Narrative Structures and the Catholic Church Closings in Detroit

We distinguish narrative structures as master frames from stories as actual telling of events, and show how they operated in the case of the Catholic church closings in Detroit in the late 1980s. Narrative structures drawn from Detroit industrial history and from reform in the Catholic church were imposed on the actual events constituting the closing process, and powerfully defined the terms of public discussion and debate about the meaning of the closings.     

Signs of child maltreatment. The extent and nature of referrals to Swedish child welfare agencies Barnavårdsanmälningar i Sverige: omfattning,källor och problembilder

This article addresses an area of Swedish child welfare work that has not previously been researched, i.e. the prevalence and nature of referrals to Swedish child welfare agencies. Four issues are addressed in the article: (1) the number of referrals to Swedish child welfare agencies; (2) case workers’ workload; (3) report sources; and (4) conditions reported.

The main findings are the following. The majority of referrals concern adolescents, which indicates that addressing youth problems—such as delinquency—is a substantial part of Swedish child welfare work. In the younger age group, it seems that the referral rate in Sweden occupies a medium position in an international context. The level of personnel resources designated to process these referrals is remarkable high, indicating that the Swedish child welfare system operates differently from the system in, for example, the USA. Mandated reporters submit the majority of the referrals, which holds particularly for the adolescent group. Despite relatively high referral rates in Sweden, reported conditions are markedly vague and rarely concern the abuse and neglect dimension. Results are discussed with particular attention to the Swedish child welfare context and the concept of child maltreatment.

Föreliggande artikel behandlar ett svagt utforskat område inom svensk barnavård, nämligen omfattningen av och egenskaper hos anmälningar till socialtjänsten där barn misstänks fara illa. Fyra frågeställningar avhandlas: (1) anmälningsfrekvens; (2) socialarbetares arbetsbelastning; (3) vilka som anmäler, samt; (4) vilka typ av problem som anmäls.

Artikeln presenterar följande huvudsakliga resultat. För det första rör majoriteten av anmälningar ungdomar. Detta tyder på att tyngdpunkten för svensk barnavård skiljer sig markant från flera andra länder. För det andra befinner sig prevalensen av anmälningar rörande yngre barn i ett mellanskikt vid en internationell jämförelse. För det tredje förefaller svensk barnavård i ett internationellt perspektiv ha markant större personalresurser avdelade för arbetet med de inkomna anmälningarna. Detta tyder på att arbetssätten i svensk barnavård skiljer sig åt i jämförelse med till exempel USA. För det fjärde framkommer att majoriteten av anmälningarna görs av aktörer som omfattas av anmälningsplikt. För det femte är de förhållanden som anmäls—trots en relativt hög prevalens av anmälningar i Sverige—tämligen vaga och rör i låg utsträckning olika typer av misshandel samt vanvård. Resultaten diskuteras med särskilt tonvikt på såväl specifika egenskaper i svensk barnavård som det—i anglosaxisk forskning och praktik—centrala begreppet ‘child maltreatment’.     

Irishness in Glasgow, 1863-70

The purpose of this article is to examine a radically new phase in Irish popular politics in Glasgow during the 1860s. More precisely, the aim is to describe and explain how a secular notion of Irishness made a decisive impact on a key migrant community in Britain. Actively opposed by the local Catholic hierarchy, this secular Irishness nevertheless allowed for the emergence not only of Irish 'ward politicians' as elsewhere in Victorian Britain, but also, in the longer term, allowed for the emergence of John Ferguson and his 'fusion' of loyalties to both organised labour and Irish nationalism.     

Media,Religion, and Politics in Nicaragua: How an Independent Press Threatened the Catholic Church

Nicaragua's La Prensa newspaper stopped publishing a weekly Catholic "Sunday Reading" page in May 2001, replacing it with a more diverse "Religion and Faith" page. A storm of protest followed, with some religious leaders saying the church was being censored. Even Violeta Chamorro, a co-owner of La Prensa and a former Nicaraguan president, denounced the action. Although this was a simple journalistic decision to better serve the readers, the move also carried substantial political implications. La Prensa and the Catholic Church had long been aligned with the powerful economic elite and shared similar histories. Both, for example, had internal battles over whether to support the socialist Sandinista revolution, and both were struggling to hold onto their clients—readers and church members. This power struggle between an independent press and the Catholic Church illustrates their respective efforts to remain relevant to Nicaraguans. This study demonstrates that both acted rationally in support of their own best interests.     

Internal ethnic friction: Orange and green in nineteenth‐century New York, 1868–1872

The presence of large numbers of Protestants within the nineteenth century Irish exodus to the USA ensured that the integrity of the Orange/Green dispute continued in the adopted homeland. The Catholic majority amongst Irish immigrants was nevertheless a minority within Protestant American society. The struggle between Orange and Green in New York thus gave each faction both a majority and a minority status. Fear of Catholicism within America meant that the commonality between Irish Orangemen and native born Protestants was a classic example of an internal ethnic dispute having a relevance to the whole society. This common Protestantism was able to straddle, to an extent, the ethnic barrier. The clash between Fenians and Orangemen in New York thus gained an inflated significance for both state and national politics.     

The Roman Catholic Church: A Centuries Old History of Awareness of Clerical Child Sexual Abuse (from the First to the 19th Century)

Debates in international forums and in mainstream media on the role, responsibility, liability, and response of ecclesiastical authorities of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) toward clerical child sexual abuse (cCSA) fail to take into account the historical roots and awareness of the problem. Reports also fail to mention the historic organizational laws RCC developed over centuries. In contrast, RCC documents evidence that the Catholic Church not only carried century’s old history of cCSA, but also repeatedly condemned cCSA by successive papal authorities, organizational laws, and institutional management mechanisms. During the first millennium, however, church laws remained confined to the bookshelves and were not converted into appropriate management policies and infrastructural models. This was largely due to the absence of a central administrative organizational structure, which developed later in the 12th century, following the Second Council of Lateran (1139) when the Papacy asserted its authority to establish administrative control over the organizational church. It was only then that management policies started to be framed and institutional structures enacted to deal more appropriately with cCSA from the 14th to 20th centuries. Despite this, RCC developed a culture of secrecy using clandestine organizational management models and institutional laws prescribed in 1568, 1622, 1741, 1866, 1922, and 1962 which aimed to manage cCSA. The current study traces reported cCSA as far back as the first century and critically examines the organizational laws, and institutional policies developed by RCC to address clerical sexual misconduct up to the end of the 19th century.     

Priests,Publicans and the Irish Poor: Ethnic Enterprise and Migrant Networks in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Liverpool

Part of the outreach mission of one of the earliest Catholic parishes in Irish Liverpool, the St Patrick's Society developed into one of the largest collecting societies in Victorian Britain, offering burial benefit to tens of thousands of poor Irish migrants beyond the reach of organised labour or industrial insurance. Growth soon led to scandal and litigation, revealing a number of fault lines within the migrant community. Catholic clergy withdrew in protest as publicans and other ‘Micks on the make’ came to the fore, secular ethnic culture brokers who accentuated the ‘Irishness’ of the Society, running it as a machine which looked less to the respectability (or religion) of the members than to their assurance of an adequately funded ‘wake’. It was this ‘Irish’ image, as much as the alleged financial irregularities, which brought the Society into disrepute (and ruin), a judgement yet to be challenged by historians. The study examines this mutualist network and explains the rise and fall of an important, but until this point, unexamined feature of the communal life of the Irish neighbourhoods of Liverpool.     

The Scylla State. A gendered understanding of the experiences of marginalised women in the United Kingdom

Since the formation of the 2012 Coalition government, the UK has been subject to 12 years of neoliberal policy enacted with ferocity and vigour. This has comprised austerity measures including the retrenchment of welfare via the reshaping of the welfare state and public services according to business practices, ideals of individual responsibilisation and overwhelmingly, the notion of reducing the state's ideological and fiscal responsibility for equity and social welfare. The neoliberal state has been conceptualised by Loic Wacquant as a Centaur, boasting a liberal head, yet one atop an authoritarian body whose focus is the designated ‘underclasses’, the socially and economically non-compliant. The Centaur takes away with one hand while ruling punitively with the other, specifically via ‘prisonfare’ and ‘workfare’ to compel submission to precarious and sub-par employment. Although compelling, the Centaur State is justifiably critiqued for its blindness to gender and focus upon the manifestation of neoliberalism in the States. By exploring the stories of 23 women in the UK with histories of survival sex working and problematic drug use, a distinct gendered alternative reality emerges of the operation and machinations of the neoliberal state. Rather than a Centaur, marginalised women experience the Scylla State, a covert, hydra-headed beast motivated by neo-Victorian ideals of ‘womanfare’. The operations of the Scylla State are unpredictable, replicate traumatising interpersonal experiences and variously involve surveillance, coercion, conditionality and the responsibilisation of victimhood to justify increasingly punitive responses to women's survival strategies in the face of increasing trauma and deprivation.     

Hiding behind the cloth:child sexual abuse and the Catholic Church

The existence of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church has shocked many. In this article, the authors review the history of child sexual abuse in the church, the recent events that brought this tragedy into societal consciousness, and the efforts by the church to conceal the abuse. Two sources of empirical literature, the general psychological writing on priest sex abuse and the psychoanalytic literature, on child sexual abuse are compared. Both sources of literature seek explanation for priests' child sexual abuse within the structure and culture of the church rather than viewing the priest as a "typical" sex predator. The authors argue that, in fact, the guilty priests are child predators who differ little from other child predators.     

Social work and Nordic welfare policies for children—present challenges in the light of the past1

The aim of this article is to explore welfare policies for children in five Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden—and in that context identify what kinds of issues and challenges social work is currently facing. The data reviewed consist of policy documents, law texts, official reports, statistics, professional texts, and previous research. Policies and laws on children's protection; provisions, including policies on state benefits and care for children; and the autonomous integrity of children in terms of the norms and policies concerning their participation, in particular in public everyday life, are analysed from a historical perspective. Hence, future challenges for social work are analysed in light of the past. Our conclusion is that social workers have a unique opportunity, based on their close encounters with children as clients, to work for the realisation of children's rights. Furthermore, by applying a holistic perspective to issues of childhood and parenthood, social workers can contribute to the development of knowledge on how welfare systems can meet the challenges brought about by the new ideas of children's rights, social changes, globalisation, and the new ideological concepts of risk that have arisen in child welfare.

Artikkeli tarkastelee lasten hyvinvointipolitiikan kehitystä viidessä Pohjoismaassa—Tanskassa, Suomessa, Islannissa, Norjassa ja Ruotsissa—ja sen valossa sitä millaisia kysymyksiä ja haasteita tämän päivän lasten hyvinvoinnin parissa tehtävä sosiaalityö kohtaa. Artikkelissa on käytetty aineistona erilaisia politiikkadokumentteja, lakeja, julkisia raportteja,tilastoja, professionaalisia kirjoituksia sekä aiempaa tutkimusta. Artikkelissa analysoidaan historiallisesta näkökulmasta lastensuojelun, sosiaalipalvelujen, lapsille suunnattujen sosiaalisten tukien sekä lasten osallistumista koskevia normeja ja toimintapolitiikkaa. Sosiaalityön tulevaisuushaasteita analysoidaan menneisyyden valossa. Johtopäätöksemme on, että sosiaalityöntekijöillä on ainutlaatuinen mahdollisuus, joka perustuu heidän läheisiin työskentelysuhteisiinsa vaikeissa elämäntilanteissa olevien lasten kanssa, olla lasten oikeuksien todellisia toimeenpanijoita. Lisäksi lapsuuden ja vanhemmuuden näkökulmat yhdistävästä toimintapaikastaan käsin juuri sosiaalityöntekijät voivat vaikuttaa tutkimukseen ja kehittämiseen niin, että hyvinvointipalvelut ja –etuudet kohtaisivat nykyistä joustavammin lasten oikeuksien, yleisen yhteiskuntamuutoksen, globalisaation ja kovin ideologisena pitämämme riskiajattelun haasteet.     

Race,Hyper‐Incarceration,and US Poverty Policy in Historic Perspective

In this article, I bring scholarship on welfare reform into discussion with work on crime control and racial and ethnic relations. I locate the genesis of hyper‐incarceration and the moral suasion imposed on the recipients of contemporary social welfare services through the poverty policies of the Victorian era and later the postbellum south, implicating the checkered history of racial domination in the United States in the development of social welfare and criminal justice policy. I conclude by discussing the ways in which the United States has been reconfigured to facilitate these trends and of new terrain in the study of marginality in the neoliberal age. Doing so demonstrates the long‐standing collusion between welfare state and criminal justice actors, identifies the racialized target of punishment and poverty management, highlights the significance of race in the development of social policy, and exhibits the importance of social welfare policy in contemporary race and ethnic relations.     

"Everyone with Eyes Can See the Problem": Moral Citizens and the Space of Irish Nationhood

This paper examines Ireland's 2004 Constitutional Amendment which removes birthright citizenship from any future Irish‐born children of immigrant parents. I argue that for particular historical reasons, the ability of the state to convince its citizens of the necessity for this Amendment was remarkable and I suggest that it was able to do so by constructing citizenship as a moral regime and foreign‐nationals and their foetuses as ‘suspect patriots.’ I describe how the notion of immorality is laminated upon black bodies — specifically black pregnant women — and how the presence of black migrant workers, refugees and asylees consequently comes to be experienced in Irish national space as transgressive, their political subjecthood constrained by the supposedly legible abjectivity of their bodies. The issue of race remains unenunciated, and yet, as the Minister for Justice stated during the referendum debate, ‘anyone with eyes can see the problem.’ The Irish government's privileging of moral rather than cultural incommensurability is strikingly similar to culturalist rhetorics of exclusion that are often invoked when race is at issue in European public debate on immigration. Configured upon, and therefore experienced as a type of body, immorality becomes an alibi for race and is naturalized as a form of exclusion and as a potential site of state intervention in the form of xenophobic legislation and policymaking. Reading this decision as merely racist however, fails to give voice to the experiences of Irish Citizens who voted for this Amendment. Their struggle to build a “New Ireland” and to accept a multiculturalist framework in the face of neo‐liberal restructuring policies and a European‐wide retreat from the welfare state must be considered as being in dialectical tension with the ideological smearing of immigrants if we are to fully grasp the complex interaction between relations of power and the privileging of difference.     

Social Policy, “Deservingness,” and Sociotemporal Marginalization: Katrina Survivors and FEMA

Limiting assistance in the context of the neoliberal U.S. welfare state relies on a distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. Hurricane Katrina survivors were caught between two opposing cultural characterizations—”deserving” disaster victims and “undeserving” welfare cheats. In this article, I examine Hurricane Katrina survivors' experiences with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)'s rental assistance policies and practices, as their experiences reveal important aspects of how aid is allocated in the context of the contemporary U.S. welfare state, and what consequences this has for marginalized populations. I analyze in‐depth interviews and field observations with displaced Katrina survivors and find that FEMA policies and practices assumed a “middle class” model of family structure and economic standing. Those who did not fit into this model were made to wait while their cases were investigated, which had negative psychological and material consequences. I argue that being made to wait, or temporal domination, is a central component of the larger sociotemporal marginalization of the poor, or the way in which time structures social stratification. Temporal domination is a feature of neoliberal social policy, neither maliciously intended nor entirely unintended, that has the consequence of punishing the “undeserving.”     

Global Catholicism and the Politics of Civil Society

A transformation of the politics of Catholicism worldwide has taken place. The final recognition of the modern principle of religious freedom at Vatican II, together with the assumption by the church of the modern doctrine of human rights, has altered the traditional dynamic of church state relations and the role of the church both nationally and transnationally.
National churches no longer aspire to become state compulsory institutions. It is this voluntary "disestablishment" that has permitted the church to play a key role in recent transitions to democracy throughout the Catholic world. Simultaneously, the papacy has assumed the vacant role of spokesperson for humanity, for the sacred dignity of the human person, for world peace, and for a more fair division of labor and power in the world system.
As the Catholic Church abandons the private sphere assigned to religion and enters the undifferentiated public sphere of civil society to take part in ongoing processes of normative contestation, a tension between catholic universality and Roman Catholic particularity becomes evident.     

Sexual Misgivings: Producing Un/Marked Knowledge in Neoliberal Marriage Promotion Policies

This article draws on what Brekhus has called “the sociology of the unmarked” to illuminate the construction of knowledge in the debate over heterosexual marriage's significance in society. It conducts a qualitative content analysis of archival data written by marriage advocates from 1990 to 2010 and finds that marriage advocates use discourses that incorporate unmarked assumptions concerning heterosexuality and marked knowledge about single motherhood and same‐sex marriage that is linked to neoliberal ideals of individual responsibility and self‐reliant family life. This article uncovers how cultural battles over marriage's significance are connected to a neoliberal discourse of individual responsibility, negotiated through boundary work that marks single motherhood and same‐sex marriage as in need of special consideration.     

Priests, Publicans and the Irish Poor: Ethnic Enterprise and Migrant Networks in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Liverpool

Part of the outreach mission of one of the earliest Catholic parishes in Irish Liverpool, the St Patrick's Society developed into one of the largest collecting societies in Victorian Britain, offering burial benefit to tens of thousands of poor Irish migrants beyond the reach of organised labour or industrial insurance. Growth soon led to scandal and litigation, revealing a number of fault lines within the migrant community. Catholic clergy withdrew in protest as publicans and other 'Micks on the make' came to the fore, secular ethnic culture brokers who accentuated the 'Irishness' of the Society, running it as a machine which looked less to the respectability (or religion) of the members than to their assurance of an adequately funded 'wake'. It was this 'Irish' image, as much as the alleged financial irregularities, which brought the Society into disrepute (and ruin), a judgement yet to be challenged by historians. The study examines this mutualist network and explains the rise and fall of an important, but until this point, unexamined feature of the communal life of the Irish neighbourhoods of Liverpool.     

Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare,Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity1

In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter‐century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu’s concept of “bureaucratic field” to revise Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault’s vision of the “disciplinary society,” David Garland’s account of the “culture of control,” and David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of “individual responsibility.” This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.     

Public Concern with Farm‐Animal Welfare: Religion,Politics, and Human Disadvantage in the Food Sector*

The welfare of farm animals has become a continuing source of controversy as states seek greater regulation over the livestock industry. However, empirical studies addressing the determinants of public concern for farm‐animal welfare are limited. Religion and politics, two institutional bases of attitudes, are rarely explored. Nor have sociologists responded systematically to the popular charge that people concerned with animal welfare care less about human well‐being. This study builds from sociology's stratification literature to address new questions about farm‐animal welfare. Using a range of animal‐welfare attitudes and samples drawn from a statewide and a national population in 2007, we find support for the religious and political bases of farm‐animal‐welfare attitudes. Frequent church attendance is related to less concern with animal welfare. However, we also find that religious beliefs can be a source of support for animal welfare. Political orientation as reflected by desire for more economic equality and greater tolerance of outgroups is also related to concern for farm‐animal welfare. Formal political partisanship and denomination have weaker effects. Concern with farm‐animal welfare is consistently related to greater concern with human welfare in the food sector.     

'Women of the Wild Geese': Irish Women, Exile and Identity in Spain, 1750-1775

This study focuses upon the experiences of first and second generation Irish female migrants in Spain during the mid-eighteenth century. Recent scholarship has sought to place Irish migrants in Europe within a broad context of assimilation. The experience of Irish communities in Spain appears to have been particularly positive, with the Irish as a group being awarded equal citizenship at the beginning of the seventeenth century. However, the gendered experience of Irish assimilation into Spanish society has received limited scholarly attention. This essay analyses the experiences of two groups of Irish women living in Spain: women who lived in religious communities and the female members of one of the most elite families to have migrated from Ireland. The lives of the daughters of Ignatius White reveal the ways in which Irish women worked their way into spheres of power and influence, including the Spanish court. The networks and activities of these women show a crystallisation of the ambitions of many Irish from the first and second generation to be born in Spain. The relationship between these women, their kinship groups and their networks of power and influence offers a positive and successful example of Irish female migrant experience.     

Falling in love again and again: Marlene Dietrich and the iconization of non‐native English1

Icons are those stars who have become widely established and circulated as enduring international cult figures. Numbered among these is Marlene Dietrich, one of a class of international performers who present in English although not native speakers. Her performances can be theorized as Referee Design, by which speakers target linguistic codes other than their own. Dietrich came to stardom in the 1930 German‐made film, The Blue Angel, which provided her career‐long signature tune, ‘Falling in love again’. Analysis of her pronunciation shows her English as markedly non‐native. Her subsequent Hollywood films crafted Dietrich's image, enregistering her non‐native accent and baritone quality as the first and lasting voice of the femme fatale. For three decades from the 1940s Dietrich toured a live show renowned for her stunning costumes. Comparison of a 1964 stage performance of ‘Falling in love again’ reveals her English as much more native but still retaining a hearably different accent, which is now valorized as her distinctive voice. Dietrich's decades of repeated performances established her iconicity, and her appearance and vocal style – both its timbre and pronunciation – were widely circulated, referenced, imitated, and occasionally parodied. Living the femme fatale persona in her own life, and cultivating her image with extreme reflexivity, Marlene Dietrich achieved the ultimate ingroup identification. In language and appearance, she became her own referee. Ikonen sind jene Stars, die sich als bleibende internationale Kultfiguren etabliert haben. Zu diesen zählt Marlene Dietrich, eine derjenigen internationalen Darsteller, die in englischer Sprache auftreten, obgleich es nicht ihre Muttersprache ist. Ihre Darbietungen können als ,Referee Design‘ bezeichnet werden, wobei sich Sprecher eines Codes bedienen, der nicht ihr Eigener ist. Dietrich wurde durch den 1930 produzierten Film Der Blaue Engel zum Star. Diesem entstammt auch der Titel ,Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß‘, welcher zu ihrem Markenzeichen wurde. Die Analyse ihrer Englischaussprache weist sie zu dieser Zeit als Nicht‐Muttersprachlerin aus. Ihre späteren Hollywoodfilme festigten Dietrichs Image. Ihre einzigartige Aussprache und baritonartige Sprechweise wurden zum Sinnbild der .Femme Fatale‘. Ab den 40er Jahren trat Dietrich drei Jahrzehnte lang in einer für ihre atemberaubenden Kostüme bekannten Bühnenaufführung auf. Ein Vergleich mit einer Aufführung von ,Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß‘ aus dem Jahre 1964 zeigt, dass ihre englische Aussprache seither muttersprachlicher geworden ist, aber noch immer einen hörbaren Akzent aufweist, der bereits als ihr Erkennungsmerkmal betrachtet wird. Durch jahrzehntelang wiederholte Aufführungen hat sich Dietrich als Ikone durchgesetzt. Ihr Aussehen und ihre Sprechweise – Klangfarbe sowie Aussprache – waren weit verbreitet und wurden ein Vielfaches nachgeahmt und manchmal sogar parodiert. Dietrich hat die Femme Fatale auch im Privaten gelebt, ihr Image mit höchster Selbstreflexion kultiviert und erreichte dadurch die Spitze der Ingroup‐Identifikation: in Sprache und Aussehen wurde sie ihr eigener ,Referee’. [German]