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Article
Publication date: 26 February 2021

David Heath Cooper and Joane Nagel

This article examines US official and public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic for insights into future policy and pubic responses to global climate change.

1922

Abstract

Purpose

This article examines US official and public responses to the COVID-19 pandemic for insights into future policy and pubic responses to global climate change.

Design/methodology/approach

This article compares two contemporary global threats to human health and well-being: the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. We identify several similarities and differences between the two environmental phenomena and explore their implications for public and policy responses to future climate-related disasters and disruptions.

Findings

Our review of research on environmental and public health crises reveals that though these two crises appear quite distinct, some useful comparisons can be made. We analyze several features of the pandemic for their implications for possible future responses to global climate change: elasticity of public responses to crises; recognition of environmental, health, racial, and social injustice; demand for effective governance; and resilience of the natural world.

Originality/value

This paper examines public and policy responses to the coronavirus pandemic for their implications for mitigating and adapting to future climate crises.

Details

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 42 no. 3/4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-333X

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Book part
Publication date: 20 June 2005

Mimi Sheller

Gender distinctions were central to the ideological and discursive construction of ‘freedom’ in colonial plantation societies, but so too were ethnicity and national identity…

Abstract

Gender distinctions were central to the ideological and discursive construction of ‘freedom’ in colonial plantation societies, but so too were ethnicity and national identity. This article examines the contested nature of masculinity in the making of free citizens in post-emancipation Jamaica through an analysis of government and missionary sources, popular petitions, public speeches, and newspapers from 1834 to 1865. Close readings of the tensions within these public texts and their official reception demonstrate how freed men worked within and against the dominant discourses of Christian liberalism and masculine individualism as the bases for national citizenship. The key argument is that in laying claim to a Christian and British identity, African-Jamaican men constituted their freedom not so much through a seclusion of women in a private domestic role, but more importantly through an exclusion of indentured East Indians who were negatively defined as ‘foreign’ heathens.

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Political Power and Social Theory
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-335-8

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Article
Publication date: 1 July 2004

Sherri‐Ann P. Butterfield

Engages in debate regarding immigrants and ethnicity in the USA. Research, based on second‐generation West Indian immigrants, shows ethnicity has very real implications for…

1061

Abstract

Engages in debate regarding immigrants and ethnicity in the USA. Research, based on second‐generation West Indian immigrants, shows ethnicity has very real implications for immigrants’ life experience. Suggests that black immigrants complicate the slight understanding of blackness in general, but also the understanding of identity development.

Details

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 24 no. 7/8
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-333X

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Book part
Publication date: 27 December 1999

Scott Swearingen and Cecilia Orellana-Rojas

Abstract

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Constructions of Urban Space
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76230-540-7

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Article
Publication date: 1 December 1999

Ed Chung and Eileen Fischer

Considers the pluralistic cultures which exist within a nation and outlines the history of previous research into this field. Introduces the concept of embeddedness which means…

674

Abstract

Considers the pluralistic cultures which exist within a nation and outlines the history of previous research into this field. Introduces the concept of embeddedness which means that the society within which a person lives will influence their behaviour. Discusses intracultural differences and presents some research strategies for looking at the ethnic consumer.

Details

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 19 no. 12
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-333X

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Article
Publication date: 1 January 1986

Leslie S. Laczko

This article presents an empirical test of three hypotheses dealing with the modernisation of polyethnic societies. An hypothesis derived from the functionalist/developmental…

57

Abstract

This article presents an empirical test of three hypotheses dealing with the modernisation of polyethnic societies. An hypothesis derived from the functionalist/developmental perspective and two hypotheses derived from the conflict/competition perspective are assessed using survey data on Francophone‐Anglophone relations in contemporary Quebec. The main conclusions are that 1) the cross‐sectional design using survey data allows a clear test of Hechter's (1975) reactive ethnicity hypothesis; 2) the reactive ethnicity hypothesis is supported in the analysis; 3) the resource competition hypothesis (e.g., Nielsen 1980) is also supported; 4) the reactive ethnicity and resource competition hypotheses are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as some recent authors have claimed (Nielsen 1980; Ragin 1979), and can best be seen as two variants of the same communal competition perspective imbedded in the conflict theory tradition.

Details

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 6 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-333X

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Book part
Publication date: 26 November 2009

Robert J. Antonio

During the great post–World War II economic expansion, modernization theorists held that the new American capitalism balanced mass production and mass consumption, meshed…

Abstract

During the great post–World War II economic expansion, modernization theorists held that the new American capitalism balanced mass production and mass consumption, meshed profitability with labor's interests, and ended class conflict. They thought that Keynesian policies insured a near full-employment, low-inflation, continuous growth economy. They viewed the United States as the “new lead society,” eliminating industrial capitalism's backward features and progressing toward modernity's penultimate “postindustrial” stage.7 Many Americans believed that the ideal of “consumer freedom,” forged early in the century, had been widely realized and epitomized American democracy's superiority to communism.8 However, critics held that the new capitalism did not solve all of classical capitalism's problems (e.g., poverty) and that much increased consumption generated new types of cultural and political problems. John Kenneth Galbraith argued that mainstream economists assumed that human nature dictates an unlimited “urgency of wants,” naturalizing ever increasing production and consumption and precluding the distinction of goods required to meet basic needs from those that stoke wasteful, destructive appetites. In his view, mainstream economists’ individualistic, acquisitive presuppositions crown consumers sovereign and obscure cultural forces, especially advertising, that generate and channel desire and elevate possessions and consumption into the prime measures of self-worth. Galbraith held that production's “paramount position” and related “imperatives of consumer demand” create dependence on economic growth and generate new imbalances and insecurities.9 Harsher critics held that the consumer culture blinded middle-class Americans to injustice, despotic bureaucracy, and drudge work (e.g., Mills, 1961; Marcuse, 1964). But even these radical critics implied that postwar capitalism unlocked the secret of sustained economic growth.

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Nature, Knowledge and Negation
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-606-9

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Book part
Publication date: 17 October 2005

David E. Woolwine and E. Doyle McCarthy

Gay men in the New York City metropolitan area were interviewed from 1990 to 1991, during the period of the AIDS epidemic. Using an interview schedule, they were asked questions…

Abstract

Gay men in the New York City metropolitan area were interviewed from 1990 to 1991, during the period of the AIDS epidemic. Using an interview schedule, they were asked questions about “coming out of the closet” and other identity issues: their experiences of “difference,” beliefs about monogamous or “open” relationships, and their views about sex and commitment. The study's focus was on the men's “moral discourse” or their relationship to the “good,” including ideas of the self, other(s), friendship, love, sex, and commitment. The study yielded a consistency in the men's responses: they did not wish to impose on other gay men their own convictions about being gay, sex, and intimate relationships. Their talk was tentative, localized, highly personal, and “nonjudgmental” on a range of identity and moral issues. These findings are discussed by relating the men's life experiences to the gay culture they shared: their unwillingness to judge others reflects their own formative experiences of “coming out” in a society that judged gay men harshly and who, in later years, lived at the time of the AIDS crisis.

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Studies in Symbolic Interaction
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-7623-1186-6

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Book part
Publication date: 7 July 2004

Regina Hewitt

This essay is an exercise in imaginative historiography. Its purpose is to modify the boundaries between sociology, social work, and literature that have become impediments to the…

Abstract

This essay is an exercise in imaginative historiography. Its purpose is to modify the boundaries between sociology, social work, and literature that have become impediments to the pursuit of socially responsible scholarship; its goal is to create an analogue in the past for a field that many revisionists wish to create in the present – a field of cultural inquiry in which knowledge is considered both cognitive and emotional, methods are imaginative, and results are meant to improve human relations. In the past I posit as a “working hypothesis” (in Mead’s sense of the term) for this field, I bring together figures, specifically Jane Addams and the nineteenth-century playwright Joanna Baillie, whose contributions to sociology and literature are being separately but not jointly recovered. I examine three key similarities that make Addams and Baillie kindred spirits: they cultivated sympathy as a way of knowing and acting, and made it the basis for social change; they preferred situational problem-solving to theory-building; they used drama for value inquiry and morality construction. Throughout, I also allude to affinities with the thought of Mead, affinities that are important for avoiding gender essentialism in this argument. I illustrate the combined use of problem-solving, sympathy and drama by linking Baillie’s plays on criminality with Addams’s and Mead’s efforts at criminal justice reform and with present-day efforts to move from an ethics of justice to an ethics of care. By bringing Baillie to Hull-House and considering how she might have contributed to the work of Addams, Mead, and their associates, I construct a precedent for transdisciplinary cultural inquiry.

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Studies in Symbolic Interaction
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84950-261-0

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Book part
Publication date: 10 March 2010

Christopher Wetzel

This paper assesses how a social movement organization strategically framed its actions to simultaneously gain the support of multiple, diverse constituencies. The challenges…

Abstract

This paper assesses how a social movement organization strategically framed its actions to simultaneously gain the support of multiple, diverse constituencies. The challenges associated with creating meaning and mobilizing potential partisans during the Indians of All Tribes (IAT) occupation of Alcatraz Island from November 1969 to June 1971 are examined through a qualitative analysis of movement-created texts. The IAT used a trio of distinct approaches to communicate with and gain the support of Native Americans and whites. Through inflection the IAT explained why they seized the island, emphasizing themes such as decolonization, democracy, and the importance of taking action. Through direction the IAT encouraged whites to write letters, sign petitions, and make donations while calling for a deeper engagement by Native Americans in the land seizure. Through deflection the IAT recounted normative stories to discourage whites and “wannabes” who failed to heed the organization's other directions about how best to participate in the takeover. These three framing processes build upon and extend social movement framing theory by complicating conceptualizations of allies and underscoring how movements seek distinct types of support from different adherents.

Details

Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-036-1

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