Jeff Goodwin

Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency

Network analysis is one of the most promising currents in sociological research, and yet it has never been subjected to a theoretically informed assessment and critique. This article outlines the theoretical presuppositions of network analysis. It also distinguishes between three different (implicit) models in the network literature of the interrelations of social structure, culture, and human agency. It concludes that only a strategy for historical explanation that synthesizes social structural and cultural analysis can adequately explain the formation, reproduction, and transformation of networks themselves. The article sketches the broad contours of such a theoretical synthesis in the conclusion.

Caught in a Winding, Snarling Vine: The Structural Bias of Political Process Theory

The study of social movements has recently been energized by an explosion of work that emphasizes “political opportunities”—a concept meant to come to grips with the complex environments that movements face. In the excitement over this new metaphor, there has been a tendency to stretch it to cover a wide variety of empirical phenomena and causal mechanisms. A strong structural bias is also apparent in the way that political opportunities are understood and in the selection of cases for study. Even those factors adduced to correct some of the problems of the political opportunity approach—such as “mobilizing structures” and “cultural framing”—are subject to the same structural distortions. We recommend social movement analysis that rejects invariant modeling, is wary of conceptual stretching, and recognizes the diverse ways that culture and agency, including emotions and strategizing, shape collective action.

Emotions and Social Movements

The study of emotions in politics and protest has emerged (or reemerged) in the past decade through a messy inductive process of recognizing the obvious: Emotions of many sorts permeate political action. In grappling with the inadequacies of existing theories of politics, researchers grabbed pieces of emotion theory opportunistically where they could find them. Few existing approaches in the sociology of emotion have been applied systematically, much less compared, in this field, but almost all have found their way into the mix to some degree. This inductive and relatively atheoretical approach may make social movements a useful venue for comparing theories of emotions developed in other settings.

Toward a new sociology of revolutions

Including a discussion of James B. Rule, Theories of Civil Violence (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); Rod Aya, Rethinking Revolutions and Collective Violence: Studies on Concept, Theory, and Method (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1990); Timothy P. Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes Since 1956 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Jack A. Goldstone, Ted Robert Gurr, and Farrokh Moshiri, editors, Revolutions of the Late Twentieth Century (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991); Farideh Farhi, States and Urban-Based Revolutions: Iran and Nicaragua (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990); and Tim McDaniel, Autocracy, Modernization, and Revolution in Russia and Iran (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

Old Regimes and Revolutions in the Second and Third Worlds: A Comparative Perspective

When they saw so many ridiculous, ramshackle institutions, survivals of an earlier age, which no one had attempted to co-ordinate or adjust to modern conditions and which seemed destined to live on despite the fact that they had ceased to have any present value, it was natural enough that thinkers of the day should come to loathe everything that savored of the past and should desire to remold society on entirely new lines. —Alexis de Tocqueville The dissolution of empires has been one of the distinguishing and most consequential characteristics of the twentieth century. The popular struggles for national sovereignty that have helped to destroy these empires have sometimes (although certainly not always) been fused with attempts to change radically the socioeconomic institutions inherited from the imperialists. The result of this fusion has been nationalist revolution—or revolutionary nationalism—another phenomenon largely unique to the present century. Most recently, in the Eastern European satellites of the former Soviet Union, imperial domination not only generated a nationalist opposition but also unwittingly radicalized it—albeit in a very peculiar way that I explain below. Thus, the Eastern European revolutions of 1989, as Pavel Campeanu (1991: 806–7) has pointed out, had “a dual nature: social, since their goal was to destroy the socioeconomic structures of Stalinism, and national, since they aspired to re-establish the sovereignty of the countries in question.”

What's right (and wrong) about left media criticism? Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model

Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky recently conducted an interesting comparative analysis of the U.S. medias treatment of the case of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, a priest murdered in 1984 by the police in thenCommunist Poland, and the medias coverage of the murder of no less than 100 priests and religious activists in Latin America-including the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero of San Salvador in March 1980 and the murder of four North American religious workers in December 1980 by security forces of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government. Herman and Chomsky found that the Popieluszko case received substantially more coverage by The New York Times, CBS News, and Time and Newsweek magazines then all 100 Latin American victims combined, including, significantly, the four North Americans. Coverage in The New York Times of the Latin American murders amounted to barely half the column inches de-

The Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Resistance

Nancy Abelmann’s book, The Intimate University, reveals stories of Korean American students at the University of IllinoisUrbana/Champaign, where she has been teaching for many years. She indicates that the American public image of Korean and other Asian Americans is that of model minorities whose racial characteristics do not have a negative effect on their academic achievements and socioeconomic mobility. But she shows that Korean American students, the largest ethnic group at the university, are socially segregated, which dogs the liberal promise of the university emphasizing the ideology of multiculturalism. The author points out that at the time she started the book project, a journalist contacted her to complete an article about Korean students’ ‘‘self-segregation’’ for Time magazine. However, in her view, racism and racial stereotypes are the main sources of Korean students’ social segregation at the university. She is not afraid to point out that the university administration is not concerned about Korean students’ social segregation, which contradicts the ideal of a multicultural education. Thus the main objective of the book is to show that Korean students at the University of Illinois cannot leave the their ethnic ‘‘comfort zone’’ due to racism and racial stereotypes. In addition, Ablemann also shows exceptions to stereotypical images of Asian Americans, associated with the model minority thesis, as ‘‘hardworking and successful,’’ and seeking ‘‘instrumental striving and materialism.’’ Through the voices of several students and some of their parents, she makes clear that both Korean students and their parents also stress the importance of a liberal education. As an anthropologist, Abelmann used ethnographic research as the major research technique for this book. She talked to the student informants about ‘‘how they managed their lives and studies in college; how they envisioned life after college; and when it mattered to them . . . how their families figured in their college lives’’ (p. 4). She took the intergenerational approach, analyzing stories of not only students, but also some of their parents. She took the transnational approach by looking at the parent generation’s history and educational aspirations back in Korea. Although she interviewed over fifty students for this book, each chapter focuses on each of several members of the Han extended family and a few other Korean students. By devoting four of the seven chapters to members of the Han family, including two children, their parents, their cousin and uncle, the author has made the book an intergenerational family study. While three chapters (Chapters Four through Six) respectively focus on each of the male members of the Han family, the last chapter introduces narratives of two immigrant women from the Han extended family to capture women’s concerns and gender issues. The author’s intergenerational and transnational approaches and her focus on family, class and gender bordering South Korea and the United States reflect her ongoing research interest in these topics, reflected in her previous publications. Abelmann is partly successful in dispelling stereotypes of Korean and other Asian Americans associated with the model minority image. Several studies have documented that Korean and other Asian immigrant parents emphasize their children’s achievement and success in school and push their children to choose science, law, medicine and business related to high-paying and high-status careers. These studies and journalistic stereotypes tend to give the general image that Asian immigrant parents and to a less extent Asian American students only emphasize the instrumental value of college education, failing to recognize the value of liberal studies. But this book shows that many Korean students and their parents do

The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological DimensionsThe Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions, by SmelserNeil J.. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. 292 pp.

very easy to interpret with confidence. The data is presented without interpretation— and in many cases the context needed to understand it—in Chapter Five, and in the discussion in Chapter Six the reader learns that many of the results are difficult or impossible to interpret because of a lack of additional variables or information on the driving population. Vehicle searches are one element Gumbhir can address with more confidence, and he uncovers interesting racial discrepancies. Both African-Americans and Latinos were more likely to be searched than whites, though there were no differences in search success rates between races, casting some doubt on differential offending as a legitimate motivation or explanation for this disparity. One of the most interesting discussions in the book (occurring in the introduction and epilogue) details the highly publicized racial profiling charges and the ensuing political furor in Eugene during and after the vehicle stop study. Additionally interesting but not directly discussed are the issues that surround asking a police department and police officers to collect data on themselves which may lead to charges of racial profiling. We are treated to hints, such as the footnote on page 206 which reveals that officers were informally instructed not to make a note of “pat down” or “Terry” searches on their vehicle stop forms, raising the question of other informal instructions the officers received on how to complete forms. In combination with the apparently non-random missing data, the significant lingering questions are about the story that, perhaps intentionally on the part of either individual police officers or the department as a whole, is not being told. Despite the limitations in what he is able to conclude with confidence, Gumbhir’s elegant theoretical framing and detailed consideration of the methodological problems in the survey design and implementation are significant contributions to the racial profiling literature. The Faces of Terrorism: Social and Psychological Dimensions, by Neil J. Smelser. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. 292pp.

29.95 cloth. ISBN-13: 9780691133089.

29.95 cloth. ISBN-13: 9780691133089.