This paper discusses the complex relationship between morals and markets and uses the case of Nantucket as an illustration. I argue that it was a specific Protestant work ethic promoted by Quakerism that facilitated the rise of Nantucket to become the capital of the American whaling fleet for more than a century. However, I also argue that the same morals and values that helped to give birth to the Quaker whaling empire contributed significantly to the downfall of the Quaker community, decades before whaling in general got into crisis. In more general terms this paper attempts to be a historical case study that illustrates the complexities of Albert O. Hirschman's doux commerce argument and particularly the way the Protestant spirit fits into Hirschman's explanation.

In this paper we analyse the decline of the Swiss corporate network between 1980 and 2000. We address the theoretical and methodological challenge of this transformation by the use of a combination of network analysis and multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). Based on a sample of top managers of the 110 largest Swiss companies in 1980 and 2000 we show that, beyond an adjustment to structural pressure, an explanation of the decline of the network has to include the strategies of the fractions of the business elites. We reveal that three factors contribute crucially to the decline of the Swiss corporate network: the managerialization of industrial leaders, the marginalization of law degree holders and the influx of hardly connected foreign managers.

This article examines the way ordinary members of the public, who were present at the celebrations for the 2011 UK royal wedding, were constructed in the televised coverage of the event on the BBC and ITV. It draws on theories of media events and on theories of the mediated construction of the views of ordinary citizens, and focuses on the way vox-pop interviews and inferences about what the public thinks were used by the two television channels. It argues that by presenting the people on the scene of the celebrations as a homogenized group which thought and acted as one, by inferring what was in the mind of this group and what they would say if they spoke, and by allowing individual members of the public relatively little flexibility in expressing themselves in their own terms during vox-pops, the coverage contributed to a dramatization of the event and at the same time constructed public acceptance of the centrality and significance of the day. Moreover these techniques functioned as an invitation to the viewer of the broadcast to identify with the group, its thoughts and emotions.

This article describes how contemporary psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theories inform my teaching of writing. It suggests that the psychological and academic challenges confronting freshmen recently placed in a new social/academic environment may be abated by a pedagogy that highlights a poststructuralist understanding of identity as multiple and performative.

Simmel says the content of experience does not make the adventure, the form does! To help clarify this remark, the Simmelian adventurer here is recast, following leads from Mead, Burke, and the pragmatists, as an ephemeral role incumbent engaged in symbolic work. The adventure is presented in terms of symbolic conversions of the content of life's experiences—physical things, social things, events, and persons—into objects of adventure. The form of experiencing engages the adventurer in symbolic work in which she or he symbolically synthesizes, antagonizes, and compromises Simmel's fundamental categories of life: certainty-uncertainty, chance-necessity, and passivity-activity.

This paper explores the politics of field research affecting the investigation of an unknown fatal disease (kuru) that afflicted the Fore people of the Eastern Highlands of New Guinea. From its outset in 1957, the kuru inquiry was characterized by professional rivalries and political manoeuvring. At the centre of the political jostling was the chauvinistic resentment of Australian scientists over the presence and activities of an American researcher, Carleton Gajdusek. Increasing tensions prompted the regulation of kuru research through the appointment in 1963 of a New Zealand neurologist, Richard Hornabrook, as the Chief Clinical Investigator. Against the background of earlier tensions, the paper examines the relationship between Gajdusek and Hornabrook as an illustration of the politics of research.

This paper explores processes of self-identification and constructions of historical memory among the Bene Ephraim of Andhra Pradesh, a community of former Madiga untouchables who came to practising Judaism in the late 1980s. Our discussion is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2009–2010, in-depth interviews, and an analysis of written sources on the history of the Bene Ephraim produced by community leaders. We consider the case study of the Bene Ephraim in the context of broader academic discussions about the universalist and particularist dimensions of the Jewish tradition and suggest that this movement illuminates both the exclusive/genealogical and the inclusive aspects of Judaism. We argue that though the perceived “ethnocentricity” of Judaism may have been the basic logic for the emergence of the Bene Ephraim movement, it nevertheless resulted in the development of groups demonstrating syncretic practices and diverse modes of engagement with the Jewish tradition.

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Over the last 40 years museums have become important sites to understand the politics and poetics of heritage management, display, and knowledge production. The books under consideration here all help demonstrate how museums as relational entities—containing dynamic relations between persons and things, as well as generating them—are emergent processes. Each work helps demonstrate why museums in their many guises remain critical terrains for the negotiation of identity, history, and culture in the push for more collaborative accounts of our world and the circulation and display of things.

In lectures delivered to psychologists in the 1920s and 1930s, Marcel Mauss argued for a rapprochement between sociology and psychology. His goal was not disciplinary unification, but rather a more holistic sociology that recognized the mutual constitution of the body and mind, and the effects of society on the embodied person. Following a review of main points from Mauss’s lectures, I critically review several research programs that are advancing in directions similar to those Mauss advocated: cognitive science research on embodied cognition; psychology studies of cross-cultural differences in perception and emotional expression; and sociological studies of moral cultures. I argue that these research programs provide firm support for positions developed in Mauss’s lectures, and that, therefore, Mauss’s ideas provide a useful template on which future sociological studies of culture, mind, and body can be built.

The primary goal of this article is to uncover the deep-seated conceptual affinities between Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias. The second goal is to demonstrate that, in part because of their diverging sensitivities, when taken together the two authors’ highly compatible approaches yield a vision more fertile than either of their sociological perspectives considered separately. Tracing the intellectual roots of the two author’s three core concepts – habitus, field/figuration, and power/capital – we show how they selectively appropriated from their predecessors. We then outline how each of the two authors used their overlapping triadic approaches to interrogate a range of empirical phenomena. Attempting to make the authors’ unexploited complementarity more tangible, we reflect on a simultaneously Elias- and Bourdieu-inspired approach to the body-centred world of sport. The conclusion argues that looking back at Elias and Bourdieu’s theoretical contributions together can revitalize our conceptualizing and investigating of human societies in the future.

To make sense of the complexity of the world so that they can act, individuals and institutions need to develop simplified, self-consistent versions of that world. The process of doing so means that much of what is known about the world needs to be excluded from those versions, and in particular that knowledge which is in tension or outright contradiction with those versions must be expunged. This is ‘uncomfortable knowledge’. The paper describes four implicit strategies which institutions use to keep uncomfortable knowledge at bay: denial, dismissal, diversion and displacement. It concludes by suggesting that ‘clumsy’ arrangements may need to be constructed to ensure that uncomfortable knowledge is not excluded from policy debates, especially when dealing with ‘wicked problems’ where the accepted version excludes knowledge that is crucial for making sense of and addressing the problem.

This article seeks to investigate which kind of educational ethos would be most appropriate for a cosmopolitan Europe. It rejects the idea of the world citizen and narrow forms of nationalism for a genuinely European cosmopolitanism that seeks to learn the lessons of Europe’s often violent past while seeking to develop an education that is implicitly concerned with questions of democracy and human rights in its contents as well as its practice. Drawing on critical debates that inform the work of Adorno, Giroux, Levinas, Nussbaum and others, the article seeks to uncover the necessary ambivalences in a educative practice that is fearful of silencing the Other and cancelling complex pedagogic relationships, while at the same time wishing to uphold democratic versions of citizenship.

We live in a world in which ever-greater arenas of social life are shaped by standardization and bureaucratic rationalization, as the pursuit of ‘measurable results’ sweeps everything from universities to hospitals to international organizations. Yet intuitively we understand that much of our collective and individual existence escapes these efforts of rationalization. How then do we develop a conception of the social world that appreciates both the powerful drive towards rationalization and the things that escape or overflow? This article seeks to answer this riddle by examining the central role of ambiguity in social life in general – and in organizational practice in particular. The concept of ambiguity is implicit in much social theory. Yet, over time, as theories become established, much of their openness to tension and ambiguity tends to be closed off. This article seeks to recapture some of that messiness, to shift the focus of attention slightly and to look at what slips out, does not fit or gets lost in translation. Drawing on the examples of two international organizations – the IMF and the World Bank – I explore the ways in which bureaucracies seek not only to contain ambiguity through various forms of quantification and standardization, but also to foster it.

The financial crisis of 2007–8 was experienced and reflected upon as a crisis of knowledge, the perennial question being why nobody accurately understood the risks that were being taken within the financial sector. In the wake of the crisis, there have been demands that rational economic knowledge be extended further and more vigorously, to prevent such ignorance being possible in future. At the same time, there have been demands for a new, softer rationalism, which factors in the possibility of errors and systemic complexities. What neither approach recognizes is that ignorance is not simply the absence of rational economic knowledge, but is a productive force in itself, something that is actively nurtured and exploited, both by neo-liberal theorists such as Hayek and by expert actors who have been implicated in the financial crisis. We explore how ignorance has been alternately an albatross, a commodity and an institutional alibi to financial actors and the scholars who study them.

This paper exhorts geographers to give critical attention to the super-rich, defined as individuals with investable assets in excess of $1 million. The super-rich currently number almost 11 million globally (2011) and have collective wealth in excess of $42 trillion. We argue that as a result of our discipline's typical, and not unjustifiable, focus on the poor and middle class, and our neglect of the super-rich, geographers may both be overlooking potentially valuable insights to the institutions, practices, and cultural values of our society and gaining only a partial view of global capitalism. We point to prospectively useful work in areas that embrace relationships between the super-rich, place, and mobility; links between wealth and (geo)politics; new philanthropy; and the social and environmental consequences of ‘luxury fever’. We also speculate as to some of the reasons for geographers’ apparent reluctance to engage with the super-rich, responding to some of the critical methodological challenges associated with such work.

The work of the late Pierre Hadot has transformed our understanding of the practice of philosophy, especially in the pre-modern world. This article interrogates how we approach the study of later Islamic philosophy, especially the thought of the Safavid sage Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1635), and considers whether the method proposed by Hadot is applicable to this intellectual tradition. While there is much to be gained from the application of a cognate hermeneutics of the text, I also suggest that we still do not know enough about the actual practice of philosophy, of philosophical communities in the Safavid period, to consider whether it constitutes a real intellectual and structural continuity with the late antique Neoplatonic past. Nevertheless, the paradigm of approaching philosophy as a way of life propounded by Hadot does seem to be the best way of making sense of philosophy in Safavid Iran.

This article examines the figure of the ‘Cashed-up Bogan’ or ‘Cub’ in Australian media from 2006 to 2009. It explains that ‘Bogan’, like that of ‘Chav’ in Britain, is a widely engaged negative descriptor for the white working-class poor. In contrast, ‘Cubs’ have economic capital. This capital, and the Cub’s emergence, is linked to Australia’s resource boom of recent decades when the need for skilled labour allowed for a highly demarcated segment of the working class to earn relatively high incomes in the mining sector and to participate in consumption. We argue that access to economic capital has provided the Cub with mobility to enter the everyday spaces of the middle class, but this has caused disruption and anxiety to middle-class hegemony. As a result, the middle class has redrawn and reinforced class-infused symbolic and cultural boundaries, whereby, despite their wealth, pernicious media representations mark Cubs as ‘other’ to the middle-class deservingness, taste and morality.

The opening decade of this millennium witnessed genome scientists, policy makers, critical race theorists and world leaders standing together to pronounce the anti-racist democratic potential of human genomics. Understanding and assessing this rise of ‘anti-racist, democratic genomics’ requires distinguishing between two problems of power and science: the first characterized by what Michel Foucault labeled states of domination; the second by what he described as relations of power. When states of domination exist, as in the case of Nazi science, liberal efforts to extend new powers of participation and autonomy to research subjects may play important roles in redressing power imbalances between researchers and their subjects. However, when distinctions between scientist and research subject blur, as in the case of much human genomics, efforts to extend liberal rights to subjects of genomic studies—or genomic liberalism—may produce novel problems, including: (1) human genome scientists' loss of capacity to describe their objects of study; (2) disruption of research subjects' abilities to define themselves; and (3) lack of accountability for the unintended effects of efforts to democratize genomics. In these ways genomic liberalism may foster, at the same that it impedes, the co-constitution of knowledge and democratic subjects. It may create new forms of racism at the very moment that it explicitly seeks anti-racist ends. Addressing the problems created by this paradoxical position will require more sustained attention to and critique of the anti-racist and democratic imaginaries that increasingly animate technoscience.

Even a superficial look at the classical ideas and practices of government of populations makes it immediately apparent that there is a peculiarity in Foucault’s genealogy of western bio-politics and governmentality. According to Foucault, western governmental rationality can be traced back to the Judeo-Christian tradition in general and to the Christian ideology and practice of the pastorate in particular. In this article, my purpose is to show that Christianity was not the prelude to what Foucault calls governmentality but rather marked a rupture in the development that started in classical Greece and Rome and continued in early modern Europe. With the rise of Christianity, the majority of these classical practices, including negative eugenics and even family policies, either faded into the background or they were rejected outright.

In 1877, the young Alfred Espinas defended a philosophical study, ‘doctorat ès lettres’, at the Sorbonne University, entitled Des Sociétés animales. This was to become one of the principal sources of French organicist sociology. The paradox, however, is that this work seems to be fundamentally a study of natural science. Espinas tried to justify his position theoretically through two types of reciprocally exclusive and uncomplementary arguments. The first one consists in showing that only certain kinds of animal groupings belong legitimately, if not academically, to sociology. The second one has a greater audacious and uncontrollable dimension. It consists in asserting that all pluricellular organisms are true societies. In this article we first focus on the role played by cellular theory in such a ‘sociologization’ of biology, concerning the extension of sociology. Second, we examine the importance of such confusion within the fields of extension, in aiming to explain the conceptual transfers between social sciences and life sciences, in the second half of the 19th century.

This article reflects on some themes in Harrison White’s work in the context of China, where the social and cultural construction of markets is quite literal. We explore how we get markets where previously there were no markets and draw on White’s central themes of ‘uncertainty’, ‘value’ and ‘order’. We maintain a distinction, with White and with Frank Knight, of risk, on the one hand, and uncertainty, on the other, where ‘risk’ has to do with entities that are in principle insurable or calculable and ‘uncertainty’ has to do with what is not calculable/insurable. An entrepreneur’s decision to enter a market, to invest in and enter a production market, entails what White calls a ‘commitment to facilities’. This, for White and Knight, is inherently incalculable, and hence uncertain.

Two significant challenges in teaching college courses are getting students to complete the readings and, beyond that, having them engage in deep reading. We have developed a specific group work format within our courses to facilitate both deep reading and active discussion of course material. Early in the semester, students are assigned to their small groups and a set of rotating group roles: discussion leader, passage master, devil’s advocate, creative connector, and reporter. Students meet with their group regularly in class throughout the semester. Before each group meeting, they are to complete a set of readings and a reading preparation sheet for their given reading group role. In this article, we outline how to implement these groups, the benefits of them, and variations to the standard format. We also present quantitative and qualitative student evaluations of this group work format demonstrating the success of this teaching technique.

There has been much debate on ‘culturespeak’ and the politics of culture, but the bureaucratic articulation of specific representations of culture has not received much attention. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article presents a double take on bureaucracy. On the one hand, I focus on the outcome of UNESCO’s bureaucracy: UNESCO promotes an all-inclusive culture perspective for ‘We the Peoples of the United Nations’, but there are limits to tolerance in this culture ideology. On the other hand, I focus on the social and pragmatic adaptation to the bureaucratic field and towards UNESCO’s keywords, as they are embedded with institutional authority in everyday practice. In conclusion, I briefly situate UNESCO’s culture ideology in relation to questions of recognition and redistribution.

Reading comprehension skill is often assumed by sociology instructors, yet many college students seem to have marginal reading comprehension skills, which may explain why fewer than half of them are actually doing the reading. Sanctions that force students to either read or to pay a price are based on a rational choice model of behavior—a perspective that many students seem to bring with them. However, deep reading—reading for long-term retention of the material and for comprehension at a level that can be perspective-transforming—involves constructing meaning as one reads. Students need help developing reading strategies that enhance this process. Moreover, cost/benefit coercion of reading does not necessarily enhance construction of meaning or deep-learning; indeed, it may reward minimalist or surface reading. This essay is an excursion into theory on deep learning and the implications of that theory for engaging students in reading. An assignment based on multiple intelligences and fostering reading comprehension is suggested and some initial data are provided regarding possible success of this strategy.

In recent years, actor-network theory (ANT) has become an increasingly influential theoretical framework through which to analyse economic markets and organizations. Indeed, with its emphasis on the power of social and natural concrete ‘things’ to become contingently enrolled in different networks, many argue that ANT successfully draws attention to the complex intermeshing of new technologies and social actors in organizations and markets across spatial divides from the local to the global. This article argues, however, that within its own method of abstraction and research methodology, ANT separates ‘concrete’ and ‘contingent’ economic markets and organizations from their abstract, necessary and virtual capitalist form. This means that ANT will tend to over-identify with how concrete-contingent actor-networks are performed in empirical economic markets and organizations at the expense of analysing how such empirical contexts are also internally mediated through abstract capitalist processes such as that of surplus value extraction. This, in turn, creates a number of difficulties in how ANT investigates economic markets and organizations. These critical points are made by recourse to the Marxist poststructuralism of Deleuze and Guattari as well as through conventional Marxist ideas.

This article aims to demonstrate how the formation of ethical subjectivity must be considered in conjunction with the techno-politics of secrecy and disclosure, and it proposes an account of the ways in which the technical transition and ‘democratization’ of archival upload/download capacity associated with digital communications fundamentally challenges the existing structure of control over such things as censorship and cultural memory understood in terms of power of recall. It argues that it is against this background and in view of the mediality of communications that the question of responsibility with respect to secrets and their disclosure must ultimately be posed. It seeks to establish the difference between a purely political and an ethico-political understanding of the secrecy/disclosure dyad as this functions, on the one hand, in relation to philosophical inquiry itself and, on the other, in relation to normative representations of informational events, and it contextualizes its theoretical account of this difference in relation to the ‘Wikileaks phenomenon’ viewed as a disclosive event. It examines how ethical subjectivity is formed in relation to ‘information’ and in the wider context of a digital culture of archivization, characterized by the ubiquitous recording of communications of all kinds. Drawing centrally on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom ‘infinite responsibility’ is ‘incarnated’ as the ‘ultimate secret of subjectivity’ in me, and Derrida’s account of both the necessary technicity of the human and the impossibility of ‘saying the event’, it proposes a way of thinking the ethico-techno-politics of secrecy and disclosure in terms of the singularity of the event and the unique responsibility of the ethical Subject in relation to that.

This article explores men’s articulations and practices of gender through transition to first-time fatherhood. Using qualitative longitudinal data, men’s antenatal intentions and postnatal practices are explored in this study which replicates earlier research on motherhood. The contemporary context in the UK is one where paternity leave, discourses of caring masculinities and more public displays of fathering involvement appear to offer new possibilities for men. But data analysis shows that whilst opportunities to disrupt gender norms are initially imagined, longer term practices can confirm ‘patriarchal habits’. The findings illuminate gender being done and undone, at times simultaneously, as the exhaustion and hard work of new parenting is encountered. A retreat into normative behaviours can be a path of least resistance as experiences unfold in an arena where men are found to have available to them a wider repertoire of discursive storylines. Optimistically, some changes in fathering involvement are discernible.

This paper proposes an approach to the question of meaning and understanding based on the idea of constitutive rules and their relationship to the social objects they are used to create. This approach implicates mutual attention as an essential aspect of the social processes constitutive of social objects and mutual intelligibility. Social objects as such include the meaning, perception and coherence of things, identities and talk, etc. There is a relatively unexplored but important line of argument in sociology that has, from the beginning, explained the coherence and mutual intelligibility of social objects and associations in terms of constitutive practices and social facts. This line of argument begins with Emile Durkheim (1893) and carries through the work of Harold Garfinkel to current studies of work and interaction, human computer interaction and talk. The argument is that we use constitutive practices (Constitutive rules or constitutive background expectancies) to create social objects and make coherent and shared meanings. To act is in this sense for Garfinkel ([1948]2006) to “mean”. Explaining the consistency of social objects and orders in terms of constitutive orders, rules, or practices is an approach that meets the challenges posed to social science and philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), Peter Winch (1958) and Paul Grice (1989).

In part because he is known through his Meditations, a short pamphlet he wrote, rightly in fear, to conciliate (unsuccessfully) with the church, and because his rationalism is misconstrued when interpreted empirically, Descartes is subject to a variety of misunderstandings. It does not help that he is dogged by a canard invented in the late 1600s and revived by the animal rights movement, a canard that was designed to denigrate the then burgeoning mechanistic new science, discovered cruelly cutting up living animals, while laughingly insisting the writhing animals feel no pain. Descartes maintained that, physically speaking, humans as well as animals are machines, but he also clearly maintained that animals feel pain and hunger, have sensory experiences, etc. As a more abstract level, 20th Century analytic empiricism revivified the attack on rationalist views. But the last half century has seen strong support (though largely unacknowledged) for Descartes’ views about cognition and perception.

Thinkers in the Zhànguó period of Chinese history debated intensely whether men were by nature “good” or “bad”. This debate has for many years been an important focus of sinological interest, but usually these properties were not attributed to men, but rather to so-called “human nature” (xìng 性) – thus, in effect, mirroring well-known (and problematic) “European” positions and discussions. The aim of this paper is, on the one hand, to redirect attention to the original Zhànguó positions and to explore the reasons for their variance by offering novel and close historical readings of relevant passages, and on the other, to propose a viable historical reconstruction of the common anthropological assumptions underlying these positions by blending it with the traces of a dominant cognitive image present in the texts. This calls for a systematic rethinking of the role of hearts (in the plural), desires, and behavioural patterns in their interplay and as elements of a concept of the psychological build of human beings current in early China.

Several developments in the measurement of justice have drawn on Amartya Sen’s work on capabilities. This article addresses the relationship between Sen’s theoretical work and its interpretation in the measurement of justice, in particular by the United Nations Development Project (UNDP) and by the British Equality and Human Rights Commission and Government Equalities Office in its Equality Measurement Framework. It starts with a review of the diverse interpretations of Sen’s work, which range from considering it to be an innovative radical development to locating his work within the liberal tradition. Central to the article is the question of whether it is possible to develop a meaningful operationalization of Sen’s philosophical distinctions, in particular that between capabilities and functionings, so as to inform measurement frameworks. It finds that on both conceptual and methodological grounds it is not possible to sustain this distinction in practice. This is illustrated by an analysis of the changing measurement of justice in frameworks developed by the UNDP and the UK government. Changes in the content of the measurement frameworks in radical or neoliberal directions are not constrained by Sen’s theoretical analysis, despite claims that Sen’s work informs these frameworks. The openness of Sen’s work means that it can be used by forces generated by the neoliberal environment to support their redefinition of justice.

This paper interrogates the status of the Malthusian couple and the policing and government of reproduction in the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I (HS1), and the associated Collège de France lectures. Presented by Foucault as one of the four ‘strategic ensembles’ of the 18th century through which knowledge and power became centered on sex, what Foucault calls the socialization of procreative sexuality (HS1: 104) also constitutes a largely invisible hinge between the trajectories in HS1: biopolitics (vector of governmentality, management, administration and intensification of life) and sex (vector through which the repressive hypothesis is rejected). Particularly because it is one of the least discussed figures in Foucauldian commentary, my argument is that a reading of HS1 through the prism of its Malthusian couple produces unexpected results. A text that can be interpreted from the perspective of (a) its debate with psychoanalysis, or (b) its potential debate with those for whom sexual rights belong to a sexual subject, or (c) its status as a watershed text for biopolitical theory, enters into a fourth dialogue with the history of reproduction as politicized and biopoliticized, a problematic to date taken up most directly by Ann Stoler in Race and the Education of Desire. This allows for a revisiting of the complex relationship between the vectors of ‘sex’ and ‘life’ in HS1. Although reproductive sex, and reproductive life, are not the themes of the strongest importance in HS1, they serve as the invisible hinge at the interface of biopolitics and sex in HS1. Considering the status of reproductive life from this perspective becomes a departure point for reconsidering the reproductive woman, in her historical role as part of the problematized Malthusian couple and at the intersection of biopolitics and thanatopolitics.

This paper is concerned with an aspect of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought which has not been duly analyzed: systematicity. More specifically, it deals with their conception of the system in three co-authored major works: What is Philosophy?, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These works are of renewed interest because they tease out, each in its own way, a particular type of system. Regardless of whether it has a philosophical import, a botanical reference, a social dimension, or a libidinal investment, the system that Deleuze and Guattari advocate is allegedly a hyper-dynamic system that resists closure. Thus, in an interview with Didier Eribon, Deleuze points out that philosophy is ‘an open system’ and then, referring to A Thousand Plateaus, he further observes that what he and Guattari ‘call a rhizome is also one example of an open system’. The purpose of this essay is not merely to explore how the system in the works of these two prominent poststructuralists is conceived, how it is structured, and how it works, but also to show how it is only superficially open. Paying a special attention to Deleuze and Guattari’s exegesis on capitalism, I argue that the proposed system is cynical and ultimately untenable.

Office outbursts are often associated with impulsive reactions to something that is said or done that aggravates an individual by offending his or her beliefs, expectations, sensibilities, or principles. Vengefulness is linked to needs for retribution (until satisfied) for a perceived offense. An unsettled issue is whether these antecedents are also manifested in electronic expressions known as cyber smearing. Free speech by constitution and legislation in the US, UK, EU have been held as a cherished value and basic right, but the rights to free speech are not unlimited and in fact are legally constrained to varying degrees regarding issues such as related to privacy, defamation, and harassment. Cyber smearing is a campaign waged to damage the credibility or reputation of others over the Internet. Using a randomized study we investigated rash impulsivity, vengefulness, and anonymous identity (a virtual self), as factors contributing to cyber smearing, and we found that when people who lack self-control and have tendencies to seek revenge especially when shrouded in anonymity of virtual self and concomitantly have high tendencies toward cyber smearing. We also found that those who hold the view in which ethical standards are situational and relative amplifies these cyber smearing behaviors.

This study examined the influence of gender, the Big 5 personality factors, and self-esteem on virtual self-representation in the form of avatar-self discrepancy. To examine this, participants designed characters to play in a video game, spent 20 min playing the video game, and then had their actual pictures taken. Our results indicated that, consistent with predictions, men and women generally selected self-representations consistent with ideal male and female bodies. This finding was pronounced for men and women high in agreeableness. Conversely, some results contradicted the normative prescriptions often associated with self-presentation. For instance, men did not build taller avatars than did women. Men who were high in openness to new experiences were more likely to select avatars with skin tone variations. Introverts – both male and female – and women high in neuroticism were more likely to build attractive avatars. Moreover, those with low self-esteem were more likely to select lighter skin tones than those with high self-esteem. Thus, the effects of gender and personality have considerable implications for online self-presentation and self-representation.

The World Wide Web provides a tremendously large quantity of information. When users search for information or products on the Web, they will presumably be inclined to choose their path of navigation on the basis of their prior knowledge. In those cases in which the prior knowledge of users is incorrect, however, this navigation process is assumed to lead to suboptimal search results. In an experimental study with 180 participants, we examined to what extent both the users’ prior knowledge and social tags – which capture the collective knowledge of a Web community in tag clouds – influenced the navigation of users and triggered incidental learning processes during the Web search. The results supported the assumption that the users’ prior knowledge is indeed crucial for navigation, as users followed those tags which corresponded to their internal associations. Moreover, we found that social tags also affected the navigation behavior of users, as a strong collective association of social tags led to a high selection rate for these tags. Finally, the results showed that social tags triggered incidental learning processes, as those internal associations which corresponded to tags with a strong collective association were strengthened during navigation. The implications of these findings for further research are discussed.

`Culturespeak' (Hannerz) is everywhere, but what is `loose on the streets', says Wikan, is typically an `old model' of culture, which `anthropologists have done their share to spread'. Whereas she wants to denounce this model (and reproach anthropologists for endorsing it), we should try to understand how and why, not just culture, but essentialist versions of culture have such popular grip; and why anxiety about `our' culture now seems ubiquitous, permeating much contemporary political and media rhetoric, among both `majority' and `minority' populations, and across political and religious spectra. This is a complex issue, and this article is a preliminary study, set mainly within the context of contemporary Europe, of a set of issues that require systematic, local-level, and comparative investigation. Not particularly concerned with anthropology's own internal arguments, the article ends with some pessimistic conclusions about the room for anthropological intervention in contemporary public debates about culture.

This essay takes Georg Simmel’s conceptualization of space as a form of sociation (Vergesellschaftung) in his 1908 masterpiece, Sociology, as a framework for critically re-reading two ninteetnth-century classics in the sociology of empire. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835/1940) is shown to illustrate Simmel’s understanding of social-spatial boundaries by portraying the cultural and historical geography of America as an ‘optic space’ of racial (in)equality. Similarly, Harriett Martineau’s study of morals and manners in Society in America (1837) exemplifies Simmel’s ideas on social-spatial sensibilities with its attention to how everyday settings serve as a kind of ‘acoustic space’ of gendered (un)freedom. Drawing on related arguments by recent thinkers and critics, and rectifying the relative neglect of how socio-spatial dynamics are addressed in the texts of classical sociology, the essay examines a description in each work of a particular personal encounter with strangers which exemplifies how the spatial sense of empire disrupts assumptions that new-world democracy has superseded old-world colonialism. Considered as illustrations of Simmel’s thesis concerning the spatial orders of society, the ‘travelling and anecdotal theories’ of Martineau and Tocqueville provide ‘sociological allegories’ designed to instruct reading publics on how law, empire, and social mores constitute bounded fields of struggle within the contact zones of modern empire.

In this study we analyze Geoffrey Hodgson’s discussion of Talcott Parsons in which Hodgson presents Parsons as a little petty bourgeois, feebleminded and insecure yet opportunistic to the core. Indeed, Hodgson does his utmost to belittle Parsons’ theoretical creativity and cultivation. Hodgson’s attempt to discredit Parsons is a part of his project to ‘rehabilitate’ the German historical school and the institutionalist tradition. We argue that Hodgson’s interpretation of Parsons’ early career is seriously flawed, characterized by superficial command of the biographical data of Parsons’ life, as well as an amateurish command of his theory. Like Charles Camic’s stigmatizing narrative years before, the essence of Hodgson’s analysis is best characterized as an exercise in ‘social interest’ reification. Especially, Hodgson ignores the impact of Parsons’ childhood socialization and grossly overstates the influence Hamilton and Ayres had on Parsons and especially misrepresents their influence on Parsons’ concept of culture as well as well as creating a caricature of Parsons’ early years at Harvard.

Based on two years of fieldwork and over 100 interviews, we analyze mixed martial arts fighters’ fears, how they managed them, and how they adopted intimidating personas to evoke fear in opponents. We conceptualize this process as “managing emotional manhood,” which refers to emotion management that signifies, in the dramaturgical sense, masculine selves. Our study aims to deepen our understanding of how men’s emotion work is gendered and, more generally, to bring together two lines of research: studies of gendered emotion management and studies of emotional identity work. We further propose that managing emotional manhood is a dynamic and trans-situational process that can be explored in diverse settings.

Physicians and scientists dominated the first generation of nationalists in at least three East Asian colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the Philippines under the Spanish and United States' regimes, the Dutch East Indies, and the Japanese territory of Taiwan. There is substantial evidence that, in each place, decolonization was yoked to scientific progress—not only in a practical sense, but symbolically too. The first generation to receive training in biological science and to become socialized as professionals used this education to imagine itself as eminently modern, progressive, and cosmopolitan. Their training gave them special authority in deploying organic metaphors of society and state, and made them deft in finding allegories of the human body and the body politic. These scientists and physicians saw themselves as representing universal laws, advancing natural knowledge, and engaging as equals with colleagues in Europe, Japan, and North America. Science gave them a new platform for communication. In the British Empire, for example in India and Malaya, medical science also proved influential, though it seems lawyers cognizant of precedent and tradition more often dominated decolonization movements. This essay will examine how scientific training shaped anti-colonialism and nationalism in the Philippines and the East Indies, concluding with a brief comparison of the situation in Taiwan.

We address a long hypothesized relationship between the proximity of individuals’ dwelling units and their kinship association. Better understanding this relationship is important because of its implications for contact and association among members of a society. In this paper, we use a unique dataset from Nang Rong, Thailand which contains dwelling unit locations (GPS) and saturated kinship networks of all individuals living in 51 agricultural villages. After presenting arguments for a relationship between individuals’ dwelling unit locations and their kinship relations as well as the particulars of our case study, we introduce the data and describe our analytic approach. We analyze how kinship – considered as both a system linking collections of individuals in an extended kinship network and as dyadic links between pairs of individuals – patterns the proximity of dwelling units in rural villages. The results show that in general, extended kin live closer to one another than do unrelated individuals. Further, the degree of relatedness between kin correlates with the distance between their dwelling units. Close kin are more likely to co-reside, a fact which drives much of the relationship between kinship relatedness and dwelling unit proximity within villages. There is nevertheless suggestive evidence of a relationship between kinship association and dwelling unit proximity among kin who do not live together.

This paper discusses the canonization process of George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) in sociology through a recounting of the history of the book Mind, Self, and Society (1934). The relation between Mead and this particular work has no parallel in the history of sociological theory. Although the book was not written by Mead, or even organized under his direction, it has been through it that generations of academics and students have come in contact with Mead’s ideas. There are two main goals behind this exercise in historical reconstruction. First, the study of how Mind, Self, and Society came into existence and acquired classical standing offers an insightful view of the contingency and the complexity of canon formation. It is on this continuous process of reception, through which certain texts and authors acquire classical value, which the second part of the article focuses. It discusses the extent to which the history of the reception of Mead’s ideas would have been very different, and the impact of his ideas for theory building substantially larger, if it had been based, not on a posthumously published transcript, but on his own work.

Analytic induction (AI) is an interpretation of scientific method that emerged in early twentieth-century sociology and still has some influence today. Among the studies often cited as examples are Becker’s articles on marijuana use. While these have been given less attention than the work of Lindesmith on opiate addiction and Cressey on financial trust violation, Becker’s work has distinctive features. Furthermore, it raises some important and interesting issues that relate not only to AI but to social scientific explanation more generally. These concern, for example, the presence and nature of causal systems in the social world, the relationship between historical and generalizing approaches, the character and role of social scientific theories, and how they are generated. In this article Becker’s research is examined in detail, and these issues explored through comparisons with the work of Lindesmith and Cressey.

Theories and practices of international aid have stressed the need for the full participation of recipients. This approach has been strengthened by international agreements such as the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness in 2005, which called for ‘ownership’ of development strategies by recipient agencies. This seemed to promise recipient governments an increased stake in the way aid was used for development and poverty alleviation. However, in practice, the new aid agenda has actually increased demands on recipients with new conditions over the management of aid funds, the setting of development strategies and the meeting of other global obligations. This issue is of particular concern in small Pacific Island states where the small size of government is coupled with increasing demands from donors for consultation, accountability and engagement to create what we argue is an ‘inverse sovereignty’ effect: despite the rhetoric of ownership and independence, recipient states are actually losing control over their development strategies, policies and programmes.

This paper uses a neotribal capitalism approach to theorize the corporate Maori tribes’ economic and political strategies in New Zealand. I trace the current convergence between neoliberalism and the corporate tribe to the alliances and networks established in the inclusive bicultural stage of the 1970s. These alliances were later institutionalized in the exclusive bicultural stage through brokerage processes which, in the brokerage function itself, developed a political relationship between the corporate tribe and the government and established the brokers as self-interest class agents. The consequence of brokerage politics has been the consolidation of a system for the transfer of economic resources from public to tribal ownership and for the devolution of state services into tribal control. This has implications for New Zealand’s liberal democracy.

This paper reports an exploratory survey in Australia and Israel of the leisure habits, attitudes and preferences of 716 teenagers aged 13-14 years who are part of the international digital games culture. The rationale was threefold: (a) this age group is not singled out in other surveys; (b) examination of gaming across five platforms would contribute new insights; and (c) the premise that a comparison between eGamers in a war zone and a peaceful country would produce striking contrasts. Virtually all participants played digital games for an average of 10-12 hours per week, the majority using all gaming platforms daily. Notable country differences were identified, particularly game genre preferences but there was also commonality as digital gamers. Digital games remain “boys’ games”, with males devoting more time to playing across five game platforms than did the females who, however, demonstrated a narrowing gap. Isolation and unfitness due to digital gaming proved contrary to popular media reports even though playing digital games was one of two top-rated leisure activities across country and gender.

This article analyses the transformation of the notion of Bildung that is constructed in the German human sciences. From a perspective of field theory and discourse analysis, the article reveals how the notion evolves and stabilizes during a first stage (1810–60), how it comes under pressure because of the contextual changes in a second stage (1860–1960) and how the tension increases before it is resolved by a fundamental change of the traditional notion of Bildung in a third stage (1960–99).

by charles tilley

The relationship between European sociology and European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is investigated through a case study of one sociologist, Émile Durkheim, in a single country, France. Reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism are distinguished and contrasted to Durkheim's sociological perspective. Durkheim's remarks about the Jews directly addressed anti-Semitic claims about them, their role in French society, and their relationship to modernity. At the same time, Durkheim was engaged in a reinterpretation of the French Revolution and its legacies that indirectly challenged other tenets of French anti-Semitism. In sum, Durkheim's work contains direct and indirect responses to reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism, and together these responses form a coherent alternative vision of the relationship between modernity and the Jews.

In this article, the term discourse co-optation is introduced based on a socially oriented discourse analysis of the Norwegian petroleum debate concerning petroleum extraction in the Barents Sea. The introduction of the term is based on empirical findings from two different studies of public discourse through four Norwegian newspapers published between 2000 and 2006. Discourse co-optation describes how one discourse ‘burrows into the heart’ of a counter-discourse, turns its logic upside down and it is put to work to re-establish hegemony and re-gain political support. One discourse is strengthened by the addition of a new, powerful argument; the other is weakened almost to the same degree.

Since the 1980s, neoliberal globalization fostered an upsurge of grassroots social movements in Latin America that sought alternatives to increasing poverty and social exclusion. Social movement scholars often interpret these movements as morally noble models of democracy given their claims to social justice and equity. My research examines the forced seizure of a closed Mexican sugar mill and establishment of a cooperative, worker-run factory by a grassroots movement whose cultural politics aimed at creating more democratic processes. Yet in 2009, after 11 years of success, movement leaders declared the mill bankrupt and shut it down. The façade of unity presented by activists obscured internal divisions and hierarchical control that beleaguered the movement. I argue that a more nuanced and critical analysis that takes into consideration the contradictions and paradoxes that may be present in grassroots struggles reframes essentialist conceptions regarding the intrinsic virtuousness of grassroots social movements.

The Maori tribal elite are identified and their political and economic ambitions discussed with reference to recent strategic documents. Framing and supporting those ambitions is an indigenous discourse that has been crucial to the elite’s success. Five discursive strategies are analysed: (1) constructing the indigenous collective as tribal Maori; (2) constructing indigeneity as ‘the logic of the gift’ in contrast to the ‘“Western” logic of the commodity’; (3) promoting indigeneity as an ahistorical primordial category to counter the social reality of ethnic fluidity in New Zealand; (4) promoting a vocabulary in order to control the meaning of key ideas; and (5) constructing indigeneity as a polity in opposition to the nation. A Treaty of Waitangi ‘partnership’ is promoted as the means by which the indigenous–colonizer dualism is brokered. Despite its efficacy to date, the discourse is undermined by inherent contradictions, including the elite’s privileged position as a capitalist class, the growing inequalities within the tribal collective and the incarceration of indigenous people in an ahistorical timelessness.

In studies of the Iron Age and Early Roman periods the concept of the ‘tribe’ has long been a social framework upon which to hang the archaeological record. Yet, despite widespread recognition of the complex social processes and shifting identities during Rome’s expansion, the nature of ‘tribes’ in Late Iron Age Britain and the suitability of this term for describing societies at this time has been largely ignored. This article examines why the term ‘tribe’ has retained its prominence in archaeological studies despite being widely critiqued by anthropologists. Through an examination of the historiography of the term I argue that the traditional tribal model was born of nineteenth-century perceptions of social systems and that neither archaeological evidence nor classical sources support many of its current connotations. The names in classical sources should instead be regarded as reflecting the emergence of new social and political entities in the later Iron Age.

A stringent criterion for a public intellectual is proposed: persons who are simultaneously major creative intellectuals, and successful political leaders. Using data from the careers of 2700 philosophers throughout world history, and social scientists in recent centuries, the article concludes that three kinds of political failure by intellectuals are prominent: (1) failure to attain political office; (2) failure while in office; and (3) failure of political influence from adoption of one’s ideas. On the whole, major intellectuals are not good at politics; and politicians do not make outstanding intellectuals. The skills and pressures of the two spheres are too different.

A Cosmos beyond Space and Area Studies: Toward Comparative Political Thought as Political Thought
Chris Goto-Jones
Abstract

While there appears to be a gathering consensus about the need to be less ethnocentric and exclusive in the composition of academic fields in the contemporary university, there remains significant anxiety about how previously excluded voices might be included (and even whether their inclusion might really be of substantive interest rather than only of ethical merit). Hence, as a response to accusations that mainstream political theory remains staunchly Eurocentric, the emerging field of comparative political thought (CPT) is anxious about its appropriate range of activity: it aims to broaden the theoretical base of political inquiry by being as culturally inclusive as possible; it seeks to transcend national boundaries and build a body of theory that is somehow “global.” However, CPT must also be sensitive to the ways that “comparison” can function to separate (rather than include), and thus should be anxious that it may actually reinforce the problem that it seeks to overcome. This article aims to propose a way of understanding and practicing CPT that resolves the field's anxieties about its ostensible obsession with origination, spatial differentiations, and area studies, which are invariably emblematized by the field's apparent (and false) “non-Western” focus. It concludes that for CPT to be a meaningful field in its own right it must be concerned with metaphysical and cosmological discontinuities rather than spatial, geographic, or cultural differences per se; this will require a radical rethinking of the dimensions of political thought as a whole and the recovery of metaphysics as central to the endeavor.

This paper examines the impact of digital media on the relationship between writing, performance, and textuality from the perspective of literate verbal artists in Mali. It considers why some highly educated verbal artists in urban Africa self-identify as writers despite the oralizing properties of new media, and despite the fact that their own works circulate entirely through performance. The motivating factors are identified as a desire to present themselves as composers rather than as performers of texts, and to differentiate their work from that of minimally educated performers of texts associated with traditional orality.

The qualitative study of global elites is a challenging task and in this article we demonstrate that the difficulties of elite research can be handled in a more transparent and productive manner by engaging feminist methodologies. Drawing on one author’s recent experiences in the field interviewing well-placed actors involved with the dispute settlement mechanism of the World Trade Organization, we argue that feminist methodologies allow the successful navigation of the authority relationship in the process of studying elites. Critical examination of researcher positionality and the micropolitics of the research encounter leads to a reconceptualization of the concept of ‘studying up’ as it obscures the complexities of the power relationships in both research and social life. We conclude with a call for deeper qualitative attention to global elites that is informed by feminist methodologies.

This paper focuses on a fundamental problem with individualisation theories – the assumption that contemporary personal lives are radically new and different from those in the past. This is a particularly important issue for individualisation theories because they essentially depend on the idea of epochal, even revolutionary, historical change. Empirically, I examine the experience of personal life in Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s (where a number of excellent sources exist) and compare it with today. Looking first at the personal life of gay and lesbian people, and of heterosexual spouses, I find substantial, but not unambiguous, ‘improvement’– in terms of equality, openness and diversity – over the period. But this improvement does not necessarily mean transformation in how people think about their personal lives and how they ought to conduct them. The paper goes on, therefore, to examine ‘tradition’ and ‘individualisation’ through the lens of ideas around extra-marital sex and divorce. Rather than some duality between ‘traditional’ and ‘individualising’ people in the two periods, I find that how people thought, and the range of their thoughts, about how to conduct personal life seem similar in 1949/50 to the present day – given the debates and issues of the time. In both periods the married, older and more religious were the more ‘traditional’, and the young and the more professional were more ‘progressive’. But the bulk of both samples were ‘pragmatists’, holding practical views of what was reasonably proper and possible in adapting to, and improvising around, their circumstances.

HOPE AND MEMORY IN THE THOUGHT OF JUDITH SHKLAR*
KATRINA FORRESTERa1
a1 King's College, Cambridge E-mail: kf267@cam.ac.uk
Abstract
Current interpretations of the political theory of Judith Shklar focus to a disabling extent on her short, late article “The Liberalism of Fear” (1989); commentators take this late essay as representative of her work as a whole and thus characterize her as an anti-totalitarian, Cold War liberal. Other interpretations situate her political thought alongside followers of John Rawls and liberal political philosophy. Challenging the centrality of fear in Shklar's thought, this essay examines her writings on utopian and normative thought, the role of history in political thinking and her notions of ordinary cruelty and injustice. In particular, it shifts emphasis away from an exclusive focus on her late writings in order to consider works published throughout her long career at Harvard University, from 1950 until her death in 1992. By surveying the range of Shklar's critical standpoints and concerns, it suggests that postwar American liberalism was not as monolithic as many interpreters have assumed. Through an examination of her attitudes towards her forebears and contemporaries, it shows why the dominant interpretations of Shklar—as anti-totalitarian émigré thinker, or normative liberal theorist—are flawed. In fact, Shklar moved restlessly between these two categories, and drew from each tradition. By thinking about both hope and memory, she bridged the gap between two distinct strands of postwar American liberalism.

Although both academics and policy-makers still debate its exact causes and the extent of its consequences, the ongoing financial crisis is doubtlessly the most distinctive economic event of the late 2000s. But despite the importance of such large-scale economic phenomena, there has been little research on their discursive construction. This paper presents some empirical data to show how the crisis is identified and its boundaries construed in corporate communication, seeking to understand how economic actors selectively shape public perceptions of critical events by routinely emphasising the role of certain agents and stakeholders while ignoring others. Terms for the crisis, their collocates and their discourse preferences are drawn from a 1,500,000-word ad hoc corpus of annual reports.

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Major works of the ninth to seventeenth centuries have described the kingship of the Nanzhao and Dali kingdoms (652–1254) of Southwest China. I argue that these narratives may be understood in terms of the modes of identifying and assimilating the cosmological alterity proposed by Marshall Sahlins: ‘stranger-kingship’, which depicted the king as a stranger; and ‘cosmocracy’, which depicted him as a universal ruler—a ‘cosmocrator’. While a stranger-king was to some extent an extra-social, guest associated with the wild and untamed, and also partly an affine of the autochthonous people, a cosmocrator was a supra-social, moral host, and envisaged more as a consanguine of the subject people. These two pre-modern ideas of sovereignty are constituent parts of Sahlins's ‘elementary forms of the politics of life’, so that one cannot be reduced to the other.