Shaping Society Research Articles

The Politics of Sleep: Governing (Un)consciousness in the Late Modern Age

Williams, S.J. ( 2011 ) The Politics of Sleep: Governing (Un)consciousness in the Late Modern Age , Houndmills, Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan , pp 198 + xxviii . ISBN: 978-0-230-22366-0 Sleep and politics may sound like a contradiction in terms, but Simon Williams’ book persuades us that sleep is deeply political both on the individual (personal) level and at the societal and corporate levels. This carefully crafted book is beautifully written, providing an elegant and convincing argument of relevance for sociologists of health and illness, as well as sociologists of the body and those interested in broader structural issues associated with global capitalism. Williams argues that sleep doubles not only as a ‘problem’ for individuals and for society but also serves as a ‘prism’ through which sociologists can gain a greater understanding of diverse aspects of life in the late modern age. In essence, how ‘sleep problems or concerns regarding sleep are not simply a product of society, but a prism or point of articulation and amplification for a range of other fears, worries, frustrations and anxieties regarding contemporary life and living’ (author’s emphasis, p.xii). The crux of Williams’ argument is to examine in detail the dominant ‘sleep-negative’ agenda and juxtapose this with the growing ‘sleep-positive’ agenda. The ‘sleep-negative’ agenda can be gauged through examining a wide range of ‘sleep-neglecting’ and ‘sleep-negating’ discourses and practices. Sleep tends to be devalued within society, which privileges the conscious rational waking dimensions of life, especially paid work and leisure activities. Williams documents the ways that the contemporary work ethic and long hours work culture, the 24/7 society, globalisation, and the ‘wired’ (always awake) world dominate over any concerns about an individual’s sleep. This dominance can be seen through emblematic expressions such as ‘Sleep is for wimps’ and examples of significant figures (such as Mrs Thatcher) for whom lack of sleep is a ‘badge of honour’. A pervasive prioritisation of values such as self-mastery and control, predominates over corporeal matters such as sleep. These dominant discourses and practices are reinforced in contemporary society by sleep being a largely private and invisible matter, generally considered of little significance. Yet, sleep can be seen as an important and powerful reminder of the limits of rational modernity and control. Counterposed to the ‘sleep-negative’ agenda, Williams examines how a concerned ‘sleep-positive’ agenda has developed from societal and corporate concerns that lack of sleep is problematic, particularly leading to accidents, loss of productivity and performance. He draws on diverse research and other sources to examine the growing proliferation of discourses about sleep-friendly policies and practices within society, self-help sleep advice, and the growth of sleep medicine, sleep clinics, sleep experts, and the ‘sleep industry’ that sells products to promise a ‘good night’s sleep’. Societal concerns can be seen through motorway signs that ‘tiredness kills’ and prosecution of sleepy drivers. Thus, Williams counterposes the tensions and attempted resolutions between the sleep-negative and sleep-positive agendas and how these tensions are played out at the individual, corporate and societal levels. A further kernel of Williams’ argument is the independent critical-reflexive role of the social sciences within these debates. He shows how social scientists through discussing or researching sleep, and sharing common assumptions with sleep scientists, may be accomplices in the increasing politicisation of sleep within both the ‘sleep-negative’ and ‘sleep-positive’ agendas. Thus, social scientists may be implicated in a dynamic way with the increasing politicisation of sleep in contemporary society. Although Williams admits to ‘theoretical eclecticism’ (p.xxi), underlying his book is a focus on sleepy/alert bodies that draws heavily on the ideas of Foucault, the production of ‘at risk’ selves and the self-regulated body. He sees sleep fundamentally as ‘located at the intersection of material-corporeal questions concerning the regulation and governance of bodies’ (p.158). His work integrates the microlevel of individual bodies with the macrolevel of the body politic, particularly the corporeal needs of the body politic in late capitalism. Thus, the book examines the biomedicalisation of sleep and the biopolitics of sleep, seeing sleep as a vital commodity to be converted into other forms of capital. The Politics of Sleep provides novel insights about a hitherto largely invisible aspect of everyday life. It will make readers ‘wake up’ to issues that are fundamental to their own lives and stimulate researchers to consider anew the reach of experts, corporations and society in shaping and moulding our dormant and waking lives.

Are Americans More Litigious? Some Quantitative Evidence

Many observers suggest that American citizens sue more readily than citizens elsewhere, and that American judges shape society more powerfully than judges elsewhere. We examine the problems involved in exploring these questions quantitatively. The data themselves indicate that American law’s notoriety does not result from how we handle routine disputes. Instead, it results from the peculiar and dysfunctional way American courts handle particular legal doctrines like class actions.

Engineers, Society, and Sustainability

Sustainable development is one of the key challenges of the twenty-first century. The engineering profession is central to achieving sustainable development. To date, engineering contributions to sustainability have focused on reducing the environmental impacts of development and improving the efficiency of resource use. This approach is consistent with dominant policy responses to environmental problems, which have been characterised as ecological modernisation. Ecological modernisation assumes that sustainability can be addressed by reforming modern society and developing environmental technologies. Environmental philosophers have questioned these assumptions and call into question the very nature of modern society as underlying the destruction of nature and the persistence of social inequality. Central to the crises of ecology and human development are patterns of domination and the separation of nature and culture. Engineering has a clear role to play in ecological modernisation, but its role in more radical visions of sustainability is uncertain. Actor-network theory provides an analysis of socio-technical systems which does not require the separation of nature and culture, and it provides a way of thinking about how engineers are involved in shaping society and its relationship to the environment. It describes the world in terms of relationships between human and non-human actors. It shows that social relationships are mediated by technologies and non-human nature, and that assumptions about society and behaviour are "baked-in" to technological systems.

Exploring News Coverage of Femicide: Does Reporting the News Add Insult to Injury?

The news media help shape society’s perception of social problems as well as public opinion of victims and offenders. Currently, there is extensive research devoted to the media’s portrayal of violence against women but very little examination of femicide (for purposes of this research, defined as the murder of female intimate partners). Using newspaper coverage of femicide cases across the state of North Carolina over a 6-year period (995 articles representing 299 cases), the current study examines the news media’s use of direct and indirect victim-blaming language, the sources cited in femicide reporting, and whether femicide cases are contextualized as an individual problem or within the broader social issue of intimate partner violence (IPV). Consistent with previous research, findings indicate that public sources (i.e., law enforcement) were the most commonly cited sources of information in news coverage of femicide compared to private sources (i.e., friends and family); however, domestic violence experts are cited more often than in prior studies. In addition, direct and indirect victim-blaming language is not as pervasive as previous research has suggested. Finally, the percentage of articles that contextualized the femicide as IPV is lower than that found in prior studies of femicide. Implications of these findings and future research are discussed.

Spaces, Times, and Critical Moments: A Relational Time–Space Analysis of the Impacts of AIDS on Rural Youth in Malawi and Lesotho

Southern Africa's AIDS epidemic is profoundly spatially and temporally structured; so too are the lives of the young people whose families it blights. In this paper we draw on qualitative research with AIDS-affected young people in Malawi and Lesotho, and recent work theorising time–space in human geography, to examine how time–spaces of AIDS-related sickness and death intersect with the time–spaces of young people and, importantly, those of their relations with others to produce differentiated outcomes for young people. We also explore the time–spaces of those outcomes and of young people's responses to them. We conclude that a relational time–space analysis of the impacts of AIDS on young people helps explain the diversity of those young people's experiences and allows AIDS to be contextualised more adequately in relation to everyday life and young people's wider lifecourses and their relationships with others. Moreover, the research points to the significance of the time–space structuring of society in shaping the outcomes of familial sickness and death for young people.

Radio Internet dalam Perspektif Determinisme Teknologi

The growth of internet radio has brought a significant impact on change management and radio audiences. Marriage analog radio with internet technology into a new media (Internet Radio) is seen as an alternative solution to some problems of analog radio. Instrumentalist views on Technology Determinism gives the assumption that the function of technology is very dominant in shaping society. Philosophy of technology against this assumption, because Technology Determinism can not explain the meaning and implications of technology for humans. Internet radio using technology to facilitate community access, however the implications of its use to produce new problems in the realm of economic, cultural, social and political. Understanding awareness of the use of technology is the essence of the basic form of critical consciousness of society.

'Social Engineering by Roscoe Pound': Issues in Legal and Political Philosophy

Man is a social animal and needs a society for his leaving, working and enjoying life. A group of individual forms a society. Society has become an essential condition for human life to develop his or her personality. Therefore society and human life always go together. Every human being has also born with some desires and expectations which are inherent in nature. From childhood to till old age, every human being expects that his or her desire is to be fulfilled for which their arise conflict of desires or claims which comes under the term ‘interest’. It is impossible to fulfil all the desires of a human being. So to fulfil the desires of maximum human being for the welfare of society the concept of Social Engineering was emerged and which was coined by Roscoe Pound.The force which asks for the adoption of Social engineering is nothing but the conflict of interests of individuals. Interests more particularly the conflicting interest are the subject of Social Engineering. Social engineering is based on the notion that Laws are used as a means to shape society and regulate people’s behaviour. It is an attempt to control the human conduct through the help of Law. According to Pound, ‘Law is social engineering which means a balance between the competing interests in society’, in which applied science are used for resolving individual and social problems. For this purpose this paper is going to discuss about the mechanism of Law in bringing Social Engineering. This paper is divided into three parts. Part II will discuss about the object of the paper. Part III will give suggestions and conclusion.

Deliberating through Group Differences in Education for Trust and Respect

Introduction In an educational setting with students from a variety of cultural, ethnic, and social backgrounds, there is abiding challenge of fostering mutual respect in spite of conflicting beliefs. The extent of disagreement falls along a continuum. A limited kind can be sub-cultural differences among members of same culture. For example, some Caucasian students from one geographical region or socioeconomic status hold one view, relative to their culture, about appropriate forms of expression differs from Caucasians in other regions. Another form of difference would be broader definition of family held by cultures from South and Latin American countries compared with a definition of family, as primarily nuclear, characterizes American middle-class ideal. In American context, competition among groups (e.g., Caucasians, African Americans, Native Americans, those of so-called Hispanic descent from Caribbean, South and Latin America) over whose narrative will be socially and politically determinant constitutes a form of conflict. The Jewish and Palestinian cultures, which have differing religious beliefs and political views regarding Jerusalem, are exemplars of extreme differences. In Nicholas Appleton's (1983) view, cultural occurs when there is disagreement between different groups; when culturally, ethnically, or racially identifiable groups clash over material rewards, status, power or values (p. 157). The most significant aspect of Appleton's definition of conflict for purpose of this article is conflict is based on cultural, ethnic, or racial distinctiveness of contending parties. The question I am addressing is: In context of differing conceptions of life in a democracy, on what basis can education encourage mutual respect for beliefs of others without illiberally imposing a particular moral or political view? Or, relatedly, how should respect be fostered in a democracy given differences among ways of life? As a proponent of democratic deliberation, Amy Gutmann maintains schools can promote respect through implementing principles and procedures of deliberative democracy in a of or public acknowledgement of minority beliefs and their significance for political, social, and educational policy. For Gutmann (2004), this approach recognizes the role differences have played in shaping society and world in which children live (p. 71). I argue despite Gutmann's cogent efforts to accommodate a plurality of views in politics of recognition within a deliberative democratic framework, for a multicultural democratic society, Gutmann's form of falls short of moral ideal of civic equality fosters mutual respect. I develop and elaborate upon this critique of Gutmann below. Democratic Deliberation, Gutmann, and Respect The body of Gutman's work on democratic fits within a fairly recent discourse on morally legitimate forms of government in society. Over last 30 years, democratic theory emerged in political philosophy literature as participatory politics has gained prominence on political front. It has done so as a counter reaction to liberalism and its institutions, in 1950s and 1960s, were intended to promote and preserve human flourishing but instead were exposed as failed bureaucracies (e.g., military, education, Congress). As Bohman and Rehg (1996) explain in their seminal text on deliberative democracy, two central tenets characterize deliberative democracy. The first is that constrains citizens to cast their proposals in relation to common good and second is deliberation should improve decision-making (p. xiv). (1) Gutman's work is particularly concerned with second claim, particularly given fact of pluralism in society. …

Facebook - et netværk i fællesskabet [Facebook - a network within the societal community

This article addresses the question of what the new "social media", like Facebook, mean for the way we are together, develop social identity and shape society. With the point of departure in the works of Luhmann, the article proposes that community-communication is the essence of the self-regulation of our society’s self-regulation and that this type of communication also provides the basis for the formation and maintenance of the person's social identity in harmony with the society. In contrast to community-communication, the article provides the notion of network-communication, classified as a type of communication that may have some positive effects but also might pose risks to modern society and the development and maintenance of social identity. Finally, the article argues that communication around status updates on Facebook may be categorised as network-communication and discusses whether and to what extent this provides the aforementioned risks.

Building a Sustainable Future for Animal Agriculture: An Environmental Virtue Ethic of Care Approach within the Philosophy of Technology

Agricultural technologies are non-neutral and ethical challenges are posed by these technologies themselves. The technologies we use or endorse are embedded with values and norms and reflect the shape of our moral character. They can literally make us better or worse consumers and/or people. Looking back, when the world’s developed nations welcomed and steadily embraced industrialization as the dominant paradigm for agriculture a half century or so ago, they inadvertently championed a philosophy of technology that promotes an insular human-centricism, despite its laudable intent to ensure food security and advance human flourishing. The dominant philosophy of technology has also seeded particular ethical consequences that plague the well-being of human beings, the planet, and farmed animals. After revisiting some fundamental questions regarding the complex ways in which technology as agent shapes our lives and choices and relegates food and farmed constituents into technological artifacts or commodities, I argue that we should accord an environmental virtue ethic of care—understood as caretaking—a central place in developing a more conscientious philosophy of technology that aims at sustainability, fairness, and humaneness in animal agriculture. While technology shapes society, it also is socially shaped and an environmental virtue ethic of care (EVEC) as an alternative design philosophy has the tools to help us take a much overdue inventory of ourselves and our relationships with the nonhuman world. It can help us to expose the ways in which technology hinders critical reflection of its capacity to alter communities and values, to come to terms with why we may be, in general, disengaged from critical ethical analysis of contemporary agriculture and to consider the moral shape and trajectory and the sustainability of our food production systems going into the future. I end by outlining particular virtues associated with the ethic of care discussed here and consider some likely implications for consumers and industry technocrats as they relate to farming animals.

Possibilidades do Ser: A ProteÇÃ o Social entre a Luz e a Sombra

Este trabalho busca desvelar alguns traços da formação do sujeito frente a si e à sociedade emque se insere para, então, discutir a importância da proteção social na economia do conhecimento como fatorde expansão das potencialidades humanas. A premissa é de que a conexão do indivíduo com o mundo sedá numa relação dinâmica em que o indivíduo molda a sociedade e por ela é moldado. Utiliza-se, paratanto, da Psicologia Social de Fromm (1961) para aclarar o surgimento dos medos e das paixões humanase do conceito de Imaterial de Gorz (2005) para evidenciar a fase da economia do conhecimento.

Engagement tools for scientific governance

Museums have a great potential to facilitate the political engagement of citizens, intended not in the sense of taking part to the “party politics”, but as full participation in the systems that define and shape society.

Jonathan Karp: The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638–1848

The Politics of Jewish Commerce is a learned, subtle, and at times penetrating study. Its premise is that Jews are a revealing lens through which to dissect the many controversial, multilayered, and perennially fascinating questions about the rise of capitalism in Europe. This premise holds particularly true for the period before the mid-nineteenth century, when the legal status of Jews in Christian Europe was often linked to their perceived economic utility and danger, and when the power of money to shape society, politics, and culture was not taken for granted and elicited ambivalent responses. In Karp's lucid prose, "A central argument of this book is the notion that a specifically Jewish commerce served a vital function in Western thought. It served to abstract various types of activities from the generality of economic life and, through their association with stigmatized Jews, make them vehicles for expressing widely felt anxieties about commerce in a manner that was politically safe and psychically tolerable" (p. 2). Karp examines how Jewish and Christian authors between 1638 and 1848 depicted Jews' economic roles in medieval and early modern Europe. At the same time, he connects these authors' images of "Jewish commerce" to heated debates about the legal status and political rights of Jews. One of Karp's considerable merits is thus to have shown the interdependence between economic and political ideologies, the economic dimension of political debates about Jewish emancipation, and, more generally, the didactic function that Jewish history played in the history of European political and economic thought. The parade of authors Karp analyzes begins with the seventeenth-century Venetian rabbi Simone Luzzatto a clear indication that Jewish scholars participated in these debates and that their voices influenced both coreligionists and gentiles in the years and centuries to come. Luzzatto made an "ingenious argument" (p. 22) that both exalted the beneficial effect of Jewish commerce on the Christian polity and downplayed Christian fears by emphasizing Jews'

From Civil Dialogue to Participatory Democracy: The Role of Civil Society Organisations in Shaping the Agenda in the Debates on the European Constitution

This article, based on ongoing research, explores the role of civil society organisations in the debate about participatory democracy in the European Constitution (TCE). The findings are based on the qualitative analysis of position papers and interviews in order to determine the ways in which civil society organisations contributed to shaping the model of participatory democracy (article 47 TCE). The article focuses on the debate on the role of civil society for democracy in the EU (Greenwood 2007b; Kohler-Koch 2007; Maloney and Van Deth 2008), by addressing its ability in fostering citizens’ participation. It considers firstly the place of civil society in the European public sphere. It then presents the role of civil society in shaping the agenda on participatory democracy before the debate on the European constitution. It particularly investigates the formation of coalitions of organisations which aimed to include these debates in the Convention’s agenda. It considers that although the Convention’s structure could have been appropriate for coalitions to voice demands from the general public, which is one of the expected functions for coalitions in the literature (Mahoney 2007: 375), this was not the case both because of the inability of European civil society organisations to mobilise the public and the high efficiency of insider strategies.

Dystopian Genesis: The Scientist's Role in Society, According to Jack Arnold

In 1971, Joseph Ben-David's The Scientist's Role in Society reinvigorated the sociology of science by presenting the emergence of autonomous science as a social process. For Ben-David, the history of science was not a history of ideas but a history of social and political developments that created specific social functions for science and for scientists. A social role for the scientist was able to develop only as a result of the unfettered pursuit of knowledge encouraged by the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, the specific social function of science required it to be free of political or religious interference and yet demanded its involvement in solving social problems (often those caused exactly by scientific and technological change ). Science was, therefore, both autonomous and intricately woven into society. Ben- David's account of this relationship between science and society stands in stark contrast to views held in the study of science two decades ear Her. Where Ben-David saw science as deeply embedded in society, internalist historians of science, following Alexandre Koyre, and positivist philosophers of science, following the Vienna Circle, maintained a view of science as an intellectual enterprise that was, at best, removed from, and, at worst, infringed on by, the social and the political spheres. Indeed, this view reflected a development within American society in which science became more and more distanced from social, political, and economic processes. Under pressure from Cold War politics, scientists retreated from public affairs and refrained from associating their work with social or political issues. In the same period, these researchers, especially physicists, detached themselves from the cultural and political centers and developed a pragmatic approach to adapt their work to their suburbanization. While science as an intellectual endeavor was increasingly regarded as striving to transcend all worldly matters in search of objective truth, scientists themselves were becoming more and more involved in the militaryindustrial complex.8 Tension between their traditional role as public advisors on social problems and their new role as secret advisors to the government and the military created a potentially dangerous position for scientists, who were, in turn, regarded with a growing distrust among the American public. Ben-David was well aware of the problems that the scientist's role in society could entail. Public trust in a science that could remain autonomous in the pursuit of knowledge, while its practitioners nevertheless became involved in political and military affairs, was based on Ben- David's belief that knowledge had intrinsic moral value. That belief was fueled by recent scientific successes that he believed raised utopian expectations of a cognitive re-ordering of the world. Few periods in history have seen a utopian belief in the power of science to solve all the problems of mankind as strong as that prevalent in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and few documents from that era depict the subsequent moral crisis of science as strikingly as the movies directed by Jack Arnold between 1953 and 1959. Arnold began his work in science fiction with a critical appreciation of the potential for science to shape society, a Utopian vision he brought to the screen in the 1953 film It Came from Outer Space. In his subsequent movies, however, Arnold began to explore the difficulties inherent in the relationship between science and society, leading him to criticize, reject, and ultimately ridicule the Utopian idea, which Ben-David would continue into the Seventies, that science could morally improve the human condition. While Arnold's films of this period belong to a variety of genres and are the products of different production backgrounds, they can be viewed as forming a coherent narrative about science and its relation to society - a narrative of skepticism that is remarkable for its resonance and style. …

National Support for Film Production in the EU: An Analysis of the Commission Decision‐Making Practice

AbstractThis article deals with the cultural welfare concerning cinema, a medium capable of both painting and shaping society. It aims to investigate the impact of the European integration on national film promotional law, by studying the European Commission decision‐making practice in the field of State aid to cinematographic works. The analysis shows that this practice can be understood in two main phases that are delineated by the adoption of specific criteria. These criteria are explored by highlighting the most elucidating cases. Furthermore, this analysis discloses two relevant conflicts: within the Commission itself and between the Commission and the Member States. Particular emphasis is placed on the latter, which is explored with regard to: the European national film agencies' polarisation of the conflict, the main form of dispute settlement adopted by the Commission, and the legal obligations imposed by Member States upon TV broadcasters to invest in audiovisual1 production. The analysis ends with an evaluation of the above‐mentioned impact and a few remarks on some unresolved issues related to the conflict between the Commission and the Member States.

Linking Individuals and Societies

How do individuals shape societies? How do societies shape individuals? This article develops a framework for studying the connections between micro and macro phenomena. The framework builds on two ingredients widely used in social science—population and variable. Starting with the simplest case of one population and one variable, additional variables and additional populations are systematically introduced. This approach enables simple and natural introduction and exposition of such operations as pooling, matching, regression, hierarchical and multilevel modeling, calculating summary measures, finding the distribution of a function of random variables, and choosing between two or more distributions. To illustrate the procedures we draw on problems from a variety of topical domains in social science, including an extended illustration focused on residential racial segregation. Three useful features of the framework are: First, similarities in the mathematical structure underlying distinct substantive questions, spanning different levels of aggregation and different substantive domains, become apparent. Second, links between distinct methodological procedures and operations become apparent. Third, the framework has a potential for growth, as new models and operations become incorporated into the framework.

Maternalism, Pronatalism, Eugenics: Women as Biopoliticians in Interwar Romania and Weimar Germany

This paper examines the complex interactions between European women’s movements and biopolitical ideas, particularly eugenics, during the turbulent interwar period. I am interested in the ways women have contributed to the ascendance of practices and ideas that hover at the intersection of medicine and political policy. The twentieth century brought women increasing public visibility and influence, including enfranchisement and the right to hold office in many nations. However, for reasons ranging from strategic to cultural, women themselves often predicated their public involvement on essentialist conceptions of womanhood. Women seeking entry to political life created analogues of their traditionally-defined domestic roles, and projected them into the larger public domain. Mothers became mothers of the nation, the race, the volk. Often, these maneuvers proceeded without disrupting traditional gender hierarchies. By focusing on women’s welfare rather than their rights, women assisted the advancement of biopolitical solutions to social problems, and thus contributed to a broader trend increasing the authority of medicine. To some degree, women, through their efforts to shape society using welfare interventions, linked emerging ‘feminist’ movements with coercive and abusive measures.

Subsidiarity in public health practice: promoting national partnerships to stop tuberculosis

Following a previous article [J Med Pers (2009) 7:103–105] on the crucial role of the principles of social justice for the public health agenda, this article provides a practical illustration of the case in point, referring to the global challenges posed by the tuberculosis (TB) epidemic. The author reviews the up-to-date global TB epidemiology and the historical background to the current efforts to establish an effective patient-centred care worldwide and bring the epidemic under control. The movement to establish national partnerships to harness the contributions of public, private and not-for-profit health care providers towards TB control is promoted to curb morbidity and mortality through improved access to essential health services. It aims as well at mitigating the impact of this disease on the daily life of millions of patients and their families, involving them and the intermediate bodies of the society in shaping the response to a disease that has accompanied the history of humankind.

Can Art Education Shape Society?

Can Art Education Shape Society?