Gifting Practices and Interorganizational Relations: Constructing Obligation Networks in the Electronics Sector

Sociologists and economic anthropologists often implicitly associate capitalist societies with the commodity form and preindustrial societies with the gift form. In contrast, this ethnographic study of the sales of electronics components shows that gifting and commodity exchange actually are inextricably intertwined in contemporary markets. Commodity exchange depends on obligation networks created and sustained, in part, by gifting and countergifting. Each juncture of the sales process has an associated type of gifting. Gifts provide the social basis for a moral economy that governs the construction of sales networks.     

No Human Resource is an Island: Gendered,Racialized Access to Work as a Performer

This article explores the reproduction of gendered, racialized conceptions of age and appearance in structuring access to performing work. Analysis of this issue leads to discussion of a key supposition: that central work experiences of women performers are manifestations of their position as formal and informal proxies for women's experiences in wider society. Women performers are formal proxies in that they are employed to ‘be women’; to represent women for consumption in the circuit of culture. They are informal proxies in that they are allocated to highly segmented labour markets based on wider patterns of gendered, racialized social relations.     

Gendered Policies and Practices that Increase Older Men's Risk of Elder Mistreatment

SUMMARY

We aim to detail some of the ways that social policy and gendered practices put older men at risk of elder mistreatment. Research on the abuse and neglect that older adults experience has often focused on the characteristics of the victims and the dynamics within families, emphasizing factors such as the likelihood of an intergenerational cycle of violence, substance abuse and dependency, and older men's financial status as key risks in elder abuse. The effect on men from this type of analysis is that elder mistreatment remains an individual or family problem rather than being viewed as a larger societal concern. This article challenges the individualistic focus by outlining the importance of societal forces affecting older men's risk of mistreatment.     

Women,Gendered Work and Gendered Violence: So Much More than a Job

This article explores the experiences of individuals who work with men who are violent, focusing in particular on the differential gendered impacts of this area of practice. Violence intervention is widely recognized as work that is difficult, demanding and, frequently, confronting. It is less often recognized that such work is not only experienced differently by men and women, but significantly, that it may weigh more heavily, with impacts that are both broader and more profound, on the women working in this area. Building upon an understanding of the gendered nature of work and the workplace, this research reveals the distinctively gendered nature and impact of work with men who are violent, highlighting the complex interplay of gendered individuals, in the gendered workplace, in relation to a specifically gendered activity, that of men's violence.     

Gendered Work Meets Gendered Goods: Selling and Service in Clothing Retail

This article explores the way retail work entails a complex form of gendering. Three distinct, but related, forms of gendering interweave in this sector of the service economy. These are the gendering of the work tasks, the gendered structure of the occupation and the gender of the retail environment. Using insights from the sociology of consumption and expanding the notion of aesthetic labour to incorporate insights from Bourdieu's sociology, the article explores how retail workers manifest particular forms of gendered embodiment, enacting a different sort of feminine performance according to the brand strategies of the organization they are employed in. The gendered objects of consumption are thus shown to be critical to understanding the nature of retail service work.     

Aid Effectiveness: On the Radar and Off the Radar

Poverty is a human construct, yet the Euro‐American development assistance programmes that aim to reduce poverty remain a function of systemic problems, profit and politics. Critics argue that widened global income inequality and neoliberalism's ineffectiveness in the Global South can be reflected in recent geopolitical and epistemic tensions. China's rise as an economic and military power and its authority in setting up the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank directly threaten Euro‐American dominance in development discourse. These changes can bring multiple perspectives in the aid effectiveness debate. While these views introduce alternatives to the business approach of poverty reduction, they also make the Sustainable Development Goals appear more significant than ever.     

Disabling Environments and the Geography of Access Policies and Practices

Writings about disabled people are usually aspatial or lack geographical frames of reference. This is curious because geography is fundamental to an understanding of the social, economic, and political opportunities and/or constraints underpinning the lives of disabled people. This paper develops the contention that geographical and/or spatial terms of reference are important in understanding disabled people's lives. In developing this point, the paper seeks to describe and account for geographical variations in local authority policies and practices in addressing disabled people's access needs in the built environment. The paper adopts and develops, after Mark-Lawson & Warde (1987), the concept of 'local political environment' as a basis for understanding spatial variations in local authority policies and practices. Such ideas, in turn, are deployed with reference to postal survey and case study data, where I describe and explain aspects of the geography of access policies and practices in the United Kingdom. I conclude by noting that geographical frameworks and/or perspectives ought to be incorporated, where appropriate, into studies of disabled people and public policy processes.     

Crafting Communities: Promoting Inclusion,Empowerment, and Learning between Older Women

Abstract

While social policy and planning documents are replete with ominous warnings about the cost of an ageing population, this article tells a different story about the productive and self-sustaining networks that exist among older women in the community who do craftwork. From our research conducted in Victoria, Australia during 2007–2008 we discovered a resilient and committed group of older women quietly and steadily contributing to community fundraising, building social networks, and providing learning opportunities to each other in diverse ways. Through our conversations with nine craftswomen we have been able to articulate clear links between the theory and models commonly espoused in the community development literature and the life-enriching practices used in organising informal community craft group activities. From our interviews with the older women we provide evidence of sustained participation, the generation of social capital, and the fostering of life-long learning. While none of the women we spoke to were trained in community development and did not use language commonly associated with feminist ideology, the relationship between the informal group work with principles of empowerment and self-efficacy were unmistakeable. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for critical social work practice.     

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.     

Gendered Congregations,Gendered Service: The Impact of Clergy Gender on Congregational Social Service Participation

Using data from the 1998 National Congregations Study, I present empirical evidence that shows that the gender of a congregation's leadership makes a difference in the likelihood that a congregation will participate in a social service programme. The results from binary logistic regression indicate that the odds of congregations with women head clergy participating in a social service programme are four times greater than those with men head clergy. In addition, as the percentage of women on a congregation's governing board increases the probability that a congregation will participate in a service project also increases. The specific types of social service programmes a congregation pursues also differ by gender of leadership, with women‐led congregations significantly more likely to pursue service projects that could be labelled feminine while avoiding programmes that are clearly feminist. To explain this gendered behaviour I incorporate Acker's (1990 ) theory of gendered organizations.     

Hands: Visible and Invisible

Theoretical work in linguistics, mathematics, and physics has created changes in academic problem formulation. This meta-analysis presents the nature of the new academic environment using precepts from New Historicism to suggest connections with the New Economy. The marketplace is often the court of last appeal in conflict resolution. This can be as basic as determining a fair price for a goose in a farmers' market to the disposition of pension funds in an international merger. Economist Lawrence Summers provides insights into theory and practice. Game theory leads from John Nash's equilibrium point to modeling in economics. A University of Chicago economist discusses the application of market reforms to Chile. He worked with Chilean economists called The Chicago Boys. A call for unification, which includes economics, follows.     

Gendered Organizations: Progress and Prospects

In this paper, we explore the context for the emergence of a theory of gendered organizations and define the basic features of the approach, noting the explosion of scholarship in the area and the now firmly established trend toward understanding gender, race, class, and sexuality as aspects of social structures. We focus on three of the most important emerging areas in research on gendered organizations: the study of intersectionality, the increasing emphasis on the importance of organizational context, and the exploration of mechanisms for organizational change. We conclude by briefly noting prospects for the further development of research on gendered organizations.     

The Crafting of Care: Rationality,Gender and Social Relations in Educational Decision-Making

This article examines discourses on care and the way they operate within four education case conferences. It examines the multiple subject positions afforded to participants in the meetings, and the constitutive aspects of language associated with discourses on care. The paper covers the following domains. Firstly, caring is explored as a specific form of gendered activity within dominant constructions of the family and organizations in contemporary Western (white, heterosexual) society. Secondly, caring is examined as a relationship and a discursive category rather than as an individual attribute. The implications this has for the participants’ identities and roles in the context of the education case conferences are explored. Thirdly, some examples of the way caring operates in specific case conferences are discussed. I conclude by suggesting that caring is employed by women professionals in the meetings discussed, as a way of mystifying differences. In some instances, it seems to function as a coping rhetorical strategy (see Davis 1994), which places a burden of responsibility onto women professionals and may project failure onto mothers and pupils within the meetings.     

Motherhood,Myth and Gendered Agency in Political Violence

By building on theoretical insights from poststructuralist feminism and Roland Barthes' mythology framework, this article is offering a nuanced understanding of female agency in political violence by engaging with the visual and the cultural, by using a broader definition of agency in political violence and by analysing what gendered representations of war mean at the domestic level. In the first part of the article, the Myth of Motherhood is conceptualized as a meta-discourse disciplining representations of female agency in political violence. The article then focuses on two specific discourses within the meta-discourse, the Vacant Womb and the Deviant Womb, that inform understandings of gender, agency and political violence in one particular cultural artefact: the British television drama, Britz. The main argument is that motherhood is ‘everywhere’ in representations of female agency in political violence and that it is useful to think about motherhood as a myth. Only this way can we confront underlying norms, values and ideas believed to be common sense and think differently about gender, agency and political violence.     

Gendered Movement: Negotiating Youth,Sex and Harm in the US Carceral State

Exempt from the current bipartisan reassessment of the US carceral state are people with convictions for sex offenses. While movements against public registries for sex offenders are scant, a grassroots movement is underway. This article offers a preliminary analysis of the complex consequence of women's political work to extract their sons from the US carceral state. This gendered advocacy is mapped against shifts in the racialised US criminal justice system, where the fluid category of child/juvenile is often unavailable to youth of colour and/or queer youth, and criminalisation is offered to regulate sexuality, consent, age and potential harm.     

The Gendered State of Business: Gender,Enterprises and State in Israeli Society

Whether the state provides different entrepreneurial opportunities for women and men and how is an issue rarely discussed in the growing literature concerning gender and organizations. Integrating gender and organization literature with political theories of the state, this paper compares women's entrepreneurship in one setting (Israeli society) across two time periods: before and after the foundation of a sovereign state. Our analysis identifies three manifestations of the gendering state through which it moulds business opportunities of men and women entrepreneurs. We examine how these manifestations: the delegation of economic actors, managing interactions between individuals and institutions, and administering a bureaucracy, shape access to capital and the structure of networks. The article contributes to the existing scholarship by extending the understanding of direct and indirect influence of the state on the reproduction of the image of the ideal entrepreneur and on gender differences in entrepreneurial activity.     

Prompts,Not Questions: Four Techniques for Crafting Better Interview Protocols

Qualitative Sociology - We offer effective ways to write interview protocol “prompts” that are generative of the most critical types of information researchers wish to learn from...