Showing papers on "Contemporary society published in 1996"

THE LIMITS OF THE SOVEREIGN STATE Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society

Abstract: The article offers a descriptive analysis of strategies of crime control in contemporary Britain and elsewhere. It argues that the normality of high crime rates and the limitations of criminal justice agencies have created a new predicament for governments. The response to this predicament has been recurring ambivalence that helps explain the volatile and contradictory character of recent crime control policy. The article identifies adaptive strategies (responsibilization, defining deviance down, and redefining organizational success) and strategies of denial (the punitive sovereign response), as well as the different criminologies that accompany them.

Into the Image: Culture and Politics in the Field of Vision

Abstract: From the Publisher: Into the Image is concerned with the significance of screen and image in contemporary society, and with the nature of our imaginary and psychic investments in visual culture. It considers modern image technologies as means to monitor and survey the world, whilst at the same time maintaining distance and detachment from it. In the coverage of contemporary war, we see most clearly how the world is screened and yet its reality screened out. Into the Image also reflects on the contemporary desire to create an alternative world by means of new image technologies. It asks what is behind the fantasies of migrating into an alternative, virtual reality. Critical of the dominant technoculture, this book seeks to develop an alternative approach to visual culture based in the realities of the contemporary social order. In its exploration of culture and politics in the field of vision, Into the Image acknowledges the continuing significance of the 'old' technologies of photography, cinema and television alongside that of the new digital developments. The crucial issues, it argues, concern the relation of image and screen culture to experience in the modern world.

Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams

Abstract: In the age of decentralization, instant communications, and the subordination of locality to the demands of a globalizing market, contemporary cities have taken on place-less or a-geographic characters. They have become phantasmagorical landscapes. Atlanta, argues Charles Rutheiser, is in many ways paradigmatic of this generic urbanism. As such, it provides a fertile ground for investigating the play of culture, power and place within a "non-place urban realm". Rutheiser uses the mobilization for the 1996 Olympics to talk about the uneven development of Atlanta's landscape. Like other cities lacking any natural advantages, Atlanta's reputation and built form have been regularly reconfigured by generations of entrepreneurs, politicians, journalists and assorted visionaries to create a service-oriented information city of global reach. Borrowing a term from Walt Disney, Rutheiser refers to these successive waves of organized and systematic promotion as linked, but not always well-co-ordinated acts of urban "imagineering". Focusing on the historic core of the metropolitan area, Rutheiser shows how Atlanta has long been both a test bed for federal urban renewal and a playground for private capital. The city provides an object lesson in internal colonization and urban underdevelopment. Yet, however illustrative of general trends, Atlanta also represents a unique conjunction of universals and particulars; it exemplifies a reality quite unlike either New York or Los Angeles - two cities to which it has often been compared. This book thus adds an important case study to the emerging discourse on contemporary urbanism. It goes beyond providing another account of uneven development and the "theme-parking" of a North American city: Rutheiser reflects on how contemporary American society thinks about cities, and argues that, ultimately, despite the ever-increasing virtualization of day-to-day life, the obliteration of locality is never complete. There always remains some "here", if only deep beneath the "urbane disguises", in the interstices of social activity, in the contradictions of experience and in the residues of individual and collective memory.

The spaces of public dissension: Reconsidering the public sphere

Abstract: The centrality of consensus in contemporary inquiries into society limits our understanding of dissent and contemporary disputation. This paper raises the question of what role dissent plays in contemporary society by interrogating an exemplar of traditional social rhetoric, the public sphere. An examination of the six characteristics of the public sphere suggests that the dominance of consensus has restricted our understanding of contemporary public argument and resistance. The possibility of de‐centering consensus and the public sphere and reconsidering dissension is explored.

Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place

Abstract: This work argues that while contemporary society seems to promote the values of individualism and mobility, human lives are enriched by participation in a social community that is integrated into the natural landscape of a particular place.

The Sociology of Money: Economics, Reason and Contemporary Society

Abstract: (1996). The Sociology of Money: Economics, Reason and Contemporary Society. Journal of Economic Issues: Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 1209-1212.

The relations of ruling: a feminist inquiry ∗

Abstract: This paper explores the complex of objectified social relations that organize and regulate our lives in contemporary society. Its inquiry is driven by experiences in the women's movement of a dual ...

Dramaturgy, politics and the axial media event

Abstract: Current theorizing on the role of media in politics and interpersonal relations in contemporary American society not only echoes questions about connections between modernity and viable democratic ...

Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics, and the Color of Our Character

Abstract: In Codes of Conduct, Karla Holloway meditates on the dynamics of race and ethnicity as they are negotiated in the realms of power. Her uniquely insightful and intelligent analysis guides us in a fresh way through Anita Hill's interrogation, the assault on Tawana Brawley, the mass murders of Atlanta's children, the schisms between the personal and public domains of her life as a black professor, and - in a moving epilogue - the story of her son's difficulties growing up as a young black male in contemporary society. Its three main sections, "The Body Politic, " "Language, Thought, and Culture, " and "The Moral Lives of Children, " relate these issues to the visual power of the black and female body, the aesthetic resonance and racialized drama of language, and our children's precarious habits of surviving. Throughout, Holloway questions the consequences in African American community life of citizenship that is meted out sparingly when one's ethnicity is colored. This is a book of a culture's stories - from literature, public life, contemporary and historical events, aesthetic expression, and popular culture - all located within the common ground of African American ethnicity. Holloway writes with a passion, urgency, and wit that carry the reader swiftly through each chapter. The book should take its place among those other important contemporary works that speak to the future relationships between whites and blacks in this country.

Language policy and political reality

Abstract: It is difficult for political theory to understand the issue of language policy in contemporary societies; likewise, theoriesof language planning and policy struggle to come to grips with political issues. Many political theories are limited by two perspectives. For theories concerned with ethnicity, language is often reduced to ethnicity, which is often seen as synonymous with ethnic conflict, while theories concerned with modernization appear to have such a strong attachment to its imperatives that aspects of language that appear to be retarding modernization present insuperable problems. A critique ofthese theories is advanced, based on the issue oflanguages in the former Soviet Union; the conflict between local and former colonial languages in third-world countries; and the searchfor appropriate language models in an increasingly integrated Europe. Three perspectives from contemporary social theory are suggested as providing a better way of relating languages to politics: a sociological perspective that looks at actual language use and attitudes rather than officialpronouncements; a culturalperspective that analyzes the significance of language in cultural terms, particularly in relation to changing concepts of ethnicity; and a discourse perspective that takes seriously language and discourse on it, identifying the relative autonomy of language issues, rather than attempting to reduce language attitudes to supposedly more basic ethnic or structural factors.

Postmodernism and the Crisis of the Intellectual: Reflections on Reflexivity, Universities, and the Scientific Field

Abstract: In this paper the author takes up the issue of the social responsibilities of academics, raised in recent articles in this journal, through a discussion of the crises facing contemporary intellectuals. The paper begins with a plea for a reflexive sociology of intellectuals, and after a brief review of early debates on the role of intellectuals, the author concentrates on Gouldner's grand vision of intellectuals as a ‘flawed universal class’. In the next section the forces that have undermined such grand visions in the past few decades, precipitating the current crises, are discussed. The author then categorises a range of positions that have been recently developed to justify some continuing role for intellectuals as a social category in contemporary society. This discussion leads on to a focus on the work of Bourdieu, which seems to the author to offer the most productive framework for thinking about these issues. But in the last section he raises a number of problems that might be tackled through the in...

Social Science and Contemporary Society The vanishing guarantees of rationality

Abstract: Social science has developed on the premises of social and scientific optimism and as the intellectual pendant of a liberal ideology which sought to manage change and claimed to be able to eliminate the sources of social unhappiness Modernity has been justified on the materialist and collectivist bases of the amelioration of the conditions of life and of social justice for all But these have proved to be unfulfillable promises which are no longer trusted Furthermore, capital accumulation is incompatible with this legitimation of modernity because it is based on the appropriation of surplus value by some from others How can social science and social scientists respond to the present era of pessimism in which the limits of the liberal and capitalist agendas have been recognized? Social science must recreate itself: the key element is the return of substantive rationality to the centre of our intellectual concerns Science is never disinterested and empiricism always presumes prior commitments The ambig

Encyclopaedism, modernism and the classification of geographical knowledge

Abstract: general principles, whether of morality, rationality or scientific law. The Encyclopidie sought to connect these separate knowledges and principles. Finally, because such thinking was, as I have tried to show, associated in the Encyclopidie, as elsewhere, with reform and change, it has a strong prescriptive and moralizing tone. Manifest in ideas of progress and varying notions of utility, enlightened thought was concerned with the ways in which a reforming 'ought' could be made to confront the recalcitrant 'is' of contemporary society. Associated with this moral purpose is a new vision, a new modernity which not only breaks up old and stable patterns of thought and authority but also serves as a goal for future action. This may have liberty and intellectual emancipation as a consequence but, as Horkheimer and Adorno argue in their Dialectic of enlightenment and as Foucault notes, it is no accident that 'reason' so often went hand-in-hand with restriction, restraint and with 'absolutism'. Reason and science, far from promoting liberty, can assume an absolute distinction between truth and falsity rather than accommodate tolerance of diversity. This contradiction, which I return to in the case of H G Wells' modernist World brain, should be understood within the context of enlightened claims to the virtue of pure reason.56 The enterprise is talked of both as a dictionary d'Alembert uses the term a 'Reasoned dictionary of the sciences, arts and trades' and as an encyclopaedia exhibiting the order and connection of all human knowledge. In the first term, we can see one reflection of contemporary interests in definition evident in geographical and other dictionaries advocating terminological and disciplinary precision, and the use of such knowledge by appropriate social groups. The forward-looking claims of the Encyclopidie did not come from prophetic vision of the yet-to-be French and industrial revolutions. They came rather from attempts to map the world of knowledge according to new boundaries determined by reason, to measure all human activity by rational standards and, thus, to provide a basis for rethinking the world. These texts were themselves disciplining knowledge. In the second term, we should consider this connectedness of world learning and the intent to order new knowledges encyclopaedism as 'the order and concatenation of human knowledge'57 to use Diderot and d'Alembert's terms as a profoundly modern geographical enterprise. I mean by this two things: first, the role of geographical metaphors by which the text was to be understood and used as the sum of human knowledge; and, secondly, the detailed definition and position of geography relativ to other dis iplines in that sum of knowledge. Metaph rs abound in describing or situating the Encyclopidie. In addition to the organic tree of knowledge with particular disciplin s forming the branches or even the fruit on the boughs,58 the authors saw their work as the universe of knowledge. D'A embert's ideals for the project have been considered those of the geometer, believing in a regular universe and operating with measurable axioms and p inciples. Elsewhere, e compared the formation of the text to the foundations of a great city and saw encyclopaedic order as a machine, whose parts all fit together but which can also be assembled in new ways. As a text, the crossreferenced Encyclopidie was to be an open-ended conversation amongst members of a cite scientifique.59 The Encyclopidie could, then, be interrogated, circumnavigated and mapped: 'mappe monde' is a metaphor crucial to the comprehension of their intentions given not only the parallels in contemporary enlightenment mapping projects, in France and throughout Europe, but also the idea of the text as summation of modern world knowledge. For Diderot and d'Alembert, the Encyclopidie

Can we Research the Private Sphere

Abstract: In the classic discussion from which this conference took its title, C. Wright Mills (1959) argued that the sociological imagination works on the distinction between ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure’, giving as one of his examples marriage. Our paper takes up this theme, describing some of the sociological, methodological, philosophical and ethical problems raised by research including our own (Duncombe and Marsden, 1993a, 1993b, 1995a, 1995b) on intimate couple relationships. Our research is in line with the recent theoretical shifts which have focused attention on the nature of interpersonal relationships in contemporary society and have emphasised the need for a greater understanding of the interconnections between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ spheres of social life. There is a new urgency in attempting to research intimate personal experience, in order to resuscitate and re-theorise areas such as changing family bonds and other newer forms of close relationships (Morgan, 1985, 1990; Clark and Haldane, 1990) but also as an essential contribution to broader theories of society (Cheal, 1991; Giddens, 1991, 1992).

Global Sociology: Introducing Five Contemporary Societies

Abstract: Chapter 1. Japan: A Conforming Culture Chapter 2. Mexico: Nation of Networks Chapter 3. The Bushmen of Namibia: Ancient Culture in a New Nation Chapter 4. Egypt: Faith, Gender, and Class Chapter 5. Germany: Social Institutions and Social Change in a Modern Western Society

Racism and Anti-Racism

Abstract: In previous chapters we have concentrated on the interface between racism and specific forms of social and political relations in contemporary societies. In doing so we have touched upon the issue of what is popularly called anti-racism, and the role of both public policies and popular mobilisations against racism. Additionally, we have discussed some aspects of public policies aimed at tackling various aspects of racial discrimination and racism within areas such as employment and housing. We have not, however, explored the issue of anti-racism in terms of what it is taken to mean and how it has helped to shape and structure contemporary debates about racism. Yet it is clear that this is a much discussed issue in contemporary debates in many societies. Partly because the term anti-racism is used in a variety of ways it is by no means clear what it means, either conceptually or at the level of practice. Nevertheless, it has come to occupy an important role in both theoretical debates and in public policy debates. In one way or another the question of what can be done to counter the influence of racist ideologies and political movements remains at the heart of contemporary concerns.

Abortion: the antithesis of womanhood?

Abstract: The debate regarding the practice and role of abortion has been an enduring and problematic area of discourse within the nursing literature, with a tendency towards a polarized and inevitably simplistic analysis of what, for many practitioners, women and families, remains a highly complex and morally fraught concept. This paper attempts to explore the concept of abortion from within a feminist epistemology, to present a review of the literature as regards women's reproductive health and responsibilities, and thereby to contribute to the process of better understanding the role of abortion within contemporary health care practice. In order to facilitate the study it has been necessary to explore the wide spectrum of historical, philosophical, legal, moral and political imperatives pertaining to the meaning of abortion as represented within contemporary society, not only in relation to women and their reproductive health, but to feminism, women's well-being and self-determinism per se.

Further beyond the society/nature divide: A comment on Freudenburg, Frickel, and Gramling

Abstract: In 'Beyond the Society/Nature Divide,' William Freudenburg, Scott Frickel, and Robert Gramling (1995) attack dualist thinking in sociology. They want to get beyond the style of thought that makes a clean split between nature and society and then allots explanatory priority to one side or the other. They even want to get beyond an eclecticism that adds up natural and social factors. Instead, they want to help us see that nature and society are products of "conjoint constitution" in which each somehow gives rise to the other (361, 366-369, 372, 387). I strongly support this impulse, not just on technical grounds but disciplinary and political ones, too. It should be a central task of sociology to get clear on the specific contours of contemporary society, and it cannot do so without conceptualizing the intertwining of the social with the technoscientific knowledge, resources, and artifacts that make up much of our engagement with nature in the late 20th century. That said, I wonder if Freudenburg, Frickel, and Gramling (FFG, from now on) have accomplished their purpose. Their parting remark is that "It may be necessary . . . to recognize or to believe in the potential for mutual contingency, or the conjoint constitution of the physical and the social, before it is possible to see the ways in which the two are interrelated. Without progress in achieving such insights ... we run the risk of having our vision distorted by the very taken-for-grantedness of our socially agreed-upon definitions-the risk of being prisoners of our own perspectives" (388). And I am not sure that FFG went as far as they could in helping us escape the prison. In what follows, I explain why I feel that

Resisting Bodies: The Negotiation of Female Agency in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction

Abstract: This work studies the female body in contemporary society. Combining anthropology with recent literary theory in the framework of cultural studies, it examines novels by 20th-century authors, Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, Margaret Drabble and Monika Maron.

Image and identity: performance appraisal in a trust hospital.

Abstract: Looks at performance appraisal (PA), which has become an important tool in the overseeing of employees in contemporary society. Notes, however, that little work, has focused on its mediation or actual practice, beyond simple descriptions informing its implementation. First examines the changing nature of employee management under PA, before investigating the contemporary usage of PA regarding its emphasis on the issue of managing and controlling the “images” of performance. Illustrates this with research, gathered from a case study in the Midlands. More specifically, focuses on the requirement on individuals to present the right image/self‐presentation as a means of subordination. Highlights, with the use of a hospital case study, some of these issues in relation to the changes taking place in the public service sector, which faces fundamental transformations to its concept of service. Concludes that, whatever the original intentions of PA were, they have seriously failed, and are superseded by the management of the subjectification of performance.

Contingency Theory: Rethinking the Boundaries of Social Thought

Abstract: A major task for social theory in the 1990s is to explain the relationship between individuals and social structures. This book makes two simple suggestions for forging a micro/macro link. The concept of contingency is a breakthrough for social theory. Where current micro/macro debates are merely an expanded, but veiled, regurgitation of philosophical issues debated long ago, the concept of contigency allows social theory to transcend old paradigms and explain contemporary society.

Fruar och mamseller. Kvinnor inom sydsvensk borgerlighet 1790-1870

Abstract: This dissertation is an analysis of the culture and lifestyle of women in the middle classes in small towns in southern Sweden between 1790 and 1870, from a gender perspective. The study builds on local material from Lund, Karlshamn and Kristianstad, and is principally made up of the private letters and diaries of a large number of people. The thesis attempts to shed light on relationships, values and reading habits in this stratum of society, and it also deals with the construction of gender. It is demonstrated that one can see a clear connection between the lifestyle of women in these small towns and the markedly agrarian pattern that characterises life in Sweden at this time. Because of the married woman's significant role in home production, she had power to some extent. In a large household that practised a high degree of self-sufficiency, co-operation between spouses was vital. Despite these circumstances, the relationship between husband and wife cannot be characterised as equal. It was the husband who was legally competent, representing the household to the outside world. One approach of the study is to focus on the unmarried women and the widows. Out in society unmarried women had a lower status than married ones. In practice, they carried important tasks such as nursing and care, housework and teaching, often within the household of their parents or siblings. It appears, that the woman's lack of legal rights posed a considerable problem when it came to safeguarding her own property. The various courses of lifestyle for the unmarried women strengthen the picture of contemporary society as built around a patriarchal norm, but at the same time layered by civil status, age and wealth. The final chapter examines what people in the middle classes were reading during this period, and above all, how they read it. It appears that reading out loud was the most natural way of reading, which ties in with various factors as the norm of household devotions, the lack of good lighting during the dark months and the limited selection of books. (Less)

Globalization and Deindustrialization: A City Abandoned*

Abstract: It is fitting that a conference with the theme "Globalization and the New World Order" should open its deliberations with a consideration of Steven Dandaneau's A Town Abandoned (1996). There are several reasons why this is so. First, A Town Abandoned is exemplary of the type of soci ology the Institute for the Analysis of Contemporary Society fosters. The work is grounded in the lived experience of a community and the historical struggles that have shaped it. Specifically, A Town Abandoned employs criti cal theory to understand the process of "dependent deindustrialization" that is laying waste to Flint, Michigan and America's industrial heartland. Moreover, Dandaneau's critique is self-consciously grounded in the socio logical imagination of C. Wright Mills. Indeed, for Dandaneau: ... critique is situated, reflexive, and communicative; the sociological imagination is its self consciousness. C. Wright Mills' triad of history, biography, and social struc ture (what he called "coordinate points"), form a constellation of the human imagi nation that is oriented to thinking the life of the individual back into the history and society that appear alien to the individual. (Dandaneau, 1996; 95) It is no exaggeration, in fact, to say that Mills's triad of "coordinate points"?biography, history and social structure?form the ontological foundation of Dandaneau's critical method. What is remarkable about Dandaneau's handling of the critical method is his ability to use a sophisticated rendering of critical theory to analyze the cultural dimensions of Flint's crisis without falling victim to the her meneutic sin of doing critique for the pure sake of critique. His analysis of Flint's response to industrial collapse and corporate abandonment does

The Meaning of Artistic Tradition in a Multicultural Society

Abstract: Teaching art in a multicultural society requires teachers to develop an understanding of the nature of artistic knowledge with regard to the cultural backgrounds of all children, so that the validity of art relates to the ethnic structure of contemporary society and takes full account of its historical origins. This requires a sound basis for interpretation of other cultures so that children can see the interrelated connections between what they are shown and know, and how this is always contingent upon historical antecedents of society and societies. No longer can artistic traditions be isolated or prioritised in hierarchies that alienate or marginalise the cultural roots of those children who happen to come from ethnic minorities. Therefore, to better teach the requirements of the National Curriculum in Art, with particular regard to Attainment Target 2, teachers need to be aware of their responsibilities in interpreting the traditions of non-indigenous cultures. This paper draws on experience of teaching art in a largely homogenised minority of Scottish Gaeldom, where historical perceptions of what constituted its tradition were profoundly significant to the aims of educating its young. And where, the teacher happens to come from outside that tradition, the importance of understanding the formation and interpretation of tradition[s] is a paramount consideration in deciding what and how to teach art. This paper focuses on the central issues and draws upon relevant literature to support the case that art must be taught with commitment to the context and artistic future of a multicultural society.

Architecture Beyond Architecture: Creativity and Social Transformations in Islamic Cultures the 1995 Aga Khan Award for Architecture

Abstract: This volume features the projects entered for the 1995 Aga Khan Award for Architecture. An introductory chapter discusses the award and explores spirituality in buildings and contemporary society. The book includes descriptions of the winning designs in Yemen, Tunisia, Pakistan, Senegal and India. Contributors include Charles Jencks, Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry.

The Political Significance of Myth The Case of Iran and Kenya in a Comparative Perspective

Abstract: The article compares and contrasts the political significance of myth in two unique societies that have been subject to rapid and profound changes in the last decades: Iran and Kenya. It focuses on the articulation and diffusion of these societies' most dominant politico-cultural myths—the Mau Mau struggle (1952-60) and the Karbala paradigm, i.e. the martyrdom suffered by the Third Shi'i Imam Husayn ibn 'Ali at Karbala in AD 680. The discussion shows how these myths have been indispensable in the process of forging the 'spirit', the ethos and political culture of contemporary society in Iran and Kenya. Both myths provided interpretative and exemplary notions that correspond to changing circumstances in Iran and Kenya, enabling political elites and the ordinary citizens to (re)define their reality and to direct their actions towards a visionary goal.

The anthropology of science part I: Science as a humanity

Abstract: While we may be disappointed at the level of science literacy in contemporary society, there has also been a quiet revolution in the humanities with respect to the nature of science itself, situating it within the general sphere of human thought and activity. Much of what is now accepted as commonplace within the humanities concerning science is commonly either unacknowledged or perceived as threatening by scientist. A broader perspective about science is called for, one that will facilitate communication between scientists and nonscientists, that will assist the teaching and general acceptance of science, and to which the field of anthropology should be central.