The Global Sociology Blog

And while I was busy setting up a new blog with Todd Krohn and Dave Mayeda – The Cranky Sociologists – I forgot to put a post here sending you all there if you feel so inclined. There is some really good stuff.

Via Global Dialogue (a newsletter from the International Sociological Association), South African sociologist Jackie Cock explains how the task of sociology is to expose what she calls slow violence: “The social structures and processes which shape our experience are often hidden or obscured by conventional beliefs, powerful interests, and official explanations. One of the most [...]

Matt Bruenig offers an interesting analysis of reality show Dance Moms and cultural hegemony: “In simple terms, cultural hegemony refers to the way in which the powerful shape a society’s norms, values, and other institutions, and how that particular shaping becomes accepted as default, natural, perpetual, and inevitable. That is, people tend to regard the way we [...]

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: [...]

Based on Urban Demographics’s post, it would appear so: The diversity, it is grossly lacking. Also, how many of them are still alive? It may be related to this (also from Urban Demographics): At the same time, it is expected that peer-reviewed publications to refer to the existing body of knowledge in each sub-field of [...]

The last parts of Stanley Aronowitz‘s Taking It Big – C. Wright Mills and The Making of Political Intellectuals deal with The Sociological Imagination and Mills’s overall impact as a public sociologist, his successes and failures as such. “Mills’s refusal of psychoanalytic interpretations of history and politics and the absence of references to Nietzsche’s conceptions of power and [...]

A lot of people are circulating this but it is of special interest to sociologists: Can anyone say “redlining” and institutional discrimination?

Because it’s not a concept. It has never been a cultural and historical reality. It is an ideological construct, like any claimed “tradition”. There is no objectivity to it. Family structures are always a product of the intersection between structure, institutions and culture. Just go read Stephanie Coontz’s Family: A History. It’s all there. The [...]

This: Social capital, strength of weak ties and all that stuff.

I see a few people have gotten upset over the publication of gun ownership data in this newspaper. I don’t see what the upset is all about. After all, this is the age of big data. There are data about us all over the place, about our cars, insurance, salary, etc. So, why not guns? [...]

It is in its fifth chapter that Stanley Aronowitz‘s Taking It Big – C. Wright Mills and The Making of Political Intellectuals deals with the power elite. The power elite seems an obvious concept and reality to many of us but maybe we forget how against-the-grain the idea was when Mills put it on the sociological table: [...]

Having examined the weakest component of the power elite in the third chapter, in Stanley Aronowitz‘s Taking It Big – C. Wright Mills and The Making of Political Intellectuals, in chapter 4, the focus is on another major work of Mills’s: White Collar – The American Middle Classes, considered the second volume of his social structure [...]

This obvious set of facts: See the differences? See the statistically significant correlation between homicide by firearms and ownership of firearms? See the massive difference between the United States and other developed countries? Now, since yesterday, we have heard a whole bunch of rationalizations as to why this has nothing to do with guns. So, [...]

To this humble single-authored blog, with a friggin’ Doctor Who cake:

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 [...]