Notes from the Iron Cage

Theory: Assignment for Paper 2

2006-03-14T10:18:00.000-05:00

Below is the assignment for the second paper in Classical Social Theory. Please note: the due date has been changed from Friday, 24 March to Tuesday, 28 March. So there will be a bit of extra time. Please feel free to come to office hours or contact me otherwise with any questions, or for advice on the paper.

PAPER #2: DURKHEIM

Choose ONE of the following questions and compose a brief (4-5 pages) essay in response. Papers will be evaluated on the basis of the style, structure and reasoning brought to the argument.

Proper citation of sources is REQUIRED. The accepted format for citation of sources is the ASA format. The ASA Style Guide has been distributed to you and is also available online at:

http://www.calstatela.edu/library/bi/rsalina/asa.styleguide.html

Papers are due TUESDAY, 28 MARCH in class. Late papers will be refused.

In The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim argues that “organic solidarity” societies may appear to integrate individuals more weakly than “mechanical solidarity” societies, but that the dependence of the individual on the collective is, in fact, stronger. What is the basis for this argument? Given the social problems on which Durkheim concentrates most strongly (the breakdown of collective consciousness and the rise of anomie), is it possible to say that “organic solidarity” exists at all?

For Marx, religion, law and collective beliefs are secondary phenomena derived from economic relations. For Durkheim, they are the central, original organizing social facts. What is the importance of this disagreement in terms of developing an understanding of society? Are there any particular facts which Marx’s or Durkheim’s model is better suited to explain?

In The Rules of Sociological Method (W.D. Halls trans., Glencoe: Free Press, p. 82) Durkheim asserts: “In principle it may be postulated that social facts are more likely to be objectively represented the more completely they are detached from the individual facts by which they are manifested.” Why would this be the case? How does he illustrate this principle in his study of suicide?

In “Estranged Labour,” Marx argues that the main problem with modern societies is that individuals suffer from being subject to too much power by an economic system that makes them unfree. In Suicide, Durkheim argues that modern societies regulate individuals too weakly, leaving them isolated, anomic, and lost. Society cannot be simultaneously too strong and too weak – which one of them is right?

Today in class we will discuss Durkheim's sociology of religion, and we will have a general overview of Durkheim on Friday. Then we move on to Max Weber!

On crime and "zero tolerance"

2006-02-19T08:19:00.000-05:00

Having finished Martin Sanchez Jankowski's study of street gangs in Boston, New York and Los Angeles, it might be interesting to have a look at the feature today in the Boston Globe on the evidence for and against (mostly against) the "broken windows" theory of crime suppression (better known in New York under the label "zero tolerance"). It traces the theory through the career of one of its best known advocates, William Bratton, who headed police forces in Boston, New York and Los Angeles.

Theory: Bad Durkheim!

2006-02-15T09:33:00.000-05:00

Thank you kindly for your papers on Marx. I will try to get them back to you in quick order. As you plunge into the works of Emil Durkheim, some of you may be interested in some theoretical tourism. The town of Bad Durkheim is known for its wine festival, and also for its sausages, which can be found at the Wurst market. It also has mineral baths, the famous "grape cure," and for those of you who like that sort of thing, a casino. No matter how bad the feeling of anomie, there is always Bad Durkheim.

Organized crime: First paper assignment

2006-02-09T12:01:00.000-05:00

SOCIOLOGY 264: ORGANIZED CRIME AND CORRUPTION

First comparative paper

Choose any two of the books we have been reading this semester on various aspects of organized crime and corruption (at this point in the term, that includes Gambetta, Sanchez Jankowski, and Bourgois), and develop a comparison of the two. The comparison may be based on the theoretical or methodological approaches, differences between the types of phenomena being considered in the book, conclusions drawn by the author, or treatment of a more specific empirical problem. Questions that you may want to consider in developing a strategy for comparison include:

•What strategies are used by the author to gain information about organized crime? What are the relative benefits and drawbacks of these strategies?

•How is the research problem of overcoming secrecy and gaining trust approached by the researcher?

•How is the relationship between organized crime and the communities in which criminals operate and the institutions with which they interact conceptualized?

•What general principles are used to exlain how illegal activity is able to function?

•What elements of the “rationality” of organized crime are emphasized in the analysis?

•What is the relative contribution of each to forming a general understanding of organized crime?

This list of questions is not exhaustive – you can come up with your own – and you will not be expected to treat all of them in your paper. The list is meant to help you in organizing your initial thoughts.

Papers should be on 6 to 8 pages in length, and are due in class on Friday, 24 February (advance notice: late papers will be refused). Proper citation of sources is required, according to the ASA format. The ASA Style Guide can be found online at this location:

http://www.calstatela.edu/library/bi/rsalina/asa.styleguide.html

Papers will be evaluated on the basis of the style, structure, reasoning and quality of the evidence brought to the argument.

Theory: Online resources on Marx

2006-02-08T09:09:00.000-05:00

For working on your papers, you may want to seek some secondary sources outside of what you have got from the Edles and Appelrouth book and my lectures. Here are a few of the online resources on Marx that you may find most useful:

Reflections on Karl Marx: A biographical essay on Marx by Stephen Kreis.
Marx and Engels Internet Archive: The site contains a glossary of terms, and a searchable archive of all of the writings of Marx and Engels -- good for getting all of the ways in which a term was used, for example.
Entry on Marx from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: General presentation of Marx's main ideas by Jonathan Wolff.
Karl Marx's Sociology: A summary of Marx's ideas and their importance for sociology by Frank Elwell.
Lewis Coser's essay on Marx: The classic summary, from Coser's Masters of Sociological Thought.
The "Chicago Summary" on Marx: This is one of a set of notes prepared by graduate students in Sociology at the University of Chicago to help one another prepare for their qualifying exams. It is on the web, so they help you too.

There are many more resources available -- I've tried just to offer a list of some of the ones that I think are best. You are also, of course, free to contact me with any questions, or for suggestions.

Organized crime: On illegal markets, and Gambetta's conclusions

2006-02-07T11:14:00.000-05:00

First, with regard to illegal business: this is a place where Gambetta's distinction between organized crime in general (a group of forces joined together to engage in illegal activity, see 227) and mafias in particular (illegal organizations providing private protection to people engaged in both legal and illegal activity) is especially important. They are distinct groups in a relationship with one another. Mafias play a role in the regulation and “licensing” of organized crime. To conflate the two activities would be a mistake. However, there is a complicating factor: what Gambetta calls “the mafia's tendency to internalize key customers by turning them into members” (227). This might be thought of as a way of maximizing profit or enhancing regulation, or it might be thought of as additional protection for criminal activity, in the form of deterrence of law enforcement.

The strongest motivation for people involved in illegal activity to seek private protection: they cannot get protection any other way (this is underlined by the foolishness of the young person in Orem, UT who reported the theft of his marijuana to the police: reported by UPI here). The second strongest motivation has to do with the need for regulation of competition and the avoidance of violence.

There is another factor as well, having to do with both the potentially high profits to be gained from illegal business and the correspondingly high levels of risk: it is difficult for people wanting to set out in an illegal enterprise to get access to capital (230-231). Smuggling, drugs processing, and similar activities can be very lucrative, but they require a large capital outlay and banks, for obvious reasons, are not likely to finance them. Enter the mafia. This means that mafias agree not only to do the work of protection, but risk their credibility and resources as well. A consequence of this: there is a strong motivation for mafia groups to form partnerships with people involved in illegal trade. A further consequence of this is that the type of “regulation” involved is likely to take the form of a monopoly (232).

This behavior is a result of the very high level of risk involved at all steps of the process. To take the example of the narcotics trade, 1) it is complex, involving a web of suppliers, transporters, processors, intermediaries, and distributors in a loose network that spans the world; 2) there is a high level of instability at all steps of the process; 3) the expense involved is large; 4) there are no guarantees of quality; 4) the level of distrust among actors in the market is extremely high; 5) the risk of theft or deception is extremely high; and 6) the exposure to law enforcement is potentially very high. One of the reasons that much of the violence that we know about involves this type of trade is that violence occurs when arrangements go wrong. There are a lot of things that can and do go wrong in this type of business.

A “solution” that probably adds to the danger of violence in the drugs market: mafia groups will generally not “protect” a complete operation from beginning to end, but will instead “protect” one particular element, bringing several (possibly competing) groups into a single transaction (239). The potential for internal disputes to emerge is very high. This also contributes to the risk of discovery and prosecution (244).

GAMBETTA'S CONCLUSIONS:

1) The mafia “brand name” is an invaluable asset, enhancing reputation and contributing to mystique. This asset is carefully maintained, which helps to explain how there can be high degrees of both cooperation and conflict within the Mafia (245).

2) The degree of “high-level” coordination is low, and this coordination is inconsistent and weak. Effective everyday control rests with the individual “family,” of which there are many (245-246).

3) There are basic consistencies over time in terms of the size and membership of mafia groups, the bases of recruitment, and what might be thought of as “codes of behavor” (246-248).

4) One of the resources on which the Mafia draws for its survival is popular support (or at least toleration), which can be attributed partly to the fact that it supplies a resource which is widely regarded as useful and necessary (248).

5) It is possible to identify basic conditions which account for the emergence of mafias: distrust, labor supply, weak government, the emergence of new and unprotected forms of property. These conditions are by no means unique to Sicily (252-254).

Gambetta also has some predictions: in particular, it seems to him that there is a tendency for mafia organization to become more centralized, and he interprets this as a sign of weakness (254-255). It is possible (but not certain) that the large-scale prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s had a major impact on the mafia, and also possible (but not certain) that institutions whose symbolic acceptance of mafia activity (such as the Church) may be backing off (255-256). Whether these apparent signs of decline lead to major, meaningful decline depends on some factors that remain uncertain, such as whether the institutions of government will be able to successfully provide the protection which the mafia has been providing.

Organized crime: Illegal protection in legal markets

2006-02-07T10:53:00.000-05:00

Sometimes a “consumer” of protection can also be a “producer” -- that is, it can happen that prosperous businesspeople or professionals are also members of the criminal organization. But as a general rule, it seems as though this is a formal arrangement to regulate access to protection. Gambetta's chart (161-162) shows that for the most part, people who play a prominent role in mafia organizations do not play a prominent role in professional life – they do low-level jobs, run small businesses, or farm. There is a disincentive for successful private businesspeople to become Mafia members, as they would be compelled to distribute favors.

What is the form of “contract” between providers of protection and their clients? The evidence (as in many other cases!) is sketchy, but there seem to be signs that 1) contracts are negotiable to a certain extent; 2) they can be long-term or mafia groups can be hired for specific instances, with mafiosi preferring long-term contracts, and 3) there is a competition between mafia organizations and law enforcement over the provision of protection (164).

Are mafia organizations in competition with one another? It looks like the potential is always there, but competiion is dangerous: it can easily lead to violence.

Are they in competition with their clients? This would appear to depend on how powerful the client is. A powerful client has the ability to shape the relationship of the business with the mafia organization.

Some of the protection is of what might be called a “general” nature. This has to do with relations between criminal groups and the local population. So mafiosi will attempt to regulate street crime and some other behavior (166-167) – this is probably related to the need to cultivate if not the acceptance of the population in the area where they operate, at least their toleration. This function is limited, however, as it is unpaid (at least in the direct sense).

When protection is in the form of services to a business, it takes the form of “solving problems” (168). Gambetta describes the service as “dispute settlement” (169). It could also be thought of, to borrow a phrase from the vocabulary of labor relations, as “binding arbitration.” In this case the reputation (and threat) associated with the mafia organization is sufficient that parties in dispute will accept the side taken by the “protector.” This process may involve violence, but as we discussed in relation to Mafia “trademarks” last week, part of the goal of maintaining a menacing reputation is to make the practice of violence unnecessary.

The classic form of “protection” may be protection against crime, especially theft (171-174). Here the relationship is considerably more complex than simply intimidating petty criminals. Consider the following possibilities:

1.In order to make a plausible argument that theft can be prevented by protection, it may be necessary to demonstrate that theft will happen without it. This means that mafia groups have to either engage in theft or have arrangements with people who do.

2.Theft may be a source of income, since the return of stolen goods may involve a reward.

3.The burden of providing protection may be very high, especially since the punishments for committing crimes that violate the system established by organized crime are often severe (Gambetta has the gruesome descriptions, I won't repeat them).

Another form of “protection” can lead directly to conflict between mafia organizations: “protection against rival taxing authorities” (175). Sometimes, however, “protectors” and extortionists find common cause (176).

Forms of payment for protection: money is used, certainly, but also – exchange of favors, directing business a certain way, portions of profit, or partnership in a concern. In these types of cases, there is a continuity between cultural practices and criminal ones: the use or threat of violence may not necessarily be involved.

However: in many cases the effective distribution of favors requires the maintenance of contacts at more than simply an informal level. Contact in the business and professional worlds is eased by the maintenance of contacts with the political world (183-187). Gambetta postulates the existence of a “market for votes” (184) in which politicians are the buyers and organized crime groups the sellers, but the structure of this “market” may be very difficult to determine. It appears to relate mostly to the distribution of favors.

Generally about protection: it may (often?) involve false promises, extortion, and violence. But at the same time “such services are often useful to and actively sought out by customers” (187). Still, private “protection” is an unregulated business, and when it goes bad, the consequences can be severe.

One of these is the use of violence to achieve the mafiosis' own ends, at the expense of the client (188-189). The clients may also abuse the power of protection against their competitors (190).

Another of these may be that the regulation of crime is not limited only to its prevention (190-191). Involvement with crime allows mafiosi to extract profit both from perpetrators (as a cut of the profit) and from victims (as the price of protection) simultaneously. This temptation may be difficult to resist, for obvious reasons.

Another consequence (and possibly the worst of all of them) may be that mafia groups may use clients as a way of undermining their mafia competitors. Clients most often do not know whether their “protectors” are weak or strong, or whether they are gaining or losing strength. Customers are placed at risk by the fighting itself, and may be placed at risk by the outcome of the fighting (192). Keeping ahead of the game would require a customer to have knowledge about relationships between mafia groups that they cannot reasonably be expected to have.

What is it all about, fundamentally? Gambetta says it is about “arrangements that thwart economic competition” (195). The term for this in economics would be a cartel. Others might call it a racket. The goal is, by way of agreements between suppliers and clients, and between potential competitors, to protect economic operators from competition – for a price, which is less than the profit to be gained by such an arrangement. Gambetta defines these as “collusive agreements” (197).

Collusion is possible in lots of businesses. Mafias tend not to be the guarantors of collusion in businesses which have either 1) high barriers to entry, or 2) sufficient power to enforce collusion on their own (steel, oil, high technology...). Instead they thrive in fields where there is inelastic demand and low barriers to entry (food, clothing, transport, garbage collection...) (197).

Additional conditions: instability in markets. This may either mean that “protected” businesses need to secure entry into new markets (in times of expanding prosperity) or need cash to remain in business (in times of shortage). Either condition invites organized crime to enter as a “partner,” in which case they “invariably overstay their welcome” (198).

Consequences of cartels: “less efficient production, higher prices, and smaller firms” (Reuter, quoted 202). Absence of initiative. Large-scale construction contracts (214-220) probably offer the best example, where markets are kept “orderly,” but to the detriment of the consumer (in most of these cases, the government).

But, the big question: why was mafia control largely broken at the fruit and vegetable market, but not at all at the fish market? Gambetta's answers (211-214): 1) to a limited extent, policy (expanded market and more licences), 2) breadth and dispersion of supply more difficult to control, 3) credit out of the hands of “middlemen.” In any case, it is not certain that the control is broken.

Challenge of the week: Figure out Gambetta's taxi puzzle (220-225)!

Organized crime: Mafia symbolism and "branding"

2006-02-07T10:48:00.000-05:00

Much of the Mafia image revolves around symbols associated with mysticism (symbols borrowed from religious orders, secret societies, military history), mystification (unique bits of terminology, coded language) and styles of self-presentation (a reciprocal cross-feeding of local and global cultural resources with images borrowed from literature and art). There is drama associated with Mafia identity and Mafia activity, even if much of the actual activity of people involved in such groups is in fact quite unglamorous and dull.

There are two ways of dealing with this complex of symbolism. One is to take it all at face value, and to understand the mythology of the Mafia as a (realistic) representation of the actual thing. The other is to disregard the whole complex of symbols as an elaborate fiction. Gambetta opts for a middle path, arguing that “the myth lends force to a reality which would not otherwise be able to manifest itself” (129), that is to say that the image of organized crime is both related to reality (even if this relation is in many ways distorted or instrumentalized) and useful in constructing reality (in the sense that real mafiosi draw on and take advantage of myths).

The use of symbols is related to the maintenance of secrecy. It allows communication to take place by suggestion rather than directly, and the lack of detail plays a role in maintaining a “menacing atmosphere” (131), which may allow for threats to made more successfully than they might be if they had to be made directly, or if they had to made in such a way that the content of the threats was clear. The point: even if symbols are not “true,” they are not meaningless either.

A good number of the images associated with organized crime in popular thinking (a style of dress, sunglasses, paricular types of coded speech and gesture) come from popular film. Here the influence can be reciprocal: mafiosi may model styles of presentation after images in film, and in some cases (Gambetta cites news reports indicating that the Japanese yakuza does this, 135) may actively participate in the promotion and production of some of these images.

Symbol Number One: the name “Mafia.” It is not a word native to the Italian language or to Sicily. Gambetta's best guess is that it came through the Arabic language by way of slang. See his linguistic-historical discussion (136-137). He suggests, “the very word mafia was generated externally from a fictional source loosely inspired by the real thing,” but that also “the word can be said to have created the phenomenon” (137). Organized crime groups existed, but a playwright (probably inadvertently?) created a collective label and a brand name for them. Similarly with the popular label cosa nostra (literally: our thing), which seems to have made a journey from an informal expression of evasion (one of many) to a semiofficial label (the FBI capitalizes it as “La Cosa Nostra” and abbreviates it to “LCN”).

So in a sense “Mafia” or “cosa nostra” are corporate names. But they are different from the corporate names of legal corporations, because they cannot be promoted through advertising or protected by trademark. This means that any kind of “advertising,” which creates a resource of identity on which mafiosi can draw, relies on informal cultural means of diffusion. One implication of this is that usages by people outside the group are at least as important as usages by people inside the group (140). Insiders have a role, however: a successful “trademark” works if 1) it is adopted by them, and 2) if there is some means of maintaining exclusivity over it (141).

So how consistent and stable are the rituals by which possession is maintained? Any “semireligious” people in here: in my experience, when my family tries to do a religious ritual, we are always faced with the problem of people who are familiar with different versions of it, or who do not know it, or who know only parts of it. My favorite sentence in Gambetta's “trademarks” chapter is his quotation of a newspaper report from Hong Kong: “When police raided a Triad initiation ceremony recently they discovered that celebrants were conducting the ritual by reference to a description in the police manual” (149). This tells us two things: 1) as with other kinds of rituals, mafia rituals suffer from the erosion of content, meaning and knowledge that happen over time, and 2) the existence of the ritual itself may be as important as any content of the ritual; this is what maintains the collective identity of the group. Perhaps more importantly, the mystical (or mystifying) elements of the ritual establish the uniqueness of the world that has been entered by means of it.

What to conclude from this:

1) fiction contributes to the creation of reality;

2) one of the contributions of fiction was to establish a valuable “trademark” in the form of the mafia name and image;

3) the “trademark” is maintained on the one hand by successfully preventing others from making use of it;

4) and on the other hand by a system of mutual recognition of the right to use it.

This helps us in a couple of ways: it explains some of the interaction between fact and fiction in the social life of illegal organizations, and it also explains how a collective “Mafia” identity can be maintained, regardless of how loosely interconnected the groups of people involved in it might be.

Theory: First paper assignment (Marx)

2006-01-31T10:51:00.000-05:00

Here is the assignment for the first theory paper! I'll distribute paper copies in class today, and have a few pieces of advice as well. Some people may be interested in my grading standards -- I tend to follow the guidelines described in this document by the Bok Center at Harvard, which sets out criteria for A, B, C and "other" papers.

PAPER #1: MARX

Choose ONE of the following questions and compose a brief (4-5 pages) essay in response. Papers will be evaluated on the basis of the style, structure and reasoning brought to the argument.

Proper citation of sources is REQUIRED. The accepted format for citation of sources is the ASA format. The ASA Style Guide is available online at:

http://www.calstatela.edu/library/bi/rsalina/asa.styleguide.html

Papers are due TUESDAY, 14 FEBRUARY in class. Late papers will be refused.

A central component of Marx’s critique of capitalism is the category of species being, both as an ideal to which contemporary life can be compared and as a goal for humanity to reach. What is meant by the term? Why are humans not able to achieve species being in a capitalist society? Why does Marx contend that people will be able to achieve it eventually?
Marx argues that just as every previous historical arrangement has fallen victim to its own internal contradictions, capitalism will eventually do the same. So far, this appears not to have happened. It is possible that his prediction was correct, but that the “revolutionary moment” has not yet been reached – do you find any evidence for this possibility? It is also possible that Marx may have made some mistakes in his analysis which led him to make an incorrect prediction – do you find any evidence for this possibility?
In Marx’s argument, alienation is an inevitable consequence of the existence of private ownership of the means of production. How are these two factors connected to one another? Is alienation at bottom a moral category or a material fact?
Friedrich Engels eulogized Marx at his funeral in 1883, claiming “Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.” Assess Marx’s “law of evolution” and suggest some conclusions as to whether Engels was overstating the case or not.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Sociology of culture: Some definitions and models

2006-01-27T08:10:00.000-05:00

The big question, to which we do not necessarily have an answer, is this: What is culture?

There have of course been a lot of different definitions over the years, not all of them consistent with one another. Generally when somebody attempts to define culture, they are also attempting to specify the social role that culture has. Here are just a few of the best-known definitions (see more definitions, and a discussion, at this site):

Matthew Arnold (1869): “Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good. As in the first view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu's words: 'To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!' so, in the second view of it, there is no better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: 'To make reason and the will of God prevail!'”
Edward Tylor (1871): “culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”
TS Eliot (1948): “Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.”
Clifford Geertz(1973): “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs”
Raymond Williams(1958): “We use the word culture in these two senses: to mean a whole way of life--the common meanings; to mean the arts and learning--the special processes of discovery and creative effort. Some writers reserve the word for one or other of these senses; I insist on both, and on the significance of their conjunction. The questions I ask about our culture are questions about deep personal meanings. Culture is ordinary, in every society and in every mind.”

These are only a few of the definitions that have been very influential. A comprehensive review of all of the definitions of culture that are in use somewhere would probably be impossible, and might be pointless. A couple of things would seem to proceed from a comparison of these definitions. First, there is an implicit difference between elite and popular culture. Second, there is a lack of agreement as to whether culture is something added to everyday life or an integral part of everyday life. Third, there is an implicit distinction between culture seen as a way of life and culture seen as cultural production or the products of cultural creativity.

It would be difficult to argue that one of these definitions is the “correct” one. Each one of them highlights some aspect of cultural processes, and we will be trying to consider, if not all of them, then as many as we can. One topic of dispute that is centrally important to us: to what degree is culture a product of other social forces, and to what degree is culture an independent influence on social forces? That is to say, is the general direction of influence from culture to society or from society to culture?

An answer to this question is also, in part, an answer to the question of cultural meaning. Some of the general approaches to answering the question of where cultural meaning comes from and whether/why it matters:

“Reflection” theory, version 1 (Marxist): Cultural production offers a mirror of the social (material) world. “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their being that determines their consciousness.” What does this mean in practice? Fundamentally, it means that while people are creative, and can produce ideas, they cannot produce just any idea – the range of consciousness is constrained by the material conditions under which people live. So culture, in this view, is at best a source of information about the syptoms of the material arrangements in any historical period.

There's another element to the Marxist version of “reflection” theory. It implies not just that culture occupies a position, but also that it has a purpose. The dominant ideas in any period are the ideas of the people who are dominant, and which justify their dominance. That is to say, most culture has an ideological purpose (in Marxist theory, the definition of ideology is narrower than in everyday usage: as Barthes argues, the phrase “dominant ideology” is redundant).

One possible example: the popularity of crime films and television programs contribute to fear of crime, which is used to encourage the expansion of the size and reach of various types of law enforcement.

“Reflection” theory, version 2 (functionalist): Humans have a concrete need to understand and interpret the social world in which they live, and this need is met by cultural products. The interaction between culture and society helps to maintain a balance between freedom and constraint, and also offers a set of interacting “inputs” through which people in societies can recognize and adapt to change.

The basic assumption of all functionalist theories is that if anything exists (and especially if it survives) then it must fulfil some important purpose. The challenge for theory is then to discover this purpose.

A possible example: the popular film Brokeback Mountain combines symbols in a way that encourages public discussion, and it is taken both as marking a change in values about sexual orientation and as a way of trying to encourage the change to take place more quickly.

Culture as an intervention into society (Weberian): Cultural products come together to create an image of the world, which can be a framework for action that changes the social environment. People are motivated by their perceptions and understandings, and some of these come through culture. The prime example for Max Weber was in his study The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, where he used religious ideas to try to answer the question of why people would be attracted to a system that demands so much and offers very little satisfaction. His answer: the technological conditions for the rise of capitalism were around for a long time before capitalism “took off” -- what was necessary was for there to appear a group of people who saw capitalism as offering way of living that was consistent with their values. So culture is what determines whether changes elsewhere will lead to social change or not.

Possible examples may have to do with the bizarre shift of rock n roll music (from “revolutionary” music at the time of its origins to generational and cold-war propaganda), or with the consequences of technology (internet: revolution in communications or convenience for shopping?). The idea here is that cultural predispositions determine whether or not a new force will change a social situation.

The point of drawing these distinctions? One of the primary motivations is a more or less purely intellectual one: to try to figure out where culture fits into a larger social picture. But also a part of the reason has to do with the relationship of individuals to culture: we see it as a source of identity and value, argue over whether elements of it are good or bad, invest energy into determining whether it is “real” or “fake.” These are ways putting all of that effort into a context that can make it understandable.

Some additional resources on Gambetta and organized crime

2006-01-26T09:04:00.000-05:00

This document may be useful to some of you, both as an overview of theories of organized crime and as an indication of some of the uses of these theories in law enforcement. It was prepared by researchers for the use of the Law Commission of Canada, and it has a very good bibliography.

For those of you interested in the ways that Diego Gambetta is applying his unique methodological perspective to other questions, you can get a nice taste from his article "Reason and Terror" published in the Boston Review in 2004. Like the book we are reading tries to uncover the rationality of Mafia organizations, this one explores the rationality of terrorism. Interesting, challenging and controversial!

How to write a seminar paper

2006-01-25T16:47:00.000-05:00

For anybody who thinks they might have some use for it, Marcia Marlene Hansen has some advice.

Organized crime: Why did the mafia develop when and where it did?

2006-01-25T15:57:00.000-05:00

As interesting as this material is, it is also a sign of one of the greatest methodological problems in researching organized crime: much of the available information is secondhand, some of it is contradictory, some of the time projections have to be made from sketchy evidence, and the need for participants to control information and enforce “codes of silence” is not helpful to researchers or to law enforcement (nor, obviously, is it intended to be).

A point we made last week: the market for private protection emerges in a context of lack of trust. So one of the explanations for the rise of the mafia has to be found in reasons for a lack of trust. If we can identify those reasons around the middle of the 19th century in Sicily, there may be ground for drawing parallels to other environments.

One possible thesis – the failure of public administration to establish grounds for trust (“public trust”) creates conditions for the framework of trust to migrate to the private realm (“private trust), in the form of local and kinship networks.

This may explain the need for protection. But it does not explain why the need was answered in the unusual manner in which it was. Gambetta offers other examples (78) of regions where “the absence of a credible central authority” undermined the development of trust, but which either developed different responses or did not develop responses. So if it is easy to explain the demand, how do we explain the supply?

One factor: The availability of a labor force. This has to made of people 1) willing and able to practice violence, who are not necessarily available in every environment, 2) trained in the use of violence, which also “derives from a limited number of environments” (78), and 3) willing and able to subordinate the use of violence to the direction of an organization.

Second factor: these violent people must not be “already called for,” that is, they must be out of work. This is where the decline of the feudal system plays a role, since it put a lot of “tough guys” who had previously been in roles such as the military or private enforcement for large landowners out of work. See the long quotation from Leopoldo Franchetti on p. 79 of Gambetta.

Gambetta's argument in short: the destruction of the feudal system had two effects. One of these was the production of a lot of smaller landowners in the place of a few big ones – that is, an expanding class of people demanding protection. Another of these was, because of the instability of political power, a long period of conflict over who had the ability to exercise property rights. There was a large enough client base that providers of protection did not have to be subordinate to one or a few clients: they became autonomous suppliers (80). This explains why the mafia developed most in places that 1) were politically unstable, and 2) experienced the most economic development, creating a large number of transactions to be “protected” (see Gambetta's explanation, 83).

This leads to an interesting finding: although there is a popular perception that the mafia is connected to a culture of poverty and “backwardness” in the southern part of Italy, the evidence suggests something else entirely. The mafia did not develop most in the poorest or most rural areas, but in the most prosperous areas with rapidly developing markets (86-87). This economic approach makes more sense than an approach based on stereotypes about Sicily: why would a protection industry develop if there was nothing to protect?

Gambetta: “mafiosi [...] have regulated the town's wholesale markets by overseeing transactions, setting prices, running auctions, guaranteeing quality, enforcing promises, imposing obligations, apparently even protecting laborers from exploitation and abuse” (87).

It is easy to imagine ways in which the expansion of private ownership of farmland, on the one hand, and the development of urban commercial markets, on the other, created conditions that expanded the market for protection, especially when the state was not in a position to provide law enforcement and protection.

Another dimension here: the rise of the mafia is connected to expanding democratization. Here Gambetta (97-98) is talking about a particular type of democratization: he means that the field of political conflict shifted from one involving a small group of large private landowners who used protection from their employees as an instrument in their conflicts with one another to one involving a much larger assortment of groups from different parts of the rising middle class who used protection from independent operators as an instrument in their conflicts with one another. The key element here is that the providers were relatively autonomous operators.

So let's say that everything Gambetta has told us so far is true, that means we know two things: 1) the mafia is an industry providing private protection, and 2) it operates in a way that is autonomous from its clients. What we do not know about is the characteristics of the organization, or even whether there is an organization. There is considerable disagreement on this point, in particular whether the phenomenon under discussion is “a tight-knit secret sect versus a vague conglomerate of loosely related agents” (102). The evidence is not solid one way or the other, but a middle-range solution is possible, since it is clear that private protection groups exist and there is evidence that at least some of them are in contact with one another and coordinate their activities to a certain degree. Either extreme seems to be a mystification of criminal activity – either they are perceived as being capable of extraordinary coordination, or they are perceived as being completely incompetent. Most likely, people involved in criminal activity have the same capacity to organize themselves as people involved in any other kind of activity. Interests play a role: mafiosi stand to benefit both from the existence of a popular belief that they are well organized and powerful, and also from a popular lack of knowledge about how.

There is evidence of some level of stability and organization (104-105): the relatively consistent of number “firms” in Sicily over a long period of time (suggesting that there is some coordination and a low level of challenges to the system) and the relatively high average age of “bosses” (suggesting the existence of a “career path” and a process of qualification). A possible conclusion from this: incidents in which there are high levels of “gang violence” probably derive from the efforts of somebody outside the cartel of groups trying to alter the balance of power by force, and the efforts of the insiders to prevent outsiders from succeeding (107).

Evidence from the testimony of protected witnesses (110- ) also suggests a relatively consistent system of organization among “firms,” though not all of them hold to it with the same rigidity, and also that there are systems of coordination in most territories. There is some lack of clarity over exactly what is regulated by these local commissions (and how successfully). Unsurprisingly, it seems that the larger the territory in question is, the weaker the regulation.

I'll leave aside the question of rituals and rules in mafia “firms,” except to note that the style of presentation Gambetta uses seems to be derived from the fact that not very much is known about these things, but there does seem to be enough information available to suggest that rules are enforced unevenly, and that many of them, except the ones related to control of information, are symbolic in nature.

At our next meeting, more about mafia symbolism.

Theory: Putting Marx in context

2006-01-25T15:39:00.000-05:00

You have already read the introduction to Marx in the textbook, which is pretty good on biographical details and in identifying the most important theoretical concepts from Marx. What I want to do is to offer a bit of background on where Marx is coming from intellectually, and why people continue to regard his ideas as important.

Probably the most important piece of the context of Marx's thinking comes from the Enlightenment agenda of perfecting the world. A lot of 19th century intellectual life can be discussed in terms of the responses to two political revolutions:

the American Revolution, which was partly about responses in a colony to issues of imperial control, but was also largely justified by elaborating an ambitious project to create a representative democracy, one which would not rely on declarations of the divine right of a monarch to rule over everybody else. In developing this project, the people who led the American Revolution were strongly influenced philosophers like John Locke, who offered new (for the time) theories addressing the question of on what basis a government can be called legitimate, and what compels people to trade in their personal sovereignty for the benefits and constraints of living under a political authority, and by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who postulated a “social contract” detailing what individuals and governments can expect from one another in this exchange.
The French Revolution, which was also antimonarchical, but in addition to this brought in the category of “the people” as a political and historical actor, and could also probably be regarded as the first major political project to create a “nation” (as defined in terms of identity and language—French was not the dominant language in all of France at the time of the French Revolution). The major figures of the revolution often spoke in terms of projects of recreating the world in a revolutionary image, based on principles of “Reason.”

Each of these revolutions was subject to a lot of different directions, and a lot of stops and starts. There was also a large number of failed revolutionary projects in this period. But one category of thinking that became widely diffused was the idea of revolution, the sense that a combination of activity, participation and reason could be brought together to fundamentally change the world. Marx participated in these ideas.

One of the frustrations of the 19th century was that even with these political revolutions, it was not clear that the promise of democracy was going to be fulfilled. At the same time that the number of democratic states was increasing, industrialization meant that huge numbers of rural poor people moved to cities to take factory jobs, where they were often underpaid, concentrated in urban slums where the living conditions were squalid and unhealthy, and kept out of public life and politics. The widespread use of child labor, and also of slavery in some countries, made the new democratic dream appear more like a nightmare for many people. Marx was one of the people who began to interpret this situation to mean that there was a need for another revolution – societies had begun to get rid of their kings and queens, now it was time for them to get rid of their business owners, who he saw as responsible for the new form of misery.

So what is it that makes Marx so sure that the business owners are the problem? To answer that question, we have to make a quick detour into the philosophy of history…

First, tothe question of whether there is a purpose to history. Immanuel Kant wanted to find a rational basis for morality. It came to be formulated in terms of Kant’s categorical imperative. Here are two formulations of the "categorical imperative":

"Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it would become a universal law."
"Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end."

Philosophically, this represents an effort to build a basis of morality that relies exclusively on reason – morality is being conceived as deriving from the need for logical consistency (rather than deriving from a source of authority). Sociologically, it presents people wanting to act in a moral way with a problem – it is deriving a principle by postulating the existence of a perfect, ideal state in which actual people do not actually live.

GWF Hegel tried to resolve this problem by introducing an element of historical contingency. He argued that by way of resolving contradictions, human history is on a (predetermined) path of moving, in every period, a bit closer to truth, to the Absolute. What this represents is an understanding of historical development that is modelled on the processes of reason and science. So we may not be able to realize Kant’s categorical imperative just yet, but when history reaches its goal, Hegel says, we will be.

Marx was heavily influenced by these ideas – the world must be better, and people should be able to count on the logic of history to move it in that direction. But there are two important differences between Kant and Hegel on the one hand and Marx on the other: they thought that they had discovered something on the level of ideas, and that understanding and perhaps changing ideas would be sufficient to bring about the change that the world needed. One of the places where this motivation is apparent is in his "Theses on Feuerbach" from 1845 (these were written in response to the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach, who in his book The essence of Christianity, sought to find a material basis for religious values).

Thesis 2:
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

Thesis 7:
Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the “religious sentiment” is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual which he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.

Thesis 8:
All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

Thesis 11:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

To change it? For what purpose? Here enters the question of what human beings are and what they need. For all his insistence on material explanation, Marx was influenced by Romantic thinking. What he offered was the concept of species being: his response to the question of what is essentially human. We will talk about this when we read Marx’s “economic and philosophic manuscripts,” but this is a problem for reading Marx – “species being” is a central concept to understanding his entire critique of modernity, but he never defines it.

Some points on "species being":
1. what distinguishes humans from other animals is that they use work in order to create their own lived environment.
2. they do this through sensuous contact with the material world.
3. by doing this they enter into relationships with one another.
4. by entering into relationships with one another, they make history and create a social order.

The closest thing in a reading of early Marx to a definition of species being comes from someone else: a footnote by R.C. Tucker in The Marx-Engels Reader:

summarizing Feuerbach on “species being”: “Man is not only conscious of himself as an individual; he is also conscious of himself as a member of the human species, and so he apprehends a ‘human essence’ which is the same in himself and in other men.”
in R.C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (2d. ed.). New York: WW Norton and Co., pp. 34-35 fn 9.

The critique of modernity is built around this insight: capitalism creates conditions which separate (alienate) people from species being, and this has consequences throughout the whole social order. History says that this problem has to be overcome. We will discuss the problem in detail, and Marx's ideas about how it can be overcome, in the following sessions.

Sociology 107: Room change

2006-01-23T20:19:00.000-05:00

We got a bigger room for the bigger class! Starting Tuesday, our meetings will be in JC 001.

Seminar paper schedule for Sociology of Culture

2006-01-21T11:29:00.000-05:00

These are the dates and topics that members of the seminar chose. As you can see, there are some topics for which people have not chosen to present: volunteers are welcome, especially for 6 April and 13 April. We have no papers scheduled for the last week of the semester -- let's keep it that way, and we can think of a nice way to celebrate our final meeting. Presenters: remember to have your paper by e-mail to me for distribution by noon on the day before the seminar.

26 January: Fundamental problems in sociology of culture
Reading: Griswold, Cultures and societies

The “reflection” model of cultural meaning
Changes in popular culture (Gross)
Technological changes in communication (Tentor)

2 February: Popular culture and cultural division
Reading: Thornton, Club cultures

“Mass culture” and “subculture” (Domash)
“Authenticity” of cultural products (Lo Conte)
Performed and recorded music (Sunkin)

9 February: Subculture and the maintenance of boundaries
Reading: Thornton, Club cultures

The “mainstream” (Cedor)
“Sharon and Tracy” (Patarkatsishvili)
“Selling out” (Weiss)

16 February: Popular culture, identity and technology
Reading: Manuel, Cassette culture

“New” and “old” media technologies (Cutroni)
Centralization and decentralization of music industries (Sylvester)
“Piracy” (Rabinovici)

23 February: Regional and local culture
Reading: Manuel, Cassette culture

The ghazal and rasiya forms (Balila)
Cassette production and diversity of music production (Block)
Popular music and sectarian conflict

16 March: Cultures in contact and conflict
Reading: Paredes, Folklore and culture

“México de adentro” and “México de afuera” (Harrison)
Cultural contact in a border region (Hickey)
Sources of misunderstanding (Cunningham)

23 March: The transformation of cultural form
Reading: Paredes, Folklore and culture

Origin and development of folk cultural forms
José Mosqueda, cultural hero (Link)
Masculine identity and machismo (Berghegger)

30 March: High culture, popular culture, and cultural creativity
Film: The miners’ opera

Poverty, economic and cultural creativity (Washington)
Participating in the film and play (Dodge)
Comparative cultural strategies (Ng)

6 April: Culture, politics and the avoidance of politics
Reading: Eliasoph, Avoiding politics

“Close to home” and “for the children”
The “volunteers” and “politics”
The “buffaloes” and public life

13 April: Culture, engagement and disengagement
Reading: Eliasoph, Avoiding politics

The production of “cynical solidarity”
Maintaining and crossing boundaries around the “public sphere”
The “cycle of political evaporation”

20 April: Culture, social change and the “underground”
Reading: Szemere, Up from the underground

What factors made rock music “political” (Garrett)
Hungarian musicians and “antipolitics” (Ventola)
Attali: “Not the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future”

27 April: The “underground” surfaces
Reading: Szemere, Up from the underground

The “pop machinery” in post-Communist Hungary
Memorializing the “countercultural past”
Gender and culture as “rebellion”

Technical update for theory course

2006-01-21T10:56:00.000-05:00

Sociology 107 now has 29 people in it, and no more people will be added. This is over the enrollment cap, and it is also more than our room can hold, so I am asking for a new classroom. Watch for notices here on the question of our new home.

Classical theory: Introductory notes

2006-01-17T21:34:00.000-05:00

Periodically I will be posting short summaries of some of the main points covered in class on a given day. These notes may or may not bear any resemblance to what is actually said or done in class. I will not be posting general lecture notes on a regular basis, as these are telegraphic notes to myself which would probably be of very limited use to anybody else. --EDG

A lot of people approach the prospect of a theory course with some reservations! Old, boring, technical, difficult, not based on facts … if by the end of the term some of you come to see how exciting theory is, I will feel like I have achieved my purpose.

A baseline definition: theory has two purposes (see textbook, p. 3): 1) to explain and predict phenomena, and 2) to produce hypotheses that can be tested. Maybe that does not sound very exciting by itself! But the interesting stuff in any text is sometimes not apparent at first glance. What I think is interesting here is what is hiding behind a proposition when we are talking about societies. It means:

Social facts can be treated like other facts, and it is possible and worthwhile to develop explanations for them.
However different societies or parts of societies may be from one another, they can be compared, across space and time. They are not mysterious.
Even if it is not possible to know what will happen in the future, people who know enough about the past and present can try to recognize patterns and suggest predictions.
Maybe most of all, facts do not speak for themselves, but have meaning only in a context: where they appear and how they are organized. Different suggestions about what the context is (Goffman called this “the definition of the situation”) will give different weights and different values to different facts.

What a lot of this amounts to is a claim that social facts can be treated the way physical science approaches physical facts, or biological science approaches biological facts. Now, a lot of people find this claim objectionable – after all, people are not the same as cells, rocks or vectors. Besides this, there are objections about claiming to achieve a level of certainty that cannot possibly be achieved, and also objections that the level of knowledge that natural or physical scientists have cannot be reproduced by “the science of society” because such things as experiments would also be impossible or so grossly unethical that it would be hard to conceive of such a thing.

Well, fair enough. Let’s say that “social science,” as we like to call it, might be a flattering image but cannot and probably should not be achieved as a fact. There are some contours of science that are simply not available to us. But maybe we need to conceive of science in a different way – not the pursuit of certainty and mastery, but the pursuit of understanding. The term that is used in German is broader than the one used in English: Wissenschaft might be broken down as “making knowledge,” and in usage it refers to the organized pursuit of understanding. This could be the kind of science we are after – somewhere in between precise measurement or manipulation on the one hand, and guesswork or the blind application of ideological principles on the other.

What this might do is allow us a way of approaching the “big questions” so that we can suggest answers.

(one big question: why were so many people in the 19th century wrong in thinking that as modernity advanced, religion would disappear?)
(another big question: how will societies around the world change when oil becomes a scarce and expensive commodity?)
(another question: how will the distribution of political power in the US change as the racial and ethnic composition of the population changes?)

The material we will be reading this term comes from a specific place and period: Europe from the middle of the 19th to the early 20th century. This is conventionally thought of as "classical " theory’s “moment”: an age of revolution(s). Let's try to put this into context.

The first original theoretical idea any human came up with was probably: “that’s the way it is.” It was the principal explanation for most social facts during most of human history. Since “the way it is” seemed to last so long and be so unlikely to change (and since the alternative was often complete breakdown or disorder!), asking why “it” was the way it was seemed beside the point. For those who insisted on questioning, there were always religious principles (theoretical proposition: the system of power in which humans are subject to other humans is a logical extension of the system of power in which all humans are subject to divine forces) to rely upon.

One of the reasons this began to break down was because of changes in intellectual life. Science began to develop to the point that things that seemed to be mysterious began to appear to have rational explanations. Philosophy developed to the point that it challenged the authority of religion as a source of truth, and became capable of proposing alternatives.

But talking about changes in intellectual life explains only so much. It is not always possible to account for ideas solely in terms of other ideas. At some point that comes to look less like sociological explanation and more like fantasy. These intellectual developments – changes in the ideas that people had available to them – did not happen in a vacuum but happened because there were changes in the way people lived.

The period is often called the age of revolutions: political; industrial; communication and travel; secular; urban.

What can we say about these revolutions? They produced tremendous hope (everything can be changed and made right) and they also produced tremendous fear (everything that we know is slipping away). In many cases, they meant that the world was fundamentally transformed over the course of the lifetime of an ordinary individual. Marx described this in the sentence: “all that is solid melts into air.”

This is one possible definition of what makes modern society different from traditional society: traditional society, for all its limitations, offered people certainty and security; modern society produced uncertainty and permanent anxiety. That would be a fairly pessimistic definition. It would imply that people experiencing this are looking for answers to the question of what happened to them, what are the new rules, and what it all means.

It would also be possible to offer another definition: traditional society, in all its seeming permanence, imposed limitations on people and seemed stagnant. Modern society seemed to offer the hope that through knowledge and reason, everything could be understood, human arrangements could be made rational and beneficial, problems could be solved.

One of the fundamental insights to come out of the rise of reason as the deciding factor in knowledge is that what people thought for many years was inevitable, the result of divine will or nature, was really the result of the kinds of arrangements that developed between people – and that these arrangements can and do change. That is to say, people began to realize that there seemed to exist something independent and powerful called society. They hoped that this could be understood using the same principles that science was beginning to use to understand everything else. The first person to use the word sociology was a philosopher, Auguste Comte, who proposed that if the rules according to which arrangements worked could be understood, then it would be possible to understand how they change and it would also be possible to understand how to intervene in order to change them for the better. But sociology was not the first term he used: the first time out, he called this new science he proposed social physics. The term was rejected, probably for good reason. But it remains useful because it implies that there is some kind of motion in question. Comte argued that social physics had two subfields: social statics (why social arrangements tend to be stable and to successfully reproduce themselves) and social dynamics (why social arrangements change or die out and new ones develop). Nearly nobody reads or cites Comte anymore or uses these terms, but let me suggest that they can be useful to keep in mind as a source of questions when you look at the works of the theorists we are reading: what are their answers to the question of social statics and to the question of social dynamics?

Another general question that might be posed is this: if people and societies change, is there anything that can be thought of as permanent? Odd as it may sound, religion has always offered some sort of answer to this question. It postulated that the moral and spiritual life of humans predates and outlives the material constraints under which they live every day. There are probably two ways to try to answer this question without relying on religion. The biological answer would involve looking backward and talking about origins and materials: what humans are made of, what they desire, what impulses and instincts they have. This leads to considering humans as individuals who live outside of history. At least one version of the sociological answer would involve looking forward and talking about what humans can hope for in the future based on what we know so far.

A point about the transformation from traditional to modern society: although this move is usually thought of in terms of progress, it did not benefit everybody or delight everybody. One of the central questions of sociological theory is what are the problems of modern life? Often the answer is posed in terms of a postulate about human nature – humans need something that modern life is not providing. Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber offered very different answers to this question, which we will be exploring in detail over the semester.

Organized crime: Introductory notes

2006-01-17T11:41:00.000-05:00

Periodically I will be posting short summaries of some of the main points covered in class on a given day. These notes may or may not bear any resemblance to what is actually said or done in class. I will not be posting general lecture notes on a regular basis, as these are telegraphic notes to myself which would probably be of very limited use to anybody else. --EDG

It is difficult to examine organized crime in an empirical and analytic manner, because the approach is in some ways constructed in advance by two very popular discourses: the discourse of moral panic and the discourse of exoticism. One thing this tells us is that organized crime has an important presence in both politics and culture. These discourses do not necessarily help much with understanding, however, since both of them come “already equipped” with a way of understanding the problem.

In this course we will not ignore the political and cultural elements present in the discourses that were just mentioned: they are important factors in the social life of organized crime. But the emphasis will be more on some other aspects of organized crime that may be equally important:

Organized crime as a business
Organized crime as a daily activity
Organized crime as an element in the lives of neighborhoods and local communities
Organized crime as a consequence of and competitor with governments
Organized crime as an international phenomenon

What we want to find out is how criminal organizations operate, who participates in them and why, what the people who participate in them do, how they interact with other institutions, and what this all means.

Corruption is a phenomenon that is sometimes related to organized crime and sometimes not related. One of the questions worth addressing is the degree to which the activities of legal and illegal organizations resemble one another, and ways in which the two worlds intersect.

A distinction worth making at the beginning: when we talk about groups engaged in illegal activity, it is useful to label these as criminal organizations. These are profit-making enterprises similar to nearly any other business, seeking to make money by selling a product. What distinguishes them from other businesses is that the product that they sell is illegal.

This has consequences for the way that business is conducted. Any lawyer will tell you that the basic element of any contract is trust, but that if trust is violated, the institutions of law are available to enforce the provisions of the contract. This applies only to legal businesses: illegal businesses do not have access to institutions of the law to enforce their contracts. So in order to assure that their business can be conducted and agreements maintained, they seek out private protection. The institutions that provide provide private protection are referred to generally as mafias (this is derived from the popular name for a variety of groups operating in or originating from Sicily, but there are obviously other organizations of the same type). Of course, there are many situations in which businesses whose activity is not illegal may also want or be compelled to use private protection. Both illegal businesses and mafias are forms of organized crime, but they play different roles in the organized crime system.

This is of course not to say that mafias are simply private versions of institutions like police and courts. They are not subject to the same sort of regulation and control, and very often compete both with legal institutions and with other illegal organizations for control of the protection market. But to the degree that mafias do provide (however imperfectly and sometimes violently) a service that provides some benefit, this may go some way toward explaining both why some people participate in their activities voluntarily, and also why such organizations are to some level tolerated both by legal institutions and by communities. That is not to say that the consequences of organized crime are in any way positive for the communities in which such organizations operate, of course.

This approach will be developed in some detail by Diego Gambetta in his study of the Sicilian mafia. While not arguing that the mafia is in any way a legal or legitimate organization, he argues that it operates according to rules and by a rational logic. Read Part I of Gambetta for Friday's class, and we will discuss his arguments further then.

Students wanting to add Sociology 107

2006-01-16T10:10:00.000-05:00

A note to any students wanting to add Sociology 107:

According to the registrar's office, the course is full. Judging from the number of people who have communicated with me, there are at least ten people wanting to add this course. Obviously not all of them can be admitted. Nobody will be admitted before beginning of the term. On the first day, it will be possible to see whether spaces have opened up. Seats in excess of the enrollment cap will go only to Sociology majors. The priorities for admission into the course are:

1. 4th year Sociology majors (there should not be any of these)
2. 3rd year Sociology majors
3. 2nd year Sociology majors
4. 3rd and 4th year Sociology minors
5. 2nd year Sociology minors
6. 1st year students, non-majors and non-minors

Please note: students who are registered but do not attend the first session will be dropped. Students who want to add can only get a place on the list if they attend the first session. As the course is offered every semester, those students who are not admitted will have another opportunity in the fall.

Syllabus for Sociology 231, Sociology of Culture

2006-01-11T14:53:00.000-05:00

The syllabus for Sociology 231 (crosslisted as Communication 230) is now ready, and can be downloaded here. This file is made available through the RapidShare file hosting service, which is a free service. However, they do have a commercial element: the interface will ask whether you want a free or a "premium" dowload. You want a free one, of course.

Syllabus for Sociology 264, Organized Crime and Corruption

2006-01-10T16:25:00.000-05:00

The syllabus for Sociology 264 is now ready, and can be downloaded here. The same advice applies as for students in theory: the file is made available through the RapidShare file hosting service, which is a free service. However, they do have a commercial element: the interface will ask whether you want a free or a "premium" dowload. You want a free one, of course.

Syllabus for Sociology 107, Classical Sociological Theory

2006-01-09T14:25:00.000-05:00

The syllabus for Sociology 107 is now ready, and the document can be downloaded here. The file is made available through the RapidShare file hosting service, which is a free service. However, they do have a commercial element: the interface will ask whether you want a free or a "premium" dowload. You want a free one, of course.

A question on grading

2006-01-05T23:21:00.000-05:00

Weiqi Gao asks whether this exam answer ought to get full credit.

I say the answer is accurate, but probably never appeared on an exam.

Grades for Sociology 136

2005-12-31T07:24:00.000-05:00

Students in Sociology 136, Effects of Mass Media: your grades are in, and your exams will be available for you to pick up in the sociology department office. And a happy new year to anyone who may be reading!

Grades for Sociology 107

2005-12-29T16:46:00.000-05:00

Students in Sociology 107, Classical Theory: the grades for Fall 2005 have been submitted, and your final papers will be available to pick up in the sociology department office.

Book for Classical Sociological Theory, Spring 2006

2005-12-09T14:49:00.000-05:00

There is only one book required for Classical Sociological Theory (Sociology 107) for Spring semester 2006. It is available at the Clark University Bookstore, and can of course also be acquired from any other source, and is available at the library reserve desk. It is:

Laura Desfor Edles and Scott Appelrouth (eds.), Sociological Theory in the Classical Era: Text and Readings. Pine Forge Press, 2004.
ISBN: 0761928022

A syllabus will follow in early January.

Books for Organized Crime and Corruption, Spring 2006

2005-12-09T14:36:00.000-05:00

The following books have been ordered for Organized Crime and Corruption (Sociology 264, crosslisted under the same number in Law and Society and Ethics and Public Policy) for the coming semester. They are available at the Clark University Bookstore, but can of course also be ordered from any other source, and are also available at the library reserve desk:

Phillipe Bourgois, In Search of Respect : Selling Crack in El Barrio (2nd edition). Cambridge University Press, 2002 (ISBN: 0521017114)

H. Richard Friman and Peter Andreas (eds.). The Illicit Global Economy and State Power. Rowman and Littlefield, 1999 (ISBN: 084769304X)

Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection. Harvard University Press, 1996 (ISBN: 0674807421)

Stephen Kotkin and Andras Sajo (eds.), Political Corruption in Transition: A Sceptic's Handbook. Central European University Press, 2002 (ISBN: 9639241474)

Martin Sanchez-Jankowski, Islands in the Street: Gangs and American Urban Society. University of California Press, 1992 (ISBN: 0520074343)

Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism. Cornell University Press, 2002 (ISBN: 0801487781)

A syllabus will follow in early January, which will also include additional articles.

Books for Sociology of Culture, Spring 2006

2005-12-09T14:26:00.000-05:00

The following books have been ordered for Sociology of Culture (Sociology 231, Communication and Culture 230) for the coming semester. They are available at the Clark University Bookstore, but can of course also be ordered from any other source, and are also available at the library reserve desk:

Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics : How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life. Cambridge UP, 1998
ISBN: 052158759X

Wendy Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World (second edition). Pine Forge Press, 1994
ISBN: 0761930485

Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture : Popular Music and Technology in North India. U of Chicago Press, 1993
ISBN: 0226504018

Américo Paredes, Folklore and Culture on theTexas-Mexican Border. U of Texas Press, 1995
ISBN: 0292765649

Anna Szemere, Up from the Underground: The Culture of Rock Music in Postsocialist Hungary. Pennsylvania State U Press, 2001
ISBN: 0271021330

Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Wesleyan UP, 1996
ISBN: 0819562971

A syllabus will follow in early January.

(Re)introducing this blog

2005-12-09T14:18:00.000-05:00

This weblog began as an experiment, to allow me to share materials and discussions with students in my Effects of Mass Media course in Fall 2005. Now it is being revamped as a general tool to allow communication involving me and all of my undergraduate students. Here you will find notes and reminders, reading lists, course syllabi, articles I have run across, assignments, and any other communication related to my courses or university-related issues. One of the best effects of this kind of technology in the last semester was that I was able to almost eliminate the copying and distribution of paper, with all of its waste and risk of loss.

If you are one of my students, bookmark the site and check it regularly. Announcements appear here first. If you are not one of my students, feel free to read and follow. Comments are welcome, but I have turned on the moderation feature, so they come to me for review before they appear on the site.

Anybody who is interested in Balkan societies and cultures is welcome to visit my other site, East Ethnia.

Paid propaganda in Iraqi newspapers

2005-12-02T18:12:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Nick for providing this item. The Senate Armed Services Committee is investigating a report that the US military has been paying newspapers in Iraq to plant stories in their editions. Apparently "stories written by 'information operation'' troops were secretly placed with media outlets in Iraq through a Washington-based defense contractor, Lincoln Group." Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, spokesman for the US military in Balghdad, defends the operation, claiming, "We do empower our operational commanders with the ability to inform the Iraqi public, but everything we do is based on fact not based on fiction'' Laurie Adler, speaking for the Lincoln Group, claims the company "can't discuss the contract but everything the Lincoln Group put out was truthful and factual.'' Meanwhile, the AP reports that Sen John Warner, chair of the Armed Services Committee, is not satisfied with the explanations he has got from the military, and Pentagon spokespeople are themselves not certain that the operation is legal. Sen Edward Kennedy is more categorical, arguing that the operation ''speaks volumes about the president's credibility gap. If Americans were truly welcomed in Iraq as liberators, we wouldn't have to doctor the news for the Iraqi people.''

Spy software on Sony CDs

2005-11-12T10:00:00.000-05:00

The Sony Corporation wants to know what you are liestening to, whether you are copying it, and where you are. So they are finding out. This seems to be an experimental effort, so whether it becomes practice will probably depend on the degree to which it provokes lawsuits, boycotts and outrage. More detail at Crooked Timber.

Update: Sony backs off.

Ban on foreign films in Iran

2005-10-26T21:01:00.000-04:00

In an effort to wipe out "corrupt Western culture," Iran is banning foreign films. This is a move to reverse the easing of cultural restrictions which was initiated by the previous president, Mohammad Khatami. People do still have satellite antennas, though, The Guardian reports:

"Under President Khatami, Iran's 70 million citizens, more than half of whom are under 30, enjoyed growing social and political freedoms and were exposed to western popular culture through satellite television. The dishes are officially banned but tolerated by authorities. Many residents in Tehran hide them under tarpaulins or disguise them as air-conditioning units."

There seems to be big disjunction between what the government wants and what the society tolerates. Bringing back strict censorship is meant to control this disjunction, but will probably make it stronger.

BBC Arabic language TV service

2005-10-25T11:18:00.000-04:00

The BBC has announced that it is launching an Arabic-language TV station, which will broadcast 12 hours a day. They have received a grant from the Foreign Office to cover the cost, but they will also be shutting down the language services in Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak, Slovene and Thai. While Nigel Chapman, director of the BBC World Services, declares the success of the outgoing programs ("It is acknowledged that their presence has contributed to the building of freedoms now enjoyed by their citizens. We believe this will be a lasting legacy.") and expects a similar success for this large new venture, not everyone agrees. The Bectu broadcasting union warns, "The decision will create a perception abroad that the BBC World Service is working to a government agenda." It will also probably compete with the Qatar-based Al Jazeera, which is itself planning to launch a global English-language service.

Notes on concentration of ownership

2005-10-21T17:37:00.000-04:00

This doesn't necessarily happen all the time, but it's an interesting little tidbit: identical editorials appearing in newspapers around the country on the same day. All of the papers involved are owned by Freedom Communications, Inc., although they go to different lengths to disguise this fact in their disclosures. This is not the first venture that Freedom Communications has made into what it calls "joint content." But syndicated cooking and advice columns are one thing, and control of the editorial page is in a different category.

How to lose friends and influence

2005-10-11T17:15:00.000-04:00

The New York Times is not disclosing how many subscribers they have attracted for their new pay-for-op-eds plan. But the first month of experience shows that the paper is losing influence in terms of presence in other media. Have a look at the chart showing mentions of NYT op-ed writers on blogs from early September to early October. It shows an across-the-board decline in citations, regardless of which part of the public the columnist appeals to. This was probably easy to predict, but it is bound to be especially damaging to the "newspaper of record" which has long been proud of its ability to set the news agenda for other papers around the country.

All rock, no action

2005-09-30T14:27:00.000-04:00

Here is a link to the article we discussed a bit yesterday critiquing the "Live 8" events and charging that the purpose of the campaign "was to amuse the crowds and to clear their own consciences, and whether they realized it or not, to reinforce dictatorships. They still believe us to be like children that they must save, as if we don't realize ourselves what the source of our problems is." The source of the problems, according to Jean-Claude Shanda Tonme, is the persistence of nondemocratic regimes.

Old media cope with new technology

2005-09-29T22:32:00.000-04:00

Digital devices have given viewers more control over what they watch. Research shows that people are increasingly editing the advertisements out of their television viewing. The advertisers' solution: make the advertising indistinguishable from the rest of the broadcast by relying more intensively than ever on product placement. Results would appear to be mixed.

How to e-mail a professor

2005-09-28T22:44:00.000-04:00

Professor Michael Leddy has advice. Some of it might go farther than necessary, but the basics (give a subject, let the person know who you are) seem to be on the useful side, if a tad obvious and by no means specific to communicating with professors. Whether or not you like the advice, it is an interesting sign that new technologies require new forms of etiquette (most people answer the phone in these parts with a "hello," a practice so widespread that it is hard to imagine not doing it -- in the early days of telephony, the standard greeting was "Ahoy!"), and the etiquette does not always develop as quickly as the technology spreads.

Blogging for democracy

2005-09-23T15:25:00.000-04:00

In our discussions of the democratic potential of new media, we have returned several times to the (maybe obvious) point that whether they are democratic depends on how they are used. Now the international group Reporters sans Frontières is tyrying to promote democratic blogging with their new Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents (dowloadable in PDF format). The handbook discusses blog sociology, blog techniques and blog strategy, and includes advice on avoiding censorship and maintaining anonymity. The material seems especially directed to bloggers and potential bloggers in authoritarian states, where control of the media can often mean that sources based on computer networks can be the only credible sources available.

Something culture is good for

2005-09-21T23:03:00.000-04:00

There is a delightful essay by the theatre director and writer Sulayman al-Bassam in the Guardian today on producing plays by Shakespeare in the Arab world. He makes the observation that many people have made before about the use of classic texts as a defense against censorship, but also goes on to discuss just how well suited these texts in particular are to examination of the contemporary Arab world, with their depiction of a pre-modern world about to be consumed in a great historical transformation, and all its attendant confusions and discomforts. It is a good starting point for understanding why anybody cares about dominant systems of storytelling.

European proposal: Media should stop promoting terrorism

2005-09-21T10:22:00.000-04:00

This looks like it is likely to be controversial, if it gets any attention at all. The European Commission is issuing a report today claiming that media promote a view of the world which tends to promote radicalisation and terrorism. According to the EC report:

"Some media disseminate propaganda which contributes to violent radicalisation. Typically this conveys a reductionist and conspiratorial world view where inequity and oppression are dominant ... Some form of self-regulation principle or code of conduct ... might be beneficial."

In addition to this, the report argues, media need to be aware of the role they play in serving as the means by which terrorists communicate with different publics. According to the report:

"The media are the main vehicle through which [terrorism] attempts to affect citizens and leaders alike. Journalists face the difficult responsibility of reconciling their duty to inform the public with the need not to facilitate the aims of terrorists."

Special attention is given in the report to the role of the internet, which is presented as a vehicle by which extremist groups communicate both internally and with the larger public:

"The growth in use of the internet enables people ... to create networks through which it becomes easy to incite racial and religious hatred and also coordinate terrorist actions."

There is also a recommendation in the report that terrorists not be referred to in terms of their declared loyalties (i.e., "Islamic terrorism"), as this both draws a false distinction between "types" of terrorism and unfairly associates criminals with whole populations:

"The commission believes there is no such thing as 'Islamic terrorism', nor 'Catholic', nor 'red' terrorism ... The fact that some individuals unscrupulously attempt to justify their crimes in the name of a religion or ideology cannot be allowed in any way ... to cast a shadow upon such a religion or ideology."

These sound like fairly harsh criticisms of media. Especially the characterization of "propaganda which contributes to violent radicalisation" sounds as though it could be interpreted as suggesting that any critical material is pro-terrorist, and does not necessarily confine itself to coverage of issues related to terrorism. If the report gets any attention at all, expect a lot of angry response from journalists.

Fear and intimidation in the production houses

2005-09-20T16:47:00.000-04:00

Former CBS anchor Dan Rather and HBO documentary producer Sheila Nevins spoke at a panel on journalism at the Fordham University School of Law yesterday. Rather complained that since he began he career:

politicians "of every persuasion" had gotten better at applying pressure on the conglomerates that own the broadcast networks. He called it a "new journalism order."

He said this pressure -- along with the "dumbed-down, tarted-up" coverage, the advent of 24-hour cable competition and the chase for ratings and demographics -- has taken its toll on the news business. "All of this creates a bigger atmosphere of fear in newsrooms."

Nevins argued that a similar atmosphere constrains the production of documentaries, arguing that:

...even in the documentary world, there's a certain kind of intimidation brought to bear these days, particularly from the religious right.

"If you made a movie about (evolutionary biologist Charles) Darwin now, it would be revolutionary," Nevins said. "If we did a documentary on Darwin, I'd get a thousand hate e-mails."

When he was asked to compare the pressure journalists now face from government to those he faced as a critic of the Nixon administration, the main difference that rather observed was that he felt that in the earlier period, his employers supported him.

Mediacourse

2005-09-14T19:35:00.000-04:00

Another correlation between the amount of tv watching and obesity, in a fairly media-materialist view point. And yes, obseity problems are getting worse, but if television is a cause or a consequence or randomly associated, was not found. The problem could very well be the amount of fast food available to kids, or even the amount of commercials of fast food per amount of tv watched. But to simply blame it on television is a mediocre answer, and to resolve the issue with less television watching isnt the best answer. Sure, kids are missing out on excercise, intellectual pursuits, and real relationships and interaction by watching television, but to blame obesity on television or atleast to use the correlation to suggest this possibility- as often done in recently published research found in newspapers/journals, seems to be an evasion of the issue- possibly even a scape-goat. what do you think? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4238386.stm

The most pointless celebrities

2005-09-13T22:36:00.000-04:00

In Britain, the television station Channel 4 conducted a survey to find which were the most pointless celebrities. The methodology was that viewers were asked for what a well known person was known, and if the viewers could not give an answer, the celebrity got a point. First place was won by the person formerly known as Posh Spice. Second place went to her husband, David Beckham.

The NYT responds to "new media"

2005-09-13T15:31:00.000-04:00

Access to the New York Times website has been free of charge for as long as they have had one, a fact which has allowed the paper to increase its readership and influence beyond what could have been achieved with print. No longer: next week they will begin charging for access to that part of their site which is different from all other newspaper sites: the op-ed pages. This is an experimental move -- either it will increase revenue (and broaden the revenue base beyond advertising) if people decide it is really worth $49.95 a year to read their editorial writers, or it will decrease the readership and presence of the paper as readers turn to other sources. My bet is on the second possibility, but the fate of this experiment will determine what happens with many other online news sources as well.

Down with allocution, up with consultation!

2005-09-13T15:06:00.000-04:00

You have been reading a lot of speculation this week about how the communication is sphere is transformed by "new media" (such as the internet) which many writers celebrate for its low barriers dividing the producers from the consumers, and for its ability to circumvent censorship. Not so in China, where an authoritarian government wants to limit access on a number of topics, and providers like Google and Yahoo, with an eye to the world's largest market, seem only too happy to play along. Isabel Hilton has the report.

The cultural significance of Gilligan

2005-09-07T16:04:00.000-04:00

Paul Farhi has a reflection in the Washington Post on the passing of comic actor Bob Denver, who played the title character on Gilligan's Island and the loopy Maynard G. Krebs on Dobie Gillis. He sees Denver's characters as emblematic of the cultural transformation television underwent as it moved from elite to "mass" medium, and laments, "How we need smart actors and dumb sitcoms now."

Has Katrina saved the US media?

2005-09-06T22:20:00.000-04:00

Writing for the BBC, Matt Wells speculates that "American broadcast journalism just might have grown its spine back," and also has some ideas about why it may have been lost in the first place.

Framing: Food for thought

2005-08-31T20:44:00.000-04:00

At Wonkette, two photos from AFP and AP are presented showing people with shopping bags making their way through a flooded New Orleans. One of the photos is captioned to indicate that the person was "finding bread and soda from a grocery store," and the other that the person had been "looting a grocery store." See if you can find differences aside from the captions.

Weblogs report on the hurricane

2005-08-30T09:23:00.000-04:00

Print and broadcast media outlets are not necessarily the fastest in getting information out about the effects of the hurricane that has hit the Gulf Coast. There is a good practical reason for this: the continuing danger, plus the fact that many areas have been mostly evacuated, mean that there are not so many people on the spot, and that government agencies which provide damage reports have not been able to do their surveys immediately. CNet offers some details on some of the different ways that weblog writers and contributors are stepping into the void, either by aggregating the information available from different local media or by publishing on-the-spot reports from "citizen journalists." It might be thought of as a window into ways in which technologies like the internet are changing the boundaries of access to information, and also expanding the ability of people to act as sources of information.

Problems with the McQuail book

2005-08-30T08:57:00.000-04:00

Some students have pointed out to me that their editions of the McQuail book have some serious printing problems -- missing or partial graphics. I have contacted Sage Publications to let them know, and will keep you informed about any response that I get.

Expanding the boundaries of authorship

2005-08-30T08:54:00.000-04:00

By now all of the people in the course should have received an automatically generated message from Blogger inviting you to become co-authors of the weblog. This means that you have the ability to post, to comment, and generally to participate in online discussion. I have also altered the settings so that only people who are members of the group can post comments.

If you should have received an invitation but did not, please let me know. Also let me know if you should not have received one but did. Either way, I will fix it.

We can talk a bit about guidelines for posting if you care to. Although a lot of it seems self-evident (what you post should be substantive and related to the course, should advance discussion, and of course should hold to standards of etiquette), our commonly understood guidelines will probably develop more or less naturally as we go along.

The interface of Blogger is fairly intuitive, but people wanting a walk through can contact me or try the Blogger help page which addresses most common questions.

Can television dramas cause terrorism?

2005-08-28T22:38:00.000-04:00

That was the topic of an exchange between the novelist Salman Rushdie and British politician George Galloway. Galloway told the audience:

...TV executives had to be "very sensitive about people's religion" and if broadcasters did not show sufficient sensitivity they "had to deal with the consequences".
He said: "You have to be aware if you do [offend people's beliefs] you will get blowback. You should do it very carefully, especially if you are a public service broadcaster."

Rushdie, subject to death threats since the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses in 1989, responded to objections to a hypothetical TV adaptation by saying:

"The simple fact is that any system of ideas that decides you have to ringfence it, that you cannot discuss it in fundamental terms, that you can't say that this bit of it is junk, or that bit is oppressive ... we are supposed to respect that?"

Pay attention to the structure of the argument: controversial material will cause anger, and then violence. Although Galloway accepts the hypothesis and Rushdie rejects it, neither one of them is disputing the logic of it.

Explaining media content

2005-08-28T16:30:00.000-04:00

There is a mildly provocative little story in The Guardian on the escalating antics in one of those so-called "reality" shows (you know these: film clips showing tiny portions of the interactions between carefully chosen people under heavily controlled conditions).

Journalists Lorna Martin and James Robinson ask the inevitable question, "Has TV become too sexually permissive?" You'll find their tentative answer if you read the story, but what may be more important is who is giving the answers. They come from three types of sources: 1) the personalities who appear in the shows, 2) the producers of these programs, and 3) the agency that regulates the programs. So two out of three from employees of the media industries, and the third from an organization closely associated with them. The criteria for giving answers seem to be: 1) does it contribute to the internal honesty of the text, and 2) is it likely to attract an audience.

The text in question is a newspaper article rather than a research study, but it will not be hard to appreciate the difference between the journalists' approach and the one used in the Payne Fund Studies conducted between 1929 and 1932, the first major effort to produce an empirical account of media effects. Their questions were built around the effects of popular films on the behavior of children. The equivalency between the Payne researchers several decades ago and the Guardian reporters does not have to be so strong for it to be clear how different levels of analysis lead to different answers.

The McQuail companion site

2005-08-28T07:58:00.000-04:00

Sage Publishers offers a companion site to McQuail's Mass Communication Theory. At the online readings page there are links to texts not in the McQuail reader (some of them we are using for the course, and some we are not), and come exam time some people might enjoy the flash card glossary, a nice little definitions game. The site also includes a fairly comprehensive set of links to online sources on media research.

How the future looked

2005-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

The introduction of new media technologies have always been accompanied with high hopes and widespread fears. Here are some quotations (there are more in the article) from a piece by Peter Edidin in today's NY Times giving examples of early responses to radio and television (the NYT site also has some multimedia samples, and at the end of the piece is a list of sources for the quotations):

RADIO

1921
Velimir Khlebnikov, Russian poet, "The Radio of the Future."
The Radio of the Future - the central tree of our consciousness - will inaugurate the new ways to cope with our endless undertakings and will unite all mankind.
The main radio station, that stronghold of steel, where clouds of wires cluster like strands of hair, will surely be protected by a sign with a skull and crossbones and the familiar word "Danger," since the least disruption of radio operations would produce a mental blackout over the entire country, a temporary loss of consciousness.

1922
Bruce Bliven, "The Ether Will Now Oblige," in The New Republic.
There will be only one orchestra left on earth, giving nightly worldwide concerts; when all universities will be combined into one super-institution, conducting courses by radio for students in Zanzibar, Kamchatka and Oskaloose; when, instead of newspapers, trained orators will dictate the news of the world day and night, and the bedtime story will be told every evening from Paris to the sleepy children of a weary world; when every person will be instantly accessible day or night to all the bores he knows, and will know them all: when the last vestiges of privacy, solitude and contemplation will have vanished into limbo.

1923
J. M. McKibben, "New Way to Make Americans."
Today this nation of ours is slowly but surely being conquered, not by a single enemy in open warfare, but by a dozen insidious (though often unconscious) enemies in peace. Millions of foreigners were received into the country, with little or no thought given to their assimilation. But now the crisis is upon us; and we must face it without a great leader. Perhaps no man could mold the 120 million people in a harmonious whole, bound together by a strong national consciousness: but in the place of a superhuman individual, the genius of the last decade has provided a force - and that force is radio.

1924
Waldemar Kaempffert, "The Social Destiny of Radio."
It so happens that the United States and Great Britain have taken the lead in broadcasting. If that lead is maintained it follows that English must become the dominant tongue. Compared with our efforts at mass entertainment and mass education, European competition is pathetic. All ears may eventually be cocked to hear what the United States and Great Britain have to say. Europe will find it desirable, even necessary, to learn English.

TELEVISION

1939
David Sarnoff, the chairman of RCA, at the televised opening of the RCA Pavilion at the World's Fair in New York.
Now we add sight to sound. It is with a feeling of humbleness that I come to this moment of announcing the birth, in this country, of a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society. It is an art which shines like a torch in a troubled world.

New York Times editorial
The problem with television is that people must sit and keep their eyes glued to the screen; the average American family hasn't time for it. Therefore the showmen are convinced that for this reason, if no other, television will never be a serious competitor of broadcasting.

1946
Thomas Hutchinson, "Here is Television: Your Window on the World."
Television means the world is your home and in the homes of all the people of the world. It is the greatest means of communication ever developed by the mind of man. It should do more to develop friendly neighbors, and to bring understanding and peace on earth, than any other single material force in the world today.

The predictions are fascinating, not just in the sense that we can say now which ones were right and which ones were wrong, but also because of the awareness (sometimes inflated!) that the "prophets" had that new technologies would have an impact on the ways in which people live and think. Another point to keep in mind here: many if not most media technologies were developed for a purpose other than the one for which they eventually came to be used -- telephones were thought of as a broadcast technology, the phonograph as a medium for dictation and, famously, the internet as a means for government officials to communicate in case of a disastrous war.

Welcome

2005-08-27T12:59:00.000-04:00

This is an experiment to see how well this fine blog technology can be integrated into education. If it works, I will keep this site around for future media courses, and see what can be done with other courses. Those of you who are interested in Balkan societies, cultures and politics are welcome to have a visit to my other blog.