historical sociology
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2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip A. Hough

Contemporary scholars debate the factors driving despotic labour conditions across the world economy. Some emphasize the dominance of global market imperatives and others highlight the market's reliance upon extra-economic coercion and state violence. At the Margins of the Global Market engages in this debate through a comparative and world-historical analysis of the labour regimes of three global commodity-producing subregions of rural Colombia: the coffee region of Viejo Caldas, the banana region of Urabá, and the coca/cocaine region of the Caguán. By drawing upon insights from labour regimes, global commodity chains, and world historical sociology, this book offers a novel understanding of the broad range of factors - local, national, global, and interregional - that shape labour conditions on the ground in Colombia. In doing so, it offers a critical new framework for analysing labour and development dynamics that exist at the margins of the global market.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
J.D.Y. Peel

This paper presents an illuminating analysis of the place of religion in Yoruba social and political life, and why the Yoruba experience represents a great ex­ample to the rest of Nigeria, particularly the religiously-volatile north of the country. Combining multiple approaches from historical sociology, the sociol­ogy of religlon, political history and the public lives of critical political and re­ligious agents over a period of about a century of Yoruba history, the article explains why the Yoruba case is an exemplar in religious harmony. He argues that the Yoruba are constantly pressed towards olaju (modernity/development/progress) which makes cross-cutting communal belonging more salient, thus ensuring that the Yoruba constantly mobilize both religious and secular insti­tutions and processes in the all-embracing project of olaju.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Raffin

This work of historical sociology revisits and analyses the earlier part of the Third Republic (1870-1914), when France granted citizenship rights to Indians in Pondicherry. It explores the nature of this colonial citizenship and enables comparisons with British India, especially the Madras Presidency, as well as the rest of the French empire, as a means of demonstrating how unique the practice of granting such rights was. The difficulties of implementing a new political culture based on the language of rights and participatory political institutions were not so much rooted in a lack of assimilation into the French culture on the part of the Indian population; rather, they were the result of political infighting and long-term conflicts over status, both in relation to caste and class, and between inclusive and exclusive visions of French citizenship.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 87-93
Author(s):  
A. Zinov'ev

This work aims a theoretical analysis of the historical situation of social problems politicization in modern Russia, by referring to achievements of modern historical sociology of revolutions and interdisciplinary synthesis in the study of social movements. Turning to the achievements of the historical sociology of revolutions and social movements allows us to understand the politicization of social problems in modern Russia within a broader theoretical context. As well it allows us to understand politicization in modern Russia within the context of state crises as revolutionary politicization (which is a consequence of “revolutionary neurosis” phenomenon). Besides this turning helps theoretically explore the politicization of social problems in modern Russia as a communicative (ideological) crisis in relations between the state and society. This theoretical analysis bases on the qualitative methodology of modern social research in the study of political and social phenomena. The generalized method of this work is the comparative social hermeneutics of historical phenomena of revolutions and states, based on the political theory of J. Habermas. Author considers the politicization of socially significant topics as a constant dialogue between state and society. The communicative rationality of the state aims at understanding in dialogue. Transition from the USSR to the Russian Federation destroyed the Soviet ideological paradigm and a new ideological paradigm is being created, which affects the complexity of the dialogue between state and society. The author concludes that the phenomenon of revolutionary politicization in modern Russia (the abnormality of the dialogue between the state and society) is a consequence of the lack of communicative rationality at the state.


Author(s):  
Agnieszka Kolasa-Nowak ◽  
Marta Bucholc

The development of Polish institutional sociology since the 1920s reflects the combined effects of domestic political and cultural factors, along with international interdependencies. Historical sociology shares in the vicissitudes of the whole discipline. Although historical sociology was only weakly institutionalized before 1989, some of the best sociological studies produced in Poland under socialism display the keen use of historical imagination, inspired both by the pre-1939 domestic tradition and by Marxist theory. This article examines the path of historical sociology in Poland after 1989 and the connection between the sociological uses of history and the experience of post-communist transformation. We posit that the social transformation experience and how it was addressed by social science directly translate into the use of history in Polish sociology after 1989. We argue that the role of historical sociology in Poland since the end of the 1990s was a function of the potential of the past as a symbolic resource in the growing interdependence between Poland and Western Europe. However, the post-1989 research agendas of historical sociology were forged according to the mode of responsiveness to political agendas predating 1989. An overview of the development of Polish historical sociology demonstrates that the ahistorical transitological thinking after 1989 has been challenged by critical agendas in historical sociology, but it was, in the first place, a reaction to the increased potential of the past as a symbolic resource in political debates. Thus, the rationale for the passage to the third wave of historical sociology was primarily political.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-46
Author(s):  
Jeremy C. A. Smith

As a field of significant activity for historical sociologists in recent decades, civilizational analysis has produced extensive and incisive works examining Japan as a historical formation of Eurasia. However, the same cannot be said of Japan’s Pacific relationship with the United States, which is neglected in the major historical sociologies of Japanese modernity. This essay seeks to address that unnecessary oversight by putting that relationship into focus as an international dimension of the institution of both states. It would be tempting to elucidate the entanglement of the two as an encounter of civilizations, but the author instead casts it as intercivilizational engagement, that is a deeper set of connections generated by routine contacts and migratory movements, trade in commerce and culture, and selective appropriation of models of statehood. Delineating the lines of exchange in all four domains of connectivity between Japan and the US, the essay profiles the international and imperial extensions of both states. In altering the perspective on Japan’s relations with the world, the author outlines a larger potential historical sociology of intercivilizational engagement between two Pacific-edge civilizational constellations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 001139212110558
Author(s):  
Sean P Hier

This article theorizes some of the ways that the COVID-19 health crisis was publicly narrated and morally regulated in Canada. Beginning with Valverde’s theory of moral capital, public health crisis communication is conceptualized as dialectical claims-making activities aimed at maximizing the individual moral capital of citizens and the aggregate moral capital of nations. Valverde’s historical sociology explains how moral capital operated in relation to economic capital accumulation in the context of 19th-century moral regulation of the urban poor. This article applies aspects of Valverde’s historical framework about mixed economies of regulation to contemporary biopolitical moralization in the midst of a pandemic. It does so by arguing that responsibilizing citizens to flatten the epidemic curve of the disease contributed to the social construction of a normative pandemic subject. In this way, the analysis provides insights into how public health crisis communication explicitly intended to mitigate COVID-19 infection rates both reflected and reinforced the conjunctural norms associated with neoliberal governmentality.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tad Skotnicki

This paper provides a comparative historical sociology of a contemporary phenomenon: the tendency to equate “ethical” goods with aesthetic quality. Studies of moral markets suggest that this equation of ethics and quality would reveal a process whereby moral sensibilities saturate market forms and processes. Yet this paper argues that we should also examine how these forms and processes can condition moral sensibilities, not just absorb them. Drawing on primary source archival materials from late eighteenth century abolitionists and turn-of-the-twentieth-century consumer activists, the author demonstrates that these activists participated in a recurring purity politics of consumption conditioned by the commodity form. This manifests in activists’ equation of: 1) the treatment of the laborers and 2) the quality of the labor with 3) the quality of the goods. To claim that goods were pure, in many instances, was also to claim that the laborers and the labor conditions behind those goods were as well. This purity politics, further, entails both public and private ways of arguing for the equation of ethics and quality, as well as distinct civic visions of ethical labor. It also opens up ways to explore certain racialized dimensions of the commodity form.


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