International Relations

images: Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (from Jill Lepore, These Truths ) People who mostly learned American history through their high school education have a limited view of the topic. It was a view that paid little attention to the concrete social issues of race, gender, or class in American history. Fortunately there is now a very good way of updating our understandings of the history of our country that rebalances our knowledge of the past. Jill Lepore's outstanding 2018 book These Truths: A History of the United States  provides crucial reading in these troubled times where racism, nationalism, and sexism are proclaimed at the very top of our government. (The book is also available as an audiobook, read by the author ( link ).) The book has many virtues. But most importantly, Lepore shows how the reality and legacy of slavery played a fundamental and debilitating role in the evolving history of the United States, from the writing of the Constitution to the political co...

A recurring theme in recent months in Understanding Society is organizational dysfunction and the organizational causes of technology failure. Helmut Anheier's volume When Things Go Wrong: Organizational Failures and Breakdowns is highly relevant to this topic, and it makes for very interesting reading. The volume includes contributions by a number of leading scholars in the sociology of organizations. And yet the volume seems to miss the mark in some important ways. For one thing, it is unduly focused on the question of "mortality" of firms and other organizations. Bankruptcy and organizational death are frequent synonyms for "failure" here. This frame is evident in the summary the introduction offers of existing approaches in the field: organizational aspects, political aspects, cognitive aspects, and structural aspects. All bring us back to the causes of extinction and bankruptcy in a business organization. Further, the approach highlights the importance of...

Many examples of technical disasters have been provided in Understanding Society , along with efforts to understand the systemic dysfunctions that contributed to their occurrence. Frequently those dysfunctions fall within the business organizations that manage large, complex technology systems, and often enough those dysfunctions derive from the imperatives of profit-maximization and cost avoidance. Andrew Hopkins' account of the business decisions contributing to the explosion of the ESSO gas plant in Longford, Australia illustrates this dynamic in  Lessons from Longford: The ESSO Gas Plant Explosion . The withdrawal of engineering experts from the plant to a remote corporate headquarters was a cost-saving move that, according to Hopkins, contributed to the eventual disaster. A topic we have not addressed in detail is the occurrence of ethical disasters -- terrible outcomes that are the result of deliberate choices by decision-makers within an organization that are, upon inspecti...

Indian economists V. K. Ramachandran and Madhura Swaminathan have edited a highly interesting volume,  Telling the Truth, Taking Sides: Essays for N. Ram , that will be of interest to anyone concerned with the progress of India in recent years. The book is a set of essays dedicated to the impact and progressive legacy of N Ram, journalist, writer, and important voice of the Left in India, and all the essays are very good. Ramachandran's own contribution is a piece of what we might call "development ethnography", a pair of interviews ( link ) with the Tamil Nadu landless worker Gabriel Selvam. This case study is a valuable document for anyone interested in poverty and global justice. Ramachandran conducted interviews with Selvam at both ends of Selvam's working life, in 1977 and 2017, and the experiences that Selvam describes are emblematic of the extreme poor in India and elsewhere throughout that forty-year period. Selvam has lived most of his life in rural Tamil Na...