Critical Sociology

Emerging as a racial formation under specific socio-historical conditions, white supremacy enacted racial projects that institutionalized terror as a function of its hegemonic rule. From the war capitalism of the settler colonialist period in North America to the racial capitalism of that same time frame, extermination of Native Americans and enslavement of people of African descent became instruments of institutionalized white supremacist terror. From colonial to contemporary times white supremacist savage war and white racial framing of policing reinforced institutionalized white supremacist terror. Nonetheless, resistance to and deconstructions of white supremacy contested and continues to contest those racial projects and that white racial frame.

This second installment continues my investigation of Marx’s research practice. I previously examined Marx’s method of successive abstractions in his analysis of modes of production. This article applies this method to a historical-materialist analysis of religion’s development across levels of historical generality. It concludes with a new taxonomy of religion based on that analysis.

Sociology has an important part to play in understanding human rights. In this article, I trace obstacles within sociology to theoretically conceptualize human rights as an ideology. These impediments, I suggest, demonstrate the need to recognize the blind spots within sociological research. However, instead of trying to persuade readers why human rights qualifies as an ideology, I attempt to demonstrate why it is beneficial for sociological inquiry to conceptualize human rights as an ideology. Instead of following the widely accepted practice of understanding human rights as a desirable set of values designed to promote a liberal peace, I propose conceptualizing human rights as an ideology which, through its institutionalization, produces coercive organizational and doctrine power. The question of whether its organizational and doctrine power is capable of value penetration in micro-solidarity groups opens up a new prism through which sociologists can assess the successes and failures of human rights ideology on the ground.

This article explores critically the relationship between capitalist performativity and the disability category. It draws on Jean-François Lyotard’s analysis of postmodernity to define ‘performativity’ as the principle of performance enhancement governing the world of contemporary techno-capitalism. The analysis then traces the historical development of the disability category in the 20th and 21st centuries and explains its complex interlinking with performativity. Special attention is paid to the impact of neoliberalism since the 1980s that includes both the disability category’s administrative shrinking and its market-based expansion. These theoretical and historical reflections are supplemented by a reading of Terry Gilliam’s movie The Zero Theorem. The conclusion discusses some possibilities for resisting performativity, suggested by the disability studies perspective espoused in the article.

Neoliberal policies instituted since the 1980s have transformed the United States economy in ways that have produced serious structural distortions in the basic operation of capitalism. Using Samir Amin’s concept of disarticulation, previously applied exclusively to the periphery of the world economy, this article argues that the twin and mutually reinforcing features of neoliberalism – global corporate restructuring and financialization – have now generated disarticulation in the core nations. This disarticulated structure is responsible for the economic stagnation and sharply unequal income/wealth distributional outcomes that characterize contemporary U.S. capitalism.

This article draws upon data from an ethnographic study of a UK call centre to investigate the claims of efficiency and productivity that underpin service occupations. Neoliberal ideology valorises competition, profitability and the free market, imperatives which filter down to organisational level and manifest as the pursuit of efficiency. The evidence in this paper highlights how the call centre’s quest for efficiency is undermined by inefficiencies that are inherent in management implementation of work routines designed to maximise efficiency. While management practice and automated work routines may not be efficient, they do generate specific outcomes; the oppression, abuse and domination of employees both in relation to conditions of employment and working conditions.

Radical and mainstream social scientists still speak of the effect of President Ronald Reagan’s administration on the welfare state and the legacy of Great Society and Equal Opportunity programs, but, as indicated in a search of the American Sociological Review and Critical Sociology, there is less research focused on President Bill Clinton’s plan to end welfare as we knew it. Here we begin with an historical perspective on race and gender gaps, 1955–2016, including a consideration of macro-economic processes associated with postmodernism. Then we compare the effects of marital and family status on earnings, focusing on race and gender effects, at the beginning (1993) and end (2000) of the Clinton era. We find considerable support for the concerns raised by early radical critics, notably, evidence of an influx of low-income black single mothers. We consider the possibility that these are institutional rather than regime effects, in conclusion.

With one of the largest and fastest growing private security sectors in the greater EU area, Turkey offers an interesting case study for examining the effects of neoliberal policing on private security labour. The analysis is based on unstructured interviews (N = 20) with private security guards, media reports and government documents. Focusing on (1) precarity, (2) militarism and (3) alienation, we find that while private security has been decisive in the militarization of urban space and the exercise of authoritarian control in daily social relations, it is also characterized by class contradictions manifested in the lived experiences of security labour. The growth of Turkish private security and its effects are both part of the common extension of pacification yet uniquely conditioned by the emergence of a single-party, authoritarian regime that has deliberately extended its reach, in part, through the expansion of private security.

This article seeks to illustrate a problematic aspect of dominant-contemporary Marxian literature on privatisation: an overgeneralised explanation that shifting structural imperatives of contemporary capitalism, global powers and international financial institutions externally imposed privatisation downwards on all national-domestic political spaces. I suggest an alternative approach that emphasises the complex interplay of three internal factors – class agency, capital accumulation strategies, and state institutions – in mediating and shaping external pressures towards privatisation. Through a study of the Turkish privatisation process in the 1980s and 1990s, I illustrate that even though privatisation was thrust on Turkey by the structural dynamics, the World Bank, the IMF and global capital, its implementation has been contested inside and outside of the state apparatus by the Turkish power bloc (i.e. fractions of capital) within the constitutive context of the prevailing strategies of the domestic capital accumulation regime of Turkey at the time.