Social Science Discourse and the Biopolitics of Terrorism

This article weaves social science discourse into the fabric of a genealogy of terrorism. The power struggles associated with the US lead global war on terrorism are producing many new objects of knowledge and possible lines of research (e.g., Islamic terrorists, jihadists, suicide bombers, experts on counterterrorism, and ISIS). This process is modeled as a cycle involving power struggles and power elite orchestrated political victimage rituals and a biopolitics of knowledge. This dynamic is explored in terms of social science discourse and the biopolitics of terrorism. The limits of current thinking in “counterterrorism” and the possibilities of future research are highlighted.     

"Sustainability" as a Dialogue of Values: Challenges to the Sociology of Development

Even in an increasingly polarized climate of global policy-making, the ideal of "sustainable development" retains currency across a remarkably broad swath of the political spectrum in debating alternative scenarios for the future. By adapting Weber's classic categories of value spheres and collective rationality, I distinguish contemporary approaches to operationalizing the concept of sustainability and elucidate the practical implications of each. For some, the social, ecological, and economic dimensions of sustainability are synergistic components of a single meaningful goal, pursued by either an overarching technique or a unifying ethic. In contrast to these unifying models, one may conclude that the dimensions of sustainable development invoke values that inevitably conflict in any complex social interaction to derive strategies for collective action. Framing the concept in such terms, as a dialogue of values , highlights the need to adapt social institutions to mediate value conflict at different scales, and points to opportunities for engaging development debates through applied research on comparative governance.     

In the office: Networks and coalitions

The study of the internal politics of an office demonstrates that levelling coalitions derive from established networks. This contradicts the view that network analysis is not useful in the study of levelling coalitions. Sixteen months of observation of office politics, particularly the functioning of levelling coalitions in the informal structure, could not be understood apart from the social networks from which they had sprung. Recruitment to and participation in the levelling coalitions derives directly from the existing networks. The analysis also demonstrates that the success or failure of the levelling coalition is dependent upon the relationships held and manipulated by the target. In order to understand the conflicts and be able to predict their outcome coalitions and networks must be analyzed.     

Gestural development and its relation to cognition during the transition to language

Four Parisian-French infants, two male and two female, were observed bi-weekly at home with their parents or caretakers from 9 or 10 months until approximately 14 months. Their entire repertoire of communicative gestures was coded from videorecordings. Comment gestures, particularly pointing in a book and showing an object, increased after 11 months, and Request gestures involving the adult as an agent increased after 13 months. The appearance of these specific gestures followed the ability to perform object permanence tasks with visible displacements and means-ends tasks involving obtaining an object by pulling a string horizontally. More primitive Reach-request and Emotive gestures declined after 11 months. These findings are compared to those obtained from English-Canadian infants followed over the same age period.Portions of this paper were presented at the Vth European Conference in Developmental Psychology held in Seville in September, 1992. This research was supported by a fellowship to the first author from the Fondation Fyssen, Paris. The filming equipment was supplied by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Blvd. Raspail, Paris. We are very grateful to the French families for their cooperation and to Nurit Nadler and Grace Borzellino for their assistance in the coding of the gestures.     

Decisions,Science, and Values: Crafting Regulatory Alternatives Analysis

Emerging “prevention‐based” approaches to chemical regulation seek to minimize the use of toxic chemicals by mandating or directly incentivizing the adoption of viable safer alternative chemicals or processes. California and Maine are beginning to implement such programs, requiring manufacturers of consumer products containing certain chemicals of concern to identify and evaluate potential safer alternatives. In the European Union, the REACH program imposes similar obligations on manufacturers of certain substances of very high concern. Effective prevention‐based regulation requires regulatory alternatives analysis (RAA), a methodology for comparing and evaluating the regulated chemical or process and its alternatives across a range of relevant criteria. RAA has both public and private dimensions. To a significant degree, alternatives analysis is an aspect of product design; that is, the process by which private industry designs the goods it sells. Accordingly, an RAA method should reflect the attributes of well‐crafted product design tools used by businesses. But RAA adds health and environmental objectives to the mix of concerns taken into account by the product designer. Moreover, as part of a prevention‐based regulatory regime, it implicates important public values such as legitimacy, equity, public engagement, and accountability. Thus, an RAA should reflect both private standards and public values, and be evaluated against them. This article adopts that perspective, identifying an integrated set of design principles for RAA, and illustrating the application of those principles.