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
PUBLIC SOCIOLOGY FORUM, 7-9p.m., November 6, Barrows 402.
Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University will present his new and magisterial book, Fear Itself, with responses from Berkeley’s sociology faculty – Dylan Riley, Loïc Wacquant and Margaret Weir
Fear Itself has caused a stir in both academic circles and public media for its recasting of the meaning and legacy of the New Deal and how we can (re)understand the present. For Katznelson US liberal democracy, with all its warts, was sustained only through the genius of three compromises: with foreign dictatorships, with racism, and with Cold War militarism. At the heart of these compromises lies the enduring (im)balance between the US’s two faces: procedural or formal democracy and a missionary or garrison state.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Classification Situations: Life Chances in the Neoliberal Era
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
EXPERIENCING TEACHING: A PANEL DISCUSSION
Irene Bloemraad, Tom Gold and Sandra Smith, University of California, Berkeley.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
THE SENSE OF STORIES: THE SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL MEANING OF STORY-TELLING
Christien Brinkgreve with an introduction by Arlie Hochschild
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
CAN SCIENCE MAKE YOU GOOD?
The distinction between expertise and virtue is a modern cultural institution. Knowing what is and knowing what ought to be done are seen as quite different capacities, and among the consequences flowing from this difference is that technical experts are thought to be no better placed than anyone else to offer moral guidance, even when they possess uniquely deep knowledge of possible outcomes of their technical work. Science just does not make its practitioners virtuous or wise or philosopher-kings.
This talk offers a historical sketch of how these sensibilities came about, roughly from the second part of the nineteenth century, and it discusses some contemporary sociological consequences of the is/ought distinction.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Why Are They so Fearless? Comparative Analysis of Revolts in North Africa, Southern Europe, and Turkey
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
NETWORKS OF OUTRAGE AND HOPE: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN THE INTERNET AGE
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
I will first review findings from a recent article published in AJS, which offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of legal endogeneity— a powerful process through which institutionalized organizational structures influence judicial conceptions of compliance with antidiscrimination law. This article uses a content analysis of opinions from a sample of 1024 federal civil rights opinions from 1965 through 1999 to show that judges increasingly defer to institutionalized organizational structures, ultimately inferring nondiscrimination from their mere presence. I will then discuss new findings from a follow-up analysis, which shows how judicial deference to institutionalized employment structures affects the outcomes of employment discrimination cases.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Social scientists have long been interested in the origins of generosity, altruism, and compassion in society. However, a relative handful of studies have looked at the effects of social context on organized charitable activity, particularly from a cross-national perspective. This talk will introduce an ongoing study examining the effects of global and domestic institutions on charitable activity among individuals and organizations in a large number of countries. I situate philanthropic and charitable activity in what world polity scholars have called a ‘global moral order’ that champions virtue and positions voluntary associations, including foundations and charities, as legitimate actors for solving global problems. Results from the study find that models of charitable activity are structured in world society.
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Blumer Room - 402 Barrows Hall
Most post-communist states suffered severe recessions, while rapid economic growth followed where communist parties survived to implement market reform. These differences have been widely attributed to the varied economic starting points of these countries or to policy choices and evolving political circumstances as market economies were built. We argue, instead, that the origins of these differences are to be found earlier in a country’s political history, specifically in the pattern of decline in communist party organizations. The more prolonged and extensive the decline of communist party capacity prior to regime change, the more that ownership claims became unclear and unenforceable, subsequently undermining contract enforcement, taxation, and state capacity. A time series analysis of 31 transitional economies demonstrates the impact of communist party decline on the relative severity of initial recessions, net of initial economic circumstances, policy choices, and regime characteristics. The impact of party decline was large and immediate, but diminished steadily thereafter.