International Sociology

Africa’s emergence into the geography of the known world has not been without controversies and the contradictions of crudity and underdevelopment in spite of the continent’s rich history as well as its natural and human resources. The crude conceptions of black Africa (as opposed to North Africa) are appositely captured in the literature and records of early Greek and Roman superpowers, European medieval explorers and Crusaders, Arab travelers and conquerors, and colonial anthropologists, archeologists, and historians. The ‘stories’ of Africa in modern times have remained that of despair and underdevelopment leading to emigration and the deployment of international aid. This review essay captures the reality and context of crude constructions of Africa by non-Africans and Africans; migrants’ appeal to religious identity in an attempt to relive and reconstruct their ‘Africanness’ for the purpose of survival; and Japanese aid to Africa.

South African sociology has a long and varied past. Over a period of nearly a century it has gone through several phases. Sociology as a course of study is offered widely in the country and sociologists – mainly at universities – have made a significant contribution to the development of the sociological literature through their research. The major outlet for this research is the South African Review of Sociology (SARS), which is the official journal of the association of sociologists in the country. Although there is some understanding of what South African sociologists are currently studying, there has been no systematic or scientific attempt to examine their endeavors. Using a novel bibliometric approach, this article analyzes the research articles that have appeared in SARS in the post-apartheid era over a period of 18 years. The findings relate to the backgrounds of the authors (race, gender, sectoral, institutional and departmental affiliation) and to the nature of the articles (collaboration, methodology, and topics). The inferences that are drawn from these could assist in determining the directions sociological research is taking in the country.

The Occupy Wall Street movement caught many analysts of social protest by surprise. Although there were isolated social protests against social inequality and disenfranchisement in many parts of the world, the Occupy movement as a global phenomenon was unprecedented. In this review essay, three recent books that focus on the social context that contributed to the Occupy Wall Street movement are discussed. The role of anarchism in imparting the distinctive characteristics of the movement is emphasized.

This review essay focuses on the concept of inequality in Daniel Dorling’s The Population of the United Kingdom and Reza Hasmath’s A Comparative Study of Minority Development. The review discusses the structure of social inequality and the principal social cleavages that are shown in both books. The books raise different issues of ethnicity, visible minority (Hasmath) and class, and life outcomes (Dorling) as they relate to the broader processes and consequences of human efforts to stratify the social world. Whether those investigations are done at the micro or macro level, they provide strong empirical evidence that social and cultural standards will be never seen as adequate as long as great social inequalities prevail. This essay also discusses the problematic use of social inequalities for empirical research. Dorling is especially sensitive to inequalities and has a strong interest in uncovering those ‘deep structure[s]’ of social differentiation that are concealed from ordinary view. Broad categories, such as poor/affluent or minority/majority, with masking of in-group differences within categories, are appropriate for a rough scan of inequalities. However, this crude classification is inappropriate for a precise summary measurement of inequalities among social/ethnic distributions.