Beck's Risk Society and Giddens' Search for Ontological Security: a Comparative Analysis Between the Anthroposophical Society and the Assemblies of God
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Global Political Ecology
Global Political Ecology The world is caught in the mesh of a series of environmental crises. So far attempts at resolving the deep basis of these have been superficial and disorganized. Global Political Ecology links the political economy of global capitalism with the political ecology of a series of environmental disasters and failed attempts at environmental policies. This critical volume draws together contributions from 25 leading intellectuals in the field. It begins with an introductory chapter that introduces the readers to political ecology and summarises the book’s main findings. The following seven sections cover topics on the political ecology of war and the disaster state; fuelling capitalism: energy scarcity and abundance; global governance of health, bodies, and genomics; the contradictions of global food; capital’s marginal product: effluents, waste, and garbage; water as a commodity, human right, and power; the functions and dysfunctions of the global green economy; political ecology of the global climate; and carbon emissions. This book contains accounts of the main currents of thought in each area that bring the topics completely up-to-date. The individual chapters contain a theoretical introduction linking in with the main themes of political ecology, as well as empirical information and case material. Global Political Ecology serves as a valuable reference for students interested in political ecology, environmental justice, and geography. Richard Peet holds degrees from the London School of Economics (BSc (Econ)), the University of British Columbia (MA), and the University of California, Berkeley (PhD). He is currently Professor of Geography at Clark University, Worcester, MA. His interests are development, global policy regimes, power, theory and philosophy, political ecology, and the causes of financial crises. -
Bridging Politics and Science: the Concept of Social Engineering in Sweden and the USA, Circa 1890-1950
Department of History and Civilization Bridging Politics and Science: The Concept of Social Engineering in Sweden and the USA, Circa 1890-1950 Carl Marklund Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to obtaining the degree of Doctor of History and Civilization of the European University Institute 5 November 2008 Abstract - Contents - Prologue EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE Department of History and Civilization Bridging Politics and Science: The Concept of Social Engineering in Sweden and the USA, Circa 1890-1950 Carl Marklund Examining Board: Prof. Bo Stråth (Helsinki University, European University Institute) - supervisor Prof. Peter Wagner (University of Trento, European University Institute) Prof. Alan Brinkley (Columbia University) Prof. Yvonne Hirdman (Stockholm University) © 2008, Carl Marklund No part of this thesis may be copied, reproduced or transmitted without prior permission of the author BRIDGING POLITICS AND SCIENCE: THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL ENGINEERING IN SWEDEN AND THE USA, CIRCA 1890-1950 Carl Marklund Abstract This dissertation aims to problematize the historical concept of “social engineering.” In historiography, social engineering is usually understood as the application of scientific theory to political and social practice. As such, it is thought to have characterized much of early 20th century expansion of public interest and state responsibility into previously non-politicized areas of private life, especially when deceptive and/or technological in nature. It has also been seen as an expression of mechanistic “modernity” and “technocracy.” Through a comparative and conceptual histoire croisée of social engineering this dissertation studies how this concept was “spoken” in Sweden and the USA circa 1890-1950. The comparison shows that social engineering rhetoric emphasized the role of human agency and voluntarism in social change, rather than social laws or mechanistic determinism. -
Capitalism and Risk: Concepts, Consequences, and Ideologies Edward A
digitalcommons.nyls.edu Faculty Scholarship Articles & Chapters 2016 Capitalism and Risk: Concepts, Consequences, and Ideologies Edward A. Purcell New York Law School Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/fac_articles_chapters Part of the Consumer Protection Law Commons, and the Law and Economics Commons Recommended Citation 64 Buff. L. Rev. 23 (2016) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at DigitalCommons@NYLS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles & Chapters by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@NYLS. Capitalism and Risk: Concepts, Consequences, and Ideologies EDWARD A. PURCELL, JR.t INTRODUCTION Politically charged claims about both "capitalism" and "risk" became increasingly insistent in the late twentieth century. The end of the post-World War II boom in the 1970s and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union inspired fervent new commitments to capitalist ideas and institutions. At the same time structural changes in the American economy and expanded industrial development across the globe generated sharpening anxieties about the risks that those changes entailed. One result was an outpouring of roseate claims about capitalism and its ability to control those risks, including the use of new techniques of "risk management" to tame financial uncertainties and guarantee stability and prosperity. Despite assurances, however, recent decades have shown many of those claims to be overblown, if not misleading or entirely ill-founded. Thus, the time seems ripe to review some of our most basic economic ideas and, in doing so, reflect on what we might learn from past centuries about the nature of both "capitalism" and "risk," the relationship between the two, and their interactions and consequences in contemporary America. -
LETTER to G20, IMF, WORLD BANK, REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT BANKS and NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS
LETTER TO G20, IMF, WORLD BANK, REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT BANKS and NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS We write to call for urgent action to address the global education emergency triggered by Covid-19. With over 1 billion children still out of school because of the lockdown, there is now a real and present danger that the public health crisis will create a COVID generation who lose out on schooling and whose opportunities are permanently damaged. While the more fortunate have had access to alternatives, the world’s poorest children have been locked out of learning, denied internet access, and with the loss of free school meals - once a lifeline for 300 million boys and girls – hunger has grown. An immediate concern, as we bring the lockdown to an end, is the fate of an estimated 30 million children who according to UNESCO may never return to school. For these, the world’s least advantaged children, education is often the only escape from poverty - a route that is in danger of closing. Many of these children are adolescent girls for whom being in school is the best defence against forced marriage and the best hope for a life of expanded opportunity. Many more are young children who risk being forced into exploitative and dangerous labour. And because education is linked to progress in virtually every area of human development – from child survival to maternal health, gender equality, job creation and inclusive economic growth – the education emergency will undermine the prospects for achieving all our 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and potentially set back progress on gender equity by years. -
Paper-8 SOCIOLOGY of GLOBALIZATION
MA in Sociology Paper-VIII Sociology of Globalization Author Prof. Navaneeta Rath Department of Sociology Utkal University Sociology of Globalization Unit-I: Globalization: The Historical and Social Context, Distinctive Characteristics and Dimensions: Economic, Technological, Social and cultural. Unit-II:Modernization and Globalization, Neo-Liberalism and Global Capitalism and Globalization and Nation State Unit-III: Global Institutions and Actors: World Bank, MNCs, WTO, IMF, NGOs Unit-IV:Globalization and Culture: The Ethos of Globalization (Individualism, Freedom, Consumerism) Cultural Homogenization, Hegemony and Dominance Impact of Globalization on poor and women UNIT-1 1.0. Objectives 1.1. Introduction 1.1.1 Origin of the Concept of Globalisation 1.1.2 Sociological Interpretation of the Term Globalisation 1.1.3 Theories of Globalisation 1.2 The Historical and Social Context of Globalisation 1.2.1 The First Wave of Globalisation 1.2.2 The Second Wave of Globalisation 1.2.3 The Third Wave of Globalisation 1.2.4 The Fourth Wave of Globalisation 1.2.5 The Fifth Wave of Globalisation 1.3 . Distinctive Characteristics of Globalisation 1.3.1. Borderless world 1.3.2. Liberalization 1.3.3. Free Trade 1.3.4. Extended Economic Activities 1.3.5. Globalization is universal, but not a uniform process. 1.3.6. Globalisation is a historical process. 1.3.7 Globalisation is both developmental and detrimental for the society. 1.3.8 Globalisation is a long term process. 1.3.9 Globalisation is an irreversible process. 1.3.10 Globalisation leads to hybridisation, homogenisation and harmonisation. 1.3.11 Globalisation leads to dispersion and diffusion. -
The Gross Domestic Product. History, Relevance and Limitations in Its Interpretation
Munich Personal RePEc Archive The Gross Domestic Product. History, relevance and limitations in its interpretation Georgescu, George 10 September 2016 Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/73644/ MPRA Paper No. 73644, posted 12 Sep 2016 17:48 UTC The Gross Domestic Product. History, relevance and limitations in its interpretation George Georgescu National Institute for Economic Research Romanian Academy Abstract. Despite theoretical and methodological improvements by national accounts framework revisions, not without disputes and confrontations of views, the growing complexity of economic and social phenomena under globalization circumstances has led to increasing difficulties in the design, monitoring and implementation of specific policies depending on GDP indicator. The paper focuses on the analysis of the GDP relevance and limitations in its interpretation, including a retrospective view. Some inconsistencies as regards the metrics of GDP (illegal activities, unobserved economy, self-consumption in rural households, owner’s imputed rents) are highlighted. Because the GDP does not take into account the impact of important factors of progress (depletion of natural resources, environmental factors, urban concentration and rural depopulation etc.) and does not reflects neither the citizens wellbeing (starting from Easterlin Paradox), efforts to develop new statistical standards in order to complement/substitute GDP with other indicators and/or building composite indicators that integrates various aspects of quality of life have been made, but without meeting a general consensus at the global level. In the end of the paper other derived indicators (GNP, GNI, AIC) are discussed and some considerations regarding the time horizon of Romania’s real convergence with the EU, including the accession to Eurozone are added. -
Factor Endowment Versus Productivity Views
Globalization, Poverty, and All That: Factor Endowment versus Productivity Views William Easterly New York University Prepared for NBER Globalization and Poverty Workshop, September 10-12, 2004 Globalization causing poverty is a staple of anti-globalization rhetoric. The Nobel prizewinner Dario Fo compared the impoverishment of globalization to September 11th: "The great speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty—so what is 20,000 dead in New York?” 1 The protesters usually believe globalization is a disaster for the workers, throwing them into “downward wage spirals in both the North and the South.” Oxfam identifies such innocuous products as Olympic sportswear as forcing laborers into “working ever-faster for ever-longer periods of time under arduous conditions for poverty-level wages, to produce more goods and more profit.”2 According to a best-selling book by William Greider, in the primitive legal climate of poorer nations, industry has found it can revive the worst forms of nineteenth century exploitation, abuses outlawed long ago in the advanced economies, including extreme physical dangers to workers and the use of children as expendable cheap labor.3 Oxfam complains about how corporate greed is “exploiting the circumstances of vulnerable people,” which it identifies mainly as young women, to set up profitable “global supply chains” for huge retailers like Walmart. In China’s fast-growing Guandong Province, “young women face 150 hours of overtime each month in the garment factories -
Beck's Cosmopolitan Politics
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Sussex Research Online A later version of this article is in Contemporary Politics 14, 2, June 2008 Beck’s Cosmopolitan Politics Luke Martell Abstract This article evaluates Ulrich Beck’s cosmopolitan global politics. I argue that areas where Beck sees bases for communal and cosmopolitan politics are structured by power, inequality and conflict. Beck has a conflict perspective on local responses to globalisation but this is not carried through to his global politics. There are issues that need to be tackled at a global level but I argue that this will have to be done on the basis of conflicting interests, power and nation-states as much as through global cosmopolitanism and co-operation. Keywords: Ulrich Beck, globalisation, cosmopolitanism, conflict, power. Ulrich Beck argues for global cosmopolitan politics with a co-operative and consensual approach over state-based and conflictual politics with a ‘national outlook’. This article focuses on Beck’s books Cosmopolitan Vision (2006) and What is Globalisation? (2000) and associated articles (eg Beck, 2000a, Beck and Sznaider, 2006). It is relevant also to his books on Power in the Global Age (2005) and Europe (Beck and Grande 2007) and, in parts, to other advocacies of cosmopolitan politics (eg Held, 1995, Archibugi and Held 1995, Kaldor 2003). I wish to argue that power, inequality and conflict, and a role for nations, are acknowledged by Beck but undermine his cosmopolitan outlook. Beck is important for his analyses of modernisation and the development of a ‘second modernity’. -
Living in and Coping with World Risk Society: the Cosmopolitan Turn
Ulrich Beck Living in and Coping with World Risk Society: The Cosmopolitan Turn – Lecture in Moscow, June 2012 – When a world-order collapses, then the analysis begins, though that doesn’t seem to hold for the type of social thinking social theory currently prevalent. With universalist aloofness and somnambulant certainty, it hovers above the currents of epochal change. Just think for a moment of the ‘cosmopolitical events’ that changed the world during the last 25 years – 9/11, the ongoing financial crisis, the ongoing climate change, the ongoing nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima, the ongoing Arab spring, the ongoing euro-crisis, the ongoing Occupy-Wall-Street Movement. All of those have at least two features in common: (1) they came and come by total surprise, which means: they are beyond our political and sociological categories and imagination; and (2) all of them are transnational or global in their scope and implications. From this follows my question: Is it true that today this kind of universalist social analysis [whether it be structuralist, interactionist, Marxist or based on critical or system theory] is antiquated and provincial? Antiquated because it excludes what is patent, namely, a paradigm shift in modern society and politics; provincial because it falsely absolutizes the path-dependent scope of experience and expectation in Western European and American modernization, thus distorting the sociological view of its particularity? It would be an understatement to say that European sociology and sociology in general needs to understand the modernization of other societies for supplementary reasons, in order to complete its world-view. It is rather the case that we Europeans can understand ourselves only if we ‘deprovincialize’ – in other words, if we learn to „Cosmopolitanism“ is a loaded concept, especially in the Russian context; it does not mean ‘unpatriotic sentiment and behavior’ as Stalin defined it politically. -
Contemporary Culture, Cultural Studies and the Global Mediasphere
1 Contemporary Culture, Cultural Studies and the Global Mediasphere INTRODUCTION: THE CONTEMPORARY SETTING In 1997 Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, was killed in a car accident in Paris. The driver was well over the legal alcohol limit and was travelling at speeds in excess of 200 kilometres an hour. While we might condemn the recklessness of the group, a global audience of around 2.5 billion people watched the laying to rest of the ‘People’s Princess’, making it the most watched event in all human history. Also in 1997 the highest grossing movie of all times, Titanic, was released; over the following decade the film earned around $US600m and reached audiences in 120 countries. Around the same year the annual earnings of the North American pop singer Celine Dion were $US55.5 million, although this figure is well short of the Rolling Stones’ tour earnings in 2005 which reached $US135m. In 2006 the annual earnings of movie director Steven Spielberg had topped $US360 million, which was about the same as the annual profit of global news broadcaster CNN. All of these figures, however, seem modest when measured against the annual earnings of the Fox Entertainment Group, which generates annual revenues of $US10 billion and holds around $US24 billion in media assets worldwide. Such immense sums have been generated through the expansion of major media cor- porations and the absorption of media audiences into global networked communication systems. Satellite, cable and wireless digital technologies have allowed media organizations to distribute their products across most areas of the world, from affluent urban centres to provincial villages in Suluwesi, Nigeria and the Amazon Delta. -
Revisiting Risk Society a Conversation with Ulrich Beck
Perspectives Revisiting Risk Society A Conversation with Ulrich Beck 2011 / 6 RCC Perspectives Revisiting Risk Society A Conversation with Ulrich Beck Lawrence Culver, Heike Egner, Stefania Gallini, Agnes Kneitz, Cheryl Lousley, Uwe Lübken, Diana Mincyte, Gijs Mom, Gordon Winder (authors listed in alphabetical order) 2011 / 6 2 RCC Perspectives About the Authors Prof. Dr. Lawrence Culver is associate professor in the Department of History at Utah State University. He was a Carson fellow from July through December 2010. Prof. Dr. Heike Egner was a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center from April through July 2010, and subsequently took up a position as professor of geography at the Alpen-Adria- Universität in Klagenfurt, Austria. Prof. Dr. Stefania Gallini is a professor of history at the National University of Colombia, in Bogotá, and was a Carson fellow from July through December 2010. Agnes Kneitz is a research associate at the Rachel Carson Center, and is writing her dissertation entitled Eco-Novels: The Concept of Environmental Justice through Nine- teenth Century Social Novels. Prof. Dr. Cheryl Lousley took up a position as assistant professor in the Department of English at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada, following her Carson fellowship from January through December 2010. PD Dr. Uwe Lübken is Project Director of Climates of Migration, a cooperative project between the Rachel Carson Center and the Center for Advanced Studies (KWI) in Essen. Prof. Dr. Diana Mincyte was a fellow at the Rachel Carson Center 2009–2010 and a fellow in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University 2010–2011. She is now assistant professor at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University. -
The Consequences of Modernity Anthony Giddens
The Consequences of Modernity Anthony Giddens POLITY PRESS Introduction In what follows I shall develop an institutional analysis of modernity with cultural and epistemological over- tones. In so doing, I differ substantially from most current discussions, in which these emphases are reversed. What is modernity? As a first approximation, let us simply say the following: "modernity" refers to modes of social life or organisation which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently be- came more or less worldwide in their influence. This as- sociates modernity with a time period and with an initial geographical location, but for the moment leaves its ma- jor characteristics safely stowed away in a black box. Today, in the late twentieth century, it is argued by many, we stand at the opening of a new era, to which the social sciences must respond and which is taking us be- yond modernity itself. A dazzling variety of terms has been suggested to refer to this transition, a few of which refer positively to the emergence of a new type of social system (such as the "information society" or the "con- sumer society") but most of which suggest rather that a preceding state of affairs is drawing to a close ("post- outside of our control. To analyse how this has come to modernity," "post-modernism," "post-industrial soci- be the case, it is not sufficient merely to invent new terms, ety," "post-capitalism," and so forth). Some of the de- like post-modernity and the rest. Instead, we have to look bates about these matters concentrate mainly upon insti- again at the nature of modernity itself which, for certain tutional transformations, particularly those which pro- fairly specific reasons, has been poorly grasped in the so- pose that we are moving from a system based upon the cial sciences hitherto.