The Global Sociology Blog

That is the question asked by Aditya Chakrabortty in this Guardian piece: “At the start of the banking crisis, the air was thick with the sound of lachrymose economists. How did they miss the biggest crash since 1929? Professors at the LSE were asked that very question by the Queen – and were too tongue-tied [...]

I know I am totally behind on this but this is a very interesting video on how iPads are made at the infamous Foxconn factory: Of course, the fact that workers are lining up to take these jobs is often used as an argument that the low wages and lousy working conditions (which have improved [...]

The darker side of the global economy is Misha Glenny‘s domain of predilection (see his previous book, McMafia on that). In Darkmarket, Cyberthieves, Cybercops, and You, he tackles the hacking world through an investigation into several Internet forums dedicated by carders for carders (carders are these people who steal your credit card numbers and PINs and use [...]

[Disclaimer: I have read the entire Hunger Games trilogy but have not (yet) seen the movie.] First off, if you have not watched the analysis videos of the Hunger Games on Feminist Frequency, you should do that. Go ahead: And comparing film and book: I pretty much agree with everything in these videos, which is [...]

Good for Nothing, from their latest album, Killer Sounds:

Obviously:

That is the rule of the game: when you get interviewed by the media, what you say / write always get reduced to a couple of points and that is very frustrating. Us academics don’t do short soundbites. So, I was interviewed for a piece in major newspaper on the subject of teens asking celebrities [...]

Let me bring my handy graph again (and a quick shout out to Simple Diagrams, a software I could not blog and teach without). It was one of the very first insights I learned in my very first sociology course, reading my first sociology book, Durkheim’s Suicide: suicide is not an individual act but a [...]

Since Manuel Castells is my sociologist of the semester, it is only fair that I devote some blogging space to his latest opus magnum (does he ever write any other kind?), Communication Power. Reviewing this book is probably going to take more than one post as Castells’s writing is so dense, it is hard to [...]

Philip Cohen started it. No one asked me but I’ll butt in anyway. The answer is, of course, yes. Sociologists should also be all over Twitter, Tumblr and other social networking platforms. To all the reasons Cohen mentions in his post, let me add a few. First of all, in the context of the field [...]

By now, you have all probably been exposed to the Hunger Games racist fiasco (neatly collected and curated here). The story goes something like this: once upon a time, a lot of young people (mostly white) read a trilogy and much enjoyed it. Unsurprisingly, the books were put into film production. When the initial casting [...]

“Feel so close” (pretty good although I prefer the instrumental version)

Well, not really: “At a TUC event last month we lamented: we are going backwards. Women are leaving the workforce in ever greater numbers, to meet the usual fate of women who don’t work in a shrinking state divesting itself even of free access to the Child Support Agency and legal aid – poverty, and indifference to poverty. When [...]

I have blogged pretty extensively on what I have called the New Sociopathy (see here) referring to the lack of empathy from the wealthy (and wealthier) towards the less fortunate. That theme has been since more discussed as a study came out pretty much validating the idea that wealth makes one less compassionate and less [...]