The Global Sociology Blog

Oh, it’s on! Let put the pieces together, shall we? On the labor side, the picture is quite bleak:

BBC NEWS | Business | Global job losses ‘could hit 51m’ via kwout

So, what should be done? The ILO Director-General has a few ideas:

BBC NEWS | Business | Global job losses ‘could hit 51m’ via kwout

So, [...]

Years ago, I was alerted by the website FUH2 (NSFW) that posted photos of people giving the fingers to people driving H2s. It is also great fun to use in class. It is interesting that the Hummer triggered satirical websites as well. What was it about the Hummer that would generate so much hostility? The [...]

U.N. crime chief says drug money flowed into banks – International Herald Tribune via kwout

When the illegal economy is more stable than the legal one, you know we’re in deep you-know-what.

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The Power Elite: Bernie Madoff, White Collar Crime, and the Economic Recession via kwout

Let me put it differently. The difference then lies in certain criminals functioning from an upper-class, dominant habitus which entitles them to a better – read "non-criminal" – social perception. Their cultural and social capital allows them to be viewed as upstanding [...]

[Update: and for another groovy music break, head on over to The Power Elite]
"Move your Feet"… groovy!

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What I mean by that is that part of thinking sociologically is to look at the way things are, seriously and in detail, which mean with specific attention to certain factors, as Avedon does here:

"And, as I have noted before, every person busted for drugs in the city and carted off to another state is [...]

Today, 190 demonstrations should take place in France, supported by eight different unions to protest the French government’s response to the economic crisis. Sociologist Denis Muzet, of Mediascopie, offers his view, in Le Monde, on this social context in which large-scale protest social movements are likely to emerge. For him, we need a new [...]

Which is always better:

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Damien Babet has an interesting post, in French, on recent forms of commodification of sociability based on a NYT article on apartment owners using companies to manage the sociability of their renters. Take a look a webpage from one such company:
In these relatively luxury buildings in New York City, as Babet reports, one can find [...]

Click on the image for a bigger and better view (Citigroup looks especially REALLY bad):

Not to worry though, the bailout will go to them, but not to family planning programs or any cram-down provisions to help homeowners.
And for the dense among us, here are two very articulate explanations of why support for family planning [...]

IRIN Africa | West Africa | Burkina Faso | BURKINA FASO: Cutters turn razors on babies to avoid FGM/C law | Children Gender Issues Human Rights | Feature via kwout

In spite of this, it seems that the law has been somewhat successful as the decline in mutilated women from 77% in the 1990s to less [...]

Charles Tilly’s Why? What Happens When People Give Reasons… And Why is an interesting departure from his usual writings. Readers of Tilly’s previous books are used to deep historical and comparative analyses of dynamics of contention or of democracy and state capacity. Why? is very different. It is a very Goffmanian book focusing [...]

So says Joseph Stiglitz in an interview with Le Monde.
For Stiglitz, what is happening is not just a crisis of the financial system, but a crisis of wealth deterioration in general. He denounces the hypocrisy of the American financial system which relied on maximum deregulation of financial flows (Appadurai’s financescapes), on the removal of responsibility [...]

Denis Colombi has some interesting considerations regarding the connections between solidarity economics and art / culture (hey, look who posted about solidarity economics before it was cool to do so!). As usual, I’ll summarize as best I can Denis’s points and add my comments when relevant.
There are already common images when it comes to solidarity [...]

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BBC NEWS | Americas | Obama lifts ban on abortion funds via kwout

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Bolivia set to adopt new constitution empowering indigenous majority | World news | guardian.co.uk via kwout

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AFP: US Senate passes wage discrimination bill via kwout

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BBC NEWS | Health | Green light for US stem cell work via kwout

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