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Jan Beek’s book explores everyday police work in an African country and analyses how police officers, despite prevailing stereotypes about failed states and African police, produce stateness. Drawing on highly readable ethnographic descriptions, the book shows that Ghanaian police practices often involve the exchange of money (bribes), the use of violence and the influence of politicians. However, such informal practices allow police officers to deal with the inconsistent necessities and the social context of their work. Ultimately, Ghanaian police officers are also inspired by a bureaucratic ethos and their practices are guided by it. Stateness, the book argues, is a quality of organizations, gradually emerging out of such everyday encounters. Producing Stateness allows a close look at the realities of police work in Africa and provides surprising insights into the rationalities of policing and state bureaucracies everywhere.
State police forces in Africa are a curiously neglected subject of study, even within the framework of security issues and African states. This work brings together criminologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, political scientists and others who have engaged with police forces across the continent and the publics with whom they interact to provide street-level perspectives from below and inside Africa's police forces.
This book, which emerges in the context of the European research network LINEE (Languages in a Network of European Excellence), is concerned with European multilingualism both as a political concept and as a social reality. It features cutting-edge studies by linguists and anthropologists who perceive multilingualism as a discursive phenomenon which can be revealed and analyzed through empirical fieldwork. The book presents a fresh perspective of European multilingualism as it takes the reader through key themes of social consciousness – identity, policy, education, economy – and relevant societal levels of organization (European, national, regional). With its distinct focus on post-national society caught in unifying as well as diversifying socio-political currents, the volume problematizes emerging contradictions inherent in the idea of a Europe beyond the nation state –between speech minorities and majorities, economic realities, or socio-political ideologies.
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This book considers the activities of migrant organizations in the face of state diaspora engagement policies in their members' countries of origin. The case study is the Programa Tres por Uno para los Migrantes in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. The research uses events - understood as festivities and work meetings - as lenses. They offer a door to access the actors' reality and furthermore serve as an object of analysis themselves. The study combines analysis of biographical interviews at the microlevel with that of organizations' work meetings at the mesolevel and the analysis of the staging in public events as way to access the macrolevel. The work concludes that institutionalizing colle...
Ethnizität und Migration gehören mittlerweile zu den Grundthemen der Soziologie. Vor dem Hintergrund einer genuin wissenssoziologischen Perspektive diskutieren die Autorinnen und Autoren des Bandes die Verbreitung von Ethnizität als soziologisches Konzept sowie dessen Verwendungsmöglichkeiten im Kontext von Migration. Dabei wird Ethnizität als gleichermaßen soziales wie kognitives Phänomen begriffen, als prinzipiell kontingentes Beobachtungs- und Deutungsmuster der sozialen Welt. Folglich bezeichnet Ethnowissen die Gesamtheit der gesellschaftlichen Kommunikationsprozesse und kollektiven Wissensbestände, die für die Herstellung und Deutung ethnischer Differenzierungen verwendet werden. Neben deutschsprachigen Originalbeiträgen präsentiert der Band wichtige Texte der amerikanischen Diskussion erstmals in deutscher Übersetzung.
Peter L. Berger (1929–2017) was among the most prominent sociologists of the past half-century. He co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, considered to be a modern classic of social science. His work on social theory, the sociology of religion, third-world development, and the role of capitalism in modern life define his enduring importance as a leading figure in social science. Berger established an international reputation for his various studies of economic development in different parts of the world, including Central America and South Africa.