The curious absence of love stories in women's talk

Sociological debate has dealt with love in a number of different ways. For some, love offers a unique opportunity; it is a path to salvation (Jackson, 1993; Langford, 1999). Others, however, take a more sceptical approach to love in modern society: for Beck and Beck‐Gernsheim (1995) love represents the path to extreme individualization, for Illouz (1997) it is ultimately underpinned by consumerism, and perhaps most extreme, for Bauman (2003) love has been destroyed. Giddens offers a slightly different (and more hopeful) perspective and suggests that with growing choice and freedom, love has become ‘confluent’ and temporary subject to individuals' needs (Giddens, 1992). When adult women were asked about love and how they have experienced love in their own lives, however, few of these themes emerged. Instead many women found it difficult to talk about their feelings generally and love in particular. There was an absence of falling in love stories and rather, women explained that they ‘drifted’ into relationships, or they ‘just happened’. The discourses and languages that these women used to explain love and their relationships will be explored in this paper. Love was simultaneously loudly absent and quietly present.     

The big story about small stories: Narratives of crime and terrorism

The ‘big story/small story’ distinction has emerged as a discrete approach to narrative analysis. Proponents of this approach are critical of the ‘big stories’ elicited by structural analysts, which they see as highly structured narratives of past experiences, typically elicited in an interview context. In contrast, they highlight the importance of studying the fragmented, contextualised ‘small stories’ that arise in everyday conversation/interaction. We question the basis of this distinction and we suggest that it unnecessarily proliferates analytic categories. Further, we suggest that the methodologies followed by ‘small stories’ analysts are often similar to those used to elicit ‘big stories’ and are hence open to similar criticisms; in particular, a failure to fully consider the issue of (contextual) naturalism. Drawing on interviews of crime/terrorism in Northern Ireland, we show how these data comprise both ‘big stories’ and ‘small stories’ within the same context and often within the same narrative.     

Hard stories in the workplace

Relationships between family caregivers and professional health care providers typically begin during an intensely painful and stressful time. This article examines the literature on professional attitude and response to suffering with particular emphasis on how exposure to hard stories affects the development and quality of alliances with family caregivers. First person accounts from a qualitative, phenomenological study conducted with mothers of children with acquired physical disabilities are used to illustrate the perspectives of caregivers and the qualities they identify as contributing to competent, meaningful, and mutual relationships that allow for bearing witness to hard stories.     

The HIT LIST and other horror stories: sex roles and school transfer

A collection of scarey stories told to pupils facing transfer to secondary school is analysed. Five major themes can be found in the stories, which are discussed and explicated. Boys and girls hear and tell different stories, while males and females feature in contrasting roles in them. An analysis focusing on the messages about sex roles in secondary school transmitted by these stories is presented.     

The representation of women in top ranked sociology departments

This paper compares the status of women in highly ranked sociology departments with their status in departments nationwide. The top ranked departments influence the profession markedly through their disproportionate share of the nation’s graduate students and faculty, and their production of more than half of the faculty in graduate departments. Women on top ranked faculties are more often at advanced ranks with tenure than their national peers, but there are proportionally fewer of them than in departments across the nation. Gender gaps in rank and tenure are also narrower in top ranked departments. Although women graduate students are less common in top ranked than in national departments, the former have financial assistance more often. Recent hiring practices have merely maintained women’s current level of representation, but men are disproportionately vacating faculty positions. With most departments growing slowly, if at all, this will result in a small increase over time in women’s fraction of faculty positions. where he is developing, with colleagues, a longitudinal model of the institutional factors that promote and impede progress in affirmative action in academia, and is completing a study of “double jeopardy” for minority women sociologists. This study was funded, in part, by the American Sociological Association, the Pacific Sociological Association, the University of Oregon Center for Women in Society, and an Arizona State University support grant. However, these organizations are not responsible for the views expressed in the paper.     

The politics of top executive compensation in advanced democracies

Since the 1980s, advanced democracies have experienced CEO pay scandals at an accelerating rate. However, this course varied across countries. Existing theories come short in explaining why some democracies experienced more frequently scandals involving overcompensation of the CEOs in core industries. Further, most studies are based on the US political and corporate system, which differ from European democracies. This is problematic as these are currently the only studies we rely on when it comes to public policy making. I develop an argument, based on a critical review, on why we need more political science studies on the different policies on CEO pay. This direction of research may more accurately tackle questions such as why some democracies meet obstacles for CEO pay reforms, more than others.     

Getting my stories straight: A narrativist in quest of congruence

Drawing on his work in the area of narrative gerontology, the author reflects on the measure of congruence that exists between the theories he has been developing about the storied complexity of adult development and his lived experience as an aging individual himself. His reflections include a discussion of his former career as a parish minister and his ongoing passion for “the writing life”. He concludes with some speculation on the possibility of combining his interests in narrative and aging with his continuing interest in theological themes.     

Disability,embodiment and ableism: stories of resistance

Non-disabled responses to visible impairment embody either social invisibility or over-attentiveness. The subjective and inter-subjective experiences of impaired bodies and intersubjective encounters within society are important aspects of disablement and the construction of a disabled identity. Impairment is read by and influences the social structure of ableism. This paper attempts to understand how ableist discourses about impaired bodies have impacted on and been resisted by disabled people and how embodiment is related to identity. In pursuit of these aims, a qualitative study was conducted with seven people who have visible physical impairments. The results indicate that disabled embodiment is produced and experienced within an ableist context that mobilizes the charitable gaze and the medical model to signify impaired bodies at the expense of the recognition of disabled identity. In order to deconstruct ableism and to recognize and respect the value of the disabled identity, a politics of recognition is required.     

Long-run trends in top income shares: The role of income and population growth

This paper studies the sensitivity of long-run trends in top income shares to differences in top-share measures. While the standard measure fixes a share of the population, we define alternatives that allow variation in both incomes and size of the top group based on defining absolute income thresholds. In an application to United States data, we find that top income share trends over the past century vary somewhat depending on the measure used. Allowing top groups to increase in size after 1980 along with overall economic growth results in a larger increase of top income shares. The historical drops before WWII are sensitive to the choice of income deflator: using GDP inflates interwar top income shares but using CPI deflates them. Altogether, these results recommend using complementary approaches to defining top income groups when measuring long-term top income share trends.

     

The new people of power: The backgrounds and careers of top labor leaders

In this profile of the personal backgrounds and careers of top labor leaders, data indicate that they have followed a long and steady climb from their working-class backgrounds through the ranks of the union hierarchy. Similarities between labor leaders’ backgrounds and careers and those of earlier leaders are provided. Preparation of this article was supported in part by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 93. Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official views or endorsement of AFSCME. The author expresses his thanks to Professor George Strauss for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Management she wrote: organization studies and detective stories

It has been postulated that social sciences in general and organization theory in particular can profit from parallels and analogies with fiction literature. As the main form of expression in social sciences, like in literature, is a written product, inspired imitation can visibly improve the literary forms of organization theory, without diminishing its specificity. This essay argues that one genre in fiction literature is especially suitable for such comparisons. This is the genre of the detective story, where the detective, much like the researcher, must untangle the social tissue to arrive at an explanation.     

Cross-national changes in time-use: some sociological (hi) stories re-examined

The paper addresses some macro-sociological questions about changes in broad categories of time-use. The focus is on large-scale cross-national time trends from developed countries in paid and unpaid work, and leisure. Reference is made to some well-known sociological and historical accounts of such change, and to the fact that time-use diary data has only relatively recently become available for analysing trends over time. The data used are drawn from a comparative cross-time data archive held by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Essex University, comprising successive time-use diary surveys from a range of industrialized countries collected from the 1960s to the 1990s. The time use evidence suggests relative stability in the balance between work and leisure time over the period covered by the analyses. Some alternative explanations are advanced for why there seems to be a gap between this evidence and, on the one hand, the burgeoning literature in both academic and popular media addressing the 'time famine' and, on the other, people's professed experience of what is happening to their time.     

Generation and discourse in working life stories

Following Mannheim's ( 1970 ) Problem of Generations, many scholars have warned of the analytical and political risks of conflating generation with cohort. Yet the temptation persists, as relying on cohort is a convenient method of dividing a population to study it. This article proposes that cohort is only convenient if the objective is understanding generations as definitive groups of people. It suggests a supplementary objective: understanding generation as a matter of discourse. Qualitative data from interviews with 52 Canadians illustrates how the discursive forms of generation in their stories render difference, human agency and social change in atomistic or voluntaristic terms. The most extreme manifestations of this theme appear related to the perception of generational conflict. Guided by James' principle of pragmatism, this article maintains that understanding generation as a discursive, historically contingent ‘thought’ with ‘effects’ is as important as understanding its structural form and contents.     

From facts to stories or from stories to facts? Analyzing public relations history in public relations textbooks

Leading PR-historiography provides a picture of an evolutionary process of public relations activity in which PR develops from a manipulative to a two-way, dialogue-oriented communication process. We analyzed a number of public relations textbooks to determine how their authors present PR history. Our major findings are: (1) The construct of the progressive development of PR is evenly spread throughout textbooks; (2) The majority of textbooks simply rely on storytelling and not on a theory-driven approach to PR history as we would prefer to see in PR textbooks that are used to teach university students; (3) The PR history presented in the books seems to be influenced by a paradigmatic stance. However, citation context analysis did not enable us to trace back the dissemination of this viewpoint to one paradigmatic author, and so we assume that the so-called obliteration effect prevents this proof.