Colloquia
Sociology Department Colloquium Series
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
MONDAYS, 2:00 - 3:30 PM
[unless otherwise noted]
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
The Martyrs Welfare State: Politics and social policy in post-revolutionary Iran
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Explaining the Decline in Mexico-U.S. Migration: The Effect of the Great Recession
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
“I Don’t Like Passing as a Straight Woman”: Queer Negotiations of Identity and Social Group Membership
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
The Chinese Bureaucracy in Three Lenses: Weberian, Confucian, and Marchian
The Chinese bureaucracy—with its long history and distinct characteristics—is arguably one salient contribution of the Chinese civilization. In recent decades, it has provided the organizational basis for the leading role of the Chinese state in China’s economic growth and institutional transformation. The Chinese bureaucracy also shows intriguing dualism between high responsiveness and strong inertia and between formal authority and informal institutions. I explore these distinctive features of the Chinese bureaucracy from three lenses: Weber’s comparative-historical approach helps locate the Chinese bureaucracy in a distinct mode of domination; the Confucian lens identifies the cultural sources of bureaucratic behaviors; and March’s image of organized anarchy sheds light on a set of mechanisms that shape the role of the bureaucracy in China’s political dynamics.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Men’s Labor Market Outcomes: Is There a Case for Marriage?
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Breaking the Machine: Social Movement Disruption and Authority Erosion in Organizations
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Copwise: The Emerging Cultural Context of Criminalized Urban Communities
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Three Degrees of Entrenchment: Power, Policy, Structure
In this talk, I propose a framework for analyzing the mechanisms and conditions of entrenchment—the process through which critical aspects of governance, social relations, technology, or beliefs become highly resistant to change. Three degrees of the phenomenon are distinguished:power entrenchment (mechanisms that preserve the power of incumbents); policy or rules entrenchment (mechanisms that may preserve policies or rules even after their originators lose power); and structural entrenchment (mechanisms that convert policies, practices, and beliefs into seemingly obdurate social facts, potentially preserving them as legacies of a regime even after the regime collapses). The mechanisms considered involve changes in the rules of change, costs of change, and choice-sets of actors. Entrenchment is an inter-temporal concept, linking conditions over time, but does not imply permanence: what is entrenched can be disentrenched.