bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The philosophical puzzle of evil
Authors: Russell Luke
Published: October 2022

This chapter introduces the concept of evil and distinguishes it from the concept of bad. Some people claim that evil belongs in the realm of fiction, or that evil is an exclusively religious concept. These assumptions seem to support the idea that evil is nothing more than a myth. However, the language of evil is frequently used in the context of real world atrocities, serial killings, war crimes, and terrorist attacks. Our challenge is to see whether we can produce a secular account of evil that vindicates these uses of the word ‘evil’ in condemnation of extreme wrongdoing.
The psychological hallmark of evil action
Authors: Russell Luke
Published: October 2022

Perhaps the special quality that distinguishes evil action from ordinary wrongdoing is that evildoing flows from a certain kind of motive. Does every evildoer have the same kind of psychological profile? We might try to build a definition of evil action by looking for a distinctive psychological feature that lies behind the horrific actions of serial killers or terrorists. Some philosophers claim that all evil actions are motivated by malice or ill will towards the victims. Others focus on the sadistic pleasure that evildoers take in the suffering of their victims. Others claim that the evildoer stands out in virtue of the fact that he knows what he is doing is wrong, and hence is defying the moral rules. Each one of these psychological features exacerbates the severity of wrongdoing, but do any of them define evil?
Britain and cinema
Authors: Barr Charles
Published: October 2022

This chapter provides an overview of British cinema and its emergence. Ever since cinema developed from a novel technology into an industry, its screens have been dominated by American films. It is thus the continuing struggle for self-definition and self-assertion against the dominance of Hollywood that gives British films their distinctive identity. The chapter then identifies three stages in the widening of access to past British films: repertory cinema, armchair cinema, and desktop cinema. Repertory cinema saw the foundation of film libraries and archives. As television expanded, TV channels began to offer an alternative ‘British cinema’. Today, British films are easily available via the computer screen.
Varieties of Britishness
Authors: Barr Charles
Published: October 2022

This chapter examines the concept of Britishness and what identifies British films. It begins by differentiating between the terms ‘British’ and ‘English’, as well as considering the difference between Southern and Northern British films. The chapter also looks at Hollywood ‘British’ films, which made it harder for indigenous versions of British life and history to hold their own in the market. They also tended to drain British talent away to Hollywood. Ultimately, their lack of ‘authenticity’ was an anxiety for critics and commentators. The chapter then defines the terms ‘closed British’ and ‘open British’, before exploring the first ten films of the director–writer partnership between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
1933 and after
Authors: Barr Charles
Published: October 2022

This chapter discusses 1933 as a pivotal year for British cinema. This period saw Britain slipping back to cinematic subservience to America, as low-budget quota quickies proliferated and Hollywood stepped up its own production line of ‘British’ films. The chapter then looks at the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, considering his partnership with producer Michael Balcon, who launched his directing career so astutely. Another significant event of 1933 is the expansion of John Grierson’s documentary unit, increasing its scope and influence. The chapter examines films such as Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII, Noel Coward’s Cavalcade, and Balcon’s The Good Companions.
Chariots and after
Authors: Barr Charles
Published: October 2022

This chapter addresses Chariots of Fire (1981), a film that marks a division between old and new British cinema. It identifies three strands of British production at that time of transition. The first strand is the high-profile, high-quality Oscar-friendly British ‘heritage’ style of film that follows directly in the wake of Chariots of Fire itself. The chapter looks at the Harry Potter and James Bond films, as well as history and literature films such as Shakespeare in Love (1998). It then turns to British art cinema and independent cinema, before considering the works of Stephen Frears, Mike Leigh, and Ken Loach.
Looking back, looking forward
Authors: Barr Charles
Published: October 2022

This chapter reflects on the future of British cinema. British film production continues strongly, as the country emerges in 2022 from two years of intermittent lockdown in response to the coronavirus pandemic. However, its connection with cinema as such becomes more tenuous. The shift towards home delivery, notably through streaming, was already happening and has accelerated. The chapter then looks at six titles which offer a plausible contemporary framework for considering issues of continuity and change. These are Downton Abbey (2019) and Sorry We Missed You (2019); The Dig (2021) and Munich: the Edge of War (2022); and The Duke (2020) and Last Night in Soho (2021).
OakRootRNADB—a consolidated RNA-seq database for coding and noncoding RNA in roots of pedunculate oak (Quercus robur)
Authors: Kościelniak Paulina , Glazińska Paulina , Zadworny Marcin
Published: October 2022

The degree to which roots elongate is determined by the expression of genes that regulate root growth in each developmental zone of a root. Most studies have, however, focused on the molecular factors that regulate primary root growth in annual plants. In contrast, the relationship between gene expression and a specific pattern of taproot development and growth in trees is poorly understood. However, the presence of a deeply located taproot, with branching lateral roots, can especially mitigate the effect of insufficient water availability in long-lived trees, such as pedunculated oak. In the present article, we integrated the ribonucleic acid (RNA) sequencing data on roots of oak trees into a single comprehensive database, named OakRootRNADB that contains information on both coding and noncoding RNAs. The sequences in the database also enclose information pertaining to transcription factors, transcriptional regulators and chromatin regulators, as well as a prediction of the cellular localization of a transcript. OakRootRNADB has a user-friendly interface and functional tools that increase access to genomic information. Integrated knowledge of molecular patterns of expression, specifically occurring within and between root zones and within root types, can elucidate the molecular mechanisms regulating taproot growth and enhanced root soil exploration.

Database URL https://oakrootrnadb.idpan.poznan.pl/
A numerical method for resolving finite mixtures of three-dimensional inter-site distance distributions measured by single-molecule localization microscopy
Authors: Tu Zhiwen , Song Congwei , Qin Xianan
Published: October 2022

The three-dimensional (3D) inter-site distance can be measured by single-molecule localization microscopy. Existing theories and analysis tools for 3D inter-site distance measurement only consider the simplest case where all measured distances are from an identical 3D Rician distribution. There are many problems where the 3D inter-site distance measurement result is made up of multiple components, for example, the measurement of intramolecular distances of deoxyribonucleic acid with multiple possible conformations. In these cases, the overall distance distributions become finite mixtures of 3D Rician distributions (or 3D Rician mixtures). Here, we provide a numerical method using the 3D Rician mixture model to resolve the finite 3D inter-site distance mixtures, which is based on the expectation–maximization algorithm. The proposed method has been tested on simulation data of finite 3D inter-site distance mixtures. The result using the Gaussian mixture model in the developed method is also discussed for comparison.
An epistemic theory of the criminal process, Part I: Measurement and control
Authors: Cullerne Bown William
Published: October 2022

The criminal process can be seen as a system of classification, akin to a search engine. I consider the impact on it of poor measurements of the rates of false positives and false negatives. With ordinal rather than interval measurements, we lose some but not all control. I identify a novel form of indeterminacy, ‘directional aimlessness’, that leads to a behaviour of ‘shoving’. This can take a form, ‘naked shoving’, that looks purposeful but isn’t. I empirically establish the presence of naked shoving in the USA. This methodological work comprises Part I of a novel theory of the criminal process. In Part II, I use it to mathematize Herbert Packer’s influential ‘two models’ theory in criminology, both a form of validation and a way of giving an abstract theory traction in the real world. We acquire a general ‘epistemic’ alternative to economic, organizational, legal or political forms of analysis and I use it to critique Richard Posner’s law and economics. Given the lack of purpose, I conclude that policymaking in the criminal process is usually a form of ritual and, now that we have the capacity for interval measurements, contemplate the end of the old order.
Inside the Black Box
Authors: Shirk Susan L.
Published: October 2022

This chapter unpacks the “black box” of Chinese politics by offering a panoramic view of CCP institutions and their failure in preventing the restoration of personalistic rule. After the death of Mao, Chinese reformers have devoted significant efforts to the institutionalization of the system, such as formalizing succession, promoting officials on the basis of their job performance, and making government operations more transparent. They have even experimented with intraparty election as a method of leadership selection. However, these efforts were rife with problems, such as the lack of written rules, the leadership’s paranoia about elite splits and social unrest, the absence of institutional checks and balances outside the CCP, and the “ambiguity of authority” within the Party organization. The existence of these problems led to the failure of reform efforts and the return to secretive rule, which enabled a strongman like Xi Jinping to rise to power.
Stability Maintenance
Authors: Shirk Susan L.
Published: October 2022

This chapter assesses how the collective leadership under Hu overreached in domestic policymaking under the guise of stability maintenance. The elevation of the chiefs of the internal security and propaganda into the Politburo Standing Committee during Hu’s second term enables these interest groups to profiteer for themselves. By exploiting the leadership’s fears of unrest among the people, these oligarchs overdid their social control policies and boosted their budget and influence through various means, such as cracking down on ethnic minorities, restricting press freedom, and applying stricter censorship. The state economic sector was also boosted in its economic and political clout as Chinese policymakers lost confidence in the American market economy following the 2008 financial crisis.
Strongman Rule
Authors: Shirk Susan L.
Published: October 2022

This chapter focuses on the return to strongman rule under Xi Jinping beginning in 2012. It starts with the discussion about the background of Xi’s family, as well as how his early working and political life and ideology shape his view of governing the country. After gaining popular support and purging political rivals through the anti-corruption and various ideological campaigns, Xi significantly weakened the oligarchs, recentralized authority, and revived Mao Zedong’s personalistic style of rule. He put the Party at the center of the policy process, reclaiming the authority that had been delegated to the government during the reform era. He began overreaching in every policy domain, including economic policy, foreign policy, and military development. Although Xi has earned praise from his subordinates and the general public over his role in clamping down corruption and his increasingly assertive policy stance in controversial issues, his management of the Covid crisis appears to have exposed some weaknesses in his ruling style.
Introduction
Authors: Howard Christopher
Published: October 2022

To complement past studies of specific programs or individuals struggling to make ends meet, this book offers a comprehensive map of the US social safety net. The first part of the Introduction clarifies the boundaries of the social safety net, which extend beyond public assistance programs. The second part introduces the care framework developed by theorist Joan Tronto. She identified four stages of care—caring about, taking care of, caregiving, and care-receiving. In some stages, care is expressed verbally, while other stages require concrete action. The rest of this book is organized around those stages. Patterns of care are related to notions of deservingness. The social safety net might favor those who are employed (i.e., the working poor). Another possibility is that ascriptive characteristics—race, ethnicity, gender—shape who gets what from the social safety net. Both possibilities will be examined in the remaining chapters.
General Public
Authors: Howard Christopher
Published: October 2022

The central questions in the chapter are how much ordinary Americans care about low-income people and poverty-related needs, and who should take care of these people and needs. Depending on question wording, the general public appears to care very little or quite a lot. However, Americans believe the poverty population is much larger than the official numbers indicate. Ordinary Americans care more about poverty than welfare, and racial stereotypes may still help explain these differences. Americans agree that governments, charities, churches, individuals, and families share responsibility for taking care of people in need. Most Americans believe that government should do more to help with food, shelter, and medical care than with income or employment. Government should also do more to help the elderly. Public opinion on these matters is divided more along racial and party lines than by gender.
Business and Labor
Authors: Howard Christopher
Published: October 2022

Normally we expect big differences in the views of business and labor. In fact, neither the AFL-CIO nor leading business associations paid much attention to poverty-related issues between 2000 and 2020. Labor unions care much more about workers and working families; they seldom mention the working poor. Business interests focus more on taxes and regulations. There are exceptions: some unions (e.g., the SEIU) and some larger corporations pay attention to the needs of lower-income individuals. Although business and labor agree that government has important responsibilities, they disagree over which programs should be emphasized. Labor unions favor social insurance programs (e.g., Social Security, Unemployment Insurance) and minimum wage laws to help workers deal with hardship. Business groups worry about the cost of social insurance programs and want the national government to target help via means-tested public assistance.
Churches and Other Charities
Authors: Howard Christopher
Published: October 2022

Churches and secular charities care much more about poverty-related issues than do business and labor organizations. Nevertheless, charities care about many other issues as well. Because Christianity is the largest religion in the United States, the first part of this chapter analyzes the views of major Protestant and Catholic groups. They speak openly about the poor and the needy. They do not expect people to work in order to be helped, nor do they make distinctions along racial, ethnic, or gender lines. While religious leaders believe that churches must take care of the poor, their resources are limited. They publicly support government programs. The largest secular charities (e.g., United Way, Feeding America) are quite diverse. Some care explicitly about the poor and needy, while others pay attention to broader groups. Some charities favor the working poor, but most do not.
Medical Care
Authors: Howard Christopher
Published: October 2022

Most Americans are covered by job-based health insurance. Low-income workers, however, may not be offered health insurance or be able to afford the premiums. Free and charitable clinics are available in some parts of the country, but not as many as food pantries. The family safety net cannot provide medical care as readily as food or housing. The means-tested Medicaid program therefore plays a crucial role for low-income Americans. State and local governments (and thus taxpayers) take care of paying for Medicaid. Medicaid coverage varies, partly because some states have refused to expand eligibility under the Affordable Care Act. In addition, Medicare helps millions of older and disabled adults, some of whom are low-income. Medical care is big business, and most caregivers work in the private sector. The uninsured are disproportionately Black and Hispanic. Many low-income Americans, even those with health insurance, cannot afford preventive care or needed treatment.
Daily Care
Authors: Howard Christopher
Published: October 2022

Many people are unable to perform everyday tasks like getting dressed, preparing meals, or bathing. Young children belong in this group, as do adults with disabilities that range from mild to severe. Historically, family members have been the primary givers of daily care; most have been women and unpaid. Over time, paying other people to care for the young, the old, and the disabled has become more common. However, most of the poor and near poor cannot afford a child-care center or nursing home on their own. If they work unpredictable hours, evenings, or weekends, affordable care is even harder to find. Few of their employers offer paid family and medical leave. The national government spends little on child care. It spends much more on long-term care, largely through Medicaid. Even so, the family safety net remains a crucial source of daily care.
Conclusion
Authors: Howard Christopher
Published: October 2022

Based on what they say, churches and other charities care more about poverty-related needs than do business and labor organizations or public officials. The latter focus instead on the needs of workers. Fortunately, society does more for people dealing with hardships than our rhetoric suggests. The patterns vary from one part of the social safety net to the next. Governments take care of income support much more than housing assistance. Charities are mostly involved with food and medical care. The family safety net is crucial in daily care. Overall, the public safety net of government programs is far larger than whatever charities and extended families provide. But government’s role is largely to pay for care given by businesses and nonprofits. Even when the economy seems healthy, the social safety net has sizable holes. Blacks, Hispanics, and people who do not work full time are more likely to suffer.
The Normalization of Saudi Law
Authors: Mallat Chibli
Published: October 2022

Saudi Arabia has never commanded more attention and yet it remains one of the world’s least understood countries. The book draws on a systematic study of Saudi law over nearly a decade; the author’s involvement as a legal expert in landmark decisions around the world; and his experience as a law professor in leading universities in the Middle East, Europe, and America. The book also reflects his work with law students and practicing colleagues, particularly in commercial cases but also in those involving government and human rights. The Normalization of Saudi Law goes to the heart of Saudi society, politics, and business by exploring the workings of its courts.  The Normalization of Saudi Law will interest both readers following the fast-changing world of comparative law and those intrigued by Saudi Arabia. Legal practitioners and scholars will find a comprehensive analysis of the law’s operation in the Kingdom. The practitioner will access full thematic coverage of all important fields: judicial organization, contracts and torts, crime, family, property, administration, commerce, companies, banking, insolvency, the stock market, the constitution, succession, and human rights, with major statutes and a large number of court decisions distilled in 16 chapters. The scholar is presented with an assessment of a dynamic legal process, a “normalization” of Saudi law where developing norms are both “normal” (usual) and “normative” (carrying moral force). This includes judges reshaping Islamic law by applying it in everyday transactions and disputes as they interpret classical treatises and modern statutes. The Normalization of Saudi Law paints a compelling picture of a fast-changing country with a unique legal trajectory.
Introduction
Authors: Mallat Chibli
Published: October 2022

The first section summarizes the lay of the land in legal terms since the 1924-5 occupation of the Ottoman Hijaz by then Emir of Najd ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Al Sa‘ud. It underlines the salient traits of the history of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia since its founding by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz in 1932: conquest, the Hanbali domination, the importance of the Wahhabi nexus, oil and technological developments, and the judicial order between the First World War and the 1950s. The second section explains how the prism of ‘normalization’ adopted in the book is premised on tracking norms understood both as normal and normative. The third section shows how a mathematical ‘spline curve’ illustrates the progress of normalization into the book’s four constituent parts: from (I) abnormal to (II) normalized case law, to (III) normalized statute law, and back to (IV) abnormality. A final section suggests the openness of the legal field to daily life stories which are often lost behind the logic of cases and their abstract legal reasoning.
Criminal Law II
Authors: Mallat Chibli
Published: October 2022

. . . and, in continuation of the previous chapter’s mapping of the Islamic criminal common law, (b) crimes left to the court’s discretion (ta‘zir), which covers homicide, assault, and battery. Ta‘zir as “everything else” is the default mode in the system, including “new crimes” ranging from joyriding to cutting a girl’s hair forcibly. Two other pillars of the criminal system concerning “violations of the body” are examined: (c) qisas/retaliation and (d) monetary compensation (blood money, diya/arsh). The conclusion summarizes procedure and substance and underlines the need to draw sentencing guidelines to limit the discretion given to the Saudi judge in deciding on punishment.
Family Law
Authors: Mallat Chibli
Published: October 2022

Saudi law is the only Arab Gulf country not to have adopted a family law code. Case law provides nonetheless a steady and predictable set of rules of Hanbali law in the process of normalization. Cases cover marriage and marital life, including maintenance; various forms of separation, a lively dispute between muftis and qadis over the thrice-uttered formula of repudiation; guardianship and custody, filiation; succession, and trusts (waqfs). In all these areas, the chapter underlines the position of women as subordinate to men together with efforts by judges to redress the balance, notably in ‘adl (the right of a male kin to prevent a woman to marry) and the equality of gender in inheritance law for a woman’s entitlement to waqf benefits.
Companies and Corporate Governance
Authors: Mallat Chibli
Published: October 2022

Company law in Saudi Arabia is predominantly statutory. It can be found in a long stream of statutes from 1931 to 2020. The most comprehensive law in force is the Law of companies of 2015, and the chapter examines the various corporate vehicles it organizes (general partnership, joint stock company, limited liability company), including those which have survived from fiqh (mudaraba or commenda) and from 19th-century adaptations (the Egyptian mahassa or joint venture). It dwells in particular on some fiqh-related complexities in the application of mudaraba and the fiduciary duties of partners. Corporate governance is then examined in the light of new legislation and case law, and in the “Family business companies model contract,” an optional arrangement encouraged by the government to ensure better governance for family businesses.
Activation and Employment Support Policies for Stronger and Fairer Labor Markets
Authors: Scarpetta Stefano
Published: October 2022

In this chapter, the author reviews the implementation of active labor market policies by countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) tracing some of the major themes from the volume’s chapters. The author places active labor market policies within the framework of an activation strategy that involves a fine balance between ensuring that unemployment and other benefits protect workers, thus enabling them to smooth consumption and engage in effective job search and ensuring that incentives to benefit recipients to take up a new job remain strong. He suggests that effective implementation of strict job search requirements, coupled with profiling of job seekers to identify their needs and mandatory participation in tailored activation programs enhance outflows from unemployment benefits and into jobs. The Great Recession exposed activation strategies to a hard test of maintaining activation services in a time of increased demand and constrained budgets. Many countries temporarily extended the length of unemployment benefits while maintaining activation requirements but faced “capacity constraints.”
Activation in Public Employment Services in Europe
Authors: Weishaupt J. Timo , Jørgensen Henning , Nunn Alexander
Published: October 2022

Since the dawn of the New Public Management and labor market activation paradigms, public employment services (PES) have been in a state of perpetual reform. This chapter not only identifies key modernization trends in three pioneering PES in Europe, including Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom, but also critically assesses whether PES reforms delivered on their promises, especially during the Great Recession. This chapter argues that while PES have performed a crucial social stabilization role, it also finds that the reforms have potentially produced adverse consequences. In Denmark, the strategy toward municipalization has generated new conflict lines between central and local actors, while British efforts toward privatization have led to bottlenecks during times of employment shortages in the private sector. The German PES, in turn, has proved most robust as it was able to balance the need for central guidance and local flexibility.
Less Common Causes of Dementia
Authors: Noble James M.
Published: October 2022

This chapter describes less common forms of neurodegenerative dementia. These less common forms of dementia can be broadly grouped as rare genetic causes (Huntington’s disease), structural causes of dementia, dementia due to other chronic neurologic disorders, autoimmune or acute inflammatory brain diseases, and rapidly progressive neurodegenerative diseases (including Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease). The chapter then looks at normal pressure hydrocephalus and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. It also considers the cognitive complications of other neurologic disorders, including multiple sclerosis and epilepsy. About half of all people diagnosed with multiple sclerosis have some degree of impaired cognitive abilities at the time of diagnosis, although these may be subtle. Many people with epilepsy also report some cognitive problems, which are often due to side effects of the medications that treat epilepsy.
Introduction
Authors: Gautney Heather
Published: October 2022

This introduction argues that the condition of inequality we find ourselves in today is the result of a class program to transfer wealth and political power away from ordinary people into the hands of a few. It presents C. Wright Mills’s analysis of postwar American power structures in The Power Elite and assesses changes in the dynamics of global capitalism and elite power that necessitated this “remake” of his work. From the Cold War onward, neoliberals have worked to debase public institutions and exalt “the free market” as an engine of human progress and equalizing principle of U.S. democracy. This positioning of government and the public sphere as an anathema to freedom has enabled power elites to transform pillars of the social order into profit-making opportunities and ransack rules and programs that once provided the most basic protections—driving an alarming turn toward authoritarianism, as Mills forewarned.
The State (2017–2022)
Authors: Gautney Heather
Published: October 2022

This chapter considers the political rise of Donald Trump, who, more than any other president, exposed the stark realities of modern capitalism and the character of those at its helm. Here, his presidency—and the suffering, corruption, and social division associated with it—is understood as a consequence of political elites’ decades-long commitment to the neoliberal class program. Though Trump was indeed singular, his ascendancy cannot be understood apart from his predecessors’ betrayal of poor and working-class people and the contradiction between their claims to safeguard democracy and the economic realities that most Americans face. The substance of Trump’s policymaking was in line with that of both major parties in terms of their commitment to a hegemonic “free market” and handmaiden state—whether through Democrats’ brand of technocratic governance or the more ideologically charged, autocratic style of the GOP. This chapter analyzes those dynamics and views Trump’s political power as indicative of neoliberalism’s compatibility with authoritarianism and the dominance of charismatic authority in American politics.
The Military
Authors: Gautney Heather
Published: October 2022

This chapter examines the militarist nature of neoliberalism and the collaboration among state and corporate elites in matters of war, conflict, and law enforcement. It tracks the United States’ history of installing antidemocratic systems in countries around the world to secure stable market conditions for transnational capital, including efforts to facilitate a massive, upward wealth transfer vis-à-vis the global War on Terror. For most generations, the United States has continuously been engaged in some form of military conflict over their lifetimes, waving the banner of freedom while advancing “favorable market conditions” by force. This chapter illustrates those dynamics, and the mechanisms by which elites exercise military power through the expansion of executive power, privatization of war, and the enlargement of the military and security industrial complexes.
Wall Street
Authors: Gautney Heather
Published: October 2022

This chapter studies shifts in the capitalist economy’s center of gravity from production to finance over the last half century and the consolidation of elite wealth and power through techniques of financialization. It traces the integration and unfettering of financial institutions and markets worldwide that have multiplied opportunities for wealth making—through financial innovation, structural adjustment, predatory lending, and high-risk speculation—and the ability of “too big to fail” banks to increase profits while externalizing risk onto the public. The chapter recalls the wealth generated on Wall Street in the 1980s vis-à-vis leveraged buyouts and explains how private equity firms today are drawing from that playbook to extract value from corporate assets and workforces, largely through plunder. It also follows the more recent rise of asset management firms—with massive ownership stakes in nearly every major corporation—that wield systemic-level power over the U.S. government and global economy.
Billionaires
Authors: Gautney Heather
Published: October 2022

This chapter analyzes how today’s oligarchs accumulate their wealth by usurping government resources, financializing business, disciplining workers, and evading taxes. It locates the roots of billionaire wealth in technological development and the restructuring of the global economy, implicating today’s retail and tech giants for their monopolistic control over essential resources and shrewd exploitation of workers and global supply chains. It demonstrates how some billionaire wealth was made through surveillance schemes that generate profits by stoking political division and exploiting people’s desires for connection. It also looks at the domination of big money in U.S. politics and resultant gutting of profit-hampering regulations in place to protect consumers, workers, and the environment. Finally, it examines how the wealthy use philanthropy to divert attention from their exploits and impose their priorities, in some cases turning public institutions into profitable industries.
Celebrity
Authors: Gautney Heather
Published: October 2022

This chapter analyzes celebrities’ role in legitimizing neoliberal hegemony through cultural life, consumption, and manufacturing consent. It also examines how ultra-wealthy celebrities exercise corporate power by controlling media and retail enterprises with extensive reach and cultural impact. By warrant of their ability to capture and monetize mass attention, celebrities generate enormous profits through advertising and branding; and by warrant of their conspicuous beauty and wealth, they function as archetypes of the neoliberal self-helped, self-actualized individual. Celebrities’ reach into hearts and minds is not only a source of corporate power but also a foundation for political exploitation. As the Trump presidency showed, charismatic leadership is now trumping bureaucratic-rational forms of authority, and in place of actual agency, emotion and entertainment are occupying a central role in political life.
Publics and Masses
Authors: Gautney Heather
Published: October 2022

This chapter discusses power elites’ class program to destroy the social solidarities, intellectual independence, and sense of obligation that constitute robust public spheres. It tracks how they have worked to sever people’s connection to their government and each other through disinformation and colonizing institutions of political engagement. For neoliberal powerholders, the very idea of a public is an anathema to freedom and the unfettered pursuit of property. In place of engaged, knowledgeable, autonomous agents of democratic deliberation, they seek to foster anti-intellectual, privatist, and uninformed masses prone to manipulation. As a measure of their success, today just a handful of moguls wield more power over the means of information than any dictator has in world history. With that concentration of power and devaluing of political and intellectual life, Americans are losing the ability to act as democratic agents and to resist authoritarianism.
Conclusion
Authors: Gautney Heather
Published: October 2022

The conclusion recaps the book’s aim to assess patterns of elite domination and to unmask the people, policies, and power dynamics that animate them. In discussing the stakes of elite power, it suggests that no single group or movement can confront these behemoth forces on its own, and that no institution or milieux should be dismissed as a site of contestation, regardless of the degree to which elites may have co-opted it. It argues that diffusing elite power will require, first, moving past social movements’ and advocacy groups’ tendency to silo their campaigns according to particular causes, ideologies, and identities, and instead developing sustained organizing programs to promote genuine social solidarity; second, renewing our sense of a public or common good as an equalizing principle and societal glue, and working to invigorate the institutions that accompany it; and third, reclaiming society’s organs of knowledge production and forging new avenues for the development of egalitarian alternatives to neoliberal capitalism.
Music’s Worldliness
Authors: Gelbart Matthew
Published: October 2022

This chapter engages with previous work on genre theory to explore the ways in which genre in music is more inherently social, spatially defined, and thus more resistant to change, than in other arts. Many Romantics—often by binding genre to the idea of “form”—sought to promote great composers as free agents who could “transcend genre”; but because of music’s spatial and social frameworks, that “escape” from genre was even less possible in music than in other arts. Numerous types of musical genres inherently resist rapid change. For example, categories such as “chamber music” depend on social settings and their appropriate styles as much as on arbitrary creative decisions. Furthermore, genres should be treated as nested categories, from metagenres to microgenres, all of which influence each other in any set of understandings, and therefore cannot be separated.
Word and Concept
Authors: Gelbart Matthew
Published: October 2022

To understand how musical categories operate, it is also important to trace the etymology and use of the word “genre” and related terms in English and other European languages with reference to music. Through this process, we can identify complementary French and German roots of Romantic resistance to the power associated with the word “genre.” Covering this history also exposes the rhetorical background of the avant-garde reductions of “genre” to “form” discussed in the previous chapter. The second part of the chapter describes how composers have demonstrated a spectrum of attitudes toward traditionally defined genres: from those who were most openly reverent, such as Mendelssohn and Brahms, to those most openly defiant, such as Wagner and Liszt—with others such as Verdi and Chopin occupying a middle ground. Likewise, genres themselves span a range from those most tightly patrolled as cultural capital to newer and freer categories. Thinking about authorial claims and genres along these spectra reinforces the ideological importance of recognized generic categories in generating both conformity and reaction. Similarly, it brings out questions we should ask about how more “radical” composers still sought to communicate with their audiences and how those audiences made sense of the music.
“Each Sort Must Have Its Music”
Authors: Gelbart Matthew
Published: October 2022

This central chapter provides a broad consideration of the increasingly vital place of audience communities and identities in conceptions of genre. It suggests that to understand the musical world of nineteenth-century Europe, we must import some ways of thinking from genre studies developed around popular music in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which have often focused in depth on how audience correlations mark and define genres. The nineteenth century already saw the expansive development of musical markets, and the inevitable resultant reactions against musical commodification. Audience correlations thus played a growing role in defining all musical genres and subgenres, including those under the umbrella of anti-commercial “art music.” A brief historical narrative lays out how, whereas in a nascent musical marketplace the trend had been toward pleasing multiple audiences with single concerts and publications, by the 1830s composers, publishers, and entrepreneurs increasingly aimed specific genres at niche target audiences. New genres developed (as they still develop) in relation to fracturing and realigning audience communities, conceived on both small and large scales. Many examples are considered, including Carmen, which is picked up here to focus on the identity of opéra-comique as the “French” “national genre.”
A Symphony by Any Other Name
Authors: Gelbart Matthew
Published: October 2022

This chapter considers the relationship between conceptual genres and generic designations in titles or subtitles, such as “Symphony” or “Opera in Five Acts,” charting the interaction between audience communities and the creative process in the allocation of such explicit labels. It argues that the strength and persistence of generic (sub-)titles is tied to the social weight behind them at different times, but that the act of official naming also provides its own generic momentum. Strong generic titles are closely tied as cultural capital to audience communities and thus often continue to be used for as long as they support an identity group, even if the musical features of the genre so designated can change a lot during this time. Opéra-comique is treated as an extended case study. On the other hand, generic titles that do not have a close symbiotic relationship with specific audiences can still be used over many decades or more, but the pieces so labeled may actually constitute multiple localized mini-genres grouped retrospectively. Piano pieces called “Ballade” are considered as exemplifying this second type. These studies reinforce the centrality of audience identities to genre. Even attempts to read works against their titular generic designation are tied to social phenomena.
Recovering the Work of a Discovering Science with a Video Camera in Hand
Authors: Sormani Philippe
Published: October 2022

This chapter delivers a hybrid study of discovering work in the form of a practice-based video analysis. The video analysis explicates the author’s practical involvement in the local production of an empirical discovery in current physics: multi-band superconductivity in lead molybdenum sulphide (PbMo6S8). Devised as an ad hoc extension of a physics tutorial, the proposed analysis makes explicit the procedures through which the physical phenomenon, as an electronically probed and visually discovered spectrum, is produced and seen for a very first time. Readers, in other words, are taught the experimental and heuristic achievement in and as its “tutorial problems” (Garfinkel 2002a, c). The local production of scientific discoveries—in their audiovisual, disciplinarily relevant, and instrumentally embodied detail—has eluded ethnomethodological and social studies of scientific work. The outlined study fills this gap in the literature. At the same time, it makes the case for technical self-instruction as a research stance, as articulated in Harold Garfinkel’s later work, while spelling out that stance’s reflexive interest for the video analysis of discovering work and, possibly, other kinds of work and lines of analysis, too.
Technology in Practice
Authors: Heath Christian , Luff Paul
Published: October 2022

Ethnomethodology has made an important and highly influential contribution to our understanding of technology. It has provided the analytic and methodological resources with which to reconsider a number of key concepts and ideas within the social and cognitive sciences and has provided the foundation to a substantial corpus of studies of technology in action. To exemplify these analytic concerns, the authors consider a surveillance technology and the ways in which personnel use the system to detect and manage the problems and difficulties that arise in the operation of a major urban transport network. They consider how the use of the technology, to survey and manage incidents and events that might ordinarily pass unnoticed, is dependent upon the operators’ working knowledge of the environment, its characteristics and contingencies, and their familiarity with the routine patterns of conduct and interaction that arise within certain locales. In short, the system’s use is embedded within practice and practical action. By driving analytic attention toward the endogenous and situated character of technology in action, ethnomethodology has had a significant impact on contemporary research and practice throughout a range of disciplines in both the human and physical sciences.
To Be Real
Authors: Jacobs Lanita
Published: October 2022

This book examines African American standup comedy over the past decade as a stage for understanding why notions of racial authenticity—in essence, appeals to “realness” and “real Blackness”—emerge as a cultural imperative in African American culture. Ethnographic observations and interviews with Black comedians ground this telling, providing a narrative arc of key historical moments in the new millennium. Readers will understand how and why African American comics invoke “realness” to qualify nationalist discourses on the 9/11 terrorist attacks and grapple with the racial entailments of the war in Iraq, overcome a sense of racial despair in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, critique Michael Richards’s [“Kramer’s”] notorious rant at The Laugh Factory and subsequent attempts by the club to censor use of the n-word, and reconcile the politics of a “real” Black in Black folks’ everyday lives via Kevin Hart’s meteoric rise to global stardom. Additionally, readers will hear through audience murmurs, hisses, and boos how beliefs about racial authenticity are intensely class-wrought and fraught. Moreover, they will appreciate how context remains ever critical to when and why African American comics and audiences lobby for and/or lampoon jokes that differentiate the “real” from the “fake” or “Black folks” from “niggahs.” The take-home point of To Be Real is this: context and racial vulnerability are critical to understanding how and why allusions to “racial authenticity” persist in the African American comedic and cultural imagination. During watershed moments of crisis (e.g., 9/11, Hurricane Katrina) or incessant hope (e.g., 2008 presidential election), African American stances around racial authenticity bespeak a need to define who and whose they are, if only to contend with the enduring significance of race. By consciously valuing a “real”—as opposed to strict notions of “the real” (which too often essentialize, objectify, and exclude)—this book reveals why authenticity matters to African Americans and, arguably all of us, when the proverbial –ish hits the fan and then, too, when things are calm and still.
On Michael Richards, Racial Authenticity, and the “N-word”
Authors: Jacobs Lanita
Published: October 2022

This chapter explores Black comics’ responses to Michael Richards’s infamous racist rant at The Laugh Factory (a well-known Los Angeles comedy club) in 2006. Following Richards’s cell-phone-recorded tirade, the club’s owner, Jamie Masada, temporary fined all comics who used the “n-word” onstage. African American comedians’ public and private responses to this gesture were as mixed as they were insightful. Onstage, several Black comics joked about what “authentic” or “real” Black folks would’ve done had they witnessed Richards’s outburst firsthand. (Here, their bids to authenticity provided an affective release and reassertion of who we [Black folks] are or can be in the face of pain and disrespect.) Backstage, however, most Black comics were surprisingly empathetic toward Richards even as they critiqued his rant as racist and inexcusable. They also vetted questions concerning comics’ freedom of speech and lambasted the racial politics plaguing the professional comedy scene, delimiting who and what “real” “Black” comics and standup comedy, respectively, can be or do.
Homegrown extremism, jihadi strategic studies, and the symbolic power of political community
Authors: Logan Sarah
Published: October 2022

This chapter interrogates homegrown extremism in the context of political community. Identifying the common threads of disparate attacks, the chapter argues that acts of homegrown extremism are by definition committed by a member of a political community against other members in a way that is incommensurate with membership in that community. Adopting a Bourdieusian approach, the chapter argues that such acts exhibit symbolic as well as material violence, heightening their impact and shaping their use as a terrorist tactic. The chapter identifies and analyses homegrown extremism’s evolution as a jihadi strategy in the post-9/11 era, from Al-Qaeda to Islamic State.