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The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenth-century France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to state formation. Logistical activity circumvented patrimonial networks, disempowering the nobility and supporting a new regime of impersonal rule: the modern, territorial state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis in this paper suggests that when technology users define some kinds of machines as better than others for their work, they construct a scarcity of "good" equipment. This socially defined scarcity encourages users to struggle to get access to "good" equipment and to treat those with access to it as elites. To make this case the author uses participant observation data on film schools and student access to film-making equipment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how people gain authority over areas of expert knowledge and use this authority to claim the right to make decisions in small group situations. Students who enter film crews are ranked and typed as members both of a school and of a crew. They claim decision-making authority based on these ranks. Thus, depending on the social characteristics students bring to crews, the authority and decision-making patterns of these groups can vary widely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the author's views on the book "Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photo Works 1973-1983." With enormous grace and wisdom, photographer, Allan Sekula has written a book on photography that should be of great use to sociologists. Sekula is one of a small group of contemporary photographers who understand the photograph as a social object, made in historical time by persons interested in using photography to promote their ends. Sekula argues that photographs gain their meaning from their context in some form of discourse, and that this discourse is necessarily attached to some form of social struggle. He takes up this issue in five essays and five photo-essays. The introduction to the book and the first essay together function as a brilliant introduction to Sekula's unique vision of the photograph as a historical and ideological force. Sekula's ideas are surprisingly accessible to sociologists. Readers who feel that they could never read photographs will still be able to learn from this book.