Crime or social harm? A dialectical perspective

This paper proposes to examine some of the core philosophical issues to have arisen out of the recent calls to move "beyond criminology". It will be claimed that the dismissal of crime as a "fictive event" is premature, as crime does indeed have an "ontological reality". Nevertheless, it will be asserted that the relation between harm and crime is contingent rather than necessary. Accordingly, this paper will argue that there is merit to the claim that we should unify research on social harm through the creation of a new field, a step which would have the added benefit of constructing an alternative venue for crimes of the powerful scholars who wish to explore the destructive practices of states and corporations unconstrained. This paper, therefore, will also offer a dialectical definition of social harm based upon classical Marxist strains of ontological thought

The Transformation of Citizenship in Complex Societies

The main purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical framework for understanding the transformation of citizenship in complex societies. To this end, the paper is divided into six sections. The first section elucidates the main reasons for the renaissance of the concept of citizenship in the contemporary social sciences. The second section argues that a comprehensive sociological theory of citizenship needs to account for the importance of four dimensions: the content, the type, the conditions, and the arrangements of citizenship. The third section suggests that in order to understand the sociological significance of T.H. Marshall’s account of legal, political, and social rights we need to explore the particular historical contexts in which citizenship rights became ideologically and institutionally relevant. The fourth section offers some critical reflections on the main shortcomings of the Marshallian approach to citizenship. The fifth section draws an analogy between the transformation of social movements and the transformation of citizenship. The sixth section sheds light on the fact that contemporary citizenship studies are confronted with a curious paradox: the differentiation of citizenship has led to both the relativistic impoverishment and the pluralistic enrichment of contemporary accounts of ‘the social’ and ‘the political’.The paper concludes by arguing that, under conditions of late modernity, the state’s capacity to gain political legitimacy increasingly depends on its ability to confront the normative challenges posed by the ubiquity of societal complexity

Political Economy of Civil Society

This chapter explores the role of civil society in relation to the economy and the polity by focusing on three distinct yet related dimensions: (1) the conceptual history of civil society in relation to political economy; (2) the theory underpinning a political economy of civil society; (3) the implications of a political economy of civil society for policy-making. The main argument is that there is a fundamental difference between ancient and medieval conceptions, which emphasise natural sociability, and modern accounts that accentuate a violent ‘state of nature’. As a result, civil society either reflects the fundamental embeddedness of economic and political processes in social relations or is an artificial construct. The chapter develops a typology of four modern models, provides a theory of the political economy of civil society and outlines a series of policy ideas

The comparative biology of New Zealand oystercatchers

Oystercatchers comprise a distinctive group of mollusc-eating shorebirds. They form an extremely uniform monogeneric family which has not undergone any major adaptive radiations into a diversity of ecological niches, but rather has dispersed from original centres of distribution to occupy identical niches in new geographical localities. The uniformity of structure and habit displayed within the group has been attributed by Larson (1957) to a high ecobiotic specialisation with centripetal selection involved. Throughout their range, oystercatchers exploit identical ecological niches which require specialised habits for successful utilisation. The specialised feeding habits of oystercatchers are well documented (Murphy, 1925; Dewar, 1940; Larson, 1957; Tinbergen and Norton-Griffiths, 1964; Dare, 1966), and a natural consequence of this specialisation is that it is restrictive to adaptive radiation

Is the future 'regional' for global standards?

The paper concerns the formation of standard setting in respect to international economic activity. A number of different forms of standard setting are discussed, but the analysis is concentrated upon the macro context for this process. In this paper I review the issue of the convergence in institutional design and systemic patterns of economic activity as global standards are pressed onto the governance framework for international economic management. However, the analysis suggests that the international economy is developing along a distinct path towards supranational regional bloc formations rather than towards an ever more global pattern. The consequences of this shaping of the international economy for the processes of standard setting in a number of different contexts are discussed