Sociology Lens最新文献

North Sea oil discoveries introduced a qualitative divide that gave rise to at least the prospect of an economically viable Scottish independence, insofar as it made the “Scottish economy” a legitimate point of contestation on constitutional lines. In turn, this problematised the nature of minority nationalism in advanced, developed, post-imperial capitalist regional economies. The research assesses how economic factors – most notably oil – materially affected the prospects of asserting power, and thus the possibilities for imagining collective agency as a national (i.e. Scottish) project. Oil helped shift “New Left” thinking away from assimilationist and modernising projects of assimilating regional consciousness into “national” projects, while also inspiring outright nationalists to define their own project in relation to the earlier phases of nationalism. The study thus contributes to recentring the study of Scotland, with a smaller emphasis on the local dimension and identities, as against the role of national actors in untangling relationships with wider geopolitical and geo-economic forces. The claim is not simply that global forces formed the qualitative divide that made nationalist action possible; but also that these were conscious considerations of actors in the aftermath of North Sea discoveries.

During significant social transformations, the government and society are closely interconnected with each other, mediated by the family. A special group of the state-owned enterprises in China prepared for national security and infrastructure constructions. The Third Front (TF), such as the Anding Computer Factory, were typical small societies that confronted the decline of the work unit system and the socioeconomic transformation from a planned economy to a socialist market system. This study attempts to understand the lives of employee residents in the Anding factory community by applying long-term participant observation and in-depth interviews. Overall, both the Anding community and its employees can be considered to have experienced three historical stages—the productive youth, the confused midlife, and the unsettled twilight years. The material culture, organization, and spirit were all profoundly impacted in each of the three periods. After realizing the unstoppable deindustrializing trend and the rising social disparity brought along by the free market, employees gradually transferred their considerations from the factory society to the future of their families as a cultural adaptaion. Driven by the priority rule of profits, the employees' lives are full of contradictions and are poorly suited to the economically competitive society. This study opens a novel dialog between ethnography, industrial relations, labor history, elderly affairs, and social dynamics.

Using publicly available census and historical records, I compare the Sundown-era residential patterns and outcomes of Black and White residents from one small Wisconsin city between 1880 and 1930 to observe how sundown violence may have affected Black residential outcomes. Census summary data shows that while the White racial group population continued to grow at the state, county, and city levels, the Black population at the city level stalled before dropping to zero, providing evidence for sundown-type violence and exclusion against Black households by White city residents. For the Black residents (N = 18) whose histories I could trace, three outcomes were observed: remaining in the city, internally migrating to an adjacent county, and moving to much larger metropolitan areas that were already known as Black residential destinations. In contrast, the residential outcomes for White residents (n = 42) were much more varied in their residential destinations, both at the state/regional levels, and in the size of community settled in. I suggest that sundown-era displacement should be further considered in discussions of Black internal migration in the early 20^th century, and that residents of formerly sundown towns and cities need to confront their under-examined histories of racial exclusion.

This manuscript examines the relationship between forced, or required, identity performances, self-identification, and the material. It tests core premises of identity formation within the performativity literature against the lived experiences of ‘Ballotee Bevin Boys’ - coal mining conscripts managed under the UK's WWII National Registration and Ministry of Labour and National Service program. Data were drawn from fifty-eight personal accounts of Ballotee Bevin Boys and analyzed to identify core themes around identity and performance by means of a narrative analysis. Multiple regression analyses then found that the quantity of i) narrative statements of self-identification as a Bevin Boy, and ii) narrative statements of the material, could be predicted based on the prevalence of narratives of institutionally forced performances, and individual performances of resistance. These results support the claim that performances required of Ballotee Bevin Boys did sediment into their understandings of self, regardless of their individual intention or desire to be a Bevin Boy – even in cases of active resistance against this externally applied category. These findings support a theorization of identity formation and the material which decenters the role of the intention of the performing individual, instead, placing greater emphasis on institutional categories and their enforcement.

The state is a contested concept in the historiography on early medieval societies. Debates have frequently revolved around its heuristic validity, but few scholars have addressed its broader theoretical implications. Those who have tend to reduce the state to its institutional features and privilege the role of the dominant groups in the analysis of state-building processes and the workings of the state. This paper contends that a richer conceptualisation of the state can overcome the limits of the debate as it has been framed so far and provide a deeper insight into how social relations shaped and were shaped by the development of early medieval polities. After reviewing the most significant historiographical contributions to the debate, the paper introduces the Strategic-Relational Approach to the state, as formulated by B. Jessop, as one that can provide a more nuanced understanding of early medieval polities. Particular emphasis is made on the analysis of class relationships and the articulation of hegemonic projects as two particularly fruitful lines of inquiry. Finally, the paper focuses on one particular instance of early medieval political practice, the politics of the land, as a means to illustrate the potential of the approach.

The undisciplined youth is one figure that is key to understanding the 1950s and 1960s in India. Politicians, officials, academics, youth leaders, and journalists developed and spread a discourse that imagined the collective behaviour of Indian youths as falling well below adult expectations of them in independent India. The imagery of the youth lacking in discipline was tied up with cycles of student unrest and the idea that the methods of protest used during the pre-independence period had wrongly continued into the post-independence period, but this discursive formation was often extended to include all Indian youths and it became translated into a long-term anxiety about the future of the newly established nation-state. These tropes about the undisciplined Indian youth became a symbol of the country's unresolved future. Unless the crisis of youth could be remedied, the narrative went, then the potentiality of Indian independence and its first generation of citizens could never be realised. This discourse took on a novel and distinctive shape during the initial years following Indian independence in 1947, it crystallised during the early 1950s, and there was a continued build-up of public concern that lasted throughout the 1960s.

Eastern Europe has been the object of orientalising discourses portraying it as a region defined by problematic statehood, underdevelopment, and nationalist-religious warmongering. These discourses have produced 19^th-century mental maps of Europe contrasting a perceived ‘core’ European area ending with the Frankish Empire's eastern border and coinciding with later Enlightenment influence and an indistinct ‘Orient’ or ‘East’, bypassed by “modernising” processes. This contribution focuses on (post-)Cold War discourses in social science and shows how these discourses re-produce 19^th-century layers of orientalising map-making and keep East-West differences alive by tracing deficient, fragile or repressive state institutions back to alleged Eastern European ‘mentalities’.

American research has found that change in political identification is a possible outcome of a university education, particularly in the liberal arts. By contrast, Canadian survey data collected in 1963, 1967, 2013, and 2017 point to there being no change in political identification on the part of undergraduates in a Canadian university with a liberal arts curriculum. In contrast to the United States, by means of cluster analyses conducted on the results of surveys of the American federal elections of 1964 and 2016, and the Canadian national elections of 1965 and 2015, I show that the political identification of two cohorts of Canadian undergraduates is more likely an artifact of the national multi-party system in Canada than it is the result of a university education.

I adopt a dialogic approach to refute Paul Oliver’s claim that there is no challenge to the authority of the black Church or religion in the segregated ‘race records’ of the first half of the 20th century in the United States. I dismiss the claims of some black theologians that the presence of biblical imagery in the blues means that performers were essentially religious. I show that the dialogue between secular song and religious sermons on record involved mutual parody, satire, and polemic in a common speech genre. Attacks on the Church, its members, clergy, and doctrines were common. Recorded sermons spoke back in defense. Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts offer purchase on the relations between secular and religious recordings in an ongoing struggle for hegemony in black cultural production.

This paper problematises the 2007 amendments to Article 5 of the Police Powers and Duties Law (PPDL) in Turkey that categorises all citizens as ‘potential suspects’ through fingerprinting technology. The amended article requires everyone to submit fingerprint samples when applying for certain official documents such as driver's licences, passports, and ID cards. Consequently, the result has been dramatic: the police have so far proactively recorded more than 60 million people's fingerprints in the process of issuing these documents. Yet, there has been no research into this phenomenon. This paper suggests that this sort of biometric police surveillance is not a recent development, rather part of a long tradition within policing ‘Turkish’ national interests. Following Foucault's genealogical methodology, the paper argues that the governability of a large heterogeneous population across a vast territory has always demanded biometric policing technologies, addressing biopolitical proximity between the capacity building of modern security apparatus and identifying the unknown masses. Studying the historical data comparatively reveals that fingerprinting first started with recording exceptional groups such as criminals and convicts in Europe, while from the late Ottoman Empire to modern Turkey, large sections of the population have always persistently been targeted by police regulations.