The Global Sociology Blog

This is the question I have every time I see an article like this: BBC NEWS | Health | Tests raise life extension hopes via kwout Socially speaking, what are the benefits of trying to extend life expectancy beyond what it already is in rich countries? It is one thing to find cures for disease [...]

One of the best things about sociologists is that we ruin everything. Take this, for instance, I bet you’re all going “awwww”, right? Now, read this: Cute Endangered Animal: Slow Loris | Mother Jones via kwout Sociologists: we put the “joy” in killjoy!

The excellent French socioblog “Fred et Ben Sociobloguent” is moving to new digs, so, update your blogroll / RSS Feeds. They are now at Socio Voce with some good content already. I am keeping the "old" blog in the blogroll to keep access to their archives. Their first article is on the persistence of social [...]

Consider this: William I. Robinson (2004), A Theory of Global Capitalism – Production, Class and State in a Transnational World , Baltimore (MD): Johns Hopkins University Press. "Governments are undertaking restructuring and serve the needs of transnational capital not simply because they are ‘powerless’ om the face of globalization, as the ‘weak state’ thesis would [...]

This New York Times article on the consequences of parental incarceration on children highlights issues that are not new to criminologists: In Prisoners’ Wake, a Tide of Troubled Kids – NYTimes.com via kwout Todd Krohn is correct to call these children "the collateral damage of the war on drugs." The Power Elite: Generation Incarceration via [...]

By Henning Meyer in the Social Europe Journal. Taking exception with the common view among the global elites that economic policy should now be outside of the scope of democratic governance: The New Politics of Globalisation: Social Europe Journal via kwout Well, no. And that is a big part of the problem. The New Politics [...]

I am shocked, shocked, I tell you: BBC NEWS | Health | Self-help ‘makes you feel worse’ via kwout I guess we can file that with the prayers studies that showed that when people knew they were being prayed for, they actually got worse. Why oh why does science persist in debunking woo woo and [...]

At least some people seem to realize this, Case in point, Scotland: BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Booth hails Scottish penal reform via kwout The counter-example, of course, would be the United States where the penal policy has not changed much since the conservative turn and the War on Drugs: lock ‘em up [...]

One of the quotes that I noted as important in The Spirit Level was the following: "Inequality increases the social distance between different groups of people, making us less willing to see them as "us" rather than "them". (62) Social distance can be created in different ways: physically through patterns of urban development that segregate [...]

Sherryl Kleinman and Martha Copp, Denying Social Harm: Students’ Resistance to Lessons About Inequality, Teaching Sociology, Vol. 37, No. 3, July 2009, pp. 283 – 293. Those of us who teach undergraduate courses in sociology know how hard it is to fight the pop psychology mixed with mass media culture, individualism and Weberian protestant ethic [...]

Military coups in Latin America always awake bad memories. Military coups are NEVER good news and NEVER done in defense of democracy. But beyond that, here are two analyses of what happened in Honduras. The first column, by Ismael Moreno, focuses on Honduran internal political dynamics Honduras: behind the crisis | open Democracy News Analysis [...]

Ok, ignore the little misspelling: Indexed via kwout

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Syria amends honour killing law via kwout So, things might suck marginally less but the whole cultural patriarchal background supportive of honorable murders remains.

A while back, Joseph Kirschke wrote a series of articles on the global reconfiguration of the cocaine trafficking as global flow whose fluidity allows it to reorganize itself when conditions require. In this three-part series, he depicts a trafficking that is responsive to fluctuations in supply (as the Colombian cartels lost their absolute control over [...]

As a follow-up on my book review of The Spirit Level, Bill Kerry, blogging over at The Equality Trust, has a blog post on their brand new FAQ. It is indeed great and handy. A sample: Frequently Asked Questions | The Equality Trust via kwout It’s a great teaching resource for those of us who [...]