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What is development? Who defines that one community/ country is "developed", while another community/ country is "under-developed"? What is the relationship between religion and development? Does religion contribute to development or underdevelopment in Africa? These and related questions elicit quite charged reactions in African studies, development studies, political science and related fields. Africa's own history, including the memory of marginalisation, slavery and exploitation by global powers ensures that virtually every discussion on development is characterised by a lot of emotions and conflicting views. In this volume scholars from various African countries and many different religions and denominations contribute to this debate.

Marginalization means being disregarded, ostracized, harassed, disliked, persecuted, or generally looked down upon. Marginalized people often include women and children, the poor, the disabled, sexual, religious, or ethnic minorities, refugees. The marginalized are those who are socially, politically, culturally, or economically excluded from main-stream society. In history, the Church in Zimbabwe has played a role in improving the lives of the marginalized, but what is religion, especially Christianity, doing for the marginalized now? Although religion is also implicated in marginalisation, the contributions in this volume did not address this angle as they focused on the role that religion can and should play to fight marginalization. The chapters come from two conferences (2012, 2014) that were held under the flag of ATISCA. The contributions have been updated to include later developments and publications.

Gözaydın, İştar -- (Dogus Author) Conference full title: Istanbul Spring School: Islam and The Non-Muslim Other: Doctrines, Attitudes, and Practices, 26-28 March 2012. Istanbul: Liberales Institute. ; This article is primarily concerned in a power struggle within Turkey for over the last 80 years, leaving aside a much longer one of 200 years. Working on religion, politics and politics of religion anywhere involves varies parties as the state, the society, and the individual of the political body of that given country. In order to try to understand the statereligion relationship in Turkey, I suggest that Presidency of Religious Affairs / Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı should be scrutinized as an initial step. Within the Turkish society, there have been existing an increasing friction between two groups that may roughly be defined as laicists1 and Islamists2 during the whole republican era ongoing since 1923, but has become more visible especially in the 1990's. In this article, I will be debating on the basic and crucial questions, as I perceive it, 'what is a capacitated democracy and how to achieve it?' in the context of law and politics in Turkey. Actually, in order to evolve my argument, I will initially be focusing on the development of the relations among the state, the groups in society, and religion in the Republic of Turkey. Then, I will be discussing the need and possibility of a mutually acceptable ground for a peaceful coexistence in this country. Obviously my preference to work on the last 80 years instead of the 200 year span of the phenomenon stems out of my acceptance of the republican times to be a more visible stage of the above mentioned contestation. ; The Netherlands Interuniversity Scholl for Islamic Studies (NISIS), The Instıtute D'etudes De l' Islam Et Des Societes Du Monde Musluman

The purpose of this article is to analyse institutionalised paralogisms, social and economic inequalities, and frustrating consequences arising from decades of symbolic and real war and post-war violence against the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The historic background of this paper is the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995), as presented in the reports of the United Nations and documents produced during international and national trials concerning war crimes. The analytical basis is a literature review of various studies from the domains of war sociology, criminology, and sociology of knowledge. Immanent antinomies, contradictions, and political, legal, and criminal perpetually institutionalise and reproduce the identitary references to war vocabulary. For this reason, creation of publicly responsible programs is necessary to evaluate the prescriptive impact of the domination of cultural and identity differences between peoples in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The genocide of Bosnian Bosniaks in the war against the Bosnian–Herzegovinian multicultural society urges the creation of a completely different description, prescription, logic of naming, and explanation strategy to achieve transitional change. The article criticized globalisation as a form of new colonisation and natural-science quantative emphasis. In the spirit of the analysed scientific literature, future scientific analyses should focus on the criminal, social, economic, ecological, anti-educational, sociopathological, and anomic consequences of the (catastrophic) impact of decades of symbolic and real war and post-war violence against the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. ; (Conference canceled)

Cycling: a Sociology of Vélomobility explores cycling as a sociological phenomenon. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, it considers the interaction of materials, competences and meanings that comprise a variety of cycling practices. What might appear at first to be self-evident actions are shown to be constructed though the interplay of numerous social and political forces. Using a theoretical framework from mobilities studies, its central themes respond to the question of what is it about cycling that provokes so much interest and passion, both positive and negative. Individual chapters consider how cycling has appeared as theme and illustration in social theory and considers the legacies of these theorizations. It expands on the image of cycling practices as product of an assemblage of technology, rider and environment. Riding spaces as material technologies are found to be as important as the machineries of the cycle, and a distinction is made between routes and rides to help interpret aspects of journey-making. Ideas of both affordance and script are used to explore how elements interact in performance to create sensory and experiential scapes. Consideration is also given to the changing identities of cycling practices in historical and geographical perspective. The book adds to existing research by extending the theorisation of cycling mobilities. It engages with both current and past debates on the place of cycling in mobility systems and the problems of researching, analysing and communicating ephemeral mobile experiences.

According to I.M. Lewis the cornerstones of religion are 1) belief, 2) ritual, and 3) spiritual experience, which together construct institutions within a society with typological effects that cut across diverse cultural forms, and thus according to him, can be meaningfully compared. The variety of cultural distinctive forms of spiritual experience, be it religious ecstasy, witchcraft, sorcery or possession, is in this interpretation of little sociological significance. What is of sociological significance are the distinctions between central and marginal (or peripheral) cults and how their sociological difference create different effects in a similar religious experience, in this case: spirit possession. Spiritual experiences as spirit possession are grounded in and related to a social environment in which they occur, they bear the 'stamp of the culture and society' in which they arise. In this political interpretation of a specific spiritual experience, Lewis constructs an epidemiology of possession with shared socio-political factors whereby the experience reflects the different social conditions in which it occurs ('the social context of possession'). (Lewis, 1993: 1-10, 23) The physical presence of spirits, which are believed in by a specific society, is therefore not just simply stated as inhabiting a metaphysical cosmology, but directly participate and inhabit in their culture and bodies (i.e. possession or ecstasy) as well. By correlating the possession experience with its socio-cultural context within different religions, a genus-typology of possession can possibly be constructed by comparing how the genus 'possession' exists and functions within them. (Freidenreich, 2004: 88-91)

Zimbabwe, a country that is made up of around 80% of Christians find itself as among the worst administered countries, among the most corrupt nations and overflowing with injustice. This paradox urges to question the role of Christianity in shaping the morality of the nation and in creating a just society for all its citizens. While acknowledging the major role played by politics and politicians in putting Zimbabwe at the crossroads, this book does not absolve the Church of complicity in making the country what it is today. Taking lessons from the Jesus Movement,, this book proposes ways in which the Church can reclaim her role in shepherding the nation towards justice, equality and equity. As the current system running the nation is anti-Christian at its core, it needs to be challenged by a propagation of the authentic faith in Jesus Christ. Christian leaders are called upon to re-direct politics instead of politics re-directing the faith towards empire sustenance.

This article interrogates dominant definitions of "populism" found in the social sciences, focusing on the term's conceptual utility in understanding recent changes in Western polities. Though populism is typically treated as a deviant form of politics, this article finds that it in fact holds remarkable continuities with conventional politics, and indeed culture more generally. It argues that these more general cultural processes can be illuminated by cultural sociology, just as the more specific but still routine political processes can be illuminated by civil sphere theory (CST). The article goes on to argue that when populism is understood as a formal mode of public signification, rather than a substantive ideology, the substance it signifies becomes crucial to determining its civility. It suggests that while populism can certainly have anti-civil effects, there is nothing inherent in it that precludes it from also acting to promote civil repair.

In this brief paper I will argue that economic sociology would do well to follow the example of political economy in this respect and pay more attention to analytical economics and its ideas. Contemporary economic sociology, I argue, focuses far too much on social relations and views the impact of these as the explanation to most of what happens in the economy. What is wrong with this approach is that it disregards the importance of interests or the forces that drive human behavior, not least in the economy. What needs to be done – and this will be the red thread throughout this paper – is to combine social relations and interests in one and the same analysis. If we do this, I argue, we may be able to unite some of the basic insights from economics, with some of the basic insights from sociology (e.g. Swedberg 2003). As opposed to modern economics, economic sociology does not have a core of basic concepts and ideas, welded together over a long period of time. Instead economic sociology, mirroring sociology itself, consists of a number of competing perspectives, some more coherent than others. Many economic sociologists, for example, draw on social constructivist perspective, others on a Weberian perspective; some follow Mark Granovetter in emphasizing embeddedness, others Pierre Bourdieu in approaching the analysis of the economy with the concepts of field, habitus and different types of capital. The reader who is interested in an introduction to these different perspectives is referred to The Handbook of Economc Sociology (Smelser and Swedberg 1994; second edition forthcoming in 2005). In what follows I shall first discuss two of the most important concepts in modern economic sociology – embeddedness (including networks) and field. I will then proceed to a discussion of two concepts that I argue should be at the center of contemporary economic sociology: a sociological concept of interest and an interest-based concept of institutions.

This conference paper was subsequently published by Wiley as: CHERNILO, D., 2014. The idea of philosophical sociology. British Journal of Sociology, 65 (2), pp.338-357. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving. The definitive published version can be found at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12077. ; This article introduces the idea of philosophical sociology as an enquiry into the relationships between implicit notions of human nature and explicit conceptualizations of social life within sociology. Philosophical sociology is also an invitation to reflect on the role of the normative in social life by looking at it sociologically and philosophically at the same: normative selfreflection is a fundamental aspect of sociology's scientific tasks because key sociological questions are, in the last instance, also philosophical ones. For the normative to emerge, we need to move away from the reductionism of hedonistic, essentialist or cynical conceptions of human nature. Sociology needs equally to grasp the conceptions of the good life, justice, democracy or freedom whose normative contents depend on more or less articulated conceptions of our shared humanity rather than on strategic considerations. The idea of philosophical sociology is then sustained on three main pillars and I use them to structure this article: (1) a revalorization of the relationships between sociology and philosophy; (2) a universalistic principle of humanity that works as a major regulative idea of sociological research, and; (3) an argument on the social (immanent) and pre‐social (transcendental) sources of the normative in social life. As invitations to embrace posthuman cyborgs, nonhuman actants and material cultures proliferate, philosophical sociology offers the reminder that we still have to understand more fully who are the human beings that populate the social world.

The Islamic Culture's sociology engulfs all socio mores of human way of living. The criterion and nature of this society is to regulate the individual's conduct both in person and with other human beings, basing on his Creator's moral fiber for ultimate success. This edict of living is marvelous which distinguishes itself from manmade experiences and evolution in its application. This is divinely ordained, tangible and everlasting for all related situations. It standardizes all living obligations of human life like faith, rituals, education, matrimonial, legal, social, political, economics and behavioral ethics. It provides guidance for every obligation of life including all societal issues of peace and war times, national/international. The main sources of guidance are the 'Quran and Sunnah' with two supplementary sources: Ijmaa and Qiyas: (Drawing analogy from the essence of divine principles and preceding by the jurists/learned people for all religious and socio living). These rulings open the doors of cosmopolitan culture for peace and progress. This sociology provides solution for all new issues of life on earth with respect to other religion's values. The example is "The truce of Madina by the Prophet of Islam (saw)" in 634 AD. The Islamic way is of tolerance and peace, it presents a moral, spiritual human civilization force which made and is making positive contribution for the development of human living. The present adversary of other cultures/ religions' followers against Muslims and Islamic culture is addressed in this paper.

In the first edition of the Handbook, published in 1994, we as editors ventured the judgment that, in the previous 15 years, economic sociology had enjoyed a remarkable renaissance, following on a season of relative quiescence. This led us to believe that the time was ripe for a consolidating publication that told about the past, assessed the present, and looked toward the future. The decade following that volume's appearance seemed to validate those assessments, if the amount of critical attention given, sizable and sustained sales, and course adoptions are taken as measures. If anything, the book's fortunes surpassed our expectations. Furthermore, the momentum of economic sociology as an enterprise has accelerated in the meantime. The quality and quantity of research have remained high; new and young talent continues to flow into the field; sociology departments in half a dozen or more leading research universities have established centers of excellence in economic sociology; courses in economic sociology have become standard fare in the curricula of most colleges and universities; and a section on economic sociology has formed and now thrives in the American Sociological Association. All these circumstances have convinced us that a second, fully updated edition of the Handbook is needed, and we are more confident of this judgment than we were the first time around. While the first edition still contains much of value to scholars and students, the knowledge it contains has in some cases been superseded by advances in the meantime. To take these into account—and also to accelerate the development of economic sociology— we had to undertake a wholesale revamping of the first edition. Fully two-thirds of the chapters in this second edition are either new or have authors different from those in the first. Despite this transformation, we found that the general intellectual architecture of the first edition remained a good organizing framework for the second. Thus, part I (chapters 1–6) is a series of general considerations of the field from a variety of different perspectives; part II (chapters 7–21), which we call the economic core, deals with economic systems, economic institutions, and economic behavior behavior. Part III (chapters 22–30) concerns a number of intersections among the economy and various noneconomic sectors of the society. Within this general frame the reader will find the following substantial thematic changes: • Two chapters on international and global concerns (contrasted with the single chapter in the first edition), with international aspects covered in other chapters as well • A chapter on behavioral economics, which continues as a vibrant subfield of economics • A chapter by Pierre Bourdieu on economic anthropology; Bourdieu had agreed to write such a chapter but his untimely death in 2002 prevented this; still wishing to have him represented, we are printing the English translation of "Principes d'une anthropologie économique," which is published on pp. 233–70 in Les structures sociales de l'économie (Paris: Seuil, 2000) • A chapter on new lines of institutional analysis in economics and sociology • A chapter on the transitions from socialist economies (replacing the earlier chapter on socialist economies themselves) • A chapter on labor markets and trade unions • A chapter on the sociology of work and the professions • A chapter on culture and consumption • A chapter on the sociology of money and credit • A chapter on law and the economy • A chapter on technology and the economy • A chapter on emotions and the economy We regard these changes as reflecting recent shifts in emphasis and active lines of research in economic sociology. We now provide a brief supplement to the table of contents, intended as a guide to readers wishing to delve selectively into the volume according to their specific interests. For those interested in learning about the scope of sociology we recommend chapter 1 ("Introducing Economic Sociology"). The remainder of part I contains chapters on comparative and historical treatments of economy and society in chapter 2 ("Comparative and Historical Approaches to Economic Sociology," by Frank Dobbin), recent developments in institutional analysis of the economy in chapter 3 ("The New Institutionalisms in Economics and Sociology" by Victor Nee), Pierre Bourdieu's critical anthropological formulations in chapter 4 ("Principles of an Economic Anthropology"), developments in behavioral economics, which has made its main business the modification of the psychological assumptions of neoclassical economics and tracing the implications of these modifications (chapter 5, "Behavioral Economics," by Roberto Weber and Robyn Dawes), and an assessment of the scattered literature on the role that emotions play in economic life (chapter 6, "Emotions and the Economy," by Mabel Berezin). The first section of part II takes a look at sociological aspects of economies at the macroscopic— including the global—level. We introduce the section with the chapter by Ian Morris and J. G. Manning on the economic sociology of the classical civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome (chapter 7, "The Economic Sociology of the Ancient Mediterranean World"). Next comes a general chapter on the international economy (chapter 8, "The Global Economy: Organization Governance, and Development," by Gary Gereffi), and one on its governance (chapter 9, "The Political and Economic Sociology of International Economic Arrangements," by Neil Fligstein). Finally, Lawrence King and Iván Szelényi develop a distinctive perspective on the varieties of transition from socialist to post-socialist economies (chapter 10, "Post-Communist Economic Systems"). The second section of part II—"The Sociology of Economic Institutions and Economic Behavior"— reaches to the heart of economic activity itself. The section begins with three chapters on markets, the core economic institutions. Richard Swedberg (chapter 11, "Markets in Society") treats the subject from a sociological and historical point of view. Wolfgang Streeck (chapter 12, "The Sociology of Labor Markets and Trade Unions") concentrates on the market for labor services, and Linda Brewster Stearns and Mark Mizruchi (chapter 13, "Banking and Financial Markets") deal with a range of markets that have only recently commanded significant sociological attention. The sociology of the production side of the economic process is the topic of Andrew Abbott's contribution (chapter 14, "Sociology of Work and Occupations"). Viviana Zelizer explores the diversity of ways in which cultural factors infuse consumption (chapter 15, "Culture and Consumption"), and Bruce Carruthers synthesizes past and present literature on the social aspects of money and credit (chapter 16, "The Sociology of Money and Credit"). Two additional chapters deal with the less formal aspects of economic life. The important work on networks in the economy is covered in chapter 17 ("Networks and Economic Life," by Laurel Smith-Doerr and Walter Powell); and the complex and seemingly contradictory nature of the informal economy is analyzed in chapter 18 ("The Informal Economy," by Alejandro Portes and William Haller). The third secion of part II—"The Sociology of Firms, Organizations, and Industry"—draws mainly from organization theory and general economic sociology. Mark Granovetter updates and reassesses the character of business groups in a comparative context (chapter 19, "Business Groups and Social Organization"). Howard Aldrich examines the nature of entrepreneurial activity and entrepreneurs in chapter 20 ("Entrepreneurship"), and Gerald Davis examines a number of environments of business firms—especially other business firms—in chapter 21 ("Firms and Environments"). Part III—"Intersections of the Economy"— deals with the mutual penetration of economic activity and many "noneconomic" sectors of society. Three chapters address the most important aspects of the economy and the polity. The first is on the state in general (chapter 22, "The State and the Economy," by Fred Block and Peter Evans). Lauren Edelman and Robin Stryker focus on law as a special aspect of state activity (chapter 23, "A Sociological Approach to Law and the Economy"), while Evelyne Huber and John Stephens assess recent developments in the welfare state and a number of assessments of those developments (chapter 24, "Welfare States and the Economy"). Two additional chapters deal with economic intersections with the institutions of education (chapter 25, "Education and the Economy," by Mary Brinton) and religion (chapter 26, "New Directions in the Study of Religion and Economic Life," by Robert Wuthnow). Chapters 27 ("Gender and Economic Sociology," by Paula England and Nancy Folbre) and 28 ("The Ethnic Economy," by Ivan Light) deal with the embeddedness of the socially constructed dimensions of gender and ethnicity in economic life. The volume is rounded out by a chapter on technology (chapter 29, "Technology and the Economy," by Giovanni Dosi, Luigi Orsenigo, and Mauro Sylos Labini), and one on economic- environmental relations (chapter 30, "The Economy and the Environment," by Allan Schnaiviii berg). Both these final topics have significant international aspects. We conclude with the hope that the stocktaking of economic sociology contained in this Handbook, as well as its attempts to drive the field forward by selecting a few new important areas, will be successful. Economic sociology, we are convinced, currently represents one of the leading edges of sociology, as well as one of its most important interdisciplinary adventures.

This is the peer reviewed version of the article which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12077. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving. ; This article introduces the idea of philosophical sociology as an enquiry into the relationships between implicit notions of human nature and explicit conceptualizations of social life within sociology. Philosophical sociology is also an invitation to reflect on the role of the normative in social life by looking at it sociologically and philosophically at the same: normative self-reflection is a fundamental aspect of sociology's scientific tasks because key sociological questions are, in the last instance, also philosophical ones. For the normative to emerge, we need to move away from the reductionism of hedonistic, essentialist or cynical conceptions of human nature and be able to grasp the conceptions of the good life, justice, democracy or freedom whose normative contents depend on more or less articulated conceptions of our shared humanity. The idea of philosophical sociology is then sustained on three main pillars and I use them to structure this article: (1) a revalorization of the relationships between sociology and philosophy; (2) a universalistic principle of humanity that works as a major regulative idea of sociological research, and; (3) an argument on the social (immanent) and pre-social (transcendental) sources of the normative in social life. As invitations to embrace posthuman cyborgs, non-human actants and material cultures proliferate, philosophical sociology offers the reminder that we still have to understand more fully who are the human beings that populate the social world.

This article aims to problematize some of the common assumptions within the dominant discourse on statelessness, such as the hegemonic framework of the international state system and the conceptualization of the state as an emancipatory actor, by using sociological notions of citizenship and nationalism to provide a more nuanced framework of understanding. Through a sociological lens, citizenship is considered a concept beyond formal legal status and as one heavily intertwined with notions of nationhood, and as a concept which can be utilized as a political tool. The paper argues that it is necessary to consider a sociological understanding of statelessness alongside a legal understanding of the issue in order to be able to address the complexities of statelessness.

Established in 1895 as the first U.S. scholarly journal in its field, AJS remains a leading voice for analysis and research in the social sciences, presenting work on the theory, methods, practice, and history of sociology. AJS also seeks the application of perspectives from other social sciences and publishes papers by psychologists, anthropologists, statisticians, economists, educators, historians, and political scientists. ; Established in 1895 as the first U.S. scholarly journal in its field, AJS remains a leading voice for analysis and research in the social sciences, presenting work on the theory, methods, practice, and history of sociology. AJS also seeks the application of perspectives from other social sciences and publishes papers by psychologists, anthropologists, statisticians, economists, educators, historians, and political scientists. ; Mode of access: Internet. ; Vols. 1-52, 1895-1947. 1. v.; Vols. 1-70, 1895-1965. 1 v.; Vols. 71-75, 1965-70. 1 v.