Gypsies: A selected bibliography (central and Eastern Europe)

National identity is constructed through successive identifications with significant Others. This article discusses the phenomenon of change and continuity in Czech identity. It is focused here on the identification towards the EU, which has become the most significant Other of today in two ways: (a) (change) contributing to overcoming the identity crisis provoked by the drastic changes that occurred between 1989 and 1993 (change of regime, disappearance of the USSR and the break-up of Czechoslovakia), and therefore the subsequent drastic changes in relations with past significant Others: communism, the USSR, and the Slovaks; and (b) (continuity) reaffirming one of the fundamental elements during the national revival in the nineteenth century, democracy, upon which the various identifications towards the EU have been aligned. According to the differing interpretations of what democracy means, and three other criteria of the “levels of Othering,” the EU has been “imagined,” on the one hand, as an entity where Czechs can flourish in their identity and ensure their freedom and democratic values (positive Other), and, on the other, as an “oppressor” entity which portrays democratic deficit, restricts freedom, and threatens Czech national identity (negative Other).     

Criminology and the sociology of organizations

The sociology of organizations offers conceptual tools that can be used bycriminologists. The logic of crossing intra-disciplinary boundaries to borrowconceptual tools rests in the analogical properties of structure and processacross social settings that are fundamental aspects of all social organization.Analogy itself is underrecognized and used as a tool for conceptual thinkingand analysis in sociology. In this article, I give examples of theories andconcepts from the sociology of organizations that can usefully be appliedto substantive criminological problems. Then I compare family violence andcorporate crime as examples of organizational misconduct, foregroundingthe organizational setting in order to examine links between micro-, meso-,and macro-levels of analysis. These two exercises demonstrate thatincorporating organization theory into criminological research can providenew insights in data analysis of substantive problems, build toward generalsociological theory, and toward integrative general criminological theorythat escapes the levels of explanation problem.