bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Small Town Race: A Performance Text
Authors: Pifer Darryl A.
Published: April 2009

During a research project designed to construct life stories for two students in a small town high school, an opportunity arose that promoted an examination of race relations in a rural context. From information gathered and autobiographical reflections, the author constructed a performance text as a means of presenting the material and promoting discussion of the issues raised. The compiled script includes four scenes showing specific events and characters focusing on the theme of race relations in a rural community. The scenes are punctuated with the words of various theorists to provide a critical perspective, and the author is included in the script as a character who provides narration during the performance. The script ends on a reflective note inviting discussion of the issues. After the script, in an epilogue to the piece, the author has included a brief discussion of the relevance and importance of alternate forms of research presentation.
Listening to Survivors' Voices
Authors: Hathaway Jeanne E. , Willis Georgianna , Zimmer Bonnie
Published: April 2009

To understand how providers can address partner abuse more effectively, the authors conducted semistructured interviews with 49 clients of a hospital-based domestic violence (DV) program. Due to the potentially grave consequences survivors face for disclosing abuse, it often took the right combination of circumstances in their lives and/or the presence of an understanding and caring provider for them to disclose. Following disclosure, survivors frequently found referral to the in-house DV program most helpful, along with other emotional and practical support. Findings from this study reveal additional ways in which health care providers can respond more effectively to this pervasive problem.
The Everyday Occurrence
Authors: Nixon Kendra , Tutty Leslie , Downe Pamela , Gorkoff Kelly , Ursel Jane
Published: April 2009

This article reports the results of qualitative interviews with 47 women involved in prostitution from three western Canadian provinces. More than two thirds of the women had become involved at age 15 or younger. The respondents described high rates of violence perpetrated against them. They reported considerable childhood sexual abuse, most often by a family member or by caretakers while they were living in foster care or group homes. The young women continued to experience violence as prostitutes so commonplace that it almost seemed “normal.” They were victimized by pimps, johns, other prostituted women, intimate partners, and representatives from mainstream society and members of the police. This article describes their experiences of violence, the associated health problems, the protective strategies they used, and their attempts to leave the streets. The conclusion suggests ways in which agencies and policies could better address the violence experienced by these young women.
Murder and Medicine
Authors: Harris Anthony R. , Thomas Stephen H. , Fisher Gene A. , Hirsch David J.
Published: April 2009

Despite the proliferation of increasingly dangerous weapons and the very large increase in rates of serious criminal assault, since 1960, the lethality of such assault in the United States has dropped dramatically. This paradox has barely been studied and needs to be examined using national time-series data. Starting from the basic view that homicides are aggravated assaults with the outcome of the victim’s death, we assembled evidence from national data sources to show that the principal explanation of the downward trend in lethality involves parallel developments in medical technology and related medical support services that have suppressed the homicide rate compared to what it would be had such progress not been made. We argue that research into the causes and deterability of homicide would benefit from a “lethality perspective” that focuses on serious assaults, only a small proportion of which end in death.
Extending the Police Role: Implications of Police Mediation as a Problem-Solving Tool
Authors: Buerger Michael E. , Petrosino Anthony J. , Petrosino Carolyn
Published: April 2009

This article discusses ramifications of role shifts that occur when police officers with traditional law enforcement expectations are placed in community policing assignments. Shifting from a control perspective to a partnership role often requires officers to abandon confrontation, command, and coercion in favor of participation, promotion, and persuasion. Types of police mediation arising in community policing are discussed relative to social distance and legal obligations across a spectrum of disputes: domestics, landlord-tenant, acquaintance/neighbor, frictions between neighborhoods and attractive nuisances, and between place guardians and regulating bodies. The New York City Community Patrol Officer Program (CPOP) and the Minneapolis Repeat Call Address Policing (RECAP) experiment provide examples. Potential problems include burnout, tunnel vision, personalization, overidentification, overcommitment, and unanticipated consequences.
Kitsch as a Repetitive System
Authors: Binkley Sam
Published: April 2009

In this article, an attempt will be made to elaborate a theory of kitsch that dispenses with the traditional hierarchical framework within which kitsch is often understood. Avoiding both the populist approach of cultural studies, and the elitist approach of mass culture theorists, an argument is made for a uniquely kitsch aesthetic that employs the thematics of repetition, imitation and emulation as a distinct aesthetic style. Breaking from traditional analyses of popular conventionality in the realm of taste which aligns taste habits with class identities (such as that offered by Pierre Bourdieu), it is argued instead that the repetitive quality of kitsch addresses a general problem of modernity, that of ‘disembeddedness’, or the undermining of personal horizons of social and cosmic security (a model drawn from Anthony Giddens). The basis of this argument is drawn from a reconstruction of traditional theories of kitsch, though illustrative cases are offered.
‘He was a Real Baby with Baby Things’
Authors: Layne Linda L.
Published: April 2009

This article explores the ways members of pregnancy loss support groups in the US use material culture to deal with the ‘realness problem’ of miscarriage, stillbirth, and early infant death. I examine goods purchased or made for the child-to-be during pregnancy; goods given from the child-to-be during the pregnancy; goods given to, or in the memory of, the ‘baby’ after its death; and things acquired to memorialize the child within the family. Through the buying, giving, and preserving of things, women and their social networks actively construct their babies-to-be and would-have-been babies as ‘real babies’ and themselves as ‘real mothers’, worthy of the social recognition this role entails.
Hummel Figurines
Authors: Chaimov John
Published: April 2009

How are we to understand the many-stranded, even contradictory, ways an artifact projects an ethnic image across the space of the contact zone? A staple of souvenir shops in German-American tourist towns and the focus of an entire museum in Texas, diminutive porcelain Hummel figurines have been selling an image of Germany to a world audience since their appearance in 1935. Various entities - corporate, civic, national - have sought to control or exploit the ethnic image that Hummels carry, molding them into what one might call ‘ideological souvenirs’. But what ideologies do they sell, what messages of ethnicity do they convey? Strategic efforts to deploy Hummels as ideological souvenirs run up against shifting historical conditions and conflicting interpretations of the figurines’ symbolic meanings. The moving target of historical reception thus exposes the dialectic of image-control and the resilient self-invention of the artifact.
I ♡ Islam
Authors: D’Alisera Joann
Published: April 2009

This essay explores how and why Muslim Sierra Leoneans living and working in the Washington DC metropolitan area inscribe religious identity onto their work sites by means of a variety of Islamic commodities. These items, ranging from bumper stickers and decals to informational pamphlets and kosher hot dogs, are physical manifestations of experience, a means of situating individual and community in transnational space. Looking at how individuals use religious objects to make and maintain their worlds points to the act of display as a physical manifestation of experience. How such objects are utilized on, in, and around taxi cabs and food vending stands - my male and female informants’ primary work sites - reveals the artistic creation of new sensitivities towards self and religion, highlighting the complexity of multiple gazes and responses in multi-cultural Muslim and broader non-Muslim spaces.
The Case of the Misplaced Ponchos
Authors: Thomas Nicholas
Published: April 2009

Research in material culture studies has demonstrated that novel things can be assimilated to existing categories. This approach has implied that indigenous cultures in particular typically employ conservative strategies, in the sense that their recontextualizations of material culture aim to preserve a prior order, rather than produce a new one. This paper emphasizes instead the use of objects to create novel and distinctive values and social orders. It proceeds through discussion of the Polynesian garments known as tiputa or ponchos, which were originally made primarily in Tahiti, but came to be widely distributed in western as well as eastern Polynesia, where their adoption was associated with conversion to Christianity.
Money and the Semiotics of Ecosystem Dissolution
Authors: Hornborg Alf
Published: April 2009

This paper argues for a semiotic approach to the problematic interface of economics and ecology. It begins by tracing the origins of materialist science and discussing strategies for transcending Cartesian dualism in the study of human ecology. It then discusses pre-modernity, modernity and post-modernity as transformations of semiotic relations with implications for identity and culture as well as human-environmental relations. The phenomenon of money is identified as a vehicle and epitome of the processes of semiotic abstraction we know as modernity. Various analogies between money and language are scrutinized and rejected. The tendencies of money to dissolve cultural and natural systems are understood as two aspects of a single, ecosemiotic process. Finally, a very general suggestion is offered as to how the idea and institution of money could be transformed so as to check the continued devastation of the biosphere.
Panos for the Brancus
Authors: Pink Sarah
Published: April 2009

This article represents an attempt to develop a reflexive approach to the question of how material and visual elements of culture are involved in the practices through which anthropological meanings are constructed. Implicit to this approach is a critical perspective on some existing approaches to the visual, material and conversational within visual anthropology and an attempt to relate the anthropological practice of photographing technological process and artifacts to more recently articulated epistemological and representational issues in anthropology. I focus on different visual, material, textual and conversational narratives produced during field work with a Manjaco weaver in Guinea Bissau in 1997 to explore how these may be usefully situated in the processes of anthropological research and representation. In doing so I discuss how photographic images and technologies, traditional weaving technologies, woven cloth, field dairies and conversations become the sites at which diverse and sometimes competing realities are constructed, represented, negotiated and interlinked.
In Pots we Trust
Authors: Gosselain Olivier P.
Published: April 2009

Previous studies have illustrated the symbolic prominence of pottery making in sub-Saharan Africa. In many parts of the continent, the craft is explicitly connected to a series of other production activities and parts of the technical process often serve as a metaphor for explaining aspects of the human experience and to structure certain rituals. Barley goes as far as to speak of a ‘potting model’, one of many ways available to a culture to think about itself. It remains to be known, however, why African people specifically chose pottery making as a way to act upon/explain the world and why the activity is connected to specific realms of the human experience throughout the continent. Also, one may wonder whether potters’ behaviour could in turn be influenced by metaphors, with steps of the chaîne opératoire becoming the locus of a symbolic discourse. In an effort to answer these questions, I attempted a systematic comparison of prohibitions and rituals connected to pottery in 102 sub-Saharan societies.
The misuse value of the TV set
Authors: McCarthy Anna
Published: April 2009

This article uses photography to document what I call ‘television settings’: the video installations that people make in everyday life by putting objects and images on and around the TV screen. Its focus is not on domestic TV, but rather on treatments of the TV set outside the home, in urban spaces of work and leisure that serve, and are operated by, members of immigrant communities in the USA. These treatments of the screen combine raw materials of diverse origin to register the complexities of transnational experience. Studies of transnationalism often describe media images as links to the elsewhere of the lost homeland. But TV settings complicate such singular views of TV’s relationship to place, calling attention instead to uses of the screen as an object in the ‘here and now’. Intertwining transnational perspectives on locality with the protocols and contingencies of small-scale commerce in the USA, the TV settings examined in this article testify to the flexibility of TV as an object through which people mark their positions in transnational and local cultural networks simultaneously.
Of irritation, texts and men
Authors: Hermes Joke
Published: April 2009

This is a case study of reading detective fiction which argues that different types of methodological and theoretical questions about relations with informants have not been raised sufficiently often in feminist audience studies or have been lost from its research agenda. They are: how to approach the culturally well established?, what is the place of texts in (feminist) audience research? and, how does this affect the positions of researcher and researched? In this case study (set up to research constructions of femininity and feminism in crime fiction), masculinity emerged as an issue because of nagging doubts about the interaction between interviewers and interviewees. Doubts and irritation led to reflection on issues of class, and then masculinity and on how to lay two old ghosts: the fear of being paternalistic in overinterpreting what informants say as an expression of their deepest being rather than as the discursive material that is produced in interview situations; and the fear of conflating audience interpretations with what a researcher may read into a text. Ghosts need laying to rest; therefore the issue of masculinity today is used here to introduce texts into the audience research project. The combination of audience and textual analysis is used to show the link between popular fiction and the public sphere, or how popular genres may contribute to cultural citizenship.
Localizing the global
Authors: McMillin Divya C.
Published: April 2009

In this article I examine the cultural role of private and state-controlled television networks in India and their negotiation of identities through profitable hybrid programming. I draw attention to a new emerging power in processes of globalization: indigenous, regional television networks. Ethnography in Bangalore, India, in 1997 and 2000 revealed that regional, private, vernacular language networks indeed played a crucial role in local imaginings and, in the long run, may rise in tremendous political power through their manipulation and reflection of regional identity. The analysis leads to a critique of local media markets and the location of ‘nation’ in global media processes.
Media policy after regulation?
Authors: Abramson Bram Dov
Published: April 2009

An apparent truism holds that the Internet and, more broadly, interoperable digital media represent the end of media policy history. This consensus rests on an erroneous reduction of media policy to broadcasting policy. Even as this reductionism makes the rounds, a new prototype for media policy is taking shape, which here is called the ‘promotional state’. The promotional state emerges at the intersection of infrastructure regulation and the new forms of intervention created to act upon media content in a space of global flows. How do governments cope with media policy when media actively reconfigure national jurisdictions? To what extent do the media and cultural industries cohere when symbolic and material economies collide? How does the promotional state modulate media policy as a way of building the media and cultural industries into its project of reshaping public spaces as particular topographies? These questions describe a particular context in which the promotional state has taken form. The article addresses those questions in describing that context.
Home and away
Authors: Ahmed Sara
Published: April 2009

This article examines the relationship between migration and identity by complicating our notion of what ‘home’ means, both for the narrative of ‘being at home’ and for the narrative of ‘leaving home’. It offers, not a migrant ontology, but a consideration of the historical determination of patterns of estrangement in which the living and yet mediated relation between being, home and world is partially reconfigured from the perspective of those who have left home. This reconfiguration does not take place through the heroic act of an individual (the migrant), but through the forming of communities that create multiple identifications through collective acts of remembering in the absence of a shared knowledge or a familiar terrain. The article interweaves a variety of different texts: short stories by Asian women in Britain, autobiographical reflection, theoretical constructions of migrancy and literature from two very different nomadic or migrant communities, the Global Nomads International and the Asian Women’s Writing Collective. The article provides a critique of recent theories of migrancy - and nomadism - as inherently transgressive, or as an ontological condition (where what we have in common is the loss of a home). The author argues that it is through an uncommon estrangement that the possibility of migrant communities comes to be lived. That is, it is the uncommon estrangement of migration that allows migrant subjects to remake what it is they might yet have in common.
‘Gendering’ as an ethical concept
Authors: Lovibond Sabina
Published: April 2009

This article explores the concept of ‘gendering’, as applied to various traditional fields of enquiry and to ethics in particular. It starts from the idea of a form of criticism that challenges the masculine bias of our inherited models of human nature. But it then argues that if we are to correct this kind of bias and to win back due respect for characteristics hitherto devalued as ‘feminine’, we shall need some criterion of when these characteristics actually deserve respect and when, instead, they should be seen as artefacts of a hostile sexual power structure. Because such a criterion cannot be provided without some degree of engagement in pre-existing patterns of ethical reasoning, the process of ‘gendering’ – however radical – turns out to be one that operates on ethics from a position not wholly external but at least partially internal to it. And this is unsurprising in that feminism depends for its motivation on an egalitarian, and hence irredeemably ethical, impulse.
European national news agencies
Authors: Boyd-Barrett Oliver , Rantanen Terhi
Published: April 2009

This article calls for more concerted scholarly attention to the role of national news agencies. The authors argue that the very viability of the institution of national news agency in many parts of Europe is under severe strain. The sources of pressure, however, are identifiably similar to those which have plagued news agencies since their inception, having to do with issues of ownership, relationship to the state, relations with clients, achieving economic balance, and technology investment. Particular attention here is given to crises of ownership. In western Europe, these are often to do with the tensions between media owners’ interests in protecting their own media from competition and in securing exclusive or privileged access to the services which their news agencies provide, and managers’ interests in diversifying the range of services they provide for the benefit of the greatest possible number of clients. Owners themselves are becoming incorporated within global media enterprises, undermining the very notion of a ‘national’ agency. In central and eastern Europe, crises often have to do with the changing role of the state in its relationship to new agencies, and in particular the tendency on the part of the state to maintain some kind of political involvement even as its financial support for the news agency declines.
‘A news of feeling as well as fact’
Authors: Kitch Carolyn
Published: April 2009

When famous people die, the public mourns them primarily in the same forum where they came to ‘know’ them in life – the news media, which become national healers. This study examines how American newsmagazine journalists have covered the deaths of 12 major celebrities. It reveals that this practice did not begin as ‘the Diana phenomenon’, but rather has been taking shape for four decades. The death of Diana, and more recently that of JFK Jr, were the same journalistic story as the passings of other figures as diverse as Judy Garland, John Lennon, John Wayne, and Elvis Presley. Their lives and deaths were made meaningful through a ritual narrative with consistent themes: the celebrity was ‘one of us’ while also representing our greatest hopes; and though the death was tragic, it reminded us of societal values that somehow had been forgotten. Commemorative journalism reaffirms rather than informs, and its subject is collective identity – social, generational, and national.
Gender, organizational and professional identities in journalism
Authors: de Bruin Marjan
Published: April 2009

The emphasis of this review essay is on gender in journalism, placed in the context of work done by media professionals in news organizations. In the recent debates on this topic, certain aspects of news production practice are assigned crucial roles: gender, journalistic professionalism, and the media organization. This essay reviews the literature on each of these aspects and identifies where and how concepts of gender identity, professional identity and organizational identity occur. At the conceptual level, inconsistencies in concepts are pointed out and a preliminary positioning of gender, professional and organizational identity in media organizations is suggested. This review also argues that in certain countries, a shifting balance can be observed: a growing hegemony of organizational identity over professional identity in which gender seems to be a casualty of conflicts outside gender relations per se.
Radio journalism training and the future of radio news in the UK
Authors: Purdey Heather
Published: April 2009

For nearly 20 years, the majority of radio journalists in the UK have been trained on courses which both the BBC and the commercial sector have endorsed. Radio news was seen as having certain constant and essential elements – whether it was broadcast on a three-minute bulletin on a tiny independent local radio station in Scotland or on a BBC network flagship news programme. But competition now means that journalists in both sectors are operating in an increasingly market-focused culture, having to adapt to new definitions of what interests the public and what the public needs to know, and it appears that the consensus on news values may be breaking down. Using original data collected from radio news editors and radio journalism trainers in the UK, this article looks at what type of journalist will be needed in the future. It analyses the skills and knowledge required for the job and what personal qualities are deemed essential. It argues that journalism training courses are caught in the middle of a divided and fast-changing industry where long-held ideas about public service and the function of news are being challenged both internally and from new media and that their own move towards increased professionalization is adding to the confusion.
Public journalism as a journalism of publics
Authors: Haas Tanni , Steiner Linda
Published: April 2009

This article addresses the alleged gap between academic scholarship on the public sphere and journalistic work in the public sphere by demonstrating how Fraser's (1990) four-part critique of Habermas’ (1989) theory of the public sphere bears on the theory and practice of public journalism. Fraser's work not only directs attention to theoretical issues regarding ‘publicness’ that have received too little attention, but also implies pragmatic guidelines for public journalism efforts – a means of evaluating the democratic viability of public journalism theory, and a normative basis for promoting public journalism practice. Some practical implications of each of Fraser's lines of criticism are illustrated in a discussion of the Akron[Ohio] Beacon Journal's Pulitzer Prize winning race-relations initiative, ‘A Question of Color’. We show how Fraser's criticisms not only direct attention to problematic aspects of the campaign, but also indicate what the Beacon Journal could have done differently and better.
Chiapas and the new news
Authors: Russell Adrienne
Published: April 2009

On 1 January 1994 the Zapatista Army of National Liberation took control of the main municipalities in Chiapas, Mexico. During this initial uprising, the commercial media overwhelmingly refused to reproduce Zapatista communiqués. In an attempt to remedy the situation, Zapatista supporters began to send them out over computer networks and in so doing catapulted news of the movement onto headlines around the world. While many are celebrating the new communication capabilities facilitated by the internet, others warn that the internet dangerously lowers traditional news standards. Taking the norms of journalism as its starting point, this article analyzes online Zapatista-related discourse in order to reveal characteristics unique to computer-mediated communication. Specifically of interest here are the mechanisms by which traditional journalism and computer-mediated communication each produce a particular truth about the Zapatista movement and how each truth, in turn, instigates its own methods of ascribing meaning to the movement.
Diffusion of online information technologies in newspaper newsrooms
Authors: Garrison Bruce
Published: April 2009

This study examined the spread of online information technologies within US daily newspaper newsrooms over a six-year period beginning in 1994. Since the general public and news media began to embrace the internet and world wide web in early 1994, a process of adoption of this interactive innovation by newspapers occurred. The longitudinal survey data revealed that use of interactive information-gathering technologies in newsrooms has reached a critical mass for (1) general computer use, (2) online research in newsrooms, (3) non-specialist content searching, and (4) daily frequency of online use. Data revealed the web and internet to be the most-used new resources for finding online information, replacing and supplementing established commercial services. Data also suggest a redefinition of roles in the newsroom resulting from adoption of the web and other online technologies, breaking from traditional news-researcher, reporter, and editor roles. Today's newsrooms often merge the researcher and reporter/editor roles, freeing researchers for other tasks. New media technologies such as online news research have achieved greater utility as more journalists have adopted them. Use levels will become increasingly sophisticated as additional users – journalists themselves and their sources – adopt.
British journalists in the spotlight
Authors: Gavin Neil T.
Published: April 2009

The article reviews current research on the way that the EU engages with journalists. It also looks at the sort of coverage that Europe receives in the press and on television, and at the likely impact of such reports. The article suggests that a number of factors explain the rather negative coverage that Europe receives. These include tension between the EU and journalists on the Brussels news beat, a lack of commitment to effective news management on the part of European institutions, and the intrinsic news worthiness of some of the more prominent stories that have emerged in recent times. The impact on the public of this coverage is under-researched, but what little evidence there is tends to suggest that television news stories may be more significant than press coverage. The article closes with an exploration of a prospective research agenda on ‘the media and Europe’.
Online journalists in the Netherlands
Authors: Deuze Mark , Dimoudi Christina
Published: April 2009

This article reports the findings of a nationwide web-based survey of so-called digital or, rather, online journalists. The survey results indicate basic, occupational and professional characteristics of online journalists working for broadcast and print media as well as online-only media. It focuses, in particular, on the question of whether it is too early to be able to determine the specifics of the new professional model of online journalism, following the proposition that the developments on the internet in terms of journalism – and more specifically, news on the world-wide web – have led to the formation of internet journalism as a separate model within the profession of journalism as a whole. One of the main conclusions from this study is that a distinct media logic for online journalists is emerging, the main characteristic of which seems to be empowering audiences as active participants in the daily news.
New Hope or False Dawn?
Authors: Pearson Ruth , Seyfang Gill
Published: April 2009

This article maps the complex and fast-changing terrain of voluntary corporate codes of conduct, self-regulatory measures increasingly adopted by firms as a response to concerns about working conditions in global production chains. It considers their origins, their potentials and weaknesses, and finally their implications for the restructuring of social policy in a globalizing world. Despite there being considerably more rhetoric about codes than good practice, the processes through which codes have been developed has brought positive impacts in terms of highlighting the needs and voices of hitherto excluded groups of workers (women export workers, homeworkers, casual workers) in social policy and labour regulation debates.
Globalization and Regional Welfare Regimes
Authors: Gough Ian
Published: April 2009

This article contributes to the ongoing debate about the impact of globalization on welfare systems across the world. Its argument is that economic globalization alters the global balance of forces compared with the ‘Golden Age’ of welfare capitalism, but that its impact on policies and outcomes is decisively mediated by national and regional ‘welfare regimes'. This argument has been developed in relation to the advanced capitalist countries of the north, but is rarely applied to the south. This article applies the argument to the south through a case study of five economically successful countries in East Asia: Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia. It depicts and analyses their welfare regimes using a new conceptual framework developed at the University of Bath. It then considers the impact of the Asian financial crisis as an example of the new risks faced by exposed countries in the global economy. The conclusion is that, despite common, sudden and decisive macroeconomic problems, the social policy reactions have differed across the five countries, in part reflecting variations in their welfare regimes.
Globalization, Social Welfare Reform and Democratic Identity in Russia and other Post-communist Countries
Authors: Chandler Andrea
Published: April 2009

This article provides a brief comparison of the politics of old-age pension reform in two post-communist countries, Latvia and the Russian Federation. As Soviet successor states, both countries inherited similar pension systems from the former Communist system, a system which although comprehensive, proved to be costly and inefficient in the 1990s. In addition, pension reform proved to be politically unpopular in both countries. Yet Latvia has succeeded in adopting a relatively rapid and thorough pension reform, while in Russia efforts at pension reform were more contentious. The article examines the political factors that influenced the dynamics of reform in the two countries. In particular, Latvia's greater international orientation was important in influencing its government's commitment to pursue pension reform; Latvia's elites saw long-term benefits for sovereignty and national identity from pursuing reforms inspired by international influences, whereas Russian leaders tended to perceive few advantages from western-oriented reforms.
Think Tanks, Global Lesson-Drawing and Networking Social Policy Ideas
Authors: Stone Diane
Published: April 2009

Think tanks have been active in social policy research for over a century. In the last few decades, however, there has been a massive worldwide proliferation of these organizations. At the same time, many of these bodies have come to research dimensions of global social policy and have become increasingly globalized in their own activity. Increased numbers do not determine influence over policy, but the international networking and transnational collaborative arrangements of these institutes in research, policy advice and implementation have contributed to the creation of coalitions; that is, global policy networks that enhance the potential impact of these organizations. One facet of think tank impact on the global order is the propensity for lesson-drawing that aids cross-national policy transfers of ideas, practices and policy programmes. The international spread of ideas can contribute to an ‘atmospheric’ form of influence on the climate of policy thinking whereas policy transfer usually involves more concrete forms of agenda-setting and political decision-making.
How Everyday Life Became Virtual
Authors: Green Nicola
Published: April 2009

This article takes as its starting point the mundane work of constructing ‘virtual identities’ and ‘virtual’ cultural practices in the course of ‘everyday’ participation in virtual reality technologies. The article explores how participation takes place, detailing in particular the work practices of staff and the interactions of staff with participants, which make ‘virtual reality’ possible. The article seeks to demonstrate the crucial role of staff as mediators translating technology into culture, and techno-culture into economics, in the distribution and institutionalization of virtual reality in everyday life. As such, the article argues that staff embody the juncture of technology production and consumption and perform key roles that embed new technologies of culture in ongoing social interaction.
On Mass Distribution
Authors: Nelson Joel I.
Published: April 2009

This article considers the problem of chain store development in a particular area of retail trade – the restaurant industry. Restaurants have been singled out as the quintessential example of chain store organization. In this article, it is suggested that, in spite of the increasingly huge size of the market, substantial segments of the industry are composed of single, independent establishments. After drawing on the distinction between full-service and fast-food restaurants, the author shows that mass distribution develops in a bipolar fashion across proximate fields – high in the fast-food sector and minimal in the full-service sector. Differential chain store growth is traced to variation in profit environments. Data from the economic census on chain store development from 1963 to 1992 are used to support the conclusion that different profit environments generate different market structures and different strategies for survival.
The New Agents
Authors: Redden Guy
Published: April 2009

The New Age is a broad milieu which allows participants to undertake a range of activities in pursuit of self-improvement. Often characterized as a form of religious consumerism in the popular media, it does not easily fit into received church-sect models of the sociology of religion. This article argues that the movement’s market-type organizational logic, in which individuals typically choose from a range of belief options rather than commit to a central doctrine, is consonant with the privatist concerns of personal authority and self-care found in its discourse. However, at the same time, the New Age does not reduce to some simple acquisitive consumerism. It is better understood as offering solutions to the problem of personal agency in a post-traditional society which obliges individuals to assume the burden of plotting their own destinies.
The Seduction of Sound in Consumer Culture
Authors: Bull Michael
Published: April 2009

Whilst much has been written about the nature of visual desire in Western consumer culture, the significance and nature of ‘sound’ desire has been largely neglected. This article sketches out what an epistemology of sound desire might ‘look’ like and reinterprets three iconic moments in the history of Western sound experience beginning with the Odysseus myth before moving on to early accounts of gramophone and radio use. The article then discusses the nature of Walkman desire and how the inherent mobility of Walkmans makes them an icon to individual choice, permitting users to create their own soundworld through the spaces, places and timings of consumer culture. Through an empirically grounded analysis of Walkman practices, the author delineates the nature of aural desire by analysing sound aesthetics, sound tourism and the intimacy of sound.
The Distaste of Taste
Authors: Turner Bryan S. , Edmunds June
Published: April 2009

This article explores cultural taste through a modification of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, taste and ‘distinction’. Mainly through an in-depth, qualitative study of members of Australia’s postwar elite, it is suggested that the particular group under consideration in this article displayed not highbrow but distinctly middle to lowbrow cultural taste. Members of the Australian elite who took part in this study showed little interest in highbrow cultural activities such as opera, classical ballet and classical literature. We argue that this apparent ‘distaste for taste’ within the Australian elite has to do with the specificity of Australian culture, together with particular generational influences that predisposed members of this generation to challenge the validity of highbrow cultural activities. Thus, the federal structure of Australia’s cultural field and an anti-authoritarian current peculiar to Australia, combined with generational factors, explain the consumption patterns of this strand of elite. By introducing generational analysis into Bourdieu’s theory of taste, a more dynamic explanation that can capture shifts in the cultural taste of the elite is offered.
The Aesthetic Economy
Authors: Entwistle Joanne
Published: April 2009

This article delineates the operations of one particular ‘aesthetic economy’, focusing on the way in which aesthetics in the field of fashion modelling are central to the economic calculations of this market. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu and Blumer, the author argues that economic calculations are intertwined with cultural concerns, bound to forms of cultural knowledge, capital and acquired taste, and to social, cultural and institutional relations. A culturally valued look (the model’s body) is produced through processes of cultural valorization within the fashion modelling network, which, in time, aim to translate into economic value in the form of high fees. Fashion modelling provides an interesting case study which might shed light on how aesthetic values are generated in other fields of cultural production with a strong aesthetic component. In setting out this case study the author delineates an approach to the study of other aesthetic economies.
Consuming Risk, Consuming Science
Authors: Tulloch John , Lupton Deborah
Published: April 2009

This article presents some findings from a study investigating notions of risk among Britons, with a focus on interviewees working as professionals in high technology (high-tech) or science industries. The discussion examines our interviewees’ responses to risks related to the consumption of genetically modified (GM) food. Our study sought to elicit personal experiences as part of an individual biography of risk which included specific concerns about food consumption as part of an ‘everyday’ set of risk perceptions. We found that many interviewees enjoyed adopting a ‘scientific knowledge’ identity in the interview, emphasizing seeking ‘fact’ about the risk associated with GM foods from a wide range of media ‘opinion’, and were confident about their own ability to control most risks. However, they also constructed a ‘two nations’ view of a knowledge-based economy, involving a disparity between ‘haves’ (themselves) and others, generally because of the faster, more demanding, no ‘job for life’ nature of the ‘flexible economy’. Consumption - including consumption of science - far from being a democratic equivalence of citizenship, was thus seen as the historical cause of ontological insecurity.
A Black feminist-inspired archaeology?
Authors: Franklin Maria
Published: April 2009

Archaeology has undergone a transition over the past two decades with the emergence of feminist discourses, and the mapping of women onto archaeological pasts. Yet Black feminist theorizing remains largely external to archaeological theory and practice, even though African-descended peoples constitute a considerable portion of the groups currently researched in the US and the Caribbean. It is a wonder that this is so, given the impressive body of literature that Black feminists have produced over the years regarding a range of topics relating to African-American experiences. I believe that Black feminist scholarship provides potential models for framing questions of difference and inequality, and for critiquing the sociopolitics of archaeology, particularly where raced and gendered representations of the past are concerned.
Agency, practical politics and the archaeology of culture contact
Authors: Silliman Stephen
Published: April 2009

I use this paper to intersect the trajectory of the agency concept in archaeology. On a theoretical front, I summarize briefly the state of ‘agency’ in archaeology and its deployment in theories of practice. This opens a space to introduce the concepts of practical politics and doxa, and I illustrate their effectiveness in addressing issues of social relations, power, identity and daily practice. I then pinpoint their particular applicability to colonial and culture-contact studies. On an empirical front, I turn the lenses of doxa and practical politics to a case study in nineteenth-century northern California. My focus is on Native American involvement in the Rancho Petaluma and the continuity of lithic practices in this secular colonial setting. I conclude that although lithic practices display a material continuity in technology, they are in fact part of a social change surrounding the politics of practice.
Visions of discipline
Authors: Chadha Ashish
Published: April 2009

Focusing on the epistemological homology between the construction of archaeological knowledge, archaeological evidence and the nature of archaeological representation, I examine the visual archive produced by Sir Mortimer Wheeler in India between 1944-48, to analyze the ideological ramification of the archaeological project. The discursive nature of Wheeler’s representations was deeply embedded in the disciplinarian ideologies of the colonial project, the scientific project and the military project. This article analyzes Wheeler’s methodical attempt at conflating the three projects by disciplining archaeology as a scientific practice in a colonial space. I argue that this was articulated by appropriating the ideas of ‘epistemic marker’ and ‘ethnic marker’ as visual tropes to transform the visual representations produced in a colonial context into a scientific discourse, aimed at transforming the discipline.
Monolingual International Schools and the Young Non-English-Speaking Child
Authors: Murphy Edna
Published: April 2009

While a majority of children from diverse language backgrounds benefit from the education on offer in most English-medium international schools, some non-English-speaking children enrolled at a young age can encounter difficulties. In this article background on the growth and development of very young and early primary-age children are reviewed, and consideration is given to the kinds of behaviour which give cause for concern in this context. Suggestions are made for ways in which some potentially disabling experiences might be mitigated or avoided, and areas for research identified.
A Dynamics-based Method for Crack Detection and Estimation
Authors: Pai P. Frank , Young Leyland G. , Lee Seung-Yoon
Published: April 2009

Presented is a dynamics-based boundary effect evaluation (BEE) method for pinpointing crack locations and estimating crack sizes using only operational deflection shapes (ODSs) measured by a scanning laser vibrometer. An ODS consists of central and boundary solutions. Central solutions are periodic functions, and boundary solutions are exponentially decaying functions due to boundary constraints. The BEE method uses a sliding-window curve-fitting technique to extract boundary solutions from an experimental ODS. Because cracks introduce localized small boundaries to a structure, boundary solutions exist around cracks as well as structural boundaries. Since crack-induced boundary solutions show characteristics different from those of actual boundaries, cracks can be easily located. A local strain energy method is derived for estimating crack sizes. In the method, the crack-induced strain energy extracted from an ODS is compared with the one calculated using stress intensity factors to determine the crack size. To verify the capability and accuracy of this BEE method, experiments are performed on six 22″ × 1″ × 0:25″ 2024-T4 aluminum beams each having a through-the-width Mode I crack at its midpoint. These cracks are slots having a width of 0:039″ and depths of 0:0625″ (25% of the beam thickness), 0:05″ (20%), 0:0375″ (15%), 0:025″ (10%), 0:0125″(5%), and 0:005″(2%), respectively. Results show that this BEE method is capable of locating and estimating small cracks.