As a result of many years of reading about and teaching Max Weber’s famous Protestant Ethic thesis, I have developed an approach to covering this material in both my undergraduate and graduate theory courses which has been beneficial to students and has helped them make sense of the rather complex argument developed by Weber. I provide a working model of all such scholarly inquires geared off the Science Triad, culminating in a five-step approach to organizing and explaining the Weber thesis. In addition, I provide an annotated bibliography of selected scholarly ruminations on Weber’s work in general and the Protestant Ethic thesis in particular.
The COVID-19 pandemic has once again brought into relief and tension the delicate balancing act modern governments must strike in assuring individual liberties of its citizens, while at the same time dealing with infectious diseases and other public health risks. It is not clear how best to strike this balance, or how to judge which countries are doing an adequate job and which others are failing (on either or both fronts). What is clear, however, is that by virtue of it being available to the state, public health is based not merely on medical expertise but also on power, insofar as it part of the regulative apparatus of the administrative state which can be implemented by decree at the behest of the executive
Erving Goffman’s emphasis on impression management in everyday life means that for the most part persons offer only partial or incomplete glimpses of themselves. Indeed, under specifiable conditions self-presentations may take the form of a negational self. If negational selves exist at the person or individual level, then they must also exist at the collective level (that is, if we are to take seriously such notions as the social mind, collective representations, or even culture). Understandings of how this negational self appears and is produced at various analytical levels (micro, meso, and macro) can be anchored via a conceptual schema which merges Goffman’s own identity typology with the three-world model of Jürgen Habermas by way of Talcott Parsons.
Since the early 1980s, specialized problem-solving courts known as drug courts emerged in the United States as a response to the backlog of drug and alcohol-related cases plaguing the U.S. criminal justice system. In a few decades, with the seeming success of the drug court in helping AOD defendants achieve sobriety while reducing recidivism, the drug court model has achieved international prominence as well. This paper discusses a pilot study which seeks to analyze the feasibility of connecting a website, drughelp.care, developed at the host institution of the co-authors, to the everyday operations of local drug courts. Talcott Parsons’ AGIL schema is utilized as a conceptual template for organizing our thinking about how the website could improve services to administrators and clients according to the unique functional elements of the drug court.
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