State in Society

The essays in this book trace the development of Joel Migdal's 'state-in-society' approach. That approach illuminates how power is exercised around the world, and how and when patterns of power change. Despite the triumph of concept of state in social science literature, actual states have had great difficulty in turning public policies into planned social change. The state-in-...

The essays in this book trace the development of Joel Migdal's 'state-in-society' approach. That approach illuminates how power is exercised around the world, and how and when patterns of power change. Despite the triumph of concept of state in social science literature, actual states have had great difficulty in turning public policies into planned social change. The state-in-society approach points observers to the ongoing struggles over which rules dictating how people will lead their daily lives. These struggles, which ally parts of the state and groups in society against other such coalitions, determine how societies and states create and maintain distinct ways of structuring day-to-day life - the nature of the rules that govern people's behavior, whom they benefit and whom they disadvantage, which sorts of elements unite people and which divide them, what shared meaning people hold about their relations with others and their place in the world.

乔尔·S.米格代尔（Joel S.Migdal），华盛顿大学亨利·杰克逊国际关系学院罗伯特.F.菲利普讲座教授。著有《农民、政治学与革命》（1977）、《强社会与弱国家》（1988）、《巴基斯坦社会与政治》（1991）等。