David Shulman

Indexicality and the Verification Function of Irreplaceable Possessions: A Semiotic Analysis

Many researchers have noted that special possessions can represent personally relevant events, people, places, and values. Semiotics provides a useful theoretical base for understanding the representation processes that support these meanings. We apply the semiotic concept of indexicality to extend our understanding of how meanings are embedded in irreplaceable special possessions. The results of two empirical studies support the proposition that these possessions establish a semiotic linkage, which enables consumers to verify self-selected moments from their personal history. Our research also reemphasizes the value of semiotic frameworks as applied to research on possession ownership and sheds additional light on the value of authenticity to consumers. Copyright 2000 by the University of Chicago.

Complexity, Generality, and Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) offers researchers the opportunity to combine the intensiveness of case-oriented research strategies and the extensiveness of variable-oriented approaches in a single framework. QCA is specifically designed for a moderate number of cases, too few for variable-oriented research designs and too many for in-depth, case-oriented analysis. To illustrate QCAs applicability to moderate-sized data sets, we analyze data on forty-one villages in southern India reported in Robert Wades (1988) comparative study of villagewide collective action, Village Republics. Using QCA, we show that Wades explanation of village-wide collective action is incomplete. We complement his strictly ecological explanation with a sociological perspective and show that intervillage competition is an important condition for villagewide collective action.

Secrecy at Work: The Hidden Architecture of Organizational WorkSecrecy at Work: The Hidden Architecture of Organizational Work, by CostasJanaGreyChristopher. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. 202 pp.

mediating rigorous rules of dress, behavior, and general appearance that mark them as ‘‘deviants’’ from established norms with their other routine activities and associations. Several ideas from Erving Goffman and Peter Berger are added to the discussion, but they do little more than restate in sociological terms those experiences already recounted more vividly in the author’s narrative. This lack of analytical rigor, as opposed to mere empirical classification, seems to emerge inevitably from the study’s very own perspective. This perspective is decidedly oriented toward the diversity and uniqueness of the identities and experiences of the participants, which are portrayed as slipping through the usual network of sociological concepts. While this approach is congruent with a richly descriptive narrative, it does little to support the author’s claims to reconfigure our theoretical sense of the relationships between the sacred and profane. Her conclusion that, in Lukumi, the two realms radically interpenetrate one another is empirically demonstrated, but is hardly a new finding. Max Weber (to name just one major thinker) would not have been surprised to see that ‘‘religion’’ and ‘‘world’’ interpenetrate in complex ways and that religions regularly sacralize everyday life, often at the price of profaning those very things held sacred; indeed, his famous ‘‘Protestant ethic’’ thesis is about little else. Conceptualizations from psychology and social psychology are also absent. This is not surprising, since Lukumi is a sort of psychology, with the various aspects of deity (the Orisha) reflecting and in turn molding the personality traits of the believer in ways that not only express facets of the self, but also unfold hidden, perhaps repressed, potentials and provide therapeutic pathways for the future development of identities. This implicit ‘‘polytheism’’ of the self in Lukumi may also help explain its increasing attractiveness to religious switchers from mainline monotheistic denominations. As identities fragment in a society of incessant social flows and reconfigurations, rather than fixed social positions, Lukumi’s lack of centralized organization, its diversity of practices in different casa de ocha, and its inherent spiritual fluidity may satisfy pressing personal needs not met by more centralized and theologically rationalized western denominations. While her surveys and interviews are standard sociological practice, Carr’s use of autoethnography may raise eyebrows. She wishes to avoid what she calls a false objectivity in the study of religious experience and thinks the inclusion of an introspective account of her own journey during the year in white valuably supplements those of her interviewees. She may well be correct—her personal reflections do add a descriptive richness that makes the book enjoyable to read. At the same time, auto-ethnography is not the same as autobiography, a fact evident from her narrative, which provides only glimpses of what led her to Lukumi— health issues, a traumatic personal rift, a Jewish religious and family background found in some way unsatisfactory, perhaps other things as well. Yet, she simultaneously closes off further understanding of the relationship between her autobiography and her autoethnographic descriptions. How much of the self must one reveal in auto-ethnography? Only those things deemed relevant to understanding the group under study? And if so, is this not a form of inauthentic subjectivity that ends with revealing too little of the self and yet also not fully engaging the full range of inevitably objectifying sociological concepts? At one point, Carr states to a skeptical colleague that she is both a believer and a social scientist. Can one be both without ending by being neither?

27.95 paper. ISBN: 9780804798143.

ety’s efforts to democratize political power, and how civil society responds to neoliberal policy. Shefner, for good reason, is not enamored of these obsessions, and proposes instead a new set of questions. For example, instead of pursuing how civil society strengthens democracy, why can’t we consider how democratization has strengthened (or weakened, as the case may be) civil society? Furthermore, instead of debating the comparative strengths and weaknesses of civil society, why not focus instead on the potentially more rewarding question of what civil society does, and whom it benefits? Having literally walked the walk for more than a decade with a local political organization, the Union of Independent Settlers (Union de Colonos Independientes, UCI) in Cerro del Cuatro, a poor community on the urban fringe of Guadalajara (the academic equivalent of a modern day correspondent being embedded among troops), Shefner thinks he may have found plausible answers to some of the questions that have been posed sporadically, if at all, in the relevant literature. Hence his disenchantment with civil society discourse, specifically the illusion “that somehow civil society can be understood as less stratified than society in general” (p. 206), “that a single civil society strategy.|.|. will comprehensively address the needs of all sectors at all times” (ibid), “that unity and coherence exist in coalitions” (ibid), and finally, “that when united action occurs among civil society groups, it will be ongoing” (ibid). Shefner’s misgivings about the continued utility of civil society are quite earnest and thought-provoking, yet, it is legitimate to wonder whether the generalized assumptions (for instance the four illusions listed above) he describes are his, or the literature’s. Put differently, are the assumptions native to a civil society literature that has never lacked internal incoherence, or are they, perhaps, assumptions dictated to the author by his own empirical context? Second, if civil society were to be differently understood, and not merely as “coalesced groups”, would the author’s general argument about civil society still remain valid? These are two key dilemmas which I personally wished had more theoretical elucidation, and my suspicion is that had the author grappled with them, he might have withheld his eventual conclusion that “The concept of civil society has run its course” (p. 207). Yet, beyond theoretical disputation, Shefner’s methodological heresy is what is more likely to raise specialists’ hackles. His approach muddies the waters of the debate on the proper distance between researchers and their subjects. I find his partisanship thoroughly refreshing and buy his argument that instead of abandoning our political stances in the field, we ought to recognize them as “opportunities” and “filters.” This volume is a finely-wrought piece of scholarship that will appeal not only to students of civil society, but also scholars (and critics) of neo-liberalism globalization, democratization, patron-client relations, and urban transformation in Latin America and other parts of the global south.