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The paper discusses the role that ethics theory might play in business ethics teaching. It is noted that little attention is devoted to the explanation and application of ethics theory in business ethics textbooks, which suggests that ethics theory is held in low esteem by business ethics educators. This relative disregard has been justified by some critics on the basis of the limited usefulness of ethics theory to business ethics pedagogy. Notwithstanding these criticisms, the paper argues that ethics theory can play an important role in business ethics teaching which conforms to a speculative agenda. A speculative agenda is described, and a contribution that ethics theory can make to it is explained. This constitutes a form of immanent critique, which enables putative statements of business ethicality to be subjected to critique against the cultural values upon which their credibility rests. Ethics theory is offered as a mediating resource to facilitate such critique. Some criteria that the presentation of ethics theory needs to meet if it is to fulfill this speculative agenda are also outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of authors to the June 2004 issue of the periodical "Sociological Theory" have background information for the readers. Bernice McNair Barnett is an associate professor in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The academic work of Rae Lesser Blumberg at the University of Virginia revolves around the theory of gender stratification and economic development. Craig Calhoun is president of the Social Science Research Council and professor of sociology and history at New York University.

This discussion forum is based on the roundtable discussion at the 27th Annual Conference of the Society for Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) hosted at the London School of Economics. The discussion presents recent work on capitalism as an evolving historical formation by Wolfgang Streeck and Craig Calhoun, together with contributions by British journalist Polly Toynbee and SASE founder Amitai Etzioni. Streeck opens with a reflection on major trends of capitalism that now pose ungovernable contradictions and thus point to an end of capitalism as a viable historical formation. Despite these contradictions, Calhoun sees capitalism as unlikely to undergo a rapid breakdown, but likely to generat continued challenges related to financial risks, limited international cooperation, negative externalities and growth of illicit forms of capitalism. Toynbee focuses on how these themes relate to the contemporary situation in the UK, outlining the growth in social inequalities and the weakness of social solidarity needed to generate political constraints on these trends. Finally, Etzioni reflects on the prospects for a post-capitalism, where work and consumption are no longer the central social identity around which social institutions are constructed. Together, the panelists present a bleak picture of the future for capitalism, which is likely to be a period of lasting disorder, where new moral foundations of a post-capitalism remain as elusive as they are necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented that reviews the books "Business As Usual: The Roots of the Global Financial Meltdown," "The Deepening Crisis: Governance Challenges After Neoliberalism," and "Aftermath: A New Global Economic Order?," which comprise a three-volume series, all edited by Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derluguian. Topics include the role of neoliberalism in the global economy, the role of the financial industry in the global financial crisis beginning in 2008, and social conditions in Russia.

In recent decades, Dutchness has become an intensely debated issue in Dutch public sphere. The article problematises the labelling of nations and nationalisms that occurs in public and academic understandings of these developments. Craig Calhoun's concept of discursive formation is argued to be more fruitful for understanding the recent contestations over Dutchness. Yet Calhoun's theory is itself in need of elaboration. Whereas Calhoun proposes to focus on the extent to which nations are constructed as publics of highly differentiated members, it is precisely this image that is central to an exclusionary discourse of Dutchness and enables the exclusion of cultural others from the Dutch imaginary. By analysing the enactment of Dutchness through discourses on citizenship, the surprising congruence of pluralism and exclusion in the Dutch context is explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a speech by Craig Calhoun, political research from New York University, delivered at the London School of Economics and Political Science on April 16, 2008, in which he discussed cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and the views of social anthropologist Ernest Gellner.

The article comments on the work of Craig Calhoun, a professor of sociology, about social science. Calhoun's achievement is evidently a work-in-progress. The author characterized Calhoun's work as an American form of critical theory. His work also arises out of the center of mainstream sociology in the U.S. Furthermore, the powerful presences in his work are history, social history and historical sociology, and anthropology.

This article responds to Craig Calhoun and other critics of the author by defending the seriousness and coherence of public sociology as a distinct realm within a national and global disciplinary division of sociological labor, and as an antidote to external subversion. Two visions of the public sociologist are two visions of social change; the one riding on the claimed universality of intellectuals, the other riding on the organization of subaltern groups. For the traditional public sociologist the privileged site is the university, while civil society is the locus of misrecognized suffering; for the organic public sociologist civil society is the source of insight into what is and what could be, insight excavated and elaborated by the sociologist. This gives two divergent visions and divisions of sociology as a field of power. In the conception of traditional public sociology the danger comes from the invading forces of mass media, consultantships, technocracy, commodification and politicization of the university, refracted within the field of sociology as the subjugation of the academic to the extraacademic. In the conception of the organic public sociology domination appears as rationalization. Here the danger comes from science itself, such as neoliberal economics that imposes a singular model on all, precisely because it does not acknowledge the critique of its theoretical foundations or the lived experience of the people its theorizes.

The article presents information on various authors, who have contributed to the 1997 issue of the journal "International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society." Some of them are Ruwantissa I.R. Abeyratne, Ljubisa S. Adamovich, Svetlana Adamovich, Craig Calhoun, Charles Lemert, Barry Schwartz, Natan Sznaider, Arthur J. Vidich and Tong Zhang. Abeyratne works as a senior professional in the International Civil Aviation Organization. He holds the degree of doctor of civil laws from McGill University. He is a law graduate of the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka and a masters graduate in law of Monash University, Victoria, Australia, where he specialized in international law and air law. Ljubisa S. Adamovich is professor of Economics at the Florida State University. He has lectured at some 40 leading universities in more than 20 countries and is a member of different associations. Svetlana Adamovich is associate professor of economics at the University of Belgrade. She received her U.S. degree in economics at the University of Belgrade, her M.S. in economics from Florida State University and her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Belgrade. Craig Calhoun is professor of sociology and history and Chair of the Department of Sociology at New York University. Charles Lemert teaches sociology at Wesicyan University. Barry Schwartz is professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology, University of Georgia, Athens. Natan Sznaider received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and is currently a lecturer in sociology at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo. Arthur J. Vidich is senior lecturer and professor Emeritus of Sociology at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research.

The article presents information on framing of sociological theories. The author states that theory, as a distinct specialty in sociology, is characterized by multiple, often isolated and mostly dysfunctional personalities. Most of those personalities appear largely irrelevant to sociologists who do not define themselves as "theorists" and to students required to study them. Scholars who do not label themselves as such or affiliate with the theory organs of the discipline, however, produce much good theory. According to the author, at least five different personalities coexist, often uncomfortably and usually unprofitably, within "sociological theory." As sociologist Craig Calhoun pointed out in his October 1991 essay in the periodical "Perspectives," theorists need to stop simply reading other theorists and begin to attend to explaining historical and contemporary social life. The reason so many do not do so, emanates from two facts. Firstly, many theorists, by personality or lack of training, are poorly equipped to leave their libraries and offices to attend to the world around them and secondly, many have no burning substantive interest or expertise within sociology.