Citizenship and Civil Society: A Framework of Rights and Obligations in Liberal, Traditional, and Social Democratic Regimes

by Thomas Janoski

Overview

Rights and obligations are confusing. When people really want or need something they call it a right. Can they simply attach this word to anything they want? Can people disregard obligations with impunity? This book argues that they can not. Rights and obligations are systematically related in important ways backed by the state. One must understand those relationships in specific ways to know what can or cannot be done with rights and obligations in public discourse and politics. They must create a web of interaction among citizens so that more long term social investments may be made.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521571982
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/13/1998
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Thomas Janoski is a world-recognized authority on political sociology and work, organizations, and inequality. He is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kentucky. He was the lead professor in creating the Management and Marketing Studies program at Duke University and Director of the Initiative in Political and Social Research (QIPSR) at the University of Kentucky. He has published widely on public policies in advanced industrialized societies concerning labor market and unemployment policies, as well as immigration and naturalization processes over decades and centuries. He has published 12 books, won three awards, and has three more books on the way. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and wrote his dissertation under Professor Harold Wilensky, a prominent political sociologist. He also worked with the renowned Weberian Scholar Reinhard Bendix Weberian. He has taught political sociology, occupations and organizations, sociological theory, and comparative-historical methods at the University of Kentucky, Duke University, and the University of California-Berkeley. Over the years, he has given many lectures in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Australia, Japan, and China.

Diverse Background: His father was a UAW member and worked at Dana Corporation loading auto frames. His mother took an hour-long bus ride to downtown Detroit to work afternoons as a telegraph operator for Western Union. He was the first in his family to go to college and paid his tuition by taking jobs in steel mills, chemical plants, coal gangs, boiler houses, and auto assembly lines in the Detroit area. After graduating from Michigan State University and receiving four previous draft notices, he was inducted into the Army with the fifth notice. Upon returning from Korea, he worked at the VA investigating schools and counseling heroin addicts. He then traveled around the world for two years on a low budget through Asia and Europe. Antonio Gramsci might say that he is an "organic intellectual" or one who writes about the more significant facets of his working-class background.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to citizenship; 2. The framing of citizens' rights: expansion, clarification, and meaning; 3. Reconstructing obligations and patriotism: limitations, sanctions and exchange in a system of rights; 4. Citizen-selves in restricted and generalized exchange; 5. The balance of rights and obligations through nesting, civil society, and social culture; 6. Incremental change in citizenship over decades: power resources, state structures, ideology, and external forces; 7. Momentous change over centuries: from Wasps to Locomotives in the development and sequencing of rights; 8. Conclusions and implications; Bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

[Janoski's] ambitious attempt to fuse social, legal, and political thought will challenge people to think about the nature and scope of citizenship rights.
— Political Science Quarterly

David Fagelson

"Aiming for nothing less than a synthesis of political philosophy, behaviorist models of social exchange, and state-centered developmental analysis, Janoski proposes an ambitious, wide-ranging but emphatically empirical theory of citizenship. Exhibiting a stunning mastery of scholarly literature, Citizenship and Civil Society critically evaluates and often surpasses recent work. Enormously learned and boldly steeped in the political and civic exigencies of our day, Janoski has set forth a series of hypotheses that must frame the forthcoming research agendas for all serious students of citizenship." Margaret R. Somers, University of Michigan

Professor Janoski has here made a substantial contribution indeed to both citizenship theory and comparative political economy. Two fields of major social science advance in recent years, they are rarely brought together. Combining them across a considerable historical sweep and a wide range of societies, Janoski has produced a work rich in original analysis and insight." - Colin Crouch, University of Oxford and European University Institute, Florence

"Citizenship and Civil Society is the most comprehensive and integrative examination of issues surrounding citizens' rights and obligations since T. H. Marshall's seminal work on the historical progression of rights. Focusing on the advanced industrial democracies, Janoski surveys legal, political, social, and participation rights in countries with different political traditions and institutions. He documents the strong link between divergent conceptions of citizenship and different ways of organizing welfare states." Charles C. Ragin, Northwestern University

"A bold and comprehensive theory which maps out the complex historical relationship between rights and obligations, Citizenship and Civil Society analyzes the key issues confronting the modern polity." Bryan Turner, Deakin University

"...[Janoski's] ambitious attempt to fuse social, legal, and political thought will challenge people to think about the nature and scope of citizenship rights." David Fagelson, Political Science Quarterly

"There is much more of value in this book than can be outlined here. in particular, the discussion of limited and generalized exchange is excellent, as is the treament of the historical development of citizenship. This book is a valuable addition to the growing library of sociological accounts of citizenship." J.M. Barbalet, American Journal of Sociology

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