Speaking to the Silences: Do We Need a Sociology for the Post-9-11 World?

Using a sociology of knowledge framing, this essay highlights how and why the sociological imagination presented by leading European and American scholars showcased in this special issue offers a relatively hopeful assessment of recent transformations. It then questions the extent to which the same optimism prevails for scholars – and citizens – of the poorer, less advanced countries of the world. It not only suggests that many of the fundamental sociological transformations associated with the contemporary era – ranging from globalization of economy, the rise of internet technology, the decline of the nation state, and the rise of more cosmopolitan identities – are unevenly distributed around the world. It also argues that their political, social, and economic impact will vary, depending on history and developmental context. The essay further suggests that precisely because of the statist and protectionist legacies of late development, many of the same transformations that bring positive gains in the advanced capitalist world, signal troubles ahead for the developing world and its future. The essay draws to a close with a more focused examination of the dark side of recent transformations, evident in such problems as unchecked violence and regional or ethnic fragmentation across major swathes of the global south. Such developments, the essay concludes, should sustain the call for a more “pluralist” sociological imagination for the new millennium, one that can take into account differences within and between various countries around the globe, while also advancing our normative understanding of what it would take to make “global society” possible.     

Searching for the best structure for American local government

Citizens, practitioners and academicians involved in local government have for decades debated the best structure for local public organizations; at the polar ends of this debate are those advocating rational administration and those advocating political responsiveness. The conventional wisdom equates rational administration with reformed structures like the council-manager plan and political responsiveness with structures which have an elected chief executive officer. The debate is unresolvable within this value-driven framework, and these ideological positions do not seem to be helping in the design of governmental structures which “work” in a practical and meaningful way. The paper argues for a “functional” model of local government structure based on how much citizens and administrators can know and oversee with competence. The analysis leads to a significant rethinking of the role of governing bodies, administrators, and the general management position in American local government.     

FROM SINGING GIRL TO REVOLUTIONARY ARTIST: FEMALE ENTERTAINERS REMEMBERING CHINA’S SOCIALIST PAST (1949–THE PRESENT)

Abstract

This article explores a unique aspect of gendered socialism by examining the competing narratives of the state and individuals’ oral accounts, particularly the stories of former singing girls and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres. During the socialist transformation of the 1950s, singing girls-turned-revolutionary artists, as popular performers and new socialist women, found mutual interests with the CCP: political propaganda for the Party, making profit for the troupe, and self-transformation for the girls. This article argues that the Party and former singing girls enacted a uniquely gendered socialism by continuously deploying the singing girls’ cultural and financial influence colored with their erotic image. In addition, this essay treats oral history as a process of identity and history construction rather than as “fact.”     

Legacies Versus Politics: Herbert Hoover, Partisan Conflict, and the Symbolic Appeal of Associationalism in the 1920s

The concept of a policy legacy has come into widespread use among scholars in history and the social sciences, yet the concept has not been subject to close scrutiny. We suggest that policy legacies tend to underexplain outcomes and minimize conventional politics and historical contingencies. These tendencies are evident in the revisionist literature on American politics in the aftermath of the First World War. That work stresses continuities between wartime mobilization and postwar policy, especially under the auspices of Herbert Hoover and the Commerce Department. We maintain that a rupture marks the transition between the war and the Republican era that followed and that the emphasis on wartime legacies distorts the political realities of the Harding–Coolidge era. We conclude by noting the risks of policy legacy approaches in historical analysis.     

从历史到理论——浅谈马克·特拉亨伯格的学术思想

马克·特拉亨伯格是横跨历史和国际关系领域的学者。他的著作不仅以对历史事件的严谨分析著称,更是以打通国际关系和历史研究在方法论上的隔阂为目标。凭借自己近40年的国际关系史研究阅历,特拉亨伯格证明了跨学科研究方法的可行性。这种研究方法将促进历史与国际关系学领域的发展。     

Leadership and innovation in the administrative state

The field of public administration, as well as the social science upon which it is based, has given little serious attention to the importance of vigorous leadership by career as well as non-career public administrators. The field tends to focus on the rigidities of political behavior and the obstacles to change. To reclaim an understanding of the importance of individual leadership the author suggests the use of biography and life history. The behavior and personality of the entrepreneur is an especially helpful perspective on the connection between leadership and organizational or institutional innovation. The case of Julius Henry Cohen, who played a pivotal role in the development of the New York Port Authority, is used to illustrate the connection between the entrepreneurial personality or perspective and innovation.

In the social sciences—and especially in the study of American political institutions—primary attention is given to the role of interest groups and to bureaucratic routines and other institutional processes that shape the behavior of executive agencies and legislative bodies. In view of the powerful and sustained pressures from these forces, the opportunities for leadership—to create new programs, to redirect individual agencies and broad policies, and to make a measurable impact in meeting social problems—are very limited. At least this is the message, implicit and often explicit, in the literature that shapes the common understanding of the professional scholar and the educated layperson in public affairs.⁽¹⁾ For administrative officials, captured (or cocooned) in the middle—or even at the top—of large bureaucratic agencies, the prospects for “making a difference” seem particularly unpromising. In his recent study of federal bureau chiefs, Herbert Kaufman expresses this view with clarity:… The chiefs did not pour out important decisions in a steady stream. Days sometimes went by without any choice of this kind emerging from their offices … If you need assurance that you labors will work enduring changes on policy of administrative behavior, you would do well to look elsewhere. ⁽²⁾

There are, of course, exceptions to these dominant patterns in the literature. In particular, political scientists and other scholars who study the American presidency or the behavior of other national leaders often treat these executives and their aides as highly significant actors in creating and reshaping public programs and social priorities. ⁽³⁾ However, based on a review of the literature and discussions with more than a dozen colleagues who teach in political science and related fields, the themes sketched out above represent with reasonable accuracy the dominant view in the social sciences.

The scholarly field of public administration is part of the social sciences, and the generalizations set forth above apply to writings in that field as well.⁽⁴⁾ (Indeed, Kaufman's book on federal bureau chiefs won the Brownlow Award, as the most significant volume in public administration in the year it was published.) Similarly, the argument regarding scholarly writing in the social sciences can be extended to the texts and books of reading used in courses in political science and public administration; what is in the scholarly works and the textbooks influences how we design our courses and what messages we convey in class. The provisional conclusion here, then, is that in courses as well as in writings the public administration field gives little attention to the importance of vigorous leadership—by career as well as noncareer administrators. Neither does it give much attention to the strategies of leadership that are available to overcome intellectual and political obstacles which impede the development and maintenance of coalitions which support innovative policies and programs.⁽⁵⁾

The further implication is that students learn from what we teach, directly and indirectly. Students who might otherwise respond enthusiastically to the opportunities and challenges of working on important social programs learn mainly from educators that there are many obstacles to change and that innovations tend to go awry.⁽⁶⁾ And there the education often stops, and the students go elsewhere, to the challenges of business or of law. Those students who remain to listen seem to be those more attracted to the stability of a career in budgeting or personnel management. Public administration needs these people, but not them alone. If career officials should have an active role in governance and if the general quality of the public service is to be raised, does it not require a wider range of young people entering the service—including those who are risk-takers, those who seek in working with others the exercise of “large powers”?

Taken as a class, or at least in small and middle-sized groups, scholars in the fields of public administration and political science tend to be optimistic in their outlook on the world. Informally, in talking with their colleagues, they tend to convey a sense that public agencies can do things better than the private sector, and they sometimes serve (even without pay) on task forces and advisory bodies that attempt to improve the “output” of specific programs and agencies and that at times make some modest steps in that direction. Why, then, do public administration writings and courses tend to dwell so heavily on the rigidities of political behavior and the obstacles to change?

One reason may be our interest, as social scientists, in being “scientific.” We look for recurring patterns in the complex data of political and administrative life, and these regularities are more readily found in the behavior of interest groups and in the structures of bureaucratic cultures and routines. The role of specific leaders, and perhaps the role of leadership generally, do not as easily lend themselves to generalization and prediction.

Perhaps at some deeper level we are attracted to pathology, inclined to dwell on the negative messages of political life and to emphasize weakness and failures when the messages are mixed. Here, perhaps more than elsewhere, the evidence is impressionistic. ⁽⁷⁾

Some of the concerns noted above—about the messages conveyed to students and to others—have been expressed by James March in a recent essay on the role of leadership. He doubts that the talents of specific individual managers are the controlling influences in the way organizations behave. He, however, questions whether we should embrace an alternative view—a perspective that describes administrative action in terms of “loose coupling, organized anarchy, and garbage-can decision processes.” That theory, March argues, “appears to be uncomfortably pessimistic about the significance of administrators. Indeed, it seems potentially pernicious even if correct.” Pernicious, because the administrator who accepts that theory would be less inclined to try to “make a difference” and would thereby lose some actual opportunities to take constructive action.⁽⁸⁾

March does not, however, conclude that the “organized anarchy” theory is correct. He is now inclined to believe that a third theory is closer to the truth. Administrators do affect the ways in which organizations function. The key variable in an organization that functions well is having a “density of administrative competence” rather than “having an unusually gifted individual at the top.” How does an organization come to have a cluster of very able administrators—a density of competence—so that the team can reach out vigorously and break free from the web of loose coupling and organized anarchy? Here March provides only hints at the answer. It happens, he suggests, by selection procedures that bring in able people and by a structure of motivation “that leads all managers to push themselves to the limit. “⁽⁹⁾     

Crimes of Color: Risk, Profiling, and the Contemporary Racialization of Social Control

In the United States the phenomenon of racial profiling has emerged as an important and controversial issue within political and criminal justice policy debates. For the most part, these debates have assumed a sort of racism at work in order to explain law enforcement's use of criminal profiles largely determined by racial classifications. Accordingly, many have worked to expose this allegedly racist behavior in the hopes that such exposure will bring an end to the practice. This essay argues that racial profiling is embedded in much larger social developments that must be explored in order to understand the role race now plays in the maintenance of social order in contemporary American society.     

From the Banan Tree of Kouroussa: Mapping the Landscape in Mande Traditional History

The West African Mande worldview links spiritual elements of myth, legend, and magic to conspicuous landscape features, the functional dimension of which is illuminated by a body of work on “native mapping” by anthropologists looking at Native American peoples. Efforts to interpret the Mande people’s perspective on their own history have focused on the actors and their deeds at the expense of attention to the physical environment in which events occur. While acknowledging the risks of relying on elements with no known date of introduction into the discourse, this article argues that in some cases iconic landscape references can be used to test the accuracy of Mande epic texts. Comparison of Mande topographical references to examples from Native American folklore demonstrates a universal concern for relating the past and present spatially in oral tradition.     

Post-communist political studies: ten years later,twenty years behind?

The collapse of communism has led to a number of different research agendas in post-communist political studies. These include political culture, “transitology,” nationalism, institutionalism, and political economy. This article critically reviews these approaches, comparing them to the more general lines of research in comparative politics. It asks what contribution each is making, and argues that a political economy perspective may be the most interesting and revealing for post-communist societies.     

The Political Context in Everyday Social Work Practice

Social work is political-normative work (De Boer & Duyvendak, 2004). Hence, the political and policy context in which social work practices take place is crucial in understanding social work as a profession and its social task as a product of the welfare state. The political comes to the fore very explicitly when studying social work interventions with clients of immigrant backgrounds, especially due to the prioritization of the “integration” of migrants on various European political agendas. This article studies how frames on “good citizenship” determine the everyday practices of social workers using data on the Netherlands.     

“Scientific independence”, capacity building,and the development of UNESCO’s science and technology agenda for Africa

Abstract

This article analyses the shifting rationales for scientific collaboration in the work of the United Nations Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the science sector in Africa from the late colonial period through to the era of capacity building. Focusing on the late colonial period and the post-independence decades of “national science” in Africa, it analyses UNESCO’s role in science policy, engineering training, and natural resources research. It demonstrates that in the era of national science UNESCO’s activities were couched in the language of independence: developing capacities in the sciences was regarded as the key to obtaining “scientific independence” to match the recently obtained political independence. This marked a significant change from the 1950s when UNESCO based its operations in Africa on collaborations with the European colonial powers. The article argues that the link between scientific independence and political self-determination gave way as UNESCO rebranded scientific capacity-building activities as efforts in the pursuit of an unclearly-defined common good.     

美国“Z世代”大学生政治认同两极化及其原因

美国“Z世代”大学生的政治认同呈现明显两极化、主体向左的趋势。一方面,这种两极化与两党意识形态、政策立场保持高度一致;另一方面,两极化也显示出新的代际特征,即鲜明的道德色彩与强烈的对抗性。从社会心理学角度看,政治认同两极化的原因包括信念激情期的周期性再现、美国大学校园成为政治认同极化的孵化器、安全空间建构与微侵犯观念隔断大学不同政见者的沟通与交流、社交媒体强化“Z世代”同一阵营内部的政治认同等。“Z世代”大学生以“对抗共同敌人”的方式参与2020年美国总统选举并使投票率创下新高,这成为其政治认同极化公开表达的明证。这一态势引起了专家、学者等的警惕,重建大学校园政治生态成为美国社会的共识。大学生政治认同两极化也给未来的中美关系增添了不确定因素,社交媒体的运用将使“Z世代”大学生对华民意更具敌意,受害者心理将使美国舆论在人权等相关问题上对中国持更负面的评价,安全空间防线将使中国对外文化传播受到进一步干扰。“Z世代”大学生政治认同两极化趋势及大学校园政治生态将是评估美国政治未来走向的重要参考因素。     

Fostering the post-development debate: the Latin American concept of tecnologia social

This essay revisits the historical development of a concept – tecnologia social – as one avenue for discussing alternatives to post-development, arguing that the Western-based historical path of technology development is one of the main sources of growing human impoverishment, social inequalities and economic dependency. The concept of tecnologia social points towards political processes that create opportunities to redefine the arrangements among social groups, artefacts and methods used in everyday life, particularly for production and consumption. Because the post-development debate has been criticised for formulating a sound and strong critique to mainstream development but failing to propose concrete empirical alternatives, we seek to foster the debate through the Latin American concept of tecnologia social.     

The making of Maoist model in post-Mao era: The myth of Nanjie village

Bucking the general trend of privatization in China, the model village of Nanjie has cultivated the image of a “small zone of communism,” a modern-day commune that practices extreme measures of egalitarianism. Such an image is promoted by some Party leaders at the center as well as local cadres, and bolstered by the spectacular display of the village's wealth. With the aid of fieldwork data, our research examines the claims of “success,” “egalitarianism,” and the attribution of “success” to “egalitarianism.” We find that the village's early rise to prosperity took place before the celebrated Maoist practices were introduced, and that its later rapid development was an artifact of politically awarded state loans. We then examine the “actually existing Maoism” by uncovering the capitalist labor relations between the local villagers and the hired laborers, and the political inequality among the village's own legal residents. We conclude by examining the political processes that gave rise to this star village in the post-Mao era.     

Development Made Sexy: how it happened and what it means

This article examines the recent trend among Northern development organisations to represent development as sexy in awareness and fundraising campaigns. The article argues that the ways in which development organisations represent the global South and development work play an important role in the construction of social power relations between people in the global North and the global South. The representation of development as sexy is compared and contrasted to other representations of development that highlight scarcity and deprivation. The article argues that, although the representation of development as sexy avoids portrayals of poor people in the global South as helpless victims, it presents an image of development in which the most important form of agency is Northern charity.     

Contemporary youth movements and the role of social media in Sudan

Youth activism in the last decade has become increasingly associated with new media technologies. The “Arab Spring”, it can be argued, prompted much interest among academics, policymakers and others on the intersection between youth, activism and social media. Although oftentimes seen as threats to authoritarian states, youths have become agents of change in the eyes of international foreign policy developers who claim to be keen on progressive and inclusive governance. This paper reflects on the role of social media in the recent (2011–2013) activism of Sudanese youth, who have taken centre stage at demonstrations calling for regime change, and adopting mechanisms similar to their counterparts in the Middle East/North Africa. While political forms of activism may have been more prominent in the Arab Spring, this paper argues that social media plays a key role in both political and community engagements of contemporary urban Sudanese youth, perhaps pointing to future possibilities.     

The DPA: Perspectives on its past and present

This essay examines the origins, development and current issues involving U.S. doctoral education in public administration by focusing particularly upon the DPA degree-—the first doctorate offered in the field. The article argues that the growth of the DPA coincided with the rapidly expanding needs for professionals in governmnt and the growth of American higher education in the postwar era. As a result, early DPA education contained a significant “professionalixing component” in its course work and dissertation research. The sharp public reactions against government professionals and professionalism in the late 1970s and 1980s combined with a new scientific research emphasis for doctoral education stressed by NASPAA's Comprehensive Schools Section, October 20, 1981, called into question the older professional assumptions upon which the DPA was created as a degree program. These trends now raise fundamental intellectual issues regarding its future and serve to fragment the once cohesive programmatic orientation of PA doctoral education today.     

The Polish–Lithuanian borderlands,past and present: multicultural versus decolonial responses to local and state violence

This article presents the case of the Suwa?ki Triangle region on the current Polish–Lithuanian border to demonstrate how local activists developed a “multicultural” interpretation of social relations to counter previously dominant nationalist narratives. It then contrasts this interpretation with a “decoloniality” framework to illustrate the limits of the multicultural approach. Decoloniality, developed by Walter Mignolo to theorize about Latin American historical experiences, finds continued hierarchies in the apparently plural social landscape, situates identity as a fluid response to these hierarchies, and privileges voices that are “delinked” from them. Decoloniality may explain the complex borderland identifications of the Suwa?ki Triangle – and potentially other territorialized communities – better than multiculturalism.     

Ethno-racial identity (politics) by law: “Fraud” and “choice”

Following an introduction to the changes in how ethno-racial identity is conceptualized in the social sciences and humanities by the destabilization of categorical frameworks, the author looks at how law reacts to these discussions and paradigm shifts, and argues that legal and administrative approaches face severe linguistic and conceptual limitations by operating within a “choice” and “fraud” binary. The article then questions if the free choice of identity exists as a principle of international minority protection law, a legal field that arguably represents a global political and ethical consensus. The author makes two claims. First, according to the basic tenet of legal logic, a proper right to free choice of identity allowing people to opt out of racial, ethnic, or national (minority) communities would necessitate the freedom to opt in to the majority or to any chosen group. The second claim, however, is that international law would not actually construct an approach to opting in. Thus, the right to free choice of identity is not an autonomous, sui generis right under international law.     

Exploring agency as a basis for ethical theory in American public administration

This articale argues that agency, the normative theory associated with the “acting for” relationship in society, has had a profound, but often unrecognized affect on ethics in public administration. Accordingly, it seeks to provide a brief review of agency theory as it applies to contemporary American public adminis- tration. The review provides an overview of agency theory, gives an example of how deeply it influences American public administration, shows how it facilitates ethical action in administration and reviews some of the major obstacles to employing agency theory in the modern American administrative state.