Scott G. McNall

The New Conservatives: Ethnomethodologists, Phenomenologists, and Symbolic Interactionists:

As Sorokin has pointed out (1956), sociological theories, like other theories, may be nothing more than attempts to explain some contemporary event in terms that &dquo;seem right&dquo; to the theorist and his audience. In fact, Gouldner (1970) has suggested that the mark of a good theory is the gut-level feeling that it fits the historical moment; it makes sense of events otherwise too depressing to contemplate, or too disjointed and random to understand. The recent

Current Perspectives in Social Theory: A Research Annual, Volume 11.

Disciplinary sociology in the united methods of empiricism - marking the boundaries to keep the poachers out, Tugrul Ilter testing Gouldners coming crisis thesis - on the waxing and waning of intellectual influence, James J. Chriss the making of serious speech - a social theory of professional discourse, Steven C. Ward reading Deleuze and Guattari fast, Allen Shelton the birth of the cinematic, surveillance society, Norman K. Denzin culture, social structures and discursive fields, Lyn Spillman critique, conservatism, ideology - the Frankfurt schools critique of the sociology of knowledge revisited, Goran Dahl can symbolic interactionism really contribute to macro sociology, Jonathan H. Turner morality, free will and transcendence in Parsons action theory, Jan Ajzner regulation theory and the politics of global restructuring, Sara Schoomaker between democratic populists and bureaucratic greens - the limits of liberal democratic responses to the environmental crisis, Timothy W. Luke the evolution of systems of social interaction, John Skvoretz and Thomas J. Fararo.

How to Create a New Narrative for Sustainability That Will Work: And Why It Matters

This is Part 1 of a two-part article explaining why we need a new narrative for sustainability, one grounded in how humans make decisions and also in how the world we live in works. The narratives we develop to make sense of the world play a central role in shaping our decisions about how to solve problems, and they determine whether or not a topic is even put on the table for consideration. Environmental narratives that focus exclusively on the harm humans are causing to the biosphere without equal consideration for human needs, are insufficient. Narratives that offer up simple causal models—all we need to do is stop or lower C02 emissions—are incomplete because they fail to deal with the interactions among social equity, the economy, and the environment. Sustainability is a complex phenomenon that does not yield itself to a simple solution or explanation, but achieving a sustainable future is possible—if we can change how we think about it. We need to move beyond crisis explanations to ones that focus on our ability to develop scientifically based, adaptive management systems. In Part 1 the authors explore the historical, biological, and social aspects of today’s sustainability narrative in order to create more effective and robust narratives for success. In Part 2 (to be featured in a forthcoming issue) the authors draw on examples of how social change happens, from frame-extension to frame-transformation, to highlight pathways forward and to identify the requirements for success. A set of guidelines are offered to help reframe sustainability into a more effective and engaging narrative.

Challenges in Creating Resilient and Sustainable Societies

The global community is faced with a set of continuing, as well as emerging, problems which include but are not limited to climate change, global inequality, population growth, increased energy needs, and destruction of the biosphere on which human lives depend. We draw on the concept of resilience from the field of ecology to broaden our understanding of the conditions that can cause human and natural systems to tip out of balance, sometimes in disastrous and irreversible ways. A resilient system is one that learns constantly, is open to connectivity and new ideas, and, thereby, anticipates and is stabilized by change. The unique but previously unexplored role that inequality plays in reducing system resilience is explored, along with how energy needs relate to states of inequality. Trust, defined as social capital, is seen as a critical variable affecting peoples ability to work together toward solutions for common ecological, political and economic problems. Trust is dependent on the kind of political institutions that govern how scarce resources are allocated, and dependent on whether or not people feel they live under a rule of law. Culture is another variable that influences a societys resilience. Culture is both an independent and dependent variable. Culture is the landscape or space into which other variables fit or are mapped. Culture creates the boundaries and pathways that determine what is possible; it creates the interaction between all of the dimensions of culture, which in turn create feedback loops that change, as economic, political, and environmental circumstances change. We focus on policy questions related to how to identify and support nations and social institutions to allow for the development of resilient, robust, and inclusive economies that can reduce the economic and social inequalities we find today. Resilient societies must meet the infinite needs of human systems, while at the same time operating within the finite constraints of natural resource systems. Given this framing, creating sustainable and resilient soeieties is a problem of planning.

Rapid Climate Change: What Is to Be Done?

This book will help people who want an overview of todays mortgage mess. Immer gluck surveys a century of mortgage activity, although he really concentrates on the last few decades. For earlier times, he relies rather heavily on a few sources, which unfortunately do not include Guy Stuarts Discriminating Risk: The U.S. Mortgage Lend ing Industry in the Twentieth Century (2003). But he finishes well with an insightful dis cussion of the last two decades, constructing a complex and acronym-strewn narrative in a comprehensible fashion.

“It was a plot got up to convict me”: The case of Henrietta Cook versus the state of Kansas, 1876

In the late spring of 1876, a Kansas farm woman, Henrietta Cook, was brought to trial and found guilty of deliberately and maliciously poisoning her husband with strychnine. A close reading of the evidence today would suggest that the jury could just as easily have found Mrs. Cook innocent of the crime. But they did not. Out of the cultural and ideological materials at hand the jury actively fashioned a truth that allowed them to deal with the heinous crime of marital murder. Drawing on Foucault, the article shows how and why one form of discourse or truth came to triumph at the trial. In the lonely frontier settlement of Osborne, Kansas, people made a clear distinction between nature, which they were trying to overcome, and civilization, which they were trying to impose. The trial demonstrated what happened when nature, in the form of the woman, Henrietta Cook, challenged not only the fragile definition of community that had been constructed, but also the vocabularly of order, rationality, and progress that gave people hope. A voice with another message could not be heard.

Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental JusticePesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice, by HarrisonJill Lindsey. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011. 277pp.

The Spectacular State explores the production of national identity in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. The main protagonists are the cultural elites involved in the elaboration of new state-sponsored mass-spectacle national holidays: Navro’z (Zoroastrian New Year) and Independence Day. The overall argument is that despite their aspirations to reinvigorate national identity, mass spectacle creators in Uzbekistan have reproduced much of the Soviet cultural production. National identity has been one of the most fraught questions in Central Asia, where nationality was a contradictory and complicated product of the Soviet rule. Although the category of nationality was initiated, produced, and imposed by the Soviet state in the 1920s, it eventually became a source of power and authority for local elites, including cultural producers. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened up possibilities for revising and reversing many understandings manufactured by the socialist regime. Yet, upon her arrival in Tashkent to conduct her research on the renegotiation of national identity in 1995, Laura Adams discovered that instead of embracing newly-found freedom to recover a more authentic history, most Uzbek intellectuals, especially cultural producers working with the state, avoided probing too far in this direction. Rather than entirely discarding the Soviet colonial legacies, they revised their history selectively. Whereas the ideological content of their cultural production shifted from socialism to nationalism, many of the previous cultural ‘‘forms’’ have remained. Similarly, the Uzbek government continued to employ cultural elites to implement the task of reinforcing its nation-building program, thus following the Soviet model of cultural production. The book consists of four chapters. The first chapter delineates the broad themes of national identity building, and the remaining chapters explore mass spectacle creation by distinguishing between three elements: form (Chapter Two), content (Chapter Three), and the mode of production (Chapter Four). The study is based on content analysis of two Olympic Games-style national holidays, interviews with cultural producers, and participation observation of festivals and behind-the-scenes preparation meetings. Although Adams provides a few references to viewers and their attitude toward the public holiday performances, her book does not offer an extended engagement with reception and consumption of these holidays. The comprehensive and multi-layered overview of the process of revising national identity in Uzbekistan is one of the book’s major accomplishments. For Adams, the production of national identity is not a selfevident and seamless production forced by the state but instead a dynamic, complex, and dialogical process of negotiation between various parties (intellectual factions, state officials, mass spectacle producers, etc.). Her account reveals the messy and often contradictory nature of national identity production and thus moves away from the tendency to reify the state and its policies. The book makes a significant contribution to studies of nationalism by suggesting that the production of national identity in Uzbekistan was centrally constituted by the consideration of the ‘‘international audience.’’ Although public holidays, studied by Adams, aimed at fostering national identification, the forms in which these celebrations are performed (including national dances and music) indicate the aspiration of cultural producers to be part of the international community. This kind of national production self-consciously oriented toward the international viewer has been the legacy of the Soviet nationalities policy where all cultural producers had to produce art ‘‘socialist in content, national in form.’’ Notwithstanding the difference in generations or genres,

23.00 paper. ISBN: 9780262516280.

Publisher Summary Walt Kelly—the creator of Pogo—in his first used the quote “We have met the enemy and he is us” on a poster for Earth Day in 1970. The climate of the earth is warming because of increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. In terms of human history, the buildup started a relatively short time ago, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century. The literature on climate change is substantial, and there is substantial agreement that the impacts of rapid climate change will be devastating. Besides this, a decade ago, Jason Shogren and Michael Toman noted that having risen from relative obscurity as few as ten years ago, climate change now looms large among environmental policy issues. Its scope is global; the potential environmental and economic impacts are ubiquitous. The potential restrictions on human choices touch the most basic goals of people in all nations. Moreover, the sheer scope of the potential response—a shift away from using fossil fuels as the primary energy source in the modern economy—is daunting.

Public Policy and Leadership

Publisher Summary Walt Kelly—the creator of Pogo—in his first used the quote “We have met the enemy and he is us” on a poster for Earth Day in 1970. The climate of the earth is warming because of increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. In terms of human history, the buildup started a relatively short time ago, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century. The literature on climate change is substantial, and there is substantial agreement that the impacts of rapid climate change will be devastating. Besides this, a decade ago, Jason Shogren and Michael Toman noted that having risen from relative obscurity as few as ten years ago, climate change now looms large among environmental policy issues. Its scope is global; the potential environmental and economic impacts are ubiquitous. The potential restrictions on human choices touch the most basic goals of people in all nations. Moreover, the sheer scope of the potential response—a shift away from using fossil fuels as the primary energy source in the modern economy—is daunting.

Public Policy and Leadership: “We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us”

A small state, like a small company, does not shape economic destiny, but bends its policies to assure survival in the dominant economic order. Thus, Greece is and will remain on the fringes of the capitalist economic system. Its recent elevation to full partnership in the Common Market has made it a small capitalist state trying to buy time, but at a high cost: permanent dependence on the dominant powers. The Greek state, compared to other state bureaucracies, is remarkably independent, i.e., it is able to operate in the interests of more than one class, and sometimes acts against the interests of a national elite.