Unpacking cosmopolitanism for the social sciences: a research agenda

This article calls for a re-conceptualization of the social sciences by asking for a cosmopolitan turn. The intellectual undertaking of redefining cosmopolitanism is a trans-disciplinary one, which includes geography, anthropology, ethnology, international relations, international law, political philosophy and political theory, and now sociology and social theory. Methodological nationalism, which subsumes society under the nation-state, has until now made this task almost impossible. The alternative, a 'cosmopolitan outlook', is a contested term and project. Cosmopolitanism must not be equalized with the global (or globalization), with 'world system theory' (Wallerstein), with 'world polity' (Meyer and others), or with 'world-society' (Luhmann). All of those concepts presuppose basic dualisms, such as domestic/foreign or national/international, which in reality have become ambiguous. Methodological cosmopolitanism opens up new horizons by demonstrating how we can make the empirical investigation of border crossings and other transnational phenomena possible.     

USE OF THE DSM IN MARRIAGE AND FAMILY THERAPY PROGRAMS: CURRENT PRACTICES AND ATTITUDES

The DSM has largely become the common language of behavioral health which its authors intended. Although family systems theory resulted in part from the study of major mental illness, it later became distanced from considerations of individual psychopathology. No studies have assessed current practices and views within the field of family therapy on teaching students the use of the DSM. Member training programs of the Education and Training Council of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy were surveyed regarding their practices in teaching the DSM. Seventy-nine of 177 surveys (45%) were returned. Ninety-one percent of these programs offered training in the DSM, and in 93% of those such training was mandatory. Written comments indicated that pragmatic concerns about students being able to speak a common language with other behavioral health providers were among the primary reasons for teaching the DSM.     

USING PATIENT NARRATIVES TO TEACH PSYCHOPATHOLOGY

Psychopathology courses are usually taught using a biomedical perspective and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV (DSM IV) as the primary text. This can result in students developing little empathy for their patients and objectifying them as disorders rather than people with problems. Using narrative, music, and art in teaching psychopathology can balance the scientific, objective style of the DSM IV. Resources and suggestions for ways to humanize a psychopathology course are given.     

Religiosity,nationalism and fertility in Israel

The present paper seeks to re-evaluate explanations for the apparently high level of Jewish fertility in Israel. We suggest that previous explanations, based on ethnic origin or religiosity, are sociologically incomplete, and substitute well established empirical correlational associations for theoretically grounded explanations. We argue that Israel's high fertility stems, directly, from the form and salience of nationalist sentiments in the Israeliconscience collective, which in turn derives from Israel's special position in the Middle East and in the world-economy. Using voting returns from Israel's proportional vote elections, we classify census statistical areas by religiosity and their support for radical nationalist parties. We show that area-level fertility is a function of nationalist support and the area standard of living, and that once these are controlled the effect of religiosity is insignificant. We therefore conclude that the statistical association between fertility and religiosity in Israel is spurious, and that much of the religiosity recorded in fertility surveys is an expression, in consciousness and in the mode of daily living, of a strongly felt nationalist sentiment.     

Comprehensive Interests Measurement in Counseling for Congruence

This article suggests that counselors measure vocational interests by using three interest inventories: the Ramak Interest Inventory, the Courses Interest Inventory, and the Self-Directed Search (Holland, 1985). Some implications from studies on (a) vocational congruence, (b) environmental congruence, (c) the structure of occupational fields and (d) within-occupation congruence are discussed. Five defense mechanisms for clients who happen to be in an incongruent occupation or environment are presented.     

From communal charity to national welfare: Jewish orphanages in Eastern Europe before and after World War I

This article examines Jewish institutions for the care of orphans in an attempt to understand several aspects of Jewish life in Eastern Europe: (1) attitudes towards orphans on the part of communal leaders, intellectuals, and political activists; (2) the transition of Jewish charitable and (in the modern period) philanthropic institutions from the pre‐modern communal charity of the early nineteenth century to modern “scientific philanthropy” at the fin de siècle to national welfare in the interwar period; (3) and, to a lesser extent, the experiences of orphans themselves, as far as is possible to ascertain from documents relating to the institutions that cared for them. Marginal figures such as orphans were of growing concern to the organised Jewish community in its increasingly complex encounter with modernity in the Russian Empire, and traditional patterns of charity, family life, and relations between socioeconomic classes were cast into doubt by new government policies and modern scientific attitudes arriving from Western and Central Europe. The religiously mandated charity of the pre‐modern kehillah gave way to a paternalistic philanthropy that aimed to mould a generation of “productive” working‐class Jews. However, the upheavals of World War I and the mass politicisation of East European Jewry brought about a transformation in attitudes towards orphans and other marginal groups, whose care was made a centrepiece of national, and nationally minded, Jewish communal life in the interwar Polish Republic.     

Self-limitation of modernity? The theory of reflexive taboos

Theory and Society - This is not an introductory text in cosmopolitan sociology, but a next step into a cosmopolitan sociology, which preserves modernity, trying to construct taboos. It is a...     

Social mobility in 20 modern societies: The role of economic and political context

It is commonly argued that social mobility rates are influenced by economic and political conditions. Nevertheless, research on this issue has tended to be hindered by two limitations that make it difficult to draw strong conclusions about contextual effects: (1) seldom have country-level and individual-level influences been tested simultaneously, and (2) only rarely have data more recent than the 1970s been employed. We improve on previous research by employing multilevel models fitted to relatively recent survey data collected from 20 modern societies by the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and national-level characteristics derived from various official sources. Our findings demonstrate systematic cross-national variation in the association between the occupational status of respondents and their fathers. Consistent with the industrialization thesis, this variation is positively associated with per-capita GDP, suggesting that more affluent nations are characterized by more open and fluid stratification structures. Our results also suggest the importance of political regimes and migration for social mobility. In contrast, economic inequality appears to explain very little of the cross-national variation in mobility rates.