bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Hong Kong, Canada: Playwriting as Critical Ethnography
Authors: Goldstein Tara
Published: April 2009

For the past 4 years, the author has been conducting critical ethnographic fieldwork in a Canadian multilingual high school and thinking about the ways she might write up her findings. In an attempt to represent the experiences of those who participated in her study in a way that does not lead to the reproduction of the policies and practices of colonialism and racism she means to challenge, the author has experimented with the genre of playwriting. The piece contains an edited version of the author’s Hong Kong, Canada, a fictional but ethnographically informed play about some of the linguistic and social dilemmas facing immigrant youth and their Canadian-born classmates. A short explanation of why and how the script came to be written follows the play. A brief discussion of audience responses to the play concludes the article.
News Constructions of Fear and Victim: An Exploration Through Triangulated Qualitative Document Analysis
Authors: Altheide David L. , Gray Barbara , Janisch Roy , Korbin Lindsey , Maratea Ray , Neill Debra , Reaves Joseph , Van Deman Felicia
Published: April 2009

A seminar project used the World Wide Web to examine the multiple meanings of fear and victim in various news media to explore the substance of news as well as experiment with using an interactive Web page in a seminar format. The approach used was triangulated qualitative document analysis (TQDA), which relied on an interactive Web page format that permitted multiple observers to view others’ data, analysis, and summary comments as well as incorporate these accounts into their own work. The aim was to foster a critical reflective analysis using online information bases and interacting with each other outside of class as well as during seminar session. The provocative findings were reflexively joined to the information technology and emergent interaction process.
Coming Clean at the Hyphen: Ethics and Dialogue at a Local Community Center
Authors: Dimitriadis Greg
Published: April 2009

Following key theorists and researchers in critical ethnography, the author argues that the increasingly acknowledged “dialogic emergence of culture” makes people responsible for the ways they as unique individuals inhabit one another’s worlds, opening a space to see fieldwork as a political praxis that individuals engage in particular ways and with real effects. Toward a clearer and more nuanced understanding of these issues and tensions, the author examines how his identity at his research site, a community center where he worked for 4 years, changed over time and the attendant problems and possibilities this posed for his work. In particular, the author explores how moving into a staff position forced him to rearticulate his original research project and practice, as well as the insight it provided on the differential social forces working on the lives of Black versus White young people and the responsibility of social actors therein.
Keeping a Close Watch: A New Year Begins
Authors: Quinney Richard
Published: April 2009

An accounting is made of an illness during the first month of the new year. The disease (chronic lymphocytic leukemia) had progressed over a period of several years; treatments had recently started, and the prognosis was unpredictable. Keeping a daily journal was a way of coping with the illness and the uncertainty (now more evident than usual) of personal existence. The storyline of one’s life, in other words, had changed, and a new understanding was in the making. The accounting over 1 month’s time is a documentation of and a witnessing to the creation of a life. Two photographs, past and present, accompany the journal entries.
“Between Eye and Eye Stretches an Interminable Landscape”: The Challenge of Philosophical Hermeneutics
Authors: Freeman Melissa
Published: April 2009

While conducting phenomenological interviews on the experience of being a parent with children in school, the author comes to a deeper, more personal understanding of the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics. How people use language—the form, content, and context of the words they use, whether in their interviews, analytic memos, or theoretical writings—is crucial to how they understand. As such, language is always communicative, relational, interpretive, and dynamic. The challenge for interpretive researchers is incorporating in their understanding of a topic the physical, emotional, situational, and relational conditions within which communication and thus understanding occur. In a series of poems, the author provides an aesthetic account of some of those conditions.
Performing Autoethnography: An Embodied Methodological Praxis
Authors: Spry Tami
Published: April 2009

This article argues the personal/professional/political emancipatory potential of autoethnographic performance as a method of inquiry. Autoethnographic performance is the convergence of the “autobiographic impulse” and the “ethnographic moment” represented through movement and critical self-reflexive discourse in performance, articulating the intersections of peoples and culture through the innersanctions of the always migratory identity. The article offers evaluative standards for the autoethnographic performance methodology, calling on the body as a site of scholarly awareness and corporeal literacy. Autoethnographic performance makes us acutely conscious of how we “ Iwitness” our own reality constructions. Interpreting culture through the self-reflections and cultural refractions of identity is a defining feature of autoethnographic performance.
Critical Race Theory, Latino Critical Theory, and Critical Raced-Gendered Epistemologies: Recognizing Students of Color as Holders and Creators of Knowledge
Authors: Bernal Dolores Delgado
Published: April 2009

For too long, the histories, experiences, cultures, and languages of students of color have been devalued, misinterpreted, or omitted within formal educational settings. In this article, the author uses critical race theory (CRT) and Latina/Latino critical theory (LatCrit) to demonstrate how critical raced-gendered epistemologies recognize students of color as holders and creators of knowledge. In doing so, she discusses how CRT and LatCrit provide an appropriate lens for qualitative research in the field of education. She then compares and contrasts the experiences of Chicana/Chicano students through a Eurocentric and a critical raced-gendered epistemological perspective and demonstrates that each perspective holds vastly different views of what counts as knowledge, specifically regarding language, culture, and commitment to communities. She then offers implications of critical raced-gendered epistemologies for both research and practice and concludes by discussing some of the critiques of the use of these epistemologies in educational research.
Stories and Silences: Disclosures and Self in Chronic Illness
Authors: Charmaz Kathy
Published: April 2009

The renewed attention to research participants’ stories and researchers’ ways of telling them has advanced our thinking about narratives but neglected the significance of silences. This article addresses the stories and silences of chronically ill people in relation to their self-disclosures. Studying their stories and silences (a) corrects an overreliance on participants’ stories, (b) notes disparities between lived experience and accounts of it, (c) brings the body into analytic purview, and (d) addresses the researcher’s stance and actions. Four often liminal concerns underlie these research participants’ stories and silences: the place of suffering, the potential of dislocation and isolation, the possibility of losing moral status, and potential loss of self and a way of life. These concerns contribute to participants’ rhetoric of self and are implicit in social scientific treatment of illness stories. The article ends by arguing that ethical dilemmas in interacting with participants and rendering their stories may take a different form than currently supposed.
Disability Research and the “Researcher Template”: Reflections on Grounded Subjectivity in Ethnographic Research
Authors: Goodley Dan
Published: April 2009

This article examines methodological and analytical issues emerging from an ethnographic study of self-advocacy groups of people with learning difficulties.1 Running in parallel to this research2 was the author’s involvement as a volunteer supporter to a self-advocacy group. This article explores how these two experiences connected to create a “researcher template.” This template provided a working subjective framework through which to control, temper, assess, and check observations and analyses while inviting a consideration of the dialectical interplay between epistemology, methodology, and analysis. Four points are considered: (a) the grounding of researcher subjectivity in relation to “knowing” research participants, (b) the impact of the author’s volunteer role on his subjectivity during ethnography, (c) the dilemmas of participating in people’s lives, and (d) the relationships between ethnography and participatory and emancipatory disability research. It concludes that explicitly rendering a researcher’s subjectivity open to critical revision feeds into the development of critical reflexivity within disability research.
Myths as Normative Frames for Qualitative Interpretation of Life Stories
Authors: Patton Michael Quinn
Published: April 2009

Myths offer a source of norms against which contemporary life events can be interpreted in the ancient tradition of meaning making. The author uses his son’s initiation in the Grand Canyon to illustrate the normative use of myth for qualitative inquiry and interpretation. Ancient and cross-cultural coming of age myths, especially the Grail Legend, provided the lens through which their experiences became focused and illuminated. Enduring archetypal myths are inherently normative, both descriptively and prescriptively. By using them to interpret modern life events, one reconnects contemporary qualitative inquiry with its ancient predecessor forms of meaning making.
Pulmonary Manifestations of Liver Diseases
Authors: Yeshua Hanny , Blendis Laurie M. , Oren Ran
Published: April 2009

Respiratory problems are common in patients with chronic liver diseases. The most common causes are disorders that are not related to liver diseases such as asthma and COPD. In addition certain liver diseases that are associated with specific pulmonary abnormalities, and conditions associated with end stage liver disease like tense ascites and intercostal muscular wasting are considered. Finally two unique disorders characterizing by vascular abnormalities independent of cardiorespiratory disorder-the hepatopulmonary syndrome (HPS) and portopulmonary hypertension (POPH) are observed. These disorders have different pathogenesis, different clinical pictures, treatment and prognosis. This article reviews the epidemiology, pathophysiology, clinical features, evaluation and current therapy of these two disorders.
Dialogue in Evaluation
Authors: Greene Jennifer C.
Published: April 2009

Dialogue in evaluation is presented as a fundamental value commitment to engagement, particularly engagement with the relational, moral and political dimensions of our contexts and our craft. Because it is at root a relational and communicative activity, effective dialogue in evaluation is inclusive of all legitimate stakeholder interests and involves interactions that are respectful, reciprocal and equitable. Effective dialogue, in turn, can enhance the democratizing potential of evaluation.
A Postscript on Thinking about Dialogue
Authors: Schwandt Thomas A.
Published: April 2009

This article offers an interpretation of different notions of dialogue as are evident in a broad literature in the social sciences and the humanities. It sets the previous articles within this broad context while suggesting ways in which the nature, aim and methods of evaluation, as well as the roles and obligations of the evaluator, are connected to these different understandings of dialogue.
Bodies of Metal, Shells of Memory
Authors: Saunders Nicholas J.
Published: April 2009

‘Trench Art’ is the evocative but misleading term used to describe a wide variety of objects in various media made by soldiers, prisoners of war, and civilians during the First World War (1914-18) and the succeeding inter-war period (1919-39). The production of such objects appears as a widespread human response to the conditions of modern warfare, with examples coming from the Boer War and many if not most 20th century conflicts. This essay focuses on metal ‘Trench Art’ from the Western Front between 1914 and 1939. It offers an initial categorization of types, and explores their various symbolic dimensions as souvenirs and mementoes, objectifications of loss, war trophies, and as materializations of the relationships between object and maker, men and women, the warring nations, and the living and the dead. It is suggested that ‘Trench Art’ is an important and hitherto overlooked source for understanding the cultural memory of 20th century war.
Domestic Objects and the Taste Epiphany
Authors: Woodward Ian
Published: April 2009

The presentation of an aesthetic identity involves the accomplishment of a coherent, plausible narrative which links one’s choices to desired characteristics of the self. As symbolic evidence of a person’s taste, material culture is a vital component of a successful narrative. Via case studies of pivotal household objects, this paper uses face-to-face interview data as a way of investigating processes of aesthetic choice. Household objects are interpreted as material elements imbricated in the presentation of a socially plausible and internally consistent aesthetic self. Narrative analysis, and the concept of the epiphany-object, are proposed as useful ways of accounting for tastes in domestic material culture. Methodological questions of truth-telling and authenticity in the face-to-face context are considered, and the sociological problem of taste is scrutinized in light of ideas about social accountability and textual identity.
Virtual Colonization
Authors: Hall Martin
Published: April 2009

In many respects, the recent expansion of the Internet retraces the geography of Europe’s first colonization of the globe from the late 15th century onwards. Are these new forms of electronic communication a continuation of capitalism’s inexorable expansion, or are they symptomatic of a new ‘media age’ that is qualitatively distinct? This essay explores the comparison between the ‘rich trade’ of early colonialism and some of the uses of the Internet, and notes the similarities in the marking out of status in hierarchical and differentiated societies. At the same time, though, the ‘death of distance’ has significant implications for forms of cultural life, and for new modes of resistance to domination.
One-legged media, lame democracy
Authors: Easterman Max
Published: April 2009

Bosnia and Albania reflect two different but related problems for the operation of democratic media in societies that, in European and also in global terms, can be described as ‘marginal’. Albania is Europe’s poorest country, and also has its least-developed civil society. The concept of democracy is poorly understood, and often deliberately distorted, by many of those who have the power and influence to affect its growth. The media in Albania have been manipulated almost as cynically as those in former Yugoslavia - but under the guise of operating in a democratic environment. Moreover, governments have used democratic processes, and the kind of laws and regulations that are common and often necessary in advanced democratic societies, to regulate the media in such a way as to ensure their compliance or drive them out of existence. For instance, new media laws have been deliberately delayed to keep independent radio stations in a legal limbo that allowed punitive action against them whenever the authorities wanted.
Spain in the European Union
Authors: Menéndez-Alarcón Antonio
Published: April 2009

This article focuses on Spanish interpretations of the European integration process. Based on extensive use of primary sources and interviews, the article examines perceptions of national identity, nationalism and people’s cultural attachment to the European Union (EU). It discusses the diversity of opinions among the different political parties, labor unions, business leaders and lay citizens regarding the organization of the EU. The study is located in the cultural studies approaches that attempt to describe the complexity and interdependence of political, economic and ideological structures. It shows that the EU is as much about representation and cultural meanings as it is about political economy. In addition, this research shows that national identity is reconstituted, maintained, internalized and reproduced in social processes that involve confrontations and competing interests in the EU. Finally, it reveals that the EU has thus far not contributed to superseding the prominence of the nation-state and nationalism and has not decisively engaged the Spanish populace to support a federal Europe.
Pleasure and meaningful discourse
Authors: O’Connor Barbara , Klaus Elisabeth
Published: April 2009

The concept of pleasure has emerged as a multi-faceted social and cultural phenomenon in studies of media audiences since the 1980s. In these studies different forms of pleasure have been identified as explaining audience activity and commitment. In the diverse studies pleasure has emerged as a multi-faceted social and cultural concept that needs to be contextualized carefully. Genre and genre variations, class, gender, (sub-)cultural identity and generation all seem to be instrumental in determining the kind and variety of pleasures experienced in the act of viewing. This body of research has undoubtedly contributed to a better understanding of the complexity of audience activities, but it is exactly the diversity of the concept that is puzzling and poses a challenge to its further use. If pleasure is maintained as a key concept in audience analysis that holds much explanatory power, it needs a stronger theoretical foundation. The article maps the ways in which the concept of pleasure has been used by cultural theorists, who have paved the way for its application in reception analysis, and it goes on to explore the ways in which the concept has been used in empirical studies. Central to our discussion is the division between the ‘public knowledge’ and the ‘popular culture’ projects in reception analysis which, we argue, have major implications for the way in which pleasure has come to be understood as divorced from politics, power and ideology. Finally, we suggest ways of bridging the gap between these two projects in an effort to link pleasure to the concepts of hegemony and ideology.
Plastic bags
Authors: Hawkins Gay
Published: April 2009

This article reflects on the meanings of waste in our everyday lives. It argues that a changing relation to waste is a changing relation to self. It traces shifting rubbish discourses and practices, looking particularly at how waste has become morally problematized: at how ‘disposal’ has become ‘management’. Its aim is to examine how a new ethos of waste might be created beyond environmental moralism. For the problem with moral codes and rulings is that they often deny the complexities, paradoxes and visceral registers that mark our relations with rubbish. Using Deleuze and Foucault, an alternative ethics of waste is proposed, one that foregrounds relationality and the arts of transience rather than separation and mastery. For, to be open to waste, to be mindful and careful with it, is to be open to our own becomings.
Sexed equations and vexed physicists
Authors: Norris Christopher
Published: April 2009

This article examines various issues raised by the famous Sokal hoax and in the follow-up book that Sokal coauthored with his physicist colleague Jean Bricmont. I argue that the episode cannot be dismissed as just a passing salvo in the ‘science wars’ but should be read in the wider context of present-day debates about science, cultural studies and the ‘strong programme’ in sociology of knowledge. Beyond that, it reveals some genuine problems with the kinds of anti-realist, cultural-relativist, or social-constructivist approach that Sokal/Bricmont take as their targets, often with good reason. However I suggest that some physicists - quantum theorists especially - have themselves encouraged this trend by advancing a range of dubious speculative arguments or by declaring scientific realism no longer tenable on the basis of far from decisive experimental evidence. This helps to explain why Sokal’s article manifests all the signs of ‘unstable’ irony, and perhaps why the Social Text editors were taken in by its motley parade of citations from cultural theorists and ‘respectable’ scientific sources alike. My discussion covers some basic issues in the interpretation of quantum mechanics by way of showing how they have influenced debate not only in post-Kuhnian history/philosophy of science but also in various quarters of postmodernist cultural theory. What limits the effectiveness of Sokal/Bricmont’s critique is their failure to acknowledge this further irony and their blanket attack on a range of (mainly French-influenced) movements of thought which require more discriminate treatment. Their case would have gained additional force had it taken account of other - e.g. Wittgensteinian - sources for this widespread turn toward cultural-relativist thinking.
Australian gay porn videos
Authors: McKee Alan
Published: April 2009

Debates about the local and the global continue to be prominent in cultural studies. By taking an example of Australian gay porn videos, which in some ways are convincingly ‘local’, the paper suggests that previous attempts to define ‘the local’ - in terms either of textual features or provenance of production - are problematic. It proposes instead the idea of ‘persuasiveness’ as a way of accounting for ‘localness’ which does not rely on implications of authenticity.
Nerd nation
Authors: Kendall Lori
Published: April 2009

This article examines the cultural figure of the nerd by analyzing images of nerds in movies, news articles and materials from the World Wide Web. This analysis shows that the previously liminal masculine identity of the nerd gets rehabilitated and partially incorporated into hegemonic masculinity during the period from the early 1980s through the present. In the process, the nerd becomes implicated in a variety of discourses about race and class as well as masculinities. Media representations use the figure of the nerd to displace bids for civil rights by African-American males and gay men. Discussions of nerds at work perpetuate stereotypes about computer users. The changing and contested meaning of the term nerd allows for both progressive uses and those which protect the status quo of hegemonic masculinity. All of these discursive uses of the nerd identity suggest that our use of computers is deeply connected to identity issues regarding race, class and gender.
Culture, government and spatiality
Authors: Barnett Clive
Published: April 2009

This article critically discusses the reconceptualization of culture and governmentality in recent Australian ‘cultural-policy studies’. It argues that the further development of this conceptualization requires a more careful consideration of the complex relations between culture, power and the different spatialities of social practices. The assumptions of this literature regarding social-democratic public institutions and the nation-state are critically addressed in the light of contemporary processes of globalization. It is argued that the use made of Foucault in this paradigm privileges a model of disciplinary power which is dependent on a particular spatialization of social subjects and technologies of the self. As a result, an uncritical application of this model to all cultural practices supports a far too coherent image of practices of ‘government’ in producing sought-after subject-effects. It is suggested that the different articulations of spatio-temporal presence and absence in cultural technologies require a less totalizing understanding of the forms of power exercised through governmental practices.
Challenges of social good in the world of Grand Theft Auto and Barbie: a case study of a community computer center for youth
Authors: Clark Lynn Schofield
Published: April 2009

This paper presents a case study of a community technology center (CTC) located in a lower income neighborhood of a high-tech city. Participant observation and interview-based research determined that while the CTC was popular among its targeted constituents, its use was not consistent with what the center’s supporters and policymakers envisioned. The emergent discrepancy between policymaker rhetoric and actual use is analyzed in light of different understandings of how internet access is perceived as a social good by policymakers, funders, and among disadvantaged communities. The article raises questions and suggests policy implications regarding how those most at-risk use community technology centers, how those centers may be funded, and how the relationship of computers and the social good must be reconceptualized to better address the issues of the digital divide that extend beyond the technological realm.
But the empress has no clothes!
Authors: Stanley Liz , Wise Sue
Published: April 2009

Who owns feminist theory? and just what is meant by the idea of ‘theory’? We explore these fundamental questions as part of interrogating some emergent orthodoxies about feminist theory, proposing that there is a ‘missing revolution’ in feminist thinking, for while ideas about feminist epistemology, methodology and ethics have been fundamentally reworked, those concerning feminist theory have not. Our purpose is to stimulate a debate about the form of feminist theory, rather than the more usual controversies about its content; and thus our concern is with promoting the development of feminist metatheory. We argue that the now-dominant version of feminist theory is a parallel project to that of mainstream/malestream social theory, and that a feminist autocritique of this and related developments is needed, with the aim of achieving a transformation of the fundamental categories of feminist theory.
What the hacks say
Authors: Brennen Bonnie S.
Published: April 2009

A review of United States journalism textbooks, published during the 1980s and 1990s, suggests that authors focus on essential new information and highlight a cutting edge understanding of new technologies, visual literacy, and/or cultural diversity in an effort to justify publishing new books on the practice of journalism. This review also suggests that while the vast majority of these texts clearly cover the field in a competent and thorough manner, there is a considerable amount of overlapping, repetitive information and that all of these books address the practice of journalism from an identical ideological perspective.
Privacy, the public and journalism
Authors: Kieran Matthew , Morrison David E. , Svennevig Michael
Published: April 2009

The paper takes as its starting point the question of whether or not the journalistic normative commitment to full disclosure of information empirically finds favour with the public. We indicate that in the case of war reporting full disclosure is not always desired by the public and then examine if, in certain circumstances, full disclosure is desired by the public in civil situations. The area for examination is that of privacy. By conceptually drawing on the notions of the Liberal and Neo-Aristotelian we show, through both focus group research and survey questionnaires, that the existence of different value positions within the population provides different responses to the rights of the individual and the public good generally and, more specifically, in relation to the regulation of media content. Yet our research shows a virtually unanimous convergence on criteria taken to govern a person's right to privacy and justifiable full disclosure which neither hold privacy to be an absolute right nor wholly subservient to the public good. We then sketch the beginnings of an analytic framework which articulates how and why this should be so. Our conclusion is that so far as the public is concerned, there is no universal right to know, and that journalists ought to understand, in each case of reporting, the emergent ‘status rules' that govern audience response to the news.
Public relations, business news and the reproduction of corporate elite power
Authors: Davis Aeron
Published: April 2009

This article discusses the rise of corporate public relations in Britain and offers an alternative explanation of how it has benefited the corporate sector. Most assessments of corporate PR tend to support traditional radical media accounts of strong corporate influence over media production and public opinion. All either argue or assume that PR is an effective form of ‘mind control’ with which to influence ‘the masses’. Against this account, this article instead argues that corporate PR has been more frequently used to gain a competitive advantage over rivals and has been primarily targeted at other corporate elites. This corporate elite focus has worked to further exclude non-corporate elites from participation in the production of financial and business news. As a result, a more general corporate advantage has been gained as much by exclusion as persuasion of the general public. After a brief discussion of the evidence and debates, these conclusions are illustrated with a case study of the Granada take-over of Forte in 1995–96.
Epistemic responsibility and narrative theory
Authors: Aucoin James L.
Published: April 2009

The combination of epistemic responsibility from moral philosophy and narrative theory provides a foundation for establishing literature-based standards for judging the quality of literary journalism. The application of these theories to the work of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski provides an elaboration of standards to which other literary journalists can be held. These literary standards can accommodate the demands of journalistic integrity, yet allow a broader range of creativity essential to good literature.
Doing the business?
Authors: Boyle Raymond , Dinan William , Morrow Stephen
Published: April 2009

This research draws upon a growing interest within media sociology in the ways in which news is shaped by information flows between sources; it focuses on how the media, and newspapers in particular, report on the business aspects of the UK football industry. Media interest in the workings of the City and issues of corporate governance extend beyond the conventional business pages to encompass the sports pages, commentary and even editorializing. The case study in this article centres on the Scottish club, Celtic, and serves to illustrate how public interest in sport can help illuminate aspects of how financial news is produced and reported in the print media. The article argues that much of the growing and complex business side of the game goes largely unreported and that there is evidence of an over-reliance on celebrity sources by journalists and a lack of knowledge or experience among sports reporters in reporting business stories.
Hegemony and discourse
Authors: Evans Michael Robert
Published: April 2009

As part of large, complex social structures, media organizations exist in constantly shifting relationships with each other, with the societies within which they work and with the internal and external audiences with which they communicate. The role of indigenous media groups in hegemonic processes, then, cannot be seen as monolithic or monologic, as some scholars have suggested. An examination of Inuit videography groups reveals that media organizations support or resist hegemonic pressures differentially; some work ‘within the system’ to further worthwhile aims, while others struggle against hegemonic coercion in an effort to expose that coercion and foster alternative power structures. Any models relating to the role of media in hegemony must reflect the heterogeneous stances and discursive relationships adopted by and among various media organizations.
Globalization, the Restructuring of Labour Markets and Policy Convergence
Authors: McBride Stephen , Williams Russell A.
Published: April 2009

This article investigates the relationship between globalization and labour market reform by examining the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD's) ‘Jobs Strategy’. It has been argued that globalization requires, and the competitive forces unleashed by that process require, the national adoption of more flexible, market-based, or ‘neoliberal’ labour market policies or states will face declining labour market performance. Thus, the globalization thesis posits convergence in labour market policies around an emerging neoliberal norm. Through an examination of the Jobs Strategy and the empirical data collected by the OECD, this article reaches several interrelated conclusions. The evidence suggests little sign of sustained convergence in labour market policies. According to the OECD's analysis, many states have been reticent to adopt neoliberal labour market strategies. Secondly, there is good reason for non-convergence: states that have adopted a liberal strategy, as a group, have not performed particularly well. Despite globalization, there is a range of labour market policy choices available to states. Several welfare state labour market strategies continue to exist.
Should the ‘Dynamic Autonomy’ of Ideas Matter to Sociologists?
Authors: Kalberg Stephen
Published: April 2009

Dominant schools of sociological theory today tend to downplay, or even omit entirely, a consideration of ‘dynamically autonomous’ ideas. This investigation reconstructs a case study - Max Weber’s analysis of the rise of otherworldly salvation religions - in which just these ideas are discovered as capable of placing thrusts into motion toward the constitution of groups and social change. Does Weber’s argument regarding the causal impetus of ideas remain plausible in secularized societies? Tensions in the American world-view, it is argued, give birth to dynamically autonomous ideas that, in an analogous manner, call forth new groupings. Analyses of social change in American society that refer alone to political and economic interests, social networks, rational choices, power, interaction, resource mobilization, state authority and structural differentiation are seen to omit an important, if often amorphous, background causal force.
Consuming Life
Authors: Bauman Zygmunt
Published: April 2009

This article posits a ‘mutual fit’ between consumer culture and the task posed to individuals under conditions of modernity: to produce for themselves the continuity no longer provided by society. It therefore explores the new forms of consumption formed from a shift from the functionality of needs to the diffuse plasticity and volatility of desire, arguing that this principle of instability has become functional to a modernity that seems to conjure stability out of an entire lack of solidity.
How Blacks Use Consumption to Shape their Collective Identity
Authors: Lamont Michèle , Molnár Virág
Published: April 2009

This article develops a ‘social identity’ perspective to the study of consumption. It builds on Richard Jenkins’ distinction between internal and external definitions of collective identity and explores the interplay of these definitions in the realm of consumption. Evidence is collected from interviews with marketing professionals who specialize in the African-American market segment to show that this theoretical approach complements and improves on existing approaches. Marketing professionals’ interpretations of the black consumer’s distinctiveness are used to map the twin processes of internal and external definitions of collective identity for African-Americans. The interviews suggest that marketing professionals (1) actively shape the meanings of the category of ‘the black consumer’ for the public at large; (2) promote powerful normative models of collective identity that equate social membership with conspicuous consumption; (3) believe that African-Americans use consumption to defy racism and share collective identities most valued in American society (e.g. middle-class membership); and (4) simultaneously enact a positive vision of their cultural distinctiveness.
Flattering Consumption
Authors: Burgess Adam
Published: April 2009

This article argues that the unprecedented prominence of consumer groups in contemporary Europe is not the product of a ‘bottom up' process driven by newly demanding consumers. Drawing particularly upon the examples of the UK and the EU, it is argued that the politicization of ‘the consumer' in Europe has come from above. The creation of the ‘citizen consumer' was firstly an attempt to introduce the appearance of accountability as the market was deregulated in the 1980s. Aligning authority with the consumer (and against the corporation) subsequently evolved as an important means of (re)establishing legitimacy. Such a process is problematic because government is effectively institutionalizing the mistrust at the heart of the new consumer culture.
The Poverty of Morality
Authors: Miller Daniel
Published: April 2009

This article contends that the study of consumption is often subsumed within an ideological concern to castigate society for its materialism at the expense of an alternative morality that emerges from an empathetic concern with poverty and the desire for greater access to material resources. Examples are given of the benefits that accrue to populations from an increased quantity of goods in certain circumstances. An anti-materialist ideology is favoured by associating consumption with production rather than studying consumers themselves and their struggles to discriminate between the positive and negative consequences of commodities. The form of morality attacked here is also associated with a generalized critique of Americanization that tends to appropriate on behalf of the United States all blame and thereby agency for regressive global and local developments. The Americanization thesis also tends to ignore the contribution of much of the rest of the world to the production of consumer culture and contemporary capitalism, and to deny the authenticity of regional consumer culture. Parallels are drawn with E.P. Thompson's essay The Poverty of Theory and its critique of similarly disengaged ideological critiques that led academics away from the study of experience.
Reconfiguring the Radical Other
Authors: Wells Karen
Published: April 2009

This article explores children’s consumption of ‘nature’ in culturally diverse urban places. Analysis of children’s oral, textual and visual representations of city life and observations of children’s spatial practices that were produced for research into the cultural practices of children in an urban context showed that children render nature in the city as a polluting and polluted presence. However, consumption practices that reconfigured ‘nature’ as part of urban culture dissolved the boundaries between nature and the city. I argue that this binary opposition between nature and urban culture echoes other binary oppositions that rest ultimately on the division between the Self and the Other. The ways that consumption practices reconfigure nature’s relationship to the city therefore offer insights into the negotiation of difference in urban everyday life.
Social archaeology and the theatres of memory
Authors: Hall Martin
Published: April 2009

Archaeology is a study of ways in which we express ourselves through the things that we make and use, collect, discard and take for granted, all archaeology is social archaeology. And, because the past is always part of the present, social archaeology is closely concerned with the construction of memory. This has been particularly evident in representations of South Africa’s past during a time of extensive social transformation. Within a short span of time, the celebration of an enduring white domination has been superceded by the recollections of a dismantled apartheid. Material culture - the tangible traces of memory - plays a central part in this theatre of memory.
Problems, functions and conditions of archaeological knowledge
Authors: Boado Felipe Criado
Published: April 2009

This article deals with some of the critical issues and problems facing archaeological theory and practice in a postpositivist world. It tries to explore a third way between objectivist and subjectivist methodological alternatives. In particular reviewing the concept and practice of interpretation as being the only way of obtaining understanding from the archeaological record. Avoiding neo-empirical reactions as much as individualistic or hypersubjectivist standpoints, this article highlights the possibility (and problems) of interpretation as a positive practice, exploring a methodology that could allow archaeology to construct an intersubjective understanding of material meaning.
The limits of agency in the analysis of elite Iron Age Celtic burials
Authors: Arnold Bettina
Published: April 2009

Burial ritual is an area of human behavior that at first seems particularly resistant to the identification of purposeful and intentional action in the archaeological past, at least when viewed from the perspective of the deceased individual. In the context of the European Iron Age this is partly because burial ritual falls so clearly into an area of group expression that is explicitly public and apparently conservative, but also because the actual focus of the activity generally is not in a position to influence the form of their own disposal. In fact, of course, it is possible to speak of agency in burial ritual from the perspective of both the deceased and the survivors involved in the mortuary performance itself. The question is to what extent and under what conditions individual action will be expressed in an archaeologically recognizable way.
Philosophy and historical archaeology
Authors: Romero Facundo Gomez
Published: April 2009

This article addresses the application of a series of key concepts of Foucault’s thought, as developed in Discipline and Punish and other works, in the context of interior frontiers with Indians in nineteenth-century Argentina. It tests the premise that a particular technology of power existed in this historical context that operated on every social level, impacting strongly on the lower classes that inhabited the incorrectly named ‘desert’. Its implementation in the military field enabled the existence of an array of micro-powers that surrounded the gaucho-soldiers and their women’s lives. This schema was adopted in different areas: in the enrollment and discipline of the gauchos, in life in the fortlet-prisons and in the ritualism of power. The alternative chosen by soldiers to evade this technology of power and the fortlet-panopticons was escape through desertion. The utility of these observations is demonstrated with reference to the archaeology of the border regions in Argentina, and their wider applicability noted for other contexts with similar problems.
The Ethics of Qualitative Social Work Research
Authors: Peled Einat , Leichtentritt Ronit
Published: April 2009

A study cannot be a good study unless proper ethical standards have been maintained. This article examines ethical thinking and practice in qualitative social work research. A review of a randomly selected sample of articles published in social work journals in the past decade was conducted, centered around four main issues: (a) prevention of harm; (b) empowerment-related aspects of the research process; (c) research-related benefits for participants and others; and (d) researchers’ technical competence. Our findings suggest that, as a general trend, ethical considerations are marginal in most phases of the studies that are reported in our journals. This raises questions as to the meaning of ‘proper ethical standards’ in qualitative social work research and as to the extent research ethics are regarded as important by researchers and journal editors in our field.
Thoughts On Qualitative Research Methods at NIH
Authors: Heurtin-Roberts Suzanne
Published: April 2009

These are brief comments describing the history, process and purpose leading to the publication of ‘Qualitative Methods in Health Research: Opportunities and Considerations in Application and Review’ (NIH Publication No. 02-!5046, December 2001). For more extensive information regarding qualitative research methods, other research questions, funding history, and general information regarding the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its components, the reader is advised to consult NIH’s websites, literature, program staff and previously funded researchers.
Statistical Damage Classification Using Sequential Probability Ratio Tests
Authors: Sohn Hoon , Allen David W. , Worden Keith , Farrar Charles R.
Published: April 2009

The primary objective of damage detection is to ascertain with confidence if damage is present or not within a structure of interest. In this study, a damage classification problem is cast in the context of the statistical pattern recognition paradigm. First, a time prediction model, called an autoregressive and autoregressive with exogenous inputs (AR-ARX) model, is fit to a vibration signal measured during a normal operating condition of the structure. When a new time signal is recorded from an unknown state of the system, the prediction errors are computed for the new data set using the time prediction model. When the structure undergoes structural degradation, it is expected that the prediction errors will increase for the damage case. Based on this premise, a damage classifier is constructed using a sequential hypothesis testing technique called the sequential probability ratio test (SPRT). The SPRT is one form of parametric statistical inference tests, and the adoption of the SPRT to damage detection problems can improve the early identification of conditions that could lead to performance degradation and safety concerns. The sequential test assumes a probability distribution of the sample data sets, and a Gaussian distribution of the sample data sets is often used. This assumption, however, might impose potentially misleading behavior on the extreme values of the data, i.e. those points in the tails of the distribution. As the problem of damage detection specifically focuses attention on the tails, the assumption of normality is likely to lead the analysis astray. To overcome this difficulty, the performance of the SPRT is improved by integrating extreme values statistics, which specifically models behavior in the tails of the distribution of interest into the SPRT.
When Oral Consent Will Do
Authors: Gordon Elisa J.
Published: April 2009

Informed consent in research requires investigators to explain to potential participants the procedures, risks, benefits, and alternatives of a study through either oral or written consent. This article discusses cases when oral consent may be more appropriate to use than written consent. A proposal is presented for writing Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols that incorporate both types of consent to protect the interests of participants and investigators.
Using Emergy Analysis in Ethnographic Field Research
Authors: Rocha Jorge M.
Published: April 2009

A methodology derived from Howard T. Odum's theory is described for the collection and analysis of ecological and sociological data. This methodology allows for a detailed and systematic analysis of how human populations interact with their environmental settings via resource exchanges. Some research results are offered as examples.