Defining the State from within

Mayrl, Damon; Quinn, Sarah

doi:10.1177/0735275116632557

Cited by 74 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 81 publications

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“…Recent sociological scholarship suggests the need to deepen the cultural dimensions of institutional analysis of state organizations and processes (Mayrl & Quinn, 2016;Norton, 2014). Institutionalist scholars propose that policies and programs have "interpretive effects" by offering sources of meaning to their beneficiaries (Pierson, 1993).…”

Section: The Cultural Infrastructure Of Welfare Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Gendered Politics of Pandemic Relief: Labor and Family Policies in Denmark, Germany, and the United States During COVID-19

Bariola

Collins

2021

American Behavioral Scientist

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The COVID-19 pandemic has magnified families’ struggles to reconcile caregiving and employment, especially for working mothers. How have different countries reacted to these troubling circumstances? What policies have been implemented to alleviate the pernicious effects of the pandemic on gender and labor inequalities? We examine the policies offered in Denmark, Germany, and the United States, three countries that represent distinct welfare regimes. We find important differences among the policy solutions provided, but also in the “cultural infrastructures” that allow policies to work as intended, or not. In Denmark, a social-democratic welfare state, robust federal salary guarantee programs supplemented an already strong social safety net. The country was among the first to lock down and reorganize health care—and also among the first to reopen schools and child care facilities, acknowledging that parents’ employment depends on child care provisioning, especially for mothers. Germany, a corporatist regime, substantially expanded existing programs and provided generous subsidies. However, despite an ongoing official commitment to reduce gender inequality, the cultural legacy of a father breadwinner/mother caregiver family model meant that reopening child care facilities was not a first priority, which pushed many mothers out of paid work. In the U.S. liberal regime, private organizations—particularly in privileged economic sectors—are the ones primarily offering supports to working parents. Patchwork efforts at lockdown and reopening have meant a lengthy period of limbo for working families, with disastrous consequences for women, especially the most vulnerable. Among such varied “solutions” to the consequences of the pandemic, those of liberal regimes seem to be worsening inequalities. The unprecedented nature of the current pandemic recession suggests a need for scholars to gender the study of economic crises.

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Section: The Cultural Infrastructure Of Welfare Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Gendered Politics of Pandemic Relief: Labor and Family Policies in Denmark, Germany, and the United States During COVID-19

Bariola

Collins

2021

American Behavioral Scientist

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“…A focus on cognitive schemas for understanding state action leads away from a Weberian inquiry into the essential nature of the state and toward a more nuanced consideration of the malleable and contested boundaries between state and society. As Mayrl and Quinn (2016, p. 6) note, “states are not objects with natural boundaries so much as entities forged through boundary work. During episodes of boundary work, actors struggle to make sense of the organization of governance in light of any existing schema of the state.…”

Section: Questions For Political Sociologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward a political sociology of privatized punishment: Contestation, state structures, and stratification

Burkhardt

Connor

2021

Sociology Compass

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Privatized punishment—in which nonstate actors carry out state‐mandated criminal punishments—has developed into a common practice since its rise in the 1980s. Many disciplines, including criminology, political science, public administration, and economics, have examined its use over the past four decades. However, privatized punishment has not garnered much attention in sociology. This is surprising, as privatized punishment touches on the key themes in sociology, and in the political sociology in particular. In this paper, we attempt to insert privatized punishment into classic and contemporary discussions in political sociology. Below, we offer an overview of privatized punishment and provide a high‐level review of how other social scientific disciplines have studied the phenomenon. Then we argue that political sociology provides a useful, if underutilized, lens for studying privatized punishment. In particular, we highlight three political sociological themes—contestation, state structures, and stratification—that can be fruitfully applied to the study of privatized punishment, and we sketch multiple lines of future research informed by these themes.

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“…Consequently, the progressive participatory approach that appears and aims, at least in theory, to create a real possibility of active participation, but turns out in fact, to reify the old top-down paternalist approach which counter-poses state and society as distinct categories, by hierarchically ordering them. One thus notes a 'path-dependent effect', 53 a condition where the organisation of the everyday operation of the scheme simply reflects the pre-existing bureaucratic hierarchical set-up. In other words, although the project was supposed to operate in a bottom-up participatory-based fashion through active farmer participation, the sheer scale and hierarchical nature of the state system obliges the government to rely on a top-down bureaucratic approach.…”

Section: Institutional Settingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamics of state-society relations in Ethiopia: paradoxes of community empowerment and participation in irrigation management

Mulugeta

2019

Journal of Eastern African Studies

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This article examines processes by which development project implementations afford the state the appearance of being a separate structure. By exploring the implementation of an important state development project in Northwestern Ethiopia, the Koga Irrigation and Watershed Management (KIWM) scheme, it shows why and how the project plan does not correspond to the real life of the scheme.The article unpacks assumptions that policymakers and development practitioners make about the a priori existence of a community and state distinction, and the ways in which they arrange them as functionally differentiated entities. It also shows how the project's community-driven participatory approach, wherein local people were involved in managing the scheme, produces the effect of ghettoising practices of abuse as community issues. The article contributes to recent ethnographic studies of state-society relations and contends that these studies could gain important insights by exploring development project implementation practices as an entry point into the study of the processes that give the state the appearance of a material reality.

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Defining the State from within

Cited by 74 publications

References 81 publications

The Gendered Politics of Pandemic Relief: Labor and Family Policies in Denmark, Germany, and the United States During COVID-19

The Gendered Politics of Pandemic Relief: Labor and Family Policies in Denmark, Germany, and the United States During COVID-19

Toward a political sociology of privatized punishment: Contestation, state structures, and stratification

Dynamics of state-society relations in Ethiopia: paradoxes of community empowerment and participation in irrigation management

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