Search results

What drives this diffusion process? One neo-institutional answer to this question is that new models of nationhood, organization, and social identity exist in the larger world environment (Meyer, 2009, p. 36ff). Because they are external, these “identities” and models can be adopted without huge costs and without necessarily entailing the reorganization of society or actors’ personalities. Thus the models of modern society can spread quickly because they are relatively easy to assume and because they have high legitimacy in the international environment. Conformity produces instrumental rewards as well. And it also signals to significant “other” nations and international bodies that a nation has accepted modernity and its responsibilities (see Boli & Thomas's discussion, 1999). Thus, foreign aid, loans, and credit may flow quickly to those developing countries that enact modern institutional structures like mass education and democratic elections.

Drawing on world society and policy analysis literatures, the purpose of this paper is to examine the uneven diffusion of family planning programs in the developing world and the subsequent consequences for child health. The study begins by assessing the effect of world society ties on countries' commitment to and capacity for family planning programs. It then examines the impact such programs have on child health inputs and survival.

This paper uses a cross‐national, quantitative study design on a sample of less developed countries.

Countries' world society embeddedness is a robust predictor of their institutional commitment to and capacity for family planning programs. Such program efforts are also shown to have a significant impact on child survival rates, mediated by reduced fertility and higher rates of childhood immunization.

Future research should further explore the way in which such programs contribute to and/or serve as a foundation for health infrastructure in developing countries.

This study points to the child health benefits associated with building capacity in family planning programs. Practitioners should take care to appropriately adapt global policy models to local needs and circumstances while allowing local control.

This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on the role of world society (international nongovernmental organization) networks in spreading development policies and programs in the developing world. Going one step further, it assesses the actual impact of one such policy program on children's health.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate discourses on globalisation and world society and to disclose the commonalities and differences of both scientific debates. In particular, it draws attention to theoretical concepts of globalisation and world society. This is considered fruitful for comprehending the complex mechanisms of sociological theory-building in a globalised world.

The article first contextualises the multi-dimensionality and ambiguity of globalisation. It then reflects on the consequences of globalisation for socio-scientific considerations. The third part of the paper highlights scientific discourses on world society and globalisation, especially illustrating the commonalities and differences of both debates. In the concluding remarks of the article, discourses on world society are presented as a seismograph of contemporary socio-scientific debates encountering processes of globalisation.

The paper does not simply present scientific discourses as isolated from a globalised world, but discloses the challenges of socio-scientific disciplines facing the global frame of reference for research. To balance the research analyses of scientific discourses, those on globalisation and world society are illustrated.

The interplay between discourses on globalisation and those on world society is rarely reflected upon in publications. This paper provides insights into how, on the one hand, scientific debates on globalisation and on world society act together as part and parcel of the overall global frame of reference for research, yet it also shows, on the other hand, how different the discourses are. Furthermore, it highlights the prospective role of socio-scientific disciplines in a globalised world.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

Still recently, one could read that social constructivism as a paradigm in sociology has yet generated no substantive theory of globalization (Risse, 2007). The argument was that even though social constructivism could certainly contribute to our understanding of globalization, notably by stressing the role of language and cultural norms in the organization of collective activities on a world scale, it could not satisfactorily account in its own terms for the entire phenomena under examination, due to the fact that globalization is not solely or even primarily about language and cultural norms. The exposition of such a position in the academic literature is worth mentioning, indeed even significant, if only for the reason that it occurred in a collection of essays edited by David Held and Anthony McGrew, who have done so much over the past decade to establish globalization studies as a solid research field, all at once theoretically sophisticated and empirically informed, with the publication of a long series of books on Global transformations (Held, McGrew, Golblatt, & Perraton, 1999; Held, 2004a, 2004b; Held & McGrew, 2002, 2003, 2007a, 2007b; Held & Kaya, 2007; Held & Koenig-Archibugi, 2003; see also McGrew & Lewis, 1992; Held, 1995). In spite of such credentials, the present article aims directly at challenging and overcoming this position by developing what would be the basis or the framework for a full-fledged social constructivist theory of globalization. Admittedly, this requires us to redefine globalization in a fundamental manner. Such a transformation is possible when one turns toward a new kind of social constructivism: Niklas Luhmann's radical constructivism as grounded in his systems theory (Luhmann, 2002; see also Luhmann, 1982a, 1989, 1990, 1995, 2000a, 2000b). I contend that globalization is neither a process of social change nor a historical set of forces of transformation having to do with the way human beings shape space through their collective activities; rather, globalization is one of contemporary society's self-descriptions.

Purpose: This chapter explores the relationship between international human rights and the domestic practices of nation-states around lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights.

Methodology/approach: Using Sweden and Russia as case studies, this chapter analyzes LGBT human rights recommendations from the cyclical United Nations Universal Periodic Review and how they affect practices within nation-states.

Findings: Sweden embraces recommendations to strengthen LGBT human rights and institutes stronger national LGBT rights policies of its own, while Russia’s compliance with LGBT rights recommendations is low. Further, reports of LGBT victimization show that the severity of attacks on LGBT people is pronounced in Russia.

Social implications: Relying on case studies limits the generalizability of this study, but the implications of these findings suggest that, to strengthen human rights compliance and improve the lives of minority citizens, human rights advocates should take note of domestic ideologies and leverage the institutional environment of the world society to provide information, resources, and pressure to facilitate nation-states’ compliance with international human rights recommendations.

Originality/value: This chapter deepens the discourse on the contested realm of international LGBT rights by highlighting the dynamics between international monitoring mechanisms, domestic discourse, and domestic law.

Michael Brown argues that what unites the human and social sciences is their evolving character, made explicit in the concepts of “reflexivity,” “course of activity,” and “theorizing.” Once the social sciences are taken as a whole, the notion of “sociality” will allow to grasp society as ever changing, as a becoming. I shall examine the notion of sociality in the literary criticism of Lukács, Goldmann, and Adorno, three authors who consider the essay as the adequate open form of critique in times of rapid social change. Originally adopted by the young Lukács, the essay tended to be abandoned by him when elaborating the concept of critical or socialist realism as a repository of timeless cultural values. In his studies in the European realist or the soviet novel, for example, on Balzac, Stendhal, Thomas Mann, or Solzhenitsyn, the dialectical concept of social totality becomes a sum of orientations, presenting the individual writer with the moral task to choose “progress” and discard “negativity.” The social is thus narrowed to individual choice. Different from Lukács, Goldmann's literary theory defines cultural production as a matter of the social group, the transindividual subject. Goldmann was deeply marked by Lukács's early writings from which he gained notably the notion of tragedy and the concept of maximum possible consciousness—the world vision of a social group which structures the work of a writer. Cultural creation is resistance to capitalist society, as evident in the literature of absence, Malraux's novels, and the nouveau roman. In the writings of Adorno the social is lodged within the avant-garde, provided that one takes its means and procedures literally, e.g., the writings of Kafka. By formal innovation—among others the adoption of the essay, the small form, the fragment—art exercises criticism of the ongoing rationalization process and preserves the possibility of change (p. 319).