Alex Law

Understanding social welfare movements

Understanding social welfare movements is the first text to bring together social policy and social movement studies. The book provides a timely and much needed overview of the changing nature of social welfare as it has been shaped by the demands of social movements.

Contesting the New Irrational Actor Model A Case Study of Mobile Phone Mast Protest

Public opposition to the siting of telecommunications masts tends to focus on perceived health risks, yet scientific evidence suggests that mobile handsets may constitute more of a risk. This paradox is usually explained in terms of cognitive or communication deficit models that contain an implicit thesis of protest actor irrationality. Recent authors (e.g. Burgess, 2002, 2004; Taverne, 2005) have, however, been more explicit in arguing that such protests are an irrational reaction to media constructed fears and state mismanagement of techno-infrastructure modernization. Together these approaches form what we call the `New Irrational Actor Model. Drawing on insights from social movements theor y and data from a 12-month case study of the campaign against Terrestrial Trunked Radio (TETRA) telecommunications masts in nor th-east Fife, we argue that contrar y to the `New Irrational Actor Model, the anti-mast protesters utilize multi-form modes of substantive and instrumental rational action.

The Maladies of Social Capital I: The Missing 'Capital' in Theories of Social Capital

Social capital is a concept that is widely celebrated by the governing institutions of neo-liberal capitalism. Under the veneer of making social relations central to public discourse social capital obscures the extent to which social life is being made to submit to capital accumulation. First, we describe the hegemony of social capital as a veritable panacea for social de-composition from the political left in the work of Pierre Bourdieu to the middling conservatism of US thinkers such as Coleman and Putnam. In contrast, the original Marxist notion of social capital leads us to argue for abandoning the orthodox conception of social capital.

'We’ve never had it so good’: the ‘problem’ of the working class in devolved Scotland

Class has become the social condition that dare not it speak its name in the devolved Scotland. This is despite the persistence of marked class divisions and structured inequalities within contemporary Scottish society. We critically examine the most empirically sophisticated and coherent analysis of social class in Scotland – that provided by ‘the Edinburgh school’ of social scientists, particularly their claim that Scotland is now a prosperous, ‘professional society’ where only a small but significant minority are trapped in poverty. This paper further considers the extent to which ‘devolution’, and the dominant representations to which it has given rise, serve to generate a series of other myths in which class is both devalued but simultaneously mobilized in the negative portrayal of some of the most disadvantaged sections of the working class. Against an emerging, home-grown view of ‘New Scotland’ as a prosperous ‘Smart, Successful Scotland’, poverty and wealth inequalities continue to be a necessary feature of the division of labour. In Scotland, as elsewhere, class remains the pivot-point around which much of social policy is encoded and enacted.

Of navies and navels: Britain as a mental island

Abstract In this paper, the conception of .Great Britain. — a wholly unsatisfactory nomenclature — as an island nation is examined. In this case, a relatively small land mass acted as an originary point of departure for outward‐bound Great Power projections across the open spaces of seas. This paper further explores the varied implications for nationalism within Britain of the diverse island ‘roots’ of the British navel and the ‘routes’ of British navalism. Three themes recur in the popular mobilization of British maritime island nationalism: the besieged island, the island as universal exemplar of civilization, and the navy as national protector. Some consideration is given to the significance of island symbols such as Britannia as a marker of the fate of great island nationalism.

The ghost of Patrick Geddes: civics as applied sociology

In 1904 and 1905 Patrick Geddes (1905, 1906) read his famed, but today little-read, two-part paper, ‘Civics: as Applied Sociology’, to the first meetings of the British Sociological Society. Geddes is often thought of as a ‘pioneer of sociology’ (Mairet, 1957;Meller, 1990) and for some (egDevine, 1999: 296) as ‘a seminal influence on sociology’. However, little of substance has been written to critically assess Geddess intellectual legacy as a sociologist. His work is largely forgotten by sociologists in Britain (Abrams, 1968;Halliday, 1968;Evans, 1986). Few have been prepared to follow Geddess ambition to bridge the chasm between nature and culture, environment and society, geography, biology and sociology. His conception of ‘sociology’, oriented towards social action from a standpoint explicitly informed by evolutionary theory. A re-appraisal of the contemporary relevance of Geddess thinking on civics as applied sociology has to venture into the knotted problem of evolutionary sociology. It also requires giving some cogency to Geddess often fragmentary and inconsistent mode of address. Although part of a post-positivist, ‘larger modernism’ Geddes remained mired in nineteenth century evolutionary thought and fought shy of dealing with larger issues of social class or the breakthrough work of early twentieth century sociology of Simmel, Weber and Durkheim. His apolitical notion of ‘civics’ limits its relevance to academic sociology today.

Competitive Nationalism: State, Class, and the Forms of Capital in Devolved Scotland

Devolved government in Scotland actively reconstitutes the unequal conditions of social class reproduction. Recognition of state-led class reconstitution draws upon the social theory of Bourdieu. Our analysis of social class in devolved Scotland revisits theories that examine the state as a ‘power container’. A range of state-enabling powers regulate the legal, economic, social, and cultural containers of class relations as specific forms of what Bourdieu called economic, social, and cultural ‘capital’. The preconditions of class reproduction are structured in direct ways by the Scottish state as a wealth container but also, more indirectly, as a cultural container and a social container. Competitive nationalism in the devolved Scottish state enacts neoliberal policies as a class-specific worldview but, at the same time, discursively frames society as a panclass national fraternity in terms of distinctive Scottish values of welfare nationalism. Nationalism is able to express this ambiguity in symbolic ways in which the partisan language of social class cannot.

'The Callous Credit Nexus': Ideology and Compulsion in the Crisis of Neoliberalism

Many accounts of the rise and decline of neoliberalism forefront its ideological nature and capacity for hegemonic leadership. In contrast, I argue that outside of elite groups neoliberalism did not become hegemonic in Gramscis sense of a ‘national-popular’ force. Neoliberalism is a convenient term to describe a two-stage process of ‘purifying’ the coercive nature of the capital relation through what Gramsci broadly called ‘a war of movement’ in the 1970s and 1980s and ‘a war of position’ in the 1990s and 2000s. This double-movement compelled credit-worthy individuals to routinely market, sell, purchase and perform for money-wages. New techniques of the self were perfected in the marketised war of position to service the credit-led financialisation of everyday life. Social positionings dependent on financialisation are now subject to a ‘crisis of authority’.

Melting the Cold War Permafrost: Restructuring Military Industry in Scotland

Military industry stands at the confluence of local, national and global processes. This paper examines the restructuring of this peculiar industry in one region, Scotland, from a perspective that takes the geography of production to be a joint, though contradictory, creation. Following the work of Lovering for the UK as a whole, the case of Scotland—often imagined as “militantly proletarian”—allows a specific study of the accumulation strategies of state and capital and the role of organized labor in mediating the spatial fix. Until the early 1990s accumulation was premised on additive “capital widening” strategies. Since then, both “capital narrowing” rationalization strategies and “capital deepening” intensification strategies have been pursued. Through restructuring, the UK military industry attempts to utilize the abstract spaces of the social economy to expediently and opportunistically reconstitute the concrete spaces of production and renegotiate its dependency on the refractory material of proximate living labor. Yet spatial shifts have not uniformly benefited the southern core of the UK military industry. One reason for thecontinuing salience of military industry in Scotland has been the role of a pan-class alliance, “the Scottish lobby,” in campaigning against closures and for the allocation of defense contracts. Trade unions have attempted to mediate the contradictions of restructuring by supporting external strategies to retain firm survival in their present localities, even as internally workforce numbers are cut in half and management regimes become more abrasive.

The reinvention of politics: Ulrich Beck and reflexive modernity

The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order by Ulrich Beck. Cambridge: Polity, 1997. Pp.vi + 206; index. £45 (hardback); £12.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 7456 1366 7 and ...