POWER, THE COSTS OF RENT-SEEKING, AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

Poor economic growth in many countries can be explained by the misallocation of entrepreneurial resources to activities that do not foster growth. This paper deals with the relation between the distribution of political power, the allocation of entrepreneurial resources and growth. We model growth as deriving from Schumpeterian entrepreneurs who try to increase profits through innovation. We endogenize the choice of time devoted to this activity vis-a-vis other ways of increasing income, such as obtaining government subsidies. More unequal access to the political redistribution mechanism makes rent-seeking activities less profitable, and results in higher growth.     

Mapping Strategic Engagements: WOMEN'S MOVEMENTS AND THE STATE

Abstract

Given that all women's movements share a unique relationship to the State – their exclusion from political power, often legally and occasionally constitutionally underpinned, has this exclusion shaped women's movements' strategies, which have had as their general goal women's political inclusion? Some similarities are evident across types of women's movements and across nations. In this article, I discuss the ‘strategic dilemmas’ that women's movements are likely to face, and I attempt to identify the range of strategic responses employed by feminist movements. I begin with a definitional distinction between women's movements and feminist movements, followed by a discussion of women's relationship to the State. I identify similarities across feminist movements in four strategic dimensions: (1) movement autonomy vs state involvement; (2) insider vs outsider positioning; (3) separatist vs coalitional stances; and (4) discursive and influence-seeking politics. These strategic dimensions shape different opportunities for women's movements across different state configurations, offering openings for some types of women's movements that may be unrecognized or unexploited by others. The article concludes with speculations concerning women's movements' strategic action in the context of state reconfiguration.     

LEVERAGING THE POWER OF THE ETHNIC ENCLAVE: RESIDENTIAL INSTABILITY AND VIOLENCE IN LATINO COMMUNITIES

Early Chicago school thinkers linked crime to the disorganizing influx of Eastern European immigrants and black migrants from the South. Extending this to contemporary concerns, we use Census and Vital Statistics data to examine whether migration to ethnic enclaves among Latinos and blacks raises violence. It appears that when Latinos settle in their ethnic enclaves, violence in their communities declines. Contrary to Chicago school assertions, this improves economic conditions and strengthens group ties as the community mobilizes to receive newcomers. In contrast, such migration does not dampen violence in black communities. We discuss the implications of this for ecological theorizing.     

THE POWER OF THE LITTLE BLUE PILL: INNOVATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS OF LIFESTYLE DRUGS IN AN AGING POPULATION

The launch of Viagra in April 1998 led to a historically unprecedented high usage of erectile dysfunction (ED) drugs. We test whether Viagra's introduction significantly influenced outcomes for its target population such as sexually transmitted disease (STD) rates of older men, as well as its nontarget populations, such as divorces, natality, the distribution of the age spread within couples, female STDs, and sexual assault rates. We find causal evidence that Viagra's introduction increased gonorrhea rates in older men by 15%–28%. We find no significant evidence of any effects on other variables. We take this as evidence that this lifestyle drug causes significant changes in choices only which affect short‐term outcomes, while long‐term planned decisions are unaffected. Overall, we find that the welfare impacts of Viagra with respect to our outcomes of interest are positive and large. (JEL I1, J1, O33)     

Tending the Vineyard: Cultivating Political Process Research

Goodwin and Jasper's criticisms of various iterations of political process theory are incorrectly applied to the entire developing paradigm. Their indictment offers a rigid and narrow representation of the theory and rejects the social science enterprise of building theory altogether. At the same time, their criticisms raise important puzzles for scholars working on social movements, particularly about defining opportunities, and studying culture. I answer their criticisms of the theory, acknowledge useful questions and challenges that they offer, and conclude by suggesting an agenda for research on social movements in the future.     

THE POWER OF PLACE: Immigrant Communities and Adolescent Violence

Despite popular assumptions, criminologists have long recognized that crime rates are lower for various immigrant groups than for similarly disadvantaged African Americans. What accounts for this paradox? In this study, we consider the role of neighborhood context, specifically, the concentration of immigrants within a community, as a protective factor responsible, in part, for lower crime rates among various immigrant groups. We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine the relationship between immigrant concentration and adolescent violence, controlling for a variety of individual‐level and neighborhood predictors. The findings indicate that immigrant concentration is negatively related to adolescent violence. They also show the protective effects of immigrant concentration are stronger for some types of youth than others.     

THE RISE AND FALL OF A LOCAL HERO: MEMORY,IDENTITY AND POWER IN RURAL AUSTRIA, 1945-1960

The article questions abstract concepts like lieux de mémoire, invented tradition and imagined communities linked to a concrete field of research. It reconstructs structures and practices of the cultural representation of mythical narrations in symbolic and social spaces. The case of a rural community in Austria after World War II shows that the encoding and decoding of a heroic saga is embedded both in the macro structures of the economic and political reconstruction of the Second Republic and the micro structures of the local festive culture. In the late 1940s, the supply of the narration, a variation of the German National myth of Herman the Cheruskian, met the demand of the majority of the villagers, above all the male inhabitants. In the 1950s, the market of cultural representations had changed: the hero of village memory became a relic of village history.     

THE HAYEK HYPOTHESIS IN EXPERIMENTAL AUCTIONS: INSTITUTIONAL EFFECTS AND MARKET POWER

We report twelve market experiments utilizing a "seller market power" supply and demand structure where two of five sellers can unilaterally increase their profit by withholding supply. The data indicate that both the double auction and posted offer institutions result in traders extracting the bulk of the potential gains from exchange in the market; however, prices generally occur above the competitive equilibrium prediction. Market power in the form of strategic supply withholding does not appear to be responsible for the supra-competitive prices.     

ETHICS, REGULATION AND THE NEW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, PART I: ACCOUNTABILITY AND POWER

A generation ago, there was a major debate about the social and ethical implications of artificial intelligence (AI). Interest in that debate waned from the late 1980s. However, both patterns of public risk perception and new technological developments suggest that it is time to re-open that debate. The important issues about AI arise in connection with the prospect of robotic and digital agent systems taking socially significant decisions autonomously. Now that this is possible, the key concerns are now about which decisions should be and which should not be delegated to machines, issues of regulation in the broad sense covering everything from consumer information through codes of professional ethics for designers to statutory controls, issues of design responsibility and problems of liability.     

The generalized action potential of protest movements: The new class,social trends,and political exclusion explanations

Three explanations have been advanced to account for the generalized action potential of contemporary protest movements: the rise of the new class, a set of general social trends that cumulatively lead to liberalized social values and loosened social restraints against protest, and the mobilization of excluded groups. Analyzing three dimensions of generalized action potential—protest potential, political action repertoires, and protest movement support—we find support for all three explanations. Educated salaried professionals, especially sociocultural and public sector professionals, display greater protest potential, especially for civil disobedience, and are supportive of emerging “middle class” movements. A set of general social trends centering on increased education, life-cycle and generational change, secularism, and increased women's autonomy also create greater action potential. Reflecting mobilization against political exclusion, African Americans display a consistently strong generalized action potential. These protests reflect the rise of new political repertoires, particularly “protest activism,” which combines protest with high levels of conventional participation and is centered among the more educated.     

YOUTUBE,TWITTER AND THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT

Videos stored on YouTube served as a valuable set of communicative resources for publics interested in the Occupy movement. This article explores this loosely bound media ecology, focusing on how and what types of video content are shared and circulated across both YouTube and Twitter. Developing a novel data-collection methodology, a population of videos posted to YouTube with Occupy-related metadata or circulated on Twitter alongside Occupy-related keywords during the month of November 2011 was assembled. In addition to harvesting metadata related to view count and video ratings on YouTube and the number of times a video was tweeted, a probability sample of 1100 videos was hand coded, with an emphasis on classifying video genre and type, borrowed sources of content, and production quality. The novelty of the data set and the techniques adapted for analysing it allow one to take an important step beyond cataloging Occupy-related videos to examine whether and how videos are circulated on Twitter. A variety of practices were uncovered that link YouTube and Twitter together, including sharing cell phone footage as eyewitness accounts of protest (and police) activity, digging up news footage or movie clips posted months and sometimes years before the movement began; and the sharing of music videos and other entertainment content in the interest of promoting solidarity or sociability among publics created through shared hashtags. This study demonstrates both the need for, and challenge of, conducting social media research that accommodates data from multiple platforms.