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Drawing on the theoretical system known as pure sociology, this chapter presents a theory of the transition from ordinary citizen to dedicated terrorist.

We support our argument with data drawn from the diverse literature on terrorist affiliation, with particular emphasis on qualitative investigations into the background of individual terrorists.

The transition from citizen to terrorist represents a dramatic increase in commitment to a moral cause, or partisanship. Such commitment is a product of a specific social geometry: social closeness to a powerful organization and social distance from the enemy. That geometry is triggered by a movement of social time entailing loss and proceeds via gravitational attraction. If uninterrupted, the process reverses social time, resulting in a highly partisan geometry that calls forth risky sacrifice for the cause and severe violence toward enemy civilians.

Our theory builds upon network explanations of the transition to terrorism but goes beyond them in three ways: (1) it provides an explanation of the initial drift into terrorist networks; (2) it does not invoke psychology, purposes or other subjective mental states of the actors; and (3) it situates the transition to terrorism within a general theory of conflict.

Since the late 1970s, Stanford-based research and researchers have been absolutely central to the field of organizational studies. Cohen, March, and Olsen's “A garbage can model of organizational choice,” Meyer and Rowan's “Institutionalized organizations: formal structure as myth and ceremony” (1977), Hannan and Freeman's “The population ecology of organizations” (1978), Pfeffer and Salancik's “The external control of organizations” (1978), and Scott's “Organizations: rational, natural, and open systems” (first edition, 1981) defined distinctive perspectives that shaped and continue to shape the scholarly conversation. It is hard to underestimate the influence of these authors and of the many other students of organizations who have taught and/or been trained at Stanford.

This paper reviews and assesses the aim, substance, and impact of Simon Susen’s book, “The Postmodern Turn” in the Social Sciences.

The review follows the structure of Susen’s book, by description and by evaluation.

Susen’s book encompasses a very large volume of literature of the self-defined “postmodern,” then concludes that the covered material has contributed little that is new to the social sciences.

The review has not been previously published, does not replicate any prior assessment known to the author.

In theorizing the dynamics of social processes, dialectical thinking informs Marx's historical materialist inquiries and both – dialectics and historical materialist principles – inform his political–economic analysis. In conceptualizing empirical observations during this work, Marx (1973b, p. 101) assumes that the “concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse” and that “With the varying degree of development of productive power, social conditions and the laws governing them vary too” (Marx, 1992, p. 28). This methodological tack strives for the flexibility needed for analyzing patterns in long-term social development (the structure of history) as well as the logic of specific systems in their totality and flux (the history of structures).

Law on the screen goes beyond film. It takes us to the domains of mind and culture, power and politics, technology and rhetoric, and the changing contours and norms of professional practice, craft, and pedagogy. Law on the screen is a multidisciplinary affair. It embraces empirical/descriptive, political/normative, and jurisprudential/theoretical dimensions of scholarship. By codifying what we know and how we know it, culture and technology mimic the regulatory force of law. But just as law is shaped and informed by technology and culture so, too, are technology and culture shaped and informed in turn by law's power to regulate. Code is a two-way street. Who gets to design the code, how, and with what effect? That is the political question par excellence of our day.

University administrators are increasingly using a range of metrics to evaluate the “quality” of work being undertaken at their institutions. The unit of analysis for these assessments varies from Department (England), field of research (Australia), and the like, but inevitably the assessment works its way to individual researchers. This poses a major challenge for administrators and even more so for researchers. Shifts in institutional policy to meet the challenges of funding and reputation/esteem of rising in the ranks raise a number of questions concerning the temporality and value of academic labor. Notably, decisions about the worth of academic labor are often well removed from the undertaking of that labor and this separation removes the human side of scholarly work and reduces knowledge production to numerical indicators and the achievement of key performance indicators. In this chapter I draw on shifts in an institution’s policy position and the impact that this has on researchers. Particularly I explore the implications of historically mapping research performance using different metrics than were available at the time and expecting researchers to adopt alternate strategies immediately (irrespective of delays in the publication process). Although I do not doubt that administrator decisions are arguably made in the best interests of advancing the institutions position in the increasingly global academy, the presentism of such strategies is in many ways at odds with the long-term focus of building coherent and sophisticated research programs. Alternate means of understanding the challenges and tensions of administrator strategy has the potential to impact on policy and the development of programs for current and aspiring researchers.

Why and how was the territorialized state form disseminated through colonial expansion? To begin to answer this question, this study proposes a relational account of the production of territorialized state space, drawing on empirical evidence from two understudied cases of colonial expansion in the early 20th century: Spain in Morocco and Italy in Libya. Drawing on colonial and local archival sources, I demonstrate how colonial territoriality resulted from a violent clash between an aspiring colonial power and a reactive, rural counter-state building movement, led by the Amir Abd al-Krim in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco and the Sanusi leader, Omar al-Mokhtar, in Cyrenaica in eastern Libya. Territorialization was not imposed from the outside by a European colonial power. Rather, it was produced relationally through violent interactions between the colonial state and a local autonomous political entity. This analysis contributes to the still-nascent study of colonial state space and to contemporary policy debates about political order in North Africa and the Middle East by emphasizing the importance of local political mobilization, the complexity of interactions catalyzed across local and translocal scales by colonial expansion, and the high levels of physical violence endemic to the production of territorialized state space.

Space tourism is often represented as an extended version of tourism on the Earth, with tourists experiencing relaxed and trouble-free experiences. But parallels between travel on the Earth and in outer space are misleading. The latter raises major issues concerning power-relations between passengers, pilots, and ground control. Who has the power in space tourism and how is this power exercised? The literature underestimates potential dangers to the human body. These include short- and long-term risks stemming from microgravity, exposure to radiation, and rapidly changing switches between day and night. These problems further undermine the popular image of space tourism as a wholesome and joyous practice. Space tourism may well be a very expensive way of achieving ill health.