Defenders of the Status Quo? Energy Protests and Policy (In)Action in Sweden

Posted on by

Uba, Katrin and Cassandra Engeman. 2024. Defenders of the Status Quo? Energy Protests and Policy (In)Action in Sweden. Social Forces, soae166. DOI:10.1093/sf/soae166

indicators of democracy

The spread of democracy across the Global South has taken many different forms, but certain features are consistent: implementing a system of elections and an overarching mission of serving the will and well-being of a country’s citizens. But how do we hold politicians accountable for such a mission? How are we to understand the efficacy of the policies they put forth? In Indicators of Democracy Diana Graizbord exposes the complex, often-hidden world of the institutions that are meant to ensure democratic accountability and transparency. Taking the case of Mexico’s National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL), Graizbord provides a deep theory of what happens when democratic aspirations intersect with technocratic ambitions. Analyzing what it takes to establish and sustain monitoring and evaluation as a form of official state expertise, Graizbord is able to put forward the contours of technodemocracy—a democratic political project that hinges on the power of experts to shape politics in unexpected but profound ways.

Disciplinary Futures: Sociology in Conversation with American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies

Posted on by

Kim, Nadia Y. and Pawan Dhingra. 2023. Disciplinary Futures: Sociology in Conversation with American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies. NYU Press.

disciplinary futures

There is a growing consensus that the discipline of sociology and the social sciences broadly need to engage more thoroughly with the legacy and the present day of colonialism, Indigenous/settler colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism in the United States and globally. In Disciplinary Futures, a cross-section of scholars comes together to engage sociology and the social sciences by way of these paradigms, particularly from the influence of disciplines of American, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies.

Pages: 1 2

Union Booms and Busts: The Ongoing Fight Over the U.S. Labor Movement

Posted on by

Stepan-Norris, Judith and Jasmine Kerrisse. 2023. Union Booms and Busts: The Ongoing Fight Over the U.S. Labor Movement. Oxford University Press.

union booms and busts

The book is a comparative and historical analysis of the factors that helped or hindered workers in their attempts to build unions in the U.S.’s 11 basic industries, 1900-2015. For each industry, we analyze shifts in union power (union density), as affected by the state and macro context, replacement costs of workers, union and employer strategies, and the impact of employment, race, gender, and occupation.  

Pages: 1 2

Piketty and Patrimonialism: A Frankfurt School Critique of Piketty’s Use of Marx, Weber, Political Economy, and Comparative Historical Sociology

Posted on by

Bakker, J.I. 2019. “Piketty and Patrimonialism: A Frankfurt School Critique of Piketty’s Use of Marx, Weber, Political Economy, and Comparative Historical Sociology.” Chapter in Lauren Langman and David A Smith, eds. Twenty-First Century Inequality and Capitalism: Piketty, Marx, and Beyond (Studies in Critical Social Sciences). Brill.

Bakker develops a detailed historical argument (that also reflects on contributions of various Frankfurt School luminaries) and sees in Piketty, for all the empirical riches, a relative theoretical poverty, with the lack of attention to imperialism/colonialism, plus his failure to link the “baronial” influence of the modern day patrimonial elites to any form of class analysis.

Blumer, Weber, Peirce, and the Big Tent of Semiotic Sociology: Notes on Interactionism, Interpretivism, and Semiotics

Posted on by

Bakker, J.I. 2023. “Blumer, Weber, Peirce, and the Big Tent of Semiotic Sociology: Notes on Interactionism, Interpretivism, and Semiotics.” Chapter in Fontdevila, Jorge and Andrea Cossu eds, Interpretive Sociology and the Semiotic Imagination. Bristol University Press, 2023. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/112239.

This chapter proposes to refine the symbolic interactionist project by incorporating Peircean semiotics and neo-​ Weberian interpretation. Symbolic interactionism appears to have forgotten key sources of its American pragmatist roots. Peirce’s indirect influence on Mead and Blumer, for instance, is often undertheorized but should be made central to the foundational narratives of symbolic interactionism. This calls for more sophisticated understandings of meaning-​ making that incorporate Peirce’s semiotic triadic model and classifications of signs where symbols are just one kind of signs among others. Here, I take on these matters and expand on my pragmatic sociology (Bakker, 2011a) to introduce the emergent project of a semiotic sociology. In stepwise fashion, I lay foundations of a metaparadigmatic synthesis—​ a “big tent”—​ based on five key arguments that build upon each other, including Blumer as its anchor point, American symbolic interactionism, global interactionism, neo-​ Weberian interpretive analysis for cross-​ historical comparison, and Peircean semiotics as the culminating paradigm that pulls it all together. The Cold War is over (Menand, 2021).