The Global Sociology Blog

Since I mentioned flexibility in my previous post, now is a good time to mention a great neoliberal invention that is supposed to sound good: flexi-security or flexicurity. Flexi-security refers to (1) flexibilization of the labor market, (2) social security and (3) rights for the unemployed. It is supposed to be a win-win system for employers [...]

This is a first in a series of posts I intend to write as I work my way through Guy Standing‘s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. First off, the precariat is not something that just happened (nothing ever does just “happen” in society) but something created as the result of socio-economic policies: “In the [...]

(Via) The country-by-country review points to systemic failure. Also: “The IMF believes there are three conditions for a mega recession: it should affect the core of the global economy, have its genesis in the financial sector and should involve a large number of countries. A budgetary crisis in the US would, according to analysts, fulfil [...]

Another great issue of Al Jazeera’s People and Power: The story is familiar: poverty, emigration with the “help” of smugglers, debt bondage and quasi-slavery, and criminalization.

Any society has a lot of cultural narratives that provide ready explanations for common phenomenon. These narratives, or commonsense explanations, are never questioned, never examined, taken for granted and become part of our stock of knowledge (to use Alfred Schutz’s formulation). It does not mean they are true. Their strength is not based on their [...]

I know, I know, but I couldn’t help it. Anyhoo, in her inimitable style, Saskia Sassen updates her ideas regarding global cities with different items. First, the ‘smart city” and urbanizing technologies: Lift 2011 – URBAN – Saskia Sassen from videosfing on Vimeo. It is worth 30 minutes of your time on the topic of [...]

Rachel Snyder’s Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade is an interesting book but boy would the author have benefited from a sit-down with a good editor who would have told her that it needed a tighter structure and line of thinking. I initially picked up [...]

(Via Taslima Nasreen) Use your 9-year old daughter to punish your wife for defending your other daughter that you tried to rape: “The Mankhurd police on Tuesday arrested a 52-year-old man after he kidnapped his minor daughter, and reportedly handed her to a youth from the locality, telling him to rape her. The youth allegedly [...]

Last week, a friend and I went to the see the final Harry Potter film (quite good), but that means we had to sit through some previews, including this one: I remember my friend and I exchanging eyerolls and snarky comments regarding the fact that some dudes had come up with that idea in the [...]

As opposed to your meat, that is, and this is why (via):

Your must-read du jour: Mike Davis on the destruction of the three pillars of McWorld, American consumption, “Even if debt-limit doomsday is averted, Obama has already hocked the farm and sold the kids. With breathtaking contempt for the liberal wing of his own party, he’s offered to put the sacrosanct remnant of the New Deal [...]

Well, it is not often that I dislike a book as much as I did Peter Berger‘s Adventures of An Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore. Before I even get into the book per se, I should mention I didn’t know much about Peter Berger himself beyond reading the modern [...]

If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably seen this over the past few days: This is mass behavior, not a social movement. Certainly, Twitter has the capacity to diffuse mass behavior extremely quickly and widely but this means widespread ranting more than social movement or action. But then, that was not the point, as Jeff Jarvis, the initiator [...]

Because fighting the war on drugs (in this case, heroin) is more important than providing pain relief to patients in large parts of the world with morphine: “For much of the Western world, physical pain ends with a simple pill. Yet more than half the world’s countries have little to no access to morphine, the [...]

Paging Bill Domhoff (and via Owen Jones), class war 101: And also: So, obviously, “shared sacrifice” is required and we need to tighten our belts.