At any given time there are huge areas of the unknown when it comes to the question, what do various members of our society care about? We have opinion research tools, of course. But we don't really have good answers to any of these questions: How do West Bloomfield teenagers think about their futures? Why …
Protest and the politics of dissent
There are several different moral and practical stances that people can take in relation to their social worlds. The scenes above depict one of these possibilities: vociferous protest and active opposition to specific social and political policies. Individuals and groups have ideas about justice and legitimacy. And they have specific material interests that are affected by …
Concrete sociological knowledge
Is there a place within the social sciences for the representation of concrete, individual-level experience? Is there a valid kind of knowledge expressed by the descriptions provided by an observant resident of a specific city or an experienced traveler in the American South in the 1940s? Or does social knowledge need to take the form …
Spatial patterns in the US
Here are four interesting graphics representing different kinds of activity in the United States. The top panel represents population concentrations across the United State. The second image is air traffic across the country, and the third image is internet traffic across the country. The final image is a photograph of the United States from space …
Real Utopias
It is worth thinking a bit about the intellectual project of envisioning a utopia. By definition, a utopia is a vision of a social order that is profoundly different from the real historical circumstances and institutions in which we live. It would correct important flaws in the social world we currently inhabit. It is a social …
Doug McAdam on contentious politics and the social sciences
Doug McAdam is hard at work shedding new light on the meso-dynamics of contention. What are the specific social and psychological mechanisms that bring people into social movements; what factors and processes make mobilization more feasible when social grievances arise? Recently he has done work on the impact of Teach for America on its participants, …
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Red shirts as a social movement
The redshirts in Thailand have moved onto the world stage in the past several months. Massive protests in Bangkok have stymied the Thai government and have held the army and police forces at bay for months. Demands from redshirt leaders and posters include removal of the military-backed government of Prime Minister Abhisit and a commitment …
System safety engineering and the Deepwater Horizon
The Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, fire, and uncontrolled release of oil into the Gulf is a disaster of unprecedented magnitude. This disaster in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be more serious in objective terms than the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986 -- in terms both of immediate loss of life and in …
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Trust networks
Chuck Tilly had a fascination with the mechanisms of social interaction at all levels. His 2005 book, Trust and Rule, picks up on one particular feature of social organization that is often instrumental in political and social episodes, including especially in the everyday workings of predation and defense. This is the idea of a trust network: …
Norbert Elias on the individual
Norbert Elias opens his 1987 book The Society of Individuals with these words: The relation of the plurality of people to the single person we call the "individual", and of the single person to the plurality, is by no means clear at present. But we often fail to realize that it is not clear, and still less why. We have the …
Understanding Society 