Historical sociologists have criticized their discipline for a tendency to ignore the temporal dimensions of social life, either by studying the correlates of outcomes rather than the character of temporally connected events or by treating events as surface manifestations of large-scale and long-term processes of change. These critiques have led to a reassessment of the value of narratives and to new methods for mapping historical sequences of events. Yet there has been relatively little discussion of the concepts needed to create a more event-centered historical sociology. This article explores the way in which four different concepts of time-duration, pace, trajectory, and cycle-have been used in recent historical social science. These concepts allow one to analyze the temporal characteristics of connected events that constitute long-term historical processes as well as the way in which actors understand and experience the temporal flow of events. They are most useful, the author argues when employed in a manner that is attentive to the understandings of social actors and the problematic reconstruction of the past. These concepts constitute building blocks for the construction of a more event-centered historical sociology.
, a small group of labor organizers from the West German metalworker union, IG Metall, stand shivering in the dark outside a Siemens plant in the East German city of Rostock, passing out leaflets to the morning shift as it enters the plant. Siemens' West German management and other firms in the East have just tried to renege on an earlier promise to increase wages by 26 percent, claiming that they can no longer afford increased wage costs due to the disastrous conditions of the East German economy. That was the official story; but with 40 percent unemployment and massive job insecurity in the East, with no history of western-style collective bargaining, and with membership in free unions new and untested, the employers hope an aggressive united front against the union will win them reduced labor costs and more wage flexibility (Turner 1998:3). It seems-in Lowell Turner's words-like "an employer's dream labor conflict" (p. 4). The business community and the business press urge restraint from the union, while the Economist titles its article on the coming conflict "Mass Suicide" (p. 3). On that chilly morning in early April, it is by no means clear that the union effort to fight the wage freeze will succeed. And the stakes are high: Should it fail, the future of social partnership and unionization are uncertain-not only in the eastern laender but in Germany as a whole. Union leaders have planned only a "warning strike" for this day, but no one knows how the East German workers, after sixty years of Nazism and state socialism, will react. "Listen, I don't know 1 This incident is summarized from Turner (1998).
How do global issue constructions serve as resources for actors engaged in domestic political contention, and what does the appropriation of global ideas by domestic actors imply about the spread of global culture? To contribute to knowledge about conflict-based diffusion of global ideas, we examine the histories of global constructions of indigenous rights and national debates about indigenous rights in Fiji and Tanzania. While global models of indigenous rights emphasize self-determination for nondominant, culturally distinct groups at risk from the nation-state, advocates for indigenization policies in Fiji and Tanzania have argued for state policies to entrench political and economic rights for majority or near-majority groups that were well integrated into the nation-state. Although transnationally connected indigenous rights organizations have a greater presence in Tanzania than in Fiji, actors in Fiji remain more engaged with changes in international indigenous rights discourse than their counterparts in Tanzania. This difference reflects variations in the leverage global culture offered in the two cases because of its externality to national political debates. In Fiji, actors appropriated global culture as a means to internationalize a domestic dispute, while in Tanzania the impetus for indigenization came from global economic pressures. Our findings imply that conflict-based diffusion concentrates agency with respect to the use of global legal discourses in domestic actors rather than the globally connected actors and experts who carry global culture in consensus-based diffusion.
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