Abstract
This issue opens with two review essays devoted to African themes; they form part of our long-standing goal of highlighting the role and nature of sociological knowledge in various parts of the world. A third review essay explores some recent writings on the Occupy Movement, whose character and promise continue to be subjects of a growing body of literature.
A particular emphasis in this issue concerns questions of inequality, seen from the point of view of global dynamics, labor processes, national specificities, and effects on wellbeing. Six reviews and one review essay are devoted to this theme. Some of them employ a specific geographic focus whereas others are comparative.
Like inequality, the general theme of migrations seems to preoccupy a growing number of sociologists. In this issue, migration is discussed in broader contexts that include refugee and minority studies. As part of the ongoing effort to globalize our sociological perspective, this section includes reviews of books in languages other than English, notably Spanish and Hungarian.
The question of difference, and how it is identified and assessed, may be regarded as another way of exploring the dynamics of inequality and migration, albeit from a more cultural or political angle. In this issue we devote a section to this general question, with a specific focus on race studies. Some of the dynamics associated with observing difference are addressed again in other terms, such as identity and memory, in a cluster of reviews devoted to how cultural perspectives are employed in recent books.
There also seems to a growing interest in network studies, rooted in part in attention to contemporary global processes. However, the study of networks seems to require a specific analytical lens. In this issue, two reviews show the promise and pitfalls of different approaches to the analysis of networks. Readers may want to think about the implications of these approaches as they read the contents of the later section on the sociology of knowledge – which focuses specifically on its production through both global networks and specific institutional settings.
The section on historical sociology includes some important recent works, which like all good historical sociology make important contribution to contemporary debates in various fields. These include the study of social movements, global inequalities, and the relation between power and symbolism.