The Global Sociology Blog

[Update: the avalanche of comments accusing them of racism must have had an effect because they removed the post and replaced it with this one. There are cached copies though, since the Internet never forgets anything. And they say there'll be another post about this tomorrow.] Via Calvin Ho, but apparently, cluelessness ruled the day: [...]

Case in point: “CLW recently completed a 136 pages in-depth investigative report examining the electronics manufacturing industry in China. This report focused on ten Chinese electronics factories that supply finished manufactured electronic products to multinational electronics brand companies, such as Dell, Salcomp, IBM, Ericsson, Philips, Microsoft, Apple, HP, Nokia, and others. The investigations took place [...]

I have already posted on Owen Jones‘s Chavs: The Demonization of The Working Class (see here and here). Another good subtitle for this book could be “the not-so-hidden injuries of class” (to riff on Richard Sennett’s classic book). If Jones is not a sociologist, he should be one because his book is a perfect illustration of [...]

Ananya Roy provides critical assessment of microfinances: In particular, she challenges the idea that microfinance represents the democratization of finances as a form of bottom billion capitalism, but rather represents the extension of capitalist accumulation and markets to previously excluded populations. She also discusses the role of the World Bank in managing and controlling the [...]

Here. Why the comparison to the original Thirty Years War? “From 1618 to 1648, Europe was engulfed in a series of intensely brutal conflicts known collectively as the Thirty Years’ War. It was, in part, a struggle between an imperial system of governance and the emerging nation-state. Indeed, many historians believe that the modern international [...]

Damn newspaper gets me irritated and it’s only Monday: Not former judge, not former anti-corruption fighter, not corporate crime prosecutor (although all that is mentioned in the article), nope. The one thing mentioned in the headline is the one completely irrelevant thing to her nomination as Green Party candidate. After all, she did the beauty [...]

Via Africa is a Country, do yourself a favor and watch this lecture of UC Berkeley geographer Michael Watts: Keep in mind the petro-state as rentier state in the oil complex as state-owned companies make Exxon and others, as Watts say, look like little start-ups. And who says rent-based means corruption, bloated and inefficient operations [...]

Because, well… As the article notes: “The extraordinary Mexican migration that delivered millions of illegal immigrants to the United States over the past 30 years has sputtered to a trickle, and research points to a surprising cause: unheralded changes in Mexico that have made staying home more attractive. A growing body of evidence suggests that [...]

This is your must-read of the day: “Fourteen million, in round numbers — that is how many Americans are now officially out of work. Word came Friday from the Labor Department that, despite all the optimistic talk of an economic recovery, unemployment is going up, not down. The jobless rate rose to 9.2 percent in [...]

Here is a short clip of François Dubet explaining that our societies rely on fictions to sustain themselves. My loose translation is below. I provided a more detailed version of this in my review of Dubet’s Les Places et Les Chances. The principles of justice are fiction. When we say that “we are all equal”, [...]

This is a second post on Owen Jones‘s Chavs: The Demonization of The Working Class. In my previous post, I focused on the sociopathic aspects of the dominant classes as they proceeded to decimate the British industrial working class. Jones details at length the policies implements not just by Thatcher and the succeeding conservative government but [...]

Cohen and Kennedy (2007: 448) define the global civil society as such: “While the civil society is made up of the networks of groups between the family and the state that try to influence political opinion and policy-making within the confines of nation-states, a global civil society includes all those social agents whose joint concerns [...]

With the publication of the UN Women’s justice report, the Guardian has this neat interactive visual on the evolution of women’s rights to vote worldwide. 1890s: 1900s: 1910s: 1920s: 1930s: 1940s: 1950s: 1960s: 1970s: 1980s: 1990s: 2000s:

You must read this first-person account of a former Goldman Sachs “quant” (that’s how analysts are called) with a degree in physics (meaning, he can do fancy maths). There is a lot to love. The hierarchy: “There were other characters in this drama. The sales guys were complete tools, with a total IQ, summing over [...]

Through the consequences of climate change and persistent conflict (whether it’s proxy wars or the global war on terror or resource wars): “Prolonged drought in the Horn of Africa is the immediate cause of the severe food crisis already affecting around 10 million people in parts of Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia. Rains have failed [...]