I'm attending the Beijing Forum 2011 this week, and it's a superb international conference. Much of the conference took place at Peking University. Over three hundred international scholars were invited to participate, and there are dozens of interesting conversations going on at any one time. The goal is to stimulate productive dialog among scholars from …
Four years of UnderstandingSociety
Today marks the fourth anniversary of UnderstandingSociety. This is the 613th posting since I began in November 2007 and the 135th in the past year. I continue to find this medium a good way of pushing forward my own learning and thinking about a swirl of topics around the central thrust, making sense of the …
Notes from Xi’an
People here in Xi'an say: "The Chinese city of the present is Beijing. The city of the future is Shanghai. The city of China's past is Xi'an." This seems to be more than a slogan. People in Xian seem deeply proud of the history and heritage that Xian represents -- the thirteen dynasties that made …
Theories of the actor
I'm attracted to an approach to sociological thinking that can be described as "actor-centered." The basic idea is that social phenomena are constituted by the actions of individuals, oriented by their own subjectivities and mental frameworks. It is recognized, of course, that the subjectivity of the actor doesn't come full-blown into his or her mind …
Can justice be causal?
Is social justice an empirical characteristic of a set of social arrangements? And can social justice be a causal factor in processes of social change or social stability? Before justice could be considered an empirical feature of a set of social arrangements, we would need to have a more specific understanding of what we mean …
Complex systems
Social ensembles are often said to be "complex". What does this mean? Herbert Simon is one of the seminal thinkers in the study of complexity. His 1962 article, "The Architecture of Complexity" (link), put forward several ideas that have become core to the conceptual frameworks of people who now study social complexity. So it is …
Levels of politics
I've focused occasionally on the idea of "levels" of social arrangements, from the local to the intermediate to the higher levels, with the idea that higher levels are composed of structures and activities at lower levels. Generally I've had in mind examples from one specific area of the social sciences to illustrate these points -- …
Historiography and the philosophy of history
The topic of the philosophy of history comes up frequently here. The related domain of "historiography" has not come up yet, however. What is the relation between these bodies of study about the writing of history? Let's begin by asking the basic question: what is historiography? In its most general sense, the term refers to …
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Rawls’s framework for global justice
Rawls's A Theory of Justice was immediately received as a major and progressive contribution to the theory of justice within existing societies. His Law of Peoples (1999) was intended to carry his basic ideas about justice to the international realm. (Here is a PDF of a preliminary version of the title essay of the book as published in Critical …
The racial equity dividend
Racial justice organizations around the United States are struggling to find the resources from the corporate and foundation worlds needed to support their continuing work. One part of the problem seems to be that business leaders simply aren't convinced that racial inequalities are a fundamental and debilitating problem in the United States that presents a …
Understanding Society 