The “Arab Spring” was a surprising event not just because predicting revolutions is a difficult task, but because current theories of revolution are ill equipped to explain revolutionary waves where interactive causal mechanisms at different levels of analysis and interactions between the units of analysis predominate. To account for such dynamics, a multidimensional social science of revolution is required. Accordingly, a meta-framework for revolutionary theory that combines multiple levels of analysis, multiple units of analysis, and their interactions is offered. A (...) structured example of theory building is then given by detailing how the development of world cultural models and practices challenge existing political structures, affect mobilization processes, and make diffusion more likely. A structured example of study design using qualitative comparative analysis of 16 Middle Eastern and North African countries provides support for the interaction of subnational conditions for mobilization, state-centered causes, and transnational factors, including a country’s linkage to world society, as one explanation of the Revolutions of 2011. (shrink)

This article presents a broad analysis of the political economy and dynamics of social change during the first year of the Evo Morales government in Bolivia. It situates this analysis in the wider historical context of left-indigenous insurrection between 2000 and 2005, the changing character of contemporary capitalist imperialism, and the resurgence of anti-neoliberalism and anti-imperialism elsewhere in Latin America. It considers at a general level the overarching dilemmas of revolution and reform. Part II of this three-part essay addresses four (...) major themes. First, it reviews the literature on revolution in contemporary Bolivia. Second, it explains why the 2000 to 2005 period is best conceived as a revolutionary epoch in which left-indigenous social forces were engaged in a combined liberation struggle against racial oppression and class exploitation. However, it argues that this revolutionary epoch has not led to social revolution. Third it examines in detail the electoral rise of Evo Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo party in the December 2005 elections. Fourth, it explores the historical trajectory of the MAS in terms of its changing class composition, ideology, and political strategies since the party's inception in the late 1990s. (shrink)

In Europe, a well-known problem is the coordination of interagency service delivery to independently living older persons, disabled persons or persons suffering from chronic illness. Coordination is necessary in order for the users to receive services at the appropriate time and place. Based on historical institutionalism, which focuses on the path dependency of the development of government policy and organizational and professional rules, it can be stated that coordination requires organizational models or other solutions that fit the characteristics of the (...) context (‘configuration’) for which the solution is intended. The western European countries have different configurations. Remarkably, across these countries, we see the emergence of multidisciplinary teams as a solution to the problem of coordination. Consequently, if we take the above statement to mean that a solution should fit all the configuration’s characteristics, we must reject the statement. However, when we assume that a solution should fit particular configurational characteristics, we must not. We take the second position and we argue that multidisciplinary teams have emerged because they fit one particular feature that is similar in the countries: professionalism and professional fragmentation. (shrink)

Not long after the completion of Michael Mann’s “quadrilogy” on The Sources of Social Power (1986–2012), social scientists began to interrogate the meaning of his concepts of “despotic” and “infrastructural” power. While we know that the former is the most evident sign of danger in times of war, less well understood is the role of infrastructural power in state/civil society relations. Most important is the ambiguous relationship between the two types of power and the possibility that—especially in times of war—infrastructural (...) power can become the vehicle for despotic ends. But infrastructural power is also reciprocal, offering firms and civil society groups channels with which to contest the state’s projects. In this article, I first explicate the different meanings that Mann gave to his concept of infrastructural power. In the second section, I turn to how the concept has been “received” in political science and historical sociology. In the third part, I argue that the main danger to American democracy in wartime lies not in its becoming a despotic state, but in the use of the state’s infrastructural channels for the exercise of despotic ends. The fourth part illustrates the complexities of infrastructural power in business/government/civil society relations in cybersecurity, which Mann—for understandable reasons—did not examine in his encompassing work. (shrink)