What is involved in providing a sociology of technical practices? (An earlier posting is also devoted to this question.) Here I am thinking primarily of technical material practices -- building a house or a boat, distilling spirits, weaving a basket, maintaining a biological research lab, or repairing a photocopy machine. There is a degree of …
eighteen forty-eight
The revolutions of 1848 were the stage upon which the "spectre haunting Europe" danced. Karl Marx, Mikhail Bakunin, Alexandre Herzen, Alexis de Tocqueville, and numerous other critical observers of Europe's trajectory looked at 1848 as a moment of continent-wide social and political revolution. Mike Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution is a very interesting effort to …
Proto social inquiry
We sometimes imagine that the current disciplines and methods of the social sciences represent a more or less inevitable set of approaches to the problem of understanding social phenomena. But really, the latter task is much larger than the specific sets of disciplines and methods we have currently developed. It is worth turning back the …
Inequalities in France
Inequalities in France are particularly volatile these days, with high unemployment, rising income inequality, increasingly evident differences in opportunities for young people from immigrant communities, and rather different levels of schooling available to different communities in France. Social conflict, strikes, and political disagreements are rising in France, and it will take skillful work by community …
Metaphors for history
What kind of thing is "history"? Think of the history of the Roman Empire, or the history of Tokugawa Japan, or the history of the American banking system. We want to be able to conceptualize these complex stories as possessing some kind of unity over centuries of time, thousands of locations, and millions of lives; …
Is a rail network a social structure?
figures: RER map of Paris; E. J. Marey's graphical representation of Paris-Lyon train schedules, 1885 What role does a rail network play within an adequate ontology of society? Is a rail system primarily a set of physical assets, a set of administrative procedures, or a set of embodied opportunities and constraints for other members of …
Social entrepreneurs
Social entrepreneurs are people who want to bring about non-routine projects, collaborations, or organizations where they didn't previously exist in order to solve a perceived social problem. This is very different from working within an existing organization and using its official resources to bring about a particular result. An example might be a community activist …
Disaffected youth
Every city seems to have its floating population of disaffected youth -- school dropouts, occasional workers, drug users, skateboarders, hooligans, street people. How much of a problem is this? What are its dimensions? What are the social causes that influence the size and nature of this population in Detroit, Manchester, Cologne, or Novosibirsk? And are …
Sociologie de Paris?
What might be involved in creating a new sociology of Paris? Paris is a particularly good subject for a new urban sociology. It is a gritty, diverse, and dynamic city, and a city displaying unceasing chaotic surges and currents of social life. It is a global city, both in Saskia Sassen's sense (strong networked interconnection …
Regional interconnectedness
Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit are part of a large economic region in the upper Midwest of the United States, which is sometimes referred to as the Great Lakes Region. There are hundreds of lesser cities within this regional system -- Erie, Toledo, Rockford, Grand Rapids, .... What are the economic interdependencies that exist among these …
Understanding Society 