Area studies and social science theories

image: The ruins of Bagan, MyanmarUnderstanding a particular place seems to involve a very specific kind of knowledge and research. It involves understanding the unique combination of historical circumstances, social processes, cultural formations, and unique institutions that give rise to the current complex social reality. And yet it also involves an effort to understand and explain the developments that are observed -- which implies some sort of appeal to social science theory.  For the past four decades this space has been occupied by "area studies" -- Latin American studies, Asian studies, African studies. Here is a nice 1998 paper by South Asian historian and former president of the Association for Asian Studies David Luddens on...

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Posted in: area studies,CAT_disciplines

A property-owning democracy

John Rawls offered a general set of principles of justice that were formally neutral across specific institutions.  However, he also believed that the institutions of a "property-owning democracy" are most likely to satisfy the two principles of justice. So what is a property-owning democracy?In Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001) Rawls offered a more explicit discussion of this concept than was offered in A Theory of Justice: Original Edition (1971).  Here are several important descriptions:Let us distinguish five kinds of regime viewed as social systems, complete with their political, economic, and social institutions: (a) laissez-faire capitalism; (b) welfare-state capitalism; (c) state socialism with...

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Posted in: CAT_moraltheory,democracy,justice,Rawls

The politics color wheel

The problem of mapping or classifying people's political attitudes is more complicated than it looks. Placing people on a spectrum from left to right is convenient but over-simple. It assumes that there is a single dimension of political difference, ranging from conservative to liberal, and that everyone can be placed somewhere along that spectrum. But social and political attitudes aren't single-dimensional. So we'd like to have a way of mapping the space of attitudes that captures the separate dimensions that go into political attitudes. Most of the schemes above take a step forward by hypothesizing two dimensions reflecting attitudes towards the involvement of the state in the economy and in individual social and moral life. An economic...

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Posted in: agency,CAT_agency,norms,values

Radicals, activists, and reformers

Several posts have drawn attention to the acts of criticism of the present and advocacy for change. But both criticism and programs of advocacy have enormous variation when it comes to analytical and theoretical rigor. Babeuf's conspiracy of equals set the stage for radicalism during the French Revolution. But how good were his diagnosis of the present and his vision of a possible future? And what was he really trying to accomplish as a radical? Criticism and advocacy can combine into several rather different stances -- think of Mill, Bakunin, and Lenin and the very different ways in which they combined reasoned thought and political activism. It is worth asking the question, what are the different states of mind and intentionality that characterize...

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Posted in: CAT_collective action,justice,revolution

Methodological nationalism

Are there logical divisions within the global whole of social interactions and systems that permit us to focus on a limited, bounded social reality?  Is there a stable level of social aggregation that might provide an answer to the "units of analysis" question in the social sciences?  This is a question that has recurred several times in prior postings -- on regions (link), on levels of analysis (link), and on world systems (link). Here I'll focus on the nation-state as one such system of demarcation.We can start with a very compelling recent critique of current definitions of the social sciences.  Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller offer an intriguing analysis of social science conceptual schemes in "Methodological nationalism...

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Posted in: CAT_globalization,identity,social groups

Knowing the population

At any given time there are huge areas of the unknown when it comes to the question, what do various members of our society care about? We have opinion research tools, of course. But we don't really have good answers to any of these questions:How do West Bloomfield teenagers think about their futures?Why do Kenyan truck drivers refrain from the most basic AIDS-prevention techniques?Are skateboarders disaffected from mainstream society?What does it mean when affluent suburban white kids wear hiphop gear?What do laid-off auto workers think about higher education for themselves?How do Mexican gang killers feel about their victims?These questions fall in the general area of qualitative knowledge of social actors and groups. We want to know in some...

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Posted in: CAT_identity,culture,Goffman,mental framework,mentality,youth

Gabriel Tarde's rediscovery

Gabriel Tarde was an important rival to Emile Durkheim on the scene of French sociology in the 1880s and 1890s.  Durkheim essentially won the field, however, and Tarde's reputation diminished for a century. Durkheim's social holism and a search for social laws prevailed, and the sociology of individuals and the methodology of contingency that Tarde had constructed had little influence on the next several generations of sociologists in France.  In the 1990s, however, several important strands of thought were receptive to a rediscovery of Tarde's thinking; Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour each found elements in Tarde's thinking that provided intellectual antecedent and support for ideas of their own.  In the past fifteen years or...

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Posted in: assemblages,CAT_foundations,contingency,methodological individualism

Protest and the politics of dissent

There are several different moral and practical stances that people can take in relation to their social worlds.  The scenes above depict one of these possibilities: vociferous protest and active opposition to specific social and political policies.  Individuals and groups have ideas about justice and legitimacy.  And they have specific material interests that are affected by state policies.  When their values and interests are offended by the actions of their government or other collective actors, they may choose to mobilize around overt opposition and collective action.  Street demonstrations, protests, boycotts, and destruction of property may be the result.  Anti-globalization protests in Toronto...

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Posted in: CAT_collective action,violence

Feasibility conditions on social reform

Several earlier posts have raised the issues of social change and social progress (post, post). People sometimes want society to be different (change), and they want it to be better (progress). But not all outcomes are possible, and some possible outcomes are not sustainable over time. So how should we think about sweeping prescriptions for social change? What constraints does social reality impose upon the reformer? And what kinds of moral and political constraints should be respected as we advocate for change?Consider an analogy with the natural sciences and engineering.  Physics and the natural sciences set the boundary conditions on what kinds of structures can be built and used.  Engineering design involves acquiring a detailed...

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Posted in: CAT_policy,democracy,policy

International social science

Last month the International Social Science Council (ISSC) launched a major review of the status of the social sciences worldwide (link).  The report was commissioned and partially funded by UNESCO.  The full report is available as a PDF file, and it is an important piece of work.  It includes review essays by leading social scientists and chiefs of social science research organizations in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, and it makes an effort to provide a fairly comprehensive snapshot of the current state of affairs in the institutions, funding, and patterns of collaboration that currently drive social science research programmes in almost all regions of the world.  (It...

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Posted in: CAT_disciplines,globalization,sociology