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8 Sociology geoffrey wood In his classic work on The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills argued that it ‘enables the possessor to understand the historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and external career of individuals’ (Mills 1959: 5). In other words, sociology seeks to explain the experience and life chances of the individual in terms of the wider historical and institutional context. Sociological accounts of the nature of democracy and democratization are thus less concerned with the formal constitution of governmental structures
Sibling relationships are full of sociological intrigue. Siblings can pervade our everyday lives, shaping our identities and relationships through the life course, tapping into profound questions about who we are and who we can become, about family, relatedness, self and time. It is surprising, then, that the role of lateral ties between siblings has received relatively little sociological attention. Drawing upon innovative qualitative data sources and focusing on four key themes in sociological thought – self, relationality, imagination and time – Siblings and sociology addresses this omission by exploring the sociological significance of siblingship. Grounded in theories of relatedness but spanning theoretical work on generation, life course, emotion, sensory worlds, normativity and identity, Siblings and sociology demonstrates how and why siblings matter, asking what sociological insights can be gained by using siblingship as a lens through which to re-examine these familiar sociological ideas.
This book is a critical engagement with Zygmunt Bauman's ideas and arguments as found in selected texts and interviews of his postmodern and liquid modern phases. In Part I of the book, the focus is on Bauman's analysis of modernity, and his interpretation of the relationship between modernity and the Enlightenment as presented in Legislators and Interpreters. For Bauman, the deepest reason for sociology's failure to deal adequately with the Holocaust is to be found in sociology's being too much a part of modernity. Part II explores how Bauman's analysis of the postmodern condition develops in a variety of works throughout the 1990s. Questions of ethics and morality were central to Bauman's concerns, and Emmanuel Levinas's work was postmodern in the same sense that pervaded Bauman's sense of the postmodern. In the third part, the book deals with metaphoricity, liquid metaphor, and solid and liquid modernity. Bauman's deployment of metaphors is a defining feature of his sociology, and most commentators have argued that Bauman's sociology has a 'literary edge'. But 'liquid' metaphor throws up several questions, as liquids come in various degrees of viscosity, but Bauman assumes that 'liquid' simply implies the opposite of 'solid'. Bauman says, in Marx's time, and throughout the phase of 'solid modernity', socio-economic change, although rapid and ubiquitous, was always only a temporary state of affairs. There have been enough significant fluidities, varying between historical periods and across territories, to cast serious doubt on the appropriateness of the 'solid' metaphor.
Sociology and postmodernity If Bauman’s stance in Legislators and Interpreters is not difficult to classify as ‘postmodernist’ in a fairly strong sense, his remarks on the specificity of the postmodern condition as characterised by uncertainty and ambivalence in Modernity and Ambivalence do little to dispel that impression. I will soon explore in greater depth how Bauman’s analysis of the postmodern condition develops in a variety of works throughout the 1990s. For the time being, though, it is necessary to explore a key theoretical dilemma that confronted
‘Metaphoricity’ in Bauman’s sociology As I have emphasised in the Introduction and elsewhere in this book, Bauman’s deployment of metaphors is a defining feature of his sociology, and most commentators have argued that Bauman’s sociology has a ‘literary edge’ giving it a number of strengths, and should not be judged in a conventional sociological manner. The ‘liquid’ metaphor is only one among myriad metaphors that litter Bauman’s sociology, among them being ‘vagabonds’, ‘tourists’, ‘legislators’, ‘interpreters’, ‘weeds’, ‘strangers’, ‘players’, ‘strollers
Chap 2 10/7/06 11:49 am Page 13 2 Music and the sociological gaze Introduction ‘The history of musicology and music theory in our generation’, write Cook and Everist, ‘is one of loss of confidence: we no longer know what we know’ (1999: v). The reasons for this widely acknowledged crisis of confidence need not be rehearsed, but clearly arise from a series of challenges to the established discipline – from, for example, the critical and feminist theories of the ‘new’ musicologists, from various claims about the proper relation of musicology to
Over the past thirty to forty years, many theorists have agreed that a sociology that explains as well as describes must be a historical sociology. Philip Abrams went so far as to call historical sociology ‘the essence of the discipline’, arguing that it is ‘almost natural to the modern Western mind’ to explain the contemporary world at least partly in historical terms. 1 What is historical sociology? Theda Skocpol listed four characteristics of historical sociological studies: ‘They ask questions about social structures or processes understood to be
Sociological institutionalism has been applied to UN peacekeeping only in a limited fashion. Indeed, most peacekeeping scholarship examines the policies, practices, processes, and effects of peacekeeping, but neglects the internal institutional environment in which the UN exists and in particular the internal preferences, interests, and motivations of staff within the UN. In this way, the UN's organisational identity, preferences, and goals are often considered epiphenomenal and thus treated as contextual factors that merit only description
Aspects of Bauman’s sociology of postmodernity: a critical commentary The consumer society In his (relatively conventional) sociology of postmodernity (rather than in his analysis of ‘sociality’ in the ‘postmodern habitat’) Bauman distinguishes his own position by identifying where the even more conventional ‘orthodox consensus’ – a term borrowed from Giddens – in sociology had gone wrong, thus ending up in crisis. Bauman could have taken a more postmodernist stance by referring to sociology’s crisis as involving in part a crisis of representation, a move that
16 The sociology of boom and bust The Republic of Ireland’s post-Celtic-Tiger collapse has become the focus of a considerable body of literature, much of this focused on the institutional failure of the Irish state to regulate the banks and property markets, on the failures of Irish political culture and on a crisis of public morality. Sean O’Riain’s The Rise and Fall of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger: Liberalism, Boom and Bust offers a sociological analysis that is very much focused on the role of institutions. It challenges arguments made most prominently by Fintan O