Public Policy in the Party City: The Spectacle of Culture,Gender, and Locality

The article explores the bidding process for the European Capital of Culture (ECOC) award, an aspect of local regeneration policy reliant upon a specific conception of culture. The process is examined in terms of changes in urban layout, manifestations of cultural and community identity, media representations, and the spectacle of culture, gender, and locality. The process is viewed as an urban managerialist project, driven by private and public sector elites in pursuit of economic rather than cultural goals. A narrow and particular view of culture was employed in the bidding process to achieve essentially managerial goals, and cut adrift from significant issues of gender, identity, and class. “Culture,” as conceived within the ECOC process, is viewed as a policy product of local government, regeneration partnerships, government agencies, and business interests, in contrast to culture as a way of life or lived urban experience. As an elite process, the voices of local culture were largely excluded.     

Unsettling Master Categories: Notes on Studying the Global in C. W. Mills’ Footsteps

C. W. Mills’ sociology arises out of the problematizing of established “truths.” The aim becomes a sociology that unsettles—not a sociology of unsettlement but a sociology that is itself unsettling. In this short essay I focus on themes that capture one way (mine) of executing C. W. Mills’ challenge to us, academic sociologists. The substantive focus is on what is needed to develop critical globalization studies. The accepted narratives and explanations of globalization have produced the global as a master category that obscures as much as it reveals. We need to generate new questions for research to recover what has been excluded by dominant narratives. And we need to develop conceptual architectures that allow us to detect what we might think of as countergeographies of globalization. Here I focus particularly on types of spaces where we can find resistance to global power and as yet unrecognized forms of participation by actors typically represented as powerless, or victims, or as uninvolved with global conditions. The overall project is a critical remapping of the analytic and political terrain of the global.     

Collaborative Sociological Practice: the Case of Nine Urban Biotopes

This paper examines the socially engaged art project Nine Urban Biotopes (9UB), an international exchange between European and South African cultural organisations. Two artist residencies offer case studies of collaborative arts and research practice. The ways that these case studies are read as ‘failures’ and ‘successes’ illustrate the complexities of North-South collaborations. This project, the partnership that sustained it and the residencies that were central to it, exemplify, in modest ways, how public sociology can be realised in modest ways in a global context. This paper shows, with examples, that whilst partnership and collaboration are emphasised in institutional and policy discourse, in practice these arrangements are filled with tension and unequal power relations between partners. An evaluative methodology premised on sociological practice allows the tensions that are inherent in partnership and collaboration to be recognised and productively interrogated. It also allows us to reimagine what ‘success’ and ‘failure’ looks like in research partnerships by working with the antagonisms that are integral to collaboration.     

The New Sociological Imagination: Facing the Challenges of a New Millennium

This article introduces the reader to the problems and the topics treated by the contributors to this special issue of the International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. It offers a reflection on the concept of sociological imagination conceived as a key element for the task of facing the intellectual challenges of the present times. What is sociological imagination? How has it been used by the main cultivators of sociology throughout history? And particularly, how is sociological imagination being renewed nowadays by some of the most successful exponents of sociological research? These are some questions considered in this introduction. The new sociological imagination uses theory, history, empirical facts, logical formalization, systematic analysis, creativity, local knowledge, moral judgment and inspiration. What distinctively constitutes its elements is not just the search for correlations between abstract variables, but the search for pertinent relationships among facts, moral problems, structural conditions, historical concerns, personal worries and ethical values of contemporary societies. The new sociological imagination is a search for satisfactory ways of understanding the contemporary world in a rational, communicable, telling and coherent way, while also contributing to the development of the public sphere and a collective understanding of social issues.     

Global Sociology: Towards an Alternative Southern Paradigm

The project to (re)construct a global sociology is one where there is no agreed paradigm or even a shared understanding of the main issues that would be needed to secure a new robust and credible paradigm. What I seek to do here is to simply clarify the terms of the debate so as to establish whether we might pursue the quest for an alternative paradigm with some conviction. I first consider the ‘strong case’ for a global sociology based on the assumptions of globalisation theory which, overall, seems to suffer from economism in my view. Next I present a postcolonial perspective which posits a fundamental division between the global South and the North, an enterprise I find to be marked by a certain culturalism. I then present elements for an alternative approach towards a new paradigm based on an understanding of complexity, uneven development and the politics of scale. A brief Latin American excursus at the end seeks to provide some texture to the overall argument that a new global sociology could develop through a critical Southern lens and a focus on cultural political economy.     

Transcending binaries in critical peacebuilding scholarship to address ‘inclusivity’ projects

Abstract

In light of the recent turn to ‘inclusivity’ in peacebuilding practice, this article problematises established ways of ‘doing critique’ in peacebuilding scholarship. Inclusivity refers to the building of peace as a situated and co-constituted process. This entails what can be termed a new epistemic commitment: the acknowledgement that peacebuilding as a dynamic and emergent phenomenon is also an epistemically co-constituted process. In the article, I make two arguments. First, the move towards inclusivity places currently dominant modes of scholarly critique at an impasse. Persistent ontological and epistemological binaries preclude a productive investigation and challenging of inclusivity projects and their epistemic commitment. Second, I argue that, by returning to historical conditions that were formative in the very emergence of the category of ‘the local’, the conceptual basis of an alternative mode of critique (re)appears. This alternative critical project allows for an analytical sensibility to peacebuilding as emergent and adaptive. It makes it possible to disentangle power relations as these emerge between different and possibly unexpected configurations of actors and knowledge claims in inclusivity projects.     

Culture Governance: Governing Self‐Reflexive Modernity

Political and administrative analysis is today said to be taking a narrative turn: to learning by telling and listening to the different stories that constitute political life. However, this new approach to studying the decentring of politics and policy as multiple discursive practices carries a new grand narrative too. A new connection between political authority and political community is taking shape outside the spheres of modern government and representative democracy. Political authority is becoming increasingly both communicative and interactive in order for it to be able to meet complexity with complexity. It is employed for reforming institutions by opening them towards the culture and by tying them to the political attributes and capacities of self‐reflexive individuals and to the transformation and self‐transformation of their conduct. I call this development culture governance. Culture governance is about how political authority must increasingly operate through capacities for self‐and co‐governance and therefore needs to act upon, reform, and utilize individual and collective conduct so that it might be amenable to its rule (Bang 2003; Dean 2003). Culture governance represents a new kind of top‐down steering; it is neither hierarchical nor bureaucratic but empowering and self‐disciplining. It manifests itself as various forms of joined‐up government and network governance and proclaims itself to be genuinely democratic and dialogical. This I shall show by a study of local Danish politics and policy in Copenhagen. Culture governance, I shall argue, constitutes a formidable challenge and threat to democracy, in attempting to colonize the whole field of public reason, everyday political engagement, democratic deliberation, and so on, by its own systems logic of success, effectiveness or influence. It seeks to take charge of the working of the more spontaneous, less programmed and more lowly organized politics of the ordinary in political communities, thus undermining the very idea of a non‐strategic public reasoning as founding the practices of freedoms.     

Modernization theory and the sociological study of development∗

The focus of this article is methodological and macro‐sociological. Its purpose is to disentangle some of the issues which arise in the sociology of development, and to question the assumptions and implications of a particular mode of conceptualization based on the notions of modernity and modernization which has provided the characteristic theoretical framework of the sociology of development. The principal assumptions of modernization theory as understood here—often enough made explicit by those who use this approach—are (1) that modernization is a total social process associated with (or subsuming) economic development in terms of the preconditions, concomitants, and consequences of the latter; (2) that this process constitutes a ‘universal pattern’. Obviously among various writers there are differences of emphasis with respect to the meaning of modernization, partly due to its relationship with—or derivation from—that most contentious concept ‘development’. For Lerner modernization is ‘the social process of which development is the economic component’ (Lerner, 1967, p. 21); while Apter sees development, modernization and industrialization as terms of decreasing conceptual generality (Apter, 1967, pp. 67–9). Some writers stress structural aspects while for others ‘the concept of modernization has to do with a transformation of culture and of personality in so far as it is influenced by culture, rather than of some aspect of social organization or of human ecology’ (Stephen‐son, 1968, p. 265). It is hoped that the following discussion is both specific enough to convey the essential aspects of the type of theory under review, and flexible enough to allow for some of the variants on the basic theme in what is a highly condensed survey of a substantial body of literature.1 The critical approach adopted reflects certain ideas about societies and hence the questions social scientists should ask; these preoccupations cannot be discussed fully within present limits but are indicated in the suggestions contained in the concluding section. The first section serves to outline the context in which the concept of development studies arose. This is followed by a schematic outline of the central concepts and conceptual procedures of the sociology of development, and more specifically of modernization theory, which are then criticized on a number of counts. These criticisms lead on to an argument for the use of a historical perspective—moreover, one which results in a re‐examination of the concept of underdevelopment, relating it to the expansion of Western capitalism and the effects of this process on the diverse indigenous societies of what is now called the Third World. The relationships of dependence and exploitation created by the process are exemplified in the colonial situation as narrowly defined though this is by no means the only situation characterized by such relationships. This perspective, developed in the work of certain political economists, can serve as the basis of a sociological approach which would prove more fruitful both in understanding the nature of underdevelopment itself, and in assessing the range of possibilities of development in the Third World, than that generally employed in the sociology of development at present.     

Power/Faith: Governmentality, Religion, and Post-Secular Societies

Foucault’s concept of governmentality, and its attending modalities of biopower and disciplinary technologies, provides a useful conceptual schema for the analysis of the role of religious and quasi-religious institutions in contemporary society. This is particularly important in the study of those neoliberal democratic states where religious organizations constitute an important presence in the civil society. As religion is thoroughly involved in the reproduction of social structure in most societies, an appraisal of the social and political importance of religious institutions is needed to understand the articulation and exercise of governmentality. This is not just limited to partnerships between state agencies and faith-based organizations in providing for social services, but also in rituals and other religious group activities of these organizations that play a vital role in shaping and molding the social and political subjectivities of the adherents. We argue that synergy between the scholarship on governmentality, and sociology of religion would allow for a more nuanced understanding of the politics and culture of post-secular societies.     

Strategic Culture,Representations of Nuclear (In)Securities,and the Government of India: A Critical Constructivist Perspective

In this article, I use Alastair Johnston's concept of strategic culture re-visited through a critical constructivist perspective to analyze the representations of India's strategic culture and nuclear policy choices. In doing so, I explore how the representational practices of (and the mutually-constitutive relation between) India's nationalist identity/Self and its strategic environment, facilitated via its political leaders’ ideological lenses, have produced shifting representations of India's strategic environment to justify the nation's nuclear policy choices. In exploring this representational linkage between India's strategic environment and its nuclear (in)securities, I am cognizant that anarchy is a challenge facing India's task of nation-making and thus realism serves as a partially valid explanation for understanding the logic proliferation. Yet, my study demonstrates how culturally guided interpretations of what constitutes the Indian Self have divergently re-interpreted India's strategic environment and (in)securities to define the nation's nuclear policy choices.     

NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT IN PUBLIC EDUCATION: A CATALYST FOR THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF SWEDISH SCHOOL PRINCIPALS

New Public Management (NPM) is one of the most significant reforms in public welfare in recent times. Making individual civil servants more dependent on the directions of the local manager than on common professional standards, previous sociological research argues that NPM results in a ‘deprofessionalization’ of civil servants. Taking a somewhat different approach, recent public administration research indicates that NPM may, at the same time, enhance the professional status of welfare managers. By integrating the literature on the sociology of professions and public administration, this article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the influence of NPM using the example of a professional project for school principals in Sweden. Taking a process‐oriented methodological approach, the result shows that Swedish school principals gained increased support for their professional project by the introduction of NPM. The article argues that NPM can function as a catalyst for welfare managers' professional projects.     

Realigning Religion and Power in Central Asia: Islam,Nation-State and (Post)Socialism

This article investigates the changing intersections between religion and politics in Muslim Central Asia. Adopting a long-term historical perspective, it shows how successive regimes meshed and clashed with Islam in their efforts to assert worldly power. Religion was uniformly marginalised in the era of Marxist–Leninist–Maoist socialism, but the cases of Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Xinjiang show that religion has been playing somewhat different roles across the region since 1991. For the secular authorities, Islam may be valued as a source of nation building or it may be feared as a potentially destabilising force. The resulting attempts to co-opt, channel and control religious expression provide insights into the nature of secular power and raise questions concerning the applicability to this region of influential theories in the sociology of religion.     

Ideas in Exile: Refugees from Nazi Germany and the Failure to Transplant Historical Sociology into the United States

This paper examines the reasons for the variable incidence and differing forms of historical sociology in several different historical periods, with a focus on Germany and the USA. It examines the flows of social scientists between those two countries due to forced exile from Nazi Germany, the American military occupation after 1945, and the voluntary exchange of scholars. The article focuses on extrascientific determinants such as political support for historical scholarship and macrosocial crisis or stability, as well as determinants that are more proximate or internal to the scientific field, such as the ongoing struggle between different epistemologies and the ability of historical sociology to sequester itself into a protected subfield. Historical sociology was one of the two poles of German sociology before 1933, whereas historical sociology had only a handful of proponents in the USA at that time. After 1933, the majority of German historical sociologists went into exile, most of them to the USA. For reasons explored here, the historical orientation of these exiled intellectuals had little resonance in the USA until the 1970s. Rather than being epistemologically “domesticated” in the 1980s, as Calhoun (1996) argued, historical sociology established itself as a subfield that is large enough to produce an internal polarization between an autonomous pole that relates mainly to history and other external allies and a heteronomous pole that mimics the protocols that dominate the sociological discipline as a whole, including a neopositivist epistemology of “covering laws” and at attraction to rational choice theory and quantitative methods, or qualitative simulacra of multivariate statistical analysis. In Germany, historical sociology failed to survive the Nazi period. Several leading Weimar-era historical sociologists stayed in Germany after 1933 but were unable to reestablish their prominence either because of their Nazi collaboration or because their work was dismissed by a new generation trained during the Nazi period for presentist, policy-oriented, “American-style”, or else trained in the USA after the war. The handful of exiled historical sociologists who returned to Germany after 1945 were marginalized, stopped working historically, or moved into other disciplines like Political Science. The explanation of these trends has to be multicausal and conjunctural. The influx of historical sociologists to the USA from Germany was unable to produce a historicization of the discipline until 1970s, when positivist hegemony was challenged for other reasons. The crisis of Fordism undermined the social regularities that had made positivist “constant conjunctions” seem plausible and at the same time rendered historicist ontologies more plausible. The neo-Marxist historical sociology gave rise to a neo-institutionalist counter-trend, which was itself eventually countered by a culturalist and conjuncturalist turn (Adams et al. 2005). In Germany, however, the society-wide destabilization of Fordism did not lead to a historicization of sociology. The extinguishing of the Weimar-era historical school in sociology meant that only high theory and “American-style” empirical social research remained as vital options. As a result, the crisis of Fordism and the ensuing social discontinuities and complexities did not give rise to historical sociology but were felt mainly within theory (e.g., the “risk society” theory of Ulrich Beck).     

The Aims and Methods of Liberal Education: Notes from a Nineteenth Century Pan-Africanist

Liberal education is in crisis as neoliberal logics continue to shape the purpose and practice of higher education. But despite invocations of its contemporary ‘global’ context, very few commentators engage the current crisis through the provocations of postcolonial studies. A key element of postcolonial critique draws attention to the ways in which the modern humanities and social sciences are colonially inflected traditions of knowledge production. Taking this critique as a point of departure, I aim to show that the critical response to the crisis prompted by the neoliberal agenda is inadequate in so far as there has been insufficient acknowledgement that modern liberal education wishes to suture and save a public culture that is racially exclusionary. To open up this space of inquiry, I focus on the thought and practice of Edward Blyden. Born in St Thomas, Danish West Indies, Blyden migrates to Liberia. A prolific writer and educator, Blyden delivers, in 1881, his inaugural address as President of Liberia College entitled ‘The Aims and Methods of a Liberal Education for Africans’. What lessons for the present crisis might we draw from a nineteenth century Pan-Africanist advocate of liberal education?     

“Neither Traditional nor Fully Modern...”

The issue of modernity has occupied the center stage of Brazilian sociology ever since its beginning. It is fair to say that “reaching for modernity” is a sort of obsession that crisscrosses and permeates the public imagery of a wide range of sectors of Brazilian contemporary society: “Are we really a modern society? How close is Brazil from the so-called ‘modern way of life’ experimented by First World nations?” This article is mainly concerned with showing how key-figures in Brazilian sociology have coped with such questions. I will focus on two of the most important and impacting sociological strands which are widely acknowledged in the Brazilian academia as two opposite lines of interpretation. These are: the so-called dependency approach (Caio Prado Jr., Florestan Fernandes, Fernando H. Cardoso and Octavio Ianni) and the patrimonial–patriarchal strand (Gilberto Freyre, S. B. Holanda, Raymundo Faoro and Roberto DaMatta). The argument that I pursue is that despite resting on different premises these two interpretive strands arrive at a quite similar diagnosis. In the end of the day, this shared diagnosis turns out to reinforce a sort of disorientating feeling that most Brazilians have about their contemporary condition, namely, that they are neither traditional nor fully-modern.     

Post-Pussy Riot: art and protest in Russia today

This article shows that resistance and a critical discourse continue in the arts, especially in visual art, in Russia under the present political conditions when free speech has been seriously circumscribed. When in May 2012 Vladimir Putin was reinstalled as president with a new authoritarian conservative agenda, it was expected that the situation for culture would change. This article addresses the question of whether a critical discourse survived in the arts under the new conditions. It presents the new political context for the arts, and provides examples of various artistic strategies of resistance/protest in Russian contemporary art by applying Jacques Ranciere’s concept of dissensus. The focus is on visual art, although references are also made to the world of theater. The first section presents the new official role given to culture and the new state cultural policy as components of a reactionary backlash against the reform policies under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, and describes conflicts around art and art productions that followed from the new state policy. A second section gives examples of dissensus in art today by presenting artworks by Piotr Pavlenskii, Arsenii Zhilyaev, Stas Shuripa, and Anna Titova.     

Goodbye,Postsocialism!

Abstract

This article assesses the trajectory of postsocialism as a concept and mounts a fivefold critique of postsocialism as: referring to a vanishing object; emphasising rupture over continuity; falling into a territorial trap; issuing from orientalising knowledge construction; and constraining political futures. This critique serves to sketch the contours of an alternative project that still recognises difference but foregrounds links and continuities, develops a political edge, and theorises not just about but with and from this part of the world.     

Globalization and Religious Organizations: Rethinking the Relationship Between Church, Culture, and Market

This article explores the organizational complexities that occur when religions attempt to operate globally. Based on the author's research on one of the new Japanese religions—Sekai Kyusei-kyo—it focuses on two aspects of transnational religious coordination. First, it shows how culture shapes religions' reception in each locality. Second, it shows the superiority of heterarchical over hierarchical organization: like successful transnational corporations, heterarchical religions move decision-making to the periphery, leaving the center with the task of normative integration. Local culture can, however, trump even such organizational flexibility. The article explores the theoretical implications of this for market-oriented sociologies of religion.     

An Alternative Sociological Perspective on Economic Value: Price Formation as a Social Process

This paper identifies some deficiencies in the theory of value as found in traditional economics, specifically the fallacy of absolute value and its spurious resolution that treats prices as a priori parameters rather than as variables to be explained. One is a fallacy of omission, the other of commission, which together comprise the epistemological paradox of the modern neoclassical theory of value. This paper advances a different, sociological approach to economic value or market prices as a possible corrective to this paradox. Such an approach has origins in sociological economics or economic sociology, the main premise of which is that social influences in the economy affect the formation of value or price. This paper therefore explores the seldom examined social underpinnings of price formation and of market processes generally.     

Outside the den of dragons: The Philippines and the NICs of Asia

The Phillippines is compared with Taiwan and South Korea on six factors, deemed in the literature to account for the economic success of the “little dragons” of Asia: colonial history, ties to the United States, class structures, state autonomy and efficacy, timing of industrialization, and culture. The theoretical implications of the comparative analysis in the study of development and underdevelopment in the Third World are considered, and the Marcos regime and the Aquino administration are evaluated in the light of the comparative analysis M.D. Litonjua is an assistant professor of sociology at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is originally from the Philippines where he taught at the Ateneo de Manila University. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Brown University. His current interests include religion and social change, capitalism and democracy in Third World countries.