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Illustrates how to use sociological concepts and theory in teaching about genocide and the Holocaust. Offers three examples to demonstrate how sociology can be integrated into the study of genocide and the Holocaust. Relates topics addressed in examples, such as gender issues. (CMK)

Reflects on the implementation of Paulo Freire's problem-posing method in an East Los Angeles College (California) course on the media portrayal of Chicanos. Examines Freire's pedagogy and its application in the classroom, and critiques the process. Describes recent work applying the Freirean methodology in college classrooms. (Author/LS)

Examines the organized contradictions linked to the simultaneous bureaucratization and professionalization of academe that restrict excellence in undergraduate instruction. Presents a general systems model that points out the need for a coordinated set of changes which, if institutionalized, could lead to an academic revolution. Responses by Lee Bowker and Zelda Gamson follow. (Author/LS)

Discusses using the critical perspective as a methodology to teach a college sociology course. Examines the failure of this approach and looks at the determinants of student apathy. Concludes that failure is unavoidable, given the structure of higher education and the intellectual level of most students. Harvey Holtz and Richard A. Wright respond to Gimenez's observations. (LS)

The 'Robodebt' scheme was an initiative pursued by the Australian Department of Human Services between 2016 and 2019 to increase the amount of money recovered from supposed 'overpayments' to recipients of welfare benefits. Drawing on the rich body of empirical material generated by the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme as well as journalists and academic observers, this paper develops an understanding of the affair from the perspective of the sociology of organizations. Particular use is made of a growing body of research in the organizational sociology of ignorance. Following an outline of the main features of Robodebt, the paper explains the significance of the conception of ignorance as more complex than the mere absence of knowledge in organizational life. It then examines the specifics of the way in which Robodebt casts light on the role played by systemic, wilful ignorance in the relationship between law, bureaucracy and politics. The paper concludes with some reflections on the senses in which Robodebt was a manifestation not only of a crisis, fiasco or scandal, but also of the normal operation of the 'will to ignorance' (Nietzsche) in organizational life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the establishment of a task force inside the European Commission at the height of the Greek crisis, known as the ‘task force for Greece’. By adopting a perspective centred on the professionals employed in this ad hoc body, I investigate its symbolic and political significance within the broader framework of European emergency governance. Through a detailed analysis of the ethos and profiles of its personnel, the article argues that the task force represented a shift in crisis management, representing both a gesture of support and a counterbalance to the costs of austerity. The findings are grounded in extensive sociological fieldwork, including interviews, sociographic data and the analysis of documents, offering a comprehensive understanding of how EU staff shaped the task force’s mandate and operations under conditions of limited material resources and considerable political pressure. This research contributes to the study of crises and of European bureaucracy by elucidating the dynamic relationship between emergency politics and bureaucratic practices within the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the encounter between bureaucrats and immigrants in immigration studies and the bureaucratization of immigrants' daily life in a small city in Turkey; refugee identity is constructed by incorporating some of the local realities, different responses to migration, social encounters, living together, and the reflection of diversity in urban public spaces in everyday life, the sociology of the city or the migration history, gains different aspects and contents in encounters with local or urban bureaucracy. This identity, shaped as a burden, ineffectiveness and waiting, becomes essential in the immigrant's self-definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There appears to be a mismatch between apparent incompetence in the world and the amount of sociological research it attracts. The aim of this article is to outline a sociology of incompetence and justify its value. I begin by defining incompetence as unsatisfactory performance relative to standards. Incompetence is thus intrinsically sociological in being negotiated and socially (re)constituted. The next section foregrounds how widespread and serious incompetence is. This renders effective sociological understanding crucial to welfare. The article then systematically analyses uses of the term in the British Journal of Sociology (a good quality general journal) to assess the current state of research. This analysis fully confirms the neglect of incompetence as a research topic. The next section proposes suitable methods for preliminary incompetence research addressing distinctive challenges like the stigma of being incompetent. These sections then allow incompetence to be better contextualised by other contributing concepts like power, bureaucracy and meritocracy. The final section justifies suggestions about directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the introduction of quantitative perspectives from the sociology of immigration into administrative departments for immigrant integration in Germany. Using Andrew Abbott's concept of professional jurisdictions within competitive ecologies, the article shows how statistical indicators enabled administrators to consolidate a lasting responsibility for the problem of immigrant integration within public administrations. In investigating administrative departments on the municipal and state level in Germany, the article highlights five crucial functions of integration statistics: They stylise integration as a problem amenable to bureaucratic intervention; they construct integration as an enduring problem that warrants the attention of a permanent agency; they offer persuasive force in securing a departmental budget; they durably redraw jurisdictional boundaries by creating a new client out of problems previously processed elsewhere; and they help monopolise a definition of integration realities among competing understandings of integration problems. The article thus extends recent research on the science-policy nexus in the field of immigration by highlighting the as yet neglected role socialscientific indicators play in securing a lasting jurisdiction for bureaucratic work in a competitive political environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bureaucrat-assisted contention in China is a type of collective action in which native-born local officials help socioeconomic elites launch or sustain popular action against outsider party secretaries by leaking information and sabotaging repression. Bureaucrats who assist local influentials are neither elite allies nor institutional activists. Instead, they unleash or support collective action as a weapon in a power struggle against ambitious, heavy-handed or corrupt superiors. Unlike mass demonstrations that are mobilized as a bargaining chip, bureaucrat-assisted contention hinges on a partnership with local elites who have their own grievances and pursue their own goals. Because it combines bureaucratic politics and popular action, this type of contention can help us understand underexplored aspects of political opportunities, framing, and mobilizing structures. In particular, it shows how participants in contention sometimes span the state-society divide, and how collective action can influence (and be influenced by) power struggles within a government.

This article discusses The Third Policeman through the lens of a dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment that is firmly anchored in the history of anthropological discourse on bureaucracy (Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss, Tambiah, Herzfeld, Graeber, Jones). From this angle, Flann O’Brien’s novel is examined as an aesthetic illustration of an essentially anthropological argument: although bureaucracy has been described as an eminently rational form of social systematisation, regulation, and control (since Weber), it also functions, paradoxically, as a symbolic site for irrationality and supernatural occurrences, haunted by madness, mystery, and delusion. The novel is intriguing partly due to its nonchalant, humorous entwining of seemingly incompatible imageries (in this case, magic and officialdom) – a strategy that proves effective not only for creating fantastic ambiguity, but also for reworking a predilect theme of bureaucratic fiction: the coexistence of rational and irrational modes of thinking, in an infinite circling around the absurd oddities of an incomprehensible Law and the impenetrable opacity of its higher powers.

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This article discusses the origin and nature of a novel type of revolutionary organization that emerged in the years between 1890 and 1914: the "party in arms." A party in arms can be defined as a political party that possesses its own military branch. During this time parties in arms sprang up in eastern Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, and Latin America. This article shows how the emergence of the party in arms was part of a wider process of modernization that played out over the course of the last two centuries. Revolutionary organizations developed from relatively simple to more complex and differentiated "bureaucratic" organisms, manifesting deepening and more sophisticated, functional divisions of labor. This was a global process. This article explores some of the sociological implications of these findings, touching on classical sociology, postcolonialism, and new global history writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents how a Constitutionally grounded effort to institute 'cross subsidies' for public utility payments gave rise to a set of numbers that never achieved the goal of cross-class solidarity. This legal based system lived on, in large part because the numbers were quickly adopted both in popular speech and by multiple institutions, in an uncoordinated manner. Scalar tensions are key to the story: the Colombian 'estrato' system for classifying residential properties (initially for differential utility payment purposes) has at its core a set of numbers that was designed as nationally valid: but the work of labelling all residences with one of the six numbers to produce zoning-like 'estrato' maps incites qualitative micro-local knowledge. Overall, we show that local knowledges of socioeconomic difference constantly clash with and undermine not only the initial ambitious plan to render cross-class 'solidarity' technical but also the subsequent efforts to propose more rational alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology is inherently reflexive. It deals with actors who themselves are constantly engaged in sociological reasoning. Concepts from academic sociology are thus prone to enter and affect the very dynamics they describe. The sociology of quantification is particularly attuned to such paradoxical effects of "reactivity," that is, measurements and categories altering observed realities. The article builds on these insights but extends them by adding one more iteration of reflexivity. Examining administrative integration departments in Germany that have implemented statistical indicators for measuring immigrant incorporation, it attends to a case where bureaucrats are themselves anticipating "reactivity" of the measurements they use. Integration officers fear that integration indicators may inadvertently reify and stigmatize the statistical category of first‐ to third‐generation immigrants, or "persons with a migration background." Consequently, they engage in various counterstrategies to offset such effects. Most notably, they launch a counter‐campaign against negative connotations of migration background that their own measurements are reinforcing as they frame migration background as an asset for society. The article argues that this is an example of second‐order reactivity, a phenomenon as yet neglected in the literature: Officers alter reality in reaction to an anticipated reactivity of their own integration statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lighting upon Weber as a history student in the late 1950s led to all round engagement with his work to the present day, beginning with rationality and bureaucracy, passing through appreciation of his synoptic vision of modernity, and arguing for the continuing relevance of his rationalization thesis. This emphasis on Weber's contribution to understanding the course of modernity led in the 1990s to pointing out that his approach to epochal shift provides the basis for understanding the global age. The ever-developing nature of his thought can be further illustrated in his studies of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses counter-terrorism intelligence cooperation between Britain and its mainland partners. In contrast to disciplinary assumptions whereby Britain is loosely connected to Europe, it argues that British intelligence has a European connection. This is supported by extensive ethnographic fieldwork with British counter-terrorism police liaison officers deployed in France and a reading of intelligence cooperation from a sociological perspective. In mobilising a Bourdieusian approach that focuses on the study of social actors and their practices, the article shows how British intelligence is embedded in European intelligence cooperation as well as the increasing place of law enforcement in counter-terrorism intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study of the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and of its relevance for contemporary sociology. Following the studies of existential sociology, this work wants to use the category of the practical-inert to analyze the construction of reality. Practicoinert is a notion coined by Sartre in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), outlined the unit of practical activities and material structures. This paper uses this perspective to analyze institutional life, bureaucracies, theoretical construction and rationality in the human sciences. Focusing the analysis in a comparison with Max Weber's perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2016, welfare recipients in Australia have been subject to the Online Compliance Intervention (OCI), implemented through the national income support agency, Centrelink. This is a big data initiative, matching reported income to tax records to recoup welfare overpayments. The OCI proved controversial, notably for a "reverse onus," requiring that claimants disprove debts, and for data-matching design leading frequently to incorrect debts. As algorithmic governance, the OCI directs attention to the chronopolitics of contemporary welfare bureaucracies. It outsources labor previously conducted by Centrelink to clients, compelling them to submit documentation lest debts be raised against them. It imposes an active wait against a deadline on those issued debt notifications. Belying government rhetoric about the accessibility of the digital state, the OCI demonstrates how automation exacerbates punitive welfare agendas, through transfers of time, money, and labor whose combined effects are such as to occupy the time of people experiencing poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that encounters between welfare bureaucracies and their clients have been reconfigured under neoliberalism to address the problem of "welfare dependency." Contemporary bureaucratic encounters therefore entail measures to activate clients' entrepreneurial/self‐governing capacities, and conditionality/sanctioning practices to deal with clients who behave "irresponsibly." Despite the dominance of the neoliberal model, recent research has identified a counter‐trend in the practices of housing services away from entrepreneurializing and punitive strategies and towards a more supportive approach. This paper examines this counter‐trend and its implications for neoliberal welfare governance. To do this, it presents findings from research into social housing governance in Queensland, Australia, where the neoliberal focus on welfare independence, conditionality and sanctioning has been tempered by a new supportive approach focused on assisting vulnerable clients to maintain and benefit from access to welfare/housing support. Following Larner, we argue that this shift signals the emergence of an "after neoliberal" governmental formation, wherein key features of neoliberal governmentality are replaced by, or redeployed in the service of, progressive initiatives that address neoliberalism's failings at the street level, but leave broader neoliberal policy settings undisturbed. We also challenge recent sociological accounts that construe supportive welfare practices as a function of an all‐encompassing neoliberal project, arguing instead for appreciation of the contingency of these developments and the progressive political affordances that they entail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses edvertising as a vehicle through which to examine autonomy and control for key agents in education when market-like reforms are combined with privately led management of schools. We begin by outlining the philosophical foundations of school choice from the perspective of autonomy and control, and then lay out the case of edvertising. Guided by Cribb and Gewirtz's theoretical discussion of autonomy and control, we explore degrees and types of autonomy and control for various agents in schools. We then examine the differences between levels of autonomy for key agents—schools, principals, teachers, parents, and the State—as idealized in the philosophical underpinning of market-based policies with the actual autonomy exhibited with the introduction of edvertising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay proposes to carry out an overview of the main contributions that sociology, political sociology and political science have made to the study of the October Revolution of 1917, and its consequences on what the Soviet state will then be until its collapse in 1991. The panorama of social and political studies in this field is in fact quite varied. In addition to well-known works, such as the works of Milovan Djilas or James Burnham, research deserves to be known and appreciated which, despite having had less "fame", does not for this constitute works of lesser scientific value, such as, for give just two examples, the work of Waldemar Gurian or, in Italy, of Bruno Rizzi. As part of this review, we proceed to a discussion of the works dividing them according to the main perspectives with which they have faced the study of the Soviet Revolution and State. These perspectives can be divided as follows: a) the debate between juridical sciences and political sciences on the classification and definition of the Soviet regime; b) the role of bureaucracy in building the socialist state; c) the debate on totalitarianism and the Soviet case; d) the role of the elites in the October Revolution and in maintaining the regime achieved by it; e) mass society in twentieth-century Russia and the use of its characteristics by the revolutionary elite. The essay concludes by noting that a considerable part of the studies in question are still not translated from Russian or other Eastern European languages, and tries to answer the question about why totalitarianism, at least in the West, has found most of the scholars who have dealt with it, intent on analyzing mainly the Nazi case in Germany, and not the communist one in Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the XVIII-XIX centuries, a unique situation is emerging - the construction of a career of dignitaries of the Russian Empire. During this period, the model «government-dignitary» prevails, based on the benefits of a representative of the government, which gradually passes over to the entire state-administrative structure «government-official». Traditions of favoritism create a unique type of person, which is simultaneously the object of state power and the subject that implements it. It was this factor that influenced the formation of modern bureaucracy as a whole. Today, the phenomenon of favoritism is comprehensively studied and is an actual topic for study in the modern plane. He is trying to understand and explain the representatives of various sciences: history, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, political science. Many issues related to favoritism of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries remained largely closed to the bulk of the population over a long period of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines tactics of resistance among Czech welfare state bureaucrats. I argue that traditional perspectives on worker resistance underplay the role of the employees in the formation of the resistance. The workers choose forms of their resistance on the basis of their habitus and the characteristics of the organizational environment. This balanced approach inspired by the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu helps to deepen the understanding of everyday employee resistance and workplace politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars have noted the disparity between Marxian approaches to macro societal issues and neo-Durkheimian sociologies of consciousness in micro settings. The first focuses on the real structures of society, the second on the social construction of reality. Theory of formal organizations, largely in the tradition of Weber, is a good place to attempt to link these major but divergent schools. Such linkage might occur from two directions: scaling Marxism down to the level of organizational practice, and scaling micro sociologies up to the level of organizational structure. For the first of these tasks, we can use special tools from the phenomenological tradition to reinterpret Marx's category of labor into that of the Lebenspraxis of everyday organizational life. For the second task, we may reinterpret ethnomethodological and symbolic interactionist studies. Though emerging from Durkheim's work on symbolism and ritual, and though ostensibly of discrete settings, these studies are in fact conducted within formal organizations. "Rationality," "legitimacy," or "authority" are structures of consciousness as well as features of face-to-face settings; as such, their construction can be reinterpreted phenomenologically as the praxiological foundations of organizational life, the organizing out of which organizations are constituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]