ASA AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION Review: Whither South Asian Sociology? Author(s): Sujata Patel Reviewed work(s): Sociology in South Asia: Heritage and Challenges by Partha Mukherji ; Jacop Aikara ; Chandan Sengupta Source: Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Jul., 1998), pp. 338-340 Published by: American Sociological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2655461 Accessed: 18/05/2009 11:14 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=asa. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Contemporary Sociology. STOR ® http://www.jstor.org
338 Symposia to recognize Canada as multinational and multicultural. One solution: Make the Canadian federation a confederal union, comprising Quebec, Aboriginal peoples, and the rest of Canada. Saskia Sassen says that globalization challenges two features of much social science: explicit or implicit assumptions that the nation-state is the container of social processes and that institutions are encased within a given territory when in fact a process within a nation may not be a national one. We need new categories that do not assume the usual dualities, global-local or national-global. The analysis of globalization typically privileges the internationalization of capital but remains silent on transnationalization of labor. Now a strategic site for transnationalization of labor and the formation of transnational identities, major cities are also a site for new types of politics. Barry Wellman presents seven propositions to show what the nature of North American communities means for privatization, specialization, and loose coupling of community and organization. One example: Both scholars and the public have seen communities as composed of broad-based relationships in which each member felt secure in obtaining a wide variety of help; but in Toronto most ties in personal communities are specialized, with active personal community members supplying only a few dimensions of social support. This means that people need differentiated portfolios of ties to obtain a wide variety of resources. In market terms, they must shop at boutiques instead of dropping by general stores. Wellman concludes that research is needed on the consequences of people's having such insecure sources of supply. Such essays, arising from a widely shared belief that annual