The Dual Strategy and Gender Policies of the Women's Movement in Korea: Family Headship System Repeal through Strategic Innovation

Abstract

Social movements sometimes successfully attain their goals by implementing policies and laws that represent their claims. Movement leaders raise issues susceptible to enactment as policies or laws, exploit legally and institutionally assured resources, and even participate at times in governmental policymaking and parliamentary lawmaking processes. This engagement strategy maximizes a movement's power to achieve its goals only when it is combined with the conventional activities of mobilizing collective action and forming dense networks across movement organizations to pressure the state. Based on the case study of Korean women's movements and their efforts to abrogate the patrilineal succession of family headship, I argue that movement activists' strategic innovation of blending “institutional politics” with conventional “movement politics”—that is, pursuing a dual strategy (Cohen and Arato 1992) and evolving into “movement institutionalization”—is critical to accomplishing gender policies and laws that, at least institutionally and legally, ensure gender equality.     

The Presentation of Self and the New Institutional Inmate: An Analysis of Prisoners' Responses to Assessment for Release*

This paper bases an analysis of the prison experience on Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life rather than on Asylums. It describes the situation of prisoners in an institution where release decisions are individualized and where release recommendations depend on official assessments of the character, background, and moral “change” of each prisoner. The paper then focuses on the work that prisoners do to demonstrate institutionally approved character and “change” to the prison staff or, in the words of prisoners, to “show them who you are.” The concepts and premises of dramaturgy are employed to analyse prisoners' techniques of self-portrayal and to analyse prisoners' resistance to institutional assessment through describing their behaviour as simply “conning” and “manipulating.”     

School Discipline,Race, and the Discursive Construction of the “Deficient” Student

Abstract

Research has demonstrated how, in the current era of mass incarceration, the punitive arm of the state now extends beyond traditional criminal justice structures into institutions typically associated with providing care or a social good. The negative effects of this shift have disproportionately impacted marginalized populations, particularly low-income black and Latino communities. This article examines one way that this extension has manifested in the realm of public education. Based on ethnographic data from a public Grade 6–12 Disciplinary Alternative Education Program (DAEP) in Texas, this article scrutinizes the program’s behavioral rules and disciplinary procedures. The analysis focuses on students’ introductory experience to the DAEP as a “strategic research site” to illuminate the program’s formal objectives, methods to achieve their institutional goals, and their intended effects on students. I find that the practices and procedures in place at the DAEP operate through racializing surveillance to constitute “disciplinary technologies” devoted to the transformation of “culturally deficient” students—a racialized and gendered classification—into docile bodies. Students are disciplined through punitive and rehabilitative methods premised on the discursive construction of “deficient” students and families.     

Developments in gender and U.S. politics: A call for intersectionality

Since “women and politics” scholarship emerged in the 1970s, social, institutional, and theoretical developments have shaped the trajectory of U.S. scholarship in this field. First, the presence of women in formal politics has increased, albeit unevenly across parties and minority groups over time. Simultaneously, the capacity to study “political women” has become supported through institutional mechanisms such as academic journals and communities of practice. Moreover, gender as a critical focus of analysis has been developed and refined. In the literature on women and politics, the shift from studying sex differences to interrogating gendered political institutions is especially salient. This institutional focus, along with recent intersectional studies of gender and politics, increases opportunities for cross‐pollination of sociological and political science perspectives. In this review, I provide a brief history of the U.S. scholarship on gender and politics and map these relevant social, institutional, and theoretical advances. I highlight the value of recent intersectional contributions in this field and make the case for bringing partisanship—an increasingly salient political identity and structure—into intersectional approaches to gender and politics.     

Representations of “the West,”“Japan,” and “the Periphery” in the Discourse of Lafcadio Hearn Studies

The purpose of this article is to analyze representations of “the West,”“Japan,” and “the Periphery” in the discourse of research on Lafcadio Hearn (“Hearn studies”) from pre‐war Japan. The nature and construction of nationality will be analyzed by examining where the representations of “the West,”“Japan,” and “the Periphery” intersected. During the 1900s, researchers in the field of Hearn studies recognized that “Japan” lacked—and thus sought—a universality similar to what existed in “the West.” The tone of the discourse shifted during the 1910s through 1920s however, and what came to be emphasized was “Japan's” peculiarity. By the 1930s through 1940s, “Japan” aimed to show to “the West” a new universality that was different from what existed in Europe and America. Yet simultaneously, in order to legitimize its representation of its self, “Japan” portrayed “the Periphery” as an object that was both excluded and absorbed or appropriated into that image. On the one hand, “Japan” received and internalized the Orientalist viewpoint of “the West.” In fact, “Japan” was always conscious of its self‐image as something to display to “the West.” On the other hand, in order to create that self‐portrayal, both a representation of “the Periphery” and a reflection from that same “Periphery” were essential. While representations of “Japan” were produced, reproduced, and reinforced through interactions with “the West” and “the Periphery,” the intersecting behavior of these three entities also points to a residual ambiguity in “Japan's” nationality. By analyzing the discourse in Hearn studies, this paper reveals how the interaction between “Japan” and the two others of “the West” and “the Periphery” helped construct and destabilize its nationality.     

Collaborative Music‐Making with Digital Audio Workstations: The “nth Member” as a Heuristic Device for Understanding the Role of Technologies in Audio Composition

This article examines amateur music‐making using a digital audio workstation, showing how audio and software are used as resources for creating compositions. The article has two aims. Firstly, to depict how digital music‐making is formed from routine interactional techniques. Secondly, to probe how researchers might account for such multi‐modal activity through a heuristic device: the “nth member.” Whereas sociology has typically been concerned with the cultural facets of how music is made and consumed, we explore the material practices of collaborative song creation utilizing conversation analytic techniques—“turn‐taking” and “next‐selection”—to capture two key interactional moments.     

Portents or Confessions: Authoritative Readings of a Dream Text

As a cultural and historical phenomenon, dreams are universally endowed with significance. Yet, their interpretations have varied widely—in the ascribed “meanings” of dreams and in the ramifications for dreamers. In this article, we examine the social trajectory of a contemporary “dream” that came to light in the context of a police investigation of a murder. We analyze the various institutional codes that refracted this “dream” through their particular vocabularies of motive, agency, and meaning. The case under investigation provides an opportunity to test a working hypothesis about a generalized modern attitude toward dreams; the two aspects of that attitude are that dreams are no longer viewed as revelatory of future events, and that dreams have been privatized. Evidence from this case confounds these expectations and leads us to develop a theory of coexisting institutional paradigms of interpretation of dreams and of the authority structures that compete for interpretive dominance. Our analysis has yielded insights into situational aspects of cultural phenomena.     

The concept of a “merit good” the ethical dimension in economic theory and the history of economic thought or the transformation of economics into socio-economics

The purpose of this paper is to defend the concept of a “merit good” and to expand its application. This is achieved by using a Kantian philosophical argument applied to the writings of foundational economists such as Adam Smith and Henry Simons (and Walter Eucken in the German literature). As a result the concept of a “merit good” is used to classify and argue for a number of governmental tasks such as the institutional arrangements to make a free market economy work, work efficiently and work in a humane way. Methodologically, this paper connects—as the work of Joseph A. Schumpeter already has—economic theory, the history of economic thought and institutional economics and thereby demonstrates that economics is necessarily about socio-economics.     

Between the Procedural and the Substantial: Democratic Deliberation and the Interaction Order in “Occupy Middletown General Assembly”

This article analyzes interaction from an intentional, self‐reflexive democratic meeting of ordinary citizens—a “General Assembly” from the 2011 Occupy Movement—to explore two competing theories of democracy: Habermas's democratic deliberation and Mouffe's agonistic pluralism. The group's rational ideals and procedures for democratic deliberation approximate those of Habermas's “ideal speech situation,” but appear limited in their capacity to ensure Habermasian understanding or consensus. Intertwined with these rational procedures are practices best explained in terms of what Goffman called “face‐work”—the ways in which participants maintain a working consensus of mutual acceptance and respect in conversation. These face‐work procedures—rather than sincere, rational intentions—help constitute the civility necessary for rational deliberation and participation. Such symbolic valuing of self and other provide interactional grounds for the liberty and equality of agonistic democratic conversation as conceived by Mouffe.     

New community in a new space: artificial,natural, created,contested. An idea from a golf estate in Johannesburg

Attention is constantly devoted to the question of living together and sharing spaces, which is often translated as a matter of social and spatial segregation and belonging to a community. New spatial, social and institutional geographies have emerged as a potential cornerstone of separateness and togetherness in South Africa with the emergence of the gated community. This article tackles the concept of “community” within the space of a golf estate (a type of gated community) located in the West Rand, Johannesburg. It aims to understand new geographies of the city through an analysis of the organisation and social life inside and outside the estate. The notion of community is explored by looking at the system engendered by the main legal actor within the estate, the Homeowners Association (HOA). It will be argued that some of these new spaces are made neutral through the action of the HOA, an agent that institutionally constructs a communitarian lifestyle, accepted and contested simultaneously by the residents. Through the formalisation of a system in which holiday-style living is promoted, life is represented as real to the residents but lived in a virtual way when linked to broader societal and urban changes, thus reframing the notion of segregation.     

Industrial welfare and the state: nation and city reconsidered

Industrial welfare history presents important challenges to developmental state theories in “late” industrialization. This article expands the debate by examining how nation-states create statutory welfare by addressing institutional variety beyond markets. It is simplistic to argue linear growth of national welfare or of states autonomously regulating markets to achieve risk-mitigation. I contend that welfare institutions emerge from the state’s essential conflict and collaboration with various alternate institutions in cities and regions. Using histories of Europe, India, and Karnataka, I propose a place-based, work-based, and work-place based welfare typology evolving at differential rates. Although economic imperatives exist to expand local risk-pools, it is precisely the alternate institutional diversity that makes late industrial nation-states unable or unwilling to do so. This results in institutionally “thin,” top-down industrial welfare. Ultimately, theories that overly depend on histories of small nations, homogenous nations, or city-states, provide weak tests of the economics of industrial welfare.     

Rehearsals in Citizenship: BBC Stop‐Motion Animation Programmes For Young Children

This paper examines new managerial discourses and practices in which the dialectic of labour is reconstructed as a series of acts of self‐understanding, self‐examination and “self‐work”, and through which the “self qua self” is constituted as the central object of management technologies. We interrogate concepts such as “excellence”, “total quality”, “performance”, “knowledge”, “play at work” and “wellness” in order to decipher the ways in which managerialism deploys what we term therapeutic habitus, and projects a new horizon of “human resourcefulness” as a store of unlimited potentialities. We invoke management’s wider historical–cultural context to situate managerialism within the framework of modernity as a cultural epoch whose main characteristic is what we term “derecognition of finitude”. It is the modern synthesis — with the “self” at the centre of its system of values — that provides the ground for current elaborations of subjectivity by managerialism. The paper examines how current vocabularies and practices in organizations use “work” to rearticulate discursively the human subject as an endless source of performativity by configuring work as the site of complex and continuous self‐expression. Management thus acquires a new discursive outline: instead of appearing as an authoritarian instance forcing upon workers a series of limitations, it now presents itself as a therapeutic formula mediating self‐expression by empowering individuals to work upon themselves to release their fully realized identity.     

“Sensory Ordering” in Nurses' Clinical Decision‐Making: Making Visible Senses,Sensing, and “Sensory Work” in the Hospital

The objective of this article is to present a study on the constitutive role of senses in clinical decision‐making. The methodology is based on a series of focus groups with nurses in various hospital departments. Based on a narrative approach, our study examines “sensory work” in clinical decision‐making in order to reveal its specificity in the clinical work of nurses. Nurses shared stories—in focus groups—about the influence of senses in clinical decision‐making. The analysis of clinical narratives helped to identify various situations revealing the “sensory work” that underlines clinical decision‐making. We put the emphasis on the spectrum of sensory activities and the interactions occurring during a clinical decision‐making. One specific contribution of our study is to make visible the “sensory ordering” at work as constituted by interactions between nurses during a clinical assessment.     

Views on medication's role in treatment begin to converge amid deadly epidemic

In “Intervention stigma: How medication‐assisted treatment marginalizes patients and providers,” a researcher writes about one of the biggest paradoxes facing those treating and being treated for opioid use disorders (OUDs): the fact that the “gold standard” for treatment — methadone and buprenorphine — subjects both providers and patients to stigma, both within and outside addiction treatment communities.     

Three Ecologies: Urban Metabolism and the Society‐Nature Opposition

This article is an intellectual history of two enduring binaries—society‐nature and city‐countryside—and their co‐identification, told through evolving uses of the concept of “urban metabolism.” After recounting the emergence of the modern society‐nature opposition in the separation of town and country under early industrial capitalism, I interpret “three ecologies”—successive periods of urban metabolism research spanning three disciplines within the social sciences. The first is the human ecology of the Chicago School, which treated the city as an ecosystem in analogy to external, natural ecosystems. The second is industrial ecology: materials‐flow analyses of cities that conceptualize external nature as the source of urban metabolism's raw materials and the destination for its social wastes. The third is urban political ecology, a reconceptualization of the city as a product of diverse socio‐natural flows. By analyzing these three traditions in succession, I demonstrate both the efficacy and the limits to Catton and Dunlap's distinction between a “human exemptionalist paradigm” and a “new ecological paradigm” in sociology.     

“The EU Should Talk to Germany” Transnational Legal Consciousness as a Rights Claiming Tool among Undocumented Migrants

Migrants must often negotiate their rights while being hampered by their precarious resident status, within contexts where the overlap of migration, welfare, labour and gender regimes lead to incoherent and contradictory institutional set‐ups that hinder their claiming of rights. The analysis of the legal consciousness of undocumented migrants in Germany reveals a complex set of orientations. On some occasions they waive their rights, accepting lower working conditions in order not to lose their jobs – a finding that confirms existing research. At the same time, they also informally “enact” rights and access to institutions themselves. They appeal to the experiences of undocumented migrants with laws and access to social services in other countries. The finding of relatively widespread transnational legal consciousness adds a new dimension to the scholarship on migrant legal consciousness and claims‐making, which has hitherto portrayed undocumented migrants as living in a legal limbo between their countries of origin and destination.     

Allocative Failures: Networks and Institutions in International Grantmaking Relationships

Using neo-institutional theory to guide my inquiry, I ask how foundations award international development grants in an institutionally complex environment, and if and how that process contributes to homophily in grantmaking. Employing a qualitative multiple case study method, I show that grants are awarded via interpersonal networks, a meso-level finding that suggests a second, macro-level research question: how are interpersonal networks institutionalized in this context? In my analysis, I contribute to a theoretical understanding of the recursive relationship between networks and institutions: I show how macro-level institutional practices and forms emerge from networks, and how the micro-level character of the network participants themselves ultimately shapes institutional forms. Combined, my results provide a mechanistic, multi-level understanding of the relationship between networks and institutions, as well as of how homophily operates in grantmaking. Because of the potential for social stratification and exclusion based on the structure of the network itself, I argue that such networks should be understood as “allocative failures.”     

The concept of chastity in biblical society

A distinction is made between two different but closely related syndromes—“cross gender identification” and “gender behavior disturbance”—in male children. Based on assessment data and systematic clinical observations of a group of 47 such children in a longitudinal research study, a set of factors are identified as relevant to the diagnostic task. Specific diagnostic procedures were developed for the clinical evaluation and psychological testing of male children referred for potential gender dysphoric problems, and these procedures are presented in detail with accompanying rationale.     

The Relationship Between Self and Activity in the Context of Artists Making Art

Art is an activity that has historically invited self-reflection, self-immersion, and self-exploration—for example, in self-portraits, exhibitions, experimentation with media—and that as such may open a window onto the relationship between self and activity. In this article, we describe two cases studies involving observation of and interviews with two artists to explore what it feels like to invest oneself in an activity emotionally, cognitively, sensuously, and reciprocally to “make oneself” through this activity. These case studies highlight the importance of authenticity in both the activity of making art and the making of self through making art. The implications for agency, emotion, and ethical activity are analysed and some of the implications for a sociocultural approach to activity discussed.     

Teacher Careers and Inhabited Institutions: Sense‐Making and Arsenals of Teaching Practice in Educational Institutions

This article advances emerging scholarship that emphasizes the benefits to new institutional theories of organizational functioning offered by empirical research rooted in the tradition of symbolic interactionism. I present evidence from in‐depth interviews with teachers from three high schools to show how individuals' perspectives about pursuing institutional goals are filtered through their accumulated experience working within those institutions. Findings show teachers develop what I call “arsenals of teaching practice” as they accumulate work experience, and this process creates a key source of difference by career stage among teachers that shapes their instructional decisions. I discuss implications for understanding the relationship between policy and practice, and extend existing theory of inhabited institutions by identifying a key way that people's sense‐making through experience drives institutional functioning.