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Literature in the Dawn of Sociological Theory: Stories That Are Telling focuses on a selection of novelists from the early 1800s to the early 1900s and their connections to the insights of Classical Sociological Theory and the sociological imagination. This monograph also considers the aesthetic, sociological, and literary insights of Theodor Adorno, György Lukács, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Wolf Lepenies, Franco Moretti, Lucien Goldmann, and John Orr. The main chapters discuss the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The concluding chapter reflects on the dawn of modernity, especially the b...
This Handbook is a collection of contributions of more than 300 researchers who have worked to grasp the Anthropocene, this new geological epoch characterised by a modification of the conditions of habitability of the Earth for all living things, in its biogeophysical and socio-political reality. These researchers also sought to define a historical and prospective anthropology that integrates social, economic, cultural and political issues as well as, of course, environmental ones. What are the anthropological changes needed to ensure that our human adventure will be able to continue in the Anthropocene? And what are the educational and political issues involved? Anthropocene is fast becomin...
This open access book examines everyday practices in an asylum administration. Asylum decisions are often criticised as being ‘subjective’ or ‘arbitrary’. Asylum Matters turns this claim on its head. Through the ethnographic study of asylum decision-making in the Swiss Secretariat for Migration, the book shows how regularities in administrative practice and ‘socialised subjectivity’ are produced. It argues that asylum caseworkers acquire an institutional habitus through their socialisation on the job, making them ‘carriers’ of routine practices. The different chapters of the book deal with what it means to methodologically study administrative practice: with how asylum procee...
This open access book describes how elite studies theoretically and methodologically construct their object, i.e. how particular conceptualizations of elites are turned into research practice using different methods for collecting, dealing with and analyzing empirical data. The first of four sections focuses on what Mills named the power elite and includes Bourdieu’s field of power. The second section addresses studies of the domain of economic power, whereas the third section centers on research on elite education. The fourth and last section highlights research on symbolic power, either within social fields or as a dimension of social structure at large, areas where recognition is essential. All sections comprise empirical case studies of elites and power, whereby each of which makes explicit the various methodological choices made in the research process. Through focusing on methodological approaches for the study of elites and power and on how such approaches relate to each other as well as to the theoretical perspectives that underpin them, this book will be a valuable source for social scientists.
The word Eurocracy has resonance throughout out Europe but in reality we know little about the people who work in and around the EU or how they fit into its large bureaucratic framework. Based on extensive fieldwork, this book addresses this problem by exploring the MEPs, diplomats, civil servants and commissioners that work in and around the EU.
Order and Compromise questions the historicity of government practices in Turkey from the late Ottoman Empire up to the present day. It explores how institutions at work are being framed by constant interactions with non-institutional characters from various social realms. This volume thus approaches the state-society continuum as a complex and shifting system of positions. Inasmuch as they order and ordain, state authorities leave room for compromise, something which has hitherto been little studied in concrete terms. By combining in-depth case studies with an interdisciplinary conceptual framework, this collection helps apprehend the morphology and dynamics of public action and state-society relations in Turkey. Contributors are: Marc Aymes, Olivier Bouquet, Nicolas Camelio, Nathalie Clayer, Anouck Gabriela Corte-Real Pinto, Berna Ekal, Benoît Fliche, Muriel Girard, Benjamin Gourisse, Sümbül Kaya, Noémi Lévy Aksu, Élise Massicard, Jean-François Pérouse, Clémence Scalbert Yücel, Emmanuel Szurek and Claire Visier.
Laying down the foundations of a critical sociological approach to the interdisciplinary domain of public policy, this insightful book presents the first systematic reflection on the use of Bourdieu’s theory of social fields to analyse policy processes. Engaging with theoretical dimensions, it provides innovative methodological tools, both quantitative and qualitative in nature. Bringing together an array of eminent contributors and case studies from across the globe, it presents theoretical and methodological insights, as well as empirical information on national cases and policy sectors.
In Code Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early accounts of cybernetics and digital media by theorists including Norbert Wiener, Warren Weaver, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Luce Irigaray. His analysis casts light on how media-practical research forged common epistemic cause in programs that stretched from 1930s interwar computing at MIT and eugenics to the proliferation of seminars and laboratories in 1960s Paris. This mobilization ushered forth new fields of study such as structural anthropology, family therapy, and literary semiology while forming enduring intellectual affinities between the humanities and informatics. With Code, Geoghegan offers a new history of French theory and the digital humanities as transcontinental and political endeavors linking interwar colonial ethnography in Dutch Bali to French sciences in the throes of Cold War-era decolonization and modernization.
New Diplomatic History has turned into one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of research – especially with regard to early modern history. It has shown that diplomacy was not as homogenous as previously thought. On the contrary, it was shaped by a multitude of actors, practices and places. The handbook aims to characterise these different manifestations of diplomacy and to contextualise them within ongoing scientific debates. It brings together scholars from different disciplines and historiographical traditions. The handbook deliberately focuses on European diplomacy – although non-European areas are taken into account for future research – in order to limit the framework and ensure precise definitions of diplomacy and its manifestations. This must be the prerequisite for potential future global historical perspectives including both the non-European and the European world.
Welfare offices usually attract negative descriptions of bureaucracy with their queues, routines, and impersonal nature. Are they anonymous machines or the locus of neutral service relationships? Showing how people experience state public administration, The Bureaucrat and the Poor provides a realistic view of French welfare policies, institutions and reforms and, in doing so, dispels both of these myths. Combining Lipsky's street-level bureaucracy theory with the sociology of Bourdieu and Goffman, this research analyses face-to-face encounters and demonstrates the complex relationship between welfare agents, torn between their institutional role and their personal feelings, and welfare appl...