More than just a product: Strengthening literature in sociological analysis

Contemporary sociology of literature is predominantly shaped by the research of literary production, which approaches literary works as black boxes and subordinates them to social interactions and institutions. Even sociologists who recognize usefulness of literature for its inner quality often look at literary texts as mere passive objects to be translated into sociological discourse. In proposing a new sociology of literature, I first briefly outline the history of sociological studies of literature; second, I introduce “the state of the art” in the sociology of literature; third, I explore the relationship between sociology and literature in more general terms; and lastly, I discuss approaches and ideas with the potential to become components of a new research program, which would be a powerful alternative to the mainstream paradigms in sociological studies of literature. Such a program would make it clear that sociology can greatly benefit from cooperation with literature when sociologists are sensitive to the subtleties and (especially aesthetic) specificities of literary works.     

It Is Not Old‐Fashioned,It Is Vintage,Vintage Fashion and The Complexities of 21st Century Consumption Practices

This article reviews consumption practices concerning vintage, a fashion style based on used or retro‐style garments. Existing studies connect vintage with authenticity, nostalgia and identity. We explore how the vintage style deploys and comments on consumer culture, bypassing producers by wearing old garments to communicate ‘authentic’ identities. We argue that existing theories on consumption, fashion and subculture cannot fully explain vintage practices. Bypassing the dichotomies and one‐dimensional explanations of these theories, we show that vintage, with its ambivalent relation to both subcultural distinction practices and mainstream consumer culture, serves as a prism through which to examine and understand the complexities and subtleties of 21st century consumption practices.     

Metaphors for mental distress as an aid to empathy: looking through The Bell Jar

This paper makes a case for the value of using metaphors when attempting to describe and understand extreme mental states. Examples of metaphors are given from practice, literature, myth and the visual arts and, in particular, a close reading of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1986). Commentary on and criticism of The Bell Jar are cited that highlight the value of this work as an aid to insight into how those in mental distress might feel. The nature and importance of accurate empathy is discussed, as is the difficulty of getting the balance right in empathic responses. Case studies linking theory and practice are cited. The hopes, ambivalence and displacement of the person seeking help are discussed, as are different ways of attempting to provide help. The paper concludes by emphasising the multi-faceted presentations of self by both caring professional and service user and the importance of recognising the subtleties of these in the context of the would-be therapeutic relationship.     

The development of anti-cancer programs in Canada for the geriatric population: an integrated nursing and medical approach

Cancer control in Canada refers to the development of comprehensive programs utilising modern techniques, tools and approaches that actively prevent, cure or manage cancer. The scope of such programs is quite vast. They range from prevention, early detection and screening, comprehensive treatment both curative and palliative to comprehensive palliative care. Cancer is a disease associated with the aging population, and as the population ages the incidence of cancer would be expected to rise as well. This in itself poses a great challenge. In addition, the aging population demographics with the projected rise in the numbers of senior citizens, especially the over 80 group in the next decade, poses its own creative challenges to health planners. In Canada, health care is centrally administered, and controlled by the provincial governments of Canada, under the Canada Health Act. The challenge of developing comprehensive programs for the geriatric population requires changes in the care models and care pathways. The patient-centred models that have been adapted require a multidisciplinary approach to the clientele and their families that integrates cancer therapy and geriatric care and realities. This requires changes in the nursing and medical approach, as well as education in the subtleties of the two intersecting medical realities.     

The place of rational choice in criminology and risk analysis

The danger in both criminology and risk analysis is that rational choice will be embraced uncritically and without examination of its subtleties, boundaries, and limitations; its dependency on context, its relationship to what is seen (and not seen), what is understood and what is not understood, its embeddedness in both personal and organizational life. That is a challenge worthy of all the social and behavioral sciences.     

Living Longer: Ageing, Development and Social Protection

Living Longer provides the reader with an overview of currentdevelopments in social policy for older people in a fast-changingworld. As its United Nations Research Institute for Social Development(UNRISD) status suggests, this text brings together the complexitiesand subtleties of changing welfare state systems worldwide.It has been published as a culmination of UNRISD funded internationalresearch, initially disseminated at a conference in Madrid in2002. This book has appeal for community activists, policy-makers,practitioners and academics who wish to understand more fullythe state of development and social policy affecting older peoplein a diverse range of countries, each of which is influencedby global change. Contributions come from authors who are clearly knowledgeableabout their own country's historical and political context andwho are thus able to demonstrate the impact     

The Constitution and Slavery: A Special Relationship

In their efforts to understand how antebellum American abolitionists interpreted the relationship between slavery and the United States Constitution, scholars have underestimated abolitionists' concern with the question ‘Is the Constitution a pro-slavery document?’ Drawing on abolitionist newspapers, periodicals and correspondence, this article shows that the anti-slavery constitutional theories of the 1830s did not presume slavery to be unconstitutional, nor did they assume that the Constitution was pro-slavery, and therefore irrelevant to the abolitionist cause. These constitutional interpretive subtleties laid the foundations for the more prominent and radical theories that came in the following decade from the pens of Wendell Phillips and Lysander Spooner.     

The exchange of nonverbal intimacy: A critical review of dyadic models

This article examines six different theoretical approaches that attempt to explain the exchange of dyadic immediacy, intimacy, or involvement cues. Affiliative conflict or equilibrium theory, two expectancy norm models, an arousal-labeling model, an arousal valence model, a discrepancy-arousal model, and a sequential functional model are summarized. Advantages and limitations of each of these approaches are discussed, and empirical support for each of these approaches is summarized.     

Ethical Decision-Making in the Helping Profession

Abstract

First, we examine several of the more prominent theoretical approaches in ethics (the utilitarian, absolute rule, principle based, and ethics of care approaches) and find the principle-based, common morality approach, and the ethics of care approach to be the two approaches that are most relevant to the types of ethical decisions practitioners characteristically are confronted with in a social work setting. We then propose combining these two approaches, taking into consideration the advantages and drawbacks of each, such that in application these two approaches can be seen to complement one another. We show in two brief hypothetical cases how the combined approach can be used to guide practitioners' ethical decision-making in real life situations.     

Language attitudes in interaction1

This paper discusses the observation of language attitudes in interaction and argues that these approaches provide invaluable insights for the study of language attitudes. In the first half of the paper, the three different kinds of discourse‐based methods of analysis that scholars have used to analyse language attitudes (content‐based approaches, turn‐internal semantic and pragmatic approaches, and interactional approaches) are discussed. In the second half, then, the third of these approaches is used to illustrate such an analysis with four stretches of conversation in different contexts. In the end, the argument is put forward that discourse‐based approaches in general and interactional approaches in particular should be viewed as at least as fundamental to language attitude research as more commonly used quantitative methods of analysis, since the former can provide the researcher with insights that the latter do not.     

Practices of Engagement: Comparing and Integrating Deliberation and Organizing

The purpose of this article is to provide a comparison of institution-based community organizing and deliberative practices and to demonstrate how these are complementary approaches for civic engagement. In contrast to older typologies describing these two approaches oppositionally, we seek to reveal a shared democratic ethos and propose greater collaboration between action-oriented organizers and deliberative advocates. The article also identifies where deliberative and organizing practices diverge and proposes a model for how the two approaches can be integrated for mutual benefit.     

The Role of Modeling and Automatic Reinforcement in the Construction of the Passive Voice

Language acquisition has been a contentious topic among linguists, psycholinguists, and behaviorists for decades. Although numerous theories of language acquisition have surfaced, none have sufficiently accounted for the subtleties of the language that children acquire. The present study attempts to explain the role of modeling and automatic reinforcement in the acquisition of the passive voice. Six children, ages 3 to 5, participated in this study. The results indicated that the children began using the passive voice only after the experimenter modeled passive sentences. Furthermore, the usage of the passive voice increased with repeated exposure to the experimenter''s verbal behavior. Given that the children were not explicitly reinforced, it is proposed that their behavior was automatically reinforced for using the passive voice.     

Botswana Expansive School Transformation Project (BeST): A Response to Serpell’s Commentary

Those who are acquainted with Vygotsky's theory probably know that his publications were blacklisted in the Soviet Union from 1936 until 1956. Regrettably though, only a few adherents of Vygotsky in the West are informed about the great pains taken by the Russian Vygotskians to get hold of a firm position in the local psychological landscape between 1956 and the origin of the perestroika at the end of the 1990s. With this in mind, we here present Vasilii Davydov's vivid account of an endeavor to organize an open conference on Vygotsky's theory at the Moscow Institute of Psychology in 1981. Ultimately, the Communist Party officials prohibited this conference. The story involved is actually an excerpt from an unedited audiotaped interview I had with Davydov in my residence on June 13, 1994. Davydov spoke in a flawless, sparkling Russian. Therefore, it was a great challenge to translate his narrative adequately. Elina Lampert-Shepel and I have done our best to render the subtleties that reverberate in Davydov's account of the event concerned.     

Constructivist and Social Constructionist Career Counseling: A Delphi Study

Constructivist and social constructionist (SC) career counseling approaches direct attention to individuals as authors who construct their identities and careers in relation with others. Often contrasted with positivist or modern approaches, distinguishing features of these relatively new approaches have not yet been explicitly identified. Panel members in this Delphi study comprised the 9 most‐cited authors on the topics of constructivist and SC career counseling, 8 of whom completed all 3 rounds of questionnaires. They offered views about definitions of constructivist and SC career counseling and identified distinguishing and essential features of these approaches in terms of theoretical underpinnings, counseling processes, client–counselor relationships, and range of applicability. The defining features and the range of applicability identified in this study may serve to guide practice, training, and supervision. A research agenda including development of fidelity measures and evaluation of the efficacy of these approaches is proposed. Controversial issues are discussed.     

Introduction: the absent child and transnational families

This article introduces the concept of the absent child, and shows its importance for understanding experiences of contemporary transnational families. The article moves beyond a dominant scholarly focus on split families of working migrant parents and stay‐behind children in home communities. Instead, it draws out the power of absence in mobile families, focusing on the signs, meanings, imaginations and practices around children who may be hidden, deceased, imagined, abandoned or in other ways not present. It provides an introduction to four accompanying articles based on original research with families from Indonesia and the Philippines. These articles focus on the absent child as prosthesis for families, on the subtleties of affect around absence, and on the impact of normative regulatory practices on child absence.     

Comparison of methods for positional analysis: Structural and general equivalences

This paper explores the conceptualization and measurement of social position in relational data. It is argued that social positions are evidenced in the interactions among individuals, which are encoded in measured social relations. Given a set of measured relations the task is to reveal social positions which consist of groups of individuals wth similar patterns of relations. Methods based on two alternative approaches are discussed. The first set of approaches is based on structural equivalence, and locates groups of similar individuals based on the extent to which they share identical ties with identical others. A second set of approaches, here called general equivalences, locates groups of similar individuals based on their sharing of “types” of ties with “types” of others. Procedures based on these different approaches are described and applied to actual data and to a constructed example. Results suggest that these different approaches identify different kinds of social groups. It is argued that structural equivalence is an unsuitable basis for analysis of relational data if the goal is detection of social positions.     

Mediation: a Family Therapy Technique?

Family mediation dovetails with family therapy approaches, in particular the brief, solution-based family therapies, such that these two interventive approaches may be considered to be notionally quite similar. Comparisons are made, and the implications of moving from mediation to therapy are explored, for both workers and clients.     

‘Bring down the controlled movements!’ – exploring the possibilities of and limitations on achieving embodied agency in ballet and fashion

This paper explores the subtleties of exercising embodied agency within two contexts shaped by ideals and norms: ballet and fashion. Here, we focus on how dancers and models rehearsing offstage towards onstage performances negotiate their potential and limitations for achieving agency over and over. Whereas a ‘turn to embodiment’ has occurred within organization studies, less is known about how embodied agency is choreographed and practised between visible front stages and ‘hidden’ offstages, or in relation to the various human and non-human agents present in the field. The empirical material of this paper is derived from two separate ethnographic studies. By combining insights from the two contexts, we make a joint effort to explore a complex phenomenon in more detail. This paper develops our micro-level understanding of embodied agency as a relational endeavour, and offers insights into the surprisingly ‘a-mobile’ discussion of embodied practices within organization studies.     

Youth tobacco sales-to-minors and possession-use-purchase laws: a public health controversy

Tobacco use among youth remains one of our nation's most significant public health problems, and yet available evidence from prevention and cessation person-centered approaches has been mixed. Given these disappointing outcomes, some have recommended more public health approaches, and these include tobacco sales-to-minors and possession-use-purchase laws. While community members and police officials have endorsed these types of public health initiatives, many within the public health community have been either guarded or even oppositional to such approaches. The primary reasons for this controversy are reviewed in this article. Outcome studies indicate that sales-to-minors laws can be an effective step toward the reduction of youth access to commercial sources of tobacco. However, even with these laws in place, many youth indicate that they continue to have easy access to tobacco, often by means of social sources. Advocates of these approaches have argued that more comprehensive public health interventions are needed, such as programs that combine youth access and possession-use-purchase laws. This article reviews the ongoing debate behind these types of public health efforts, and examines the evidence of such programs to reduce youth tobacco use.     

Argentina and the brain drain: some perspectives from expatriates in the United States

This study focuses on the brain drain of health care professionals and physical scientists from Argentina, using survey data on a group of 89 immigrants who are currently US residents and listed in the current edition of AMERICAN MEN AND WOMEN OF SCIENCE. Although the loss of educated people is probably more likely if their degrees are acquired abroad, even at the doctoral level, the majority of those responding held Argentine degrees. The most important motivation was to gain professional and career advancement. Although pragmatism was associated with the decision to emigrate, the political environment was also quite important. Responses indicate that the losses of scientific personnel which have occurred in the past may be irreversible. Most of the respondents have become US citizens and now have families in that country. However, many respondents still have family, friends, or professional associations in Argentina. Some subtleties bear mention. The retreat of the generals has not removed all political factors from the problem list. Now scientific and professional activities must be de-politicized. The government must take explicit steps to ensure that academic and scientific positions are awarded on the basis of expertise. The evidence suggests that educational considerations are far less important as a causal element in the brain drain from Argentina than is the case in many Third World countries.