International Sociology

"The high rate of population growth in Africa has led to government attempts to encourage fertility control, but economic development does not seem to be following Western demographic transition theory. Kenyan total fertility was 8.1 children in 1979 and mean desired number of children for ever married women is 7.2. Key patterns of fertility contributing to these figures are high levels of pre- and non-marital fertility, traditional orientations to fertility, low prevalence of modern orientations to family size and contraception, regional and ethnic variations and high fertility among young urban women." The value of existing theories of fertility in explaining these trends is considered.

A number of demographic, economic, socio-cultural and psychological factors determine the nature, pattern and direction of migration in Africa. Much of the existing literature tends to emphasise the economic motives for migration. However, it is becoming increasingly evident that socio-cultural and other non-economic factors are also very important, and that a realistic explanation of African migration should be multidisciplinary. This theory of African migration shows that migration in Africa is determined by economic factors such as employment, social factors such as education and demographic factors such as population growth. The results indicate that these three factors explain 70 per cent of the variance in net migration, and that the economic factor is the single most important determinant of migration. The theory shows further that the existing socio-economic institutions in Africa tend to support the prevalence of rural-rural and rural-urban migration.

This paper attempts to discuss the link between population growth, peasant agrarian economy and environmental degradation in Tanzania. It argues that high population growth and economic backwardness are dependent variables which contribute significantly to rapid resource depletion, and hence to environmental degradation. In other words, peasant agrarian economic conditions stimulate the demand for larger families which leads to high population growth in turn. A change in one of these variables will necessarily lead to changes in the other, and both of them have an impact on the environment. The conclusion drawn is that attempts to reduce population growth need to be linked to the war against poverty and environmental degradation. Efforts should be directed to changing traditional ways of life by eliminating poverty and improving the means of production in the rural areas. Such efforts will ease the demand for children and reduce fertility levels in the long run.

Iran's explosive population growth, which increases the country's population by about 1.9 million people annually, is causing a considerable strain on resources and the environment, and the coming generations will be facing a serious situation unless this trend is reversed. The strength of cultural values has not encouraged a declining population growth rate in parallel with the Iranian wave of modernization before and after the revolution. A special cultural revolution is the prerequisite for a demographic revolution. This study is placing main emphasis on the social and psychological factors involved in family planning. The general findings of surveys conducted so far demonstrate that few people know anything about family planning and methods of contraception. Social, cultural, and religious institutions seem to inhibit the expansion of family planning. Moreover, the lack of economic and social security promotes a large family size and prevents contraceptive use. However, social change in Iranian society will eventually be brought about by urbanization, industrialization, and education, and the ensuing modernization of values is expected to increase the use of contraceptives and lead to changes in the associated social and cultural institutions.

Interview data gathered during two surveys in Anhui and Zhejiang Provinces in 1986 and 1987 are used to depict changes in the social status and life situation of rural women in China in three age groups, 18-36, 37-55 and 56 and over. For the younger women, marriage increasingly is a result of discussion with parents, not arrangement, but third-party introductions are increasing. They are active in household and township enterprises and aspire to more education and economic independence. The middle-aged group experienced war and revolution and now work non-stop under the responsibility system of household production, aspiring to university education for sons and enterprise work for daughters. The older women, while supported by their sons, live a frugal existence. In general, preference for sons is still prevalent and deep-seated. At the same time, the bride price and costs of marriage are increasing and of widespread concern. Rural socio-economic growth is required before Confucian traditions are overcome.

This paper offers a framework for the comparative analysis of international migration into Western Europe since 1945. It identifies "the migration of four analytically distinct categories of person which highlights the role of the state in the reproduction of the imagined community of nations. That role is carried out in the context of a more general process of the regulation of scarcity, in the course of which people are simultaneously included in and excluded from the hierarcy of economic, political and ideological positions in the nation-state. Of special interest is the content of the processes of signification and categorisation that are generated in the inclusionary and exclusionary processes. The countries selected for analysis are France, the Netherlands and Britain."

The Igboland of Nigeria has been under the influence of socio-economic change since the turn of the century, as typified by a high literarcy rate, a highly migratory population, the predominance of Christianity, and built-up towns and villages. Yet Igbo fertility has remained high even by Nigerian standards. Part of the explanation for high Igbo fertility is the prevalence of peculiar socio-cultural institutions which tend to encourage or support high fertility. In this study fertility differentials, reproductive behaviour and fertility preferences and intentions are examined as a function of three well-recognised cultural institutions or contextual factors: the bestowal of high fertility honour or title to women of a given family size, patriarchal relations, and patrilinearity and son preference, together with individual status indicators. Our findings suggest that socio-cultural institutions establish or condition relationships and behaviours among the Igbo; in other words, individual fertility behaviour takes place within the context of complex social organisation and under the influence of multiple social, cultural and ideological realities.

The author reviews recent evidence concerning the emigration potential of Russia and Eastern Europe, using data from a 1991 survey of 4,269 respondents. "It is demonstrated that the proportion of adults wishing to emigrate from each of these countries in February 1991 varied from a low of 2 per cent in Lithuania to a high of 13 per cent in Poland. Total emigration potential from the region is estimated to have been between 10.2 and 16.7 million....A multiple regression analysis indicates that age and pessimism concerning democracy are the main factors that were independently associated with desire to emigrate."

This paper focuses on patterns of population growth in Kenya. The historical pattern of population growth from the close of the nineteenth century to 1992 is explored in the first two major sections. Estimates of the annual rate of natural population growth have not exceeded 2.5 per cent prior to 1960. Since 1960 the annual natural population growth rate has increased from 3 per cent in 1962 to 3.8-3.9 per cent for the 1977-1990 period. The rate has fallen slightly to 3.6 per cent for 1992, and data from the 1989 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey indicate that the total fertility rate declined significantly during the 1980s. The applicability of demographic transition theory to the study of population growth and development in Kenya is addressed in the third section. A fourstage model grounded in the work of Petersen, Caldwell and Chesnais is developed and applied to Kenya. Kenya is observed to have passed through the underdeveloped stage characterised by increasing birth and death rates and entered the transition/developing stage during the 1980s. Issues concerning the prospects of substantial continued reductions in the fertility level are addressed in the concluding section.

"The present paper is an attempt to analyse and forecast the following major issues relating to migration in Europe after 1992: (i) the evolution and structure of intra-European flows in the forthcoming single European market; (ii) the integration, after 1992, of established immigrant communities, including ethnic minorities and second generation groups; (iii) future immigration from non-EC member states.... The article explains that, in addition to policy-related mutations inherent in the completion of the internal market, other factors (demographic changes and insufficient enrolment of national graduate students in key disciplines) and issues (emergence of atypical groups such as second generation and Eastern European migrants), are due to generate new patterns and modified interests in European labour migration after 1992."

PIP This paper uses the phenomenon of natural fertility control (NFC) to explore the ways in which concepts and artifacts influence and circumscribe everyday beliefs. Specifically, the paper examines how NFC configures the physiological "reality" of the female body and, thus, gender relations, physiological expertise, and knowledge claims. The research for this study was based on a literature review which included approximately 200 articles published since 1966 on ovulation detection and prediction. Additional information was gained from interviews. After describing the research in the introductory section, the first part of the paper introduces NFC and describes its marginalization and how that marginalization contributes to the marginalization of the female reproductive system. In the second section, language and imagery used to describe the "activity" of sperm are contrasted with that which portrays the egg as "passive." Such terminology would have to be rethought if the active nature of female mucus (which is crucial for guiding the sperm to the egg) were acknowledged. By examining accounts of reproduction as cultural constructions and as constructions articulated with reference to gender relations, this section allows consideration of the ways in which a marginalized "fact" (the action of the mucus) provides a "natural resource" which can be used to reconfigure gender/physiology (and is, therefore, culturally subversive). The third section shows how current NFC innovations (such as the urinary dipstick) reconfigure the instruments of knowledge production (with detection transferred from the woman's "untrustworthy" manual assessment to a "superior" technology). This section illustrates how modes of knowledge discipline both "natural" phenomenon and "social" relations by redistributing expertise along clinically hierarchial lines. Thus, the new ovulation prediction technologies serve to strengthen traditional gender imageries and roles.

"This paper provides a critical review of existing studies about how migration alters women's position in the course of social change....First, the conceptual and methodological issues that bear on the assessment of changing gender relations are distilled from the existing literature. Second, for heuristic purposes we delineate three alternative outcomes for migrant women using the distribution-redistribution analytical framework....Finally, we provide a selective review of case studies illustrating alternative outcomes for migrant women in Africa and Latin America." (SUMMARY IN FRE)

Urban development since the colonial period in Nigeria has led to a rural-urban migration pattern in the post-independent state. A return labour migration process with implications for rural development has, however, accompanied certain socio-economic and political events in Nigeria in the 1980s. This paper highlights some factors that have impaired the rural transformation prospects of the new migration trend.

An increasing number of women are participating in the movement to Nigeria's cities. As expected, the majority of female migrants, especially if they were already married, are associational, in that they move with the family or relatives. The important point to note, however, is the preponderance of autonomous migration among single women. Whether married or not, women migrate for much the same reasons men do, mainly to seek remunerative employment in order to meet personal as well as socially ascribed financial obligations to children and relatives. Other reasons for migrating include the need for further education or for learning a trade as an apprentice. Because of the importance of migration to family survival, the extended family and friends both at the migrants' places of origin and in urban centres facilitate the migratory process and adjustment to the new destinations.

Actors are embedded in networks of communication: the relations of the actors can be represented as the rows of a matrix, while the column vectors represent their communications. The two systems are structurally coupled in the co-variation: each action can be considered as a communication with reference to the network. Co-variation among systems if repeated over time, may lead to co-evolution. Conditions for stabilization of higher-order systems are specifiable: segmentation, stratification, reflection, differentiation, and self-organization can be distinguished in terms of developmental stages of increasingly complex networks. The sociological theory of communication occupies a central position for the clarification of the possibility of a general theory of communication, since it confronts us with the limits of reflexivity in human understanding and reflexive discourse. The implications for modelling the relations among incommensurable discourses (e.g., paradigms) are elaborated.

The process of policy diffusion is gaining increasing attention among social scientists. Following world society theory, a burgeoning literature reports a positive relationship between national linkages to global cultural norms and the diffusion of public policies. However, previous analyses do not simultaneously control for time-varying domestic cultural orientations. In order to conduct a stricter test of this theory, this article examines the wave of same-sex union (SSU) laws in Europe. While in the mid-1980s, no European country provided explicit recognition to gay and lesbian couples, by 2009, 16 European countries had legalized these unions. Using event history models, the article tests predictions of the world society theory and Inglehart’s domestic-cultural theory. Results provide strong support for the world society and domestic-cultural theories. Countries with a higher level of value secularization and stronger links to the global cultural order are more likely to introduce legal protections for SSUs.

The convergence argument in the debate on globalization regards globalization as a structural change. Globalization, however, is as much a structural change as a social construction - an imagined order of the future that involves value judgment and an ideological stand. Through an analysis of the ideological conflicts in the politics of Japan's national response to the challenge of globalization, the article shows that the convergence argument is being challenged on four specific issues in Japan: the universal model of market economy conflicts with the search for national identity; the big bang strategy that asserts a radical turnover of the national economic system is discredited by the holistic view of the economy that emphasizes the social embeddedness of the economic system; the new interpretation of the Japanese economic system as a product of wartime control contradicts the widely held image of postwar Japan as a democratic country; and the efficiency principle for future economic governance is challenged by the established norms concerning equality. This study indicates that the convergence argument in the debate on globalization faces strong resistance from the deeply institutionalized beliefs in the national economic system.

A remarkable expansion of secondary and tertiary education has been witnessed in mainland China in the past decades, resulting in changing returns to educational credentials. Using data from the 2003 and 2008 Chinese General Social Survey, this article examines (1) the changing returns to secondary and tertiary credentials in urban China from 2003 and 2008; and (2) the changing education requirements of employers across the same period. This research highlights a significant decline in economic returns to college credentials, but no significant changes in the economic returns to secondary educational credentials are detected. The percentage of job positions requiring secondary education on the labor market is stagnant while there is a significant increase in the job positions which require tertiary education credentials. This research highlights the potential effects of employers’ responses to educational expansion on the returns to educational credentials.

The Institute for Social Studies and Research, founded in 1958, provided a framework for research and teaching modern social sciences, especially sociology, in Iran. The political climate of post-Second World War Iran, that delivered neither the full benefits of freedom nor the true powers of censorship, fostered both resilience and pragmatism among the founders and leading figures in the Institute. The outcome was a brand of applied sociology that strived to provide scientific guidance for the state’s modernization project while trying to maintain independence and critical distance. The resulting tensions are both unique to Iran and, at the same time, indicative of larger global trends.

This article focuses on two questions relating to social class inequalities in education: cross-national differences and the contribution of material, cultural and school factors in accounting for the relationship. These questions are addressed using the EGP measure of occupational class and student performance in reading literacy in 30 countries. The pattern of cross-national differences is more closely associated with indicators of modernisation and the organisation of the school system, rather than indicators of overall societal inequality and economic development. Both material and cultural factors contribute to the relationship between class background and student achievement with cultural factors marginally more important overall. In countries with highly tracked school systems, schools mediate the relationship in that children from lower class backgrounds are more likely to attend lower performing schools. However, the inverse is not true: school differences in student performance are only partially accounted for by class background and other socioeconomic factors.

The home, school and peer setting play a crucial role in processing socio-cultural conceptions of female sexuality (the social meanings attributed to the girl's sexual and reproductive capacity). This process is not necessarily consistent across institutions of socialisation; yet, notwithstanding growing scholarly interest in girlhood, little is known about institutional variations in sexuality-laden socialisation practices and experiences. The present research simultaneously examines the home, school and peer group experiences of girls from two different milieux, focussing on convergence or divergence between institutions, within and across groups. First-hand accounts of daily experiences, elicited through interviews of 50 teenage girls (advantaged and disadvantaged) studying in two innovative residential settings, suggest that the three institutions of socialisation generate divergent sexuality-laden practices and experiences, and thus that the profile of socialisation differs for each group of girls. The conservative understandings of sexuality generated by practices in the home and the female peer-group of disadvantaged girls were paralleled by progressive understandings in the innovative school. Conversely, it was the school which perpetuated conservative conceptions among advantaged girls, while their homes and female peers instilled progressive ones. An examination of such inconsistencies in gender socialisation can be expected to enhance the understanding of gender identity formation in adolescence. The revealed divergence between institutions within and across groups points to the limits of theories of social reproduction in explaining socialisation practices and experiences, particularly those related to gender socialisation.

In current welfare state analysis there is little theory to explain the action of exclusive groups. This article explores the possibilities of a theory that focuses on the interaction between individual choices and strategies, the formal systems, policies and rules of governments and the informal norms and practices of groups. The argument is that club theory, a branch of public choice concepts, represents a promising new element in such an approach. A theoretical frame has to account for both collectivisation and fragmentation processes - how mass solidarities in welfare states come to be created and in turn to be broken up into narrower mutualities. Migration is used as an example to show how the actions of migrants and policy decisions about them affect these dynamics or are affected by them.

Students of social movements dispute the causal weight they should accord political opportunities, political enculturation and human agency in influencing strategic action. They have made little progress advancing the debate on empirical grounds. The authors of this article reviewed English and Arabic newspaper accounts, read organizational histories and documents and interviewed key informants to explain variation in strategic action by the two main Palestinian militant organizations, Fatah and Hamas, during the second intifada or uprising against the Israeli state and people (2000—5). The authors show how perceived political opportunities and political enculturation influenced the strategic action of Fatah and Hamas leaders but find little independent effect of agency leading them to question whether recent claims about the supposed primacy of human agency in social movement strategic action may be exaggerated.

Constitutional courts in a number of new democracies have become very powerful institutions with a wide range of capacities. But how have they been able to achieve this power politically? This article examines the Hungarian and Russian constitutional courts in their political contexts and shows how these courts have both shaped the political environments in which they have worked and have been shaped by them. Rather than finding that the courts are an anti-democratic check on democratic governments, this analysis concludes that courts can be the strongest advocates of the demands of democratic citizenries against governments that stray from their promises. The theory of the `counter-majoritarian difficulty' developed to understand US judicial review, therefore, does not work well to explain the rise of the new constitutional courts.

Human rights discourse is central for the work of international social movements. Viewing human rights as a context-dependent and socially constructed discourse, this article investigates how it is used by a specific social movement – Israel-critical diaspora Jewish activists – and argues that it can simultaneously challenge and reproduce existing practices of domination. The article applies contemporary critiques of human rights to the case of Palestine, where this discourse has arguably been used to undermine Palestinians’ political subjectivity and collective struggle, and legitimise outside intervention. Nevertheless, transnational groups critical of Israel, particularly diaspora Jewish organisations, rely on a human rights frame. There are several reasons for this: it offers activists a means to achieve ‘cognitive liberation’, to speak about the issue and to frame their activities so as to attract recruits. The article investigates this paradoxical role of human rights, and recommends understanding it as a language which both constrains and enables the practice of transnational solidarity.

This article is about the creation, resuscitation and activity of the Russian Sociological Association in the context of the transformation of sociology brought about by the changes in its societal setting from 1916 till the end of the 20th century. The periodization used (`thaw', `stagnation', `perestroika' and `transition period'), is the one recognized in the newest reading of Russian history, and is primarily based upon the degree of liberalism of government and freedom of speech. It shows that in the autocratic (Tsarist and later socialist) state there was no place for civil society organizations. The intelligentsia played the role of opposition, expressing its social and political concerns primarily in literary fiction and the arts. The sociological profession was a very ideological one, and the professional association had to control the presentations made by Soviet sociologists. After the collapse of the Communist regime, the imposed unity of the sociological community disintegrated. The gradual transition to civil society provides new opportunities for sociologists, and first of all opportunities for the conscious and scientifically grounded shaping of social processes.

Although Emile Durkheim’s sociology was used by the Turkish state elite in the early 20th century, no comprehensive literature delineating its influence on Turkish politics exists. This article attempts to fill this lacuna by analysing how Ziya Gökalp, the founding father of Turkish sociology and a prominent politician of the early 20th century, adapted Durkheimian sociology to explain and respond to the sociopolitical problems of the period. It relies on a comparative reading of the works of Gökalp and Durkheim, along with related academic literature. The present study proposes that: (1) Gökalp’s culture–civilization distinction is the foundation of his attempt to provide a basis for social unity in Turkey; and (2) Durkheim’s theoretical claims regarding magic and religion in particular, and his view on the relationship between social constraints and individual agencies in general, are intrinsic to the culture–civilization duality. This article concludes that the sociology of Ziya Gökalp is less original than has been suggested in the literature.

This article adapts Robert Merton’s theory of coping with social strain to revisit the main paradigms in the literature of migrant adaptation. Intersecting this literature with Merton’s theory of coping with social strain and the ideas of emergence and resistance, the authors develop five new ideal types of migrant adaptation: (1) migrant conformity through straight-line assimilation; (2) migrant ritualism through multidirectional assimilation; (3) migrant retreatism through segmented assimilation; (4) migrant innovation through transnationalism; and (5) migrant rebellion through cosmopolitanism. The authors’ typology makes the point that migrant adaptation is a plural and ambiguous process, which needs to be understood and explained to identify the causes and effects of long-term migrant adaptation, integration or non-integration. The results show that these ideal types provide an explanation of how and why many of the paradigms on which the literature on migrant adaptation is based also lead to different forms of migrant non-adaptation.

This article argues that sub-Saharan African women, particularly those that work in the microenterprise sector, have been affected by globalization. While these women have seldom been considered in the social science literature that documents the impact of globalization on women who work in assembly production, data-processing operations, domestic work and sex tourism, globalization does impact the business operations of African women in the microenterprise sector of the economy. Based upon fieldwork conducted among entrepreneurs in hairdressing and sewing in urban Zimbabwe, this study documents the negative effects of adjustment policies and globalization on these enterprises over the past decade. Their businesses have suffered due to increased costs, competition and bans on imported raw materials that are specifically related to the economic structural adjustment program enacted in late 1990 at the behest of the IMF and the World Bank. Using a feminist political economy paradigm, the experiences of these women are considered against the backdrop of the economic and political development of Zimbabwe from the colonial to the post-independence periods.

Although climate change has slowly emerged in academic, media and political debates as an important social issue, it might be too slow for something to change significantly before it is too late. As such, it is probably a good time for social scientists to get more involved in understanding and explaining how this entirely human affair can be tackled and how it will affect our lives. The three books reviewed here address the sociology of climate change from different perspectives.

The author argues in this paper that we need a new paradigm for the idea of development. Its linkage with the notion of ever on-going progress has to be abandoned. Mere tinkering with this concept of development, such as advancing the idea of organic development, is no longer sufficient. In fact only phases of development exist within a dynamic equilibrium. This idea, however, does not seem to be appropriate, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Hence, a provisional strategy is necessary to implement a countermovement to the idea of development. This countermovement can arise from a reflection upon art and philosophy which are non-developmental phenomena, i.e. they do not have a development in the sense of unlimited progress. Thus, in the fields of art and philosophy a distinction between developed and developing countries cannot be maintained, while developmental differences between the Western world and sub-Saharan Africa are of course very real in other fields. A dialogue between artists and philosophers from both parts of the world can and has to take place on the level of complete equality. As such it also acts as a counterforce to the idea of development in areas other than art and philosophy.

This article analyses the profiles of a sample of Russian women seeking partners from western countries collected from the website of an Internet marriage agency The popular viewpoint is that such women, in possible collusion with the agency, use the anonymity of the Internet to create an image of a perfect partner for a western male. Taking the information at face value, the article compares single women seeking partners to women featured in a 'Success Stories' section. The study finds that although most of the self-reported information is not significantly different across the two groups, women from major cities (which are the locations of 'romance tours') are twice as likely to be successful. Surprisingly, standard factors valued in marriage markets do not matter. The findings are interpreted as evidence of the importance of face-to-face meetings and as partial support for the authenticity of the data included in the profiles.

In this paper we outline a general evolutionary theory, which we suggest can provide a useful point of departure for the description and analysis of cultural and institutional dynamics. The paper defines culture and institutions as systems of social rules, produced and reproduced by human groups, and formulates the evolutionary dynamics of such rule systems. In the context of the resurgence of evolutionary thinking in the social sciences in the last decade, we distinguish between contemporary evolutionary approaches and earlier developmental approaches. By evolutionary we mean models of the generation of variety, transmission of information and the operation of selection and other processes (migration, distorted or incorrect knowledge transmission etc.) on the distribution of information within and between populations over time. The key units of information consists of social rules, the production, reproduction and transformation of which is the focus of the theory. In this scheme macro or population-level phenomena and structures are shaped by micro-level processes and in turn are the selective environment for the micro-level processes. Historical developments are seen as the result of complex contingencies rather than representing a tendency for key variables to move towards a static or dynamic Aristotelean `natural state'. In historical developments, human agents play a major role but often not in the ways they intend or anticipate.

This article examines cross-national differences in the time parents allocate to their children using aggregate data from 15 countries collected as part of the Harmonized European Time Use Survey (HETUS). The analysis is restricted to married or cohabiting parents with at least one child under the age of seven. Results show large differences between countries; differences which appear to be associated with four main national characteristics: the countries’ level of economic development, the number of hours spent in paid work, values regarding gender roles, and post-materialist values. Some elements of the countries’ work–family policies also appear to matter but their overall effect is less conclusive.

This article explores to what extent and how individuals’ welfare state attitudes relate to their subjective assessment of the available social support. Using various sociological and sociopsychological theories the authors first provide a theoretical analysis of the micro–macro links between perceived social support (micro), social trust in support availability (macro) and public attitudes towards welfare states (micro). An empirical test based on a large cross-country dataset of 31,122 respondents in 25 European countries shows that the more welfare is provided by the state, the less of it is desired in countries where individuals have the general belief that they can rely on each other for support. Importantly, only when considered jointly, do welfare state provision and social trust in support availability become essential in explaining welfare state attitudes.

The sociology of religion claims to possess a cross-culturally valid objectivity that is belied by its paradigm shifts in both classical and recent times. Its sequential emphasis on such issues as the changing bases of religious authority, secularization and rational choice depends in large part on Western models of religion, of the relationship between the individual and society, and on key Western values. These are not shared by other traditions. Classical Confucianism provides sociological models, core concepts and values that are distinctly different from those of the West. It has the potential to generate a sociology of religion altogether unlike the one to which we are accustomed. This article begins the task of outlining such a potential sociology.

Many scholars see the tourist as engaged in a search for authenticity, a managed effect which tourist sites strive to produce in convincing forms and formats. This intellectual concern is reflected in the current debate over heritage, in which questions are raised as to exactly how far historic sites can and should try to achieve historical authenticity. Much of this discourse, however, seems strangely detached from social structures relating to power, social class and ethnicity. Using the case example of the Amana Colonies in southeastern Iowa, the author examines who stands to benefit from efforts to achieve authentic representations of this community's pietist and communal past. Examining the social interactions and social structures relating to both historic conservation and tourism in Amana, the author concludes that only heritage professionals appear to have a short-term interest in approximating historical reality through accurate historic representations. In the long-term perspective, however, it is argued that both residents and tourists might be seen as having interests that run counter to their apparent short-term interests in the economic and entertainment exploitation of this historic resource.

The concept of glocalization is used to analyse the ways in which social actors construct meanings, identities and institutional forms within the sociological context of globalization, conceived in multidimensional terms. This article seeks to advance the sociological grasp of glocalization processes through a field-work-rooted study of particular migrant, culturally defined social groups: North American-based supporters of the Scottish football teams Celtic and Rangers. The authors examine four features of glocalization in regard to the migrant experience: the transplantation of the original local culture to a new context; subsequent intracultural identities and practices; intercultural identities and practices; and the potential for the reproduction of ‘glocal’ identities. Further, they consider projects of glocalization that are attendant upon each of these features. A model is developed that facilitates future comparative and critical investigation in regard to the glocalization projects of social groups that are defined variously by ethnicity, migration or popular culture.

Based on ethnographic research of Japanese expatriate families in Los Angeles, this article explores how Japanese expatriate mothers, in dealing with globalization and transnational migration, develop transnational habitus and education strategies. These mothers attempt to assure their children’s successful reintegration into the competitive Japanese education system that is increasingly concerned with raising globally oriented, cosmopolitan Japanese children. Drawing on a transnational perspective, this case study illustrates how the global economy increasingly offers chances to live abroad, which in turn offer opportunities for families to cultivate their children’s academic proficiency, transnational competencies, and various cultural skills. Yet, this article also reveals a cost of such activities, namely the emotional burdens of the mothers, which derive from their increasing engagement in intensive mothering and identity management in a transnational social field. The findings suggest the importance of studying the intersections between globalization and women’s construction of race, ethnicity, gender, and emotion by focusing on their embeddedness in multiple sociocultural contexts.

The social sciences are Western products and aspects of the socio-cultural dependency of the Third World. They are ethnocentric in terms of research areas and membership of research groups. Within those groups there are sharp national boundaries reflected in publications such as the American dominated International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Both Marxism and Popperian naturalism regard this as unproblematical. The Third World can choose from the range of expert knowledge (not science) which the Western social sciences provide and develop their own social science groups.

The apocalyptic dimension of the ecological situation seems to emerge in the present-day environmental debate. But in contrast to the early seventies, eco-alarmism in its present form seems to reflect growing uncertainties and anxieties related to the changing character of late modern society. Such uncertainties and anxieties do not only pertain to high-consequence risks, as exemplified by the Chernobyl accident, but also to local problems of providing safe drinking water from the tap. Ulrich Beck's risk-society theory, elaborated by Anthony Giddens, analyses these eco-anxieties against the background of changing conditions of modernity. Because of its overall pessimistic undertone and its basic questioning of the role of science and technology in overcoming an eco-catastrophe, the risk-society theory seems to fundamentally contradict ecological modernisation theory. In confronting both perspectives, the paper aims to contribute to environmental sociology in three ways. First, we try to come to understand the present-day rise of ecoalarmism. Second, an evaluation is made of the contribution of risk-society theory in analysing environmental problems and in developing projective realistic utopian models dealing with the environmental crisis under conditions of late or reflexive modernity. Finally, by bringing formal sociological theory into environmental sociology, both models contribute to the conceptual development and refinement of the sub-discipline.

This article dissects the role of culture in securing authority relations within a militarized police apparatus. Adding structure and power to the symbolic interactionist approach to organizational culture and interests and positionality to the structural functionalist perspective on militarized organizations, the author examines how, through the preservation and imposition of a sacralized worldview and morality (symbolic violence), police officers – the commanding caste of a two-tiered type of police organization – manage to charismatically legitimate the internal distribution of authority and its exercise in the relations between commanding officers and the non-commissioned officers, turning sheer bureaucratic authority into charismatic power (symbolic power). The author draws on ethnographic observations, interview data, and a structural-semantic analysis to reconstruct the system of beliefs involved and to describe the practices and mechanisms through which intra-bureaucratic domination is charismatically legitimated and made effective. These processes are examined both in everyday relations of command and in the extraordinary event of a police mutiny.

This article discusses two basic theories of social measurement in development studies – the quality of life (QOL) and social quality (SQ) theories. The QOL theory has a long tradition in the study of individuals’ living standards, whereas SQ theory helps us understand the traits of social circumstances. Based on survey data collected from six Asian societies, a number of QOL and SQ factors are examined in this study to show how these two approaches are both distinctive and complementary. The study suggests consideration and comparison of these measures relating to factual indicators and subjective indicators in order to reveal the features of different societies.

In the Arab world, most constitutional documents have been promulgated less by the nation assembled than by existing regimes seeking tools to enable them to face domestic and international challenges. Constitutions have been issued to address a varying range of concerns: international, domestic and internal to the state itself. This article traces the enabling aspects of Arab constitutions over the past century and a half, concentrating on the very recent past. In some ways, the past couple of decades have seen a definite (if limited) upsurge of interest in constitutionalism in the Arab world. Recent constitutional innovations have stressed regularization of authority, bounded democracy and a modest increase in the autonomy of some constitutional structures (especially courts and parliaments). Yet that change should not obscure an underlying continuity. For while the Arab world has joined the global trend toward greater interest in constitutional structures, the changes of the past few decades have not reversed the patterns of the past: constitutions remain politically enabling documents.

Our analysis here of the `Other Underdevelopment' is based on the premise that interaction between unequal partners tends to underdevelop the self-possessed resources and capacities of the dominated parties. Contemporary Western domination of the Third World is a classical case in point. This domination has not only led to the socio-economic underdevelopment of the African, Asian and Latin American countries, but it has also created among them a psycho-cultural underdevelopment: the `Other Underdevelopment'. The latter consists of two components: (1) cultural underdevelopment, and (2) psychological underdevelopment. Two examples are sufficient for illustration here. The widespread use of English and French during and after the British and French colonisation in the Third World has replaced or reduced (underdeveloped) the use and the promotion of native languages. The inferiority complex syndrome (self-esteem deterioration) toward the West has become a common feature among various groups of the developing nations. Thus, Third World underdevelopment is a multi-dimensional phenomenon of which the `Other Underdevelopment' is an integral part. In spite of this, both liberal and Marxist modern social scientists of underdevelopment have remained silent on this crucial issue of underdevelopment.

How can one explain the striking discrepancy between the globalisation - during the eighties on a planetary scale - of practices formerly identified with new social movements in the West and the `pessimism' of the theories which usually do not even include in their field these new movements? This discrepancy is due to the application to the movements of the eighties of a conceptual framework worked out for the movements of the seventies. Hence the necessity of a new conceptual framework, which is developed here through the analysis of the contemporary peace movement and applied to the various other movements which have emerged recently around international issues. The paper proposes, first, to analyse the peace movement as a problem-centred, three-dimensional movement which is aimed at the conflictualisation of the security issue and engenders a double process of citizen empowerment and alternative problem-solving. Through this analysis it brings to light, secondly, the new pattern of social movement and the new mechanisms of social change, in order to develop, finally, a new definition of contemporary society as self-creative society, characterised by its auto-creativity: by its new capacity to invent and realise, and therefore to choose, its own futures in an autonomous manner. The central argument concerns this new paradigm and the question `what is at stake' in self-creative society. Through this new definition, the paper seeks to offer a genuinely new manner in which to address the problem concerning the centrality of new social conflicts and the unity of social movements in our self-creative global society.

The main question in this article is whether new cosmopolitan forms of power, on the one hand, and established forms of power, on the other hand, may lead households to make different educational choices for their children. Two types of Dutch secondary education are compared: internationalized education in which English and Dutch are the languages of instruction versus traditional elite schools, the classical gymnasiums. It is claimed that the coexistence of both school types goes together with a diverging process of social reproduction between an upwardly cosmopolitan fraction and an established fraction of the Dutch upper middle class.

One of the outcomes of the ongoing Israeli—Palestinian conflict has been the phenomenon of hasty marriages of convenience between Palestinian women from the Occupied Territories and Israeli Arab men. The children of these couples are Israeli citizens, while their mothers find themselves living in Israel illegally for years on end, ineligible for services that are provided to legal residents and in constant fear of deportation. This article is based on semi-structured interviews with 30 such women about the issues surrounding their situation. Findings were analysed using Lukes’ three-dimensional theory of power. Mann’s concept of organizational outflanking is cited as a possible explanation for the way in which the women are kept silent. Recommendations for practice are made.

The academy and the museum were once in an organic interdependent relation as legitimate institutions of artistic production and consecration of their work, generating an academic art against which Impressionism led a symbolic revolution. Modern art has been able to succeed because state protection has been withdrawn from the academy, because of the opening of the Salon des réfusés and the progressive establishment of the modern art market. Today modern art has found its place in the history of art and entered the museum, which is flourishing more than ever, but in the process has undergone a redefinition of its traditional functions. The threats which menace the museum are mainly its loss of independence in its aesthetic judgement with regard to the art market - which has in a way replaced the academy as the museum partner in the modern art world - and the competition with richly endowed private collections displayed in a museum framework for the day-to-day writing of the history of art. This new situation implies the risk of the museum changing into a cultural amusement park, and for contemporary art to become museum art guaranteed by the art market.