Kitchen Stories: Patterns of Recognition in Contemporary High Cuisine

How are patterns of cultural production informed by the nature of the field? In particular, I am concerned with how the mode of cultural production mediates relations among creators and, in turn, how these relations affect cultural production. I also inquire into how these two sets of relations are influenced by the connection between the field of cultural production and the larger social world. I rest my inquiry in the field of culinary arts. Drawing on ethnographic research with elite chefs in mid‐ to high‐status restaurants in New York City and San Francisco, where I have conducted 45 in‐depth interviews and observation in their restaurant kitchens, I analyze how actors subjectively manage the institutional conditions of authorship and differentiation through their discursive practices on the mode of cultural production and on their relations with other creators. By analyzing how chefs manage these issues, we will also observe how they subjectively deal with their objective position in the field.     

New insights in reproducing transnational corporate elites: the labour market intermediation of executive search in the pursuit of global talent in Singapore

In this article, I provide new theoretical and empirical insights into the reproduction of transnational corporate elites through the process of people moving between firms’ internal labour markets rather than from expatriation. Theoretically, the article advances understandings of the reproduction of transnational corporate elites by drawing on a pioneering engagement with global talent, transnational elites and labour market intermediary discourses. I generate these new theoretical insights through an original case study of how global executive search firms in Singapore create pipelines for the recruitment of transnational corporate elites between firms’ internal labour markets. The findings also highlight the vital role of Singapore's neoliberal labour market practices, as well as its foreign talent programme to ‘win the war for talent'. By situating this research on the agency of executive search in reproducing Singapore's transnational corporate elite, the article's key contribution is to decentre North American and Western perspectives on the reproduction of knowledge on transnational corporate elites.     

The hybridization of organizational culture in tokyo disneyland

Tokyo Disneyland (TDL), a licensed version of the American theme park which was re-made in Japan, is a unique cultural, organizational and consumerist junction where “Japan” meets “America.” Offering an ethnography of this meeting, I focus here on the appropriation of the “Disney Way” into TDL's socialization practices of hiring and training. TDL's organizational culture is divided between an American influence that relates to part-timers and a Japanese tradition that applies to regular workers. It is discussed how local culture facilitated the successful transfer of the Disney Way to Japan while also promoting a modification of specific elements.     

The labour–nature relationship: varieties of labour environmentalism

ABSTRACT

This special issue is a contribution to environmental labour studies, which aims to investigate the practices and theories that integrate labour and nature, by focusing on labour environmentalism. While nature is privately appropriated and exploited by Capital, workers’ organizations tend to construct nature as labour’s other, a place to enjoy or a place to be protected from destruction at best. In the following introductory article to this special issue, we present our view of what environmental labour studies are investigating and might investigate in the future and the place of labour environmentalism within this broader agenda. We also suggest an analytical framework to evaluate the depth, breadth, and level of the agency of the variations of labour environmentalism. We suggest that environmental labour studies can be a way of studying not only the intersections between social and environmental justice, climate change and working conditions but can also contribute to building a bridge between environmental theory and practice.     

The nightmares of the heteronormative

Abstract

Race and sexuality have always intersected in African‐American racial formation. In this article, I argue that this intersection has inspired certain epistemological, political, economic and cultural formations. In terms of epistemology, American sociology and African‐American literature have historically addressed the connections between race and sexuality. Both were interested in the ways that African‐American racial formation transgressed ideal heterosexual and patriarchal boundaries. As far as cultural formations were concerned, such transgressions materially and symbolically aligned African‐American racial formation with homosexuality. Attending to the political and economic effect of this alignment, I maintain that it helped to articulate African‐American racial difference and worked to exclude African‐Americans from the privileges of state and capital. Thus, the article argues that African‐American racial subordination can best be understood as it converges with heteronormative and patriarchal modes of regulation and exclusion. After showing how the most prominent sociology during the 1940s (Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma: The Negro and American Democracy) marked African‐Americans as pathologically heterosexual, I go on to read James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain to determine how the alignment between blackness and homosexuality suggests alternative and oppositional epistemological, cultural and political practices.     

‘Knowing one's place’: gender,mobility and shifting subjectivity in Eastern Indonesia

Abstract In this article I analyse the gendered space of transnational mobility by problematizing migrant subjectivity in everyday practices. In line with feminist perspectives I highlight the significance of the micro‐scale experience of female migrants from Eastern Indonesia in acquiring mobility as a struggle for new subjectivity. I frame this migration as a production of the subjective space of power. Based on in‐depth interviews with returned migrants, I present reflexive accounts of two migrants on contract domestic work abroad to illuminate the changing contours of the relationships between gender, mobility and shifting subjectivity. Households take into account the cultural meanings of space in everyday life including local relations in the decisions on mobility. Strategies of ‘knowing one's place’ reflect women's agency in negotiating alternative roles and positions within the intra‐household dynamics and in the workplace. Women's personal accounts have the potential to illuminate spatial processes of migration as a contested space for the repositioning of self in networks of family, kin, local and global relations.     

Positioning Students as Actors and Authors: A Chronotopic Analysis of Collaborative Learning Activities

Bakhtin's (1981) concept of chronotope provides a way of viewing student participation in the classroom as a dynamic process constituted through the interaction of past experience, ongoing involvement, and yet-to-be-accomplished goals. Although the actual design and use of classroom space may be important in facilitating a participatory pedagogy, chronotopic analysis directs attention to the grounding of interaction in dynamic and shifting time-space contexts that are emergent within the students' and teacher's discursive practices. In our analyses of classroom events and conversations, we focus on the agency of the students in actively shaping the space-time contexts of the classroom, considering how particular groundings for interaction are created as they draw on past, present, and future temporal relations to explain and justify their ideas to one another. Our analyses provide insights into the contested nature of the time-space relationships in the classroom, the hybridization of time-space contexts, and the ways students enter into past, present, and future time-space contexts during collaborative work in the classroom.     

Black Immigrants in the United States and the "Cultural Narratives" of Ethnicity

This article argues that social science representations of post-1965 Black immigrants in the United States employ the concept of "ethnicity" in ways that reinforce the racialist myth of Black (American) cultural inferiority. Specifically, the discursive use of Black immigrant "ethnic" and "cultural distinctiveness," while admittedly reflecting an important recognition of the heterogeneity of the United States Black populations, is in fact predicated upon a repackaged "culture of poverty" discourse that serves to reaffirm the overarching racial order. In a discussion of the theoretical and historical development of the concept, I show how the current discourse of "ethnic distinctiveness" perpetuates a form of racism under a theory that denies the relevance of race while it continuously recodes the biological notions of race as "culture." Thus, Black immigrant distinctiveness, when presented through the prism of the cultural narratives of ethnicity, allows for the perpetuation of a "cultural racism" that adversely affects all Blacks in this country. I therefore call for a rejection of ethnicity theory as it is currently conceptualized and suggest the need to ground theories of Black distinctiveness within analyses of power relations and ongoing practices of racial subjugation.     

'Ancient + Future = Now': Goa Gil and Transnational Neo-Tribalism in Global Rave Culture

Abstract

This article posits the case study of rave music DJ Goa Gil as a dynamic example of the transnational, deterritorializing flows that inform the community formation and signifying practices of contemporary rave culture. Intended as a commentary on the changing nature of subcultural formation and practice, Goa Gil's story reveals a complex pattern of transnational and transcultural networks and exchanges. From 1960s American hippy to global rave music DJ, guru, and nomad, Goa Gil is one of the subculture's progenitors of neo-tribalism, a discursive and symbolic trope that allows ravers to imagine, and give name to, their transnational communities of affect that cross national and cultural borders. Set within a social context of advanced information technologies and rapidly changing modes of communication, neo-tribalism, as a critical concept, can be easily applied to any number of communities of affect across the globe, paving the way for a re-evaluation of (sub)cultural inter-connectedness in the early twenty-first century.     

Knowledge and class

Cultural scholars are paying increasing attention to the ways in which choice has become a cultural obligation deeply ingrained in neoliberal, post-feminist, therapeutic and consumerist norms. Drawing insights from this literature, this paper first charts the changing discourse on choice, and then goes on to both examine and challenge the centrality of the rhetoric of choice in contemporary discourses of singlehood and single women. In my analysis, the idea of choice is posited as a multivalent signifier dependent on changing social contexts and denoting shifting aspects of feminine subjectivity and personal relations. It is my aim thereby to problematize notions of choice and singlehood, as well as to question the cultural processes that produce them. To do so, I probe the discursive relations that produce distinctive clusters of meanings, as well as the tensions and contradictions that emerge around them. Such a reading emerges from a content-based analysis of readers' comments and responses to an online Internet column depicting the various advantages of being ‘single-by-choice’. The findings show that while choice can be a discursive force that enables single women to resist traditional family forms and establish their chosen subjectivities, the centrality of choice in the construction of intimate relations today also casts in doubt and paradoxically delegitimizes single women's option of autonomy and individuality. Some of the social interpretations of choice denote that single women are endowed with a partial and incomplete subjectivity, while according to other stances the choice of singlehood signifies a radical option for claiming singlehood as a long-term way of life. However, the aim of the critique proposed here is not merely to deconstruct the discursive mechanism that delegitimizes singlehood, but also to point out some of the potential limitations emerging from the new counter-discourse of chosen singlehood.     

Visitors to modern and contemporary art museums: towards a new sociology of ‘cultural profiles’

Sociologists traditionally focus on the power of socio‐economic variables as drivers of attendance at museums. However, this research runs the risk of a certain socio‐economic reductionism which fails to register the aesthetic dimensions of cultural consumption. To remedy this, I propose a new focus on cultural profiles beyond the prism of SES, which allows us to better interpret the role of the art museum visit in visitors' daily life. The cultural profile is defined as a set of cultural, creative and leisure preferences and activities, towards various forms of art, which classify and can be classified. I use multiple correspondence analysis to examine the nature of cultural profiles among visitors of six museums of modern and contemporary art in Belgium. Six different cultural profiles are defined, each a ‘bricolage’ of different classifying registers that structure and define practices and tastes. My approach allows us to reconcile and elaborate current interests in cultural sociology about the relationship between high versus low culture (Bourdieu), experimentation versus classicism, transgression versus conservatism and omnivores versus univores (Peterson).     

Contested Notions of Issue Identity in International Public Relations: A Case Study

The Open University's circuit of culture model, which comprises a melding of critical or cultural and postmodern perspectives, encompasses 5 central discursive moments: regulation, production, consumption, representation, and identity. Using the World Health Organization's smallpox eradication campaign as a case study, we gathered data from a wide variety and in-depth collection of materials to examine how the moment of identity informs our understanding of international public relations practice and theory by recasting identity as a central, discursive concept within public relations.     

Gender and Tobacco in (Globalizing) Asia – Exorcizing the Ghosts of Dualistic Thought?

This paper investigates the intersections between tobacco, gender and globalizing Asia. I argue that binary tropes like modernity/westernization‐tradition and masculinity–femininity are incessantly invoked in a burgeoning tobacco‐control literature focused on Asia. This tends to reify discursive and material gendered smoking stereotypes, as well as their underlying asymmetrical power relations. Responding to this I chart out three ways in which dualistic gender ideologies can be rethought. Firstly, I attend to varieties within gender categories to account for more nuanced articulations of gender identities. I do this by demonstrating the co‐imbrication between polyvalent masculinities and smoking practices. Secondly, I am attuned to intersecting facets of smoking subjectivities – situated within a specific Asian cultural fabric – that complicate the easy conflation of masculinity with power, and femininity with disempowerment. Lastly, I contend that fleshing out the embodied aspects of gendered smoking practices can assist us in confounding polarized gender categories and their associated attributes. I conclude my paper with a discussion on the uneasy relationships between Asia, Westernization, gender and a possible move away from a Western‐centric dualistic thinking.     

Anti-Afropolitan ethics and the performative politics of online scambaiting

ABSTRACT

Online scambaiting problematises the identity of the 419 scammer whose virtual labours connect significantly to the digital dimensions of Afropolitanism. When examined through the photographic practices demanded of 419 scammers in several Internet communities, scambaiting, a form of Internet vigilantism that is targeted at online scammers to avert scam, produces epistemic violence which evacuates the black male body of human dignity. Although scambaiting is potentially an ethical project, it embeds a system of oppression that generates Afropolitan masculinities, caricatured performances of the bodies of 419 scammers exhibited online as objects of shame. As a philosophical and aesthetic response to translocality and mobility, Afropolitanism stresses the cultural experiences and agency of ordinary Africans who assert a global sense of awareness. As both the Afropolitan subject and the 419 scammer are entangled in the assertion of agency, the globalism of both is shown to converge at the intersection of the digital. Building on Lisa Nakamura's essay on dogshaming, I argue that the sexual exploitation of black bodies on scambaiting websites gestures at technology's complicity in interpellating digital subjects and circulating social injustices. Unlike Nakamura, I foreground the performative aspects of scambaiting and connect these to Afropolitanism's intrinsic digitality.     

“Transnational” Socio‐Cultural Systems and Ethnographic Research: Views from an Extended Field Site

This article discusses a widespread pattern of migratory moves that is often overlooked in contemporary research on transnational migration. Transnational theory has successfully highlighted the significance of migrants' attachments to people and places transcending the confines of nation‐states. By emphasizing, a priori, the national, this theory tends to overlook the full complexity and meaning of migrants' extra‐local socio‐cultural relations. Through an ethnographic study of dispersed family networks of Caribbean origin, I explore the wide range of migration practices in which differing actors engage and the nature of the sociocultural systems that emerge as migrants move between places.     

Romancing the nation: Family melodrama and the sentimental logics of bourgeois nationalism

Abstract

In the years since the 1970s, something of a revolution has occurred in the area of South Asian American fiction, as writers like Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander, Ginu Kamani, Anita Rau Badami and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni have begun publishing their work. Bharati Mukherjee's predominant focus is the politics of immigration, not only as a prevalent preoccupation in her fictional writing, but as the focus of a series of newspaper and journal articles as well. This article seeks to contextualize the development of Mukherjee's writing in relation to wider current debates about the nature of the American canon, the question of 'Americanness', and the continually vexed issue of multicultural politics in the US. In reading four of Mukherjee's novels both through and against her polemical writing, I will argue that Mukherjee's fictions should be read together as an ongoing counter-nativist project and, as such, constitute an important intervention in US race relations.     

Structures,Challenges, and Successes of Volunteer Programs Co‐managed by Nonprofit and Public Organizations

This article presents a mixed‐methods, multicase study and comparison of volunteer programs in US national parks that have evolved, in response to growth and fiscal pressures, to be co‐managed by national park staff and their nonprofit support partners. Findings detail why and how the expanded partnerships were formed; how they operate; challenges they face; ways in which they adhere to, stretch, and depart from theories of nonprofit management, collaboration, and program institutionalization; and the significant—even exponential—volunteer program growth that resulted in each case. These nonprofit?public volunteer program partnerships—at Acadia, Arches and ­Canyonlands, Cuyahoga Valley, Golden Gate, the National Mall, and Yosemite national park sites—employ many standard forms of interorganizational relations, even though in these cases the nonprofits give money to the government organization instead of the reverse. Their volunteer program and management structures also share similar elements because of coercive, normative, and mimetic pressures. At the same time, each volunteer program partnership is a distinct blend of collaboration and management practices because of the unique natural features, climate, needs, adjacent populations, and personalities of leaders at each site. The cases employ innovative strategies to substantially increase the number of staff who lead volunteer programs. Recommendations are offered for nonprofit management research and practice, and findings are instructive for organizations that utilize volunteers either as a single entity or as part of a collaboration.     

Staying Alive: Matricide and the Ethical-Political Aspect of Mother-Daughter Relations

In this article I argue that an account of nonmatricidal relations between mothers and daughters should include an account of the transformative process through which mothers and daughters can overcome the damage of phallocentrism. I further argue that as a lived experience, mother-daughter relations are always actualized in relations with a normative background, authoritative discursive practices, and social institutions, all of which constitute motherhood in different contexts. Transforming this space means challenging these contents and practices. Thus, it follows that creating nonmatricidal relations includes an aspect of witnessing in which the mother addresses to the daughter her refusal of phallocentric practices and values. By becoming the addressee of the mother’s subjectivity, as expressed in her ethico-political refusal, the daughter constitutes relations of difference. Reading the biblical story of Lot’s wife and her daughters, I suggest that the act of witnessing the violence of divine law has constituted a space between Lot’s wife and her daughters wherein they could create a lineage based on resistance to phallocentric law and affirmation of an alternative ethics.     

Black Immigrants and the Rhetoric of Social Distancing

This article focuses on the empirical evidence of social distancing in the interdisciplinary literature on black immigrants. I argue that the conventions that have guided popular and scholarly representations of relations between foreign-born and native-born blacks have been shaped by seminal writings in sociology. Treating interviews with black immigrants as sites of various kinds of discursive practices, my aim is to illustrate a shift in the expression of social distance that maps onto contemporary ways of talking about race in the US. I argue that social distance rhetoric is an expression of what black immigrants learn about race and ethnicity in American society. This reading challenges the widely held interpretation that social distancing accurately reflects individual subjectivity and collective identity.