Alexander M. Hicks (born 1946) is an American sociologist who principally studies the causes and consequences of social democracy, corporatism, the welfare state and the sociology of culture, literature and film. [1] [2] [3]
Hicks was born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1946 and attended public, parochial, and private primary and secondary schools in Weehawken, New Jersey, Rye, New York, Santiago, Chile, Manhattan, and Arlington County, Virginia. He graduated from McGill University with honors in sociology in 1969. He received a PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied on fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundations and the National Institute of Mental Health, in 1979. [4]
He is emeritus professor of sociology at Emory University, where he has been since 1986 (as chair of sociology 1988‑91, as full professor 1993-2017, as Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology 2007-10) following an instructorship and assistant professorship at Northwestern Political Science Department and a postdoctoral fellowship at the NORC, University of Chicago. [1]
Graduate students have included Desmond King (Nuffield College, Oxford), Joya Misra (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), 2023-2024 President of the American Sociological Association, Dan Slater (University of Michigan), Christina Steidl, Associate Dean, College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, (University of Alabama, Huntsville) and Duane Swank (Marquette University).[ citation needed ]
He has delivered invited talks at the Juan Bosch Institute in Madrid, the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, and at universities including the University of Chicago, Columbia, Indiana University, Taiwan's National Chung Cheng University, New York University, Stanford and Yale.[ citation needed ]
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He has been married to Nancy Ellen Traynor Hicks (in corporate communications 1975-2015) since 1970; they have a son, Ryan, working in New York City in the nonprofit promotion of affordable housing.
Hicks has over 6500 Google Scholar citations, including ones to the below publications.
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, or ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.
Political sociology is an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with exploring how governance and society interact and influence one another at the micro to macro levels of analysis. Interested in the social causes and consequences of how power is distributed and changes throughout and amongst societies, political sociology's focus ranges across individual families to the state as sites of social and political conflict and power contestation.
Democratic capitalism, also referred to as market democracy, is a political and economic system. It integrates resource allocation by marginal productivity, with policies of resource allocation by social entitlement. The policies which characterise the system are enacted by democratic governments.
Reinhard Bendix was a German-American sociologist.
Welfare capitalism is capitalism that includes social welfare policies and/or the practice of businesses providing welfare services to their employees. Welfare capitalism in this second sense, or industrial paternalism, was centered on industries that employed skilled labor and peaked in the mid-20th century.
Barrington Moore Jr. was an American political sociologist, and the son of forester Barrington Moore.
In political economy, decommodification is the strength of social entitlements and citizens' degree of immunization from market dependency.
Gøsta Esping-Andersen is a Danish sociologist whose primary focus has been on the welfare state and its place in capitalist economies. Jacob Hacker describes him as the "dean of welfare state scholars." Over the past decade his research has moved towards family demographic issues. A synthesis of his work was published as Families in the 21st Century.
Historical institutionalism (HI) is a new institutionalist social science approach that emphasizes how timing, sequences and path dependence affect institutions, and shape social, political, economic behavior and change. Unlike functionalist theories and some rational choice approaches, historical institutionalism tends to emphasize that many outcomes are possible, small events and flukes can have large consequences, actions are hard to reverse once they take place, and that outcomes may be inefficient. A critical juncture may set in motion events that are hard to reverse, because of issues related to path dependency. Historical institutionalists tend to focus on history to understand why specific events happen.
The Nordic model comprises the economic and social policies as well as typical cultural practices common in the Nordic countries. This includes a comprehensive welfare state and multi-level collective bargaining based on the economic foundations of social corporatism, and a commitment to private ownership within a market-based mixed economy—with Norway being a partial exception due to a large number of state-owned enterprises and state ownership in publicly listed firms.
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy and supports a gradualist, reformist and democratic approach towards achieving socialism, usually under a social liberal framework. In practice, social democratic regimes have presented a model of socially managed welfare capitalism, significantly differing from liberal capitalism through partial public ownership, economic control over the market, and policies promoting social equality. The principal means have been interventionist policies of economic management.
The effects of social welfare on poverty have been the subject of various studies.
Duane Swank is a scholar of comparative political economy and the welfare state. His research has critiqued the conventional view that the welfare state is in decline and has sought to explain the political origins of different types of modifications to capitalism. Swank is currently a Professor of Political Science at Marquette University. He received his B.A. from Millikin University and his Ph.D. at Northwestern University.
The modern welfare state has been criticized on economic and moral grounds from all ends of the political spectrum. Many have argued that the provision of tax-funded services or transfer payments reduces the incentive for workers to seek employment, thereby reducing the need to work, reducing the rewards of work and exacerbating poverty. On the other hand, socialists typically criticize the welfare state as championed by social democrats as an attempt to legitimize and strengthen the capitalist economic system which conflicts with the socialist goal of replacing capitalism with a socialist economic system.
Erik Olin Wright was an American analytical Marxist sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, specializing in social stratification and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He was known for diverging from classical Marxism in his breakdown of the working class into subgroups of diversely held power and therefore varying degrees of class consciousness. Wright introduced novel concepts to adapt to this change of perspective including deep democracy and interstitial revolution.
Centre-left politics is the range of left-wing political ideologies that lean closer to the political centre and broadly conform with progressivism. Ideologies of the centre-left include social democracy, social liberalism and green politics. Ideas commonly supported by the centre-left include welfare capitalism, social justice, liberal internationalism, and multiculturalism. Economically, the centre-left supports a mixed economy in a democratic capitalist system, often including economic interventionism, progressive taxation, and the right to unionize. Centre-left politics are contrasted with far-left politics that reject capitalism or advocate revolution.
Lane Kenworthy is an American professor of sociology and political science. He has worked at the University of Arizona since 2004, being a full professor since 2007. He is known for his statistical and analytic work on the economic effects of income and wealth distribution. He currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego.
The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism is a book on political theory written by Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen, published in 1990. The work is Esping-Andersen's most influential and highly cited work, outlining three main types of welfare states, in which modern developed capitalist nations cluster. The work occupies seminal status in the comparative analysis of the welfare states of Western Europe and other advanced capitalist economies.
Walter Korpi is a Swedish sociologist.
Joya Misra is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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