Ad van Iterson (Maastricht University, the Netherlands) has contributed a chapter on Norbert Elias’s impact on organizational sociology to the Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Organization Studies, edited by Paul S. Adler (University of Southern California). The aim of this handbook is to re-assert the importance of classical sociology to the future of the study of organizations. The volume includes chapters on Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, Parsons and some twenty other European and American scholars. The chapter on Elias concentrates on the importance of his theory of the civilizing process.  When brought into the context of contemporary work organizations, Van Iterson argues, Elias’s approach is rich in implications for the behavioral and emotional aspects of trends towards empowerment, teleworking, 24-hour working day, despecialization, and multitasking.

Akira Ohira (ed.), Norbert Elias and Globalisation: Sport, Culture and Society (Tokyo: DTP Publishing, 2009). 208 pp. ISBN: 978-4-86211-173-9

Norbert Elias and Globalization, edited by Akira Ohira, is a collection of essays that address two related strands of thought in Elias’s work. The first is the relationship between Elias’s civilising process, modernity and globalisation theory. The second is directly concerned with power relationships within the framework of established and outsider groups.

Snowdon’s contribution places Elias within the cosmopolitan intellectual cultural context in which he grew up, making clear that concern about the social forces which are often grouped under the label “globalisation” is by no means as novel as we are sometimes led to believe.

The essays by Ohira, Manning and Waddington concerning aspects of sport in the tradition of Elias and Dunning in Quest for Excitement (1986; 2008) show how the historical development of sport and the contexts in which they are performed provide empirical studies of civilizing social forces in action. Not only that, they also demonstrate that far from being oppositional concepts, the nation and globalisation are intimately connected, simultaneously challenging and reinforcing each other. The dialectical relationship between the national, sub-national and supra-national is also elucidated in Bacon’s essay on the development of the European Union.

The essays by Ohira on Japanese literature, Oliphant on disability and Manning on stigmatisation present the depth of Elias’s thinking on the articulation of power in society that is put into the context of sociological practice if read in conjunction Wada’s essay comparing Elias’s civilizing process with Max Weber on modernity.

There is a distinctly Japanese flavour to the volume with four of the essays presenting case studies from Japan. The juxtaposition of these with the contributions that address subjects within cultural contexts more familiar to Elias serves to emphasise the applicability of Eliasian concepts beyond Europe. It is hoped that this book is a useful contribution to those seeking to combat the reifying dead hand of cultural essentialism.

This is believed to be the first book about Elias and things Eliasian to be published in English in Japan

Norbert Elias, Essays III: On Sociology and the Humanities (Dublin: UCD Press, 2009 [Collected Works, vol. 16]), edited by Richard Kilminster and Stephen Mennell. 312 pp. ISBN: 978-1-906359-03-4. €48.00.

The latest volume in the Collected Works contains a total of 28 essays on a wide range of topics, more than half of them never before published in English. These are marked with an asterisk in the following list of contents:

*1 ‘Figurations’, and

*2 ‘Social processes’, both of them entries for a dictionary of sociology published in 1986

*3 ‘Towards a theory of social processes’ (previously published in a back-translation from the German, but this is the first publication of Elias’s original English text)

*4 ‘Social processes on multiple levels’

5 ‘On the sociogenesis of sociology’

6 ‘The break with traditionalism: report on the discussion’ (report of a session at the 1962 World Congress of Sociology in Washington DC)

7 ‘Group charisma and group disgrace’

*8 ‘Address on Adorno; respect and critique’ (Elias’s speech on accepting the first Theodor W. Adorno Prize of the City of Frankfurt, 1977)

*9 ‘Sociology in danger: the case for the reorientation of a discipline’

*10 ‘A diagnosis of present-day sociology’

11 ‘The retreat of sociologists into the present’

12 ‘The concept of everyday life’

*13 ‘The story of the shoelaces: a sociologist on his travels’

*14 ‘Social anxieties’

15 ‘On human beings and their emotions’

16 ‘Sociology and psychiatry’

*17 ‘Civilisation and psychosomatics’

18 Foreword to The Sociology of Sport

*19 ‘Football in the process of civilisation’

*20 ‘Pigeon racing’, c. 1967 – a real oddity: from the typescript of an article co-authored with Eric Dunning, which Eric believes to be have been published but cannot recall where, and which the skills of several university librarians have failed to locate.

21 ‘African Art’ – the introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition of his collection of African art that was mounted in Leicester in 1970

*22 ‘Stages of African Art: social and visual’ – from an unpublished typescript dating from 1975

*23 ‘Some remarks on the problem of work’, 1984.

24 ‘Professions’

25 ‘The changing balance of power between the sexes’

*26 ‘Where two people come together in lawful matrimony …’, foreword to Michael Schröter’s book Wo zwei zusammenkomm in rechte Ehe …, 1985

*27 Foreword to Women torn two ways – Bram van Stolk and Cas Wouters’s book Vrouwen in tweestrijd, 1983

28 ‘Renate Rubinstein’

An appendix also contains the text of a letter to the editor of The Listener, 6 November 1958, responding to a review of volume 5 of Edward Hallet Carr’s History of Soviet Russia. This letter came to light after the volume went to the typesetter!

Like previous volumes in the series, this has been very carefully edited and annotated to improve the readability of the texts: sadly, it appears that the first editions of most of Elias’s works in English escaped the attentions of competent copy-editors, a lacuna that has now been remedied.

Especially because of the higher standard to which these volumes have been produced, which makes Elias’s texts much more accessible both to students and scholars, it is important that they find their way into university libraries throughout the world.

You can buy copies of the volumes at a discount of 20 per cent on the published price, if you order direct from the publisher, via the website: www.ucdpress.ie.

Previously published volumes in the series are:

1 Early Writings (2006)

2 The Court Society (2006)

4 Norbert Elias and John L. Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders (2008)

7 Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process (2008)

8 Involvement and Detachment (2007)

9 An Essay on Time (2007)

15 Norbert Elias, Essays II: On Civilising Processes, State Formation and National Identity (2008)

Supplementary volume: The Genesis of the Naval Profession (2007)

The next in the series to appear, scheduled for summer 2009, is volume 14, Essays I: On the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sciences, again edited by Richard Kilminster and Stephen Mennell.

Forthcoming from Routledge, June 2009. Order it for your library!

Especially since the end of the Cold War, the concept of ‘civilization’ has been frequently deployed by those who seek to describe and explain the world in which we live. The events of 11 September 2001, and the subsequent ‘war on terror’, have further elevated the concept’s use in the discourse of politics and international relations. There has, for instance, been feverish speculation and increasingly heated rhetoric about struggles ‘for civilization’ or a possible ‘clash of civilizations’, particularly between the West and the Islamic world. The term is used both to describe—and to cast value-laden judgements about—people, places, and events. It is often misinterpreted and misapplied, with sometimes dangerous consequences. In response to the revival and misuse of ‘civilization’, this new four-volume collection from Routledge Major Works meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a vast and growing scholarly literature. It brings together canonical and the best cutting-edge research to provide a comprehensive overview of the origins, contested meanings, contextual applications, and general history of this critical concept.
With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Civilization is an essential work of reference. It is destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers of politics, political philosophy, and international relations—as well as those working in allied disciplines such as security studies and international law—as a vital research resource.

Routledge
June 2009
234×156: 1,779pp
Set Hb: 978-0-415-46965-4  £650.00

Continue Reading »

Here are the proceedings of a conference about Studien über die Deutschen held at the University of Bordeaux:

Tristan Coignard, Hélène Leclerc (ed.), Norbert Elias, un “marginal 
établi”? Ancrages et réception d’une démarche singulière en sciences 
humaines
in: Collection Individu et Nation [en ligne], Vol. 3, 24  février 2009
available online:
http://revuesshs.u-bourgogne.fr/individu&nation/sommaire.php?id=216
ISSN 1961-9731.

The official Call for Papers for the three proposed Figurational Sociology sessions at the 2010 ISA World Congress has now been posted on the Congress website.

Please note the deadline for submission of abstracts to the session organizers – Robert van Krieken and Stephen Vertigans - 1 October 2009.

The three sessions are outlined, very roughly, as follows:

Session 9: Civilization and the new world order of difference: current trends in international relations. The end of the ‘Cold War’ and subsequent decline of America’s cultural, economic and political dominance and concomitant rise of  other nations like Brazil, China, India and resurgent Russia have contributed to seismic shifts in global figurations.  In this session papers are invited that explore the consequences upon local peoples and international relations. Topics that are anticipated to be discussed include the impact upon social consciousness within communities that are experiencing enhanced national profiles, the repercussions of America’s decline within the United States and global processes and what these changes mean for international relationships and in particular different forms of social identification, global security and human rights.

Session 10: Civilization, violence and war. This session is intended to explore violence across the world in order to gain greater insight into the social processes and activities behind the behaviour.  A range of papers will be invited that will discuss state, non state and international agency violence that includes war, terrorism, genocide and ‘political’ rape.   Discussants will be expected to apply sociological reasoning in order to explain how forms of collective violence emerge and why people are able to commit these ‘uncivilized’ acts.  Participants could also consider the consequences for the ‘civilization’ in the name of which these actions are often undertaken.

Session 11: Multiple modernities, diverse identities, and the civilizing process. Just as ‘modernity’ has been shown to follow a variety of paths, and sociologists now think in terms of ‘multiple modernities’, the concept of ‘the civilizing process’ can also usefully be seen to take a variety of forms in different historical and cultural settings. This session will develop the comparative sociological analysis of civilizing processes to explore the differing forms that civilizing processes take, as well as the specific contributions that thinking in terms of ‘civilization’ can make to our understanding of the range of social and cultural identities produced, facilitated as well as undermined in the context of processes of modernisation.

Robert van Krieken

Kaven, Carsten: Die Durchsetzung der Reformpolitik in China. Analyse eines Ereignisses, Münster (LIT-Verlag), 2009, ISBN: 978-3-8258-1712-1, € 19,90

This book is inspired by Elias’ thinking although the title does not contain his name. Some of his concepts like “Machtbalance”, “Verflechtungszwang” and “Spannungsachsen” are used in the analysis. The study analyses a historical event from a historical-sociological perspective: the enforcement of reform policy in communist China in the mid/end of the 1970s. Thus, the aim is to judge about this issue: Should this event be interpreted as a result of deliberate policies of actors or is it rather the effect of long-term processes? To achieve this purpose, an analytical framework is applied that combines theoretical reflections as well as empirical research.

Kaven, Carsten: Sozialer Wandel und Macht. Die theoretischen Ansaetze von Max Weber, Norbert Elias und Michel Foucault im Vergleich, Muenster (Metropolis), 2006, ISBN: 978-3-89518-557-1 , € 36,80

This book deals with the relation of two concepts of social theory: power and social change. In doing so, it aims at a contribution to a historical-sociological modelling of social change and social processes. Such modelling should be able to indicate the role of power within concrete social change as well as to define the unity of relevant social processes. For this purpose, Max Weber, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault, who developed competing notions of power and social change, are criticised, refined and updated systematically.

The latest volume of the Elias Collected Works, volume 15, is the first of three volumes of Elias’s Collected Essays, all of them edited by Richard Kilminster and Stephen Mennell

Essays II: On Civilising Processes, State Formation and National Identity is numerically the middle one of the three volumes, but the first to be published. The other two, Essays I: On the Sociology of Knowledge and the Sciences (vol. 14) and Essays III On Sociology and the Humanities (vol. 16) are already in press, and will be published in the first half of 2009. Unlike in the German Gesammelte Schriften, where Elias’s 80-90 essays are arranged in order of the date of their publication, the Editorial Advisory Board for the Collected Works decided to group them thematically, as the titles of the three volumes indicate.

Of the 18 essays in volume 15, Essays II, as many as 11 have not previously been published in English. These are:

‘Civilisation’, probably Elias’s most succinct exposition of his theory of civilising processes, written for a German textbook of basic concept of sociology, published in 1986.

‘What I mean by civilisation: reply to Hans-Peter Duerr’, which appeared in Die Zeit in 1988.

‘L’Espace privé - “Private space” or “private room”’, a lecture given in Berlin in 1983, one of several essays in which Elias criticises the work of the historian Philippe Ariès, who was present in the audience on this occasion.

‘The structure of development of standards of behaviour’, Elias’s foreword to Hans-Volker Krumrey’s book Entwicklungstrukturen von Verhaltensstandarden (1984).

‘Power and civilisation’, a lecture given in 1981 in Graz.

‘The Germanesi’, Elias’s postscript to Meike Behrman and Carmine Abate’s 1984 book of that name, a study of the effects on their home village of Italian Gastarbeiter returning from Germany to their original communities.

‘The charismatic ruler’, published in Der Spiegel in 1989 to mark the centenary of Hitler’s birth.

‘Public opinion in Britain’ and ‘National peculiarities of British public opinion’, two lectures given in Germany in 1959 and 1960. For British readers especially, these two enjoyable and insightful lectures will confirm the truth of L. P. Hartley’s famous dictum, ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’.

‘Fear of death’, a 1986 lecture in Groningen, deals at some length with a subject that Elias is often accused of neglecting: religion. (Actually, in the course of editing the Collected Works, it becomes clear that Elias actually discussed religion in very many parts of his work.)

‘Has hope a furure?’, a contribution to the 1986 Christmas edition of Die Zeit.

Even among the essays originally written in English, many have not until now been at all easy to track down. One example from volume 15 is Elias’s 1950 review of Eva G. Reichmann’s book Hostages of Civilisation: A Study of the Social Causes of Antisemitism.

Like all volumes in the series, these latest three have been very carefully edited and annotated to improve the readability of the texts: sadly, it appears that the first editions of most of Elias’s works in English escaped the attentions of competent copy-editors, a lacuna that has now been remedied.

Especially because of the higher standard to which these volumes have been produced, which makes Elias’s texts much more accessible both to students and scholars, it is important that they find their way into university libraries throughout the world. Readers of Elias-I are urged to ensure that they are ordered by their own institutions’ libraries.

You can also buy copies of the volumes direct from the publisher, at a discount, via the website: www.ucdpress.ie.

Previously published volumes in the series are:

1 Early Writings (2006)
2 The Court Society (2006)
4 The Established and the Outsiders
7 Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilising Process
8 Involvement and Detachment (2007)
9 An Essay on Time (2007)
Supplementary volume: The Genesis of the Naval Profession (2007)