Society

What is the nature of our current societies? Do we see a clash of civilizations, or the end of history? The advent of globalization, or the birth of the network society? Are we witnessing the emergence of a risk society, or the advent of the knowledge society? More fundamentally, is ‘society’ an ideological construct that should be abandoned? Coming into English from the Latin term ‘societas’ via Old French ‘société’, the etymology of ‘society,’ in the sense of a system adopted by a group of co-existing individuals for mutually beneficial purposes, can be traced back at least to the mid-sixteenth century. By the Age of Enlightenment, ‘society’ was increasingly used in intellectual discourse to characterize human relations, often in contrast to notions of ‘the state’. During the nineteenth century, the concept was subject to highly elaborate treatment in various intellectual fields, such as political economy, philosophy, and legal thought; and ‘society’ continues to be a central conceptual tool, not only for sociology, but also for many other social-science disciplines, such as anthropology, economics, political sciences, and law. The notion resonates beyond the social sciences into the humanities; it is a fundamental concept, like nature, the universe, or the economy. Moreover, ‘society’ remains a highly contested concept, as was demonstrated, for example, by the controversy surrounding the former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s pithy assertion of the neoliberal economic wisdom that ‘there is no such thing as society’ (Woman’s Own, 31 October 1987); and by the term’s rehabilitation at the turn of the twenty-first century, not least with the ascendancy of the notion of ‘civil society’. This four-volume collection, a new title in the Routledge Critical Concepts in Sociology series, brings together both canonical and the best cutting-edge research to document the intellectual origins and development of what remains a key framework within which contemporary work in the social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, proceeds. Edited by Reiner Grundmann and Nico Stehr, two leading scholars in the field, this Routledge Major Work makes available the most useful, important and representative treatments of the subject matter, and helps to make sense of the great variety of perspectives and approaches in which social scientists and other thinkers have understood, and continue to understand, society. Fully indexed and with a comprehensive introduction newly written by the editors, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Society is an essential reference work, destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital research resource.

Professions, class and society:solicitors in 19th century Birmingham

The thesis provides an analysis of an occupation in the process of making itself a profession. The solicitors' profession in Birmingham underwent a great many changes during the 19th century against a background of industrialisation and urbanisation. The solicitors' conception of their status and role, in the face of these challenges, had implications for successful strategies of professionalisation. The increased prestige and power of the profession, and especially its elite, are examined in their social context rather than in terms of a technical process, or educational and organisational change. The thesis argues that -the profession's social relationships and broad concerns were significant in establishing solicitors as "professional men". In particular these are related to the profession's efforts to gain control of markets for legal services and increase social status. In the course of achieving these aims a concept of profession and a self-image were articulated by solicitors in order to persuade society and the state of the legitimacy of their claims. The concept of the gentlemanly professional was of critical importance in this instance. The successful creation of a provincial professional "community" by the end of the 19th century rested principally on a social and moral conception of professionalism rather than one which stressed specialised training and knowledge, professional organisations and credentials.

Nonlinear speech analysis algorithms mapped to a standard metric achieve clinically useful quantification of average Parkinson's disease symptom severity

The standard reference clinical score quantifying average Parkinson's disease (PD) symptom severity is the Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS). At present, UPDRS is determined by the subjective clinical evaluation of the patient's ability to adequately cope with a range of tasks. In this study, we extend recent findings that UPDRS can be objectively assessed to clinically useful accuracy using simple, self-administered speech tests, without requiring the patient's physical presence in the clinic. We apply a wide range of known speech signal processing algorithms to a large database (approx. 6000 recordings from 42 PD patients, recruited to a six-month, multi-centre trial) and propose a number of novel, nonlinear signal processing algorithms which reveal pathological characteristics in PD more accurately than existing approaches. Robust feature selection algorithms select the optimal subset of these algorithms, which is fed into non-parametric regression and classification algorithms, mapping the signal processing algorithm outputs to UPDRS. We demonstrate rapid, accurate replication of the UPDRS assessment with clinically useful accuracy (about 2 UPDRS points difference from the clinicians' estimates, p < 0.001). This study supports the viability of frequent, remote, cost-effective, objective, accurate UPDRS telemonitoring based on self-administered speech tests. This technology could facilitate large-scale clinical trials into novel PD treatments.

[Review of] Ivo Mijnssen, The Quest for an Ideal Youth in Putin’s Russia I. Back to Our Future! History, Modernity and Patriotism According to Nashi, 2005–2012. Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2012, 202pp., e 34.90 p/b

THE YOUTH MOVEMENT NASHI (OURS) WAS FOUNDED IN THE SPRING of 2005 against the backdrop of Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’. Its aim was to stabilise Russia’s political system and take back the streets from opposition demonstrators. Personally loyal to Putin and taking its ideological orientation from Surkov’s concept of ‘sovereign democracy’, Nashi has sought to turn the tide on ‘defeatism’ and develop Russian youth into a patriotic new elite that ‘believes in the future of Russia’ (p. 15). Combining a wealth of empirical detail and the application of insights from discourse theory, Ivo Mijnssen analyses the organisation’s development between 2005 and 2012. His analysis focuses on three key moments—the organisation’s foundation, the apogee of its mobilisation around the Bronze Soldier dispute with Estonia, and the 2010 Seliger youth camp—to help understand Nashi’s organisation, purpose and ideational outlook as well as the limitations and challenges it faces. As such,the book is insightful both for those with an interest in post-Soviet Russian youth culture, and for scholars seeking a rounded understanding of the Kremlin’s initiatives to return a sense of identity and purpose to Russian national life.The first chapter, ‘Background and Context’, outlines the conceptual toolkit provided by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to help make sense of developments on the terrain of identity politics. In their terms, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has experienced acute dislocation of its identity. With the tangible loss of great power status, Russian realities have become unfixed from a discourse enabling national life to be constructed, albeit inherently contingently, as meaningful. The lack of a Gramscian hegemonic discourse to provide a unifying national idea was securitised as an existential threat demanding special measures. Accordingly, the identification of those who are ‘notUs’ has been a recurrent theme of Nashi’s discourse and activity. With the victory in World War II held up as a foundational moment, a constitutive other is found in the notion of ‘unusual fascists’. This notion includes not just neo-Nazis, but reflects a chain of equivalence that expands to include a range of perceived enemies of Putin’s consolidation project such as oligarchs and pro-Western liberals.The empirical background is provided by the second chapter, ‘Russia’s Youth, the Orange Revolution, and Nashi’, which traces the emergence of Nashi amid the climate of political instability of 2004 and 2005. A particularly note-worthy aspect of Mijnssen’s work is the inclusion of citations from his interviews with Nashicommissars; the youth movement’s cadres. Although relatively few in number, such insider conversations provide insight into the ethos of Nashi’s organisation and the outlook of those who have pledged their involvement. Besides the discussion of Nashi’s manifesto, the reader thus gains insight into the motivations of some participants and behind-the-scenes details of Nashi’s activities in response to the perceived threat of anti-government protests. The third chapter, ‘Nashi’s Bronze Soldier’, charts Nashi’s role in elevating the removal of a World War II monument from downtown Tallinn into an international dispute over the interpretation of history. The events subsequent to this securitisation of memory are charted in detail, concluding that Nashi’s activities were ultimately unsuccessful as their demands received little official support.The fourth chapter, ‘Seliger: The Foundry of Modernisation’, presents a distinctive feature of Mijnssen’s study, namely his ethnographic account as a participant observer in the Youth International Forum at Seliger. In the early years of the camp (2005–2007), Russian participants received extensive training, including master classes in ‘methods of forestalling mass unrest’ (p. 131), and the camp served to foster a sense of group identity and purpose among activists. After 2009 the event was no longer officially run as a Nashi camp, and its role became that of a forum for the exchange of ideas about innovation, although camp spirit remained a central feature. In 2010 the camp welcomed international attendees for the first time. As one of about 700 international participants in that year the author provides a fascinating account based on fieldwork diaries.Despite the polemical nature of the topic, Mijnssen’s analysis remains even-handed, exemplified in his balanced assessment of the Seliger experience. While he details the frustrations and disappointments of the international participants with regard to the unaccustomed strict camp discipline, organisational and communication failures, and the controlled format of many discussions,he does not neglect to note the camp’s successes in generating a gratifying collective dynamic between the participants, even among the international attendees who spent only a week there.In addition to the useful bibliography, the book is back-ended by two appendices, which provide the reader with important Russian-language primary source materials. The first is Nashi’s ‘Unusual Fascism’ (Neobyknovennyi fashizm) brochure, and the second is the booklet entitled ‘Some Uncomfortable Questions to the Russian Authorities’ (Neskol’ko neudobnykh voprosov rossiiskoivlasti) which was provided to the Seliger 2010 instructors to guide them in responding to probing questions from foreign participants. Given that these are not readily publicly available even now, they constitute a useful resource from the historical perspective.