First Contact: Queer Theory, Sexual Identity, and “Mainstream” Film

This paper begins by raising questions about the role of queer theory in media critique, centering on a discussion of four recent mainstream mass-circulation films with significant lesbian and/or gay content. It is asserted that these films operate within accepted discourses on sexuality that require both the notions of public self-disclosure and of the truth of the hetero/homo binary. The methods used by media productions to disseminate that discourse from a lesbian/gay point of view are discussed in terms of the implications of such mass-circulation films being for many persons a first contact point with that discourse.     

Viewing Telephone Therapy Through the Lens of Attachment Theory and Infant Research

This article discusses the use of the telephone for psychotherapy and applies basic tenets of attachment theory and research on infant development to understand the therapy process. Clinical case examples of four models of attachment (secure, insecure ambivalent, insecure avoidant, disorganized) illustrate diverse patient capacities to use the telephone during a planned 10-week break from ongoing, in-person treatment. It is suggested that telephone therapy may be variously effective based on the attachment system that becomes activated due to the separation, and patients with insecure avoidant or disorganized attachment patterns may have more difficulty managing the alternative treatment modality.     

“Queer's” Near Absence in Academic and Student Service Websites

This essay studies several Websites that deal with mainly U.S. universities' LGBT/Queer student services and/or LGBT/Queer academic programs, and it considers the terminology such programs apply to name themselves. Notably, the term queer is almost absent on many of these sites, especially sites that are non-academic and provide student services. Drawing on Annamarie Jagose's Queer Theory, the author suggests that the term queer may be too threatening, too ambiguous, and too masculine to be useful in naming these programs and services. While numerous specific university sites have been explored, the essay focuses on the listings of services and programs found on two sites: University of Illinois-Chicago's site College/University Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Centers/Programs at http://www.uic.edu/org/lgbt and John Younger's Website University LGBT Programs: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies in the USA and Canada at http://www.duke.edu/web/jyounger/lbgtprogrs.html.     

Beyond the nature/society divide: Learning to think about a mountain

Sociological efforts to understand environment-society relationships fall primarily into four conceptual categories. The first three, involving analytical separation, analytical primacy, and balanced dualism, all draw distinctions between biophysical and social aspects of human experience, with subsequent analyses being based on thesea priori distinctions. The fourth or constructivist approach questions this naturalized dichotomy, calling attention instead to mutual contingency or conjoint constitution: What we take to be physical facts are likely to be strongly shaped by social construction processes, and at the same time, what we take to be strictly social will often have been shaped in part by taken-for-granted realities of the physical world. Technology offers important opportunities for tracing these interconnections, being an embodiment of both the physical and the social. The point is illustrated with a long-term historical analysis of a specific physiographic feature—a mountain—that has undergone little overtphysical change over the centuries, but has undergone repeated changes in its social meanings and uses. Few of the changes would have been possible in the absence of the mountain's physiographic characteristics; similarly, few would have occurred in the absence of changing sociocultural definitions and possibilities. The challenge for sociology is not just to recognize the importance of both the physical and the social factors, and certainly not to argue over the relative importance of the two, but to recognize the extent to which what we take to be physical and social factors can be conjointly constituted.The paper's subtitle is intended as a tribute to Aldo Leopold and to one of his most famous essays (1949).     

Picking Up the Pieces After the Sudden Death of a Therapist: Issues for the Client and the “Inheriting Therapist”

The death of one's therapist can be considered a traumatic event for the patient. The closeness of the relationship between therapist and patient, especially if the relationship is long-term, makes the loss analogous to losing an intimate attachment. This article will explore the complexity of issues involved for the patient who loses a therapist due to sudden death and examines the issues for the inheriting therapist as well. Case examples will be used to highlight some of the more stressful areas of practice in this difficult transition.     

Snarls,Quacks, and Quarrels: Culture and Structure in Political Process Theory

Political process theories of social movements have relied on a set of oppositions between culture and structure that has limited their capacity to capture the supraindividual, durable, and constraining dimensions of culture. The solution is not to abandon an emphasis on objective political structures in favor of potential insurgents' subjective perceptions of political opportunities, but rather to probe the (objective) resources and constraints generated by the cultural dimensions of political structures. Such a perspective would pay closer attention to the cultural traditions, ideological principles, institutional memories, and political taboos that create and limit political opportunities; and would link the master frames that animate protest to dominant political structures and processes.     

“Lost Childhood”—Lessons from the Holocaust: Implications for Adult Adjustment

This paper was written in memoriam to the one and a half million children murdered during the Holocaust; in celebration of the tiny percentage who survived; in honor of their rescuers, the Righteous Christians and in meeting our own responsibility as survivors to bear witness.     

Caught in a Winding,Snarling Vine: The Structural Bias of Political Process Theory

The study of social movements has recently been energized by an explosion of work that emphasizes political opportunities—a concept meant to come to grips with the complex environments that movements face. In the excitement over this new metaphor, there has been a tendency to stretch it to cover a wide variety of empirical phenomena and causal mechanisms. A strong structural bias is also apparent in the way that political opportunities are understood and in the selection of cases for study. Even those factors adduced to correct some of the problems of the political opportunity approach—such as mobilizing structures and cultural framing—are subject to the same structural distortions. We recommend social movement analysis that rejects invariant modeling, is wary of conceptual stretching, and recognizes the diverse ways that culture and agency, including emotions and strategizing, shape collective action.     

Predatory,developmental, and other apparatuses: A comparative political economy perspective on the Third World state

Disappointment over the contributions of Third World state apparatuses to industrial transformation and the increasing intellectual dominance of neoutiliarian paradigms in the social science has made if fashionable to castigate the Third World state as predatory and rent seeking. This paper argues for a more differentiated view, one that connects differences in performance to differences in state structure. The incoherent absolutist domination of the klepto-patrimonial Zairian state are contrasted to the embedded autonomy of the East Asian developmental state. Then the internal structure and external ties of an intermediate state — Brazil — are analyzed in relation to both polar types. The comparative evidence suggests that the efficacy of the developmental state depends on a meritocratic bureaucracy with a strong sense of corporate identity and a dense set of institutionalized links to private elites.     

Theory at risk: Accounting for the excellence movement

Amidst widespread concern about educational crisis and the need for reform, the current excellence movement places a pronounced emphasis on rigor, standards, and a core curriculum of basic studies. At issue here is whether major macro-the-oretical perspectives can account for the emergence of this movement. Functional and Marxian theories do not meet this challenge well, especially insofar as they posit a tight, rational linkage between school and economy and downplay the institutional autonomy of the educational system. A status conflict approach, emphasizing middle class mobilization, offers greater insight, though it must be complemented with a recognition of constraints imposed by capitalist organization and the institutionalization of educational myths.     

Lying about running: The functions of talk in a scene

The running scene rests upon a system of beliefs (a code) about the qualities of running performances. Membership in the scene entails the interrelated use of conversational forms and the presentation of a team identity. The forms consist of nomic talk, ritualized lying and code truth telling. Within each form, the runner may lie about or manage information regarding running performances in order to construct, maintain or attack the system of beliefs. The lie, then, plays a major role in the scene as a device of social interaction.     

Anniversary reactions: Trauma revisited

This article is intended to acquaint the reader with a phenomena known in the psychoanalytic literature as anniversary reactions. Conceptualized as ensuing from incomplete forms of mourning, these reactions may be evident in various forms including somatic symptoms and diseases, depression, psychosis, suicide, and homicide on the anniversary date of a significant past traumatic event. This article identifies various manifestations of anniversary reactions and familiarizes the reader with some of the elements thought to constitute them: trauma, incomplete mourning, identification and an unconscious sense of time. A clinical vignette is presented and discussed.     

A Cultural Perspective on the Study of Chinese Adolescent Development

This paper argues that the dominant Western construction of adolescent development which defines adolescence as an individuation process with the primary theme of developing an autonomous self is alien to the Chinese cultural system. In contrast to the Western conception of an autonomous self based on separation from others and self-other differentiation, the Chinese conception of self is more complicated. Based on the Chinese-West differences, the paper argues that the borrowed Western concept of self and the Western models do not appear to fit Chinese adolescents' experience. A concept of self-in-relational-network is therefore proposed for understanding the unique developmental processes and outcomes of Chinese adolescents.     

The state and the economy in late imperial China

Conclusions Non-development of a modern economy, the failure to begin modern economic growth, I am prepared to argue but that would require another article- is over-determined. It's not a particularly interesting theoretical question any more. Proponents of economic, political, cultural, social structural, demographic and other explanations have each adduced overwhelming arguments and evidence for their favored explanations. In fact, any one - or two - is a sufficiently mortal debility for the premodern economies and societies that they have studied. More is merely overkill. What we really don't know for sure yet is how modern economic growth begins - even in the case of Western Europe whose economic history has been minutely examined for more than a century. The common fate of most of mankind before the very recent past - slow and uncertain premodern growth of population and output where it occurred, stagnation or decline otherwise - has not (by historians at least) received attention comparable to the more fashionable problem of modern development, whether that be phrased as the Marxist transition from feudalism to capitalism, the neo-classical growth model, or the perhaps now somewhat faded study of modernization.Late imperial China - from the tenth century to the nineteenth - experienced in world perspective a remarkable millennium of premodern economic growth (see table 1). Population and total grain output each increased by a factor of five or six over these centuries, in contrast to the first millennium of the imperial era - from the Qin (221–206 B.C.) through the Tang (618–906) during which, with often sharp fluctuations, a sort of plateau seems have been reached early and never overcome. (Europe's population growth was comparable - the estimates of course, like those for China, are sometimes more testimony to our faith than to our science. There were perhaps 39 million inhabitants in about 1000, 74 million before the demographically disastrous fourteenth century, a recovery to 50 million by 1450,105 million in about 1600, 115 million about 1700, and a total of possibly 190 million inhabitants in 1800.) While overall impressive, the growth of people and production in late imperial China was uneven in both rate and locale, and punctuated by severe fluctuations due to both natural and manmade disasters.Neither the direct nor the indirect influences of the state on the economy were major factors determining the nature and rate of this premodern economic growth. That was largely decided by the dynamics of the dominant private sector of the economy. So far as they affected premodern growth the policies and actions of China's imperial government do not seem to have differed greatly in range or quality from those of the emerging national states of early modern Europe before, let us say, the seventeenth century. Certainly the acceleration of traditional growth in seventeenth- and especially eighteenth-century China argues against the view that the late imperial feudal autocracy was a major obstacle to economic performance in the Ming and Qing periods. On balance, the actions of the state probably helped rather than hindered the long-term growth of population and total output. The state's control of or influence over only a very low percentage of gross national product at the very least limited negative interference with the private sector where the most remarkable Ming-Qing achievements originated.Toward modern economic growth, on the other hand, the Chinese state contributed little if anything, in contrast to the history of early modern Europe. I have already suggested that this conclusion should not be surprising. It, rather than the still only partially understood European experience, represents the mode in world history. The fact that state policies and performance might have lubricated late imperial economic expansion does not imply any necessary forward linkages to the much different and much more difficult task of expanding not just total output but output per capita. The experience of the past is surely not irrelevant, but it may not all be positive for the goal of achieving economic growth in the modern epoch. Thus the Chinese experience of managing and participating in complex bureaucratic organizations may have left a positive legacy for the twentieth century. And similarly, the much higher degree of male literacy in Qing China than we have hitherto assumed, demonstrated in the admirable work of Evelyn S. Rawski, would presumably be conducive to the later achievement of modern economic growth. But the distancing - whether by cultural choice or due to political weakness - of the state from the private economy, while it may have facilitated premodern growth, could be a negative rather than a positive asset for a backward country seeking economic growth in the twentieth century, as Professor Gerschenkron has shown us. Does the contrast between late imperial China and early modern Europe derive, after all, mainly from the greater relative success of the Chinese experience under conditions of premodern economic growth? I refer of course to the achievement of a unified and integrated polity with an adequate customary standard of living for most of the population (in normal times), which was spared (or deprived of?) disquieting church-state conflicts and international wars (for the most part), where one found no Sunday Confucians and no domestic modernist challenge to a deeply rooted and genuine conservatism before the twentieth century. There was little reason for the Qing emperors and the bureaucratic elite who served them, while they still had the power to do so before the shameful nineteenth century, to follow the path of the Houses of Stuart, Bourbon, and Hapsburg and their bureaucratic administrators who built the modern European nation-states and purveyed some of the critical abstractions and institutions of law and property that unwittingly perhaps facilitated Europe's modern economic growth. The Chinese rulers already possessed all under heaven (tianxia), and they could hardly foresee how parochial that universal conceit would become.

---

     

Privacy and privilege: Patients', professionals', and the public's rights

Conflict between the individual's right to privacy and the public's right to know is increasing as insurance companies and other third parties are demanding more information about patients and clients and data banks are storing it for retrieval and later use. Social workers are ethically bound to protect the privacy of their relationships with patients and clients and the confidentiality of their communications. But there are situations in which the obligation to society is deemed greater than the individual's right to privacy, and even in states in which their patients' and clients' communications are granted privilege by law, the social worker can be required by law to divulge confidential information or risk being held in contempt of court. This paper will discuss the individual's right to privacy, privilege and its exceptions, and present examples of court decisions related to these issues.     

Physiographic gestures as decoding facilitators: Three experiments exploring a neglected facet of communication

There is a dearth of studies exploring the role of gestures in the communication of experience, i.e., events external to the speaker; whereas much research has been concerned with gestures as expressions of attitudes and emotion. This state of affairs has tended to reinforce the premature assumption that gestures serve functions quite different from those of speech. Three experiments reported here were designed to investigate this neglected role examining specifically, physiographic gestures (pgs). A variety of tasks were devised; information pertaining to each being recorded on videotape and presented under varying modal conditions. It was found that pgs do contribute to the communication of events external to the speaker. Possible mechanisms are discussed.This is a more extensive version of a paper entitled A Clarificatory Paper on the Role of Gestures in Communication, presented at the British Psychological Society London Conference, 1977, Imperial College.     

The Organization of Nonprofit Activities

This paper investigates the repertoire of organizational forms in Western societies in order to assess the nonprofit sector's distinctiveness. A repertoire of six different ideal type constructs is presented adding to and reformulating existing theories, which have primarily focused on the market and the firm. This new extended theoretical platform builds both on theories discussing market, organization, and governmental failures and on approaches where homo economicus is replaced by homo complexicus and transactions by interactions. This effort aims at making the nonprofit (or voluntary) sector in society both more visible and theoretically substantiated. At the end of this paper, the theoretical framework is applied by analyzing empirical nonprofit organizations.     

GLB + T?: Gender/Sexuality Movements and Transgender Collective Identity (De)Constructions

In the United States during the 1990s, there emerged a new form of collective political organizing and action around transgender identity. In this essay, the author depicts the dynamics of transgender activism during the mid-1990s based on original research in the form of a postmodern ethnography of transgender activism. Using data from field research, interviews, and observation, the author illustrates the way that transgender activism was characterized by simultaneous claims to a shared transgender quasi-ethnic identity and the complications thereof. In particular, the author details transgender social movement processes of identity—both processes of collective identity construction and deconstruction—demonstrating that transgender politics are not simply identity politics nor deconstructive (queer) politics. Using constructionist social movement literature, the author argues that in sexuality/gender studies we must expand our understanding of identity politics in order to understand the simultaneity of constructions and deconstructions of identity and gender/sexuality movements today.     

Inclusive Governance and “Minority” Groups: The Role of the Third Sector in Wales

Following the establishment of a national legislature in Wales in 1999 the third sector has entered into a pioneering cross-sectoral partnership with the Welsh government. This paper presents the results of a research project that has studied the new structures of devolved governance through the expectations and participation of voluntary organizations representing three marginalized or minority groupings: women, disabled people, and those from an ethnic minority background. The findings reveal that despite varying levels of expectation expressed by minority voluntary groups, active engagement of minority groups in policy making has been a feature of the Assembly's first months. Nevertheless, formidable challenges face both sectoral partners in the new system of governance, not least in creating organizational structures that facilitate partnership working in the devolved polity.     

Social affinity among top managerial executives of large corporations in Korea

Korea is a society subject to quite diverse social forces. Modernization should encourage reform, but the yoke of tradition restrains this tendency. This paper examines the patterns of preferential treatment of executives, based on family, school, and regional ties, by the owners of large Jaebol corporations in Korea. We found that about 21% of the total number of executive positions in the large corporations were occupied by individuals who had some type of family tie with the owners of the corporations. Also, there is a strong tendency of corporation owners to employ the executives of the same regional origin of birth as their own, but the affinity based on school ties was not as strong as that of regional origin. The findings of this study seem to support the arguments of previous studies that claimed a trust factor as a main cause of social similarity and affinity between the owners and executives in corporations.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, August 17–22, 1987, Chicago, Illinois.