An interesting analytical tool.  Read more 

Both the Obama and McCain campaigns are acutely aware of where this election will be decided, and it is not amongst Liberal voters.  Read more 

Groups

Social groups have specific characteristics: (a) they consist of two or more people who (b) interact in an ordered fashion, (c) share specific values and norms, and (d) have at least some sense of unity and common goals.

Group conformity / obedience

One of the main influences that groups exercise over their members lies in their capacity to induce conformity – the process through which members modify their behavior to comply with the group’s norms or decisions. Research shows that group pressure does not have to be intense to produce conformity.

One such experiment was conducted by Solomon Asch (1956) to show the power of groups to influence behavior. Asch assembled 6 to 8 students, all accomplices except one, the subject of the experiment. The students were shown a line on card 1 and asked to pick the corresponding line on card 2 (see diagram).

It is obvious that the correct answer is A. At first, Asch’s accomplices answered correctly but in further rounds of the experiment they started answering incorrectly. Asch wanted to see what the subject would do: would he provide the correct answer despite the group’s incorrect consensus or would he go along with the group?

One third of the subjects went along and provided the wrong answer and later admitted they knew it but did not want to be singled out. In other words, they were willing to compromise their judgment for the sake of going along with the group’s (wrong) answer.

Here is a video to illustrate this dynamic further:

 Read more 

After weeks of looking back and taking stock of what happened to the major players in the progressive blogosphere (PB1.0), let’s move forward, shall we?

It’s time to come out and stake our claim to a place in the blogosphere. We need to define ourselves as we are already being defined by others as "just disgruntled HRC supporters over there at Corrente."  Read more 

The Principles

What we for PB2.0

• Promotion of Justice / Social Justice
• Promotion of truth no matter what
• Promotion of the tools of critical analysis
• Party invariance
• We are not impartial, we are progressives

What we don’t want for PB2.0

• An exclusive focus on electoral politics
• Too close a relationship between the blogosphere, the media and party politics

Here is the second part of my review of Manfred Steger’s The Rise of the Global Imaginary (part 1 here). In the last part of the book, Steger focuses on the sometimes conflicting ideologies derived from the global imaginaries.

Starting from the collapse of the USSR, Steger argues (correctly, I think) that the first winning ideology in the decontestation game was market globalism, the ideology that managed to decontest "globalization" in the limited sense of deregulated markets on a global scale.

To explore the tenets of market globalism, Steger reviews the writings of one of its main proponents and popularizers: Thomas Friedman. Needless to say, this is painful to read as is anything related to Thomas Friedman (hence no links), however he is indeed a central figure in the promotion of market globalism. He is also a good representative of the way this ideology was promoted by the political, economic and corporate elites in the 1990s (or the transnational capitalist class as Leslie Sklair calls this group, Friedman belongs to the ideological sub-group of the TCC).  Read more 

Coss-posted from The Global Sociology Blog, a proud PB2.0 Blog!

I have already blogged a bit about Manfred Steger’s concept of social imaginary but that was before the actual publication of his book on the subject. Now that I have had the time to read the book, let me offer the following review.

Let me say right off the bat that I am a big fan of Manfred Steger’s writings on globalization. His Globalization: A Very Short Introduction is still the best introduction to globalization on the market and the one I use for my undergraduate classes. His other book, Globalism: Market Ideology Meets Terrorism is a great exploration of the ideological and cultural implications of globalization.

In his latest book, The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from The French Revolution to the Global War on Terror, Steger offers another analysis of the ideological dimensions of globalization, but more in-depth than in his previous books.  Read more 

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

As the Olympic Games started in Beijing, the question of human rights in China has been already well discussed. What was interesting to me was a Guardian op-ed by Brendan O’Neill on the journalistic and activist distortions and myth created regarding the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989.  Read more 

“Many have accused the Chinese of trying to control international perceptions of Tiananmen Square – Beijing’s “blackened heart”, as one reporter describes it – and no doubt that is true. Disgracefully, the Communist party of China’s official position on the 1989 massacre is that it wasn’t a noteworthy event. Officials still refer to it as “the incident”, a shocking label for the Chinese military’s massacre of anywhere between 300 and 1,000 people on the hot, heady nights of June 3 and 4 1989.

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

This session by ASA President Arne Kalleberg (website) deserves a post of its own, because I thought it was so good and important. The title says it all: when it comes to the meaning of work, socio-economic forces have made work more insecure, unpredictable, and risky. In other words, in the brave new world of work, the French concept of précarité is the name of the game: work has become more precarious.

Kalleberg divided his presentation into four sections:  Read more 

• The causes of growth of precarious work as global challenge
• The consequences
• Rethinking the employment relationship
• Challenges for public policy and sociology

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Echidne has a great article over at Alternet regarding the non-sensical and stupid thesis that there are few women in politics because they do not have the ambition, drive and thick skin to face the political world. In other words, states the stupid thesis, they have an inner glass ceiling. This is idiotic, of course, Echidne lists all the relevant arguments, so, just go read, ok? Then come back and read some of the background I have to offer on this.

According to Paxton and Hughes (2007), women represent approximately half of the world’s population but only 16% of national parliaments. Of 190 countries, only 7 have women as head of the government. Women are 9% of ambassadors to the United Nations, 7% of the world’s cabinet ministers and 8% of the world’s mayors. In politics and government, the gender gap is extremely wide and well represents the global persistence of patriarchy.

In addition, in no country do women make half of the parliament even though a few countries come very close (See table). Interestingly, some countries of the global South seem to do a better job than some Western countries when it comes to promoting women in politics. After all, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Indonesia and Chile have or have had female presidents; in contrast, France and the United States have not.  Read more 

(Hideous table alert)

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Progress!! I managed to get Japanese food AND utensils, which avoided my having to resort to the same creative, yet shameful, solution as I did yesterday.

Things that suck

Please, my fellow sociologists: do NOT bring a goddamn infant to a presentation… believe it or not, it’ll end up crying (no way??!!)… and you may be used to your spawn wailing, but it annoys the rest of us (especially me, which is all that matters).

CLIQUES!! Star sociologists hang out together and with the few non-stars that managed to latch on to them and ignore the rest of the vulgum pecus.

Things that do NOT suck

Being reminded why sociology is great and important and why I majored in it in the first place.

Panel 1 - Public Sociology

Ok, so, on to business. The first panel I attended was a panel on public sociology regarding sociology and the media.

[Disclaimer: I’m a big supporter of public sociology, which is why I blog… duh.]  Read more 

Who’s this Krugman guy? He’s got a really good blog:

As we all know, the Bush administration essentially brushed aside all notion of due process. It locked up and tortured people it said were “enemy combatants”; it engaged in warrantless wiretapping; and so on.

We weren’t supposed to worry our pretty little heads about this, because we were supposed to take it as a given that these were people we could trust not to abuse their power.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department was interviewing job candidates, and asking,

What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?

In other words, there was a combination of power without oversight and a deeply creepy cult of personality (which was obvious long before we got the latest specifics.)

I think we were lucky to get out of this with democracy more or less intact.

Let’s not count our chickens, OK?  Read more 

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

Christian Chavagneux and Ronen Palan’s Les Paradis Fiscaux is a great (and mercifully short) introduction to tax heavens, banking secrecy and the offshore financial world. And it’s in French. For my non-French readers, not to worry, hopefully, my review will give enough substantial information… or, y’all could learn French! However, I have preserved what I think are the best quotes in the original language so as to preserve their value.

The book’s central thesis is that the development of offshore financial centers since the 1960s is an integral part of the dynamics of contemporary globalization, both in the financial and productive sectors. Tax heavens are now a pillar without which contemporary economic globalization could not function.

And surprisingly, they have not been studied to the extent that they should have been. For orthodox economic literature, tax heavens are a product of overtaxation in industrialized countries or a simple manifestation of informal economies. Both views are faulty according to Chavagneux and Palan.  Read more 

So I saw The Dark Knight, and I liked it. I admired its seriousness among the bombast, but did not love it. I had bones to pick about its plot —

A DA is the salvation of his city?
And he uses RICO, a Federal instrument? Without Federal intervention?
And offers himself up as bait, endangering the prosecution of hundreds of criminals to catch one psycho?
And houses his star witness with the psycho in a corrupt precinct house? And orders no metal wanding of the psycho’s henchmen with cellphones visibly sewn into their flesh?
Really?  Read more 

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

The book I want to start this conversation on social class is Robert Frank’s Richistan - A Journey Through The American Wealth Boom and The Lives of the New Rich. It is an ethnographic overview of the lifestyles of the new superrich. What does Richistan mean? According to Frank,

"Today’s rich had formed their own virtual country. They were in fact wealthier than most nations. By 2004, the richest 1 percent of Americans were earning about $1.35 trillion a year - greater than the total national incomes of France, Italy or Canada.

And with their huge numbers, they had built a self-contained world unto themselves, complete with thwie own health-care system (concierge doctors), travel networks (Net Jets, destination clubs), separate economy (double-digit income gains and double-digit inflation), and language ("who’s your household manager?"). They didn’t just hire gardening crews; they hired "personal arborists." The rich weren’t just getting richer; they were becoming financial foreigners, creating their own country within a country, their own society within a society, and their economy within an economy.

They were creating Richistan." (3-4)  Read more 

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

I have already discussed sociologist Anthony Elliott’s Book, Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming our Lives when it was reviewed in a newspaper. I have since read the book in its entirety. Below is my full review.

"In the new economy nothing is more sexy than surgery. From Botox to lipo to tummy tucks and mini-facelifts, the number of cosmetic surgery operations undertaken around the globe has soared recently, as consumers spend more and more on themselves in the search for sex appeal and artificial beauty. In a society in which celebrity is divine, information technology rules, new ways of working predominate and people increasingly judge each other on first impressions, cosmetic enhancements of the body have become all the rage." (7)

In other words, for Elliott, we have entered the era of the cosmetic surgical culture, a subset of the makeover culture that also includes fashion, fitness and all sorts of therapies. His book is dedicated to examining the social causes and consequences of this cultural shift in the global context, both in terms of the social production of identity at the micro-level and at the global level of shift in the structure of work at the macro-level.  Read more 

As promised, here are my initial reflections (or intellectual masturbation, as PLuk would say… works for me too!) on the conception of social justice that I think PB2.0 should promote and apply to whatever structure it ends up having.

A quick response to Paul on the intellectual masturbation:

"In ‘why I write’, George Orwell claimed that all writers were motivated by some mixture of four motives. The first was ‘sheer egoism’, which must to some be present if (as Orwell assumed) a ‘writer’ is not someone who is not content to write but wants to publish. The second was ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, which Orwell took to be some concern for the form of one’s work. The third was ‘historical impulse’, or, more broadly, ‘the desire to see things as they are.’ The last was ‘political purpose’ — using the word "political" in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter people’s idea of the kind of society they should strive after."

That’s a quote from Brian Barry’s book, Why Social Justice Matters, which inspired some (but not all) of the reflections below.

Again, my thanks to Lambert for offering me this opportunity.

I am one of the people who thinks that PB2.0 should be both about substance and structure. Both topics deserve posts of their own but in this post, I focus more on substance: a basic conceptualization of social justice.

What should PB2.0 stand for ?  Read more 

Lambert has kindly invited me to write this week’s installment in our PB2.0 series and I am happy to do so, although I live in a Central Time area so, my post will probably be up around 6pm, Eastern.

My contribution will focus on what I think should be central to PB2.0: social justice (Lambert and I have a slight difference of view on this, so, I’m sure / I hope he’ll explain in the discussion).  Read more 

What Glenn Greenwald said:

While there are substantial, important differences between Republicans and Democrats, critical political debates are at least as often driven not by the GOP/Democrat dichotomy, but by the split between the Beltway political establishment and the rest of the country. As the above-chronicled events demonstrate, all of these assaults on our core civil liberties and the rule of law are not Republican attacks with Democrats fighting against them. They are attacks launched by the political establishment against the citizenry, and they ought to be responded to as such.

He’s talkin sense, Merle.  Read more 

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog (Lambert, where’s my “Department of Analytical Tools”??).

Watch this first amazing video. It is 16-minute long but worth every second (and see this BBC background page):

Those of us old enough to have lived through the 1980s remember Bhopal as a major industrial disaster in 1983. On December 3, 1984, a Union Carbide pesticide plant (UC was bought by Dow Chemical in 2001) released poisoned gas that killed an official estimate of approximately 3,800 people (actually doctors on site claim that 15,000 died within a month). Over 500,000 have been affected by inhaling the gas.  Read more