Critical Sociology

Existing theories of revolution are briefly presented and critiqued. Building on recent work, a new model is introduced in which the key variables are the effects of dependent development on social structure, the exclusionary nature of repressive, personalistic dictatorships, the elaboration of political cultures of resistance, and a dual crisis consisting of a simultaneous economic downturn and an "opening" in the world-system. The combination of these necessary and sufficient conditions predicts the outbreak of a successful social revolution. The model is then applied to the similar cases of Iran and Nicaragua and contrasted with the negative case of El Salvador.

There are broad, historical-structural linkages among the distinct Latino groups in the United States, on the basis of which a Latino national minority is forming. In analyzing the disproportional effects on Latinos of the global economy, this essay argues that there is a common Latino historic experience vis-à-vis the world system: incorporation into the U.S. political economy, with its characteristic pattern of racialized social relations, from the immediate U.S. periphery, the Greater Caribbean Basin, and through colonial conquest. This constitutes the structural underpinning for a Latino national minority. This analysis also provides new components of a theoretical framework for understanding minority group formation.

Drawing on the work of Dorothy Smith, the author identifies the ideological practices he discovered during participant observation of a treatment program for men who batter their wives. The struggles between the counsellor and the men took place within a discourse that drew heavily on feminism, but which, ironically, often seemed to end up reinforcing rather than challenging sexist attitudes and behavior. To understand how this happened, the author begins an institutional ethnography, exploring the complex processes of social organization through which the particular site was entered into the relations of ruling of patriarchal capitalism.

A new type of trade unionism has emerged in a number of "Third World" countries, which can best be described as "social movement unionism." This category seeks to understand the role of trade unions in promoting radical social change in a manner that goes beyond both the prevailing "bourgeois" and Leninist conceptions of unions. This paper refines this concept and then applies it to a case study of the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU) Labor Center of the Philippines.