A false premise?

"[The article] puts forward some new arguments to explain 'grassroots resistance' to the deep marketization in many societies and answers the question why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else."

Written by a Russian economist. In what respect has "deep marketization" failed in Russia?

I'd say this was a hoax meant to make fun of evolutionary psychology, but that doesn't seem to be the case

This: http://news.yahoo.com/why-im-a-creationist-141907217.html

Cut to now. I still read and read and listen and listen. And I have never found a more compelling story of our origins than the ones that involve God. The evolutionary psychologists with their just-so stories for everything (“You use a portable Kindle charger because mothers in the primordial forest gathered ginseng”) have become more contradictory than Leviticus. Did you all see that ev-psych now says it’s women who are naturally not monogamous, in spite of the same folks telling us for decades that women are desperate to secure resources for their kids so they frantically sustain wedlock with a rich silverback who will keep them in cashmere?
Sigh. When a social science, made up entirely of observations and hypotheses, tells us first that men are polygamous and women homebodies, and then that men are monogamous and women gallivanters—and, what’s more builds far-fetched protocols of dating and courtship and marriage and divorce around these notions—maybe it’s time to retire the whole approach.
All the while, the first books of the Bible are still hanging around. I guess I don’t “believe” that the world was created in a few days, but what do I know? Seems as plausible (to me) as theoretical astrophysics, and it’s certainly a livelier tale. As “Life of Pi” author Yann Martel once put it, summarizing his page-turner novel: “1) Life is a story. 2) You can choose your story. 3) A story with God is the better story.”

I mean, what better argument against half-assed evolutionary explanations of social behavior than to say that it encourages belief in creationism!

Also, a little earlier in the piece, there's this perhaps unintentionally cutting observation: "I assume that other people love science and technology, since the fields are often lumped together, but I rarely meet people like that. Technology people are trippy; our minds are blown by the romance of telecom." I mean, the unembarrassed juxtaposition of technology-commodity worship and old-fashioned religious obscurantism!

The case for it being at least kind of a joke would be based on 1) the purely trolling mention of climate change and 2) the fact that it really is hard to believe someone honestly following the reasoning that, more or less, science is confusing so let's default to the old testament.

This is a lie.

"This paper takes as its starting point the fact that Bourdieu’s views on sociology as a science have not been sufficiently and adequately understood and discussed."

"a racially gendered classed capitalist world-system"

American Sociology: History and Racially Gendered Classed Knowledge Reproduction

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore how racially gendered classed power-relations structure history, knowledge and American Sociology's historical memory and disciplinary knowledge production. In order to do so, this paper will 1) utilize Cabral's (1970) theory of history to center humanity as historically developed into a racially gendered classed capitalist world-system, 2) employ intersectionality as a heuristic device to see how knowledge is manipulated to normalize dehumanization as well as to perpetuate exploitation and privilege by denying “Othered' ” knowledges, and lastly 3) sociologically imagine this racially gendered classed process in the “institutional-structure” of American Sociology by exploring the ancestry of the concept of “intersectionality.” In all this paper argues 1) American Sociology under theorizes history, a central aspect of the sociological imagination and production of new sociological knowledge, 2) American Sociology reproduces a dehumanized theory of history per Marx's “historical materialism” and 3) the structure of American Sociology's knowledge is racially gendered classed, as illustrated in the collective memory of the concept of “intersectionality.”


Journals should probably issue rules to the effect that "there should be no more than 1 numbered list of 3 or more items in any abstract." I'm also inclined to think that not much anything good comes from theorizing history.

DEEPLY muddled

This is rare, but I can't even begin to make head or tails of this abstract.

Sagi Cohen, "'The Last Refuge of the Scoundrel': Debating between History and Theory" Journal of Historical Sociology.

When “History” is called to represent silence, its metaphysical position is symptomatically felt. Tracing what Fasolt calls “the historian's revolt”, this paper identifies the political impetus behind it as the symptom dictating Foucault's own silences/silencings (regarding Derrida's intervention in his History of Madness). In naming such a symptom/silence – in taking “Derrida's position” – this paper performs its own violence/decision by, both “justifying,” and betraying, this position; by installing itself in, instead of “above,” this curious “debate”. “The last refuge of the scoundrel” appears then as the reflective exteriority of a political antagonism that's based on a metaphysical difference with regards to the legitimate “seat” of authority (in Fasolt, an antagonism between the historian and the Catholic Church). Finally, this trajectory is installed within a wider – metaphysical and historical – context, where Hegel's famous saying, that the University is the Protestant's Church, might yet echo that distant metaphysical decision – still looming, like a “genealogical specter,” over Academia and its Social Sciences.

NB also this note of acknowledgment: "This version of the text is deeply indebted to both its anonymous reviewers, to whom I would express my necessarily asymmetrical gratitude, for what I can only describe as a pure gift."

Very important issues

The Discreet Charm of Lenin

from Journal of Historical Sociology by Petra Rethmann

Abstract

This article takes two postcards of Lenin as their point of departure to ask about articulations of Soviet history as image and kitsch. I am especially interested in the ways in which the dead body or mummy of Lenin comes to symbolize an imagined social coherence that accrues specific political significance after the demise of the Soviet Union. In looking at Lenin's mummy as a site of memory and key to understanding contemporary Russian political desires, the article offers one analytical interpretation of the continuing preservation of Russia's revolutionary and also Stalinist past. By arguing that the Lenin mummy simultaneously functions as camp and kitsch, and as an embodied time of eternity, I also seek to understand how “grandiose” understandings of Soviet history work in this present.

Sometimes our culture still manages to surprise me for its absurdity

So, this: http://articles.marketwatch.com/2013-04-24/finance/38773627_1_billionaires-u-s-senators-graduate-school

My first reaction was to just be appalled that someone with a job at a major research university was doing something this idiotic:

Billionaires are among the world’s cleverest people, according to new research. In “Investigating America’s Elite,” Jonathan Wai, 33, a research scientist in psychology and member of Duke University’s Talent Identification Program, looked at the correlation between wealth and brains — or at least, brains as measured by education. Some 45% of billionaires rank among the smartest 1% of people in the U.S., the study found. Other groups with high representation in the smartest set: U.S. Senators (41%), federal judges (40%), and Fortune 500 CEOs (39%).

Wai looked at five groups of America’s business and political elite, totaling 2,254 subjects. The majority of Fortune 500 CEOs, federal judges, billionaires, senators and members of the House of Representatives had attended either a selective undergraduate institution or graduate school, Wai’s research found. And if they attended one of the 29 “elite colleges,” they were considered to be among the top 1%. Wai chose the schools based on their average SAT scores and American College Test scores, as tracked by the “U.S. News & World Report.” Average SAT scores of 1400 or greater — a combined score on the math and critical reading sections — put a school in the top 1%, he says.

No seriously, he comes to the conclusion that "America’s elite are largely drawn from the intellectually gifted, with many in the top 1% of ability" (from the abstract) based entirely on the fact that graduates of top colleges and grad programs tend to end up in powerful positions. The problems with that are so extensive I can't even think about it.

But that's not the part that makes this a classic. This article brings in someone to criticize the study - one Steve Siebold. "A former professional tennis player who coaches Fortune 500 executives on mental toughness, Seibold has been interviewing multi-millionaires and billionaires since college, and he says many of the world’s wealthiest people have little or no formal education." Now, he does make a few of the relevant points (about e.g. that college admissions and the SAT are not perfect proxies for "intelligence" to put it mildly). But that's not the bone he primarily wants to pick. Well, let me quote: 

Siebold: This is based on a faulty premise. If I have a lot of money, I can get into one of the country’s elite schools. Family connections are a big part of attending colleges too. George W. Bush got into Yale. I’d love to see him get into Yale without the Bush name. I say that after 29 years interviewing the 1,200 wealthiest people in the world. I was broke and I wanted to be rich. I just wanted to follow the wealthy so I could be one of them. I found that anyone can be rich if they can find a problem and solve it.
Siebold: In terms of what separates the wealthy from the average person, it starts with their beliefs about money. Guys like Trump and other rich people tend to have positive beliefs about money. The average person tends to believe that rich people are narcissists. America wouldn’t exist without rich people.
Siebold: ...I’m more interested in how successful people use their use their emotions to work long hours that no rational human being would work and take chances that no ordinary person would take.

In other words, we get this bogus research pushing one version of the American meritocratic ideology, and they bring in to oppose it some guy pushing the contradictory ideological alternative that "you can make it if you try!"

"Here, cows' bodies, movements and subjectivities are trained and manipulated in accordance with a persistent discourse of agricultural productivism"

Cows' subjectivities? Really?

Re-capturing bovine life: Robot–cow relationships, freedom and control in dairy farming

from ScienceDirect Publication: Journal of Rural Studies

Available online 26 February 2013
Publication year: 2013
Source:Journal of Rural Studies

Robotic milking machines are novel technologies that take over the labour of dairy farming and reduce the need for human–animal interactions. Replacing ‘conventional’ twice-a-day milking managed by people with a system that supposedly allows cows the freedom to be milked automatically whenever they choose, it is claimed that robotic milking has health and welfare benefits for cows, increases productivity, and has lifestyle advantages for dairy farmers. Such claims are certainly contested, but the installation of robotic milkers clearly establishes new forms of relationships between cows, technologies and dairy farmers. This paper draws on in-depth interviews with farmers and observational research on farms to examine relationships between representations of robotic milkers as a technology which gives cows freedom and autonomy, and practices and mechanisms which suggest that bovine life is re-captured and disciplined in important ways through the introduction of this technology. We focus on two issues. First, we explore changes in what it is to ‘be bovine’ in relation to milking robots, drawing on a combination of a discursive framing of cows' behaviour and ‘nature’ by dairy farmers and on-farm observation of cow-technology interaction. Second, we examine how such changes in bovinity might be articulated through conceptions of biopower which focus on knowledge of and intervention in the life of both the individual cow body and the herd. Such knowledge and intervention in the newly created sites of the robotic milking dairy are integral to these remodelled, disciplinary farm systems. Here, cows' bodies, movements and subjectivities are trained and manipulated in accordance with a persistent discourse of agricultural productivism. In discussing these issues, the paper seeks to show how particular representations of cows, the production of embodied bovine behaviours, technological interventions and micro-geographies contribute to a re-capturing and re-enclosure of bovine life which counters the liberatory discourses which are used to promote robotic milking.

Highlights

► The paper examines notions of bovine autonomy in robotic milking systems. ► Concepts of biopower in human–animal–technology relationships are developed. ► Manufacturers' claims and on-farm experiences of robotic milking are compared. ► The paper examines how bovine life is ‘recaptured’ in robotic milking systems.

Watkins and Miller

Things that didn't make it into the memo.

First, in something that Miller later identifies as the "alteration principle," he insists that in principle, any social fact could be changed by the "relevant" individuals, given the will and sufficient information about the situation. Miller seems unhappy this, though I'm not 100% clear on why. His idea seems to be something like a false consciousness argument: that it is possible for individuals to be systematically confused about what they want, and so prevented from acting to change collective practices that damage their interests. In contrast, I actually like this idea a lot as a way to express the essential mutability of social relations. Of course, one needs to be more explicit than (the ideologically tinged) Watkins of what's involved here: the "relevant individuals" are at the least going to have serious collective action problems (think the difference between individualistic and organized strategies by workers) and very likely going to have systematic conflicts of interest (e.g. the "relevant individuals" in anything involving work conditions are going to include employers).

Second, Watkins says this: "The practical or technological or therapeutic importance of social science largely consists in explaining, and thereby perhaps rendering politically manageable, the unintended and unfortunate consequences of the behavior of interacting individuals” (112-3). This strikes me as a remarkably clear statement of the ideal of "reformist liberal" social science. For one thing, it's pitched in terms of "unintended and unfortunate consequences" as opposed to objective conflicts. But even more interesting is the implicit equation of the "practical" consequences of social science with first technology, then therapy, then political manageability. Talk about a grab-bag of ideological metaphors. Politics is not about conflicting claims, but about "management" of problems that are implied to be akin either to "magneto trouble" (to use Keynes' phrase) or individual maladjustment to society.