One of the most fundamental and distinctive aspects of the American approach to undergraduate education is the priority given to making sure that students receive a broad “liberal education.” What this phrase means has nothing to do with “liberal politics”; instead, it is a theory of education that holds that the undergraduate student needs to …
The great divergence
It has been ten years since Ken Pomeranz published The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy., a book that forced some real rethinking about the economic history in Europe and China. Along with Bin Wong in China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience, he called for a deep …
Rural studies in China
I spent a rewarding afternoon at the Institute for Rural Studies at Central China Normal University in Wuhan this week (link). The Institute is the leading center for research on China's rural population, and it has conducted research projects for decades on villages throughout China. It is an important resource for government officials as they …
Technical knowledge
There is a kind of knowledge in an advanced mechanical society that doesn't get much attention from philosophers of science and sociologists of science, but it is critical for keeping the whole thing running. I'm thinking here of the knowledge possessed by skilled technicians and fixers -- the people who show up when a complicated …
Political polarization?
Is the American electorate "polarized" with regard to sets of political issues? McCarty, Rosenthal, and Poole accept the common view that we have in fact become more polarized in our politics over the past twenty years, and they offer an interesting theory of what is causing this polarization in Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology …
Social obligations and markets
The vice presidential pick for the Republican ticket is an extreme voice on the question of whether individuals have obligations to others in society that justify taxing them to maintain their basic human needs. Paul Ryan is a fan of Ayn Rand's philosophy, which is an extreme version of individualism against social obligations. According to …
Mobilizing the masses
One of the books on the Chinese Revolution that I particularly respect is Odoric Wou's 1994 Mobilizing the Masses: Building Revolution in Henan. As noted in an earlier post, histories of the revolution have gone through several waves, and a general trend has been towards more focused regional studies. Wou's book belongs in what I categorize as …
Civil Rights history
What is involved in assembling the history of a complicated period like the US civil rights movement? This is a difficult question for any complex historical phenomenon, and there are many choices that the historian is forced to make. When should we start the story? End of the Civil War Reconstruction Jim Crow period 1950s …
Mayer Zald
I am sorry to share the news with readers that Mayer Zald passed away today in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Mayer was a brilliant sociologist, a founding contributor to the fields of organizational sociology and social movement theory, and a fertile and stimulating voice in conversation with scholars old and young until the final week of …
Response to Little by Dave Elder-Vass
[Dave Elder-Vass accepted my invitation to write a response to my discussion of his recent book, The Reality of Social Construction (link). Elder-Vass is senior lecturer in sociology at Loughborough University and author as well of The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency, discussed here. Thanks, Dave!] Social construction and the reliability of knowledgeby Dave Elder-Vass …
Understanding Society 