Deals with the comparative and historical social science. This title focuses on a variety of questions relating to states, citizenship, and power, common themes examined with divergent analytical entry points and through deep knowledge of country cases as diverse as Russia, the United States, El Salvador, South Africa, and Israel.

This volume of "Political Power and Social Theory" includes a selection of papers exploring Obama and the Politics of Race & Religion. Chapters examine the complex dynamics of race relations and racial meaning in America under the Obama administration. The "Scholarly Controversies" section features a debate on Obama and religion in the United States. This volume will be among the first to critically assess the meanings of race and religion in America under the Obama administration, featuring controversial chapters by Phil Gorksi of Yale University and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva of Duke University,...

As economic stagnation freezes the globe; capitalism is increasingly questioned; war, revolution and political instability unsettles the Middle East; and President Obama's campaign for the Presidency looms, Volume 23 of Political Power and Social Theory reflects on these and related issues. Chapters in this volume discuss the meaning of revolution, the origins of neoliberalism in India, identity formation in a Chicago social movement, the Palestinian National Question, and the Black middle-class in the US. Additionally, in the Scholarly Controversy section, Fred Block questions whether the...

Postcolonial theory has enjoyed wide influence in the humanities but for social science, and in particular sociology, its implications remain elusive. This special volume brings together leading sociologists to explore the concept of "postcolonial sociology," with brand new postcolonial readings of canonical thinkers like Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and Robert Park. Chapters consider whether or not postcolonial theory is compatible with sociology; explore the relationship between knowledge and colonial power; and offer critical perspectives on the sociology of race and the...

Social theory and research has long faced the limitations of its conventional Eurocentric focus. The essays in this volume offer new thoughts and empirical studies for transcending those limitations. A continuation of PPST's previous volume on "Postcolonial Sociology," this volume, "Decentering Social Theory," questions old categories, advances new postcolonial themes in social science, and debates alternative theoretical paradigms. The "Scholarly Controversies" section contains a critical exchange on "Southern Theory" between Raewyn Connell and Patricia Hill Collins, Mustafa Emirbayer, Raka...

Is the United States in decline? If so, what are the causes and dimensions of that decline and is it irreversible? Will American decline be accompanied by the rise of a new hegemon? To what extent are that rise and decline merely concurrent processes, determined by forces internal to each polity, or are American decline and the rise of its competitors both manifestations of a single global dynamic? The essays in this volume address those questions by examining the rise of finance in the U.S. and worldwide, the U.S. government's actual industrial strategy, China's failure so far to challenge...

This issue of Political Power and Social Theory explores the changes in science associated with the rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s. The neoliberalization of science has complicated interactions among states, markets, and civil society, often in ways that challenge major assumptions underlying decades of research. The articles collected here break with older Mertonian sociologies of science and constructivist microsociologies of scientific knowledge to examine the mesolevel problem of the changing institutional contexts of "the scientific field" as originally identified by Pierre...

There is today a new interest in empires past and present. Scholars seek fresh ways of understanding a form of power far older than the modern nation state. Others see empire, not long ago assumed to be a mode of governance on the way out, as having a surprising new lease on life, and want to better understand the reasons why. This volume focuses on the interconnected formations of patrimonialism, colonialism/empire and capitalism. Leading scholars analyze patrimonial politics in empires in regions throughout the world, including the United States, Latin America, China, South Africa, North...

This volume covers the evolution of the chartered company; contributions employ comparative methods, archival research, case studies, statistical analyses, computational models, network analyses, and new theoretical conceptualizations to map out the complex interactions that took place between state and commercial actors across the globe.

In this special issue, we address what we refer to as 'perversity of the political' or 'perverse politics': namely, the assumptions political theory and movements, and in our specific case feminism, often make on behalf of their subjects, and how their subjects, in return, perform individual and collective contrariness, unruliness and resistance to what is expected or desired from their 'subjectivity'. Specifically focusing on the themes of 'false consciousness', multiplicity, and uneasy alliances, the papers collected here seek to empirically lay out a number of such 'perverse' moments, and...