Ivan Ermakoff

Classes:

Soc 476 Contemporary Sociological Theory
Soc 624 Political Sociology
Soc 724 Intermediate Political Sociology
Soc 924 Political Processes

Associate Professor of Sociology
Associate Chair, Department of Sociology
8116a Sewell Social Sciences
(608) 262-8206
ermakoff@ssc.wisc.edu
Office Hours: W 2-3:30 and by appt. (Fall'09)

Selected Publications:
BOOKS

Ermakoff, Ivan. 2007. Ruling Oneself Out. A Theory of Collective Abdication. Duke University Press. “Politics, History and Culture” series. Forthcoming.

ARTICLES

Ivan Ermakoff. 2008. “Patrimonial rise and decline. The strange case of The Familial State," Political Power and Social Theory. Forthcoming.

Ermakoff, Ivan. 2001. “Strukturelle Zwänge und zufällige Geschehnisse” [Structural Constraints and Incidental Happenings], March 2001, Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Translation: Structural Constraints and Incidental Happenings, History and Society.

Ermakoff, Ivan. 1997. "Prelates and Princes: Aristocratic Marriages, Canon Law Prohibitions and Shifts in Norms and Patterns of Domination in the Central Middle Ages." American Sociological Review 62:405-422.

Areas of Interest:
Class Analysis and Historical Change
Comparative/Historical Sociology
General Social Theory
Organizational and Occupational Analysis
Political Sociology

Affiliations:
Sociology

Research Interest Statement:
My research agenda is centered on transition processes and collective situations in which individuals are confronted with decisions that challenge their sense of self-interest, preservation or identity. I have been investigating aristocrats facing new matrimonial regulations in Europe in the central middle ages, parliamentarians confronted with the prospect of their own collective abdication, political leaders devising strategies of political survival and/or democratic consolidation in times of democratic crisis, and civil servants confronted with the task of enforcing inhumane policies. In these different instances, to identify collective processes and reconstruct the specifics of the relevant empirical cases, I draw on multifaceted tools of analysis—formal, quantitative and hermeneutic—applied to a variety of historical sources. This approach combines historical research with a set of methods geared to probing the empirical soundness of hypotheses that can be transposed to different times and places.