CHAPTER 3 -- Disciplined Selves

This chapter centers around Kondo's experience at a Japanese 'ethics school.' It is a kind of motivational camp, people are usually sent there by their employer. It is a kind of sadistic retreat. Ethics schools are reputed to build individual morality and strength, with foci on filial obligation and humility. The ethics center articulated a powerful, vivid doctrine of selfhood. Kondo writes: ''What the ethics center allows me to do is introduce, through a series of startling events, the recurring motif of this book, the historically and culturally specific, discursive production of selves in the domains of work, family, and community.''

Kondo went on the workers' retreat (called the youth seminar) at the ethics school with her employer for 6 days. Perhaps the most obvious feature at the school was the group organization involving group responsibility. Participants were divided into squads upon arrival and each squad slept, exercised, ate, and participated in events, together. The program was a highly structured, almost militant seminar. Many of the events elicited strong emotional responses from both Kondo, herself and American native, and the Japanese participants. She argues that it is precisely this combination of strong emotion and rigid form which provides the key to the interpretation of the ethics center program and its underlying assumptions about crafting disciplined selves. Activities during the seminar included getting up very early and greeting nature; constantly asking your parents for forgiveness for your selfishness; grueling physical activities and tasks, such as washing long hallways on your hands and knees; shouting practice, called vocalization; cold water ablutions, aimed at cleansing the self; walking and kneeling on gravel at midnight; a marathon; a follies show, with a morale to each story; and other activities aimed at purification and betterment.

Individual transgressions were punished by disciplining the whole group, thus team mentality was encouraged. Every day, participants were expected to set concrete goals and share them with the group during vocalization if called on. Though many found the center's activities to be physically painful and demanding, many did not find the activities to be especially surprising, which surprised Kondo. Even though who resisted certain activities rationalized them for the most part.

Participants were expected to help in daily cleaning and work activities. They were expected to everything into their work, no matter how monotonous. From this they were expected to learn vitality, perseverance, and their full potential ability. Extraneous thoughts or daydreaming were strongly discouraged.

Individual achievement was the focus of only one event, the marathon. It reinforced several values complementary to those emphasized in the group teachings. It was meant to emphasize the notions they you can do it if you try; life is a competition with one's self, not others, and the road to success ids through consistent, constant effort. After the marathon, the seminar again returned to focus on the community and group values.

The efficacy of the center's programs lay in specific notions of selfhood and pedagogy that pivoted around dualisms expressing the recurrent themes of form and feeling, social and emotional, outside and inside. The center's teachings centered around central notions of Japanese selfhood. One is the ki, the movement of spirit from one moment to another. More importantly though, is the kokoro, the heart, the seat of feeling and thought. The kokoro partakes of the energies of ki, constant energy, work and movement help it develop and thrive. Laziness, selfishness and indulgence are the root all negativity in human life. These are compounded by on, obligation to parents and filial piety. They all come together in sunao na kokoro, which is a heart accepting of all things, sensitive to the needs of others, and not centered on its own desires. It is concerned with duty and obligation.

No wonder employers generally pay for this seminar! According to Kondo, it is quite successful, though its effects lessen with time. It encourages individuals to work hard, thus accepting lower pay and greater job demands can be perceived as testaments to the strength of one's sunao na kokoro. Hardship is the gateway to happiness. Thus the center's teachings overlap with those of the broader society, which is why they are so affective. Endurance and perseverance can be easily applied to one's home world of work and family outside of center walls. Lastly, the genius of the ethics center lies in its recognition of itself as a ritual experience, which expects initial resistance. It is precisely because of the initial resistance and disbelief that participants may come to embrace the key ethics center precepts.

CHAPTER 6 -- Company as Family?

In this chapter, Kondo focuses on her work experiences in a Japanese bakery. She claims that much has been written about the success of Japanese companies and how well they treat their workers. However, these studies focus on large corporations, they neglect the small business and dirty factory work. In these businesses, workers often are not satisfied, labor-management tensions are common, there are no lifelong employment promises, in other words, it a different world.

Time is short, so I'll run through some major points: There is a sharp demarcation in the bakery between kin and nonkin workers of the owner. This complicates traditional Japanese work culture which says that the work place should be a second home for the worker. This is all fine and dandy for the owner and his family, but not so good for nonkin employees who have to watch what they say and remain respectful at all times.

The family metaphor of the company presents many difficulties. Employers like it,and claim that employees do not act appropriately. They also feel that 'family' implies being able to expect workers to work diligently at all times, not demand pay raises, time off, or better conditions, out of loyalty. Workers say that employers use the 'family' thing to their advantage, and that if the company really were like families, workers would treat them better and give them more perks. They have the preferential treatment of kin employees to provide a comparison for their treatment and the treatment of real family. The company trip is a bone of contention, the owner sees it a generous gesture to the worker, the workers expect it as an expected, standard reward; it is routine in Japanese businesses.

All of this brings up the issue of meaning. Meaning is subjective (go figure). Different actors perceive events and their meaning differently.

For all of their bitching and moaning in the bakery, the artisan bakers took much pride in their work in public. They worked exceptionally long and grueling hours during peak periods and festivals when demand for certain baked goods was high. They slept on flour sacks for two hours at a time throughout the day and night. At public sales, they did not bad mouth the company, but spoke with pride and viewed the products of their labor with reverence and pride, even the most insolent workers.

Resistance was present, and it was communicated in subtle, non-confrontational ways from workers to the manager/owner. In this ways the messages were communicated, but other higher Japanese values of obedience, face and honor were upheld. Kondo concludes that the nature of oppressions, the arenas in which resistance can be expressed, indeed the very definitions of resistance are culturally mediated.

Kondo's big findings concern power relations in general. She argues for a complex view of power and human agency. This requires seeing individuals as decentered, multiple selves, whose lives are shot through with contradictions and creative tensions. People may rearrange power relations as they appropriate and redeploy cultural meanings, but they can never escape the place beyond power. Thus, there are no pristine places of power and resistance. Matrices of power and meaning are open-ended. Finally, a more complicated view of the agency and selfhood of those who resist would see people caught in contradictions, constructing new arrangements of meaning and power as they craft their lives, but never 'authentically resisting' power to attain some emancipatory end.

MICHELLE LAMONT AND ANNETTE LAREAU
Cultural Capital: Illusions, Gaps, and Glissandos

This article looks at the impact of cultural reproduction on social reproduction. It uses Bourdieu and Passeron's original work on cultural capital and specifies the various theoretical roles cultural capital plays in their model and the various types of high status signals they are concerned with. This article proposes a new definition of cultural capital which focuses on cultural and social exclusion. It shifts the attention of the reader to American literature on cultural capital.

Introduction:
Cultural capital consists of high status cultural signals used in cultural and social selection (Bourdieu and Passeron). Cultural capital's underlying theory provides a complex and far-reaching conceptual framework to deal with the phenomena of cultural and social selection. It has improved our understanding of the process through which social stratification systems are maintained. Bourdieu and Passeron's work shows that apparently neutral academic standards are laden with specific cultural class resources acquired at home. B&P also improve on theories of social reproduction because their cultural capital concept is structural yet leaves room for human agency. Individual social beginnings provide them with resources which need to be actively invested to yield social profits.

Bourdieu and Passeron on Cultural Capital:

Introduction:
B&P developed their concept of cultural capital to analyze the impact of culture in the class system and one the relationship between action and social structure. They look at the contribution of education and family socialization to the reproduction of the structure of power relations and symbolic relations between classes by contributing to the structure of distribution of cultural capital. Schools for instance reflect the experiences of the dominant class.

Disentangling the Concept:
The cultural capital concepts performs different roles in B&P's writings: academic criteria, tastes mobilized for social selection, power resources as indicators of class position. We need to simplify this term and make it refer to the performance of a narrower set of functions. L&L's definition of cultural capital is institutionalized, i.e., widely-shared, high status cultural signals, which are defined by a large group of people that are used for social and cultural exclusion (attitudes, preferences, formal knowledge, behaviors, goods). Bourdieu is not concerned with how individuals gain status but only with the institutionalized structure of unequally valued signals.

Methodology: Problems in the Original Theory
Bourdieu suggests that a legitimate and a dominated culture exist because the value of cultural preferences and behaviors are defined relationally around binary opposites. Cultural legitimacy is attributed to specific practices in contrast to other practices. Yet in a large and highly differentiated society, the defining process is not so ideal or zero sum. Even dominated groups have their own sets of norms which can be relatively autonomous from the dominant ones. This implies that the value of cultural practices is not defined relationally.

Exclusion and Power:
Whereas Weber is more concerned with prestige and intergroup status boundaries, Bourdieu adopts a more Durkheimian approach and focuses on the necessary and classificatory effects of cultural practices. Bourdieu's approach is Goffmanesque. Cultural capital is an interpersonal identifier of social ranking, only recognized as such by those who possess the legitimate culture. It is a basis of status boundaries and is used to exclude and unify people. According to Bourdieu, most signals are sent unconsciously because they are learned through socialization and incorporated as habitus: the unintended classificatory results of cultural codes. Cultural exclusion in Bourdieu's terms is a phenomenon intrinsic to modern society and not likely to disappear without he decline of status and capitalist groups.

The power exercised through cultural capital is a power legitimating the claim that specific cultural norms are superior and of institutionalizing these claims to regulate behavior and access to resources. the capacity of a class to make it preferences seem natural and authoritative is the key to control. A dominant class can exercise symbolic violence, which is the power to impose meanings as legitimate by concealing the power relations which are the bases of its force. Individuals adjust their investments to the probability of success.

American Works on Cultural Capital:
American researchers have abstracted cultural capital from the micro-political framework of studying class reproduction and made it a tool for examining the process of status attainment. The micro-political dimension according to L&L should be preserved in the American study of cultural capital by examining more closely cultural and social exclusion. The latter is a crucial topic for understanding cross-national differences in how stratification structures are reproduces.

Goal: To Decouple American Cultural Capital from French Cultural Capital
In the US, as opposed to France, class cultures are weakly defined and high culture is debased by commercialization. Symbolic boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate cultures are weak. There is a greater autonomy of lower class, high status cultural signals from middle class ones. This problem of stability of cultural boundaries goes unmentioned by Bourdieu.

Micro level interactions in which individuals activate their cultural capital to gain access to social settings, or the study of cultural reproduction, is a topic neglect by both French and American researchers.

Conclusion:
Bourdieu's theory differs form Weber because Bourdieu provides a more sophisticated concept of exclusion because of his concern with indirect forms of exclusion as well as direct ones. Bourdieu's theory differs from Veblen's in that he thinks that status signals are mostly set unconsciously via the habitus. B&P's work improves on others' because of their structural view of institutionalized status signals and their dynamic approach to social reproduction which looks at agency. Nonetheless their are problems with their relational method of cultural capital. There are contested conclusions concerning the subordinate nature of lower class culture. In addition, their theory of power remains under-theorized.

We are reaching the conclusion that more attention should be give to the institutionalized repertoire of the high status cultural signals and to conflicts around symbolic boundaries. We need to clear up the confusion concerning the multiple functions of capital and the unsupported assumptions of the relational nature of the cultural system and a lack of autonomy of dominated culture. However, we should maintain B&P's analysis of direct and indirect exclusion.

ALAIN LIPIETZ
Mirages and Miracles -- CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2 -- Tthe Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Central Regime of Accumulation: Fordism

(This is the one which made no sense b/c it kept referring to chapters which we didn't read. I don't really get it, but I don't think that many people got it. )

Lipietz is concerned with what he terms a regime of accumulation. A regime of accumulation is a systematic and long-term allocation of the product in such a way as to ensure a certain adequation between transformations of conditions of production and transformations of conditions of consumption. It can be defined in terms of a schema of reproduction which describes how social labor is allocated over a period of time and how products are distributed between different divisions within the productive system over the same period. A regime of accumulation is not some disembodied entity, it is realized and reproduced through a mode of regulation, which includes all of the institutional forms, procedures and habits which either coerce or persuade private agents to conform to its schemas. A given regime will continue to be reproduced unless confronted with a major crisis which indicates that the mode of regulation is no longer adequate to the regime. Major crises arise either because they potential of a specific regime has been exhausted, or because the emergence of a new regime is being held back by outdated forms of regulation.

With the general framework of economic systems laid out, Lipietz proceeds to a apply his theory to Fordism. Fordism was in full effect in the US in the 1920s. It combined the scientific management techniques of Taylorism with automation. Fordism was aimed at mass production for mass consumption. In its Golden age, it was untouchable. However, production soon outstripped consumption in the national market and wage rates were unable to keep pace with the consumptive needs of the market. In other words, individual purchasing power fell behind market prices and needs, which resulted in a huge productive surplus. The US tried to save itself by putting its surplus goods on the international market, but many countries were not socially, financially, or, most importantly, financially ready to accept mass consumption practices. These things combined to bring downfall to the 'hegemony of the U.S.'

Because of this crisis, the US experienced drops in real wages, productivity and profitability. The US began to incur a trade deficit, and it was the end of the Golden Age, so the regime of accumulation associated with Fordism came to an end. Because of this, the US had to change its mode of regulation, which affected patterns of work, consumption, factory organization, etc.

TORIL MOI
''Appropriating Bourdieu's Feminist Theory and Pierre Bourdieu's Sociology of Culture''

Feminism and Critique:
'Appropriation' is a critical assessment of a given theory formation with a view to taking it over. Toril Moi will do this with feminist purposes. Her proposal of appropriation and critique as key feminist activities is intended to contest the idea that feminists' are doomed to be victimized by male theory.

Why Bourdieu?
Moi agrees with Wolfe that feminist criticism should develop a more sophisticated understanding of the social aspects of cultural reproduction. Bourdieu's sociology of culture is promising terrain for feminists because it allows them to produce highly specific analyses of the social determinant of literary enunciation (act of utterance). The Bourdieuian approach enables feminists to reconceptualize gender as a social category in a way which undercuts the traditional essentialist/nonessentialist guide.

Bourdieu has a micro-theory of social power; he links details of life to the general social analysis of power. But are Bourdieu's terms with their insistence on the way in which social agents internalized dominant social values, capable of theorizing change? Is Bourdieu implying that social power structures always win out?

Field, Habitus, Legitimacy, Symbolic Violence:
Field and habitus are deeply interdependent. The field is a competitive system of social relations which functions according to its own specific logic. Any agent in the field may be assumed to seek maximum power and dominance within it. He will confer legitimacy from any other agents in the game. Legitimacy is an institution, action, or usage, which is dominant but tacitly accepted. The intellectual field is relatively autonomous in relation to the whole social field and generates its own legitimacy.

Each field generates its own specific habitus -- a system of dispositions adjusted to the game of the field. The totality of general dispositions acquired through practical experience in the field. At one level, habitus is practical sense, an active general set of unformulated dispositions. Also, the field is a form of censorship. Every discourse within the field becomes and enactment and an effect of symbolic violence.

Those with legitimacy are spokespersons for the doxa. Those who challenge it are heterodox. The powerful possessors of symbolic capital become the wielders of symbolic power and of symbolic violence. (Symbolic violence is legitimate and unrecognizable as violence. If explicit ideological or material struggle between groups or classes develops such as class conflict or the feminist struggle, symbolic violence may be unmasked, but then it can no longer function as symbolic violence.)

Distinction equals legitimate taste. The point of imposing legitimacy is to reach a point where the categories of power and distinction merge. Legitimacy is achieved when dominance and distinction blend.

Education and the Reproduction of Power:
For Bourdieu, the educational system is one of the principle agents of symbolic violence in modern democracies. It is pivotal in a construction of an individual's habitus. The function of the educational system is to produce the necessary social belief in the legitimacy of currently dominant power structures. The distinguished products of the educational system are distinguished as a result of the belief in their distinction. This is social magic.

In lack of educational capital can be compensated for by political and social capital. If capital is what it takes to produce more capital, an agent lacking in social capital at the outset, will not benefit greatly from a relatively nonprestigous education. The ideological role of the educational system is to make it appear as if positions of leadership are distributed according to merit.

Doxa, Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, Change
Taste or judgment is the artillery of symbolic violence. Doxa occurs when the natural and social world appear as self-evident. Orthodox and Heterodox are distinguished form doxa because they recognize the possibility of different arrangements. In doxa, everyone has a perfect sense of limits. The question of legitimacy does not even arise.

A truly critical anti-doxic account of feminism would be one which also reflects on the social conditions of the possibility of feminist discourse. Feminism as a critique must also be a critique of feminism. Otherwise, the feminist becomes caught up in the mechanisms and strategies of the field she is in.

Change is not impossible in Bourdieu's scheme. Insofar as symbolic is deeply doxic, it may be challenged on precisely the same grounds as the doxa, but we must remember that social change is grounded in praxis. (Nonetheless, discourses produce material and practical effects in their own right, hence, they can be seen as transformative of praxis.)

The Social Construction of Gender:
Bourdieu's concept of class is indistinct. It comprises any social group whose members share a certain number of material and social conditions and thus develop a common habitus. For Bourdieu, the sexual division is like racism. It aims to ascribe historically produced social differences to a biological nature. He writes that our perceptions of the biology of reproduction are the effects of the thoroughly arbitrary social construction of gender divisions which they are supposed to legitimate and explain. Biology presents gender divisions as doxic.

For Bourdieu, sexual oppression is an effect of symbolic violence. It is structured by habitus that makes it seem even legitimate to live in. For Simone de Beauvoir there can be no liberation until women themselves cease to reproduce the power mechanisms that confine them. But in 1949, she thought that she and other professionally trained women had already won the game.

According to Bourdieu, what is required to effect (gender) change is collective action which sets out to organize a symbolic struggle capable of questioning every tacit presupposition of the fallow narcissistic vision of the world. Moi states that in contemporary society the position of women and men in relation to social power is more complex and contradictory than even Bourdieu would acknowledge. Gender relations are not tacit but are battle out in the ortho- and heterodox. For contemporary feminist theory, the strength of Bourdieu's analysis is not so much his ideas about the social relations between the sexes, but his insight that sexual differences are neither essences nor simple signifiers, neither a matter of realism or nominalism, but a matter of social practice. Sexual identities can't be deconstructed away. Real social change is required to empty those categories of meaning.

Bourdieu and Feminist Theory: Gender, Habitus, and Social Magic
Moi asserts that gender like class is part of the general social field rather than any specific field of gender. Symbolic violence turns into real violence (i.e. against women) in times of crises. The difference between a feminist appropriation of Bourdieu and other forms of materialist feminist is not the emphasis of gender as a socially constructed category, but the fact that a Bourdieuian perspective also assumes that gender is always a socially variable entity, one which carries different amounts of symbolic capital in different contexts. Because gender never appears in a pure field all of its own, there is no such thing as pure gender capital. The capital at stake is always the symbolic capital, relevant for the specific field under investigation. Ostensibly egalitarian institutions tend to breed consent rather than opposition. Particularly among the miracules, i.e. Simone de Beauvoir. Miracules identity with the system as the enabling cause of their own success. Bourdieuian categories are always relational. For him, capital has shifting importance within and among fields. Moi states that the advantage or disadvantage of femaleness can vary at certain times in life.

Why do some women writers accumulate more symbolic capital than others? Social capital. Social capital helped Simone after she started her career but also brought on sexist attacks from patriarchs who feared her. Simone also gleamed social capital from Sartre. Through Sartre, she gained access to important contexts and cultural power. Hence, Simone is an example of the shifting significance of gender.

Reading with Bourdieu:
Bourdieu's analyses may help us see the way in which certain texts enter into field-related, intertextual relations with other texts. This woman author, named Sixous, made no mention of Beauvoir in ''The Laugh of the Medusa.'' This was an article which should have included Simone de Beauvoir. By excluding Simone, Sixous makes a bid for power and silences her opposition. She perceived the rhetoric of male-dominated French philosophy to which Simone adhered as opposition. However, by silencing Simone, Sixous actually takes male-dominated rhetoric as an attribute, thus she enters into conflict with her explicit message of receptivity of women writers. In the case of Sixous, the Bourdieuian approach provides us with insights about the relations between Sixous, the feminist and intellectual fields in France, and between ''The Laugh of the Medusa'' and ''The Second Sex.'' It helps answer why one should juxtapose these specific texts.

TORIL MOI
The Making of an Intellectual Woman

Moi's study of SImone de Beauvoir, her exceptional position within the French educational field, her self-image, and how these thing were influenced by her gender. Moi argues that there was nothing unusual in Beauvoir's background except for gender, which could have been responsible for her experiences in the French field of academia. Beauvoir was fortunate in her life, because many of her accomplishments would not have possible without changes in the system a few years before Beauvoir pursued her training. Changes in the agregation exam policy, the opening of French schools to women at the highest levels, and changes in the occupation of teaching, all benefited Beauvoir. However, Moi argues that Beauvoir downplayed all of her struggles and the recent radical change which allowed her to succeed. Beauvoir was incredibly personally fortunate, if she had tried to accomplish certain things even 5 years sooner, she might have been shut out. When Beauvoir writes that her own generation of women no longer needed to struggle for their basic rights since they already had won most of the battle, she was generalizing entirely based on her own experience.

Many structured gender inequalities were against Beauvoir. Early schooling for girls was inferior to that for men, and, as a woman, Beauvoir had a more difficult time converting her educational capital into intellectual capital. Essential to these assertions is Moi's ongoing comparison of Beauvoir and Jean Sartre. Sartre and Beauvoir were in the same exam group at the university, they were friends, lovers. On the agregation exams, Sartre placed first, Beauvoir second. After the exam, Beauvoir downplays her accomplishment as exceptional, claiming that Sartre was much better suited to a distinguished position. Moi says that this again demonstrates Beauvoir's blind spot to her own femaleness, and the inequalities which often accompanied it. Beauvoir continually underestimates her own intellectual achievements and overestimates the importance of her certificates - badges of honor granted to her by the male establishment. Beauvoir is constantly trying to minimize her difference and any possible threat which may be perceived from it.

Beauvoir wants so much to be a part of French academia, that she does not wish to acknowledge any quality which may set her apart. Subsequently, she overcompensates by buying so completely in the stereotypes and images of the field and marginalizing her own success. Internalizing and identifying with the habitus of the French intellectual field, she fails to recognize the extent to which that habitus favors men. Simone de Beauvoir may at once be seen as both victim and perpetrator of an oppressive system. She made it despite her femaleness, yet to do anything to alter the system for future women could jeopardize her precarious position in a world of men. (The Uncle Tom of Patriarchy effect.)

In Beauvoir's work, Moi finds an innate tension and anxiety. She attributes this to Beauvoir's attempts to investigate her own marginality from a position of centrality. Beauvoir's position often incurs hostile reception of her work.

STEIN ROKKAN
Dimensions of State Formation and Nation Building: A Possible Paradigm for Research on Variations in Europe

This article contained of a lot of snippets of the political history of Western Europe, recounted with a quiet 'as-everyone-knows' undertone. Well, I'm admittin', a lot of that stuff I didn't know (the history of linguistic divisions in Finland, for instance), and so I can't put in any coherent story for you. Thus, I'm leaving most of it out. Rokkan's model is supposed to be a synthesis of the insights of Parsons and Hirschman (Exit, Voice and Loyalty). I'm not entirely sure I understood this article.

Main Argument:
The main reasons for variation in the timing and the quality of transition to mass politics in the nation-states of Western Europe are:
1) remoteness from or closeness to the central trade belt, leading to distinctiveness or sharedness of legal, religious and linguistic standards
2) within the central belt, whether there was a certain degree of autonomy from the center.
The key reason for the smoothness of the process of nationbuilding in European states, as compared to the postcolonial states, was the low level of overall political mobilization at the time of state-building in Europe.

Rokkan breaks down the development of a nation-state into four phases: two center-generated thrusts through the territory, the first military-economic, the second cultural; and two phases of internal restructuring opening up opportunities for the periphery, the first symbolic-cultural, the second economic.

Phase I: Penetration: the state-building process. A period of cultural, political and economic unification at the elite level (eg., Western Europe from the High Middle Ages to the French Rev.)

Phase II: Standardization: brings in larger and larger sectors of the masses (conscript armies, compulsory schools, emerging mass media create channels of contact b/t the elites and those in the periphery; this fosters a sense of identity with the total political system -- sometimes through conflict with other identities (linguistic, religious, etc.)).

Phase III: Participation: brings the masses into active participation in the workings of the territorial political system through extended franchise, organization of political parties, etc.

Phase IV: Redistribution. Expansion of administrative apparatus of the territorial state: growth of agencies of redistribution, including public welfare services, taxes, etc.

The strongest of the early European nation-states were built up around territories with a long history of concentration in the ownership and control of land.

Cities depended for their survival on the freedom of the trade networks which often went against the interests of the centralizing states. When the states were remote from the central trade belt, such conflicts of interest were minimal; there were fewer occasions to defend the state's boundaries and an early growth of distinctive legal, religious and linguistic standards (England, Norway, Sweden). In the central trade belt, whenever cities were relatively autonomous, there was scope of participation (Netherlands, Switzerland); in both those cases, participation and redistribution phases (III and IV) were easily reached. In those regions of the trade belt where cities were weak, the necessity on the part of the central agency to protect its border choked trade and, consequently, representation.

To put it only slightly differently, the cities depended for their survival on the freedom of trade networks, and, controlled the greatest resources against the centralizers. But the ability of cities to resist depended heavily on the structure of alliance options within each territory: who else needed exit options? Wherever cities were weak and isolated, the territorial centralizers succeeded: the result was a reduction in exit opportunities and a corresponding increase over time in the pressures for voice. However, these absolutist-centralist states not only tried to close off their borders, they also blocked channels of representation within the territory. As Hirschman says, you cannot cut off both exit and voice options without endangering the balance of the system: thus, these absolutistmercantilist states had to go through much more violent transitions to mass democracy (phases II-IV-- e.g., France, Spain).

What turned out to be crucial in the development of nation-states in Europe was that the fragmented center belt was made up of territories at an advanced level of culture, both technologically and organizational (can you say, ethnocentrism boys and girls). The main facilitators of smooth nation-building in Western Europe were: a well-developed agricultural economy; a network of highly autonomous cities institutionally distinct from the surrounding agricultural lands; the fact that these cities, as well as rural areas, were linked together culturally through a common religion as a cross-territorial corporate church, through the operation of a major organization for long-distance communication through craft literacy in one dominant standard language, Latin; and, the transactions across these varied territories were controlled under a body of inherited normative precepts, those embodied in Roman law.

The development of these states was further facilitated by the development of literate bureaucracies and legal institutions; the growth of trade and the emergence of new industries, developments which allowed the military-administrative machineries to expand without destroying their resource base; the development of a national script and consequent attempts to unify the peripheral territories culturally through a standard medium of internal communication. The extraordinary synchrony of all these developments during the years from 1485 to 1789 is key in the rapid growth of consolidated nation states in Europe. What proved decisive for the further growth of these political systems were the low levels of overall mobilization at the time of state-building. The decisive thrust toward consolidation took place before the lower strata could articulate any claims for participation. This gave the national elites time to build up efficient organizations before they had to face the next set of challenges (standardization, participation and redistribution). The western states got to take care of the task of state building before they had to face the ordeals of mass politics.

JAMES ROSENBAUM and TAKEHIKO KARIYA
''From High School to Work: Market and Institutional Mechanisms in Japan''

Instead of using the traditional economic model or the sociological personal network mode, R & K analyze the high school to work transition in Japan using the institutional linkage model. This model explains the ties between Japanese high schools and employers. The Japanese system shifts the competition for jobs from the labor market to schools where employers compete for sources of labor. Desirable jobs are then allocated more on the basis of academic than non-academic criteria. Scholastic achievement has greater effects on jobs with linked employers than on jobs with non-linked employers.

This last statement disproves the critique of the institutional model which states that the Japanese system reduces competition. Institutional models actually suggest that linkages improve market processes. They raise efficiency and strengthen the relations between achievement and jobs by increasing information and trust.

Does Japan's Institutional System Increase Youth Entry Problems:
Market models assume that institutional linkages make poor hiring selections and raise labor costs. Does the Japanese institutional system reduce productivity more than the US market system? No. Japan has fewer entry problems than the US. There is less unemployment, less delayed work entry, and less job turnover.

Mechanisms Preserving School-Employer Relations:
How do Japanese schools' job placement services affect the school-to-work transition? School Employer Semi-Formal Contracts: Employers in Japan distribute jobs unequally to high schools. There are fixed quotas for each school which restrict the number and types of jobs available to the students in each school. These quotas place structural limits on students' job opportunities. Employers base their quota decisions on past hiring and employment experiences with each school. Each school has an ongoing relationship with a certain employer. Contract employers hire almost half of the work-bound grads from each school.

Responsiveness to Maintain Contracts:
Continuity is an essential aspect of the semiformal contract for schools and employers. Schools and employers have reciprocal obligations wherein the school keeps trying to supply good students and the employer keeps trying to offer good jobs. Employers place a high emphasis on grades. They prefer to hire from better ranked schools and encourage schools to select students based on their grades. Hence, schools feel constrained to use academic achievement as the sole criteria. Students' personalities are not important. Schools will not recommend students with low grades, even if it means they will not fill their quotas.

Employers also feel constrained to accept the schools' nominations whenever possible. They try to maintain hiring practices even in times of recession. This is because a steady labor supply from each school is important to them. Having dependable schools reduces recruitment, hiring, and firing costs.

This relationship is the opposite of market relations. Every hiring decision is a continuation of an institutional relationship with a long history and economic fluctuations will be cushioned by both parties' interests in maintaining the relationship.

Selection Criteria for Desirable Jobs:
Japanese fathers' occupations generally have no significant effects on youths' jobs after high school. Grades are still the most important criteria.

The Strength of Employment Contracts Among Schools:
Higher ranked school have a larger yield of jobs per contract employer. Other aspects of schools such as age and location seem to hold no importance. The number of contracts a school has does not reduce its competitive ranking contrary to assertions by market theorists.

Allocation of Desirable Jobs Within Schools:
Grades have the strongest impact. It appears that personal attributes such as rule violations and leadership qualities do not have significant affects on job placement. Hence, the Bowles and Gintis hypothesis that employers do not care about academic achievement is not confirmed. Do school contracts protect students from the strict merit criteria imposed by markets? Grades do not have diminished influence in contract relationships; they actually have significant stronger influence on students' chances of getting good jobs.

Discussion:
The Japanese system entails competition both among institutions and among individuals. Competition does not so much fit a monolithic bureaucratic model as it fits a modified market model in which competition within and between institutions offers some distinctive outcomes. The system shifts competition away from the market and it can create exchanges based on universalistic achievement criteria. This can reduce the risk of personal influences inherent in personal linkages. There are few deviations from merit criteria for fear of destroying the linkages. The system works well because it is continuous. Employers' hiring practices are viewed as investments in the future continuity of their labor supply. This, in addition to the fact that employment is based on academic achievement, makes school-to-work transitions highly predictable. As a result, students have clear information on their career paths.

The American experience suggests that problems arise in a market system if market assumptions are not met. That is, if youth lack information or if their school efforts are unrelated to job rewards. The Japanese system provides clearer information; thus, its institutional linkages provide the conditions necessary for market incentives to operate.

R & K do note that signals to employers about future employees' productivity can be different in each country. In Japan, these signals are grades. They do not specify what the signals would be in the US, but the article implies that American signals might be leadership and assertiveness.

KAREN BRODKIN SACKS
''Toward a Unified Theory of Class, Race, and Gender''

In exploring the relationship of these three concepts, Sacks wants to retain Marx's notion of class, but modify it so that it becomes a gendered and racially specific concept.

Early marxists-feminists followed the analytic tradition of Engels and argued that wage labor was key to ending women's oppression, because only this would give them the necessary class experience from which to develop a working class consciousness. This view did not regard family and domestic relations as class relations; hence, the social relations of domestic labor, as well as household, community, racial, and quality-of-life issues remained outside class analysis.

This led to debates over the meaning of domestic labor and its relation to class oppression. The following theories were advanced:

1. Domestic labor as primary: early recognition of domestic exploitation in capitalism led to arguments that this was a universal and precapitalist condition of social existence and at the root of women's subordination under capitalism. Women were directly exploited by capital through their social responsibility for unwaged domestic labor.

2. Capitalism as primary: counter arguments to the above theory suggested that capitalism's organization of waged labor kept women out, and hence was what devalued domestic labor and thus women as a gender. These first two theories were disputed by anthropological and social historical studies which provided evidence against these ideas.

3. Dual Systems Theory: women's subordination lay in an interaction of a precapitalist and patriarchal mode of production with a capitalist mode of production. Women's oppression in the private sphere is due to patriarchy and exploitation as workers is due to capitalism. This theory is criticized for using a concept of patriarchy that is ahistorical and culture-bound.

4. Another stream of argument problematized the meaning of domestic labor for women and men of color. For women of color, domestic labor was often both waged and unwaged labor. Because domestic labor had different shapes, it was likely to have different historical significance for domestic relations in the social structures of minority communities. These arguments pushed for an expansion of the meaning of working class.

Following this fourth line of argument, class is not only experienced in historically-specific ways, but also racially-specific, gender-specific, and kinship-specific ways. Sacks advocates a definition of the working class in which membership is not determinable on an individual basis, but rather as ''membership in a community that is dependent upon waged labor, but that is unable to subsist or reproduce by such labor alone.'' This is the economic basis of class as a relationship to the means of production. There are social implications as well. For example, women's unwaged work creates community-based and class-based social ties of interdependence that are key to neighborhood and household survival.

ANN LAURA STOLER:
''Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule''

The central idea at work in this article is that while the anthropology of colonialism has given great (almost exclusive) attention to the state of the indigenous colonized community, meaningful analysis of the colonizing parties is generally lacking in the field. Often in these studies, the colonizers are treated as homogenous European agents with unified interests, as an abstract force, or a structure imposed on local practice.

Stoler contends that colonial cultures were never direct translations of European society- but were, rather, based on new constructions of European-ness. In reality different groups within the colonizers were often pitted against each other as well as against the policy makers in the metropole. She cites the relevance of the notion of imagined communities of Benedict Anderson (a man who can cite - but apparently not translate - extended passages in every obscure language under the sun) - specifically, communities consciously created and fashioned to overcome the economic and social disparities what would in other contexts separate and often set their members in conflict. Stoler takes up and puts a new spin on the classic colonial trope of racism, proposing to demonstrate the ways in which competing colonial agendas, based on distinct class and gender interests, shaped the politics of race and tensions of rule. The specific case for study is the East Deli community of East Sumatra in the earlier part of this century. Two social groups (poor whites and white women) were categories that both defined and threatened the boundaries of European (white male) prestige and control.

Basics about Deli:
Opened by the Dutch in late 19thCentury, extensively pioneered and developed by a multinational community of investors that maintained a high degree of autonomy from the Dutch metropole. An extensive system of concubinage and social discrimination developed (possibly due to the influence of British planters in the region). In Deli, there was a strong mystique surrounding strength of character (pioneering Protestant ethic of the planter prototype) as the basis of privilege and power (as opposed to race or class). Stoler, however, points out that this 'character' was itself constructed out of a cultural consensus on European-ness - to which all whites had to subscribe and from which all Asians were barred. In reality, however, the Deli planters were not so much gentlemen planters as they were bureaucrats, office workers, specialists, and field foremen working in a rapidly expanding corporate hierarchy. There existed a stratification of Europeans on the basis of their positions (or lack) of authority due to their location in this hierarchical scheme. Lower level European plantation workers banded together into a union that published its own newspaper, fought against policies which affected employee's private lives, and also lent support to various indigenous protests, railway strikes, and nationalist organizations.

Marriage Restriction: corporate authorities enforced a marriage prohibition against all incoming European plantation employees - the rationale being that there workers couldn't support a family in a manner befitting to a European. This restriction facilitated the development of an extensive system of concubinage, which was seen as morally passable, posed little financial burden and also allowed employees to quickly learn native language and customs. The marriage restriction was rescinded in 1920 in the midst of heightening tension in labor relations that threatened European unity in Deli. Officially the reason given was the Deli plantations were now lucrative and successful to allow for the lower-level employees to support families at an acceptable level.

Following this European 'reconciliation' (of sorts) and in response to heightened indigenous resistance to Dutch rule, additional reforms were instituted to actively reinforce and reaffirm a united European front as well as to maintain an increased physical and social distance between European staff and their native workers (eg: mediated chain of command). The official discourse of colonial rule was laden with military metaphor - cf. tomb of the unknown planter.

Even from the outset, Deli's colonial community was defined in terms of cultural criteria that set it off sharply from the colonized. The introduction of large numbers of European women is generally seen as an impetus of greater colonizer/colonized political and social differentiation, particularly along racial lines. It has been suggested that this increase of racist sentiment could result either from over-zealous white male chivalry aroused to protect the European women, or because women might have been more avid racists in their own rights. In either event, the presence of European women did not inadvertently (arbitrarily) produce stronger racial divisions, but may have been intended to precisely enforce the separations between Asians and whites (possibly in conjunction with a prior/planned stabilization of colonial rule).

Stoler believes that certain aspects of the demographic distribution of the Deli community (particularly in its earlier stages) as important in understanding the structural dynamics of the European community there. As previously noted, white women and children were absent from the earliest formative periods of the colony's history. In addition, the European colonial elite also restricted presence of those white men who would undermine the image (read mystique) of a healthy and powerful European race - eg: non-productive, aged, poor, or infirm men and insurgents. Despite extensive efforts to maintain a middle class facade against the appearance of 'wretched European pauperism,' the presence of poor white men became quite widespread. A variety of community-based relief and make-work efforts as well as attempts at repatriation were employed to try to manage the spread this pauperism in the face of deteriorating local conditions and crises in the world market (ie. Great Depression).

The handling of the world-wide economic crisis had several consequences for intra- and inter-group relations:
1) elimination of the dissident elements of subordinate whites in the estate hierarchy - gelling of a 'community of interests' in the face of shared economic hardships;
2) new wave of reaction against the increasing number of non-Dutch Europeans employed as estates staff; and
3) a more solid alliance between plantation elite and the colonial administration.

In conclusion, Stoler believes that care must be taken so as not to equate 'European' with 'colonizer.' Shifting definitions of group membership was a crucial strategy employed by the colonial elite to control/limit access to property and privilege. Further, she contends that we need to reexamine the internal structures of colonial authority, and to explore the salient features of European class cultures that were selectively refashioned to create and maintain the social distinctions of imperial control.

MARSHALL SAHLINS
Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities

Sahlins is concerned with explaining historical change and he critiques structural and utilitarian theories for their inability to do this. Structuralism tends to exclude individual action and worldly practice and is disengaged from history. Human action enters into account only as it represents the working out of an established order, the 'stereotypic reproduction' of existing cultural categories. Utilitarian theories (both ecological and historical materialist) also do not explain historical change because they offer a model of 'historical physics.' That is, they acknowledge that culture may set the conditions to the historical process, but it is dissolved and reformulated in material practice so that history becomes the realization, in the form of society, of the actual resources people put into play.

Sahlins supports the anthropological view that the historical efficacy of persons, objects, and events, arises in their cultural value ('significance'). He wants to show that history is organized by structures of significance. He uses the historical changes that occurred in Hawaii with the arrival of the Europeans, particularly Captain Cook, to illustrate the reproduction and transformation of structures of significance.

Reproduction: Structures of the Long Run
Sahlins argues that Cook's arrival to Hawaii and death by the hands of the Hawaiians were historical metaphors of a mythical reality. The events of Cook's experiences strongly paralleled Hawaiian mythology, whereby Cook represented the god Lono, who rivaled the king for Hawaiian power. The experiences of celebrated mythical protagonists (Lono) were re-experienced by the living (Cook) in analogous circumstances (the Europeans represented a potential threat to the King). Cook's fate was the historical image of a mythical theory, mediated by the correlation between his own practical rituals for dealing with the natives, and the Hawaiian ritual practices for dealing with the gods. By ritually sacrificing Cook, the Hawaiian king inherited Cook's mana, that is the mana became British. The continuity of the chiefly status thus depended on a deployment of the myth as practice. Chiefs had to adopt signs of European civilization for status. Europeans were fit into the status system; their relationship to the Hawaiians was like that of the chiefs to the people. Thus far, Sahlins argues, the content of the system is changed, but not its norms.

Transformation: Structure and Practice
In the course of reproducing European contact in its own image, Hawaiian culture changed radically and decisively. Practice has its own dynamic - a 'structure of conjuncture' which meaningfully defines the persons and the objects that are parties to it. Contextual values, if unlike the definitions culturally presupposed, have the capacity of working back on the conventional values. In this way the structure - a set of relationships among relationships - is transformed. Thus, the Hawaiian scheme of social distinctions was redefined by their differential relationships to the European presence. This came about particularly in the realm of trade. Trade encounters challenged and redefined traditional taboos. The taboo logic thus became the mechanism of revaluation of persons and objects that it had originally defined. The taboos were revised in practice - in relations of the conjuncture, and returned to the cultural order in altered relationships to each other. This transformation of taboos ultimately transformed relationships between men and women and between chiefs and people, and eventually led to the abolition of the taboos themselves.

Conclusion: Structure in History
People act upon circumstances according to their own cultural presuppositions. when received categories do not conform to the anticipated ones, they are revalued in practice and functionally redefined. What begins in reproduction ends as transformation.

Any comprehension of history as meaning must recognize the distinctive role of the sign in action. All inflections of meaning depend on the actor's experience of the sign as an interest; its place in an oriented scheme of means and ends. The sign is determined as a concept by its differential relation to other signs in the collective symbolic scheme. It also represents a differential interest to various subjects according to its place in their specific life schemes. In action, as their capacity as interests, signs can acquire new conceptual values: 1.) insofar as they are placed in novel relationships with objects in the referential process, and 2.) insofar as they are placed in novel relationships with other signs in the instrumental process.

The historical process unfolds as a continuous and reciprocal movement between the practice of the structure and the structure of the practice.

RALPH H. TURNER
'Sponsored and Contest Mobility and the School System' ASR 1960

Turner explores how the accepted mode of upward mobility shapes the school system directly and indirectly through its effects on the values which implement social control by comparing the ideal typical normative patterns of social mobility in the U.S. and England.

Contest Mobility in the U.S.:
The U.S. subscribes to a system of contest mobility in which elite status is treated as a 'prize' which may be won in open competition. Everyone has an opportunity to win in this contest and their success depends upon their individual efforts. It is a meritocratic system in which the paths to success are determined by objective criteria, allowing everyone a fair chance at the prize. The contest is governed by some rules of fair play, but the contestants have wide latitude in the strategies they may employ. The governing objective of CM is to give elite status to those who earn it. Early selection of favorites is disapproved of as premature judgment; everyone has a fair chance to play to 'the end.'

Sponsored Mobility in England:
Under SM, elite recruits are chosen by the established elite and elite status is given on the basis of some criterion of supposed merit and cannot be taken by any amount of effort or strategy. The idea is to make the best use of the talents in society by sorting persons into their proper niches. Early selection of recruits is desirable to allow time for proper training.

Social Control and the Two Norms:
In a society stratified along class lines, the most difficult control problem is that of ensuring loyalty in the disadvantaged classes toward a system in which their members receive less than a proportional share of society's goods. Dominant ideas of upward mobility perpetuate particular norms and values which serve to maintain social control in societies where there is an unequal distribution of power, wealth, and the resources. CM promotes three main norms which serve this function in the U.S.: 1) a futuristic orientation, whereby the 'have-nots' can hope that someday their situation will improve 2) an emphasis on ambition, which convinces people that upward mobility is possible if they just try hard enough 3) a general sense of fellowship with the elites, which demonstrates that the lower classes that they are not intentionally oppressed by the elites In contrast, control in England is maintained by socializing the lower classes to believe that they are not capable of ruling society, and they should therefore step aside and allow the more competent to fulfill that role (859).

These different conceptions of social mobility are what Turner refers to as 'organizing ideal norms' which shape institutions such as the educational system (856). Turner points out four major differences in the educational systems of the U.S. and England which result from these different norms:

1.) There is a different value placed on education in these two countries. Under SM, education is valued for its cultivation of elite culture, while under contest mobility it is seen as simply a means of getting ahead (862)

2.) The 'logic of preparation' differs in these two countries. In the U.S. bright students are not selected out from classes with other students because of the belief that everyone should have a fair chance at success until the end of the contest. In England, however, early selection is encouraged so as to properly 'groom' children for elite status (863)

3.) The educational content differs under these two systems. In the U.S. a liberal education is not seen as sufficient for success and students are encouraged to seek 'practical' training outside of school. In England, however, school is seen as the place to learn elite culture and to build intra-class loyalty (864).

4.) Training in 'social adjustment' is peculiar to the system o CM. This prepares students to cope with situations for which there are no rules of intercourse. Under SM, elite recruits are inducted into a homogeneous stratum within which there is consensus regarding the rules.

Effects of Mobility on Personality:
Under CM there may be more serious and continuing strain over the uncertainty of attaining mobility; more explicit and continued preoccupation with the problem of changing friendships; and more contradictory learning to inhibit the acquisition of a value system appropriate to the class of aspiration than under SM (866).

Turner concludes this article with the admission that his observations are 'broadly impressionistic and speculative' and that further research in this area is needed.

IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN
''TheThree Stages of African Involvement in the World Economy'

In order to understand modern Africa, one must look at its development within the framework of the capitalist world economy.

This capitalist world economy, according to Wallerstein, consists of a single division of labor, production for profit, capital accumulation for expanded reproduction as a key mode of maximizing profit, the emergence of three zones of economic activity (core, periphery, semiperiphery), a multiplicity of state structures, and the development over time of two principal world class-formations (proletariat and bourgeoisie). Africa's incorporation into this world economy can be analyzed in three stages, beginning in 1750. Prior to this date, slave trade was a luxury not a necessity; therefore, it had very limited consequences for the social organization of African society.

Phase I: 1750-1900 (the 'informal empire')
Around this time there was pressure to expand the capitalist world economy and this effort to expand led to a labor shortage. This increased the need for slaves and slave exports ceased to be a 'luxury' item, but a necessity. This paved the way for the periphalization of Africa. Those areas of Africa that came to be incorporated into the capitalist world economy as peripheral zones retained their local sovereign political institutions for the most part. The expense of direct political domination was avoided because it was seldom required to maintain the flow of commerce.

Phase II: 1900-1975
The period of 1873-1897 was a time of contraction in the capitalist world economy. when the phase of expansion occurred (1900-1913) there was an alteration in the world terms of trade in favor of agricultural exports. Since there was a shortage in the supply of world raw materials, it was profitable to initiate new production of export crops in Africa because of the low cost of labor. The objective was to create sufficient cash crops to meet world needs and to sustain the political-administrative costs that European powers had forced on each other. This brought about the following changes in the African political economy:
1. most production was primary production
2. most labor power was migratory, keeping the cost of labor low
3. administrative bureaucracy was small and relatively inexpensive
4. the middle class grew slowly

This second phase was brought to an end by the accumulated contradictions both of the world economy as a whole and of Africa's role in it. On the one hand, the expansion of total industrial capacity in the world economy had by mid-1960's outdistance both the expansion of raw material production and the expansion of effective demands, given the world distribution of income (overproduction crisis). This led to the beginning of the world economy downturn whose first serious signs were the world monetary crises of 1967.

Phase III: 1975 -
In the next 50 years, the incorporation of Africa into the world economy will take one of two forms: dependent development or revolutionary transformation. The form will depend on the outcome of the class struggles both internal to Africa and in the world system as a whole. This third phase signals the culmination of a long process of expansion of the geographic parameters of the capitalist world system, and the approximation in reality, for the first time, of the model of this system as outlined by both the classical economists and Marx.

IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN:
''The Construction of Peoplehood'' -- Chapter 4 from Race, Nation, and Class

Wallerstein here takes a stab at what he identifies as the hot topic of identity and labeling. As an example of this kind of issue, he takes the case of Apartheid in South Africa. Under this system, people are separated into 4 different official (i.e. government-enforced) groups: that carry with them different political and social rights:
1) Europeans,
2) Indians,
3) Coloureds, and
4) Bantus
Each group is in reality a complex category with multiple subgroups.

The history of opposition to Apartheid:
Initially there was formation of organizations within the framework of each racial category:
--The Congress of the People consisted of organizations from the 4 groups was established in 1955 and issued a Freedom Charter calling for an end to Apartheid.
--The ANC - the representative of the Bantus, who make up 80% of the population - was the largest member group.

In the 60s and 70s, the group started using the term 'African' to refer to non-Europeans. Other groups used a White/non-White distinction. So basically there is an emergent tendency toward a reduction to a 2- rather than 4-fold classification, but this was not an unambiguous process. The Coloured category (which corresponds approximately to the term 'mulatto') was a particularly troublesome spot. Something of controversy arose around the designation of 'Coloured' vs. 'so-called Coloured.' On the one hand, the term 'Coloured' defined a marginal group, composed of individuals who do not fit easily into other categories and acts to perpetuate the racist pure-White Afrikaner myth.

Further, this designation is neither 'natural' (deriving from actual social causes or every day life experience) nor is it chosen. Rather 'Coloured' is a label imposed by the European regime. Those who endorsed the use of the term 'so-called Coloured' feel that: 1) it denoted the aggressor's imposition of the term, and 2) identification with and growing unity of an oppressed 'Black' majority (rather than Coloureds separate from Blacks) combined with distance from the White oppressor-minority and its racist ideology offers a valuable strategy in the opposition to Apartheid.

The differing views on whether a Coloured people actually exists as such, or is an artificial/constructed/imposed designation, leads Wallerstein to raise questions around how peoplehood is defined. He introduces the idea that perhaps a people is supposed to be inconstant in form - its central feature being the reality of this inconstancy and the concomitant denial of this reality. That is, a people is actually a fluid category, but we tend to think of it as something that is more or less written in stone.

Historical social science doesn't use the term 'people' much, but rather prefers three other terms:
Race: supposed to be genetic category with a visible physical form
Nation: sociopolitical category linked to actual or potential boundaries of states
Ethnic Group: a cultural category; continuing behaviors are passed intergenerationally; not normally linked to state boundaries.

All three terms are used inconsistently, but generally indicate some persisting phenomenon which, by virtue of its continuity, both has strong impact on current behavior and offers a basis for making everyday political claims. A people is said to exist or act in a certain way because of either its genetic characteristics, sociopolitical history, or traditional norms and values. A temporal dimension of pastness is inherent in the concept of peoplehood. Wallerstein sees Pastness as a tool to control/influence behavior. It is a central element in socialization, maintenance of group solidarity, and establishing challenges to social legitimacy. Pastness is a contemporary (i.e. 'present-tense') phenomenon, interpreted in relation to present the social world and life, and is therefore inconstant. Wallerstein also makes a distinction between the real past (which is constant) and the social past (which is inconstant - although this inconstancy can never be admitted).

Q: Why have the separate notions of race, nation, and ethnicity evolved when a single term would have sufficed?
A: All definitions of peoplehood are constructed, political phenomena.

Wallerstein looks at the Capitalist world economy and how each of these modal terms hinges on one of the basic structures of the capitalist economy.
Race: the axial division of labor in the world economy; core::periphery
Nation: political superstructure of this historical system
Ethnic Group: household structures that permit maintenance of large components of non-wage labor in the accumulation of capital.

Note: none of these three is directly related to class.

The axial division of labor promotes spatial division of labor. The core::periphery arrangement relates to differential cost structures of production; actual location of each sphere is not inevitable/constant, but it tends to become normalized because:
-periphery is associated with primary production which places geographical constraints especially as pertain to relocatability
-political elements are involved in maintaining set of C-P relationships (e.g. control of frontier transit, and commerce)
-development of differentiated political structures in C-P tends to maintain the inegalitarian axial division of labor

Genetic racial variants were distributed in particular patterns prior to the onset of agricultural cultivation, the permanence of residence in agricultural societies led to a fairly homogenous localized racial patters. As C-P processes concentrated and more geographically disparate, 'racial' categories began to crystallize around certain labels there came about an increasing polarization which lead to a decrease in the number of racial categories. Race (and racism) are an expression, promoter, and consequence of geographical concentrations associated with the axial division of labor - so basically it is a complicated relationship. For example, in S. Africa, Japanese business men are classified as European (due to their dominant role in the world economy) rather than as Coloureds (as they probably should be according the a more strict adherence to official policy. 'Nation' arises from the political structuring of the world system. And in almost every case, statehood precedes nationhood.

Q: What about nationalist political movements?
A: -Most originate in already-constructed administrative boundaries,
so a state precedes the movement.
-It is debatable how deeply rooted 'nation' as a communal sentiment precedes the actual creation of a state.

Q: Why does the establishment of a sovereign state within the inter-state system create a corresponding nation/people?
A: Development of 'naitonal' sentiment strengthens the state against subsequent threats from internal disintegration and external aggression.
-Nationalism also promotes state-level uniformities, especially as relate to administrative issues (cf. C. Tilly)
-Nationalism is also a component of the interstate system in so far as it is a hierarchical system with a stable but changeable pecking order. There inequalities lead to ideologies (i.e. nationalisms) that act to either justify high rank or challenge low rank (need nationalism to 'play the game' in the interstate system).

Why Race and Nation?
Race: - crude core-periphery antimony
- Ramifies Core and Periphery intrazonal unity

Nation: - competition between states, more detailed degree of advantage/disadvantage in the interstate system.
- intrazonally divides Core and Periphery into nations competing for rank in the world economy

Ethnic Group is a minority with respect to social power, but not necessarily in the numerical dimension. EG's are linked in practice to state boundaries and nations - but states tend to have many ethnic groups. The key institution that permits varying levels of exploitation under capitalism is the household of the part-life wage laborer. Along with the occupational hierarchy comes the 'ethnicization' of the work force within a given state's boundaries. The 'culture' of an ethnic group consists of the kinds of normal behavior, set of rules, and attitudes appropriate to a set of relations of production. Particularistic socialization is a key factor here. Ethnicization provides a legitimization to the hierarchical reality of Capitalism (practical inequality) in such a way as does not offend formal equality before the law (one of the avowed premises of capitalism). Ethnicity mediates the contradiction between theoretical equality and practical inequality.

Peoplehood is a major institution that forms an essential pillar of capitalism, as is statehood - both grew increasingly more important with the advance of capitalism. Classes are different than peoples in that the former are objective, analytical categories that deal with contradictions in a historical system, not descriptions of social communities. Classes fur sich have been very elusive because the constructed peoples (race, nation, ethnic group) correlate heavily with objective class. The consequence is that a very high proportion of class-based political activity in the modern world takes the form of people (not class) based political activity.

PAUL WILLIS
Learning to Labor -- CHAPTERS 1-4

Willis is interested in explaining why working class kids get working class jobs. So, he hangs out with various groups of kids in a few schools in Hammertown, an industrial town in Britain. The centerpiece of the book are 'the lads,' sons of manufacturing workers who are disaffected with school. We follow them in school through the end of their schooling and their transitions into the work world. Unlike Bowles and Gintis, Willis actually goes into schools to look at the process of class reproduction/social stratification/regeneration of working class cultural forms/etc. Unlike some other writers in this area, he actually allows people some agency. However, the kids' creativity (cultural production, rather than reproduction) still ultimately leads to the reproduction of the class system, and their own inherited class positions.

CHAPTER 1 - Introduction

Class culture is not a neutral pattern, a mental category, a set of variables impinging on the school from the outside. It comprises experiences, relationships, and ensembles of systematic types of relationship which not only set particular choices and decisions at particular times, but also structure, really and experientally, how these choices come about and are defined in the first place.

Paul is a marxist (and that's ok!) and so he asserts that laboring is not a universal changeless transhistorical human activity, but in fact takes on specific forms and meanings in different kinds of societies. Thus he thinks the processes through which labor power comes to be subjectively understood and objectively applied and their interrelationships are of profound significance for the type of society which is produced and the particular nature and formation of its classes. These processes help to construct both the identities of particular subjects and also distinctive class forms at the cultural and symbolic level as well as at the economic and structural level.

Paul believes that the specific milieu in which a certain subjective sense of manual labor power, and an objective decision to apply it to manual work is produced is the working class counter-school culture. It is here where working class themes are mediated to individuals and groups in their own determinate context and where working class kids creatively develop, transform, and finally reproduce aspects of the larger culture in their own praxis in such as way as to finally direct them to certain kinds of work. It is working class kids' own culture which most effectively prepares some working class lads for the manual giving of their labor power; thus, there is an element of self-damnation in the taking on of subordinate roles in Western capitalism.

However, this damnation is experienced, paradoxically, as true learning, affirmation, appropriation and as a form of resistance. There is an objective basis for these subjective feelings and cultural processes; they involve a partial penetration (key term for Paul) of the really determining conditions of existence of the working class, penetrations which are definitely superior to official versions of their reality proffered through the school and various state agencies. These forms of penetration are limited, distorted, and turned back on themselves, often unintentionally, by complex process ranging from both general ideological processes and those within the school and guidance agencies to the widespread influence of a form of patriarchal male domination and sexism within working class culture itself.

CHAPTER 2 - Elements of a Culture

The most basic, obvious and explicit dimension of counter-school culture is an entrenched general and personalized opposition to authority. This opposition involves an apparent inversion of the usual values held up by authority. Diligence, deference and respect become read as wimpiness, etc. Opposition is expressed mainly as a style, and lived out in countless small ways such as conspiratorial looks and nods to other lads, constant annoying questions to teachers,etc. Key in this is 'the laff.'

The 'ear'oles' (can you think of some in our department? let's try that now.) are school conformists. They support the idea of teachers; they have invested something of their own identities in the formal aims of education and support of the school institution. They demand that teachers should at least respect the same authority; they complain when the teacher is not strict enough, etc. The term 'ear'ole,' conferred on the conformists by the lads, connotes the passivity and absurdity of school conformance the lads perceive in the ear'oles. The lads think the e's are always listening, never doing, never animated with their own internal life. The lads reject and feel superior to the e's, in a variety of ways, including sexually.

Opposition to staff and distinction from the ear'oles is continuously expressed amongst the lads in the whole ambiance of their behavior, but also made concrete in certain stylistic/symbolic discourses centering on clothes, cigarettes and alcohol. The lad has a certain look, which allows him to snub the school (with its drab uniforms), to distinguish himself from the ear'oles and to be sexually attractive to girls. The majority of the lads smoke, and, more importantly, are seen to smoke. The adult world, specifically the male adult working class world, is turned to as a source of material for resistance and exclusion. Drinking is undertaken openly not only for the buzz, but also because it is a signal to teachers and conformists that the lad is separate from the school and has a presence in an alternative, superior and more mature mode of social being.

Another way of looking at the lads' opposition to the school is to read it as the classic opposition between the formal and the informal. The school is the zone of the formal. The ear'oles invest in this formal structure, and in exchange for some loss of autonomy expect the official guardians to keep the holy rules. Counter-school culture is the zone of the informal. The material base of counter-school culture is the informal social group, the basic unit of the culture. The essence of being a lad lies within the group. You cannot generate fun, atmosphere and a social identity by yourself. The group supplies those contacts which allow the individual to build up alternative maps of social reality, it gives the bits and pieces of information for the individual to work out for himself what makes things tick.

Opposition to the school is principally manifested in the struggle to win symbolic and physical space from the institution and its rules, and to defeat its main perceived purpose, which is to make you work. The lads construct virtually their own day from what is offered from the school; truancy is only one relatively unimportant and crude variant of this principle of self-direction (others are not doing work, wandering the halls, being asleep in class, etc.) This self-direction and thwarting of formal organizational aims also is an assault on official notions of time. The lads are criticized by the ear'oles and the teachers for wasting valuable time (which, like $$, ought not to be squandered).

Key is 'the laff,' part of an irreverent, marauding misbehavior. One of its purposes is to fend off boredom. Often the laff is at the expense of those outside the group, but it also takes the form of 'piss-taking,' a persistent ragging on one another. The soul of wit for the lads is disparaging relevance: the persistent searching out of weakness. It takes some skill and cultural know-how to mount such attacks, and more to resist them. Violence is also important for the lads; it is the fullest commitment to a blind or distorted form of revolt. It is the ultimate way of breaking a flow of meanings which are unsatisfactory, imposed from above, or limited by circumstances.

Another important theme for the lads is sexism.Women for the lads are both sexual objects and domestic comforters (it's that whole mother/slut thing again -- get a new theme, guys!), so while women must be sexually attractive, they cannot be sexually experienced. The model for the girlfriend is the mother, and she is fundamentally a model of limitation. In the home there is a clear sense that men have a right to be waited on by the mother. What the lads see of the romantic behavior they have partly conditioned in the girls is weakness and a silly indirectness in social relationships; thus, they get to feel superior to women. Since the girls have abandoned the assertive and the sexual, they leave that ground open to the boys.

The lads are also distinctly racist. The school staff shares some of their attitudes.

CHAPTER 3 - Class and Institutional Form of Culture

The achievements of counter-school culture must be placed against the larger pattern of working-class culture in order for us to understand their true nature and significance. The credentials for entry into shop floor culture are skill, dexterity, confidence and a kind of presence which adds to more than it subtracts from, a living social force.

Shopfloor culture is essentially masculine (in our culture): self-esteem of doing a hard-job well, and being known for it. Another main theme of shopfloor culture is the attempt to gain informal control of the work process by floor workers. This is mirrored in the kids' attempt to control the use and deployment of their time in the school day. The informal group, on the floor as well as in the school, locates and makes possible the culture's other elements. The floor informal group shows the same attitude to conformists and informers as do the lads. The laff and physical humor are key on the floor, just as they are in the school.

Practical ability always comes first on the shopfloor, and is the condition of other kinds of knowledge. Theory is useful only insofar as it really does help to do things. [Contrast: The middle class see theory partly in its social guise of qualifications as power to move up the social scale. In this sense theory is well worth having even if it is never applied to nature. It serves its purpose as the means to decide precisely which bit of nature one wants to apply it to, or whether to apply it at all. Paradoxically, the working class distrust and rejection of theory comes partly from a kind of recognition, even at the moment that it oppresses, of the hollowness of theory in its social guise.]

Class cultures are created specifically, concretely in determinate conditions, and in particular oppositions. They arise though definite struggles over time with other groups, institutions and tendencies. Themes are shared between particular manifestations because all locations at the same level in a class society share similar basic structural properties.

Even if there is some form of social division in the junior school, in the first years of the secondary school, everyone is an ear'ole. The lads rarely identify deep causes for the changes (from ear'ole-ness into lads) they experience; they consider it a question of the need for friendship, or as arising from some accidental causality. The staff see this counter-school culture arising from permutations of character deficiencies ('he's a bad influence') in relation to the impressionable ('he's as weak as water').

Differentiation: the process whereby the typical exchanges expected in the formal institutional paradigm are reinterpreted, separated and discriminated with respect to working class interests, feelings and meanings. Integration is its opposite: the process whereby class oppositions are redefined, truncated and deposited within sets of apparently legitimate institutional relationships and exchanges. Differentiation is the penetration of the informal into the formal; integration is the progressive constitution of the informal into the formal or official paradigm. Differentiation plays a successful, if mystifying role in social reproduction. D. is experienced by those concerned as a collective process of learning whereby the self and its future are critically separated from the pre-given institutional definitions. On the other hand institutional agents experience differentiation as inexplicable breakdown, resistance and opposition. Within the school, the essential official paradigm concerns the particular view of teaching, and its differentiation produces forms of the counter-school culture.

The post-differentiation school situation can be very hostile. Where knowledge becomes devalued or worthless, authority, stripped of its educational; justifications, can appear harsh and naked. The staff's frustration with the withdrawal of the students' contribution to their relationship (respect, attention, etc.), leads them to withdraw their contribution, knowledge -- or, more precisely, teachers revalue knowledge's nature in a way to make it utterly beyond the reach of the lads (thus, teachers' belittling and sarcastic attitude toward the lads). What is an essentially institutional dynamic is perceived by the lads as a class dynamic.

CHAPTER 4 - Labor, Power, Culture, Class and Institution.

A new development in education has been careers education. It has good intentions, in that is asserts that careers teaching should specifically exclude service to the economy and its manpower requirements; careers teachers should serve their clients, the students. However, careers education largely fails on its own terms by not reaching the majority of working class kids in an effective way.

Even progressive perspectives on teaching (child-centered, preparation for life, work experience and the encouragement of self-concepts in relation to work) get turned in to one-sided, bastardized forms in an attempt by teachers to hold the axis of control and pedagogic security. Work values are brought back into the school to disqualify non-conformist behavior. Everything the lads do seems to come back to their being selfish, rude and uncooperative, and, finally, damning to their future working lives.

The lads reject the idea of qualifications, since these are allied with knowledge, and knowledge is to be resisted and opposed. The lads reject careers advice, because it is part of school. The conformists are believed to need qualifications, because they don't have the imagination or wit to get jobs any other way.

In terms of job choice, for the lads it is not official careers advice, but his culture which provides the most influential guides for the future. The lads culture provides a set of unofficial criteria by which to judge what kind of working situation is desirable. It is much like the school, in fact, to work where there is a boss, a 'them and us' situation. The lads assume that all work is unpleasant, and what is really important is the potential a job holds for self and particularly masculine expressions, for diversions and 'the laff': these things are quite separate from the intrinsic nature of any task. The lads seek a type of work; the particular choice of a specific job can be quite random.

The school has built up a resistance to mental work and an inclination to manual work in the lads. Mental work demands too much, encroaches too far (like school) on those areas which the lads regard as private and independent. The specific social form of mental labor is an unfair equivalent in an exchange about control of those parts of themselves which they want to be free; after the experience of school, mental labor carries with it always the threat of a demand for obedience and conformity.

After the cultural apprenticeship of the shopfloor is worked out (it is more brutal than the school), and its main real of activity of hard work for others in unpleasant surroundings is see more clearly, there is a double kind of entrapment in what might be seen, as the school was seen before, as the prison of the workshop. Ironically, as the shopfloor becomes a prison, education is seen retrospectively, and hopelessly, as the only escape.

Employers in manual and semi-manual work like the lads: they are well prepared to work in a situation of hierarchical authority, and their 'laffs' are amusing and show spirit (but, of course, are not threatening). ??

VIVIANA A. ZELIZER
''The Social Meaning of Money: 'Special Monies' ''

Classic interpretations of the development of the modern world portray money as a key instrument in the rationalization of social life. Money is reductively defined as the ultimate objectifier. Traditionally, money, as the most material representation of market exchange, seems eminently exempt from extra-economic influences. But Zelizer argues that not all monies are equal, and that money is subject to social and cultural influences. She proposes a model of 'special monies' that incorporates the social and symbolic significance of money. More specifically, she uses the example of domestic money as an example of special money.

For Weber and Simmel, money was a key instrument in the rationalization of social life. For Marx, money emerged as the ultimate objectifier, obliterating all subjective connections between objects and individuals and debasing personal relations into calculative instrumental ties. Money neutralized all possible qualitative distinctions between commodities as pure exchange value. Even Cooley, who defended the dollar and regulation of money, also saw it as a purely economic phenomenon. All of these classic interpretations of money in modern society are based on 5 assumptions:
(1) The functions and characteristics of money are defined strictly in economic terms.
(2) All monies are the same.
(3) Money is defined as essentially profane and utilitarian.
(4) Money invades all areas of life and is thus the vehicle for an inevitable commodification of society.
(5) Money is exempt from extra-economic forces.

Zelizer departs from this approach by arguing that money is neither culturally neutral nor morally invulnerable. There is historical and anthropological evidence which supports this assertion. Zelizer claims that there are qualitatively different kinds of monies, she calls them special monies. Her model has different assumptions. They are:
(1) While money is a rational tool, it also exists outside the sphere of the market and is profoundly shaped by social and cultural factors.
(2) There is a plurality of different monies.
(3) The classic definition of money is unsuitably narrow.
(4) The assumed dichotomy between utilitarian money and non pecuniary values is false, for money under certain circumstances mat be as singular and unexchangeable as the most personal object.
(5) Given the previous assumptions, the alleged freedom and power of money becomes untenable. Extra-economic factors constrain the uses, the users, the allocation systems, the control, and the sources of money.

With these assumptions, Zelizer moves beyond , but does not deny, the quantifiable character of money.

Her empirical evidence comes from the plentiful data sources concerning domestic money in America between 1870-1930. This was the time when consumerism came into being and the home economics move began, so the information on this topic was fairly plentiful. More specifically, Zelizer analyzes the changing meanings, allocation systems, and uses of married women's money in this period. She argues that the battle over the purse strings in the homes was regulated by notions of family life and by the gender and social class of its participants.

As America entered the consumer age, fiscal problems went public. New legal issues arose, and where a wife's money was traditionally considered the husband's property, it slowly but steadily began to change. But before the change, as real incomes began to rise, women were often expected to manage the household's money efficiently and well, which required some technical knowledge, but they were not allowed to own their own money or spend it on themselves. This is an inherent conflict, and it often led domestic discontent. Women developed ways of obtaining their own money either through work , manipulation of household funds which came from husbands and children's pay checks, or 'theft' (this is when a married woman did something like take her husband's pocket change unbeknownst to him).

Women usually handled all of the families financial matters in lower classes. In the middle and upper classes, women were required to handle the household's expenses, but they did not control all of the families money like their lower-class counterparts. Traditionally, husbands doled money out to their wives when necessary. This meant that women had to ask, cajole or beg for money. A true power game which gave men all of the financial power.

In the early 1900s the allowance system became popular, where women were given a steady allowance on a monthly or weekly basis and allowed to spend it according to their own discretion. The allowance system was favored by women and feminists, but it was often resisted by husbands. It was hard to regulate, and it smacked of paying a wife for her services, as one would a servant. In the 1920s, even as the allowance was gaining further support, it also received a lot of criticism from those who saw it as an inadequate and even degrading form of domestic money. Most critics advocated joint control of the family purse. But even while all of these new alternatives were being talked about, actual change was slow in the arena of domestic money. What did change though through all of this was the symbolic meaning of women and the money they encountered, were allocated, or controlled. The allowance was changing from a sign of independence and domestic control to a form of financial submissiveness.

Zelizer returns to the class issue, saying that the observations regarding the economic clout of working class wives may have been overemphasized. There is much evidence that husbands did hand over their pay to their wives, but they often withheld money for themselves. It is clear that while wives may have had discretionary control over everyday expenses and making ends meet, their control diminished greatly when there was any surplus money.

Also important is the differentiation of monies when both men and women worked outside of the home. Wives' income was usually termed 'pin money' and it was used for specific purposes, typically such things as luxury goods or special services. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that there existed a dual economy, with women and children providing fro living expenses while husbands paid for mortgages and new machinery.

Domestic money is thus a very special kind of currency. In the case of married women, their money was routinely set apart from real money by a complex mixture of ideas about family life, by a changing gender power structure, and by social class. Once money entered a household, its allocation, calculation and uses were subject to a set of domestic rules distinct from those of the market. When the wife worked, gender also played a major role. All of the evidence supports Zelizer's differentiation of special monies, and shows the limits of a purely instrumental, rational model of market money in the modern world.