The Global Sociology Blog

Via Nathan Yau (who did write the book on visualization and has a great website to go along with it), this very interesting and interactive visualization of the world’s billionaires: Billionaires 2013 from SocProf on Vimeo. Here are a few static images. The rankings: The bar charts: The ranking shifts over one year: The plots: [...]

This is an interactive infographic, so, here is a quick video: The Power Elite – Chinese Style from SocProf on Vimeo. I initially found this in a blog post in Le Monde but the original article is here. Note the consistency in color schemes in the different visualizations. A few snapshots (not interactive, of course): Also: [...]

It is with the third chapter of Stanley Aronowitz‘s Taking It Big – C. Wright Mills and The Making of Political Intellectuals, that things get more sociological and critical. This chapter is largely dedicated to Mills’s The New Men of Power – America’s Labor Leaders, published in 1948. “The New Men of Power is not a [...]

I have already posted quite a bit about David Harvey‘s Rebel Cities: From The Right to the City to the Urban Revolution: the fetishism of the local and the horizontal monopoly rent and local capitalism the cities in the context of the anti-capitalist struggle And more broadly on global cities. It is somewhat of a given [...]

Thank Manuel Castells for that one (adapted from Entman, 2004:10): So what does this mean, exactly? This diagram was used to illustrate the way influence is exercised in society, what Castells calls a hierarchy of influence because not all players have the same ability to set the agenda, prime the public, frame issues and index [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

One of my Twitter followers pointed me to this documentary: It is quite nice, for a change, to listen to social scientists that are neither psychologists nor economists discuss the current crisis. And I would argue that only sociologists are properly equipped to discuss social movements as the one that have been taking emerging all [...]

I am always suspicious of broad generalizations about entire populations or generations. So, I am not entirely sure what to make of this argument by sociologist Sophia Mappa. Something to think about. It is in French, so here is the gist of it in English. The starting point of her argument is that Angela Merkel’s [...]

One of the things that we dutifully teach sociology undergraduate students is the functionalist idea that social institutions fulfill functions for society as a whole but this is (1) profoundly annoying, and (2) wrong. This gives a sense of monolithic arrangement that is “just the way it is”. In reality, institutional arrangements are structured as [...]

Via Lambert at Corrente:

Cue London Calling references: But let us not play clueless here. Things have been brewing for a while in England. Remember the Vodaphone protests? Or the anti-university fees protests? So, whatever the initial reason for the uprising in Tottenham, it is clear that many of the countries where austerity policies are being imposed from above [...]

And let’s not forget that the presence of a power elite is, inherently, detrimental to democracy:

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 [...]