Social Ordering Research Articles

The (Self) Protection of Civilians in South Sudan: Popular and Community Justice Practices

Over the past decade, a body of scholarship on civilian self-protection (CSP) has emerged, advancing understandings of civilian agency in war. In this article, we argue that CSP has been conceptualized in a narrow manner, reflecting the nascent status of the field. Scholars have focused on responses to threats directly related to the dynamics of conflict, physical in nature, and caused by the presence of armed groups. Using the case study of the Protection of Civilians (PoC) sites in South Sudan and drawing on over 150 interviews, we identify one type of protective response neglected in the literature: community and popular justice. Although the PoC sites provide a measure of protection, residents face a range of daily threats that are indirectly related to the conflict, such as crime. In this context, community justice emerged as a natural response, an overlooked yet vital form of CSP that addresses immediate protection needs and fulfills a social ordering function. By conceiving of justice in this way, this article aims to deepen understanding of civilian agency and start a conversation with scholars and practitioners about the boundaries of (self) protection.

African values and institutional reform for sustainable development in Africa

The way society patterned its institutions and framed its laws, is predicated on the prevalent values of the people, which is rooted in their culture, philosophies, and spirituality. The way such a society makes progress and promotes coexistence is linked to the values that they uphold. Similarly, African values are those axiological principles that form the foundation of social living and social ordering in traditional African society, which can still be relevant today. These social values of the African people are what were used to construct African inclusive institutions in the traditional setting before it was eroded by colonialism and imperialism. Thus, for Africans of today to rebuild inclusive institutions that will guarantee sustainable development across the continent, there is a need to revive and reintegrate the principles from the study of African values into the reform of contemporary African social institutions. Therefore, in this paper, the authors argue that for African institutions to deliver the good of sustainable development, they must be reformed along the lines of foundational principles of African cultural values. The paper employs the philosophical method of critical analysis in dissecting the issues within this discourse.

PRODUCTION OF COMMON SPACES AS AN APPROPRIATION OF THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT: RETHINKING THE EXPERIENCE OF HOUSES OF CULTURE

The article deals with the dichotomous process of production and experience of the soviet Houses of Culture as an appropriated «common space» with their further transformation into a disciplinary institute of social ordering. On the basis of Lefebvre’s triad of the perceived \ conceived \ lived space, the production of public places was analyzed in relation to changes in the representational field from early Soviet times to the present. This development marks a transition from the perception of the Houses of Culture as the most innovative common places for the creation of a new human being to the places of achievement of centralized biopolitics in times of totalitarianism. In the absence of relevant social practices, abandoned Houses of Culture cannot find their place in the social network of the modern world. In the late capitalism era, public spaces become specific private places, implying the subjectivation regime prescribed by its type. This process intensifies the feeling of alienation and prevents the creation of a universal public space open to different practices. In the context of the destruction of public spaces and spatial identities as a problem tendency of a contemporary city, it is necessary to appeal to the experience of Houses of Culture in search of new forms of universal multifunctional public places. The article applies the experience of Houses of Culture to modern conditions in order to create a new type of «common spaces».

Foucault’s Keystone: Confessions of the Flesh. How the Fourth and Final Volume of The History of Sexuality Completes Foucault’s Critique of Modern Western Societies

In the final pages of the now-final volume of The History of Sexuality, Volume 4: Les aveux de la chair (“Confessions of the Flesh”), Foucault’s intellectual project comes full circle and achieves its long-awaited completion. In those final pages, dedicated to Augustine’s treatment of marital sexual relations, Foucault reveals the heretofore missing link that now binds his ancient history of sexual relations to his critique of contemporary forms of neoliberal goverance: Foucault discovers in Augustine’s writings the moment of the birth of the modern legal subject and of the juridification of social relations. Like the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle, the appearance of the modern legal subject completes Foucault’s critical project and allows us to fold the entire four-volume series of The History of Sexuality back into his critique of contemporary modes of social ordering in the neoliberal age. Many critics of Foucault complain that the turn to subjectivity, to care of the self, and to truth-telling at the end of Foucault’s intellectual journey undermines the political force of his philosophy and has pushed contemporary critical thought into a complacent apolitical direction. The now-published Volume 4 of The History of Sexuality should dispel that argument and open the way to integrate those two projects—knowledge-power and subjectivity. That is our greatest task and challenge today: to explore how we have been shaped as subjects in such a way as to implicate ourselves—both willingly and unknowingly—in the social order within which we find ourselves and that, through the interaction of knowledge-power-subjectivity, we reproduce and reestablish ourselves.

The Every Day Work of Studying the Law in Everyday Life

Susan Silbey began her academic training in political science and in the course of her studies became a sociologist of law, the last two decades as a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's anthropology department and management school. The disciplinary transformations ground, in part, her attention to the ways in which the everyday life of scholarship has led her to study the everyday life of the law. In this article, she describes her scholarly life through seven chapters of relatively distinct challenges and themes. Across the arc of her life, she identifies the recurrent influence of both serendipity and theoretical inference acting within the immediate constraints of family and personal capacity. Reading across descriptions of her work on regulatory enforcement, dispute negotiation and mediation, and popular legal culture and consciousness, she points to the necessity of reconciling on-the-ground vicissitudes of doing legal work with the theories and narratives social scientists construct to make sense of institutions and history. She muses on theoretical attempts to align the particular and the general, the micro and macro forces working in legal cultures, and concludes by celebrating the ubiquity of social ordering whose own momentum both seduces and frustrates social scientists.

Centros, California’s ‘Women on Boards’ Statute and the Scope of Regulatory Competition

In its 1999 Centros decision, the European Court of Justice affirmed that the EU right of establishment protects a corporation’s right to select a state of incorporation. Specifically, Centros rejected the argument that, under the real seat doctrine, the country in which the corporation’s head office is located may deny recognition or apply domestic corporate law to a corporation that is validly formed in another EU state. At the time, commentators broadly viewed Centros as opening the door to greater regulatory competition in Europe. Twenty years later, we examine Centros through the lens of SB 826—the California statute mandating a minimum number of women on boards. SB 826, like Centros, raises questions about the extent to which a forum state, as opposed to the state of incorporation, can impose its laws on corporations that operate within its borders. In the US, these questions are typically addressed by application of the internal affairs doctrine which provides that the law of the state of incorporation applies to the corporation’s internal affairs. Both SB 826 and Centros thus highlight the critical importance of the scope of the internal affairs doctrine. In this article, we stress the importance of the shareholder primacy norm to understanding the scope of US corporate law, which results in corporate law focusing primarily on matters of shareholder economic interest. We argue that the internal affairs doctrine should be understood within the context of the shareholder primacy norm and therefore directed to rules oriented to enhancing firm economic value. Considered in this context, SB 826 is distinctive in that it focuses on broader societal interests than traditional corporate law. In the same vein, EU corporate law has traditionally had a broader stakeholder orientation. We posit that the limited impact of the Centros decision, an impact which differed significantly from its predicted revolutionary effect, can be attributed to the greater focus of EU corporate law on social ordering and a more limited adherence to the shareholder primacy norm. Ironically, California’s adoption of SB 826 may portend a movement of the US towards Centros-style governance.

Strategies for Recuperating the Competence of Informal Land Delivery Channels

There is a mounting accord in study that informal land has contributed the bigger part of urban land for housing stipulation. The informal land system as flexible as they appear have a process via which transactions are carried out. These processes through which household owners access land for housing are not accidental but are structured and regulated by some form of social ordering. Notwithstanding, despite their major contributions to providing residential housing, several shortcomings such as tenure insecurity, uncoordinated development etc, are some of the resultant outcomes of the system. This paper therefore, with the aid of data obtained through primary and secondary sources which were analyzed, and presented in matrixes explains the strategies that are required to improving the workings of informal land institutions in Karu the gate city as a reference to other Nigeria cities. 310 questionnaires were distributed amongst household owners using Likert scale. This paper identified legal recognition of the informal land delivery sector, introduction of local land managers at district levels, guided development, transparency and accountability and assessment. Despite some shortcoming associated with informal land delivery, this paper has established that with the strategies proposed such challenges can be checkmated. However, the paper concludes that state should not be seen as the sole umpire in charge of controlling urban land markets but alternative institutions, in this case, formal and informal be allowed manage and regulate urban land market to be supported by law

Social order as a tool to increase the social services efficiency provision on the regional levely

The article considers the theoretical and practical aspects of the social order tool’s implementation and realization in the social service system at the regional level. It has been proven that the basic conditions that will contribute to a positive social effect from the a social order introduction into the social service system are: the social order institutionalization, effective and coordinated information and com- munication interaction between the social order subjects, ensuring realization of the competitive system openness and availability principles in social order, the civil society’s local institutions’ development. Based on this, the main criteria of social order’s social efficiency as a tool to improve the social services efficiency at the regional level are highlighted: 1) the social services accessibility criterion (the territoriality principle); 2) the social services quality criterion; 3) the transaction and minimize costs’ criterion; 4) social justice criteria; 5) social responsibility criterion. The main social order advantages in the social services field are: improving targeting, social services accessibility and recipients’ coverage by them; social services’ entities providing competitive selection, competition in the market is a powerful incentive to constantly improve the quality and services efficiency; budgetary social expenditures optimization, savings and involvement additional resources in the social sphere; ensuring in development procedures openness and targeted social programs’ transparency imple- mentation; countering corruption and protectionism; increasing the initiative level, activity and control by the public in the social sphere; increasing social security of the population, promoting social harmony; civil soci- ety development through its participation in the social ordering process and taking on social responsibility. So, the following mechanisms can be distinguished in the social order as a tool to improve the social services efficiency: 1) engaging to management of social service institutions and directly to rendering social services at the level of territorial community by public organizations; 2) creating conditions for the competitive environment during the social competition; 3) optimization of the budgetary funds’ use in the social services system. The study’s results prove that a social order introduction into the social services system at the regional level is based on the following provisions: first, a high awareness’ level by social order entities of the need for interaction between the state, business and civil society in the process of modernizing the existing social services system; secondly, the social order in the social services system should be used by introducing social monitoring of the social services’ quality and identifying the local communities’ actual needs; thirdly, the main conditions that will contribute to a positive social effect from a social order introduction into the social service system are: the social order institutionalization, effective and coordinated information and communication between the social order’s subjects interaction, ensuring the implementation of the openness principles and the competitive social order system availability, a local civil society institutions’ development.

BULLYING ENTRE MENINAS: TRAMAS RELACIONAIS DA CONSTRUÇÃO DE IDENTIDADES DE GÊNERO

Resumo Este estudo etnográfico realizado em duas escolas públicas de ensino fundamental II, de São Paulo e Salvador, analisa como meninas adolescentes negociam identidades de gênero nas tramas relacionais do bullying. Conformando um processo de controle social, o bullying assenta-se em jogos de diferenças que conduzem à apreensão de normas de gênero. A discussão do bullying como violência de gênero mostra como meninas manipulam categorizações e atributos femininos tradicionais para promover distinções sociais e desigualdades de poder entre elas. As disputas por poder e status subsidiam o ordenamento social do grupo, por meio da regulação da sexualidade e de comportamentos estereotipados de delicadeza e cuidado feminino, mas também possibilitam a reivindicação de valores e práticas igualitários.

Inductive Reasoning in Social Choice Theory

The usual procedure in the theory of social choice consists in postulating some desirable properties which an aggregation procedure should verify and derive from them the features of a corresponding social choice function and the outcomes that arise at each possible profile of preferences. In this paper we invert this line of reasoning and try to infer, up from what we call social situations (each one consisting of a profile and the associated social ordering) the criteria verified in the implicit aggregation procedure. This inference process, which extracts intensional from extensional information can be seen as an exercise in “qualitative statistics”.

Why Variable-Population Social Orderings Cannot Escape the Repugnant Conclusion: Proofs and Implications

The population literature in theoretical economics has long focused on attempts to avoid the repugnant conclusion. We advance the literature by proving that no social ordering in population economics can escape the repugnant conclusion in all instances. As we show, prior results depend on a formal definition of the repugnant conclusion that artificially excludes some repugnant cases. In particular, the literature traditionally formalizes the repugnant conclusion to exclude cases that include an unaffected subpopulation. We relax this normatively irrelevant exclusion, and others. We prove that any candidate social ordering that satisfies either a basic axiom of Aggregation or Non-Aggregation implies some instance of the repugnant conclusion. Therefore, the repugnant conclusion provides no methodological guidance for theory or policymaking, because it cannot discriminate among candidate social orderings. This result is of practical importance because evaluation of important climate or development policies depends on comparing social welfare across populations of differing sizes.

The Legitimacy of Civil Freedom

Force and Freedom by Arthur Ripstein provides a comprehensive account of the modern legal system on a Kantian basis, reaching from private law to public international law. The legal system is presented as a coherent whole, solely based on the idea of equal freedom. Ripstein’s fundamental claim is twofold: first, the Kantian foundation is hermeneutically superior to alternative approaches to understanding the normative structure of the legal system; second, the modern legal system, due to its foundation in equal freedom, resides in reason and is thus normatively superior to alternative ideas of social ordering. Such a great work is typically subject to a wide range of objections. Some of them are raised in contributions to Freedom and Force, edited by Sari Kisilevsky and Martin Stone. This review essay attempts to explain Ripstein’s basic line of thought in Force and Freedom and to defend his account against some mistaken, but nevertheless illuminating, arguments from his critics in Freedom and Force. It then raises two further concerns, one internal, regarding the idea of justice in contractual exchange, and one external, regarding the cogency of a Kantian legitimation for the modern welfare state.

Beyond Judgmentalism and Non-Judgmentalism

Contemporary social discourse oscillates between norms against being judgmental and discourse filled with highly judgmental conflicts. The paper suggests the inability to understand the scope and limits of judgment in society requires Christian ethics to recover its own understanding of judgment, including of a final judgment as something other than a courtroom encounter over one’s individual sins. After exploring the centrality of God’s judgment in Scripture as an ongoing activity of social ordering for justice and mercy, I draw on several theologians to develop a different imagination for what final judgment means, rooted in conflicts of social identities, and then identify four key lessons for ethical discourse about social sins.

An axiomatization of the mixed utilitarian–maximin social welfare orderings

We axiomatize the class of mixed utilitarian–maximin social welfare orderings. These orderings are convex combinations of utilitarianism and the maximin rule. Our first step is to show that the conjunction of the weak Suppes–Sen principle, the Pigou–Dalton transfer principle, continuity and the composite transfer principle is equivalent to the existence of a continuous and monotone ordering of pairs of average and minimum utilities that can be used to rank utility vectors. Using this observation, the main result of the paper establishes that the utilitarian–maximin social welfare orderings are characterized by adding the axiom of cardinal full comparability. In addition, we examine the consequences of replacing cardinal full comparability with ratio-scale full comparability and translation-scale full comparability, respectively. We also discuss the classes of normative inequality measures corresponding to our social welfare orderings.

The Spatial‐Political Outcome of Urban Development Conflicts: Emancipatory Dynamics of Protests against Gentrification in Peñalolén, Santiago de Chile

AbstractThis study addresses the spatial‐political impact and lasting emancipatory potential of urban development conflicts. It is based on a case from Santiago de Chile, where activists from different social backgrounds struggle against processes of gentrification and structural densification within the context of current urban planning measures. The (temporary) peak of the conflict constituted a referendum, by means of which the social movements were able to refuse a new land‐use plan. Theoretically, the article builds on the combination of radical democratic and spatial perspectives. A frame analysis serves to capture the spatial‐political approach for the empirical analysis. Findings reveal a range of emancipatory practices, such as counter‐hegemonic and self‐organized housing and planning policies. Furthermore, my research shows that maintaining agonistic spaces enables experimental social orderings that symbolize sustained contestations of neoliberal spatial policy.

Lexical Measures of Social Inequality: From Pigou‐Dalton to Hammond

A measure of social inequality is essentially a rational ordering over a space of social distributions. However, different measures, including the most popular ones, may provide very different rankings over the same set of typical distributions. We thus propose an axiomatic approach to inequality measurement mainly based on the Hammond principle, a natural generalization of the Pigou‐Dalton principle, attempting to clarify the true nature of social inequality: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Under the standard assumptions of anonymity and scale independence, we show that a social inequality ordering is the leximinimax measure if and only if it satisfies the first Hammond principle, and it is the leximaximin measure if and only if it satisfies the second Hammond principle.

The Aadhaar debate

The Aadhaar project which aims to provide all residents in India with a unique identity number requires much more attention from sociologists of India. There are several areas of research where sociologists can help: one, the implications of new technologies of surveillance for (a) privacy and (b) society; two, the repercussions of the desire for social ordering and control and technocratic solutionism for people in their interactions with the state demands fuller sociological study. This brief note attempts to outline some of the issues that call out for enquiry.

Education or enforcement? Enrolling universities in the surveillance and policing of migration

This article examines the enlistment of educational providers in the surveillance and policing of non-citizen students. Employing the USA, UK, and Australia as cases, it situates efforts that render universities responsible for managing migrant “illegality” in broader trends concerning legal control and security governance. In particular, it analyzes the development of electronic surveillance and information-sharing systems that mobilize the knowledge, energies, and access of educational providers for the purposes of identification, tracking, and reporting. University personnel’s conscription as de facto border guards accentuates the pluralization of migration policing, highlighting how techniques of governance and surveillance are effectuated through quotidian actors and sites positioned beyond the sovereign state. By drawing universities into the orbit of territorial gatekeeping and interior enforcement, emergent policies are producing numerous tensions, whether in relation to their officially stated objectives or transformations in higher education’s character, ethos, and mission and their implications for non-citizens’ legal and social identities. Alongside enhancing understandings of migration control, this paper advances conversations regarding the increasingly networked, pre-emptive, and ubiquitous qualities of social ordering and control.

AS CRIANÇAS PARTICIPAM DE CORPO INTEIRO

EnglishChildren participate whole body in their worlds of life, making visible the embodied nature of human action. From an ethnographic research with children, from 3 to 6 years old, at doctoral level, their empirical and theoretical bases (FERREIRA, 2009, 2013; FINGERSON, 2009; GIL, 1997; LE BRETON, 2009) of children is the basis of all their social experience, mediator of relationships, practices, discourses, appropriations of the Other and the world. This idea needs to be considered in pedagogical practices, so that we overcome the strong mechanisms of control and domination that institute and guide a normative social ordering of the ideal model of a disciplined and obedient body that marginalizes and excludes the body of the child eager to discover and discover- in its new and embryonic relationship with the world. The childrens as full-body social actors have in their incorporated action one of their ways of participating in the collective educational contexts through which they express their points of view, being essential the development of appropriate approaches to the children’s communication forms, establishing a culture of communication that starts from the position of the child, so that we can build democratic practices, established in the paradigm of listening, more specifically auscultation, involved in human communication. Children as subjects of knowledge and producers of meaning have “voice”, are legitimate forms of communication and relationship that they use to express themselves and, in doing so, contribute to the renewal and reproduction of the contexts in which they participate when there is who are interested in hearing their voices. portuguesAs criancas participam de corpo inteiro nos seus mundos de vida, visibilizando a natureza incorporada da acao humana. A partir de uma pesquisa etnografica com criancas em nivel de doutorado, sua empiria e bases teoricas (FERREIRA, 2009, 2013, FINGERSON, 2009, GIL, 1997, LE BRETON, 2009), vimos que o corpo das criancas esta na base de toda sua experiencia social, mediador das relacoes, das praticas, dos discursos, das apropriacoes do Outro e do mundo. Tal ideia precisa ser considerada nas praticas pedagogicas, para que vencamos os fortes mecanismos de controle e dominacao que instituem e orientam um ordenamento social normativo do modelo ideal de corpo disciplinado e obediente, que marginaliza e exclui o corpo da crianca avido por descobrir e descobrir-se na sua relacao novidavel e embrionaria com o mundo. As criancas como atores sociais de corpo inteiro tem na sua acao incorporada uma de suas formas de participar dos contextos coletivos de educacao pela qual expressam seus pontos de vista.

Datastructuring—Organizing and curating digital traces into action

Digital transformations and processes of “datafication” fundamentally reshape how information is produced, circulated and given meaning. In this article, we provide a concept of “datastructuring” which seeks to capture this reshaping as both a product of and productive of social activity. To do this we focus on (1) how new forms of social action map onto and are enabled by technological changes related to datafication, and (2) how new forms of datafied social action constitute a form of knowledge production which becomes embedded in technologies themselves. We illustrate the potential of the datastructuring concept with empirical examples which also serve to highlight some new avenues for research and some empirical questions to explore further. We suggest a focus on datastructuring can ignite scholarly debates across disciplines that may share an interest in the technological configurations, sorting activities, and other socio-material forces that shape digital spaces, but which are rarely brought together. Such cross-disciplinary conceptualizations may give more attention to how information is structured and organized, becomes “algorithmically recognizable”, and emerges as (in)visible in digital, datafied spaces. Such a concept, we suggest, may help us better understand the novel ways in which “backstage datawork” and “data sorting processes” gain traction in political interventions, commercial processes, and social ordering.