bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Resolving Mechanical Resonances with Breit-Wigner Formula
Authors: García-Berrocal A. , Blázquez J. , Montalvo C. , Balbás M.
Published: April 2009

Vibrating mechanical systems are usually characterized by a number of resonances appearing in the Power Spectrum Density (PSD). Each resonance is featured by three quantities with physical meaning: the resonant frequency, the damping coefficient and the amplitude. Often, another parameter, the asymmetry factor, is required when neighbor resonances overlap. Resonances can be represented by a mathematical formula, so the four parameters can be obtained by fitting the PSD to that formula. The proper expression for fitting comes from the transfer function for resonances, using a pair of complex conjugate poles. Keeping in mind that the PSD stands only for positive frequencies, a Breit-Wigner formula is derived for fitting resonances. Breit-Wigner formula is widely used in Nuclear Physics but seldom in Mechanical Engineering and so the derivation of the formula is outlined. Applications are presented for resolved resonances and the method is tested in simple cases. There is a case study for unresolved resonances belonging to the vibration of a pressurized water reactor core barrel measured by ex-core neutron detectors. The four resonance parameters are changing along the time, so for preventive maintenance purposes, they must be supervised. A natural question arises: what is the percent change of the four parameters altogether? Such a question is replied by using quaternion numbers.
Costs of Smoking: A Focus on Maternal, Childhood, and Other Short-Run Costs
Authors: Adams E. Kathleen , Young Terri L.
Published: April 2009

Estimating the costs attributable to smoking is helpful for evaluating appropriate tax policy, informing both public and private managers of health care, and evaluating alternative smoking cessation programs. While the smoking-attributable costs of chronic conditions have been well studied, these costs are less relevant to health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and employers whose populations are younger and transient. Costs incurred in the short run, such as those related to smoking during pregnancy and environmental tobacco smoke exposure (ETS) of children, are more relevant. In this article, the authors review studies of these sources of smoking-attributable costs as well as studies that focus on smoking-attributable outcomes and costs from the employer or HMO perspective. Subsidies may be necessary to induce employers to recognize the full social benefits of smoking cessation programs.
Strategic Groups and Performance in the Nursing Home Industry: A Reexamination
Authors: Marlin Dan , Sun Minghe , Huonker John W.
Published: April 2009

This study further examines the relationship between strategic group membership and performance in the nursing home industry. The results indicate seven strategic groups in the industry with significant between-group differences in operating margin, average profit per patient day, catheterization rate, health deficiencies, life and safety deficiencies, and efficiency in the provision of services. The authors did not, however, find significant between-group differences in pressure sore rate, the use of restraints, or in the percentage of patients with significant unplanned weight changes. The group with the highest private-pay utilization combined with high Medicare utilization generally performed the best along all indicators. Results also suggest that strategic group membership and rural/urban location have a greater impact on performance than do ownership, chain membership, or possession of a dedicated specialty care unit.
Dynamic Inquiry Relationships: Ways of Creating, Sustaining, and Improving the Inquiry Process Through the Recognition and Management of Conflicts
Authors: Abma Tineke A.
Published: April 2009

From a social constructivist or relational point of view, knowledge is the outcome of interactions and relationships between the inquirers and the participants. These interactions and relationships are shaped by dynamic sociopolitical processes and go through conflicts and impasses. This implies that the quality of knowledge depends on the quality of the relational process in conducting a qualitative inquiry. In this article, the author indicates some notions that might be useful in improving this process. These involve the recognition and management of conflict. Conflict is understood here not as the absence of consensus but rather as the negation or exclusion of “otherness.” A case drawn from an evaluation study in which a conflict arose among the client, site workers, and the author as an evaluator forms the basis of this article. A thick description and interpretation of the conflict is presented.
Always Dying: Living Between Da and Fort
Authors: Pelias Ronald J.
Published: April 2009

This is a performative writing essay that reflects on Peggy Phelan’s thesis from Mourning Sex that theatre is a rehearsal for death. Using the Freudian frame of da (there) and fort (gone), the essay moves between presence and absence, between aesthetic performances and everyday performances, and between life and death.
Setting Aside the Identity Furor: Staying Her Story-Course of Same-ness
Authors: Porter Eileen J.
Published: April 2009

In qualitative research, considerable emphasis has been placed on the representation of identity, but this discussion has occurred largely within the context of the Self-Other dichotomy. Here, an alternative perspective on identity is presented. It is emphasized that exploring a participant’s “same-ness” is a critically important aperture to human experience that may be neglected in the furor over whose voice is being presented in text. In this article, narratives of the researcher’s experience during a descriptive phenomenological study of older widows’ experience of home care are interspersed with excerpts from interviews with one older widow. There is evidence that the participant and researcher share the goal of revealing the participant’s same-ness. This shared aim can supercede the focus on interpersonal differences that is at the heart of the Self-Other identity furor.
“Dream Child”: The Role of Poetic Dialogue in Homeless Research
Authors: Finley Susan
Published: April 2009

This article represents the usefulness of artistic approaches to social science research. Following a brief introduction to the research context—an inquiry into the life experiences of homeless youth travelers—the author presents a poem that interweaves snippets of conversations audiotaped during the inquiry with lines of poetry that she has written in her reflections about the research process and with poetry written by a 17-year-old female traveler. She presents the poem as an example of the way that poetry has been used throughout this research project both to record research findings and to generate further conversations with research participants.
A Night With The Narcissist and the Nasty Boys: Interpreting the World Wrestling Federation
Authors:   Communication Studies 298 California State University, Sacramento
Published: April 2009

This article narrates the observations and analyses of a research team that conducted an ethnographic study of a city arena. The article describes observations, analyses, and reinterpretations of the most interesting event the team witnessed at the arena: a World Wrestling Federation (WWF) contest. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1968) characterization of carnival, the team discusses multiple interpretations of WWF wrestling as a violent and grotesque spectacle that is coperformed by wrestlers and audience members. Inspired by Van Maanen’s Tales of the Field, the team tells this story incorporating elements of realist, confessional, impressionist, and critical tales.
Writing the American Ineffable, or the Mystery and Practice of Feng Shui in Everyday Life
Authors: Goodall H. L.
Published: April 2009

The ancient practice of feng shui is an interpretive framework used by practitioners to channel positive energies into and through various environments, therefore altering or changing individuals’ fortunes. This article describes a variety of feng shui applications in relation to beliefs about the role of magic, mystery, and order in American life.
Angles of Vision: Enhancing Perception in Qualitative Research
Authors: Peshkin Alan
Published: April 2009

This article develops the idea of consciously using different lenses for the purpose of expanding the perceptual efficacy of the researcher. Lenses provide a means of opening into or looking into. They alert and arouse us to mobilize resources of interest, energy, time, and attention. To be so mobilized is to foreground and background what is out there and thus to construct what is available to see. The author assumes that although researchers always use one or another lens while engaged in the process of observation, they can learn to see in unexpected but useful ways if they are aware of a range of possible focal points. Nine such focal points are developed in this article.
Unsettling Engagements: On the Ends of Rapport in Critical Ethnography
Authors: Springwood Charles Fruehling , King C. Richard
Published: April 2009

The authors attempt to frame the essays in this issue of Qualitative Inquiry by arguing that an increasing emphasis on forms of “critical ethnography” in a variety of ethnographically informed disciplines has significantly complicated the notion of ethnographic rapport. Rapport, as a methodological trope and relational strategy of the ethnographic habitus, has, in some circles, already been undergoing reconsideration and revision. But too often, it has simply been ignored. This refusal to locate rapport has been particularly problematic for ethnographers informed by technologies of critical theory. Critical ethnographers, including the contributors to this issue, inscribe a range of contrasting perspectives variously regarding the (im)possibility, desirability, ambiguity, and legitimacy of rapport. This issue allows ethnographers of human practice and meaning to seriously ponder the suggestion that they must indeed “forget” rapport.
The Ambiguity of Boundaries in the Fieldwork Experience: Establishing Rapport and Negotiating Insider/Outsider Status
Authors: Sherif Bahira
Published: April 2009

This article contextualizes an emerging issue in critical ethnography, specifically, the problem of establishing rapport and negotiating boundaries for a partial insider in a non-Western setting. A description of the author’s experiences while conducting fieldwork among upper-middle-class Muslim families in Cairo, Egypt, highlights the fact that an ethnographer’s notions of self intersect with those of the people studied in multiple ways. In particular, the formulation of knowledge and its interpretation are affected. Further, it is illustrated that the constantly shifting, ambiguous boundaries between people become an important part of the research process.
With Mother/With Child: A True Story
Authors: Ellis Carolyn
Published: April 2009

This story describes an evening of interaction with the author’s aging mother as the author assists her in her nightly routine of preparing for bed. The surrounding frame describes the author’s reading of this intimate story to her mother. The author comments on the tension between independence and dependence that occurs as she tries to help her mother without taking away control, and her mother seeks to be helped without relinquishing control. The author reveals her hesitancy and fear in reading this story to her mother. This hesitancy leads into the last frame, which probes the general methodological issue of the ethics of writing about intimate others. Taking into account her mother’s perspective and those of her academic audience, the author discusses how she resolved the ethical issue of how much to tell to and about her mother by living through this experience with her, writing about their relationship, and examining her own feelings in the context of the story.
Telling Stories About School: Using Critical Race and Latino Critical Theories to Document Latina/Latino Education and Resistance
Authors: Fernández Lilia
Published: April 2009

Education researchers have increasingly begun to use critical race theory (CRT) and Latino critical theory (LatCrit) in their qualitative studies. This article draws on those methodological and theoretical frameworks to examine the educational experience of a Latino student in a public high school in Chicago, Illinois. By exploring this student’s narrative, the author gained insight into how the student understood his own personal educational experience as well as that of his fellow Latina/Latino classmates. Moreover, this narrative highlights how he and his classmates resisted inadequate schooling by sometimes choosing alternative activities or practices over attending school. The author argues that it is of critical importance to use Latina/Latino students’ stories, not as accessories to our research but as the centerpiece of qualitative studies that aim for a better understanding of the issues these students face in contemporary schooling.
Dead Again in Berkeley: An Ethnographic Happening
Authors: Richardson Laurel
Published: April 2009

This article focuses on discerning and legitimating crossovers between modernist and poststructural ethnographic practices and between literary and scientific forms of representation. Presented within is both analysis of and an example of writing, which is intended to be received as poetry, performance, and ethnography.
Multitextual Analysis in the Service of Peace: Local People and Peacekeeping
Authors: Neack Laura , Knudson Roger M.
Published: April 2009

The authors explore the use of personal narratives as a method for the study of conflict and peace, selecting as a site for interpretation the militarily and ethnically divided island of Cyprus. The international community has made a considerable investment in peacekeeping operations, but the many active sites of these operations can only be understood in terms of the multiple, intersecting, and often contending accounts of both the truth and the reality of the local circumstances, including the accounts of local citizens. This article presents an illustration of how personal narratives and official narratives derived from the Greek Cypriot side of the conflict combine to create a cohesive, culturally shared narrative. The ultimate goal of the research project is to write the many different voices, or “texts” that surround the ethnic dividing line in Cyprus, especially those that deviate from the dominant narratives in the service of elusive peace.
Two-Stepping in the ’90s
Authors: Denzin Norman K.
Published: April 2009

This article calls for a new ethics of writing, asking that writers put their texts in forms that readers can use in their own lives. This allows the writer to use the personal in the name of the political. These points are illustrated in an analysis of personal texts dealing with the death of a family member.
A Typology of Women's Use of Violence in Intimate Relationships
Authors: Swan Suzanne C. , Snow David L.
Published: April 2009

Women's use of violence in intimate relationships is not well understood. This study examined women's violence in relation to their male partners'sviolence against them. The sample consisted of 108 women who had used physical violence with a male partner in the previous 6 months. Almost all the women experienced physical abuse from their male partners. Whereas the women in the sample used more emotional abuse and moderate physical violence than their partners, the women were more often victims of sexual violence, injury, and coercive control. Three types of relationships were identified: women as victims (34%), women as aggressors (12%), and mixed relationships (50%), which were of two subtypes'mixed-male coercive (32%) and mixed-female coercive (18%). The study illustrates that women's violence needs to be examined within the context of male violence and abuse. The implications of the findings are discussed for researchers and practitioners who work with domestically violent women.
Predicting Five Dimensions of Police Officer Stress: Looking More Deeply Into Organizational Settings for Sources of Police Stress
Authors: Zhao Jihong “Solomon” , He Ni , Lovrich Nicholas
Published: April 2009

Research on police officer stress has focused primarily on the rather atypical nature of police work and extent of adherence by law enforcement agencies across the nation to the Weberian bureaucratic form of organization and management practices. This study explores the effect of individual perceptions of work environment on male officer stress. Survey data from two large police departments in the northwestern United States are used in the analysis. The findings observed suggest that the levels of five dimensions of workplace stress are similar to adult males in the U.S. workforce and that an individual's perceptions of their work environment do have a significant impact on police officer stress.
Anatomy of a Gang Suppression Unit: The Social Construction of an Organizational Response to Gang Problems
Authors: Archbold Carol A. , Meyer Michael
Published: April 2009

This article explores the institutional response of a midsized Midwestern police department to a perceived growing problem with youth gang activity. More specifically, this article analyzes both individual- and organizational-level variables that provide justification for creating and sustaining the existence of a Gang Suppression Unit (GSU). The evolution of the GSU is traced through both formal and informal constructions of a perceived youth gang problem by the Cedar Springs Police Department. Data collection consisted of 250 hours of participant observation with both uniformed patrol officers and members of the GSU, as well as official memos, records, and newspaper articles, to illustrate a historical overview of how the GSU emerged. In addition, this case study also provides evidence of common conditions often found in moral panic situations.
Text in an Evaluative Context
Authors: Abma Tineke A.
Published: April 2009

Written texts are an important medium for evaluators to communicate their findings. Evaluation reports take many forms and functions, commonly having the character of a scientific text. An objective and factual description informs readers about the activities and outcomes of the program and its underlying mechanisms. In this article I suggest that a scientific text can be useful when an evaluation aims to determine the worth of a program. However, if the goal of evaluation is to promote a dialogue among those who have an interest in the evaluated program a different kind of text is required. In my attempt to identify an appropriate text for such a purpose I describe and apply the notions of texts developed by postmodern writers—self-reflexivity, polyvocality and multiplicity—in an evaluative context. The potential of this kind of text is illustrated and critically examined by the responsive evaluation of a Palliative Care project.
The Factory
Authors: Alexander Catherine
Published: April 2009

This article considers the Turkish State’s use of the built environment to mould behaviour and how local practices modify such architectonic command sequences. Specifically, the Turkish Sugar Corporation from its inception to the present day is analysed, through the prism of the architecture of factory compounds. Through the fourfold structure of ‘form’, ‘practice’, ‘building’ and ‘setting’, the changing relationship between Republican centralist ideology and local practice is monitored. Local forms of architecture are analysed to suggest not only their practical appropriateness, but also as alternatives to the common equation of body and house.
A Praxeological Approach to Subjectivation in a Material World
Authors: Warnier Jean-Pierre
Published: April 2009

This article aims at bringing together various lines of analysis that have been kept more or less separate until now, that is, studies on the body, motricity, perception, agency, material culture, the subject, unconscious drives, and power systems. By drawing on the work of Mauss, Schilder, Tisseron, Parlebas and Foucault, it discusses how the subject and its drives are invested in sensori-motricity in a material world. When it is socially validated and coded, such an investment amounts to what Foucault called the ‘techniques of the self’. The subjectivation thus achieved may be consistent or at odds with corresponding representations. The notions provided by praxeology, the science of sensori-motricity, may help in producing an ethnography of subjectivation in a material world.
The Making and Marking of The ‘Japanese’ and the ‘Western’ in Japanese Contemporary Material Culture
Authors: Goldstein-Gidoni Ofra
Published: April 2009

This article uses the analysis of sets of contemporary Japanese cultural materials in order to explore the dynamics of the significant process of making and marking of the ‘Japanese’ and the ‘Western’ in contemporary Japanese culture. Through the observation of material culture - mainly food and clothing - in its public presentational arenas, it aims at reaching a better understanding of the processes in which the foreign and the local interact in this so-called era of globalization. Both the ‘Western’ and the ‘Japanese’ are illustrated as cultural constructs. The distinction between them is not based on objective classification. Their cultural making and marking is described on the background of the formation of the modern Japanese culture and cultural identity.
From Garden Suburb to Olde City Ward
Authors: Rosin R. Thomas
Published: April 2009

In post-Independence India, new colonies of garden suburbs served an educated citizenry to integrate science and nature into their daily life. However, one such colony of bungalows ( kothi) and gardens, begun in Jaipur in the 1950s, after two generations of incremental construction, has become in the 1990s similar to an old city ward with towering courtyard houses ( haveli) abutting the property lines. This longitudinal study compares the middle class occupants’ initial aspirations with real outcomes as documented in the materiality of built form. The biography of these buildings reflects not only a quest for a life style of class, but the adapting of site and building to make secure one’s livelihood and heritage for one’s descendants, and to manage relations with one’s neighbors. The built environment is not simply an outcome of regulation, design, and willful intent. The levels of agency and the variety of actors are multiple and complex, demanding an analysis of social interaction and an assessment of aggregate outcomes.
Charged Artifacts and the Detonation of Liminality
Authors: Landzelius Kyra Marie
Published: April 2009

This article employs ethnography to explore the multiple significations of ornamenting the incubator, a quasi-ritual practice wherein mothers of preterm babies place rudimentary things, like stuffed animal toys, into their infants’ life-support machines. I contend that such enactments pose more or less conscious endeavors to domesticate and animate these prosthetic devices, as veritable cyborg wombs which interpolate mother-child bonding and problematize maternal identity. In these acts, the ‘technoscapes’ (Appadurai, 1990) of cheap, mundane items and exclusive, precision instruments converge in a paradoxical, but fertile juxtaposition to make the ambiguous figure of the preterm infant culturally-intelligible as well as biologically-viable. It is suggested that the liminality of toys and trinkets out of place empowers them to attenuate the alienness of the incubator and its technoliminal capacity to alienate. A kind of teddy-bear diplomacy is in play wherein juvenile playthings are enlisted to detonate the charged foreignness of the incubator-other, and bring baby into familiar cultural grammars.
Branding ‘Perfection’
Authors: Halstead Narmala
Published: April 2009

This article examines notions of fake and real vis-a-vis East Indians’ interactions with American brand names, which provide particular insights into how they define themselves in relation to the ‘foreign’. It considers how this claiming of the foreign allows for a notion of personhood which relies on outward migration or how people imagine themselves as being somewhere else. Belonging has to be understood in relation to another place, the locus of which in contemporary Caribbean has come to mean North America. It is how the American brand explicates an idea of perfection that in turn illustrates how East Indians in Guyana and New York relate with the foreign as self and the self as other to complete a sense of who they are. The notion of the fake indexes these relations in terms of both ‘real brands’ and ‘real lives’, which find different meanings in the shifting landscape of the foreign.
Accounting for Materialism in Four Cultures
Authors: Ger Güliz , Belk Russell W.
Published: April 2009

Accounts for materialism are examined based on qualitative research in Romania, Turkey, the USA, and Western Europe. Various spontaneously offered accounts reconcile the discrepancy between the belief that materialism is bad and materialistic consumption behavior and aspirations. These accounts include justifications - passionate connoisseurship, instrumentalism, and altruism - and excuses - the compelling external forces, the ways of the modern world, and deservingness. The differences in accounts can be understood culturally and historically. In negotiating the ‘bad’ material world with their own consumption worlds, informants draw from various ethics prevalent in their cultures to moralize their personal materialistic consumption. Our findings suggest ways in which materialism, moralized by local accounts, is able to grow globally in spite of its condemnation.
Radiocracy
Authors: Hartley John
Published: April 2009

The history of radio from the early pre-broadcasting period shows how transmitted music and talk have been caught up in the evolution of contemporary citizenship. The article discusses Bertolt Brecht’s experiments in public radio in the 1920s, and argues that commercial radio can also be seen to have contributed to the self-identification of ‘imagined communities’. Internationally, despite the ascendance of other broadcast and communications media, radio continues to be used in a variety of community-building developmental situations, providing remote, marginal and disenfranchised communities with low-cost, low-tech public space. Radio remains one of the pillars of civil society, combining entertainment and democracy, sound and citizenship. This article is a modified version of the welcome address that launched the ‘Radiocracy’ conference.
The laboratory of hate
Authors: Windrich Elaine
Published: April 2009

Radio played an important role in the 30-year war in Angola. For Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA rebels broadcasting provided a means of recruiting supporters, sustaining rebellion and appealing for external support. In addition to lauding Savimbi and instilling hatred of the enemy - the ruling MPLA and its Cuban/Russian allies - UNITA’s broadcasting featured anti-communist rhetoric and grandiose claims of military victories. For this, it had the unwavering support of South Africa’s apartheid regime and the Reagan and Bush administrations in the USA. But UNITA also had its dissidents, and when they defected they revealed the inner operations of a clandestine radio station. Radio was also a vital instrument for the Angolan government’s propaganda war against UNITA. However, although state radio always publicized Savimbi’s human rights abuses, it refrained from criticizing government violations such as corruption and censorship.
Democratic rhetoric and emergent media
Authors: Spinelli Martin
Published: April 2009

This article offers a comparative analysis of the promotional rhetorics that surround the emergent media of radio and the Internet in the USA. It details the development of each rhetoric, provides an analysis of their ideological underpinnings and suggests that - given the emphasis on the ‘virtual’ in Internet theory and promotion - our current communication utopia will come to resemble its predecessor: a literal ‘no place’ in which the word ‘democracy’ becomes a consumption-based parody of what might have been the medium’s actual democratic potential. The analysis of radio’s promotional rhetoric studies the writing and speeches of the National Broadcasting Company/Radio Corporation of America leader David Sarnoff, the newspaper editor Martin Codel, the educator Joy Elmer Morgan and the psychologist and media analyst Rudolf Arnheim. The examination of the Internet takes up the work of former Speaker of the US House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, Vice President Al Gore and Internet theorist Howard Rheingold.
Sacred-secrets, justice and reconciliation
Authors: Pritchard Stephen
Published: April 2009

This article examines a number of discourses that surrounded a Royal Commission set up to investigate the truth about certain Australian Aboriginal ‘sacred-secret’ traditions. The central focus of this study is the relationship between the way in which the commission attempted to overcome the silence of the secret or the lack of clear positive evidence, the question of the authoritativeness and conclusiveness of its findings and the way in which the sacred-secret has been dealt with in such contexts. Taking such concerns as a starting point, the article poses a range of broad philosophical problems concerning the relationship between the idea of the ‘secret’, the problematic of representation as identified in recent postcolonial theory, and makes some suggestions about what the Hindmarsh case might offer towards an understanding of nation, reconciliation and justice between cultures.
Media events or media stories?
Authors: Sun Wanning
Published: April 2009

Taking Dayan and Katz’s argument of media event as the point of departure, I want to not only assess the relevance of media event theory to a non liberal-democratic media system such as China but, more importantly, to argue that ‘media events’ need to be studied in juxtaposition to what I refer to as ‘media stories’ in order to yield insight into the complexity and ambiguity of the Chinese mediasphere. I show that whereas media events are about spectacles, official time and grand history, media stories are mostly about everyday life, unofficial time and individual memory. I argue that the co-existence of conflicting temporalities between the official media and commercial media contributes to a process of fragmentation and dispersal of a sense of national space and time. I further argue that although media events and media stories perform different spatial-temporal duties and functions in the way in which the nation is imagined, there is a complicity between nationalist discourses and transnational processes in contemporary China.
Popular media as public ‘sphericules’ for diasporic communities
Authors: Cunningham Stuart
Published: April 2009

The dynamics of ‘diasporic’ video, television, cinema, music and Internet use - where peoples displaced from homelands by migration, refugee status or business and economic imperative use media to negotiate new cultural identities - offer challenges for how media and culture are understood in our times. Drawing on research published in Floating Lives: The Media and Asian Diasporas, on dynamics that are industrial (the pathways by which these media travel to their multifarious destinations), textual and audience-related (types of diasporic style and practice where popular culture debates and moral panics are played out in culturally divergent circumstances among communities marked by internal difference and external ‘othering’), the article will interrogate further the nature of the public ‘sphericules’ formed around diasporic media.
Television and cultural studies
Authors: Turner Graeme
Published: April 2009

This introductory article argues that the current state of debate on television within cultural studies is marked by considerable areas of theoretical and political uncertainty. The spread of deregulatory and privatizing public policies in relation to television, and the disarticulation of television from the idea of the national community and from the role of the citizen, have posed new problems for theorizing the relation between television and its audiences. In this article I survey a number of key areas of debate: the relation between television, the nation and the state; television and the citizen/consumer, television content and performance, and the likely future(s) of television.
Living on Dawson’s Creek
Authors: Brooker Will
Published: April 2009

This paper explores issues of cultural convergence around television audiences, with a particular focus on the Warner Brothers (WB) teen drama Dawson’s Creek and its viewers. It argues that contemporary television increasingly ‘overflows’ from the primary text across multiple platforms - particularly onto dedicated internet sites - and that certain programmes invite a participatory, interactive engagement which constructs the show as an extended, immersive experience. My ethnographic research with American and British viewers asks whether viewers actually follow this pattern of structured interactivity, whether they produce any ‘folk’ culture of their own or simply follow the culture provided from ‘above’, and whether factors such as age, nation, gender, and economic background shape their engagement with these secondary texts.
Big Brother Australia
Authors: Roscoe Jane
Published: April 2009

Big Brother is a hybrid format that is both innovative and engaging and, as such, warrants critical attention. In an attempt to move the debate beyond discussions of ‘tabloidization’ and narratives of decline, this paper examines Big Brother in terms of the production strategies, textual innovations and the various ways in which audiences are able to interact with this media event. It is argued here that Big Brother is an important precursor to fully interactive TV, and a significant prototype for future media events.
The opinion poll as a cultural form
Authors: Lewis Justin
Published: April 2009

The article examines public opinion polls from a cultural studies perspective. Polls are discussed as a cultural form, a system of representation that attempts to signify the public. The article explores the differences between the products of polling agencies and the interpretation of polls in the mainstream media. It is argued that for all its attempts at closure, the opinion poll discourse is a fairly ‘open’ text, signifying a far wider range of political ideas than is found in mainstream political discourse. Once these representations of the public are re-presented in mainstream media, the discourse narrows: responses that might be articulated within a progressive political framework are generally ignored or repressed. The article examines this form of closure and concludes by proposing that a pro-corporate, center-right hegemony in the field of public opinion is a narrow, strategic project rather than a broad ideological victory.
Television and civilization
Authors: Keane Michael
Published: April 2009

This paper examines the manner by which the Chinese Communist Party has moved to allow cultural producers more autonomy. I argue that such a shift in government rationality needs to be viewed as part of wider reform programmes and strategies intended to promote diversity and make institutions more accountable and efficient. The interface between culture and the market in contemporary China is often described as a tension between commercialism and propaganda, or simply a trend towards pluralism, but with ‘Chinese characteristics’. I argue that it is more useful to view the relations between culture and government as accommodation and compromise. Cultural policy statements are often deliberately ambiguous and relations between officials and producers are continually being redefined. I suggest that a Foucauldian notion of governmentality can provide the methodological tools to understand the complexity of quasi-commercialized culture in China. A reading of cultural policy statements pertaining to television drama production will illustrate my argument.
The European Union and the information society
Authors: Goodwin Ian , Spittle Steve
Published: April 2009

In this article, critical discourse analysis is utilized to scrutinize the discursive structure of an increasingly contested debate over the social, cultural and economic impact of the ‘information society’ within the European Union (EU). This debate has informed the development of information policy goals and affected their implementation. This analysis builds upon previous critiques of language and policy by focusing on language as a mode of social action. Four major discourses are identified: threat/opportunity, technological determinism, market dominance and citizen vs consumer. Despite the articulation of a broad set of policy goals, it is argued that these discourses act to structure the debate in such a way that its economic parameters become privileged, at the expense of social and cultural factors. Further, it is contended that this has consequences for information policy, and the type of information society that will ultimately be achieved.
Gender's nature
Authors: Hird Myra J.
Published: April 2009

The distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ is challenged by arguments that ‘sex’ is equally a social construction, initiating a selfreflexive effort to return feminism to its foundational grounding. This article concerns intersexuality and transsexualism as two bodily forms that further suggest ‘sex’ as socially inscribed. I argue that feminist theory needs to ascertain whether the artificial emphasis on sexual difference, contra nature, is better able to effect social change than conjoined efforts to expose ‘sex’ as a construction intended to ground divisions. Recent support for ‘multiple genders’ often remain dependent on a morphological notion of ‘sex’, and, as such, may not constitute a radical challenge to our current ‘sex’/‘gender’ system.
The objectivity norm in American journalism*
Authors: Schudson Michael
Published: April 2009

Why did the occupational norm of ‘objectivity’ arise in American journalism? This question has attracted the interest of many journalism historians but it has not previously been examined as an instance of a more general social phenomenon, the emergence of new cultural norms and ideals. Four conditions for the emergence of new norms are identified – two having to do with the self-conscious pursuit of internal group solidarity; and two having to do with the need to articulate the ideals of social practice in a group in order to exercise control over subordinates and to pass on group culture to the next generation. Reviewing the history of the professionalization of American journalism, this essay identifies the late 19th and early 20th century as the period when these conditions crystallized. Alternative technological and economic explanations of the emergence of objectivity are criticized and the difficulty of understanding why objectivity as a norm emerged first and most fully in the United States rather than in European journalism is discussed.
The First Amendment and the doctrine of corporate personhood
Authors: Allen David S.
Published: April 2009

This article traces the development of the American idea that corporations are people and entitled to constitutional rights – commonly referred to as corporate personhood – and what that development means for the press and democratic life. In the opinion of many US Supreme Court justices, the press is entitled to special constitutional privileges because of the unique role it plays in democracy. The Court has also endowed corporations with many of those same rights, in part to serve as a check on the corporate press. With the growing corporate ownership of American media, the Court has struggled to find clear reasons for how the press is different from corporations. It is argued that by collapsing the press–corporation distinction, the Court is creating an avenue for corporate values to dominate the public sphere.
The journalist as moral witness
Authors: Plaisance Patrick Lee
Published: April 2009

Prototypical philosopher–journalist Michael Ignatieff argues that the globalization that has helped spawn modern ethnic conflict demands that mass media assume new roles as sentinels of ‘moral engagement’. Underlying Ignatieff's call are the claims that history has debunked the concept of absolute human values and that global communication must, above all, mediate among opposing moral worlds. His pluralistic philosophy represents the culmination of a strain of ethical thought that has pre-revolutionary Russian roots. This study examines important elements in Ignatieff's literary persona and the philosophy that informs his journalism.
Epistemologies of TV journalism
Authors: Ekström Mats
Published: April 2009

This article sketches a theoretical framework for studies of the epistemologies of journalism. In this context epistemology does not refer to philosophical inquiries into the nature of true knowledge but to the study of knowledge-producing practices and communication of knowledge claims. The focus in the article is mainly on TV journalism. The theoretical framework distinguishes three fundamental areas and three main questions for research on the epistemologies of journalism: (1) form of knowledge (What are the characteristics of the knowledge that television journalism produces and offers its audiences?); (2) production of knowledge (What rules, routines, institutionalized procedures and systems of classification guide the production of knowledge and how do journalists decide what is sufficiently true and authoritative?); and (3) public acceptance of knowledge claims (What conditions are decisive for the public's acceptance or rejection of the knowledge claims of television journalism?). The article develops the framework by way of theoretical conceptualizations and empirical illustrations from concrete forms of TV journalism.
From Counterculture to Consumer Culture
Authors: Arvidsson Adam
Published: April 2009

This article contributes to an analysis of the origins of contemporary post-modern consumer culture, centred on the notion of lifestyle choice. It presents a case study of Piaggio's marketing strategies for their motor scooters – the Vespa being the most famous one – during the 1960s and 1970s. Although the Vespa had become an icon of the international youth culture already at the beginning of this period, it is argued that Piaggio's advertising agency did not appropriate the counterculture on account of its quantitative importance. Rather, countercultural attachments were mobilized and made part of Piaggio's advertising discourse first when they harmonized with visions for a future ‘postmaterialistic' consumer society harboured by advertising professionals. They subsequently used new techniques of market research, like motivation research, to translate such countercultural attachments into a consumer culture centred on individual self-realization rather than collective rebellion. In the 1970s, it is argued, this new consumer culture was transformed into what is now known as ‘life-style consumerism'.
Consuming Ambivalences
Authors: Halkier Bente
Published: April 2009

Consumers handle politicized consumption practices such as food risks in more ambivalent ways than is often assumed in public debate about such issues. This article attempts to show the analytical relevance of clarifying and using the concept of ambivalence in analysis of consumer culture. In particular, this is because societal problems of ambivalence are often framed as personal problems for consumers via campaigns to make consumers discipline their so-called problematic practices. The article argues in favour of working with a concept of ambivalence that is sensitive to a variety of socio-cultural ways of handling ambivalence in consumption practices. Theoretically, the article connects such a concept of ambivalence to an understanding of consumption that is grounded in ‘weak’ constructivist everyday life sociology. Empirically, the article presents examples of experiences of ambivalence from a Danish qualitative study of consumers' handling of environmentally related food risks
The Hidden Injuries of Media Power
Authors: Couldry Nick
Published: April 2009

The consumption landscape is saturated by media messages and media values, as many pessimistic diagnoses of contemporary culture have emphasized. We lack, however, the tools for understanding the details and the structural forces at work within that landscape, a gap which this article aims to fill by developing a concept of media and the boundaries and hierarchies that help produce the media's legitimacy. ‘Media power’ means here the concentration of symbolic power in media institutions, particularly those of television, radio and the press (the common-sense definition of ‘the media’), although the long-term impact of new media on media power is considered in the article's conclusion. The central parts of the article discuss, first, the theoretical framework that underlies this approach, which draws by analogy on Durkheim's account of the social generation of the sacred/profane distinction, but also on the work of Bourdieu and others; and second, material is presented from the author's empirical research on situations where non-media people come into close contact with the media process (both at leisure sites, such as Granada Studios Tour, the home of the set of the UK's longest running prime-time soap, Coronation Street, and at protest sites featured in the media). The conclusion looks more broadly at the implications of this approach for grasping the tensions and conflicts inherent in today's mediated landscape of consumption.
Consuming Morality
Authors: Wilk Richard
Published: April 2009

This paper addresses the close relationship between moral discourse and the practices of consumption. I suggest that moralizing about consumption is itself a phenomenon worthy of study. Further, there are a number of reasons why consumption itself inevitably raises moral issues in every culture. Finally, given urgent environmental problems, we should not seek to separate discussions of consumption from fundamental problems of justice and the common good.
Social Work in the Seventh Moment
Authors: Denzin Norman K.
Published: April 2009

My intentions in this article are fourfold: (1) to show how the discourses of qualitative inquiry and cultural studies in the seventh moment can be put to critical advantage by social work researchers; (2) to discuss the cultural studies assumptions that define a critical social work research agenda; (3) to offer a set of interpretive, methodological and ethical criteria that can be used by social work researchers; thereby (4) establishing the relevance of this approach for the practices of critical social work research in this new century. Throughout I use examples from the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s.
Social Research Today
Authors: Hammersley Martyn
Published: April 2009

Difficult dilemmas face social researchers - in the field of social work and social policy, as elsewhere. These can include tensions between the following: doing what a commitment to research requires or serving policymakers; prioritizing basic inquiry or promoting applied research; having a primary concern with producing knowledge versus an immediate and urgent commitment to practical improvement in the world. These dilemmas are probably intrinsic to the position of social research in modern societies, but they are becoming more severe at the present time. It is argued that, in dealing with them, we should be clear about the distinctive character of research, as against other related activities; and must recognize its heterogeneity, identifying the dimensions that differentiate its legitimate forms.