Roger Friedland

Lost in space : The geography of corporate interlocking directorates

The article studies the causes of local and nonlocal interlocking directorates among the largest U.S. industrial corporations in 1964. The authors hypothesize that interlocks are spatial phenomena‐ with spatial attributes and spatial determinants. Consistent with this hypothesis, they find that local and nonlocal interlocks have different correlates. Further, three spatial structures influence interlocking: the location of a corporations headquarters vis‐a`‐vis other corporate headquarters and upper‐class clubs, the territorial distribution of a firms production facilities, and the spatial configuration of a corporations ownership relations. This suggests that previous interlock research, which ignores spatial considerations, has been seriously misspecified.

NowHere : space, time, and modernity

CONTRIBUTORS: Ann Bermingham Richard Biernacki Deirdre Boden Roger Friedland Saul Friedlander Carol Brooks Gardner Anthony Giddens Allan G. Grapard Richard D. Hecht Stephen Kern Harvey L. Molotch Donald Palmer Paul Rabinow A. F. Robertson Adam Seligman Edward W. Soja

Money, Sex, and God: The Erotic Logic of Religious Nationalism

God is once again afoot in the public sphere. Politics has become a religious obligation. For a new breed of religious nationalist the nation-state is a vehicle of the divine. This essay seeks to accomplish four things. The first is to argue for an institutional approach to religious nationalism in order both to interpret and explain it. Second, I argue that religion and nationalism partake of a common symbolic order and that religious nationalism is therefore not an oxymoron. Third, the essay seeks to explain why religion has become such a potent political force in our time. And fourth—the task that will take up the bulk of the text—it seeks a principle of intelligibility in the semiotic order of religious nationalism that can comprehend its preoccupation with both womens erotic bodies and monies out of national control.

The Public Economy and Economic Growth in Western Market Economies

This essay analyzes the impact of two welfare states-one for households and the other forfirms-on economic growth in twelve advanced market economies between 1962 and 1983. We find that both welfare states contain stimulative and depressing forms of spending. Transfers in support of household income stimulate growth, while public production of goods and services largely consumed by households depresses growth. Transfers to firms may have a predominantly negative impact on growth, while military spending has a stimulative impact on the economy. We also find that increasing household tax burdens, a correlate of postwar welfare-state expansion, slows economic growth. National debates about economic growth have increasingly been structured as zero-sum choices between the welfare state for households and economic growth. This reasoning neglects the potentially stimulative components of the welfare state for households, and ignores the potentially negative impact of the welfare state forfirms.

Class Power and State Policy: The Case of Large Business Corporations, Labor Unions and Governmental Redistribution in the American States

This paper investigates the impact of business and labor organizations upon governmental redistribution to the poor, or the extent to which government expenditures and revenues redistribute income to poor households. A cross-sectional analysis of 48 American states circa 1960 supports the propositions that large business corporations negatively affect governmental redistribution and that labor unions positively affect governmental redistribution. The analysis also supports past findings relating socioeconomic development, poverty, and the interaction of Democratic party strengths and cohesion and interparty competition to governmental redistribution. Findings suggest that redistribution to the poor by American state governments is a class issue, partially determined by conflicting class forces.

The Institutional Logic of Religious Nationalism: Sex, Violence and the Ends of History

This essay seeks to explain the practices of contemporary religious nationalisms by examining these movements not as an agonistic struggle between groups, but as an effort to transform the institutional architecture of society. That religious nationalist movements tend toward violence and are preoccupied with the regulation of sexuality can be derived from the institutional logic of religion, from its parallel and conflicting claims to the ontological ground of state authority, from the fraught relation between birth, death and state authority. Using the inner logic of Max Webers theory of value spheres, I show how the constitution of political authority involves a ‘religious’ ordering of love and death, which lends itself to religious politicization. Violent death and reproductive sex are institutionally natural stakes in a struggle over the interface between state and religion.

The geography of corporate production: Urban, industrial, and organizational systems

This paper examines how the territorial organization of corporate production — the extent to which firms connect places in the city system through intraorganizational relationships of ownership and control — is shaped by urban, industrial, and organization factors. Specifically, we study the determinants of the dispersion of corporate production facilities in the U.S. urban system. We analyze the number of U.S. cities and states in which the largest 500 industrial corporations operated plants in 1964 as a function of the characteristics of the location of the corporate headquarters, the predominant industries in which their plants produce, and their organizational structure. We find that corporate dispersion is shaped by some of the same factors that have been shown to organize the market-based territorial division of labor — the size and functional specialization of cities and the locational requirements of industry. But in addition, organizational attributes — a firms industrial diversity, its age, and the extent to which it is controlled by families as opposed to managerial coalitions — also influence its geographic dispersion.

Private and social wage expansion in the advanced market economies

The sources of family income in advanced market economies have become increasingly complex. A familys real income depends not only on the money wages its members receive in the labor market, but also on the extent to which those wages are taxed and the public services and transfer payments it receives from the state. The income and services households receive from the state constitute a social wage, which is growing in importance relative to the private wage. Growth in state support of living standards has added a new institutional locus of conflict over the distribution of income.

When God Walks in History The Institutional Politics of Religious Nationalism

Religious nationalism represents an institutional project to transform the ontology of the social, to redefine the substance of collective representation, the principle of domination and the criteria for membership. Religious nationalism transforms the territorial nation-state into a vehicle in and by which to extend the materiality of its culturally specific categories, codes, values and narratives. It thereby challenges social theories, like that of Bourdieu, that deculturalize power, as well as those, like Alexander, that culturalize it in an institutionally restrictive manner. Religious nationalism is not a retreat to the premodern, but an effort to bound and energize the elemental modern moments, that of the self and the national-state. Religious nationalism represents the return to text, to the fixity of signs, the renarrativization of the nation in a cosmic context. It returns us to bodies and souls, a zone to be defended against things on the one side and beasts on the other. It offers a way to secure morality against an increasingly post-humanist world. Its discourse of difference seeks to bound the nation. Religious nationalism restores the binaries of inside and outside, us and them, good and evil, man and woman and centers them in sacred space.

The gods of institutional life: Weber’s value spheres and the practice of polytheism

Webers theory of value spheres outlines a project of institutional polytheism, each ordered around a ‘god’. This suggests not only that social theory can build a religious sociology, but that a theory of institutions must be an exercise in comparative religions. Webers comparative sociology of religions, however, does not align with his theory of value spheres in terms of his distinction between polytheism and monotheism, transcendence and immanence, salvation and mysticism, being possessed and possessing. A theory of institutional logics points beyond Webers separation of value and instrumental rationality, faith and practice, and hence the ways in which he partitioned the institutions of modernity.