Toward a political sociology of privatized punishment: Contestation, state structures, and stratification

Political Sociology Is Dead. Long Live Political Sociology?

POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY IS DEAD. The old kind, anyway. What counted as political sociology in the past just is not practiced anymore. Generalizing wildly, political sociology used to be the study of how voters, classes, movements, parties, and so on influenced the state—be it political leaders, policy, administration, and so forth. In Canada, this kind of political sociology was represented by both...

Political Contestation in Global Production Networks

This paper develops a critical framework on international management and production that draws from the literatures on global commodity chains and global production networks (GPNs), from institutional entrepreneurship, as well as from neo-Gramscian theory in international political economy. The framework views GPNs as integrated economic, political, and discursive systems, in which market and p...

of Political and Military Sociology

Deontology, Political Morality, and the State Symposium: Political Theory and Criminal Punishment

Sometimes the government makes a policy choice, and, as a result, innocent persons die. How should we morally assess such deaths? For instance, is the government's choice of the reasonable doubt standard or its decision to restrict the death penalty to certain narrow categories responsible for deaths of innocents? If so, does the deontological norm against harming people dictate that the govern...

Elite Theory in Political Sociology

Elite theory‟s origins lie most clearly in the writings of Gaetano Mosca (18581941), Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923), and Robert Michels (1876-1936). Mosca emphasized the ways in which tiny minorities out-organize and outwit large majorities, adding that “political classes” – Mosca‟s term for political elites – usually have “a certain material, intellectual, or even moral superiority” over those th...