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Some texts appear more than once across the corpus of Zygmunt Bauman's work. This has led to accusations of self-plagiarism and a lack of scholarly rigour. This paper is an explanation of why texts reappear. It pays attention to a number of frequently overlooked texts from the 1970s which are of fundamental importance for any understanding of Bauman's work. It is contended that if: (a) there is an understanding of the stakes and purpose of sociology as it is framed in Bauman's work; and (b) attention is paid to the argument of Hermeneutics and Social Science; then (c) the repetition of texts across the work becomes explicable and unproblematic. The paper argues that dealings with Bauman's work need to be more aware of the less well-known texts. They also need to be alert to different – and incommensurable – ways of practising sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a typology of university management roles in the age of permanent austerity. The repackaging of every function within the university administration as a cost centre – meaning of course a potential profit centre – has long been seen as an unsustainable market model. Yet perversely it persists, and we would do well to name the hyperbolic functionaries of this administered institutional reconstruction, in a place where a humourless credentialism prevails. The paper revives the work, and temperament, of the early 20th-century sociologist Thorstein Bunde Veblen as a heuristic aid. With Veblen, the protocols of commercial imperative in the state education sector masquerade as education as a social good while the 'university' itself is skewered with the tragic realism of forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminism is well versed in conversations about engaged scholarship and has provided important critical commentary on Michael Burawoy's campaign for public sociology in recent years. This paper draws from feminist perspectives to argue for reflexivity, praxis, and interdisciplinary work as key pillars for public sociology. I then draw from my own experiences doing feminist work in community-engaged settings to consider various limitations of Burawoy's notions of traditional and organic public sociology. To move past this dichotomy, I put forward a conceptual model for understanding public sociologists as public intellectuals, community-engaged scholars, community educators, and/or advocates and activists. In considering how researchers might navigate these various roles, I argue that discussions of expertise and universities as value-laden institutions are important to build sustainable practices. Overall, the strength of public sociology is that it acknowledges these blurred boundaries and allows for the development of collaborative forms of expertise to address social problems. However, there is additional theoretical work to be done, as well as practical supports developed, to enable feminist researchers in particular to successfully navigate these roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a memoir of living with Zygmunt Bauman. It begins with the early encounter of Bauman and Aleksandra Kania in Warsaw in 1954, where both were Masters students working with the humanist Marxist Adam Schaff. Kania and Bauman followed their separate life paths for decades, though they were both postwar communists and reconstructionists. Much later, the loss of their partners led to union, in Leeds and across the globe in travel. This is a story of friendship and mutual enthusiasms, then intimacy between two working sociologists. There are also some apparent differences, as between the Lark and the Owl, or between Phosphorous and Hesperus. Life together leads especially to Italy, and to Pope Francis. This is a reflection on what Bauman called the art of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate the enduring relevance of the concept of ideology to contemporary sociological analysis. To this end, the article draws upon central arguments put forward by Pierre Bourdieu and Luc Boltanski in ‘La production de l’idéologie dominante’ [‘The Production of the Dominant Ideology’]. Yet, the important theoretical contributions made in this enquiry have been largely ignored by contemporary sociologists, even by those who specialize in the critical study of ideology. This article intends to fill this gap in the literature by illustrating that useful lessons can be learned from Bourdieu and Boltanski’s critical investigation, as it provides crucial insights into the principal characteristics and functions of ideologies, including the ways in which they develop and operate in advanced capitalist societies. The article is divided into two main parts: the first part examines various universal features of ideology; the second part aims to shed light on several particular features of dominant ideology. The paper concludes by arguing that the ‘end of ideology’ thesis, despite the fact that it raises valuable sociological questions, is ultimately untenable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conversation about the different generational experiences of LGBT academics and the changing status of sexuality and queer studies. Ken Plummer, Arlene Stein and Travis Kong, longtime colleagues and sociologists of sexuality, share their insights. They discuss how different generational contexts and geographic locations shape sexuality studies. They acknowledge the ways Ken's work, and the efforts of his generation of activist-scholars, played a pivotal foundational role in establishing LGBT studies. They consider the relationship between queer theory and sociologies of homosexuality, and the growing importance of digital media. In conclusion, they discuss how neoliberalisation and authoritarian movements are impacting intellectual work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article theorizes the relationship between social movements, public opinion, and presidential power. While sociologists and social movement scholars have long neglected these interconnections, we argue that they form a key foundation of American political life. Drawing on civil sphere theory, we show that, at least in formally democratic regimes, the exercise of state power is continuously subject to public opinion, via social movements that pressure states in the public's name. We demonstrate how social movements compete with one another to speak on behalf of 'public opinion.' In giving expression to the desires of 'the public', imagined as a putative whole, movements exercise what we call 'civil power.' Taking the second-wave feminist movement and the countermovements that arose against it as our empirical case study, we examine their interaction with three particularly illustrative presidential administrations: that of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. While presidents organize state power, we argue, the effective functioning of this formal power is enabled by the civil power of social movements, whose roots are located in collective meanings and whose generation occurs outside the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates about the state of Australian sociology have raged for as long as sociology has existed in Australia. Concerns about the discipline's future may be inevitable for a critical, reflexive discipline, but to those entering the discipline, it is neither instructive nor productive to be subjected to lingering disciplinary anxieties. After more than fifty years, it is time to take stock of the differing visions of sociology, and examine the arguments about the health, or otherwise, of Australian sociology. To advance this debate, we consider the signs and benchmarks of a 'successful' sociology as expressed in The Australian Sociological Association magazine, NEXUS, and key writings from Australian sociologists. We suggest that much of the disagreement over the status of sociology derives from the way 'disciplines' and 'success' are defined. Regarding sociology to be an heterogeneous, multi-modal, social institution and practice, we propose a way forward in our efforts to represent ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists commonly adopt a bifurcated understanding of the neoliberal state, showing how neoliberalism's advance coincides with the growing authority of specific actors and ideas inside the bureaucratic state as others' authority declines. This article complicates this view by probing the dynamics of non-neoliberal action inside the state, demonstrating the ways even demoted state actors can strategically muster power resources to forward distinct policy agendas. Taking a long-term perspective on social policy developments since the early 2000s, this article reviews the case of Israel, where neoliberal policies' new hegemony and adverse outcomes triggered counter-actions inside the state, ultimately leading to policy change. Paying particular attention to the role of ideas, this article argues that by rearticulating their policy mission to align with market conventions, non-neoliberal actors were able to persuade neoliberal actors to support their policy proposals, succeeding to advance creative policy alternatives under hostile political conditions. Highlighting this strategic capacity and ideational resilience and acumen in adapting to neoliberal critique reveals how demoted state actors can manage to sustain entrenched organizational goals and institutional motivations even as they help ease the adaptation of their historical mission to the neoliberal zeitgeist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education is an essential aspect of any society in the world. As such, it has been a topic studied by many sociologists since the origins of the discipline. Today it is one of the most common subjects in sociology, in part because it has been recognised as a crucial environment for the (re)production of inequalities. This article explores the role of education in the (re)production of social inequalities and its potential to challenge such inequalities. In addition, the article presents some of the distinctions between research in the Global South and North, both in geographical and metaphorical terms. Since this article is the introduction to the special issue Education and the Production of Inequalities: Dialogues from the Global South and North, a synopsis of the published articles is presented at the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a commemoration of Ulrich Beck, written originally just after his passing. It understands Beck in terms of Kant’s critiques. Here if, say, Latour incorporates the first critique of instrumentalism and Habermas the second critique of morality, then Ulrich points us to the third critique – hope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German sociologist Alfred Vierkandt is hardly remembered today. This may seem surprising. Several prominent sociologists from the German-speaking countries contributed to the Handwörterbuch der Soziologie (1931), which Vierkandt edited and published. However, Vierkandt did not interact with any of them significantly, and this publication brought no recognition of the importance of his sociological oeuvre in Germany, the United States, or elsewhere. His key notion of the social group found no acknowledgment among other contemporary or later sociologists, even though several of them used this notion and discussed social groups in their own writings. Moreover, those who paid close attention to his writings, like Abel and Hochstim, evaluated them quite critically. Both before and after World War II, Vierkandt remained a solitary and relatively unknown author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A focus on law's role in economic activities was central to many of the classical sociologists, and it remains a key theme in the sociology of law, although no longer central. The view of capitalism as a market economy is reflected in formalist perspectives on economics, law and even sociology, and limits these understandings. Economic sociologists and institutional economists have examined the extensive institutionalisation of economic activity due to the shift to corporate capitalism since the last part of the 19th century, and have focused on law's role in these processes. The neo-liberal phase of capitalism since the 1970s brought a renewed emphasis on property rights and market-based management, but accompanied by an enormous growth of new forms of regulation, often of a hybrid public-private character, leading to a new view of law as reflective or responsive, very different from traditional formalist perspectives. We argue that law's role in the economy can be better understood by examining the social processes of lawyering, mediating between the realms of political and economic power, through practices of legal interpretation that both reflect and shape economic activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the development of the sociology of culture in Czechia. Its focus is on the sociology of the arts and cultural sociology, which, it is argued, are connected through the notion of the relative autonomy of cultural structures. While the Czech sociology of culture may have been rendered less dynamic by the lack of a critical mass of sociologists specialising in this area and by the country's frequent political upheavals and its isolation from the international circulation of ideas, it has experienced moments of considerable vitality. Three periods in the development of the field are identified here, each of them marked by a movement toward a stronger and more sociologically adequate conceptualisation of cultural autonomy: (1) from the diffuse culturalism of the field's founding figures to the functionalist theory of the interwar sociologist Inocenc Arnošt Bláha, whose view of the relationship between art and society was influenced by the work of the Prague School of Structuralism; (2) from the cultural reductionism of Marxist-Leninist theory after 1948 to the eclectic sociology of culture and the arts of the late socialist period; (3) from the demise of this transitional form of a sociology of culture in the 1990s to the increasingly internationalised but also heterogeneous landscape of the 2010s, which is constituted by a semi-institutionalised centre of cultural sociology at Brno and small groups or individuals in Prague and other academic locales. The thread of continuity in an otherwise discontinuous historical development is found in the recurrent motif of the relative autonomy of culture which the Czech sociology of culture absorbed through its exposure to art and literary theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to question the nature of the socio-anthropological approach in Lefort's thought. The author explores the complex relationship between Lefort and the Durkheimian French school of sociology in four stages: in the first, he shows Lefort as a sociologist 'worthy of its name' or, in other words, a sociologist interested in questioning the 'institution of the social'. In the second, he focuses on the disturbing elements that Lefort introduces: the political and the division into the French sociological approach. In the third stage, he focuses his attention on the sociological approach in Lefort's way of thinking about democratic society. Finally, he concludes by referring to Lefort's apparent opposition between philosophy and social sciences – and the errors that this may have engendered – in order to demonstrate the continuity of Lefort's sociological approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores material loss and develops a new conceptual agenda. Synthesising and developing debates on the sociology of consumption and material culture in combination with those of the sociology of nothing, it argues that material loss is crucial to understanding people's everyday relationships to the material world and to practices of consumption. Abstract notions of absence, nothingness and loss are becoming increasingly intriguing phenomena for sociologists interested in the everyday. However, whilst their theoretical connotations are being discussed more and more, empirical investigation into these phenomena remains somewhat (ironically) absent. This article draws on a recent project exploring lost property, based on qualitative interviews with lost property offices, households and museums. Developing previous work on material affinities and material culture, the authors argue that lost property reveals the enduring relationships people have with objects which are no longer in their possession. These relationships disrupt and develop contemporary debates on the sociology of consumption regarding how objects are devalued, divested and disposed of, as well as how they are acquired, appropriated and appreciated. In turn, we contend that the transformative potential of material loss and absence offers a way of thinking about alternative, non-material practices of accumulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An editorial is presented which discusses article on work and life of Maria Márkus, a Polish sociologist and philosopher. Topics discussed include Maria's themes and preoccupations about building civility in our institutions and decency in our relationships; her decisive contribution to the short-lived renaissance of Hungarian critical sociology during the middle of the 1960s; and her analysis of contemporary social life against the background of the personal meaning of a successful life.

In the early twenty-first century, liberal democracies have witnessed their foundational norms of critique and deliberation being disrupted by a combination of populist and technological forces. A distinctive style of dispute has appeared, in which a speaker denounces the unfairness of all liberal and institutional systems of equivalence, including the measures of law, economics and the various other 'tests' which convention scholars have deemed core to organisations. The article reviews how sociologists of critique have tended to treat critical capacities as oriented towards consensus but then considers how technologies of real-time 'control' circumvent liberal critique altogether. In response, a different type of dispute emerges in the digital public sphere, which abandons equivalences in general, instead adopting a non-representational template of warfare. This style of post-liberal dispute is manifest in the rhetoric of populists but does not originate there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International Relations has developed an exciting new research agenda on diplomatic practice, drawing largely on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu. However, it largely ignores Bourdieu's theory of patriarchy, as well as extensive feminist Bourdieusian analysis. These are analytical tools that can be used to understand how diplomacy reproduces itself as a masculinized field. They are 'practice theory' as well and should be incorporated into our research on diplomatic practice. My aims here are to recover feminist practice theory for a diplomatic studies audience and to indicate how we can develop an interdisciplinary research agenda on gender and diplomacy. The first part of the article provides an overview of practice theory in diplomatic studies and discusses Bourdieu's overlooked contributions regarding gender. I then use Bourdieu's 'thinking tools' of field, habitus and practice to examine diplomacy and gender using examples drawn from the literature, as well as from some primary sources. Throughout, I show how feminist sociologists have developed his ideas to create sophisticated approaches to studying the persistence of patriarchy. This does not capture all the ways in which diplomacy is gendered, but these tools reveal the limitations in our current understanding of diplomatic practices. I conclude with suggestions for future interdisciplinary research that takes gender seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses polemically, perhaps, the most prominent class analyses today – the occupational and stratification approaches (OSAs) developed by various sociologists and economists. Strongly opposed to the "big class" of conventional Weberian and Marxian typologies, the stratification and occupational models have, unsurprisingly, claimed more realistic grounds. By contrast, key dimensions of social relations such as domination, exploitation and oppression are purposely overlooked. Moreover, the lack of theorization – even marginally regarded, does not take into consideration the qualitative explanatory strength for the analysis of social structure. Alternatively, the underlying optimistic market-oriented belief of the "realistic" class framework overestimates the role of institutions and economics. Thus, this "Smithian" background unveils a market fetishism as well as a functionalist and naturalized vision of class structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When theorizing differences in action between structurally unequal groups, sociologists often disagree over the roles that structure, culture, and resources play. It is not uncommon for debates to arise in which structural explanations for unequal outcomes are pitted against cultural ones, with the former pointing to group resource disparities and the latter emphasizing differences in how groups think and do things. In this article, we develop a theoretical approach that conceptualizes culture as an element of social structure and draws on Sewell's multiplicity of structures and Bourdieu's habitus to theorize group differences in action as structural. This approach, we argue, advances a structural sociology of stratification that helps counter the tendency for U.S. individualism to promote interpretations of group differences/disparities as having individual-level rather than structural-level sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology has an important part to play in understanding human rights. In this article, I trace obstacles within sociology to theoretically conceptualize human rights as an ideology. These impediments, I suggest, demonstrate the need to recognize the blind spots within sociological research. However, instead of trying to persuade readers why human rights qualifies as an ideology, I attempt to demonstrate why it is beneficial for sociological inquiry to conceptualize human rights as an ideology. Instead of following the widely accepted practice of understanding human rights as a desirable set of values designed to promote a liberal peace, I propose conceptualizing human rights as an ideology which, through its institutionalization, produces coercive organizational and doctrine power. The question of whether its organizational and doctrine power is capable of value penetration in micro-solidarity groups opens up a new prism through which sociologists can assess the successes and failures of human rights ideology on the ground. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Vicki Kirby discusses her research into the relationship between nature and culture, focusing in particular on her recent edited collection, What If Culture Was Nature All Along? The volume appears in the 'New Materialisms' series, and so the interview begins by situating the collection with respect to the recent materialist turn in social theory. Kirby discusses the influence of deconstruction on her thought, and the way that she draws upon Derrida to think through recent research in the life sciences and its implications for understanding the relationship between matter, life, and communication. She also goes into the political implications of her work and the relationship between biopolitics and biodeconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim is to investigate how digitisation and in particular e-books have changed relations between private players and public institutions within the Danish book world through a case study of eReolen, a private-public partnership functioning as common platform for public libraries' lending of e-books in Denmark. Traditional and new models of the book world are discussed as the basis of understanding relations between the players. A new way of analysing the field outlined by literary sociologist, Professor Johan Svedjedal, is adopted. The main conclusions are that the lending of e-books has disrupted the traditional understanding and interaction between the public library system and the commercial book market. In addition, the Danish library system through the partnership has taken on a new function in relation to the commercial market, namely acting as the engine in building a market for Danish e-books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about the future of sociology, as transformations in the digital and biological sciences lay claim to the discipline's jurisdictional hold over 'the social'. Rather than analyse the specifics of these transformations, however, the focus of the article is on how a narrative of methodological crisis is sustained in sociology, and on how such a narrative conjures very particular disciplinary futures. Through a close reading of key texts, the article makes two claims: (1) that a surprisingly conventional urge towards disciplinary reproduction often animates accounts of sociology's crisis; (2) that, even more surprisingly, these same accounts are often haunted by a hidden metaphorical architecture centred on biology, vitality, vigour and life. The central gambit of the article is that, perhaps in spite of itself, this subterranean image of life actually hints at less reproductively conventional ways of understanding – and intervening in – sociology's methodological 'crisis'. Drawing, empirically, on the author's recent work on urban stress and, theoretically, on Stefan Helmreich's (2011, 2016) account of 'limit biologies', the articles ends with a call for a 'limit sociology' – a form of attention that could, similarly, expand rather than contract the present moment of transformation. At the heart of the article is a hope that thinking with such a limit may help sociologists to imagine a less deadening future than that on offer from a canonised discipline cathected by endless crisis-talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an article about the history of US sociology with systematic intent. It goes back to World War II to recover a wartime narrative context through which sociologists formulated a ‘trauma’ to the discipline and ‘blamed’ qualitative and values-oriented research for damaging the scientific status of sociology. This narrative documents a discussion of the changes that sociologists said needed to be made in sociology as a science to repair its status and reputation. While debates among sociologists about theory and method had always been contentious, the wartime narrative insisted for the first time that sociology be immediately unified around quantitative approaches. The narrative of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ science that developed during the war not only undermined the efforts of social interactionists to theorize social action and social justice, but also derailed Parsons’ pre-war effort to bridge differences. The moral coding that is the legacy of the narrative stigmatized important approaches to sociology, leading to a ‘crisis’ in the 1960s that still haunts the discipline. Disciplinary history has overlooked the wartime narrative with the result that the role played by World War II in effecting this crisis has gone unrecognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An intellectual and cultural movement advocating a radical enhancement of human performance via technoscientific and biomedical advances, transhumanism has grown in notoriety in recent years. Grouping engineers, philosophers, sociologists, and entrepreneurs, the movement and its ideals of enhanced humans have a strong social resonance, be it doping in sport, the use of smart drugs, or the biomedical battle against aging. This article sheds theoretical and critical light on transhumanism through the lens of human perfectibility. It particularly aims to show how the movement marks a significant reversal of the humanist conception of human perfectibility inherited from the Enlightenment. Far from working for the social and political emancipation of humans and the human condition, transhumanism is emblematic of a depoliticized conception of human perfectibility focused on the technoscientific adaptation of the human being. Transhumanism thus marks a major rupture with the modern democratic project of autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative sociologists have long considered occupations to be a key source of inequality. However, data constraints make comparative research on two of the more important contemporary drivers of occupational stratification – globalization and technological change – relatively scarce. This article introduces a new dataset on occupational ‘routine task intensity’ (RTI) and ‘offshorability’ (OFFS) for use with the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). To produce these data, we recoded 23 country-specific occupational schemes (74 LIS country-years) to the two-digit ISCO-88 scheme. When combined with the handful of LIS countries already reporting their occupations in ISCO-88, we produce individual level RTI and OFFS scores for 38 LIS countries and 160 LIS country-years. To assess the validity of these recodes, we compare average labor-income ratios predicted by recoded ISCO-88 occupational categories to those predicted by reported ISCO-88 occupational categories within countries that transitioned from country-specific to ISCO-88 codes over time. To assess the utility of these RTI and OFFS scores and advance the literature on income polarization, we analyze their association with work hours and labor incomes in the global North and South. Both covariates correlate with work hours in ways that are consistent with previous research and additional theoretical considerations. Moreover, we show that both RTI and OFFS contribute to income polarization directly in the North, but not in the South. This article generates a public good data infrastructure that will be of use to a wide variety of social scientists, and brings new evidence to bear on the question of income polarization in rich democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology has known very divers receptions, depending on the intellectual contexts and periods of writing. Through a study of the prolific work of the author, this article aims at describing the different steps of this path, in order to grasp the process leading to such disparities. This analysis will try to explain the feeble reception of the thinker within the French intellectual sphere, as well as the several polemics engendered by his work in the English-speaking academic world. Lastly, this article would like to partially define the form and status of what the author has called ‘liquid sociology’ in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article maps the development of the sociology of culture in the Soviet Union and Russia from pre-Soviet to post-Soviet times. The analysis highlights the effects of two groups of factors – one cultural, the other structural – the combination of which brought about various patterns at each stage of the discipline’s development. Because of the political environment within which they worked, Soviet researchers of culture had to employ strategies of resistance to survive. The three most common were: finding niches in related, ideologically neutral disciplines; doing purely empirical work; or, in contrast, critiquing ‘bourgeois social theories’. They also opted to work in the modes of reading rather than writing, oral discussions rather than publishing, and communication with like-minded colleagues rather than debates with opponents. Contemporary Russian sociology of culture displays this inheritance in being structured by the opposition between isolation and international integration, as well as the tension between an elitist vision of culture and the economically centered worldview which has been dominant since the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since representations of social life are rarely separate in their effects from the worlds they aspire to depict, this article argues that as producers of such representations, sociologists are automatically responsible for considering the performative consequences of their work. In particular, it suggests that sociologists have an ongoing normative responsibility to draw out emergent strands of social hope from their empirical analyses. Through a comparison of Rorty, Levitas, and Unger’s different theorizations of social hope, the article argues for a pragmatic model of social hope that is rooted in empirical conceptions of the past and present, but, alive to the transcendent possibilities of the emerging future, refuses to be entirely determined by these conceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Full securitization has largely been regarded as something negative that should be avoided. While acknowledging this, the present article adds that securitization moves that fail to succeed (i.e. that end in securitization failure) can, at least in the environmental sector of security, trigger positive outcomes if a given issue becomes (re)politicized rather than depoliticized. This is because securitization moves can be helpful in raising sufficient awareness of an issue to gain the attention of the relevant audience(s). Subsequently, the article argues, different audience strategies determine whether securitization moves are turned into securitization failure as (re)politicization or securitization failure as depoliticization. The article introduces different behavioral strategies that audiences can employ to reject securitization moves: the passive recipient strategy, the blocking strategy, and the active reshaping strategy. Only the latter indicates that an audience not interested in letting securitization moves succeed simultaneously seeks to have the issue in question be, or remain, a part of the political agenda. The article uses the spring 2010 Mekong crisis as a test case to support its theoretical arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To find the productive implications beyond ‘Weber fever’, a contested theme of ‘the Confucian ethic and economic development’, this article attempts to first examine the dual context in which Weber’s works were introduced before 1949, then to scrutinize the interpretations and evaluations of Weber’s work in the 1980s. Besides, an overview of the Chinese translations of Weber’s work and influential introductory materials is also necessary to understand the reception of Weber. While the reception among early Chinese sociologists before 1949 was separated by the division of disciplines, the reinvention of Weber during the 1980s appeared in at least three different forms in Taiwan and mainland China. Both Taiwanese and Chinese sociologists played crucial roles in establishing Weber as a social theorist of modernity, respectively resisted the Americanized Weber and developed a particular image of Weber in Chinese-speaking academic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A personal narrative is presented which explores author's experience of visiting the Prague conference in, Czech Republic focused on philosophers, legal theorists and sociologists.