Paths to Democracy and Authoritarianism in Europe before World War One

This article offers a novel explanation of why some European democracies survived while others collapsed in pre-WWII Europe, describing historical paths which ended with establishment of either self-sustainable democracies or non-democratic regimes in the interwar period. The historical path to self-sustaining democracy began with the emergence, in the nineteenth century, of constitutional monarchies with executive power responsible to the monarch and freely elected legislatures. Such polities, without exception, became self-sustaining democracies unless the transition was achieved through regime discontinuity (as in Germany in 1918). An intermediate stage in this historical process consisted of development, in some countries, of competitive oligarchy as a transitional stage between the constitutional monarchy and democracy. If a country's political history did not follow the above-mentioned path, its initial democracy was susceptible to breakdown. This pertained to countries which transitioned directly to democracy or competitive oligarchy from absolute monarchy or other regimes lacking open-outcome elections.     

Freedom ossified or economic crisis? A comment on Holger Henke

This article contends with the view that the political crisis in some Anglophone Caribbean countries—primarily Jamaica—can be understood as arising from the black middle‐class leadership's use of race and nationalism to obscure class issues. It argues that the race and national issues were and are legitimate class issues and that it is theoretically and practically a mistake to counterpose the two. The black middle class achieved important victories against colonialism and racism but now is faced with global economic and political forces for which it is ill‐equipped to address. The political crisis that it faces is more a result of these global forces than it is of the internal weakness of this class.     

Donald Trump's discursive field: A juncture of stigma contests over race,gender, religion,and democracy

Donald Trump's election to the U.S. Presidency in 2016 qualifies as one of the more shocking events in American political history. This article reviews the literature on the social construction of Donald Trump's political career. It finds prominent ideological laminations over racism, Islamophobia, nativism, sexism, Christianity, and right‐wing populism in Trump's discursive field. This article argues that Trump's discursive field comprises a juncture of stigma contests over the moral worth of numerous collective identities including men, women, racial minorities, immigrants, Muslims, Christians, and the middle class. Such stigma contests likely exacerbate recognition gaps created by neoliberal policies. This review suggests that scholars should continue to examine the connection between Trump's political career and stigmatization. Moreover, cultural sociologists should ready themselves to track the dialectical response to Trump and to assess the lasting impact on the American normative order.     

Interpretative Freedom and New Combination: The Way in Which the “Middle Class” Has Been Narrated

The English words “middle class” have experienced much more connotations and denotations—typically “bourgeoisie,” “white‐collar,” and professional—than any other class‐referring word since the latter half of the 18th century. On the one hand, in response to such diverse narrations during about two and a half centuries, I partially agree with some of the nominalistic theories of class, in that the middle classes were not created until they were named by contemporaries. On the other hand, my view diverges from those theories, in my asserting that the contemporaries have had an interpretative freedom to recognize “middle classes” only within the bounds of plausibility on the side of the realistic social world. The typical middle class in each period has emerged in such a way that Schumpeter's new combination is performed in a stage of recession by new entrepreneurs, who will move into the “middle” strata and hold some cultural leadership but still obtain inconsistent statuses, to be recognized as “middle class”ex post facto in a boom time. Two Kondratieff's cycles have had one recognition of the typical “middle class.” The new combination is one of the pressures bringing middle classes into a modern society, contrary to the so‐called class decomposition into the two poles.     

Theories of collective action and the Iranian revolution

Most analyses of the collective actions that led to the Iranian revolution rest upon one of two classical models: social breakdown or social movement. These explanations emphasize such factors as the politicization of recently uprooted migrants, the growth of a new middle class opposing autocracy, the authority of the clergy, and specific aspects of Shiite Islam. Conflicts of interest, capacity for mobilization, coalition formation, and the structure of opportunities that shaped the collective actions of various groups and classes are ignored or downplayed. This paper argues that mobilization and collective action against the monarchy resulted from the adverse effects of state development policies on bazaaris, industrial workers, white-collar employees, and professionals. Bazaaris' mobilization provided an opportunity for other social groups and classes to oppose the government. A coalition of disparate interests, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, brought down the monarchy.Iran's two major twentieth-century revolutions, and especially the second, appear so aberrant. They do not fit very closely widespread ideas of what modern revolutions should be like. Yet there is no doubt that the Islamic revolution in 1978–79 provided a thoroughgoing overthrow of the old political, social, and ideological order (Keddie, 1983:580).     

The political process of the revolutionary samurai: a comparative reconsideration of Japan’s Meiji Restoration

In the 1860s and 1870s, the feudal monarchy of the Tokugawa shogunate, which had ruled Japan for over two centuries, was overthrown, and the entire political order it had commanded was dismantled. This immense political transformation, comparable in its results to the great social revolutions of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries in the West, was distinctive for lacking a major role for mass political mobilization. Since popular political action was decisive elsewhere for both providing the force for social revolutions to defeat old regimes and for pushing revolutionary leaders to more radical policies, the Meiji Restoration’s combination of revolutionary outcomes with conservative personnel and means is puzzling. This article argues that previous accounts fail to explain why a group of relatively low-status samurai—administrative functionaries with some hereditary political privileges but in fact little secure power within the old regime—was able to overcome far more deeply entrenched political actors. To explain this, it is necessary to distinguish clearly between two political processes: the long-standing political relations of feudal monarchy and magnate lords and the unprecedented emergence of independent samurai political action and organizations cutting across domain boundaries. It was the interaction of these two processes that produced the overthrow of the Tokugawa and enabled the revolutionary outcomes that followed it. This article’s revised explanation of the Meiji Restoration clearly places it within the same theoretical parameters as the major revolutions of the seventeenth century and later.     

The Making of the Urban Middle Class in South Korea (1961–1979): Nation‐Building,Discipline, and the Birth of the Ideal National Subjects*

This article examines the process through which the state nurtured urban middle‐class formation during the Park Chung Hee regime in South Korea. While existing studies have focused on the size and characteristics of the middle class, few studies explore the political process or mechanisms through which the middle class was on the rise as a mainstream force. This article argues that urban middle‐class formation was a political–ideological project of the authoritarian state to reconstruct the nation and strengthen the regime’s political legitimacy. In particular, this article explores the two concurrent processes of urban middle‐class formation in Korea: one is the growth of the middle class in an objective sense, as a result of state‐directed economic development; and the other is the production of urban middle‐class norms. Drawing on the discourses of the Korean government and the media disseminated during from 1961 to 1979, I trace how the formation of the middle class in Korea was intertwined with modernity and nationalism in order to consolidate state power.     

Where professional and personal values may clash: social workers' attitudes towards professional involvement in the evacuation of Israeli settlers from Gaza and Northern Samaria

Israel's evacuation of settlers from their homes in Gaza and North Samaria provided a real time opportunity to examine social workers' attitudes towards offering their services in controversial political situations. This study, conducted shortly before the evacuation, is a qualitative examination of the attitudes of 108 Israeli social workers towards offering professional services to the evacuees. Findings show that while most respondents supported social worker involvement, around a quarter either qualified their support or objected outright. Calls are made to ensure that professional services and resources become available to persons of all political persuasions and in all political situations.     

Race,Class, and the Packaging of Harlem

In the 1970s and early 1980s, patterns of divestment dotted Harlem's landscape with abandoned buildings and the urban blight this engenders. With government subsidies, many of these properties have been refurbished and are now occupied by African American professional homeowners. Overall, capital investment in housing property is up and businesses are taking an interest in a community that was previously avoided. This article looks at the impact of gentrification in Central and West Harlem, New York. It identifies key actors and institutions involved in facilitating this transformation, examines social relations among black professional residents, and considers how these may be informed by class and race inequalities. This article is also critical of theoretical and ethnographic approaches to African American life that mythologize the middle class, erase the working class, and fail to acknowledge fragmentation in both groupings. It concludes with a brief discussion of some of the responses to this research that were shared by project participants and other anthropologists.     

The Hobo Anomalous: Class,minorities and political invention in the Industrial Workers of the World

This article is an analysis of minority political invention in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Against the tendency in recent social and cultural theory to dichotomize class and difference, it argues that it was in and through the IWW's formulation of class that minority political and cultural invention occurred. Using the framework of Deleuze and Guattari's minor politics, the article shows how the IWW's composition in the simultaneously diffuse and cramped plane of work operated against the major political identities and subjects of worker, immigrant, American, citizen and 'people', and towards the creation of minority political knowledges, tactics and cultural styles premised on the condition that 'the people are missing'. Seeking to understand the IWW's modes and techniques of invention, the article explores the general plane of IWW composition, its particular political and cultural expressions (in songs, manifestos, cartoons and tactics), and its minor mode of authorship. The article focuses in particular on two aspects of IWW minority composition, the itinerant worker, or hobo, and the politics of sabotage.     

Environmental Politics: the Structuring of Partisan and Ideological Cleavages in Mass Environmental Attitudes*

This paper explores the impacts of political party identification and political ideology on two dimensions of mass environmental beliefs—awareness of environmental problems and support for environmental reform. We argue that while the environmental movement's mobilization of public awareness of environmental problems was essentially non-partisan, more recent movement efforts to achieve environmental reforms have taken a discernible “reform liberal” stance of advocating state regulation of the private sector. Neither political party identification nor political ideology has a substantial effect on awareness of environmental problems. Anti-laissez-faire political liberalism proves to be highly correlated with support for environmental reform, particularly among the middle class. Despite the major impact of political liberalism on support for environmental reform, there are no partisan differences in such support. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the notion that political-ideological differences in support for environmental reform exist despite political parties.     

Changes in Community Organization Practice in Quebec (Canada)

Abstract

This paper examines the changes that occurred in community organization practice in the public establishments of Quebec (Canada) in the 1990s. The results of replicated statistical research show that many changes in community organization practice occurred during this period. Most of these changes can be explained by the socioeconomic crisis that took place in the 1990s that affected part of the middle class, driving the reorganization of public social services organizations and important cuts in the government's budget. In this context of crisis, the government of Quebec more easily accepted the local development strategy to overcome unemployment and poverty. These changes can also be explained by a change in community organizers' perceptions of their profession and their strategy for professional recognition observed in the creation of a professional association.     

Technique and Ethos in Nonviolent Action: The Woman Suffrage Case

The Woman's Party, a militant woman's suffrage organization, was active in nonviolent protests from 1916 through 1919. The party members, who drew their inspiration from the woman suffrage movement in Great Britain, were predominately middle and upper class. They were motivated to protest by the descrepancy between their relatively high social status and their relatively low political power. Although they continued to agitate for equal rights after the suffrage ammendment became part of the Constitution, they did not generalize their concern to an explicitly pacifist ethic but continued to emphasize the particularistic ideology of feminism.     

Support for Academic Women in Political Science 1890-1945

Between 1893, when the first woman took a PhD in political science, and 1945, about 150 women became political scientists. Support for their professional lives came primarily from other women who were their teachers or their colleagues in women's colleges. Most early women did not marry; those who did found domestic roles detrimental to their careers. Graduate departments channeled women back to women's colleges and did not recruit women for their own faculties. Women are included in the professional organization primarily as representatives of women's colleges. The condition of entry into a secure academic life was to remain sigle and accept a sex-segregated place; but this security did not provide the necessary credential of a prestigious home department for leadership of the nationally organized profession.     

HOW IMPORTANT IS SOCIAL CLASS IDENTIFICATION IN TAIWAN?

Data from a 1992 survey (N = 2,377) of the population of Taiwan show that class identification is rooted in the objective stratification system: the higher one's education, occupational status, power, and income, the more likely one is to identify with the middle or upper classes rather than the working or lower classes. Class interest theory predicts that the higher a person's objective position and subjective class identification, the more likely s/he is to hold a conservative ideology concerning class issues (e.g., do large firms have too much power? Should employees protest against their employer's personnel practices, and go on strike?). Multiple regression analysis provides only partial confirmation for class interest theory. The finding that the most educated and those in professional and technical occupations are the least conservative on class issues is interpreted as supporting a “new class” form of class interest theory. While the Taiwan respondents are not generally conservative on these class issues, their class identification appears to have little to do with whether they are conservative or nonconservative, either before or after objective position in the stratification system is held constant.     

The Power of the Vulnerable Body

Abstract

Through a critical Agambean reading of aging Finland's care deficit, I argue that the human body is politically powerful in its “bare” vulnerability. Even in feminist care theory, however, the neediness of the body is barely recognized as political. This is somewhat paradoxical, given that the vulnerable body is discursively deeply feminized. Thus, through a deconstructive reading of feminist care theory and Joan Tronto's (1993 Tronto, J. 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York and London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) ethics of care in particular, I argue for a new political understanding of care, defined as a corporeal relation. In this conception, the political dimensions of care are no longer understood in terms of work or the moral dispositions enabled by caring, as the existing literature largely suggests. Rather, the political relevance of care is seen as departing from that which makes the work of care an absolute necessity: namely, the needy body that belongs to each and every one of us. Through its neediness, the vulnerable body exposes itself as a constant opening of the political, the recognition of which also leads to an alternative type of ethics.     

Becoming Red Thread Women: Alternative Visions of Gendered Politics in Post-independence Guyana

This essay argues that the rise of Guyana's Red Thread Women's Development Organisation in the mid-1980s was precipitated by the establishment of a hegemonic political culture through the regime of President Forbes Burnham. Utilizing both Aldon Morris's (1992, 2001) notion of 'opppositional consciousness' and Raka Ray's (1999) typology of 'political fields' the author finds that the founding members of Red Thread were engaged in a struggle to redefine the political culture in Guyana. Through its mobilization of women across the divides of race/ethnicity, class, religion, and geography, Red Thread was a key site for rethinking the nature of the political structure for women's politics and women's empowerment. The essay places the emergence of Red Thread within a critical review of Guyanese women's mobilization and organization in trade union movements and women's auxiliaries to established political parties through the Colonial and post-Colonial eras.     

沙特君主制政权相对稳定的原国

沙特君主制政权相对稳定大抵有如下几个原因：沙特人注重血统、功名，习惯家族统治、构成沙特君主制的坚实政治、文化基础；沙特王权高举伊斯兰教旗帜，坚持以教治国，为民众所认同，并得到乌里玛的支持；政治联姻与世袭君主可择优遴选保证了沙特王权的社会基础宽阔；巨额石油收入加强了国防力量，缓解了内外矛盾；政治改革不断地缓解了各种社会矛盾。     

Four Months to System Change

Abstract

This paper discusses the process through which students in a Community Intervention class brought about change in university policy to recognize Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday as a university holiday. It includes tactics and strategies used to influence decision makers, to educate the community, and to empower the minority community on the campus. It discusses important lessons for students including the political nature of system change, issues of power and stratification, and the impact of successful tactics on the opposition. This project was able to bring about change in a system that was unwilling to change. In today's social climate, that is often what social workers must do. Experiencing the process of system change during the educational process allows for the lessons of one class to be applied to larger systems of service delivery in professional practice.     

The never changing story: Eight decades of the government public relations department of Thailand

The Government Public Relations Department (GPRD) of Thailand has existed in various forms since the country’s governing system changed from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one in 1932. This study reflects on how the GPRD’s practices have been affected by the country’s governing and political environments over time. It has periodized the eighty-four-years of development of the GPRD into sequential phases based on a continuum approach. The GPRD’s roles and duties are detailed based on four periods: Beginning Period, Growth Period, Full Expansion Period, and Weak Period. The GPRD was firstly positioned to be the primary government tool for introducing the concept of democracy to the Thai populace and disseminating information about government policies, activities and propagandistic campaigns. Through Thailand’s periods of political instability, World War II, the Cold War and rise of communism in Indochina, globalization, and the current digital age, the GPRD has expanded in its role within the government as the center of communication for a wide variety of governmental organizations. However, even as it has expanded and undergone re-organization, it has been criticized for being a government mouthpiece rather that a reliable source of factual information. Working under the direct oversight of the various governments led by the military, as well as both appointed and elected politicians, the GPRD has struggled to maintain a balanced public relations role at the juncture of Thai politics and public interest.