bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Using Theory and Research on Controlling Attachments to Inform the Clinical Assessment of Pre-School Children
Authors: Vallance Denise D.
Published: May 2004

The purpose of the article is to provide a clinical assessment model for the identification of controlling attachments among parents and pre-school children who present with behavioral, emotional or functional problems. Research indicates that a large portion of pre-school children (aged 3–6 years) presenting to children’s mental health clinics display severe attachment difficulties with their primary caregivers, that is, controlling, role-reversed attachments. Given that these children are at the greatest risk for childhood social and emotional maladjustment and adult psychopathology, there is a need for their identification so that effective intervention can be implemented to mitigate the development of further child psychopathology, and ultimately prevent the inter-generational transmission of dysfunctional parent–child attachments. Clinical assessment of controlling attachments between parents and their pre-school children presenting to mental health clinics is dependent on obtaining information regarding the child’s early attachment history, the parent’s state of mind regarding their relationship with their own parents, the parent’s and child’s representations of their relationship, and assessment of interactions between the primary caregiver and the referred child. Using parent and child interviews, as well as the clinical observation of parent–child interactions, child attachment strategies, accompanying parent caregiving behaviors and relational dynamics can be uncovered and targeted for intervention.
Community Health Psychology: Promoting Analysis and Action for Social Change
Authors: Campbell Catherine , Murray Michael
Published: May 2004

Community health psychology is concerned with the theory and method of working with communities to combat disease and to promote health. This introductory article outlines key assumptions and debates underlying this area of research and practice—in the interests of framing the papers in this special edition of the Journal of Health Psychology. Attention is given to the value of emphasizing the community level of analysis and action; the role of collective action in improving health; psycho-social mediatiors between community participation and health; and the potential role of partnerships in creating ‘healthy communities’. A distinction is made between ‘accommodationist’ and ‘critical’ perspectives, and the authors consider whether or not significant social change can come from community-level action.
Making ‘Context’ Concrete: A Dialogical Approach to the Society–Health Relation
Authors: Cornish Flora
Published: May 2004

To understand the role of context in constituting health is recognized as a key challenge facing contemporary health psychology. However, few models or theories are available which pinpoint the processes linking individual health with community or societal contexts. This article draws on dialogical and sociocultural psychological theory, to make context concrete by proposing the concepts of ‘mediating moments’ and ‘reflected mediating moments’. These concepts are further developed through their application to the empirical case of the constitution of condom use in sex-worker–client interactions in Calcutta. Interviews and group discussions with sex workers and other ‘red light area’ residents are interpreted to examine at what moments the societal phenomena of poverty and gender relations come to mediate condom use behaviour.
Autistic Disorder in Nineteenth-century London
Authors: Waltz Mitzi , Shattock Paul
Published: May 2004

This article examines the existence, description, perception, treatment, and outcome of symptoms consistent with autistic disorder in nineteenth-century London, England, based on case histories from the notes of Dr William Howship Dickinson at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Three cases meeting the DSM-IV criteria for autistic disorder are described in detail. Other cases in which autistic traits are described are briefly summarized. The article explores the environment of contemporary medical practice, beliefs about childhood brain disorders, and social practice regarding children with brain disorders, and the impact of these factors on assessment and treatment. It correlates Dickinson’s observations with current research on autism, providing information about children with autism before the condition was formally named in 1943.
Autistic Spectrum Disorder
Authors: Keen Daphne , Ward Stephanie
Published: May 2004

This study analyses the prevalence of ASD, comorbidity, educational provision and ability in autistic children in a single health district, born between 1983 and 1996. The number of recorded diagnoses doubled over a 4 year period. This appeared to be due to greater recognition of ASD in more able children, in children initially presenting with ADHD, and possibly in females. ADHD accounted for a substantial proportion of comorbidity. Age at diagnosis appeared to be related to school placement. Cognitive ability levels ranging from more than three standard deviations below the mean to more than one standard deviation above the mean were found in the moderate and severe learning difficulty school population as well as in the mainstream population. Exceptionally low levels of verbal ability were present in a high proportion of mainstream pupils. Measured levels of cognitive function show poor relationship with actual educational placement.
‘Watcha Gonna Do when they Cum all Over You?’ What Police Themes in Male Erotic Video Reveal about (Leather)Sexual Subjectivity
Authors: Joshi Sam
Published: May 2004

This article is a theoretical investigation into the appeal of police themes widespread in gay video pornography. I use this investigation as a pathway to certain broad, if polemical, conclusions about contemporary male subjectivity. I begin by identifying the reasons for Leathersex (a prominent expression of inter-male sadomasochism), due to the prevalence of police fantasies therein. A Durkheimian analysis explains Leathersex as a reparatory rite that addresses the liminality and inter-male alienation marking contemporary male subjectivity. Next, I draw on the literature on male rape in prison to explain how this conception of male subjectivity is a result of interpellation by the state, thereby accounting for the prevalence of police fantasies in Leathersex and Leathersex-inflected male erotic video. Lastly, I enter these insights about male subjectivity into dialogue with three videos by noted auteurs, unearthing the ambivalence that marks the relationship of male subjects to patriarchy and the patriarchal state.
Teacher Transsexuality: The Illusion of Sexual Difference and the Idea of Adolescent Trauma in the Dana Rivers Case
Authors: Cavanagh Sheila L.
Published: May 2004

This article focuses on a media-induced school scandal involving a male to female transsexual teacher, Dana Rivers, who taught for a school board just outside Sacramento, California. Rivers was fired for allegedly talking to students about her sexuality and the importance of gender self-determination. I offer a psychoanalytic reading of the transphobic response on the part of parents lobbying for Rivers’ dismissal and appraise the adolescent trauma thesis used to validate concerns about teacher transsexuality. I argue that the panic surrounding the Rivers case is not about adolescent psychological health (as argued by intolerant parents) but a psychic investment in heterosexual bifurcations of gender and an insistence upon sexual difference.
The Queer Performance of Tilda Swinton in Derek Jarman’s Edward II: Gay Male Misogyny Reconsidered
Authors: Richardson Niall
Published: May 2004

Gay male misogyny has become a cliché. From the novels of Alan Hollinghurst and David Leavitt to recent gay themed films such as Trick and Broadway Damage, woman’s abject presence is used as a defining other for the gay male bodies. Myopic critics have cited Jarman’s films in the same league. This article will argue that Jarman does not represent his favourite actor - Tilda Swinton - as an abject sponge. Instead, Swinton’s performance evokes an interrogation of the assumed stable continuum of the sexed body and gender. Through a camp performance, Queen Isabella (Swinton) offers the Butlerian potential of exposing the performativity of gender. The film continually stresses a Brechtian distanciation between Swinton’s gender performance and her famously androgynous body.
Chimerism, Mosaicism and the Cultural Construction of Kinship
Authors: Hird Myra J.
Published: May 2004

This article introduces chimerism and mosaicism as two recent scientific ‘discoveries’ that present challenges to western heteronormative notions of kinship. Chimerism, in the form of xenotransplantation, already demands a rethinking of traditional boundaries between what is considered ‘kin’ and ‘non-kin’. Recent biological studies describing chimerism as two genetically distinct cell lines in one organism not caused by transplantation, invites further questions regarding the stability of kinship ideology. The aim of the article is to argue, with anthropologists and feminist science studies scholars, that the western understanding of kinship relies upon a problematic use of ‘nature’, and that this dependence necessarily produces shifting and contradictory definitions of kinship.
Outside in America
Authors: Kooijman Jaap
Published: May 2004

Six months after his controversial arrest for ‘lewd conduct’ at a men’s public restroom in Beverly Hills, British pop star George Michael released the song and music video ‘Outside’ which can be seen as an explicit commentary on the controversy. In this article, I read the music video in three ways: 1) as part of the star-text of George Michael, repositioning him as an openly gay megastar; 2) as a British/European critique on American heteronormativity and the criminalization of public sex; and 3) as a marketing tool to sell George Michael and his music on a global level.
Sport, Nationalism and the Shifting Meanings of Soccer in Slovenia
Authors: Stankovic Peter
Published: May 2004

So many different meanings have been attributed to the game of soccer in recent decades in Slovenia that it is difficult to believe they are just a reflection of the varying fortunes of Slovenian clubs and, later, of its national team. Taking this observation as a point of departure, the author scrutinizes the most important shifts in the meaning of soccer in the country, arguing that they have more to do with the existing relations of power between Slovenia’s ethnic majority and minorities than with the game itself. The radical devaluation of soccer seen in the period between the late 1960s and late 1990s, for instance, can be interpreted as a way of saving the emerging Slovenian nationalist discourse from threatening inconsistencies and, at the same time, as a way of legitimizing the existing ethnic cleavages in Slovenian society. On the other hand, while the popularity of soccer’s recent revival in Slovenia has obviously been triggered by the Slovenian national team’s success, its implications for interethnic relations in Slovenia are no less important. Despite the fact that the national team has been largely comprised of first or second generation immigrants, for example, the Slovenian nationalist discourse has almost completely disregarded this fact, appropriating this success as a sign of typical Slovenian vitality.
The Effects of Intragroup Interaction and Cohesion on Intergroup Bias
Authors: Petersen Lars-Eric , Dietz Joerg , Frey Dieter
Published: May 2004

The current study investigated the effects of intragroup interaction and cohesion on intergroup bias in a minimal group setting. As expected, interacting groups displayed a stronger intergroup bias than did individual group members acting in isolation. Moreover, there was a tendency for cohesive groups to show more intergroup bias than did groups formed on an ad hoc basis. Additional analyses showed that while groups and individuals did not differ in their treatment of the ingroup, groups discriminated against outgroup members more strongly than did individually acting group members. The findings are discussed with respect to their implications for understanding the differences in intergroup bias between groups, whose members interact, and individually acting group members.
Genocide as Transgression
Authors: Stone Dan
Published: May 2004

The origins of genocide have been sought by scholars in many areas of human experience: politics, religion, culture, economics, demography, ideology. All these of course are valid explanations, and go a long way to getting to grips with the objective conditions surrounding genocide. But, as Berel Lang put it some time ago, there remains an inexplicable gap between the idea and the act of mass murder. This article aims to be a step towards bridging that gap by adding a human dimension to the existing explanations. Building on Roger Caillois’s anthropological analysis of ‘war as festival’, Georges Bataille’s concept of society’s ‘excess energy’, and Emile Durkheim’s idea of ‘collective effervescence’, and connecting these terms to those used explicitly in relation to the Holocaust by Dominick LaCapra (‘scapegoating’ and the ‘carnivalesque’) and Saul Friedl‰nder (‘Rausch’ or ‘ecstasy’), I argue that prior to and during any act of genocide there occurs a heightening of community feeling, to the point at which this ecstatic sense of belonging permits, indeed demands, a normally forbidden act of transgression in order to ‘safeguard’ the community by killing the designated ‘threatening’ group. This article is a theoretical starting point aimed at stimulating discussion, in which I refer to the Nanjing and My Lai massacres and the genocides in Nazi Germany and Rwanda to show where empirical research is needed to illustrate this concept of ‘genocide as transgression’.
The Domestication of Anger
Authors: Lyman Peter
Published: May 2004

Anger is often described as a wild emotion that endangers both social order and the possibility of constructive political dialogue. And yet, anger is an indispensable political emotion – for without angry speech the body politic would lack the voice of the powerless questioning the justice of the dominant order. Anger is not the opposite of order, for anger is domesticated by the dominant to serve order – in the form of force, authority, moral indignation and care. Moreover, order itself, in the form of technical rationality, is rooted in the anger of the middle-class professional whose claim to social status and power depends upon their moralistic enforcement of the rule of technique. A dialogical politics can only emerge when anger is heard with empathy, rather than domesticated or silenced.
Microscopic Fungi Found in the Libraries of Vilnius and Factors Affecting their Development
Authors: Lugauskas Albinas , Krikŝtaponis Arūnas
Published: May 2004

In the period 1995–2001 mycological investigations were conducted in the libraries situated in different buildings in the city of Vilnius. A total of 174 fungal species ascribed to 52 genera have been isolated from the premises of the libraries and identified. Mitosporic fungi (previously Fungi imperfecti) made up the vast majority of the isolated fungi. It was found out that the mycological state of the books depended largely on the condition of the building, its maintenance, location and the type of ventilation system. The main factors, which predetermined mycological pollution of the buildings and the level of contamination of the books, were installations in and overall maintenance of the premises, temperature, humidity, air movement, and the number of visitors. Age of books, materials used for producing them, extent of mechanical damage, intensity of handling and other associated factors were pertinent to the microbiological pollution and the state of the books. Allergenicity and the ability to produce, accumulate or release volatile toxic secondary metabolites into the library surroundings are characteristics of the fungi found in library premises and in books. Such factors may pose a risk to the health of staff and visitors.
Calculating climate: ‘advanced liberalism’ and the governing of risk in Australian drought policy
Authors: Higgins Vaughan
Published: May 2004

For most of last century, governments in Australia treated drought as a ‘natural disaster’, an event that could best be dealt with through public forms of financial assistance. However, following a Review of Natural Disaster Relief Arrangements in 1990, the official definition of drought was changed to a ‘manageable risk’ that farmers were seen to be able to predict and control through formal business planning techniques. Through the use of the literature on governmentality, this article argues that such a shift was of crucial significance in changing the rationalities and technologies of drought management. Farmers were, from this point, constituted as key agents in the management of risk. However, the article argues also that drought as a natural disaster was not completely abandoned and continues to remain important in defining the limits of drought as a managed risk, and in calling into question the capacities of farmers to plan for so-called exceptional events. This contestation of managed risk shows one of the ways in which advanced liberal forms of rule can be shaped in a ‘social’ manner.
Working with the vulnerable but meritorious: the non-governmental and public sectors and African refugees in Melbourne
Authors: Majka Lorraine
Published: May 2004

Since the early 1980s, Australia has resettled more than 5000 African refugees. The purpose of this article is to report preliminary findings from a survey of the 56 non-governmental and public organizations that assist African refugees in Melbourne. The macro-organizational configuration that has emerged for aiding Africans is described. Various generalist organizations and ethno-specific associations’ primary objectives and principal projects, initiatives and programmes are also analysed. The strongest finding is that generalist organizations and ethno-specific associations offer a wide range of programme goals, aid schemes, assistance packages and relief operations for newly arrived and longer-term resident African refugees. Programmes for social development and cultural maintenance constitute but one crucial area of support. The article also comments on the implications of the findings and makes suggestions for future research.
Explaining stable partnerships among FTMs and MTFs: a significant difference?
Authors: Lewins Frank
Published: May 2004

Research on male to female (MTFs) and female to male (FTMs) transsexuals has pointed to a number of important differences between these categories, namely their different propensity towards cross dressing and relative levels of mental stability. Recent research demonstrates that these assumed differences are not supported by evidence. One difference remains unchallenged – the greater capacity of FTMs to attain and maintain stable partnerships. Extensive interviewing amongst both categories of transsexual reveals that the capacity to maintain stable partnerships is linked to gender socialization. Being socialized as a girl then as a woman elevates the importance of affective ties in partnerships, such as bonding and caring. By contrast, being socialized as a boy then as a man places more importance on the role of physical characteristics of the man and his partner in attaining and maintaining partnerships.
Reclaiming the ancestral past: narrative, rhetoric and the ‘convict stain’
Authors: Lambert Ronald D.
Published: May 2004

This paper reports the arguments used by members of two convictdescendant societies in embracing their convict ancestry. The data are taken from interviews that I conducted in 1999. In the main, respondents were involved in genealogy prior to discovering their or their spouses' convict ancestry. Respondents effectively countered ancestral stigma by making two kinds of argument. In the first, they recast ancestral convicts as: objects of quasi-professional interest; nation-builders; a minority within a multicultural society; collectibles; and embodying ‘interesting stories’. The second type of argument forwarded more particularized treatments of convict ancestors by: minimizing the gravity of their offences; temporally distancing descendants from them; empathizing with them; and claiming their redemption. I offer some concluding thoughts on the sociology of memory and the place of genealogical memory workers within the family.
The influence of social and economic disadvantage in the academic performance of school students in Australia
Authors: Considine Gillian , Zappalà Gianni
Published: May 2004

The relationship between family socioeconomic status (SES) and the academic performance of children is well established in sociological research. Another important dimension is the factors that may influence educational outcomes within low SES families. This paper presents new data from a sample of over 3000 students from financially disadvantaged backgrounds to estimate the extent of socioeconomic, family, individual and contextual factors on school educational performance. Results obtained using binomial logistic regression techniques indicate that gender, unexplained absences, parental educational attainment, housing type, ethnicity and student age are all statistically significant variables and predictors of academic performance. In contrast, family structure, the main source of family income and geographical location do not significantly predict outcomes in school performance once other factors are controlled for. The findings support the notion that the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’ components of the socioeconomic status equation have distinct and separate influences on educational outcomes. While financial assistance to schools and families in need is important, policies and programmes that also assist low-income parents in providing appropriate psychological and educational support for their children should also be promoted.
The paradox of the ‘two sociologies’: Hobbes, Latour and the Constitution of modern social theory
Authors: van Krieken Robert
Published: May 2004

So far there have usually been only two answers to the question of what to do with dichotomies in sociology, either embrace them or attempt to synthesize them. However, this has produced merely an endless vacillation between the two positions, and a paradoxical constant reproduction of dichotomous thinking, rather than its transformation. This paper works towards a ‘third answer’ to the question, first, by outlining how the concept of the ‘Hobbesian problem of order’, as proposed by Talcott Parsons, underpins all sociological dichotomies, and why it is important to re-read Hobbes and revisit the socalled ‘problem of order’. Second, it explains how Bruno Latour's model of the ‘Constitution’ of modern thought helps us to understand the dynamics of oppositions like nature/society or agency/structure, and how the problems with dichotomies derive from only perceiving part of the Constitution, rather than all of it. The paper concludes with a discussion of one example of a type of sociology that does operate across all of Latour's Constitution because it is based on a different conception of what is problematic about social order, Norbert Elias’‘figurational sociology’, as well as some observations about what we might do with sociology's Constitution from this point onwards.
Social Interactions Across Media
Authors: Baym Nancy K. , Zhang Yan Bing , Lin Mei-Chen
Published: May 2004

Two studies compared college students’ interpersonal interaction online, face-to-face, and on the telephone. A communication diary assessed the relative amount of social interactions college students conducted online compared to face-to-face conversation and telephone calls. Results indicated that while the internet was integrated into college students’ social lives, face-to-face communication remained the dominant mode of interaction. Participants reported using the internet as often as the telephone. A survey compared reported use of the internet within local and long distance social circles to the use of other media within those circles, and examined participants’ most recent significant social interactions conducted across media in terms of purposes, contexts, and quality. Internet interaction was perceived as high in quality, but slightly lower than other media. Results were compared to previous conceptualizations of the roles of internet in one’s social life.
Socio-Communicational Structure among Political Actors on the Web in South Korea
Authors: Park Han Woo , Kim Chun-Sik , Barnett George A.
Published: May 2004

This article examines the current structure of the sociocommunication network among Korean political parties and politicians on the world wide web and how the structure has changed over the last two years. The communication network is defined by the existence of hyperlinks among websites. The data were obtained from the homepages of Korea’s parties and national assemblymen for 2000 and 2001. The results indicated that the network has become denser, more highly integrated, centralized and interactive over time. This suggests increased use of the world wide web for political discourse in Korea.
A Note on Laughter in ‘Male–Female’Interaction
Authors: Jefferson Gail
Published: May 2004

Working with interactional data, one sometimes observes that a type of behavior seems to be produced a great deal by one category of persons and not all that much by another category. But when put to the test of a straightforward count, the observation does not hold up: Category X does not after all do this thing significantly more often than Category Y does. It may then be that the apparent skewing of the behavior’s distribution across categories is the result of selective observation; noticing with greater frequency those cases which conformed to some biased notion held by the observer of how these categories behave. But there seems to be another possibility. It may be that the observation has located, but only roughly and partially described, a complex of behaviors which the observation can then be seen to reflect, refer to, or constitute a ‘gloss’ for.
Anthropology as Cosmopolitan Practice?
Authors: Kahn Joel S.
Published: May 2004

This article advances the case for both an anthropology of cosmopolitanism and, at the same time, a cosmopolitan anthropology. Illustrated by means of a case study of apparently traditional Minangkabau domestic authority structure, the article seeks to sketch in the parameters of an anthropological contribution to the recent attempts to recover a notion of cosmopolitanism, mainly by social and political theorists. One anthropologist who has made out a case for a cosmopolitan anthropology has been Adam Kuper. But unlike Kuper’s piece, this article argues that we need to locate all such arguments more firmly within the modern intellectual tradition within which they are formed. This means also that we must seriously engage with those critiques of that tradition that suggest that all such universalizing logics are Eurocentric, based on highly problematic notions of universal human reason, and thereby exclusionary of other races and other cultures.
Post-Marxism in a Post-Socialist Perspective
Authors: Kipnis Andrew
Published: May 2004

Post-Marxism has been defined as the attempt to insist on the continuing value of Marxist thought while incorporating post-structuralist criticisms of holism. In this essay, I use a perspective developed through studying the contours of power in actually existing socialist and post-socialist regimes to critically examine three influential works in post-Marxism. While finding much of value in these books’ development of non-totalizing forms of social theory, I argue that they also reproduce some of the theoretical logics that plagued the worst moments of socialist governance. In particular, I take issue with their implicit assumptions about the performance of political identities in academic writing and the relationship of empirical research to social theory.
Human Nature and Race
Authors: Wade Peter
Published: May 2004

Most scholars argue that ‘race’ has no relation to human nature. A minority contend that it does. I argue that ‘race’ is a cultural category which can become an embodied part of the human experience. This embodiment helps account for the power of the idea of race.
Archaeologies and utopias
Authors: Johnson Tracy
Published: May 2004

The predominance of patriarchally-based structures in Kristeva's work sets up an uncomfortable dichotomy for feminist critics. Her 1979 essay `Le temps des femmes' (translated as `Women's Time' in 1981) most explicitly articulates her own approach to feminism, addressing women's troubled relationship to patriarchy in terms of time and space. Kristeva identifies three distinct positions in feminist thought: `equality', `difference' and an anticipated `third generation' feminism that integrates the previous two attitudes, representing what she defines as a new `signifying space'. The value of the `third space' is that it offers a method for proceeding beyond the either/or status offered by previous stages of feminist thought and analysis, challenging gender identity per se and bringing out the singularity of each individual subject. I explore ways of reading from the third space through examples of the `Cassandra' myth and H.D.'s epic poem Helen in Egypt (1974) , looking specifically at women's relationship to patriarchal language.
Deleuze in the postcolonial
Authors: Wuthnow Julie
Published: May 2004

This article examines the implications of the Deleuzian concept of `nomad thought' within the context of postcoloniality and indigenous politics. I argue that Deleuze's deconstruction of coherent and self-identical subjectivity through this concept disallows the possibility of effective indigenous politics through its lack of accountability to a `politics of location', its implicit reproduction of a universalized western subject, and its delegitimation of `experience' and `local knowledge'. I investigate these dynamics in Deleuze's work, and also in deployments of the Deleuzian figure of the nomad and of `nomad thought' by Rosi Braidotti and Paul Patton. As a counterpoint to Deleuze, I discuss a number of feminist and postcolonial writers who recuperate concepts such as `experience' and `local knowledge', yet without lapsing into essentializing discourses. Their work enables robust versions of indigenous politics, and it is by adopting such approaches that feminist and postcolonial theory can move forward in politically accountable ways.
Lippmann Revisited
Authors: Petersen Jørn Henrik
Published: May 2004

The contribution argues that complaints about journalism follow from the societal ideal regarding the media as an institution of direct democracy expected to present us with a true picture of the external world in which we are interested. The illusory nature of this ideal is enhanced by the characteristics of the edited society in which information ‘providers’ try to involve the media in a political struggle over opinion-shaping, agenda-setting, personal profiling, economic control and political influence. Journalism and politics both concentrate on the specific, the short-term, the individualized and the tangible, rejecting the attention attached to the general, the long-term, the collective and the abstract. The core of the problem appears to be the intolerable and unworkable myth that each of us must acquire a competent opinion about all public affairs. This fiction, partly a product of the voters’ rational ignorance, creates a tension between our ideals of democracy and the realities.
Radio Leaks
Authors: Jaworski Adam , Fitzgerald Richard , Morris Deborah
Published: May 2004

This paper analyzes the discursive construction and contestation of ‘leaked’ stories in news broadcast programmes. Drawing on a sample of BBC Radio 4 news programmes recorded between May and June 2000, we analyze four items of news presented as leaks about upcoming events. We suggest that these examples highlight the leaking of information as a valuable newsworthy commodity in that it not only allows news organizations to report what is going to be news before it happens but also enables speculative discourse as to the meaning of the event yet to happen. However, in order for a story to be accepted as a leak it must be seen to fulfil a number of criteria. With this in mind, we identify four features accompanying the introduction of the news items as leaks in the process of authentification: secrecy, authorship/ownership and future orientation. The article then discusses how these features are used when contesting the status of a news story as a leak, and how temporal play contributes to downgrading the content of the leak and, hence, its relevance, immediacy and newsworthiness.
Between Power and Luck
Authors: Selck Torsten J. , Steunenberg Bernard
Published: May 2004

Taking Barry’s (1980a,b) question ‘Is it better to be powerful or lucky?’ as a starting point, we try to answer the question of how influential the European Parliament is in the European Union (EU) legislative process. We assess the proximity between what the Parliament wants and what it eventually gets and whether this is the result of its own power or the similarity between its position and the positions of other EU actors. The empirical analysis uses different models of legislative decision-making and shows that the European Parliament has been rather influential under co-decision and it has been ‘lucky’ for most legislation negotiated under the consultation procedure. Differentiating between capabilities and preferences, and therefore between ‘power’ and ‘luck’, remains crucial in explaining political outcomes.
A Priori versus Empirical Voting Power in the EU Council of Ministers
Authors: Pajala Antti , Widgrèn Mika
Published: May 2004

Numerous scholarly articles have investigated member states’ a priori voting power in past, present and possible future Councils of the European Union (EU). This article introduces three empirically oriented variants of the standardized Banzhaf index and compares them with the standardized Banzhaf index itself. The comparison suggests that the averages of the empirically oriented indices converge towards the Banzhaf index, and hence that there is no dominant ordering of the member states or the issues and, consequently, no stable minimal winning coalitions over time. However, statistical analysis reveals that the country-bycountry average difference from the Banzhaf index, considering all issues, remains significant in all three variants of empirical power.
Government–Financial Market Relations after EMU
Authors: Mosley Layna
Published: May 2004

The European Monetary Union (EMU) has generated a variety of changes, including the loss of national monetary policy autonomy and the creation of deeper integrated intra-European markets for goods, services, and financial instruments. This article explores the extent to which EMU has changed the ways in which and the extent to which international financial markets influence national policy choices. There are important reasons to expect that financial markets exert greater influence on governments after EMU; for instance, governments now borrow in what is essentially a foreign currency. This change might serve to heighten the perceived danger of default in Europe. At the same time, however, financial markets appear to reward governments for the fiscal consolidation and increased market liquidity that flow from the single currency. I argue that, as a result of these offsetting trends, there have thus far been no dramatic changes in financial market–government relations. Although governments continue to face external pressures on domestic policy-making, these pressures may be only slightly more severe for EMU than for non-EMU countries. As in the past, domestic politics and institutions will be as important as, if not more important than, financial market pressures in EU governments’ policy decisions.
‘Now You Got Your Answer...’
Authors: Wilson Diana , Csordas Thomas J.
Published: May 2004

Understanding the apparently effective bodily transformation by traditional Navajo healing rituals as the part of a consistent technological practice is, perhaps too quickly, perceived as undermining a foundation of western science in objectivity and logic. However, some of the differences that make a difference between Navajo and western technologies of the body may be due to contradictory spatiotemporal axioms for recognizing bodily boundaries. Attempting to explain what we don’t understand about a Navajo Shooting Way ceremony - our directly perceived experiences and talk in English about the ceremony by others - we draw analogies between the intentional bodily spaces cryptically described by Merleau-Ponty, linguistic studies of Navajo spatiality, and non-Euclidean projective geometry. We find that the Navajo healer takes a strong, phenomenological standpoint, but we also find much of what the healer tells us about her ceremony and its intended effect on bodies, to be nonsensical. However, we begin to hear more cogent sense in the healer’s words by means of spatial metaphors suggested by both the structure of the Navajo language and by projective geometry: codeterminative processes in place of dichotomies, ratio relationships in place of part/whole hierarchies, and manifesting temporalized space in place of linear, spatialized time.
Surveillance Underground
Authors: Paperman Patricia
Published: May 2004

Subway police work is preoccupied with the hidden nature of the deviance hunted and the visibility of the uniform worn. Uniformed subway police manage their visibility to provoke manifestations of suspects’ affiliations with deviance, and they work in concert to shape how bystanders perceive their interventions. The distinctiveness of subway security work is shaped less by the criminality specific to the subway than by the constraints created by the structure of subterranean space for managing the social meanings of police appearance. Central to the phenomenological tradition, the distinction between the visible and the invisible is treated here in an ethnomethodological perspective, not as a philosophical concept but as a crafted sensibility that constitutes the métier of subway policing. Phenomenology provides leads to the folk theories of social interaction that members of society employ to construct their behaviour and their social worlds.
Grappling with Modernity
Authors: Qayum Seemin , Ray Raka
Published: May 2004

This article explores the culture of servitude of Kolkata’s (formerly Calcutta) respectable classes against the backdrop of their project of modernity. In societies with long and unbroken histories of domestic servitude such as India, the institution is central to understanding self and society. The relations of paid domestic work are intimately tied to the self-conscious evolution of a modern Indian elite. We highlight three premises with origins in pre-independence Kolkata which continue to shape its culture of servitude today: first, servants are essential to a well-run and well-kept household; second, servants are ‘part of the family’ and bound to it by ties of affection, loyalty, and dependence; and third, servants comprise a category with distinctive lifestyles, desires and habits. Yet at the close of the 20th century, this culture of servitude is no longer hegemonic. The first premise sits uncomfortably with contemporary notions of privacy and ideologies of the nuclear family, especially in the more confined space of the apartment. The second is complicated by the entrance of capitalist and corporate discourses about employers and employees. The third is challenged daily in a political culture where democratizing discourses circulate in both state and civil society.
‘It’s a sucker’s outfit’
Authors: Scott Greg
Published: May 2004

This article examines how drug-dealing gangs shape the pre- and post-carceral lives of male ex-convicts in Chicago based on ethnographic interviews with 19 former and current gang affiliates backed by field observation and an additional 85 interviews. While the gangs supply important material and non-material resources to its members in the short term, association with it turns out to be debilitating and self-defeating in the long term. Ex-felons returning from prison to their neighborhood thus experience the street gang as a double-edged sword. They hold that poverty, institutionalized racism, and underdeveloped and undervalued human capital are best compensated for, if not remediated, by joining up with the gang. Yet they also realize that the gang is every bit as exploitative as the mainstream institutions of the host community that they seek to avoid. In most cases the adaptive strategies ex-convicts devised in response to this awakening reinforced and fueled the problems they were attempting to solve. The contemporary urban street gang forms in response to oppression but ultimately reproduces within its own ranks the oppression it originally sought to ameliorate.
Community Theatre as a Means of Empowerment in Social Work
Authors: Boehm Amnon , Boehm Esther
Published: May 2004

• Summary: The article explores the potential of combining community theatre and social work as a means of empowerment. It describes a case study of a group of six women guided by a social worker and director, who set up and participated in community theatre in Israel. The development of the group and the play, the actors’ involvement, the group’s relationship with the audience and other groups in the community, and the roles of the social worker and director are described and discussed.

• Findings: The findings show that the individual, group and community processes that evolved during the course of the community theatre project contributed considerably to the participants’ empowerment, especially in terms of self-esteem, mastery, critical awareness, expression of inner voice, propensity to act, and collective empowerment.

• Application: The discussion focuses on the characteristics of community theatre that contribute to empowerment, as well as on its limitations. It suggests guidelines for the use of community theatre as a tool in social work practice and may inform the development of community theatre in other settings.
On Making Data Social: Heterogeneity in Sociological Practice
Authors: Michael Mike
Published: May 2004

This article is concerned with how we might go about theorizing the roles of nonhumans (technologies, animals, etc.), and their associations with humans, in the production of ‘social data’. Drawing on recent sociological work on heterogeneity, the article explores how nonhumans contribute to the emergence of both the ‘microsocial’ and ‘macrosocial’ as complex patterns of ordering and disordering. These patterns are exemplified with reference to a ‘disastrous interview episode’. With the aid of such concepts as parasite, preposition and co(a)gent, the disastrous interview episode is interpreted in three ways to show how nonhumans must be disciplined in order to allow the emergence of social data; how nonhumans’ ‘misbehaviour’ can be understood in terms of their ‘hybridic’ associations with humans; and how the interaction between hybrids mediates such macro entities as universities and corporations. Finally, in conclusion, some of the broader implications of this analysis for sociological practice are considered.
I Define My Own Identity
Authors: Franklin Marianne I.
Published: May 2004

Most of the participants in the internet discussion forums, the Kava Bowl and the Kamehameha Roundtable, herald from the South Pacific islands of Tonga and Samoa. These forums are part of a cluster of popular online meeting places for the ‘Polynesian Diaspora’ and other people from the Pacific Islands who live in the USA, Australia and New Zealand for the most part. They have been going strong since the mid-1990s, nearly as long as the worldwide web. One of the most recurring topics in the discussions is the nature of Tongan and/or Samoan ‘identity’ and how this relates to ‘living overseas’. In these discussions, participants - many of whom are of ‘mixed race’ - exchange personal experiences, political opinions, emotional and intellectual expectations about the outer and inner limits of race/ethnicity, and/or culture in their everyday lives. This article reconstructs several of the more substantial debates on the meaning and implications of ‘identity’ that show how these generations of the postcolonial South Pacific Islands are (re)defining what it means to be Tongan, Samoan - Polynesian - in a diasporic context. Discussions revolve around several axes; the personal and political issues of race (ethnicity) as everyday embodiments; Tongan/Samoan and Pacific Island cultures as negotiable rather than fixed practices; ways of turning colonialist categories for Pacific Island societies, such as ‘Polynesian’, into futurist tropes for communities who are often socioeconomically disadvantaged and discriminated against both ‘at home’ and ‘overseas’. As they argue, write, read, send emails and interact with one another on and offline, the creators of thousands of interwoven online texts over the years have been articulating ‘race’ and ‘culture’ on their own terms. They have been doing so in the public cyberspaces of the worldwide web, tracing, as they come and go, a nascent postcolonial politics of representation.
Ethnic Relations in Estonia’s Post-Soviet Business Community
Authors: Vöörmann Rein , Helemäe Jelena
Published: May 2004

The central focus of this paper is an analysis of the problems of ethnic relations in the post-Soviet business community and how entrepreneurs of different ethnic origins articulate them. The core argument is that the ethnic segregation that took place in Soviet Estonia and was based on language (Estonian and Russian) is also present in post-Soviet Estonian entrepreneurship, despite the slogan: money does not know a state (or ethnic) boundaries. In focus group discussions, representatives of three groups of business people (Estonian-owned, non-Estonian-owned and joint companies, i.e. owners are both Estonians and non-Estonians) clearly demonstrate their understandings of what motivates and what isolates entrepreneurs of different ethnic origins in Estonia. At the same time, there are signs demonstrating the need for common activity and hope that in the future there will be an organization at the state level representing and protecting entrepreneurs’ common interests.
The Los Angeles Times’ Coverage of the 1992 Rebellion
Authors: Vargas JoÃo H. Costa
Published: May 2004

Focusing on staff writers’ articles and editorials published in the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion, this article examines the Los Angeles Times by paying attention to how race in general, and African Americans in particular, were depicted in its pages. What notions of society emerge from this newspaper’s coverage of the 29 April 1992 civil unrest following the acquital of four police officers accused of brutalizing Rodney King? How do representations of racial differences reflect and consolidate such notions of society? By investigating the Times’ narrative between 30 April 1992 and 4 May 1992, this article will also analyze related concepts of politics and justice that emerged in those days. This article argues that, while the Times erroneously cast blacks as the main perpetrators of the rebellion, it expressed widely held views on race and, ultimately, through its specific understandings of politics and justice, justified racial oppression.