Drawing upon our experiences at the University of Melbourne, we examine the issue of how environmentally sustainable that university and other Australian universities are in an era increasingly impacted by anthropogenic climate change. We argue that while indeed the University of Melbourne has embarked upon a variety of activities and programs that exhibit some commitment to the notion of environmental sustainability, it continues to engage in practices that are not sustainable, the most glaring of which is ongoing investments in fossil fuels. We argue that, like other universities in Australia and around the world, it needs to not only financially divest from environmentally damaging practices but review some of the fundamental institutional logics that universities have adopted since industrialization, and more intensively since the burgeoning of the combined forces of globalization and neoliberalism under which governments have reduced financial support for universities.
In their appreciation of modernity, Marx and Nietzsche have a lot in common. It is mistaken, for example, to assume that Nietzsche was interested chiefly in ethical and cultural matters, as opposed to Marx’s supposed fixation on the economic ‘base’. Nietzsche’s whole notion of culture was predicated upon a keen appreciation of the indispensable role of the economic base in sustaining all culture, while Marx, conversely, was deeply concerned about the fate of civilization. In that respect, it is useful to underline their ‘agreement’. Their disagreement concerns their respective social vantage-points: Marx envisioned a society overcoming class divisions, whereas Nietzsche directed all his powers at preventing precisely such an outcome. I will attempt to illustrate the usefulness of juxtaposing Marx’s notion of ‘the social individual’ with Nietzsche’s famous depiction of ‘the Last Human’, arguing that their true meaning emerges best when they are brought together.
Europe is in crisis. In recent years, there has been a rise of xenophobic parties in a number of European countries. While arguing that there is indeed a European crisis, this article focuses on the Swedish take on the crisis. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of migration, from a Swedish vantage point. This orientation has particular significance since Sweden has traditionally been extolled as defending human rights and multiculturalism by opening its doors to refugees – the so-called Swedish exceptionalism. Reality, however, is quite different and former policies are contested, raising the question whether this signals the end of this exceptionalism. In Sweden, ongoing processes are transforming the core social fabric of what was previously known as the Swedish model. It is potentially a bellwether for the transformation of a previously inclusive democratic society into something quite different, in which ‘the Other’ increasingly plays a defining role.
This paper uses Chela Sandoval’s (2000) concept of meta-ideologizing to examine how definitions of ‘access’ are reframed to further the goals of social justice activists. Meta-ideologizing refers to re-operationalizing liberal, widely-accepted terms to fit the needs of a community. The paper draws from 14 semi-structured interviews with individuals pivotal to the passing and implementation of Toronto’s ‘Students Without Legal Immigration Status Policy’, also known as a ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy. It also employs data from literature developed by stakeholders as well as the author’s experiential knowledge. It examines how organizers have reframed the concept of ‘access’ by extending its focus beyond entry into schools and including the need for undocumented migrants to be safe and have access to other social services. It also analyzes the ways bureaucratic logic can invisibilize the gains made by developing procedures that reify illegalization.
The fate of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), currently under negotiation, has been called into question. At issue is the inclusion of the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism that has been included in the NAFTA, CAFTA, and many bilateral agreements. Authorizing corporations and investors to bring disputes directly against governments for adopting regulations negatively impacting market share or future profitability, this mechanism has generated significant opposition, particularly in Europe. This paper probes the factors driving the struggle over this political project. Revealing the mechanisms operating to secure the inclusion of ISDS in the TTIP, these findings contribute to the interdisciplinary debates that have emerged around the rise of a transnational capital class and the transformation of the state. These developments have significant normative implications, the analysis of which contributes to a critical tradition that seeks to uncover processes that have been naturalized and reveal strategies for political contestation.
Neoliberal cut-backs in health-care spending have had numerous negative impacts on nurses, but we know less about how they fare when governments move from neoliberal austerity to reinvestment in their health-care systems. El Salvador is an apt case to examine for how a post-neoliberal health-care reform, launched in 2010 by the newly elected FMLN government, addresses the deterioration in nurses’ work conditions caused by austerity policies. Based mainly on focus groups, interviews and participant observation conducted in the first three years of the reform’s implementation, the analysis finds important strides for nurses, especially in increased hiring in the expanded components of public health-care, and the reduction of labor precarity in formal employment. But several problems continue to imperil nurses’ well-being, reflecting, in part, a persistent devaluation of the care work that is performed mainly by women.
This article uses the United Kingdom as a case study to explore the limits of financialisation. It makes visible the increasingly intimate relationship between financialisation, indebtedness and social reproduction under the conditions of neoliberal austerity (Fraser, 2014). It does so by unpacking how the everyday experiences of indebtedness materialise among individuals, households and communities. Specifically, we investigate debt’s significance within the household economy by analysing the everyday talk within ‘debt threads’ from leading peer-to-peer forums (Stanley, 2014, Stanley et al., 2016). The evidence reveals how debt interferes with and disrupts the intimacies of life, and in doing so erodes its own moral economic claim as a priority obligation within the household economy. These are the limits of financialisation because if debts are not ‘cared for’ they are non-performing. And, non-performing loans – as it turns out – cause catastrophic failures in financialised global markets. This alone makes understanding the household economy relevant to why neoliberalism is failing.
This paper explores how to consider the far right in historical-material and psychoanalytic perspective in the current conjuncture. Since the early post-Second World War interventions in this register, both the social relations of capitalism and psychoanalytic theory have evolved, while the problematic of the far-right had been somewhat marginalized as an object of research. This discussion revisits these broad concerns with attention to developments in the characterization of contemporary character structures and social relations. It examines two psychoanalytic approaches – drawn from Kohut and Lacan – that have been mobilized to examine the dominant character structures of late capitalism to consider their complementarity (and differences) with respect to certain psychological functions – defenses, affect and identification – that may offer insight into the far-right in the contemporary moment.
This article examines the contradictory relationship between neoliberalism and the politics of the far-right. It seeks to identify and explain the divergence of the ‘economic’ and the social/cultural spheres under neoliberalism (notably in articulations of race and class and the ‘politics of whiteness’) and how such developments play out in the politics of the contemporary far-right. We also seek to examine the degree to which the politics of the far-right pose problems for the consolidation and long-term stabilization of neoliberalism, through acting as a populist source of pressure on the conservative-right and tapping into sources of alienation amongst déclassé social layers. Finally, we locate the politics of the far-right within the broader atrophying of political representation and accountability of the neoliberal era with respect to the institutional and legal organization of neoliberalism at the international level, as most obviously highlighted in the ongoing crisis of the EU and Eurozone.
In his Critical Sociology essay on Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, William Jefferies aims to rescue Marx’s labor value analysis by demonstrating the purported inadequacy of the Sraffa model. Jefferies’s argument is untenable, however; for it rests upon a thoroughly confused caricature of Sraffa’s analytical framework. The present comment argues that, far from undermining Marx, Sraffa provides a way to place Marx’s project on solid foundations.
In 2011, the government of Bangladesh began an investigation into the financial dealings of the Grameen Bank that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. This disciplining of a world-renowned institution and its founder by the state reconfigures the altered relationship between the state and NGOs in Bangladesh. This article investigates this about-face between the state and NGOs from the 1990s, when their relationship was characterized as ‘partners in development’, to the late 2000s when the state saw the leading NGOs and their leaders as potential political adversaries. In Bangladesh, the former relationship of a weak state vis-à-vis the powerful, western-funded NGO has been recalibrated. Under the present condition of authoritarian rule, the state is willing to accept the role of the NGO as a development actor but not as a political contender. This article examines this shifting relationship between the state and NGOs.
The nonprofit worker center model has been heralded as a promising development, given union decline and the rise of low-wage service jobs in the United States. Yet rather than challenging exploitative work conditions, some of the national organizations developed by worker centers have embraced neoliberal rationalities through projects such as workforce development, employer alliances, and entrepreneurial ventures. In the same period, strategic funding, which applies the logic and techniques of financial investment to grantmaking, has become standard practice for American foundations. As national worker center grantees adopt neoliberal rationalities through their interactions with funders, we argue that these grantees become less inclined to engage in contentious politics. We analyze the projects of two national worker center organizations, contrasting these groups with three local centers that still organize confrontational campaigns. We suggest that by emphasizing worker leadership, involving members in decision-making, and finding alternative funding sources, they have been able to maintain their confrontational politics.
The relationship between taxation and structural racism is both understudied and undertheorized. Our article introducing the following symposium is a starting point to address this gap, proposing that "a racial tax state" structures the US tax system. Grounded by contemporary race theory, we show how this seemingly innocuous and bureaucratic procedure is structured by and reproduces racial inequality. Far from a neutral and even-keeled practice, taxation is a political tool imbued with stereotypes, values, and emotions to carry out and justify acts of taking. To suggest future directions for this area of research, we propose five initial mechanisms the racial tax state deploys to codify racialized inequalities of socially-defined rewards and penalties: enfranchisement, hoarding, abatement, extraction, and redistribution. We provide both historical and contemporary examples of these mechanisms, drawing especially on the symposium’s contributors, to show patterns in tax contestation and restructuring at moments in which racial justice seemed possible.
This paper demonstrates how print media sources frame the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in ways that, consciously or not, support the prevailing status quo – social, economic, and political elites. The study employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the analytic framework, investigating how print media (sometimes referred to as ‘print capitalism’) utilized framing techniques that disparaged the two political organizations but in very different ways. The analysis incorporates articles appearing in the New York Post and the New York Times from the inception of each organization, through six weeks after the 2012 Presidential Inauguration; articles were coded to uncover themes that defined both organizations as ‘outsiders.’ Tea Partiers are characterized as irrational demagogues, while Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activities are criminalized; both are dismissed as irrelevant, leaving the predominant ‘mainstream’ political rule intact. Findings identify tools of discourse used by media to limit the influence of competing movements while essentially protecting the status quo. Revealing these tools provides clues to unreliable discourse in media coverage of presidential candidates, which tends to quash open debate and threaten principles of participatory government.
Neoliberalism is often sharply contrasted with collectivist ideologies, including conservatism and fascism as well as socialism. This paper challenges such a characterization as too one-sided, focusing on neoliberalism in the context of ‘crises’ of liberal modernity, highlighting significant areas of overlap with authoritarian conservative and neo-fascist critiques of the rise of ‘mass democracy’ in the 1930s, and the common project to resist the politicization of the market economy and constitutional order. This project was applied and adapted in the post-1945 context, and specifically the second crisis of liberal modernity in the 1960s and 1970s, which turned to insights from the Chicago School to support economic technocracy over democracy. It was in this context that neoliberals developed either a more explicit authoritarianism in order to resist the demands of democracy, or the reconstruction of governance according to market principles, both designed to ‘de-democratize’ the liberal democratic political order.
Using the alternative sociological approach, institutional ethnography, this article reveals how experiences growing up in social housing (re)produce conditions of oppression that exacerbate housing precariousness and other forms of exclusion. Data were generated through participant observation, textual analysis and in-depth qualitative interviews with Young People of Colour living in vulnerable urban neighbourhoods, designated as Neighbourhood Improvement Areas in Toronto, Canada. Findings reveal how discourse, policy and practice related to community safety comprise an institutional nexus, connecting policing with social housing. These intersectional institutional relations create conditions of continuous housing precarity; youth street involvement and homelessness; increased involvement in the youth criminal justice system; and a belief among economically marginalized Young People of Colour that the state does not care about their safety and inclusion.
This article argues that labour can be understood as a commons, located in the discussion of how commons can advance the transformation of social relations and society. To manage labour as a commons entails a shift away from the perception of labour power as the object of capital’s value practices, towards a notion of labour power as a collectively and sustainably managed resource for the benefit of society. Given that social change is largely a result of social struggle, it is crucial to examine germinal forms of labour as a commons present in society. I focus my analysis on worker-recuperated companies in Latin America and Europe. Worker-recuperated companies are enterprises self-managed by their workers after the owners close them down. Despite operating within the hegemonic capitalist market, they do not adopt capitalist rationality and are proven viable. Worker-recuperated companies offer a new perspective on labour as a commons.
This paper deals with the question of antisemitism in relation to the construction of national identity in late capitalist and post-Nazi societies. Its argument centres on the concept of ‘secondary antisemitism’, as developed within the Critical Theory tradition. Thus, I will elaborate on the complex relationships between post-Nazi antisemitism, the culture industry and the radical destruction of memory in late capitalist societies. The aim is to show the contemporary relevance of secondary antisemitism beyond the immediate context of the task of remembering the Nazi past. In the second section of this paper I will illustrate this by an analysis of examples from print media debates in Austria on the recent financial crisis and show that instances of secondary antisemitism are utilized for the discursive construction of an exclusive national(ist) unity.
The contribution examines the market liberal veracity of Hayek’s view that a dictatorship may be more liberal in its policies than an unlimited democratic assembly. Hayek’s warning about the potentially illiberal character of democratic government is key to the German ordoliberal thinking that emerged in the context of the crisis of the Weimar Republic. The ordoliberal thinkers were keenly aware of Schmitt’s political theology and argued with him that the state is the predominant power in the relationship between market and state, conceiving of this relationship as free economy and strong state. They maintained that the establishment of social order is the precondition of free economy; law does not apply to disorder and does not create order. The liberal state is the ‘concentrated force’ of that order. The contribution argues that ordoliberalism is best characterized as an authoritarian liberalism and assesses its contemporary veracity in relation to the European Union.
The sociologist of religion Fenggang Yang has recently extended his ‘markets of religion’ framework to the spiritual ‘soul searching’ in contemporary literature. In his epilogue to Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang’s Mo Yan in Context (2014), an anthology of interdisciplinary interpretations of Mo Yan’s ‘hallucinatory realist’ fiction, Yang claims that ‘Chinese souls’ have been ‘caged’ by, among other things, ‘Marxist-Leninist-Maoist atheism’. He refers to the Marxist theory of religion as merely ‘the Marxist adage’ that religion is ‘the opiate of the people’. This essay analyzes Yang’s ‘cage’ concept, to ‘work against it both from without and within’, as Lenin says. In doing so, I argue that Yang’s ‘soul searching’ epilogue is a highly concentrated text of bourgeois ideological mystification and is, therefore, a productive site for Marxist oppositional pedagogy which contests the imagism of ‘cages’ with the materialist dialectics of class struggle.
Since the world system emerged in the mid-19th century, the stages of capitalist development have all been initiated by economic crises. But unlike the crises of 1873, 1929 or 1973, that of 2007 did not signal the end of the neoliberal stage, but rather its continuation in more extreme forms. This break in the previous pattern requires us to periodize neoliberalism itself and understand how the cumulative effect of the policies implemented during the ‘vanguard’ and ‘social’ periods prepared the way for the current ‘crisis’ period, by restricting the options available to political and state managerial representatives of capital. By reorganizing political economy in such a way that states respond to short-term demands by key sectors of capital rather than the needs of the system as a whole, neoliberalism has inadvertently undermined the accumulation process, producing permanent ‘states of exception’ as the only means of containing the resulting social crisis.
This article examines the theories and practices of neoliberalism across 13 aspects of (‘things you need to know about’) neoliberalism. They include the argument that neoliberalism is not reducible to a cogent ideology or a change in economic or social policies, nor is it primarily about a shift in the relationship between the state and the market or between workers and capital in general, or finance in particular. Instead, neoliberalism is a stage in the development of capitalism underpinned by financialization. Neoliberalism by its nature is highly diversified in its features, impact and outcomes, reflecting specific combinations of scholarship, ideology, policy and practice. In turn, these are attached to distinctive material cultures giving rise to the (variegated) neoliberalization of everyday life and, at a further remove, to specific modalities of economic growth, volatility and crisis. Finally, this paper argues that there are alternatives, both within and beyond neoliberalism itself.
Scholars of contemporary capitalism have argued that the rise of flexible accumulation and precarious employment has left workers disillusioned and adrift, experiencing an erosion of solidarities and human bonds. In contrast, this study uncovers a sense of collective efficacy where existing scholarship would lead us to least expect it: among workers who are, structurally, among the most marginal and vulnerable. The case examined is a Chicago living wage campaign, which for three long years mobilized workers laboring outside of traditional employment relationships. Why would a sense of collective efficacy emerge when participants’ ability to make change had remained in doubt for years? Why would workers who lack structural power come to feel so efficacious? Drawing on in-depth interviews with campaign participants, I argue that their understandings of power arose from their experience of collective action. The case sheds new light on our understanding of identity and subjectivity under contemporary capitalism.
Critical explanations of neoliberalism regularly adhere to a dominant narrative as to the form and implementation of the neoliberal policy revolution, positing neoliberalism in its vanguard period as a project implemented by governments of the New Right, imposed coercively on civil society by state elites and only subsequently adopted by social democratic parties. In such accounts, labour is typically posited as the object and victim of neoliberalising processes. In contrast, this article focuses upon the active role of labour within the development of neoliberalism. The period of social democratic government in Australia (1983–1996) is used as a case study to illuminate labour’s active role in constructing neoliberalism. Indicative evidence from the USA and UK is then presented to argue that the agency of labour can usefully be ‘written in’ to the presently dominant narrative regarding the rise of neoliberalism to provide a more satisfactory account of its nature and resilience over time.
Research on NGOs in rural Zimbabwe suggests that ideas of automatic opposition between ‘civil society’ and/or non-governmental organizations and authoritarian states are too simple. Rather, relations between state and non-state organizations such as those referenced in this article, in the rural district of Mangwe about 200 kilometres south-west of Zimbabwe’s Bulawayo, are symbiotic. This contrasts with urban areas where political histories have led to more contested state-civil society relations in the last two decades, during which social movements with a degree of counter-hegemonic (or counter-regime) aspirations were allied with many NGOs and opposition political parties. Gramsci’s idea of ‘rural intellectuals’ could complement the widely used notion of ‘organic intellectuals’ to examine the members of the intelligentsia appearing to be at one with subordinate groups in the countryside and at odds with the state. Likewise state workers distant from the centre and close to their class peers in NGOs as well as their ‘subjects’ may operate with autonomy from their masters in ruling parties and states to assist, rather than repress, citizens and also to co-operate with NGO workers. This research indicates that discerning how hegemony works across whole state-society complexes is more complicated than usually perceived, given the many regional variations therein.
This article analyzes the European crisis and the reconfiguration of neoliberal governance in light of efforts to deepen integration via what European Union President Manuel Barroso (2010) called a ‘Silent Revolution’ to create a new ‘economic government’ that could better manage crises and shape development alternatives. The article places recent developments in a longer-term perspective involving post-Second World War geopolitics, transatlantic class formations, extension of the world market and recent, fundamental crises of capitalism. It argues that in the current situation, the relative unity of Europe’s ruling classes contrasts with the relative fragmentation of subaltern forces, mainly along national-popular lines. This situation shapes (but does not necessarily determine) the ‘limits of the possible’ for political agency in Europe, and it helps explain the persistence of neoliberalism in the European Union in a situation of organic crisis, where the relations of force remain contested, open and politically unstable.
Efforts to enhance the academic performances and educational experiences of Black males in college has exploded in the past 15 years, including institutional, state, system-level, and national programs, policies, and calls to action. Key among these efforts is establishing Black Male Initiative (BMI) programs, which primarily are structured as social cohesion programs and intended to increase students’ retention and graduation rates. Using qualitative interview data from a convenience sample of 40 Black male students at two different institutions, this project explores their engagement and experiences in a BMI program. First, I analyze students’ narratives regarding their participation and meaning-making of BMIs. I find that BMIs play a critical role in supporting students through increased access to social and cultural (sociocultural) capital while simultaneously honoring the cultural wealth students bring to campus. Second, I examine how engagement in the BMI community helped enhance students’ academic experiences and sense of self.
In a global knowledge economy, western nations compete for the best knowledge workers, while positioning English language and western education as superior. Drawing from critical theories of globalization, we argue that the international education field has become a site to maintain a neo-imperial agenda concealed by a neoliberal rhetoric of progress and economic expediency. Using Canada as a case study, we critically examine the global tactics of power and governance strategies in international education policy, as they influence and shape education and immigration policy within Canada. We illustrate how the OECD positions itself for global dominance in education and (re)produces the international education field using tactics such as rescaling, the policy cycle and ‘self-responsibilizing’ students. This process creates and maintains a global market for knowledge producers and expands the soft power of western nations.
Dominant ideologies about poverty in the USA draw on personal responsibility and beliefs that a ‘culture of poverty’ creates and reproduces inequality. As the primary recipients of welfare are single mothers, discourses surrounding welfare are also influenced by dominant ideologies about mothering, namely intensive mothering. Yet, given the centrality of resources to intensive mothering, mothers on welfare are often precluded from enacting this type of parenting. In this paper, I conduct a critical discourse analysis of 69 interviews with Ohio Works First (USA) program managers to examine how welfare program managers talk about and evaluate their clients’ mothering. My findings suggest three themes regarding expectations and evaluations of clients’ mothering: (a) enacting child-centered mothering, (b) breaking out of the ‘culture of poverty’ and (c) (mis)managing childcare.
A major component of the online pro-eating disorder culture (‘pro-ana’ and ‘pro-mia’) is what is referred to as ‘thinspiration’ or ‘thinspo’, which consists of images, slogans and videos aimed at inspiring the pursuit of extreme thinness. More recently, there is a specific kind of thinspiration, labeled online as ‘black girl thinspiration’, that seeks to inspire black women to reject fuller-figured body shapes as beautiful and responsible. Through the application of a spatial analysis, I contend that pro-eating disorder environments are spaces where women attempt to de-mark their racialized bodies through hard work, will-power and mastery over their desires. Theorizing from critical race and feminist postmodern perspectives, this article disrupts the white hegemony and privilege of the thin ideal. This disruption is achieved through unmapping how modern capitalism, sexism, and racism operate in unison to produce women who starve, purge, abuse laxatives and hate their bodies, while highlighting the tremendous violence embedded in these practices.
New York has some of the most segregated high schools in the country, and schools serving low-income and minority students have the lowest graduation rates. This paper discusses changes in inequality between New York City high schools during a period of neoliberal education reform. Neoliberal education reforms are intended to improve schooling through choice and accountability policies. I find that segregation has increased in the best performing schools during this era of reform, and that race and class maintain a negative impact on graduation rates despite the implementation of neoliberal policies. I argue that these policies not only fail to reduce inequality, but exacerbate and reproduce existing class and race inequalities in schooling.
Worrell and Krier’s ‘Atopia Awaits! A Critical Sociological Analysis of Marx’s Political Imaginary’ raises serious issues regarding Marx’s legacy. They hold that a fatal flaw in Marx’s framework can be detected in his account of a post-capitalist society, which reveals a theoretically impoverished and politically dangerous neglect of essential features of social life. I argue that there are good reasons to reject Worrell and Krier’s thesis that Marx got immensely important things horribly wrong. Marx’s limited remarks on post-capitalist society are certainly inadequate in numerous respects. However, they point in the right general direction, and Worrell and Krier fail to offer a satisfactory alternative. The prospects for a critical social theory adequate to the immense challenges of the 21st century would be harmed if their readers agreed with the paper’s main thesis.
Over the last two decades, the notion of primitive accumulation has been reemerging within studies of historical capitalism. Nonetheless, most research on contemporary dispossessions has related them to capitalist accumulation proper without sufficient theoretical care, in a way that virtually collapses the concepts of dispossession and accumulation into one another. The purpose of this paper is to suggest some theoretical distinctions to better understand how contemporary dispossessions and their variations, forms and mechanisms relate, contribute, or even do not contribute, to capitalist accumulation proper. To do so, I discuss the concept of classical primitive accumulation and its alleged continuity until today. I then propose the concept of redistributive dispossession which, unlike primitive accumulation, does not create any condition for the expansion of capital. Such conditions are created through the processes I discuss under the label of expanding dispossession, which I split into expanding capitalizing dispossession and expanding commodifying dispossession.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has positioned itself as a modernising country (re)built on the profits of its energy boom and the efforts of, currently, over four million labour migrants, the majority from Central Asia. Far too many migrants endure an extremely precarious everyday as they are forced to live in what this article describes as a citywide state of exception, within which legal frameworks protecting migrants are ignored or misinterpreted to the benefit of the market. Many migrants who desire ‘legality’ are forced into ‘illegality’ by their employers and landlords refusing to register their documents correctly, increasing their vulnerability. Such abuses are facilitated by the state construction of migrants as diseased and criminal, which in turn becomes embedded into cultural imaginations. Employing Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, this paper theorises how these constructions position migrants as superfluous and that they can be ‘let to die’. The research demonstrates that migrants are simultaneously visible and invisible to the state; with the latter, the legal uncertainty denies migrants access to welfare and a voice within the city, but they are visible for exploitation both in terms of their labour and the political capital gained from their presence.
Following recent debates between Vivek Chibber and leading postcolonial theorists, I probe into what is missing in these exchanges. I focus on the figure of the ‘tribal’ in modern India in Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India and Alpa Shah’s In the Shadows of the State, both of which claim to offer emic perspectives on subaltern politics and history. Yet both works, despite their undeniable differences, display a striking universalism that puts them, paradoxically, in the company of Chibber. This universalism, which we may call the resisting subject, is about the Other and about us simultaneously, the former constituted by the latter as an abstract object of analysis and as a key symbol of intellectual vanguardism. Are we not better off abandoning such universalisms and searching for ways in which Marxist theories of culture can be melded with postcolonial theories of capitalism?
This article aims to study the collective strategies and social networks of young Spanish emigrants in the European Union, paying special attention to their perceptions of and practices regarding working conditions, as well as their relationships with the trade unions and social movements. The article focuses on two case studies of migrant self-organisation networks: the Union Action Group of Berlin, Germany and the Solidarity Federation in Brighton, UK. On the basis of semi-structured interviews and document analysis, the article concludes that the existing gap between trade unions and migrant labour can, under certain circumstances, favour the emergence of solidarity networks which in part play the role of trade unions. We call this type of organisation interstitial trade unionism.
This article argues that well before the taxpayer revolts of the 1970s, taxpayer identity was a consciously privileged claim that both obscured class divisions among whites and elevated those racialized groups presumed to have higher taxable income to a higher position in claiming citizenship rights. The paper examines hundreds of letters to the Supreme Court defending racial segregation in the wake of the Brown decision from 1954 to 1970, a third of which deployed the purportedly ‘neutral’ language of taxpayer status to argue for the maintenance of the structure of white supremacy and inequality in educational access and resources. In this ‘marketplace of citizenship,’ whiteness was automatically presumed to imply ‘taxpayer,’ a category which was then deployed to claim educational entitlement for white children. Meanwhile, ‘nontaxpayer’ was consistently racialized – regardless of actually taxpaying levels – and treated as a justification for inequality. This article argues that the very question of who can claim an identity as a ‘taxpayer’ (and why they may choose to) is deeply historically racialized and serves to construct people of color as outside the burdens and benefits of citizenship as well as ensuring that the poor more broadly are perpetually insecure in their access to rights claims.
The article seeks to explain why denials of reality are tolerated and go largely unchallenged in communication research. It proposes that the acceptance of anti-realist views is related to communication theorists’ general hostility toward radical political economic critiques of media institutions and coverage. Unwilling to undertake research which lucidly exposes the central power relations in society, communication scholars sympathetic to corporate ownership and elite opinion resort to a particular form of obscurantism. This form of obscurantism does not only misrepresent uncongenial work, but espouses an apparently abstruse – though rather vacuous – anti-realist philosophy, which pre-empts consideration of ideas that threaten to expose the workings of existing institutional structures and communication scholars’ role in defending them.
In the late 20th century, two thirds of American states enacted policies to limit the growth of local property tax revenues. We examine the effects of property tax limitations on the effective property tax rates reported by homeowners of different racial and ethnic groups in the United States. We find that property tax limitations reduce the effective property tax rates of homeowners regardless of their race and ethnicity, but that most forms of property tax limitation exacerbate racial inequality, providing the greatest reduction in effective tax rates to white homeowners. In the aggregate, these inequalities result in substantially unequal tax savings that might not survive democratic scrutiny if they were distributed as direct subsidies. This inequality may be especially problematic insofar as tax privileges for property owners effectively disguise a public benefit as a private property right.
Social movements and acts of protest have played significant roles in charting the path of Bolivian history. Massive waves of protest against neoliberalism led to the overthrow of two presidents from office and culminated in the victory of Evo Morales. The stability of the Morales government stands in stark contrast to the chronic political instability of the neoliberal era. This paper deals with the paradox of the persistence of acts of protest all over Bolivia and the stability of the political regime of Evo Morales. The paradox is explained through the use of the distinction between populist and institutionalist politics made by Ernesto Laclau. Politics in the neoliberal era was populist, where society was divided into two opposed camps through the construction of a ‘people’ against the regime. The era after the election of Evo Morales is characterized by institutionalist politics where each political demand is separately and unevenly absorbed into the system. The potential of acts of protest to cause political transformations at various levels depends on their ability to construct a hegemonic chain of equivalence against the system, and the failure to construct it has frustrated efforts to create a more radical alternative to the current government.
The current special issue examines the range and strength of analysing contemporary transformations and struggles through the lens of ‘precarity’. Rather than defining a single precariat, the interest is in exploring ‘varieties of precarity’. These take different forms in different parts of the world, on different scales and in different socio-economic contexts, and yet they share certain characteristics in terms of conditions and capacity for agency. Contributions to this volume testify that precarity may be a political proposition as much as a sociological category that offers an analytical description of current transformations. The selection of articles has the ‘politics of precarity’ as a frame of reference. It describes the political economy of neoliberal globalization producing institutionally embedded precarization of labour, livelihoods and citizenship, but also resistance against the systemic structuration within which it is embedded.
This article analyzes the neoliberal turn to contingent labor in academe, specifically the development of a ‘teaching-only’ sector, through the lens of feminist, interdisciplinary and intersectional studies of care work. Integrating discourses on faculty contingency and diversity with care scholarship reveals that the construction of a casualized and predominantly female teaching class in higher education follows longstanding patterns of devaluing socially reproductive work under capitalism. The devaluation of care may also have a disparate impact on the advancement of women within the tenure system. In short, academic labor issues are also diversity issues. To re-value those who care, intersectional alliances must be forged not only between faculty sectors, but also among faculty, care workers in other industries, and members of society who benefit from caring labor.
Capitalist development in India, and the politics of those who are its immediate victims, defies the main varieties of postcolonial theory and Marxism that are today in contentious debate, in which postcolonial theory is identified with culture and particularity, and Marxism with political economy and universalism. Rejecting this framing, I draw attention to recently translated works by Marx, debates in agrarian political economy, and writings that emphasize the temporal specificity of contemporary capitalist development in India. I show the ‘compulsion’ of capitalists to compete and workers to sell their labour is held back by the ongoing politics of hegemony: capitalists want state protection and support for accumulation, and democracy and rights provide the poor with limited but sometimes effective political power. As a result, the primitive accumulation process remains indefinitely incomplete, and mature capitalism, defined by some Marxists as ‘universal’, is held in a sustained state of deferral.
What is a border? Who is a migrant? The paper uses these questions to distinguish between constructivist, Marxist and postcolonial answers provided by critical border scholarship, with three aims. First, identifying common concerns and interrogating divergent trajectories, the paper offers a practical invitation to dialogue between these various positions. Second, it evidences how critical border scholarship follows a social-to-spatial analytical trajectory to answer these questions: borders and migration function as a spatial confirmation of a pre-defined ontology of the social. As this is deemed unsatisfactory, third, the paper proposes turning this analytical trajectory on its head by going back to borders, i.e. by studying the spatial manifestations of borders and migration to investigate how the social is heterogeneously configured in place-specific and embodied settings. The paper argues that what is left after these debates is the need to focus on actual social hierarchies, as opposed to epistemological ones.
What are the methods and goals of radical history? How can Marxist historiography, charged with producing radical histories, contend with the postmodernist challenge that knowledge is always mediated, that only fragments are recoverable, not totalities? Working through concepts and methods associated with postcolonial literary studies and subaltern studies, the article analyzes a document in the British colonial archives from the time of the 1857 Revolt in India that challenges both nationalist and imperialist histories of its most famous rebel: Lakshmibai, queen of Jhansi. Understanding mediation and the limits of knowledge – the fissures and conflicts among colonial officials, the ambiguity of the queen’s intentions – are crucial to understanding this file, and the 1857 Revolt itself. But Marxist historiography must also link that text – mediated and complex as it is – to the world outside of the archive, and seek explanatory frameworks and adequate truths in the effort to produce radical histories.
A paradigmatic shift around the central role of ‘social entrepreneurs’ is captivating a broad, diverse range of social actors refashioning the institutional landscape of human rights and humanitarian practices. For this special issue dedicated to ‘Re-imagining Human Rights’, we explore some of the implications of these revolutionary changes in human rights practices, and their consequences for sociological study and political critique in the 21st century. Following a discussion of the state of the sociology of human rights practices, we describe the remaking of the human rights arena into a site of technocratic organizations with an emphasis on the ‘triple bottom line’ (financial, social and environmental sustainability). This market-led rights paradigm also promotes a new kind of empathy required for social problem-solving and humanitarian action – one less sentimental, much more technocratic and managerial. We offer some critical observations on this ‘smart humanitarianism’, which emphasizes the human-machine partnership via online technologies, apps, and expert systems management strategies; they redistribute the cognitive responsibilities of determining and delivering goods for greatest measurable impact with a quid-pro-quo of reframing inequality. We introduce the other contributing articles, signposting notable elements and the implications for wider socio-political critique, especially regarding ‘smart humanitarianism’.
Based on 153 interviews at a mid-sized, commuter university, this article examines the disjuncture between students and alumni on the one hand, and faculty, academic staff and administrators on the other in their perceptions of the challenges facing students who graduate during the Great Recession. Findings reveal a culture of despair in response to economic insecurity for students and graduates: they pursued degrees primarily for a workplace credential, were fearful about the future, and experienced and expressed uncertainty in their post-college plans. While university employees were sympathetic to student problems, only a small number of faculty, staff and administrators viewed student despair as resulting from large-scale structural problems. Instead, the majority of faculty and all of the administrators and academic staff emphasized the need for an individualized response to the social problem of the Great Recession.
The aim of this study is to evaluate the relationship between the two assessments of subjective placement in the social structure – class identification and subjective social placement – in a top-to-bottom social hierarchy. In this article, the focus is on the association between working-class identity and subjective social placement. The source material is derived from the International Social Survey Programme from 2009 and 2012. The analysis reveals that women who identified with the working class to a higher extent located themselves towards the lower strata compared to their male counterparts, a result indicating that the female class structure may be more polarized than that of males. The results imply a need for more research concerning how women and men relate their objective class position to social status, as well as the relationship to different outcomes, such as subjective well-being and social justice.
This article examines how neighborhood disadvantage affects neighborhood collective action. Neither the urban poverty literature nor the collective action literature has adequately examined how poverty would affect neighborhood level collective action on their own. I seek to bridge these two literatures to examine how collective action operates in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Though the existing literature would argue that increased social disorganization due to depopulation, social isolation, and hyper-segregation would result in decreased collective action, I argue that other neighborhood characteristics may offset the lack of ‘resources’ and ‘organization’ available to disadvantaged communities. I use the Chicago Tribune from 1970 to 1990 to create a data set of neighborhood-level protest events. Using random effects negative binomial regression, I show that while disadvantage does indeed negatively impact mobilization, factors such as the racial composition of the neighborhood, organizational density, and prior mobilization rates can offset the impact of increasing neighborhood disadvantage.
Exploring the relations between different migrants who meet in Spain, this article discusses issues of mobility, the globalization of care and service work, and precarization of labor and livelihoods, of crucial importance to welfare states and the future of work and retirement conditions in Europe. A mélange of migratory processes are scrutinized along a Swedish-Spanish North-South axis. It analyzes longstanding conditions on the Spanish labor market combined with neoliberal de- and reregulation of work and welfare with a bearing on spatial and social inequalities across the European Union. From a relational approach, the authors examine conditions of Swedish retirement migrants in Spain and of the workers and entrepreneurs who provide care and services for them. Social networks, intermediaries and subcontractors are crucial to organization of migration as well as work and services. Some of these workers, especially third country migrants, occupy precarious, and sometimes informalized, low skilled jobs in an ethnically segmented and gendered labor market.
This article focuses on the links and interdependences between new trends in post-Fordist globalization and the current direction of migration flows and migrants’ projects in Italy. On the one hand, thousands of migrants are arriving as stowaways or asylum seekers due to political and economic tensions from the Syrian crisis and elsewhere in the Arab world. At the same time, an increasing number of highly-skilled youths are leaving Italy in order to seek insertion in more dynamic knowledge-based economies. Informed by Foucault’s approach to biopolitics, this work critically considers the ‘complementary heterogeneity’ of these migratory flows as a focal point and examines them in the structural context produced by the post-2007 crisis.
This article offers critical readings of two works that are symptomatic of a troubling repudiation of postcolonialism and Marxism by each other. Locating itself within the subfield of postcolonial international relations, John Hobson’s The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics (2012) dismisses Marx as imperialist and Lenin (and various forms of neo-Marxism) as Eurocentric. Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) renews the Marxist attack on postcolonialism, ironically casting subaltern studies as a form of orientalism. I argue that the relative lack of attention in these polemics to reparative possibilities immanent within the theoretical formations being criticized is disabling, forcing us to choose positions that insist on the priority of some axes of marginality over others. In the tradition of feminist intersectionality, my critiques of these texts insist on reading their respective theoretical antagonists in ways that bridge the supposed gulf between postcolonalism and Marxism.
The central concern of this paper is the linkages between contradiction and social change, as developed in the work of Nishida Kitarō, a critical social philosopher who explored the nature of social contradiction vis-à-vis local agency, global structures, and social change. Building on Nishida’s conceptual framework, I trace social change to the ontological nature of social contradiction as manifest in myriad social phenomena. This then provides a critical lens for analyzing the contemporary development of community-supported agriculture (CSA). Indeed, the growing popularity of CSAs across the USA makes visible a host of social contradictions, including those between local and global food production and between local consumption and global distribution. Invoking Nishida to peel back the layers of contradiction and assess the potential social impact of CSAs, we address two broad questions. First, what is the nature of contradiction as a fundamental aspect of social life? Second, how can the notion of contradiction help us frame the role of CSAs as a force for social change? In this manner, Nishida’s interpretation of social contradiction shapes our understanding of CSAs, while our understanding of CSAs further refines our assessment of Nishida.
This study argues that the understanding of politics that prevails in contemporary Turkey resonates with Ernesto Laclau’s perspective on Turkish politics of the 1930s. Adapting Laclau’s antagonistic politics to the analysis of contemporary Turkey produces a critical counter-narrative that reveals in effect a continuation of an authoritarian tradition, between the socio-political discourses of the 1930s CHP and the present AKP. Accordingly, discourses of both political movements are fundamentally inspired by the same logic of difference, one that reduces the role of the construction of equivalential chains among different pre-existing political demands to a pragmatist game of hegemony. Their authoritarianisms, however, differ from one another in terms of the symbolic frameworks within which each respective regime is sustained. Whereas the early CHP represented French-inspired, Jacobin-like, nationalist approach to democracy, the AKP has established US-paralleling, neoliberal and neo-conservative governmentality, which was made public in the party’s New Turkey Manifesto in 2014.
Discipline and Punish has been the seminal text for students of the rationality of disciplinary power. In recent years, critical scholarship has become increasingly keen to move analytically beyond the normative mode of disciplinary power. As such, D&P is increasingly marginalized as a text, in favour of Foucault’s later works. In this discursive context, this paper has a twofold aim. Firstly, I want to think through the transformations in labour control over the last 30 years of neoliberal counterrevolution in terms of the movement beyond disciplinary power. Secondly, I shall critique the autonomous and normative governmentality concept by the reinsertion of the ‘genealogy of capital’ in terms of the ontology of axiomatic capitalism. I shall address the undertreated genealogical movement from disciplinarity to governmentality, by arguing for something provisionally tagged meta-disciplinarity. The worth of such a move is to challenge the critical potency of the governmentality concept as is, in the belief that the ‘meta-disciplinary’ offers the most promising and relevant ligature from Foucault’s work into Marxist scholarship on the transformations of neoliberal capitalism and the technologies of its megamachine that confronts us 40 years on.
This article addresses the two main roots of postcolonial criticisms of Marx as a Eurocentric thinker, that is, the closely interrelated views that his value theory is restricted to a national level and that his concept of AMP implies the inferiority of Asia. The article first investigates how classical political economy set the stage for a materialist understanding of capitalism and of history, while contradictorily grounding methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism. Drawing on the still partially unpublished Marx’s London Notebooks (1850–53), the article then argues that Marx consistently developed the labour theory of value at the international level. In the summer of 1853, moreover, he put in question Bernier’s theory of Oriental despotism, paying increasing attention to the concrete situation of the population in India and to forms of anti-colonial resistance. By overcoming atomistic and unilinear views of development, the article argues, Marx was able to recognize the material seeds of interdependence and collective power of an emerging world working class.
This article contributes to the discussion about the process of relocation of industrial production. The study focuses on a community in Eastern Europe which witnessed a cycle of events: from localization of a high-scale global factory in 2007 to its unexpected displacement in 2012. In this study is analyzed the process of the community’s inclusion in the production system, and it is argued that the challenge of production mobility is distinctively different in middle-income economies. Employing a cultural approach to the study of global production, the process of social reconstruction caused by the investment is chronologically outlined and its outcomes for the local labor market and host community are described.
This article illustrates the phenomenon of migration as a key for analyzing neoliberal as well as Keynesian logic. The European socio-economic frame of integration is defined as a four-fold complex consisting of an employment regime (types of labor markets), forms of consumption, a system of social protection, and a type of socio-political integration. It is shown that the articulation of these four levels produces virtuoso or perverse cycles of social integration. Using official data, it can be seen that the Spanish labor market has suffered structural changes since the post-2007 economic crisis, including alteration in work activities, occupations and the unemployment level of the labor force; deterioration for specific groups such as young people and immigrants; and increased risk of poverty. With the deepening of the crisis, immigrants have found themselves trapped in Spain’s network of unemployment, temporary employment, lack of stable employment prospects, irregular economics, increased risk of poverty, and a perverse cycle of exclusion that calls into question not only the effectiveness of European neoliberal policies but the entire European social model.
The article focuses on systemic drivers of poverty, inequality and precarious livelihoods. It discusses the transformation of South Africa’s labour force management and its migratory system from a centralized management of unfree labour by the apartheid state bureaucracy, to a post-apartheid state of precarity, driven by ‘flexploitation’. The nexus of precarious work and a fracturing citizenship is seen to represent a duality of flexibility linking practices of employment and labour control to areas like welfare benefits, citizenship status, political participation and informal livelihoods. This is applicable to migrants and natives alike, but with migrants being particularly flexible. The author connects the issue of precarity with politics of xenophobia seen as a stratagem for the retaining of hegemony confronting looming labour struggles and an insurgent citizenship of the poor. The argument revolves around precarity as representing a rallying point for resistance as well as a social condition.
This article focuses on the facilitation, consent and consumption of state violence, as an aspect of the state’s hegemonic control in the current stage of neoliberal capitalism. We suggest that the commoditized symbols of state violence are a part of everyday life for millions within the United States and are embedded within ideologies of nationalism–national security, supported and reinforced through consumerism. The consumption (figuratively and literally) within the confines of neoliberalism is disconnected from the actual course of state violence, facilitating their own pacification while giving consent to hegemonic control. In this sense, the population’s consumption becomes more than pacification and consent, but rather an active constituent in the production and reproduction of state violence: making it the accepted and banal violence of the spectacle.
This article provides an introduction to the special issue, ‘Marxism and Postcolonial Theory: What’s Left of the Debate?’ It casts a critical glance at the long history of engagements between Marxism and postcolonial theory that have been both collaborative and antagonistic. The authors argue that far from materializing the end of either postcolonial theory or of Marxist approaches, these exchanges have been productive and have underscored the continuing currency of both, pointing to ways that go beyond the impasse. The article also provides a critical overview of the debates within different disciplines and suggests new and creative ways of reconceptualizing Marxism and postcolonial theory for the current conjuncture.
What does it mean to read Stuart Hall from South Africa, in relation to South Africa, and with South Africa in mind? This paper engages ‘what’s left of the debate’ between Marxism and postcolonialism as politico-theoretical projects by refusing the opposition of compartmentalized scholarly fields, and by positing a conjunctural postcolonial-postsocialist praxis necessary for interpreting contemporary South Africa (as elsewhere.) Drawing on Hall’s notion of ‘moments’ as both spatial and temporal, and assembled in the work of representation, I draw together insights from three moments in Hall’s work: his foundational essay for the apartheid predicament, ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance’; the collectively written Policing the Crisis and particularly its remarkable conclusion which speaks to the criminalization of poor people’s struggles; and his later thoughts on ‘the end of innocence’ with respect to coalitional Black politics. Reflecting on aspects of my research on 20th-century Durban, I suggest why these three moments must be seen in relation to each other, as a constellation that points, through the legacies of the Black Radical Tradition, to as yet unnamed postcolonial-postsocialist Marxisms of the future.
Marx’s (1844) estranged labor manuscript maps processes that stultify spontaneous human relations under the division of labor in the regime of capital accumulation. For Marx, negating absolutes would put ‘Man’ back on its natural trajectory toward positive freedom. Such evacuation of mediating ‘substances’ results in either frivolity or pragmatic barbarism rather than positive freedom. Marx’s political imaginary rejected philosophical mysticism but overlooked finer points of Hegel’s dialectic that contribute to an immanent critique of Marxist political ideology. Missing from Marx’s thought is the logic of post-capitalist mediation and a trace of the subjective modalities that correspond with the objective forms of alienation. Lacking an adequate psychology, Marx did not see that he had constructed a communism that mirrored the subjective spirit of bourgeois society. We draw upon philosophical, sociological, and psychoanalytic currents to remap the genome of Marxist political philosophy with a Whitmanesque imaginary congenial to free, poetic social mediation.
While scholars have shown how ‘color-blind racism’ functions as the dominant form of racist discourse in the post-Civil Rights era, few have interrogated how this logic operated before the advent of US Civil Rights, or how ethno-racial groups such as Puerto Ricans exist in an unique and liminal position and have been subject to color-blind racist discourse. The authors explore the construction of Puerto Rican identity during the pre-Civil Rights: a time rife with color-blind American paternalism over the supposed cultural dysfunctions of the Puerto Rican diaspora, an era of mass Puerto Rican emigration to the US, and a moment when Puerto Rico underwent a political change. The authors employ a content analysis of The New York Times (1948 to 1958) in order to investigate the relationship between the discursive construction of Puerto Rican identity and the flagship newspaper’s use of nationalist and racialized cultural schemata.
The 2013 publication of Vivek Chibber’s book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital has reignited debates over the relative merits and demerits of Marxism and postcolonialism. This article reviews the debate and raises some critical questions about Chibber’s engagement with questions pertaining to universalism and capitalist development. Focusing on Chibber’s critique of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe, the article contends that whereas Chibber is right in arguing for a concept of universal history, the approach he offers towards this end pushes in the direction of Eurocentrism. As an alternative, the article proposes the possibility of crafting passages from Marxism to postcolonialism in order to move beyond Eurocentrism in the historical-sociological study of capitalist development.
This article explores the constructions and dynamics of subaltern migrant subjectivities in three arrival cities, Athens, Istanbul and Nicosia. The paper draws on empirical research in three cities geopolitically located in the most south-eastern part of the Mediterranean basin and the boundary triangle connecting Europe, Asia and Africa. This is essentially a process where the will, agency and praxis of subaltern migrants in the context of social struggles are interwoven with precarious spaces. Precarity is at the core of their daily existence: precarious labour, precarious stay and precarious lives. The generation, maintenance, evolution, even erosion of mobile commons are consequential of social processes and struggles driven by subaltern and precarious subjects, migrants and non-migrants alike. The article explores how the generation of claims to rights is restructuring Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’, as new forms of commons through mobility, resistance and digital materialities are contesting the sovereign governance and surveillance technologies in Europe and beyond. The paper contends that such perspectives from the borders of Europe, that is, in and out of Europe, are not only crucial to the understanding of what is happening in Europe, but are an advanced glimpse into potentialities of the world ahead.
Although Frantz Fanon’s work has been widely read and discussed in recent years, his contributions are often abstracted from its debt to Marxist theory and Hegelian philosophy. This paper seeks to correct this by re-examining his approach to issues of recognition, identity, and self-consciousness in Black Skin, White Masks in light of contemporary issues of racism and ethnic identity. Fanon departs from Hegel in many respects, especially concerning his understanding of the nature of the ‘master/slave’ relations that are structured along racial lines. He also seeks to go beyond Marx by providing a psycho-affective as against a primarily economic analysis of exploitation and alienation. Instead of representing a departure of the dialectical tradition, however, Fanon’s insights on these and other issues represent a crucial extension and concretization of it in light of the realities of his lived experience.
Guy Standing’s description of the precariat in his 2011 book has revitalized the debate on what the precariat is, and what it is not. Although the book faced criticism from labour studies, Marxist approaches and others, it opened up a new discussion of precarity under neoliberal capitalism. This article draws on understandings that link the notion of the precariat (and processes of precarization) to practices and investigates links between immigration and precarity. It argues that the analysis of what precarity is should be supplemented by an inquiry into what it does. Precarity is here understood as a mode for analysing economy and for rethinking heterogeneous identities and group formations. The article uses two cases, Lampedusa in Hamburg 2013–2015 and the "Freedom Not Frontex" action in June 2014, to illustrate how processes of precarization play out in everyday life situations and the economic, legal and social system for immigrants.
Scholars developing a concept they call the ‘human rights enterprise’ suggest a theory of human rights guaranteed, in some cases, by social movements from below and often against the wishes of the state. This article draws on data from an ethnography conducted in a small Food Not Bombs collective to critically assess the radical potential and pitfalls of the claims made by scholars promoting the human rights enterprise and the social movement organizations using the language of ‘rights’ to frame their direct action-oriented praxis.
This paper discusses the transformations that have taken place in Irish higher education under neoliberalism and, in particular, during the period of austerity since 2008. We adopt a critical political economic framework conceptualizing Ireland as a prototypical neoliberal state and maintain that the period of economic crisis since 2008 has witnessed a deepening of neoliberalism. We argue that restructuring in the education sector has been shaped by forces originating from the European Union, global institutions, as well as from the interests of Irish political and economic elites. We examine several aspects of the neoliberalization of the education sector, including privatization, commercialization, labor casualization and the erosion of work conditions. Empirically, the paper synthesizes and conceptualizes available data on neoliberalism and higher education in Ireland. Theoretically, it presents a useful framework to investigate similar cases in other countries.
Migrants with undocumented/irregular statuses constitute one of the most vulnerable groups in terms of living and working conditions. This paper critically engages with the discussions on precarity in relation to irregular migrant labour in Turkey. It addresses the living and working conditions of migrant workers as a particular form of work and life, who can be seen as representing the new precariat of Turkey. The number of immigrants has grown in Turkey since the late 1980s, and with the mass influx of Syrian migrants since 2011 the public visibility of migration and associated precarity has increased as well. Deriving from such a context, the article adopts a theoretical and empirical analysis of the relationship between precarity and migration in the Turkish context by critically evaluating migrant workers’ work and life experiences (including migrants’ contestations of their everyday life).
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) employs creative playfulness and subversive storytelling in their human rights campaigns and solidarity-building practices. The article focuses on three particular media to illustrate how they construct transnational solidarity: (1) son jarocho music as a medium for organizing the March for Rights, Respect, and Fair Food targeting Publix Supermarkets for human rights abuses like wage theft; (2) mística theater as a medium for organizing the Encuentro gathering to build their campaign against Wendy’s for failing to free their supply chain from worker abuse; and (3) a grassroots community museum as a medium for building support against slavery. Creative playfulness and subversive storytelling contribute to successes built on human rights principles and realized through corporate accountability strategies. The article describes these media, and shows how they overcome challenges of building transnational solidarity. Finally, it suggests how the CIW has influenced recent farmworker strikes in Mexico.
Approximately 50 percent of the world’s Palestinians reside in the diaspora, territorially disconnected from occupied Palestine, but no less part of a population so often associated with political resistance. This article asks: how do Palestinians living in the UK express resistance to the military occupation of their homeland? In what ways are such expressions of resistance shaped by social processes specific to such a context? It makes the case for a more nuanced analysis of resistance amongst Palestinians living in the UK, framed by understandings of (post)colonialism. Through a qualitative analysis of ethnographic interviews with Palestinians residing in Manchester and Edinburgh in 2013, I begin by outlining a postcolonial context in the UK characterized by an Orientalism that Palestinians are forced to negotiate. I then spotlight ‘storytelling’ as an important instance of everyday resistance within (post)colonial settings, suggesting that storytelling might allow Palestinians to negotiate their resistance against the various constraints of life in the UK. The findings challenge notions of ‘violence’ and collectivity traditionally associated with Palestinian resistance, pointing towards a need to reconceptualize everyday diasporic resistance in light of often complex, context-specific interactions.
Through developing of the concept of hitmazrehut, the article highlights avenues for decolonializing and de-orientalizing sociopolitical theory and practice in Israel/Palestine. Hitmazrehut (literally ‘becoming of the East’) is understood as the transformation of relations between space, identity, and narrative through an intersectionality framework of social movement activism and intellectual counter-discourse. Exposing the intersections among sites of marginality as well as cultivating localized interpretations of identity (delinked from the orientalist positing of Israel in the ‘West’) would contribute to the possibility of the formation of transformative coalition building across national boundaries. Hitmazrehut is both an outcome and a necessary process for enabling geopolitical reframing. The article begins with the ahistorical and orientalist biases of sociological inquiry into the region. It continues with an analysis of efforts to localize and re-orient Jewish identity as well as the Mizrahi discursive critique of epistemological violence guiding sociological scholarship, double consciousness and patterns of ethnic passing.
This article asks two questions: for immigrants, how is an exploitative labor market constituted, and how do immigrant employees and employers understand exploitation involving co-ethnics? Taking ethnic Chinese immigrants (PRC-Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kongese) as an example, this article examines employer hiring strategies, employee economic rationales, cultural perceptions, and the work experiences of ethnic Chinese migrant workers who find work in the informal sector in Australia. This article argues that language barriers, relatively higher earnings than home countries, the flexibility of cash-in-hand jobs, and the low expectation that job-seekers have of co-ethnic employers increase the willingness of ethnic Chinese migrants to work in the cash economy. On the other hand, employers look for an ‘obedient’ employee and create the image of a ‘good boss’ to decrease the expression of hostile emotions from their employees. Considering how economic factors and mutual cultural perceptions are embedded and reflected in the informal labor market, this article concludes that co-ethnic exploitation is formulated and justified by both employers and employees in Australia.
This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out among what Lian Si (2009) has called China’s ‘ant tribe’, referring to the millions of unemployed Chinese college graduates who live in the outskirts of Beijing and to some extent share the predicament of China’s migrant workers. Education has been the main route to social mobility for centuries in China, but today college graduates are outnumbering jobs in China’s large cities. I focus on the relationship between the fantasy of education as a route to social mobility and the actuality. By narrating the biographies of two university graduates, Jing Jing and Bai Gang, who attempted but partly failed to transcend the boundary between rural and urban China, I show how their quests for social mobility and a more fulfilling life were tied to economic, legal and cultural constraints. I argue that the quest for a better life through educational migration may lead to physical mobility, but that existential mobility is lacking and this sometimes leads to instances of suicide, just as is the case for Chinese migrant workers who feel trapped in appalling working conditions.
As the crisis turns into long-term economic downturn, younger age-groups in Europe seem to be hit with higher levels of unemployment while the welfare state is steadily shrinking. The young have suddenly become a social group united by collective material interests, but does this translate into a sense of a collective political interest? The paper examines to what extent the dominant class-based social science of the post-war years can help us understand the politics of age-groups. The analysis highlights four changes since post-war years: the workplace has changed, impacting socialization; modern media has changed, impacting mobilization; the political landscape is fairly institutionalized, tempering the possibilities for new political concerns to find voice; and those who would define and articulate the political priorities of the young are leaving the Old Continent.
This paper completes an investigation into why there was no major social movement around the foreclosure crisis. The basis of this research was a community study that involved surveys of foreclosed people, community members, and activists, as well as participant observation of anti-foreclosure organizations. Initially I found that lack of membership in or contact with civic organizations on the part of those going through foreclosure was at the heart of the failure to form a movement. The present study adds to this finding by focusing on the groups attempting to organize around foreclosure. I argue that the absence of progressive organizations with organic social roots in the communities affected by foreclosure, lack of resources to make foreclosure a public issue, and failure to develop an ideology that could effectively frame this issue played additional parts in explaining this missing movement.
Most states authorize the sale of tax liens (a legal claim against a tax-delinquent property) or deeds to tax delinquent properties by local governments to third parties. As federal and state funding for local governments declined and property tax delinquency rose in the 1970s, cities increasingly auctioned tax liens to generate revenue. Beginning in the 1990s fiscally distressed cities negotiated bulk sales of tax liens to private investors or used tax liens as collateral for securitized bonds. Tax lien privatization unleashed a wave of predatory activities chiefly targeting low-income homeowners, exacerbated racial inequities in the property tax system, accelerated the decline of urban minority neighborhoods, and stymied efforts at neighborhood recovery and revitalization. This article examines the racially disparate impact of market-based approaches to generating tax revenues and enforcing taxpayer compliance and its implications for understanding the historical and contemporary causes of the racial wealth gap in the US.
Pamela Ann Davies argues that the closure of the Lynemouth, UK, aluminum smelter generated adverse social justice impacts and was caused by the adoption of green state policies. She employs that argument to critique green criminology for promoting adverse social justice impacts. Here, we reanalyze the Lynemouth plant closure. First, this reanalysis illustrates the various social and environmental forms of injustice the plant generated, especially its adverse human, nonhuman and ecological health consequences. Second, the closure is reassessed from a political economic perspective that places the plant closure within the context of global capitalist plant closures in the aluminum industry. That review notes that plant closures and deindustrialization in developed economies are now a common occurrence driven by economic concerns, not environmental policies. We point out that social injustice as well as ecological destruction are often created by the normal operation of capitalism, and that those consequences should not be overlooked.
Environmental protection is presumed to damper economic growth and media accounts of resource extraction often portray trade-offs between jobs and the environment. However, there is limited evidence that environmental protection universally costs jobs and heavily polluting industries provide few jobs in comparison to environmental impacts. Therefore, how has media discourse contributed to the taken-for-granted division between the economy and the environment? This paper uses the Keystone XL pipeline controversy as a case of the symbolical conflict between supporters of growth and conservation to explore the role of ideology and power in media discourse. I use frame analysis of newspaper articles to explore the representations of labor and the environment and how hegemonic ideology legitimizes resource extraction. My analysis reveals binary framing that constructed the pipeline as a political controversy over the trade-off between the environment and the economy, which made conflict between workers and environmentalists sensible, and silenced alternatives.
This paper relies upon the ‘what’s the problem represented to be?’ approach to policy analysis to interrogate key representations of human trafficking implicit in the UK government’s anti-trafficking policy. It identifies six policy vectors, or representations, of human trafficking embedded within the policy, including organized crime, ‘illegal’ immigration, and victim assistance as three primary vectors; sexual exploitation/prostitution, poverty in countries of victims’ origin, and isolated instances of labour law infringements as three secondary vectors. In addition, a series of assumptions, which underlie the current interpretation of trafficking, are also identified. By exploring what the problem of human trafficking is represented to be, the paper also provides an insight into what remains obscured within the context of the dominant policy frameworks. In doing so, it highlights the role of state-capital entanglements in normalizing exploitation of trafficked, smuggled and ‘offshored’ labour, and critiques the UK’s anti-trafficking policy for manufacturing doubt as to the structural causes of human trafficking within the context of neoliberalism.
This article criticizes the negative impact of productivism on disabled people of working age in the postsocialist region of Central and Eastern Europe. Productivism is conceptualized as a mechanism that generates cultural and material invalidation of those considered to be unable to work. The analysis begins by outlining some political-economic features of state socialism that underpinned its productivism, emphasizing commodification of labor. It proceeds by discussing the ensuing approach to social policy, comparing it with two alternative models. Afterwards, it highlights several ways in which productivism shaped disability policy in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. Finally, the analysis looks at present-day disability policy in the postsocialist region. It is argued that after 1989, the state-based productivism of the socialist regime was partially complemented and partially displaced by the market-based productivism of the new neoliberal regime. The conclusion discusses strategies for resisting productivism, focusing specifically on decommodification of labor.
In this paper, we read college course syllabi as material objects that shed light on larger issues, specifically conflict between faculty and students. We explore the commodification of ‘college labor’ where degreed labor and credit hours are produced. Under these conditions, the syllabus becomes a labor contract detailing faculty expectations of students. Rather than merely introducing the course subject matter or providing only basic information, the syllabus increasingly spells out the precise conditions under which student work will be evaluated and credit hours awarded, and the behavioral and attitudinal expectations of students. By observing how power is transacted through the syllabus, we better understand the role that faculty/student relations play in further undermining academic community.
A transformation of world capitalism took place during the 1970s. Profitability decline in core countries was compounded by an increase in world oil prices connected to the rise of OPEC’s oil rent. In this context, a fraction of the Latin American semiperiphery rose in industrial prominence but ultimately collapsed. A combination of recycled petrodollars and an agrarian transformation underwrote this semiperipheral agro-industrial rise. By 1982, however, illusions of advance resting on industrialization were undermined by the debt crisis. While part of the semiperiphery embraced debt-led industrialization, capitalism switched gears into a regime where financial power, not industrialization, became the main sign of coreness. This process is examined through a perspective of capitalism as (simultaneously) world economy and world ecology, where the production of nature and the production of capital are organized in order to secure endless profitability. Nature, in the form of oil, labor-power and agricultural exports takes center stage.
This article introduces the special issue on post-racial ideologies and politics in the Americas. It argues for the necessity of a transnational frame when examining the related, yet historically variable expressions of post-racial ideology and politics across diverse moments and contexts in the Western Hemisphere. The article examines various modalities of ‘post-racial’ thinking and politics, including mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture), colorblindness, and multiculturalism, elaborating their interrelated characteristics in relation to the silencing and minimization of racism and the elision of the role race plays in maintaining structural inequalities. The intersections between the post-racial and racial neoliberalism are highlighted as are the implications of post-racial ideologies for anti-racist and decolonial politics. Special issue article contributions are also described and situated.
This article analyses the conflicting understandings surrounding the recognition of anti-black racism in Mexico, drawing from an analysis of the 2005 controversy around Memín Pinguín. We ask what is at stake when opposition arises to claims of racism, how racial disavowal is possible, and how is it that the racial project of mestizaje (racial and cultural mixture) expresses a form of Mexican post-racial ideology. We argue that the ideology of mestizaje is key for unpacking the tensions between the recognition and disavowal of racism. Mestizaje solidifies into a form of nationalist denial in moments when racism is openly contested or brought up. It becomes a concrete strategy of power that is mobilized to simplify or divert attention in particular moments, such as with the Memín Pinguín controversy, when the contradictions within the social dynamic are revealed and questioned. Here is where Mexico’s "raceless" ideology of mestizaje overlaps with current post-racial politics. We explore state, elite and popular reactions to the debate to discuss how such public displays reflect an invested denial of race and racism while, at the same time, the racial status quo of mestizaje is reinforced. This, we argue, is the essence of post-racial politics in Mexico.
This article examines barriers to collaborations that arise between Andean farmers and a Bolivian rural development NGO in efforts toward agroecology. Despite their shared concerns, tensions are evident in the power imbalances embedded in these relationships, as well as in the divergent values and meanings assigned to participation and equality, most evident when viewed through the lens of gender. The implications of these tensions extend to how gendered human rights are understood more broadly. Western liberal notions of human rights may conflict with local cultures’ notions of these rights, informed by the organizing principle of gender complementarity. To explore this, ethnographic data on farm women’s participation, issues of decision-making power, and their public voices and silence are brought forth, demonstrating how the NGO is positioned as cultural broker between two different conceptions of equality – that of the farm families and the funding agencies and partners from the Global North.
In the 1970s, US capitalism suffered a legitimacy crisis as the economy was mired in high inflation, unemployment, and slower growth. The rate of profit had been decreasing since the late 1960s and by the mid-1970s Wall Street was in poor shape. Capitalists politically mobilized in the 1970s to restore the rate of profit and to restore power to economic elites. In this article, I examine changes to the American economic system with special focus on the perspectives of capitalist elites. While the rate of profit in industry was not restored by the "neoliberal" era, the rate of profit in the financial sector (albeit sometimes volatile) has increased beyond what it was prior to neoliberalism. Thus, the capitalist political mobilizations of the 1970s inadvertently put Wall Street back into power.
Since the 1970s, transnational alternative policy groups (TAPGs) have generated visions and strategies pointing to alternatives to capitalist globalization. However, TAPGs are also embedded in networks of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and foundations, and may thus be subject to NGOization. This article examines two bodies of data relevant to this issue: (1) network data that highlight TAPGs’ links to major sources of funds as well as key IGOs; (2) reflections of TAPG protagonists gleaned from in-depth interviews conducted at these groups. While our network analysis is consistent with the NGOization narrative, and while our participants offered many narratives of their own in line with it, they also provided more nuanced accounts that begin to specify the contingencies mediating between, on the one hand, resort to formal organization and to working with IGOs and foundations, and on the other hand, descent into hegemonic incorporation. In a neoliberal political – economic environment, the future of counter-hegemonic politics hinges partly on our identifying how ‘preventative measures’ can be brought to bear on processes of NGOization.
This article introduces the distinction between ‘routine’ and ‘emergency’ times in human rights struggles. Based on ethnography of Israeli non-governmental organizations (NGOs) advocating on migrant workers’ rights, we show how this emergent distinction manifests in the social dynamics of human rights struggles. Thus, whereas in their daily work, human rights NGOs follow the logic of the bureaucratic system in a slow, Sisyphean manner, in times of perceived ‘emergency’, opportunities open up for a faster pace of action and for breaking routine repertoires. In bringing socio-temporal configurations to bear on human rights struggles, we show how activists’ experiencing of events as ‘emergency’ was a catalyst for the transformation of social mobilization, positing that both NGOs and social movements, however distinct from each other, are in fact related to different ‘times’ of human rights struggles.
For several decades, the distinction between ‘white-collar’ (non-manual) and ‘blue-collar’ (manual) work occupied a central place in the analysis of working-class consciousness. According to many scholars, the expansion of non-manual employment was key to dismantling traditional working-class identities. Although several analysts noted the irrelevance of the white-collar/blue-collar distinction as a determinant of class consciousness, the most recent research on class in Chile continues on the traditional argument. However, the empirical research supporting such a contention has been scarce. In this paper I test that hypothesis. Based on quantitative and qualitative data, I show that the distinction between manual and non-manual labor does not lead to significant variations in workers’ class consciousness. Therefore, its use in recent research on class (e.g. the contention that non-manual employment reinforces a ‘middle-class’ consciousness among workers) is deemed questionable.
Efforts to build stable states in Africa have often been conditioned by ideological and policy debates about the right approach for enhancing freedom and social wellbeing. Since independence, African countries have experimented with unorthodox variants of liberalism and socialism. However, neither of these has enhanced African states. This article examines the shift from orthodox neoliberalism in the international approach to state-building in Africa and raises questions about the feasibility of an international development approach that fuses neoliberalism with a human development approach. The article advances the notion of people-centered liberalism as the latest approach to international state-building in war-torn African countries. It uses the internationally-driven postwar reconstruction plans for Sierra Leone and Liberia to demonstrate people-centered liberalism.
This paper explores the dynamic between the Venezuelan state, which has committed itself to a discourse on grassroots political participation, and civil society, which has responded to this call in ways that often exceed and challenge the expectations of the government. The Bolivarian process has raised Venezuelan’s expectations of the state, and its very success depends on both the actions of grassroots activists and the Chavista government. By analyzing the case of Venezuela I make three arguments concerning human rights. First, although human rights in recent years have more often than not served as a hegemonic tool of the West, they can have emancipatory potential, especially when used by social movements, as effective agents of social change. Second, in order for human rights to serve an emancipatory or counter-hegemonic function, they must be radicalized and transformed. Movements from below must drive the reconceptualization of human rights rather than powerful governments, international institutions and other top-down entities. My third argument is that the conception of the state as the sole violator of human rights or as the guarantor of human rights is a false dichotomy. While the state can be a violator of human rights, when pressured from below the state can protect its citizens from human rights abuses.
One generally enjoys rights, if at all, then only as a member of a particular political community. The nation state’s territorial sovereignty precludes the possibility of human rights. I propose a ‘human rights state’ whose members seek the corresponding nation state’s embrace of human rights. It functions as a metaphor with ‘deontic power’, with each member carrying these deontic powers in a ‘human rights backpack’. Metaphorical thinking is more plausible than theology or metaphysics on the approach I adopt: social construction. Accordingly, all norms are human inventions and at best emerge through ongoing self-reflective politics: rejected or embraced on the basis of critical examination and justification. Creating justice begins with an act of imagination, envisioning better alternatives, and resisting taking for granted many aspects of the communities we are born into. Metaphorical thinking facilitates creating justice in this sense: limiting the sovereignty of the nation state to the extent necessary to allow for human rights.
The argument of this paper is that social ties beyond the boardroom matter. At the structural level, social ties from non-profit foundations, cultural organizations, university boards, policy planning organizations, and private social clubs add unique ties to those established by interlocking directorates. In addition, the multiple configurations of these social affiliations increase the centrality and reduce the social distance among the corporate directors. Although visualizations of these social networks underscore the changing roles these extra-corporate ties play in uniting corporate directors, they cannot precisely capture the unique effects of ties created by social affiliations outside the boardroom. Utilizing the concepts of structural redundancy and multiplicity, the paper describes the unique contribution each set of ties makes in constructing the social mosaic of corporate America during the second half of the 20th century. The results indicate a dramatic reduction in the role private clubs play in supplementing corporate ties, and an equally significant rise in the importance of social ties generated by policy planning organizations.
The movements against the Vietnam and Iraq wars gave rise to analogous resistance efforts, in the form of draft resistance and counter-recruitment, respectively. Despite their many similarities, the draft resistance and counter-recruitment movements emerged in distinct historical eras marked by very different ‘state imaginaries’ or assumptions about the nature of the state and people’s relation to it. Drawing on original archival work, this paper excavates these state imaginaries and examines how they conditioned activists’ subjectivities in each era. More specifically, this paper argues that the 1960s were marked by an imaginary of the state based on consent, which positioned draft resisters as complicit citizens and engendered a sense of personal responsibility for the war. This state imaginary was displaced in the neoliberal era by an imaginary of the state as an alien and invasive force, which positioned counter-recruitment activists (or their children) as potential prey and impelled efforts at self-defense.
Through a review of public speeches, media declarations and interviews by French government officials and influential intellectuals, this paper examines the language used and the measures taken by the French government during the 2005 ethnic riots. Particularly, this essay argues that the government’s response to the riots shows that (1) by applying a white racial frame on the riots and the rioters, the state was able to denigrate the rioters and deny any legitimacy to the riots themselves; and that (2) by applying color-blind racist labels to the rioters, the state was able to discredit the revolt so as to rationalize and justify a set of repressive tactics and racist measures without ‘sounding racist’. Furthermore, this study reveals that the French government ultimately normalized a racial frame about the riots through color-blind rhetoric and practices. This essay concludes that the rhetoric used by the French government signals the rise of a legitimized racism, becoming a dominantly accepted and supported view in the political arena and society in France.
Research recognizes both a tension between standardized work and employee participation as well as the fact that management and labor negotiate both formally and informally over the reorganization of work. Through a comparison of the lean production systems being implemented at three General Motors assembly plants, this article demonstrates the tension between standardization and participation to be socially constructed due, in part, to workplace historical context. Workplace history shapes the attitudes of actors as they negotiate change and can become a significant obstacle to implementing teamwork and employee participation schemes, while perceptions of the future may determine whether or not those obstacles are overcome.
According to legal scholar Sumi Cho, an important role conservatives of color play in the larger conservative movement is functioning in the role of racial mascots. Racial mascotting is when conservative individuals of color are embraced by their white peers with the purpose of helping to deflect charges of racism from critics. Conservative social activist Star Parker contends that the practice of welfare capitalism, as illustrated by the Community Reinvestment Act’s mandate to banks to provide services to underserved minority and low income communities, was one factor that contributed to the subsequent housing crisis. Parker also asserts that mortgage relief programs, similar to other domestic social programs like welfare, produce a form of moral hazard among its recipients because both programs appear to reward an individual’s poor behavior instead of making them accountable for their actions. I argue that in addition to Parker’s analysis of the housing crisis being empirically flawed, her idealized construction of an American society functioning under the rule of laissez-faire capitalism where racism’s impact on the opportunity chances of African Americans is minimal ultimately allows for the maintenance of an American social structure where ‘whiteness’ and racial inequality reign supreme.
This paper examines the impact of neoliberal reforms on Mexico’s mining sector, with a focus on the social and environmental conflicts that have emerged since the 1990s. It distinguishes between two types of conflict: labor conflicts, which stem from intensified labor exploitation in the realm of expanded reproduction; and eco-territorial conflicts around accumulation by dispossession. It argues that free-market mining in Mexico has led to Mexican oligopoly control, Canadian imperialism and narco-mining.
Recent Argentine history showed that since 2003 the labor movement became increasingly relevant due to protests organized by unionized formal workers. Labor revitalization in a context of persistent informality raised the following question: Were there union organizing strategies that related formal workers to the broader working class community that included informal workers? This article answered the question through the analysis of union strategies from three formal sector firms located in one city of the Northern Gran Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 2005 and 2011. The evidence from this comparison showed that in two of the factories there were union strategies to reach the community. The existence of a grassroots democratic union in the shop floor appeared as a necessary condition for inclusive union strategies. The scale of those relations varied according to the geographical pattern of workers’ housing, which was the result of the company’s localization strategy.
The author examines the "It Gets Better" (IGB) anti-gay bullying project, focusing particular attention on social class narratives in videos made for the campaign. Results, based on a content analysis of 128 videos, indicate that individuals most commonly began by describing negative experiences during adolescence before shifting to a narrative of progress, emphasizing how their life had improved since high school. In doing so, the makers of the videos drew on class-based standards of success such as traveling, attending college, and moving to a big city. At the same time, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people sometimes stigmatized the bullies in classist ways. Thus, as IGB encourages makers of the videos to underscore their financial success and to condemn the perpetrators of anti-gay bullying, the project reinforces the cultural elements of neoliberalism.
Piero Sraffa’s The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is the seminal attempt to create a physical, rather than a social, numeraire to measure the price of commodities. Sraffa’s physical numeraire is predicated on the physical identity and, therefore, direct commensurability of inputs and outputs. It is considered to be the viable alternative to Ricardo and Marx’s social numeraire that used labour time to measure the value of incommensurate inputs and outputs. Sraffa’s assumption of the identity of inputs and outputs contradicts the essential nature of the production process itself, where human activity changes one set of inputs into a different, and therefore incommensurate, set of outputs. This false premise underpins every critique of labour value theory, including from Samuelson and Steedman. Paradoxically, Sraffa’s assumptions also underpin the work of Marxists, notably Freeman and Kliman, who attempt to defend labour value theory in models where it does not apply.
The goal of this reflection is to develop an explanation about how social actors who express their discontent in street protests have come to be considered enemies of the rule of law and social stability, thereby justifying the repressive measures that state authorities take against them. This dynamic traces its legitimacy to the existence of a social representation of crime that elicits thoughts of danger and fear for a variety of social groups. In the context of this reflection, we will analyze the social protest of 1 December 2012 that took place in Mexico City on the occasion of the presidential inauguration of Enrique Peña Nieto.
Indigenous hip-hop artists throughout the Americas are currently challenging cultural genocide and contemporary post-racial discourse by utilizing ancestral languages in hip-hop cultural production. While the effects of settler colonialism and white supremacy have been far-reaching genocidal projects throughout the Americas, one primary site of resistance has been language. Artists such as Tall Paul (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe), Tolteka (Mexica), and Los Nin (Quecha), who rap in Ojibwe, Nahuatl, and Kichwa respectively, trouble the pervasive structure of U.S. cultural imperialism that persists throughout the Americas. As a result, Indigenous hip-hop is a medium to engage the process of decolonization by 1) disseminating a conscious pan-indigeneity through lyricism and alliance building, 2) retaining and teaching Indigenous languages in their songs, and 3) implementing a radical orality in their verses that revitalizes both Indigenous oral traditions/storytelling and the early message rap of the 1970s and 1980s.
This research examines the ways in which Ohio Works First (OWF) program managers respond to the bureaucratic constraints of implementing welfare-to-work programs. Using qualitative data collected from telephone interviews with program managers in 69 of Ohio’s 88 counties, we build on prior research that examines caseworker identity and case management (Watkins-Hayes, 2009) by investigating how managers view the challenges and program barriers to self-sufficiency for cash assistance clients in Ohio. We find three distinct manager identities and responses to these challenges and barriers. First, following Watkins-Hayes (2009), we find ‘social work’ identified managers are more holistic in their approach and focused on structural barriers to self-sufficiency. A second type of manager – ‘efficiency engineers’ – are far more rules-minded and focused on clients’ individual barriers. Third, similar to existing research (Taylor and Seale, 2013), we find support for another category of managers – ‘conflicted’ – who discuss both structural and individual-level barriers to self-sufficiency.
This article addresses Michael Burawoy’s call for a public sociology. While it takes a critical view of Burawoy’s proposition, it accepts the basic idea of conceptualizing sociology as a discipline inherently engaged with the public. To this end, it draws on the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer formulated in his Truth and Method. While Burawoy understands public sociology as a distinct type of sociological work complementary to traditional professional sociology, using Gadamer’s philosophy I attempt to avoid this division and to conceptualize sociology on the basis of the intersection between professional and public sociology. I understand sociology not as a research field formulating theories that describe society, but as a distinct interpretative tradition that participates in contemporary discussions seeking answers to the social-related questions posed by the public.
In cities around the world, environmental concerns have spurred urban activists to organize alternative forms of settlement. Here, we assess efforts by one ecovillage in the Pacific Northwest to change their lifestyles in accordance with ecological principles. Drawing from the concepts of restitution and the political-economic opportunity structure (PEOS), we find that ecovillagers intend to mitigate the antagonism between humans and nature, but they face limitations from the larger urban and political-economic contexts. As such, this study describes the routine practices and experiences of urban ecovillagers as an example of the micro-level dynamics and tensions implied in metabolic rift theory.
Australian settlement policy has stressed social cohesion for new refugee-background migrants, including the importance of integration into rental housing. The authors argue that the transitory nature of rental property is an obstacle for many migrants of African background, for it is the inability to have land on which to plant a tree, that there is non-belonging. For spiritual continuity, and in order for connection to the living-dead ancestors to be real, it is critical to have a home and land. Through the use of story and proverb, the article argues that Congolese ways of knowing the non-material world offer a point of radical departure from Western ways of knowing and experiencing belonging to place, particularly in the post-colonial context of Australia, where belonging has become inimically tied to possession of a home and land. Further, the authors argue that the decisions as to what is known are embedded in questions of power.
This article explores the production of human rights discourse by examining the organization and social actors involved in its construction. The author proposes a triad constellation configuration for situating the varied engagements of human rights by different constituencies at the United Nations level: dominant understandings, counterpublic approaches, and social praxis. Dominant understandings are affiliated with the Western-legal apparatus, counterpublic approaches embrace antiracist and feminist epistemologies, and social praxis is about the mediation between the first two constellations. This article argues that the social praxis constellation is where the discourse of human rights can be inventive and dynamic because an envisioning of human rights moves beyond the rubric of civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights.
In the wake of the global financial crisis, societies across the world are attempting to manage potentially destabilizing levels of youth unemployment and underemployment. New terms have entered the popular lexicon such as ‘generation jobless’, ‘the new underclass’, and ‘the precariat’ in order to describe a generation of young people struggling to acquire secure livelihoods in the most dismal labor market since the Great Depression. This article draws on analytical resources from critical sociology of education and heterodox political economy in order to critique orthodox economic diagnoses of generational precarity as a human capital problem. It argues that while neo-Keynesian accounts provide an important corrective to certain aspects of conventional (neoclassical/neoliberal) viewpoints, they ultimately fall short of the explanatory power of Marxian analysis, particularly concerning the primacy of class relations and the contradictory role of employment within an increasingly crisis-ridden global capitalism.
The construct of place has largely been under-utilized, and, therefore, under-theorized, in social science discussions regarding systematic racial oppression, but we need to consider physical space or symbolic (i.e. social/political) place in our ideas about both racial identity formation and racial relations. During the Jim Crow era, blacks were expected to ‘stay in their place’, and that place was always subservient to the position of whites. Despite advances by racial/ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged groups, vestiges of this American Jim Crow belief system still operate in society. The author contends that recent widespread voter suppression efforts commencing en masse since 2010 are not a rejection of black bodies per se but a response to perceived black (and brown) bodies out of place. The article provides a framework to help illuminate the presence of continued systematic pushback against the advances of minorities amidst a growing discourse of colorblindness.
This article will argue that the concepts of repression and militarization are inadequate tools for a radical critique of the targeted and selective application of coercion and consent in efforts to (re)produce a liberal capitalist order. The article will first of all show how liberal social control is best understood as uneven processes of pacification targeting specific individuals, groups and populations through a combination of coercion and consent. Secondly, the article will examine historical and current efforts to control protest through the lens of pacification. The analytic of pacification will then be applied to broader trends in US social control. Last but not least, the article will show that the apparently technical distinctions that allow for the targeted application of coercion and/or consent frequently reflect and reinforce existing societal divisions along the lines of race, class and gender.
The article focuses on the relationship between capitalism and religion through an allegorical double reading of social theory and fiction. Theoretically it discusses capitalism as religion. Empirically it analyses Michel Houellebecq’s recent novel The Map and the Territory. Houellebecq’s is a late modern world in which capital tends to replace, like a map, the actual experience of life, the territory. A world in which everything is modelled on the logic of businesses and capitalism has taken the place of religion. However, The Map and the Territory distils the relationship between religion and capitalism anew, and this relationship, together with the political questions it invites, is the leitmotiv for the considerations here.
For nearly three decades, racial formations theory has influenced ideas, discourses and political projects surrounding race and racism in the United States. The theory holds that although race is a permanent feature in the US, the formation, order, and set of meanings inscribed onto racialized subjects are contingent upon historical and political contexts. This framework conceals anti-black racism as an enduring social order that affects policies, policy outcomes and organizes the relationship between non-black and black bodies. One exemplary social institution through which this can be seen is the public education system and its culture of discipline and punishment in the US. Current interrogations of school disciplinary landscapes have focused in on disparities in discipline policies as they affect working-class/working-poor boys of color. While it is useful to examine the uneven rates of suspensions, expulsions, and arrests, focusing on these disciplinary discrepancies misses everyday occurrences of punishment that young black girls experience. This qualitative paper examines school discipline policies and informal punitive practices including the implications that these mechanisms have on the physical and emotional worlds of black girls. The study finds that black girls are rendered structurally vulnerable to discipline and punishment at the hands of adults and peers in ways that exceed or contend with the logics espoused through racial formations theory. Placing black girls at the center of analysis compels us to examine the anti-black logic of discipline and punishment in schools and at large.
This article explores dimensions of a foundational social antagonism that, the author claims, characterizes the Brazilian polis, by analyzing the ways in which the problem of Black presence manifested itself in the 2013 mass street protests and the rolezinhos (literally cruises, or little strolls). The author makes an initial analysis of the drastic policy changes brought about by the two Lula federal administrations, in particular their emphasis on addressing long-term and structural poverty. This is followed by an examination of white participation in and Black disidentification with the 2013 protests, establishing the grounds on which the heuristic proposition about the foundational Black antagonism vis-à-vis the nation is further elaborated and tested. The final section analyses the rolezinhos and the controversies they generated.
This article examines the tensions between constitutional rights, welfare politics and extractivism in Ecuador. In practice, the rights of nature risk being subordinated to other human values amidst strategic State interests in economic development and social programs, due to the government’s pragmatic approach toward environmental rights. The Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 has been celebrated for being the most radical in the world regarding the specific rights of nature and the indigenous peoples. The central framing of the Constitution is the indigenous concept of Sumak Kawsay regarding humans being in harmony with nature. The Rafael Correa government launched a groundbreaking initiative to protect biodiversity and indigenous peoples in the oil rich national park of Yasuní, adding to the image of Ecuador as an ecological alternative to follow and a challenge to global capitalism. Far-reaching welfare programs have been implemented during the Correa administration, but resource extraction has increased. In light of the Ecuadoran experience, substantial questions remain as to whether Sumak Kawsay can be a path for socialist transformation and ecologically solvent development.
Durkheim and Weber contributed a neglected, but substantial and controversial body of literature to the topics of education and immigration. A sanitized version of Durkheim and Weber exists in the literature that should be critically revisited. Durkheim’s work fails to engage the implementation of one of the most selective school systems, Weber’s work contains Darwinian, racial overtones in response to Polish migration. Durkheim and Weber’s articulation of autonomy vis-a-vis their subjects of inquiry is examined. The article argues that a limited and restricted version of autonomy out of necessity impaired the progressive potential of the policy reforms that Durkheim and Weber pursued. It draws on McNally’s concept of a ‘feudalized’ bourgeois elite aligned with nationalist interests in order to explain Durkheim and Weber’s conservative, statist solutions for education and immigration, and the administrative, political reproduction of class distinctions that were to follow in France and Germany.
This article addresses the relationship between anti-racism and decolonization in the North American context. It argues that the logic of decolonization movements for indigenous sovereignty and against the settler states of Canada and the USA overlap the discursive field of contemporary post-racialism in ways that circumvent the challenges and possibilities offered by black radicalism in the historic instance. After engaging recent theoretical literature on settler colonialism, it is suggested that the freedom drive that abolishes slavery unsettles both colonial and decolonial forms of sovereign determination.
This article examines the racial identities of middle class Mexican Americans, and provides a focus on how racial oppression plays a significant role in the formation, negotiation, and organization of these identities. This article sheds light on how Mexican Americans continue to experience racism despite being middle class and achieving socioeconomic parity with many middle class whites. Drawing on 67 semi-structured open-ended interviews (one to three hours each) in Phoenix and San Antonio this article shows how middle class Latinos/as negotiate racialized identities and racial oppression. This research concludes that these middle class Mexican Americans utilize different identity practices to navigate racism and racial hierarchies. These practices are attempts to access white coded middle class resources and to maintain and/or shift their positions in the race and class hierarchies of the USA.
The problem that this paper seeks to address is ostensibly a simple one: why did the Irish Supreme Court dramatically reverse its long-term stance between 1990 and 2003, with regard to the sanctity of the family unit, including that of non-Irish nationals who had children in Ireland, to adopt one emphasizing the sanctity of state sovereignty? The answer, it is argued, requires looking at a complex matrix of interlocking sociological factors including a rise in asylum applications from Nigeria, a decline in the power of the Catholic church, the emergence of the Celtic Tiger economy, a shift in the meaning of Irish nationalism, and finally the interests and world-view of the Irish judicial doxa.
This article reports on an ethnographic study of the process by which a young man became a drug dealer in a in a small northeastern US city. Drug dealing was the principal occupation in his predominantly black neighborhood. This process is treated as an initiation into a criminal career that involved not only the mastery of specific steps of drug dealing but also learning the expectations of the local interaction order framing the space where he lives. Approached in this way, one young man’s story offers a window into the local interaction order of a drug-dealing space: a set of local social practices that must be routinely mastered in the area where he grew up. The pervasiveness of drug-dealing practices in the local interaction order offers valuable insight into how and why male youth in this locale would enter the drug trade and are at considerable risk of arrest.
In recent protest movements, such as those against ‘globalization’, Situationist ideas and practices – which were developed in the late 1950s to the early 1970s – have inspired some of those radicals involved in such dissent. Given this revived interest in the Situationist International, this article takes the opportunity to examine the Situationists’ theory of revolution in relation to both Marxism and anarchism. It argues that while the Situationists’ theory of revolution, in respect of some of its key characteristics, corresponds to Bakunin’s vision of a revolutionary upheaval, the intellectual ancestry of the Situationists’ theory can be traced, chiefly, to the thought of Marx and the ideas of several Marxist thinkers, as well as to the ideas of pre-Situationist avant-garde ‘artists’.
This study explored Latina/o American college students at a predominantly white university in the South. The authors assessed how 12 Latina/o American college students understood racism and racial microaggressions, and developed counter-spaces to navigate the white college milieu. Qualitative analysis revealed instances of racism were dealt with through assimilation and working hard to excel. Additional responses involved aligning themselves with same-race groups and maintaining a high grade point average. Our findings demonstrated that Latina/o students often utilized counter-spaces and determination to excel in college. Finally, a major contribution of our research was that it provided an example of a small case study of Latinas/os, primarily consisting of males, a group that has traditionally been underrepresented in higher education, who performed very well academically at a PWI.
This article provides a reconstruction of the concept of false consciousness seen as defective forms of reasoning that derive from particular forms of socialization. In contrast to the traditional understanding of the concept, I suggest that it is a state of accepting the value patterns and cognitive styles of thinking generated by others, particularly by forms of institutional norms and cultural patterns of activity that can deform critical-cognitive capacities. As a result, false consciousness is a phenomenon linked to questions of power since it is the very means by which groups come to submit themselves to the interests of others, in particular the ability of an elite to be able to actively distract subordinates from questioning the basis of their social relations with one another. False consciousness is therefore recast here as a pathology of subjective cognitive and moral reasoning faculties brought on by particular social-cultural forces within administrative-capitalist society.
Following the decline of ethnic notions of national identity, the extent to which immigrants are believed to have acceptably liberal values has become a site of boundary making in Western Europe. Much scholarly work has focused on ‘boundary liberalism’ in European media/policy discourse, and the ways that Muslim migrants in particular are framed as carriers of unacceptable ideologies. There has, however, been little exploration of how these ideas shape practice in the mandatory citizenship training that is an increasingly common feature of European integration regimes. This article examines boundary liberalism in citizenship education as it took place in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Attention is paid to how instructors interpret the mandate to enforce tolerance in others in light of Germany’s own problematic history, how curricula and classroom interactions define normative liberalism, and how lessons on these values still draw the symbolic boundaries of national and supranational identities to exclude Muslims.
After the Spanish-American War of 1898, anti-imperialists and imperialists hotly debated whether to keep the Philippines as a colony. The ‘generation’ schema, which communicated racialized views of Filipinos/as and their ability to self-govern once they had been educated by white Americans, developed in these debates. For both imperialists and anti-imperialists, the ‘generation’ schema was rooted in racialized neo-Lamarckian notions of how the environment (i.e. US tutelage and training) could change the character of a non-white group. Therefore, this article analyzes debates between anti-imperialists, imperialists, and Filipinos/as as they each deployed ‘generations’ in the field of the colonial state. Using archival sources authored by imperialists, anti-imperialists, and Filipinos I find imperialists argued that future generations of Filipinas/os held more hope for independence in order to dismiss Filipina/o and anti-imperialist demands for immediate independence, while anti-imperialists and Filipinos/as used the schema to garner policies that incrementally led to independence in 1946.
For decades sociologists have been interested in the labor movement’s attempts to rebound. Most research, however, focuses on revitalization within the service industry, ignoring important efforts in other sectors, like construction. As recent scholars argue, revitalization within the building trades is unique because organizing workers is not the same as organizing work. Locals must simultaneously increase membership and market capacity. Unfortunately, existing theories ignore many obstacles that building trade unions face in market expansion efforts. These obstacles include macro-economic conditions, like the Great Recession, which limit work opportunities; inter-union competition which allows one Local to expand market share by poaching work from another; and cost differentials which continue to prevent unions from breaking into new markets. Relying on the case of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 58, these obstacles are explored and used to reformulate current theories on revitalization and market recovery within the building trades.
This article asks whether volunteering by refugees and asylum seekers holds potential to foster collective resistance to the British state’s increasingly punitive asylum policies. It draws on research that included four organizational case studies and in-depth qualitative interviews with refugees and asylum seekers volunteering in a city in Northern England, and analyses this data using inter-related concepts of contradiction, hegemony and social capital. This research found that volunteering by refugees and asylum seekers had potential to contribute to cohesive social blocs that might form a basis for resistance, yet also exhibited tendencies to divide refugees and encourage individualized forms of action, which reinforced a subordinate position for the majority. The article concludes that realizing the potential of voluntary activity as a basis for collective resistance to the state’s asylum policies may require it to be combined with political education and organization.
Contemporary sociology seems to have extreme reservations about the significance of vote-motivated responsiveness – ordinary people’s reputed influence on policy in democratic settings – both in general and especially when it comes to the masses’ role in endorsing policies with repressive outcomes. Those texts that do acknowledge the masses’ role in policymaking deal almost exclusively with the struggle of the lower-classes for emancipation/equalization, and rarely delve into broad social groups’ contribution to repressive policies. The repressive-responsiveness hypothesis suggested here is used to reexamine the case of internal Jewish ethnic politics in Mandatory Palestine. I argue that ethnic politics of this period can only be thoroughly understood once responsiveness to the majoritarian Ashkenazi workers’ interests is incorporated, thus suggesting that the use of democratic procedures was central to Mizrahi marginalization in that period.
The aim of the essay is to situate Bataille’s idiosyncratic thought on consumption in the context of the modern debate on this topic, to unravel its vacillations and contradictions, and to tease out its main implications. The modern philosophical and ideological debate on consumption, while highly variegated, can be usefully divided into two main camps, two broad intellectual traditions or lineages, a Marxist and a Nietzschean one. These camps are diametrically opposed in all important respects, including consumption, yet paradoxically enough, Bataille had roots in both. This point is of crucial importance for understanding his position and its striking peculiarities. Bataille’s contradictory political position is explored, a position which overtly embraces radicalism but remains in fact profoundly attached, it is argued, to capitalism.
The practice of community based participatory research (CBPR) has evolved over the past 20 years with the recognition that health equity is best achieved when academic researchers form collaborative partnerships with communities. This article theorizes the possibility that core principles of CBPR cannot be realistically applied unless unequal power relations are identified and addressed. It provides theoretical and empirical perspectives for understanding power, privilege, researcher identity and academic research team composition, and their effects on partnering processes and health disparity outcomes. The team’s processes of conducting seven case studies of diverse partnerships in a national cross-site CBPR study are analyzed; the multi-disciplinary research team’s self-reflections on identity and positionality are analyzed, privileging its combined racial, ethnic, and gendered life experiences, and integrating feminist and post-colonial theory into these reflections. Findings from the inquiry are shared, and incorporating academic researcher team identity is recommended as a core component of equalizing power distribution within CBPR.
Survey research shows that foreign-born Latinos in the USA are among the least likely to participate in political activism. Yet during the spring of 2006, up to five million (mostly Latino) immigrants and their allies took part in a historic national protest wave. This article examines how nativist legislation can spark immigrant large-scale collective action in an unexpected location. The case of Fort Myers, FL illustrates the cognitive mechanisms that help explain why and how external threats can transform a latent sense of group membership among unconventional protest organizers (e.g. immigrant soccer league members and ethnic small business owners) into a willingness to take action and utilize pre-existing community resources for the purpose of mass mobilization. These findings have important implications for Latino politics, immigration, and social movement scholars.
Although tenant evictions are routine in impoverished urban communities throughout the USA, scholars of housing and urban poverty have consistently overlooked this social problem. Drawing predominantly upon participant observation on eviction crews in Baltimore, this study examines the social drama of eviction, focusing upon the orchestration and execution of the court-ordered physical removal of tenants and their property. I find that property managers delegate the ‘dirty work’ of dispossession to a dispossessed population and that laborers on eviction crews tend to differentiate and distance themselves from the people they are evicting, adopting the dominant belief that eviction is rooted in the individual, moral deficiencies of the tenant. These findings reveal that those who are excluded from the American ‘paradigm of propertied citizenship’ – the homeless – are used to enforce, and serve to legitimate, that very paradigm. I argue that evictions entail a circle of dispossession, reproduced both materially and ideologically.
This article defends the normative legitimacy of modernity from postmodern attempts to implicate modernity in oppressive social practices; Zygmunt Bauman’s Holocaust writings are an extreme example of such attempts. To discredit modernity Bauman renders the Holocaust a rational enterprise analogous to a modern factory system, dispassionately perpetrated by banal bureaucrats, such as Eichmann. Following Bauman, the identification of the Holocaust with modern mass production has become a standard trope of mainstream sociology, culminating in its identification with McDonald’s. However, this obscures the sadistic brutality of the Holocaust, the ideological zeal of perpetrators and the counter-modern norms that drove it. Although Bauman is widely considered a progressive thinker, his Holocaust writings bear the stamp of Heidegger’s regressive critique of modernity. A theory of counter-modernity not only provides a more accurate account of the Holocaust; it also restores the legitimacy of modern norms upon which a progressive critique of genocide rests.
This article documents macro-level trends regarding gender equity for women managers in paid workplaces and examines the importance of factors related to equitable promotion. Primary evidence is drawn from 1982, 2004 and 2010 surveys of work and learning activities of the employed Canadian labor force. These surveys provide unique national-level data on the managerial levels, qualifications, sex of supervisor and divisions of paid and unpaid labor among male and female managers which could provide benchmarks for further international surveys. Women’s representation in top-level jobs remains very restricted, and most women still manage only women. Greater employment experience and higher educational qualifications are now generally significant factors for promotion of women as well as men. But glass ceilings maintained by men and women’s own primary responsibility for household work remain the major obstacles to equitable promotion. Women managers’ increasing economic power remains contingent on facing up to these interrelated barriers.
According to Henri Desroche (1961), one could write an entire history of religion as ‘the mother of social resignation’ or, with equal justification, as ‘the mother of social protest’. Desroche’s apt observation summarizes the topic of this essay, which deals with the oppositional and the culturally adapted communities and movements in the recent history of the Christian churches, focusing particularly on their relationship with social inequalities. Taking a perspective strongly influenced by Max Weber’s sociology of religion, it discusses the ‘religious ideas’ that have guided, and continue to guide, the actions of various Christian churches and groups in societies marked by social inequality. Theoretically, this essay argues that the social positioning of church groups and movements is heavily dependent on the cognitive content of religious beliefs. The contrasting cases it cites show the fruitfulness of such an analytical approach.
Since James Scott introduced the concept of ‘everyday resistance’ in 1985, research has grown within partly overlapping fields. Existing studies utilize very different definitions, methodologies and understandings of ‘everyday resistance’, which makes a systematic development of the field difficult. In previous work, the authors have suggested a theoretical and definitional framework where everyday resistance is understood as a specific kind of resistance that is done routinely yet is not publicly articulated with political claims or formally organized. A more comprehensive and systematic exploration of this challenging phenomenon is possible through an analysis where: repertoires of everyday resistance are taken into account, together with relations between actors, as well as the spatialization and temporalization of resistance. These analytical dimensions are explained and motivated through illustrations from existing research. Finally, it is argued all four dimensions need to be studied in intersections.
Marx, on several occasions, registered his plan to devote a volume of Capital to the state. At the time of his death, however, this volume remained unwritten. Subsequently, students of Marx have proven hesitant to theorize the distinct organizational schema of modern state power, and the way it mediates and enriches those tendencies identified by Marx in Capital’s first three volumes. Instead, the capitalist state is often distinguished by pointing to its disaggregation from the economic structure of society. The following paper will return to Marx’s proposed volume on the state, using a number of recently published scholarly tracts to consider its potential analytical orientation. Particular attention will be paid to Foucault’s late work on governmentality which, it will be argued, offers a useful starting point for conceptualizing modern state power, and the historically distinct ways it forms part of capitalism’s interior.
Nearly four decades have passed since the publication of Immanuel Wallerstein’s first volume of The Modern World-System. Wallerstein and world-systems analysis are frequently viewed, on the one hand, as successful and firmly established, and, on the other, as of largely historical interest, surpassed by a number of new realities and theoretical paradigms. This article seeks to restate the contemporary importance of Wallerstein’s project. It begins by recounting the key conceptual and historical claims of world-systems analysis, and subsequently surveys the broad varieties of critique across questions of economics, politics, and culture. It is argued that Wallerstein’s contentions have travelled well over time, still contenders for attention amidst the globalization literature, and still defensible against post-modern, post-colonial and complexity theory claims. In particular, the strong metanarrative, generative hypotheses, and the still productive research programme of world-systems analysis appear even more compelling in the face of current global turmoil.
This article examines the construction of conservative consciousness toward the establishment press, namely the articulation of the idea of the liberal media. Using discursive institutionalism and Nancy Fraser’s critique of Habermas’s conception of the public sphere as a theoretical lens, it is argued that the liberal media bias critique was developed and solidified in what the author calls the ‘conservative counter-sphere’, a sub-public sphere for right-wing activists and thinkers. A content analysis of the conservative publication Human Events empirically demonstrates that right-wing news outlets provided a public space for the emerging modern conservative movement to articulate a hegemonic discourse and mode of thought about the seeming liberal bias of the mainstream media.
Music has been critical to the alliances and affiliations that have connected black-identified artists and activists from North America and the Caribbean with indigenous artists and activists from Australia and Papua New Guinea since as late as the end of the 19th century. This article sketches out those connections, asking what kinds of social formation this ‘Black Pacific’ has represented. Following Howard Winant, I argue that though affecting a relatively small number of people in places that are generally remote from western metropoles, nevertheless, this story of transcultural identification is crucial to understanding the trajectory of racialization as a component of modernity.1
This article conceptualizes economies of spectatorship through a case study of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally (SMR). Economies of spectatorship produce spectacular diegeses as commodities sold to spectators and sponsors. They develop through a dialectical process of progressive decontextualization as their diegeses are cross-marketed with discrepant products and services to reach new markets. Progressive decontextualization leads to diegetic incoherence that threatens the realization of profit. As an economy of spectatorship, the SMR produced an outlaw biker themed diegesis replete with vicarious action and consumable character gambles. The SMR progressively decontextualized as it cross-marketed its outlaw diegesis with establishment corporate, religious and political themes. The resulting diegetic incoherence threatened profits and required the SMR’s producers to make significant investments in order to stabilize its flow of spectators and sponsors. Conceptualizing such inherently negating processes is critical to understanding the commodification of spectacle in mature capitalism.
A community-driven, collaborative approach to urban development is central to the work of the Rebuild Foundation (RF). This group of artists has spent several years forging community ties while purchasing decrepit buildings in St Louis, gradually transforming them into creative incubators with residents. In winter 2012 Social Agency Lab, a collective of urban experts, gathered to work with youths that regularly partake in RF activities. The goal was to collaboratively develop an entry for Pruitt-Igoe Now, a competition to re-imagine the urban scar left by the demolition of the public housing project. In this article, we investigate the potentialities of play in forging a common language among diverse actors. We propose that this common language enables an agonistic model of the public that privileges dissent and instability over consensus. We argue that play enables diverse groups to collaboratively imagine and perform different possibilities of urban living beyond neat, authoritative urban visions.
This article examines spatial politics involved with the remaking of urban citizenship across Chinese cities. China’s emerging urban citizenship is shaped by its hukou system, which not only spatially and socially segregates rural migrants and urban natives in the cities, but also creates a large group of unregistered or ‘illegal’ migrants. This case study of unregistered migrant street venders looks at the implications of their unregistered status and how it has changed over time, shifting from creating benefits to becoming a burden. I capture how unregistered migrants’ lack of status has increasingly become an important basis of exclusion, and a burden, as they are denied access to new legitimate avenues of claims-making such as NGOs, courts and arbitration. This helps explain the increasingly common, and intensifying, clashes between migrant street vendors who are struggling for a right to the city and the chengguan, public security officers who are charged with regulating the streets.
The concept of corporate social responsibility has been widely discussed in academia in the past decades. Most often, however, this debate has taken place in the traditional hierarchical and structural boundaries of global economy, limiting it to certain contradictory perspectives, swaying between a business-management and a critical-normative approach. This article argues that there is an urgent need of studying the concept from a different angle. Using a power perspective and basing it on authors such as Michel Foucault, David Harvey and others, it discusses the hypothesis that the current theoretical framework of the concept ‘corporate social responsibility’ is subject to a strong imbalance and a structural misalignment and is – despite its allegedly benevolent intentions – perfectly blending into the hegemonic construction of our global economy with its dominant axis between the ‘West and the Rest’. The article concludes with propositions for further research on the topic.
This article contributes towards understanding how Islamophobia manifests in the lives of Muslim converts in Britain. The significant relationship between Islamophobia and racialization is highlighted by arguing that before experiencing Islamophobia, ‘white’ converts to Islam are re-racialized as ‘not-quite-white’, or even ‘non-white’, because of a persistent conflation of Islam as a ‘non-white’ religion. The article also seeks to comprehend why Muslims may be so anxious about Islamophobia when they may rarely have experienced Islamophobia themselves. Rather than suggest this is because Muslims are paranoid and because Islamophobia is just a myth, as some have suggested, this article suggests that Islamophobia can be difficult to detect because it often manifests in a discreet manner. It is shown that converts are well placed to expose this ‘subtle Islamophobia’ because their intimate and regular contact with non-Muslims makes them particularly susceptible to frank remarks about their Muslim identity.
This article discusses critical discourse analysis CDA) as a framework for a critical agenda in the sociology of religion. CDA uniquely brings together discursive and critical (broadly Marxist) approaches to religion, both of which have been underrepresented in current mainstream scholarship. The article argues that a CDA perspective has a lot to offer to the sociology of religion both by sensitizing scholars to the significance of discourse in creating hegemonic understandings of religion and religions in everyday social interaction dominated by the media; and by offering a framework through which to analyse the discursive construction, reproduction and transformation of inequality in the field of religion. The article discusses the concept of discourse and its different meanings, examines what being ‘critical’ means in the context of discourse analysis and constructs a framework for doing practical CDA. Finally, CDA is discussed as a foundation for a critical sociology of religion.
Much recent academic work on making sense of the changing public profile of the Muslim community in Britain operates within an explanatory framework that assumes a shift from ethnicity to religion and an accompanying shift from racialization to Islamophobia. A key limitation of this work, often grounded in media representations, is that it tends to be disconnected from contemporary lived social relations. In response, this paper critically engages with these debates, drawing upon qualitative research that explores a changing cultural condition that is inhabited by British born, working-class Pakistani and Bangladeshi young men. It is argued that this emergent cultural condition cannot conceptually be contained within a singular category of religion as the contours of the young men’s cultural condition are embedded within a range of intensified and ambivalent rapidly shifting local, national and international geo-political processes. Therefore in contrast to recent theorizing and research on Muslim communities and identities, the young men in this study critically engage with the contextually-based local meanings of Muslim, Islamophobia and racialization to secure complex masculine subjectivities. Alongside this, the article highlights that young men recognize that Islamophobia, displacing a notion of racialization, is a danger for their community because of the attendant invisibility of the current impact of social class within conditions of socio-economic austerity, which for them is a central element of their social and cultural exclusions.
The racialization of Muslim Americans is examined in this article. Qualitative in-depth interviews with 48 Muslim Americans reveal they experience more intense forms of questioning and contestation about their status as an American once they are identified as a Muslim. Because Islam has become synonymous with terrorism, patriarchy, misogyny, and anti-American sentiments, when participants were identified as Muslims they were treated as if they were a threat to American cultural values and national security. Their racialization occurred when they experienced de-Americanization, having privileges associated with citizenship such as being viewed as a valued member of society denied to them. This article highlights the importance of gender in the process of racialization. It also demonstrates the need for race scholarship to move beyond a black and white paradigm in order to include the racialized experiences of second and third generations of newer immigrants living in the USA.
Despite the defunding and shuttering of many language courses and departments in public American universities, offerings deemed ‘critical’ to security and military interests have seen a dramatic rise since 11 September 2001. These courses are largely populated by Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) learners interested in career advancement and payment through military stipends for course enrollment and ‘heritage’ learners interested in deepening their familial connections and cultural identities as expressed through language. Drawing on nine months of participant-observation and interviews in one such course, the author identifies three locally constructed symbolic boundaries (us/them; soldier/civilian; white/non-white) used by students to reflect unequal identities and classroom experiences. Findings suggest that the federally-funded American critical language classroom can serve as a domestic stage upon which ROTC students may informally ‘try on’ militarized identities vis-à-vis classmates who are sartorially, spatially, culturally, and racially cast as native-civilian others.
Michelle Alexander’s critical analysis of the US criminal justice system contained in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness has received extraordinary critical and popular acclaim. Her main thesis, that mass incarceration constitutes a new system of racial oppression akin to slavery and the original Jim Crow, has had a profound impact on mainstream and academic framing of criminal justice issues. This article outlines her main thesis, then builds on and critiques her work by interrogating her notion of ‘racial caste’, updating her statistical breakdown of the racial demographics of the incarcerated population, and outlining the constituencies and organizations which are essential to the building of a social movement to reverse the mass incarceration process.
The enactment of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (‘BAPCPA’) of 2005, amending the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978, marks a transformation in bankruptcy law and policy that is representative of larger shifts in dominant economic and political models from ‘embedded liberalism’ to free market ‘neoliberalism’. BAPCPA’s provisions are part of the new practices of the emergent neoliberal state as they relate to the American middle-class segment of the population. In disciplining the middle class, BAPCPA shifts the risk and the responsibility of the lending relationship onto consumer debtors.
This article examines the rise of algorithmic trading and the invention of new financial instruments, their implications and effects. It politicizes and denaturalizes the technological ‘innovations’ that have created networks of control over groups that states and corporations have designated as threatening, then examines how such ‘innovations’ have transformed stock market trading from a geographically-fixed, paper-based institution to a high-speed electronic casino. Finally, it discusses how and why financial actors have amassed the social, economic and political power that allows them to engage in practices that cause immense social harm while remaining virtually untouched by state regulatory agencies, civil and criminal law.
Bringing together Karl Marx’s key intellectual contributions and the best of contemporary anti-racist (critical race) queer feminism is a promising direction for critical social theory. Important studies exist that use this approach. However, its theoretical foundations have not been adequately clarified or elucidated; this article attempts to do so. The proposed anti-racist queer feminist historical materialism rethinks Marx’s materialist conception of history and theory of the capitalist mode of production through the more expansive conceptions of social reality offered by anti-racist queer feminism while simultaneously reworking the latter contributions through Marx’s critical materialism and particular attention to historical specificity and social form.
This article provides an account of Antonio Gramsci’s impact on the area of critical pedagogy. It indicates the Gramscian influence on the thinking of major exponents of the field. It foregrounds Gramsci’s ideas and then indicates how they have been taken up by a selection of critical pedagogy exponents who were chosen on the strength of their identification and engagement with Gramsci’s ideas, some of them even having written entire essays on Gramsci. The article concludes with a discussion concerning an aspect of Gramsci’s concerns, the question of powerful knowledge, which, in the present author’s view, provides a formidable challenge to critical pedagogues.
This article examines processes of state formation in Chiapas, Mexico, from the time of the Revolution (1910–17) to the present. The purpose of the article is threefold. First it demonstrates how differing modes of production attempt to alter the production of space, yet at the same time, how pre-capitalist spaces and social relations, as well as movements of resistance, both alter the topography of capitalism as it unfolds. Second it explores ‘everyday’ processes of state formation linked to localized class cultures. In doing so, it makes claims to originality by providing a spatially sensitive account of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, and indeed breaks new ground by demonstrating a sub-national articulation of passive revolution as a means of constructing state space. Finally, it considers the importance of counter-spaces formed in opposition to the state and what the response has been in turn to these ‘spaces of resistance’.
The sociological study of popular cinema provides an analytic entry point for exploring how economic realities are given meaning through cultural products. In this paper, I compare how two Hollywood movies about bike messengers, Quicksilver and Premium Rush, position their main characters in relationship to the new economy. Both films provide commentaries on work and social class, but, as products of unique socio-historical periods, I argue that their commentaries differ significantly. Produced in the 1980s, Quicksilver uses messengering as a form of middle-class redemption, allowing the protagonist to return to the world of capitalist finance. By contrast, as a product of the Great Recession, Premium Rush offers a utopian vision of self-determination for low-wage service workers at the same time that it reifies the uncertainty, unpredictability, and riskiness that increasingly characterize American labor. I also show that both films converge in their portrayal of women and working-class blacks.
This essay contends that the digital debates over Islamophobia show a curious resemblance to pre-existing American folk theories of racism. The outcry surrounding the reality show All-American Muslim is the case study, but the argument applies to a broader development of cultural racism and Islamophobia in American society. Starting from a discussion of the politics of racialization and ‘post-civil rights’ racism in the USA, the article outlines the mediation of racial politics through reality television and online commenting in relation to Islamophobia. Finally, appropriating the work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Jane Hill on the underlying theories of American racism, I examine two seemingly opposing discourses entailed in the AAM controversy, and demonstrate that the entire online outcry has closely followed the old paradigms through which Americans talk about racism.
Procedural (formal, liberal, capitalist or bourgeois) democracy is the political form of neoliberalism, and it dominates political thought and state practice today. This modality of management of class relations is currently in crisis, expressed through the evacuation of politics, the erosion of civil liberties and the emergence of authoritarian governance. This article offers a Marxist critique of neoliberal democracy, concluding that neoliberalism is incompatible with the expansion of democracy into key areas of social life. This is expressed by six paradoxes of democracy. Conversely, the expansion of democracy can provide an effective lever for the abolition of neoliberalism. This approach is promising for three reasons: first, the expansion of democracy is valuable in itself. Second, the contradictions between economic and political democracy illuminate the limitations of contemporary capitalism. Third, struggles about the nature and content of democracy can throw into question the limitations of capitalism as a mode of production.
This paper examines the precolonial and colonial history of race in Korea, which has been overlooked in the study of race, empire, and Korean history. While the study of race claims to be global, it implicitly assumes that racism becomes possible through physical contact with ‘different races’. Rather than examining the emergent racial politics after the recent global migration, I suggest that racism could emerge regardless of collective racial migration and contact. Further, recent colonial studies have overlooked the colonized, the Japanese Empire and its colonized. Accordingly, I question the absence of race in Korean historiography and the assumption of Korean racial naïveté based on the supposed racial homogeneity. Further, I demonstrate how the notions of race and blackness are fundamentally embedded in Koreans’ understanding of the Age of Empire. Thus, this paper calls for a new ‘global’ approach to the study of race and empire that questions these overlooked assumptions.
This article challenges the tendency to conceptualize contemporary debt bondage as an individualized relationship between employer and victim. It highlights the systemic relations of inequality that underpin debt bondage in advanced capitalist countries, focusing on temporary migrant workers in the United States. It advances two interlocking arguments. First, that debt bondage in the US market is rooted in processes of ‘neoliberalization’ that have left dispossessed populations few alternatives but to sell themselves into coercive labor markets. Second, that debt operates as a class-based form of power that disciplines all sectors of the labor market, albeit in variegated forms and degrees. Far from an archaic or non-capitalist social relation, debt bondage must be understood as a profitable strategy of labor discipline anchored in state regulatory frameworks that have bolstered the power of employers and facilitated predatory and privatized forms of credit and lending as solutions to poverty and unemployment.
In this article, I analyze the particularity of post-racial ideology in Brazil. I examine recent deployments of mixture and racial democracy as re-articulations of historically hegemonic versions of these ideologies that minimize the problem of racism, deny its systemic nature, and deem ethno-racial policies as threats to achieving nonracial belonging and citizenship. Drawing on scholarship on race and racism from the United States, Brazil, and elsewhere in Latin America, I delineate a relational framework for analyzing the post-racial and apply this framework to three examples of post-racial ideology. Through these examples, I illustrate the problematic logics shaping aggressive investments in the post-racial as future promise to the detriment of addressing the unequal effects racial difference presents for inclusion/exclusion today. The article asserts the necessity of mounting transnational and interdisciplinary theoretical, epistemological, and practical strategies to challenge the ways post-racial ideologies rearticulate racial hierarchies, maintain racial subordination, and delimit social change.
This paper documents the shift toward increasingly coercive means of collecting debt from working class and poor borrowers, with a specific focus on incarceration. Placing this trend within an historical trajectory, it is argued that the law has always been central to creating and securing the social relations of debt as class relations. While the abolition of debtors’ prisons in the 19th century helped to shift struggles between debtors and creditors out of public view and into the depoliticized realm of ‘the law’, a number of factors have led to its reappearance in the contemporary era. These include (1) changes to bankruptcy legislation that have given creditors greater power over debtors, (2) the emergence of the debt-buying industry and (3) the growing privatization, decentralization and commercialization of the state, which have transformed it into a creditor that relies on its power to punish to compel payment from some of the poorest debtors.
America’s new race/class contradictions erupted in the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, providing an impetus to think through the dialectic of political and human emancipation the young Marx articulated in Zur Judenfrage. For Stanford Lyman, the theoretical response to the assimilation of diasporic Jews into modernizing 19th-century Europe was appropriated by American sociologists responding to 20th-century America’s ‘ethnoracial mix’. At the text’s four discursive sites, history contextualizes theory and theory contextualizes history, beginning with a recollection of the authoritarian custodial state and Third World America that came screaming to life with the LA rebellion. At the second site, Black Studies, post-LA, found itself on the discursive frontline of this neoliberal turn. The third site is the intersection of religion, race and rights, where we reconstruct Marx’s theses on the Jewish Question, revealing the undisclosed biopolitics of a racial formation theory embedded in his writings of the 1850s and 1860s on the US Civil War and Capital. The fourth site of this post-LA reconstruction is a discussion of the state and the limits of black political empowerment.
Race and racism may be termed the ‘dark matter’ of the modern epoch. Race was invented along with the modern era. It was central to the liftoff of capitalism, a big bang itself. The dark matter then – the darker peoples of that time – was not complete: in fact they were not invisible as ‘matter’, as something that mattered. They were invisible as people. Empire, slavery, augmented state power, and the dialectic of enlightenment as well, can all be seen as racial dynamics in which absolutism’s grasping and violent claws tore at these ‘others’, seeking to dominate their bodies and their lands. Today the ‘dark matter’ persists in the form of disregard from above. An institutionalized forgetting of the meaning of race (‘colorblindness’) disguises this coercion and violence, these assaults, this war. Race and racism also continue from below, as matters of resistance and as frameworks for alternative identities and collectivities.
Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a broad theoretical framework created by synthesizing the main themes of scholars who have challenged dominant contemporary understandings of race and the law. Although a theory of state tacitly undergirds much critical race scholarship, no one has yet aggregated the literature’s disparate assertions into a unified theory of state. This article represents an initial contribution toward that effort. Through comparison with Omi and Winant’s (1994) Racial State Theory (RST), I identify six central tenets – racialization of the state; state as white institutional space; instrumentalism; interest-convergence; fluid boundaries; and permanent racist orientation – that characterize the CRT of State for the United States. I close by entertaining three questions Omi and Winant (2012) argue demonstrate the utility of RST and use them to illustrate where the CRT of State I outline achieves greater analytical purchase than RST.
In the period 2002–12, the Peruvian economy almost doubled in size. This growth was mainly the consequence of the commodity boom in these years. The importance of the mining sector for the Peruvian Treasury is politically translated in the immense difficulties Peruvian Governments have in closing the doors to transnational mining corporations. The government of Ollanta Humala actually inserted the fiscal contribution of extractive industries into the cornerstone of its social policies. In Peru, a growing body of literature is emerging regarding mining issues. However, it lacks an analysis of the development of the mining sector in relation to the general workings of capitalism. In this article we analyze the development of mining in Peru from a critical political economy perspective as this enables us to identify the forces that are advancing the capitalist development process as well as the forces of resistance to this development.
Although the commodification of experience has been a long-standing concern for critical scholars, today the breadth and depth of this practice and the conscious manipulation involved is unparalleled. In this paper I analyse contemporary commodification of experience drawing on insights from the early Frankfurt school and autonomist thought. In doing so, I show how contemporary commodification of experience, understood in particular in terms of expropriation of the affective common, comprises a form of biopolitical exploitation that is part of broader biopolitical struggles in which capital seeks to draw the entirety of human life into its circuit of valorization. Although the critique of the Frankfurt school remains important, the variety of forms of experience for sale today warrants a broader politico-economic analysis in light of historical changes in the logic of accumulation and the operation of the commodity-form, which autonomist thought can help illuminate.
The Dove campaign for ‘real beauty’ has been exceptionally successful, generating public attention and increased sales. This article uses focus group analysis to investigate how young, feminist-identified women understand the campaign, and how they respond when a corporation encourages them to exercise their politics through consumption. We ask whether the campaign is seen as compatible with their vision of feminism, and whether corporations are potential vehicles for feminist change. To conceptualize critical consciousness, we suggest that classical critical theory, particularly Herbert Marcuse, can be fruitfully connected with contemporary critical and feminist theories of capitalist cooptation. Participants varied in their critiques, but relished the opportunity for deliberation, and displayed a clear capacity to disentangle ‘opposites’ like feminism and corporate profiteering. Most women saw the campaign as ‘better than nothing’ and supported some notion of ethical consumption – a kind of pragmatism that suggests the difficulty of imagining alternatives to consumer capitalism.
This article describes the structural characteristics and socioeconomic effects of the neoliberal model that was implemented in Mexico at the beginning of the 1980s. Employment conditions, informal and precarious labor, and poverty generated by neoliberalism are analyzed. The article examines how the economic crisis has been dealt with through macroeconomic policies and social development by the Mexican Government. The characteristics of the public welfare system and the social policies that have been used during this neoliberal period are scrutinized. The program Oportunidades (Opportunities) as the primary national effort made by the government to combat extreme poverty is examined in detail. It has a social policy focus and is assistance-based which has yielded public financing at a high cost with limited poverty reduction. It is proposed that there are intrinsic limitations to these kinds of policy, leading to an increase in fragmented and ineffectual programs.
While many scholars have commented on the rise of consumer finance, few have sought to critically explore a largely invisible segment of this industry: the multi-billion dollar consumer data broker industry. The industry has amassed trillions of digital consumer records, or ‘big data’, that are stockpiled, analyzed, and sold. The odious under-regulation of this industry, as well as the role it plays in consumer debt and data breaches, often flies under the radar of critical social analyses. I adopt a neo-Gramscian approach to make sense of the material, historical, and social dimensions of this phenomenon. This article asks: what are the sources and nature of this industry’s power, and how does it relate to consumer debt? The analysis suggests that these systems demonstrate how financial capital can constitute certain domains of public policy.
The term ‘managerialism’ has been widely used but theoretical publications on managerialism remain rare while theory development continues to be insufficient. This article is a contribution to the current discussion on managerialism. Managerialism is a deeply ideological project transcending its traditional position when entering into society. The following theoretical rather than empirical article sets out to present a short overview of the current debate on managerialism, seeking to deliver some preliminary approximations on a possible definition of managerialism and its ideological project. The second part highlights what distinguishes managerialism from neo-liberalism. It is followed by a brief discussion on ideology. Clarifications on managerialism and ideology set the scene for a few preliminary introductory thoughts in ‘Early Signposts for a Future Critical Theory of Managerialism’. The conclusion provides a brief emancipatory note on what lies beyond managerialism.
This article considers the re-emergence of populism in Poland. With an all but absent left, the anti-neoliberal position in Poland emerged from the right. The article explores the processes associated with this and critically evaluates the populist turn asking if this is a rejection of neoliberalism or whether recombinant populism is increasingly compatible with contemporary neoliberalism. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with post-communist transition, first through Shock Therapy, second through Europeanization, and more recently through the so-called global financial crisis, former dissidents have been co-opted into the reproduction of neoliberalism. In the absence of a more forceful left response in Poland, the population has proclaimed its outrage with the hardships of post-communism by discovering a captivating message from the populists. The emergence of populist social forces has become one of the mechanisms for the disenfranchised to make sense of the pressures of neoliberalization. Populism, nationalism and neoliberalism can happily co-exist.
This article maps out the genealogy of the anthropological concept of emotional economic man, which emerged in the 1990s tied to the concept of emotional capital. Analysis of the discourse about emotional capital in management and neoliberal economics explains how economic man is linked to emotions and how the management of emotional capital creates an emotional power (or ‘pathospower’) that is manifested in three main corporate dispositifs: emotional intelligence, organizational culture and the commercialization of experiences. These power dispositifs have led to unprecedented cohesiveness in the construction of workers’ and consumers’ emotional lives, introducing the management logos as rationality over emotions. Emotions are converted into a vehicle through which power penetrates bodies and subjectivities, sustains active economic conducts, imposes corporate goals for life and disseminates the logic of capital. This emotional power is part of the history of the ways that people feel in contemporary societies.
In this article we examine the empirical impact of diversity on non-white participation in corporations by analyzing images of racial minorities that appear in business magazines. Our findings indicate that odds of non-white inclusion increase when explicit reference to diversity is made. We also find that non-whites are more likely to be depicted as having ancillary roles in corporations; rarely are they presented in leadership positions. Media images are not only produced and disseminated, they are translated into social practices. Therefore we also consider how the images that are included in the magazines we reviewed may inform organizational practices that shape the racial makeup of corporate workplaces. We argue that how and when non-whites are included in these media reinforces an emergent ideology, which concedes that diversity enables corporations to give discursive attention to race without prompting deep investigations into continuing patterns of racial inequality in the workplace.
Cities are a locus for struggles over the ability for historically marginalized groups to feed themselves. These stratified spaces represent a distinct expression of the conventional agrifood system: the undernutrition/malnutrition paradox. By investigating the food politics of two organizations – Food Not Bombs in Orlando, FL and People’s Grocery in West Oakland, CA – this article advances scholarship on how activists are working to heal and prevent further individual and social metabolic rifts tied to urban food systems. Particularly regarding food access, strategies to resist and transform the conditions producing experiential and cognitive alienation and the commodification of land and labor often emerge from interstitial spaces. Yet, radical food politics is embedded within ongoing processes of neoliberalization that complicate and oftentimes blunt their transformative potential. In short, this article investigates the potential for and challenges faced by ‘actually existing radical projects’ working to lessen/end hunger and diet-related health problems.
National manifestations of anti-Muslim racism reflect both transnational and local self-imaginings and relations of power. In this article, Carr and Haynes present Irish anti-Muslim racism as exemplifying the confluence of such forces. They argue that Muslims are caught in a clash of racializations; in this instance, between exclusionary Irishness and racialized Muslimness. Both operate to expose Muslims to racist activity while concomitantly excluding them from the protection of the State. Carr and Haynes argue that the State’s failure to tackle anti-Muslim racism is part of a wider dismantling of the apparatus to address racism, which reflects both the neoliberalization of ‘race’ and the racing of neoliberalism. In support of these arguments, Carr and Haynes present extensive primary data which evidences the complex intersectional relationship between religion, ‘race’, ethnicity and gender in the lived experience of anti-Muslim racism and underline its existence as a cohesive phenomenon.
The article examines how the entrepreneurial municipal government in Chicago, IL has deployed tax increment financing revenues to realize so-called urban education reform through the construction of exclusive neoliberal schools. At the same time traditional open enrollment schools are relatively deprived of tax increment financing revenues for school construction projects. In effect, Chicago’s municipal government is allotted the financial flexibility by the tax increment financing program to construct a variegated, unequal and polarized school system consisting of well funded, high quality exclusive public schools and underfunded, lower quality open enrollment public schools. Further, the placement of exclusive schools is also polarized as prestigious selective enrollment public schools are located in high socio-economic neighborhoods and partially privatized charter and contract schools, outside of local democratic control, are located in predominantly African-American low socio-economic neighborhoods, thus disempowering these residents.
This article frames the focus of this special Africana studies issue of Critical Sociology, discussing its theoretical and epistemological necessity for the discipline, its potential for critically informing inquiry within the discipline with respect to Africana social phenomena and human experience, the challenges it poses for the traditional conduct of sociological inquiry, and what the particular pieces selected for this issue contribute to each of these.
This article utilizes an auto-ethnographic approach to consider some of the tensions inherent in the requirements of sociology as an industry. Short production timelines, high expected output, and classical notions of objectivity continue to organize sociological inquiry, even as critical sociologists continue to question these very relations of ruling. This essay contributes to ongoing critical analyses of sociology’s disciplinary paradigm and offers a consideration of the interstitial spaces potentially produced by ‘slow sociology’ as one possible antidote to these limitations. Productive of a borderlands epistemology, slow sociology resists the ruling relations of sociology and encourages nuanced translation work between cultures of study, cultures of habitation, and cultures of disciplined inquiry, fostering links between public society and academic endeavors.
This essay brings together ‘commodity chain’ analysis with some of the central concerns motivating studies of consumption and consumer culture. It argues that we can, from the perspective of capitalist agents and agencies, discern important historical shifts in the economic significance of the various activities that generate modern consumer culture, or ‘consumer cultural production’. Shifts in both the nature and intensity of competitive pressures imply different roles for consumer cultural production within the portfolios and strategies of leading capitalist organizations over time. Thus, the essay provides a framework for periodizing and linking historical shifts in the organization of commodity chains in relation to transformations in the structure and nature of consumer cultural production over roughly the past century. More concretely, it connects the broad shift from commodity chains organized along a ‘producer-driven’ form to the ‘buyer-driven’ arrangement to different kinds of ‘market making’ through consumer cultural production.
In recent decades, sports franchises have exploited their privileged relationship to the state in order to expand the scope of their local monopoly powers. This article examines efforts by the owners of the United Center, the home arena of the Chicago Bulls and Chicago Blackhawks, to eliminate competition from local peanut vendors. The owners benefited from court rulings rejecting the legitimacy of government intervention in local markets at the same time that they successfully lobbied municipal politicians to intervene on their behalf by passing anti-vendor legislation. This story not only offers a case study in how teams’ monopolistic privilege has extended to concessions markets, but also contributes to a broader understanding of how the neoliberal state works to minimize risk and maximize profitability for large-scale real estate investments like sports arenas. The methodological approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on legal and business history, urban geography and sociology, and radical political economy.
Drawing on multi-sited ethnography and qualitative research, I argue that the visual register in particular modes of communication technology like Skype and Facebook ushers in a different quality of relationships for transnational families. Most participants in this study are undocumented immigrants unable to return to their families for long periods of time because of legal consequences that will ban them from coming back and working in the USA. On the other hand, their families in the Philippines cannot visit the USA without proper documentation. The economic necessity of working abroad and legal conditions deter family reunification. Consequently, since these families are separated their only means of sustaining their relationships is through communication technology. The new mediums of communication, given their innovations in visuality, frequency and access to one another’s digital lives, present complicated issues as well as different forms of intimacy for members in a transnational family.
The growing precariousness of the working class and the declining significance of unions has given rise to precarious politics: non-union struggles by insecurely employed and low-income groups. Under what conditions do unions incorporate these struggles as part of a broader labor movement? This article examines how unions responded to two particularly visible examples of precarious politics in the late 1990s and early 2000s: the struggles of low-wage noncitizen workers and communities in California, USA; and the struggles of poor citizen communities with high unemployment in Gauteng, South Africa. Contrary to what the legacy of unionism in each context would predict, unions became fused with precarious politics in California but were separated from them in Gauteng. This surprising divergence stemmed from the reconfiguration of unions in each place, most notably due to steady union decline in California and democratization in Gauteng. Whereas unions in California understood noncitizen workers as central to their own revitalization, the close relationship between unions and the state in Gauteng created distance from community struggles. Both cases underscore the importance of workers’ citizenship status and the role of the state for understanding how unions relate to precarious politics.
A variety of pessimistic economic forecasts predicts a long period of poor growth and continued high levels of unemployment even as the stock market has reached new highs. Trend extrapolation suggests we can expect continued rising inequality in income, wealth and political influence. Because these developments are so visible there was widespread positive reaction to Occupy Wall Street and its analysis of the causal factors at work shaping the political economy of the contemporary conjuncture. This article argues that these developments should inform the work of social movements and considers the strengths and weaknesses of the Social Forum/Occupy activists and the socialist/Marxist wings of the broad left movement and drawing on contributions of selected European theorists suggests a perspective enabling these poles of the movement to work together while maintaining, as they must, their different foci and political philosophy priors.
This article traces the central role of the American state, led by the Treasury, not only in the spread and deepening of global finance, but also in containing the financial crises to which this gave rise. The first part examines this role in relation to the financial crises abroad in the 1990s. The second part focuses on the Treasury’s opting for failure containment over failure prevention amidst the financialization it promoted through the 1990s. The third part shows how this laid the basis for the interpenetration of US and foreign financial markets in the mortgage credit boom in the years leading up to the 2007 financial crisis.
On 28 June 2009 moderately left-of-centre Honduran president, Manuel ‘Mel’ Zelaya, was overthrown in a military coup d’etat. The coup was followed by the systematic repression of anti-coup activists and the eventual election of current president, Porfirio ‘Pepe’ Lobo, amid that repression and in the absence of constitutional democracy. While critical scholarship on the international dynamics of the Honduran coup has discussed evidence of US involvement, Canada also actively intervened politically. Canada’s intervention has been marked by the bold promotion of the interests of Canadian capital operating in Honduras, as part of a wider geopolitical concern of the Canadian state to reproduce a political environment in Latin America amenable to the interests of Canadian investors. Using interviews with Honduran activists organizing against the coup and Canadian capital, as well as Canadian government documents obtained through Access to Information, this article explores the political-economic strategies of Canada’s post-coup intervention in Honduras.
This article contributes to scholarship that conceptualizes an ‘immigration industrial complex’, but argues against assertions that the complex represents a ‘confluence of interests’ or an unintended consequence of immigration policy enforcement. Instead, law regulates immigration and constructs ‘illegality’ in the interests of global (US) capital. This analysis has two implications. First, private government contractors are only one segment within a broader complex. Second, enforcement through policing, detention, and deportation may not appear to serve the short-term interests of businesses that depend on undocumented workers, but these practices reflect state investment in the expansion and accumulation of capital. The article refocuses attention toward our collective ‘race to the bottom’.
Dependency theory in the tradition of Ruy Mauro Marini emphasized the super-exploitation of labor and helped direct attention to capital’s quest to further expropriate part of the consolidated consumption fund historically won by labor. Marini’s work represented a significant departure from the ECLAC conception of vulnerabilities exhibited by developing countries, opting instead to take Lenin’s theory of imperialism as the key point of departure for analyzing dependency. Marini was critiqued on intellectual grounds by more conservative dependency theorists such as Cardoso, Serra and Cueva, consequently blunting the critical leading edge of dependency theory. This exploration of Marini’s critical Marxist formulation helps contextualize the continuing relevance of dependency theory for comprehending the ongoing class struggle in 21st century Latin America.
One of the most important components of Antonio Gramsci’s social theory is his discussion of political strategy, particularly his distinction between ‘war of maneuver’ and ‘war of position’. For Gramsci, the classical model of revolution through military insurrection (war of maneuver) has been supplanted within advanced capitalism by a cultural struggle of much longer duration and complexity (war of position). Despite the significance of Gramsci’s analysis of war of maneuver/war of position for contemporary Marxism, it is striking that so little attention has been paid to these terms. These terms have a history, both in military theory and in Marxism, which predates Gramsci’s prison notebooks. An examination of the military writings of Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, which are grounded more directly on military theory, leads to different conclusions about the nature of political strategy and the relationship between war of maneuver and war of position.
Glaeser and Vigdor (2012) recently declared ‘the end of a segregated century’. Because America has returned to 1910 segregation levels, it has allegedly achieved transcendence over racism. After all, the authors note, government no longer endorses housing discrimination, all-white neighborhoods are extinct, and white racial attitudes have liberalized. Despite the proclamation, many questions regarding segregation remain unanswered by Glaeser and Vigdor. Namely, how can segregation be conceptualized and its measurement improved, what might alternative methods for analyzing it yield, and why does it matter in the first place? To prompt an overdue substantive and methodological discussion, we undertake a case study analysis of Cook County, Illinois to address these questions. Our analytic goal is to illuminate how segregation is a much more complex matter than many analyses reflect, and when this is taken into account, it becomes readily apparent that any assertions of racial transcendence are quite premature.
Coleman’s concept of social capital has acquired an eminent place within various regions of the current sociological imagination as well as in policy discourses. Yet, it is founded on some very questionable premises. This article starts by reconstructing and assessing the problem – theoretical and empirical – that Coleman’s social capital sought to respond to. Then it examines the sociological thrust of social capital to show how Coleman’s formulation of the concept is caught up in some irreconcilable tensions, some logical problems with ideological implications, and some conceptual blurriness and silences around structures of inequality and the ways in which these structures causally mediate many aspects of what Coleman gathers under the name of social capital. It also shows how social capital is premised on a mix of communitarian, culturalist and familial axioms within a normative vision for suburban milieus where social capital features as a constitutive marker of territory.
This article uses Marxian class theory to examine the state’s role in disciplining the modern corporation. Over the past decade, the Canadian government has enacted laws extending corporate criminal liability to safety crimes and stock market fraud, and considered, but ultimately decided against, legislation that would have made Canadian mining, oil and gas companies operating in developing countries liable under Canadian law. Using empirical data from Canadian parliamentary hearings, the author argues that efforts to punish corporations through law represent an important struggle over who should have the power to control the conditions for appropriating and distributing surplus value. At the same time, however, these struggles fail to address the fundamental exploitation that Marx identified in his surplus labour theory of class. The author concludes that we need to transcend the state’s law reform efforts to transform the manner in which surplus values are generated, appropriated and distributed.
Today, to perceive the link between society and environment does not require that we engage in an effort of great abstraction. What remains paradoxical is that the intensity and scale of societally induced environmental degradation, which rose to historically unprecedented levels during the latter half of the 20th century, is synchronous with an equally impressive increase in public concern for and attention to the biophysical world. This article examines values-based and traditional Marxist-oriented approaches to environmental sociology in the USA in order to assess whether or not – and if so, how exactly – these approaches help us make sense of the aforementioned paradox. Against this background, the necessity of critical theory for environmental sociology is illuminated. In order to further research efforts accordingly, this article advances the concept of sociobiophysicality, which allows us to grasp objective drivers of human-ecological transformation and forms of subjectivity as synchronous with the commodity form.
Previous research has shown that nativist ideology racializes nonwhite immigrants, but little research has looked at how color-blind racist discourse shapes how people accomplish this while maintaining a race-neutral identity. This study examines how online discussion forum participants of an anti-immigrant organization in the United States use color-blind racist discourse. The qualitative analysis of 200 threads (2,168 posts) shows that forum participants use the color-blind discursive tactic of diminishing the importance of race through rhetoric of legality, cultural racism, and reverse racism. This rhetoric frees forum participants to conflate illegal, criminal, and Hispanic. This neutralizes contradictions in their claims of a race-neutral stance, which is most evident in their discussions of Puerto Rico whereby participants reinforce a dichotomy between citizen and Latino. While color-blind racism has been used to explain race relations between white and nonwhite citizens, this research shows how the ideology extends to include nonwhite immigrants.
This paper addresses the problem of social psychology and the political regime in North Korea through the sociopsychological theory of humanist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. Since humanist psychoanalysis has not been systematically applied in academic discussion on North Korean politics and society, the author outlines Fromm’s neo-Marxist/neo-Freudian perspective in conjunction with observations on eroding totalitarianism and patricentrism, group narcissism and anxiety, official ideology, internalized authority and women, the revolutionary façade, and dream analysis as a relevant component of a social psychology of North Korea.
Anarchism has not had a noticeable impact upon sociology. The two traditions diverged in their interest in society and their relationship to it. This paper contrasts the practitioners or thinkers of one tradition against the other. The analysis shows some strong antagonisms, many instances of close analysis and critique of each other’s perspectives, and a number of friendly and supportive relationships between anarchists and sociologists. Anarchists tended to admire the intellectual rigor of sociologists, but thought sociologists were insiders – mere reformers at best, reactionaries at worst – content to study society, but rarely to act for its improvement. Sociologists viewed anarchists with an even wider range of opinion, including considering them principled and admirable revolutionaries, slightly naïve utopians, or criminals and chaos-lovers bent on the destruction of social order. These factors contributed to the exclusion of anarchist ideas and anarchists themselves from the sociological canon.
More than a generation after the civil rights movement, racial inequality persists as a defining characteristic of United States social structure. Scholars from across the political spectrum have discussed and debated the causes of persistent racial inequality, offering various interpretations. Yet in the work of these otherwise different scholars, there is a consistent theme – the post civil rights era is an era of ‘formal legal equality’. Employing a method of structurally situated critical discourse analysis comparing Supreme Court race jurisprudence in the Post-Civil War and the post-Civil Rights Eras, this article interrogates this deployment of the concept of formal equality. The analysis reveals that in both eras the Supreme Court utilizes a discursive frame that asserts the position of formal legal equality, yet simultaneously employs narrative moves that ignore social structural mechanisms of racial inequality. The result is a legacy of legal framing that deploys an ‘epistemology of ignorance’ as a mechanism to protect white privilege, power, and wealth.
Drawing on qualitative interviews and fieldwork, this paper examines the risk factors that lead families into mortgage default and foreclosure risk. While neoliberal ideology and policy recognize lower-income families as at greater risk, in this paper we argue that immigrants and women experience particular risks – separation and divorce, the expense of remittances, poorer treatment in rental markets, and conflicting experience of ownership between the United States and country of origin. When these differences are ignored, social policies cannot respond adequately to the disproportionate risk that women and immigrants face to homeownership.
This article offers an alternative account of the European far-right from those prevailing in comparative politics and the history of ideas literatures. The article focuses on: (i) the historical evolution of the European far-right from its late 19th-century origins to its contemporary form as a current of anti-globalization; and (ii) the way in which international capitalist development explains the generalized emergence and ‘success’ of the far-right. I argue that uneven capitalist development has been integral to the evolution of the far-right. It has been the geopolitical expressions of capitalist development that best account for enabling domestic political contexts that have facilitated far-right mobilizations. Consequently, whilst the far-right has re-emerged, because of the post-1945 decoupling of uneven capitalist development from geopolitical rivalry, the international and domestic social, political and ideological resources that the contemporary far-right can draw upon are considerably weaker than the historical far-right.
It is widely accepted that Sheldon Wolin has revitalized the tradition of radicalism in the context of modern political thought, as evidenced by his contribution to the debate on the so-called death of political philosophy and his forceful critique of Rawls and modern political liberalism. However, Wolin’s fugitive democracy has met with opposition. This paper investigates fugitive democracy from a Marxist perspective and questions whether fugitive democracy can actually confront crucial socio-political issues such as the lack of democracy for the masses in the production of social wealth. Moreover, Wolin’s misinterpretation and rejection of Marx’s theory of democracy and politics leads him to a misconceived view of the Marxian philosophy of history and the progress of political societies as a whole, a misconception that leads to inconsistencies within his own work. And finally, although Wolin seems to be a radical democrat and appears to hold a worldview close to that of socialists, he in fact, despite his criticisms, follows a liberal logic.
In this paper, I discuss ways in which several important fiscal and monetary policies implemented in Brazil after the Real Plan interfered with class relations and how they reveal the financial class character of the state. The fiscal policies analyzed are the release of federal tax revenue entitlements, the so-called fiscal responsibility, and the goals for the primary and nominal fiscal results. In the realm of monetary policy, the analysis focuses on the priority given to inflation control and inflation targeting. The results suggest that these policies facilitated favoritism towards the financial fraction of capital; the policies constitute an institutional apparatus for the reproduction of the income that finance extorts from labor through the state.
Commodification has been and still is one of the key processes within capitalist market economies. Since the 1970s, different forms of knowledge have increasingly been subjected to this process. In this paper the commodification of knowledge in the field of higher education is defined in a broad sense as an example of the intensive enlargement of capitalism. I argue that knowledge shares some features of public goods and can be subjected to commodification both as an educational product and academic research itself. However, the simple dichotomy of public vs. private good is not nuanced enough to understand the status of knowledge within higher education. How to reconstruct this dichotomy, whether knowledge should be commodified, and how to justify one’s normative stance in this respect are three important issues for further study.
This essay examines the role played by Soviet sociology in the USSR’s transition to capitalism. It analyzes the discipline’s contribution to the critique of Soviet socio-economic life during the 1980s, identifying the emergence of two divergent viewpoints within Soviet sociology over the relationship between inequality, the market, and the goals of a socialist society. The essay explores how these viewpoints intersected with the implementation of economic reforms by the Gorbachev regime, arguing that the dominant forces within Soviet sociology ultimately helped the party-state bureaucracy craft the legitimizing ideology of perestroika by insisting that growing social inequality and market-based mechanisms of distribution were the very embodiment of socialism. After enduring a politically fraught and semi-pariah existence for much of its history, Soviet sociology enjoyed a belle epoque as it helped the ruling elite navigate the transition to capitalism.
Scholars have recently called attention to the changing nature of the American university in the wake of the current economic downturn. Considering the transformative nature of knowledge production in the United States, we introduce the concept of intellectual closure in illustration of the unintended outcomes of individual decisions and career trajectories as they operate under the forces of social closure. Intellectual closure is defined as subtle and hidden forms of constraint on individual agency. Intellectual closure includes calculative thinking about how to publish in flagship journals, avoidance of high-risk projects, and preference for short-term projects with more immediate rewards. Structural constraints, specifically within sociology, are enabling the emergence of narrower perspectives and eroding former professional norms as individual decisions aggregate, unintentionally, to constitute a more competitive discipline with narrower definitions of productivity and quality.
The racialization of migrants is constitutive of the socio-political and economic order in the United States. Racial violence has been and continues to be a fact of life for Mexican and Latino migrants in the United States. In 2006 ‘illegal’ migrants throughout the United States rose up to challenge the processes of dehumanization they face on a daily basis. The central question of this study is what compelled ‘illegal’ migrants to organize resistance leading to the marches of 2006? Was this a response to a single external threat? Or was this act of resistance linked to or informed by previous historical struggles of Mexicans and Latinos in the US? In surveying the phenomenon of 2006 while advancing a conception of resistance within the Mexican and Latino community, this study will attempt to link the processes of racialization and their socio-political construction of ‘illegal’ subjects to the formation of migrant resistance.
In 2001, the US National Science Foundation inaugurated the ADVANCE Institutional Transformation program with the primary objective of increasing the participation and advancement of women at American Universities in all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. Although ADVANCE has been received very well, its effects have been uneven among institutions receiving the ADVANCE grant. In this paper, we reflect on the NSF’s goals for ADVANCE and initiatives ADVANCE schools undertake to increase gender equity in the context of gender organizations theory. Specifically, we comment on tensions that emerged through our own research concerning the relationship between feminist objectives of equity and justice and the nature of the ADVANCE program and transformational initiatives. We conclude by raising the perennial feminist question: ‘Can the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house?’
‘Africana Sociology’ begins with a reappraisal of the ‘image of Africa’ in the form of sociology’s theoretical narrative about modernity’s spatial and temporal order. Early sociologists, like Auguste Comte and Lester Ward, conceived sociology as a secular discourse, although it transmitted Protestant values that reduced people of African descent to fetish objects. In the work of Charles H. Long, the ‘image of Africa’ appears in the African American religious imagination because it – more than the land in which Blacks were enslaved – authenticated their origins. In my appropriation of the concept, it is a semiotic device that, through its dialectical relationship with the ‘image of involuntary presence’, structures sociology’s narrative form. Like in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, the image of Africa designates the American nation as a site of crisis, while imbuing Black subjectivity with a wider consciousness of modernity.
This article examines the seemingly incongruous ways in which Shelter-in-Place (SIP) practices have been sold, deployed, and discussed in Southern California to battle wildfire. In particular, this will be a critique of the technical literature and application of fire safety in housing, as well as the anthropocentric hubris that humans can outsmart wildfire. Rather than focus on the success or failure of SIP, I am situating the SIP within the context of architecture, the history of fire safety, and the push of neoliberalism. The purpose of this approach is to make SIP and fire safe home design less about technology and know-how, and more about broader social issues such as privatization and social inequality.
Can consumers be socially responsible? Can the interests of consumers, corporations, and the overall society be reconciled? Traditionally, sociologists have conceptualized consumerism as enhancing individual wellbeing at the expense of moral citizenship. Yet throughout US history, popular discourse has linked consumption to the social good. Business schools currently expound this belief in their ‘principles of marketing’ courses. Popular textbooks promote ‘relationship management marketing’ which teaches students to target their most profitable customers, develop life-long relationships with them, and promote the societal concerns that they care about. The textbooks maintain that corporations are well-equipped to address the societal concerns of profitable customers through the use of cause marketing, granted minimal government interference. We describe this worldview as ‘neoliberal consumer citizenship’ and discuss its implications for social theory and a democratic society.
This essay seeks to contribute to the development of an African-centered sociological approach to examine Africana lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersexed identities and performances. While sociologists using the most progressive approaches outline the Western hegemonic nature of Africana peoples’ perceptions of gender and sexuality, neither approach allows sociologists to view the relationship between social formations, human consciousness, and cosmological patterns. African-centered social scientists and social theorists typically determine that Africana lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersexed identities and performances are outside of Africana humanity. Within this essay, the author relies upon the Kemetic Anunian cosmology and personality constructs as sources through which to develop an African-centered framework to explain the multiple expressions of Africana gender and sexuality. This model considers that one’s gender and sexuality are contained within and inseparable from one’s higher-self that animates one’s existence. This work, then, opens the door for further theory development and praxis in the emerging field of African-centered sociology and African-centered gender and sexuality studies within the discipline of Africana studies.
This study explores how a home-grown framework could be advanced for the process of socio-economic transformation of the ECOWAS sub-region. Subsisting cleavages toward former colonial powers (and other global powers), existence of multiple monetary zones and border posts have been hindering productive socio-economic interactions among over 300 million inhabitants of West Africa. The study analyzes how uncensored cross-border mobility and institutionalization of a single monetary zone could facilitate regional socio-economic integration and development of West Africa. It identifies extant culture of ‘transnational simultaneity’ among Nigerian migrants in Cote d’Ivoire as a formidable means in this regard. Imperative data for the study were derived from primary (interviews) and secondary (evaluative) sources.
This article attempts to understand how hip-hop, as a uniquely black American articulation of marginalization and resistance, becomes a complex symbol of global belonging and post-colonial resistance in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan hip-hop artists have established distinctive rap cultures, borrowing from their own local culture, as well as from US hip hop cultural practices in general. From more locally popular hip hop artists like Krishan, to internationally renowned M.I.A., these artists perform complex identities that symbolically centralize their ethnic identity, while simultaneously reproducing images of war, conflict and cultural displacement that articulate Sri Lanka’s complex relationship with the British empire, an ‘Americanized’ globalization, and a nationalist post-colonial identity.
Though language and oral tradition have long been appreciated among the indigenous people of Africa as the vehicle of knowledge and central to societal development, social scientists and even sociologists have not utilized these sufficiently in undertaking their researches. Knowledge and theories are mainstreamed and applied relative to Africa without significant appreciation of elements of knowledge that could positively impact theories and methodologies most relevant to and from those societies. This is in spite of recognitions of contextual content of ‘everyday sociology’ as necessary for ‘verstehen(ing)’. This challenge also interface with policy papers on the continent. Many policies on the continent fail because their knowledge base is not localized through appropriately indigenous knowledge, thereby leading to failure. This article attempts to show how the incorporation of indigenous knowledge structures into sociology and development policies can assist in development of Africana sociology that will be useful for both theory and practice.
Current advances in Africana (Black) Studies utilize an African-centered conceptual framework in the study of Africana life, history, and culture. This conceptual framework has been utilized and expanded on by those developing scholarship in the sub-discipline areas of Africana Studies, including African-centered psychology, history, and literature. However, to date the articulation of an African-centered sociology, grounded in an African-centered conceptual framework, has not developed; neither has it occurred for African-centered sociology as a sub-discipline of Africana Studies, a sub-discipline of traditional sociology, or as a stand-alone discipline, itself. After a review of the worldview concept and framework and an analysis of the intellectual history of Black Sociology, this article then discusses the possibility of an African-centered sociology contingent upon the usage of an African worldview as the conceptual framework. Finally, the impacts of an African-centered epistemology and African-centered social theory are considered for the future of African-centered sociology.
In the past decade or so, a sizable literature on anarchism has appeared. It has often been attached to the newer movements associated with alternative globalization and with post-modern theoretical currents. This literature is of significant interest for those working within the areas of social and political theory, globalization studies, and social movements. This article critically surveys the literature. It starts by examining the devices used to make the case for a renewed interest in anarchism, and traces the broad lines of historical anarchism. It then moves to explore the affinities between anarchism and the alternative globalization movement, and, at greater length, those between anarchism and contemporary theoretical issues. Critical of some of the post-modern excesses in this literature, and of the too sharp divide between Marxism and anarchism, this reconfigured anarchism is of great relevance. The article closes with some modest suggestions for further exploration in this work.
We examine the experiences of whites displaced by racial change by focusing on the ways in which nostalgia narratives are used to construct and maintain white racial identity in an era of color-blind discourse. Expanding on the analysis of nostalgia as a tool to create identity in response to a loss in one’s place attachment, we explore how nostalgia is used in constructing and maintaining contemporary forms of whiteness. Based on data from in-depth qualitative interviews, we find that nostalgia narratives are useful in framing white racial identity along the themes of innocence and virtuousness as well as powerless and victimhood. In the shared storytelling of this nostalgic past, whites create a present that plays by color-blind rules, while reproducing, reiterating, and strengthening whiteness.
In this article we outline the ‘walls of whiteness’ that make it difficult to teach the sociology of race and racism and make it difficult for students at historically white colleges and universities (HCWUs) to wrestle with these important issues. Most white students enter HWCUs surrounded by these walls – protecting them from attacks on white supremacy – that have multiple layers and therefore are even more difficult to penetrate; yet they must be penetrated. With a few exceptions, the institution of American higher education does not threaten those walls. Instead, college education often bolsters them through curricular and extracurricular experiences, residential and disciplinary isolation, institutional symbols, cultural reproduction, and everyday practices such as grading and classroom interactions. We identify these walls in this article and make suggestions regarding strategies to begin their dismantling.
The present study examines the trend of urban women’s domestic role orientation in the wake of market transition in post-Mao China. During the 2005–7 period, we conducted in-depth interviews with 115 married women, who either currently held a job or had retreated to the home from workplaces, of both Mao and post-Mao cohorts in four large cities. It is found that women’s growing domestic orientation mainly stems from labor commodification and denigration, as the party-state scaled back its welfare provisions and commitment to social justice, on the one hand, and unleashed market forces, on the other. Therefore, women’s domestic orientation, rather than a mere reflection of persistent traditional culture, may be seen as their refusal to be commodified and passive resistance to labor denigration in the new age of economic liberalism. The findings also bear feminist and class implications of complex dynamics of capitalism.
Many scholars associated the recent transformation of Turkish democracy with the rise of a new bourgeois class and the neoliberal restructuring of the world economy. Using a social property relations approach, I provide a critique of the readings of Turkish modernity based on the fall and the rise of bourgeois agency. Revealing the non-capitalist origins and the protracted capitalist transformation of Ottoman and Turkish modernization, I conclude that the reformulation of the main pillars of Turkish modernity today is an expression of the recent consolidation of capitalist property relations.
Finance has traditionally been conceptualized on the basis of what could be labelled a credit model. This model theorizes finance as a functional actor in the process of capitalist accumulation. This structural model has entertained a specific understanding of the contradictions of finance which emphasizes the imbalances in its relation to production. While the rich literature based on this template has generated important insights for understanding capitalist finance, it is debatable whether the credit model is sufficient to account for financial speculation. This article argues that the perception that speculation is essentially based on irrational optimism fails to capture what is important about recent developments of finance. New conceptual foundations are required, in order to develop a political economy of speculation which examines the way in which speculation is socially constructed, how it evolves through history and whether or not it is transforming the nature of capital accumulation.
This article argues that the Depression era musical, Swing Time (1936), provides access to understanding some of the forms of socially constructed desire that shaped working class solidarity in the 1930s. In the first part of this article, I explore the roots of Swing Time’s critique of vested forms of desire in Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. I argue that Swing Time offers an extension of Veblen’s theory by analyzing the power of mass communication to rewire social circuits of desire. I then explore the meaning of the stylistic realism and the language of protest operating in Swing Time’s narrative. From this I conclude Swing Time offers a critique of capitalism precisely in order to affiliate itself with a new, working class oppositional culture. But in affiliating itself with this oppositional community, Swing Time accepts and reinforces the language of racial privilege circulating within the ‘white’ working class. With a final critical act, however, Swing Time symptomatically reveals the invidious character of white privilege, as well as the fact that the cultural heritage of the (white) working class (swing music itself) comes from the theft and plunder of African American originality.
This article considers the turn to punishment in neoliberalism, and the hardening it marks in the criminal justice system, education, and public life. Examining tensions between neoliberalism’s doctrine of equality before the market and its actual reproduction of racial disparities, I specify a concept of violation, as a principle of both material and symbolic domination, that can respond to these tensions. Considering influential analyses of the turn toward punishment, I argue that the historic legacy of racism is a crucial determinant of the excesses of current regimes of penality, and that racialized repression figures in a contemporary recomposition of political economy. Furthermore, in the neoliberal moment the disciplinary repertoire of racism is extrapolated to new populations and terrains. I recontextualize the current carceral turn within a broader logic of violation that links moments of social production and decomposition, and fuses processes of material exploitation with racialized injury and subjection.
Whichever nomenclature is used to describe the study of black peoples and the African Diaspora – whether Africana, Black or African Studies – the approach that is taken is critically important to academia in terms of its potential to provide a direct response and challenge to the intrinsic Eurocentric and Orientalist bias of the US educational system. Unlike other area and ethnic studies disciplines, this field was established as a link between the community and academia. However, in recent history, approaches have become polarized and the field has lost momentum as a consequence of arbitrary boundaries and politicized knowledge. In this article, the Orientalist perspective and Afro-centric knowledge in Black Studies are examined in their historical and political context. This analysis culminates in a proposed approach to use the Sociology of Africa as a new model for Afro-centric knowledge and teaching in this field.
Theorizing the social influence of racism and race has long been a concern of sociologists. Theories have addressed how racism, race and race inequality are organized and changed. Yet they have not addressed why racism and race are persistent despite social change. A social process theory of racism and race is proposed that analyzes their flexibility and persistence. It posits that racism is a social process where the meanings of race identities are traded across macro, meso, and micro levels of society. These trades legitimate social policies, are used to define a society as moral, and inform experiences. Black and white identities in light of the civil rights movement and its retrenchment, and the post-9/11 identity of Muslim Americans provide examples for applying the theory. I discuss the implications of the social process theory of racism and race for the future of race inequality in American society and sociological research.
This article examines the factors that influenced the birthing decisions of a group of African American women from regions throughout the United States who selected to give birth at home. Using the Afrocentric and Africentric social science models developed by Asante and Akbar, respectively, 25 African American women were interviewed to discern why they chose to give birth at home and eschew traditional Western medical birthing practices. The women asserted that (1) a desire for control, (2) avoiding pharmacological pain relief, and (3) dissatisfaction with the medical aspects of intrapartum care were all central in their decision-making process. Finally, the participants also alluded to a desire to utilize indigenous African birthing methods and to reconnect with more indigenous African cultural practices.
In 2009, US financier Bernard (Bernie) L. Madoff was jailed for 150 years after pleading guilty to running a massive ponzi scheme. While superficial condemnation was widespread, his US$65 billion fraud cannot be understood apart from the institutions, practices and fictions of contemporary finance capitalism. Madoff’s scam was rooted in the wider political prioritization of accumulation through debt expansion and the deregulated, desupervised and criminogenic environment facilitating it. More generally, global finance capital reproduces many of the core elements of the Madoff scam (i.e. mass deception, secrecy and obfuscation), particularly in neoliberalized Anglophone societies. We call this ‘Madoffization’. We suggest that societies are ‘Madoffized’, not only in the sense of their being subject to the ill-effects of speculative ponzi finance, but also in the sense that their prioritization of accumulation through debt expansion makes fraudulent practices, economic collapse and scapegoating inevitable.
African American women are continually engaged in challenging invisibility, marginalization, and exclusion. Africana Sociology has the potential to support these efforts by incorporating key conceptual models and constructs from Black Sociology, Afrocentricity, and Transdisciplinary Applied Social Justice (TASJ©). Africana Sociology should recognize the role of intersectionality and socially-constructed and intertwined race, class, and gender identities; it should acknowledge the importance of African-centered thought, including the role of Ma’at; and it should reflect a commitment to praxis – using theory to transform social institutions and thus, social outcomes. With this conceptual foundation, Africana Sociology can serve as a theoretical, methodological, and practical approach for implementing transformative change in the experiences of African Americans, and African American women, in particular.
Scholars analysing Durkheim’s relation to socialism have generally focused on whether Durkheim was personally a socialist and/or his discussion of socialism as a ‘social fact’. This article focuses on whether Durkheim had a socialist theory. I will highlight how Durkheim’s normative and socialist political sociology aimed its critique at: the dominance of the market economy; economic polarization; class conflict; the ‘capitalist state’; and the impossibility of universal individual realization without radical economic change. From here Durkheim’s framework for an alternative political society will be outlined. This alternative, with its advocacy of political organization in ‘corporations’, can be located within a tradition of ‘libertarian’ socialism found most prominently in the work of the early 20th-century English social theorist, G.D.H. Cole. It will be argued Durkheim offers a powerful explanation for the continued dominance of neoliberal ideas ‘after the crash’ and the resulting ‘Occupy’ protests.
As global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions seem an ever more distant prospect, attention has turned to adaptation to the unavoidable impacts of climate change. On the key frontier of sea level rise, this amounts to the injunction ‘build sea walls’. But what are the implications of a scramble for coastal protection technologies? This article explores sea wall politics in one of the countries most vulnerable to sea level rise: Egypt. It is shown that protection of the Nile Delta coastline is skewed towards sunk capital and expected investments rather than poor people. This is a consequence of the neoliberal policies of the Mubarak regime and, on a more fundamental level, of uneven and combined development in Egypt. The latter process is thus undergoing an inversion and reappearing as ‘uneven and combined apocalypse’, on the threatened coastlines of Egypt and elsewhere.
The task of this article is to help in the grounding of foundations for relating surveillance studies to Marxian categories. Existing theories of surveillance have thus far not been linked systematically to Marx’s works. The contribution of this article is that it discusses the relation of the Marxian concept of the cycle of accumulation and the notion of surveillance. It is shown that for Karl Marx surveillance was a fundamental aspect of the capitalist economy and the modern nation state. Surveillance is an integral negative and antagonistic feature of capitalist society. The Marxian concept of the cycle of capital accumulation allows for systematically distinguishing six forms of economic surveillance: applicant surveillance, workplace surveillance, workforce surveillance, property surveillance, consumer surveillance, and surveillance of competition. The notion of accumulation is suitable for establishing a general critical understanding of surveillance.