“That institutions affect the performance of economies is hardly controversial. That the differential performance of economies over time is fundamentally influenced by the way institutions evolve is also not controversial.” (North 1990, p. 3)

Explanation of the growth of Christianity in the third century Roman Empire has long been controversial. However, recent game-theoretic research shows how a strategy of unconditional altruism such as Christianity formally enjoined can, under certain conditions, resist invasion by defectors, free-riders and cheats. It is accordingly plausible to suggest that in the particular environment of the third century Empire this uniquely distinguishing feature of Christianity accounts for much of its otherwise surprising degree of success.

Since the early or mid-1980s important changes have taken place in economic sociology. New topics have been added to its agenda, and interesting advances have been made in analyzing problems that were initiated during the 1980s when “new economic sociology” was born. As to theory, it appears that the embeddedness approach is still the most popular approach – but it is also increasingly criticized and a few other theoretical alternatives exist today. The three topics of networks, markets and firms continue to be central, and some important advances have been made during the last decade. New topics include finance, law, stratification and comparative-historical studies. New economic sociology is still suspicious of mainstream economics but has good relations with the other social sciences as well as with other subfields in sociology. If there is one weakness to recent economic sociology, the article concludes, it is the lack of new ideas. Economic sociology still lives very much on the ideas from the 1980s, which is worrisome.

The transnational turn in international migration research since the early 1990s has sparked vigorous debates among migration scholars. Yet the political aspects of transnational migration have been under-studied when compared to social, cultural and economic processes. This is particularly astonishing because the very term transnational suggests the importance of national borders and nationally-bound polities as opportunities and restrictions of exchange, reciprocity, solidarity and hierarchical control for processes involving non-state actors to varying degrees. The goal of this analysis is to take stock of some developments in the general study of transnationalization and treat the aspects of politics, policy and polity as a specific case of this broader conceptual and empirical effort. This effort also identifies questions for further research and offers methodological venues for the study of transnationalism arising out of international migration.

Montesquieu popularized the notion of Oriental Despotism as the type of government pertaining to a lawless society based on the equality of subjects in fear and powerlessness. It typified Europe's Other in the age of absolutism. This essay does not examine the idea of total despotic power directly but rather the assumption of the absence of law and its guarantee of a sphere of civil autonomy and agency which will anachronistically be called “civil society”. While substantiating the emergence of a public sphere around coffeehouses, the growth of guilds on the basis of customary law and the development of educational and philanthropic endowments on the basis of the law of waqf, we also take the opportunity to compare the civic and educational institutions of the Ottoman and Safavid empires in the 17th and early 18th centuries.

The article deals with family solidarities and the grey economy in modes of resistance against poverty and social isolation, in unemployment situations in Portugal. We examine the strategies used by these social groups in order to fight against the economic and social effects of unemployment. We then analyse the social norms structuring the mobilisation of family cooperation and activities on the labour black market. Finally, we conclude by underlining the positive effects and disavantages of these compensations on the experience of unemployment.

This article criticizes two theoretical approaches to ethnicity and ethnic conflict. One emphasizes the intense solidarity generated by the ethnic bond and explains this in terms of a deep, quasi-kin feeling. The other emphasizes the contingency and situatedness of ethnic feeling and the fluctuating character of ethnic “groupness”. We adopt an alternative strategy, locating ethnicity as one factor among many, which may form a path-dependent self-reproductive system generating communal opposition and ethnic conflict.

“ Qu'est-ce que le fouriéisme? Je ne sais pas ”Charles Fourier, Lettre à l'éditeur de La Gazette de France (décembre 1835)

The article is a systematic synopsis of significant aspects of the modern semantics of contingency on the basis of its historical genesis. His thesis is that hermeneutic, phenomenological, post-structuralist, system theoretical, pragmatist and anthropological concepts of the modern age can be joined to a “post-modern” “métarécit”: in opposition to “post-modern” selfinterpretations, modernity as a culture of contingency is the “métarécit” of “post-modern” modernity.

Sociology can be introduced to students not as a story of “great men” but as a practice shaped by the social relations that made it possible. (R.W. Connell, “Why Is Classical Theory Classical?”)

TWO NEW, COMPLEMENTARY ESSAYS BY JACK GOODY together add up to an impressive call for a general reorientation of academic perspectives concerning the mythologies and hypocrisies of “the West”. In addition to a detailed survey of the recent literature on the topic, each volume is also full of entertaining digressions, some of a personal nature, which provide insight into the long-term intellectual agenda of a remarkable scholar. In the course of this review I shall draw attention to some of the most pertinent of his earlier publications, in which themes touched upon in these high-level syntheses are explored more fully.

This paper aims to demonstrate that cosmopolitanism should be understood as a transnational mode of practice, whereby actors construct bonds of mutual commitment and reciprocity across borders through public discourse and sociopolitical struggle. This practice oriented perspective allows us to question three of the main assumptions imbedded within most frameworks theorizing global solidarity, namely cultural homogenization, political fragmentation, and social thinness. To illustrate my argument, I draw upon examples taken from the alternative globalization movement.

The irreversible adoption of English as Europe's lingua franca raises at least four serious issues of linguistic justice: unequal language-based economic rents, unequal share in the burden of language learning, unequal capacity to influence, and unequal respect for the associated identities. In each case, the nature of the problem is spelt out and solutions are proposed, on the background of an analysis of the micro-mechanisms that underlie the dynamics of secondary language learning and multilingual interaction.

This paper raises the question to what extent of East Germans support the political system in which they live. Have people who lived for decades under authoritarian conditions been able to develop a democratic culture? Or are their mind-sets and attitudes still influenced by the effects of GDR socialization with its socialist values and ideals? The paper argues that the peculiarities of the political culture in East Germany are less attributable to effects of GDR socialization than to current differences in the economic situation between East and West Germany.

THIS REMARKABLE COLLECTION of (mostly reprinted) essays is first and foremost a defense of the statistically-based research program that has motivated Professor Goldthorpe's work through a distinguished career. In defending the statistical methodology that has become a standard in his corner of sociology, he also sets sharp limits to what can be contributed through qualitative methods. He then offers a challenge for future statistical analysts to address more directly that program's theoretical foundations. The dozen essays range widely in questions of methods and substance — in this review I provide no general summary but rather highlight a dual plea he makes to his profession: to marry macro statistical work to micro theory; and to press colleagues who engage in case study, historical, and ethnographic work to think more rigorously about what inferences can be correctly drawn from their low-n studies.

CHARLES WRIGHT MILLS commands a footnote in the history of sociology. With the exception of The Sociological Imagination, his work is largely forgotten save for a diminishing band of devotees, for whom he remains iconic. Following his early death in 1962, at the age of 46, there was a spate of studies reviewing his work, which simultaneously rendered this rebel into a more benign figure and sanctified him. Sociology as a discipline however, tends to quickly forget its lesser gods and consider them only as part of its past. Citations to this kind of sociologist tend to fall off rapidly when they die, although routinely they are rediscovered half a lifetime later. Renewed assessments of C. Wright Mills's life and career have followed publication over the last decade of large parts of the archive of his private letters, giving the re-engagement with Mills a pronounced biographical focus.

This study discerns peculiarities in the electoral mobilisation in EU member states in recent years and examines the effect of current social transformations on political discourse and voting behaviour. The overall change is traced to the emergence of opportunity-vs-risk vectors of political identification, challenging the capital vs labour dynamics of conflict. The decline in electoral support for traditional Left parties is attributed to the failure of the European Left to adjust to this realignment.

HOW SHOULD SOCIOLOGY understand its history? Do the concepts that sociologists use routinely to study classical sociology and its contemporary significance improve or impede this understanding? This book examines these questions by assessing the value to sociology of the concepts of founders, classics and canons. Its central thesis is that it is possible to resolve controversies surrounding the origins and appraisal of sociology's heritage but that doing so requires a proper understanding of what it means to talk about founders, classics, and canons. For each concept, and the set of controversies that surround it, the structure of Baehr's analysis is the same. He arrives at a proper understanding of the concept by first summarizing the extant sociological literature and then augmenting this literature with logical, theoretical or historical analyses that consider wider debates in sociology and other disciplines. He then uses this understanding to account for current usages of the concept and to present arguments for or against these ways of using it to interpret, defend or attack authors, institutions, and texts.

ONE OF THE CURIOUS DEVELOPMENTS in intellectual circles over the past few years is that the subject of imperialism is no longer a bailiwick of the Left. To be sure, so long as colonial empires were in strength, there was no denying the reality of European and American imperial expansion. But over the course of the post-war era, as decolonization rippled through the Third World and the formal mechanisms of colonial control were thrown overboard, any insistence on the continuing salience of imperialism became identified with left-wing ideologies. If it did enter mainstream debates, it was inevitably Soviet or, more generically, Communist imperial ambitions that were subjected to scrutiny.

CET OUVRAGE DE BERNARD PERRET, économiste et membre du laboratoire de Sociologie du changement des institutions (LSCI), est composé de deux essais distincts sous-tendus d'une visée politique commune. Le premier commente avec beaucoup de sympathie, mais aussi avec de sérieuses critiques, le concept de “ capital social ” de Robert D. Putnam. Le deuxième esquisse une théorie de l'action critique de l'utilitarisme en tant que modèle moyens-fins et fondée sur les deux notions de l'agir instrumental et de l'agir constitutif. Cette dernière notion représente l'apport de Perret qui met en avant l'action humaine visant “ à construire ou modifier le cadre dans lequel elle s'exerce et par l'intermédiaire duquel elle acquiert une signification subjective ” (p. 9). Cette notion du “ constitutif ” ouvre pour Perret non seulement la possibilité d'intégrer dans son modèle des théories de l'action plus riches que celle que l'on pourrait subsumer sous le terme de “ rational choice ”, mais aussi de mettre en avant l'aspect politique de l'action humaine.