Contemporary articles citing Goldstone J (1991) Revolution Rebellion

change, states, path, state, politics, four, groups, therefore, history, development

Goldstone, Jack & Bert Useem. 2012. "Putting Values and Institutions Back Into the Theory of Strategic Action Fields." Sociological Theory. 30:1 37-47. Link

Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam have presented a new theory of how collective action creates the structure and dynamics of societies. At issue is the behavior of social movements, organizations, states, political parties, and interest groups. They argue that all of these phenomena are produced by social actors (which may be individuals or groups) involved in strategic action. This allows Fligstein and McAdam to advance a unified theory of ``strategic action fields.'' This article takes issue with aspects of Fligstein and McAdam's important contribution. We argue that that all organizations are not essentially the same; in addition to the location and interactions of their strategic actors, their dynamics are shaped and distinguished by differing values and norms, by the autonomy of institutions embedded in strategic action fields, and by the fractal relationships that nested fields have to broader principles of justice and social organization that span societies. We also criticize the view that social change can be conceptualized solely in terms of shifting configurations of actors in strategic action fields. Rather, any theory of social action must distinguish between periods of routine contention under the current institutions and norms and exceptional challenges to the social order that aim to transform those institutions and norms.

Collins, R. 2004. "Lenski's Power Theory of Economic Inequality: a Central Neglected Question in Stratification Research." Sociological Theory. 22:2 219-228. Link

Hung, HF. 2003. "Orientalist Knowledge and Social Theories: China and the European Conceptions of East-west Differences From 1600 to 1900." Sociological Theory. 21:3 254-280. Link

This paper examines the long-term development of Orientalism as an intellectual field, with the European learning of China between ca. 1600 and ca. 1900 as an exemplary case. My analysis will be aided by a theoretical framework based on a synthesis of the world-system and network perspectives on long-run intellectual change. Analyzing recurrent debates on China within European intellectual circles, I demonstrate that the Western conception of the East has been oscillating between universalism and particularism, and between naive idealization and racist bias. This oscillation is a function as much of the changing political economy of the capitalist world-system as of the endogenous politics of the intellectual field. Despite their contrasting views, both admirers and despisers of the East viewed non-Western civilizations as uniform wholes that had never changed. I argue that the fundamental fallacy of Orientalism lay, not in its presumptions about the ontological differences between East and West and the former's inferiority, as previous critics of Orientalism have supposed, but in its reductionism. Understanding non-Western civilizations in their full dynamism and heterogeneity is a critical step toward the renewal of the twentieth-century social theories that were built upon and impaired by the Orientalist knowledge accumulated in the previous centuries.

Li, JL. 2002. "State Fragmentation: Toward a Theoretical Understanding of the Territorial Power of the State." Sociological Theory. 20:2 139-156. Link

In existing theories of revolution, the state is narrowly defined as an administrative entity, and state breakdown simply refers to the disintegration of a given political regime. But this narrow definition cannot deal with this question: Why, in a revolutionary situation, do some states become fragmented and others remain unified? I would therefore argue for the broadening of the concept of state breakdown to include the territorial power of the state and to treat the latter as a key analytical dimension in the study of state fragmentation. The dynamics of territorial state power involve the control of critical territories and valuable resources associated with the spatial position of a given state in the interstate system. A strong territorial state is able to maintain its organizational coerciveness and territorial integrity, whereas a weak territorial state is vulnerable to fragmentation. The overall state crisis derives from the accumulated effects of geopolitical strain by which territorial fragmentation unfolds.

Li, RSK. 2002. "Alternative Routes to State Breakdown: Toward an Integrated Model of Territorial Disintegration." Sociological Theory. 20:1 1-23. Link

A theoretical strategy is proposed to integrate competing models of state breakdown by conceptualizing key concepts in these models at a more abstract level. The demographic model, which asserts that rapid population growth can bring about state breakdown when economic and political institutions are too rigid, is extracted from Goldstone's work. The geopolitical model, which argues that deteriorating geopolitical condition can bring about state breakdown if the state is too weak and the economy too unproductive, is extracted from Skoepols and Collins's works. The competing models are conceptualized as alternative and interacting routes to state breakdown where changing population pressure and geopolitical condition may generate integrative or disintegrative tendency depending on state power and productivity. A model describing four dimensions of state power-economic, military, political, and administrative-is constructed to incorporate various conceptualizations of the state in the state breakdown literature. Also integrated in the model is a third alternative route suggesting that rapid market development can generate disintegrative tendency if state power is too low. The synthesized model allows us to see that disintegrative/integrative tendency produced by one route mail intensify or alleviate that generated by another route.

Goldstone, JA. 2000. "The Rise of the West - or Not? a Revision to Socio-economic History." Sociological Theory. 18:2 175-194. Link

The debate over the ``Rise of the West'' has generally been over which factor or factors-cultural, geoographic, or material-in European history led Europe to diverge from the World's pre-industrial civilizations. This article aims to shift the terms of the debate by arguing that there were no causal factors that made Europe's industrialization inevitable or even likely. Rather, most of Europe would not and could not move toward industrialization any more than China or India or Japan. Rather, a very accidental combination of events in the late seventeenth century placed England on a peculiar path, leading to industrialization and constitutional democracy. These accidents included the compromise between the Anglican Church and Dissenters, and between Crown and Parliament, in the settlements of 1689; the adoption of Newtonian science as part of the cosmology of the Anglican Church and its spread to craftsmen and entrepreneurs throughout Britain; and the opportunity to apply the idea of the vacuum and mechanics to solve a particular technical problem: pumping water out of deep mines shafts in or near coal mines. Without these particular accidents of history, there is no reason to believe that Europe would have been more advanced than the leading Asian civilizations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Tilly, C. 2000. "Processes and Mechanisms of Democratization." Sociological Theory. 18:1 1-16. Link

Unlike Artistotle's analysis, recent treatments of democratization identify pathways and propose necessary conditions but fall short of specifying cause-effect relations. Democratization does not follow a single path, and is unlikely to have universally applicable necessary or sufficient conditions. A political process analysis of democratization defines it as movement toward broad citizenship, equal citizenship, binding consultation of citizens, and protection of citizens from arbitrary state action. High levels of all four elements depend on a significant degree of state capacity. Democratization emerges from interacting changes in public politics, categorical inequality, and networks of trust, which in turn depend on specifiable mechanisms of change in social relations. When the shocks of conquest, confrontation, colonization, and revolution promote democratization, they do so by accelerating the same causal mechanisms. The next round of research and theory on democratization requires identification, verification, and connection of the relevant causal mechanisms.

Mahoney, J. 2000. "Path Dependence in Historical Sociology." Theory and Society. 29:4 507-548. Link

Mclean, PD. 2004. "Widening Access While Tightening Control: Office-holding, Marriages, and Elite Consolidation in Early Modern Poland." Theory and Society. 33:2 167-212. Link

Elites are dynamically emergent and evolving groups, yet their organization at any given time has tremendous implications for the tenor of social life and the probability of historical change. Using data on more than 3,000 Senatorial office-holders and over 3,100 elite marriages in early modern Poland, this article systematically documents changes over time in the structure of the Polish elite between 1500 and 1795 from a ``multiple-networks'' perspective. It measures timing of entry into senatorial ranks, regional integration of the elite, degree of elite dominance, and patterns of overlap between office-holding and marriage networks across four distinct eras in Polish history. Aggregate network patterns reveal a system in the eighteenth century characterized simultaneously by widening political access and increasing super-elite political control. Highlighting these patterns makes better sense of the Polish nobility's distinct cultural practices than do other historical sociological accounts and illuminates the structural basis for Poland's remarkable constitutional moment in the late eighteenth century.

Goldstone, JA. 2004. "More Social Movements or Fewer? Beyond Political Opportunity Structures to Relational Fields." Theory and Society. 33:3-4 333-365. Link

If social movements are an attempt by ``outsiders'' to gain leverage within politics, then one might expect the global spread of democracy to reduce social movement activity. This article argues the reverse. Granted, many past social movements, such as women's rights and civil rights, were efforts to empower the disenfranchised. However, this is not typical. Rather, social movements and protest tactics are more often part of a portfolio of efforts by politically active leaders and groups to influence politics. Indeed, as representative governance spreads, with the conviction by all parties that governments should respond to popular choice, then social movements and protest will also spread, as a normal element of democratic politics. Social movements should therefore not be seen as simply a matter of repressed forces fighting states; instead they need to be situated in a dynamic relational field in which the ongoing actions and interests of state actors, allied and counter-movement groups, and the public at large all influence social movement emergence, activity, and outcomes.

Tilly, C. 2004. "Contentious Choices." Theory and Society. 33:3-4 473-481. Link

Articles in this special issue address two choices faced by all analysts of contentious politics: 1) which features of political processes the analysts single out for description and explanation and 2) what sorts of conceptualizations and explanations of those processes they propose. On the first point, the articles split among a) variation and change in actors' strategies as well as consequences of those strategies, b) longer-term transformations of political context and consequences, c) grounding of contention in local circumstances. On the second, they choose among a) very general explanatory frameworks, b) particular causal mechanisms that produce similar effects across a wide variety of political circumstances, and c) explanation by means of careful attachment of episodes to local and regional settings. The articles therefore illustrate broad challenges in current studies of political contention.

Kwon, Keedon. 2007. "Economic Development in East Asia and a Critique of the Post-confucian Thesis." Theory and Society. 36:1 55-83. Link

Some scholars have put forward what they call a post-Confucian thesis to explain East Asia's successful economic development. The thesis makes two important arguments: first, that Confucianism has enabled East Asian countries to take a different type of capitalism and a different path to modernity than did the West; second, that Confucianism has been the source of those ethics such as activism, hard work, thrift, and the like that have been conducive to economic development in East Asia. This article calls into question the first argument of the thesis by taking the example of the employment systems in Japan and Korea and showing that Confucianism has not been an important factor in defining their central features. In order to evaluate the second argument, this article investigates two major modernization campaigns in Japan and Korea, claiming that those supposedly Confucian virtues can be better seen as the products of the states' social engineering for modernization and economic development.

Kittikhoun, Anoulak. 2009. "Small State, Big Revolution: Geography and the Revolution in Laos." Theory and Society. 38:1 25-55. Link

Extant theoretical insights-mostly derived from studies of prominent revolutions in large countries-are less useful when applied to the unfolding of revolutions in small states. To understand why revolutions happened in the latter, a framework is needed that takes into account geography. For small states, geography is more than dotted lines on maps. It is the source of intervention and vulnerability. Deeply mired in history and memory, states' geographies shape their distinctive identities and have great impacts on national political trajectories, including revolutions. Thus, to provide understanding of revolutions in these countries, no analysis could be complete without taking into account their places, understood in physical, ideational, and historical terms, within their regions and the world. The case of Laos is used to suggest a geographical analysis of revolutions that provides overlooked insights into the origins, processes, and outcomes of revolutions in small, vulnerable states.