International Sociology

Research has not satisfactorily answered the question of whether institutions are becoming more similar across countries despite the existence of nationally distinctive social, cultural, political and economic factors. This study presents an institutional account for the process of change in national institutions over time, and specifically examines one of the most important national institutions, health care systems (HCSs). Longitudinal data on national health care systems and population health in the OECD countries show that there has been increasing convergence in the general characteristics of national HCSs since 1960, mainly in the expenditure on health and the level of public coverage of medical costs. At the same time, the composition and utilization of such HCSs have diverged, particularly concerning the national availability and utilization of health care resources. Despite these differences in national HCSs due to variations in national cultural traits like the degree of individualism, countries have healthier populations, and improvements in health appear to converge all over the industrialized world. Results from this study indicate that population health is ultimately affected by social variables such as the level of socioeconomic inequality rather than by the way countries organize health care.

Across the social sciences, a recurring theme is that market production, where goods and services are produced for monetized exchange by capitalist firms for profitmotivated purposes, is replacing non-market production in the advanced economies. The aim of this article is to evaluate critically this marketization thesis. Analysing data on the volume of market and non-market activity in the advanced economies, it reveals not only the relatively shallow penetration of the market sphere but also how for some four decades, contrary to the marketization thesis, the market sphere does not appear to have grown relative to the nonmarket realm. Here, therefore, the view that non-market activity is a vestige of a pre-capitalist past is rejected and its persistence and growth are instead explained in terms of both the prevalence of resistance cultures to marketism and the inherent contradictions embedded in the pursuit of marketization. The article thus concludes with a call to transcend the currently dominant view that the market is victorious, pervasive and hegemonic, and for greater recognition and value to be given to the non-market realm as well as the possibility of alternative futures beyond marketization.

Theorists in the sociology of development have extensively discussed the capacity of a developmental state to intervene in the industrialization process of a nation. Evans argued that state capacity could be enhanced through the securing of internal cohesiveness, for which the establishment of an effective, rule-following bureaucracy was the key. Chibber amended Evans’s view by arguing that bureaucratic rationality would lead to state cohesiveness only in the presence of disciplinary coordination by a ‘nodal agency’ which was endowed with power over other state agencies that might compete for scarce resources for national development. Based on a study of the state-led biotech development in Singapore, the author of this article makes two further amendments. First, a nodal agency, as shown by the Economic Development Board of Singapore, can maximize the coordination of industrial and technology policy by maintaining an interlocking directorship with other state agencies and externalizing its culture rather than exercising coercion over other state agencies. Second, bureaucratic rationality in the presence of a powerful nodal agency can be a double-edged sword that enables and inhibits technological development.

In the last three decades, a spate of research brought to light the dynamics of contentious politics in early modern Europe. These studies suggest that surges of commerce and centralized state power led to a transition of contentious politics from reactive to proactive claims, and from violent to non-violent repertoires. This literature assumes the uniqueness of the western experience, and pays little attention to the non-western world. This article is an attempt to examine the patterns of contentious politics in mid-Qing China, a period when China witnessed profound commercial growth and political centralization. Based on a catalogue of contentious events derived from archival sources, the article finds that contentious politics over mid-Qing China changed from predominantly proactive and peaceful actions to more reactive and violent forms. The direction of transition was opposite to that in Europe, and could be explained by the specific trajectories of state formation and commercialization in early modern China. The article also argues that the modern revolutionary movement in 20th-century China was a continuation of the reactive, violent contentions of the early 19th century. This study shows that ‘modernization’ of contentious politics in non-western civilizations is rarely a simple repetition of the western way, but is rather a complex interaction between western influences and indigenous tracks of development.

Theorists of secularization considered modernity an irreversible process of differentiation between mutually exclusive spheres of private vs public life. In contrast, proponents of a new paradigm argue that differentiation has strengthened religion in modern society through the establishment of religious market economies. Contrary to both views, the resurgence of religious movements in the last 20 years, particularly Islamist movements, has introduced a new form of contentious public religion that calls into question the interconnectedness of modernity with the privatization of religion. This article shows how the reintroduction of religion in the public sphere contributed to a new understanding of Islam and its relation to contemporary social life. Two distinct articulations of Islam before and after the Iranian revolution of 1979 are examined, those of Ali Shari`ati and Abdolkarim Soroush. Whereas Shari`ati transformed Islam into an ideology of social change, in his ideology critique, Soroush reinstated the enigmatic core of Islam through a hermeneutic distinction between religion and the knowledge of it. The article argues that what religion is, a theological question, is intimately linked to the sociological question what religion does.