Showing papers on "Ideology published in 1988"

Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977)

Abstract: The state is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itselfthe mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is. There is a state-system: a palpable nexus of practice and institutional stucture centred in government and more or less extensive, unified and dominant in any given society. There is, too, a state-idea, projected, purveyed and variously believed in in different societies at different times. We are only making difficulties for ourselves in supposing that we have also to study the state - an entity, agent, function or relation over and above the state-system and the state-idea. The state comes into being as a stucturation within political practice: it starts its life as an implicit construct: it is then reified - as the res publica. the public reifkation. no less - and acquires an overt symbolic identity progressively divorced from practice as an illusory account of practice. The ideological function is extended to a point where conservatives and radicals alike believe that their practice is not directed at each other but at the state; the world of illusion prevails. The task of the sociologist is to demystify; and in this context that means attending to the senses in which the state does not exist rather than to those in which it does. When the state itself it is danger', Lord Denning said in his judgment yesterday, "our cherished freedoms may have to take second place. and even natural justice itself may have to suffer a setback'. 'The flaw in Lord Denning's argument is that it is the government who decide what the interests of the state should be and which invokes 'national security' as the state chooses to define it'. Ms Pat Hewitt. director of the National Council for Civil Liberties, said yesterday'. The Guardian. 18.2.77 ttt**

Ideological Dilemmas: A Social Psychology of Everyday Thinking

Abstract: A major contribution to the social scientific understanding of how people make sense of their lives, Ideological Dilemmas presents an illuminating new approach to the study of everyday thinking. Contradictory strands abound within both ideology and common sense. In contrast to many modern theorists, the authors see these dilemmas of ideology as enabling, rather than inhibiting: thinking about them helps people to think meaningfully about themselves and the world. The dilemmas within ideology and their effects on thinking are explored through the analysis of what people say in specific key situations: education, medical care, race and gender. The authors identify common ideological themes running through the common-sense discourses they analyse. They highlight the tensions between themes of equality and authority, freedom and necessity, individuality and collectivity. Time and again, the contradictions between these ideological themes crop up as respondents argue and puzzle over their social worlds. Written with refreshing clarity, the discussion cuts across the boundary which often separates sociology from social psychology. Sociologists are reminded that the reproduction of ideology involves individual processes of thinking; social psychologists are urged to recognize the ideological nature of thought.

Constructing the political spectacle

Abstract: Thanks to the ready availability of political news today, informed citizens can protect and promote their own interests and the public interest more effectively. Or can they? Murray Edelman argues against this conventional interpretation of politics, one that takes for granted that we live in a world of facts and that people react rationally to the facts they know. In doing so, he explores in detail the ways in which the conspicuous aspects of the political scene are interpretations that systematically buttress established inequalities and interpretations already dominant political ideologies.

Structural analysis: From method and metaphor to theory and substance.

Abstract: Structural (or network) analysis has mystified many social scientists. Some have rejected it as mere methodology, which lacks due regard for substantive issues. Some have fled from its unusual terms and techniques, not having played with blocks and graphs since grammar school. Some have dismissed one portion for the whole, saying, for example, that their study of class structure has little need for the focus on friendship ties emphasized in network analysis. And some have scorned it as nothing new, claiming that they also study "social structure." Others have bolted on variables such as network "density" as they would a turbocharger in order to boost explained variance. Still others, attracted by the capability of studying nonhierarchical, nongroup structures, have expanded structural analysis into a network ideology that advocates egalitarian, open communities. Some have even used "network" as a verb and "networking" as a noun to advocate the deliberate creation and use of social networks for such desired ends as getting jobs or integrating communities. These misconceptions have arisen because too many analysts and

Structure and Consistency in Public Opinion: the Role of Core Beliefs and Values

Abstract: Research in public opinion and mass belief systems has provided numerous insights into the organization of political attitudes and beliefs and levels of political sophistication in the public. However, having found that most people do not structure their beliefs ideologically, this literature is of limited usefulness in understanding how people do form their political attitudes and beliefs. Another large body of literature suggests that specific attitudes and beliefs are in part a reflection of people's core beliefs and values. This paper examines the role of three core beliefs-support for equality of opportunity, economic individualism, and the free enterprise system-in structuring political beliefs and evaluations.

Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law

Abstract: Recent works by neoconservatives and by Critical legal scholars have suggested that civil rights reforms have been an unsuccessful means of achieving racial equality in America. In this Article, Professor Crenshaw considers these critiques and analyzes the continuing role of racism in the subordination of Black Americans. The neoconservative emphasis on formal colorblindness, she argues, fails to recognize the indeterminacy of civil rights laws and the force of lingering racial disparities. The Critical scholars, who emphasise the legitimating role of legal ideology and legal rights rhetoric, are substantially correct, according to Professor Crenshaw, but they fail to appreciate the choices and possibilities available to an oppressed group such as Blacks. The Critics, she suggests, ignore the singular power of racism as a hegemonic force in American society. Blacks have been created as a subordinated "other," and formal reform has merely repackaged racism. Antidiscrimination law, she argues, has largely succeeded in eliminating the symbolic manifestations of racial oppression, but has allowed the perpetuation of material subordination of Blacks. Professor Crenshaw concludes by demonstrating the importance of exposing the racist nature of ostensibly neutral norms, and of devising strategies for change that include the pragmatic use of legal rights.

An Ethic of Caring and Its Implications for Instructional Arrangements.

Abstract: Education for moral life has, until recently, been a primary aim of American schooling. In this essay, it is argued that the aim itself is appropriate but that our conception of morality needs revision. Caring is suggested both as a moral orientation to teaching and as an aim of moral education. After a brief discussion of ethics of caring, four components of a model for moral education are described: modeling, dialogue, practice, and confirmation. Use of this model requires that teachers and students spend more time together so that relations of trust may be established. Finally, the perspective of caring is used to make recommendations on research for teaching.

Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England

Abstract: Mary Poovey's "The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer" has become a standard text in feminist literary discourse. In "Uneven Developments" Poovey turns to broader historical concerns in an analysis of how notions of gender shape ideology. Asserting that the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural, phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and institutions-medical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that this instability helps explain why various institutional versions of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn, helped to account for the emergence in the 1850s of a genuine oppositional voice: the voice of an organized, politicized feminist movement. Drawing on a wide range of sources-parliamentary debates, novels, medical lectures, feminist analyses of work, middle-class periodicals on demesticity-Poovey examines various controversies that provide glimpses of the ways in which representations of gender were simultaneously constructed, deployed, and contested. These include debates about the use of chloroform in childbirth, the first divorce law, the professional status of writers, the plight of governesses, and the nature of the nursing corps. "Uneven Developments" is a contribution to the feminist analysis of culture and ideology that challenges the isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the isolation of women's issues from economic and political histories.

Selected Subaltern studies

Abstract: This book collects ten essays from the five volumes of Subaltern Studies that have so far appeared. The aim of the studies is to 'promote a systematic and informed discussion of subaltern themes in the field of South Asian studies, and thus help to rectify the elitist bias characteristic of much research and academic work in this particular area. The contributors...focus attention on what Gramsci called the subaltern classes and their condition, and also re-examine well-known events and themes in the new, more rounded perspective. The contributors encompass history, politics, economics and sociology; attitudes, ideologies, and belief systems.' Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay 'Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography' introduces the volume and Edward Said, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia has provided a foreword.

Nationalism and the politics of culture in Quebec

Abstract: Richard Handler s pathbreaking study of nationalistic politics in Quebec is a striking and successful example of the new experimental type of ethnography, interdisciplinary in nature and intensively concerned with rhetoric and not only of anthropologists but also of scholars in a wide range of fields, and it is likely to stir sharp controversy. Bringing together methodologies of history, sociology, political science, and philosophy, as well as anthropology, Handler centers on the period 1976 1984, during which the "independantiste" Parti Quebeois was in control of the provincial government and nationalistic sentiment was especially strong. Handler draws on historical and archival research, and on interviews with Quebec and Canadian government officials, as he addresses the central question: Given the similarities between the epistemologies of both anthropology and nationalist ideology, how can one write an ethnography of nationalism that does not simply reproduce and thereby endorse nationalistic beliefs? Handler analyzes various responses to the nationalist vision of a threatened existence. He examines cultural tourism, ideology of the Quebec government, legislations concerning historical preservation, language legislation and policies towards immigrants and cultural minorities. He concludes with a thoughtful meditation on the futility of nationalisms."

Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution

Abstract: In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes examines the impact on women of the emergence of a new, bourgeois organization of public life in the eighteenth century. She focuses on France, contrasting the role and representation of women under the Old Regime with their status during and after the Revolution. Basing her work on a wide reading of current historical scholarship, Landes draws on the work of Habermas and his followers, as well as on recent theories of representation, to re-create public-sphere theory from a feminist point of view. Within the extremely personal and patriarchal political culture of Old Regime France, elite women wielded surprising influence and power, both in the court and in salons. Urban women of the artisanal class often worked side by side with men and participated in many public functions. But the Revolution, Landes asserts, relegated women to the home, and created a rigidly gendered, essentially male, bourgeois public sphere. The formal adoption of "universal" rights actually silenced public women by emphasizing bourgeois conceptions of domestic virtue. In the first part of this book, Landes links the change in women's roles to a shift in systems of cultural representation. Under the absolute monarchy of the Old Regime, political culture was represented by the personalized iconic imagery of the father/king. This imagery gave way in bourgeois thought to a more symbolic system of representation based on speech, writing, and the law. Landes traces this change through the art and writing of the period. Using the works of Rousseau and Montesquieu as examples of the passage to the bourgeois theory of the public sphere, she shows how such concepts as universal reason, law, and nature were rooted in an ideologically sanctioned order of gender difference and separate public and private spheres. In the second part of the book, Landes discusses the discourses on women's rights and on women in society authored by Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Gouges, Tristan, and Comte within the context of these new definitions of the public sphere. Focusing on the period after the execution of the king, she asks who got to be included as "the People" when men and women demanded that liberal and republican principles be carried to their logical conclusion. She examines women's roles in the revolutionary process and relates the birth of modern feminism to the silencing of the politically influential women of the Old Regime court and salon and to women's expulsion from public participation during and after the Revolution.

Sports and Male Domination: The Female Athlete as Contested Ideological Terrain

Abstract: This paper explores the historical and ideological meanings of organized sports for the politics of gender relations. After outlining a theory for building a historically grounded understanding of sport, culture, and ideology, the paper argues that organized sports have come to serve as a primary institutional means for bolstering a challenged and faltering ideology of male superiority in the 20th century. Increasing female athleticism represents a genuine quest by women for equality, control of their own bodies, and self-definition, and as such represents a challenge to the ideological basis of male domination. Yet this quest for equality is not without contradictions and ambiguities. The socially constructed meanings surrounding physiological differences between the sexes, the present “male” structure of organized sports, and the media framing of the female athlete all threaten to subvert any counter-hegemonic potential posed by female athletes. In short, the female athlete—and her body—has become a con...

Changing men : new directions in research on men and masculinity

Abstract: Rethinking 'Masculinity' - Michael S Kimmel New Directions in Research PART ONE: REFORMULATING THE MALE ROLE The Structure of Male Role Norms - Edward Thompson and Joseph Pleck The Embodiment of Masculinity - Mark Mishkind et al Cultural, Psychological, and Behavioral Dimensions The Life of a Man's Seasons - Michael Messner Male Identity in the Lifecourse of the Jock On Heterosexual Masculinity - Gregory M Herek Some Psychical Consequences of the Social Construction of Gender and Sexuality PART TWO: MEN IN DOMESTIC SETTINGS American Fathering in Historical Perspective - Joseph Pleck Paternal Child Care and the Status of Women - Scott Coltrane A Cross-Cultural Study of Gender Differentiation Fathers in Transition - Teresa L Jump and Linda Haas Dual-Career Fathers Participating in Childcare PART THREE: MEN AND WOMEN What do Women Want...from Men? The Role Men Play in Women's Lives - Kathleen Gerson One of the Boys - Gary Alan Fine Women in Male Dominated Settings The Fraternal Bond as a Joking Relationship - Peter Lyman A Case Study of the Role of Sexist Jokes in Male Group Bonding PART FOUR: SEXUALITY In Pursuit of the Perfect Penis - Leonore Tiefer The Medicalization of Male Sexuality Motivations of Abortion Clinic Waiting Room Males - Arthur Shostak 'Bottled-up' Roles and Unmet Needs Mass Media Sexual Violence and Male Viewers - Edward Donnerstein and Daniel Linz Current Theory and Research PART FIVE: RACE AND GENDER Gender and Imperialism - Mrinalini Sinha Colonial Policy and the Ideology of Moral Imperialism in Late 19th Century Bengal Predicting Interpersonal Conflict Between Men and Women - Lawrence Gary The Case of Black Men Race, Class and Gender - Noel Cazenave and George Leon An Analysis of Male Work and Family Roles PART SIX: TOWARDS MEN'S STUDIES New Perspectives on Masculinity - Harry Brod A Case for Men's Studies Teaching About Men - Michael S Kimmel Maculinist Reaction or 'Gentlemen's Auxiliary'? The Men's Movement - Michael Schiffman An Empirical Study

Communication and Power in Organizations: Discourse, Ideology, and Domination

Abstract: The book's last chapter pursues a nonrational view of planning rooted in psychodynamics. Drawing from work on autocommunication, Broms and Gahmberg treat plans as forms of intrapersonal communicationprojecting hope, vision, and ego enhancement. This chapter echoes the position that the process of planning is more salient than the product or its implementation. The authors, however, need to distinguish their view of planning from conceptualizations of plans as advertisements, as games, or as excuses for interaction (March and Olsen, 1979; Weick, 1979).

Feminism & Foucault : reflections on resistance

Abstract: Although Michel Foucault's ideas on sexuality, ideology, and power have established him as one of this century's most influential thinkers, the implications of his work for feminists continue to be the subject of heated debate. This book fosters an unprecedented dialogue between Foucault and the fertile ground of contemporary feminism and explores the many ways these disparate approaches to cultural analysis converge and interact.

Tenacious Assumptions in Western Medicine

Abstract: While biomedicine has successfully created and hoarded a body of technical knowledge to call its own, its knowledge and practices draw upon a background of tacit understandings that extend far beyond medical boundaries The biological reductionism by which modern medicine is frequently characterized is more theoretical than actual; in its effects, biomedicine speaks beyond its explicit reductionist reference through the implicit ways it teaches us to interpret ourselves, our world, and the rela-tionships between humans, nature, self, and society It draws upon and projects cosmology (ways of ordering the world), ontology (assumptions about reality and being), epistemology (assumptions about knowledge and truth), understandings of personhood, society, morality, and religion (what is sacred and profane) Although biomedicine both constitutes and is constituted by society, this interdependency is nevertheless denied by biomedical theory and ideology which claim neutrality and universality

Hidden Arguments: Political Ideology and Disease Prevention Policy

Abstract: In this provocative book, Sylvia Tesh shows how "politics masquerades as science" in the debates over the causes and prevention of disease.Tesh argues that ideas about the causes of disease which dominate policy at any given time or place are rarely determined by scientific criteria alone. The more critical factors are beliefs about how much government can control industry, who should take risks when scientists are uncertain, and whether the individual or society has the ultimate responsibility for health. Tesh argues that instead of lamenting the presence of this extra-scientific reasoning, it should be brought out of hiding and welcomed. She illustrates her position by analyzing five different theories of disease causality that have vied for dominance during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and discusses in detail the political implications of each theory. Tesh also devotes specific chapters to the multicausal theory of disease, to health education policy in Cuba, to the 1981 air traffic controller's strike, to the debate over Agent Orange, and to an analysis of science as a belief system. Along the way she makes these prinicipal points: She criticizes as politically conservative the idea that diseases result from a multifactorial web of causes. Placing responsibility for disease prevention on "society" is ideological, she argues. In connection with the air traffic controllers she questions whether it is in a union's best interests to claim that workers' jobs are stressful. She shows why there are no entirely neutral answers to questions about the toxicity of environmental pollutants. In a final chapter, Tesh urges scientists to incorporate egalitarian values into their search for the truth, rather than pretending science can be divorced from that political ideology. Sylvia Noble Tesh, a political scientist, is on the faculty of the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History

Abstract: Introduction. The problem of sources the establishment of the Wycliffite movement Lollard society Lollard education Lollard biblical scholarship the ideology of Reformation - theology, ecclesiology, politics the context of vernacular Wycliffism the re-emergence of reform conclusion - the premature Reformation?

Women and the Politics of Empowerment

Abstract: Rethinking Women and Politics: An Introductory Essay Sandra Morgen and Ann Bookman Part I: Expanding and Redefining the Political Terrain 1. "Making Your Job Good Yourself": Domestic Service and the Construction of Personal Dignity Bonnie Thornton Dill 2. Building in Many Places: Multiple Commitments and Ideologies in Black Women's Community Work Cheryl Townsend Gilkes 3. Gender and Grassroots Leadership Karen Brodkin Sacks Part II: Gender and the Shaping of Women's Political Consciousness 4. "It's the Whole Power of the City Against Us!": The Development of Political Consciousness in a Women's Health Care Coalition Sandra Morgen 5. Women Workers and Collective Action: A Case Study from the Insurance Industry Cynthia B. Costello 6. The Edison School Struggle: The Reshaping of Working-Class Education and Women's Consciousness Wendy Luttrell Part III: Reverberations among the Spheres: Family, Workplace, and Community Networks 7. Unionization in an Electronics Factory: The Interplay of Gender, Ethnicity, and Class Ann Bookman 8. Urban Politics in the Higher Education of Black Women: A Case Study Andree Nicola-McLaughlin and Zala Chandler 9. The Politics of Race and Gender: Organizing Chicana Cannery Workers in Northern California Patricia Zavella Part IV: Conditions, Catalysts, and Constraints: Political Economy and Grassroots Activism 10. Women Unions, and "Participative Management": Organizing in the Sunbelt Louise Lamphere and Guillermo J. Grenier 11. Working-Class Women, Social Protest, and Changing Ideologies Ida Susser 12. Vending on the Streets: City Policy, Gentrification, and Public Patriarchy Roberta M. Spalter-Roth Part V: Grassroots Organizing and Political Theory: Toward A Synthesis 13. Communities, Resistance, and Women's Activism: Some Implications for a Democratic Polity Martha A. Ackelsberg 14. "Carry It On": Continuing the Discussion and the Struggle Ann Bookman and Sandra Morgen The Contributors

Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film

Abstract: Preface Introduction 1 From Counterculture to Counterrevolution, 1967-1971 1. Alienation and Rebellion 2. Feminism, Black Radicalism, Student Rebellion 3. The Hollywood Counterrevolution 2 Crisis Films 1. Diaster Films 2. Metaphors of Fear 3. Francis Coppola and the Crisis of Patriarchy 3 Genre Transformations and the Failure of Liberalism 1. Western, Detective, Musical 2. Social Problem Films 3. Conspiracy Films 4 Class, Race, and the New South 1. The Hollywood Working Class 2. Representations of Blacks 3. The New South 5 The Politics of Sexuality 1. The Poisiton of Women 2. From a Male Point of View: MenOs Movies and the Return of Romance 3. The Family and the New Sexuality 6 Horror Films 1. The Occult 2. Monsters 3. Brian De Palma and the Slash and Gash Cycles 7 Vietnam and the New Militarism 1. Debating Vietman 2. The Military Rehabilited 3. The New Militarism 8 Return of the Hero: Entrepreneur, Patriarch, Warrior 1. The Triumph of Individualism--From Man to Superman 2. George LucasOs Strategic Defense Initiatives 3. The Leadership Principle--From Movie Brats to Movie Moguls 9 Fantasy Films 1. Technophobia 2. Dystopias 3. At Home with Steven Spielberg 10 The Politics of Representation 1. On the Left Edge of Hollywood 2. Within the Hollywood Codes: Political Films 3. Beyond Hollywood: The Independent Sector Conclusion: Film and Politics Postface Appendix Notes Selected Bibliography Index

Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence--Boston, 1880-1960

Abstract: "In this unflinching history of family violence, the historian Linda Gordon traces policies on child abuse and neglect, wife-beating, and incest from 1880 to 1960. Drawing on hundreds of case records from social agencies devoted to dealing with the problem, Gordon chronicles the changing visibility of family violence as gender, family, and political ideologies shifted. From the "discovery" of family violence in the 1870s - when it was first identified as a social, rather than personal, problem - to the women's and civil rights movements of the twentieth century, "Heroes of Their Own Lives" illustrates how public perceptions of marriage, poverty, alcoholism, mental illness, and responsibility worked for and against the victims of family violence. Powerful, moving, and tightly argued, "Heroes of Their Own Lives" shows family violence to be an indicator of larger social problems. Examining its sources as well as its treatment, Gordon offers both an honest understanding of the problem and an unromantic view of the difficulties in stopping it. "

Festivals and the French Revolution

Abstract: Festivals and the French Revolution--the subject conjures up visions of goddesses of Liberty, strange celebrations of Reason, and the oddly pretentious cult of the Supreme Being. Every history of the period includes some mention of festivals, although most historians have been content either to ridicule them as ineffectual or to bemoan them as repugnant examples of a sterile, official culture. Mona Ozouf shows us that they were much more than bizarre marginalia to the revolutionary process. Festivals offer critical insights into the meaning of the French Revolution; they show a society in the process of creating itself anew. Historians have recognized the importance of the revolutionary festival as a symbol of the Revolution. But they have differed widely in their interpretations of what that symbol meant and have considered the festivals as diverse as the rival political groups that conceived and organized them. Against this older vision, Ozouf argues for the fundamental coherence and profound unity of the festival as both event and register of reference and attitude. By comparing the most ideologically opposed festivals (those of Reason and the Supreme Being, for instance), she shows that they clearly share a common aim, which finds expression in a mutual ceremonial and symbolic vocabulary. Through a brilliant discussion of the construction, ordering, and conduct of the festival Ozouf demonstrates how the continuity of the images, allegories, ceremonials, and explicit functions can be seen as the Revolution's own commentary on itself. A second and important aim of this book is to show that this system of festivals, often seen as destructive, was an immensely creativeforce. The festival was the mirror in which the Revolution chose to see itself and the pedagogical tool by which it hoped to educate future generations, Far from being a failure, it embodied, socialized, and made sacred a new set of values based on the family, the nation, and mankind--the values of a modern, secular, liberal world.

Ethics and Professionalism

Abstract: John Kultgen explores the ways morality and professional ideals are connected. In assessing the moral impact of professionalism in our society, he examines both the structure and organization of occupations and the ideals and ideology associated with them. Differing from standard treatments of professional ethics, "Ethics and Professionalism recognizes that it is the practices within the professions that determine whether rules and ideals are used as masks for self-interest or for genuinely moral purposes. "This book provides a functional analysis of what it means to be a profession or a professional society."--"Journal of Mass Media Ethics

Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction Part I. France: 1. The transformations of Auguste Comte: science and literature in early positivism 2. Agathon and others: literature and sociology in France at the turn of the century Part II. England: 3. Facts and culture of the feelings: John Stuart Mill 4. The unwritten novel: Breatrice Webb 5. The utopian novel as a substitute for sociology: H. G. Wells 6. Concealed sociology: English literary criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Part III. Germany: 7. Prologue: artisan and poet too: W. H. Riehl 8. Hostility to science and faith in poetry as a German ideology 9. A German speciality: poetry and literature in opposition 10. Disciplines in competition: sociology and history 11. Remoteness from society and hostility towards sociology in Stefan George's circle 12. Stefan George, Georg Simmel, Max Weber 13. Weberian motifs in the work of Thomas Mann 14. The German spirit in peril: E. R. Curtius, Karl Mannheim and T. S. Eliot 13. Epilogue: sociology in National Socialist Germany and afterwards Bibliography Index.

A conflict of visions : ideological origins of political struggles

Abstract: "A classic of a very special kind...A gem of a book, crafted with passion for the truth and love for mankind. " -Christian Science Monitor. . Controversies in politics arise from many sources, but the conflicts that endure for generations or centuries show a remarkably consistent pattern. In this classic work, Thomas Sowell analyzes this pattern. He describes the two competing visions that shape our debates about the nature of reason, justice, equality, and power: the "constrained" vision, which sees human nature as unchanging and selfish, and the "unconstrained" vision, in which human nature is malleable and perfectible. A Conflict of Visions offers a convincing case that ethical and policy disputes circle around the disparity between both outlooks.

Ideological production: The making of community mediation

Abstract: Through an analysis of the structure of the community mediation movement in the United States and an ethnography of the practices of mediators in local programs, this paper examines how community mediation is made, and how it is ideologically constituted. The ideology of community mediation is produced through an interplay among three ideological projects or visions of community mediation and organizational models, and by the selection and differential use of mediators to handle cases. We argue that ideologies are formed through the mobilization of symbolic resources by groups promoting different projects. Central to the production of mediation ideology is a struggle over the symbolic resources of community justice and consensual justice. Although various groups propose differing conceptions of community justice, they share a similar commitment to consensual justice, and this similarity is produced through reinterpretations of the same symbols. The ambiguities in community mediation are, it appears, being overtaken by consensus on the nature of the mediation process itself.

Crossdressing, The Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England

Abstract: How many people cross-dressed in Renaissance England? There is probably no way empirically to answer such a question. Given biblical prohibitions against the practice and their frequent repetition from the pulpit and in the prescriptive literature of the period, one would guess that the number of people who dared walk the streets of London in the clothes of the other sex was limited. None the less, there are records of women, in particular, who did so, and who were punished for their audacity; and from at least 1580 to 1620 preachers and polemicists kept up a steady attack on the practice. I am going to argue that the polemics signal a sex-gender system under pressure and that cross-dressing, as fact and as idea, threatened a normative social order based upon strict principles of hierarchy and subordination, of which women’s subordination to man was a chief instance, trumpeted from pulpit, instantiated in law, and acted upon by monarch and commoner alike.1 I will also argue, however, that the subversive or transgressive potential of this practice could be and was recuperated in a number of ways. As with any social practice, its meaning varied with the circumstances of its occurrence, with the particulars of the institutional or cultural sites of its enactment, and with the class position of the transgressor. As part of a stage action, for example, the ideological import of cross-dressing was mediated by all the conventions of dramatic narrative and Renaissance dramatic production. It cannot simply be conflated with cross-dressing on the London streets or as part of a disciplining ritual such as a charivari or skimmington. In what follows I want to pay attention to the differences among various manifestations of cross-dressing in Renaissance culture but at the same time to suggest the ways they form an interlocking grid through which we can read aspects of class and gender struggle in the period, struggles in which the theater-as I hope to show-played a highly contradictory role.