Contemporary society

About: Contemporary society is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3991 publications have been published within this topic receiving 91755 citations.

Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction

Abstract: African American writers explore the enduring effects of slavery on American society Slavery is America's family secret, says Ashraf Rushdy, a partially hidden phantom that continues to haunt our national imagination. Remembering Generations explores how three contemporary African American writers artistically represent this notion in novels about the enduring effects of slavery on the descendants of slaves in the post-civil rights era. Focusing on Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975), David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident (1981), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Rushdy situates these works in their cultural moment of production, highlighting the ways in which they respond to contemporary debates about race and family. Tracing the evolution of this literary form, he considers such works as Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family (1998), in which descendants of slaveholders expose the family secrets of their ancestors. Remembering Generations examines how cultural works contribute to social debates, how a particular representational form emerges out of a specific historical epoch, and how some contemporary intellectuals meditate on the issue of historical responsibility - of recognizing that the slave past continues to exert an influence on contemporary American society.

The Family Business in Contemporary Society

Abstract: A family has many tasks. It formalizes the relations between men and women; it provides for the birth and upbringing of children; it houses and feeds its members; it is the primary human group through which social relations are made and maintained. It is the focus of the love and hate, reassurance and anxiety, security and insecurity that are the fundamentals of social culture. In different societies, different laws, customs, and behavior govern the roles taken by the members of the family, and family organizations extend all the way from matrilineal and even polyandrous structures, in which the role of husband and father is barely relevant, to the more common patrilineal structures, in which, in the extreme, women are regarded, and accept themselves, as inferior to men. This is not the place to summarize the extensive literature on forms of family organization in different societies. It is enough to emphasize that our own society, however complex in both its material environment and its institutional forms, is based upon the primary human group-the family. In our society, as in primitive societies, the family is the institution that formalizes the relations between the sexes and provides for the process whereby children are born and protected through the long period of their dependence on others. In the next four sections, we shall be considering some of the problems created for family businesses by the modern structure of the family and prevailing social values. In the last four sections, we shall be examining some of the consequences of economic and technical change. There are, of course, still a large number of family businesses in existence, and more are being started daily, but the areas in which they can be successful are diminishing. One can think immediately of small shops, of farms, hotels, and restaurants that are run entirely by family members or by family members with very few employees. Such enterprises

The "Real World" and the Irrelevance of Theory-Based Research

Abstract: Selecting one issue as crucial to leisure research at the millennium is somewhat like playing tennis with only a serve. We need a full-court game in research as well as in the sport. Nevertheless, since I have been working on my serve, here is the one shot. To cheat a little at the beginning, however, I would like to suggest two books that take a more complete and complex view of leisure at the beginning of a century. The first is the best leisure theory book of the decade, Betsy Wearing's Leisure and Feminist Theory (1998) that delivers far more than it promises. The other is the new critical intro text that Val Freysinger and I are introducing this Fall, 21st Century Leisure: Current Issues (Kelly & Freysinger, 2000) that features debates on over thirty issues.. Both take much more comprehensive approaches to the changing social world and emerging conflicts and challenges. "Theory-based " Research Since 1972, I have been more or less associated with theory-building and theory-based research. At this time, however, I am concerned that a limited approach to theory and a narrow view of "science" may have led the field into research agendas that are largely irrelevant to what is going on in contemporary leisure and its social/political/economic contexts. Without becoming specific or naming names, I would suggest that a review of the past decade of Leisure Sciences or the Journal of Leisure Research will identify a high percentage of articles in the following mode: 1. A problem is stated from within the field. 2. A literature review consists almost entirely of references to studies published in leisure-oriented journals. 3. A model, usually referring to individual behavior, is selected that purports to exemplify "theory" by offering an abstract and acontextual explanation of some aspect of behavior. 4. The study appropriates that model and claims to be theory-based. 5. The implications are totally directed toward the parochial interests of conventional leisure studies. Note that in this bounded world there are no emotions, no bodies, no structural discrimination, no inequities, no social and economic forces, no conflict, and no change. Then we complain when those outside the leisure studies corral ignore our work when they begin to investigate and analyze what they see as the leisure-related issues of contemporary society. Sometimes our relevant work is just not noticed because it is published in our parochial journals and in books by our "niche" publishers. More likely, however, is that most of what we publish just doesn't connect to the issues being raised in other disciplines or in the media. Our abstract models and centripetal focus have no clear relationship with the exploding world of leisure in a global market economy and mass culture. They seem especially unrelated to environmental conflict, political power, diverse cultures and life styles, exploitation of the relatively powerless, the investment biases of market capitalism, religious and ethnic conflict, or most issues of gender, class, and race. Issue-based Research What I am proposing is that at least a major segment of leisure research be directed toward larger issues than those currently funded by resource management agencies or shaped by the now-traditional methods and agendas taught in our graduate programs in the past decade or two. We need to break outside our little enclave of what Kuhn called "normal science" to address what the rest of the world sees as significant and problematic. To begin with, let's remember that an estimated 97 percent of direct spending on recreation in the United States is in the market, not public, sector. Also, the Office of Management and Budget estimated that in 1994, .17 of 1 percent of federal government spending was on recreation. Clearly, much of our focus has not been on "where it's at." Even the most cursory analysis reveals that the market is providing much more than just nice "healthy" activities or that opportunities and resources are generally available throughout even the wealthiest societies. …

Gender as a Group Process: Implications for the Persistence of Inequality

Abstract: Gender is at core a group process because people use it as a primary frame for coordinating behavior in interpersonal relations. The everyday use of sex/gender as cultural tool for organizing social relations spreads gendered meanings beyond sex and reproduction to all spheres of social life that are carried out through social relationships and constitutes gender as a distinct and obdurate system of inequality. Through gender's role in organizing social relations, gender inequality is rewritten into new economic and social arrangements as they emerge, contributing to the persistence of that inequality in modified form in the face of potentially leveling economic and political changes in contemporary society.

The ideology of ageism versus the social imaginary of the fourth age: two differing approaches to the negative contexts of old age

Abstract: The development of social gerontology has led to the emergence of its own terminology and conceptual armoury. ‘Ageism’ has been a key concept in articulating the mission of gerontology and was deliberately intended to act as an equivalent to the concepts of racism and sexism. As a term, it has established itself as a lodestone for thinking about the de-valued and residualised social status of older people in contemporary society. Given this background, ageism has often been used to describe an overarching ideology that operates in society to the detriment of older people and which in large part explains their economic, social and cultural marginality. This paper critiques this approach and suggests an alternative based upon the idea of the social imaginary of the fourth age. It argues that not only is the idea of ageism too totalising and contradictory but that it fails to address key aspects of the corporeality of old age. Adopting the idea of a social imaginary offers a more nuanced theoretical approach to the tensions that are present in later life without reducing them to a single external cause or explanation. In so doing, this leaves the term free to serve, in a purely descriptive manner, as a marker of prejudice.