The end of history, again

When the Berlin wall fell, and then the Iron Curtain, and then the Soviet Union dissolved into national tribes pursuing free market economies, the academic conservatives were gleeful.  “The End of History” was the zeitgeist text and meme that Fukuyama penned.  The metanarrative debate and power struggle about the role of government at “the commanding [...]

Summer Reading List

OK, I leave for five weeks in a week. Its mostly vacation, but I am looking forward to spending some time reading some of the dense social theory or social science books that I rely on, but have never finished or even read (ouch, hurts to admit that in print). I’ll probably [...]

Critical Realism and Network Theory

SOCNET brouught this symposium across my screen.
“Against The Flow: Critical Realism and Critiques of Contemporary Social Thought.”
Too bad it is in the UK.  :<(
I would particualrly liked to have seen :
Jonathan Joseph,
“A Critique of Networks and Flows”
AND
Nick Hostettler,
“Dialectical Critical Realism, Marxism and Critiques of Network theory: On Continuity and change in the theory and reality [...]

The Information Society and Terrorism

I am deep into editing a paper about looking at terrorism from the perspective of OT and organizational studies.  Its been fun and allowed me to go back to the more recently resurgent grand theorizing of the likes of Manuel Castells, Charles Tilly, Ulrich Beck, and Anthony Giddens.
My initial reaction is that many of the [...]

One more social theorist to check out

Reading a book about Castells, (by Fleix Stalder), I uncoverd this nugget by Scott Lash (whose name I have beeb seeing referenced for years).
“what is characteristic about the second modernity is the emergent demise of the distinction between structure and agency altogether” (Stalder 184).
Given the tag line of this blog, seems like I gotta check [...]