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The so-called "problem" of structure and agency is clearly related to the philosophical problem of free will and determinism, yet the central philosophical issues are not well understood by theorists of structure and agency in the social sciences. In this article I draw a map of the available stances on the metaphysics of free will and determinism. With the aid of this map the problem of structure and agency will be seen to dissolve. The problem of structure and agency is sustained by a failure to distinguish between metaphysical and empirical senses of the relation between social structure and individual agency. The ramifications of this distinction are illustrated via a case study of competing explanations of perpetrator behavior in Christopher Browning's and Daniel Goldhagen's studies of the German Order Police in the Holocaust.

The mechanism-realist paradigm in the philosophy of science, championed by Mario Bunge and Roy Bhaskar, sets certain expectations for the substantive social-scientific application of the paradigm. To evaluate the application of the paradigm in accomplished substantive research, as well as the potential for future research, I examine the work of Charles Tilly, the exemplary substantive work in the mechanism-realist tradition. Based on this examination, I argue for the usefulness of explanatory mechanisms, provided that they are couched in terms of a heuristic. Such a position is the most reasonable one to adopt given the expectations set by the paradigm in relation to complexity stemming from mechanism interaction and to a notion of causality that is deeper than that acknowledged by empiricism and positivism.

We can make progress in political justification if we avoid debates about the extent of moral pluralism. Just by having a political view, we are committed to its realization but also to its defense upon justifying grounds. It would be inconsistent to seek to realize my view in ways that undermined my ability to justify it. Yet justifying a view implies that I am open to challenges to it, & that perpetually draws me potentially into dialogue with all others, regardless of my will, & into structures that allow an inclusive dialogue to take place, with decisions being made, on the basis of open public discussion, with which I may disagree. Thus a form of deliberative democracy, probably with representative institutions, is justified, without any normative assumptions being made. 16 References. Adapted from the source document.

Media pressure on government and public administration has intensified radically in recent years. This article analyzes the behind-the-scenes processes of a strategic government pitch that aims to push the success and core values of Norwegian immigration policies in the media. The study brings attention to the complex and often conflicting demands on government officials engaged in proactive media strategies. It examines how the officials adapt to the news media logic, perceive the competition with other strategic actors, and simultaneously pay regard to the constraints inherent in a bureaucratic ethos. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the article illuminates how bureaucrats legitimize proactive strategies; the risks involved; and how these strategies modify the distinctive roles of political leaders and civil servants, challenging traditional bureaucratic values such as impartiality, neutrality, and loyalty.

As demonstrated by San Francisco's recent adoption of instant runoff voting and New York City's recent expansion of its program for funding candidates for municipal office, local governments around the country have been actively engaged in examining and revising electoral and governmental processes. These local initiatives include alternative voting systems, campaign finance reforms, conflicts of interest codes, term limits, and revisions to tax, budget and legislative procedures. These local innovations illustrate both the capacity of local governments to restructure basic features of their political organization and their interest in doing so. Local political innovations also test the scope of local legal authority under home rule. Local innovation may be challenged as either unauthorized by state law or, more commonly, as inconsistent with and thus preempted by state laws governing local structure and elections. This paper examines local political innovations, their reception in state courts and the implications for home rule and political reform more generally. It finds that to a considerable degree state courts have upheld local innovations either by recognizing the dominant local interest in questions of local government structure or by determining that state laws do not preclude local departures from state-prescribed models. These political innovation cases suggest techniques that may be used to expand local legal autonomy. More generally, local political innovations show localities – as well as, if not more than, states – can be laboratories of democracy. A significant benefit of local freedom to innovate under home rule can be the local introduction and testing of political reforms than can national benefits.

Heinrich Meier's work on Carl Schmitt has dramatically reoriented the international debate about Schmitt and his significance for twentieth-century political thought. In The Lesson of Carl Schmitt, Meier identifies the core of Schmitt's thought as political theology-that is, political theorizing that claims to have its ultimate ground in the revelation of a mysterious or suprarational God. This radical, but half-hidden, theological foundation underlies the whole of Schmitt's often difficult and complex oeuvre, rich in historical turns and political convolutions, intentional deceptions and unin

This essay is a call for research on the role of information and communication technology in distant lands. I address the globalization of science as a process by replacing the concept of development with the idea of reagency, a process of redirection involving a contingent reaction between identities. I focus on the Guest, an identity that assumes particular importance in relation to Hosts in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Following recent work that stresses the dependence of knowledge production on places, the Guest House is introduced as an architectural structure that crystallizes and reinforces a Guest/Host relationship that has developed during the aid era. The advent of the Internet offers the possibility of a change in the structure of science, with the inclusion of researchers in distant lands as full participants in global scientific communities. The principal issue is whether the connectivity initiative centering on the Internet is just another development program, like so many others that have come and gone, or whether it is different in character. Three empirical research questions are posed to assist in examining this question. A minor thread throughout the essay explains the author's romantic interest in the subject, and his transition from a phony donor to a real one.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Critical Insights: Bringing the social sciences and humanities to AI -- Section I: Posthumanism -- Chapter 2: Virtually Grown Up: Artificial Intelligence in Youth Fiction -- Chapter 3: The Feminized Robot: Labour and Harawayan Afterlives -- Section II: Human values -- Chapter 4: AI's fast and furtive spread by infusion into technologies that are already in use – a critical assessment -- Chapter 5: Dumbwaiters & Smartphones: The Responsibility of Intelligence -- Section III: Media and Language -- Chapter 6: Artificial Intelligence: a medium that hides its nature -- Chapter 7: Gender Bias in Machine Translation Systems -- Section IV: Governance -- Chapter 8: Not Anytime Soon: The clinical translation of nanorobots -- Chapter 9: Controversial Covid-19 contact-tracing app in India: digital self-defence, governance and surveillance -- Chapter 10: Intelligent Justice': AI Implementations in China's Legal Systems -- Section V: Resistance -- Chapter 11: Artificial Intelligence between Oppression and Resistance: Black Feminist Perspectives on Emerging Technologies -- Chapter 12: AI Ruined the Internet – and Everything Else: A manifesto -- Index.

Physiological & psychiatric approaches to the study of terrorism are reviewed from a social science perspective. A physiological approach is used to develop an individual-level model of terrorist contagion. The effects of terrorism on its immediate victims are considered, & the possibility of panic, among the general public, resulting from terrorist acts is discussed. The policy & theoretical considerations raised by the physiological & psychiatric approaches are explored. 1 Figure, 43 References. HA

This paper is an introduction to the special issue on 'space and analytical political economy'. First, the term analytical political economy is defined by an examination of the historical rise of the political economy perspective within economics. Second, three leading variants within the analytical political economic tradition are distinguished and described—neo-Ricardianism, fundamental Marxism, and rational choice Marxism. Last, the consequences of inserting geography into the aspatial theories of analytical political economy are briefly reviewed.

Reading Harry Holland's literary works as an integral part of his political project and vision, this essay argues that greater attention be paid to the dissident, radical and revolutionary socialist currents shaping Labour's thought world in the pre-1935 period. Holland's socialist project, and its ambitions to shape new kinds of political subjects, had, I suggest, a wider resonance and is of greater contemporary interest than most historians have allowed. His poetry and literary works need restored to scholarly and political attention.