scholarly journals Developing the concept of society: Institutional domains, regimes of inequalities and complex systems in a global era

2020 ◽  
pp. 001139212093294
Author(s):  
Sylvia Walby
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Complexity Science ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Global Era ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Multiple Regimes ◽  
Temporal And Spatial

This article develops the concept of society to meet the challenge of cross-border and global processes. Global processes have made visible the inadequacy of interpreting the concept of society as if it were a nation-state, since there is a lack of congruence of institutional domains (economy, polity, civil society, violence) and regimes of inequality (class, gender, ethnicity). The article engages with two strands of intellectual heritage in sociological analysis of society as a macro concept: the differentiation of institutions and the relations of inequality. The concepts of society and societalisation are developed by hybridising these two approaches rather than selecting only one or the other. To achieve this, the concept of system is developed by drawing on complexity science. This enables the simultaneous analysis of differentiated institutional domains (economy, polity, violence, civil society) and multiple regimes of inequality without reductionism. In turn, this facilitates the fluent theorisation of variations in the temporal and spatial reach of social systems.

scholarly journals Hegemony and Counter-Hegemony in a Global Field

2007 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Neoliberal Globalization ◽  
Social Visions ◽  
Economic Landscape ◽  
The One ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Activist Groups ◽  
Two Sides

Social justice struggles are often framed around competing hegemonic and counter-hegemonic projects. This article compares several organizations of global civil society that have helped shape or have emerged within the changing political-economic landscape of neoliberal globalization, either as purveyors of ruling perspectives or as anti-systemic popular forums and activist groups. It interprets the dialectical relation between the two sides as a complex war of position to win new political space by assembling transnational historic blocs around divergent social visions – the one centered on a logic of replication and passive revolution, the other centred on a logic of prefiguration and transformation. It presents a sociological analysis of the organizational forms and practical challenges that their respective hegemonic and counter-hegemonic projects entail.

Cross-Border Interactions and European Identity

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 380-401
Author(s):  
João Henriques
Keyword(s):  
Social Systems ◽  
The Other ◽  
European Identity ◽  
Host Society ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Different Levels

Abstract This article examines what types of cross-border interactions promote a stronger sense of European identity than national identity. Firstly, using data from the Eurobarometer survey a typology of cross-border practices is constructed and associated with different levels of European identity. Secondly, a qualitative study evaluates the life course of 36 individuals involved in a European binational relationship. Both interactions within and outside Europe are assessed. The findings show that three types of interactions might promote a strong identification as European: Intra-European integrative interactions, involving a certain level of integration into the host society (in economic, educational and social systems) and associated with long-term stays; Multicultural interactions, involving a setting of shared activities and cooperation between individuals of several European nationalities; and Outside Europe interactions, that put Europe at perspective between the “we” and the “others”. On the other hand, the effect of Non-Integrative (sojourns) and short-term stays might be negligible.

Praktiken und Praxis

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (2) ◽  
pp. 41-56
Author(s):  
Thomas Alkemeyer
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
Lived Body ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Discipline Formation ◽  
Material Basis ◽  
Embodied Self ◽  
Self Formation

Two forms or rather perspectives of observations appear alongside practice theories: The first perspective can be called the „theatre perspective“: practice here is observed as a regular, spatiotemporally ordered, socially structured, and therefore recognizable historical form of „practical doings and sayings“, in which participants are understood as mere carriers of practices and their bodies as the raw material for processes of formation. In the other perspective, understood as the perspective of the participants themselves, practices come into view as ongoing, conflictual, and contingent accomplishments, in which participants occur as intelligently collaborating contributors with so called „lived bodies“. These bodies are affectable, sites of experience, and media of a sensitivity that allow an embodied self to orientate itself (with)in a practice. This paper proposes a methodological mediation of both perspectives by taking into account both a sociological analysis of discipline, formation, or adjustment, and the reflexive sensing in action, which can be modeled phenomenologically. Thus, a „lived-body-in-accomplishment“ comes into view that serves the material basis of subjectivation procceses, i. e. the (self-)formation of a constitutionally conditioned (political) agency.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Arneil
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Rural Land ◽  
Internal Colonialism ◽  
Key Terms

Chapter 1 defines the volume’s key terms: domestic colonization as the process of segregating idle, irrational, and/or custom-bound groups of citizens by states and civil society organizations into strictly bounded parcels of ‘empty’ rural land within their own nation state in order to engage them in agrarian labour and ‘improve’ both the land and themselves and domestic colonialism as the ideology that justifies this process, based on its economic (offsets costs) and ethical (improves people) benefits. The author examines and differentiates her own research from previous literatures on ‘internal colonialism’ and argues that her analysis challenges postcolonial scholarship in four important ways: colonization needs to be understood as a domestic as well as foreign policy; people were colonized based on class, disability, and religious belief as well as race; domestic colonialism was defended by socialists and anarchists as well as liberal thinkers; and colonialism and imperialism were quite distinct ideologies historically even if they are often difficult to distinguish in contemporary postcolonial scholarship—put simply—the former was rooted in agrarian labour and the latter in domination. This chapter concludes with a summary of the remaining chapters.

scholarly journals Phylogenetic paleoecology: macroecology within an evolutionary framework

Paleobiology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-177
Author(s):  
James C. Lamsdell ◽  
Curtis R. Congreve
Keyword(s):  
Species Diversity ◽  
Spatial Variation ◽  
Geographic Distribution ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Phylogenetic Signal ◽  
Evolutionary Rates ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ecological Data ◽  
Temporal And Spatial Variation ◽  
Temporal And Spatial

The burgeoning field of phylogenetic paleoecology (Lamsdell et al. 2017) represents a synthesis of the related but differently focused fields of macroecology (Brown 1995) and macroevolution (Stanley 1975). Through a combination of the data and methods of both disciplines, phylogenetic paleoecology leverages phylogenetic theory and quantitative paleoecology to explain the temporal and spatial variation in species diversity, distribution, and disparity. Phylogenetic paleoecology is ideally situated to elucidate many fundamental issues in evolutionary biology, including the generation of new phenotypes and occupation of previously unexploited environments; the nature of relationships among character change, ecology, and evolutionary rates; determinants of the geographic distribution of species and clades; and the underlying phylogenetic signal of ecological selectivity in extinctions and radiations. This is because phylogenetic paleoecology explicitly recognizes and incorporates the quasi-independent nature of evolutionary and ecological data as expressed in the dual biological hierarchies (Eldredge and Salthe 1984; Congreve et al. 2018; Fig. 1), incorporating both as covarying factors rather than focusing on one and treating the other as error within the dataset.

scholarly journals Differences over Difference: Sino-Russian Friendship at Interstate and Interpersonal Scales

2021 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-721
Author(s):  
Ed Pulford
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
Global Era ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Border Town ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Daily Interactions ◽  
Difference Form ◽  
Social Scientific

AbstractRelations between states are usually framed in human terms, from partners to rivals, enemies or allies, polities and persons appear to engage in cognate relationships. Yet whether or not official ties and relationships among people from those states actually correspond remains less clear. “Friendship,” a term first applied to states in eighteenth-century Europe and mobilized in the (post)socialist world since the 1930s, articulates with particular clarity both the promise and the limitations of harmonized personal and state ties. Understandings of friendship vary interculturally, and invocations of state-state friendship may be accompanied by a distinct lack of amity among populations. Such is the case between China and Russia today, and this situation therefore raises wider questions over how we should understand interstate and interpersonal relationships together. Existing social scientific work has generally failed to locate either the everyday in the international or the international in the everyday. Focusing on both Chinese and Russian approaches to daily interactions in a border town and the official Sino-Russian Friendship, I thus suggest a new scalar approach. Applying this to the Sino-Russian case in turn reveals how specific contours of “difference” form a pivot around which relationships at both scales operate. This study thus offers both comparison between Chinese and Russian friendships, and a lens for wider comparative work in a global era of shifting geopolitics and cross-border encounters.

I Was a Retail Salesperson: An Examination of Two Memoirs About Working in Retail

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-49
Author(s):  
Brittany Clark
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Working Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nation State ◽  
American Perspective ◽  
Retail Workers

This article considers Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed (originally published in 2001) and Caitlin Kelly’s Malled (2011) as representational narratives of working-class retail workers. The display of working-class experience in each work is considered in the context of the authors’ lives and experiences, considering use of language, events and broader expectations of the working life of retail salespeople. Using Stuart Hall’s concept of the ‘Other’ (2013) as a theoretical key point, the article also considers, for an American perspective specifically, how these workers are constructed in the broader ideology of the nation state.

scholarly journals Divergent Accounts of Equivalent Narratives: Russian-Swedish Interdevochka Meets Swedish-Russian Lilya 4-ever

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Lyngsgaard Fjord Kristensen
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Labour Migration ◽  
National Context ◽  
Transnational Cinema ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Nordic Cinema ◽  
Russian Identity ◽  
Prime Case

In a region that is traditionally considered to be transnational, Nordic cinema has often posed as the prime case for a transnational cinema. The paper contests this notion of Nordic transnationality by analysing two films that depict two Russian women travelling to Sweden. Interdevochka/Intergirl (Todorovski, 1989, USSR) and Lilya-4-ever (Moodysson, 2004, Sweden) challenge the inclusiveness of the region and make explicit the fact that Russian identities are not part of the homogenous mixture of the region. Instead, Russian identities of cross-border prostitution are cinematically subjected to rejection and victimisation. This paper examines how Lilya-4-ever adheres to a European anxiety narrative by performing a Russian return narrative and how Interdevochka/Intergirl portrays ‘the fallen soviet woman’ by travelling to Sweden. These cinematic representations of the female Russian identity travelling to Sweden differ from each national context, but by probing into a comparative analysis the paper will reveal that both films need the Other to narrate these stories of transnational labour migration.

A minoritized language on both sides of the border: legal framework and language policy of Catalan in Andorra and Catalonia

Multilingua ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-168
Author(s):  
Juan Jiménez-Salcedo
Keyword(s):  
Language Policy ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
The Other ◽  
Language Policies ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
State Schools

Abstract This article analyzes the legislation of the two territories that have the most advanced legal framework regarding language policies towards Catalan: Andorra and Catalonia. The study of the legislation in relation to contexts of social and institutional use shows how this legal framework is not sufficient to change Catalan from being a minoritized language, since the phenomenon of minoritization is innate to the ecosystem in which languages develop. This ecosystem is conditioned by the presence of Castilian as a lingua franca on both sides of the border between Andorra and Catalonia. In the case of Andorra, its status as a cross-border microstate makes it a plurilingual space with Castilian as a socially cross-cutting language; moreover, the fact that until recently there was no network of state schools hindered Catalan language normalisation efforts. Catalonia, on the other hand, is an even more complex example on account of how the implementation of llengua pròpia policy contradicts the constitutional control the Spanish state exercises on this.

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