The Shag‐Band Menace: Tracing the Spread of a Contemporary Legend

The internet enables analysts to better track rumors and contemporary legends through time and space. Comments about sex bracelets reveal waves of concentrated attention; the spread of particular variants display a similar pattern. The diffusion of such stories reflects constructions of childhood and adolescent sexuality as social problems.     

Challenging Social Work Education’s Urban Legends

Urban legends circulate throughout society, including higher education and social work education. Some academic mythologies take on the status of a tradition—no matter the evidence or lack thereof—and continue to thrive, to influence thinking, and to shape norms, which, in turn, direct behaviors. As with urban legends, academic myths are able to overpower and dismiss the conclusions drawn from critical thinking processes. Accreditation standards, common program structures, and faculty behaviors and expectations have evolved over time grounded in and shaped by various legends. Social work educators applying critical thinking processes to their educational enterprise will be able to challenge with intellectual rigor the profession’s urban legends, which will then result in national standards and program models that are creative, proactive, and forward-thinking.     

Warm Hearts/Cold Type

Summary

The practicalities and legends of desktop publishing arc explored in detail, based upon extensive experience of working on contracts for non-profit institutions in New York City.     

Fear and Loathing on Reality Television: An Analysis of “America's Most Wanted” and “Unsolved Mysteries”*

From early newspapers to contemporary television drama, the media demonstrate a continuing fascination with crime. Two recent television programs, “America's Most Wanted” and “Unsolved Mysteries,” claim to offer a different treatment of crime in that these programs dramatize “real” crimes and encourage the television audience to assist in locating fugitives. Content analysis of the programs reveals that depictions of crime are consistent with television crime drama, and that these dramatizations resemble urban legends in which crime symbolizes the uncertainties of modern life. The programs convey an unpredictable world filled with unsafe people and places. This sense of modern danger justifies the programs' solicitation of audience participation through surveillance.     

Families and mobility: The European experience

This paper introduces a new method—Social Genealogies Commented and Compared—for observing how social trajectories of individuals and families are shaped. The basic features of this method—its focus on families rather than individuals, the flexibility of interviewing, the comparison of case studies of families’ histories—make it complementary to survey research. It is argued that the contention of survey research to be the only scientific method of studying social mobility rests upon a Newtonian conception of science that has become obsolete even in the natural sciences. Surveys work best in societies which have stable social structures and a large degree of social homogeneity nation‐wide, and where individual achievement, not family ties, is the key factor in shaping individual trajectories; this is not the case for most European societies. Techniques for collecting and analyzing Social Genealogies are described. Issues such as representativeness and generalization, family legends and the breakdown of nuclear families are briefly dealt with. The pedagogical usefulness of this form of data collecting is stressed.     

Beyond Social Constructionism: A Structural Analysis of the Cultural Significance of the Child Star

This article challenges the dominance of social constructionist theories of childhood by presenting a structural analysis of the child star as a recurrent, universal feature in the myths and legends of the world. The article argues that by conceptualising our understanding of children and childhood as being due solely to the socio‐historical context in which they live, an important dimension of childhood may be overlooked. Through looking at media stories about child stars throughout the twentieth century, this article uses a psychoanalytic Jungian framework to explore deeper similarities and patterns in cultural story telling about children over different cras and social contexts.     

Anhedonia: Gender and the Decline of Emotions in American Film, 1930–

An interpretive study of Hollywood films from 1930 to 1988 suggests a hypothesis about gender relations. Employing the mythopoetic conception of male-female relationships that is found in the legends of Ariadne and Theseus, the study proposes a diachronic unfolding of the dialectic of love and freedom. In the process, a disenchantment sets in revealing anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure. This dysdaemonic picture provides an illustration and commentary on American norms of achievement, marital fidelity, conjugal relations, and child rearing. The rise and fall of the Ariadneac mystique offers one way to read Hollywood films in terms of the sociology of the emotions. Future research is suggested to test the hypothesis and to explore the relationship between its thematic and socio-cultural life in America.     

The sociology of social problems in Japan

The sociology of social problems in Japan has different characteristics from its counterpart in the United States. These differences are the circumstances surrounding an individual’s knowledge of social science prior to World War II, and the two main streams of social science after the rush of American sociology into Japan following that war. A few legends in some of the main fields of study are reviewed. Additionally, one of the most urgent social problems facing sociologists in Japan, the decline and survival of departments of sociology, is described and discussed.     

王嘉玲：闯进男人世界的女人

王嘉玲,中国长航重庆长江轮船公司总船长,中国内河航行史上第一位驾船行走长江全线的女船长,长江航运界的首位女总船长,这位身材娇小的南方女子．骨子里却有着不输男人的坚持。投身长江航运事业近33年,她用自己的亲身经历成就了儿时的梦想,书写了一段女性创业的传奇,被誉为“长江的女儿”。     

Greater dead heroes than live husbands: widows as image-makers

Before public relations had form, a name or formal practitioners, before visual images were created easily and indelibly with color photographs, television and computer morphing, widows created heroic images of their dead husbands. Widows as image-makers is both historic—Mrs. George Armstrong Custer and Mrs. Robert F. Scott—and contemporary—Mrs. John F. Kennedy and Yoko Ono among others.The most successful wove the ambiguities of their husbands’ deaths into enduring myths and legends by adroitly using the mores, values, sentimentalities and dreams dominant in their times and countries.The myths of dashing military leaders, pop celebrities and politicians—created, disciplined, and relentlessly publicized by their widows—alter still, even swamp reality. The widows insured that heroic veneration, honors, monuments, and tendentious history would dominate, thwarting spoil sport truth-seeking historians.     

On the Culture Origins of the Name of the Characters—Harry Potter

Abstract:The thesis started from the angle of the culture origins,the author finds out there is some profound significance behind it,with relations to the British culture tradition,legends and the aesthetic value it fosters.Therefore,the thesis tires to analyze a large amount of culture origins of the novels,especially in the theme and setting of the novels,and summarize the essential elements of the novels so as to establish a new view and interpretation of names of the characters in the novels which is called the"children’s novel"Harry Potter.     

Alligators in the sewer,dragons in the well and Freud in the toilet

One of the most popular of all urban legends is the story about alligators in the sewers of New York (abbreviated AIS story). While previous investigations have been concerned with the historical origins of AIS stories, this article is concerned with developing a psychoanalytic explanation which accounts for the continuing popularity of such stories. In developing such an explanation, this article makes use of the association between‘penis’ and ‘feces,’ an association that is very likely among the earliest associations formed in the human mind. Given the penis = feces association, and given Freud's suggestion that the young child will typically take defecation as a model for castration, it is argued that AIS stories are ultimately concerned with castration. The fact that ‘castration’ has different connotations for males and females helps to explain some of the details invariably incorporated into an AIS story. Finally, the argument developed in connection with modern AIS stories is used to provide a new perspective upon traditional English stories about dragons.     

Through the lens of the camera in remote mining sites in the Peruvian highlands

A freelance photography assignment took me to the remote mountain highlands of Peru in 1999, where, in addition to covering the brutal working conditions to which children and their parents are exposed in the mines, I learned about the myths and legends that permeate the lives of the miners. In sharing the myths and the lives of the inhabitants of the place, however, I must account for my role as an observer with a camera. In this paper I aim to provide a brief introduction to the culture, the myths and legends of the mining populations of the highlands as they were conveyed to me. I discuss some of the ethical concerns of using a camera to capture and convey child labour in the highlands and the ethics of photographic and humanitarian interventions.     

THE MASS MEDIA AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE MISSING CHILDREN PROBLEM

This article traces the role of the mass media in the social construction of the "missing children issue' as a social problem. The social construction explanation of social problems offered by Blumer (1971) and Spector and Kitsuse (1977) has been criticized (cf. Best and Horiuchi 1985) for lacking a conception of extra-media influences that can affect audiences beyond the initial viewing situation. Recent work in mass communication indicates that a media logic is adapted by other institutions to amplify television imagery and themes about crime, danger, and child abuse. A case study of the origins and claims and counterclaims about the nature and extent of missing children is combined with an empirical analysis of the impact of various sources of information about the missing children issue in order to demonstrate the process by which a social problem is constructed. The impact of additional information is analyzed by administering a self-report questionnaire to 96 respondents before and after viewing a two-part documentary on the complexities of the issue. The data suggest that mass-mediated imagery and formats forge an interactive informational context for social problems by sustaining what is viewed in one's living room with imagery in bulk mail, milk cartons, and posters. It is further suggested that mass media depictions of problems such as "missing children' carry over into consonant images such as child abuse. This conceptualization is capable of encompassing other accounts of social problems (e.g., "urban legends") within claims-making activity.     

Opinion… foreign policy acumen needed by global CEOs

Vulnerability and exposure notwithstanding, through the highly diplomatic language of the NACD’s Commissioners, the ‘Blue Ribbon Commission Report… ’ emphasizes that Director participation must be, and increasingly become, ‘Constructively Engaged!’ The report further included Mr. Budd’s recognition of the absolutely pivotal importance of “non-financials” and the significance of both social and political trends. It is in that light we find the role of the CEO being extended into domains considered uncomfortable, difficult and decidedly outside the path of the direct pursuit of Quarterly Profit Numbers.The emerging diplomatic role of international business leadership will take the duties of senior executives and board governance upward onto a new global platform. This platform will likely overlay the realms of Commerce, Finance, Government Affairs, Integrity, Credibility, and Diplomacy. Above all else, it will include a required new sense of common fairness that will become part of Year 2001’s soft core values against which business transactions – and CEOs – will be substantively measured and held accountable. This shift in public attitude will encompass not just American-based CEOs, but most foreign senior business executives as well.CEOs in international markets have the opportunity to be perceived as much as ambassadors as business leaders. Those that do so stand to gain unique competitive advantages in the form of long term trust. While perhaps difficult to assimilate under existing business pressures, in actuality, this development simply continues a pattern of U.S. policy vulnerability begun after the collapse of the Soviet Union.Historically, it is with no small irony that CEOs return to a role once more publicly held during the latter Cold War era of the 1970s by business legends such as Leo Burnett (Leo Burnett), David Rockefeller (Chase Manhattan Bank), Walter Wriston (CitiBank), Robert Woodruff (Coca∼Cola), Walter Disney (Disney]),Tom Watson, Jr. (IBM), Reginal Jones (GE), Ray Kroc (McDonald’s), Armand Hammer (Occidental Petroleum), David Kendall (PepsiCo), Edwin Land (Polaroid), Irving Shapiro (DuPont) and others who either actively sought out that unique stature or had that status thrust upon them. The sole difference today is that this type of mantle is much more broadly forced across the entire business community leadership at large.     

Transgressive Sexualities: Politics of Pleasure and Desire in Kamasutra: A Tale of Love and Fire

Utilizing feminist film theory, critical reviews, and viewer responses, this article examines visual representations of transgressive sexuality in two diasporic Indian women's films: Kamasutra: A Tale of Love by Mira Nair, and Fire by Deepa Mehta. The article draws from research on ancient discourses on sexuality in India to argue that contemporary constructions of women's sexuality in South Asia are not devoid of patriarchal and fundamentalist cultural politics of representation.     

Kashmir and Palestine: archives of coloniality and solidarity

ABSTRACT

What features of contemporary coloniality emerge if we examine geopolitical alliances across settler and ‘post’ colonial contexts? What forms of solidarity become necessary in the context of these colonialities? Referencing the historical and contemporary features of the occupations of Kashmir & Palestine, the introduction to this special issue makes the case for naming the states of India and Israel as part of a contemporary geocolonial formation. Naming and framing require understanding present forms of coloniality and reflexive solidarity. The essays in this special issue form an archive of coloniality and solidarity through which the authors examine the minutiae of living and of dying, of assembling archives from below, and of building and decolonising solidarities across Kashmir & Palestine.     

Transfer of learning: concept and process

This article will present findings from a doctoral study exploring the impact of 'SVQ Care: Promoting Independence (level III)' within children's homes. The study focuses on the extent to which SVQs enhance practice and their function within a 'learning society'. A total of 30 staff were selected from seven children's homes in two different local authority social work departments in Scotland. Each member of staff was interviewed on four separate occasions over a period of 9 months. Interviews were structured using a combination of repertory grids and questions. Particular focus was given to the assessment process, the extent to which SVQs enhance practice and the learning experiences of staff. The findings suggest that there are considerable deficiencies both in terms of the SVQ format and the way in which children's homes are structured for the assessment of competence. Rather than address the history of failure within residential care, it appears that SVQs have enabled the status quo to be maintained whilst creating an 'illusion' of change within a learning society.     

Sociology and abortion: legacies and strategies

A survey essay sees the sociological view of abortion practice in 1979 appearing as a dense web of philosophical conundrums and at times violent political strategies; with abortion still not typically seen as 1 form of birth control among others. Attention is called to the variety of approaches to abortion in books and articles about its medical, demographic, religious, historical, political, philosophical, psychological, practical, and personal aspects. These include: James C. Mohr's Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy 1800-1900; Abortion, by Potts, Diggory, and Peel; Abortion in Psychosocial Perspective: Trends in Transnational Research, edited by Davis, Friedman, Van der Tak, and Seville; Linda Francke's The Ambivalence of Abortion; Mary K. Zimmerman's Passage Through Abortion: The Personal and Social Reality of Women's Experiences; Abortion Politics: The Hawaii Experience, by Steinhoff and Diamond; John Connery's Abortion: the Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective; Abortion: New Directions for Policy Studies, by Manier, Liu, and Solomon; and Harry Harris' Prenatal Diagnosis and Selective Abortion.