State neutrality and Islamic headscarf laws in France and Germany

Neutrality has been the classic answer of the liberal state to religious and cultural difference. A number of multicultural critics recently debunked it as “myth” and group power in disguise. Comparing Islamic headscarf laws in France and Germany, I argue that neutrality is more complex and multifaceted than this. The comparison shows that neutrality leaves space for particularistic and universalistic, unity- and rights-oriented stances, the first located in the sphere of democratic politics, the second in the legal–constitutional sphere. Recent headscarf laws may then be understood as political backlash against the rights-oriented neutrality that has emerged in the legal spheres of both countries.

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The crisis of neoliberalism and the future of international institutions: A comparison of the IMF and the WTO

The current crisis of neoliberalism is calling into question the relevance of key international institutions. We analyze the origins, nature, and possible impacts of the crisis through comparing two such institutions: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Both originated in the post-World War II U.S.-led hegemonic order and were transformed as part of the transition to global neoliberalism. We show that while the IMF and the WTO have been part of the same hegemonic project, their distinct institutional features have put them on significantly different trajectories. Historical differences in the two institutions’ systems of rules have placed the IMF in a more vulnerable position than the WTO, which provides clues to the future contours of global economic governance.

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The Politics of Space and Culture in Santiago, Chile’s Street Markets

Recent discussions of contentious politics have focused on struggles in and over space and place. This article builds upon these concerns by using ethnographic, interview, and documentary data to analyze the spatial politics of street market vendors in Santiago, Chile. Drawing upon Lefebvre’s concepts of perceived, conceived, and lived space as well as ideas drawn from research on space and protest, I show how street market vendors build upon spatial routines, a sense of place, political alliances, and scale jumping in their self-defense strategies at the local, national, and international scales. The findings illustrate Lefebvre’s argument that the advance of abstract space (constructed by dominant economic and political elites) provokes resistance by groups who defend and seek to reconstruct lived space.

Bringing the body back into theory and methodology

This is a discussion of a book by Kathryn Linn Geurts, Culture and the Senses. Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002; and a book by Judith Farquhar, Appetites. Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002.

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Small state,big revolution: geography and the revolution in Laos

Extant theoretical insights—mostly derived from studies of prominent revolutions in large countries—are less useful when applied to the unfolding of revolutions in small states. To understand why revolutions happened in the latter, a framework is needed that takes into account geography. For small states, geography is more than dotted lines on maps. It is the source of intervention and vulnerability. Deeply mired in history and memory, states’ geographies shape their distinctive identities and have great impacts on national political trajectories, including revolutions. Thus, to provide understanding of revolutions in these countries, no analysis could be complete without taking into account their places, understood in physical, ideational, and historical terms, within their regions and the world. The case of Laos is used to suggest a geographical analysis of revolutions that provides overlooked insights into the origins, processes, and outcomes of revolutions in small, vulnerable states.

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Sartre for the twenty-first century?

By virtually dominating French intellectual life (literature, philosophy, culture) during the early post-World War II period, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) embodied what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “total intellectual” – one who responds to and helps frame public debate on all the intellectual and political issues of the day. During his lifetime and even after his death in 1980, Sartre’s thinking and political engagements provoked sharp reactions, both positive and negative, in France and abroad. Marxism, decolonization struggles, and violence are three key themes on which Sartre’s public positions continue to generate considerable debate – a debate that remains relevant today.

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Contentious mass politics in Southeast Asia: Knowledge accumulation and cycles of growth and exhaustion

The study of mass contentious politics in Southeast Asia has accumulated significant knowledge over the last 40 years. This politics is instructive because it presents distinctive problems for analysis whose solutions will be useful to future analysts there and elsewhere. Two areas of knowledge where this literature has made special contributions are peasant resistance and the politics of insurgency and counterinsurgency. In addition, the peculiarities of the scholarship on this topic offer an opportunity to engage two different debates. First, because of the diverse methods employed to tackle this topic, the literature is useful for evaluating claims often made by partisans to methodological debates that only one’s own method can accumulate knowledge while others cannot. Second, given the high geopolitical stake Southeast Asia once held for the United States in its fight against world communism, the scholarship on contentious mass politics in this region provides an appropriate test case for the common argument that postwar American scholarship has been dominated by American “imperial designs.” This article examines the different genres of analysis in the literature and shows how these genres hold different normative and ontological assumptions, conceptualize problems differently, and accumulate knowledge in different modes. A key finding of the essay is that knowledge accumulation by different genres has experienced cycles of growth and exhaustion. The evolution of these genres indicates the often neglected fact that knowledge accumulation consumes exhaustible knowledge resources that need to be replenished. The changing fortunes of the genres with different normative orientations also suggest a loose link between scholarship on this topic and broad ideological shifts in the United States, although “imperial interests” did not always prevail as often claimed.

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The inverse plurality rule—an axiomatization

Under the ‘inverse plurality rule’, voters specify only their least preferred alternative. Our first result establishes that this rule is the only scoring rule that satisfies the minimal veto condition (MV). We then prove that the inverse plurality rule is characterized by MV and the four well known conditions that characterize scoring rules; namely, Anonymity (A), Neutrality (N), Reinforcement (RE) and Continuity (CO). Our new characterization result is related to the characterizations of approval voting and of the widely used plurality rule. We finally show how the axiomatization of the inverse plurality rule can be extended to the axiomatization of elementary scoring rules (vote for t-alternatives scoring rules). We are indebted to two anonymous referees for their most useful comments.

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Informalization and contemporary manners: The Wouters studies

This is a discussion of two books by Cas Wouters, Sex and Manners: Female Emancipation in the West 1890–2000 (London: Sage, 2004), and Informalization: Manners and Emotions since 1890 (Sage, forthcoming 2007, English version).

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A Calmly Disruptive Insider: The Case of an Institutionalized Advocacy Organization at Work

Through a case study of a leading service provider organization in Philadelphia, this paper explores the advocacy work of a publicly funded, professionalized, institutionalized nonprofit organization. In this article I relate how in the spring of 2002, staff at the organization responded to a recurring political issue: local business groups were again calling for official action against “aggressive panhandlers” in the downtown district. I use ethnographic and historical data to show that the organization’s institutionalization and ties to the public sector have allowed staff to develop resources and skills for being both contentious claim-makers and influential actors in the institutional political arena.

The making and unmaking of a “transborder nation”: South Korea during and after the Cold War

The burgeoning literature on transborder membership, largely focused on the thickening relationship between emigration states in the South and the postwar labor migrant populations and their descendants in North America or Western Europe, has not paid due attention to the long-term macroregional transformations that shape transborder national membership politics or to the bureaucratic practices of the state that undergird transborder claims-making. By comparing contentious transborder national membership politics in South Korea during the Cold War and Post-Cold War eras, this article seeks to overcome these limitations. In both periods, the membership status of colonial-era ethnic Korean migrants in Japan and northeast China and their descendants was the focus of contestation. The distinctiveness of the case—involving both a sustained period of colonial rule and a period of belated and divided nation-state building interwoven with the Cold War—highlights the crucial importance of three factors: (1) the dynamically evolving macro-regional context, which has shaped transborder national membership politics in the region in distinctive ways; (2) the essentially political, performative, and constitutive nature of transborder nation-building; and (3) the role of state registration and documentation practices in shaping the contours of transborder national membership politics in the long run. By incorporating Korea—and East Asia more broadly—into the comparative study of transborder nation-building, this article also lays the groundwork for future cross-regional comparative historical studies.

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The poverty of organizational theory: Comment on: “Bourdieu and organizational analysis”

American organizational theorists have not taken up the call to apply Bourdieu’s approach in all of its richness in part because, for better or worse, evidentiary traditions render untenable the kind of sweeping analysis that makes Bourdieu’s classics compelling. Yet many of the insights found in Bourdieu are being pursued piecemeal, in distinct paradigmatic projects that explore the character of fields, the emergence of organizational habitus, and the changing forms of capital that are key to the control of modern organizations. A number of these programs build on the same sociological classics that Bourdieu built his own theory on. These share the same lineage, even if they were not directly influenced by Bourdieu.

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Voice and Agency in Social Movement Outcomes

Focusing on the interactional dynamics of movements, we find that two constructs, voice and agency are critical to the development of a sense of “groupness” and can aid social movement actors in accomplishing desired goals. Voice and agency are accomplished when movement actors engage in various processes such as planning and strategizing, completion of goal-oriented tasks and other unifying activities. We examine four social movement organizations operating in separate movement contexts with different outcomes: contested gay politics in Cincinnati, Ohio and grassroots feminism in Cleveland, Ohio and New York City, New York. We find that groups will have a better chance at achieving their goals if members are able to create a unified voice, and if leaders include and draw from the strengths of those they recruit, thus allowing a sense of agency.

Can faster income growth reduce well-being?

In his book Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (1999) economist Robert Frank describes a number of significant trends in the U.S., and to a lesser extent in other industrial economies, since the late 1970s: rapidly rising incomes, for those at the upper end of the income scale, increasing hours of work, and increased consumerism (share of consumption of ‘status goods’). We demonstrate that the first development can parsimoniously account for the latter two. Our novel specification of the utility function simultaneously incorporates a relative-consumption effect for status goods and non-homotheticity of preferences between status and non-status goods, and we also allow for endogenous labour–leisure choice. It is possible that well-being has declined, notwithstanding the faster income growth, or at least not risen pari passu with the growth in earnings. Comparisons are made with other studies, and policy implications briefly discussed.

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Where did the new economic sociology come from?

Like all new research fields, the “new economic sociology” was produced by the redeployment of relatively diverse researchers under a single academic label. Academic entrepreneurs in the second half of the 1980s took up the traditional term of the European “founding fathers” claiming they were renewing the discipline while distinguishing themselves from (1) the old homegrown denomination “economy and society,” (2) anti-disciplinary currents such as neo-Marxism, and (3) interdisciplinary movements like “socioeconomics.” The relative unity of the new economic sociology was due more to this set of demarcations than to a specific intellectual approach. The new economic sociology obtained its scientific legitimacy by bringing together two promising new currents: network analysis and neo-institutionalism, along with a more marginal cultural mode of analysis. While there had been very little exchange among these currents, mutual references became more ecumenical once a common label had emerged and distinct intellectual programs were launched. Institutional legitimacy was quickly obtained thanks to the support of the Russell Sage Foundation, enabling a process of expansion that in Europe developed far more slowly. The case of the “new economic sociology” demonstrates that the creation of new subdisciplines cannot be understood merely through the analysis of direct interactions among persons linked to each other by inter-acquaintanceship. In accordance with a field theoretical approach, academic entrepreneurs function under structural conditions which must also be taken into account. Among these structural conditions were changes in the academic field itself (due to demographical effects, the imperialism of economics, and the surge in Business Schools) as well as in the political sphere (the rise of neo-liberalism).

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Reduced prizes and increased effort in contests

We study the general class of two-player public-policy contests and specify the asymmetry condition under which a more restrained government intervention that reduces the contestants’ prizes has the “perverse” effect of increasing their aggregate lobbying efforts.

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The critique of intelligent design: Epicurus,Marx, Darwin,and Freud and the materialist defense of science

A new version of the age-old controversy between religion and science has been launched by today’s intelligent design movement. Although ostensibly concerned simply with combating Darwinism, this new creationism seeks to drive a “wedge” into the materialist view of the world, originating with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and manifested in modern times by Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Intelligent design proponents thus can be seen as challenging not only natural and physical science but social science as well. In this article, we attempt to explain the long history of this controversy, stretching over millennia, and to defend science (especially social science) against the criticisms of intelligent design proponents – by defending science’s materialist roots.

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The once and future information society

In the late twentieth century, many social scientists and other social commentators came to characterize the world as evolving into an “information society.” Central to these claims was the notion that new social uses of information, and particularly application of scientific knowledge, are transforming social life in fundamental ways. Among the supposed transformations are the rise of intellectuals in social importance, growing productivity and prosperity stemming from increasingly knowledge-based economic activity, and replacement of political conflict by authoritative, knowledge-based decision-making. We trace these ideas to their origins in the Enlightenment doctrines of Saint Simon and Comte, show that empirical support for them has never been strong, and consider the durability of their social appeal.

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Keynes, legacies, and inquiry

As President Nixon once observed, “we are all Keynesians.” And we do indeed live in a macroeconomic world, essentially, as defined and elucidated by Keynes. But Keynes himself is underrepresented in both political science and in mainstream economics. This is a costly intellectual error. Keynes’ prodigious writings, as well as his actions, offer a treasure trove of inspiration, analysis, and insight. This article considers four themes in Keynes’ oeuvre that are especially worthy of revisiting: the importance of economic inequality, the potentially fragile underpinnings of international economic order, the inherent dysfunctions of the international monetary economy, and, perhaps most important, Keynes’ philosophy and its relationship to economic inquiry.

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