Thomas D. Beamish

Who Supports the Troops? Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Making of Collective Memory

During the Gulf War, U.S. media portrayed Vietnam-era protesters as having treated American soldiers shamefully during the Vietnam War. Even Gulf War protesters lent credence to this historical interpretation. By “supporting the troops,” dissenters distanced themselves from their counterparts during the Vietnam era and its “remembered” anti-troop sentiments. But after analysis of Vietnam era media, we find that the media of the time—consistent with most subsequent published accounts—did not report the movement as “anti-troop.” Although policymakers frequently attempted to imply that protesters were anti-troop, we find virtually no instances of protesters themselves being reported as targeting the troops. Our findings show that the memory of protester-troop antagonism is not so much the product of conflict between these two groups, but rather of a selectively remembered and edited past. Just as it hamstrung the anti-war movement during the Gulf War, the current recollection may endure as part of the conditions facing opponents of future military actions.

The role of social heuristics in project-centred production networks: insights from the commercial construction industry

Project production networks or PPNs are now the primary means for organizing in many industries including fashion design and manufacturing, moviemaking and construction projects. PPNs enable professionally and geographically distributed participants of a common project to bring their expertise and resources together to achieve an economically and technically superior product than a single firm could produce. PPNs also have benefits over purely market-based contracting relationships as participants often recombine to work on projects serially allowing knowledge and relationships to develop in ways that support production outcomes. The growth in the use of PPNs has led to a number of studies describing the structural characteristics and benefits of this organizing strategy as compared to firms and markets. Relatively little analysis has been done of the ways in which PPNs govern themselves, however. We report here on PPN governance in commercial construction focusing on the role that social heuristics as sh...

Economic Sociology in the Next Decade and Beyond

This article assesses “Economic Sociology in the Next Decade and Beyond.” In addressing this broad thematic, as it relates to what some have called the new economic sociology , the article notes the “legacy effect” that a polemic with conventional economic conceptualizations has had on the recent reemergence and shape of this field, the relationship that the predominate schools of thought have to one another and the centrifugal tendencies they currently exhibit in this field, and the relationship this field of study currently has to general sociological theories and research streams. The article expressly argues that it is essential to the current and future relevance of the new economic sociology that it seek to bridge key concepts and ideas across methodologically and substantively distinct subfoci within its purview; enhance the theoretical continuity between its findings and theoretical insights and those that explain more generic sociological processes; and more explicitly theorize the role of agency, materiality, and the place of inequality in economic contexts, especially markets, as these are currently undertheorized in this field of study.

Mesoeconomics: Business cycles, entrepreneurship, and economic crisis in commercial building markets

Both neoclassical and Keynesian economists have widely favored the use of equilibrium models to understand economic activity, but dramatic periods of change such as the current global economic downturn are poorly understood by assuming equilibrium. The economist Joseph Schumpeter tried to inject dynamism and disequilibrium into economic models by arguing for the role of entrepreneurs in creating microeconomic change, and for examining long-term macroeconomic change as represented in business cycles. No economist, including Schumpeter, has ever connected these two approaches to change and these approaches are not typically used as alternative and complementary ways of viewing transformation over time. We suggest that these theories can be connected in a “mesoeconomic” institutional analysis rooted in economic sociology; we demonstrate this connection by examining the US commercial building industry. This industry has changed in qualitatively distinct ways over the past two centuries in what we call market orders, economic orders sometimes lasting for decades or more. In each market order, entrepreneurs of different sorts are able to flourish and push forward institutional changes that result in long-term economic shifts. Credit and finance have been pivotal influences in each market order, a factor supporting Schumpeters focus on entrepreneurial action and speculation and one not largely discussed today. We view the recent disruption of financial markets as a signal of the destruction of a reigning market order.

Capital and carbon: The shifting common good justification of energy regimes

Abstract This article traces the regimes of worth that defined energy for centuries as a productive force of human and animal labor, an understanding that transformed in the 18th century to an “industrial-energy” regime of worth supporting an economy of mass production, consumption, and profit and more recently one centered on market forces and price. Industrial and market energy and the conventions and institutions that support them are currently in a period of discursive and material ferment; they are being challenged by different higher order principles of worth. We discuss eight emergent energy justifications that argue what kind of energy is – and is not – in the best interests of society.

Fracking the Neighborhood: Reluctant Activists and Natural Gas DrillingFracking the Neighborhood: Reluctant Activists and Natural Gas Drilling, by GullionJessica Smartt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. 191 pp.

females as his to violate. These notions help provide some context for incest and sexual violence, but more could have been said about why these ideas carried over to the colonized people. Why does a brutal tool of Spanish conquest still tacitly allow men to violate their own daughters? Second, Mexico’s incest laws could have been examined more fully. In the introduction, González-López states that she wants to examine the ‘‘historical evolution of laws on incest and sexual violence in the family’’ (p. 10). She briefly discusses incest laws in the final chapter of the book, but she devotes only about a page to the topic. A more thorough examination was needed. She includes an appendix on state penal codes regarding incest, but without more historical context and discussion, this addition falls short of realizing her goal of examining the historical evolution of these laws. These points are not criticisms; rather, they speak to the power of the book. GonzálezLópez writes with such passion that the reader is provoked—to learn more and to do more. Throughout the book, González-López urges further study of incest, patriarchy, and gendered servitude in Mexico, and she has skillfully laid the groundwork for future research into these topics.

32.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780262029766.

Abstract Following Philip Selznick’s lead in using pragmatist social science to understand issues of public concern we conducted a study of failed innovation in the commercial construction industry (CCI). We find that social heuristics – collectively constructed and maintained interpretive decision-making frames – significantly shape economic and non-economic decision-making practices. Social heuristics are the outcome of industry-based “institutionalization processes” and are widely held and commonly relied on in CCI to reduce uncertainty endemic to decision-making; they provide actors with both a priori and ex post facto justifications for economic decisions that appear socially rational to industry co-participants. In the CCI – a project-centered production network – social heuristics as shared institutions sustain network-based social order but in so doing discourage novel technologies and impede innovation. Social heuristics are actor-level constructs that reflect macro-level institutional arrangements and networked production relations. The concept of social heuristics offers the promise of developing a genuinely social theory of individual economic choice and action that is historically informed, contextually situated, and neither psychologically nor structurally reductionist.

Social Heuristics: The Pragmatics of Convention in Decision-Making

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews http://csx.sagepub.com/ Putting Social Movements in their Place: Explaining Opposition to Energy Projects in the United States, 2000 − 2005 Thomas D. Beamish Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 2014 43: 235 DOI: 10.1177/0094306114522415bb The online version of this article can be found at: http://csx.sagepub.com/content/43/2/235 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: American Sociological Association Additional services and information for Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews can be found at: Email Alerts: http://csx.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://csx.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav >> Version of Record - Feb 27, 2014 What is This? Downloaded from csx.sagepub.com at UNIV CALIFORNIA DAVIS on May 20, 2014

Putting Social Movements in their Place: Explaining Opposition to Energy Projects in the United States, 2000–2005

In 1992, an internal memo signed by then Chief Economist of the World Bank Lawrence Summers argued that the bank should encourage the poorest societies to accept the world’s most toxic industries: ‘ . . . shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LCDs? . . . The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that’ (Summers, 1992). The memo from inside the world’s leading development bank seemed to expose the callousness of its liberal trade agenda: the poorest would bear a majority of capitalisms risks because that was their ‘comparative advantage’. In the ensuing public outcry, Summers maintained that the memo was not a serious policy statement but was meant to be ironic; the World Bank had no intention of supporting such a policy mandate. For critics, however, the ugly truth of risk distribution both within and between nations, from global North to global South, from rich to poor, and from white to persons of color was tragically self-evident. Site Fights and Resisting Global Toxics are two very different efforts to empirically and theoretically address the logic of risk distribution that Summers euphemistically described