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Social science is vested in the potential technology carries for expression and connection. Human beings utilize media, social media, and communication technologies for expression and connection. The author has been studying the social and political consequences of communication technologies, with an interest in the soft structures of feeling that these technologies filter, conduit, and enable. This interest has led to the development of the construct of “affective publics” and its companion term, “affective news.” Affective publics are networked publics that come together, are identified, and disband through shared sentiment. These concepts have been adopted in a multitude of studies that examine the relationship between technology and politics. This chapter explicates the concept, traces its theoretical roots, and describes how it might further an understanding of civic engagement.

This chapter explores “anti-consumerist” critique and practice as articulated in a range of Western nations over the last two decades. It surveys the rise of a twenty-first-century consumption politics, identifying how it has coalesced around opposition to consumerism and overconsumption, while remaining elusive in the extent to which it advocates substantive social and economic change and in the degree to which it rejects or embraces consumption as an arena of agency. The chapter explores this ambiguity through discussion of two interconnected forms of recent consumption politics—“responsible” consumer choice and “alternative” enterprise—outlining the fractured and tenuous ways in which these practices speak of contestation and of the emancipatory in relation to consumption and consumer economies. The chapter concludes by recognizing the conceptual and ideological limits of contemporary consumption politics, while insisting also that it has significantly expanded the political and ethical sensibilities through which we understand the commodity and its impact.

This article examines the relationship between foreign aid and poverty in developing countries, with the goal of determining whether donor governments are motivated and actively set out to reduce poverty in developing countries through the provision of aid but with the impact of aid on poverty reduction. It begins with an overview of the aid and poverty record based on global data from the 1980s onward, with particular emphasis on Official Development Assistance (ODA). It then considers the analytics of aid and poverty before reviewing the relevant literature, including studies that address the impact of aid on growth and growth elasticity of poverty. The article argues that aid has had a marginally positive impact on poverty reduction in developing countries, and that poverty would be slightly higher without it.

This chapter considers the significance of Marx’s concept of alienation to his overall criticism of capitalism. At the concept’s core is the idea that while labor is potentially a fulfilling and liberating activity, under capitalism it appears only as a hostile, dominating force. Workers thus experience their own activity, natural and built environments, and fellow human beings as alien and hostile. While this idea has been deeply influential, it has also been the subject of heated controversies, in particular for its apparent dependence on an essentialist or teleological idea of human nature. While important, such controversies were often inflated by their political and intellectual context, and this chapter argues they should be considered alongside the lasting significance of alienation as an explanatory concept. Understood as such, it can still contribute a great deal to understanding and criticizing contemporary society, and provide guidance for how to transcend and replace it.

Marx’s historical materialism is a powerful antidote to culturalist essentialism of the kind that became known as Orientalism after Edward Said. The Marxian perspective allows for a full consideration of the role of Western imperialism in hindering the development of the Middle East as well as in the deliberate preservation of archaic sociopolitical features in the region. The concept of Bonapartism that Marx developed in his writings on the French Second Empire is highly relevant to the analysis of the national-developmental experiences that emerged in the Middle East in the twentieth century. His insight on the reactionary aspiration of sections of the petite bourgeoisie confronted with capitalist transformation provides an important clue to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East. Marx’s theory of revolution as resulting from the blockage of economic development finds a most striking illustration in what is commonly designated as the Arab Spring.

Dealing with the immense societal challenges of climate change and resource depletion requires no less than a fundamental transformation of the energy system, comprising not only technological change, but also cultures of energy use and consumption, new regulations, and new types of actors operating on the energy market. A growing field of interdisciplinary social science research on “sustainability transitions” deals with the dynamics and governance of such transformative, systemic, and socio-technical change processes toward sustainability. This chapter gives an overview of concepts used to study energy system transitions, their strengths and shortcomings, as well as new advancements. The chapter also discusses a concrete example of socio-technical change in the field of renewable energy—wind power—and reflects on some of the lessons that can be drawn from this about the interdependence of energy and society and for an understanding of transitions toward a more sustainable energy system.

This chapter provides an overview of the antecedents and consequences of gossip in work groups. First, the chapter reviews the different motives for gossip in work groups (i.e., bonding, entertainment, emotional venting, information exchange, maintenance of group norms/social order, and interpersonal aggression) and links each motive to psychological theory. Second, the chapter reviews the different types of influence that gossip can have on various indicators of group effectiveness. Reflecting on the motives underlying gossip in work groups, as well as on its outcomes, it argues that future research should start integrating the diverse insights provided by earlier research on both gossip motives and outcomes, and it provides a number of suggestions for doing so.

This chapter examines global energy trends, whether a global renewable energy transition is already taking place, and what steps are needed to further accelerate the global deployment of renewables. It first considers the expansion of renewable energy in light of global energy trends, noting that a global energy transition is not yet a reality but is urgently needed. It then looks at drivers and barriers for an accelerated expansion of renewable energy and proceeds by discussing how renewables are moving from the sidelines to the center stage of global energy governance. In particular, it describes the politics behind the creation of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an intergovernmental organization on renewable energy, as well as current challenges for global governance on renewable energy. The chapter shows that global renewable energy capacities have grown significantly but that global energy supply is still dominated by fossil fuels.

This chapter discusses how autonomous vehicles (AVs) may interact with our evolving mobility system and what they mean for mobile communication research. It juxtaposes a conceptualization of AVs as manifestations of automation and artificial intelligence with an analysis of our mobility system as a historically grown hybrid of communication and transportation technologies. Since the emergence of railroad and telegraph, this system has evolved on two layers: an underlying infrastructure to power and coordinate the movements of objects, people, and ideas in industrially scaled speeds, volumes, and complexity and an interface to seamlessly access this infrastructure and control it. AVs are poised to further enhance the seamlessness which mobile phones and cars already lent to mobility. But in assuming increasingly sophisticated control tasks, AVs also disrupt an established shift toward individual control, demanding new interfaces to enable higher levels of individual and collective control over the mobility infrastructure.

Datafication—through which many aspects of social life are transformed into data—is usually equated with a more efficient use of resources and improved state–citizen relations. But it can have negative consequences on those at the margins of society, such as refugees, racialized individuals, gig workers, and citizens of countries with scant respect for human rights. How can we understand the ways in which the disempowered are impacted by and resist datafication? This essay presents an analytical matrix to study data at the margins. The matrix identifies three components of data at the margins: (1) infrastructure, emphasizing the material dimension; (2) practices, pinpointing agency in people’s encounters with datafication; and (3) imaginaries, that is, the cultural and symbolic facets of data at the margins. The matrix offers also three lenses of interpretation through which to observe the components: (1) decoloniality and race, (2) intersectionality and feminism, and (3) the “pluriverse.” Together, they help in questioning datafication and why certain social groups are oppressed while uncovering pathways toward justice and equality.

Singapore and Dubai are hypermodern city-states that host large temporary migrant populations. The majority of this group is composed of low-wage workers, migrant men from India who labor under conditions of structural inequality and extreme precarity. While there is a growing literature that discusses the issues of debt bondage and unfair conditions of employment that these men face, there is far less interrogation of the everyday and embodied forms of discrimination they encounter. In taking a deeply embodied and ethnographic approach to understanding the experiences of low-wage migrant male workers in these two metropolises, this chapter demonstrates how they are subject to multiple tropes that, in totality, seek to marginalize and devalue their work and the more intangible “learning” of the city that they undertake as part of the migration trajectory. As a result, despite extended periods of sojourn, they are never fully incorporated into the urban.

This chapter explores three central questions. The first section describes the four core varieties of capitals: cultural, social, economic, and symbolic. It highlights some peculiarites of Bourdieu’s approach: the focus on symbolic capital, a definition of social capital different from those of North American. A second section questions the limits of economic metaphors. Bourdieu borrows from the lexicon of economics (capitals, conversion rates). But he devotes attention to the sociopolitical dimension of the struggles for defining the conversion rates between capitals and warns that “rational” actions are one historical dimension of a complex space of “reasonable” actions. Finally, the chapter discusses the question of the number of capitals. Should one add to Bourdieu’s list something like a bodily or erotic capital? If each field values a specific capital, should researchers produce an endless list of specific capitals, or are these specific capitals always combinations of the four basic ones?

This chapter argues that rather than being focused on the higher levels of consumption of aesthetic goods on the part of the educated class, Pierre Bourdieu’s main hypothesis in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste was concerned with how differences in class fractions as defined by total educational endowment (parental and individual) predict the extent to which individuals consume more artistically legitimate versus less artistically legitimate cultural forms. This argument leads naturally to Bourdieu’s understanding of the difference between the consumption styles of the educated (and less educated) classes as built from his understanding of differences in the formative experiences of different classes. The chapter develops the implications of this for contemporary debates regarding a more illuminating explanation of the omnivore taste phenomenon and other forms of aestheticized consumption.

Market intermediaries such as location consultants, tourism promoters, and branding specialists exploit the symbolic value of national territories to promote economic development. Although these practices are often justified as a way to “level the global playing field” of market interactions, they typically achieve the opposite effect, reinforcing or creating inequality and status differences. This chapter reviews some of the theoretical assumptions and pragmatic features of place-based marketing and branding, with particular emphasis on the role of judgment adopted by market intermediaries in the cultural economy. The argument advanced here is that symbolic and material systems are co-constitutive in the production of place; and that market intermediaries engage in ongoing practices of valuation to link national identity with material advantage.

This article examines capability deprivation as the basis for analyzing poverty. The capability approach, developed initially by Amartya Sen, questions the “informational space” on which considerations of poverty, inequality, justice, and so forth, should be based. According to the capability approach, the appropriate “space” for analyzing poverty is not what people have, nor how they feel, but what they can do and be. After providing an overview of the concepts that comprise the capability approach, this article discusses three key questions within the literature regarding the nature of the approach, namely: the question of functioning and/or capabilities, the question of a capability list, and the question of aggregation. It also describes some prominent empirical applications that have been inspired by the capability approach and concludes with an assessment of the current state-of-the-art literature on the capability approach.

Capital is the fundamental concept of modern social theory because capital is the foundation of bourgeois society. Unlike produced means of production, capital is a specific social form of production. A vast gulf separates Marx from the mainstream notion that capital is produced means of production. Inattention to production’s social form, a feature of the “bourgeois horizon,” shackles social theory: it puts capital out of sight. Capital is value whose value is increased. Value is enigmatic; a strange, “supersensible” social form of wealth, it results from commodity-producing labor. The topic of labor’s social form falls outside economics. Capital shapes and subsumes society in various ways. Marx identifies several forms of subsumption: formal, real, and ideal, as well as “hybrid forms.” Commerce makes capitalist society appear classless; however, capital presupposes a class division of the means of production and subsistence. Crises are seeded in the dichotomous character of commodities.

This chapter explicates Marx’s concept of capital and highlights its centrality to his book Capital, arguing that Capital is specifically about capital, not all of capitalist society. In Marx’s conception, capital has two forms, money and means of production, but capital itself is the process of self-expansion of value, or valorization. The commodity fetish and subsumption of labor under capital are explored in relation to this. Employing Marx’s concept of the circuit of capital, the chapter considers his theory that value self-expands by extracting surplus labor and his understanding of the reproduction and accumulation of capital. It also argues that failure to rigorously respect the difference between constant capital and the value of means of production is one source of allegations that Marx’s value theory and falling-rate-of-profit theory are logically inconsistent or incorrect. Finally, his theory of surplus-value is compared to the view that interest is a “return to capital.”

This chapter argues that capital in general and competition are the two main levels of abstraction in Marx’s theory in Capital and that they correspond to the theories of the production of surplus value in Capital I and II and the distribution of surplus value in Capital III. The main question addressed at the level of capital in general is the production of surplus value or the determination of the total surplus value produced in the economy as a whole. The main question addressed at the level of abstraction of competition is the distribution of surplus value, or the division of the total surplus value into individual parts (first the equalization of the rate of profit across industries and then the further division of the total surplus value into commercial profit, interest, and rent).

This article analyzes how the research on the relation between capitalism and the state in Latin America has developed from the 1950s up to the present. It starts from the premise that knowledge of this relation in sociology and other social sciences in Latin America has been taking shape through the disputes that have opposed three intellectual standpoints: autonomist, denialist, and North-centric. It analyzes how these standpoints envision the relationship between economy and politics and how they conceptualize three regionally and globally growing trends: the concentration of power, social inequality, and environmental depletion. It concludes with a series of challenges aimed at restoring the theoretical and political potency of the autonomist program in Latin American sociology.

This entry will look at Marx’s theoretical contributions to social reproduction in relationship to critical assessments of his alleged “neglect” of reproduction and to the development of the social sciences, particularly the “radical” social sciences that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and continued to develop ever since. Marx, as well as Engels, offered important insights for understanding social reproduction as an abstract feature of human societies that, however, can only be fully understood in its historically specific context (i.e., in the context of the interface between modes of production and social formations). Social reproduction in the twenty-first century is capitalist social reproduction, inherently contradictory, as successful struggles for the reproduction of the working classes, for example, do not necessarily challenge capitalism. Finally, this article argues that radical social scientists, because they identify the capitalist foundations of the social phenomena they study, have made important contributions to the study of capitalist reproduction.