China's many revolutions

It is worth reflecting a bit on how absolutely tumultuous China's history has been since the Communist Revolution in 1949. The Great Leap Forward and consequent famine -- 1958-60, in excess of 20 million famine deaths. The Cultural Revolution -- 1966-1976, in excess of 1.5 million deaths by violence, many times that number of maimed and ruined lives. The Democracy movement and Tiananmen Square and its dramatic suppression -- 1989, unknown thousands of victims. And since the early 1980s, economic reforms, rapid growth, and a substantial degree of social transformation.If you consider these events in terms of age cohorts, the historical experience of almost every generation has been a traumatic one. Chinese men and women born in 1930 were teenagers...

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Posted in: CAT_China,CAT_history,China,cohort,history,revolution

Rising income inequality in China

Allan Wheatley writes an important article in Reuters this week about the situation of rising income inequalities in China as part and parcel of the booming economic growth the country has witness for the past two decades.  Several key facts emerge from the piece: While spectacular affluence is emerging at the top end of China's economic hierarchy, 204 million people lived on less than $1.25 per day in 2005.  China's Gini coefficient of income inequality rose from 40.7 in 1993 to 47.4 in 2004, according to an Asian Development Bank report -- a remarkably steep and rapid rise.   (This compares to a Gini coefficient of income inequality in India of only 36.2.)  And inequalities of income between urban and rural people continue...

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Posted in: CAT_China,China,economic development,inequality,peasant,poverty

Action and its causes

What is an action? And, eventually, what role does action play in history?There is a large philosophical arena that focuses on the first part of this question. And basically, it comes down to "persons intervening intentionally". Persons commit actions. Persons have beliefs, desires, intentions, plans, and goals; they have reasons for what they do; they have emotions and aversions; they have habits. Persons also have freedom: they have the ability to choose to act or not to act, in typical circumstances.These components all support the idea of the agent as a conscious, intentional intervener: the agent intervenes in the world in some way, in order to bring about an outcome that he/she desires or intends, based on her beliefs about the causal...

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Posted in: agency,CAT_agency,rationality,verstehen

Literary tradition and social identity

Literary traditions are sometimes thought to have an underlying interconnectedness and coherence that makes them more than simply a group of works sharing geography or group. Irish poetry and drama, for example, extend over several centuries, involving writers with a range of voices and preoccupations; and yet it is often thought that they are distinctively "Irish." How should we conceptualize this notion? And how does it relate to the concept of a social identity?One might speculate that the continuity of a literary tradition derives from two social factors: first, that authors directly and indirectly respond to the writings of other authors in their tradition; and second, that writers express themes in their work that derive from a cultural...

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Posted in: CAT_identity,identity,literature,microfoundations

Intellectual leaders

In 2005 the Nouvel Observateur published a special issue devoted to "25 grands penseurs du monde entier" -- 25 great global thinkers. (The issue was published separately as Le monde selon les grands penseurs actuels.) The selection of thinkers was excellent: Stanley Cavell, Souleymane Diagne, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Sudhir Kakar, Vladimir Kantor, José Gil, Ian Hacking, Candido Mendes, Slavoj Zizek, Jon Elster, Kwame Appiah, Giorgio Agamben, Axel Honneth, Martha Nussbaum, Carlos Maria Vilas, Simon Blackburn, Toni Negri, Charles Taylor, Peter Sloterdijk, Richard Rorty, Philip Petitt, Daniel Innerarity, Jaakko Hintikka, Amartya Sen, and Michael Walzer. The volume consists of smart articles about each thinker offering a brief but meaningful...

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Posted in: globalization,philosophy,theory

Safety as a social effect

Some organizations pose large safety issues for the public because of the technologies and processes they encompass. Industrial factories, chemical and nuclear plants, farms, mines, and aviation all represent sectors where safety issues are critically important because of the inherent risks of the processes they involve. However, "safety" is not primarily a technological characteristic; instead, it is an aggregate outcome that depends as much on the social organization and management of the processes involved as it does on the technologies they employ. (See an earlier posting on technology failure.)We can define safety by relating it to the concept of "harmful incident". A harmful incident is an occurrence that leads to injury or death...

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Posted in: CAT_mechanisms,causal mechanism,failure,organization,safety,technology

Texts, ideas, and "about"

Harvard philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote a series of articles in the 1970s on the subject of "about" (PROBLEMS AND PROJECTS).  It was an interesting effort by a deeply gifted philosopher to get a handle on what a text is "about", without simply restating the content that the article or text includes.  In hindsight Goodman's interest was prescient, and it points forward to current interest in the "semantic" web and search technology.There is an interesting tool provided by Wordle that provides an intriguing way of extracting a sense of what a blog or other text is "about" by generating a word cloud based on the frequencies of words used.  Included below are the results for a number of interesting blogs; I think they give...

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Posted in: philosophy

Public versus hidden faces of organizations

Think of a range of complex organizations and institutions -- police departments, zoning boards, corporations, security agencies, and so on indefinitely. These organizations all have missions, personnel, constituencies, and policies and practices. They all do various things -- they affect individuals in society and they bring about significant social effects. And, in each case there are at least three aspects of their realities -- the ways they publicly present themselves, the ways their behaviors and effects are perceived by the public, and the usually unobservable reality of how they actually behave. Usually the public persona of the institution is benign, fair, and public- spirited. But how close is this public persona to the truth? In many...

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Posted in: CAT_power,corruption,institutions,justice,organization

Discipline, method, hegemony in sociology

An earlier post referred to the "Perestroika" debate within political science. There are similar foundational debates within other social science disciplines, including especially sociology. What is particularly striking is not that there are deep disagreements about the methodology and epistemology of sociology -- this has often been true within sociology, going back to the methodenstreiten that divided the German-speaking social sciences around the turn of the twentieth century, but rather the degree to which these disagreements have been so divisive and polarizing within the discipline in the U.S. in the past forty years.Several interesting books that focus on some of these debates within sociology include George Steinmetz, The Politics...

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Posted in: CAT_methodology,disciplines,heterogeneity,quantitative methods

"Moral economy" as a historical social concept

The concept of a "moral economy" has proved useful in attempting to describe and explain the contentious behavior of peasants in response to onerous social relations. Essentially, it is the idea that peasant communities share a set of normative attitudes concerning the social relations and social behaviors that surround the local economy: the availability of food, the prices of subsistence commodities, the proper administration of taxation, and the operation of charity, for example. This is sometimes referred to a "subsistence ethic": the idea that local social arrangements should be structured in such a way as to respect the subsistence needs of the rural poor. The associated theory of political behavior holds something like this: peasant...

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Posted in: agency,agriculture,CAT_identity,class consciousness,community,concepts,culture,moral economy,motivation,peasant,social groups,Southeast Asia

Heterogeneity of the social

I think heterogeneity is a very basic characteristic of the domain of the social. And I think this makes a big difference for how we should attempt to study the social world "scientifically". What sorts of things am I thinking about here?Let's start with some semantics. A heterogeneous group of things is the contrary of a homogeneous group, and we can define homogeneity as "a group of fundamentally similar units or samples". A homogeneous body may consist of a group of units with identical properties, or it may be a smooth mixture of different things, consisting of a similar composition at many levels of scale. A fruitcake is non-homogeneous, in that distinct volumes may include just cake or a mix of cake and dried cherries, or cake and the...

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Posted in: assemblages,CAT_ontology,causal mechanism,complexity,heterogeneity,microfoundations

Engels' sociology of the city

Friedrich Engels' book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, was one of the earliest "sociological" descriptions of the emerging working class in industrial Europe. Engels is a good subject for this blog, because this book is a very interesting effort to "understand society" at a time when the changes that Britain was undergoing were perplexing and rapid. Like other nineteenth century thinkers -- such as Thomas Carlyle, Alexis de Tocqueville, or Alexander Herzen -- Engels was trying to find language, concepts, theories, and metaphors in terms of which to comprehend the rapid processes of urbanization and industrialization that he observed. This is a place where the "sociological imagination" is most critical -- the ability of talented...

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Posted in: CAT_foundations,city,class consciousness,Marx,materialism,urbanization