In contrast to neoliberal rhetoric, the commercialisation of knowledge has proved to be an intricate endeavour that implies unexpected effects. Taking Monsanto’s transgenic canola and its propertisation regime as an example, we will shed some light on the counterintuitive phenomenon that strong intellectual property rights are in heavy contrast to the liberal utopia of full commodification, i.e. universal competition and ideal type market relationships. We will find that Monsanto, in order to avoid Napsterisation, has established and still maintains a rather repressive commercialisation regime that maximises property control by strongly reducing the exchangeability of seed and crops. It can therefore be interpreted as a new form of landlord dominion which contradicts the modernist idea of concordance between market liberalisation and individual emancipation.

This paper examines changing German and Korean policies towards transborder coethnics (Germans in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and Koreans in Japan and China) during the high Cold War and post-Cold War eras. The paper contributes to the emerging literature on transborder forms of membership and belonging by highlighting and explaining the selective, variable, contingent, contested, and revocable nature of states’ embrace of transborder coethnics. The explanation highlights the relationship of transborder populations to predecessor polities; changing geopolitical contexts and domestic political conjunctures; the constitutive, group-making – and group-unmaking – power of state categorization practices; and the enduring institutional legacies and unintended consequences of such practices.

Rogers Brubaker in his 1992 path-breaking study proposes a theory of citizenship as a coherent world view: the French liberal model identifies citizenship as a community based on territoriality; the German ethno-nationalist model bases citizenship on blood-line. Rogers Smith challenged Brubaker and, based on a 1997 study of United States immigration laws, claims that the American concept of citizenship is a non-coherent mix of various principles: liberal, ethno-nationalist and republican at the same time. Both authors inspired a great deal of research, but all studies so far have attempted to adjudicate between the two competing theories by looking at inclusionary practices, at the various ways citizenship is granted in various countries, and their results are inconclusive. This paper reports findings for a study which looked at exclusion. The data on United States laws and legislative debates about the states’ rights to revoke, and citizens’ privilege to renounce, citizenship lends support to Rogers Smith’s arguments regarding inclusion and citizenship, while underlining war as an independent sociological source for the genesis, persistence and dispersion of these bundles or equilibria.

This paper examines the development of religious education policy in the government schools of New South Wales (Australia) since 1960. The New South Wales religious education curriculum features three components: (1) teacher-led “general religious education” (gre); (2) right-of-entry denominational instruction provided by visiting clergy (“special religious education”, or sre); and (3) occasional additional devotional exercises such as hymns and prayers. Between 1960 and 1980, this system underwent a partial secularization. gre was transformed from a straightforward course in Christianity built around government-produced Scripture readers to a flexible curricular component built around the academic study of multiple religions. At the same time, sre was strengthened and had its position in the curriculum secured; and devotional exercises were allowed to continue only in those settings where they formed an “appropriate” match with the community. I find that “secularizing” reforms were most consistently driven by teachers and administrators with practical motives: avoiding controversy, improving working conditions, and facilitating class management. This finding both challenges and complements recent works that interpret secularization as a political process driven by politicians and professionals primarily interested in enhancing their power or prestige at the expense of religious actors.

Drawing on Williams’ distinction between thin and thick ethical concepts, I argue that current moral neuroscience and psychology unwarrantedly restrict their researches to thin morality only. Experiments typically investigate subjects’ judgments about rightness, appropriateness, or permissibility, that is, thin concepts. The nature and workings of thick concepts – e.g., dignity, integrity, humanness, cruelty, pettiness, exploitation, or fanaticism – have not been empirically investigated; hence, they are absent from recent theories about morality. This may seem like a minor oversight, which some additional research can redress. I argue that the fix is not that simple: thick concepts challenge one of the theoretical backbones of much moral psychology and neuroscience; they challenge the conception of a hardwired and universal moral capacity in a way that thin concepts do not. In the conclusion I argue that the burgeoning science of morality should include both thin and thick, and that it should include the contributions of psychologists and neuroscientists as well as those of anthropologists, historians, and sociologists.