HOW SHOULD WE characterize the economic period we have now entered? After nearly two brutal years, the Great Recession appears to be over, at least technically. Yet a return to normalcy seems far off. By some measures, each recession since the 1980s has retreated more slowly than the one before it. In one sense, we never fully recovered from the last one, in 2001: the share of the civilian population with a job never returned to its previous peak before this downturn began, and incomes were stagnant throughout the decade. Still, the weakness that lingered through much of the 2000s shouldn’t be confused with the trauma of the past two years, a trauma that will remain heavy for quite some time.

The unemployment rate hit 10 percent in October, and there are good reasons to believe that by 2011, 2012, even 2014, it will have declined only a little. Late last year, the average duration of unemployment surpassed six months, the first time that has happened since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking that number. As of this writing, for every open job in the U.S., six people are actively looking for work.

All of these figures understate the magnitude of the jobs crisis. The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s. And for large swaths of society—young adults, men, minorities—that figure was much higher (among teenagers, for instance, even the narrowest measure of unemployment stood at roughly 27 percent). One recent survey showed that 44 percent of families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year.

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The latest issue, Volume 4, Number 11, of  The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences includes:

• Training Adults’ Trainers in Greece: “Efforts for Innovation” by Constantinos Tsamadias, Konstantina Koutrouba and Maria Theodosopoulou.
• Space, Process Philosophy and Mental Distress by Ian Tucker.
• University and Regional Development: The Case of the School of Humanities, University of the Aegean in Rhodes by Chryssi Vitsilakis, Persa Fokiali and Eugenia Arvanitis.
• The Mediating Role of Work-family Conflict in the Relationship between Supervisor Support and Job Satisfaction by Noryati Ngah, Aminah Ahmad, Tengku Aizan Tengku Abdul Hamid and Azahari Ismail.
• Reflexivity and the Regulation of GM Food and Feed in the EU by Alexandros Khoury and Athanasia Chalari.

The ‘Energy Cultures’ research programme applies a novel combination of complementary social science methods to improve understanding of the drivers of household energy behaviours, and to deliver an effective strategy to achieve more energy-efficient behaviours.

Our disciplinary backgrounds include physics/engineering, economics, marketing, sociology/human geography and law.  Prof Lawson, Dr Stephenson and Prof Carrington will co-present at the plenary.

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EM: Over the last couple of years you have been working on the question of religion from a series of perspectives: philosophical, political, sociological, moral, and cognitive. In your Yale lectures from the fall of 2008, you approached the challenge of the vitality and renewal of religion in world society in terms of the need to rethink the link between social theory and secularization theory. In those lectures, you suggest that we need to uncouple modernization theory from secularization theory. Does this mean that you are taking distance from the dominant trends in social theory in the West, which began with Pareto, continued through Durkheim, and reached their apogee in Weber, and thus also from its explicit and avowed Eurocentrism?

JH: We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The debate over the sociological thesis of secularization has led to a revision above all in respect to prognostic statements. On the one hand, the system of religion has become more differentiated and has limited itself to pastoral care, that is, it has largely lost other functions. On the other hand, there is no global connection between societal modernization and religion’s increasing loss of significance, a connection that would be so close that we could count on the disappearance of religion. In the still undecided dispute as to whether the religious USA or the largely secularized Western Europe is the exception to a general developmental trend, José Casanova for example has developed interesting new hypotheses. In any case, globally we have to count on the continuing vitality of world religions.

In view of the consequences of which you speak, I consider the program of the group around Shmuel Eisenstadt and its comparative research on civilizations promising and informative. In the emerging world society, and concerning the social infrastructure, there are, as it were, by now only modern societies, but these appear in the form of multiple modernities because the great world religions have had a great culture-forming power over the centuries, and they have not yet entirely lost this power. As in the West, these “strong” traditions paved the way in East Asia, in the Middle East, and even in Africa for the development of cultural structures that confront each other today—for example, in the dispute over the right interpretation of human rights. Our Western self-understanding of modernity emerged from the confrontation with our own traditions. The same dialectic between tradition and modernity repeats itself today in other parts of the world. There, too, one reaches back to one’s own traditions to confront the challenges of societal modernization, rather than to succumb to them. Against this background, intercultural discourses about the foundations of a more just international order can no longer be conducted one-sidedly, from the perspective of “first-borns.” These discourses must become habitual [sich einspielen] under the symmetrical conditions of mutual perspective-taking if the global players are to finally bring their social-Darwinist power games under control. The West is one participant among others, and all participants must be willing to be enlightened by others about their respective blind spots. If we were to learn one lesson from the financial crisis, it is that it is high time for the multicultural world society to develop a political constitution.

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The most recent issue, Volume 4, Number 11, of  The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences includes:

• Realist Evaluation of Social Services: What Works and in What Circumstances by Mansoor Abul Fazl Kazi.
• Measuring Technical Efficiency and Profitability: A Case Study of the Malaysian Commercial Banking System by Nur Azura Sanusi, Roshanim Koris and Suriyani Muhamad.
• Relevance of Adult Education to the Yar’adua’s Seven Point Agenda in Nigeria by Sydney Nwanakponna Osuji.
• Effective Environmental Policy toward Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions Produced from Transportation by Fazil Najafi, Sofia Vidalis, Kim Munksgaard and Matthew Diamond.
• Toward a Social Change: Restructuring of Roles and Educational Models from a Gender’s Meaning by Dra. María Pilar Cáceres Reche, Francisco Javier Hinojo Lucena, Inmaculada Aznar Díaz and Lucia Villar Jimenez.

The eleventh issue of Volume 4 of The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences has been published.

Volume 4, Number 11 includes:

• Modern Analysis of Bike Sharing Feasibility by Sofia Vidalis, Fazil Najafi, Dain Chernick, James Jackson, James Parker and Scott Ryland.
• Cross-Cultural Communication: Taiwanese University Students’ Understanding of Symbols in the Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Marilyn Baker.
• A Multidimensional Approach to Interprofessional Education and Practice by Maria Julia.
• Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Disciplinary Approaches to Identifying Public Contracting Discrimination in the United States by George R. La Noue.
• Invisible Frontiers in Contemporary Cities: An Ethno-Semiotic Approach by Massimo Leone.

Abstract: An excessive focus on methodological training and recent case studies has left political scientists woefully ignorant of work done by scholars in other fields, particularly that of economic historians and historical demographers. Most glaringly, political science has missed the emergence of ‘cliodynamics,’ or the novel attempt to fashion broad historical trends into consistently measurable data over great lengths of time. I therefore not only submit a comprehensive survey of the population, economy, and conflict research offered by historiographers, but also explain how this data can be harnessed by political science.

If you have read the paper you may wish to add a review.

Just as soon as anyone notes the dismal state of science in contemporary Muslim-majority countries, someone else with a little knowledge of history will observe that the Islamic world was once the center of the scientific world, and Arabic was once the lingua franca. From the eighth to the end of the fourteenth centuries, the most important work in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, optics, and medicine took place under Muslim rule.

Before Europe’s first university had opened in Bologna, the House of Wisdom in Baghdad was amassing a library that reportedly housed as many as four hundred thousand volumes. There, under the patronage of the Abbasid dynasty, Arabic-speaking scholars—including Persians, Christians, Jews, and others—translated Greek texts by authors such as Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates, and Galen, as well as material in Persian, Syriac, and Sanskrit. It was not until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that this ancient learning came to Europe, primarily by way of Muslim Spain. As late as the seventeenth century, European colleges still relied on the Canon, a medical textbook by Avicenna, the Latinized name of the medieval physician and polymath Ibn Sina.

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Congratulations to all of the Award Winner finalists:

In issue 20(1) of The Journal of Evolution and Technology, we published “Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism” by Stefan Lorenz Sorgner (March 2009). In this intriguing article, Sorgner argues that there aresignificant similarities between the concept of the posthuman (as typically deployed in transhumanist thought) and Nietzsche’s celebrated notion of the overhuman (often referred to, perhaps misleadingly, as “the Superman”). Sorgner does not claim that late twentieth-century and contemporary transhumanist thinkers were knowingly influenced by Nietzsche: this is a question that he explicitly leaves open. Nor does he depict transhumanism as monolithic, or the concept of the posthuman as unambiguous. For all that, he suggests that the similarity between the two concepts – overhuman and posthuman – is not merely superficial: it lies at a fundamental level.

Sorgner compares the posthuman and overhuman concepts in a way that is calculated to bring out a deep similarity. He discusses, for example, how the relevant systems of thought are alike in viewing humanity as merely a work in progress, with only limited potential in the absence of a radical transformation. Humanity is, in other words,  not an evolutionary culmination but something that cries out for improvement. Sorgner adds, however, that the idea of the overhuman provides Nietzsche with a grounding for values that appears to be missing in transhumanist thought.

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