Sociology of the State

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

Back cover text: If the new fin de siècle marks a recurrence of the real, Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power epitomizes that development and sets new standards for social and political inquiry. The Danish town of Aalborg is to Flyvbjerg what Florence was to Machiavelli: a laboratory for understanding the real workings of power, and for grasping what they mean to our more general concerns of social and political organization. Politics, administration, and planning are examined in ways that allow  a rare, in-depth understanding. The reader witnesses, firsthand, the classic and endless drama which defines what modernity and democracy are and can be.

This article presents the theoretical and methodological considerations behind a research method which the author calls ‘phronetic planning research’. Such research sets out to answer four questions of power and values for specific instances of planning: (1) Where are we going with planning? (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (3) Is this development desirable? (4) What, if anything, should we do about it? A central task of phronetic planning research is to provide concrete examples and detailed narratives of the ways in which power and values work in planning and with what consequences to whom, and to suggest how relations of power and values could be changed to work with other consequences. Insofar as planning situations become clear, they are clarified by detailed stories of who is doing what to whom. Clarifications of that kind are a principal concern for phronetic planning research and provide the main link to praxis.

We contribute to the literature on institutional and organizational change by integrating two related areas of study; the theory and method of analysis informed by the research on institutional logics and historical-event sequencing. Institutional logics provide the theory to understand how the content of culture influences organizational change; historical event sequencing reveals the underlying pattern of cultural transformation. We apply this dual perspective by focusing on the cases of institutional stability and change in organizational governance in three distinct industries: accounting, architecture, and highereducation publishing. Research on governance has focused on changes in organizational design between markets, hierarchies, and networks. Missing from this research is an understanding of how institutions at the wider societal level motivate organizations to adopt one of these governance forms over another. We examine how the governance of firms in these industries has been influenced by the institutional logics of the professions, the market, the state, and the corporation by focusing on three mechanisms-institutional entrepreneurs, structural overlap, and historical event sequencing. Overall, our findings reveal how accounting was influenced by state regulation producing a punctuated equilibrium model, architecture by professional duality producing a cyclical model, and publishing by market rationalization producing an evolutionary model of institutional change in organizational governance.

Taken together, the works of Jurgen Habermas and Michel Foucault highlight an essential tension in modernity. This is the tension between the normative and the real, between what should be done and what is actually done. Understanding this tension is crucial to understanding modern democracy, what it is and what it could be. It has been argued that an effective way of making democracy stronger is to strengthen civil society. This article contains a comparative analysis of the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to the question of democracy and civil society. More specifically, the discourse ethics of Habermas is contrasted with the power analytics and ethics of Foucault evaluating their usefulness for those interested in understanding, and bringing about, democratic social change.

“Bourgeois Collectivism, Professional Power and the Boundaries of the State: The Private and Public Life of the Law Society, 1825-1914" (1996) 3 International Journal of the Legal Profession pp. 81-135.

ABSTRACT

This essay considers anew the rise of the Law Society from its foundation in 1825 to World War I, and its larger political and cultural significance.  The period from 1825 to 1914 was the seminal or classical period in the development of the Society.  Many of the controversial and difficult issues that today concern both the profession and the public about the conduct of the Society and the solicitors’ profession at large came to the fore and were crystallised during this formative period.  It was during this period that the Society established itself as the predominant voice of the solicitors’ profession, the arbiter of admission to the profession and proper conduct, the defender and extender of the profession's monopolies, and an influence of major significance on legislation and legal practice, despite recurrent bouts of public disquiet and discord within the Society and the profession, and on-going conflicts with other professions and the State concerning their respective jurisdictions.  How and why did this happen; and what is its larger significance?  In particular, the essay will address what has been called “one of the most important questions about the evolution of the legal profession up to the twentieth century”: namely, how was it that the regulation of solicitors came to vest considerable autonomy in the profession, an autonomy frequently envied by other professions? 

In examining the rise of the Society, the essay will focus on four of the most important factors: firstly, the way the Society was constructed from and inscribed within a complex of pre-existing traditions, forms, and vocabularies, including those relating to state regulation, self-governance and middle class systems of association; secondly, the swift and successful way in which the Society changed its orientation from a coffee-house type meeting place to an energetic, self-sustaining and proactive association; thirdly, its intimate links with elite City firms and the state; and, finally, its success as a pressure group, constituting and influencing legislation and practice.

The web of interlocking contacts that enmeshed the executive of the Society, the elite City firms, the government, parliament, the judiciary and the local law societies is a subject which has hitherto been neglected by historians and sociologists.  The Society’s role as a lobbyist and pressure group has already been subjected to scrutiny.  This valuable work has nonetheless tended to be limited both with respect to subject-matter and periodisation.  As regards subject-matter, it has largely concentrated on the Society's defence of its conveyancing monopoly and its efforts to thwart title registration.  With respect to chronology, it is the period 1880 to 1925 which has received the lion's share of attention---which is not surprising given its pre-occupation with title registration.  The vital importance of this subject-matter and period is beyond dispute.  Nonetheless, there is a danger of portraying the Society's lobbying as more occasional, limited, and particularistic than was actually the case. 

This essay aims to supplement these accounts with a necessarily brief survey of some of the other areas which have received less attention.  More generally, it illustrates what earlier accounts have tended to de-emphasise, namely, the Society's influence from its inception on the legislative process, helping to shape the terms of debate through its specialised knowledge, contacts and personnel, an influence which embraced professional and non-professional matters.  From this perspective, the Society became an intrinsic partner in the formulation of state policy.  As such the paper is part of a larger study of the political and cultural significance of the Society.  It is hoped that this project will make an empirical contribution to current, largely theoretical controversies concerning the nature and politics of legal professionalism, the complex interplay between law and politics, the tensions between serving equally and concurrently the public interest and the interests of a profession, and the nature of government and democracy in England.

The essay begins, not with 1825 and the foundation of the Society, but with the Society’s pre-history.  This is essential if one is to understand the constellation of factors that helped to explain the rise and relative success of the Society, and the continuities and well as the discontinuities in professional form, culture and power over time.  Indeed, it is no longer possible to treat the early modern period as a sort of primordial slime from which emerged modern, mature forms of professional associations, and which, therefore, merits scant attention.  This is in part because the traditional stark and simplistic contrasts between the profession of the earlier period and that of the modern era have been largely repudiated in ways that have important consequences for how we characterise and periodise modernity.  Recent research on the history of the English legal profession is virtually unanimous that: several of the key features of the modern legal profession can be found in its earliest history; the legal profession of the early modern period, especially between about 1500 and 1650, exhibited many of the traits that sociologists have associated with “professionalisation” (the existence of national, autonomous professional organisations; self-regulation; systems of discipline and education; custody of esoteric knowledge; monopolies of competence etc.); and the tendency within the sociological literature to assume that professionalisation was peculiarly associated with industrial capitalism or modernity is highly misleading. Thus Part One adopts a broader view of the context within which the Society was constructed than is normally the case. 

Part Two considers the period 1825 to 1845, the period from the establishment of the Society to its second royal charter.  It demonstrates how the Society worked at building respectability: from the construction of a prestigious headquarters, the establishment of elite contacts and learned lectures, to attracting the right people, performing the right work, in the right manner.  Although a patrician, London-dominated minority within the profession, the Society swiftly secured the mantle of the spokesperson of, and representative for, the profession as a whole, despite the outright hostility and suspicion of large sectors of the profession. 

Part Three considers the sources of the Society’s success during the period 1845-1914, with special reference to its interpenetration of the state and, in particular, its influence on the legislative process.  While Part Three analyses and demonstrates the relative success of the Society and the consolidation of its power, Part Four complements this by stressing the limited hegemony of the Society.  It also points up the ways in which the Society became a victim of its own success.  It was also during the period 1845-1914 that the tensions between its diverse roles (defender of the profession, assistant to the state, protector of the public interest etc.,) came to the fore as the Society’s ability to safeguard both the interests of its membership and the consumers of the law was periodically questioned. 

In the concluding section we consider some of the larger findings and issues generated by this research to date, in particular: the continuities, discontinuities and the construction of “two hemispheres” within the profession; the political and cultural significance of the solicitors’ profession, relative to the bar; the nature of the special relationship between the legal profession and the state; the role of the Law Society in the construction and transmission of political discourse; and the elastic ideology of legal professionalism.

This paper suggests a framework in which the importance of the individual dimension and agency can be reclaimed within a profoundly social and relational view of the self. Juxtaposed with recent research on the self, cultural-historical activity theory is discussed, including its foundational premises formulated by Vygotsky and its conception of the self articulated by Leontiev. Expanded in a number of ways proposed in this paper, this theory helps to theorize the self (a) in its practical relevance, as a lawful and necessary moment in human collective practices, (b) as endowed with the capacity to generate new cycles of practice, and (c) as immanent in activities that position individuals to contribute to meaningfully changing the world. The concept of 'self as a leading activity' is discussed as a way to capture what the self is, where it is located, and what its purpose and relation to society are.

In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning. We posit an alternative approach based on the power analytics of Michel Foucault which focuses on ‘what is actually done’, as opposed to Habermas’s focus on ‘what should be done’. We discuss how the Foucauldian stance problematises planning, asking difficult questions about the treatment of legitimacy, rationality, knowledge and spatiality. We conclude that Foucault offers a type of analytic planning theory which offers better prospects than does Habermas for those interested in understanding and bringing about democratic social change through planning.

This article provides an answer to what has been called the biggest problem in theorizing and understanding planning: the ambivalence about power found among planning researchers, theorists, and students. The author narrates how he came to work with issues of power and gives an example of how the methodology he developed for power studies—phronetic planning research—may be employed in practice. Phronetic planning research follows the tradition of power studies running from Machiavelli and Nietzsche to Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. It focuses on four value-rational questions: (1) Where are we going with planning? (2) Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? (3) Is this development desirable? (4) What should be done? These questions are exemplified for a specific instance of Scandinavian urban planning. The author finds that the questions, and their answers, make a difference to planning in practice. They make planning research matter.

The Aalborg Project may be interpreted as a metaphor of modern politics, modern administration and planning, and of modernity itself. The basic idea of the project was comprehensive, coherent, and innovative, and it was based on rational and democratic argument. During implementation, however, when idea met reality, the play of Machiavellian princes, Nietzschean will to power, and Foucauldian rationality-as-rationalization resulted in the fragmentation of the project.

Closely associated with China's growing prominence in international politics are discussions about how to understand Chinese history, and how such perspectives inform the way a stronger China may relate to the rest of the world. This article examines two narratives as cases, and considers how they fit against more careful historical scholarship. The first is the nationalist narrative dealing with Qing and Republican history, and the second is the narrative on the Chinese world order. Analyses of Chinese nationalism tend to see a more powerful China as being more assertive internationally, based in part on a belief in the need to address and overcome past wrongs. Studies of historical regional systems in Asia point to the role that a peaceful 'Confucian' ethos played in sustaining a stable Chinese-led order, and highlight the promise it holds for checking regional and international tensions. The two perspectives create an obvious tension when trying to understand China's rise, which can suggest that using historical viewpoints to understand contemporary developments may be doomed to incoherence. This article argues that difficulties in applying knowledge of the past to analyses of China's role in contemporary world politics indicate a relative inattentiveness to Chinese and Asian history. It illustrates how the nature of China's rise may be more contingent on the external environment that it faces than popular received wisdom may indicate. The article suggests that a more extensive engagement with historical research and historiography can augment and enrich attempts to appreciate the context surrounding China's rise.

Over the past 30 years, few sources have been the subject of more scholarly attention than medieval and early modern pardon letters. These charters, issued by the royal or princely chancery in response to a petition addressed to the monarch and his council, were the strongest manifestation of the sovereign’s right to remit crimes in many European polities, including France, England, the Low Countries, Castile, and Portugal. Following the paradigmatic interpretation of ordinary violence as the expression of well-integrated social behaviours, historians of crime and criminal justice have found in petitions and pardon letters records of powerful narratives describing episodes of violence in the population’s everyday life. Yet scholars have also debated the reliability of these stories, as they were obviously designed to support the petitioners’ claim for pardon. Another major historiographical controversy concerns the articulation between the power to pardon and the criminal policies of the monarchs. While some historians considered the granting of pardon letters as the product of a weak or corrupted justice system that preferred to remit crimes in exchange for money rather prosecuting the perpetrators, others argued that the rise of the power to pardon followed the process of early modern State-building and served to temper criminal prosecutions and assert the sovereign’s right over the life and death of his subjects. This essay introduces the reader to the historiography of pardon letters and shows its connections with the recent developments in the history of crime and criminal justice in late medieval and early modern Europe.

This book explores the developmental legacies of British colonialism.  Through a nested-research design that combines comparative-historical methods and statistics, it offers evidence that different forms of colonialism institutionalized states with different capacities to promote development.  Relative to indirect rule, direct rule promoted states that were bureaucratic, infrastructurally powerful, and inclusive and all three proved vital to broad-based development.  The book includes in-depth case studies of Botswana, Guyana, Mauritius, and Sierra Leone.

"Corruption has become one of the most popular topics in the social scientific disciplines. However, there is a lack of interdisciplinary communication about corruption. Models developed by different
academic disciplines are often isolated from each other. The purpose of this paper is to review several major approaches to corruption and draw them closer to each other. Most studies of corruption fall
into three major categories: (i) rational-actor models where corruption is viewed as resulting from cost/benefit analysis of individual actors; (ii) structural models that focus on external forces that determine corruption; and (iii) relational models that emphasize social interactions and networks among corrupt actors. Focusing on actors’ behavior and the social context, this article explains corruption concepts taken from sociology, economics, organization studies, political science, social anthropology, and social psychology."

The heated debates between proponents of rational-choice, culturalist, and structuralist (or historical institutionalist) analysis over method and substance derive from differences over philosophical issues. This article relates these differences between ideal-typical rationalist, culturalist and structuralist analysis to their positions on two fundamental problems in social theory: (i) the epistemological significance of structural principles vis-a-vis agency; and (ii) the relative significance of the material and ideal dimensions of social processes. This suggests that many recent efforts at ‘synthesis’ (e.g. through ‘analytic narratives’) end up being rhetorical gestures since the fundamental assumptions identified with a given approach are not significantly relaxed. A more pragmatic position has been outlined in ‘structurationist’ perspectives that build on Weber’s social theory. Such perspectives are consciously agnostic about epistemological first principles in order to permit more question-driven analysis. Structurationism does not represent a novel paradigm for comparative analysis, but its epistemological flexibility makes it an ideal foundation for eclectic scholarship intended to transcend and engage the debates among rationalist, culturalist, and structuralist analysis.

Niccolò Machiavelli, the founder of modern political and administrative thought, made clear that an understanding of politics requires distinguishing between formal politics and what later, with Ludwig von Rochau, would become known as Realpolitik. No such distinction has been employed in the study of rationality. Yet I will argue that distinguishing between formal rationality and real rationality is as important for the understanding of rationality and planning as the distinction between formal politics and Realpolitik has been for understanding politics.

In recent decades, the sociology of the state has become engrossed in the relationship between knowledge and modern statecraft. Heeding recent calls for “society-centered” approaches, this article investigates the role of nonstate leaders in the production of state knowledge. It takes up the question: How have nonstate leaders—i.e. civil leaders and community advocates—contributed to what James Scott (1998) has termed “state legibility.” While historical traces suggest these actors have worked to lessen opposition to state projects, this activity remains empirically understudied and conceptually underdeveloped. Addressed to this problem, this article introduces the concept of consent-building and proposes an analytic approach that focuses on the motivations of nonstate leaders, the obstacles of noncompliance they confront, and the persuasive tactics used to foster public cooperation. To illustrate the purchase of this approach, it presents a case study of local Latino promoters of the 2010 U.S. Census. This analysis reveals how nonstate leaders can enable, rather than impede, the capacity to “see like a state.”

National identity is constructed through successive identifications with significant Others. This article discusses the phenomenon of change and continuity in Czech identity. It is focused here on the identification towards the EU, which has become the most significant Other of today in two ways: (a) (change) contributing to overcoming the identity crisis provoked by the drastic changes that occurred between 1989 and 1993 (change of regime, disappearance of the USSR and the break-up of Czechoslovakia), and therefore the subsequent drastic changes in relations with past significant Others: communism, the USSR, and the Slovaks; and (b) (continuity) reaffirming one of the fundamental elements during the national revival in the nineteenth century, democracy, upon which the various identifications towards the EU have been aligned. According to the differing interpretations of what democracy means, and three other criteria of the “levels of Othering,” the EU has been “imagined,” on the one hand, as an entity where Czechs can flourish in their identity and ensure their freedom and democratic values (positive Other), and, on the other, as an “oppressor” entity which portrays democratic deficit, restricts freedom, and threatens Czech national identity (negative Other).

The immediate post-war period was defined by shifts in capitalism's socioeconomic and institutional underpinnings. Commonly known as Fordism, until the early-1970s models of standardized industrial mass-production and robust state planning and intervention were relatively successful in maintaining secular growth in employment, productivity and demand as well as establishing the national economy and society as unified, governable fields. This paper considers how migration controls in Canada and Australia enhanced and extended such arrangements. In simultaneously boosting production and demand, diversifying and integrating industrial activities and assimilating European migrants into a mass consumer culture while excluding non-Europeans perceived as disruptive of material and sociocultural homogeneity, such policies provided central vectors of economic and cultural nationalism that complemented other monopolistic and redistributive interventions.

In this paper we address the ongoing debate on the democratic quality and the legitimacy of the European Union. We focus on the recent argument that at least in the foreseeable future the European Union will not be able to develop an inputoriented legitimisation due to a lack of a 'thick' collective identity and therefore should be satisfied with an output-oriented legitimisation. We raise several question with regard to this debate. First, we address the empirical implications of this argument. Output-oriented legitimisation supposes both a common perception across the European Union of the most important problems to be solved and a common understanding that these problems should be solved at the European level. Secondly, we take issue with the argument that a well developed democratic political system at the European level requires a thick collective identity. The concept of a 'demos' is not identical to the concept of a 'people' (Volk) in its sociological meaning. Also, we express our doubts about the democratic quality of a democracy only based on government for the people. We argue that once political decisions are taken at the European level, there is every reason to apply the same normative democratic principles to the European Union that are applicable to its member states. In modern politics democracy almost by definition means representative democracy and representative democracy supposes a competitive party system. Therefore, we address the question to what extent a competitive party system at the European level would be feasible.

In this conceptual essay, the authors argue that one way to understand the Chinese state is to view it from below, from the perspective of people advocating change. The authors' "state reflected in society" approach is illustrated with accounts of Chinese lawyers, journalists, and NGO leaders who operate at the boundary of the acceptable and are attentive to signals about what the authorities will tolerate. Their experiences suggest that mixed signals about the limits of the permissible is a key feature of the Chinese state. Beyond a number of well-patrolled "forbidden zones," the Chinese state speaks with many voices and its bottom line is often unclear. At the border of the uncontroversial and the unacceptable, the Chinese state is both a highcapacity juggernaut capable of demarcating no-go zones and a hodgepodge of disparate actors ambivalent about what types of activism it can live with. Whether mixed signals are deliberate or accidental is hard to determine, but they do offer the authorities certain advantages by providing a low-cost way to contain dissent, gather information, and keep options open.

Published in the Journal of Historical Sociology : https://t.co/Zm334jkkWT

Neo-Weberian historical sociology and political science establishes that territory is a defining feature of the modern state. Drawing on insights from political geography, I argue that ‘territory’ is not a pre-existing physical location, but an effect produced by state practices and technologies. The spatial fetish of territory, moreover, distracts analytical attention from the equally important non-territorial dimensions of the state. To map these new and unfamiliar dimensions, I propose three analogies from the study of physics - wormholes, gravitational fields, and quantum entanglement - as powerful conceptual devices with the potential to reorient social scientists towards a fuller understanding of state-space.

Truth is for sale today, some critics claim. The increased commodification of science corrupts it, scientific fraud is rampant and the age-old trust in science is shattered. This cynical view, although gaining in prominence, does not explain very well the surprising motivation and integrity that is still central to the scientific life. Although scientific knowledge becomes more and more treated as a commodity or as a product that is for sale, a central part of academic scientific practice is still organized according to different principles. In this paper, I critically analyze alternative models for understanding the organization of knowledge, such as the idea of the scientific commons and the gift economy of science. After weighing the diverse positive and negative aspects of free market economies of science and gift economies of science, a commons structured as a gift economy seems best suited to preserve and take advantage of the specific character of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, commons and gift economies promote the rich social texture that is important for supporting central norms of science. Some of these basic norms might break down if the gift character of science is lost. To conclude, I consider the possibility and desirability of hybrid economies of academic science, which combine aspects of gift economies and free market economies. The aim of this paper is to gain a better understanding of these deeper structural challenges faced by science policy. Such theoretical reflections should eventually assist us in formulating new policy guidelines.

This article examines the role of Enron, an American corporation, in its promotion of the electric power sector in the Dabhol Power Project in India. Under the new economic regime in India, policy changes were followed by nine fast-track private electric power projects in different parts of the country with foreign companies as primary promoters or major collaborators. The new, privately promoted power projects brought into focus the power of foreign capital and neoliberal discourse. Neoliberalism is not about free markets, nor about freedom, nor development of the global South or postsocialist economies but rather a form of power that creates congenial spaces for the extraction of revenue by corporations in countries that were, until recently, relatively less accessible to capitalist exploitation. The research is based on interviews with key informants and archival data. Este artículo examina el papel de Enron, una corporación norteamericana, en la promoción del sector de energía eléctrica del Proyecto Dabhol de Energía, en la India. Bajo el nuevo régimen económico de ese país, sobrevinieron cambios de política en nueve proyectos energéticos privados, en diferentes partes del país, en los que compañías extranjeras figuran como promotores primarios o colaboradores principales. Los nuevos proyectos energéticos promovidos desde el sector privado colocó en primer plano el poder del capital foráneo y el discurso neoliberal. El neoliberalismo no se refiere a mercados libres, ni es acerca de la libertad, ni del desarrollo del Sur global o de las economías possocialistas; en vez de eso es una forma de poder que crea espacios congeniales para que las compañías obtengan ingresos en países que hasta hace poco tiempo eran relativamente poco accesibles a la explotación capitalista. La investigación se basó en entrevistas con informantes claves y datos de archivos.

(abstract in english and french below)

GERMAN ABSTRACT: Der Beitrag befasst sich mit der Bürokratisierung Europas und sucht die Frage zu beantworten, ob der europäische Integrationsprozess jenseits ei-ner europäischen Vergemeinschaftung legislativer und judikativer Funktionen auch das Verwaltungshandeln bis auf den " street level " hinunter verändert. Er greift den feld-und praxistheoretischen Ansatz von Pierre Bourdieu auf, um jenseits des insti-tutionalistischen Schwerpunkts der bisherigen Forschung die Verwaltungspraxis in den Blick zu nehmen. Die Erörterungen, die sich am Fall des Gemeinsamen Euro-päischen Asylsystems orientieren, zeigen, dass bestehende nationale Verwaltungs-praktiken verschränkt und grenzüberschreitende Verfahrensabläufe etabliert werden. Vor allem das Dublin-Verfahren hat Routinen der Zuständigkeitsprüfung, Aktenfüh-rung und Fallbearbeitung etabliert, die länderübergreifend angelegt sind. Sie sind hochgradig formalisiert und objektiviert und operieren auf der Grundlage informa-tioneller Datenbanken und Software-Programme, die Arbeitsabläufe standardisieren und den Raum einer sachlich begründeten Entscheidungsfindung reduzieren. Der Beitrag schließt mit einer Diskussion der Implikationen dieser Entwicklungen.

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The article deals with the bureaucratization of Europe. Looking beyond the policy and judicial levels, it aims to ascertain whether the European integration process also affects the “street level” of administrative practices. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice and fields is used to transcend the institutionalist bias of previous research and focus more attentively on administrative practices. The analysis looks at the Common European Asylum System to illustrate that bureaucratization unfolds through the interconnection of practices between member states and the establishment of joint administrative procedures. Especially the Dublin Regulation has implemented cross-national administrative routines of record keeping, case management and responsibility sharing. These routines are highly formalized and objectified. They operate on the basis of electronic databases and software programs that standardize work processes and reduce the space of decision-making. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these developments.

FRENCH ABSTRACT: Cet article consacré à la bureaucratisation de l’Europe cherche à déterminer si le processus d’intégration européenne a non seulement abouti à la communautarisation des fonctions législatives et judiciaires mais aussi modifié les pratiques administratives jusqu’au niveau des bureaucrates de terrain (street-level bureaucrats). Il recourt à la théorie de la pratique et des champs de Pierre Bourdieu pour dépasser le biais institutionnaliste des recherches conduites jusqu’à présent et examiner les pratiques administratives elles-mêmes. Ces analyses basées sur le cas du régime d’asile européen commun mettent en évidence une interconnexion des pratiques nationales existantes et la mise en place de procédures administratives communes. Le règlement de Dublin, notamment, a établi des routines transnationales en matière de détermination des responsabilités, de gestion des dossiers et de traitement des cas. Ces routines hautement formalisées et objectivées s’appuient sur des bases de données et des programmes informatiques qui standardisent les procédures et réduisent la marge de décision discrétionnaire. L’article se conclut par une discussion des implications de ces évolutions.

Why does the Federal Reserve govern finance in violation of a core principle of political liberalism, private gain–private loss? Turning capture theory on its head, this paper argues that the Fed bails out banks not because it is captured by financial interests, but by “systemic risk.” Systemic risk emerged in the mid-1960s as the byproduct of a jurisdictional struggle between two groups of experts, monetary substantivists and formalists, over the Fed. Initially, it was a tendency of money markets to produce liquidity crunches. Yet, formalists, taking over the Fed, built a governance regime around these markets and instituted an emergency lending program to protect this regime from bank failures. Although they invented the concept of “systemic risk” in the 1980s to negotiate their autonomy with stakeholders, this frame gradually turned into a paradigm through which central bankers think about, see, and act on financial disasters.

To refine wholesale accounts of transnationalism, scholars have cited the amplification of border enforcement and immigration control. Whilst received analysis emphasizes multiple processes whether border militarization, mass deportation or the crossdeputization of local authorities, other trends remain unexplored. Employing the insights of scholarship on the diffusion and decentralization of policing and crime control, this work interrogates the enlistment of private individuals in official gatekeeping efforts. Drawing on relevant empirical examples -anonymous tip lines, voluntary immigration posses, border vigilantes, local anti-immigrant ordinances and other practices that compel, encourage and include societal participation -it assesses three modalities of citizen involvement: deputization, responsibilization and autonomization. Each displays distinct state-society relations and techniques for mobilizing societal actors and energies. In addition to illuminating the complexities, consequences and contradictions of contemporary immigration control, this article enriches understandings of social exclusion and the redistribution and transposition of government amidst neoliberal restructuring.

This article analyzes temporary migration schemes in Canada and Australia. Unlike the bulk of affluent states, both countries eschewed guestworker programs for most of the twentieth century, embracing migrants as permanent settlers and future citizens. Acting within neoliberal templates of government, political officials have recently promoted temporary migration as a mechanism of labor market regulation. While valorized workers are extended opportunities to transition to permanent status, for less-skilled workers state-imposed legal categories and regulations are being employed to attenuate attachment to the receiving society and heighten their flexibility and tractability. This research argues such trends embody and extend transformations concerning the restructuring and globalization of labor markets, the regulatory profile of states, and nature and significance of citizenship.

This conceptual article draws on literature in the sociology of science on modelling. The authors suggest that if state theory can be conceptualized as an ‘engine’ rather than merely a 'camera’, in that policy is mobilized to make the world fit the theory, then this has implications for conceptualizing states. To examine this possibility the authors look through the lens of actor-network theory (ANT) and in doing so articulate a relationship between two models of the state in the literature. They find that an ‘actor model’ of the state is accepted by many scholars, few of whom develop ‘network models’ of the state. In response, this study introduces an actor-network model and proposes that its contribution to state theory is in rethinking the character of modern states to be the outcome of actually performed assemblages of all those practices of building it, protecting it, governing it and theorizing about it.

In this article I explore the political and technical controversies of measuring water leakages in Mumbai to demonstrate how the dense historical accretions of technology, material, and social life that form hydraulic infrastructures in Mumbai trouble the audit cultures of neoliberal government. While scholars have recently drawn attention to the generativity of ignorance in the making of the state, in this article I argue that ignorance is not only a technology of politics, produced and managed by municipal water engineers and their subjects. Leakages, and the ignorances of leakages, are also enabled by the vital materiality of the city’s infrastructure. As engineers work hard to improvise resolutions to the leakages they can fix, and ignore the thousands of others they cannot, the processes of leakage always exceed the control of the city’s government. As such, the uncertain appearances of leakage in Mumbai not only provide the grounds for the work of the state. Leakages also constantly disrupt governmental projects in ways that make the water department vulnerable both to the claims of marginalized subjects and to new reform projects in the city.

Much of the scholarship around the workings of education policy has
focused on the global West and has taken for granted the state’s limited
abilities in the control of policies as both text and discourse. Drawing upon policy texts from the Singapore Ministry of Education and ethnographic data collected in a Singapore school, this paper explores the enlarged but by no means unproblematic role of strong states and their provision and regulation of education policy in Asia. The paper begins by providing an overview of the major emphases and research trajectories taken up by the field of education policy. This is followed by an elaborated account of the nature and politics of the strong state in Asia in general and particularly in Singapore. These theoretical and contextual remarks then pave the way for a closer look at how the Singapore state functions as a major mediator and recontextualizing agent of education policy. The discussion foregrounds the enlarged role of the state in prescribing, translating, and regulating how a national curriculum policy on critical thinking finds its way into the practice of local schools and classrooms. The paper concludes with a number of remarks on the deparochialization of research and how recent work on ‘Asia as method’ may provide a fortuitous approach to critiquing hegemonic systems of knowledge production.

Recent sociological works establish the significance and role of the state and political sphere in the enactment of racial oppression and construction of racial categories. However, less understood are the racialized dynamics that mediate exclusion and access to political power, particularly at the meso‐ and micro‐levels. Synthesizing extant theory and research on racial inequality, the state, politics , and power, this article advances a framework centering on boundaries and barriers. First, it discusses the relationship between the state and political sphere, political power, and racial inequality. Next, it explores the literature on the deployment and contestation of racialized boundaries to the symbolic and material benefits of the state. It then examines the literature on racialized barriers to engagement, participation, and influence in the political sphere. The article concludes by suggesting future research in the related areas of agenda‐setting and influence and the microdynamics of political power.

Violence against women appears to be endemic even in those societies where women have formal and equal citizenship. The influential theorist of citizenship, T.H. Marshall, found the status of women, or at least married women to be 'in some important respects peculiar'. Women in social democratic societies seem to have overcome those peculiarities and achieved full citizenship. And yet women's rights as citizens continue to be undermined by violence, specifically gender-based violence. In order to address the question about the apparent failure of citizenship rights to protect women from persistent violence this paper will suggest that the state is integral to our understandings as well as to any useful strategies for change. Based on the argument that citizenship is defined and practiced in terms of the sexual politics of contested gender relations, the paper argues that the state connects citizenship and violence. The persistence of violence against women is implicated in the sexual politics of citizenship. Hence, the challenge of violence against women is recognised as an issue for the state, citizenship and the whole community. Campaigns to recognise this challenge are becoming valuable sources of agency and activism as can be seen in recent campaigns and heightened media attention.

Within the politics of nationalism and nation-building, the emigration of ethnic and religious minorities, whether voluntary or involuntary, appears to be a commonly occurring practice. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, modern Turkey still carried the legacy of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious diversity in which its Armenian, Greek and Jewish communities had official minority status based upon the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. However, throughout the twentieth century, Turkey’s non-Muslim minority populations have undergone a mass emigration experience in which thousands of their numbers have migrated to various countries around the globe. While in the 1920s the population of non-Muslims in the country was close to three per cent of the total, today it has dropped to less than two per thousand. This article analyses the emigration of non-Muslim people from Turkey and relates this movement to the wider context of nation-building in the country.