bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Towards a digital economy with Chinese characteristics?
Authors: Dai Xiudian
Published: July 2003

There are two opposing views when considering economic development strategies in the digital age: some insist that the ‘new economy’ applies mainly to the industrialized countries and are doubtful that new information and communications technologies (ICTs) will allow developing countries to leapfrog to higher levels of development; others argue that ‘jump-starting’ development may not be as difficult as the pessimists think. Through a case study on China’s ‘twin-track strategy’ for economic development, which involves merging industrialization and informatization, this article aims to investigate whether developing countries are able to play a significant role in shaping the digital revolution and the global ‘new economy’. The evidence presented in this article suggests that China’s status as a poor and developing country has not prevented its government from making effective preparations to embrace the opportunities and challenges associated with new ICTs in ways that are compatible with indigenous socioeconomic factors.
Will the government ‘serve the people’?
Authors: Zhang Junhua
Published: July 2003

In the wake of globalization, the idea of electronic government (e-government) has become an integral part of modernization efforts undertaken by countries with a variety of political systems. This article will examine how it is being pursued in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in order to contribute to our understanding of how e-government works in a non-liberal democratic polity. The analysis will start by focusing on the issues of how the Chinese understand the concept of e-government, continue by looking at what is actually being done by the state for the purpose of establishing it, and finish with a discussion of the methods that can best be used to assess the achievements and problems that are being met.
Identity politics, resistance and new media technologies
Authors: Fung Anthony Y. H.
Published: July 2003

Addressing the debate over the emancipatory potential of the internet, this article analyses the archival data of an electronic discussion group (e-group), Hong Kong Net (HKnet), to assess the use of the internet by a group of Hong Kong Chinese in the United States to engage in the construction of their own identity within the context of decolonization and the transfer of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. The study adopts a Foucauldian perspective to examine not only the significance of the texts but also what marginal groups actually do with the text and the internet. The argument is developed that while the Hong Kong Chinese cannot not evade the power of the dominant discourses of the social networks within which they are located, they are able to confirm their own independent subjectivity for themselves in this specific local site through online practice at a specific historical juncture.
The Diffusion of Information Technology in Singapore Schools: a Process Framework
Authors: TANG PUI SEE , ANG PENG HWA
Published: July 2003

This study looked into the way in which Singapore implemented the use of information technology in its schools. It adopted a process framework in using the diffusion approach to study the issue. Instead of focusing primarily on the outcome of adoption it also looked at context and actors' dimensions. The study found that the communication process was persuasion-oriented instead of interaction-oriented as intended by the new communication model. The communication process was outcome-oriented; communication was pro-innovation-biased and the message preoccupied with persuasion. Little room was given for the active interpretation of recipients and involvement of the recipients in planning. The study found that the practical operation of the two-way communication model was limited by the inherent top-down approach of the diffusion approach. It also found that the integration of IT into lessons was best achieved by granting autonomy to the schools.
Theorizing Cyberspace: the Idea of Voice Applied to the Internet Discourse
Authors: MITRA ANANDA , WATTS ERIC
Published: July 2003

This article offers the idea of voice as a way to think of cyberspace and the internet. It is argued that web pages represent the presence of individuals and institutions representing what they have to say. Consequently, we would argue that a robust construct such as voice might offer an unique theoretical lens through which to examine the internet and cyberspace phenomenon. This article argues that cyberspace can be conceptualized as a discursive space, and calls for a textual/discursive/rhetorical analysis focusing on the eloquence of representation as a principal means by which people and institutions voice themselves in this space.
The Logic of New Media in International Affairs
Authors: KLUVER ALAN R.
Published: July 2003

Proponents of new technologies argue that new media forms could have a dramatic impact on the way in which citizens gain political information, including important information regarding international affairs. This article argues that foreign policy is constrained by public opinion, which is in turn affected by media portrayals of other nations. Moreover, the impact of a particular media form is mediated by the `logics' of the format. The article proposes a conceptual scheme and criterion for determining the impact of media format in presenting international issues; it also proposes that the logic of new media, in contrast to the logic of traditional media, brings greater information, but less knowledge and critical awareness of foreign affairs.
Communication Research About the Internet: a Thematic Meta-analysis
Authors: KIM SUNG TAE , WEAVER DAVID
Published: July 2003

This study presents a theoretical and methodological review of communication research about the internet. Through a thematic meta-analysis of recent research publications about the internet, we identified topical, methodological and theoretical trends of current internet studies. The patterns of the internet research agenda are discussed in relation to a development model of communication research. We hope the findings of this study provide not only an overview of current internet research trends but also new insights for future research directions regarding this new medium.
Instantaneous Representation and the Pig Itself
Authors: KUJUNDZIC NEBOJSA , DORRELL MATTHEW
Published: July 2003

Instantaneous representation offers the promise of showing reality itself, but as all representation removes context, it still relies on what are traditionally considered to be elements of writing, rather than existing in opposition to writing. Narrative is essential in any form of representation, as the proliferation of talk radio, `reality television', docu-dramas, etc. shows. Virtual reality can also be seen as a type, or a continuation, of the writing process. Furthermore, editing, whether in television or photography, makes the delivery of `reality' an idiosyncratic process rather than an impartial reporting, even in the case of instantaneous representation (i.e. live television).
Putting Violence to Work in New Media Policies
Authors: DWYER TIM , STOCKBRIDGE SALLY
Published: July 2003

This article is concerned with key policy interventions in relation to the issue of violence in the Australian media. Media panics about violent events or violent media events, new media technologies and executive government inquiries are argued to be important elements in our analysis of policy formulation. We examine the recurring patterns in Australian regulatory policies governing media representations of violence from 1983-97. Media image regulation, at the close of the 20th century, is in part characterized by liberalizing and self-regulatory tendencies and that regulation inevitably has a strong commercial and market orientation. There exists a trajectory from state- to self-regulation, even though tensions still exist between these two regulatory impulses. Older media, television and video, have been subject to renewed attempts at state regulation, whereas emergent media policies display a clear industrial or market orientation.
Disposable Love
Authors: BLOCH LINDA-RENÉE , LEMISH DAFNA
Published: July 2003

One particular toy, the Tamagotchi, is analyzed as a cultural artifact which incorporates the latest in computer and video technology and virtually engages players in the most basic of nurturing relationships. Here one day, and gone the next, the Tamagotchi is seen as a symbol of its times in which even the most intense connections are disposable. The essay examines how this object relates to popular culture and to other children's playthings in particular, and what it signifies in terms of relationships, gender identity, and existential predicaments. As a consequence, it raises a number of questions concerning the role that these and similar toys perform in the socialization of children and of society in general.
Private Uses in Public Spaces
Authors: LEE SARAH
Published: July 2003

This paper is based on an empirical study of users of an internet café in South east England. It picks out some of the key distinctions between internet use within domestic spaces and as a technology accessed in a public economy of consumption. The research findings are contextualized and tested against existing work on public internet access. The material derived from interviews with customers is used to explore the ways in which the internet is differently perceived, used and gendered in the public spaces of an internet café. The paper argues that public use of the internet is not just a transitional phenomenon which precedes home internet adoption. The research revealed that the internet café provided a distinct and dedicated use space which was intimately bound up in the domestic and work routines of its users.
Rehabilitation as Rhetoric
Authors: LYNCH MONA
Published: July 2003

This article reports on a set of findings from an ethnographic research project conducted in a parole field office in central California, specifically addressing how the notion of rehabilitation is expressed in parole discourse and practices. It appears that while the agency (and its field agents) still espouse the validity of normalization and reformative goals in this arm of corrections, the resources and commitment to carry out those aims are in short supply. Consequently, agency actors appear to have constructed the parolee subject as one who is dispositionally flawed, and who is ultimately responsible for his own improvement. The findings are discussed in relation to Simon's (1993) analysis of the agency's struggle to construct a plausible account of parole's purpose in the face of shifting structural, political, and institutional demands.
Penal Policy Making
Authors: JOHNSTONE GERRY
Published: July 2003

Recently, a new approach to penal policy making has emerged in the UK and elsewhere. An elitist model is giving way to a more populist model, in which governments consult ordinary people, especially those living in areas undermined by crime and disorder, before formulating and implementing policies to tackle crime. This trend has been accompanied by a continuing drift towards less tolerant and harsher policies. This article proposes a critical response to this phenomenon. There is little point, it suggests, in yearning for a return to the elitist model. Rather, what is required is a move in the opposite direction, i.e. towards a more participatory style of policy making. A participatory crime policy would not necessarily be intolerant and repressive. To the contrary, participation is likely to develop and foster the very qualities people need to imagine, formulate and implement more rational responses to escalating rates of crime, violence and disorder. Some principles and ideas which could inform the development of a more participatory crime policy are outlined.
Developing Prison Standards Compared
Authors: MORGAN ROD
Published: July 2003

This article argues that the two most developed sets of international custodial standards are those of the Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment and Punishment (CPT) in Europe and of the American Correctional Association (ACA) in North America. It examines the different origins of each set of standards and the different methods by which they are applied. It points out that the ACA standards have been largely practitioner driven whereas those of the CPT have the explicit aim of enhancing human rights. An important feature of both sets of standards is that they are dynamic rather than static and that they have achieved a high degree of credibility with practitioners and the judiciary alike.
Looking Daggers
Authors: VALIER CLAIRE
Published: July 2003

This article explores the character of our subjective investments in the practice of legal punishment, and asks whether in attending to these the possibility of an ethical relation to the other might be opened up. The medium for this reflection is an introspective reading of several visual and literary representations of imprisonment. As concerns the emotional significance of the act of punishing, the reading advanced challenges Durkheimian and Foucauldian understandings of the meaning of punishment. This renders the question as to whether contemporary penality can be described as `post-disciplinary' somewhat premature. Proceeding from this primary thesis, I go on to argue for the work of psychoanalytic reading as a valuable critical and reflexive exercise in the study of penality. Scholarship that fails to elaborate in any detail the complexities of the intrasubjective does not facilitate a reflexive approach to penality. Melanie Klein's work, however, is particularly apposite, with its unflinching pursuit of vacillations between relations to others and what Klein called `the relationship to ourselves'.
Proportionality, Sentencing and the Multiple Offender
Authors: LOVEGROVE AUSTIN
Published: July 2003

This article develops a numerical framework governing the application of the principle of proportionality to the sentencing of cases comprising multiple separate offences each warranting imprisonment. The solution offered is based on an understanding, formulated by two English lawyers, that in the cumulation of sentence proportionality should be maintained between the seriousness of classes of offence: for example, no number of trivial offences warrant a sentence appropriate to a single moderately serious offence; to achieve this, cumulation of sentence across offences is in effect by decreasing gains. To operationalize this notion, pairs of offences were selected, and seriousness levels were quantified, using official statistics. The result was statements of proportionality: for example, for a case comprising secondary offences each warranting 1.2 years and together totalling 100 years, not more than 2.7 years should be added on to the sentence for the principal offence. From this a curve was calibrated as a representation of the cumulation of sentence. This framework offers a better understanding of the principle of proportionality in regard to the multiple offender, and has implications for guidance. Moreover, it provides a numerical standard against which to investigate whether judicial practice satisfies the principle of proportionality in this type of case.
Imprisonment Rates and the New Politics of Criminal Punishment
Authors: ZIMRING FRANKLIN E.
Published: July 2003

While the rate of imprisonment in the United States has been increasing sharply for more than a quarter of a century, the seven years after 1993 present a special set of conditions because crime rates were decreasing while imprisonment rates continued to soar. The increase in imprisonment rate after 1991 is equal to the total imprisonment rate in the United States in 1981. This article links the recent increase in rate to a new politics of penal severity that assumes any increase in pain for criminal offenders produces a corresponding benefit to crime victims. Much of the mandatory punishment legislation of the period is a product of distrust of government that increases the level of government intervention. This new political landscape will be a very important restraint on the capacity to lower rates of incarceration in the foreseeable American future.
The Private and the Public in Penal History
Authors: LICHTENSTEIN ALEX
Published: July 2003

Much of the recent commentary on America's incarceration crisis operates on the assumption that penal practice is a matter of public policy, susceptible to rational debate about social good and social harm in the public sphere. This essay takes a far more pessimistic view, arguing that in historical perspective punishment in America has deep roots in the private sphere. Historically, the form and frequency of punishment in the United States has been driven by the desire for private retribution and personal vengeance more than abstract notions of justice. Secondly, rationalistic penal reform rarely detaches itself from the other deep motive in American criminal justice, the goal of racial control. Penal systems regarded today as barbarities, for example the southern chain gang, in their time emerged as reforms to replace apparently even more barbaric systems, such as convict leasing. The character of such reforms often reflected a basic continuity: the use of the criminal law to discipline and punish racial minorities. Together the privatized and racialized character of American punishment make genuine penal reform unlikely.
Fear and Loathing in Late Modernity
Authors: SIMON JONATHAN
Published: July 2003

Mass imprisonment is based in some way on the intense fear of crime in the United States but how should we think about this fear? Douglas and Wildavsky (1982) provided a productive framework for examining the relationship between social organization and risk selection in their path-breaking study of environmentalism. Douglas and Wildavsky argued that the contemporary obsession with pollution risk indicated a drift in society toward sectarian forms of social organization with weak incentives and internal social controls. This article applies the Douglas and Wildavsky framework to the fear of crime in the United States since 1980 and concludes that crime has replaced pollution as the preferred risk for America's increasingly sectarian social order.
Private Revenge and Public Justice
Authors: CANTARELLA EVA
Published: July 2003

This article intends to show that the study of the Homeric epics may be useful for understanding the historical roots of our modern institutions of Criminal Justice. The Iliad and the Odyssey (both the product of an oral tradition that lasted several centuries) were written down around the middle of the 8th century BC and describe the moral values and the social life of the Greek world of that period. The social organization that they describe was not yet a polis, and the law did not exist (at least in the modern sense of the word). Nevertheless, a set of social rules existed and was basically respected. The fundamental rule was an obligation to react to any offensive behaviour by taking revenge on the offender. The sanction for not taking revenge was `losing face'. But revenge was not a free exercise of violence. It was regulated by detailed rules, some of them considered so important that if a dispute arose concerning their violation, the Council of Elders settled the dispute, acting as the first documented body of jurors in western history.

The Homeric epics, therefore, show the instruments and the effectiveness of social control in situations where a state does not exist, as well as the way - or one of the ways - in which a legal system may come into existence.
Punishment and the Restoration of Rights
Authors: BROWN STEPHEN PAUL
Published: July 2003

This article considers the attempt to justify punishment in terms of its ability to restore the breached rights of the crime victim. It examines the arguments put forward by Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel and contends that their theories, having followed similar patterns linguistically and stylistically, each founder though for different reasons, at the key stage of demonstrating how punishment restores rights. Kant relies upon an inappropriate analogy while Hegel resorts to an over-extended metaphor. Neither demonstrates how punishment `undoes' the wrong inherent to crime. Within the contemporary literature there is a move from punishment as the restoration of right towards punishment as the reaffirmation of right. However, the article argues that the theories following this path fail to demonstrate why punishment is necessary to the reaffirmation of right. For the above reasons, there is, as yet, no satisfactory `justificatory' link between punishment and victims' rights.
Exploring risk management in probation practice
Authors: Robinson Gwen
Published: July 2003

As an exemplar of modern penality’s ‘normalizing sector’ (Garland, 1985), probation is deeply implicated in the purported shift towards a ‘new’ or ‘postmodern’ penal rationality with risk management rather than normalization at its heart. This article reviews the emergence of risk management in recent criminological theory and goes on to explore the emergence of risk and risk management in the Probation Service in England and Wales during the 1990s. Drawing on the author’s recent empirical research it then presents an analysis of the dynamics of offender supervision in probation which, in common with a growing number of studies in other penal contexts, reveals that the increasing dominance of risk-based reasoning has not ushered in an approach conforming entirely to theoretical formulations of risk management. It is argued that in the context of probation supervision two relatively distinct ‘modes of governance’ are emerging, based on a distinction between those offenders assessed as posing a serious risk of harm to the public, and those who are not. It is argued that these modes of governance constitute different but complementary adaptations to the purported shift from normalization to risk management, or from ‘old’ to ‘new’ penologies.
Punishing not-for-profit
Authors: Armstrong Sarah
Published: July 2003

While a lively debate rages over the role of the private sector in the administration of punishment, this debate focuses nearly exclusively on for profit corporations, excluding the role that nonprofit organizations play. A study of the famous Massachusetts experiment in juvenile decarceration (in the early 1970s) and its aftermath provides information about how the nonprofit sector operates in juvenile justice. This information allows for an analysis of how reform rhetoric, and specifically the idealized concepts of ‘community-based’ and ‘nonprofit’, works in practice. ‘Community’ remains an under-theorized notion in criminology, and community-based treatment in Massachusetts often clones the disciplinary regimes of secure custody rather than play setting to less coercive forms of control that then link up informal with formal modes of social control. ‘Nonprofit’ evokes a number of positive images. However, the nonprofit contractors to the Massachusetts juvenile justice system behave in more complicated ways, displaying some characteristics in common with the for profit sector and some in common with the state bureaucracy. All of these qualities combine to create a unique dynamic of nonprofits, which I describe as ‘entrepreneurial bureaucracy’.
Knowledge, Domination and Criminal Punishment Revisited
Authors: SAVELSBERG JOACHIM J.
Published: July 2003

A theory of criminal punishment that introduces the organization of knowledge production and of political and legal decision-making as central concepts (Savelsberg, 1994a) is further developed. This article first explicates the general theoretical model. Second, the comparative perspective is enhanced as a previous comparison between the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the United States (US) is extended to include the experience of state socialist systems. Three distinct empirical patterns of punishment dynamics are identified. Each of them is associated with a distinct type of social organization: decentralized domination - personalistic; decentralized domination - bureaucratic; and monopolized domination - bureaucratic. An analysis of the cases of Poland, building on earlier work by Greenberg (1980), and the German Democratic Republic reveals that the organization of domination and knowledge production are crucial to the understanding of criminal punishment under conditions of totalitarianism as well. Yet, bureaucratization does not necessarily lead to stability in punishment trends as the US-West German comparison had suggested. Bureaucratization in combination with monopolization of decision-making power is likely to result in rather dynamic trends. Further, punishment under conditions of totalitarianism appears to follow immediate and strategic political rationales. Politics of punishment in such contexts also do not face the translation problems that haunt the application of political motives to control practices in systems with decentralized power structures.
Causation and the postmodern critique of objectivity
Authors: O’Meara J. Tim
Published: July 2003

Advocates of what are loosely called interpretive, critical, and now postmodern theories reject the possibility of objective knowledge and instead assert the subjectivity of knowable phenomena. According to their critique, facts and realities are socially constructed and politically negotiated, and therefore subjective rather than objective. The concept of objectivity itself is taken to be a tool of hegemonic discourse, and science is just politics by other means. I argue, however, that the critique of objectivity mirrors the scientism it rejects by conflating two very different types of facts and realities. I conclude that the critique is correct for one of those types, but not the other. My basic argument is that the critique of objectivity and the social and cultural scientism it rejects both err in making a simple category mistake that is founded in turn on an empirically incorrect, Humean account of causation, and that as a result, they both err in taking objectivity fundamentally to be a matter of inter-subjective agreement. I draw two primary implications from this argument. First, the critique of objectivity helps to undermine fatally attempts to construct an objective science of ‘social facts’ and ‘social reality’. Second, the critique is irrelevant to carrying out an objective science of physical facts and physical reality. Replacing the mistaken Humean account of causation with an explicitly physical account, I develop a simple litmus test that anthropologists and other researchers can use to determine whether any particular assertion makes an objective claim and is therefore vulnerable to the test of experience. Finally, I apply the litmus test to a very brief survey of anthropological theory, and then in more detail to current debates on ethnic identity, sacred sites, and anthropological authority.
Materialist, cultural and biological theories on why Yanomami make war
Authors: Ferguson R. Brian
Published: July 2003

For decades, there have been three primary anthropological perspectives on why people make war: materialist, cultural, and biological. Each has a long history of application to the Yanomami. This paper considers these three alternatives. First, it summarizes the author's materialist models and what they are purported to explain. Second, it discusses more cultural explanations offered by several field researchers, concluding that some might be synthesized with a materialist perspective, while others seem irreconcilable. Finally, a range of hypotheses invoking evolved predispositions are considered and found to be directly contradicted by Yanomami ethnography, even if limited to the works of Napoleon Chagnon.
The whole history of kinship terminology in three chapters
Authors: Trautmann Thomas R.
Published: July 2003

The article questions the current consensus that kinship terminologies evolve from something like the Dravidian to something like the English terminology, examining it over three time periods. Before Morgan the study of kinship terminology was embedded within a comparative study of core vocabularies to determine historic relations among nations (e.g. Leibniz). Morgan's breakthrough was to disembed the terms of kinship from the vocabulary list and conceptualize them as a set. His vision of their evolution had two phases. Before the revolutionary expansion of ethnological time in the mid-19th century, he developed an evolutionary view of the Indo-European kinship terminology that was very acute but tied to a short chronology for world history that the time revolution shortly exploded; after the time revolution he conceived the Iroquois and the English (as types of the Classificatory and the Descriptive) terminologies as an evolutionary series caused by successive reformations of the marriage rule. After Morgan, Dravidian and its structural neighbors have come to play the role of evolutionary starting-point. The article concludes with reasons to be skeptical of the current consensus and ways to move forward.
Symbolic technologies
Authors: Hornborg Alf
Published: July 2003

By extending the Marxian theory of fetishism from money and commodities to machines, we may achieve an epistemological shift in our understanding of the foundations of ‘technological development’. The first part of the article discusses previous definitions of fetishism in order to distil some central themes that appear to be particularly significant to the argument on machine fetishism. It is argued that semiotic theory can be useful in distinguishing different varieties of fetishism. The core of the Marxian definition is understood to be the mystification of unequal relations of social exchange through the attribution of autonomous agency or productivity to certain kinds of material objects. The attribution of productivity to modern technology is here interpreted as a mystification of the unequal, global exchange of (labour) time and (natural) space.
Elias and the anthropological tradition
Authors: Goody Jack
Published: July 2003

The impressive work of Norbert Elias displays little knowledge of `other cultures' nor of anthropology in general. But it does promote a comparative method along the lines of Marx and Weber, and this served to encourage such studies in the social sciences, methods which had been rejected by many anthropologists in the 20th century. Elias was interested not only in comparison but in long-term historical change and in what he called `sociogenesis'. The civilizing process is described as having its genesis in the European Renaissance with the increased part played by the state and the disappearance of feudal structures. It is argued that he arbitrarily selects certain aspects of manners, neglects the growth (or continuation) of violence and fails to take account of the `conscience collective' operating in simpler societies, let alone developments in other post-Bronze Age societies. Manners he treats largely in psychological terms of the advance of the highly generalized notion of self-restraint, in which he tries to use Freud for historical purposes. But without precise measurements these questions of `mentality' are too problematic to be examined by texts alone, without direct observation.
Using Gender to Undo Gender
Authors: Lorber Judith
Published: July 2003

Women’s status in the Western world has improved enormously, but the revolution that would make women and men truly equal has not yet occurred. I argue that the reason is that gender divisions still deeply bifurcate the structure of modern society. Feminists want women and men to be equal, but few talk about doing away with gender divisions altogether. From a social constructionist structural gender perspective, it is the ubiquitous division of people into two unequally valued categories that undergirds the continually reappearing instances of gender inequality. I argue that it is this gendering that needs to be challenged by feminists, with the long-term goal of doing away with binary gender divisions altogether. To this end, I call for a feminist degendering movement.
Re-reading the Second Sex
Authors: Stavro Elaine
Published: July 2003

In this re-reading of The Second Sex, the author argues that Beauvoir transgressively employs Sartre’s universal binary categories of Being and Nothingnessin her effort to account for the economic, political, cultural and psychological conditions of women’s situation. In doing so, she challenges Sartre’s theory of radical ontological freedom and concretizes his abstract philosophic voice, thereby avoiding their rationalist and voluntarist implications. Contesting Beauvoir’s feminist critics, who saw her as emotionally and philosophically dependent on Sartre and her work as an amalgam of Sartrean existentialism and feminist insights, the author maintains that Beauvoir had her own independent project – to transform Sartrean existentialism to make it contextually sensitive. Distancing herself from Sartre’s theory of freedom and its valorization of masculine experience and disembodied consciousnesses, Beauvoir’s theory of situational freedom and embodied subjectivity draws her closer to the existentialism of Merleau-Ponty.
Sexual deregulation or, the child abuser as hero in neoliberalism
Authors: Haug Frigga
Published: July 2003

Focusing on the issue of the sexual abuse of children, I discuss the question of the relationship between changes in sexual politics and how we think about drives in the context of their relation to neoliberalism. This subject is so emotionally charged that a rational ediscussion of that which goes beyond our comprehension is almost impossible. Any doubt of an easy solution moves the doubter himself or herself into the domain of abuse. The sets of complex interrelated issues associated with child sexual abuse deny any simple description or critique. I therefore approach the topic from three fronts which initially may seem quite separate but which will enable a new perspective and facilitate thinking about it. The first part of this article historicizes the topic. Here I present Ian Hacking’s (1996) work on knowledge, power and truth, which elucidates the crusading nature that the fight against sexual abuse has assumed. I then invoke Foucault’s reconstruction of the production of sexuality in the family in order to replace a position of straightforward moral disgust with the issue of power in the context of sexuality and drive construction. Hacking and Foucault serve as the conceptual bases for reviewing the infamous case of the Belgian child abuser Dutroux. 1 In the third part of the article my analysis is in the first instance focused on a theoretically informed critique of the news media, in particular European and German media. This Eurocentric study has global implications. Its aim is to make a first attempt to demonstrate a relationship between sex scandals and the demands and opportunities of the global free markets.
Listening to situated textuality
Authors: Hunter Lynette
Published: July 2003

Ethics is enabling of agency, but also normative and conventional. At the moment a gendered ethics, or the gendering of ethics, is a helpful approach because it is concerned with issues to do with people often peripheral to and excluded from power. At the moment it can work to keep ethics responsive, but how do we halt the drift into the normative, both as prescriptive and as ideological? A feminist ethics maintains the responsive and undermines prescriptive categories, and is committed to involving disempowered voices in the conversation. The article is particularly concerned with the articulation of the situated, and raises questions about attending to, learning how to listen to and learning how to speak, so that many people from different places can get involved in ethics. Otherwise ethics isn’t ethical.
Dear Abby
Authors: Currie Dawn
Published: July 2003

This article explores how textual analysis can help us understand subjectivity as an empirical, rather than purely theoretical, phenomenon. The texts discussed here are advice columns in adolescent magazines; the analysis takes as its starting point girls’ accounts of magazine reading. Drawing on focus group discussions and interviews with 48 girls between the ages of 13 and 17 years, I explore how the accomplishment of ‘individuality’– as a culturally and historically-specific task of adolescence – is mediated by advice texts. Because my analysis directs us to the existence of embodied subjects, I employ the notion of ‘Subject-ivity’. As a concept, ‘Subject-ivity’ reminds the analyst of the presence of an embodied, rather than theoretically constructed Self, brought into existence as a practical mode of consciousness. It thus provides a potential bridge between the sociological world of social subjects and highly theoretical work on subjectivity.
Deconstruction of gender and women’s agency
Authors: Hüchtker Dietlind
Published: July 2003

The article discusses Berlin’s Poor Relief Policy from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century, posing the question: how can premises of theoretical and political feminist discussion be put into practice? In analysing the shift in poor relief, I have taken up three essential aspects: (1) power relations must be examined in a context that cannot be reduced simply to the opposition between ruler and subject or men and women; (2) when does gender become a principle of social order?; and (3) gender as a construct and women’s way of action need to be linked. I show how a method that combines the different statements made by the texts as conflicts and discourse is useful, in that it facilitates working out the diversity of poor relief politics and historicizing the term ‘poor women’. At the same time it can show how social change in everyday life was structured and established.
Biomedicine, tissue transfer and intercorporeality
Authors: Waldby Catherine
Published: July 2003

More and more areas of medicine involve subjects donating tissues to another — blood, organs, bone marrow, sperm, ova and embryos can all be transferred from one person to another. Within the technical frameworks of biomedicine, such fragments are generally treated as detachable things, severed from social identity once they are removed from a particular body. However an abundant anthropological and sociological literature has found that, for donors and patients, human tissues are not impersonal. They retain some of the values of personhood and identity, and their incorporation often has complex effects on embodied identity. This article draws on feminist philosophy of the body to think through the implications of some of these practices. Specifically, it draws on the idea of intercorporeality, wherein the body image is always the effect of embodied social relations. While this approach is highly productive for considering the stakes involved in tissue transfer, it is argued that the concept of body image has been too preoccupied with the register of the visual at the expense of introceptive data and health/illness events. Empirical data around organ transplant and sperm donation are used to demonstrate that the transfer of biological fragments involves a profound kind of intercorporeality, producing identifications and disidentifications between donors and recipients that play out simultaneously at the immunological, psychic and social levels.
Prima gravida
Authors: Betterton Rosemary
Published: July 2003

Over the past decade, representations of pregnant embodiment, foetal imagery and the maternal body have become the subject of intense feminist investigation across fields as diverse as philosophy, science and cultural studies. This body of work represents a sustained intervention in the politics of reproduction and the politics of representation that builds on earlier feminist discourses on motherhood. Within this article, I want to address the limits of, and ruptures in, the representation of the maternal body in relation to particular examples of visual art practice. The article focuses on four pregnant figurations that seem to constitute certain limit points in the representation of maternal embodiment: the `phantom' pregnant body; the elderly prima gravida; the pregnant woman with disabilities; and young women undergoing abortion . My argument is that, in these particular visual texts, `being pregnant' is represented as an unnatural rather than a natural state and as a cultural rupturing of feminine and maternal norms. This seems to offer a useful starting point from which to interrogate the relations between prevailing discourses around the maternal subject and the unstable subject of pregnancy.
Manufacturing Sexual Subjects
Authors: Salzinger Leslie
Published: July 2003

Standing for all instances of problematic workplace sexuality, the notion of `sexual harassment' illuminates but also obscures the role of desire in work relations. It spotlights isolated individual interactions at the expense of structural processes and stresses choice and blame rather than the way in which a given workplace evokes particular sexual subjectivities in the service of production. An ethnography of shopfloor relations in a Mexican export-processing plant shows how labor control operates through the interpellation of both workers and supervisors as sexual subjects. In this plant, panoptic architecture evokes and focuses the male gaze in the service of `quality' and `efficiency', and desire emerges as a force of production. Male supervisors are located as voyeurs and young female workers as sexual objects to be consumed. Worker efficiency and desirability are conflated and workers become subject to management for the affirmation of both. In such a setting, framing shopfloor sexuality as aberrant distracts from its primary, and equally problematic, function as a shopfloor discipline.
The `Revenge of History'
Authors: Lee Ching Kwan
Published: July 2003

In the Rustbelt of China, state workers have become restive as market reforms have undermined their entrenched way of life. By comparing cases of worker protest in an industrial city in northeastern China, once the cradle of its planned economy, this article analyses the configuration of conditions underlying these labor protests. I have found that collective memories of Maoist socialism, enterprise residential communities and enterprise property helped overcome the crippling effects of demoralization and atomization in the wake of massive unemployment. At the same time, new identities based on citizens' legal rights and political spaces in the realm of public policy and the law are also forged in the reform process, mediating workers' activism. Labor resistance in a period of system transition draws on resources and influences from both state and market socialisms.
A Brazzaville Friendship
Authors: Eaton David
Published: July 2003

This article tells a story of a friendship between an American ethnographer and a young man of Brazzaville, capital of the Republic of Congo, at a time of economic crisis and factional warfare. Over time, our mutual misreadings of our relationship led to conflict, undermining the shifting narratives through which we understood and represented our actions. Feelings and gestures of good will, generosity and loyalty were made ambiguous in light of accompanying tactics of domination and expropriation. Perceived betrayals revealed and mobilized institutions - church, state, militia - which each of us believed could protect his interests. Our friendship became something more difficult, and thereby illuminated configurations of power both in this fieldwork encounter and in larger Congolese society.
Between `Mate' and `Scab'
Authors: Beaud Stéphane , Pialoux Michel
Published: July 2003

This article uses the case study, informed by long-term fieldwork in factories, neighborhoods and homes, of a young worker in the Peugot automobile plant of Sochaux who is himself the son of a foundry worker in that same factory to dissect the divisions and contradictions that beset the industrial working class in contemporary French society as a result of the onset of mass secondary schooling, the normalization of high unemployment and the shift to postfordist modes of production. A deep-seated social opposition and cultural gulf is shown to emerge between older semi-skilled workers and younger workers endowed with school credentials (albeit devalued ones) which splinters the class asunder and further contributes to its collective demoralization and deconstruction. On the one side stands the generation of the fathers who, weakened by the decomposition and precarousness of the conditions of existence of the popular classes, encounter insuperable difficulties in transmitting their social and political heritage, their shopfloor know-how and tactics, modes of resistance at work, masculine sociability and political forms of expression in the workshop. On the other side, their sons have acquired in the course of their secondary schooling (which recently became near-universal in France) social dispositions, bodily demeanors and cultural aspirations that lead them to distance themselves from a heritage which consigns them to remaining `mere workers' when their ambition is to escape from the class and its collective entrapment.
Yellow Sand of Berlin
Authors: Boyer Dominic
Published: July 2003

While conducting fieldwork in Berlin in 1996 and 1997, I encountered a Zeitgeist of `becoming' enveloping all aspects of my life in the city - from the sensory experiences of walking a metropolis under intense revision, to listening to public discourse on the future of the `New Berlin' as symbol of German cosmopolitanism, to hearing my East German interlocutors recount the erasure of the GDR past from the historical narratives of unified Germany. This essay in literary ethnography seeks to capture this collective mood and sense of simultaneous historical becoming and erasure by weaving anecdotal observations, encounters and reflections oriented by the metaphor of shifting sands. It recalls a host of dialectical apparitions in the politics of German unification, in contemporary East-West relations in the profession of journalism, and in the ratio of historical effacement to futurological manifesto in the built environment of the city itself.
Was Max Weber a Selectionist in Spite of Himself?
Authors: Runciman W. G.
Published: July 2003

Despite Weber's explicit rejection in several of his writings of the Darwinian concepts of selection and adaptation, in his sociology of law he briefly discusses the emergence and diffusion of novel forms of behaviour in selectionist terms entirely consistent with the Darwinian paradigm. There is therefore reason to suggest that he could have advanced his ‘Protestant Ethic’ thesis in similar terms, and that if he had its merits and deficiencies would have been significantly easier to diagnose. So interpreted, the thesis is still inadequately supported by the evidence that he adduces in its favour. But a reformulated selectionist version directed to explaining the success of Protestant entrepreneurs in the 18th century is much more convincing, and can be supported by the evidence for what did (and didn't) happen in Scotland and China as well as continental Europe. Moreover, Weber's underestimation of China's economic achievements strengthens rather than weakens the reformulated version.
Max Weber’s Disenchantment
Authors: Mackinnon Malcolm H.
Published: July 2003

Weber’s disenchantment is that Kant’s reason fails to deliver on the promise. Kant’s promise is that reason in history will produce ‘progress’, produce ever greater quantities of reason culminating in a ‘rational kingdom of ends’. Weber’s Puritan studies put this claim to the test. They do so through Kant and Channing, who see the providential ‘determinism’ of predestination as an insult to reason and ‘freedom’. Calvinists respond to predestination’s insult with the ‘free force’ of ‘ideas’ - with reason, and with ‘good works in vocation’ for God’s glory. Yet this response fails to produce the rational-ascetic utopia that Kant predicts, and leads instead to the material sensuality of capitalism. Reason is thus irrational because it creates the capitalist conditions of its own negation, because, in short, freedom creates determinism.