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International Sociology | 2010
Diane Romm
This collection of essays, whose point of departure is 1868–1945, refutes a prevailing idea that Japan is a homogeneous society. Indeed, Japan is home to a wide variety of communities including many covered in this book – indigenous populations such as the Ainu, the Dowa or Burakumin, the Chinese, the Koreans and other mixed race groups such as Japanese Brazilians. The second edition of this collection also includes a new chapter on blacks in Japan. The essays were chosen with four goals in mind: (1) to evaluate how Japan has created the idea of a racially homogeneous society; (2) to provide a history of Japan’s minorities; (3) to examine aspects of life as a minority in contemporary Japan; and (4) to evaluate attempts by minorities to overcome discrimination and negative images about them in Japan. The introductory essay about the development of the Japanese notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ creates the context for consideration of non-Japanese groups within the country. It explains why this country remains ‘wedded to the myth of racial and cultural homogeneity, where the state denies the existence of minority populations and where minority access to economic, political and social opportunities remains limited’ (p. xxi). While some of the chapters note that selected members of minority groups have had success in overcoming barriers to employment, social acceptance continues to elude them. In fact, one of the goals of this collection, which would be a useful resource for a course on Japan, is to promote human rights in the country.
International Sociology | 2010
Diane Romm
Kampmann Walther examines the connections joining a television series and its website through a wider geopolitical context. The construction of social identities through media resources and performances is the main issue in this article. This book may inspire those interested in technologies and society insofar as it brings together a large and diverse range of contemporary problems related to the internet in everyday life. Furthermore, the authors develop some creative methodological strategies in order to grasp the multiple aspects that one has to deal with when addressing the interaction between the internet and the social life. However, readers interested in sociological theory will not find convincing solutions to the current challenges facing this discipline. The central sociological questions that are highlighted already in the introduction, those related to the impact of the internet on the classical notions of action and structure and to the links between aesthetics and politics in the development of the world wide web, are not satisfactorily answered in subsequent chapters. Since the argument rests upon an effort to elaborate a theoretical synthesis about the embedding of the internet in everyday life, it concentrates further on aesthetics and understates politics. In part this stems from the undue focus on Giddens’ theory of structuration, while not exploring the many other theoretical approaches that also focus on the interplay between action and structure. The problems addressed in this book could have been clarified far more if the authors had incorporated the conflictual – and not necessarily dialectic – dimensions of this interplay. An increased emphasis on cross-cultural analyses could have expanded the sociological gains from these studies by enhancing this conflictual aspect, and thus reviewing the very notion of ‘society’ towards which the authors orient themselves. Yet the book does provide some valuable and imaginative insights into how websites mediate between agency and structure.
International Sociology | 2010
Diane Romm
745 Oleg Yanitsky is an environmental sociologist and risk researcher who participates in the UNESCO ‘Man and the Biosphere Programme’. He is the author of 15 books and more than 400 articles that have appeared in English, French, German, Chinese, Hungarian, as well as in Russian. His books in English are: Cities of Europe: The Public’s Role in Shaping the Urban Environment (ed. with T. Deelstra, 1991); Russian Environmentalism: Facts, Opinions, Leading Figures (1993); and Greens in a Risk Society: A Structural Analysis (2000). His articles have appeared, among others in: the International Social Science Journal, Society and Natural Resources, International Sociology, Innovation, International Review of Sociology and Current Sociology. Address: Institute of Sociology Russian Academy of Sciences, Krzhizhanovskogo str. 24/35, block 5, office 524. 117218 Moscow, Russia. [email: yanitsky@mtu-net. ru; [email protected]]
International Sociology | 2010
Diane Romm
713 Doreian, Patrick, Batagelj, Vladimir and Ferligoj, Anujka (2004) Generalized Blockmodeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freeman, Linton (2004) The Development of Social Network Analysis: A Study in the Sociology of Science. Vancouver: Empirical Press. Jackson, Matthew (2005) ‘A Survey of Models of Network Formation: Stability and Efficiency’, in Gabrielle Demange and Myrna Wooders (eds) Group Formation in Economics: Networks, Clubs and Coalitions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Matthew (2007) ‘The Study of Social Networks in Economics’, in Joel Podolny and James Rauch (eds) The Missing Links: Formation and Decay of Economic Networks. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Nadel, Siegfried (1957) Theory of Social Structure. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Newman, Mark, Barabasi, Laszlo and Watts, Duncan, eds (2006) The Structure and Dynamics of Networks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pattison, Philippa (1993) Algebraic Models for Social Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, John (2000) Social Network Analysis, 2nd edn. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Wasserman, Stanley and Faust, Katherine (1994) Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watts, Duncan (2003) Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York: Norton. Watts, Duncan (2004) ‘The “New” Science of Networks’, Annual Review of Sociology 30: 243–70. White, Harrison, Boorman, Scott and Breiger, Ronald (1976) ‘Social Structure from Multiple Networks I: Blockmodels for Roles and Positions’, American Journal of Sociology 81(4): 730–80.
International Sociology | 2009
Diane Romm
This collection of 22 articles begins with an examination of the concept of civil society and then compares and contrasts its use in Latin America and Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the United States, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The book concludes by considering the question of whether there is a global concept of civil society. Given that the idea of a civil society is western in origin, its examination in the context of other cultures is timely and illuminating. Is a civil society necessarily secular and formally organized or can it take other forms? Through the articles presented, the editors, all from the London School of Economics, hope to demonstrate ‘the need to recognize civil society as a site of struggle, multivocality and paradox’ (p. 10). The arrangement of the articles by geographic region makes the book useful to students of both political science and sociology.
International Sociology | 2009
Diane Romm
731 research the implementation chain of any value-driven policy (what KalekinFishman did in the field of education could be applied most profitably in the field of social policy); (3) those who are interested in questions in the realm of the sociology of knowledge; and last but not least (4) all those in western countries – most probably in the European Union – whose field of research is multiculturalism and education for immigrants from non-western cultures.
International Sociology | 2008
Diane Romm
Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins defines black sexual politics as ‘a set of ideas and social practices shaped by gender, race, and sexuality that frame Black men and women’s treatment of one another, as well as how African Americans are perceived and treated by others’ (p. 7). She maintains that in order for the African American community to deal with new forms of racism and social problems, it must analyse the links between gender and sexuality, which is one of the goals of this book. Implementing critical social theory, Collins treats race, class, gender and sexuality as intersecting circles rather than competing approaches to Black sexual politics. Collins focuses on the African American community rather than other black minority groups in the belief that the tendency to universalize that community’s experiences ‘potentially distorts the uniqueness of African American struggles and can also support new forms of racism’ (p. 12). Viewing the African American struggle for social justice through the lenses of gender and sexuality will bring about fruitful dialogue and action among African Americans and between African Americans and other social groups. Collins makes extensive use of material from Black popular culture and the mass media to illustrate her arguments, creating a volume that is at once scholarly in its discussion and accessible to the lay reader.
International Sociology | 2008
Diane Romm
Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins defines black sexual politics as ‘a set of ideas and social practices shaped by gender, race, and sexuality that frame Black men and women’s treatment of one another, as well as how African Americans are perceived and treated by others’ (p. 7). She maintains that in order for the African American community to deal with new forms of racism and social problems, it must analyse the links between gender and sexuality, which is one of the goals of this book. Implementing critical social theory, Collins treats race, class, gender and sexuality as intersecting circles rather than competing approaches to Black sexual politics. Collins focuses on the African American community rather than other black minority groups in the belief that the tendency to universalize that community’s experiences ‘potentially distorts the uniqueness of African American struggles and can also support new forms of racism’ (p. 12). Viewing the African American struggle for social justice through the lenses of gender and sexuality will bring about fruitful dialogue and action among African Americans and between African Americans and other social groups. Collins makes extensive use of material from Black popular culture and the mass media to illustrate her arguments, creating a volume that is at once scholarly in its discussion and accessible to the lay reader.
International Sociology | 2008
Diane Romm
748 since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976. She uses these cases to examine the question of why so few women have received the death penalty and why these specific women were put to death while other female offenders have not been executed. Atwell proposes an integrated approach to answering these questions through an extension of the General Strain Theory, which ‘posits that crime and deviance occur when socially approved goals and socially approved means are out of alignment’ (p. 3). She contends that race, class, sexual orientation and deviations from expected social norms all contribute to the characterization of these 11 women as ‘others’ who were in some way unnatural or monstrous.
International Sociology | 2011
Diane Romm
