Sociology of the State

""Corruption has become one of the most popular topics in the social scientific disciplines. However, there is a lack of interdisciplinary communication about corruption. Models developed by different
academic disciplines are often isolated from each other. The purpose of this paper is to review several major approaches to corruption and draw them closer to each other. Most studies of corruption fall
into three major categories: (i) rational-actor models where corruption is viewed as resulting from cost/benefit analysis of individual actors; (ii) structural models that focus on external forces that determine corruption; and (iii) relational models that emphasize social interactions and networks among corrupt actors. Focusing on actors’ behavior and the social context, this article explains corruption concepts taken from sociology, economics, organization studies, political science, social anthropology, and social psychology.""

Gli studi urbani hanno spesso la tentazione di considerare i problemi come autoevidenti. Quasi vi fosse un nesso diretto e immediato fra esperienza dell’individuo e discorso pubblico. La sociologia politica, e gli studi sui movimenti sociali in particolare, hanno messo profondamente in discussione questa convinzione implicita. Per quanto un fenomeno possa essere vissuto come problematico a livello individuale, o anche a livello collettivo (o, più precisamente, da parte di un collettivo) ciò non basta a suscitare una tematizzazione pubblica. A partire dalla disamina di diversi risultati empirici di ricerche effettuate su politiche locali, il capitolo mostra come la sostenibilità di una politica emerga nel momento in cui il suo disegno, e la sua implementazione, tenga insieme, alimentando reciprocamente diritti della persona e protagonismo del territorio. Trasferendo poteri agli individui (e non solo ai territori) e diritti al territorio (e non solo agli individui). Una pista di ricomposizione dello stato assai interessante da esplorare, non solo per le politiche sociali ovviamente.

The relationship between capitalism and democracy has historically been a complicated one whose contradictions were reinforced by capitalist crises. In this context we address the following key questions: (1) how have the relationships between capital and democracy been constituted during the principal organic crises of historical capitalism? (2) How can we understand those relationships within the current deep crisis? In so doing we develop our principal hypothesis concerning the crisis of democracy today: while the crisis of Fordist capitalism in the 1970s was a crisis of too much democracy (at least from the particular perspective of capital), the crisis of neoliberalism today (from the perspective of the political economy and of society in general) is a crisis of not enough democracy. The crisis of democracy in this sense constitutes the principal impasse for sustainable exit strategies from the contemporary organic crisis.

"We discuss the work of Bob Jessop, focusing on the transition he proposes to the contemporary state form – the Schumpeterian workfare post-national regime (SWPR). After a brief presentation of the author’s account, we explore its main critiques and recent reformulations. We then consider whether Jessop’s narrative resorts to economic determinism, structuralism or functionalism, as some authors have indicated. We defend that while some traces of these might indeed be found, they can be sidestepped by approaching the emergence of the SWPR as part of an ongoing research agenda. We
finally propose some changes to the latter, related to developing an explicitly evolutionary theoretical framework, to the space that post-Fordism comprehends and to the articulation between different subtypes of post-Fordist social formations and accumulation strategies. A central point is not proposing competing regimes of accumulation for a single space, but rather a single regime that articulates the relevant forms of capital and is brought about by competing accumulation strategies."