Can government encourage innovation and economic growth, or is it just a drag, an obstacle? According to the authors, almost all of the recent breakthrough technologies successfully marketed by U.S. firms enjoyed crucial government support for the original research and steps toward commercialization. If you don’t believe it, all you need to do is look at your iPhone, your new car, or a major appliance, and you will see technologies nurtured to commercial fruition by support from public sector agencies.

Metta World Peace and his Lakers are out of the running now, but with the NBA playoffs in full swing it’s a great time to take a look at this recent book from one of the leaders in sport sociology. Leonard uses Artest and the infamous melee in Motown as a meditation on how the league goes about the business of packaging and controlling its African American superstars, how we participate in the process, and what it all says about race in contemporary American culture.

Georg Simmel once said that the opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference. While cultural sociologist Eva Illouz’s new book might help us understand what Simmel meant, the publisher’s blurb suggests more materialist insights: “This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.”

The big new blockbuster (and its paper predecessor) is chock full of sociological insight and intrigue, but among the most important and least understood themes are the relationships among authority, injustice, and consent. This classic study of Appalachia—a place with obvious parallels to Katniss Everdeen’s District 12—provides an insightful and compelling overview.

If you were at all interested in this weekend’s atheist march on Washington, you might want to take a look at this paper.

Written and researched by a Minnesota team that included Joe Gerteis, author of the recent TSP White Paper on religion and American political culture, this widely cited study was among the first to document and analyze negative public perceptions of atheists in American public life.  (For a decidedly non-academic take on the paper, see p. 61-62 of Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (and So Can You!).)

As you enjoy a day off to remember presidents (or at least, we hope you have the day off!), why not consider how we remember those presidents and why?

California’s controversial Prop 8 (the ban on same-sex marriage) has now been struck down as unconstitutional, but ballot initiatives themselves can have lasting effects even if they’re unsuccessful. This article illustrates how and why the campaigns impact the targeted groups. Using community interviews from 2008, the authors show that the fight for the measure made gay people feel excluded and unequal, but also gave friends and family a moment to rally around their loved ones in opposition to the ballot initiative.

Okay, it’s obvious but our recommendation for Valentine’s Day is Ann Swidler’s Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (2001). This SocImages post from a couple of years back provides a nice intro and an array of illustrative illustrations.

Two days later, everyone’s still talking about the Super Bowl ads. This classic book is great resource for putting these pitches in perspective: Schudson argues that advertising is both a much more complicated and a much less successful enterprise than is often realized. In fact, he writes, the “success” of a marketing campaign is often driven by contingent, contextual factors as much as the ads themselves. For further reading, the second edition of Schudson’s The Sociology of News is also out now.